So, on the 28th of March I'm supposed to be talking knowledgeably about 'branding and environmental issues', so I've been trying to think about a framework for it. There are tons of examples of great stuff that people are doing to make products more sustainable through recycling, thoughtful design etc but I thought I'd try and think about some other areas too, just to extend the argument a little. And probably to expose my own naivety.
The areas I've come up with are below. If anyone has any good thoughts or examples pertaining to any of these I'd love to hear about them. Though you've already done a ton of sterling work here.
1. Where branding/marketing makes some form of environmentally positive behaviour more desirable (and ideally does more than just preaches about/demonises bad behaviour).
I'm hoping that there are some examples which aren't just from governmental or charity organisations with an explicit mission to promote green behaviour. I'm hoping to find evidence of business using green ideas as part of its aspirational values. (That's a bit jargony but do you see what I mean?)
2. Where the consumption of branding/marketing/communications/media substitutes for the consumption of stuff.
This is the thing I talked about here (and which has interesting echoes here). I'm still not certain how this might work, but I think it'll reward some thought. And I'm working on a scheme/prize idea that might help flesh it out a little. More of that later.
3. Where packaging is dramatically re-evaluated, not just minimised.
This is horribly simplistic, but whenever I think about this I think about biscuit tins. Once upon a time packaging wasn't disposable, it was useful. We didn't think about recycling biscuit tins because we kept them, they were useful. And now they're even more valuable than they were. So I'm wondering if there's a way of thinking about packaging sustainability that makes it more valuable, not more recyclable. Does that make sense?
4. Where attitudes to consumption are changed through the renaissance of craft, making, etc. Especially relating to things like Make's ideas of repairability.
I guess this relates to point 3. Are there brands out there that are actively trying to build brand value in the idea that you can keep this product for a long time, play with it, alter it, repair it and never have to buy another one? And is this crossing-over from niche territories to the mainstream?
So, those are the areas I'm going to try and flesh out with examples, I'll report back as and when I have something.
But I also think there might be something bigger going on, I wonder if we're at a point where (in the West at least) mainstream society is trying to establish a new balance between rampant consumption and everything else. We're seeing an increasing resistance to brands and marketing invading every sphere of life and an increasing ability to tune them out (or regulate them out). I don't think this is something brand-owners should just bleat about (or should merely attempt to lobby against) - we should take it as a sign that there's something out of kilter about our relationship with people and society and that smart, relevant, effective brands will find new, more respectful ways to relate to the world. Sustainability will hopefully be a component of that stance.
So I'll try and flesh that out too. Any thoughts, very welcome.
I've always wanted to write on glass. I wanted to do it when I saw people do it in the movies - in films set in the control room of naval control rooms, or miltary bases beneath mountains. I wanted to do it even more when they do it in CSI and programmes like that. It's how TV people can show you're thinking hard and still show your face. Well now Grant McCracken has found a way to do something about it. He's found these Bright Sticks which are apparently perfect for writing on windows. Which I will be doing very soon.
Recognise this? It's a tagcloud anaylsis of Steve Jobs' speech at Macworld created by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and detailed here.
And this is Bill Gates' at CES. Bill loves to say 'great'. Almost never says 'boom' though. Something like this might be a good way of making sure you're saying what you think you are. But perhaps more interesting, and certainly worth using to find out if you're writing understandble presentations are the language-assesment tools they found at UsingEnglish. You can probably imagine what lexical density means and wouldn't be surprised that Jobs had a lower score than BIll. But I thought the Gunning Fox Index was worth thinking about too.
I've going to do another lunchtime presentation for w+k on Friday. Like this one. I'm even less prepared this time, so any suggestions gratefully received. The basic premise is 'interesting things that are going on'. Or as they bill it - russell's rubbish.
I've not worked out themes yet. But things I thought I'd show/talk about are:
All the agencies etc leaping into Second Life. (I sort of did this last time but it didn't really work.) Just to suggest that that particular band wagon has left the er, band wagon depot.
