There were some excellent builds on the ideas, which I will write about shortly.

Thanks to everyone who added ideas in the ‘unconference’ discussion and pub afterwards. So many good ideas. So much to explore!

An Emerging Agency OS

What’s broke?

-Our focus:

Outcomes have become divorced from outputs

Clients seek a profitable growth outcome, agencies seek rewards from a famous output

Clients like increased profit, agencies like making things

Consequently, clients don’t always value the same things as agencies do

Replacing a client with a new one easily costs £100k or more. Our failure to align is eating into our profit and morale.

-Our business model:

Agencies have two masters but only get paid by one.

Agencies are addicted to short term client cash whereas consumers offer an additional revenue stream.

Spend will slowly flow away from agencies to cheaper crowd and outsourced services. All areas will be affected, from strategy modeling, to production, to optimisation to ideas.

As marketing, products, services and media merge, agencies, with new partners, will be able to service consumers as well as clients.

What’s the need?

Client needs are simple:  Clients need Ideas, Innovation and (real time) Intelligence to power sales.

Agency needs are to attract best talent and to increase revenue to pay for that talent and any (currently lacking) R&D

-Talent: Agencies are full of inventive and productive people but servicing clients full-time undermines motivation. If they are to be kept in agencies, agencies will need to find better ways to fulfil them.

-Revenue: Agencies have loads of ideas but make too few. We can divorce ourselves of client only revenue by exploiting our existing ideas and engaging new partners to fund and develop our ideas to successful launch and customer revenue.

What are the trends?

Two agency types are emerging – those that value outcomes, and those that value outputs:

1) Outcomes agencies will worship effectiveness and will be built around the client’s business. They will become convergence consultants to deliver Ideas, Innovation and Intelligence (from any source) to grow client profit over time.

2) Output agencies will continue to generate big ideas, they will create fame for clients but will also develop new revenue streams for those ideas from direct to consumer products and services, thereby beating their addiction to short term client cash

All agencies need an AgencyOS – a data driven platform and structural/organising principle to deliver real time insight, development and optimisation.

The most successful agencies will deliver both ideas and effectiveness. But those will be rare as the increase of channels and approaches continues.

Implications

1. the agencies closest to the data will lead their agency partners and will gain new business The most successful agencies will combine both talents in equal measure.

2. in client organisations, the older generations will cede control to younger managers investing ahead of the curve for the real time and digital future that’s unfolding. This will come too slowly for some. Those that don’t answer customer’s immediate needs will quickly lose customers.

thanks to net_efekt/flickr

As part of the google firestarters event, brilliantly hosted by Neil Perkin, I debated the failure of research companies in helping clients and agencies with the ‘how’: the act of making and perfecting ideas in market, with communities and within organisations.

Since that event Cog and Face Group have discussed their services, as well as Brainjuicer.

This is great. Well done those pioneering companies. Every one should hire them!

But the problem with the ‘how’ remains a big one for us on a number of fronts, not just insight and testing. And it’s getting bigger by the day.

Once agencies relied on the power of the idea and communal faith (with a bit of testing) it would work now we must become engineers of its success.

What do I mean? Well, here’s the logic flow:

Because business never stops, neither should our marketing. PR, e-commerce and CRM have always known this. The ad world are catching up.

Advertising in the future will be much more like PR, observed former Publicis COO Richard Pindner for the ever thought-provoking Ignition group

“We’ll be run more like a daily TV show or an interactive newspaper than an advertising factory.”  As in political campaigns, agencies today need to operate as a nerve center.  Most PR firms are already built on this model; ad agencies must learn to do the same”

So if our marketing is to be always on, and if ‘doing’ then becomes as important as saying, then it figures that HOW you do what you do becomes as important as WHAT you’re trying to do.

Surely you need to get ‘what’ right first don’t you?

Well not necessarily.

Why?

First, we all know that we improve and learn through ‘doing’. And in this way we get better at helping customers. So ‘doing’ is critical to business improvement. So through doing we can improve what we’re doing. The ‘what’ is iteratively improved all the time across all business functions. Why should the marketing function be any different?

Some of the biggest recent improvements in business service (the thing people talk about most and that most affects Net Promoter scores) has been seen via iterative innovation. See how Instagram founder Kevin Systrom references simplicity and focus when developing the right solution for customers.

