Campaign

A Little Thought About Big Brands

A person’s feeling towards a brand is made up of the aggregation of their experiences with that brand layered one on top of another over time.

In the not so distant past, the vast majority of those experiences were controlled by us, the brand owner.  We created the experience through the product, in store and event or we served it up in a one-dimensional, passive mediated way to people through TV, radio, print etc.

The change that has come is not in the way that brands are created over time but in our loss of control over the mediation.

The most powerful force for vicarious experiences now is the connection between ordinary people.  The power of mediation is passing from our hands and from the hands of the media owner into the hands of the collective. And this mediation is now active – the mediators add their own spin whereas they never used to.

This leaves us with two routes for communication – create more stand-alone experiences ourselves and work with the fluid, active, multi-dimensional mediation of the collective.

And working with the collective - really working with them - will take us to a new place in our thinking about the way big brands need to behave.

A brilliant man I worked with once said "Brands exist in the minds of consumers" (Paul Feldwick, BMP) but right now, those minds are made public, become connected and are archived and searchable. 

We are all getting used to the idea of co-creation of content, but are we ready for the notion of co-curation of brands? 

1969 and The Big Idea

This week, forty years ago, I remember two things that happened.

The big one was sitting down on the floor of my school watching the TV as the BBC showed footage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon and declaring  "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." 

Even at that age, I knew he was right but it did not seem that unreal or fantastic.  It was just what happened.  Man on the Moon, Atom Ant, a six foot mouse that talked and Captain Scatlett were all equally credible.  It was something that my small and curious brain just accepted and took for granted.

It was not that I took everything for granted back then because the day before this momentous step for mankind, I had been presented with something in Sunday School which I did struggle with and which didn't make sense.  It was the story of the Prodigal Son.  Now I guess my powers of exegesis were not that well-formed back then but the story did worry me - and that worry has stuck with me to this day.

My take out from the parable was that there was more rejoicing from whomsoever you believed was interested if you lived a life of dissolution, erroneous ways and brazen fun but then said you were sorry than if you toiled carefully and honestly to stick to the rules and live a 'good' life (as defined by the well-meaning, white-haired fellow with the beard who took our Sunday School class).  This was compounded by the 'more rejoicing over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who do not'.  I remember asking the teacher about this issue and I am sure he gave me a very sound answer, but my misinterpretation has stuck with me ever since.

And it returned last week triggered by two events.  The first was watching a documentary on a plane about Apollo 11 and the second was judging some advertising awards.  How are these two linked?  It was through the notion of a 'big idea'.

We are all so conscious of looking for the big, new, groundbreaking thing, the thing that makes the difference and nudges us on a bit that we often overlook the ideas that just work.  Those ideas that do what they are designed to do, do it with the minimum of fuss and do it without breaking the rules or without changing the game.

It seems to me that the ideas we celebrate and rejoice over, the ideas we laud and throw parties for, the ideas that we reward and that make news are the big, new, exciting ones.

But shouldn't we also admire the simple, good ones too?

We all remember Neil Armstrong and his mighty step.  We all remember Buzz Aldrin and his brilliant first name.  But do we all remember the guy that did the driving and picked them up and brought them home?  Maybe we can all pretend we do and look him up on Google but he should be celebrated just as much as the other two.  As should the simple, common, hardworking idea.

Unfortunately, this is never the case.  These small ideas get overlooked even though they keep the system going.  The big ideas are the ones that take us forward and maybe they are the ones rightly lauded and rewarded.  I just wish sometimes we could acknowledge the little ones too and this became painfully apparent in the awards judging.  Some good, solid, "little" ideas that did the job simply and elegantly but that lack the sex appeal to be celebrated.  Shame, really.

And this reminds me of something else I read from 30 years or so before the moon landing,  a quote from Mae West: "To be big is good. To be good is better. To be both is best."  she was as equally right about ideas as she was about whatever she was referring to back then.

It would be good to adopt that as a mantra for our ideas in advertising - especially in a week where one of the biggest ideas of all was realised.  Fly to the moon and then rejoice when we come home again.

Catching the Catchphrase Wave

Diligence is a good thing.  Looking out for what is happening now is what good people do.  I think many call it ‘due diligence’.  Keeping your eye on what is going to happen soon is another skill.  What should we call that?  ‘View Diligence’?  ‘Clue Diligence’?  Maybe ‘New Diligence’?  I think I like ‘Clue Diligence’ best.  Kind of gives the feeling that there is a higher class of trend spotters out there and we should now call them ‘Trend Detectives’.

