second brain

why ad agencies miss out on magic

Ever since ad agencies started grappling with digital disruption of their industry, a common refrain has been heard: "It's still all about big ideas. They can happen in any channel".

Execution has been downgraded. The focus in ad agencies is on getting 'upstream'.

Such thinking is a great comfort to superannuated planners and creative directors. But it misses out something huge.

Brilliant campaigns hardly ever born fully-formed on a powerpoint chart or on the back of a notepad. In that sense, they are not abstract 'ideas'. They are things, And magical things have to crafted, cajoled, tweaked and twisted into life. 

Here's a guy that knew something about magic:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. […]

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

(In case you hadn't guessed - that's Steve Jobs.)

getting to know siri

One of the most striking things about the launch of Siri is that its most talked about feature isn't its ability to find restaurants or source facts or send texts, but its sense of humour. Siri comes pre-programmed with seemingly myriad smartass ripostes to smartass questions, spawning many tweets, articles and at least one entire blog.

I find it fascinating that Siri's personality, rather than its functionality, is driving the conversation. Of course, Siri's ultimate value doesn't lie in its sense of humour; there's only so many times you can be amused by its response to a declaration of love. But neither is Siri's personality unimportant to its (yet to be determined) usage and popularity. It's not a 'hard' feature, but it seems to be a very important 'soft' one.

The interesting question is, what role is 'personality' playing here, beyond a bit of light entertainment for the user? The answer seems to be that it establishes an emotional bond between the user and the service - or more specifically, it establishes trust. By showing that it can crack jokes, Siri can smooth over the inevitable gaps in its functionality; it encourages us to think of it as an adaptive, sentient being that is smarter and more surprising than we might predict (of course, we 'know', rationally, that it's a digital programme, and not a person, but we are so willing to anthropomorphise that a little artificial personality can go a long way).

This is really a reproduction of the normal relationship we have with real people. It helps to explain why, for instance, the personality of politicians is so important to their popularity. People - usually politicians - often bemoan the role that personality plays in politics - why can't it be all about 'the issues'? Again, the answer is trust. Voters use instinctively know that policies and promises can change; so they zero in on the person espousing them. Assessing someone's humour and personality is a short-cut to a judgement on their character - and thus helps us predict how they will behave in the future.

less is more

That seems to be the implication of this paper from Yale School of Management:

Here, we focus on a particular aspect of the advertising content choice: an attribute-focused appeal versus an appeal with no direct information on product attributes. We make two assumptions that capture the reality of the advertising context. First, we assume that the bandwidth of advertising is limited: a firm can only communicate about a limited number of attributes. Second, we assume that consumers are active: they can choose to engage in a costly search to obtain additional product-related information. In this setting, we show that there exists an equilibrium where the high-quality firm chooses to produce messages devoid of any attribute information in order to invite the consumer to engage in search, which is likely to uncover positive information about the product.

So if you're offering a product or service of genuinely superior quality, the best thing to do is intrigue without informing, and let people find out for themselves. Not having read the whole paper I can't comment on how robust this finding is, though it makes intuitive sense. But it's a tough message to buy, especially because we often tend to think of advertising as persuasion rather than provocation.

systems thinking

The man on the right is John Sculley, former Apple CEO (we can all be grateful that the man on the left dumped the bow tie for the turtleneck). Sculley took over at Apple in 1983, after Apple's co-founder and senior 'grown-up' Mike Markkula retired. The board didn't trust Jobs to actually run the company, and so, with Jobs's co-operation, they lured Sculley from Pepsi-Cola, where he had been a highly successful marketing executive. The two soon became locked in a power struggle, which Sculley won, forcing Jobs out. Sculley stayed for a decade, and while the company grew during that time it lost direction, failed to innovate successfully, and became, essentially, mediocre.

