Idea Protection Program

One of the most frustrating things about being 'a consultant' is that you tend to leave all of your good ideas on paper, with a client who due to time constraint and internal pressure then neglects the idea for long enough to have it atrophy and die.

Everyone recognizes this - there's no dearth of good ideas out there; just an absence of good ideas that make it out into the world.

That's probably why one of the ideas that people are most excited about when I talk to them about my new company is the Idea Protection Program.

Basically what we do is offer to stay with an idea and to give assistance at the key - idea threatening points of the process.

What we offer is help with research methodology - so that the idea gets the fairest shot in testing. No 'squeeze into this dress Margaret' testing for our ideas - the research is bespoke and designed to help improve rather than disprove the idea.

We also offer help with stimulus here - so that the people are responding to something that accurately represents the idea that we have in mind

And we offer help with recruitment.. so that the right people see and respond to the idea


We then offer help with internal presentations... pulling together the data, making the charts look great, proof testing the story and even coming along and presenting the hell out if it, if that's what's required

And finally we help with the briefs to external agencies...taking the time to explain the idea, the work to date and the requirements going forward

It's a simple idea...


- Set up research for learning and success
- present that work in as impactful a way as possible
- share the idea, stoke the excitement

But ultimately it's about ensuring that understaffed companies don't kill ideas with neglect and standard process.
And it seems to be something that people want

How to get who you want

I’m about to do something very rare (for me) here, I’m about to admit that I was wrong about something.

You see before George Bush slipped in one final fuck-up – the global collapse of capitalism – I was watching an exodus of talent from big agencies and thinking, hmmm maybe we’re about to see something interesting here. Maybe we’re going to see agencies looking again at the way that they work. Maybe this massive talent drain is going to force some introspection. Maybe, just maybe, things are about to change here.

And then of course the world’s economies turned to mush, the big agencies started laying people off left, right and center, retrenchment became one of those words that tripped easily off the tongue and the moment seemed to have passed. Sure there were hundreds of creative people all looking to start something smaller, and more collaborative and with less overhead; a thousand plans for a loose network of non-network talent. Facebook lit up. Twitter was abuzz with fresh noise. GoDaddy registered site name after site name. But I thought that the real opportunity, the opportunity to change the way that the big networks operated had slipped away, the power of the talent exodus buried beneath the noise of the recently redundant.

But I was wrong. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops, my mac aglow, live streaming myself typing away and talking to various people as I’ve done it I’ve found something really interesting. All of the good people, the people with a real idea, the people who are looking beyond the ‘burn it down’ model and towards the ‘make it more fun, make it better’ model are talking with the big networks. It seems that I was wrong. The big networks haven’t been blinded by the squirting jugular of recession to the sights and sounds of a new, quiet revolution. Instead they’re watching, learning, networking, and cherry picking the best ideas.

Here’s what I think they’re hearing.

The smartest people don’t want to do something trivial – advertising used to be seen as something that was kind of glamorous. It was fun, it was frothy, it paid reasonably well, the girls wore short skirts and heels high enough to compensate for the baseness of their morals. You could have ideas and see them out in the world. You could change the way that people thought about things. And you could wear what you wanted while you were doing it. But that was then, back when greed was good and suspenders were red. Over time advertising lost its sheen. The money was nothing compared to the city, or silicon valley or consulting. So the smart and the greedy went elsewhere. The offices and the perks were nowhere near as glossy as the fashion industry and the media, so the shiny chose something else too. New holding companies demanded that the people in the offices conform to standard HR policies, so the deviant, the drunk and the deranged chose the music companies and then the weird world of mobile media. And of course Hollywood weighed in – advertising man became a shorthand for shallow, silly and in need of a lesson (thanks Mel Gibson) and so the serious minded looked at academia and at research. Advertising is like a 29 year old Miami party girl, no longer frothy and fun – but desperate, showing its age and smiling through it.

The smartest people do want access to the power of brands however. They realize that while spending your life trying to figure out a new way to say ‘now tastes of something’ or ‘now without cancer causing fats’ nay not be the most rewarding job nor the job with the most integrity it does give you access to something with tremendous power. It gives you access to brands.

Brands are a powerful shorthand, they touch almost everyone in the first world and they give you access to large groups of people willing to hear you out. Brands are intimately connected with people, and they have the money to broadcast a message. They can whisper and they can evangelize. Work in the confession box and in the pulpit of a mega-church, And that’s why really smart people are willing to work with agencies. They’re not going near a brand that’s all about being ‘one quarter moisturizer so it won’t dry your skin like soap’ but they are going to want to be part of a brand looking to ‘Stand against stereotypes and stand for Real Types’.

Better still they’re going to bring you new ways to express and prove your promise. The people that agree to work with you because they to believe in a brands message aren’t coming to you blank, they’re coming with a social agenda, they want to change things, they think they know how and they have a completely different approach to you and to the agency. They’re interested in playing with new media models, they’re interested in activism, they want to measure success in a different way. They’re going to stretch you, they’re going to challenge you and ultimately they need you too.

So the first thing to take out of this brave new world is this – don’t try to hire the smartest people in the world to work in and for your agency; try to hire them on projects where they can work for the brands within your agency. Agencies are frothy, brands are meaty.


It’s not about select Creative people, it’s about energetic environments – if your agency is reliant on a single department, strictly paired together as art director and copywriter then frankly, you’re fucked. Agencies have been wrestling with the idea of how to bring their different departments together earlier, how to cross pollinate more and how to take the pressure for ideas off the shoulders of the few and into the hands of the many. Most see it as a process problem and invent new ways to force people into proximity at key points in the process. Most have ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ written somewhere in the building… but very few are genuinely ‘open source’. I’ve always believed that the best ideas are both bouncy and sticky. You have an idea and you throw it to someone, they add to it and throw it again, with greater force. The best ideas gain in size and momentum as they pick up something from every hand that touched them and increase in velocity as they feed off the energy that they create. The key to making an agency work is to allow people to see just how bouncy and how sticky an idea is.

Most of the people that I know who have left the agency space haven’t immediately locked themselves into cubicles or offices. They haven’t set up strict departments. And they haven’t decided that their job is to take the brands that they’re working on into whatever media was bought by the company in the upfront.

They also miss being surrounded by amazing people from different disciplines. Creativity is an energy level.

So the second way to get people to work with you is to set up an Energetic Environment invite people in before you have a brief, ask them to help fill a blank wall with facts that might lead to a strategy, give them the opportunity to work with a bunch of people from across your company, have lots of open space, allow people to write on the walls, allow people to work on whichever brief interests them the most, with people who are also interested in it, fill the place with stimulus, make it tactile. Allow anyone to wander in at any time and throw an idea. Set aside an afternoon a week where the people you love the most from outside your agency come in and get to play with the ideas that the people from inside the agency have had. And pay those people for their time. Make it fun, make it physical, have ‘idea battles’, don’t set up the invitation list based on department and always have the session facilitated by someone who has no end goal other than keeping it fun and keeping it flowing.

Finally, it’s who you know, not who you employ… agencies have amazing black books, they know lots of great people. Bring together people from radically different backgrounds, bring together people with radically different points of view, bring together people that you know are going to just love each other; regardless of what their background is – and ask only that they give you and idea, a song, a piece of strategy, a piece of art in return.

Connections and networks are vital to the people that you’re looking to woo. You can help facilitate that. Tell me that you have a project going and that it has Jonathan Harris involved and I’m there. Tell someone that you have an innovation thing and I’m involved and they may have the same reaction. Leverage who you know, not who you employ and you’ll become magnetic

Again all basic stuff.

Invite people to work in brands
Offer energetic environments
Act as a talent hub

And I promise that the people you’ve been itching to work with will come running and that the people you employ will walk 6 inches taller.

