Campaign

An entirely new role for brands in social media

I love flashmobs, I really do. And I like those moments of collective subversion, such as making Rage Against the Machine the Christmas Number 1.

But the real promise of collective action will only be realised when there's money involved as well as time. When flashmobs become cashmobs. Theoretically, one of the greatest improvements in the quality of human life in a generation is already within our reach - it will become possible once we learn to use the internet to enable large groups of people to get together and collectively microfund public goods. This development would also provide a welcome opportunity for consumers to move beyond their obsession with individual acquisition and consumption, and to spend money on a healthy mixture of public and private investments.

The Victorians, being rather public spirited, were much better at collective funding than we are. Take the green taxi hut above. You may have wondered why these huts tend to be found in such upmarket locations (Grosvenor Gardens, Cheyne Walk, etc). The reason is that they were built by public subscription. The residents of these prosperous areas shrewdly reasoned that, with a cabbies' cafe in their square, there would bever be a shortage of hansom cabs available day and night, so they got together and each pitched in a tenner or so towards the creation of a cafe.

At the moment, even with the internet, we aren't very good at this kind of thing. So it falls to government to fund most public goods (see here for a definition) - with a few exceptions (such as broadcast TV and fireworks displays - oh and most of the internet) being funded by advertising or brand sponsorship.

The trouble with government is that it has so many calls on its money that it is very difficult for it to do anything that isn't life saving or economically essential. Things that are merely entertaining or culturally interesting fall outside its remit. In fact one of the reasons the National Lottery was created was precisely to pay for the kind of nice but non-essential things which public opinion ("what with people dying in NHS hospitals, etc") would no longer allow government to fund.

It seems to me that one possible role for brands would be to enable this collective action to take place. They may need to create a few financial mechanisms first - such as a credit card system where you would not be charged for your pledge until the required number of pledges had been reached. But, thanks to work on game theory by the economist Alex Tabarrok, there is another role which brand-owners can play in enabling collective action. That is to play the role of the entrepreneur in a Dominant Assurance Contract.

Unless you are a keen anarcho-capitalist, you may not have heard of the Dominant Assurance Contract, but it is a vitally useful concept if brands are to find an effective role as magnets for collective action.

Wanted - an Austrian School of Marketing

I notice the Government has started to offer stop-smoking kits to people who want to quit. It’s a very good idea. In fact everything that allows people to change their behaviour in gradual steps, rather than expecting a single road-to-Damascus conversion, generally seems to work well. Kits are a very good solution to this, as can be a series of timed SMS messages.

Behavioural economists call this step-by-step approach “chunking” and there are plenty of experiments to prove how it can work for people. What also seems to be true is that the nature of the first step has an insanely disproportionate effect on whether people complete the journey.

In 1989, about a year after I started work at OgilvyOne (which, back in those analogue days, was known as Ogilvy & Mather Direct) we performed a series of tests to determine whether mailings to BT customers should allow people to reply by telephone, by post or by their choice of either. I think the origins of the test may have lain in BT’s understandable belief that, where possible, people should be encouraged to use the telephone – combined with a sensible concern that the insistence on telephone response might alienate those elderly people who were uncomfortable using the device to talk to a call centre (this was 1989, remember). When the results came in, it was among the first of a few hundred findings over the years which have deepened my obsession with the anomalies of human behaviour – long before I had even heard the term “behavioural economics”. I can’t remember the exact response rates from 1989, but they were as near enough along the following lines: Mail-Only: 3%. Phone-Only: 1.8%. Choice of both: 4.7%.

Now remember that everything else about the mailings was identical – they were sent to randomly selected and representative audiences with identical offers, identical creative treatments and identical copy. Only the response vehicle changed What is odd here is that the response level of version 3 is almost the sum of the other two. To an alert analyst, this suggests that the single greatest factor affecting whether someone buys the product or not is not the price of the product, nor even what it does, but the means by which you can order it. It was the first of many times I was to learn a vital lesson about human decision-making. That the interface and framework within which we take a decision may have a greater effect on the decision we make than the actual consequences of the decision. And that the extent to which we enjoy the first step (or dislike it) has an insanely powerful influence on whether we do anything at all. If you don’t like the phone (or, in the case of 1.8% of people, you don’t like the writing of coupons) it almost doesn’t matter how good the product is – you probably won’t buy it.

I discovered this phenomenon for myself a few years later through a kind of accident. I had occasionally ordered business products online from Royal Mail, and so was listed on their database as a “business”. One day they wrote and offered me some “free Special Delivery envelopes” – not prepaid, you understand, but just strong plastic self-sealing envelopes . I sent back a card and said “Yes! Please send me your free envelopes without delay.” To my surprise a few days later there arrived a package containing not the ten envelopes I had expected but reams of the things - well over 100. But this wasn’t the really odd thing. The really amazing thing was that, eight years later, I had used them all. Probably 100 of them were sent by special delivery. Having these envelopes increased my use of Special Delivery by about 500%.

