furtherandfaster

the future of comms planning

well the deadline is passed and all the essays are in for this first competition set by Admap magazine. I am dying to find out how many entries they got and what the big themes are. Well for now we shall have to wait.  

Spat about emotion - the St Valentines day massacre

I'll just put down the bare bones of this spat from Valentines Day when Brainjuicer's Will Goodhand raided Millward Brown to present a cheeky valentine of congratulations for Millward Brown deciding at long last that emotion rather than rationality was central to the measurement of communications.  Which was received by a Mr Trustlove - something Will made a meal of. You can see the video here.

 and here's the card.

Worth a chuckle then. What turns it into a belly laugh is Nigel Hollis of Millward Browns riposte on his blog and the comments below. Nigel claims that MB have known about emotion for years.  His reply is a little po faced - this isn't about reality but about perceptions and I am afraid that is what Millward Brown need to address. In the process of answering the critics Nigel manages to tick off a longstanding client who was just trying to join the debate and play the whole thing down. A clever prank to start a debate and to make Brainjuicer look like the creative guys.  Worth a look. And worth thinking about how to respond if your company gets pranked. A dignified silence is best..probably

If the new atheists treated sport like religion..

this has been out a while - Feb 3rd actually written by Nick Spencer a longstanding mate of mine. Pointing out that requiring people to dress up in scarves and support sport in the privacy of their homes is a silly idea - and if sport can't be privatised then why should religion? Please note that the new atheists don't seem to be content to practice their beliefs in the privacy of their homes.. but have some kind of social obligation to try to confine religious observance. Which is odd.

Where the piece gets funny is with the comments afterwards where a pack of angry atheist scissorhands pour out to heap bile on the article and make personal attacks on Nick. I always wonder who the people are who want to add comment number 75 to an online newpaper article.

The Future of Planning Admap Prize: 6 Content

In this last territory of communications - I was really out on a limb because content was still a relatively new idea and was in direct conflict with the advertising model which develops highly focussed content for a single purpose and is only paid when they make new content.  Developing content at much lower cost or borrowing it from 3 parties is an idea which has been fuelled by the explosion in social media - so I am relieved to see how far content has progressed as a way of building relationships with audiences and creators/promoters. I still think Walkers Crisps and the find a new flavour campaign takes a lot of beating.

If you look back to my comments in the Coca cola content strategy you can see I have misgivings about the amount of control companies are willing to cede. It sounds like a great idea but the lawyers get involved very quickly - Companies are happy to create as long as they control/own the content. And this isn't really the spirit of co-creation is it?  The reason why content is so compelling is that there is so much good quality content out there - advertising worked because you had to watch it to get hold of the good stuff. That is no longer true.So brands need to light lots of fires and then help people to build up the ones they find useful. Tricky if it turns out that what the client really wants is product endorsement and ads that the customer has made themselves.

The high ground for me remains the ability of brands to construct narratives which people want to pay attention to. For geek brands like Apple -not announcing product release schedules and doing reveals is a kind of storyline but dependend on a series of product launches which amaze the faithful. I'm not convinced this model is sustainable. More interesting is Virgin Atlantic giving their profits away for researching global warming - doing interesting things and setting oneself challenges which your customers care about is a powerful way to win attention because your customers may want to help by cretaing content around this - imitation (John Grant has written about this in the Green Marketing Manifesto as well as in Co-opportunity. Brands resource their customers and vice versa).  Of course money has to be made as well but the value being created is no longer just about share price which neither customers nor employees for the most part consider an eseential part of the value of the business.  Constructing these kinds of narratives seems to me to be one of the emerging planning challenges.Requiring planners to be creative and commercial when sometimes these are at odds with one another. I have been able to use my brand screenplay technique on a number of occasions both to workshop storylines for brands and also for doing brand development research. For brands such as the London Eye. What I value in the screenplay writing approach (and this is backed up by those I have taken through the process) is the way it allows you to understand the narratives being contributed by brands across a market category. Far too much brand essence work takes the brand in isolation from what competitors are doing which is why so many brands are (design elements aside) identical to their competitors brands in the values they hold. This technique helps you get away from that kind of delusional thinking. Also narratives develop using conflict - most brand development avoids conflict - the brand is simplistic and static and the values never challenged. Conflict defines character and enables you to see what a brand character is capable of.

Transmedia is another area I am intrigued by. Certainly it has become a mainstream of entertainment allowing the sifting of audiences based on the amount of attention each is able and willing to give. My problem with companies telling their stories in different ways across lots of different channels is that it requires a lot of attention from your customers most of which have better things to do.  Western youthful audiences can now cope with much more dense storylines than they used to. But engagement across all levels is more important than entertainment. I don't think that any brand can flourish by entertaining its customers and not doing more than that. Experiential marketing immerses customers to give them a different level of understanding and emotional involvement  - it doesn't just entertain.