Second, we’ve witnessed that all of our stresses, every one of our failures (I won’t go into details!) and every single frustration that we have with clients and that clients have internally (and of course with us) is born out of a failure to ‘do’ effectively.

Pretty much every intelligent person in a marketing or sales function can get their heads around the ‘what’; the plan or the ad or the app or the service we’re proposing. Only a handful of naturally entrepreneurial sorts as swiftly compute ‘how’ to make the idea happen.

These people, wherever they sit in an agency or client business, instinctively think about inventing new ways of working so that we can make these awkwardly non-traditional ideas happen. The approaches that get debated are most often approaches working around a client’s organisational structure.

To put it simply, the client’s company is in the way.

These agents of progress are critical to making anything vaguely imaginative or (as everyone is realising) effective happen. Without people willing to stick their necks out and thinking in new ways, nothing new would get out the door. So more of our day to day efforts are going into making the ‘how’ possible.

If we focus on better ideas and they sell themselves don’t they?

Well, not really. Great ideas in new forms force us to focus on the ‘how’ and failure to make the ‘how’ work kills ideas. No matter how seemingly great they are. ‘Great’ to us usually looks like ‘risky’ to a client.

So we’ve lots of unsold ideas because we lost the fight or the race to make them happen. And here’s the rub: look around you – everyone, eventually, comes up with the same ideas. The original, ground breaking new ‘what’ is an NPD fantasy. In our networked age, most of an agency’s ideas to help a client solve customer problems in a category have been thought of in some form or other, and probably already prototyped or launched. Just check Google and Springwise.

Customers recommend companies that get the basics right (the service and the products). So as marketers we don’t need to bust a category open with a startling new innovation. We simply need to reduce the risk of failure in our attempts at making good ideas great.

This might be an odd admission from someone in a creative company selling irresistible new creative solutions. But it’s a reality. Most ideas are already out there in some form or other. Just because this is the case it doesn’t mean a client’s business can’t benefit from them if they were to be built upon, delivered well, consistently improved and integrated into a clients offerings. That’s how businesses grow profitably. Our job is in reducing the risk in innovating. No human likes change or risk. A little bit is fun, but not if it threatens your job. With profits on the line, Marketing Directors and CEOs seek progress with minimised risk.

So our creative skills are being used more and more in marshalling new and existing ideas and techniques together for a brand’s benefit and then, crucially, making them happen. With scale, impact and to customers’ satisfaction.

So this is why the ‘how’ has become the crucial issue.

Getting the ‘how’ right means the difference between a good idea and a truly great one. The testing, the customer (or member) feedback loop and the iterations are the ‘how’. The client business buying into the idea and making it work is the ‘how’. The client themselves being structured to make the idea work internally and across customer touchpoints is the ‘how’. It’s our agility we should be tested on when we sell in ideas and promise they’ll work.

Tim Williams at Ignition sums it up rather nicely when he talks about the internal processes growing to define the way agencies think:

“If you want to make your firm more agile, assign a small team to observe how work really gets done in the agency.  Then build your systems around that.”

Rebuilding systems is a crucial piece of the jigsaw. Without this nothing will be bought and nothing will work in market. So it’s this ‘plumbing’ that will be increasingly relied upon in getting great ideas into people’s hands.

The ideas themselves can be half right at launch. But it’s the ‘how’ that will make them work and deliver the effects for businesses.

Let’s never underestimate the importance of ‘how’ something will happen, not just ‘what’ it is we want to happen.

I presented this article at the above conference as a prezi, which really doesn’t work without the voice-over! So here’s the full contents.

For those who were there, you saw me bitch about the lack of innovation in the recently re-branded marketing and innovation ‘insight’ industry.

With the notable exception of the constantly experimenting Brainjuicer and its irrepressible John Kearon (whose thoughts about corporate innovation practices in his ‘Marketing Has Been the Death of Innovation’ paper I’ve gratefully borrowed) there has been little in terms of exciting new ways to probe the human mind in a way that delivers marketers insights on the fly. Indeed, the whole industry is struggling to work with those more digitally minded (clients, consumers or agencies), nor to create research solutions for niche but inmersive experiences that provide insights in ways Marketing Directors appreciate.

Online communities and their dashboard tools have been a liberation. Likewise, the kind of qual/quant surveying Brainjuicer started out with provide rich but quantifiable data. But beyond their efforts in testing innovation and exploring the web for insight, I’d argue the research industry has been slow to service the needs of modern marketers. Discuss.

