NORTHERN PLANNER

At eighteen, we wear what everyone else wears. Most of us are frightened of individuality at that age, not least when we're far away from home and trying to fit in (students etc).

Therefore, most of teen culture since the 1950's has involved some sort of uniform that, in one contradictory swoop, enables them to gently rub against the generation that came before, flick the bird to the grown-ups and utterly conform with each other. Few have had the self confidence to be different and ignore what everybody thinks and wears. 

A few years ago, teenage girls mostly worse low rise jeans to expose the muffin topped belly.

Then it was skinny jeans forced into whatever size legs they had with smock tops.

From that basis of conformity, as we grow as people and construct our identity, begin to branch out.

Well, sort of anyway. These uniforms always reflect shifts in society, that's why I find it daft for sniffy intellectual types to dismiss fashion, it's a beacon of the times it lives in. In the 1950's it was the twinset, in the progressive 60's it was the miniskirt (but for much less of it than most assume).

Clothes in the 60's represented the emancipation of female bodies, largely tearing apart the soft femininity and elegance of Diors 'New Look'.

The liberation of shoes without massive heals literally as well as metaphorically took women to places they'd found hard to explore before.

In other words, clothes wear us as much as we wear them, which is why, it's so interesting to look at the way young people really dress now.

No longer is it one uniform. For a bit it was the uniform of the tribe, lots of different accepted ways of dressing to fit in, but contemporary youth fashion, and even  more the grown up version, is now porous, just as culture has become so.

If there is a uniform, it is incredibly subtle as they constantly mash it up and swap identity. The codes are so subtle that only the most attentive observers can understand it. It is still uniform, but, like the secret handshake, only those in the know get it.

Which means that if you're doing anything with 'yoof' as a marketing type, you either have to absolutely on the money if you try and mirror their lives back to them, or instead, both harder and easier, have a big, motivating, provocative vision for them to partipate in, that zones in on a searing cultural issue or need.

 

I often think the daftest thing you can possibly do is read the same stuff as everyone else. Contagious, Archive, Creative Review, the D&AD book – all it gives you is stuff to copy…and guess what everyone else is doing?

Self obsession is never an attractive trait, and ad/digital type people are one of the guiltiest tribes. Apart from the hideous, destructive qualities of pre-testing, it's the reason that so much creative work looks the same. The people that made it all read the same stuff.

New stuff that's useful comes from voraciously consuming lots of apparently useless stuff and making the connections – widening the bandwidth of your mental scrapbook as much as you can.

That's why I've re-subcribed to Stack. A different set of obscure magazines to read every month. Wierd, esoteric, not the usual. I found I was reading too much of the same old stuff. Time to go back on safari, which, with kids and stuff is harder than ever.

I need ready made serendipity.

Take this month and Wooden Toy magazine. I'm still not 100% what it's supposed to be about, roughly some intersection between design, art and obscure music, But the writing is great and the art direction is unlike anything I've seen from any creative department I've ever worked with (possibly a reflection on the creative departments I know).

Look at this, lines from songs illustrated. Beautiful. I don't how this will come in handy, but I'm sure it will someday.

There was one other thing on that IPA Modern Briefing that, talking about it with someone, made me go 'Are you sure?'. It was something Patricia Macdonald (from Glue )raised.

Before I start, let me state that she's obviously a lot cleverer, successful and talented than I could hope to be.

Let me also say that I enjoyed her advice to turn business problems into behavioural problems, something too many strategy types have forgotten, leading to 'making great work' as their only goal, rather than 'great work that solves business issues'.

BUT, I didn't agree with her use of data to support the assertion that 'participation is the currency of the modern campaign'. Specifically this data:

Yes, the 1:9:90 may not be correct for today's post-digital folk, yes, it may be well be a 'way of life' for more and more people, but that doesn't make it the natural heartland of brand communication.

Oh, and then there is this:

This really isn't evidence for participation, it's evidence that the large MAJORITY of people DON'T rely on friends for content. Isn't it?

Then there's this quote (backed up by proper quant analysis by the way) from the Future Foundation:

"It must be significant that 1 in 3 of us say that we now feel more influenced by experts than we once did. Meanwhile, an identical proportion will report that they feel less influenced by contacts on our social networks"

Again, only a third of people, but if she can quote that content chart, I can quote this!

Topline, the data isn't about participting with brands, it's more about people participating with each other. Just because that's what people are doing, it simply doesn't follow that brands can muscle in.

