furtherandfaster

The Future of Planning Admap Prize: 2 Messaging

 

 

In the second of the blog posts based on my Admap article back in 2008 I want to focus on messaging.  Planners spend a lot of their time polishing propositions – and despite the changes in our understanding of how communication works I doubt this is likely to change. Getting the core message right is critical. And this has led to more specialisation in recent years. Its easy to say yes to widening the remit of communications and treating advertising as a cipher for every other kind of communications. But that leads to lowest common denominator. Advertising thinking is brilliant for producing advertising but less reliable for producing anything else. In fact it can be misleading to apply advertising thinking to other areas. Which is why you now have different kinds of planners working in different areas. And advertising planning remains an honourable and highly skilled specialism. I would argue that integrated comms planning is a separate and distinct one also.

 

 

Its not just about getting the message right it is about sequencing the messages. Designing a message is rather like designing a firework. Sequencing is part of the design. If the bits come out in the wrong order then you will confuse recipients. Part of the development process is checking that the message sequences organically because it not only makes the message easier to understand but is easier to remember. Which is why development research is still useful after decades of regular use.  At its lowest common denominator advertising development is exposing a rough idea to a roomful of strangers fresh who have to make sense of it. John Webster of BMP used to do this with the cleaning ladies at 7am as a creative director who couldn’t get an objective response out of his own teams. But effective creative development research can achieve more than lowest common denominator if the sample is well recruited.  And if the hothousing implicit in getting amateurs to talk about advertising is properly taken account of (and tuned down).

 

At Spring Research we have  developed a non-verbal technique for evaluating advertising ideas using emoticons to collect emotional response.  This reflects the shift away from testing rational response to messaging. To brand affinity and liking as facets which are associated with better storage in short term memory – and which don’t require respondents to be immersed in MRI machines. Technologists need to be actively discouraged sometimes. You don’t need neuroscience with all the trimmings to check emotional response.

Engagement is the word that refuses to go away. Part of me is very cynical that engagement is being used as a synonym for entertaining.  And ad that engages people is one they like watching.  Which doesn’t solve the problem of how to make sure that your rough advertising idea is going to be engaging.  Engagement covers the two ideas of grabbing attention and emotional involvement.  And we need to check for both. Body language still being a perfectly acceptable way of testing attention by the way.

We still work with the understanding that a message you pay attention to is more impactful than one that isn’t. The attention wars of the last decade have made massive changes to the landscape. The media people are stil (some of them) talking about impressions but not many of them.  We have retreated from the idea that if we hit people over the head with lots of messages that they are more likely to remember it.  The shift of the debate towards emotion has come from the idea that once we have seen a communication then subsequent messages may not be actively noticed but can be shown to cumulatively build up in the system.  Making a strong impression is now about embedded and recovering the message and not about carpet bombing. 

 

We started along this route when it took so many exposures to cover the majority of the TV audience that we had to look for another justification.   We now have another reason which is that of divided attention. At the Google campus in San Francisco last November  I heard a statistic quoted that 40% of tablet use is while watching TV. This rises about 50% if the user is under 25. And its not just tablets but PCs and smartphones.  In truth most of the advertising to which we are exposed does not attract our attention. Because  we are concentrating on more than one screen, or multitasking. The good news is that it still works.  Bad news for media auditors but good news for the industry.  Hard to decide which channel is creating the impression but what is important is understanding how the totality of the message is being received.

Years ago I had the thankless task of justifying using different media channels in combination to allocate budgets. Each combination of channels works in a different way -  that’s one reason we rely on media specialists who really understand how each channel works.  I’m uncomfortable with big bang media thinking which assume media neutrality and want to choose the most cost effective blend of channels. Each medium is part of the message – so we continue to need to think about how channels contribute uniquely

 

I need to bring this rather rambling account of messaging to a conclusion. To leave you with the final observation that messaging takes its elements from culture.  Cultural ideas.  Actually the number and variety of messages is finite. What makes messaging interesting is the way we construct the story or problem to which the message is the conclusion. If you want to make a creative brief interesting you don’t do it with the proposition but with the setup. Ask a more interesting question.  

Oh and one more thing about messaging.  Advertising is more effective delivering one message at a time. But other comms disciplines such as PR favour the seeding of lots of different complementary messages.  And some messaging via sponsorship or transmedia can be so deeply buried as to be little more than an emotional association. Sorry this has been such a ramble but I didn’t have time for a short post. I could write a book about this!  

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     

Act of creation: Fyfe Dangerfield & Natalie Clein on Front Row

Here's the link to the Tuesday Front Row iplayer. This got me grinning from ear to ear driving round the M25 at 7.30 last night (no mean feat). It was supposed to be a joint interview with Fyfe Dangerfield of the Guillemots who had been commissioned to write a 5 minute solo piece by the cellist Natalie Clein. Due to be performed for the first time at the Bridgewater Hall Manchester on Thursday 30th. And Natalie Clein.

Only it turned out that Fyfe hasn't heard the whole thing played yet. And they were due to meet today (Wednesday) to do the final rehearsal.