The very anatomy of insight is changing

We’re moving from adhoc research to responsive insight, slowly.

But like all change it’s painful and scattered.

Insight is everywhere, it’s just not peddled well by research agencies or by any agency for that matter.

Brilliant insight is as likely to be tiny, tactical and changeable as earth-moving and revolutionary.

I thought I’d share a problem with have…after all, a problem shared…

Insight is only valuable if proven through action, mostly sales-driving marketing.

So it’s the application of insight through what we do that we need to focus on, especially to prove the discipline’s value within the organization.

The problem is that in a connected world, marketing should mean always-on collaboration with audiences, working with consumer reactions and making ourselves more and more relevant to them.

However, few clients are structured to deal with continuous, iterative, responsive communication and few agencies have structured themselves to deliver this either (because the clients aren’t structured that way yet).

We rely on pricey and protracted up-front planning.

But planning, even keeping best practices in mind, is just guessing.

The only military analogies and lore worth keeping from previous eras of marketing strategy is the wisdom that all plans go out of the window at first contact with the enemy.

Most of the time we don’t know how the plan is going, not in time to do anything about it anyway.

So we need real-time insight to tell us.

Once we have an idea of what to improve, we need the latest insight to guide us, continuously, across bought, owned and earned touchpoints.

But this rarely happens.

So testing the quality of insight through marketing is mostly too slow, confusing and inconclusive.

In delivering clients useful, timely insight to improve marketing on the fly, we are failing.

What about proving the value of insight through the resulting innovations in services and products?

Well, I propose that most of our market research bypasses real ‘innovation’ (new approaches that create disproportionate value by combining ways of working or technologies) and concentrates instead on ‘optimisation’ (small improvements to what we’re already doing).

True category-beating innovation doesn’t tend to fit well with research. Trend research is useful, but testing ideas in consumer research can often kill them or strip the originality from them (in marketing as in innovation) because people don’t tend to respond well to uncomfortably new ideas. Even skilled qual researchers can’t probe the subtle responses to truly eye-opening innovation well.

Real innovation, it appears, is the domain of visionary start-ups, not risk-averse big business.

8 of the Interbrand top 10 brands in the world (and almost half of the top 50) originated the category in which they operate.

Yet the centralised, risk averse marketing-sciences practiced by large businesses since the 1960s has served to merely ‘tend the garden’ these innovations created.

With the exception of a handful of brands, true innovation in FMCG, technology, banking, apparel and other industries has been left to start-ups and fringe players with the corporates buying those that succeed.

Bacardi bought the biggest new thing in vodka of the 90s Grey Goose, then the noughties hero 42 Below, Google has bought every other hyped start-up in Silicon Valley, Unilever the iconic Ben and Jerry’s, Cisco bought the category busting Flip video camera, Coca-Cola bought trailblazing Innocent and Glaceau. The list of big corporates paying top price for innovations they could easily have developed themselves goes on and on.

The corporate exceptions tend to be businesses led by a strong vision, who support their own ideas with gut instinct over consumer research and cultivate a healthy acceptance of failure.

Ibuka, the Chairman of Sony, one of the few big corporations to have created new categories said, “The consumer doesn’t know what they want, it is for us to invent it for them”.

Others that behave in this way are the Virgin group, Apple, Google, Facebook and 3M. Google has bought many of their successes but are committed to experimenting ferociously.

Criminally, the marketing services industry itself fails to innovate. With the exception of groundbreaking research ideas like DigiViduals from Brainjuicer, few new approaches to gathering insight appear to have been created.

So when it comes to big business successes through innovation, we in the insight industry have struggled to provide much demonstrable value.

So from a planning perspective (as a buyer as well as collator of insight), I’d beg the following of our industry:

Support ‘Flexible guessing’

If plans are there to be broken, let’s use scenarios.

Let’s propose what might happen, then adopt agile methodology to change what we do on the fly.

If social networks can respond to user behaviour to roll out new versions and whole new services every few weeks, why can’t the rest of the brands online do the same?

Let’s devise short, medium and long-term activity.

Let’s work out how to react on launch, what to anticipate and what to commit to across all touchpoints.

Thinking long term is critical. Successful approaches need to be learned. Starbucks has its most senior and talented people dedicated 24/7 building long term relationships through it’s most important marketing activity, its platform on Facebook.