Getting traction in this kind of way is completely different to paid media, where most people implicitly accept the deal they make, accepting interruptive advertising in exchange for cheap or even free media.

Even then, it's wrong headed to assume that because TV watching is a way of life, TV advertising is the currency of the modern campaign either.

People ignore crap ads and do their best to avoid them.

Just like they flick past crap print ads, or ignore crap outdoor.

Just like no one will give up their valuable time to participate with anything a brand makes that isn't either widly entertaining, or wildly useful.

In fact, where there's so much stuff to play around with, to assume most people will play with brands without a very good reason is even more wrongheaded.

In a more crowded world with more to do, people want to think about brands LESS not more.

And, as has been said elsewhere, you have to assume that those who 'participate with brands' are likely to heavy buyers, who shouldn't really be the focus of budget in most cases.

So yes, most people might (MIGHT!) participate as a way of life, but they don't participate with BRANDS as a way of life and they never will.

 

(sorry about the visual pun)

So I went to the IPA Modern Briefing event yesterday and it was really good. It's true that planning often spends too much time talking to itself, but this felt different.Thankfully because the speakers didn't fall into that dreadful trap of fetishising the brief- you know, sad planning directors tinkering with the boxes on the hallowed briefing document because they don't do any real work anymore.

They didn't really talk about briefs.

They really talked about developing strategy for a world that has moved on. Some useful, instantly actionable pointers on getting good work out of an increasingly messy and process that includes more and more actors. You can read the presentations here.

Quotes of the day:

"Media is too important to be left to media agencies" -Jason Gonslaves

"Buying AKQA is an admission of defeat" Richard Huntington on WPP's latest purchase.

Some things that made me go , erm, really?………..

The bloke from Contagious going on about Kraft brand managers and agency types spending three months 'collaborating in a room'. Three months? What's the point of sharing this when the reality for most of us is getting quality stuff out faster and cheaper than ever before. Even the other speakers looked bemused.

Which brings me to Contagious itself. Don't read it, seriously.

Not only will they make you believe it's a perfect world where everyone is wildly innovative and everyone thinks in 'brand' rather than 'sales', everyone else is reading it. Fish where the others don't fish. Read weird stuff. Work hard, don't copy others.

That's what I liked about the tone of most of the day, it was a big admission that this job is hard, and harder than ever.

That said, it's really boring to talk about 'the age of this' and the 'age of that'. It's just as boring for this generation of strategy people talking about dealing with the 'how the world has changed', as if we're the first to deal with seismic shifts in our industry, as it is to listen to any young generation to think they've discovered 'rebellion'.

The end of the commission stucture

The rise of TV

Clients starting to use research

There was no point where this industry dealt with any sort of status quo for long, the big networks just pretended we did.

And still do.

I remember being taught on an APG creative brief course how 'propositions' has developed from 'single minded propositions' to 'emotional propositions' to 'task based propositions'. That was ten years ago. The only thing you can sure of in this business is change.

Finally, many speakers talked of a 'traditional process' where you get the client brief, do some planning, get creatives involved, get the work approved then make it. I've never experienced this really and, to quote John Hegarty from over ten years ago, "Many conversations, not just one brief".

The process, for great work anyway, has always been messy, collaborative and not completely linear. It's just that agencies like to pretend to clients that we're really professional and predictable.

We, of course, are not.

I think the main difference the day highlighted was that we're all finally admitting this and, more importantly, more clients are demanding that different practitioners actually work together towards one goal, and create stuff people actually notice and interact with, because they've run out excuses too.

 

 

 

With a two year old, it's inevitable I get my fair share of kids telly.

Most of it manages that genius balance of being mostly aimed at kids, but with enough subtle adult themes to get parents watching with their offspring.

Which means the usual, tired old archetype of Dad as the feckless idiot who needs resourceful Mum and kids to get him out the scrapes he continually blunders into.

There's King Thistle.

 

There's Daddy Pig

 

Just like there's Mr Incredible

 

You see this tired old archetype in hundreds of ads and stuff. Without wanting to bang on about male anxiety again, if ever there was an opportunity to creare a new, hero Dad type, it is now.

 

There are two kinds of shopping.

Hunting.

Gathering.

 

Hunting is the task based version when you know exactly what you want and desire to get it over with as soon as possible.

It's the supermarket shop, it's the traditional man looking to buy a shirt. But it's also the woman looking for the quintessential black dress (and rarely finding it), it's the guy looking the perfect suit for the first job.So it can be utterly practical or bursting with drama – the trepidation of not finding what you want, the joy of the find and the fleeting contentment of owning it and, in the case of clothes, wearing it.

