furtherandfaster

Saturday IAA Advertising school Next Level Day 2

Day 2 of the IAA training – today we look at new marketing (thank you John Grant) the 3 Ps other than promotion then promotion during the afternoon. The students really seem to be getting into it. The highlight of the day seems to me when I cover off interactivity and give them 10 minutes to create a new cocktail serving/drinking ritual. I had plans to have dinner with a friend but technology defeated us. For some reason my mobile doesn’t do SMS at present. Her blackberry went down which knocked out audio and email and by the time communications were restored it was too late to meet, So I consoled myself by sampling another famous name from the Romanian winelist.

Friday IAA Advertising School the Next Level day 1

Friday morning and the start of the IAA advertising school – this is for young professionals from agencies and clientside. I got to the training room at 8.30 and experienced Romanian time. There were supposed to be 16 students but it took until 10 am until we had enough students to start the training which for day 1 is about 10 types of audience discontinuitiesand how to build strategies to exploit these.  Mine is the only module of the course which doeesn’t carry an exam and I had been concerned that this was likely to affect attendance, By mid morning the course organisers were in full flow communicating with employers and issuing dire threats if students didn’t attend so from that point I mostly had a full house.  It is a pleasure training in Romania – these students are the brightest and the best but it is a paradox – there is so much creative thinking but at the same time clients are very conservative and often imitate one another so there is a lot of frustration.

In the afternoon I got to do my showpiece for the second time. Costin had sourced me two bags of rubbish from 2 very different households. Which I emptied on the floor of the training room to get the students to work out the size, composition and demographic make up of each household. I do it largely for shock value because of the assumption that you can’t do this sort of thing or that you won’t learn anything from it. Not true on either count. This time one of the households was a 75 year old woman living alone. The students thought she was 45. Partly I supposed because they have never had to market to anyone older than 45 so it is largely an alien concept. Once again it was a lot of fun and really helped to energise the afternoon when often the energy levels start to drop.

Afterwards I dropped into the white church round the corner from the IAA for a few moments to catch part of the evening service – it is Good Friday after all in the UK – Catolica Easter as they call it here – Orthodox Easter is at the end of April. I didn’t realise until too late that I would be working right through Easter weekend and the family holiday. I appreciated the otherness of a service I couldn’t make head or tail of – the constant signing of the cross made by the congregation and the utterly gorgeous tenor of the priest who was the cantor. People were holding onto the robes of the priest and placing them over their heads. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. Sometimes worship is best without words and without understanding. 

Not a lot to report about Friday night except that I opted to wander round the centre of Bucharest – I am learning my way around now. The old town hasn’t changed much at all. I heard they were renovating it and taking it upscale. It turns out that as soon as they started to dig they found archaeological remains (surprise – not) so everything has been put on hold. Nothing in Romania happens fast. The Amsterdam café where I have had several fun evenings with the planners is now an antique shop. The owner of the bar left to make some money working behind a bar in London –and Bucharest is the poorer for it.  I had dinner back in the hotel and happened upon a fantastic Romanian wine from Delea Mare by the Carpathian mountains, a soft fruity red easily as good as the best I have tasted from Chile or Argentina – it turns out there are plenty more of undermarketed wines in this part of the world. 

European pocketbook

I've been leaning heavily on the WARC pocketbook for my preparations for the IAA School Friday and Saturday. It is invaluable because it allows such swift comparisons between European countries. It was evident that media is concentrating on TV - now nearly 90% of the spend is on TV - which cannot be healthy for advertising or for the development of the economy. EVen more interesting was looking at these figures on European league tables where Romania is the 20th biggest economy but the 8th by advertising spend. But based on ad spend per GDP per capita Romania leads Europe. I tentatively mentioned this being all too aware that my hosts were the official advertising body for Romania who might take exception so some of the conclusions I might draw from the data. I was interviewed for the IAA website and if your Romanian is better than mine you can read it here. 

Musical Gestalt theory

I've been a subscriber and avid reader of Computer Music since their first issue. And its just astounding how computer based music has progressed since the mag came out in the late 90s. But as well as all the techy reviews - they also like you to get more experimental.

So Rachmiel - who's their most experimental columnist did an article in the June issue 113 about the principles of musical gestalt (with music samples to demonstrate) in the June issue. It was so interesting - as I read it travelling up to London today on the train I though I'd share them:

1. Proximity. We tend to instinctively group elements the closer they are to each other. Its a classic way to create meaning.

2. Similarity - we treat objects of similar size colour, shape and texture as part of the same gestalt 

3. Closure - we tend to enclose spaces by completing contours and ignoring gaps.

4. Figure and ground - we divide the visual field into figure and ground - and can't normally see both at once - perception is selective.

5. Symmetry -  We perceive complex images as wholes because of their combined symetrical forms rather than their individual asymetric parts.

6. Pragnanz  - the most mysterious. Perception is holistic so given inputs of complexity and randomness we instinctively simplify, regulate, balance and impose perceptual order.

I've come across these before in my reading around the area of design. What intrigues me is how gestalt can be applied to strategy and the orchestration of ideas. Because strategizing is usually verbal the connections made are verbal and logical. When the creative outputs are closer to gestalt. Gestalt gives us some pointers for how to go about non verbal strategizing - how humans instinctively create associations and how using persuasion we can inform the creation of perception.  Advertising works this way rather than logically anyway. But it seems bizarre that we can't use these foundational principles to sort the messaging before the creative brethren get to turn it into a creative idea.

Off the scale??

I was doing a Tickle questionnaire today - Tickle is a website which engages people by seting lots of questionnaires an awful lot of which lead to a pretty crass event to join an internet dating service.  This questionnaire was supposed to be about Gardiner's 7 intelligences.  What amused me was that my social intellegence quotient was off the scale. It had to be. What they told me in the report was that I had scored better than 100% of people who had taken the test. Which is mathematically impossible. Surely I was one of the 100%?? Try it yourself.

bombs and the internet

This morning the papers and radio were all a flutter about the number of websites where you can find plans so you can build your own bomb.  A couple of polticians promised they would put a stop to this for good.  Which seemed very ridiculous.  I've got a better idea. Flood the internet with lots of designs for bombs - but all fake or deeply flawed.  A terrorist is hardly going to go to the trouble to build a bomb if he doesn't know if its going to work or not.  There's a serious point to this. We're not honest enough about the amount of spam which floats around the category - marketing junk, me too claims and the rest. It would apppear that a lot of marketing cretes spam. Presumably this is OK otherwise we wouldn't do it - no one would buy. because they couldn't work out what was true and what wasn't. There has to be a optimum level of spam which favours one brand rather than another. Some brands must want spam free categories. Others must revel in them. The trick for each brand is figuring out how much noise you ideally want. It isn't just about signal.