Why so? Well, again, it’s about the order in which we make decisions. The order of decision-making when sending a parcel does not necessarily begin with the question “To which distribution brand shall I entrust the delivery of this item?” Instead the first question may be “How the hell do I pack this damn thing?” If in your stationery drawer you have strong, large envelopes marked Special Delivery, the second question “How do I send it?” is already answered for you. It’s an order effect, in other worlds. Make the first step pleasant and easy and the subsequent steps seem to follow on naturally, with other options not being considered at all.

I am not sure that this bias does not apply to far more momentous decisions than what we buy or how we send packages. Women are traditionally more eager to marry than men. Is this because the long term institution of marriage is less appealing to men than to women? Or is it merely that the first step we take towards being married – in other words planning and enacting a wedding – is vastly more appealing to women than to men? Do women want to get married for life because of the pleasure of spending a day in a pricey frock. And do men resist the institution because they hate the idea of dressing up like a git and making a speech while risking the ridicule of their friends? If people entered the married state not by spending a month discussing floral arrangements and corsages, but simply by a protracted stag party - spending a month being bought cars and consumer electronics by adoring relatives while enjoying nightly porn film viewings and free beer, would the world be full of men desperate to marry at 18 while blaming their reluctant girlfriends for their “fear of commitment”?

Now there is a vital lesson from all this, I think. Most brand thinking assumes that consumers make decisions in one simultaneous act of comparison - in a kind of brand beauty pageant, with a line-up of competing brands being assessed on their merits and costs. Sometimes this may be true. People may well choose washing powder off a shelf in a supermarket in this way. (Interestingly, and perhaps unhelpfully, it is the early influence of fmcg marketing which still defines most brand thinking today). But most human actions are not the product of a single decision in this way. They are - like my parcel sending activities- the product of a series of decisions, with a separate comparative frame being applied for each step. If you don't believe me, think of the way you buy petrol. Brand is a factor, but rarely the primary one. We like Coke, but a huge element of its power is that it is the only brand you can request where it is not you but the restaurant who is embarrassed by the answer "We haven't got any". Asking for Dr Pepper Zero somehow arries a level of anxiety which requesting Coke does not.

In my case above the order was 1) "How do I wrap this bugger?" followed by 2) "which distribution company do I employ to send it?" There is often a whole ecosystem of decision-making, with massive interdependencies involved as we progress towards an outcome. In many cases whole swathes of possible brands will never be considered at all in my evaluation, since they have already been eliminated in a prior round of reductionist decision-making. If I have decided I want an off-road vehicle, it is unlikely that Jaguar will feature in my brand short-list, however potent their advertising may be. If I have decided I want a European holiday, I won't check the Virgin website.... and so on.

In my next post I shall detail a very extreme version of this behavioural phenomenon concerning ordered decision-making. It is of massive importance in the understanding of human behaviour - which is why the Austrian School of economics under Ludwig von Mises (pictured above) created a whole science of Praxeology (see Wikipedia) in an attempt to understand it.

What seems bizarre is that brand marketers seem to make very little effort to understand Praxeology at all - preferring to maintain the pretence that all decisions happen at the brand level. Hence it is rare for any marketing spend to be used to infulence anything other than the choice between very similar products or services. Category advertising is almost extinct. Yet the new media we have at our disposal give us a tremendous opportunity to influence decisions which often do not take place at the brand level at all.

If you have time, spend a moment investigating praxeology and the Austrian economists (many of whom, confusingly, are not Austrian). Of particular appeal is that 1) They are great believers that value is and can only be understood subjectively; 2) They reject most forms of research, believing that humans are too self-conscious not to have their behaviour affected by the very act of observation and 3) they won't use maths, since human desire is too complex to be expressed numerically. Our kind of guys, in other words.

Why on earth has Accenture ditched Tiger Woods?

Surely Tiger's decision to outsouce sexual services to a range of competing providers is in line with Management Consultancy's established best practice?

Previously he had been tied to a monopoly Scandianvian supplier - with the cripplingly high social costs this usually entails.  Moreover, given his wife's age, it is possible that she was on the brink of becoming a depreciating asset who needed to be moved off the balance sheet as soon as possible.

Admittedly he could have off-shored more - to girls from low-wage economies. But the arrangement where he could have anything from nil to three girls on call at any one time allows for better load-balancing, enabling him to handle the peaks and troughs of demand better than under the previous inflexible arrangement. By sourcing girls locally, he was also reducing distribution costs and helping the environment...... while allowing him to adopt a best-of-breed approach to sexual delivery, rather than depending on a single source.

Do people in the music industry understand music?

And do people in the Advertising Industry understand brands?

Everyone is familiar with the experience. You go into a record shop and are treated with disdain because of your drearily mainstream tastes. Or, in the days when they existed, you wandered into a video rental shop and irritated the cinephile staff by renting Titanic.

The Onion even parodies this effect. So did Not the Nine O'Clock News with the legendary "Gramophone" sketch.

The point that these sketches make is that, in any field, the difference between an expert and the ordinary public is not just a difference of degree - it is a yawning gulf of mutual incomprehension.

So, for instance, the only people not to like the film Mamma Mia are film critics. The only people not to like ABBA are music journalists (or wannabe music journalists). And the only people not to like J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are pretentious literary types. Like me.