Last year, Sculley gave a remarkable interview about his time at Apple and his impressions of Jobs. With any animosity long-dissolved, Sculley is perceptive, candid, self-critical, and fascinating on the topic of Jobs's working methods. Better than anyone else I've read, he articulates what it is about Jobs that makes him different, that made him great. If you're interested you should really read the whole thing, but here's a taster:

I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed [there's a photo here]. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewellery...

...Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system. It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else. If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely different way of looking at things...Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.

Sculley says Jobs saw Apple as being a 'vertically-integrated ad agency'. Certainly, for companies that don't have a Jobs in charge, ad agencies should be aim to perform something like this role: thinking about the whole 'system' in which a product or service is embedded; seeing the whole of the moon. More to the point, it's how all technology companies need to think of themselves. Too often, the temptation is to focus on the product and its brilliant features, rather than where it fits into the network of relationships between people and technology. Talking of which - see also this fascinating explanation of why Nokia failed.

before they started popping

The Pringles brand was based on an extraordinary innovation: the production of regularly sized, curved potato chips that could be stacked on top of each other, sealed in a container and shipped - and thus distributed nationally (and later internationally).

When your breakthrough product is based on a genuine technological innovation, it's very tempting to tell the world about it. You're excited - surely they will be too! But of course, consumers won't necessarily give a hoot about your ingenuity. When P&G launched Pringles in the US in 1973 they got carried away with their cleverness. Despite being famed, as marketers, for a ruthless focus on consumer benefits, they ended up launching this new brand with a bizarre ad that had everything to do with their internal breakthrough and nothing to do with what consumers got out of it. It promoted Pringles as a form of futuristic, 'new fangled' technology - rather than as an irresistible snack:

"Are there really potato chips in there?"
"I don't believe this."
"They're made a new way."

The launch was a flop, sales flatlined, and the brand looked in danger of failing altogether. Then in the 1980s P&G decided to refocus on consumer benefits, found the tagline "Once you pop you can't stop"...and Pringles never stopped.

dept. of candour

During Apple's wilderness years, it nearly got bought by Sun Microsystems. This is what former Sun CEO Scott McNealy has to say about that now:

“If we had bought Apple, there wouldn’t have been iPods or iPads … I’d have screwed that up.”

why nokia failed

Nokia has gone from being the world's most successful purveyor of communications devices to a basket case in the space of a few years. Stephen Elop, its new chief executive, has described the company as standing on a 'burning platform'. To understand why, you - and he - could hardly do better than read this brilliant post by an ex-Nokia employee, Adam Greenfield. It's full of insight, not just into Nokia, but into how the world of communications has changed:

Nokia’s engineers were and are brilliant at this. I am so far from an expert on the topic it’s not even funny, but I’d feel comfortable wagering that there is still no organization on the planet more capable at designing the guts of a phone, the various antennae and radios-on-a-chip that allow a handset to communicate with a network. Nor are there many who can compete with Nokia on the ability to optimize a supply chain and bring in a given bill of material at a given (and generally astonishingly low) cost. These are precisely the skills you need if you’re interested in dominating a global market in commodity communication devices, as Nokia did for the fourteen years ...But the company utterly failed to anticipate, understand or organize itself to deal with the critical thing that happened...This was that you could no longer think of mobile phones as communication devices. You had to conceive of them as interface objects through which users would experience content and command functionality that ultimately lived on the network.

Nokia's 'value engineers', says Greenfield, have been allowed to dominate the company, at the price of marginalising its more visionary and design-focused thinkers:

And this is the crux of it. As it happens, the value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences. Of course you still want to produce your offering for the lowest achievable cost — but that cost is bound up in intangible, nondeterministic dimensions of design, in ways that are only partially-at-best quantifiable. It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons: they’re, I daresay, not even neurocognitively equipped to do so.

Read the whole thing.

