furtherandfaster

About this blog

I wondered if I should give some explanation about why this blog wanders around quite so many topics. I can see from the traffic sources that the site attracts people to all sorts of different posts - it isn't just a question of seeing the latest thing I have posted. My work is as a communications planner and researcher. And we need to stay curious and to analytical. About just about everything. And quite deliberately following Facebook and Twitter I have opted not to separate my work from the rest of my life. It is all part and parcel and I hope more interesting because its all mixed together.

I have other content which stays resolutely on topic - there's the back catalogue of my comms planning website on www.planningaboveandbeyond.com which you're welcome to look at. That's web content placed there between 2000 and 2005. There's Waggledancers a site about strategy that creates momentum for ideas through and out of companies and is my personal bet for where planning is going. Following the adage If you want to know the future then better set out to invent the future yourself! And there's Cloud of Knowing a project about the incorporation of analytics within normal research practice.  Because there are themed sites which are far more focussed, the blog is really my play area -and noticeboard for things I find interesting or want to comment about.It really is all over the place. Just look at the tag cloud. Having the breadth ought to make me more effective when I get pulled into a project at the start of which I usually no almost nothing so have learn at high speed. This is what planners do all day every day - and on this blog you can watch me staying in condition! 

Askcepts

A borrowing from Blackbeard's excellent blog as Tom riffs the future of Market research - top 10.This one is number 5. His 140 character conference 3500 word 'summary' is excellent too.  Tom asks whether we can't serve questions the way the web serves banner ads. Which is a simple brilliant idea. I call them askcepts instead of concepts. Produced by one of two groups of people. The first is researchers if they can restrain themselves to asking one question at a time. And assembler granular surveys by aggregating lots of different answers.

But its the other group of people than interest me. The engagement creatives who hone questions so they are impossible not to answer and to disclose. What do we call these people? They are rather like the creatives who get briefed to produce concepts which engage and communicate product and brand ideas. But they're not the same because their focus is not on broadcast but on generating feedback and creating irresistible conversations. Which gets me rather excited because this also draws on research skills but creatives get paid rather a lot more than most researchers and are considered a whole lot cooler. So pick up your shades, cultivate a patter which borders on the inarticulate and start cranking out askcepts. Someone is bound to set up a Creative Ask awards. Or an Ask effectiveness award. This could run and run!

Why vampires are our favourite stories right now

I'm a going waggledancing in the next couple of days. Which is Griffiths speak for running a workshop for marketers about how to use herd thinking to get ideas through and out of their organisations. Named after the dance of the honeybees who waggledance to show all the other bees where to find the good stuff.  And while I was casting around for an exercise to get people thinking about their customers thought with Christmas in the offing that it might be good to get them to choose a book from the bestsellers list to give to their target customer and to explain to each other why they had. Simple enough exercise. Which gets you thinking about what is making these books so popular. And what if a brand was to pop one of these books in the post to you what would you think? Would you regard them differently? And wouldn't this conversation be a lot more interesting than the usual marketing gambit Heard the latest about my product? Wanna buy it?

At which point I was startled to discover that 4 of the top 10 best sellers are The Twilight series vampire books by Stepanie Meyer which have come in on the back of the Twliight Movies. Flash in the pan you say. But each one these books have been in the top 100 list for more than a year and a half. In fact you can see the editorial picks studiously ignoring them because patently they are selling themselves. There seem to be a rash of vampire TV shows at present as well. Vampire stories are clearly as addictive in the 21st century as they were a hit in the 20th. Why? Well I would be interested to hear your opinions on this one. My own theory is that the topic trilogy of money sex and power always interests us. And the spike in the money topic in the last 18 months has meant that while there are a lot of us worrying about money a lot of us want to think about something else. And the cocktail of sex and power which the vampire stories represent will do just nicely.  Oh and there's a lot of restraint out there at the moment - which translates nicely into repression. More vampires anybody?

Connections Planning

Great presentation about Connections Planning from Gareth Kay and Jason Oke at Planningness - how connections planning is not just bundling up hundreds of media channels instead of the original 5 but designing experiences. Which also is a vivid reminder that account planning is now many different streams. The presenters make a valiant attempt to keep the issues central to all planning but its a measure of how far communications planning has come that so much planning won't actually pay heed to any of this. And will get away with it.

