Campaign

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.

Are you a capitalist or a creativist?

Recently, practitioners of experimental philosophy (trendily known as x-phi) described two different scenes to a randomly selected audience.

In the first, the vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximize profits but will harm the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be harmed but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed.

The selected audience are then asked whether the president is harming the environment intentionally. On the one hand, his intention is only to maximize profits but he is conscious that this also involves harming the environment. 82% said “yes”.

The second scene is identical to the first except the word harm is replaced with help. The vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximize profits and will help the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be helped but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed. The people are then asked whether the president helped the environment intentionally. Interestingly, only 23% say “yes”.

There is a huge discrepancy here since, to a philosopher at least, the two examples are identical.

One interpretation of this is that, while an action based on self-interest that has bad effects is (unsurprisingly) seen as a bad thing, an action based on self-interest which has good effects is NOT seen as a particularly good thing.

This reveals an essential asymmetry in human perception.

What it seems to show is that people are overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one.

To anyone working in business, and in particular to those working in the many thousands of organisations which have spent the last fifteen years in thrall to a narrow, reductionist obsession with short-term shareholder value, this seems an important – and worrying – finding.

For it suggests the spectacular achievement of capitalist free markets in producing cheaper, better goods is often perceptually wasted, since most of us simply don't much respect the selfish motivation behind the achievement.

To Adam Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." We should add "But don't expect anyone to like the butcher very much."

In short we have an economic system that is much better at delivering efficiency than it is at inspiring affection. The obsession with shareholder value has perhaps created autistic businesses – of a kind that nobody much wants to work for or buy from.

At a societal level, it means the benefits of competitive free market economics (choice, low prices, innovation) don’t really translate into happiness, gratitude or affection – as they are tainted by the self-interest with which they have been obtained.

And if you have ever wondered why people show such affection for public-sector brands (such as the BBC, the Post Office, the NHS) even when their levels of service are, um, questionable, there’s your answer – for all their failings, they are untainted by perceptions of greed.

In the words of Jack Welch, widely seen as the father of the Shareholder Value movement, but now one of its harshest critics. “Shareholder value is an outcome – it’s not a strategy.”

Or as Eddie Izzard remarks, "I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist. I want to make money so that I can create things. Suddenly all these people have come along who want to create things so they can make money."

It’s an important distinction. Which are you?

Certainly the best brand owners are creativists. Nike, Ford, Kellogg, Apple, Virgin were all created by people whose ambitions went far beyond self-enrichment.

There's an interesting lesson here. Maybe greed is bad for business. It's certainly bad for brands.

The cuddly side of BBH

Undoubtedly the best idea to come from an ad agency this month is BBH's decision to allow staff to vote on a 3.5% voluntary pay cut - in the shape of a day's unpaid leave every month. Certainly the people at BBH seem to think so, since they voted 99.5% in favour, a kind of unanimity you don't usually see outside a North Korean election result.

BBH staff vote for pay cut over redundancies

I can't quite understand why this isn't more common.

For a start, it isn't quite accurate to describe this as a pay-cut at all. A pay cut would involve less money for the same amount of work. Here staff are being offered the chance to trade a 3.5% cut in pay for a near 50% increase in their holiday allowance. It would be interesting to find out how many people would have willingly made this trade-off even before the downturn. Nearly all studies show that employees would like to translate some of their wage gains into greater leisure, but are reluctant to do so for fear of seeming uncommitted. Unless you are a banker, and see your life's purpose as nothing other than a matter of self-enrichment, most people realise that the value of your money is enhanced when you have time enough to enjoy it.

 
However, in a recession, the trade off makes especially good sense. For one thing, this is a disproportionately bad time to lose your job. But it is also a disproportionately good time to keep your job. Prices are falling, and mortgage costs are probably low enough to offset the loss in pay for many people. Moreover the leisure is also offered in an intelligent form - single days off. What always struck me as moronic about the French attempt to enforce a 35-hour working week as part of their bid to reduce unemployment was that there is very little benefit to anyone in a marginally shorter working day. Once I have gone to the trouble of getting up, dressed, washed, shaved and then have to make the journey to and from work, I might as well give it a full nine hours. No, the minimum (or "quantum") unit of worthwhile leisure is the single day off.I might also add the fact that (as my self-employed father always loved to point out) a day off during the week is twice as valuable as a day off on Saturday or Sunday.

 
It is far cheaper for an agency to engage in this arrangement than to lose or hire people every time the climate changes. In fact, given that advertising is becoming a slightly seasonal business - with some months routinely busier than others - it's possible future agency contracts should allow for a certain flexibility of employment as a matter of course. Leisure, incidentally, can be a very tax efficient perk.