Twitter, got to talk about twitter, because there's something really interesting happening there. And loopt I suppose. And I think it ties somehow to photo geotagging as a sort of voluntary version of Microsoft's MyLifeBits thing. (Aslo gives me an opportunity to talk about the splendidness of Nokia's lifeblog which is beginning to make me question my lifelong Sony/Sony Ericsson loyalty.)
Then there's random stuff like the open source car project; OSCar (via chroma). Or there's Imagini (via design verb) which seems, well, prototypical, but points at something interesting. And similarly, somehow there's musicovery. It'd be nice to talk about Charmin. And radish races (via wmmna). I think they'd like this culture catcher project (via MAKE) and it'd be worth talking about the MAKE: Owner's Manifesto too. And they should see etsy, if they've not already.
And I might talk about Leon and attention to detail. (They just sent out a promotional email offering free coffee with organic porridge to about 800 people, but they did it as a cc rather than bcc, so we all saw everyone else's email addresses. Then they sent this: 'Fuck fuck fuck ccd rather than bccd sorry sorry sorry. I will think of a suitable apology'. My favourite response so far has been 'it's going to take more than porridge'. I got slightly pedantic with Leon a while ago, which is, I presume, how I ended up on their mailing list. At the time I thought I was being an arse, but maybe attention to detail is something they have trouble with. And maybe I'm still being an arse.)
Sorry for breaking the no brands rule. Circumstances have overwhelmed me.
Anyone got any other interesting stuff I might share with the good folks at w+k?
So these are the title slides I used for the Battle Of Big Thinking thing I did on Wednesday. Being as I was drawn against Jim Carroll, who is tremendously smart (and as I discovered, tremendously nice) I'd originally intended to go defensive and do a sort of 'my schtick greatest hits'. But a couple of days before the thing I thought screw that and decided to experiment a bit. So I spent ages downloading stuff from YouTube and built a 15 minute video to talk over. (So at least I knew I wouldn't go over my 15 minute time limit). I've put the links to YouTube etc in here because I think embedding them all will be a bit messy. I edited some of them for the presentation but they're all worth a look.
I threw some of these lovely Japanese ads up as background while I talked, or as intermissions to give me time to think. They're completely charming.
Here's some 70s BBC featuring the marvelous Magnus Pyke, personifying the typical planning stereotype. (He arrives a couple of minutes in). My first point was that this planning stereotype - Tall. English. Academic. White. Male. Lunatic - is starting to disappear (though you wouldn't have known it from who was represented on stage) New planning cultures are starting to emerge, both growing out of distinct cultures (North American planning is not like British planning) and out of different thought-styles. This is one of the joys of planning, I can look at almost any planner and think - I could never do what you do, and what you do is brilliant. One sign of that massive diversity is the way we're all trying to find new descriptions to replace 'planning' which is obviously a terrible name, but everyone seems to have a different idea about what it should be.
Here's the Ronin trailer, which very effectively explains what Ronin are. The only difference is that planners are willingly abandoning their feudal overlords and striking out on their own. Mostly because they can. Their is massive demand for planning, in all sorts of businesses, within communications and beyond, and more and more of us are building the work-lifes we want to live. It won't be long before groups of creative, strategic and executional Ronin become effective competitors to established agencies.
It only occured to me recently that the genius of the original brief we got from Honda ('we want to pass VW in sales and reduce media spend every year') has a natural corollary. That eventually we'll get to a media spend of zero. And that as that becomes more and more possible more and more businesses are going to find it a tremendously attractive prospect. Things like this Ronaldinho viral demonstrate the reach etc you can get for 'free' but I suspect this is just the beginning. It's easy to imagine a business taking it's $30million media budget; taking half of it and investing it in content, retail, customer service and product improvements - and reaching just as many customers and potential customers as they had before - and giving the other half back to the business. Wouldn't you like to be the marketing director who did that? Except what then would you be directing? Maybe aiming for a media budget of zero also means getting rid of the marketing function - or at least distributing it around the business. That would be interesting. (Of course not every brand is the kind that can do this, but as the competitive advantage in having this ability/relationship grows, more of the weak and the rubbish will go to the wall. So that'll be good then.)