While embracing the future, let’s keep a link to the past – history is bound to repeat itself if we don’t plunder the archives for lessons and ensure the inspiring young Turks know them.

Support ‘Responsive doing’

So in a connected world, we should be testing, learning and changing in real time collaboration with our communities

Let’s light lots of fires as we will never know what will take-off and what won’t.

Let’s respect our own hunches. Faster horses would never have spawned a multi-billion dollar industry. Serendipity is more useful than tight processes when it comes to making new ideas from new connections.

Let’s do it in small ways, and amplify what works, and let’s do it in small groups. Autonomy fosters passion and vision and that’s where great ideas come from so maverick thinkers within organisations must be supported with time and cash.

Let’s love failure. Dyson prototype number 1527 was the one that worked, Virgin has more failed businesses than successes.

And let’s re-organise ourselves to deliver this. In client businesses and agencies alike, insight and marketing functions need to be nimble and always-on. This takes bold internal change.

To conclude

Insight into the state of our own profession, like that shared today by the Future Foundation, is a great place to start.

The insight and marketing services industry appears caught like a rabbit in the headlights. Basking in new found relevance, but creaking with processes, tools and systems hopelessly out of date.

We need insight’s innovation and help.

If we are to help clients embrace a rapid, real-time, collaborative marketing environment we’d better get on and innovate pretty swiftly. Else the Googles and Facebooks of this world will eat our lunch.

I think this is an important book but it won’t get huge attention, sadly. The cover is awful (so cover-judging book readers will be put off) and the central tenant not mainstream and catchy enough. But it is an informative, and sobering, read. With a bit of sensationalism, the main idea could catch on: slow down or live a poorer existence.

From someone involved everyday in fast-paced continuous marketing activity, saying that things have to slow down sounds a bit hypocritical. And it is. But as a Dad, I’m getting paranoid about the creeping ‘normalisation’ of rapid consumption. You Tube is like cat-nip to my kids. It’s a joy to get to sit and read a book to them. They love it, but only after they’ve forgotten you’ve banned them from the iPad.

So here’s the quickie book summary for you snacking types. I’d advise you to read the whole thing though. In a dark room. Without interruptions every 3mins. And when you’re inspired by the contents avoid the office, as it stops deep-thinking. Enjoy.

Futurologist and strategist Richard Watson discusses an unfashionable idea: that all this connectivity might not, in fact, be good for society or us.

While such skepticism of technology’s rapid changes is not new, the exhaustive support collected by Watson for this argument is sobering.

His central ideas are as follows:
Permanent connectivity is changing the brain

In the process of developing a ‘digital mind’, children as young as five can spend an average of eight hours a day in front of a screen. This ‘screen time’ is affecting the malleable brain’s structure. Connectivity Addiction is on the increase, and Continuous Partial Attention is a noted phenomena.

Digital interruptions affects societal bonds

The pre-teen ‘screenager’ will be continually stimulated by multiple devices. His parents will be glued to BlackBerries and laptops. TV may replace dinnertime. ‘Cerebral whiteout’ can occur and information overload leads to stress and ‘work guilt’ as time poor parents respond to work requests wherever they are, even on holiday. This continuous connectivity scenario is being blamed on societal ills as far reaching as the rise in teenage pregnancies (due to the loss of quality family conversation time) to general ignorance and lack of imagination in students.

Faced with the sheer volume of evidence charting the negative effects of our digital binge, Watson endeavours to provide some guidance:

• He promotes the idea of ‘free play’, where by children have plenty of time to invent without guidance from games manufacturers, or restricted by structured activity. Boredom is apparently excellent for imagination.

• He advises that in a knowledge economy staff with lateral thinking ability are prized, and that focusing on only rational subjects harm student’s prospects

The bulk of the book Watson focuses on ‘deep thinking’; the act of the mind to probe its memories and invent new connections to solve problems.

He divides this subject into two broad areas: where ideas come from, and what we can do to get better at having them. The common enemy of both these areas is seen as digital interruptions.

Office based workers apparently suffer from an interruption to their work every three minutes. Yet the brain needs to have time to process ideas. Surveys record that ideas are not generated at desks, but in showers, on running machines, in baths etc. The brain needs lots of sleep and lots of downtime. Doing nothing, Watson argues, is the best way to crack a problem, as the brain is in fact working hard to process the information it has received. Eureka moments come at downtimes (or monotonous/routine times).