Amplified Ignorance

I talked a little before about the “Culture of Comment” and the predicament that brands find themselves in when facing an online world where the comment thread is always going to be longer than the article that sparked it.

It’s one of the things that killed the old model of “Interrupt and argue.” We’re no longer in an era where your brand can merely get in the way of a favorite TV programme or magazine article, state its case and hope to have won you over. Instead we’re in a world where people demand the right to argue back; and where they have the ability to do it. And it’s an unfair fight because while brands are monitored and restricted in their communication (they have to tell the truth or a version thereof) the people that they’re arguing with have no such restrictions.

Of course brands have tried to monitor and control these online debates. They’ve demanded the right to approve all comments before allowing them to be posted, they’ve hired moderators to answer the worst of the criticisms and they’ve hired Blog Lobbyists to ensure that not only is blog content favorable but blog comment is regulated too. Some of it works, but ultimately this is the wild west (or modern Russia) and ‘the law’ don’t go down too well ‘round these parts.

An aside. A friend of mine took some time out to travel. Like a lot of people who did this he took a Lonely Planet Guide. Well the problem that you have when everyone has a Lonely Planet guide is that the bits of the Planet that they recommend soon aren’t that lonely at all. Everyone is there. Add to this a sharp practice by savvy traders – on one street in Tibet there were four cafes all with the same name” – all claiming to be the original one recommended by Lonely Planet. All crammed with backpacks and their dreadlocked wearers.

Anyway he wrote about this on his blog. Two days later he had a comment from a Lonely Planet moderator, paid to monitor the buzz on the brand. They thanked him for the thoughtful way he’d written about the problem and assured him that they were looking for solutions. Unable to help myself I dived in with some solutions of my own – and three days letter got a ‘Thank You’ from the Web Watcher.

A couple of things to take from this. It pays to be watching the comments out there, amid the dross may be some solutions to problems – or better still a highlighting of problems that you didn’t know you had. You need to be careful in how you deal with the people that are writing about you, or they freak out and get all ‘They’re Watching Me!’ and finally when you do decide to intervene make it an invitation to a dialogue, not a ‘cease and desist’

Back to the point though. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops and listened to a 1000 treadmill conversations I’ve come to the conclusion that calling what we have a “Culture of Comment” is a little too flattering. What we actually have is “Amplified Ignorance”

Now those of you who know me will know that I tend to trace America’s hatred of nuance back to an educational system that tells you to circle the letter corresponding to the ‘correct’ answer and ignore the others. It’s a system that deals in absolute certainty, in black and white at the expense of gray and it leads to statements like “You’re either with us, or you’re against us” (try telling that to Sweden, or Switzerland)

In the UK the system tells you to take a side and argue it persuasively. In France to take each side and argue one against the other. I think it’s why the British make such good comedians, the French philosophers and the Americans such good Christians.

But “Amplfied Ignorance” is of course a wider cultural phenomenon. What the internet, comment boxes, twitter, text messages, facebook status boxes and ‘press one if you agree’ polls have done is two things. Firstly they have handed the bullhorn to anyone who wants it. And the people who most want to be heard on an issue are usually the people shouting about it. So it’s governed by the extremes. Secondly it’s condensed the space and time for response, so you can bang out any opinion in seconds, publish it and be pretty much certain that nobody is going to take the time to offer a thoughtful refutal. No harm, no foul you may say. But….

The internet is an amalgamator, what it does is take all of the data out there, weigh it and offer it up to people without editorializing. That’s how Google works, straight numbers. And when you have people shouting at the extremes and at each other, all of the time what happens is that the bullshit rises to the top of the search engine and becomes ‘fact’ – why it’s only a half step away from being on Wikipedia.

It’s this kind of thing that allowed the Republicans to ‘Swift Boat’ John Kerry. The facts were that Kerry was a decorated war hero where Bush had dodged going to Vietnam and may well have actually deserted his post in the National Guard (the records were missing). But through an ad’ that generated comment, that sowed doubt, that generated more comment that became the established orthodoxy somehow Kerry was painted as the less heroic. And he allowed it to happen, because he misunderstood the culture of ‘Amplified Ignorance’… he thought that having the facts on his side would win the argument for him. Big Mistake.

So how do you ensure that your brand doesn’t get ‘Swift Boated’ – that people don’t think that your burgers are made from eyeball and gristle and that the holes in your jeans aren’t individually scratched in by an Indonesian orphan?

How indeed.

I think that you have to start by going back to the basics of a brief. If you remember most good briefs wouldn’t ask “What is it that we want to say here?” instead they’d ask “What do we want people’s take away to be from this communication?” And the two are different. What you say and what people hear can be wildly different – as I found out when I did a campaign for a food that “Kids will love” and got back data that what people were hearing was “Not good enough to serve an adult” and therefore “not good enough for my kids either”

These days the planner has to ask a few new questions

i) “What responses will this communication provoke”
From the point of view of both the Brand Evangelist (out there to sell your brand to every person that they know) and the Brand Arsonist (out there to burn your brand to the ground)

ii) What ammunition can we give Brand Evangelists to help them argue the case online? What can we send them? What can we embed in the communication? Which links should they be cutting and pasting?

iii) To what degree do we want to acknowledge and neutralize the Brand Arsonists? Do we want the communication to address them head on? Do we want it to have a counter-argument embedded? Do we want to deflect them onto another issue?


A quick example. In every US Domestic Car focus group there’s an asshole. He’s full of technical ‘data’ and ‘facts’ that aren’t true, he’s really loud and at some point he WILL say “Found On Road Dead.” or “My Chevy wouldn’t make it as far as the levy” You can show him a campaign that shows that Ford’s are the most reliable cars in America, that they whup Toyota’s ass or that the new Malibu is the best build car on the road and that every independent source says so and he’ll brush aside the fact and restate the stereotype.

Internally agencies working on Domestic Car accounts got tired of hearing this and tended to discount it. But it was actually a huge problem out in the world. Everyone knew a Domestic hating asshole and his harking back 20 years to a stereotype that people knew was actually damaging the brand and stopping it moving forward.

The US companies took the high road here and decided not to attack the guy. Sticking instead to the data, the facts and 3rd party sources and hoping that they would get through eventually.

But it would have been an interesting exercise to look at work that either gave Domestic Loyalists a giant bandaid to slap over Asshole’s mouth or to look at work that took the guy head on – a “Hey Asshole” campaign, or an “Are you a domestic racist?” campaign

It worked for Skoda when they showed people running from the badge. The risks are high, it’s not always the right strategy, but it’s worth looking at.

Not a lot of answers here but something to think about. Whatever you do, someone is gonna hate it. And that hate will be based on prejudice. And that prejudice will fuel a lot of comment venom. You need to decide whether or not you want to deal with that. It needs to be a choice, not an oversight.

More on Brand Collaboration

Collaboration needn’t be the exclusive preserve of the French during wartime. In a world where people are assembling a patchwork of brands around themselves in a bid to show the world who they are and what they believe it pays to know who you’re being lumped in with – and on occasion to force those connections.

Of course there are different approaches to collaboration between brands, and those approaches depend largely on the situation that you find yourself in.


Model One. Media / Content Partners

Take for example the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and the US post office. Star Wars needs to achieve ubiquity – universal awareness. The post office is part of the fabric of every town in America, it has real estate, it has installations (in the form of post boxes) and of course it has collectibles (in the form of stamps)… what the post office needs is injection of interest and of cash. That can come in the form of exclusive stamps. What Star Wars needs is visibility – that can come from painting mailing boxes as R2D2 and from the PR you get from having your own stamp. Done well it’s a win-win. Post office used as media vehicle and rewarded with profit from a one-off product (stamps) – Star Wars even more entrenched in popular culture.