But there's a final reason this is such a good for our industry. You see it isn't clear that BBH will be much worse off for everyone's one-day absence. One of the fabulous things about this business, for all its annoyances, is that you can become better at your job by doing just about anything. Actuaries or lawyers don't become better at their jobs by reading a novel,  listening to a conversation on a bus, watching a film, going to an exhibition or sitting in a park. We do. Rather as Google has found, the odd day for staff to pursue their own interests may pay back in more than mere cost savings.   

Beyond advertising, we also need to ask ourselves whether BBH may have pioneered one possible answer to the economic downturn. Reading about this issue the other day, I stumbled on a few articles on the five-day week and the shorter working day. Until then, I had always assumed that Saturday had become a day of leisure through the efforts of social reformers. Not so. In the US, at any rate, it was pioneered by Henry Ford, driven by a mixture of philanthropy self-interest.

 
In his article Why I Favour Five Days' Work for Six Days' Pay Ford explains that a well paid and more leisured working man will have time and money enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.

With a two-day weekend, it might even be worth buying a car.
 

Why didn't anyone say anything?

In a few months' time everybody will be at it. Slagging off the Shareholder Value model, laughing at the witless preoccupation with quarterly reporting and with a business culture that refused to recognise the value of anything which could not appear on a spreadsheet.

 In fact the Shareholder Value idea is now so badly holed beneath the waterline that even Jack Welch - for a long time believed to be its parent (although he denies paternity) refers to the idea as "dumb".Shareholder Value, he says inarguably, "is an outcome not a strategy."

There are some fairly good causes to criticise the Shareholder Value concept. Not least being the fact that it has done untold damage to brand value over the past decade or so. Referring to "The Black Hole of Shareholder Value" in the latest Market Leader, Hugh Davidson describes it as "encouraging short-term profit maximisation and financial manipulation."

"At its heart," says Davidson, "is the narrow financial accounting model, which 'reports spending cutbacks as increases in income, even when the reductions have cannibalised opportunities for future capabilities for creating future economic value'."

There are a few other reasons to find fault with this approach from a marketer's point of view. For a start, it has often led marketers to concentrate on easily measurable things (market share gains, say) at the expense of things that are difficult or slower to measure (such as justifying a price premium), even when it may be in the less measurable areas where marketing works best. And - I am saying this as a direct marketer, too - it has led to an unhealthy preoccupation with with transactional forms of advertising, since visibly generating numbers has become a kind of proxy for creating value.

The fact remains that there are plenty of healthy business activities whose ROI cannot be accurately measured. R&D, Market Research, Customer Service, HR, Knowledge Management - and let's not forget the finance function itself - never seem to be asked to justify their every penny of quarterly cost with one-point-three pennies of return. There are also activities (R&D, relationship marketing) whose overall return might be measurable but where it is a fatal mistake to attempt to assign value separately to every component part. Most human relationships, and the generation of human trust, depend on a level of value exchange over time - they are not founded on immediate reciprocation. For instance, you might be able to report on the overall health of your marriage, but it might not be wise, say, to attempt to isolate the contribution of floral purchases to raised levels of sexual activity. Marketing, rather like seduction, requires the art of concealing your self-interest. One of the problems of making everything so accountable is that company body-language becomes unnatractively self-serving and predatory, resulting in a massive erosion of trust and affection. 

But, as Davidson says, the worst aspect of this period of obsession with Shareholder Value is the extent to which all of us in marketing completely acquiesced in it. To me it seemed a little reminiscent of Stockholm syndrome, where we almost seemed eager to take on the characteristics of our abusers - becoming "more accountable than thou". I can't remember a single voice really fighting what was in many ways an attempt by the finance function to seize control of the levers of business by banning non-numerical measures from the business vocabulary. Why were we all so feeble? To me this seems to suggest a crisis of confidence which we need to solve.

However, it's one thing to criticise a metric, and quite another to propose its replacement. What measure should replace Shareholder Value? And what measures should marketers devise to replace the current regime. Net Promoter Score? Some other balanced scorecard?

I have absolutely no clue. But I have one suggestion - whatever happens, you need more than one measure to evaluate what you are doing. And the reason for this comes down to something (thanks to Mike Hoban for introducing me to this) called Goodhart's Law. Goodhart formulated this when a senior economic advisor to the Bank of England in the late 1970s.

Put at its most simple, Goodhart's Law states that "any metric which becomes a target will over time lose its value as a metric." In other words, the very pursuit of the value renders the value meaningless.