Also, don’t be shy to ask silly questions or to make mistakes, as it is well proven that from these experiments serendipitous discoveries are born.

The author explores crowd-sourced idea generation and concludes that for well-defined problems, many minds make light work of the issues. But for revolutionary jumps, groups are hopeless because new ideas don’t fit with existing ways of thinking, and humans collectively reject that which won’t fit.

So Watson explores how we can shrug off this ‘normalising’ instinct and create environments for deep thinking.

• We must seek ‘the overview effect’; an objective place where lateral inspiration can be found: “Stop searching for great ideas and simply make room for them to visit” recommends Robert Grudin, author of The Grace of Great Things.

• Messiness may well be part of this: resilience, creativity and effectiveness all come from a messy desk. Paperless offices are a real threat to invention he argues, quoting Eistein: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”

• Accidental encounters and quality conversations stimulate deep thinking. However be wary of open-plan offices, as these often infringe on the quiet and study space the brain needs.

• Remote working and teleconferences may be as damage innovation as natural environments (and human contact) slow us down and help the mind relax, creating a more effective environment for thinking.

• The ‘strategic use of lunch’ is recommended to increase times we can pause and reflect. Reclaiming lunch allows for quality conversations while a visit to a garden or art gallery provides stimulation. In the words of Gandhi “there is more to life than increasing its speed’.

So slowing down is central to deep-thinking. Like the Slow Food movement, Watson foresees counter-trends emerging that seek to defy the pace and ‘crazy busy’ lifestyles we’ve created for ourselves. Instead ‘digital diet’ holidays will appear while café’s and public spaces will start banning wifi and mobile phones.

A powerful warning summarises Future Minds: “we assume the Internet is spreading knowledge, but the reverse could be happening. Ignorance could be increasing …because the volume of digital dross and distraction that is now so easily co-created and distributed is drowning out learning and wisdom”.

The iPad example below isn’t technically social,  but it could be with a couple of tweaks. Rather than just an expensive remote control as in this example, the iPad has a lovely tactic potential of using its 3G access to deliver advanced, very human computing (rather than compromised mobile phone experiences). I’m sure there’s an app to swap rich online profiles with a neighbouring iPad into the address book via the cloud. It reminds me of the original Palm PDA with its infrared business card sharing app. Those were the days.

This presentation looks at the impact on memory of involvement, in particular  online  involvement with businesses. It goes through approaches for how to harness open business tactics to build brand/product/service recommendation.

Summary: This essay proposes that the next big effects of the internet on business and society will be in the structures of organisations. Whilst consumers have embraced new ways to buy, talks find and share, organisations have, structurally, failed to profit from the always on connectedness the internet brings. We expect significant change in this area of the next few years which will impact massively on the role of marketing and the even question the existence of the marketing department.

We wondered what would happen if we banned people talking about ‘digital’, ‘social’, ‘viral’, ‘mobile’, ‘ATL’, ‘BTL’ and ‘TTL’.

As an exercise it’s revealing. What do you sell to clients? What do they buy? What do you ‘make’? What do planners talk about all day?

We believe it’s the end of the road for talking about ‘digital’ and all talk of channel-based silos. Thinking and making in silos prevents us from joining the dots between a business’s activities and the audiences it seeks. Both client side and agency side, silos are the enemy. But what’s the alternative?

We want to see organisations structure themselves around what’s real, not what’s convenient to manage: connected people and the data they provide.

The almost total digitization of commerce, content, media channels, customer service, R&D, research and channels to market has meant a growing two billion people around the world are connected to each other around their friendship groups and interests.

Existing human behavioural norms have been magnified, leading to the disruption of global societal and commercial structures.

For example, now we’re all connected, nothing is secret anymore. Nor is anything unavailable. Nothing is right or wrong because opinion is everything. Nothing is controllable (centrally at least). It’s also a meritocracy out there; no-one much cares unless you’re interesting. It applies for people, and so it applies for organisations. Consequently, everyone’s a marketer because everyone has an audience. So it follows that interest-based niches are the new mass and marketing control is decentralized.

If this is the new normal, what’s next? Well, as Sci-fi writer William Gibson supposedly said: “the future’s here, its just not evenly distributed”. We foresee innovation in organisational structure as the most important consequence of the growth in global connectedness. Those organisations that limit agility and fail to build their offerings around the flow of data between company and consumer will lose competitiveness.