This is an interview with Brian Eno about his 77 Million Paintings project, which is genius. And it illustrates a possible solution to the tension between simplicity and complexity in brands and communications and stuff. As I've argued before, communications need to be complex if they're to be effective, they need to have emotional depth, nuance, blah blah blah if people are going to engage in them. But it's clear that large organisations can't cope with complexity in the management of brands, that's one of the main reasons that dumb reductive tools like brand onions and propositions remain, not because they help to make great work but because they make it easier for organisations. Anyway, there's no point fighting that, that's just how organisations are, and it's why One Word Equity makes so much sense.
So we need to find a way to give the organisation some simple rules to follow and to allow the brand and communications to be nuanced and complex. And maybe the answer lies in generative art and complexity and fractals. Things which I don't really understand, but I do know that you can get fascinating, compelling, unpredictable complexity from the interaction of a few simple rules and very slight changes to initial starting conditions. Surely that's a model we should be pursuing.
Then we had a bit of this and I did a minute on consumer generated content. Not a very convincing minute, but did point out that in a world where brands have to surrender control to win influence then planners should be reasonably well-placed, because that's what we learn to do professionally. It kind of led into...
If you've been visiting the Joga Chain periodically you'll realise that it keeps being tweaked, they keep improving it, adapting it, adding bits on to respond to how it's being used. It's permanently in beta in that it's never finished, it's always changing. This is something brands are going to have to get used to and it'll impact everything from budgeting to remuneration to who's in charge.
I suspect many planners will end up more like brand gardeners than master strategists. There may be occasional moments of grand strategy but the more meaningful interventions will be in shaping and pruning the day to day activity; bending a retail piece this way, nudging a product design that way. This is the only way to respond to a world where brands have to respond to, and embrace, the winds of chance and the interventions of their customers.
(Or something. Looking back on this presentation, I realised that the way I did it is rather like the way I think brand communications should be. I'm not that obsessed with a clear, singular point - it's not about a proposition or something. It's more of a bundle of ideas and associations, that aren't neccesarily that 'digital' but which might add up to an interesting territory. It's like the tennis ball thing (the little films of tennis balls being caught, or being thrown at the back of someone's head) - they seem to stick in people's heads and say something about the way we think about communications without making some specific, 'digital' point. Or, as Ivan points out, as soon as I've finished no-one can remember what I said.)
Anyway, then came the big finish. Which I'm sure was entirely the reason I won - you can't lose if you end with huge pictures of your audience/voters set to 'We Are The Champions By Queen'. Useful new business tip there.
Click here for a brilliant animated presentation by George Toft about the future of pizza delivery (making a larger point about privacy). A) it's a fantastic way to illustrate a point. Relatively easy to do but hugely compelling. B) it's a great point to make. Goes to show that just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. And customer service can do easily tip over into customer abuse.
It's been about for ages, but I just heard about it on Culture Shock and found it via this LSE blog. (Culture Shock also features Piers and is well worth listening to.)
Ben and Neil have posted their presentations from the Bucharest trip and I was feeling guilty that I'd not done the same. But I don't think just sticking up the powerpoint will be much help to people - it won't make a lot of sense on its own. And some of the stuff is sort of private (ie it was made while I worked for other people, and while I don't believe it's a problem to show it at a conference I think it'd be wrong to stick it online.)
So, what I thought I'd try and do is share and talk through most of the stuff here, in the hopes that some of the point will come over. This is, basically, my schtick, if you'd asked me to come and speak at a conference at any time in the last couple of years this is probably what I'd have done. I quite like presenting it, I've worked out where all the gags should go.
I've never written it down so I'm planning to just type it out as it comes into my head, it won't be that coherent. There will be typos and missing words and stuff but if I stop to think about it I'll never get it all down. That's one of the things I like about presenting, it can be more of a bundle of an ideas than an arguement. And you can make it up as you go along. Well, that's what I do anyway.