Something we have not taken seriously enough is the level of marketing literacy - marketing is now understood - it is taught in primary schools. In the light of which it is surprising how dull so much marketing is and how much more playful it could be. So why not ask your customers to choose the marketing strategy - or make them guess which one you're following?

So to conclude another rather rambling post - I think planning has a role in making marketing and marketing communications more playful and purposeful to engage customers. And to be involved in wider aspects of their lives. This seems to be the way content marketing is indeed going. 

Right then that's the 6 areas by way of an update from the article I wrote in 2008. Now with a little over a week to go I need to think about what I would put into a paper about the future of planning. Taking it to 2020. Hmm

 

the universe

Awesome isn't it? Take a look

The Future of Planning Admap Prize: 5 Audiences

The 5th in the series around what I term the communications big 6 - conveniently located around a hexagon (that's 2 planning triangles in old money) You can read the original Admap article here. By audiences I mean the delivering of a whole group of people from a few thousand to many million. In advertising this was by and large carried out by media people who were largely left to their own devices. Creative agencies contented themselves with what at best could be described as a qualitative pen portrait of the prospect/customer usually described in terms of demographics and attitudes.  When I started to work in direct marketing I stopped describing them and started counting and valuing them. Much as media planners have to do.  And the key metrics are quantitative how to increase their value or increase their number.  This arms length attitude by traditional account planners is long past. Because clients have embraced audiences. They don't just pay media owners for access to them. Clients have become media owners in their own right and here I am not talking about content but the aggregation of audiences. CRM was part of the story. Though frequently this resulted in datawarehouses which were so unwieldly as to be commercially useless. But as many clients started to turn their transaction systems into marketing databses they started to get into the territory of big data. The most famous of these is the Tesco Club Card but airlines, cable companies, mobible phone companies and of course internet retailers have discovered that the behavioural data they collect as a necessity for trading is worth more than the income they generate from selling.

Data planning used to be a poor relation - but not any more. Data planning is now part and parcel of marketing  and an essential component. Frequently it is the database which is required for research and for mainstream marketing activity. We rely on media channels less and less - not only for cost reasons but because there is an incremental cost in measurement and for many data assets held inhouse or close to inhouse - the measurement is inbuilt.  Segmentation, testing matrixes - all these have become mainstream tools. Direct marketing agencies and loyalty agencies have the expertise to build business cases fast.  Digital agencies are also operating in this territory when they move beyond the technology to modelling and not just counting.

The sheer scale of the big data available means it is a mainstream concern for planners. If you don't understand this stuff then find out fast. The challenge for researchers is the clients are losing interest in samples. Why bother if you can have a dataset that includes near everybody?  If you are starting your career then you will need qualitatative skills. But you will also need to be numerate and to talk intelligently about data - don't expect media types and econometricians to do all the lifting for you.  

 

Remember also that mass audiences aren't nearly as interesting as lumpy ones. finding those who are promotionally active, or who love advertising, or who are social, or persuasive - these are much more interesting ways of separating people out. I have a list of such discriminators filed away for checking purposes. Focus also on behaviour and goals rather than demographics and attitudes they much more reliably measurable.

Get to know excel. Learn how to make simple models to test different scenarios - better still get a job in an agency that takes audiences seriously and measures them and you will be taught. 

I could write about audience for hours but that will have to do for now. 

 

Coca cola and content

Coca Cola have set out their stall on content marketing. There's a useful summary blog here if you're in a hurry but I have also embedded both films below.  There's jargon a plenty but what Coca Cola ingenuously avoid is looking too closely at two core ideas: they want to double the amount of Coca Cola they are selling globally and 2/ they want to add to the sum of human culture.  Apparently if they do 2 then 1 will follow inexorably. My problem with this is that human culture is not dominated by 'conversations' about fizzy drinks. Don't get me wrong - thirst is universal but thirst related conversations aren't. As the strategy unfolds with talk about link tests, in-market testing and liquid ideas I am uncomfortable about the idea that Coca cola through active listening increase their share of culture ideas. I do accept that it may be possible for them to increase their share of Coc  acola related conversations (but not that much) -  Are their customers are allowed to talk about the product or do Coca cola want to do all the talking?  

 

 

Breaking out of the category and talking about universal ideas is a great idea - I just don't think Coca cola can do it without reminding us of what is the real thing. Otherwise the ROIs started looking bad.

What if your customers talk about things you'd rather not talk about - how are you going to develop the conversation? The language of Coca cola looks postcolonial to me. This isn't opening up conversations but using big bucks to amplify a narrow range of campaign topics and to actively close others down. Dissidents will be suppressed.  The whole point of content marketing is to follow and amplify the themese which genuinely engage people not to turn your own agenda away from ads to advertorial from people who turn out not to be genuine customers at all.  

10 questions for when you're dying...

from the naked pastor - rather good I thought. Take a look

great way to review the coming week!

Dickens Bicentennial - Simon Callow

Went to a performance by Simon Callow at Bishops Stortford College this evening all about the life of Charles Dickens - something he is taking around the country to support his book about Dickens life. The way he told the story took Dicken's childhood job in a blacking factory as the secret spring to his life - creating a drive that finally killed him. The bicentennial of his birth is on Tuesday Feb 7th.