Perhaps a better example, certainly one that feels more modern was the collaboration between ubiquitous convenience chain 7-Eleven and The Simpson’s Movie. 7-Eleven agreed to totally rebrand a dozen of their stores (I know it seemed like more) as Kwik-E-Marts (the convenience store in the cartoon)… in addition to the rebranded stores all 7-Eleven’s would carry some of The Simpson’s most famous fictional products… Buzz Cola, Krusty-Os, Sprinklicious donuts and Squishees. Throw in exclusively designed point of sale and you have a PR stunt that generates yards and yards of press, a movie that opens ahead of estimates and a store that sells out of all proprietary products and more than 3 million bits of Simpson’s shit. Cool.


Model Two. Blurring the (on)line.

Some brands live online. They have no physical footprint. That’s not an issue, but it does throw out a tantalizing opportunity for brand collaboration. When you throw together two brands, on virtual, one bricks and mortar and add a willingness to blur the lines between virtual reality and actual reality (VR and AR?) you can get something interesting.

Take for example H&M and The Sims. This could have been a case of two brands with a shared demographic coming together and doing a coupon exchange. It would have worked too. Sell The Sims in H&M, advertise H&M in The Sims. What we got instead was a decent blurring of the lines, H&M gets integrated into the new Sims game. You can buy an add on module that allows you to shop in the virtual store, to try on virtual clothes, to meet with virtual friends. This offers H&M the chance to showcase new lines and gives The Sims an anchor store within the virtual world. But then they took it further. If you wanted to you could design clothes within the game, which would be sent to H&M who in turn would make some of the clothes designed in the virtual world and sell them in the real world. Yes it still has the stench of competition about it (why don’t you offer to make anything I design?) but it turns the game into a two way street – and that’s a door worth pushing against.

Model Three. Shared Host, Shared Occasion. Opportunity to Innovate.

Nike and Apple don’t have a whole lot in common. Really. One’s about a celebration of participation in physical activity, the other is about unleashing an individual’s creative potential. One lives on the track and pounding the street, the other in dark bedrooms and glossy graphic design studios.

But the Nike Shoe and the I-Pod shared two things. They shared a demographic and they shared an occasion. The people out pounding pavement were listening to music on their I-pods as they went. Now I’ve worked in Innovation companies and I know that at some point both Nike and Apple will have been approached with this ‘Insight’ (again it’s an observation but in the Innovation world an Observation is worth nothing whereas an insight is a $200,000 project) and told “Nike you should make a MP3 shoe” or “Apple, it’s time for the I-sneaker”

Both ludicrous of course. Apple have no expertise in shoes and Nike none in well designed electronics. But the idea will have been floated.

So it’s to the credit of the companies that they saw the opportunity and decided to go for it together. Nike+ puts a ‘digital pebble’ in the shoes of its runner, the pebble talks to your I-pod, you get all kinds of information recorded – from your speed and distance to your route. Throw in an online community for some competition and you have a collaboration that’s useful to runners, that allows one party to take the lead, that sells additional hardware and that gives both companies more access to their customers (via the website) and consequently extra opportunities to sell (‘hey you’ve done 1000 miles, time for new shoes’, ‘here’s the prefect playlist for your run’)

It’s a delicate balance… and ego could get in the way, but Collaboration for Innovation seems like a place to explore in the future.


Model Four. Trading Credibility and Accessibility.

Your brand has a great product but it’s not taken seriously enough. You want to demo your product. Their brand has a great product but it’s really niche, people don’t know that they’d enjoy it. Time for a brand tie-up.

When HP wanted to demonstrate the quality of its high end printers it got together with the National Gallery. The strategy? reproduce some of the most spectacular National Gallery pieces using HP equipment, and then post those pieces of art all over London, in some really incongruous places. Throw in a phone number by each piece that allows The National Gallery to talk you through it in an accessible way and a website that lists all of the locations of the art and allows HP to talk about the quality of its printing and you have a campaign that brings new people into contact with the National Gallery and gives HP the kind of visibility that it couldn’t buy – especially as the PR cloud turned into a mushroom cloud of chatter.


So – one question to ask when looking at communication on your brand… “Who would we love invite onboard with this one?” and “What’s in it for them as well as us.”

Simple stuff but worth asking.

Orville who is your very best friend?

No brand is an island. It never was and it never will be. But in the past, in the bad old days where the model was interruption and media was used merely as a holding pen (the first part of the Trap and Trip model) brands were defined in opposition to each other.

People bought you because you washed whiter, lasted longer or felt a little bit posher (more upmarket for you non-British folks) than that other guy. You were chosen in opposition to the brand leader / cheaper alternative – which is why taste tests and having Danny Baker show up on your doorstep asking whether your knickers were really as stain free as you might get them with Daz worked.

In ye olden days brands had CLAIMS at their core

But the model is changing. We’re moving from having a unique selling proposition (USP) to a Genuine Reason for Existance (GRE). People aren’t asking WHAT your brand does – they’re asking WHY you started it in the first place.

These days brands have a CAUSE at their core.

That’s a fundamental shift –

FROM ‡ ‘WHAT it does’ (and the manufacturing / marketing version of the question ‘WHAT it does BETTER’)

<- TO ‘WHY it exists’ and the brand / marketing version of the question WHY its existence matters to you

My hypothesis (and I hope that it’s right) is that as brands continue to abandon manufacturing claims and embrace instead their reason for existence the way in which brands relate to each other will also change.

Just as we moved from a model about interruption and into one about engagement so too are brands moving – from a model about opposition to one about collaboration.

One of the questions that we should be asking when we’re thinking about our brands is this – who should our brand be playing with?

Because the way that your brand shows that it’s relevant in the world isn’t by going all Maximus on our asses and destroying the opposition, it’s by finding like minded brands and creating something unique with them.

Sounds like utopia, doesn’t it? Brands being about collaboration and creation, eschewing argument and destruction, having a social purpose at their core – involving the people that love them to most in achieving that social purpose. It should because it could be.

I’m going to go into examples that I’ve loved (and a model that looks at kinds of collaboration) in the next post here but until then just ask yourself ‘Does my brand have more friends than enemies?’ ‘Does my brand spend more time trying to create something than it does trying to destroy something?’ ‘Does my brands have a cause or a claim at its core?’

The brief or the briefing

Today’s coffee shop ramble may well be an exercise in the bleeding obvious.

I’ve long argued against having a creative brief as anything other than a record of intent – an agreed set of objectives against which the client can later judge the work. I’ve wanted the Brief to be a pair of granny knickers – there to ensure maximum ass coverage, to provide comfort and to keep everything decent.

But as a document that is intended to inspire creative people – forget it. Briefs tend to be exercises in filling in boxes. That process has become more ‘collaborative’ with clients, meaning that they get more words of their own in the boxes and given more time to argue over those words. So in most agencies the brief is now a political document, designed to appease each of the parties involved to the degree that creative work can start.

What then happens is that clients and agency alike use the work to thrash out what should and shouldn’t have been included in the brief in the first place and you end up with rounds and rounds of creative work; each round exploring a different strategy, rather than each refining an idea. It’s frustrating – but it’s how things work these days.

What has always excited me the most is the briefing. At its best the briefing is where a good planner gets to inspire people around an idea. It’s where they get to relive the excitement of the discoveries along the way, to talk about the brand, its ideas, what it means to people, where it fits in culture and what its ambitions are. The briefing is a session that’s all about instilling an idea and energizing people around it. My briefings tend to be full of anecdotes and asides and bits of trivia that I found along the way and made sense of as we groped towards a strategy. Other people use graphics and music and tours of facilities. It’s a session where you job is to sell the possibilities of the strategy. One word of warning here – it’s also often the session where the planner tends to try to sell what they think the perfect execution of the idea is. Do try not to… it may be a great idea, but it’s not the time.