But now I've put it on here I think I need to get some more material.
Just a blank screen, stood still, let it play. I thought it was magnificent. It just felt like something important or interesting was about to happen. I thought I'll start all my presentations like that from now on.
But first it's important to assert that this presentation will conform with the EU mandated thresholds established under recent regulations governing the scope and content of planning presentations. As above.
I was working for a large software manufacturer a few years ago and wondered into a meeting room after a marketing meeting. And this was drawn on the whiteboard. Either it was a proprietary technology they were working on, or it was a picture of how they thought communications worked. It wasn't how we thought communications worked, and fairly soon after that we ended up fired. But they more I thought about it the more the idea of 'how we think communications work' became important to me. And I spent quite a lot of time thinking about the models and metaphors we use to describe how advertising and marketing is actually supposed to work. Because I think many of us have very sophisticated and nuanced espoused theories about communications, but our theories in use are actually kind of simplistic and dumb.
That's the plan for this presentation today.
And we're going to examine the relative values of simplicity and complexity, strategy and execution and words and other stuff.
The first metaphor (or theory in use) to think about is the bullet to the brain. The message. The idea that the task of the planner (or whoever) is to distill the whole complicated range of what they want to communicate down to a tiny little nugget of message which 'media' will then fire into the consumers brain, causing some kind of 'change of mind'. When you express it like that it seems kind of stupid and I'm sure most people would say it's more complicated than that. But that's not how we behave, the whole industry is obsessed with the idea of a simple message, endlessly repeated.
You don't see this picture so often do you? You see the bullet through the apple a lot. It makes an appealing metaphor. You don't see the bullet through the orange much because the bullet seems to tumble and emerge unpredictably. Maybe that's a better metaphor for what happens inside people's heads. But actually, there's even more slippery thinking behind the idea of the simple message, which takes us from bullets to tennis balls.
The first time a young planner comes up with a strategy or a creative brief with a little bit of complexity or a couple of parallel objectives in there some old git will normally say: ' listen young fellow/lady, if you throw one tennis ball at someone, they'll catch it. If you throw two they won't catch either.'
To start with, experimentally that's not true. Throw two tennis balls at people and they'll often catch one, sometimes two. But the theory in use behind the analogy is the more interesting thing here. It contains an assumption that consumers are just standing there waiting to catch the tennis balls that we're going to lob at them. Like this:
There's the consumer on the right, standing there, humbly waiting to catch the messages we lob at them. That's how most advertising people assume the world works. Have another look:
But of course the world isn't like that. Our consumers aren't sitting there waiting to have messages lobbed at them. The reality is more like this:
That's what the advertising process normally looks like. Our stuff is just bouncing off the back of people's heads. The best we can hope most ads will do is piss people off, maybe annoy them into paying attention.
This should not be news to anyone. 'People will only watch what they want to watch'. But it is news to many ad folk. Or at least, even if it's not news, it seems to contradict how we actually behave. And as regular people get more and more choice about what they do watch, they're choosing, more and more often, to not watch advertising. That's not really that surprising. What we normally build isn't designed to entertain or delight them. It's designed to change their mind. To get a bullet into their brain. Who wants that?
What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distlled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No-one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.
Look, for example at this ad:
What would you say the 'message' of that ad is? No idea. Me neither. Because it doesn't really have one. But does that mean it doesn't communicate something of value? Of course not. I've got a little research video that show people watching that ad (which I won't put up here because the people in it didn't agree to that when it was made) and it shows what happens when they watch it. They smile. They move along with it. They nod. They move closer to the screen. And they say thankyou at the end. (How many ads do you get where people say thankyou for showing it to them?) Communication is going on here. But it's not verbal communication. It's communication with other bits of the brain. Mirror neurons are firing. All sorts of things are happening. But it's not about a single, clear message.