In the marketing world, clients know what they want to buy from their marketing partners, but they’re often not structured to buy it. Agencies know what they want solutions they should provide, but they too are poorly structured to create it. Every agency is talking the same ‘new world’ vision. But only those designed to deliver it consistently (and painlessly) will flourish. Decentralized marketing models are developing, and its proponents are data rich, always on businesses.

Yet much marketing is still stuck in the military campaigning mindset rather than the continuous diplomacy and influencing mindset needed to manage reputations through relationships. We expect to see future-thinking companies re-structure, enabling access to customers and prospects at every stage of a two-way Value Chain.

Few businesses are truly ‘consumer centric’, so this is the opportunity to finally do marketing as it should be by placing connected consumers (and the insightful data they generate) at a businesses’ heart.

So we say ‘Death to digital, all hail marketing’.

In the progressive company, who’s staff are constantly connecting with the consumer through technology, each department will naturally be involved in marketing. Many across a business will be empowered with tools to connect to their respective audiences (both internal and external) and nurture the value of that community to the business. We are already seeing the suppliers of tools (37signals) and advice (Altimeter Group) flourish.

So we say ‘Death to channels, all hail relationships’.

The Innovation and IT functions in progressive businesses have generally led the way: Alibaba and IP exchanges help all kinds of companies outsource their product development, Boeing famously collaborate with thousands of suppliers worldwide at every stage from design to delivery, Amazon organizes data more nimbly with Mechanical Turk while Good Guide and Get Satisfaction are helping consumers make better buying choices. New online players like Threadless (fashion), globrix (property), linqia (marketing), Kiva and Zopa (finance) are using connected and inherently open models to find customers.

As a result of existing marketing experiments, we believe similar models will be created in established businesses as managers seek to continuously test and learn, in real time, with diverse audience communities.

Consequently, we expect to see greater distribution of ‘marketing’ activity such as selling and reputation management responsibility across business functions traditionally out of the public gaze. For example, customer service departments will chat real time to large communities of customers and develop CRM solutions, product departments will crowdsource to aid innovation, or recruiters will promote the CSR initiatives of the company through public webinars to entice new applicants. All of this may come at the expense of the marketing department’s role as the official communications conduit.

The sponsor of this shift will be the CEO. Their internal goal will be for greater responsiveness to market needs and a leaner sales function, while their external aim will focus on creating fans of the brand through ever more personal and relevant service. In effect a consumer centric organisation has a marketing director as their CEO.

Agencies and marketers alike will be forced to forge relationships business wide, to lead the sharing of data and promote openness and solution neutral ideas.

Unless the marketing department takes the lead in developing brands with a relevant and flexible idea at their heart that allows for multiple forms of connection with consumers, the company-wide distribution of marketing activity may shrink its role to simply that of channel co-ordination and brand policing.

So we say,

death to digital
death to channel silos
death to the marketing department?

All hail the connected organisation

What struck me about this piece is its natural drama.

The subject matter is drama and then they unashamedly beef it up.

We often find insights based on conflict (the heart of drama) and then we skirt around them fearing offense (in case we put anyone off the campaign or ad, rather than making people love it even more).

If we seek entertainment and joy in the things we consume, why would we be attracted to overly sanitized ads? If drama excites us (books, film, gossip, sport, politics), why do marketers work so hard to avoid it? Are we just too timid?

It seems such as shame that all these talented creative people (who’d rather be in the arts but can’t get paid for it), are prohibited from using their natural sense of drama to promote products in a way people will take notice of by client organisations built to omit drama from their every day lives.

Sports brands do drama pretty well, but not brilliantly. Why aren’t there sports brands creating feature films or theatrical events? They’d argue the drama is in the sport of course, but I’m not sure that should get them off the hook. Timidity again?

This wonderful image by Kim and Tony at W+K is probably the best example of pure drama expressed in the category.

Straw poll:

What was the last ad you were moved by?

What was the last marketing experience that gave you goose bumps?

If you can remember one, then you can be sure the brand tracking was healthy.

I tweeted like an idiot yesterday at Battle of Big Thinking, the APG event. I was trying to record the ideas that had salience as they were delivered. There’s a great collection of people’s opinions on twitter here. Looking back there were nice nuggets. But what do I remember from the event the day after, without needing my memory jogged? What can I take away and use, mull-over, critique?
Sadly, surprisingly little.

