NORTHERN PLANNER

The interwebs, it could be argued, are like a big purgatory.

An 'in between' worlds for thousand upon thousands of interactive this and social media stuff, that no one ever bothered with.

Digital tumbleweeds doomed to spend eternity in limbo where no one can be fagged to do interact with them, yet no one can be bothered to put them out of their misery. 

But it's not just digital. There are thousands of integrated campaigns out there that were crushed underfoot by tracking studies, much-too-late rushes of common sense and, more importantly, no shifts in sales or behaviour.

Spoof campaigns that folks didn't really were spoofs. 'Cultural strategies' that never inspected the culture properly and a general shower of work that just didn't connect. 

All these doomed souls, that somehow got through approval processes and even pre-testing. Made and signed off by perfectly normal human beings that forgot to ask themselves the simplest of questions. "Would I..?"

Would I take this campaign seriously?

Would I really give up enough attention to understand this spoof was ironic?

Would I really upload a video of myself?

Would I really share that with my peers?

Would I take a fizzy drink seriously as route to eternal happiness?

For some reason, when most of us walk though the doors of out places of work, we forget how much we hated our commute, how much we don't pay attention to marketing, how important our time, family and friends are, how much we hate Truview ads and re-targeting. 

We think people will do the strangest things, stuff we never do ourselves.

Because we fall for the myth that people care about brands. 

We believe the trend guys telling us that people want to co-create with brands. 

We believe that young people want brands to be authentic, when really, as ever, they just notice the ones that are cool. Look at the queues in Primark. Does any of this lot care about authentic Primark is? Nope,just that they can get high fashion for buttons. 

We believe the lies of segmentation studies that artificially make people who are very similar very different. 

We believe it's all about earned media and that no one cares about telly anymore. Even though telly is more efficient that ever.

Layers of self-delusion, or even worse, disrespect to people out there. 

Resulting in a shadow world of spectres unable to find peace. 

The ghosts of our hubris.

Who's fate could have been avoided, if we could all just say, "What would I really think/feel/do?"

The most important question in strategy and idea development. 

"Would you?". 

Really, would you?