catenaccio, totaalvoetbal, tiki-taka

'That’s the essence of strategy: to outperform rivals, who are trying to do better than us' 

Phil Rosenzweig ‘Left Brain, Right Stuff’ 2015 

On the evening of 31 May 1972 in Rotterdam, Ajax of Amsterdam defeat Internazionale of Milan 2-0 - via two second-half goals from Johan Cruyff - to win the European Champions cup for the second successive year.

The Times reported ‘Ajax proved that creative attack is the real lifeblood of the game; that blanket defence can be outwitted and outmanoeuvred, and by doing so they made the outlines of the night a little sharper and the shadows a little brighter.’

This game is often said to be totaalvoetbal’s finest moment.

The Dutch press trumpeted ‘The Inter system undermined. Defensive football is destroyed.’ 

The Inter system, or catenaccio was a tactical system in football with a strong emphasis on defence.

The system had been employed most notably and successfully by Helenio Herrera, coach for the great Internazionale team - known as Grande Inter - in the latter half of the1960s.

Inter dominated domestic Italian football during this period and when they won three Scudetti, two European Champions Cups and two Intercontinental Cups.

Herrera adapted the traditional Italian 5–3–2 formation known as the verrou (door bolt) - a parking-the-bus approach focused on preventing opponents goal-scoring opportunities - to include the new idea of the swift counter-attack.

Counter-attacking being a rapid back-to-the-front tactic typically beginning with long passes from the defence catching opponents out of position while they are focused on attacking manuevers.

Key to the catenaccio system – and rapid counter-attacking - was the introduction of the role of a libero or sweeper. The libero is a free creative defender who operates behind a line of three defenders, ‘sweeping up’ loose balls, double-marking and setting up counter-attacks from behind the defence.

The Grande Inter team were captained by libero Armando Picchi.
Though perhaps the most famous sweeper of all is the German, Franz Beckenbauer.
The irony of this fact shall become apparent.

Herrera was also notable introducing motivational psych tactics and was good for a few one-liners.

‘Class + Preparation + Intelligence + Athleticism = Championships’ 

But while Inter and catenaccio were dominating European football a new development began to emerge in the Netherlands.

Totaalvoetbal, (total football) pioneered by Ajax of Amsterdam, under the guidance of coach Rinus Michels emerged from around 1965, flourished between 1970 and 1974, and that one night in May 1972 appeared to have effectively killed Herrera's catenaccio stone dead.

To observers at the time totaalvoetbal, seemed to be the antithesis of catenaccio.

For a start, totaalvoetbal is an attack-oriented strategy.

A pro-active approach. There is no counter-attacking, total football works by constant positional interchange among the players, pressing hard to gain and keep possession while preventing the opposition from having the ball.

The genius of total football was its agile approach.
NO player is fixed in his role; anyone can assume the role of an attacker, a midfielder or a defender, depending on the nature of the play.

In the 1970-73 era Ajax dominated the domestic Dutch league and won three successive European Cups. In 1972, after Ajax defeated Inter 2–0 in that European Cup final the experts confidently announced the victory as the ‘destruction of catenaccio’ .

The final nail in the catenaccio coffin was the following year as Ajax destroyed Milan 6–0 to lift the European Super Cup.

While seemingly polar opposites in approach - catenaccio being defence oriented, totaalvoetbal attack based – there are commonalities.

The Dutch striker Johan Cruyff, for example, was totaalvoetbal’s poster child.

Cruyff was officially a centre forward, however he played all over the pitch, starting attacks from wherever he could collect a pass.

Cruyff's teammates had to adapt themselves flexibly around his movements, regularly switching positions so that the team kept its shape, although the positions were filled by anyone.

In a sense the Cruyff role was the attacking free role version of the defensive libero of the Grande Inter era.

Cruyff summed up his (total football) philosophy:
"Simple football is the most beautiful. But playing simple football is the hardest thing." 

The 1970/71 Ajax coach Michels was later appointed Dutch national team coach for the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

Unsurprisingly, most of the 1974 squad were players from Ajax and rivals Feyenoord (who also played a style similar to the Ajax totaalvoetbal).

The Dutch cruised through their first and second round matches, defeating Argentina 4–0, East Germany 2–0, and holders Brazil 2–0 to set up a final with hosts West Germany, which they were expected to win.

So, when Johan Neeskens scored from the penalty spot to give the Netherlands a 1–0 lead within 80 seconds of play (and before a German player had even touched the ball) totaalvoetbal’s moment on the global stage seemed to be imminent.

However, the German defenders Beri Vogts and – in a throwback to the Inter catenaccio system – libero Franz Beckenbauer, were able to snuff out Cruyff's influence, dominate midfield, and went on to win 2-1.

Using the same strategy, the Dutch reached the 1978 World Cup final only to fall once more at the final hurdle, this time to Argentina.

Perhaps totaalvoetbal could be countered?
Perhaps defensive football was not destroyed?

Though neither the ’74 German side, nor the ’78 Argentina team would be described as defensive, in the catenaccio sense.

Even Beckenbauer, in his sweeper role, often played further up the pitch into midfield.

While both the park-the-bus and counter-attack of catenaccio, and the all-out-attack of totaalvoetbal, had each delivered success in the short term it turns out that neither strategy was enough on its own .

Just like how ‘performance’ based direct digital marketing that seeks to capture intent and convert will not deliver long term effects on its own, without the presence of brand building work, conducted consistently over time to create demand.

Just this week, Amsterdam’s own Martin Weigel addressed this very issue, in a long piece - that is worth taking the time to digest in its entirety – a section of which is quoted below..

‘Under pressure to account for our activities and to show that they are having an effect (any effect) and hooked on the crack cocaine of the short-term, we seize on intermediate metrics…like crazed junkies desperate for the next fix. 