I was disappointed by the lack of insight in the 25 presentations. Only a handful were based on an idea with substantiated evidence or a truly new way of looking at things. Most were the same regurgitated en-vogue arguments. Few featured lateral thought, or smart new combinations of seemingly unrelated insight. Few amazed. So I guess few were ‘big’?

My takeout? Most planners are reading the same stuff and thinking the same stuff. And it’s boring.

Age seemed to matter. The most insightful thoughts came from the older guys and the youngest guys. In between (apart from Peter Sells of BBH talking about mobile), there seemed to be a lot of repetition and recycled subjective beige.

I will take away the following ideas:

Guy Murphy won overall with some thinking based on research into brand perceptions amongst the populations of about 15 countries worldwide. What JWT have concluded is that as markets mature, consumer’s interest (measured by ‘time’ spent with or thinking about a brand) declines.

He then compared the creative approach of brands across the world and concluded that a lack of playfulness in mature markets was hampering the efficacy of communications. His Brand Toys application helps companies visualise and explore their potentially playful identity.

This was insight rich thinking which made the audience re-appraise first, their cynicism to emerging markets in terms of creativity, and second, their own strategies for the tired old brands in the West. It also made you want to work overseas. Solid work from a pro!

Justin Basini introduced a proper big thought - that business and therefore marketing must move away from the consumption based economics that is driving us into a resources-battering Matrix-style nightmare, and instead focus on ‘conservation economics’.

A handful of changes to our practice was recommended:

1. Encourage punters to value what they have, rather than value what they don’t have. Demand for services/products can be based on building on what people do/own/use already rather than promoting a disposable culture.

2. We should move from mass marketing to mass interactions as the Cluetrain Manifesto was right and conversations will guide consumer behaviour.

3. We should seek to extend the life of products with additional services. For example, the App store and Nike+ provide added value with few resources being used up.

4. Corporations who are ‘too big to fail’ must now appreciate their role in society beyond making profit. A new obligation to create on social good should be introduced. Marketing can play a critical role in this.

Peter Sells from BBH used his experience as a cognitive psychologist to align mobile technology with human needs. He talked about the core needs we’re driven by:

1. Resolution

2. Connection

3. Contentment

4. Control

5. Information

Satisfying these needs leads to a sense of happiness. Happiness as seen through ‘flow‘, or a frictionless ‘optimal experience’, can become a worthy goal of any service a company might deliver to customers. As a fundamental requirement for the most timely, proximal channel currently existing, happiness is a neat aim for mobile activity.

He pointed out that there is a massive market for happiness. So alongside Guy’s playfulness and another speaker’s reference to VW Fun Theory, a trend to use smart behavioural planning to create contentment and happy people emerged from the day.

Patrick Cairns from Plum Baby made the simple and refreshing point that, contrary to most large companies, those organisations with innovation naturally at their heart are driven by a vision and by a leader’s instinct. Instinct rules when it come to innovation it seems. Innovation is about opinion (which is future orientated vs past orientated fact). Patrick told us to ‘embrace outsiders’ in order to find new ways forward, ‘fail quickly’ and make an idea ‘personal but solidly managed’. And it should be quick otherwise everyone loses. See Nonsense’s 24 start-up idea as an example. In 24hrs they’ve created Dr Hue. And it works!

So while I was disappointed by the lack of new thinking led by research or real insight during the day, Patrick’s opinion was a powerful one. He suggested we find ways to help people who express a fresh new vision (as opposed to a recycled one). We should support and explore their instinctive belief, unfettered by committees and what Malcolm White called ‘Premature Evaluation’ (Number 3 of 15 ideas in 15 minutes).

The most fun part of the day was from the new ‘Open Mic’ section - 5 young planners from places like Fallon, Naked, Grey and Carlson fought it out for 3 mins each. Considering the quality of the content, 3 mins seemed an unfairly short amount of time. Indeed more came from their punchy ideas in 15mins than from almost the entire morning.

The winner was James Mitchell who dared suggest that BOBT’s promise that it would offer ‘a year’s worth of ideas in one day’ might be a bad thing, and that information overload was our biggest threat. It was simple, entertaining and heartfelt. Like Jon Alexander’s sustainability themed talk, James’ vision was Utopian and therefore extremely compelling. The audience was lifted and post-lunch blues dissipated. I think the success of this section pointed the way to the evolution of the BOBT concept.