 

 

semiotic cross-dressing

things consumers never say

All of these ring painfully untrue...

human

I like this quote from an interview with Lonely Planet's Gus Balbontin:

The essence of what the print people have known for 500 years is still the same in the digital world: you still have to publish great content. Yes, the tone may change a little. Yes, the experience might be slightly different. But at the end of the day, the people creating the content are humans. The people consuming it are also humans. The same humans that consume print consume digital. It's not different... In terms of the next 10 or 20 years, the essence of what publishers are doing won't change at all. This is what should make publishers feel comfortable about the future. The reason why you're there and the problems that you can solve for customers won't change.

I'm not sure 'comfortable' is the right word. But he makes an important point and one that's easily forgotten.

making people love ads

The big challenge for brands over the next few years will be getting people to watch or listen to ads. So far, and despite predictions of its demise, the interruption model has held up pretty well; for instance, people with DVRs may skip through some of the breaks when they watch a recording but they also tend to watch more TV and so, in the aggregate, more ads. There's still plenty of interruption ads on the web.

But as the viewer-medium interface becomes more and more supple, and choice increases, advertisers will have to get more creative in order to keep people watching the stuff that pays.

The conventional wisdom amongst agencies has been that advertisers will simply have to make ads (etc) so entertaining, so brilliantly compelling, that consumers will seek them out. Sweet as this idea is, it's a little like campaigning for world peace - worthy but unrealistic. Only a very small minority of brands will ever produce content like this, on a regular basis.

But there are now emerging some more thoughtful and truly creative solutions to this problem - and they're coming from media owners, rather than agencies or advertisers. They involve targeting consumers much more closely, making ad-watching more social, and giving viewers more control over what ads they watch. This piece in FastCompany, on Hulu, outlines some fascinating new approaches:

While one ad is showing, Hulu will display three other options, as in the picture below. If you don’t like the one in front of you, you can choose one of the others. That's a better experience for users, Kilar says. As for the advertisers, the first brand doesn’t have to pay for that impression. Only the second brand pays—and they actually pay a higher rate, because the user chose them. That, in turn, generates more money for the content owner.

Link to article.

when buying isn't the same as consuming

I read this profile of Slavoj Zizek when it came out, loved it, and have returned to it several times since, because it contains more stimulation, more gems of insight, than 99% if marketing books. To take but one example (the one I happened to notice today, and which helps explain why, now that I have Spotify, I hardly ever listen to music):

"Videos and DVDs have ruined movies for me," he says. "Instead of seeing the movie, I buy it, and then I have it, so why should I watch it?"

advertising life

What if all that stands between you and death is an ad?

McCann Erickson devised this for Serbia's Suicide Prevention Office. The phrase translates as "You are not alone" and it's projected on to the water beneath Belgrade's highest bridge (and can only be seen from there).

the importance of taste

From a 1997 interview:

Great products, according to Jobs, are a triumph of taste, of ''trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.'' The Macintosh, he has said, turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.

And so Jobs's return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce certain standards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown ugly. Jobs has never hidden his longstanding objection to Microsoft -- not, he says, because of its dominance, or even Bill Gates's billions. ''The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,'' he said last year in ''Triumph of the Nerds,'' a television documentary about the history of the computer industry. ''I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products.

this is broken

Seth Godin is consistently glib, superficial, and annoyingly brilliant:

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

how to get five million readers for your blog

Matthew Inman explains how he did just that, from scratch, within a year. Anyone interested in what kind of content attracts attention in the online world should watch this:

At Second Brain we care about quality of audience, not mere reach, of course.

nineteen words

In case you weren't aware, Dilbert creator Scott Adams keeps a very stimulating blog. He's got a fascinating, contrarian take on the Apple press conference, which most commentators deemed a flop:

If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy." Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.

Did it work? Check out the media response. There's lots of talk about whether other smartphones are perfect or not. There's lots of talk about whether Jobs' response was the right one. But the central question that was in everyone's head before the press conference - "Is the iPhone 4 a dud" - has, well, evaporated. Part of the change in attitude is because the fixes Apple offered are adequate. But those fixes easily could have become part of the joke if handled in an apologetic "please kick me" way.