This data might be exciting, it might be highly responsive to communications activity, it might be easy to measure, and it might give us impressive sounding numbers to use in case study videos, but it is short-term data that tells us nothing about the long-term business effects of our efforts. 

Worse, our holding up of short-term metrics that simply measure the exposure of consumers to our ideas as evidence of our success relegates our contribution to the mere distribution of content. And so – such is our appetite for evidence that something happened in the short-term – we relentlessly conspire to render the creation of enduring ideas, the building of memories, the shaping of perceptions, preferences, and behaviours a trivial side-show. 

The very things which that are the source of our value as an industry, and the generators of sustainable value for brands and businesses.’

The way forward is not this OR that, but this AND that.

Johan Cruyff, at the end of his playing career now knew this.
He took over as coach of Barcelona in1988 and continued through to 1996.
During this time Cruyff introduced a new theory.

Tiki-taka 

Cruyff’s revelation incorporated the purism of totaalvoetbal and the pragmatism of catenaccio.

Not this OR that, but this AND that.

Characterised by zonal play, short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession tiki-taka is associated with Barcelona from Johan Cruyff's era through to the present, and also the Spanish national team.

Crucially, Tiki-taka is "both defensive and offensive in equal measure" – the team is always in possession, so never needs to switch between defending and attacking. 

Tiki-taka – as employed by the Spanish national team has won them Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012.

And also continues to be used by arguably the greatest club team in the world, Barcelona, which have won two European Champion’s League titles in recent years while also co-dominating Spanish domestic football (alongside the slightly more pragmatic Real Madrid).

Tika-taka has been described as the most difficult version of football possible: an uncompromising passing game, coupled with intense, high pressing.

To the same token, combining direct response with long term brand-building - 'brand response' - is not easy either. In fact it's perhaps the most difficult form of marketing possible.

Further in Martin Wiegel’s article he points out:

‘The short-term is invariably easier to manage and measure than the long-term…what is important, and what is easy to measure, are not always the same thing. We forget the distinction between the important and the easy at our peril.’

Cruyff, similarly is wary of being data or performance driven at the expense of all else.

'I find it terrible when talents are rejected based on computer data. Based on the criteria at Ajax now I would have been rejected. When I was 15, I couldn’t kick a ball 15 meters with my left and maybe 20 with my right. My qualities - technique and vision - are not detectable by a computer’.

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football's not a matter of life or death, it's nudge more important than that.

I’m not sure if this story that I heard at the weekend qualifies as a nudge or a full-on behaviour change intervention. Or something in between.

My 6-year-old boy and I were listening to the keeper talk at the giraffe enclosure in Melbourne Zoo, who gave us the gist of the following story.

The giraffes in the zoo have come from the Melako Conservancy in Northern Kenya, one of 26 community conservation areas managed by the Northern Rangelands Trust.

This area covers about 1500 square miles and, alongside the giraffes, it is home to approximately 40,000 Rendille people, semi-nomadic groups who’s main livelihood revolves around rearing of livestock.

In traditional Rendille culture, young men between the ages of 13 and 25 went through initiation to gain status and become a warrior.

Among the rituals the hunting and killing of the native animals such as giraffes, zebras and oryx.

The traditional role of the warrior had been to protect the community, acquire livestock and, as a by product, demonstrate their 'fitness' and gain subsequent status and reproductive advantages. 

The top boys would obviously become tribe leaders of the future, with all the perks that go with that role.

Times have changed, there’s less imperative for young Rendille men to become traditional warriors however old habits die hard and the lads tended to still cause trouble with rival gangs, hunt the wildlife, to jostle for group status.

The bigger problem now is that certain species including Beisa oryx, Grevy’s zebra, giraffe and gerenuk are now becoming endangered.

So the NRT people and representatives from Zoo’s Victoria came up with an intervention that they hoped would work with the need for the nascent warriors to compete for group status but divert it away from the behaviours that put the animals under threat.

It turns out that the Rendille boys other principle interest other than the activities mentioned, was soccer*.

So the NRT and ZV set about bringing in the kit needed to set up pitches, balls and strips.

The Melako league now consists of 16 teams.

The nudgey bit is that the teams are named after the wildlife that were previously under threat and incorporated into the team badges printed on the team shirt.

A commitment device.

The NRT are measuring the impact of this in a reduction in what they call flight distance. 

When wildlife is feels stressed or harassed it is more difficult for humans to get close to them, resulting in longer flight distance.

When wildlife feel less wary of humans then the flight distance is shorter and it is easier to get closer to them, and to count the numbers.

According to our zookeeper friend, the numbers are improving.

*I'm using the term soccer so as not to confuse with the strange game that passes as football in Australia, ok?

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the brains of millennials are (not) being rewired by the internet

There is a popular idea.

One that you probably encounter, in some variant, a few times every week.

It goes along these lines.

The internet is rewiring the brains of millennials, as they evolve and adapt to the new processing skills they need to survive in today’s information saturated environment.

Among the essential adaptations are things like rapidly searching, assessing quality, and synthesizing vast quantities of information and data.

Some pundits go as far as to add that the ability to think about one thing in isolation, in some depth, will be of far less consequence for most people in the near future, therefore contributing to new social divides and labour divides between these new ‘supertaskers’ and the pervious generation of dullards.

On the other hand perhaps the internet has produced a generation addicted to quick-fixes of info-nuggets, self-obsessed, averse to any critical analysis, making shallow choices and chasing instant gratification.

There’s not much wrong with that description either, except there’s nothing particularly new or adapted to behold, and it certainly wasn’t the product of the internet.

It’s a fairly standard illustration of young human behaviour throughout the ages.

I prefer the explanation offered by the evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker.

‘Claims that the Internet is changing human thought are propelled by a number of forces: the pressure on pundits to announce that this or that "changes everything"; a superficial conception of what "thinking" is that conflates content with process…

The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people's ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think.'