So I’ve always been anti-brief and pro-briefing… asking why we archive briefs but never record the briefings that led to great work.

And of course I was wrong. To a degree.

Guy Murphy, a wily planner and man who knows good work pointed out that the brief and the briefing - despite sharing a phonetic similarity - are two entirely different beasts. Like Beavers and Diva (perhaps explaining my life-long preference for the latter)

As he said “The brief should be exactly that. It should be as short as possible and contain only the key objectives and points.”

Whereas the briefing “Should be as long as necessary – and contain as many of the stories, anecdotes, diversions, observations and facts as is necessary to excite people about the brand and the task at hand.”

He’s always more succinct than me, that Mr Murphy.

But he set me thinking. If the brief needs only objectives and facts then what should it look like? Here’s my first stab, I’m sure it exists somewhere, all briefs do.


So here’s my version of a brief

THE BRAND IDEA _________________
This is where we remind ourselves that our brand has a purpose and an idea that’s unsullied by the immediate need for action. This idea will rarely change. Nike has always been ‘an exhortation to participate’ because it has always believed that more people should be out sharing in the joy of sports. That’s not going to change

WHAT IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO DO _____________
What’s the task here? Is the brand looking to introduce a new product? Are they looking to charge a premium? Do they want 1% of Londoners to take part in some sort of sporting activity (the brief for Nike’s Run London)… do they want more young women to continue in sport?

WHY HASN’T THAT HAPPENED ALREADY? ________________
What are the things that have held the brand back from doing this in the past. If they want to increase their share of the 18-21 virgins market why don’t they have the share they’re after already? People give up exercise after it stops being compulsory at school? Young women are determined to keep an intact hymen? What’s up? Basically.

WHO IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO ATTRACT?____________
Brands are magnetic, people are drawn to them. Who is the brand after?
In this case it’s those 18-21 year old virgins who have given up on sport ….

HOW DO THEY RELATE TO THE BRAND IDEA?
Just what it sounds like. “18-21 year old virgins don’t see any need to participate in sport, they get all of the exercise they need burning down abortion clinics… and texting each other snide messages about the slutty girls”

WHAT CAN THE BRAND CREDIBLY OFFER THEM THAT THEY FUNDAMENTALLY DESIRE?
This is our ‘human truth’ – the thing that we all have in common.
“They do like the idea of having a slamming sportsperson’s body, that way virginity seems like a choice.”

WHERE ARE THEY MOST LIKELY TO BE RECEPTIVE TO THAT MESSAGE?
Where can this message be most culturally and personally resonant? Is it a billboard, a magazine that they read guiltily and in secret or do we need the local church to endorse “Hot bodied virgins for Jesus”?

WHAT ELSE DO WE KNOW THAT COULD BE RELEVANT HERE
Is there a piece of trivia, a case study, a seemingly loose connection that can make all of this really make sense to somebody looking for a fresh way in. “During the research we noticed that a lot of the girls had posters of _____ on their walls; they liked her ______”

SUM IT ALL UP_______

We’re a brand that’s all about getting more people to play sport.
We want to attract a certain group, 18-21 virgin girls
They gave up on sport after school
But haven’t given up the fantasy of a slammin’ athlete’s body
They’re most receptive to messages from their pastor

WHAT WE NEED________
We need a campaign that gets 50,000 late teen ice queens to take up some form of regular exercise.


Okay – snarky example but I think it works as a brief.
That may of course just be the way my mind works
Or the way it works today
Really need input on this I think.

Planners and the transparent dangling carrot...

And so to the bit where I link planners, Alanis Morrissette, the death of irony, consumer insight and fear of death together in a jumble so loose it seems seemless.

Consumer insight is a transparent dangling carrot. Or rather it's not... but it seems like one. And that's dangerous. We all sense that it's out there. That it's close. That it's worth chasing, That we'll find it. But alas the thing about consumer insight is that it’s so often mislabeled it has become impossible to spot the real thing. Agencies and the planners within them have done to consumer insight what Alanis Morissette did to irony – mislabeled, muddied and made misinterpreted and then pushed out into the world at large.

So just as the following things now pass as ironic when in actuality they’re no more than unfortunate

- Turning 98, winning the lottery and dying the next day
- A death row pardon two minutes too late
- A black fly in your chardonnay
- Rain on your wedding day

These things now pass as insightful when they’re no more than observation

- Our target will be in the market for a new car
- These people watch more sports programs than most
- These are people who aspire to things
- Yellow is the color for the coming season

Of course there’s not a shred of insight there – but the fact is that there’s more and more resource going into more and more research to get to the silver bullet of a ‘Consumer Insight’ that will ‘change everything.’ And quite frankly I believe that the money would be better spent looking for Unicorn Dung that could be sold to fuel power stations without pollution.

I’m not saying that Consumer Insight doesn’t exist. Or that there aren’t good uses for genuine insight. There are plenty. One of my favorite campaigns, Reebok’s “Belly’s gonna get ya” was based on a very real insight that some people aren’t running for the love of sport… they’re running away from middle aged spread. It was an insight that could have been better used against Nike but it was true and useful and could have led to a brand positioning that would have split the market. So Consumer Insight is out there, but it’s rare and to seems, to me at least that the whole insight industry has gone slightly mad… which brings me to a more practical objection – at least from an agency point of view.

It’s my contention that agencies can no longer afford the search for insight. That’s a relatively new thing, so let’s go back to the days when I was a junior planner again (ripple dissolve to ye olden days).

In ye olden days the insight business was a profitable one for agencies. Every client wanted one, every planner knew how to get one and there was a 10% commission (15% if you did the sums properly) on all of those lovely focus groups. Planners had ‘Research targets’ – an amount of money that they had to make from each client. Clients were happy that they were able to be involved in the strategy, and that the M&Ms were plentiful. In a bid to help strengthen their hands planning directors added a ‘Consumer Insight’ box to the Brief, thus formalizing their importance and making the research an easier sell. “We need an insight for the brief, we need a brief to progress, how soon can we do the research?”

All was good with the world. Insight was an important thing. Clients were spending money finding insights. Agencies were saying that a good Consumer Insight was needed as a springboard for communication. Time and effort were being put in. So of course clients started hiring people to manage that time, effort and expense. Client Insight Managers suddenly started springing up. They were well funded, they were bold and they spent all of their time thinking about this one subject…. which is of course why they wanted to see it evolve.

Very soon the blunt tool of the focus group was being replaced by the more scalpel like Ethnography and that quick and profitable group being done by the planner was being outsourced to a cool ethnographic consultancy (“where there’s money, there are consultants” being one of the key tenants of the business). The role of the planner changed. They were there to help manage, observe and interpret. It meant a lot more time on the planner’s part, but no more money for the agency. Client Insight Managers started to develop rosters and preferred research suppliers and internally approved methodologies and so started to use them more and the agency less. More time of planner, less money coming in. Sound familiar?

Now the whole ethno / culture commando / art hypnotherapy / observed interaction thing is a lot of fun for the planner and some agencies manage to hold on to some of it but by and large the insight business has been outsourced to specialists by people who are one step removed from marketing and agencies are suffering the financial and political implications of that.

But it’s not just affordability that has me looking at consumer insight and (like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Dane and the girls you see chewing as they text) saying “Really?”

My real issues with Consumer Insight are twofold. The first is that it’s very rarely useful, the second is that it’s a rather rickety crutch on which to rest the weight of a brand. Too often Consumer Insight becomes a list of demands “This is what we think it is that people want” and actually bars the door to deeper thinking.

So while Consumer Insight can make us sound very clever and witty and pithy at parties when we explain what we do it’s limited in its usefulness and I think that I know why.