And this is the problem with any attempt to express value in a single measure. In truth Shareholder Value wasn't that dumb a measure - and Milton Friedman's assertion that a company's primary duty is to its shareholders is possibly philosophically correct. However what made the measure so damaging in its effects was the fact that it was pursued to the exclusion of all else. If pursued to its obvious conclusion, it would have created businesses which nobody ever wanted to work for or to buy from.

However, don't take this as a left-brain bashing piece. It occurs to me that Goodhart's Law applies just as much to creative awards as well. The moment an awards tally becomes a target, awards lose their value as a metric. Worth remembering when the Gunn Report comes out. 

Oh hell - I've just gone and solved the problem the wrong way.

A few years ago I was digging through some old copy test questions from the 1970s. I can't remember where they came from, but we might as well assume they were from J Walter Thompson, who seem to have been by far the best practitioners of this form of recruitment [1].

The question was as follows: "Using as few words as possible, write a notice to be placed at the entrance to a country-club [2] swimming pool requesting that members who have been previously been playing squash shower before entering the pool."

Now I imagine most people would have spent their time attempting to convey this message visually, since using no words at all does rather tick the box of "as few words as possible", none being just about as few as you can get. And they would have been half right.

But, a few weeks later, it occurred to me that this isn't primarily a creative question at all. It's a media and targeting question. For the brief contains a bad assumption. Since your only target audience is squash players, the place to put this notice is not at the entrance to the swimming pool but at the exit to the squash courts.

There are several good reasons to move the sign.

1) First of all, it is likely to be more effective, since it reaches people at a point where they still have time to change their behaviour. By the time the sweaty squash player has changed into his bathing trunks and is walking towards the pool, it's probably too late. (Read Nudge for more on this).

2) There is less wastage. Sometimes wastage is a good thing: but here I suspect you do not want to remind non-squash-playing bathers about the possible presence in their pool of sweaty people. It's a little like entering a restaurant and seeing a notice in the window reading "Staff required: no experience necessary." This is a case where spillover is bad.

3) When the ad is placed contextually at the exit to the squash courts, it can be more efficient as a piece of communication. You no longer have to waste part of the communication singling out your target audience. No need for "Been playing squash?".  It lets you be more concise - for instance "Please use our showers before using our baths." Or, if you are using pictures, you can use simpler pictures.

The value of this kind of media-creative solution (and the greater opportunity for devising them in the new media world) may explain the resurgence of the full-service agency. If the media and creative specialists are separated, this valuable kind of holistic problem solving is harder to do [3].

That said, having encouraged you all to solve problems in as broad a way as possible, I should now add a note of caution. Often, clients don't much like it when you do. There are quite a few reasons for this.

First, you regularly find - generally too late - that you are presenting your work to the swimming pool manager, who has no authority to put up notices in the squash-courts. To make things worse, in client-world you usually find the swimming pool manager and the bloke who runs the squash courts hate each other, because five years ago one of them tried to get the other one fired.

Then there may be the problem of metrics. The research methodology used at the country club involves asking random people in the pool how "aware" they are of the shower rule for squash players. Since only squash players would be aware of this rule under the proposed new media plan, it would completely ruin these measures, and the client's bonus would be badly reduced. It would also make his media buying measures look poor, because while the sign would cost the same, its superior relevance would mean that fewer people would actually see it, damaging his lovely CPM figures and getting him into trouble with media auditors for his excessive efficiency.

But a bigger problem still may be psychological. There's a slight feeling that, if you brief someone to come up with a press campaign and they come back with a solution involving text message reminders, they are somehow cheating. It looks like a cop-out - a  bit of a chiz. I remember a campaign we presented to a prospective client where we largely solved their business problem through several ingenious ideas which incurred almost no media cost at all. We thought we'd be heroes. They never even rang back.

If you think this issue is confined to the ad industry, remember the story of John Harrison and the £20,000 Longitude Prize. The great clockmaker was in his eighties before he was properly rewarded for his contribution; the full £20,000 promised was never awarded at all. Why? Because the Board was expecting an astronomical solution to the navigation, not a horological one. Harrison's clocks (H1 to H4 are on display in Greenwich) were seen as a cheat, because while they solved the problem beautifully, it wasn't in the way the brief writers imagined. 

You might call this John Harrison syndrome. The peculiar bias which means that, the more lateral the solution to a problem, the less likely it is to be adopted.

One small way of addressing this problem is to ensure every brief contains at its heart a single sentence definition of the problem, agreed by everyone involved.  (If I may be allowed a quick plug, I think the new Ogilvy briefing format does this well.) In recent years, I felt so much of a creative brief was consumed with vague speculation about the nature of a solution, that the problem at its heart was liable to get lost. By the time the brief reached the creative team, the problem may have been almost invisible beneath a heap of surrounding verbiage.

