Russell Davies

traffic and production

Here's last week's Campaign piece. I had more fun writing this than anything I've done before because it's not the usual planning/brands nonsense, it's about the people in agencies who actually get things done.  (Who, I should have remembered like to call themselves 'Creative Services' these days.) And, of course, I got more feedback on this than anything I've written. ie I got some feedback rather than none. Because traffic people are lovely and gracious. Thanks everyone.

One day soon, when planners as rare as chimney sweeps, creatives are just avatars and advertising is a cottage industry again, we will still have bequeathed a lasting gift to the world. Our two greatest disciplines, the engines of our economy, will outlive our puny business and flourish in the outside world because they're the people who actually know how to get stuff done. I'm talking of course, of traffic and production.

If you haven't done it recently, spend some time with traffic. They experience the world in a deeper way than you and me. They exist in time and space, but also perceive dimensions of cost and practicality, of real time, pitch time and lunch-time. They negotiate tides of creative entropy, waves of management paranoia and the tsunamis of new business. An expert traffic person can weedle, cajole, threaten and condemn with the flick of an eyebrow. They know where all the bodies are buried and when to dig them up again. They know how long things should take, how long they will actually take and how long they should tell you they'll take. Watching a seasoned traffic person dragging work out of a gnarled old creative team is like watching that infamous imaginary fight between the bear and the shark. Except you know the bear will win, because deadlines must be met. Traffic makes ideas happen.

As a planner I've always regretted that I spent most of my career at the other end of the line to production. TV producers are unutterably glamorous creatures; the foreign correspondents of advertising, reeking of airport lounges, hotel bars and Soho. But if you're stuck in a desert needing a crate of Tizer, four jugglers and a helicopter they'll get on the phone and those things will arrive. And I love print producers because they represent our last connection to craft-skills and the actual physical world. If they say something can't be done it's not a conceptual thing (ie someone won't let you do it) it's a literal thing - you can't actually print that on that, you can't get those to stick on there. It's impossible. And then, of course, they find a way to do it. 

It's this commitment to getting things done that means these trades will probably outlive the rest of us. Every company you come across seems to call itself an idea business right now, we think it makes us special. But ideas are the easiest, fastest and cheapest things to have in the world. It's getting them made that's hard, and for that you need traffic and production. Ladies and Gentleman, we salute you.

twoll

Steve Bowbrick's got a fantastic little twitter service called Listen With Bowbrick. He twitters to point you at interesting stuff on the radio. It's a perfect use of a constrained service. Then, yesterday, he discovered/proved/invented the existence of another great twitter use - the instant survey or twurvey. (I'd like to suggest twoll.) Obviously it's open to spammy abuse but as a quick way of finding something out from a few distributed people it's damn smart.

aagh - it's the end times (temporarily)

act now to avoid needing to act later

We had a little meeting about Interesting2007 today (I'll explain about the 'we' in a subsequent post) and decided that we should limit attendance to 200. That means the room will feel full but not crowded and I'd rather do something good for 200 than average for 300.

And, as of 11pm on Thursday March 29th we've sold 182 tickets, so, if you want to come, you might need to get a move on.

UPDATE: Really sorry. We're sold out for now. We'll look at how we can add tickets. Email me or comment below and I'll let you know if/how/when we do that. (russell at russelldavies.com)

The thing we're worrying about now is finding some really good AV folk and someone who's a projector/laptop/DVD/mac/windows/where's-your-dongle magician. We're going to be juggling lots of presentation formats (including, I hope, nothing, and some people with actual likely-to-be-amusingly-upside-down slides) and we're going to be getting people on and off really quickly. So I need to find someone really good.

We're planning to avoid all that fakery you usually get with some big conference logo screen serenely masking the changing laptops behind the scenes. I figure we might as well throw it all up there, and make 'detect displays' part of the show. We'll be breaking the fourth conference wall. It'll be epic presenting.

Anyway. Anyone got any suggestions of great AV folk? And get your tickets now, while stocks last.

work avoidance II

I was at a conference the other day, and we were talking about consumer research and pre-testing. And someone trotted out that old thing Henry Ford said: "If I'd have asked my customers what they'd wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".

I'd normally agree with that sentiment, but it occurred to me that, based on what we know now about the internal combustion engine, a faster horse might have been a better answer.

work avoidance

I noticed something about myself today (Hurrah, you think, how fascinating). Tomorrow morning I've got to hand in my copy for next week's Campaign and I've got nothing. No words. No clue. Thing is, I've got quite a good idea for it. I know what I want to write about. It's quite interesting and there are things to be said. But I just can't start.

It doesn't normally work this way.