And we have one of those in our office – a splendidly perspicacious person called Katy.  Anyway, the other day, she sent round a link to Google Wave (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html and http://wave.google.com) and you should go check it out. 

It seems to be a splendidly Googlicious fusion of the utility of social networking tools and the futility of trying to work things out on your own.  Actually taking the power of connected people to work, share, filter, fact-find and have fun doing it.  It is going to be big … very big. 

And here is my term for it: “Social Nextworking”.  Do you see what I did there?

This set me thinking about the stuff people like doing on the web and I heard a very bright man – Faris Yakob (www.farisyakob.typepad.com) – talking about the joy that people have in mashing stuff up and how it is much easier to engage consumers in playing with your stuff than it is to ask them to create their own.  Think ‘Cadbury’s Gorilla’ and you will know what I mean.  He has a point, and as he was making it, I thought about another catchphrase that we could all start to use to describe this phenomenon: “User Modulated Content”.

There is even a catchphrase that describes how this happens – “Pick Up, Play and Pass It On’.  But maybe I didn’t think that up at all and maybe I just dredged it up from things I have heard other people say.  But from whom?  And when and where did it come from?

Whilst I was feeling my catchphrase gland throbbing away in the mostly unvisited regions of my brain, I recalled a presentation that a brilliant man called Tom Himpe (and a not so brilliant man called ‘me’) did in April 2007 when he coined that phrase the first time around.  We were talking about ‘User Generated Content’ or UGC and the myth of it.  At the same time we talked about half a dozen other UGCs that cast some light on where the interweb might be going.  Amongst other things we predicted ‘User Generated Crap’ – millions of bits of useless stuff that not many people like (think my last blog post).  We predicted ‘User Generated Cash’ where people used the connections made on the web to raise money to support causes and businesses (think ‘Fundable’).  Going one step further, we predicted ‘User Generated Companies’ where the web spawned communities of people with a shared idea and the willingness to turn it into a co-operative company (think ‘Threadless’).  And many other spiffy acronyms were toyed with.

And that then set me thinking about all of the catchphrases, the natty names and the acronyms that our industry invents and propagates.  Ones I have personally seen happen are things like “Connection Planning” (Derek Morris, 1997) and “Transmedia Planning” (Faris Yakob, 2007) and I bet I have seen a lot more considering all the brilliant people I have worked with.

We need these pithy descriptors, these witty one-liners, this taxonomy and we need the people that coin them and make them work.  But who are they and how do we moderate them?  Who anoints a term?  Who defines its meaning?  And is there a business opportunity out there to simply name trends, processes and practices and then patent them?

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

And just as in history, where the truth is made by those who write it, in advertising, those with the best end lines are the ones remembered longest.  I bet no one will remember the phrase “Social Nextworking”.  Maybe I should have collaborated with 'the crowd' to come up with something better.

What do you think the best catchphrases in our industry are and can you point to who genuinely came up with them - not the ones who nicked them and put them in their books or on their blogs?

A Post-Modern Take on Digital

I have just spent a splendid weekend in Scotland cycling with an old friend in an 80-mile race called the ‘Etape Caledonian’.

This friend, as well as being a ginger haired dynamo of a bike rider who cycled the legs off me around the glorious Scottish countryside, is also an ad-man who is much sharper than the carpet tacks spread around the cycle route by disgruntled locals.

We will come back to the carpet tacks later but I want to relate the content of just one of the several intriguing dinner time conversations my friend and I enjoyed about the state of our industry and the lemming-like stampede away from the traditional strengths that made London the creative centre of the best work in marketing communications.