If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 in particular to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won't work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to "all smartphones have problems," the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

Adams calls this move the "high-ground maneuver": taking the argument up a level and changing the way it's framed. Try it at home!

sensory branding

In a digital world, don't underestimate the importance of appealing to all the senses:

Singapore airlines is the pinnacle of sensory branding and offers a full scale assault on our brains. Like any other airline, Singapore airlines employs common consistent visual themes. Unlike other airlines the company incorporates the same scent, Stefan Floridian Waters, in the perfume worn by flight attendants, in their hot towels, and other elements of their service. Flight attendants must be physically attractive and wear uniforms made from fine silk which incorporates elements of the cabin decor. The airline strives to make every customer interaction both appealing, and, equally important, consistent from encounter to encounter. It's no wonder the airline is perennially at the top of travelers' preference rankings.

I'm not sure I like the idea of a full-scale assault on my brain. But this is impressive, if a little scary.

More on sensory branding here.

the disloyalty card

What a good idea.

the case for studying poetry in the information age

NYT columnist David Brooks stands up for the touchy-feely humanities in an increasingly technocratic world:

In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

the best creatives have always been the best planners

Here's proof: a great idea based on an exquisite consumer insight. And it worked.

a stern rebuke to behavioral economists?

From a wonderful collection of strange signs.

urned media

I particularly enjoyed the Simpsonesque name of this man's hometown:

SPRINGFIELD, Ore. – A Springfield man with colon cancer who has been told he has just months to live is selling advertising space on his urn. Aaron Jamison told KVAL-TV he hopes to raise $800 to help his wife Kristin pay for the cost of his cremation.

One friend, restaurant owner Dustin Remington, has already paid $100 for an ad. Jamison plans to hand-paint the ad on his urn.

a feeling people want to be part of

Maybe more brands should think of themselves like this?

"People see Barcelona not as an industry, not as a business, more as a feeling. As a human being you prefer to be involved with a feeling or an emotion than a business. How do you describe a feeling? How do you describe love?"

Sandro Rossell, Barca businessman and backer.

twitter saved the tv star

The trouble with TV, people have been saying for years, is that it's not interactive. It's a passive medium, and for a generation raised on the internet, that's a big problem, especially since interactive TV turned out to be such a flop.

The other problem identified is that TV isn't social. It's a one-to-many technology. Not only can I not talk back to it, I can't use it to talk to my friends.

TV has proved fairly resilient so far, however. It's showed no sign of going the way of the CD. This shouldn't be so surprising - you can't beat a big screen with moving pictures and decent sound for entertainment, immersion and emotional power. Nor is it easy to replicate that feeling of sharing in a communal moment you get when you watch any programme with a big audience.

But there's something else. I think what people have underestimated is TV's adaptability - the way that it works as a hub for plug-in devices. DVR (Sky Plus/Tivo etc) is the most obvious. But a plug-in doesn't literally have to plug in, or be designed for TV-compatibility, to function as enhancer of the TV experience.

Twitter is a TV plug-in. As this New York Times piece explains, people are using Twitter more and more as a kind of user-created subtitling, or commentary (adoring/trashing/ironising) on whatever's on the box. "Event TV" in particular benefits from this effect. In the US, audiences for large events like audiences for large events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics have been breaking records - we've seen  the same here with X-Factor. This effect may be good news in particular for the biggest, established mainstream channels (ITV here, NBC/ABC etc in the US) which have lost so much share in recent years, because they have the conversation-generating reach, and mass-appeal content that smaller channels don't.

So one way to think about Twitter is as the latest in a short but powerful series of TV-enhancing innovations (colour, remote controls, video, DVR...). Twitter effectively plugs those two holes in the TV offer: interactivity and social-ness. But it's not a one-way benefit: social media benefit because TV brings what they don't have - an immersive sensory experience.