APG awards .. the morning after and what comes next.. crowdsourcing planning awards?

Again - I'm sorry I wasn't able to be there but it looks as if a good night was had by all. Congrats to McCanns for getting the big one for Halo3 and BBH (pictured here) for winning the team trophy. Can't wait to see the casestudies.

But I also want to continue my post yesterday about what could happen next.  No I haven't seen the case studies and yes I am confident that what was celebrated last night was outstanding work. But it can't be representative of the work being done by planners worldwide. This is just thinking out loud and I would be really interested to get feedback from others as to how to tackle this. What if there was a worldwide planning award scheme covering any discipline including clientside where planners or those doing strategic development could submit casestudies online. The rating system would be a collective vote. In effect we would crowdsource the best planning work. I would envisage an Academy of voters who would have to register, provide contact details and provide basic information about themselves. Everybody would get at least one vote. If you work in the same specialism as the category you get an extra vote. If you have held a position as a planning director then you get a third. BUT you would not be allowed to vote for work carried out by an agency you are working for or have worked for.  Before the winners would be announced there would have to be an audio to weed out the possibilties of electoral fraud! This wouldn't prevent block voting and it wouldn't stop fraudulent casestudiesm it could also favour primary markets where there are a lot more planners and bigger departments but it would allow a lot more work to be recognised and celebrated than is currently the case. What we have is Formula 1. What we need is closer to Player of the year or man/woman of the Match.

What we would also get as a rather useful offshoot would be a global database of planners with an abbreviated CV - a useful asset in its own right if it were used (and not abused) properly. That's my suggestion. Now what does the rest of the crowd think?

APG awards - the usual suspects

Its APG Awards night tonight. It seems to have crept up on me - I'm afraid I won't be there for the first time in nearly 10 years - I've always forked out for it because it is the equivalent of the planning Oscars. Regular readers of this blog may recall that back in May I was asked to write to encourage a wider range of entries. The call to action seems to have worked because the APG got a record haul of 150 entries from which 25 have been shortlisted. At the time I expressed my concern that the problem with the awards was that the winnners came exclusively from advertising and advertising agencies. In the last 4 awards only a handful of agencies working outside of advertising got anything.

In response to this Matt Willifer the chair of the APG offered these reassurances which you can read here.

Well we still have to wait to see who the winners are and to hear what it was that made them winners. But you can see the shortlist on the APG site now. And it makes discouraging reading. Of the 25 shortlisted papers only one is from an agency outside of advertising: Tribal DDB a previous winner. So out of 150 entries whittled down to 1 in 6, ad agencies once again have taken the lot.  Now it may be that many of these campaigns demonstrate through the line thinking. But it is time to ask some harder questions.  The number of agencies employing planners in the UK runs to hundreds. In every kind of discipline. Is it really the case that all of the the best planning is being produced by planners in the top 30 advertising agencies? If that is the case then what on earth are all the other planners doing? And why is it that advertising is losing share to other communication channels?

What we seem to have here is rather similar to Formula 1. Which doesn't showcase the best drivers but those who given a seat with a particular team with the budget and the time can drive a winning race on the day. The time has come to ask whether we need to develop a different awards scheme which is more representative of the planning which is going on in this country and not just in a handful of advertising agencies. An award scheme which incentivise all the planners and not just those in the top ad agencies. I promoted the APG this year in good faith hoping against hope that if you put in a case study you might have a fair chance of ending up on the rostrum. Well if you don't work in a top 30 ad agency then you're either not good enough. Or the APG awards are measuring the wrong thing.

Moltmann on Hermeneutics (and the interpretation of advertising)

Had a real treat today as I was a guest at Ridley Hall where Jurgen Moltmann was giving the annual  Moule lecture. Moltmann is in his 80s but would make the top 10 Christian theologians of the 20th century with 3 classic texts under his belt Theology of Hope, The Crucified God  and The Church in the power of the Spirit. This afternoon he had chosen to speak on hermeneutics - which is the study of interpretation theory. Interesting because he's a systematic theologian rather than an expert in Biblical studies.