The most popular and successful things on the internet are the tools that have adapted themselves to serve natural human behaviour.

Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram and new arrivals such as Snapchat and Periscope work so well because they are perfectly adapted to allow us to display (or most often fake) specific personality traits.

These traits are the ‘central six’ as described by another evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller.

The central six are General intelligence, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Stability and Extraversion.

This set supersedes any Myers-Briggs nonsense, and the briefest perusal of anyone’s Twitter stream can reveal points to be placed against each of these criteria.

[Note: While it will not always give an exact score of the real personality traits of an individual it will give an accurate representation of what they are attempting to fake.

Miller’s general description of humans as ‘hypersocial, semi-monogamous, status-seeking primates’ serves as a decent rule of thumb for all behaviour]

Additionally, it seems that much of the ‘rewiring the brain’ narrative – particularly in media and comms circles - seems to stem from:

1. A proliferation of neuro-bollocks (this shall be addressed in another post)
2. And the brain-as-computer metaphor.

There are a large number of reasons why this metaphor is not useful and, for the most part, completely wrong however one particular difference should be most interesting for us advertising types.

Computers are binary with a numerically ordered and numbered memory. If it wants to find something it goes to a specific address and picks up the piece of information.

This is known as byte-addressable memory.

While the promise of highly targeted advertising’s effectiveness sounds plausible, it is also binary – byte addressable.

But brain chemistry runs on content addressable memory or associative memory. 

The big difference is that when a memory is piqued in the human mind a signal is sent to the entire memory and those memory locations that have a scrap of related information all respond at once.

This is why familiar and popular brands become salient in buying or usage contexts – the number and quality of associations is strong enough to bring the brand ‘to mind’.

With that thought perhaps another interesting development of the Internet is not how it is changing the way brands advertise but how the internet is adapting to the way that advertising works.

For example, Facebook Video Ads are noe being bought and measured in a way that’s pretty similar to how advertisers have historically bought and measured on TV. 

And Bloomberg reports that Snapchat’s new ‘Discover’ feature ‘looks a lot like a basic cable package’.

The free service includes 11 ‘TV’ channels, including CNN, ESPN, the Food Network, National Geographic, People, and Vice, alongside Comedy Central.

The channels produce their own videos and also sell their own ads, giving Snapchat a cut of the revenue.

Interestingly, with a user base of 100 million, Snapchat says it doesn’t track user behaviour to target ads; advertisers get the run of the whole network.

It may be that the internet is adapting to the way that advertising – and the human mind – works.

For both advertisers and humans the principal appeal of the internet is for signaling (or faking) the central six personality traits to everyone else.

In ‘The Tyranny of Dead Internet Ideas’ as referenced in Don Marti’s seminal piece on signaling from a brand pov  ‘How Signalling Breaks Down’ - Don Weaver says:

‘One can argue, and maybe I’m the first one to do it, that all this targeting and audience segmentation might be creating an internet that’s worse for the consumer.

By downplaying the need for context, we’re actually dis-incentivizing the creation of quality content and environments.’

So the internet is not rewiring our brains, it's adapting to how our brains work.

Likewise successful advertising and marketing on the internet - as with any other medium -will be the kind that adapts best to human nature rather than what technology can do.

Albeit at the risk of muddling, and if we must have a metaphor, perhaps the one suggested by the view of Tooby and Cosmides, the pioneers of evolutionary psychology.

'The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life'
In this sense the mind is more like an iPhone.

The mind is made up of ‘apps' that are domain-specific processes -  mating behaviour, predator avoidance, kin selection, language etc - that all evolved in our ancestral environment to meet the specific challenges of that environment.

Looking at human behaviour today, a lot of it doesn't seem to make much sense from a biological standpoint.

We relentlessly compete to climb the corporate ladder rather than spending time with our families;

We take drugs and drink too much alchohol.

We stuff our faces with sugar and junk food;

We obsess over celebrities , instead of going out and forming real relationships

We are addicted to communication technology and news that is manipulating our feelings and behavior in subtle ways we don't notice.

But of course they do make sense when you they do make sense when you recognise that these behaviours are all responses to recent developments in human technology and media that have emerged in the last couple of hundred years, and that for the 99% of the time that humans have been on this planet (thats about 8 million years) these things didn't exist.

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the reduce speed dial

Behaviour change 101 (actually there are a few but this is one) decrees that in order to move a behaviour then making adjustments to the environment in which the behaviour occurs can be very effective.

Many of your classic nudges play to this principle.

The fly 'target' in urinals, mirrors at the cake counter and the eyes on the poster behind the honesty box, for example.

Road safety is one of those areas that is problematic for those trying to modify behaviour.
Speeding in particular.

Often Road Safety communications have relied on fear campaigns or threats of death or punishment, however theres a mountain of research that suggests framing any kind of road use as ‘death-defying’ is not always a good strategy, it can be (unconsciously) received as a kind of challenge, especially among males.

It's also apparent that the only real feedback we get about our behaviour on the road is when its too late. We get a speeding ticket, nearly hit another road user or get hit ourselves.

Even armed with this knowledge, making environmental interventions is hard.

There have been some decent attempts, including the rightly celebrated Swedish Speed Camera Lottery - developed for Volkwagen's Fun Theory project - whereby drivers driving at or below the speed limit were photograhed and entered into a prize lottery, the winnings were funded came from the fines collected from fining the drivers who did not obey the speed limit.

What this also demonstrated is that, government and policy can only go so far.

On the road interventions can only go so far.

The real environment where the behaviour occurs is inside the vehicle (and inside the drivers head).

All of which is why we were attracted to the experiment in the video below. conducted for Volkswagen in New Zealand by our friends at Colenso BBDO.



They say
'In a controlled experiment, we created a replacement panel for the speedo in four Volkswagen Golfs. They followed all of the clarity and safety restrictions of a standard speedo, but the dial was personally hand written by a loved one. This simple, personal mnemonic aims to remind drivers what they have to live for at the exact moment they consider speeding.'