Just occasionally there are people who manage to attract both the high-brow and the mainstream (in a 30-year-old survey of high-brow and low-brow literary heroes, Raymond Chandler was the only man to make it onto both lists). But this is rare.

 What's going on? Happily, I think behavioural economics (you weren't expecting that, were you?) and the idea of the paradox of choice may help us understand this gulf.

If you are an expert in a field, you are a maximiser. Your car is Teutonic. You listen to relatively obscure Indie music. You wear niche clothes brands, like those funny jeans with a wiggle on them. You eat at restaurants you have learned about through recommendation or reviews. And go on holiday somewhere other than Spain, France or the USA. The maximiser seeks to find the very best of everything, and uses his consumption choices to define himself or herself apart from other people. The maximiser makes his choices with the aim of outdoing his or her peer group - to compete with other maximisers and to be differentiated from them.

The person I have depicted above may be one person. Some people are fearsomely competitive in everything. But most people tend to be maximisers in a few areas only - for most of us it's simply too much intellectual effort to compete in every field. Moreover, most people tend to be maximisers in those fields where they know a great deal about the subject, or in the field where they are employed. If you work in the music industry, say, and compete for advancement with a bunch of people who have "just discovered a new Peruvian funk artist", it's not much good to spend your time raving about Girls Aloud.

Now, here's the issue. Most people, in most fields of consumption, most of the time are NOT maximisers at all. They are something completely different. They are satisficers. What they are doing is not using insane amounts of mental energy to attempt to optimise every decison. They are instead simply trying to avoid making a decision that is actually bad or which might cause them to look or feel foolist. For those people, good enough generally is. 

Most important of all, they are not using their brand choices to compete with their fellow man, or to draw distinctions between them and their peer-group. They are using them to fit in. To conform, not to outdo. You go to the films your friends like, you read the books your friends like, you listen to the music your friends like. It's safe, after all. And you drive the car your friends drive. Because what you are driven by is not the idea of choice optimisation, but (in behavioural terms) the much more powerful idea of risk aversion. By fitting in, you may not have the best musical taste in the world, or eat the best food, or drive the best car - but you won't go far wrong either. And, when making a puchase, what most people want, most of the time, is not the best they can buy: they want something that's very unlikely to be crap.

The difference between The Best and The Least Likely to be Shite seems a hairsplitting one. In fact they are almost opposites.

Yet marketers very rarely acknowledge this distinction when debating the role of the brand - and it pays little attention to the job of being assuredly not crap -  even though I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast-iron assurance of pretty dependable non-shitness. The Fina ad is one good example. Even better is that great CDP ad for Smirnoff - "why waste money on real lemons" - which I can't find - or the Volkswagen promise of reliability. But overall this proposition of "loss avoidance" is rare - most ads seek to boast a lot more than they reassure. Yet when you are handing over £1,000 to buy that flat screen TV, how much of your brain is worried about whether it is the best TV you can buy for £1,000, versus the part of the brain thinking "I hope this TV isn't a crock of shite"? I'd but the ratio at about 1:2.

Because we all work in the field, marketers and advertising people are by temperament maximisers when it comes to brands. They use the fine distinctions between them to delineate themselves and to highlight their individuality. Yet the vast bulk of the money in any market at any time is in the hands of Satisficers. People who want to meld with a peer group, not to outdo it, and people who are more eager to avoid social embarrassment or regret-inducing purchase mistakes than they are to display dominance.

Regret is a huge emotion, and people will pay huge sums to avoid it. You just need to watch Deal or No Deal to see this. 

And the avoidance of possible regret is a much bigger factor in brand selection than the pursuit of perfection.  It will kill people in advertising to acknowledge this, but Ford is a much better brand than Audi, and M&S is a much better clothes brand than whatever it is you young things are wearing nowadays.

Interestingly, although unfashionable, Satisficers are generally happier than maximiers. As one Brummie Ford driver once told us in a focus group: "I'm dead middle of the road, me. I love it."

Just in case you thought you weren't important

About a month ago, BT put on a rather good firework display on top of the BT Tower to mark 1,000 days until the London Olympics. This pleased me on two levels. First because I like fireworks. Second because the economics-nerd in me finds fireworks very interesting.

A public fireworks display is an interesting example of what is technically called a "public good". First developed by Herbert Samuelson, the definition of a public good is that it is both non-rivalrous in its consumption and non excludable.

What the hell does that mean? This chart, from the relevant Wikipedia article, may help:

A fireworks display is non-excludable, in that once you put one on, you can't really charge tickets for attending - since people can simply stand in a nearby street and watch for free. It is also non-rivalrous in that your enjoment of the display does not detract from anyone else's - unlike my enjoyment of a beef & onion pie, which prevents you from enjoying it.

If you were slightly unconvinced by that ad which used to appear at the start of every legal DVD and which said "You wouldn't steal a car...... you wouldn't mug a pensioner...... you wouldn't ransack a convent and smear excrement all over the walls.... So don't buy your DVDs from a dodgy bloke at the local market" you are already familiar with the distinction of rivalrous consumption. Cars are rivalrously consumed, whereas fireworks and digital entertainment are not. By pirating a DVD, you may be depriving the creator of lawful revenues, but you are not immediately detracting from your fellow-consumer's enjoyment of the film. Sorry, you people in the music and film industries, but it's not quite the same as nicking a car.