This is a blog about advertising which wanders into all sorts of corners but rather than give you a pure blast of undiluted hermeneutic theory let me attempt some translation.  The reason why we need hermeneutics is that an awful lot of communication doesn't go to the people it was originally aimed at. And while it is theoretically possible that a communication can be so appalling that the original audience don't get it - usually that kind of messaging disappears very quickly - why should anybody pay attention. Which brings us to audiences living at a different time - for Biblical hermeneutics, and audiences which are tangential to the core audience. This kind of spillage happens a lot. And there's no guarantee that the message travels. It is quite important that it does particularly because of the way that advertising by being public legitimises the message because it is 'out there'.  The point Moltmann was making was that the 20th century obsession with overlaying different cultural frames of reference to analyse messaging are in severe danger of misrepresenting it because they don't behave as an audience - they don't listen to the message as if it was spoken to them.  For proper interpretation the analyst has to make themselves the audience. Step into the auditorium and not try to find a vantage point above from which to critique.

Communications planning I believe does this not by some peculiar interpretation on the consumer's behalf or because the research 'says so' but because they put themselves in the frame as an audience looking for connection points. And judge the work on its ability to connect, engage, break through the noise.  Moltmann's conclusion was that the resurrection of Christ is the hermeneutical bridge which links a life lived 2000 year old with the present across time and across cultures.This is untranslateable! But the point - that the audience is always the point where communication works. And you can't do that sideways. You have to get into the frame yourself.

APG response for APG submissions from non advertising solutions

Interesting questions asked by people who don't work in "traditional creative advertising agencies" .....

..... and some answers from Matt Willifer, APG Chair.

Do the Awards reward non-advertising solutions?

We actively encourage papers concerning solutions that are non-traditional, and last time we saw some fantastic examples. Tate Britain won for an idea which was about the theming of tours (so more NPD than communications). Radio 1 won a special prize for a digital tool called Musicubes. Orange won for creating a piece of content with Frank Lampard that could be downloaded to your phone. 

Does my paper have to be for a big, well known campaign?

Not at all. Last time, although Sainsbury’s won the Grand Prix, there were awards for niche campaigns: Gold for Tate Modern and Silver for the Learning Channel. It is not to do with the size of the brand, but to do with the quality of the thinking.

What if all the thinking did not originate in my agency?

Sometimes an agency inherits an idea from another agency, and needs to fit their solution around it. However, it might still be that your have made a valuable strategic contribution. It might be, for example, that you do not take credit for the macro strategy, but your contribution turned on a fascinating channel insight. Or, it might be that you team up with the other agency to create a paper that combines both of your contributions. We would really encourage partnerships, especially given the way most agencies work is increasingly collaborative. Last time, for example, Lucozade Hydroactive was written by both M&C Saatchi and Fast Track. We would love to see more of these in the future.

Matt Willifer
APG Chair
matt.willifer@apg.org.uk 

....click here to go to main 2009 Awards

here's the clickthrough to my earlier blog posting on the topic

Last chance saloon - the APG awards

I've had a request from the APG - they're looking for more papers from sources other than classic advertising agencies. I took a deep breath and began to explain why this is more than a straightforward sell.

When I was a shorlisting judge for the APG awards back in 1997, and I was the planning director of an integrated agency,  there were quite a few papers at the time from direct marketing agencies. Nobody made it. The same thing happened again 2 years later. If we look at the score board for the last 4 awards here's the number of non ad agencies who got anything: 

2007 Weapon 7 and Agency Republic got a bronze
2005 Naked got a silver working with M&C Saatchi
2003 DDB Tribal got a bronze
2001 Mediavest got a bronze working with TBWA

All of this is very comforting to the ad agencies because it confirms their huge suspicion that the only planning of any consequence happens in 'creative' agencies. Mediocre or shoddy thinking is being done elsewhere. Indeed Richard Huntingdon's introduction to the 2005 awards was pretty much along the lines of "Advertising plannings coming home".  But I'm afraid its not quite so simple.