Aside from the techno wizardry the interesting thing for us was the core behavioural nugget at the centre of the idea.

It's been well documented that priming people with pictures of babies faces can trigger caring and nurturing behaviour in adults.

So by inserting primes of the drivers own children right into the operations of the vehicle - amplifying the prime with a bit of extra Darwinian urgency - makes it extra cool.

For agency types it's also encouraging to see our peers being properly engaged by their clients in using their smarts to experiment around problems other than those that are exclusively communications or advertising.

By all accounts the experiment nudged the subjects driving behaviour in this instance - albeit a small sample - but its easy to imagine subsequent iterations or adaptations using this kind of thinking to address other problem driving behaviour (drink driving? spacial awareness re: cyclists etc are just two) and from a commercial standpoint then as a mass customisation tool, on a global level, then it's easy to see the possibilities.

File under: designing environments to optimise the chances of a desirable behaviour, through (at least partly) unconscious influence.

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the streisand effect

‘There's no such thing as bad publicity", as the saying goes.

Because when people are publicly (and conspicuously) outraged about how some piece of media is offensive in some way - and the greater and more amplified the outrage becomes - so it draws disproportionate attention and chatter, increasing the fame of the thing itself, and furthermore arousing the natural curiosity of bystanders who want to know why this thing is deemed so offensive.

A close relative of this phenomenon has been coined the Streisand effect.

Roughly, this effect describes how when it becomes publicly known that someone famous or powerful/influential is using strong measures to try to suppress or hide a piece of information then many more people will start to want to know what it is, even if they never cared before.

When the California Coastal Records Project - a government-commissioned photographic study of the entire California coast – included a pic of Barbara Streisand’s Malibu home in their 2003 report Babs tried to sue the photographer and force him to take the pic off of his website.

Of course this quickly backfired, the internet (albeit pre-Twitter etc) went off on one and now everybody wanted to see the picture that Babs didn't want us to see, wondering why she didn't want us to see it.

Turns out there was nothing much to see, it was a picture of a big house. 

Except now it was a picture of a big house reposted on hundreds of websites and the 'problem' (that was never really a problem) was a thousand time worse.

In ye olden times, a decent tactic for a singer or group trying to have a hit record would be to attempt to get the record banned by as many radio stations as possible. Frankie Goes To Hollywood managed to make a decent career on minimal talent this way.

So when the internet kicked off this week around the 'Are you beach body ready?' campaign for the weight-loss brand Protein World my guess is the brand couldn’t believe their luck.

The protests – apparently the campaign promotes negative body issues - are reported to be culminating in a 40,000strong demonstration in London’s Hyde Park on Saturday.

As a card-carrying fatty myself, perhaps I should be joining them.

However Protein World themselves claim that the campaign – and the unexpected associated kerfuffle – has brought them in 20,000 new customers and a million quid’s worth of new revenue in under 4 days.

It's also reasonable to argue Dove's semi-real time response mimicking the Protein World branding and creative treatment simply helped amplify 'recognition' value for the original, given the almost invisible nature of the Dove branding. For the distracted and indifferent consumer (ie just about everyone) the 'parody' could, for al intents and purposes, be just another extension of that 'beach body' thing that they vaguely remember hearing something about.

[*UPDATE 10.23am* It's been pointed out to me that the Dove parody was not an official Dove communication, but was still widely shared so the point is still valid]

What is unclear is why this particular campaign has particularly irked those who find these things irksome.

A cursory Google search on Beach Body or Bikini Body even, throws up thousands of articles, diets, sports nutrition and fitness DVDs all illustrated in a similar manner, and presented by brands like Cosmopolitan, Womens Health mag and suchlike.

The kerfuffle is especially surprising given that 'Beach Body' as an advertising 'idea' itself is almost banal, such is it's unoriginality and ordinariness.

Protein World will perhaps just accept their good fortune, in having caught this week's wave of conspicuous outrage - or what James Bartholemew in the Spectator this week called virtue signalling.

‘I hate 4x4s!’ you declare. This is an assertion that, unlike others, you care about the environment.

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are.'

Not exactly the Streisand Effect, but enough is enough.

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over the counter-culture

The following is an excerpt (and slight expansion) from a section of a talk I gave earlier this week at the Google 'Firestarters' event in Melbourne.

The theme was 'Adaptive Strategy for an Adaptive Age'.

In this particular section of the talk I speculated around some of the external cultural factors that have implications for strategy (rather than discussing specifics of strategy or process and the like).

To illustrate I called upon two important texts in particular, a snippet of a recent interview in the Observer with Don Letts - legendary DJ, film-maker, Rasta punk and musician with Big Audio Dynamite - and the significance of the performance given by KLF at the Brits in 1992.

The first text was 'Subculture' by sociologist Dick Hebdige, a study of UK youth subcultures from the 50's to late 70's (a fantastic academic book, fairly unique among academic writing in that it is actually readable for mere mortals).

Hebdige describes the two principle methods by which every counter-culture idea of any significance is later incorporated or co-opted by the establishment.

He calls these the commodity form and the ideological form.

In the commodity form the establishment attempts to transform the 'other' into meaningless 'exotica'.

This is done by taking the style, trends, dress, music etc of the subcultures and popularising them so that the subcultures lose their exclusivity and gradually become mass-produced commodities made available to all. 

Or, secondly the ‘other’ is trivialised. What was 'otherness' is reduced to 'sameness'.

This incorporation minimises the ‘otherness’ and then ultimately defines the subculture in exactly the terms that it originally sought to resist in the first place.  So, as soon as the innovations that signified a subculture are translated into commodities and become everyday they lose meaning, i.e. what were subcultural 'signs' become mass-produced stuff. 