The reason the BBC licence fee was first introduced was that broadcast TV, before the days of encryption, was a public good. Non rivalrous and non excludable. Then, as now, there are only two ways to pay for public goods. One is through a form of government levy or taxation.

The other is  by advertising.

Hence some fireworks displays are funded by government (local councils, typically) and others are funded by the likes of BT.

Now what makes advertising so important is that, the range and importance of public goods is likely to grow enormously. Digital technology may make excludable goods non excludable. Arguably digital music is now a public good (whereas music on vinyl was a private good). Since, in the next ten years or so, it will be hard to argue the case for government funding of mere entertainment, it will fall to advertisers to fund a large proportion of human happiness.

The IPA, Oxbridge and Lap Dancers

One common lament you would commonly hear at the IPA over the last few years concerned the lack of diversity in advertising agencies. “The whole industry is still dominated by white Oxbridge graduates”.  

You won’t hear that any more – as I’ve put a gagging order on it. For it simply isn’t true to say there are too many Oxbridge graduates in advertising. There are hardly any – do a survey if you like - Cambridge graduates in agencies anywhere. There are, however, far too many Oxford graduates.

It’s an important distinction. After all, if you want to populate the agency of the future, do you want to fill it with people from a place where they split the atom, discover DNA and write Principia Mathematica, or do you want people who have spent three years poncing about in a linen suit while carrying a stuffed bear?

At TED Stephen Fry recently observed of the Protestant reformation that Cambridge produced the martyrs and then Oxford burned them. We ourselves need fewer politicians: we need more dissenters and sceptics, not people whose chief talent is advancing their political careers by gently fellating the status quo.

The problem we have faced as an industry is that we have been forced to become an excessively arty industry for want of a science to call our own. Many mathematical and scientific areas – most notably economics – have traditionally relied on models of human behaviour so reductionist and rational that they leave no room for human understanding at all. So, spurned by hyper-rational economists and accountants, we have reacted in one of two ways: either we have clung hopelessly to the “overt rational persuasion” model of advertising as a desperate attempt to make sense of what we do, or else we have overcompensated and taken up allegiance with flower-arrangers, choreographers and fashion-designers and claimed that this is simply a business that can only be understood emotionally. Neither stance, to be frank, does us much good.

 So I implore you to come along to this upcoming event organised by the IPA to see what a scientific approach might bring us.

If you need any more persuasion, Professor Miller is not only the author of Spent, a Darwinian Psychologists approach to consumerism. He also won a recent Ig-Nobel Prize for Economics for his paper ‘Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap-dancers’.

See you there!

What the fashion industry can teach us about advertising awards - and it isn't pleasant.

 Last week Campaign ran a piece about the decline in scam advertising entered into Cannes this year. In the inset it included a fairly sensible defence of scam work from Neil French which is simply to say "if it's interesting, who cares?" Just as no-one really cares whether catwalk fashion is wearable or not.

This to me is still Exhibit A in the case for the Defence. We enjoy looking at great work, and it helps inspire us. There is of course the risk that through scam work (as I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog) great ideas are squandered on miniscule businesses - so that a chip shop ends up running a campaign that could have made millions for KFC. But that is not the fault of awards, it is the fault of an exaggerated obsession with originality that pervades our industry. If we were run like a sane business, Cannes would become a giant trade fair.... and some Japanese 4x4 manufacturer would pay the Land Rover Owners Club of Malaysia and their creative team £500,000 for their campaign idea.  Alas this is not how things work, and a great number of creative people lack swimming pools as a result.

Exhibit B is simply that awards are an aid to hiring. That is not to say that you should hire the team with the most awards, but simply that you should think before hiring any team which has been working for a few years and yet has never won any awards at all. The fact that you can do the award-winning stuff when the occasion requires is important, since it proves you have that mix of talent, ambition and tenacity which you'll need as a team if you are to be any use in the long run. Awards are a bit like A-Level Latin: even if it's not much use in itself, it is evidence of a tolerable degree of intelligence, ability and commitment.

But there is a dangerous downside to awards, and it is exacerbated by league tables, Gunn Reports and bonus schemes which reward people proportionately according to the number of awards they win. All these things create the belief that someone who wins 15 awards is three times better than someone who wins five. This is a little like hiring as graduate trainees whichever applicants have the most A-Levels. (I don't know about you, but to me a cv with 17 A -Levels on it would suggest not a great hire but some kind of wacko). To attach numerical rather than subjective values to awards is to fall foul of Goodhart's Law, which states that any metric which becomes a target loses its meaning as a metric.

But the worst effect of awards is really that they may encourage creatives to compete.

Eh? How can I, a bit of a Thatcherite and all that, suddenly attack competition.

Well, only if I explain - as this blog post does very neatly - that there are two kinds of competition. When you compete for something, and when you compete against someone. The first is much more creative than the second.

When you compete against people, you use the same frame of reference they are using. The competition generally becomes formalised, and conventions are observed. Most sports are eventually codified this way.And, like most sports, it largely deteriorates into a zero-sum game. Fundamentally the activity is self-referential rather than being truly original.It also leads to the kind of sameness and commoditisation which should be anathema to any good marketer - a bunch of me-too products which all compete on the same measures and which are largely defined by their competitors.