Together, TV and Twitter form a powerfully compelling nexus. It will be around for a while yet.

the new etiquette of flow

A provocative little picture-essay from Peggy Nelson that argues we've moved from the etiquette of individuals communicating with each other one at a time to a new mode of always-on, always-connected communication:

We’re beginning to inhabit ad hoc, overlapping, always-on virtual salons—you’re talking to someone, and then you both get pulled off into different directions, to form different shapes and vectors within the conversations, and then come together again, having never really been apart. You can even have multiple conversations via multiple media with the same person at one time. Single conversations are one-dimensional chess. Once you master multiplicity, who’s to say how far you will go? Correction: how far we will go. For we will all go together, wherever it is that we are going.

Don't underestimate, however, the value of solitude and introspection - an ability which will become more, not less valuable, in this new age.

google goes trad

Excuse my lateness to this, but last month hell froze over:

I've never believed that, as some claim, big branding campaigns and/or TV advertising will die any time soon. It's just become one weapon in a brand's armoury, rather than the only or default one. Any time you gets serious competition on product grounds (as Google now has with Bing) it becomes important to build emotional values into the brand - and TV (ie moving pictures + sound + big screen) is still the best way to do that.

And I think it's a very clever ad. It's incredibly hard to infuse emotion into a) a web-based brand, b) a demonstration ad, c) an impersonal global brand. But somehow they found a way of doing it.

Whilst we're on Google, all media owners need to heed Martin Sorrell's recent words:

“Google is a media owner, not a technology company.”

NBC/ITV/Sky should be afraid. But at least they might be getting some ad monies from their nemesis along the road to their destruction.

dept. of disastrous semiotics

(via Andrew Sullivan)

how fluent is your marketing?

Perhaps that's a question we should all start asking ourselves. The study of "cognitive fluency" is a hot topic in psychology and might soon be one in communications. We can intuitively grasp that, all things being equal, the mind prefers simple information to complex information. What's more surprising is how much simplicity or ease-of-use affects our judgements across all sorts of criteria:

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities... Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information.

Or, as an old client of mine was fond of putting it, "if I can't spell it, you won't sell it."

two cheers for domino's

Domino's have a new campaign - Pizza Turnaround - that's attracting a lot of attention. It does something that is, on the face of it anyway, very bold - it admits their pizzas have been crap:

I'm not a huge fan of this. On the one hand, I genuinely like the principle of a company "opening itself up" to the public, exposing its workings, being ultra-candid, and showing people where it's moving to as a business. And, being English, I like a bit of self-deprecation. I also applaud attempts to break with ad conventions. This is from Slate's commentary on the campaign:

These are commercials masquerading as documentaries—designed to pierce through the viewer's built-up resistance to typical scripted, acted spots.

But therein lies the problem. The campaign is very obviously scripted and acted. These are clearly not real people saying spontaneous things. They are actors (or perhaps in some case Domino's employees who have been made to sound like actors) delivering cute lines, in contrived environments. Consequently it doesn't feel authentic. It feels like a trick, a scam, a masquerade, albeit a fun one. In other words...it's an ad.

It's like the client and agency got so far towards a truly bold and radical execution of a bold strategy - and then got nervous, and decided to return to those old, reassuringly conventional ways...

why twitter is here to stay

As David Carr remarks at the beginning of this excellent piece, it's got one of the most godawful brand names ever. But that just goes to show that if the product is good enough, nothing else matters.

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

even the new rules can be broken

I've come across a big, consumer-facing company that doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, does very little to "engage" with its customer community, isn't transparent (in fact is positively secretive), doesn't give anything away for free, often seems to treat its consumers as ATMs to be regularly emptied of cash, and in its marketing relies overwhelmingly on TV, press, and posters.

This company must be dead or dying on its feet, right?