Robin Wight used the podium to launch an impassioned demand that we must Save Advertising. He argues that market research has failed to evolve since the 60′s when Account Planning was born. A wrong assumption about the way the brain works has led us to rationalising, Link-testing madness.

He argues that brain science has helped us understand that the primal instinctive brain makes most of our purchasing decisions (we don’t like to work hard thinking about less important things as it uses up too much of the body’s energy), while the rational mind justifies it.

We are truly in two minds with tricky decisions (such as moral issues), but for most consumption needs, we think very little.  So asking us why we made a choice is a complete waste of time, as we don’t know (at least we can’t tell you accurately).  Robin used new norms from brain science to discount the use of norms from Link tests and other rationalising research methods.

The danger inherent in this approach is that brain scans and the assumptions being made around them are a) new and b) themselves little understood.

So while Robin will receive much support from planners weary of models that claim to uncover truths that often go against our creative instincts, he has yet to propose a new methodology to replace the old model. I hope a new agreed upon research model emerges from science and psychology soon. ‘Till then, we have what we have. But good on Robin for getting the debate started.

So what should we do next year?

As an APG committee member, I could propose a few tweaks to the format. So ideas are welcome!

Katy from Naked, John from PHD and I thought perhaps a ‘Planning’s Got Talent’ format could work for an entertaining day! A speaker has to make their point and is allowed to continue only if the audience is suitably impressed. Audience voting during the speech however can force the speaker offstage.

A less aggressive version could simply see the BOBT format condensed and the battle elements increased. I do think shorter speeches are needed. But if people like the idea, perhaps longer versions of the ideas could be prepared for further debate later in the day.

Either way, quality control should be excersized and speaker briefings must be thorough. To avoid articles like this one from Matthew Taylor of the RSA.

I have been to good events. I’ve even hosted them — times when the speakers have been well briefed, the event has a clear purpose, the questions addressed have been relevant and engaging. But to be honest they are the exception.

Links to blogs and presentations from the day are being uploaded here. Well done to everyone who took part. It has certainly generated plenty of positive buzz, despite my cynicism.

Here’s a list of the presentations (thanks to @yodanny for compiling)
Guy Murphy – “Brand Play”

James Mitchell – “Too Much Information: a big thought in three short minutes”

John V Willshire – “ Social Production”

Peter Sells of BBH, Scott Seaborn of Ogilvy, Todd Tran from Joule – “Mobile”

Mike Barlett from Skype, Patrick O’Luanaigh from N’Dreams, Claus Moseholm from GoViral – “Free”

Justin Bassini (ex-Capital One) spoke about brand responsibility. Here are a couple of his follow-up projects:

http://www.escapingthematrix.basini.com/
http://www.pipelineideas.com/

A handy slice of opinion for your consideration. I will add to this list of requirements and welcome your thoughts on it!

I like the ‘adds the madness to the method’ thought.

I’m not so keen on the advice of avoiding simplicity (or not rewarding it), as I prefer looking at our work as distilling and simplifying (vs one word simplicity perhaps). More reflective of the “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” problem. (Quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), not Mark Twain by the way.)

I like the ‘hyphen’ thought: the more hyphens in your title (writer-director-actor) the more opinion on the world. There is a legacy problem with thought ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. This hangs over our heads and it’s unfair. Breadth is important, as empathy and understanding can guide solutions out of silos and into new areas.

The role of specialist is there in the mix, but perhaps the Stephen King vision of planners as ‘master strategists’ is more useful to the future of the discipline. Ad-tweaking should not be our lot. Nor should we be obsessed with minutiae beyond knowing what craft skills to employ and avoiding silly mistakes when generating direct response. Our clients’ days are full of detail, so much so that they can’t always see the wood for the trees. They should look to us to provide inspiration by joining the dots between initiatives and insights from a more objective standpoint, rather than following them around worrying about the day to day.

A clear need comes from the video’s opinions for people with a broad curiosity who are also interesting themselves (‘interested and interesting’), and for people who can add a touch of magic.

What a romantic vision! But it is a useful way of talking about the diagonal skills required in this job.

Mr Pollitt believed this when he instigated the discipline at BMP

“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.”

(Stanley Pollitt)

One final thought I like comes from G.K. Chesterton. It sums up the ‘no-man’s land’ that planners find themselves in on a daily basis. This place creates fears that can lead to timid proposals. But it’s a reality and one through which we must navigate if we are to find motivating solutions for our clients.

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.