Most insight (and insight research) tends to be focused around behavior. Which means that it tends to be culturally specific. Which makes it pretty useless on brands that are global or that need to span the cultures of a country (or even a city)

An example. When I talked about how I appreciated the thinking behind “Dirt is Good” earlier I meant it. But then I’m a Westerner with access to good sanitation and effective drugs. Were I in the slums of India where dirt harbors tuberculosis and other diseases that will kill a couple of your children then “Dirt is not good” and no amount of money is going to change that.

So here’s what I think, for what it’s worth. Consumer insight is a useful cultural modifier of a bigger idea, but it is rarely big enough to drive a brand by itself. What brands need is something bigger, something more universal and something much more Obama than Consumer Insight.

I believe that brands need to start not by looking at the behaviors that make us different and unique but at the beliefs, fears and drivers that are Universal. That what every brand needs is a Universal Truth (cue Universal Truth Consultancies forming lines outside of major clients) that is then modified locally with a Cultural Insight.

So we start with something big…

People are afraid of infirmity (Olivio)
People are running away from old age (Reebok)
Men are emotionally inarticulate in the presence of the women they love (Diamonds)

And we modify that Human Insight with a Cultural Insight

Olivio gives you a chance at a Mediterranean lifestyle in your dotage
Reebok allows you to dodge the middle aged spread that your friends will laugh at
A journey’s diamond is a way to say ‘Love Grows’

Again it’s a simple point.

What Universal Thing does the brand promise?
How does that manifest itself in market?

It’s a change and it means clients writing things on briefs that make them uncomfortable. Many seem to hate the idea of ‘negative insights’ but if we can have brands that stand for the big things in ways that are relevant to people on the ground then we have a better chance at building lasting relationships between brands and the people that use them.

It’s not about finding out what they want, it’s about understanding what they need – and how you can best deliver it.

That was a long way for a ham sandwich huh?

Bubbling Under

Clients and the multiple bubble theory

So you have a great idea that you think will start online but your client is looking at you as though you’re mad. You’re talking about going out to a handful of people and he’s got 30 years of norms that tell him that the way to win is to buy a big audience and expose them to the brand as often as you can afford.

If you have a good relationship with your client he might tell you that he’s just not brave enough to bet the farm on something that’s hard to measure and promises deferred results.

If you have a great relationship with the client he’ll probably also tell you that if he was that brave then, in truth, you probably wouldn’t be his agency.

A few people reading this will shake their heads at this point. To you I say, “Congratulations, you are the lucky few, the agencies who can ask clients to breathe deep and trust you. You don’t need a model, you don’t need an argument, you just need your brand.” Those agencies exist, I’ve worked for a few and their reputation is usually hard earned.

But for the rest of us, the people working really hard in agencies whose names act as security blankets rather than bar call brags for clients this is where a model really comes in. Because if you’re in a ‘security blanket’ agency then you shouldn’t be selling the rush of risk and the buzz of breakthrough. You should be selling a safe way in to a new area. And nothing says ‘this is okay’ more than a simple explanation of what it is that makes it safe.

So here’s the way that I think bubble theory works.



The first fear any client is going to bring forward is that any online, ARG, live narrative etc. story is not only going to appeal to a very small number of people – it’s also going to appeal to the wrong kind of people. The objection goes something like this

“You want me to spend the first three months wooing the kind of dungeons and dragons player I’d never want to see using my brand?”

The answer to this is ‘yes’

And the reason for that answer is that we’re trying to create a wealth of content that will do two things.

The first is that it needs to be wide and deep enough to warrant exploration when we finally invite the mainstream in.

The second is that we need enough volume of content to float the idea of ‘something is going on’ to the media.

And here’s the rub. In order to create the volume of content that we need later in the program we have to appeal to the type of people who upload more things than they download.

So these are not a Dungeons and Dragons target – these people are our Upload target.

A qualifier here. We’re not expecting the upload target to be responsible for spreading the word about what we’re doing very far. They only know each other and they all speak Klingon. We just want to stir their passion enough to have them comment on, play with, criticize and play with our idea.

They’re part of our plant and grow content loop.

And their job is to take the content that we push out into the world and generate posts around it. They’re growing the cloud of interest. Nobody need ever know who they are. They needn’t be seen with the brand. We just need to engage them, entertain them and involve them in something interesting.

A couple of things that you should go look at right now are Beta7, Audi : Art of the Heist and almost anything by 42 Entertainment from I love Bees on…


At this point your client will nod and then say “I get that the nerds are going to go ga-ga and fill the world with stuff about this… but the general public aren’t interested in nerd speak, it’ll just be an inflated niche”

At which point you introduce Bubble Two.

Bubble two is where you take all of the content that you’ve managed to generate and you have it validated – via limited distribution and word of mouth.

This is where you start to drop clues and invitations to the content to those people who have contact lists that make you drool. It’s where you send out some exclusive stuff to those blogs who like to see it first. It’s a controlled dissemination strategy and your aim is to chill the word around your content to sub-zero. Bubble Two is where you claim your cool. And Bubble Two is as far back as the general public will usually search – they’re arbiters of cool, filter for content and backstop. Lots of blogs, magazines, music people, social network icons and industry specialists exist in this space. Their job is to validate the cool of your content, add some of their own and expand the distribution some.

Why will they do this? Well they’re hungry for content, they’re hungry for exclusives, they need new stuff to be able to pass on and they’re suckers for a great idea.

Once you have this second bubble you’re ready to go mass – to show the people what they missed, invite them in to a late stage and give them permission to distribute the content widely. This is where you start to spend and to direct people toward your story. That’s where the numbers come in, that’s where the phenomenon is born and that’s when you can come in with all kinds of marketing support.

So three bubbles :-

Dungeons and Dragons – there to co-create content
Arbiters of Cool – there to validate & co-create content; add limited distribution
Mass - there to consume, distribute and add to content


Three bubbles then. Create, validate, consume, distribute, add.

Simplistic I know but it makes for a neat diagram – which I’ll draw as soon as the squeaky girl at the table next to me shuts the fuck up. Like really, todally, kinda, okay, we’re like, I would say, through, during, not, you know…

The whole world is watching something - it's probably not you

The whole world is watching… they’re just not watching you

A long time ago, when I was but a boy, Nike ran an ad’ called “Parklife” and it was brilliant. The idea – take a bunch of professional footballers down to a park where amateurs play every Sunday and have them join in. Film it et viola you have an ad’ that celebrates the those who ‘just do it’ for the love of sport. Some sharp editing, a Blur tune and a ton of media money later you had something famous and affecting and award winning. Like I said, it was brilliant.

But these days it seems hopelessly old fashioned.

Tell a kid at the Miami Ad School that you shot an ad’ with some of the most famous sportsmen in the country, in a public place and the only cameras that caught it were those of the film crew and a half dozen people who happened to have their film cameras on them that day and they’re going to do a double take. The first at the fact that the images weren’t immediately circling the globe and the second that you hadn’t thought of a way to use that fact. Then they’d glance again as they worked out that you’d shot your entire wad on a single media.. akin to a porn star ignoring the eager faces of two of the triplets vying for his attention.

Times have changed. Try to shoot that ad’ today and almost every person in the crowd will have a camera, that can instantly send the images to blogs, webhosts, cell phones and news media. They’re everywhere and that changes everything. When every person is equipped to be a paparazzi you’d better be ready to reap the whirlwind.

That very phenomena was brilliantly demonstrated by T-Mobile’s ‘Station Dance’ spot recently. A busy station, a tannoy announcement, music from nowhere and suddenly half the station starts to dance. What do the other half do? Reach for their phones and start to record, click and broadcast. These days news can’t wait until you get home, every experience is an experience that can be shared.