 The alternative is to ignore a peer group and compete for something external.

Or, as Buckminster Fuller had it, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In other words, don't use your competitors' metrics, devise one of your own. Dyson, iPod, easyJet...... it's an easy list to write.

Now if you want to see an example of where competition goes wrong, where it deteriorates from the healthy form to the ingrown version, once again Neil French's fashion industry holds a lesson.

 Take a look at women's fashion - possibly the greatest example of misdirected human effort since the Germans lost 3m men invading a country I don't even want to go to on holiday. A pointless industry which pollutes the high street of every town in the country, leaving little room for essentials such as curry houses, ironmongers and pubs.

 At some point, maybe a million years ago, women used their clothes to attract men. However, outside the more vulgar form of film, this technique has now become lost. Women now buy clothes simply to intimidate other women. For women have entirely lost sight of their primary target audience and concentrate exclusively on the secondary audience - each other.

The apotheosis of this movement arises in the UGG Boot, an item of footwear so fantastically repellent to men it is impossible for us to become even partially aroused when within 100 yards of any pair (even if they are in a locked wardrobe).

Have awards gone the same way? In other words are they now merely, like women's fashion, a battleground for peer-group intimidation rather than having any surviving intrinsic purpose. An arms race, in economic parlance.

The solution is fairly simple. Restrict entry to one international awards show and one local one. Bank the money you save. Use it to create fabulously generous rewards for creatives who win these awards for existing clients. And also fabulously lavish rewards for non-award-winning work which is remarkable in some non-formulaic way - or for work which is startlingly effective. Make sure that the work rewarded is always remarkable but often unexpected. Reward the huge and good alongside the small and great.

Shockingly lazy, I know - but I am on holiday....

 ....and, besides, what's the point of my writing anything new when your time could be just as well spent discussing this.

 It is Mark Wnek on the peculiar, bifurcated job title that is Creative Director - writing in AdAge. I think I agree with everything he says. But, even if you don't, it is so very worthy of discussion.

You might also add that the disappearance of group heads from our ranks has exacerbated the problem. By and large, in the agency of the early 90s, CDs mostly confined their activities to the overarching aspects of the work while group heads supervised execution. Now what?

The Day the Copy Died.....

Even if you think Jeremy Clarkson is the spawn of Satan, you will grudgingly find yourself sharing one or two of his opinions as expressed in this review of the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue SE. (I am fairly safe in this belief since my father, who generally regards Clarkson as the embodiment of materialistic vulgarity, sent it to me approvingly the day bit came out.)


What Mr Clarkson is saying is that he is a bit of a Platonist. That, while most categories contain many variants, and very nice they may be too, all are defined by a kind of archetype - a conception of a thing at its most perfect. He lists a few of these: France, the iPhone, Bacon & Eggs. The "Who's the daddy" campaign for Holsten Pils a few years back played off this same thought. It's a game you can play with any category: brands (Coke), classical composers(Bach) or Prime Ministers (Churchill).


Now I have to confess something here. While I think originality is a wonderful thing, and while I'm all for stretching envelopes, pushing boundaries, throwing out rule-books, thinking outside boxes, casting off strait-jackets and generally pissing against the wind, I do still believe there is a Platonic archetype for press advertising. In short, I still feel the Full English Breakfast of a press ad involves a big pikkie at the top, a headline (and even a subhead) underneath, with two or three hundred words of intelligent, characterful chit-chat leading smoothly towards a logo or coupon at the end.

 
You might think of this as the David Ogilvy layout. Funnily enough I don't. I often think of it as the CDP layout, since it was their ads in the Sunday Times colour supplement of the early 70s which made me first want to work in this business. Back then press advertisements were polite enough to engage you in conversation, rather than just barking out their proposition before drifting off to find someone more interesting.

What's odd about this wonderful approach isn't that it's rare - it's that it's almost completely bloody dead. Why? It certainly isn't consumers themselves - in fact I was amused to see this recent eye-tracking research which completely vindicates this layout even fifty years on.

 
Ten years after David Ogilvy's death, I think we should ask ourselves what went wrong here.

 
One problem, I think, is that people have started to conflate creativity with brevity. This is absolutely wrong. Good creative work has an immense respect for the value of the reader's (or viewer's) time, true, but that need not mean it is always brief: too much brevity can be as much of a discourtesy as too little. Someone weeks away from buying a car will probably be happy reading a few hundred words about any car under consideration. (Someone who has just bought the car may eagerly read a full treatise on the thing for reasons of reassurance). In any case, noone is forcing you to read copy: it's simply there for those who want it - and prospective buyers often do.

 
Other possibilities? That noone can write long copy any more? I don't entirely buy this, although it's a contributory factor for sure. International awards - and the hurried way awards are judged? These probably have an effect. I certainly find it interesting - as someone who never went to art college - that Cannes entries often expect a ludicrously high degree of visual literacy in their audience (every year there are a few winners that I simply cannot understand) whereas very few make much use of language.