Then there is gathering. 

The simple joy of prowling the shops, the shelves (real and virtual) simply to have a look at what is out there and be joyfully surprised – that intense gladness of discovery. The frisson of indulgence and naughtiness when you find something you don't need but now want more than life itself. Especially clothes of course. Here, it's as much about identity construction as anything, heightened by our modern transformation culture. The possibility of discovering a new version of yourself to try on and keep, or discard. It's free, you don't have to buy anything, the object, it's IDEA, what it might say, what part of yourself it might suddenly awake is enough.

Increasingly for young men and well as women.

That's in direct contrast to hunting, where you already know what side of yourself you want to project. It might have inspired by all sorts of stuff, but the idea is there. That little black dress might be fulfulling the wish to become sophisticated, sexy and cosmopolitan, perhaps inspired by a film, an image or simply an occasion where you know how you want to come across. Equally, it could be the need to be seen as a 'creative' type – the jeans, ironic t-shirt and urban hippie look of the modern agency, or digital type.

Only the mentally disturbed don't look like they care about what they wear on purpose. Every decision about what we wear is a decision to show the world the person we want them to see, on some level.

Unlike the relief and satisfaction of hunting, gathering relieves our need for novelty and surprise, the need for some sort of chance that we could be more than we thought we could be, that life isn't fixed. That everything is up for grabs. It's safe adventure if you like.

It doesn't matter what shopping experience it is you are designing, it is either about finding something you want quickly – sometimes high drama, sometimes not- or wanting to research the world and be inspired. It's amazing how many retailers- on and offline – seem to either don't know this, or just ignore it.

It's quite fashionable at the moment to dismiss research as worthless, limiting or the enemy of creativity.

Despite a sneaky suspicion that much of this comes from those who want to avoid doing the kind of hard work that creates amazing work that has an effect, rather than just amazing work, one can't help but agree.

Most research is crap. But's that's not the fault of 'research' the problem should be placed firmly on the slim shoulders of poor researchers and the ones who commision them.

The most incredible, game changing ideas – in communications ideas or even better, actual product and market innovation, have mostly come from a deep and intelligent understanding of people and what they were doing.

Not from asking people directly what they wanted, or what they thought of a new idea- it came from understanding situations.

Apple didn't ask people if they wanted an Ipod, but Steve Jobs understood that people still wanted 'mobile' music but found it incredbly difficult to liberate the hundreds or thousands of songs from their CD's and stuff.

In that famous John Steele, Porsche case study, no one TOLD him what was stopping people buying Porsche's- being thought of as a rich douchebag. It came from the disconnect connecting between the insight that people thought of Porsche drivers as douchebags and the fact that even rejectors in test drives couldn't stop talking about the  thrilling drive, rather than the 'image'. Hence repositioning Porsche drivers as driving enthusiasts. 

The same man, found that you could increase sales of milk, not by promoting 'milk', but by promoting the situations milk was essential for – with cookies, cereal etc. And 'Got Milk' was brought into the world.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that good research is about uncovering situations – great problems, gaps, issues and tensions in real lives, not artificial segmentations. That can be with data, qual research or, even better, going out and talking to people in real life situations. That's not hard, it's just hard work.

Then it's the leap of creativity or imagination to fill that gap. To change the situation.

Here's a mundane but very telling example. In EVERY test of popcors eaters in cinemas, people with large buckets ate 53% more than those with medium ones.

Not everyone finished the buckets by the way, so it's not that the people with medium buckets ran out, it's just that if you give people a larger portion, they'll eat more.

So if you want to reduce obesity, it's better to directly alter the situation rather than mess around with 'perceptions' of fat, greed and health, just reduce portion size.

Just like the wierd example in bars, that people with different drinks, say a half pint and pint, finish their drinks as the same time. The perception of how much we have to consume directly affects how MUCH we consume, how fast we consume and how we feel about it.

If the popcorn eaters has been 'asked' why they ate what thety ate, they would have said stuff like, "I know when I feel full". When of course, none of us really do (especially when the sensation of feeling full lags about 20 minutes behind actual consumptionm which is why slower eaters tend to be less obese than guzzlers).

So yes, good research doesn't hinder ideas that change the future, if done right, it unleashes them. By 'done right' I mean uncovering a situation you can change brilliantly. Not by listening to what people say they want, or what they claim they'll do, because the best ideas also show that none of us really know.