The key is in finding things interesting enough to have people activate their networks, That sounded jargony. It’s simple. Every person is directly connected and no more than 1 second away from every other person that they have in their e-mail list, cell phone or social network site of choice. Those networks need feeding, But with so many people connected to each the feed needs to be selective. You need to push in only the good stuff or risk getting caught in a log-jam of unwanted content. We all had one friend who forwarded everything he ever received… he soon found himself FaceBlocked.

So – advertising people. You’re looking to do something interesting enough to have people activate their networks. It’s a big move. You’ve gone from buying media that they can’t ignore to a model where you have to activate media that you can’t buy. And you’d better be good because the funnel is narrow.

In yolden days you created a piece of communication, directed the megaphone in the direction of the people you wanted to talk to, bought the biggest speakers you could afford and blasted away. Now you’re looking to create something that makes people say “Hey, look at this”

My old friend Michael Fanuele has been on to this for years. In every creative review he’d preface each idea with the words “Wouldn’t it be cool if we….” It’s amazingly effective. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we replaced the current posters with new ones that say 34mpg rather than 32mpg” doesn’t really cut it. Try it. It works. And when you get a good idea that WOULD be cool you’ll feel the energy level in the room surge.

What I’m looking to do with my brands at the moment is to Create A Phenomena that’s supported by Deep Content should people want to explore it.

Again what do I mean. Well at it’s simplest it’s using the B roll footage well. B roll is basically all of the Making Of stuff and since DVDs started having to justify their price it’s something that we’ve come to expect.

So when the Honda Cog ad’ was at the height of its fame the phenomena created was around the ‘how did they do that?’ factor and the Deep Support came from two sources. Controlled Support in the form of PR that told the story of just how many attempts it had taken to make the ad’ and web support that allowed those interested enough to delve deeper and play with the idea. And Uncontrolled (viral) support in the form of spoofs, tributes, copycats and the inevitable ‘they stole this idea’

Bravia do this too. Instead of creating their spectacular ads on a computer or a closed set they do it out in the real world. The people there get to see things first, they take pics and they pass them on, Then they announce what they’ve done and show the raw footage online. More people come in to view, that triggers the newspapers to pay interest. Finally the TV ad breaks and is backed up by all of the ‘how we did this’ story,

The key is to get clients to realize that much of this activity will be viewed backwards. And that’s a tough thing. Clients are used to seeing immediate response to expensive mass media so when you tell them (as I did on a booze client recently) that you want to spend $8m putting voices into people’s heads as they drink using an audio laser, that the $8m will probably reach only 400 people and that most people won’t know what you’ve done for 12 months they start to get nervous.

But our plan had been to run an entire event before going mass with it. The story of our founding would be told as a modern ghost story via live interaction, online clues, an Actual Reality Game and finally a spectacular séance. It would involve very few people, a couple of thousand at most; but participation wasn’t the key to success. The key to success was how we presented all that had happened to our mass audience. Once we’d run the story we’d edit all that we’d done and release the DVD as a tip-on in print. It would become our print ad. People would see what we’d done, what they’d missed and would be invited to see all that had been generated as we’d gone. In essence we were spending a year seeding a story before we’d ever get to the masses. The masses would see a cool DVD that told our story on an interesting way. And if they were interested enough they’d find a mountain of content, both ours and that generated by participants over the year when they reached for Google.

So something else to ask in the creative review. You’re generating interesting content. When you put it out into the world it’s going to be shared. People are going to ask their friends “Did you see that Pinky Bar thing?” and in response friends are going to open up their search engine and type “Pinky Bar.” When they do, what will they see? How much of it will be your content? And what do you want the User Generated Content to look like? In your next creative review ask “What will people find when they google this?”

There’s lots more to write on this… and I will. I’ll also post the model. It helps, I know. But for now my latte is as low as my battery and the looks that I’m getting from Busty Barista (one day I’ll ask her for her name) are filthy. So tomorrow.. tomorrow.

First - simple model

So there's absolutely nothing complicated or new about our first model - but it's an interesting framework at least. There's no harm in asking "where on the spectrum does my brand sit?" and "what would happen if we tried to shift where we are on the model?"


BIg brands may well be happy in defining the category expectations. Advertising is good at this. It's easy to tell people what to look for - and surprisingly easy to convince them that this criteria is natural. As a kid I spent days seeing whether I could "Pinch more than an inch" in a bid to determine whether I needed Special K. And longer counting the perforations in my tea bag.

So if you're a brand leader you may want to settle for telling people what it is that your brand does - and encouraging them to seek out only those things. In our example, bathroom tissue, that means having people look for Soft, Strong and Long.

Now HOW you tell people to look for that is up to you. You may want to demonstrate all three - the Andrex / Scottex puppy does this beautifully. An aside here - I was once told by a semiotician that the Andrex Puppy wasn't just a tool to show how long and strong a roll of bathroom tissue could be; but that it represented 'Anarchy of the anus"... one of the few creatures that's allowed to soil the house at will and still be loveable. But I digress.

Of course most brands aren't brand leaders. The traditional model here would therefore ask you to either "Attack a weak link" or "Outflank the opposition"

Attacking a weak link usually means choosing a single category attribute and arguing (or these days PROVING) that you're better at it. That you're softer, stronger or longer. In essence you're telling a story of what the clever people in manufacturing have done TO the product to make it superior. It may now be through-air-dried for extra softness, or cross-plied for extra strength. How you prove it doesn't matter - so long as you do. This is a very unsubtle form of jujitsu. You take something that the big brands have spent time and money claiming is important to the category and then say "Yup, and we do it better"

Innovation agencies often come in here - the Cross-Ply thought coming from 'steal from another category' session that cost a six figure sum and involved numerous heart shaped post its, no doubt.

Another place that the Innovation Agencies love is 'Out-flank' - this is all about finding new pillars upon which to build the category. It may be that your toilet paper is more decorative, or recycled or quilted. What matters is that it's new and that somehow it makes sense. Easier said than done, but done well it's really effective. Still in the 'what the product does' section but it manages to bring some news to the category. You saw it in detergents when they went from 'whiter' to 'better against lingering odors" -pow there's a whole new niche out there.

So you can talk about what the product does (reshaping expectation if necessary) or what you've done to the product to make it do what it does better. So far, so 70s.

If you're an A-Team / McGyver type you could take a step into the 80s and talk instead about how the product makes you feel. Or more often about the kind of life that the product is a gateway to. That toilet tissue can make you feel like a more caring mom, it can make you feel environmentally conscious (and smug as a result), it can make you feel like a style maven (my tissue and drapes match) or it can make you feel sophisticated (it has a touch of Myrrh you know) but it's all about imagery. Get the right spokesperson onboard, pay attention to production values, limit your distribution and choose your font with care, tone, style and attention to detail is key here. You need to be able to smell the attention to detail.

And then there's the 90s model. The late 90s model. Talk about the brand's purpose, its cultural significance and its role in the world. Having a living founder to embody those values is great (Branson wants to stick it to The Man, his are Robin Hood brands - Jobs is all about liberating creativity - Nielman does believe that nobody should be afraid of the airplane's Call Service button). The key here is to have that belief filter down into EVERYTHING that you do. So if you're a brand that's out to eradicate beauty stereotypes and promote real-types you'd better have a foundation, sponsor research, pressure the fashion industry and never, ever launch face-lift or anti-aging products) If you're there to Help 15 year old boys in the mating game you'd better follow through. And that's the issue with trying to place yourself into culture - if you don't really believe it, if it's a cocktail party belief - you'll be exposed faster than Britney's minge in a crowd. So if you decide that your toilet tissue is on a mission to eradicate Colon Cancer you'd better be giving away some proceeds, funding research, writing about it on the packaging and co-packing with fiber rich foods; or it's over for you.