Research is also partly to blame, especially since all press ads are researched without body copy - an approach based on the moronic belief that you can research a proposition in the absence of a surrounding execution. Moreover every focus group nowadays contains one certified tyre-kicking twat who seeks to establish his superiority to his fellows through his disdain for all marketing. "I'm not reading all that crap" is a fairly typical way of expressing this.

And we should not forget the absurdity of client approval processes - without which all account-handling departments would be half the size. David Abbott was supposedly first driven to produce posters for the Economist since getting press ads approved simply took far too long. And clients seem to have an aversion to running long copy ads. Whenever we write them and present them, clients always seem to love them in theory, but not to the extent of running them in practice. Why so?


I would value more and better explanations below. People don't read ads - said Howard Gossage - they read what interests them: and sometimes it's an ad. Here was a truly innovative man - whose ads were almost all as wordy as hell. The Internet, rap music, talk radio - these booming media forms are all copy driven.  Email marketing seems to work a treat. Why does everyone love words more than we do?

A few lessons from Elvis, Jacko and Johnny Cash.

When my grandfather was a doctor in South Wales, the local hospital proudly unveiled its first X-Ray machine. At the official opening ceremony, the mayor removed his chain and all other metallic objects to christen the device as its first ever “patient”. This was only intended as a publicity stunt. Unfortunately the inaugural X-Ray revealed a cancer somewhere in the mayor’s chest. They operated almost immediately but he was dead within a month.

As my grandfather wryly observed, he would have survived another five years without the operation.

One of the big unspoken topics of medicine is the proportion of deaths which are in some way caused by the treatment not the disease – the technical term is “iatrogenic”. Deaths as much or more the result of medical intervention as of any illness. Or entirely new illnesses that only happen as a result of prior treatment.

You would probably assume that, by and large, the better funded your country’s health provision, the longer people will live. Actually, this seems not to be true. Above a certain level of expenditure, the benefits stop coming. Some economic theorists, among them Robin Hanson, believe this is because once you spend more than a certain amount on medical treatment, the problems arising from excessive intervention – because “we must be seen to do something” – outweigh the benefits.

What’s certainly interesting is that Elvis and Michael Jackson, two people both with personal physicians, died so young.

I can imagine what it must be like to be a personal physician. Every day you must feel you have to do something to justify your existence. Yet, in truth, most of the time people are better off being medically left alone most of the time. And most illnesses may be best treated with rest and a little warmth. All the same, the urge to do something must become overpowering. We are, as several Darwinian experts have observed, over-wired to display conscientiousness and effort. And sensible non-intervention can always risk appearing like laziness or stupidity. So we always intervene.

The whole process of creating advertising needs to be very alert to the risks of iatrogenic illness.  We – and our risk-averse clients even more - tend to assume that more research, more tissue sessions, more inputs, more opinions will make the outcome better. Yet, as with medicine, beyond a certain level they are more likely to be damaging than beneficial.

You learn this as a creative director. Some of the time, you need to look at work and resist the urge to justify your salary. “It’s great, “you force yourself to say. “Don’t change a thing.”

But many people involved in the commissioning and approval of advertising don’t realise this. The whole idea is that research, reworking, endlessly protracted approval processes are all contributing to the end product. As likely as not, they are killing it.

Have any doubts? Try this experiment. Next time you are asked for an opinion, don’t give one. Say you don’t know. Say it’s fine. Say “I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

It’s difficult, isn’t it?

The result of this tampering is that simplicity gets lost. Clarity gets muddied. Most likely of all, a certain charm gets killed off. For the hardest thing sometimes isn’t to do something good. It’s to leave well alone. To get it simple and have the courage to keep it simple.

Which brings me to Johnny Cash.

He was once asked by another guitar-player to justify himself. “Look”, said the struggling guitar-player, “Here I am playing, busting my arse, making my fingers bleed while playing painful chords and complex riffs – while all you do is stand there all evening and go dum-ditty, dum-ditty, dum-ditty, dum-ditty ding.”

“I know”, said Mr Cash. “That’s because you’re still looking. I’ve already found it.”

This is worth 20 minutes......

The best kept secret of the Internet for Brits may be American Public Radio. The initials NPR usually are taken to stand for National Public Radio, unless you are right of centre (in which case you claim they stand for National Pinko Radio) or perhaps Zionistically minded (in which case it's known as National Palestinian Radio). Which said, regardless of your politics, the quality of the best programming is spectacular and an instant riposte to Europeans who see Americans as unintellectual or even sometimes a bit thick. 

Think Radio 4 times ten.

 A lot of the best programming seems to be produced by WGBH in Boston, KQED in California and WFMT and WBEZ in Chicago. Much of it is podcasted. Including this fascinating fifteen minutes (start from 8'45" in) which I heard in the car on the way to Bluewater this morning (I love the disjointed feeling you get listening to overseas media when driving). In this segment, the daughter of Julian Koenig (he of Papert, Koenig Lois) celebrates her father's genius (and rather disparages that of George Lois). In the interests of balance, I should point out that Sarah Koenig is a Producer of This American Life for WBEZ, and it seems a bit odd using your employer's airtime to settle old family scores. On the other hand I never knew JK invented Earth Day or thumb-wrestling (in its way just as great an achievement as writing Think Small).