Normally I have no real clue what I'm going to write about, but something churns away at the back of my head all week and at some stage a sentence or phrase pops out. So I write that down. Then plaster stuff to the front and back of it until it gets to 440 words. Then I look at what I've written, try and work out what it's about and tweak, nudge and massage it until it actually is about that. Then I send it off.*

Can't do that this week. I've started with a strategy. I'm screwed.

*And please don't tell me that's how it reads, I know.

schtick 2.0

If you're not doing anything tomorrow there's an exciting opportunity to see three eccentrically coiffed  tallish people talk about brands at the Warc Creativity In Advertising conference - me, John Shaw and John Grant. I'll be doing a version of schtick 2.0 but I bet John and John will be good and there's other interesting people like Tess Alps and Matt Smith.  Details here.

kiwi spam

A correspondent in New Zealand has a question for us all. Anyone got any thoughts?

"Down here in New Zealand the local city councillors of Auckland are proposing a total ban on all outdoor media city-wide in a belief that such commercial messages are screwing up the city, destroying the ambience of our architecture, and generally can be blamed for all things bad that has stopped the city from becoming "Paris in the Pacific" yadda yadda etc.

Obviously both advertisers and outdoor companies are doing their nut and as you can imagine kittens are being born all over town, and to be honest so much has been said on the subject to date it doesn't need further thinking about, but one journo down here has picked up on a recent speech by Stephan Loerke, MD of the World Federation of Advertisers (who?) who opened an address in Auckland recently by saying "Perhaps, industry's greatest challenge today is an anti-brand, anti-corporate, anti-advertising sentiment that is pervading society...........  It is time for us to face the truth that on many levels, and in increasingly influential circles, attacking advertising has become fashionable not just among consumer and pressure groups but in society as a whole"

The local journalist is writing an article that "attacking advertising has become fashionable and that restricting advertising has become a populist, vote-winning policy measure with no heed taken for the unintended consequence of such restrictions"

I have been asked to respond to the journo by Monday next week.

My open question to those such as myself who read your fabulous blog is this:

"Does society as a whole actually hate advertising as proposed by Loerke in his recent address?

My thoughts:

Is advertising welcomed as a form of entertainment? (Superbowl break being the most extreme example)

40% of those with Tivo who technologically could avoid ads still choose not to (recent Nielsen study)

Is the question instead that people don't hate "advertising" but hate irrelevance?"

fractiousness live

There are many reasons why I'm exactly the wrong person to be writing this blog. I can't spell or punctuate. I'm starting to be horribly exhausted by the sight of the word 'brand'. But perhaps, most damningly, I absolutely cannot bear any form of disagreement. I'm massively conflict-averse. So I've not read any of the debate about whether blogging's killing planning. And I'm not going to the IPA to see the fractiousness live.

But that's a personal failing, you may be less squeamish, and Rob asked me to post the details. So here they are. Hope it's good.

bright green

So, I'm sitting at home trying to work out what I'm going to say at the D&AD thing tomorrow. And I'm not getting very far. So I thought I'd see if I can work it out as a blog post instead.

I think most of the evening will be a panel/debatey thing, which doesn't require much preparation of stuff, but does need me to work out what I think about things, which I always find hard in the absence of conversation, so this is maybe part of that conversation.

The actual presentation bit is supposed to be about 5 minutes and this is the brief:

Brief introduction – who/what/where

What is the biggest hurdle your country has to overcome to turn the tide of climate change

Show 3 examples, from within your country/region, of creative branding that demonstrates good  practice (preferably work by other agencies/companies rather than your own)

What lessons can others take from your country/region

I'll be very surprised if anyone sticks to 5 minutes.

Introduction

Here's what I've been thinking following the conversation starter here.

At the moment we're caught between the need to do something serious and drastic about climate change and the realities of what a consumer capitalist system will allow. ie people will only vote for, and pay for, so much right now. It's possible that it's not enough (it's entirely likely in fact) but until the threats are even more palpable we have to operate within the limits of popular support.

Therefore I think we have to accept that people will continue to want to 'consume'. They still have a need for novelty, they still have a need for new experiences (which often involves travel), and they (they? - who am I kidding? I mean 'we') still have a need to display something of who we are through the things that we own. Meaning status, style, tribe, etc. The trick now is to bend that urge to consume into behaviours with minimal impact on the planet.

So, you start to ask questions like -

Can you deliver novelty without delivering more stuff?

Can you deliver new experiences of the world without burning tons of fuel?

Can we transform ideas of status so they're about reduced impact on the world, sensible consumption, and thoughtfulness?

And, can we create a minimal-impact version of consumer society that's attractive enough that the developing world will want to adopt it as a vision for their future (assuming they don't come up with something better)?