Okay too much talk about something that's not new... next we'll talk about what happened in the early noughties "Total Brand Surrender" and what happens next.... gripping huh?

Doing a Dove

So a quick recap, before charging on into the brave new world of the future.

In the past you asked yourself whether you were going to

- Argue that your product did what was expected of it better than its competitors
- Argue that your product does something differently / better than what’s expected
- Argue that your product was an emblem of and gateway to a better world

Of course there were variations on the theme – education, introduction of a new occasion and the possibility of a hybrid brief that brought several elements to the fore. But relatively speaking it was a simple task.

Now the question has changed and things have become more complex. We’re asking what people are going to do with our brands… and before they get to our brands what they’re going to do with our communication.

We’re basically asking “How can we BE what they’re interested in”

That’s the question that I’m going to be exploring on these pages, it’s the question that agencies and clients alike are asking, it’s a question that’s spawning new disciplines. And of course there is no one answer. So let’s start with a thought that’s been around for a while.

“We can be what they’re interested in – by demonstrating what we believe in”

Or as it’s known in the industry “Doing a Dove”

The basic idea here is that there are very few categories that allow you to be big enough in terms of idea to maintain people’s interest over the long term. Sure you may have a product that’s a hit today but, the argument goes, if you’re in the category business, you’re in the fashion business – and that means that you’re out as often as you’re in.

Belief is critical in the world at the moment. When you look around you all of the pillars of certainty are being pulled down. Western Europe has all but given up on the church, the state can’t meet its pension obligations, the markets have proved themselves to be less than trustworthy, people are moving more and more often’ taking away the certainty of family. Politicians lie, big corporations are corrupt, the food you love will kill you, the food you should be eating seems to be poisoned, the world is going up in flames and you now have access to a world of beliefs out there that contradict each other and themselves.

It’s confusing. And it wasn’t that way for my dad. My great grandfather was a miner who married a girl from the village and attended the Methodist Chapel. My grandfather was a miner who married a girl from the village and attended the Methodist Chapel. My father, sure of his place in the world from an early age followed suit and was a miner who married a girl from the village and attended the Methodist Chapel (and I wonder how in this swirling village gene pool I picked up my overbite).

The thing is that there is now no mine. There’s also no Methodist church, it was converted into housing. I married a girl from Holland, not from the village – and moved to Singapore, not to Southfield Road. I’ve not been to church in years – and then only for a funeral. Change was forced upon me and with it uncertainty. No union meant no job for life. No fixed country means no guaranteed pension. No belief means… well no belief. It’s little wonder that the self help mantra of “You build who you are through the experiences you have” sells to millions by the million.

And as we’ve become more mobile so too have the geographical villages of interest broken down. My dad shared job, religion and a pint after work with the people who lived around him. I live between an Accounting Professor, Dentist and Internet Twiddler (I’m not entirely sure what he does but it keeps him in shiny Subarus and young ladies).

I share nothing with the people around me. Other than perhaps self-perception. We all live in lofts… the only lofts in town. And THAT says something about us. What says even more about us is that we share a fondness for certain brands. Brands that say “I have creative potential that is yet untapped” – every one of us is a Mac user for example.

And this is were really powerful brands exist. They badge and enable our beliefs about ourselves. Roper-Starch research sees “I want a brand that shares my beliefs” rising as a reason for purchase year on year – and I believe that one of the reasons is that brands help you define your beliefs – or at least the good ones do.

And I don’t think that it’s a single brand thing. I think that brands are congregating under flags of interest, staking out areas of belief and co-existing, each one standing on the shoulders of the next in a weird physically impossible but metaphorically okay if you don’t think about it too hard kind of a way.

What does this mean for those of us that have to write a brief? Well one of the things that it means is that you have to ask yourself a few questions

- Is this a brand that can stand for something over and above its category?
- Is it a brand that can embody a belief?
- Is it a brand that can prove commitment to that belief?

If the answer is yes then you may just have received the “Free get out of months of trying to hold every department together hell card”

An example I think.

For years Persil has washed whiter. Ask any UK housewife to name a detergent ad and she’d likely tell you about the Dalmatian shaking off its spots – so good was the brand’s whitening power. Whiteness, brilliant whiteness was what the product was about.

But it’s hard to rally behind a flag of ‘marginally whiter than the other guy” – unless you’re a Republican politician. And so Persil was caught in an endless and costly cycle of marginal product improvement, heavily advertised followed by marginal share increase, held on to by aggressive discounting. Such is the world of FMCG.

But then somebody pointed out that people were paying a premium for things that bolstered their self-perception of ‘being a creative type’. People aspiring (there’s that word) to the Creative Classes were prepared to pay a premium for computers that badged their creativity (Apple, Vaio) for coffee that fed the feeling of sophistication (any coffee house) and for flooring that had once been forests.

The badge of “Creative” it seemed added to the price that people were willing to pay for things. Montessori school boards rejoiced and the people at Persil took notice.

But how could a laundry detergent become a brand that promised to liberate and promote your creative talent?

Now I’m sure that at this point there were lots of ads written about clothes as a blank canvas and whiteness as a clean slate upon which to express yourself. Thankfully they were thrown away.

What they were replaced with was an observation

“Moms are so worried about kids getting dirty enough to ruin their clothes that they’re actually stopping their kids from playing. And by doing that they’re stunting their kid’s creative development.”

Which led to a new belief for the people at Persil

“Kids need to get dirty in order to fulfill their creative potential”

And to a mission

“Let’s take the fear out of Dirt so that the next generation reaches its full potential”

The final communication was simpler than that… it merely said “Dirt is Good”
It then went on to explain why
And offered moms help – including a ‘how to get dirty with them’ program

Suddenly Persil was a product for moms who aspired to the Mac, Latte, architect glasses set; and was out of the day to day ‘How white are your panties?” melee.

It may not have happened quite that quickly – but it’s an example of what can happen when you decide to break the glass ceiling of your category and reach out for a belief.

A soap can decide to stand against beauty stereotypes and for real types
A computer can be an aid to creativity
A car can stand against fearful driving and for joyful motoring
A packet soup can be about family time


A few words of caution though.

These days it doesn’t matter what a brand says… nobody believes you
What matters is what you do… that’s undeniable.

So if your brand isn’t willing to invest time and energy and resource in a belief then don’t reach for one; there are other things that you can do.

Don’t chase your customers and mirror their beliefs. They’ll smell that bullshit a mile off. Pick something and go for it… belief if magnetic, it will draw the right people.

Know which brands you want to co-exist with. What does your world look and feel like? Good briefs actually ask this – “Who lives in your world and what’s your relationship to them?” It pays to know whether your Fair Trade or Peta…

Okay all very simple, to the point of simplistic. Real, hardcore models on the way. Just as soon as I get out of this coffee shop (Espresso Royale), find some power for my MacBook and put some more gas in my Mini.

Less Duran Duran, More Lily Allen?

More pre-amble today I’m afraid. Think of it as that little salad thing that they bring out before your main course, you didn’t ask for it but you welcome it as a sign that the steak is on its way and find yourself really rather enjoying it despite yourself.

For those of you of an impatient nature may I remind you of the mantra at many a Playboy party – “We’ll get to the models in a moment, but first Heff wants to make a little speech.”

The biggest change in planning in the time that I’ve been doing it has been the question that we ask on the brief. That’s pretty fundamental. The words haven’t changed much, but the question these days is entirely different. Back in the early 90s the toughest box on the brief to fill out was the one that ask a version of this question

“What do we expect this advertising to do to people?”

It was a tough question mainly because the answers were very limited and so you were always looking for a nuance.

The thinking was pretty simple.

