Just a small rant - all I had to do was to run a session for the Ogilvy planners at 3pm yesterday and run 2 groups in Thames Ditton last night. Here's the score card:
Train 1 - is late - the brakes aren't working. Which means paradoxically it stopped all the time - got into Liverpool Street late - O&M meeting started 20 mins late - they were very nice about it considering...
Train 2 to be more accurate a tube train - is delayed because someone pulls the alarm in the train in front of us - get to Waterloo late.
Train 3 there's a broken rail in Wimbledon causing chaos for trains out of Waterloo - manage to get on a train to Surbiton - told we will get there in 15 minutes -we don't because we have to go through Wimbledon at walking pace - don't play skittles with railway workers. Get to the groups with 10 minutes in hand.
Train 4 Victoria line ... closes down at 11. - am told the train will go to Walthamstow - then we are thrown off at 7 Sisters. Wait half an hour for a train then 10 minutes for a further connection. Arrive home at 12.30. 2.5 hours to cross a distance of some 30 miles.
Makes you want to get in a car and make your own travel chaos.
Marketing magazine is an unusually hilarious read this week. Highlights include LG changing its strapline Life is good because of the insight that mebbe life isn't so good after all. And Diageo changing its agency because for a Tanqueray Gin ad campaign: "The subtle nature of the campaign was believed not to have suited countries with low gin awareness." So it Tanqued guys yes?
My favourite though is a piece about the British Humanists Association campaign to tell us via bus sides that there's probably no God. Which started with a budget of 11K but has now through donations got donations of over 100 thousand. You would think from the article that God rather than the absence of God is the news story. Because it cites a number of different religious campaigns which provoked the ire of the humanists so they put their own. Apart from the absurdity of promoting the non existence of anything or anyone doesn't the campaign actually end up doing the diametric opposite. Getting people to think about it and to conclude that God probably does exist (as apparently three quarters of the UK population still thinks that God does in fact exist). Its interesting though quite how easy it is for religious stories to generate headlines these days.
That's what Paul Wolley director of the Christian political think tank Theos believes. He is quoted as saying "The atheist bus campaign is a brilliant way to encourage people to think about God. It wasn't BHA's aim but its what we're here to do." Which is why Theos have made a financial contribution towards the Probably no God campaign. Pure genius.
I'm not going to pontificate about the Brand Ross debacle other than to point out that .01% of the complaints that's 2 came from those who listened to the programme. All the rest came from those who had not heard what was said though I bet lots of them tuned in later to check - where's their moral superiority now? and then joined the chorus. The classic defence of broadcasters is that most of those who listened or watched didn't complain so what is the problem? The stupidity of this defence is that it ignores the power of mass opinion - for whom it doesn't matter whether they heard the offending content or not. For a public broadcaster the crowd surge is the killer - its not your audience that matters - its your constituency. Often forgotten by the shock jocks of which we have many in advertising. Great to get the advertising talked about and it will only offend a very few. Wrong - it gets noticed by the majority who will come to their own conclusions about how they talk about the brand and how they influence or even trial the brand themselves. I'm deep into the crowdsourcing book at the moment so overly sensitive to crowd news stories. But I bet Brand Ross very quickly takes its place as a classic crowd casestudy and how not to do it - Get a grip BBC - Brand and Ross weren't talking to yoof they were talking to everybody !
Got a letter in the post today from the Church of England explaining
that now I have got to 70 years of age I can no longer continue to be
licensed as a lay reader. They have offered to make a me a Reader
Emeritus but I am welcome to keep my licence and hang it on the wall
for sentimental reasons. Have had to reassure them that I have a few
more decades of life in me yet. Suddenly I feel tremendously alive..
The respondent tipped back his chair abruptly and left. So suddenly that the rest of the respondents assumed he's had to rush to the toilet and would be back. I knew he wouldn't and I knew why. I had just presented a programme concept - and as I often do in groups I had handed out pens and paper and asked people to write down their first reactions - always useful before you get the group response. My departee almost certainly couldn't write at least with a pen. He was sitting next to me so he was aware that I could see he wasn't writing anything down. And rather than face a humiliating question in front of the group he left. Literacy or rather lack of it - whether writing or dyslexia is an ever present possibility in research. And unavoidable. I was sorry it had happened but not sorry enough to drop the technique.