I guess a truncated version of that might serve as introduction.

Biggest hurdle we have to overcome - complexity

Apart from all the obvious ones; greed, apathy, entropy, I think the biggest issue we have to face is complexity. There are very few known knowns and lots of unknown unkowns. Every positive step someone takes is condemned by someone else as either hysterical panic, green-washing or insufficient incrementalism.  It's very hard for anyone to 'win' because there seem to be very few completely unalloyed actions that anyone can take.

We Are What We Do's Anya Hindmarch bag project seemed like a good thing to me. It's fun and maybe a little superficial but that's exactly the kind of thing that might infect the popular imagination and create different behaviour, and certainly debate about the wasteful stupidity of plastic bags. Yet, it's easy to condemn the project too - the bags aren't organic cotton etc, so they're not that green, and that seems like an own goal. But then I bet they couldn't have done them for £5 if they'd made them organic. And the low price point seems part of the point to me. Equally, some people have said that all this fashion bag stuff is nonsense and the government should just ban plastic bags (and personally I'd go along with that) but is that politically realistic? Maybe it is now.

See what I mean about complexity?

I think we should applaud initiatives like M&S's Plan A partly because they're doing it in the face of all this doubt about exactly what the right thing is. They must have known that they'd be slagged off by many for greenwashing hysteria and by others for not going far enough yet they decided to do it anyway. And that's probably the thing that give me hope. Brands like M&S are reasonably in tune with mainstream opinion in this country and if they're doing something then I suspect the country is ready to do this and more.

Show three examples of good practice in creative branding from your region

I'm struggling with this bit, because I don't think it's really about branding, it's about action.  The important bit about the Plan A stuff is that they're doing it, not how they brand it.

Things I'm talking about covering are:

Walkit, because I like the way it uses information to motivate you to do something positive. And that seems to me the big contribution can make. Branding is about adding information, ideas and emotions to generic services and things, to make them more desirable. If it can be done with walking, what other positive things might it be done to?

Innocent's Carbon Footprint project because I like it's relative modesty and realistic, practical approach (as opposed to the Virgin thing John cites in the comments) (and I know everyone always talks about Innocent at conferences, but this seems to be an appropriate time to do it).

And this Greenpeace ad (thanks Rory).  I'm including this because it points to something interesting. I think we're only a few years away from casual air travel being as socially acceptable as wearing fur. (Which I think is a line stolen from John Grant.) This is a little like some of the early anti-fur work and it feels like it's starting to have a similar effect. Every social moment needs a leading edge and a trailing edge and this ad seems them working in tandem, Greenpeace at the lead, Virgin being the corporate follower. Or something.

I've got more to add, but I have to go to a meeting. At least I'm going on my bike....

...I'm back. Thanks Matt (see comments), perfect stuff. And just the reminder I needed to try and shoe-horn some extra things in:

I think I might open with this quote: "contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive,         glamorous and seductive". It's from the Viridian Green manifesto and has been stuck on my wall since it first showed up on the Viridian Green mailing list.  And I think that's where our little branding world might be able to do our part for climate change. In making green-ness seem sexy, cool and interesting. Not worthy or necessary.

I want to fit this in there somewhere:

Because I think one of the ways that people are rethinking their relationship with brands, products and services is to do with what ownership really means. (Partly prompted by DRM concerns.) And I bet we'd be pushing against an open door if we tried to make long-life and repairability high status values for a product (to Ben's Porsche point - see comments). And the ability to fix stuff and tinker will clearly be high-status things in a post-conspicuous consumption Maslow heirachy. (Sorry, lapsed into bollocks there for a second.)

And, I'd like to talk about the responsibility of 'our industry' (whatever that is) to try and play its part in a chain of influence about how businesses conduct themselves. Advertising agencies are some of those most environmentally profligate organisations in the world (for their size), I sometimes think they're put on earth solely to have large quantities of polyboard driven around in the taxis. So we should examine our own consciences in these matters. Because if we don't do it, we'll be made to. As more and more clients adopt environmental pledges how long before carbon-neutrality becomes a pitch requirement? And how many agencies are ready to meet that. (A good start might be to read Marcus's piece on printing.)

And, given that I'm only supposed to be doing 5 minutes maybe I should stop there.

Matt's comments have really made me want to dive into a conversation about 'maximum idea, minimum stuff'. Or rather the notion that an idea can substitute for stuff, and that people's desire to consume could be satisfied without the creation of new stuff. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I suspect  getting there will involve some consilient thinking -  we'll need to collide  brains that currently live in boxes labeled Industrial Design, UI, Software, Brand and probably Some Other Things. I don't know.

I really am rambling now. Better start trying to cram all that into 5 powerpoint slides.