If your advertising was an argument then it would Persuade them to change their behavior by delivering a killer fact. That could have been a USP ‘this is the only one that doesn’t cause anal leakage.’

This was pretty much the standard one. Our job was to argue people into submission. To come into their homes and say ‘You think that your whites are white now. You’re wrong, we’re right. Now switch.”

When writing what was called a ‘Persuasion” brief (a euphemism that I’m sure could be applied to water boarding in Gitmo today – ‘persuasion sessions’ perhaps?) the TONE box used to be very important indeed. How you argued became how you differentiated. Were you going to whip out the evidence with a flourish, or were you going to try to hide it behind some entertainment. Were you “Now with Super-Stain-Bleacher” or were you ‘You can’t get better than a Kwik Fit Fitter?” replete with jingles and funny dances.

Lots of pharmaceutical advertising is still Persuasion and USP based. Claratin makes you less sleepy than Baratin that works in two ways instead of the one way that Daratin, the fastest one works.

There were of course certain strategies that grew up around this. Jim Carroll of BBH put it very well when he talked of Cowboys and Crusaders. The big brands, he claimed, try to define all of the rational points that are relevant in the market. They tell you what you should be looking for, then claim them all as their own.

So Scottex tells us that Bathroom Tissue should be ‘Soft, Strong and Long.” – we buy their argument and their demos and they become huge.

That leaves only two strategies for smaller players.

They can abide by the rules and start to argue against one of the points – “we’re softer or stronger or longer”

Or they can try to introduce a new point of argument, convincing people that this is what’s really important. So you suddenly find brands that are “recycled” or even brands that are “prettier”

The trick here was always to try to bring the category identifiers down by claiming parity there… they’re ALL soft, strong and long – this one does all of that AND…

I still play the game of trying to spot these ads during the rare moments that I’ve not delayed my viewing of American Idol by enough to whiz past everything paid for. They tend to have a sentence that starts with “Sure….”
The second strategy that we used to try during the days of “What will this advertising do to people?” was to move beyond the rational and into the emotional. We were going to SEDUCE them. The ESP (emotional selling proposition) was a defining to 80s advertising as Thatcherism was to society (though she’d have denied its existence) – and its legacy was about as long.

The ESP led agencies to say things like “We’re not here to sell things to people, we’re here to make them want to buy”

This strategy was about FOSTERING DESIRE and everyone wanted to do it, because it meant bigger budgets, glamorous work and awards galore.

The word that acted as lube to this strategy tended to be ‘aspiration’ – we suddenly realized that we didn’t have to show our brands in relation to people’s actual lives. They didn’t have to argue that they could solve a real life problem and leave hands that did dishes as soft as your face – no, they could promise to be a gateway to a more fabulous, imagined life. One full of yachts and beaches and Yasmin Le Bon. Yes, you too could be Duran Duran.

Ask any British person between the ages of 35 and 45 to give you an example of this style of advertising and they’re very likely to show you a Bacardi cinema ad. In this a yacht serves as ‘the last bus home’ and beachside bar as ‘your local pub’ etc. and the line “If…. You’re drinking Bacardi”

There were other ways in of course – but the shift here was from winning the argument rationally to winning it by proving that you were a better gateway to a better life. It made for some great work. Instant Coffee became fodder for glossy soap-opera affairs, small cars migrated to Château in the South of France and phallic chocolate bars were consumed only by gorgeous people in bathrooms bigger than the average British house.

The really clever people managed to mix both messages. Levis advertising always took a rational point (shrink to fit, button flies, double stitched) and wrapped it in a heady mix of sex, rebellion, hormones and glamour.

‘Aspiration’ is a word still bandied about by clients but the days of the Imperial Leather family on their private jet now seem as naïve and dated as the Two Tarts in A Kitchen (there’s a cleaned up phrase) advertising of the 50s.

So the question when I started was

“What will this advertising do to people?”

These days that question has changed. We’re asking something else entirely. These days the brief asks the question

“What will people do with this communication?”

It’s a fundamental shift. And one that I think one of the big agencies summed up very nicely when a terribly bright young planner there wrote this

“For too many years we’ve been in the business of Interruption. We found content that people were interested in and we got in the way of their enjoyment. Found an article that you love, we’ll put an ad in the middle of it. Want to know what happens next on your favorite TV show, find out… after the break. Want to get information online, click to close our banner.

Well technology has changed and the age of interruption is dead.

We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in, and be what people are interested in.”

The agency loved this, put it on their website, told clients about it, wrote it on their walls, put the young planner in their ‘high potentials group’ and then laid him off during a round of cutbacks – proving that in advertising you’re only as big as your byline.

But it does sum up the change and it does explain the sudden panic around agencies regarding ‘What to do?” in this brave new world,

I’m hoping that this book can provide a clear framework for thinking about what we do when the question changes and we’re all asked

“What will people do with this communication”

Or as I like to think about it – what do we do when the soundtrack is no longer Duran Duran singing “Rio” but Lily Allen singing her diary?

Tomorrow we’ll get to the meat of that one…

Why I'm doing this

This is going to be a very simple blog - that I'm hoping will eventually be a very useful book.

20 Planning shapes that can help you sell any idea to a client.
Backed up by 20 case studies that show how the shape has been used. And 20 lovely anecdotes that should help keep the attention of your audience.

I'm hoping that it becomes a bit of a planning tool kit.

The kind of thing that you pull off the shelf once in a while and say "This calls for an Adopting Bonnie Rait strategy"; or "Let's explain why they need to be planting marigolds rather than buying roses"

Both of those are models that I'm gonna throw out for comments. But as this is entry one, allow me to be self indulgent for just a second and explain how this came about - think of it as the foreword and if you're the kind of person that skips forewords skip it.

As a planner you're in the business of 'stealing with glee' - or rather in the business of adopting and adapting the models out there to help better explain what it is that you're doing.

A nice shape on a chart is always a good thing (planners do have a thing for shaded arrows) as it allows you to do the presentation trick that evades many account people.

A good planning shape buys you time to explain your concept. This is a good thing as the temptation in this powerpoint templated world (does anyone else now turn their paper landscape when starting on an idea?) is to throw down a couple of bullet points, fill in some sub-bullets and then try to speak faster than the crowd can read. This of course makes you a monkey - as any fool can read what's on a chart.

However when you go Benny Ninja on their asses and 'throw a shape' you have the opportunity to explain what it means - making you more than monkey, you're now 'the guy that gets it'

So first thing we need is THE SHAPE.


The problem that we often encounter in meetings however is that while we grasp the concept in the abstract ("What you need to do is create the phenomenon, that will create a cloud of PR vapor off which the campaign will feed') the client is looking for something more concrete. This tends to lead to frustration all around. You go back to the agency and mutter darkly about how they don't get it, they return to their subsidized cafeteria wondering why you're more interested in jargon than selling things.

Of course in your head you have a wealth of examples of what you're talking about. Bravia! Lynx Pulse! But of course what's in your head isn't much use until it's been used to sell the idea. John Bartle, a man who knew a thing or two about planning always used to say that the job of the planner was "to sell the idea the first time" and that the planner's most powerful tool was "his filing system". I'm in no position to disagree, so every model here will be backed up by a case study that shows how the thinking has panned out in the past and offers a clue as to how it might be used in future.

So you'll also get THE CASE STUDY


And the last thing really is how to make it all stick. In my career, such as it has been, I've always had a reputation for 'colorful description'. There's been a reason for this. I wanted the thought to stick. And in order to make it stick you need to make it either relatable, funny or provocative. Hopefully all three.

So the last thing that we're going to have as an adjunct here is THE ANECDOTE.


Enough of the preamble though.

I'd love to know whether this sounds useful before starting to write around the first model.... MARIGOLDS NOT ROSES

Let me know