What made this interesting was that this group had been recruited from an internet panel. So he could read and browse websites - and presumably sign up for research but this didn't make him confident with a pen and paper. Much has been made of the digital divide. Not everyone on the internet is a blackberry wielding, ebaying, facebook junkie. We need to be aware of those in the margins and shadows of the internet as we are with similar sampling issues for offline research
I met up with Adrian Kemsley briefly at midday. He was creative director at CDP when I first got there (we made the pilgrimage to Dentsu in Tokyo together in January of 1998), and has been creative director of a whole string of ad agencies. Adrian now runs his own freelance consultancy - we were trading exchanging war stories about life around the ad agencies in London at present. His experience is particularly interesting because his portfolio leans heavily towards TV so the future of TV ads not to mention their online equivalents is something he has clear and strong opinions about! If you want to find out more about Adrian and his work you can track him down on www.creativefreelance.co.uk
Out on Stanton moor today by Birchover- walking past standing stones and exploring caves - but have also to keep a research project on track using dodgy email links and SMS to push fieldwork and finalise the discussion guide. Work life balance was never so much fun ....
Billed as an innovation conference to attract the innovation
fraternity – this conference was the brainchild of John Kearon Chief Juicer of
the research agency Brainjuicer. He had the idea of gathering together the most
interesting speakers he had heard in the last 12 months. BV Pradeep of Unilever
offered their St James Road office in Kingston as a venue and so the event came
together – a safe place for those specialising in innovation to set aside day
for stimulating argument and discussion with some networking thrown in.
After John’s introduction, BV Pradeep, insighter in-chief
and member of Unilever’s global leadership team, led the conference through two
case studies: the Pro-age case study for Dove and the story of the launch of
the anti-dandruff shampoo Clear – the first an example of challenging the
conventions of the skincare market and targeting a whole new audience. And the
second a classic story of launching a fighting brand to challenge Head and
Shoulders’ overwhelming dominance and in at least one market to take market
leadership within a year. Useful examples because as emerged from the debate
afterwards successful product launches are as much about successful execution –
launching your plane down the runway and making sure that all 4 engines are
firing – as it requires reframing a marketplace with a piece of successful
insighting. The reason why Head and Shoulders was vulnerable was in part
because the high price point made it a profitable sector to attack – perceived
efficacy was linked to price! There was also an interesting discussion about
whether the Pro-age strategy marked a broadening of the natural beauty idea
from body shape to post menopausal skin or the next articulation of it.
And then something completely different.Michael Spencer of Sound Strategies followed
with a series of quiz questions about the use of sound as part of brand
identity. Because our vocabulary in explaining sounds is so limited we find it difficult
to talk about differences in types of music. What he seemed to demonstrate was
that the usage of sound was so misplaced it explained exactly why so few
companies put sound on their websites – it’s a very difficult thing to get
right. But this is a missed opportunity.People become so much engaged with sound that with a proper strategy
sounds could become a powerful tool for establishing clear brand identities and
creating better recall and involvement.Michael cited British Airways as a great example where the Lakme theme
has been reused and adapted for different contexts so that it is always
recognisable but doesn’t have to be the same score or specific recording. We
finished this session with a 4 part jungle chant with full audience
partcipation!
Mark Earls concluded the morning with an introduction to his
herd concept: humans as theherd
species that think they’re an I species. Much of the material he presented
referenced academics and evolutionary psychologists who would be unfamiliar to
most marketing people. New to me at least was the typology of social influence
(decisions or copying) crossed with directed or random decisions – work which
has come out of Mark’s collaboration with Alex Bentley of Durham university.