Well, not quite.

the choice architecture of restaurants

A behavioral economist dissects the design of restaurant menus.

search wars

The news that News Corp is considering an alliance with Microsoft will be causing real concern at Google.

Now of course, News Corp is the David here, up against the digital Goliath. The Murdoch media empire is just a small part of the world's information and news services, so it may well be that by removing themselves from Google they're simply shooting (or stoning) themselves in the foot. But even if that's so, the very act of unsettling the status quo just might prove deeply damaging to the world's favourite second brain.

As consumers, we've been in the thoughtless habit of going to Google whenever we want to find information for ten years now. This development might make it less thoughtless, and less of a habit. When you know that certain content will only be found on another search engine, not only will that prompt you to consider a specific alternative - it will prompt you to consider why on earth you're so reliant on one particular search engine in the first place. And who knows where that will end...?

Google's search technology isn't demonstrably superior to its competitors. One its biggest competitive advantages is consumer habit. News Corp's move - whether beneficial to News Corp or not - has the potential to unravel that advantage.

the "paradox of choice" is no such thing

Tim Harford - the nemesis of behavioral economists - explains why new research seems to show that this most heralded and cited of recent ideas is, well, of dubious substance:

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided...to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why. After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect. The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way

(via Tyler Cowen, who saw this coming)

why (genuine) brands make you a better person

Dan Ariely, behavourial economist and author of Predictably Irrational, outlines a fascinating experiment which suggests that wearing fake brands is bad for one's moral health. Luxury brand-owners agree.

a lesson in how to create branded content (from 1895)

From the New Yorker's fine piece on the Michelin guide:

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat.

tmi

(via Indexed)

sunday night is suddenly alright

Sunday night TV has, for as long as I can remember, been an entertainment desert for anyone born after the release of the White Album. A relentless diet of hymns, antiques, bumbling vicars and period frocks, it's been a conspiracy to bore the nation, or at least half of it, into a state of melancholic resignation at the end of another weekend.

I've always wondered, for years now and often out of sheer frustration whilst flicking across channels, why none of the broadcasters, despite their ferocious competition for viewers elsewhere in the week, hadn't taken the initiative and tried something different on a Sunday evening. It seemed like such an easy win. You have a near-captive audience who want to stay in and sedate themselves in preparation for the start of another work week, including the much sought-after younger demographic, shagged out from partying the previous two nights. And if you move first, you have an enormous advantage over the almost uniform tedium across the schedule. Why hadn't anyone gone for it? When I worked at Channel Five I used to ask this question of everyone, including schedulers. I never found a satisfactory answer. It was just the way things were, apparently.

Finally, ITV has taken a look at this open goal, and decided to boot the ball into it:

Traditionally an evening for the small-screen equivalent of a warm bath, ITV's decision to broadcast its hour-long X Factor results show on Sundays has brought it massive ratings.. "It was waiting to be done. I'm not surprised that there's a large audience on a Sunday night – people don't go out," said the ITV director of television, Peter Fincham.

And that, folks, is why TV execs get paid the big bucks.

decent, honest, truthful

It's not about brands but it is - in the broader sense - about human behaviour, so here's a link to my recent Times piece on why we have a very evolved capacity for deception (not a capacity that those of us in marketing and advertising ever exercise of course...).

the marshmallow test

The marshmallow test is one of the all-time great psychology experiments. It was invented in the 1960s by a Stanford psychologist called Walter Mischel and has been repeated many times since. Essentially, it's a test of self-control. In brief: put a four-year-old in a room with a marshmallow (or some other sweet they love) and promise them another, but only if they can wait a few minutes before eating the first one.The researcher leaves the room, so the child is left alone with their temptation. Some kids barely wait till the researchers have closed the door (or not even) before gobbling up the one on the plate. Some stare at the thing intensely until they can wait no more and give in after a minute or so. Others find ways to distract themselves - singing, looking away, crawling under the table - and win their reward.