What begins as symbolic challenges end up becoming the new conventions.

For instance, the music of the Sex Pistols was played to the Queen, as an enduring symbol of Britishness, at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012.

For a long time, as I fancied myself as a sort of left-wing pseudo sociology professor and agitator type, this point of view made perfect sense.

So if a subculture could somehow resist incorporation and not 'sell-out' it could prevail, values intact.

However approaching the problem from another angle reveals a somewhat different possibility.

What if there is/was no subculture?

What if mainstream culture and counter-culture were simply two sides of the same coin?

What if consumer capitalism was not about conformity at all, but actually depended upon rebellion and counter-culture absolutely in order to generate the next wave of rebel product for integration into the mainstream?

This is the argument put forward by Heath and Potter in our second text 'The Rebel Sell - Why The Culture Can't BeJammed'.

That much of consumption is not about conformity- but distinction.

(From an evolutionary bases standpoint these would be the types of buying behaviour related to signaling - status and reproductive fitness - versus consumption broadly driven by survival instincts)

Cultural products that are purchased to display that we are smarter, cooler, more 'authentic' than others, generate competitive consumption.

Heath and Potter further argue that the cycle perpetuates itself because one the early adopters see too many people jumping on the latest counter-cultural bandwagon, they get off and move onto something else.

The irony being that "anti-consumerist" consumers are actually the most brand conscious.

As Debord would have observed ‘Opposition to the spectacle can produce only the spectacle of opposition’.

Don Letts makes a point in his Observer article.

(Ideologically he appears to be coming from the Hebdige point of view – lamenting the decline and slow death of the counter-culture from the rebel standpoint.

However what he also describes is the adaptation facing consumer capitalism. When there is no longer any significant counter culture from which to draw the next wave of cultural consumer products, then they begin to emerge from somewhere else altogether.)

'These days, people get into music to be part of the establishment. 

The most fuck-you guy around is Justin Bieber. What does that mean? 

There’s no counter culture – only over-the-counter culture.'

Selling out is now no longer something that needs to be post-rationalised to stave off cognitive dissonance in rebellious youth.

Selling-out is the objective, right from the get-go!

For Gen Xers this is a hard one to swallow.

Not so for millennials, rebellion has never been part of their culture – their only culture has been a marketing culture.

Later I argued that the real genius of Uber is nothing to do with technology or even (dubious) business practices.

The genius of Uber is in turning a commodity (consumption) product – the Taxi – into a display (status) product and spinning it’s anti-unionisation, anti-regulation winner-takes-all form of ultra-capitalism as some sort of signal of non-conformity and rebellion.

Now we know what’s going on, is it possible to map the disruption over time?

Possibly. This is purely a thought experiment - an ‘acausal connecting principle’ – e.g. a sequence of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect but something may be behind these events, even if we don’t know what.

I’ve joked in the past that the millennials are unique in post-war youth culture in one respect at least.

They are the first generation that was unable to come up with any kind of counter-culture idea that their parents would be afraid of. Sorry hipsters.

1980 was the year that millennials started being born, and therefore started to enter their teens around 1993 – the year that the internet began to be adopted and began it’s ten year march towards critical mass.

The previous year the KLF appeared on the televised Brit awards show, to perform and collect the award for ‘Best Act’.

In a final futile act of defiance Drummond and Cauty appeared on stage backed by Extreme Noise Terror (thrash metallists) and performed a barely recognizable thrash noise rendition of their biggest hit ‘3am Eternal’ before Drummond sprayed the audience (the music business itself) with  (blank) bullets from a machine gun and announcing ‘The KLF have left the music business’.

In The KLF:Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs the author offers this:

‘In a strange way, something about the music industry did die around that point. Music in the twentieth century had shown an incredible ability for invention. New musical genres were constantly created and explored – so much so, in fact, that this was considered normal. The first half of the century had given us such distinctive new genres as blues or jazz. The Fifties gave us rock ’n’ roll, and the Sixties gave us psychedelia and soul. The Seventies gave us reggae, heavy metal, disco and punk, and the Eighties had delivered hip-hop, techno, acid house and indie. The assumption was that this level of creativity was normal and would continue indefinitely…. It would never have occurred to anyone in those seats, as Drummond fired blanks into the ranks of their peers, that this period of invention had come to an end’.

The final nail in the coffin for the counter-culture – given that pop music of some shape or form has always been central to these movements - can then probably (and not without some significant irony), be traced to sometime around the turn of the century with the advent of the iPod, file sharing and streaming music services such as Spotify.

Is it that the emergence of devices and services that at first look appeared to democratise the music industry, shifting the power structure and giving us access to all music, all for free was an incorporation or co-optation too far?

Music began to lose it's signalling and galvanising power because it became an individualised 'pleasure' commodity product consumed (for free) by individuals in private within their earbuds.
That's if the individuals could even make it through the 3 minutes without pressing skip.

The well was now dry.

Our relationship with music had now changed forever – seemingly overnight, though it had been incrementally creeping up on us for 10 years and we hadn’t noticed.


Therefore consumer capitalism’s (profitable) relationship with the counter-culture has changed forever.

What happens now?

I’ve no idea, but the adaptive challenge for strategy needs to take this on board.

Or since the millennials dropped the ball, maybe Gen Z can come up with something.

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you get what you pay for

Every week now there seems to be another social media marketing disaster, usually revolving around the hijacking of the campaign hashtag or - as in the case of the lamentable #freshinourmemories debacle most recently - the hijacking of a 'branded' meme generator gizmo.

Blamestorming from the chattering classes obviously divides it's finger-pointing towards either the agency or the client.

I'll always tend to look at the agency and wonder what on earth they were thinking.
It's grade-A Dunning-Kruger.

In the #freshinourmemories case it appears that the agency in question may pay heavily.

Their website has gone offline completely and other clients have been reported to have dumped them.