When ad agencies take the APG awards seriously there is usually an internal review even pitch as to which papers should be submitted. The shortlist of papers at submission and final presentation stage will run the gauntlet of subediting and coaching all the way from departmental head all the way up to the agency chairman. And the writing process (though nothing like as rigorous as for IPA effectiveness submissions) can take up to 8 weeks. Anyone who has worked in any other kind of agency than an agency environment could not even begin to imagine spending that amount of time writing an awards submission. DMA and ISP awards typically take a couple of hours to write. There's a reason for this. And that is that most agencies bill their planners out by the hour. And there is simply no time available for the writing and testing of papers about strategy. So it starts to look as if the APG awards are measuring the ability of agencies whose planners are given the time to write papers. Most planners aren't.

We move onto development times. Which because of the very different business models of different types of agencies are radically different. Time to develop that killer creative brief.. in an ad agency can be up to 2 weeks. In many direct and digital agencies it can take as little as a couple of hours. Because the business model allows no more time. Not a lot to write about in your APG paper huh? Hunting for that wonderful breakthrough.

Now lets consider research and the proportion of campaigns which involved some form of research to diagnose the core strategic issue or at the very least validate the brilliant leap forward of the creative idea. Again the advertising agencies have it, and other kinds of agencies much less so.

But I'm still not done. I've had feedback from judges that great papers from great papers were given short shrift because the judging panel as a whole didn't actually understand how good these papers were and the communications issues they had solved. A consistent problem has been how advertising strategists consistenltly overestimate their ability to shape and critique communication problems for which advertising isn't the best solution. I know this first hand. It took several years for me to unlearn what wasn't helpful as an advertising planner and to reinvent myself in direct, then sales promotions then integration. There is a real danger that with the best will in the world that all submissions are compared as different variants of advertising using multiple channels based on a single creative idea.

Where am I going with this? If you work in an agency which is not an advertising agency or one which is not in the top 30 then I strongly recommend that you put in a submission this year. Because arguably you have never had as good a chance of winning as you do now. Clearly they haven't got enough entries. I don't expect you to be naive about your chances. If your agency isn't regularly in Campaign. If the creative work is the least bit iffy however good the strategy. If the campaign is for an obscure area so hasn't had much coverage in the advertising press, then I feel you are perfectly entitled to haul Matt Willifer the chair of the APG over the coals before writing your submission and ask him if there is really any point at all in writing a paper.

But it matters because this really is last chance saloon. It takes hours and days to write a good paper. If the APG can't find any good strategic thinking outside of the usual suspects then if we don't get some unusual winners this time then it really is time for a lot of people to up sticks and launch a communication planning award which has a broader remit and a judging panel to match.  It matters because the share of communications taken by advertising is in relentless decline along with the gross margins. So if non traditional agencies can't win then we may as well just draw the line around the APG awards and call them the advertising awards - no shame in that. Only in a few more years the ad planners won't have the time to write strategy papers either. Jon Steel has already expressed his despair that ad planners are working on up to 10 accounts apiece and can't do a decent job if they work on more than 3. If the APG doesn't find a way to break out of this vicious circle then it will be a dwindling group of agencies waving their awards talking to themselves at just the point where globally planning much of it not in traditional advertising is rolling out across the world. Let's stop that happening.

The deadline is June 1st. Here's the info about the awards. Aim your tough questions at these guys

Matt Willifer, APG Chair
matt.willifer@apg.org.uk
Guy Murphy, Chair of Judges, APG Awards 2009
guy.murphy@apg.org.uk

and get writing     

Books from the Copy Workshop plus Liquid Gold from the APG

I just collected a parcel of books from the Copy Workshop. A Chicago based publishing house which specialises in books about advertising and marketing. In 2008 they produced Readings in Account Planning edited by Hart Weichselbaum - and I was delighted that they used one of my articles in it - the only time I imagine that I shall ever find myself between the (book) covers alongside the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Scott Bedbury.

Well they've sent me a couple of new titles to read and review. Gossage about the life and work of Howard Gossage. And a huge volume Advertising and the Business of brands hot off the press. 21st century ed. copyright 2009   Which is like an Almanac of advertising thinking - I'm not quite sure how to read the latter one actually. But will and bring you a review.

Check out www.adbuzz.com for more details.

At present I am working my way a couple of casestudies a day through  the APG gold standard all the gold APG awards. A cracking read because the casestudies have been precised. I am even thinking of trying to do a kind of revision summary on the back of a postcard which I can scan and post here. Watch this space.