Guy Murphy was the first person to make this point, appropriately enough at the launch of the book commemorating Stephen King.   "We all spend too long quibbling about the solution and far too little time defining the problem."

Never forget, if you can find a new way of defining the problem, you've gone most of the way to solving it.

Just don't expect anyone to thank you for it. Or pay you.

In fact John Harrison spent more of his life trying to get paid than he did building clocks. I suppose he would have felt at home in a modern agency.

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1. I am delighted to say that the IPA is currently looking to resurrect this exellent idea, thereby allowing us to recruit copywriters from a wider pool than at present.
   
   
   
2. It might have been a "leisure centre" not a "country club", but remember this was the JWT of the 70s, where people may not have known what a leisure centre was. This was an agency where one distressed account director telephoned from home at the last minute to postpone a client meeting because "his horse had fallen into his swimming pool."
   
   
   
3. In fact what would often happen nowadays is that, while the creative agency were busily trying to work out what to put on the sign, the media agency would have already commissioned a seventeen-part soap opera for the Nintendo Wii set in a municipal swimming pool in which the protagonist's girlfriend dies from contracting a fatal disease from an insanitary squash-player - thereby cutting out the sign-writer altogether and pocketing the content budget. But, hey ho!

The great unasked question of the age....

And, interestingly, it is a comedian who finally asks it.

Here you see the famous Boston somedian "Louis CK" appearing on the Conan O'Brien show. He is making fun of the "generation of assholes" who "feel the world owes them something they knew existed only ten seconds ago". The 500,000 views this clip has received on YouTube suggest I am not the only person who thinks he may have a point.

And he is asking the very question which should rightly prepoccupy the waking hours of anyone who works in technology marketing, indeed anyone who works in marketing..... actually make that anyone who lives in a market economy.....

What in God's name is the point of all this brilliant innovation if it brings so little enduring joy? 

Bill Gates voiced a similar concern when he observed that "people don't how to want the things we can offer them". But I don't have so much of a problem with people not embracing innovation - that's their right, after all. I'm more concerned with the indifference they show towards innovations two weeks after they have adopted them. You could call it the Paul Arden* question: "How can people more fully appreciate the magic and wonder they already have around them?" As advertising experts, we are supposed to be the authorities on adding perceived value to things. So we should ask ourselves why the public's appreciation of most things (especially those things provided by private enterprise)  is so woefully low. Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection.... goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents.... and within a minute or so you'll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.

It seems to me that, if we were seeking graitude rather than money, most capitalists would have given up the game decades ago. Sixty years ago, under communism, a few million Russians were happy to die for the right to queue for a potato. Today, in a market economy, people who buying a microwave oven for £70 at two o'clock in the morning complain if they have a three-minute wait.

It also occurs to me that the premise of most consumer journalism may be completely wrong. Implicit in the activities of organisations such as "Which?" or programmes such as "You and Yours" is the assumption that consumers are blameless and rational individuals who are in permanent danger of being misled by evil corporations. I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion (as are a few scientists, I might add) that corporations do an okay job: it's the individual human who needs more serious investigation. 

The rich (or anyone richer than average) are worse offenders than most, here. If you are wealthy, you will find the price of almost all consumer goods set at a level to sell in large quantities to a mass market - in other words at a price aimed at people much poorer than you. This means that a man earning £50,000 a year pays a price for his new flat-screen LCD TV that has been set be within the reach of people earning £20,000 a year - a price typically several hundred pounds lower than the rich man would be prepared to pay. This difference (known as the consumer surplus) seems to bring no added happiness at all. It's as if rich people were given a £200 refund every time they bought a major puchase, and merely shrugged it off. I recently asked a professor from Caltech and a couple of other behavioural economists why this is no. No-one seems sure - but they admitted it is a major loss of potential happiness.

The brutal question underlying all this is simple. For all the talk about "value not price", do people have any genuine appreciation of value at all? Or is our only conception of weath and fortune not absolute but merely relative (do we inhabit a world where, as one economist famously observed, "a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife's sister's husband.")

This is a vitally important area of study for us. Partly because, if only at a small level, brand value might be one rare example when products are successfully imbued with a certain amount of added emotional enjoyment. But we need to know much more about this issue.

Do you think the problem is societal? Or is it innate? And, either way, what can we do about it?

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1.  * I call this the Paul Arden question after a story from William Burdon, which appears on the tributes page to Paul Arden ".....On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account-man answer - "Ferrari", I suspect. Paul's answer was "a sense of wonder."