My pedal-pounding pal had worked in some of the best creative agencies in the eighties and nineties such as JWT, WCRS and Wieden + Kennedy before setting up his own agency, 180, in Amsterdam.  Between us, this is what we came to conclude over post-peloton haggis and chips.  As I said, he is very smart so most of the good points here are his and most of the bad gags are mine:

Digital is Deceptive: Let us ignore, for the moment, the fact that we talk about digital as if it is a noun and not an adjective.  Why are we so excited about ‘it’?  Because it does have lots going for it.  It is direct, it is downloaded, it is demanded by the consumer.  It is interactive, it is interesting, it is infinite.  It is cheap, it is cheerful and in a few cases it is cherished.  But it is not the answer to everything even if it looks like it.  Yes it is measurable, but we need to recalibrate the measurements we keep making.  We all get so excited when Susan Boyle gets 100m downloads and rightly so.  But she is one of hundreds of thousands of pieces of content uploaded this year and she stood out because of her exposure elsewhere.  But boy, did she spread rapidly.  I am always reminded of a brilliant fact Derek Morris told me in 2008.  At that time, the most downloaded video of all time was ‘The Star Wars Kid’ (Google it) which had had over 970 million downloads since it first appeared in 2003.  But in one week, in one TV programme, in one country, the cumulative advertising exposures totaled 830 million (ITV, Coronation Street, all broadcasts).  Sure it is different and definitely the web-watchers would have been more engaged that the telly-babies but it does serve to remind you that for many marketers, scale is important and measuring one download rating on YouTube against another can be construed as arguing about who is the tallest dwarf round at Snow White’s house.  So before we rush in, think carefully about what we are rushing towards.

Fragmentation is Frightening:  A few years ago, we were all being taxed and tormented by the thought that TV audiences were fragmenting.  It was getting harder and harder to build the reach that many of us needed.  TV was not delivering in the way it used to do.  That was definitely a fair criticism but we seem to have forgotten this particular worry when we decide to ‘go digital’.  Talk about fragmentation!  Some estimates reckon we are approaching 200 million websites in the world with more than 3 billion pages indexed.  And we want our stuff to stand out.  Sure it can be done but honestly, it is like trying to find needles in haystacks.  There are so many needles out there that there will come a time when nobody wants to go roll in the hay anymore but in the meantime, our challenge is to make sure that when we go digital, our pin-*** is the most likely to be felt and remembered.  So how do we take part, jump into the haystack but still stand out?

Evolution is Essential:  This might sound like a polemic against the newest thinking – propagation, user modulated content, social mediation etc – but it isn’t.  Of course we have to evolve and take advantage of the brilliant step change in the ability of technology and communication to connect people to us, to each other and to companies all over the world.  This has been coming – and has been here – for a very long time.  The Electronic Telegraph was launched 15 years ago, for heaven’s sake.  Who would have thought that Sir Cliff Richard was such a visionary when he sang ‘power to all my friends, to the music that never ends’?  Did he prophesy MySpace?  Of course we need to embrace all things digital (using it as an adjective).  The question is how?  Because the more beer we drank and the more we talked the more we became convinced that digital provided the power to modern day communication solutions but it was not the solution itself.  So what does that mean?

The Modern Model: Laurence Green at Fallon told me a great line from Brian Eno about “A big here and a long now”.  Laurence had taken that and made it comparative and talked about a “bigger here and a longer now” that was being enabled by the digital connected revolution.  Laurence is clever and my friend Guy is definitely cut from the same cloth.  He took that thought and started talking about the way the new world and the old world surely work best together.  How, in communications, do we create a ‘Bigger Here’?  How did Susan Boyle do it?  How did Fallon do it with Cadburys and Sony?  And how did they go on to create a ‘Longer Now’?  I suspect we have to apologise to Mr. Eno (and maybe Mr. Green) because he was talking at a much deeper level than how to plan your communications exposure, (he was talking about the need to shift cultural perceptions of time and space), but Guy went on to elegantly state something that I have been espousing ever since I worked on Sony “Paint” with, what was then, an unconvinced Fallon.  You start the fire with the biggest bonfire possible and then fan the flames with the most efficient tools you can use.  In other words, for many campaigns, build it big on TV then make it live online.  We still need reach and frequency but we do not need to build them in the same way as we used to.  So build big and then blow long.