Maybe ads/brands/whatever work more like velcro than like a bullet or a tennis ball. It's not about one big, simple hook, but thousands of little ones. If some of them fail it doesn't matter. Some of them are verbal. many of them aren't. They're mostly the things that happen in execution, not in strategy. They're to do with tone, manner, character, attitude, look, feel. Orr to be more specific, they're to do with design, font, colour, photography, music, casting, copy, typesize. All that.
These are the things that really determine the efficacy of a piece of communication. Not the 'high-level message'. But we spend very little time thinking about them. We spend most of our time writing powerpoint and brand onions, arguing about the tiniest nuance of our strategies. Trying to decide whether the fifth word on our list of values be 'fun' or 'funny'.
It seems clear to me that we do this, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's way easier. We've got all sorts of great tools to talk about strategy. Charts. Graphs. Devices. Diagrams. And all kind of spurious new language as been created to do it. So we'll spend months agreeing the strategy and maybe an afternoon in the pre-production meeting, despite that probably being the most important meeting in the success of any piece of communication.
There is some dispute about who said this; Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, Steve Martin or someone else, but I think it's the fundamental reason why we spend so much time arguing about strategy and so little talking about execution. It's because language is such a bad tool for the discussion of communications things like ads and websites. Business schools don't teach you how to talk about fonts or art direction, and even if they did, we'd only get to the obfuscatory language of art criticism. Which probably doesn't help.
I saw Paul Feldwick talk about Watzlawick once and he explained it much better than I could. But the simple essence seems to be this. Human communication is divided between the digital (language, words, etc) and the analogic (tone, manner, body-language). Both are components of succesful communication. But we can't describe the digital using analogic language and vice versa. So if we confine the language of briefing and strategy to digital tools like words then we'll never be able to discuss at least 50% of what goes into our communications. Tone and manner statements on a creative brief will never do more than scrape the surface of what we're trying to get at.
(This seems to be more of problem than ever as marketing changes. Digital language is apparently mostly concerned with objects and the properties of objects, which always used to be the number one obsession of marketing - faster, cleaner, bigger, harder. But analogic language is more about relationships, and as marketing becomes more and more about relationships our inability to discuss the analogic is more and more of a hindrance.)
Big pause. Deep breath. Sip from a glass of water. Look around the audience.
So all those theories are all very well. What does this have to do with making ads. Good question. I'm not sure. But here's a story of some of the stuff we did on Honda which might explain some of it.
The pitch brief we got from Honda was one of the best client briefs I'd ever seen. The data made it very clear what the problem was - consideration. Once people started to think about buying a Honda they were quite likely to do it. The models, reviews, WOM were all great. The only problem is that it never really occured to people to think about a Honda in the first place. And the problem was that the brand was boring. Everything else was fine. It's just that Honda was boring. That's good. That's a problem that advertising can help with.
The second element of the brief was genius. They told us that they wanted to achieve very ambitious sales targets while reducing media spend every year. That was very smart. That demanded that we think about communications very differently. I loved that. Every client should do that.
Once we'd looked at the typical car marketing of the time it was obvious that out-thinking the opposition wouldn't be that difficult. Car marketing was in a stupendously bad phase. All the above ads are from a single issue of Top Gear magazine and they indicate the paucity of imagination in the business. If it hadn't been for the boffins at Nissan inventing a car that pointed the other way they'd all be completely identical. All we needed to do, to achieve some impact, was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.
And for the rest of the Honda story your best bet is to go here and download the APG paper. I basically say the same stuff but it's less rambly in the paper.
My basic point is that what we created on Honda was a way to do strategy and execution at the same time. The Book Of Dreams let us have all those analogic conversations about the brand, it let us talk about tone and voice and character and attitude and fonts and photography and colour. As part of the strategic process. And this helped us develop a brand that went beyond a few ads. Blah blah blah.
And then I get to this bit:
This is the model of idea creation that most agencies (advertising, digital, whatever) sell their clients. A bunch of smart strategists narrow down the strategic possiblities (with their clients or without) getting to a simple, smart, sharp, focused strategic idea which forms the basis of a controlled explostion of creativity. (Not too big, not too small). This idea is then implemented across a number of media channels to the happiness of everyone . This model is, of course, complete bollocks, and it's designed chiefly, to save money by a) keeping the really expensive people (the creatives) working for the minimum amount of time and b) making the process look calm and predictable. No good idea has ever happened like this.