What emerges from this is that marketing involves thinking entirely differently
about how to engage an audience –the challenge is to make it easy for people to
imitate what others do rather than focus on messaging and getting messaging
thought about and remembered.Mark
finished by saying that what we had to do was to light lots of fires without
any certainly about which one would be the most successful.From the questions afterwards it was clear
there was some resistance – someone wanted to know if this meant lighting the
same fire lots of times! And some were less convinced that the theory of high
status influencers was as broken as Mark claims.
The Q and A following Mark’s session stretched for the best
part of half an hour. Which made a sizeable dent in the time John Kearon had
for his presentation.What followed was
an act of great generosity – John cut his session in half to get the conference
back on time. He spoke in praise of failure and outlined Thomas Edison’s 5
principles: align processes with goals, cultivate charismatic optimism, seek
knowledge relentlessly, experiment persistently, pursue rigorous objectivity.
And he asked a question which became a persistent theme through the afternoon.
Why is it that with the solitary exception of conjoint analysis in the 1950s
quantitative research has failed to produce any significant new technique for
two generations. Agencies grow by eating each other not by doing anything
different.One of John’s last slides
was a composite of the movers and shakers he respects in research at present –
in effect his significant competitors who he went through one by one
identifying how these pioneers were starting to break into new territory.
When he finished the first question came from one of his
financial backers. Why are you so open about your best ideas – aren’t you
damaging the business? His answer was as follows – no one is likely to steal
your ideas until they are successful – in which case you are in the strongest
position to exploit them based on the experience you have accumulated. Put it
out there to give others a chance to contribute. And as the category prospers
everyone benefits (and so will you).An
interesting take in a room full of innovators!
Jaroslav Cir, consumer and market insight director for
Rexona took up the baton to attack the myth of market research certainty.He pointed out that the availability of the
GMI panel made it easy for any of his own people to put out quick online
surveys to check hypotheses. Unilever can move faster because it doesn’t have
to wait for its suppliers. He tipped Facebook as the future of for market
research. Sorrell should have bought Facebook not TNS! To break new ground in
insighting it was better to trust individuals. At which point he namechecked
the semiotician Greg Rowland who got more mentions in the next half hour than Joe
the plumber in the last presidential debate!At the end of the session there was an interesting exchange between
Pradeep and Jaroslav. Pradeep’s point was that to get Unilever’s management
behind an initiative you still need the classic evidential tools to provide an
element of certainty. But they agreed that without the leaps which individuals
could provide Unilever can’t grow – there is a genuine problem that the large
research agencies aren’t delivering the great leaps forward.
The last speaker of the afternoon was Andrew Gaule of the
H-I network. What he showed was how diverse are the means for developing new
products – there are literally dozens of models for developing revenue streams
on the borders or even right outside the large organisations. His core
schematic illustrated that modest changes in business focus could result in
dramatic business growth through innovation. One of his examples was Philips –
how do you grow a business where DVD players are now cheaper than DVDs? He
showed a prototype which was designed externally and which Philips had
manufactured – Philips is willing to turn inside out – assembling what outside
designers create. When the questions started Andrew was a lot more equivocal.
With so many different models to choose from he refused to be drawn on his
preference for particular forms of spin off. Suits you sirseemed to be the mantra! It depends on what
you need.
And so the day came to a conclusion – as we headed for the
drinks table we were each presented with a brain shaped stress cushion. So what
did the day deliver?Brainjuicer was
among friends so had no need to hustle its own products.Unilever’s hosting ensured that the content
of the day stayed focussed on client issues and not on supplier products. What
I enjoyed about the day was the achievement of a genuinely safe space for
exploring ideas. Confidentiality can only get you so far. I got the sense that
a lot of conversations were going on – conversations which would be difficult
to hold in other more conventional industry environments. So a good fest – hope
they do it again.
TTS sent this to me this morning. Due to be taken to Uganda at the weekend for doing music therapy with war orphans. Each microphone powers up from usb and will record 2 - 4 hours of mp3 or wav. Drag and drop the files to your pc or mac. And they have already loaded the audio editor Audacity onto the microphone. The quality is very good. Now any kid can record a podcast. At 25 quid each this is a bargain. Will be trialling for research and when I work with children. Here's the main link but there's also a catalogue link.