Trust in the Traditional:  But how do you do that in this day and age?  You expect me to say TV and posters and print, don’t you?  But that would just be dumb based on what I said above.  You pick the thing that is right for the job whatever that happens to be.  It could be TV but it could also be packaging or posters or PR or print or personnel or pop music … and they are just things beginning with ‘p’.  You pick whatever works.  But it is not as simple as that.  In a diatribe reminiscent of being in a pub with David Hackworthy, Guy went on to declaim the current passion for thinking the channel is more important than the charm.  Making something brilliant, something beautiful, something brave and something right for a brand is still a magnificent fusion of strategy and creativity.  The ability to look at the hard facts, identify the opportunity and then make a leap of inspiration to turn it into something simply compelling.  And you know what, at the heart of doing that are the craft skills that those big, old-fashioned behemoth agencies helped shape and develop and still champion today.  They are not the only ones who do it, of course, but they are sometimes out-gunned by more nimble agencies that can build visions based on ether and electricity but not founded on solid ground.  The agency of the future has to find a way of bringing the best of the traditional world and make it fit for the fantastic opportunities that the digital age is opening up for communication.  Clay Shirky in Media Guardian talked about the web being more important that the printing press and maybe being the first true medium.  He is right but let us not forget that just like the old days of printing, it still takes talent to make something that is both engaging and effective.  So put some trust back in the traditional skills of the last century and apply them to this current landscape.

Integration is in the Second Act: So imagine you do that?  You work out where something needs to get big and you work out how to make it go long and then you engineer it to happen through brilliantly compelling content, what next?  Next is getting it to work together, to make it integrate, to become as one campaign.  Not disjointed bits competing with each other to be more important but joined-up bits collaborating to make something work.  This is so much easier said than done because usually, as well as bits competing you have agency businesses.  The smart agencies are waking up to a more co-operative approach to answering clients’ needs and the smarter clients are rewarding them for this.  It remains to be seen whether the agency of the future can make both bits work – the traditional skills of craft and the modern craft of integration.  Specialist agencies will rise up that are capable of doing this but the challenge is for the agencies of old – and that means the digital agencies of today as well as the advertising agencies of the eighties – to rise from the ashes and invent the new model for tomorrow.

So there you are, a charter for the modern traditional agency dreamed up by two old men in Lycra but beautifully demonstrated by one or two disgruntled Townsfolk of Tayside.  

If they had set the challenge to communicate their issues to a current communications agency, they might have been persuaded to make an online film, inform the local press, invite some user generated content and expose their message to 10,000 people in their combined Facebook groups.

Instead, they worked out the most compelling medium - experiential marketing - and with a bagful of carpet tacks and a willful intent they exposed their message to millions. It made the national news, it was front page on The Scotsman and by the time Guy and I had made it back to the bike shop to buy new inner tubes, it had made it onto the BBC website and was printed out in the shop for us all to read.

Traditional thinking harnessing the modern means of distribution for faster, deeper, wider effect.  I don't appreciate or endorse what they did but it is salutary to think about the way they did it.

The Age of the Old

I was in a meeting with a nice bunch of clients the other day and they were showing me their vision of the future.  All very stirring stuff - and quite frightening  too.  And all very much on the money.

One of the clips in their epic movie really stuck out.  It was a picture of a fit looking, grey-haired dude in a skin tight wetsuit poised athletically on a surf board as he rode out a magnificent wave.  All sinew and silver hair, this surfing sexagenarian was accompanied by the voice over: "Ninety will be the new sixty".

At first hearing, that sounded the wrong way round.  It didn't seem to be elevating the age of sixty but rather advocating that we should all look forward to the final decade of our own personal centuries.

But when you think about it, it is right.  When I was a kid and was playing football in a good, amateur team, there was a centre-forward that we unkindly referred to as "Dad" because he was 33 years old.  He was a former professional who had been on the books of Notts County and he had a "Magnum PI" moustache and the most amazing ability to hang in the air.  He smoked and drank like any good Nottingham lad brought up in the shadow of the Player's factory and he had teenage kids.  The point was that we all thought it was amazing that he was still playing a decent level of football when he was that OLD.

But times have changed.

We are getting older younger and staying younger longer.  That is not a new thought.  It has been well documented that by 2025, more than 25% of Europe will be over the age of sixty.  It also used to be said that they would also be very affluent.  Not now that the credit crisis has stolen a third of their savings and their pensions but still, they will be active and they will have money and they may still be hanging in the air on the far edge of the six-yard box just like Dad. 

It is a heartening thought that we will still be bright and active and smart when we are sixty - especially for me as I approach that age with a rapidity that still shocks me.  I am looking forward to that.

But what made me think was the flip side.  The fact that ninety is the new sixty.  There will also be a huge increase in the proportion of the population that is ninety and these people will be old.  Old like we used to think of sixty as being old.  And while we all get excited about the prospect of seventy year-olds completing the Ironman triathlon, are we also stopping to think of what we will need to do as a society to look after the ninety year-olds?