The reality of any good process that produces great work is more like this:
It's a mess. A good strategist involves the executers as soon and as often as possible. She allows execution to feedback into strategy and vice versa. Something that happens at the end changes something you thought of at the beginning. It's chaotic, wasteful and unpredicatble. It involves lots of people, lots of dead-ends and wastes lots of ideas. But it's the only way to produce stuff that goes beyond the everyday run of communications. Something that people actually want to engage with. Something that works.
I never really know how to finish. I just peter out. Very bad. Oh well.
Hope this makes some kind of sense. Now I've written it down I'm not sure. Maybe I should film myself doing it sometime, maybe that'll be better.
I think I've worked out what to talk about for the APG Big Thinking thing. I'm not sure how to package it up yet but it's somewhere at the confluence of these conversations:
There's this question that Gemma asked here. (Which I've still not answered. Whoops. Will try to do that this week.) I like the idea of talking about the future of planning, communications, the creative industries. Not about brands. Thinking about how our lives might be different.
Which relates to a conversation I was having with Vas and Simon at coffee yesterday about the future co-evolution of planners and creatives. (And everyone else.) We were discussing the role of creative people with specific craft skills in a world where so much of what they're asked for is conceptual and completely indepedent of any need to execute. This relates to a feeling I've had for a while that the distinction between creative person and planner is becoming as useful and relevant as the current distinction between copywriter and art-director in the traditional creative team. ie not very useful or relevant most of the time.
I also think there's something interesting in examining Richard's provocative reversal of the usual planning/creative dynamic. Instead of thinking of us inspiring them, he suggests, let's think about them decorating our ideas.
Then you'll probably need to bake in Mark and John's new thinking about brands, people, society and business. And there's something in thinking about a revival of quant planning and attentionomics - given all the data that web 2.0 is going to give us.
Anyway, that's what I'm going to take a stab at. Anyone got any thoughts?
I'm working on a presentation for someone right now, I'm going to share some first thoughts with them tomorrow, on the general theme of 'interesting things that are going on'. They're a fascinating company with some great brands, which do some really smart things - but they seem to want to know more about what's going on 'out there'. What 2.0y things should they be thinking about?
Isn't this always the case? - it's the interesting companies that want to know more. The dull ones are just happy to stick with what's worked so far.
Anyway. The plan tomorrow is to share a list of the kind of things that might be interesting to talk about and make sure I'm heading in the right direction and I couldn't think of a better way of putting that together than just sticking it here. Links from PowerPoint is still kind of clunky. So here it is. I'm also trying to lump things into useful conceptual chunks, just so the whole things a bit more comprehensible.
The Challenge Of Openness
There's a whole interesting saga in the Coke/Mentos story. I think I should talk about that. Starting here. And contrasting this reaction and this.
Which then leads into talking about the goodness and badness of The Coke Show. Which of course I can't link to, which is part of the badness.
I guess the big point to this section is the general demand out there for openness. And the way that brands can use that well or can find themselves caught completely off-guard. I guess the more practical point is that something unexpectedly good or bad can happen overnight, and you need to create an organisation and some communication habits which can cope with and ideally exploit the unexpected. Because the idea of a secret brand organisation, lurking in the background, which no-one thinks about, has well and truly gone.
Then I thought I'd talk about some of the good and open things that people have done - splendid wholesome things like peas, smoothies and mothers. (via Chroma).
I was also wondering about touching on the way openness is going to impact the way marketing people do their jobs - not just the relationships they build between brands and consumers. This is a great example. As is, I guess, the fact that I'm writing this.
Does that make sense so far?
Community, Collaboration and Co-Creation
(God, I wish there were better words than 'community' 'collaboration' and 'co-creation').