But this hurts us all. It makes the whole industry looks bad.

To those who would blame the client - they signed it off etc - I would say, perhaps.

But then don't expect clients to come to agencies for strategic counsel for much longer.

Do we want to be just implementers?

Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. He'd be having a laugh at this business.

But here's a question.

Would there have been the same kerfuffle if the campaign had been a bunch of press ads and posters, for example?

Media that had to be paid for.

Rory Sutherland mentions this a lot.

The act of advertising - in a paid form and because that form is expensive - conveys an implicit meaning which free (ie social) media does not.

Paying for advertising is a kind of 'costly-signalling' by the brand that says ' we have some confidence our service and we value our reputation. So much so that we are prepared to stick some money behind it.'

The message of #freshinourmemories was not exploitative in itself (though 'fresh' is pretty clumsy).

But to simply pay to promote it may have been viewed as showing more commitment to the spirit.

Dare I say, more 'authentic'.

But as long as agencies are peddling 'the answer is social media, now what's the question?' then the clients that 'buy' into that will be getting what they pay for.

At best, not a lot.

At worst, regrettable and avoidable gubbins of the kind we've witnesses this week.

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the return of nietzsche marketing [ #dashbutton edition]

We conducted a small survey on supermarket shopping behaviour using the agency staff as our sample group of around 50.

It was relatively unscientific, however, the aim was to crudely test one particular covert thought.

We simply asked our respondents if they used a shopping list when visiting the supermarket.

For those who answered 'yes' we asked them to provide an example of a typical shopping list.

For those who answered 'no' we asked them to jot down what their mental list might typically be, anyway.

This gave us some interesting feedback - scribbled paper lists were by far the most popular, followed by self-text messages - and among this group no-one used a list-type app.

But that wasn't what we were really looking at.

Recently we've been reading Herb Sorensen's 2009 book 'Inside the Mind of the Shopper'.

His research that suggests that:
1. Around half of supermarket trips result in baskets of 5 items or less.
2. The most common basket size is just one item.

(This data is further referenced in the Byron Sharp textbook 'Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice' Chapter 8.)

Close to 90% of our responses contained 5 items or fewer.
The other 10% were 6.

For psych fans, and in the context of of Millers Law - The Magic Number 7, this was also curious.

The 'law' asserts that humans can retain 7 (plus or minus 2) pieces of information easily in working memory.

It turns out that this is less of a law and more of a decent hunch, the real number is closer to 5.

We could infer then, that shopping lists (list apps or other ‘solutions’) don’t necessarily add any utility to shoppers. We are reasonably capable of remembering 5 things.

More on shopping technology in a minute.

So our data was obviously slightly skewed as midweek shopping trips will be more likely to be quick trips, but you get the general idea, and our mode was 2 (pretty close to 1).

(Milk, bread and tissues in case you are wondering.)

Again, all this was interesting but not what I wanted to observe.

What I was looking for was specific brand name mentions.

And among the 86 different product categories listed by our respondents were only two instances of brand names.

Everything else was generic category - bread, milk, fruit, meat, tissues etc.

This seemed to be clear indication that, for the most part, people set out to buy from categories first, brands come second.

Of course preferences do exist, but these are more implicit rather than explicit.

In many fmcg categories brand either doesn't exist or is invisible (meat, fruit, vegetables) might exist but have little or no effect (bread, milk) and in the categories where it does have some influence the brand that gets bought is the one most salient at the point, and context of purchase.

Familiarity, popularity, habit and availability drive FMCG categories.

Unlike fashion or cars for example there is no 'display' or 'social' value for consumers.

One's choice of washing powder does not signal anything to anyone else.

It is simply something to be consumed.

Display value is only a marginally stronger pull anyway.

This is the eternal conundrum for commodity type brands.

All of which is the long way round to looking at Amazon Dash.

The Dash Button is a single-use Wi-Fi enabled ordering device for a selected set of partners including Gillette, Pampers, Tide and Olay. You press it and it orders directly - and frictionless - for you.

The promise of, for example, self-replenishing fridges, has long been part of the lore of 'the internet of things' and this appears to be Amazon’s play in that area, allowing customers to instantly repeat buy partner brands without thinking about it, more importantly, without being distracted by a competing brand at the shelf.

For the remainder of this piece we need to put aside any notions of could/should.

Amazon (and the other SV corporate giants) winner-takes-all disintermediation of every category imaginable is another debate.

Though as Andrew Keen quotes in 'The Internet is Not The Answer'.

“In Darwinian terms these new corporate giants are just the latest stage in the evolution of the public corporation, they exist to create wealth—vast quantities of it—for their founders and shareholders.

Their imperative is to grow and achieve dominance in their chosen markets—as well as in others which they now deem to be within their reach. They are as hostile to trade unions, taxation, and regulation as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ever were in their day. The only difference is that the new titans employ far fewer people, enjoy higher margins and are less harassed by governments than their predecessors.”

For FMCG brands, however, this is of little concern. Distribution is distribution.

What's interesting here is not the idea that push button instant replenishment is anything to do with notions of brand loyalty (active, in an attitudinal sense).

But is everything about enabling 'loyalty' in the passive behavioural sense.

On the one hand, commodity products with no display value can try and create 'meaning' by spending on huge emotional advertising - eg P&G's 'Thank You Mom' and the like.

Being famous and familiar will always be important.

But the Dash Button is somehow more refreshingly Nietzschean in it's acceptance of the kind of emptiness of consumption. In reaching acceptance that it will never be loved Tide is now happy just to be bought.

Who will press a button to order Tide? Or 5 boxes of Tide?
Well, we've already seen that people will trek to the supermarket for less than five items.
And most of the time for just one.

To come back to Professor Sharp's idea of brand salience, by which we mean the propensity of a particular brand to come to mind in a particular buying or usage situation.