200 years after his birth, will marketers discover Darwin?

The great Drayton Bird once related a rather damning criticism of advertising once made by a client of his. "You advertising people.... you go very deeply into the surface of things, don't you?"

It is of course true. Yet half of me feels no need to apologise for this bias. The importance of the superficial is hugely underrated. As Matthew Taylor remarked last week at the IPA's 44 Club, we can talk about quantitative easing as much as we like, but Gordon brown's electoral fate has been sealed not by his macroeconomic policy decisions but by a tendency to display bizarrely demented face movements which appear like some early failed attempt at Supermarionation.

Yet there is one form of shallowness in our business that does pain me. The fact that, as I remarked in my IPA inaugural speech, our models of human behaviour and persuasion are so pathetically shallow and make no attempt to place our discipline within any evidence-based scientific framework. "Rather like astrologers," I said, quoting my colleague Alasdair Graham, "we use a language which is convincing to fellow converts but sounds suspiciously like bollocks to anyone else."

 Or, as I wish I had said, "Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature - research by evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists..... as a result, they don't have access to a good map of the human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What marketers need is Darwin." 

The reason I did not quote this sentence - along with many others by its author - is simply that they had not been published when I made the speech. This needle-sharp assessment (though I would add behavioural economists and information economists to his list) comes from Spent, by Geoffrey Miller, a Darwinian Professor of Behavioural Psychology who has decided to investigate (with a healthy mixture of fascination and horror) the deeper origins of consumerism.

 Alongside Steve Harrison's, this in the one book on marketing and advertising you should read this year. (In fact it is interesting that Steve Harrison's book also includes a plea for better human insight and cites both Alex Bogusky's and Bill Bernbach in their preference for anthropologists over trend-spotters and other surface-skaters).

Now, in our defence (and Miller acknowledges this), it is only in the last few years that economists and psychologists have been prepared to speak to marketers. For years, the right wing within academia (often economists) didn't like to acknowledge us because we disturbed their neo-classical model and the idea of the perfectly rational agents who operated within it. So much so, that The Economist for years employed an advertising correspondent who seemed to despise advertising. On the other hand, the Left (usually social scientists) didn't like us because they thought we manipulated people into buying Hummers. It is only in recent years that a few people outside marketing have been prepared to overcome their initial distaste to discover that our job is an area worthy of study.

But in my view it is vital that we extend a hand of welcome to these people. Not least because we have quite a lot to contribute, as well as even more to learn. But also because it will be impossible for us to preach the value of marketing beyond the choir if we continue to speak only Marketingese - a language unintelligible to outsiders - rather than finding a shared vocabulary with people whose frame of reference stretches a little further than ours - and which is grounded on some solid scientific foundations rather than on mere marketing case-law. 

  I should reveal a few prejudices here. I am a bit right wing, and also a bit Anglocentric. If I am asked to connect what we do to the world of big ideas, for me that means Adam Smith not Marx, Darwin not Freud, Dawkins not Derrida. I would be perfectly happy to accommodate testable theories from elsewhere. But we must realise that, while we may be obsessed with the superficial, this does not mean that what we do is trivial or should driven by the fleeting whims of fashion.

Bernbach was convinced that the fundamentals of human nature don't change much; in fact they may be even older than he thought. In a passage that will fascinate Mark Earls, many herd animals (including dogs) exhibit many of the personality types of humans, as do most higher primates, cats, ferrets and (weirdly) hedgehogs. This stuff is older than us. 

As if that wasn't enough, Miller also socks it to demography and that old planner's crutch Maslow. Not before bloody time.

 Buy this book.

Another book recommendation

Open source brief number one. Solve the "problem" of saving.

I have just been reading Animal Spirits. Subtitled: How Human Psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism.  It's a surprisingly readable book - and coauthored by George Akerlof, a man who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001 for a 1970 paper entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism".

Akerlof's Lemons paper should be interesting to marketing folk on two counts.

For one thing, the article spawned a discipline known as information economics - along with useful concepts such as signalling, this field has created an area of study invaluable to anyone who wants to present the economic case for building brands.
 

The second interesting thing about the Nobel-prize-winning paper is that, before it was finally published, it was repeatedly rejected by academic journals on the grounds that its subject-matter was too trivial to be worth printing. Which suggests that, just as advertising does, high-level academia has that category of work which somehow straddles the line between infantilism and genius. I suppose Compare the Meerkat, Shake 'n' Vac and (greatest of all) www.rainhamsheds.co.uk would all be examples of this kind of work. A magical type of work which, incidentally, the planning function in advertising, with its tedious reliance on logic, tends to destroy. But I digress.

Reading the  book above, I came across this interesting paragraph, in which the authors ask why, if we are all so driven by rationality, personal rates of saving in China are nearly 20% of GDP while in the US they are near zero.
 

"The Governments of both the United States and China have wanted to promote personal saving for many decades. Since the early 1950s the US has promoted saving with special tax incentives, such as individual retirement accounts, 401(k) and 403(b) plans and savings bond campaigns.