I found a fantastic thing to talk about yesterday (via Beyond Madison Avenue and DailyFix). The Fiskateers. A community and blog project created for Fiskars by Brains On Fire. (Though maybe created is the wrong word, it seems artificial then, and the joy of this thing is it's not artificial.)
And actually I think community is a strong, often overlooked point about Run London. The best campaigns were the second one (I'll do it if you do it) and probably this year's. Both of them are about running as a communal activity. It would also make sense to talk about joga at this point. And The Chain. The interesting thing about them, to me, is the delicate balance you have to strike between giving people a framework to play in and not interfering with their play.
Mind you, I was also thinking about creating a chunk called Marketing As A Service - and I'd put RunLondon in there too - especially the RouteFinder.
The community aspect that doesn't get talked about enough though is the collaboration brands need to do with other brands - the little worlds and affinity groups they need to create amongst themselves to offer interesting experiences to people. This was brought home really strongly to me at Fruitstock this afternoon. Just smoothies and music would have been one thing, but by bringing in all sorts of like-minded brands it became a bigger, more interesting thing. Brands need to think about what other brands they want in their world, or more tellingly what brand-worlds do they want to be in? and do they deserve to be there? Should/could your brand fit in here?
Interestingness
There's still a place for Big Ads in the world but something has changed. They have to be any good. They have to be interesting. And if they are interesting that means you can build stuff around them. Two good examples here - one, for Bravia, is a brand exploiting the interest it's created, the second for Honda, is an example of what can happen when you make something people are interested in.
A Different Mindset
I wanted to talk a little about the need for brands and brand-owners to get comfortable with a slightly different mindset when dealing with the modern 2.0y word. It's a world where creative fecundity trumps tight control and where lots of little ideas are better than one big one. My favourite illustration of creative fecundity is always ZeFrank. So we'll have a bit of him.
And a great illustration of a little moment of that's-interesting-captivation (as opposed to bash-you-over-the-head-re-appraisal) is the 'Your Collection' stuff they did at Tate Britain. Or, a lovely little touch from Fruitstock - innocent hung tags on the bikes of people who'd cycled there, to thank them for cycling.
And Mat talks about a nice example of the opportunistic small idea here.
Your Consumers Are Funnier Than You
Not a very clever title, but I wanted to make the point that nothing's sacred; great movies, dumb ads, whatever. It's all going to get messed with, mashed-up, remixed, and the fact that regular people don't have CI guidelines, compliance departments or legal advice means they get to have more fun, and be funnier than you do. And when they decide to have fun with you, you need to decide is that a good thing or a bad thing? (Darth being a smartass via BoingBoing/Wonderland)
I wonder if I should mention the problem of Urban Spam - the thin line between engagement and annoyance. I guess the coke and pepsi examples make the point pretty well.
I think the larger point here is about the changing face of interuption. No-one really thinks of an ad in Coronation Street or The Simpsons or The Sun as spam. Because we're used to it. We, collectively, made that deal a while ago. So while we may no longer be looking at those ads we're not actively annoyed by their mere presence. It's when advertising gets into new places that it risks being seen as spam. Because when we see it somewhere new we naturally think about whether we want it there. And very often that's a deal we're no longer willing to make - because the trade-offs - entertainment for attention or something - aren't being made attractive enough. It's not enough to bounce up to someone in a branded t-shirt with a free voucher for something, what else are you going to do for me?
So, that's about it for now. I'm conscious that it's a bit of a stream of incoherence but tomorrow's meeting should help to sort out what I should keep and what I should add. (I'm feeling it's all a bit too online to start with, but I can correct that.) I'll keep you updated with progress and if any of y'all have any thoughts or suggestions I'd love to hear them.
Boy I need your help now. I've signed up to be a speaker for the APG Battle Of Big Thinking which sounds like it might be great - some of the stuff we've been asking for from the AAAA conference. But I think I've got to debate Jim Carroll of BBH and then the audience is going to vote who's best. Jeez. Have you seen Jim speak? He's fantastic. So, my only topic seems to be Big Planning Thinking, any ideas what I should talk about?