If the buying situation occurs at the point of usage, ie in front of the washing machine then the brand that was last used, and the brand on the button becomes the most salient by default. No other brand is in it.

This is what Dave Trott might describe as 'getting upstream of the problem'.

People will never love their soap powder brand, but will be inclined to repeat purchase out of habit providing nothing else gets in the way.

So make sure nothing else gets in the way, then.

There's a statement attributed to Jeff Bezos that we often recall and use.

Bezos says that - given that Amazon are a cutting-edge tech retailer - people are interested in their innovation pipeline and therefore he often fields questions asking about what Jeff thinks might change in business in the next 5-10 years.

His reply is that he is more interested in what will stay the same. Because you can build a business on things that are stable in time.

People will always want things faster and cheaper.>

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the cult of authenticity [five minutes]

Sorry young millennials.
You are not special.

Your old Gen X mums and dads were just as confused as you, in their day.

'Ultimately, the uneasy relationship The Stranglers had with the punk scene reflected the need that the various protagonists within the movement had for 'authenticity'.

In 'The Culture Of Narcissism', Lasch had noticed that in the late-industrial cultures of the West, in which basic needs had become easily satisfied, and new wants had to be created by the propaganda....a “cult of authenticity” had emerged within “the spectacle” of consumerism that fetishised spontaneity and the confessional.

Punk’s most glaring, and therefore most sensitive, internal contradiction was that it was a largely manufactured movement that was intended to give vent to the organic, spontaneous rage of British youth.

The Stranglers weren’t marginalised because their “opportunism” made them less “real” than the other punk groups. They were marginalised because their established history drew attention to the inauthenticity of the others.'

Identity, Status, Structure and The Stranglers by Phil Knight.

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norman whitfield and barrett strong are here to make everything right that's wrong

Our good friend @MarkSareff had a pop at the growing tendency for some sections of the marketing world to be bewitched by 'neurobollocks' in a post over on Linked in.

And rightly so.

The infamous Martin Lindstrom 'You Love Your iPhone, Literally' article is a particularly salient example.

In any case the idea that individual human brains, studied in isolation from other factors can predict future buying behaviour is pretty flawed.

Studying how and why people behave the way they do in real buying situations over time, and how they act within the broader culture and environment is far more important.

Indeed much of what passes for - and is acceptable as - standard 'market data' - derived from surveys, focus groups, satisfaction scores and the like - is equally flawed, and suffers from many of the same limitations.

Small sample sizes invariably produce more extreme results.

Separate small groups often produce results that bear no resemblance to each other’s.

And, most importantly, lab or focus group outputs are not an analysis of real world behavioural data because the environment has no similarity to the one in which buying decisions will actually be made.

Neuroscience is an important science, there's no doubt about that.

However, as with every new shiny object adopted by the marketing community in an attempt to shortcut real planning rigour, cherry picking and misusing a few 'sexy' techniques off the top and then using the outputs to jump to conclusions is neither correct nor advantageous.

I commented on Mark's piece, noting that we should again be mindful of Sturgeon's revelation (that 90% of EVERYTHING is shit).

For advertising, there must be a middle way, however.

On the art side of the art v science debate is the Bernbach-ian dictate of taste, artistry and magic so venerated by creative departments. But this is not satisfactory either.

In Paul Feldwick's recent book 'The Anatomy of Humbug' - a compendium of popular advertising theory from the last hundred or so years - he correctly points out that all those words exist to close down discussion rather than open it up.

That's not to say that intuition and gut feel aren't useful to guide advertising decisions. In fact there's some pretty decent science to back up the value of smart heuristics.

If I were to open a market research company I'd name it Whitfield and Strong.

A small section of the lyrics from 'I Heard it Through The Grapevine' tell us most of what we need to know.

'People say believe half of what you see, son,
And none of what you hear,
I can't help bein' confused,
If it's true please tell me dear?
Do you plan to let me go,
for the other guy you loved before?'

Believe nothing that consumers tell you they they do.
Believe about half of what you see them do.
And believe nearly all of what the behavioural/sales data tells you they have done, because that's best indicator of what they might do in the future.

Though, you still can't be sure.

All of which is a decent excuse for this...

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if it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together

For a time during World War II, the chances of a member of US bomber crews actually making it back from any given mission, were on the side of slim.

The nature of the work meant that bombers were out for a long time, they were massive cumbersome planes visible from a long way away, and their ability to do serious damage if successful meant they were the number one target of both the guns on the ground and in the air.

For the bomber crews, each subsequent mission piled up the odds against them making it back this time.

And the Army Air Force couldn’t make planes quick enough to replace the ones that went down.

The situation was unsustainable.

In the hope of a solution the military engineers examined the bombers that made it back from their missions.

Patterns started to emerge. They saw the damage tended to accumulate in the same places.

They observed clusters of bullet holes along both wings, down the center of the bomber’s body and around the tail gunner area.

The answer was clear. The bombers needed more armour.

However they couldn’t just reinforce the entire plane – the weight would prevent them from even taking off.

So, based on the data they had, the obvious solution was to put thicker protection where they see the most damage, and ramp up reinforcement in the areas where the bullet holes clustered.

Just to be sure they were doing the right thing, the engineers called in a statistician, one Abraham Wald.

Wald was a member of the military’s ‘Applied Mathematics Panel’ – a secret boffin unit working out of Columbia University applying the science of probability and statistics to the war effort.

And good job they did, as Wald saw immediately that they were about to make exactly the wrong decision.

Because the common patterns of bullet holes actually showed where the planes were strongest.

The holes showed where a bomber could be hit repeatedly and still make it back.

The planes that didn’t make it home were being hit in different places.

Until Wald’s intervention the military were overly focused on the planes that made it home and almost made a potentially catastrophic decision by ignoring the planes that got shot down.

That’s a long-winded way round to pointing out that the same survivorship bias is prevalent in marketing departments and agencies every day.