I hope so.  I intend to be one of those one day too.

We are so focused on youth and all the brilliance that that brings with it that we forget the richness of the old.  Their knowledge, their wisdom, their strange hair and their mode of dress.  I wonder how we harness all of this and how it will impact on the way that we develop marketing and advertising in the near future?

The Power of Nice

I admit it.  I am in love with David Beckham.

I was lucky enough to go to the England match last night.  I love football, I love England, I love the crowd, I love David Beckham, I even like the new Wembley Stadium.

But that's enough about me, let's talk about Beckham.  He came on in the second half and I don't know if this showed on the televison but he got a standing ovation.  Just for coming on.  That's all.  Maginficent. But why is that?

Sure, he is a good player.  He used to be a great player.  But a standing ovation?

I think it is because he is more than great as a role model and an inspiration.  For two reasons - he tries hard and he is nice.  You have to respect that.

On the pitch, he could swan around; he could rest on his laurels; he could goal hang like the cool kid in the playground at school that scored all the goals, got all the girls and never had holes in his 'adidas Kick' trainers.  But he doesn't.  He runs around, he does his job, he plays for the team and he tries.  Still.

And he could be aloof, serious, worry about his image and conform to the sterotype of a footballer's wife's wife.  But he doesn't.  He goes on Comic Relief (remember the Ali G interview?  And what about Smithy's Motivational Talk? Genius).  To set that in context, here is a bit of gossip - a couple of the other players did not want to appear in that sketch because they were worried about their image - not Mr. Beckham.  He was game for it.  And he did his bit for charity.  He is, by all accounts, nice.  A pleasant man who is kind and considerate to people, who is generous with his time and wealth and who is a great example of what being English is all about.

Sure it helps that he is fabulously rich, amazingly handsome, athletic and non-threatening but he could choose not to be nice.

And I think he genuinely helped us win The Olympics.  And he invented the steam engine, discovered penicillin and solved Fermat's theorem.

Maybe I am getting carried away because I genuinely think we are going to win the FIFA World Cup next year.  And I think he - and the Fabulous Cappello - will be instrumental in making that happen.  I even have a big wager on it with a very smart man who saw through my hubris to the temptation of an easy $100.

I even like Victoria.  I have heard stories of her kindness too. Maybe I am just too gullible and willing to see good things in people.

So the lessons out of this eulogy, this magnilloquent panegyric about Sir Lord David Beckham are two fold:

1.  Everyone should be nice and try really hard for the people around them

2.  I should seriously consider putting a lock on my closet

The Perils of the Modern Age e-Marketer

So check this out for a well timed, well crafted opening to a direct mail shot:

"Good morning.  Personally I would like to offer you and your business a complimentary session to be held at your place, where together we will run through proven strategies that will enable your business to: 1) Win more Sales (156 ideas);  2) Make more profit.  (126 ideas);  3) Handle more business more efficiently.  (84 ideas)"

Sounds good, doesn't it?  And it was well timed and well targeted.  It had me thinking straight away.  "Personally" had a nice touch.  "Complimentary" made it sound like it was no risk. And it seemed actionable with all those ideas.

Now this came from someone called Ryan Jarvis at a company called ProfitClub.  I had never heard of him but it caught my attention and my PA got in touch with him to arrange that complimentary session.  Then she got in touch with him again.  And again.  And on the third time of not hearing back from this brilliant e-marketer, this man who claimed he knew how to generate and handle more business more efficiently, she came back to me and asked what to do next.

This was my response - quite literally - to the aforementioned Mr. Ryan Jarvis:

"Hello Ryan ... I enjoy the irony of you sending an unsolicited, outbound email telling me you could teach my colleagues how to be better at new business and handle more business more efficiently and then you singularly failed to respond to two attempts to take you up on your offer.
That made me chuckle... At least you gave me some concrete guidance for my team about how to handle new business."

Apart from the chuckling, this made me pause to think about the sort of stuff we always say to our clients - if you are soliciting a response, make sure you can handle it.  Nothing spreads faster than bad experiences.  And in this day and age, that spread, that speed and that power of 'WWWOM' (wicked worldwide word of mouth) can seriously damage business. Why?