What made the experiment really notable was that Mischel followed the lives of the children in those first tests as they grew into adolescence and adulthood. He found that the ones who managed to wait it out - who were good at managing their own impulses towards instant gratification - tended to be happier and more successful at school and in their careers. Those who didn't even bother trying to resist were more likely to have drug problems, wayward careers, broken relationships, and so on. This suggests just what an important skill it is to be able to manage our own instincts, to conceive of our future selves as well as address our immediate desires, to play the abstract future off against the clamorous present. For a longer, fascinating account of the experiment and its implications, print 'n read this. (The video above is a sort of impressionistic take on the experiment - I don't know if they were doing it 'for real', as it were.)

The test provides a suggestive analogy for brand management, too. Marketers are constantly having to balance the short-term needs and opportunities of a brand against its imagined future. The temptation to eat the marshmallow on the plate comes in many forms (cut the price, run that promotion, do a deal with a partner that doesn't share our values but offers big volumes). Strong brand management requires a vivid ability to imagine (and persuade others of) a future for the brand for which it might be worth sacrificing the immediate opportunity. Brands that are good at this are likely to be stronger and more valuable in the longer-term. Sometimes, however, you just really, really want that marshmallow.

the homer simpson effect

The excellent Lucid Thoughts describes a fascinating new study on the links between food advertising and actual eating behaviour, based on a cleverly designed experiment. The gist of it is that food advertising does stimulate people, unconsciously, to eat more... although not necessarily to eat more of the advertised brand (I think LT may be over-interpreting a little when he says the ads aren't building a brand - does the paper actually show this or even investigate it? Sounds like a separate question about long-term effects to me but then I haven't bought and read the whole paper).

how to create a successful rumour

One way to read this 1943 document from American intelligence is as a handy guide to viral marketing...

on being old in a world of new media (or why huey lewis was right)

The venerable Washington Post recently resdesigned its website for the 21st century. It looks pretty good; well organised and reasonably clear if a little busy. The headlines are sans serif, as you'd expect in this sleek, fluid medium. And what have they done with the all-important masthead (essentially, the logo)?

This is the new one. Up until the redesign, they were using a contemporary, serif-less font for this as well (in fact I think they were using the dot com address as the masthead). So in order to move their brand into the future, they've gone back 100 years. This isn't as crazy as it seems.

Let's look at a couple of UK newspaper brands, as manifested in advertising. Here's The Guardian:

When it was launched, a couple of years ago in a pre-crash world, it looked right: contemporary, colourful, creative. But to my eyes, this style looks dangerously flippant and throwaway in these gloomier, more insecure times. Also - note the logo. It's just another website address. That's reflected in the actual Guardian masthead, which is designed to look like an internet brand: lower case only, the two words running together. Looks cool. But what are they giving up when they do this?

Here's The Times (other executions here):

The Times is right up against it. If News Corp are about to introduce some kind of payment-model for it, then their brand advertising needs to work harder than ever. Leaving aside the question of whether it will do so in vain; I think these ads do about as good as job as they can do in the circumstances.

What they focus on is reasserting the brand's authority. Each ad is rooted in The Times' expertise: its special correspondents, its grasp of the facts, its depth of knowledge. They've also kept faith with a more traditional masthead/logo, and put it front and centre in the ads.

The internet has been a great leveller and democratiser. Our information sources have been infinitely expanded. News comes from everywhere and anywhere, including our social networks. This is a terrific and exciting thing. But our euphoria at this transformation is curdling. We're starting to realise that, like most terrific things, it carries a cost. Blogs skim and snatch at events; opinions flow as easily as tapwater; rumours spread like smallpox. It's ever harder to know who and what to trust, where to find serious analysis rather than cheap chatter, and how to do so quickly and easily. Here's where newspaper brands - precisely because they've been around forever - should find their competitive advantage. But some of them are so busy trying to look like the rest of the internet that they've forgotten how to be themselves.