Just like our Air Force engineers, it’s easy for marketers and agencies to get distracted by the high response rates and dramatic ROI that appears to fall out of marketing discounts or offers to a particular segment of heavy customers.

On the surface it appears logical.

But these are people who are likely to buy anyway.

These customers are the cluster of bullet holes that registered on the wings of the planes that made it home.

And the bigger the plane the bigger those clusters will naturally be. This is because the bigger brands in any given category tend to have slightly higher rates of bullet hole frequency (and loyalty) than their smaller competitors.

For just about any brand, attracting the mass of category buyers who are light and non-buyers of the particular brand – just like the bullet holes that didn’t show up, or barely registered on the bombers that made it home – holds the key as to whether the mission is going to be successful or not.

Survivorship bias in marketing is your tendency to focus on heavy buyers instead of light or non-buyers and on activities that look like winners in the short term which turn out to be losers in the long game.

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never tell anyone outside the agency what you're thinking

At the beginning of 'The Godfather', just before the scene of Don Vito Corleone's daughter Connie's wedding, Santino 'Sonny' Corleone is in a clandestine meeting with Virgil 'The Turk' Sollozzo in which they discuss a potential opportunity for the Corleone's in Sollozzo's nascent heroin business, which he plans to bring to New York.

(This discussion is happening without Don Vito Corleone's prior knowledge and ultimately leads to the attempt on the Don's life later on.)

Sonny is already receptive to the heroin idea, narcotics looks likely to be a lucrative business in the near future and worth getting in early on, and proceeds to sets up a meeting with Sollozzo, Tom Hagen - the Corleones' consigliere (who is similarly enthusiastic), and the Don.

Sollozzo arrives in New York and has already 'secretly' allied with the rival Tattaglia family, however still has ideas on bringing in the Corleone family for further financial backing and to ensure heat protection from the police and justice departments in the city, whom the Corleone's have in their pocket.

Vito Corleone - who, unbeknown to Sollozzo - is already wise to the Tattaglia involvement, decides to decline the offer on the basis that heroin is generally a bad business and - in any case - would put a strain his political connections, which he viewed as strategically more valuable in the long game.

During Vito's polite refusal of Sollozzo's offer, Sonny - understandably inscensed by Sollozzo's faintly ridiculous suggestion that the Tattaglia's would guarantee the Corleone's investment - breaks ranks and interrupts his father with an display of temper directed at Sollozzo.

Vito calmly puts Sonny back in his box, and once their guests have departed expresses his disappointment with Sonny's indiscretion.

'Never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking again'.

The damage has been done, unfortunately.

Sollozzo, realising that Sonny (Vito's eldest son, family underboss and therefore next in line to the throne) is:

a) more receptive to the heroin idea
b) prepared to speak over the top of Vito and
c) unable to keep his cool in a business situation.

The Turk now starts to think that a good strategy would be to take out Vito.

Sonny's outburst not only undermined the Don but sowed the seeds for and undermining of the credibility of the entire Corleone family/organisation.

As it transpires this will now lead to all kinds of trouble for the family - including the death of Sonny - and Vito's capitulation into the heroin business, a compromise in order to prevent an all-out war among the crime families.

Many years ago I was a designer in a small but emerging agency.

The founders had a lot to say for themselves, a definite point of view on the world and it was an exciting - if sometimes seat-of-the-pants - time.

One Friday afternoon a not very senior client called up and asked the account person if we could make a small change to some element of an ad.

This was right at the last minute before the thing was due out of the door.

Both the Creative Director and the Planning Director were out so the account person agreed, instructed me to make the change, the ad went off and that was that.

Later that evening I got a message from the Planning Director indicating we would be having a chat on the Monday morning.

By 'chat' it became clear that he meant getting the metaphorical shit kicked out of me by him and the CD.

By making a - what seemed to me to be minor - change to the ad on the request of a junior client, without consulting the CD I had undermined the credibility of the entire agency.

I had made us look like we didn't know what we were doing.

I learned something that day.

Several years and several agencies later I sat in presentation to a brand new client at an agency I had just joined. The ECD was presenting a camapign to this new client.

At the end of the show the client started making comments on the work and suggesting small changes to copy, edits and suchlike.

The ECD sat stony faced while receiving the feedback and then removed the work from the table explaining that if the client didn't like the idea then we would take it away and come back with something else.

The client wouldn't be put off, insisting that just a few of his changes and the work would be fine.

To which the ECD responded, 'Thank you Mr [name], but we'll come back with another idea. I don't tell you how to make [product X] so please don't tell me how to make advertising'.

That might look like arrogance to some, to me this was necessary.

The creative credibility of the agency must be preserved, almost at all costs.

This is not about stroking creative egos. I have had many a stand-up fight with CDs over the years. It's the planner's job to make sure the advertising is 'right'.

For one's own credibility that means being prepared to scrap.

However, those things happen behind closed doors. It doesn't matter how much I disagree with a Creative Director I would never voice that in a client situation or any other situation where their status could be undermined.

Bob Hoffman says that 'everyone else in an agency are organisers, and the creatives make the ads'.

This is right to a certain extent, but most certainly should be the impression given to people from outside.

Agencies are judged by their creative output.

While we all know that a huge amount of work goes into making the advertising 'right' but when non-creatives undermine the creative product - by unquestioningly agreeing to client whims or making their own suggestions in the presence of anyone outside of the agency - it undermines the entire agency.

The popular notion of 'ideas can come from anywhere' is in part to blame for these incidents.

Of course ideas can come from anywhere, however that does not make them good ideas.

Good commercial creative ideas tend to come from people who's job it is to have them.

When you devalue ideas, you capitulate.

When you devalue ideas, you undermine the whole agency.

Before you know it you become a chop shop and it's a long long way back.

Never tell anyone outside the agency what you're thinking, again.

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