Well, it is not only the immediate impact of the shared bad experience but the fact that all this word of mouth - good as well as bad - is archived and will exist for quite a long time.

Take this as a case in point.  Maybe Mr. Jarvis will continue undaunted in his e-mail campaign.  Any recipient of that e-mail will, by definition, have access to the web and a proportion of them who might consider doing business with ProfitClub or Ryan Jarvis might copy and paste his name into a search engine and some may find this story - one person's experience - online.  And my advice to them is do not bother contacting this company.  If his ability to harvest his incoming new business responses is an indication of his ability to teach you anything then I suggest that his teachings will count for nothing.

Interestingly, Mr. Jarvis wrote back to me this morning.  A contrite apology? An automated follow up? A proffered meeting? No.  Just another e-mail this time proudly proclaiming:

"Morning.  I hope this comes as a pleasant surprise to you, having researched your market there are three areas where you can win more business from over 91% of your competitors ..."

Yeah.  And having researched his business, I can tell him there are a couple of areas where he can do the same.  And a couple of them are to follow up on his leads and don't be a pain in the ass by sending more unsolicited, misleading and downright stupid e-mails.

Chariots of the gods

 I have been traveling a lot recently.

A colleague and I have done 9 countries on 4 continents in 31 days. In fact, if we can manage to arrange a workshop somewhere in Antarctica in the next month we will each win a set of kitchen knives and a commendation from The Royal Geographic Society.

One of the interesting side effects of all this travel was that my hair - odd at the best of times - had become unruly and ill mannered and so I found myself in a barber's chair with my hairdresser, Ian.

Now Ian is a skinny Mancunian with an earnest desire to become a photographer, a deft pair of scissors and an interesting line in patter honed on the back streets of Salford.

But on this particular day, he was also sporting a magnificent black eye partially obscured by the liberal application of concealer. Obviously, this shiner became the first point of conversation.

Apparently Ian had been wandering home in Camden after a couple of pints and was accosted by a young gentleman of that environs.

"Gizza f@*king ***" implored said youth. Ian ignored him at his cost as a healthy blow landed just under his eye. No warning, no delay, just wallop.

Now as I said, Ian is a skinny mite of a lad. In fact he makes me look like a rippling mountain of finely tuned man-muscle but I happen to know he is a pro-level kick boxer.

Sure enough, he did make the lad pay for his rudeness, grabbing his hoodie and pulling him forward onto a supremely angled Doctor Marten. Hostilities ended and each went on their way.

But it left a question hanging - why, when Ian is such a fighter and a Man City supporter into the bargain, why did he get caught with a punch?

And here is where the conversation got interesting. Ian had been at a mate's house and they had watched a bootleg dvd of a lecture given by some crazy Swedish bloke about extra terrestrials and the evidence for them living amongst us today.

And he began to reel off examples culminating in a excoriating polemic against a certain hairdressing impressario who fit the Swedish Theory so perfectly that Ian expected Gillian Anderson to be popping round to his house that later evening.

But why did that lead to a punch? Did Ian believe the hoodie came from elsewhere? No, not at all. He had just been so buried in thought remembering the books he had read as a kid, written by Erich von Daniken in the late seventies, that he hadn't been concentrating.

Now if you haven't heard of this bloke and his ideas, Google him and check it out. From the Nazca Lines to Chichen Itza to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, this guy had some interesting hypotheses.

Ian and I discussed them and took them to another dimension. What if they were not extra terrestrial but were from earth but in the future?

Would the same stuff have been created? For example, anyone today knows man can fly, we are all taught basic geometry at school and we all know how to magnify a scale drawing to a 3-d imprint on a grand scale using theodolytes and a protractor (don't we?).

So Ian and I could have gone back in time and made those giant spiders and that chalk man with the enormous willy and we could have done it as a prank.

And that got me thinking: imagine if we could use time travel as marketeers to go and tamper with people's minds, what would we do? I, for one, would go back and change the formative experiences of today's thirty to forty year olds so they were more likely to buy my brands now.

And when you think like that you can see why it is a sensitive topic, advertising to the young, and you can absolutley understand why this government is so set against the use of time travel in marketing campaigns.

Tyranny

So I was talking to a very smart, very funny friend in Denver last night and the discussion turned to the topic of tyranny.

I was anticipating subject matter like social injustice, the inherent problems of ochlochracy, the evil of avarice and the economic downturn to come up.  Maybe even the social pressure to be beautiful or the compulsion to get onto your Facebook page, but no, none of this surfaced.