Egged on by John Wilson Natalie Clein cello in hand leaped straight into some of the details of the piece. So what we get is a live exploration of an unpremiered work by performer and composer. Quite extraordinary. It is as if briefly they forgot we were listening. This sort of thing only works on radio. On TV it would look contrived. And it shows vividly how performers stretch the composer by showing techniques of which they are unaware. And how a composer can direct a performer in subtleties which the score cannot portray. One direction was to play like a flopping Egyptian mummy. If you want to hear creativity at work wrap your ears round this while it is still streaming.  Oh and check out the Guillemots whil you are at it. Little bear is my favourite so far.

Oh and if you're in Manchester you could always go along tomorrow night and hear the whole thing!

How far can co-creation go? Respondent generated advertising

 This is a blog entry to summarise the thinking behind the workshop I ran at the Market Research Society 2009 conference with Elena Ionita Head of Planning at Leo Burnett in Bucharest. I have uploaded at the end of this posting the handout we provided then from the study which they carried out which you can read more about on Leo She choose whether you want to read about it in Romanian or English.

But lets pull out some of the big issues here. I love the way in which a new idea gains traction and massively evolves as you work with it. Its one reason why I can't stand to sit in meetings where people assert that their organisation gets it right first time. Its nonsense, the first iteration is normally a faint echo of where an idea goes as it develops. So the rule has to be to iterate fast to get rid of the duff versions and to find out what is useful. And this idea has moved a long way now.

Version no. 1 was something I peddled round London in 2004 I think it was. It was basically the idea of getting respondents to write ads to work out the advertising norms of the category. I thought it was a pitch winner because it gave you the norms of the category at low cost. It forced the creatives to do something better than respondents had. And by showing the client the language of the category as cliche it potentially showed up competitor agencies by showing their ideas to be passe and derivative.  No ad agency in London I spoke to at the time would touch the idea - but agencies are of course very conservative places.

Leo Burnetts took me up on the idea in 2006 when I ran a training day on among other things advertising research on my first visit to Romania - I have returned many times since to train agencies there. The way they approached the study was to interview young women in friendship pairs, ask them to write ads across 5 market categories.  What emerged was a lexicon for the advertising conventions in each category.  There was an order effect where the more cliched ideas emerged first and the wilder ones were usually rejected by those thinking them up as to experimental ( I will come back to these in a minute). When asked to precis their ideas respondents would throw out extraneous details and deliver core cliches.

Elena's take on this is very interesting. Romania has big issues with qualitative pretesting. What the research exercise showed is that when respondents 'improve' ads they are likely to make suggestions that match what they already know about the advertising language of the category. In other words they add cliches. So it has raised major questions the validity of qualitative pretesting.

Secondly it has started a debate about what clients really want. By mapping the cliches we find the norms of the category. Now many clients may just want the cliches. But instead of tango lasting weeks as all the various parties claim they are trying to find a new creative treatment only to sell in a vignette which has been seen many times before, now the issue about cliches is firmly on the table If that is what the client wants and believes to be effective then here's a much quicker cheaper way to draw out what respondents identify as advertising norms.

Thirdly it is about raising creative standards. the first round of creative ideas often takes a a couple of weeks to work through and most of it doesn't survive. Wouldn't it raise creative standards and reduce costs to build category maps. Semioticians of course can do this but to a rather different price tag. So here's a way to agree the norms before we set out to break the rules or to somehow rework cliches to make them seem fresh.

 My last take on this is about co-creation. One of the best things about online research is the way in which we have begun to recognise that materials generated by and introduced by respondents are much more interesting and generative than those usually introduced by the agency or research company. Because they come from the respondents' own world.  What we take into groups isn't of course advertising but advertising ideas. And there's a certain irony in introducing our own material before we have understood what is already in respondents experience.

 The really interesting aspect for me is what started to come out of the shadows and which needs further investigation.  The cult of the creative says that creatives are uniquely placed to tap the zeitgeist and to come up with original ideas which make connections with the population. That axiom has never yet been proven. How exactly is a creative team better qualified than the general public to have original ideas?  Creatives fulfil an essential craft function which guilds of craftspeople have always fulfilled.  Namely to prevent the overt theft of ideas from others in the guild. And to ensure that work is executed capably and artistically. 

If it turns out that creative ideas can be generated from just about anywhere the creative role is humbled but not I believe diminished. Because the craft skills are as important as ever. Ordinary people don't have the skills to write novels and make films. Much of what they produce is derivative. But the internet has shown that originality and brilliance are indeed widespread. As branded content becomes more and more important I believe that the professionals will direct the largest and most complex pieces. But as brands surround themselves - it is going to be hard to claim that only professional creatives should be allowed to provide this kind of material. Citizen journalism is here to stay. Citizen branded content is an intriguing concept. Over 10 years ago I used to surf websites where Honda drivers uploaded audio recordings of the accelerating engines of their souped up Civics - and wonder where it would all lead. I believe I have a clearer view now.

Here's the handout from the MRS conference workshop:Download Handout for Advertising Cliches workshop