"In communist China, where there was no income tax, efforts to spur saving took the form of propaganda campaigns.... A 1953 paper shows a group of happy, smiling workers turning in cash for government bonds at the People's Bank of China. A 1990 poster shows a smiling Lei Feng...writing the word 'save' on a money box. In the 1990s big red banners were hung in the streets: 'Saving is Glorious'. These campaigns, which made saving everyone's patriotic duty, set the stage for today's high savings rates."

This raises a few questions. First of all, why - other for psychological reasons - do the Chinese save more than even fairly wealthy Americans? If logic were the driver, would it not be the other way round? After all, perhaps more than 50% of Americans have more material possessions than they can possibly need, while many of the frugal Chinese are living in meagre circumstances. This is a massive behavioural difference - it drives the entire world economy - and yet it is not merely affected by "animal spirits", it is exclusively driven by them.

A second question.  Why is it considered ethically acceptable for the government to use tax-payers' money to create tax breaks for savers, whereas it would be considered wasteful for the government to spend a fraction of this money advertising the virtues of saving? Especially when the Chinese approach seems to be many times more effective at changing behaviour.

But another, more important question: what is behind this staggering behavioural difference, and is there anything you can do to change it? To make Americans and Brits save even adequately.


It may be that there is nothing we can do. That the whole Chinese behaviour is rooted in Confucianism and hence is impossible to replicate without a few thousand years of cultural indoctrination.

Or it may be a very different reason: one theory I have even seen advanced is that, because the Chinese are indiscreet about money (you can routinely ask someone their salary without seeming rude) they don't need to buy expensive goods in order to convey their wealth to other people: you don't need to buy a BMW when you can just go around like Harry Enfield's Brummie character telling people how rich you are.  Or is it perhaps a question of choice architecture - that Westerners are faced with so many competing investment opportunities they just can't be bothered to choose between them? Or is it simply that their dictators are more trustworthy than our bankers?

Whatever your answer, the difference is psychologically driven, and could submit to marketing-led approaches?


There may even be a very simple stimulus required to change things.... Tesco letting you save at the checkout? Social networks making your savings visible?

The fact is that indidual savings levels are amazingly arbitrary. And marketing is good at influencing the arbitrary.


You're a marketer. What's your answer?

Why creatives should wear ties occasionally

One of the most disturbing advertisements of the last few months is the single page ad for the iPhone. "Solving life's little problems one app at a time."

Frankly this advertisement contravenes all the guidelines for contemporary press advertising. It contains a large shot of the product so you know what it looks like, carries a headline which discloses a consumer benefit and, worst of all, it contains a series of little captions (old direct marketing hands will know them as "call-outs") wherein a number of words are arranged in some grammatical order to convey to the reader useful information about what the product does.

Jesus, I hope this sort of thing doesn't get out of hand. Where could it end? If you're not careful, you'll have readers going to the shops in their droves and exchanging their money for iPhones.

Fortunately, I don't think this will last for long. Soon we'll be back to sanity - with shaven headed women leering out of the page displaying their tongue-piercings beneath incomprehensible two-word headlines.

Why is this perfectly sensible kind of advertising so rare? One problem may be that the same creative brief is often written for print as for TV. I'm not sure this makes sense  - perhaps the kind of low-involvement, image-intensive brief which works well in film may be ill suited to the high involvement medium of print. Another problem may be that the "brevity is always best" assumption that has become a reasonable rule-of-thumb in poster advertising has by now completely infected press.

But there may be a simpler question at stake here. Are we trying too hard to make press ads cool? Perhaps the best thing you can do when writing a good press ad is to abandon any attempt at being even remotely hip. Put on a suit and tie. Read the Daily Mail. Go foxhunting for a day. Visit Croydon.. Push Pineapple. Shake the tree. Push Pineapple. Grind coffee.  To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees. Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody. But do not, even for a second, consider going to Magma.

You can do almost anything in press. You can do intelligent, witty, urbane, posh, intelligent, popularist, large breasts, innuendo, informative, helpful, educational, belly-laughs, puns, logic, outrage. But it's hard to do cool. Or, to be more precise, you can do cool, but the line in print between being cool and being a self-indulgent twat is perilously narrow. Remember, too, that when you fail to be cool you alienate everyone - the cool people who hate you for failing and the uncool people who hate you for even trying.

At which point a bigger question. Is it even sensible for most brands to try to be cool at all?  Just remember that in pursuing cool-hunters you are chasing the most fickle market that exists. Cool people do not even form a market that is even specially large or wealthy - and it is by definition fragmented. It may or may not be influential - that varies. But usually the best financial return to be derived from brands is best achieved by having, in Tim Harford's words, "a strong brand in a conservative market".

The single most important financial and social role which brands play is that they create new possibilities - for brand owners and consumers alike. People who are fashionable and experimental will try new things anyway. But strong mainstream brands radically change the behaviours of the many millions of people who are temperamentally less adventurous.

You wouldn't have got a few million people to buy the Focus, the S-Max or the Ka (all radical designs) had they been branded Alfa Romeo. And, if it weren't for Sainsburys, olive oil would still be sold only in chemists' shops.

If we were true to our belief in brands, the dress code for the D&AD awards would stipulate M&S suits.