Instead, the conversatuon turned to PowerPoint.

Tyrannical?  PowerPoint?  In the grand scheme of things?

Maybe not in the grand scheme but in our industry, PowerPoint wields an unhealthy and potentially stunting influence.  Hear this out.

On the one hand, it curbs our creativity because it sets the parameters for what we expect of ourselves to be able to do.  Now this is an old moan - don't just stick to slides, do something more original because it will be more engaging for your audience.  I, for one, have resorted to juggling, unicycling, rapping, fishing and hang-gliding just to appear more interesting on platforms and trust me, doing something different isn't enough on its own.  It has to be different and good.  We do PowerPoint because it is easy and it works really well.  But the point my friend was making was that inside of PowerPoint, our expectations of what we can achieve are bounded by what we think it allows us to do.  Discover a new slide build, get the graphics to explode, insert a clip of yodeling from The Sound of Music and suddenly you think you have created art.  Fair enough inside the confines of that medium but not exactly art.  It is like telling all painters they can only use the colour blue.  They would all be constricted (apart from maybe Picasso).  So thinking beyond the artificial limits of PowerPoint is something we should all attempt once in a while.

Now that was a minor theme.  Interesting but not completely new.  But then she explored a more compelling line of thought, her major theme.

PowerPoint is tyrannical not because of the limits it sets on our imagination but on the limit it imposes on our ability to make things really happen, on our productivity.  Her hypothesis was that in too many industries, the objective of our toil - and the expectation of the fruits of that labour from our customers - is too often seen as the delivery of a presentation.

Too often we see this as the end of our work when in reality it should be the beginning.  Just delivering a great presentation - complete with animated slides, movie clips and the odd magic trick thrown in in memory of Ali Bongo - is not enough.  It is a part of the journey, and an important one, but it is not the destination.  And too often we, in our industry, focus on that as our endpoint and not on what happens afterward. 

So, this artificial goal of delivering the PowerPoint, getting the presentation done, getting the slides made, this gets in the way of seeing the true objective of making something useful happen.

An interesting discussion to have on a Monday evening, I thought.  What do you think?  How can we work through this problem (if indeed it is a problem)?

And this all goes to show that Rory is right.  Everything we do has the ability to make you think better, think different and be more useful.

My conversation with my friend is an example of just such a thing happening.  Blogging is fine, Facebook is OK, text is useful but none of it is as good as talking.  Useful things always come up ...

Mind you, she also pointed out that in every airport you visit, anywhere in the world, in all kinds of weather, there is always a big guy with shorts on pulling a wheelie bag and going red in the face.  

One Day At Lord's

The ISBA conference yesterday was interesting.

Great setting for a conference - Lord's Cricket Ground - and a team of speakers that rattled through their innings like a late order England collapse with most of us not lasting any more than thirty minutes at the crease.

But that kept the excitement up and some pretty good knocks were played out.

The speakers that stuck in my mind were Richard Eyre, Nick Milligan and Justin Billingsley. Richard outlined a digital future where we can all have whatever we want, wherever we want it so long as we find a way of paying for it.

Richard is one of the best public speakers you can find anywhere because he just weaves a huge amount of brilliant stuff into an interesting story. Go see him if you can and see what you can pick up from him.

Nick Milligan talked about Sky's tech development and the impending arrival of 3DTV ... only 2-3 years away. He also mentioned a hugely important advance that is in Beta at the moment - the possibility of using the data collected from the Sky Box and the opt in from households to serve tailored advertising all the way down to an individual household level.

No. 67 sees the Zafira ad, No. 59 gets the Mazda one and I get another ad for a cheap bicycle. This has been a long time coming but it is nearly here.

They just have to beat IPTV to the punch and we could have an incredibly useful tool to get broadcast TV to work harder for us. And finally, Justin Billingsley who put a positive spin on the recession - learn to love it because it increases creativity, makes marketing more important and heightens the role of iconic brands in people's lives. Nice to hear someone looking on the bright side.

And you have to admire Michael Kassan, flown in from New York with his laconic lambasting of a certain big media owner which he delivered as a 'googly to Google'. Nice. An American using cricket terms at Lord's. Now if only Gordon Brown could have pitched a no-hitter to President Obama yesterday ...