Having discovered that Dickens commuted from Camden (where I work) to Embankment to work in the factory on starvation rations of a shilling a week. I dug out the film below of locations in the vicinity of Camden linked to his life. 16 Bayham street is 5 minutes walk from our office. I've made a mental note to reread Pickwick papers.  I studied Dickens at university but rather went off the grand storylines and the tendency to mawkishness - I always enjoyed Pickwick papers so will give him another go. His range and characterisation was astounding but he also carried a load of sentiment with him too less to my taste.

Drove home in a blizzard - shades of Lady Dedlock walking to London..

 

 

 

The future of planning Admap prize: 4 channels and networks

The admap prize deadline for submission of the essay has extended to Feb 20th which gives me a little longer to get this commentary on the Admap article I wrote on the subject in 2008.  I ran the topics of channels by which I mean media channels together with networks by which I mean human networks because this seemed to be the territory of media delivery where the focus is on how the message is delivered - where the medium is part of the message.

That is what makes the endorsement of seeing an ad in a glossy magazine broadly equivalent to a recommendation by a trusted friend. And the more people networks have proliferated most notably Facebook the more I think of these channels as mass advertising channels as individuals promote themselves online - what we get in social networks is exactly the kind of selective social editing which commercial advertisers practice. And arguably social networks should be tracked and evaluated just as advertising is evaluated. its value is that brand mentions become a kind of endorsement. What it doesn't represent is an online equivalent of real world networked relationships which can be treated as a proxy for the rest of people's lives offline. This seems to me to be the folly of a lot of online site scraping which treats social media data as somehow intuitive and authentic. It is anything but. But being advertising doesn't make it any less revelatory or useful to us. I was wondering where the rise and rise of the app should be logged. I could have placed it into the interactivity category (see the earlier entry about interaction from a few days ago.

I think it is interesting to put apps here because their value lies less in their utility and engagement than the idea that they become social objects which gather people around them. Embedded games and apps spread virally.; Its not that a significant percentage of the entire planetary population play Farmville but that they share artefacts and scores with one another. This kind of networked usage is what makes these kinds of apps relevant and interesting to marketers. Education and  entertainment are much simpler goals.  Mass sharing and competition are a new emerging communication form which are more powerful than one way communication with mass audiences. I am very relieved that we seem to have moved on from the idea that advertising in gaming involved selling hoardings in racing games which the players pass in their souped up cars to deliver incremental advertising exposures. Gaming is much more engaging and it is the social dimension which is providing the power.

While I am on the topic of social networks its also worth reminding ourselves of how our understanding of influence is changing. PR is still clinging by its fingernails to the idea of trickledown influence - the little black book of journalists who can make or break a story. Now influence is much more widely but unevenly distributed. Unfortunately we seem to have replaced the idea of the influential expert with a TV show with a kind of amateur advocacy which sets up bloggers at top of the influence food chainl. So now we have to hunt down the new experts who are cheaper and who don't have agents and book deals so are somehow more authentic. The problem with this revised model of trickledown is twofold. Firstly there aren't enough of these people and there's no guarantee that your customers will track them down.  Secondly they may love proclaiming their opinions but there is no guarantee that your particular brand is high enough on the food chain for them to talk about it. If you're Apple  or Virgin then good luck to you. But most brands aren't interesting enough for brand advocates to talk about. You can pay them of course but for both your sakes I hope you don't get caught.

Much more interesting is what we call passive advocacy. Everyone has experience of a whole range of brands. Its just that we don't have permission or confidence to talk about them. So it requires those on the hunt for products and services to ask for advice and pull the advocacy out of people. Small plug again for Firestarter a research product I work on which looks at word of mouth not only from what we call ardent advocates the influentials who brand managers are desperate to court. But also passive advocates. Of which there are very many more and these are far more likely to be the source of the word of mouth. We also need to consider the type of advocacy - whether it is how the category is organised - or about the quality of the experience good or bad.  Advocacy tends to focus on one or the other. And understanding who is recommending and what they are recommending gives a brand manager a much more rounded understanding of where to spend their money influencing a network. And the power of this kind of analysis is when it is linked to touchpoints across a customer journey and taken through quant research to size the opportunity. 

Now we're at touchpoints we are in more familiar territory the selection of media channels based less on their media efficient in terms of cost per thousand or reach than their intrincic authority and familiarity to a customer or prospect.  One of the biggest successes of communications planning has been the rise of contact planners in a business which has such low margins you wouldn't think it could afford to employ them. But now contact planning is established. These planners may never get to brief a creative team in an ad agency. But increasingly they are working with other kinds of creatives to implement ambient or event based ideas.  The high end of this area is experiential marketing which creates deep extended experiences for relatively small numbers of people because commercially that has been shown to be more powerful.

I think I shall leave it there for now and blog about audiences our 5th area at the beginning of next week.