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