The Washington Post and The Times are realising that in the world of new media, one of a newspaper brand's greatest strengths is being old. It's hip to be square.

species variation

This helps with a few questions I've had for a while...

(Via Geek Media)

good old-fashioned advertising

Or, how to spend a huge amount of money and energy creating a finely crafted commercial based on a hopelessly flawed metaphor:

If I were an American with funds to spare, here are some things this ad would make me think:

1. Wow, cool ad.
2. What's it for again?
3. An investment fund. Something about thinking long term. Cool.
4. I'm putting my money in a savings account.

how things spread

The metaphor of epidemics or contagions for the spread of ideas, preferences, habits and more has become very fashionable in the last few years, partly as a result of Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, and partly because of the increasing influence of the internet on our social lives. It has led to much prefixing of marketing with words like "buzz" or "W.O.M" or "viral", and confident assertions about the targeting of "influencers". But the truth is, scientists and sociologists are still getting to grips to with this phenomenon. We still don't know, for instance, whether so-called influencers have any more influence than anyone else.

It's definitely true, however, that the field of social network analysis is important and exciting, and anyone involved in marketing needs to be abreast of it. Social networks are getting easier to study and analyse: the rise of digital communications means that we're now leaving ever-richer data trails about where we are, what we're doing and what we're thinking and of course, who we're connected to.

For a brilliant survey of what we know about social networks, look no further than this article in the NYT.

thinking and drinking

Talking of the bias towards rationality...

"Know Your Limits" is part of a long-running campaign. There's another example, from last year, here.

It goes without saying that the problem of binge-drinking and its social effects is a very serious one. Which is why I'm concerned about how and whether this kind of advertising works. What follows is speculative and inquiring rather than evidence-based.

When I suggest there's a rational bias at work here, I don't mean that the ad itself is unemotional. Clearly it is designed to have some kind of visceral impact on the viewer (we can debate how much of one, but let's leave that to one side). My question is, what's the model of human behaviour that purports to link the experience of watching this ad in the cinema (as I did last night) with the "moment of purchase" - or in this case, the moment of being blind drunk at 2am in a group of similarly pissed mates?

I imagine it's meant to work via metaphor: when I'm drunk, I'll remember my mild revulsion at that man in the ad proposing all manner of silly stunts, think to myself "That's just like me right now", and stop myself from throwing up into the gutter.

As I say, I've not looked at any data, but to me that suggests an extremely implausible optimism about the power of the frontal cortex.

This is exactly the kind of problem that would benefit from a serious investigation into the mental processes of a mind under the influence, and how/whether it's affected by recently absorbed communications. Perhaps the client and agency have already done this, rather than rely on the conventional and deeply flawed assumptions about decision-making that are embedded in marketing-think. But I'd be surprised if they'd done so and come up with this as an answer.

the ambler

Here's a podcast of a fascinating interview with Tim Ambler of the London Business School on the potential of neuroscience to improve our understanding of how marketing works. It's worth five minutes of your time.

Ambler argues, in his pleasingly robust style, that most market research is based on a false premise: that we make our consumption choices rationally. The truth is, everything that we've learned about how our brains work in the last few years points to the overwhelming dominance of our unconscious, emotional brains in decision-making (if you haven't read this superb book, you must). But the in-built bias towards rational analysis in marketing (neither consumers nor marketers like to believe that they proceed largely by feeling and intuition) inhibits our investigation of what's really going on.

He makes the intriguing suggestion that marketers ought to work with scientists to investigate autism, because autistic people either lack, or display extreme versions of, universal human traits that marketers rely on or attempt to tap into (a pronounced tendency to entrenched habit and routine on the one hand, a lack of emotional empathy on the other).

sentiment analysis

An excellent piece from the NY Times on the new industry forming around projects that crawl the web and look for indicators of people's mood, creating global emotion maps.