Thoughts from a communications thinker and tinkerer
Following up on this from PSFK, is this great presentation by Zeus Jones. Which I came across at Adam’s great blog – thanks for the timely find.
Now I wouldn’t say this is the model that will change things over night, but it’s the thing that is exciting me the most at the moment.
The ‘advertising’ world perhaps? The old theories and the agency flab definitely. Get doing it absofriggingloutley! This is well worth watching if you can make the time. It has a nice mix of hatred for ‘BDAs’ (George Parker of Adscam), idealistic thinking about marketers being the saviour of the world (Steve Stainaker of Hub Culture), a perspective from an agency that really does do things differently (Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly) and a touch of ‘cut through the crap’ realism (Russell Davies of OIA).
First of all I don’t believe that marketers could or should be contemplating changing the world. By all means go and work for a charity or a pressure group. Use your skills for something different with a higher purpose, but don’t forget what clients pay us for if you work in an agency. I do believe every business should be socially responsible, but unless it’s relevant and a central part of the brand, then we shouldn’t be doing it just because it’s fashionable, or because it allows us to feel better at dinner parties. I’d hate to see every agency and brand from soap to cars being cause related and purpose driven. As Russell says: ‘leave changing the world up to revolutionaries and governments’.
Unless it’s authentic, which is easier said than done, just concentrate on doing things better. I’ve said it before, it’s not about ‘BDAs’ vs digital agencies it is just about tearing up the rule book and doing the right things, not just ‘differently’. And despite the often gloomy outlook there are a lot of cracking agencies and people doing just that.
The second point from this is about cutting out the rubbish and deconstructing what it is we actually do. There isn’t a Holy Grail that will make our lives simpler as much as we would like one. It will vary from agency to agency and discipline to discipline. We shouldn’t be so hell bent on pigeon holing the industry. Terms such as advertising, marketing and brands have become meaningless. They are just used to generalise what we do so we don’t really have to explain it, or god forbid go into more detail and risk being exposed as money grabbing charlatans. If you want to read a great book on how strange concepts and beliefs supplant rational thinking over time, then this is a great place to start.
I personally really love Anomaly’s ethos. I can’t for the life of me work out how they get clients to work within their fee structure, but they do, so fair play to them. But being in the business business just makes sense. It sums it up perfectly to me. Anomaly feels like independent, fluid, problem solvers that actually create stuff that’s useful for businesses. I know it sounds quite vague, but that is the point, it is free to do what is right. I think it’s the clearest way of describing the kind of agency that clients will find more and more attractive.
“Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still” – Jalal ad-Din Rumi
No one likes to think they’re average. But the fact of the matter is at least half of us are below average. Yes it’s true I’m afraid, averageness is all around us.
Now I think I’m quite a proud Englishman, despite the fact that we are generally average at everything in the modern world. Our culture is average, we’re average at sport, our economy is average, our service is average, our music is average, our weather is average and it would seem that even our creative industries are now seen as average. At least that’s how people generally think of it.
As a nation we seem to be a pessimistic bunch with such high expectations – God forbid should our great empire be considered average. I think we are way to hard on ourselves sometimes and perhaps a bit of optimism is in order. Just like this fantastic exhibition currently on at Tate Britain.
‘How we are: photographing Britain’ was an open exhibition that invited anyone to contribute photographs of Britain taken through their own lens so to speak.
It doesn’t necessarily celebrate our averageness, but embraces it and portrays Britain in its most unspoilt and often humbling way. Much of it is optimistic and endearing, looking for the interesting thing in an ordinary life or object. Such as these:
You can view all the entrants and winners here
Watch the ad here
I like to think I’m a bloke that knows. And in my opinion every bloke that knows, knows a bloke like Mickey and probably thinks he’s a bit of a dick!
The BBC has shown off its understanding of youth culture and social media by creating a ‘virtual desktop’ for one of their teen characters in Eastenders. After all: ‘Now Lucy’s parents have read her diary she wants to put her thoughts somewhere they won’t look – Online.’
I can’t even begin to rationalise it because I have no idea what they were thinking of. It’s bloody awful. At least they didn’t try and do it on Facebook I suppose.
If you really want a laugh have a look at Lucy’s videos.
Posted in BBC, Campaigns of note, Digital, Eastenders, Random observations
When I heard about The Filter I thought it sounded fantastic. An application that integrates with your iTunes and iPod to creates your playlists for you.
Sounds like the answer to all my dreams. Particularly seeing as I’m on my third iPod in 18 months and I can’t bothered to spend hours creating playlists if they give up the ghost halfway through the year. And for the record, I’m yet to meet a genius or be given an alcoholic drink to numb the pain at Apple’s so called ‘genius bar’.
Essentially The Filter allows you to pick a broad criteria to be analysed, such as by track or by genre. You then click on a track on your iTunes or you iPod, click on ‘create playlist’ and hey presto, it generates a play list of similar tracks directly into your library. The problem is they aren’t that similar.
I’m off on my hols soon so I thought I would create a nice lazy, summery playlist. So I selected Jack Johnson and let it create a list of 30 similar songs from my 5,000 strong library.
It’s a bloody good job I checked because there I would have been, chilling out, lying on my sunbed, dozing off, listening to a bit of JJ. When I would have been awoken by the dulcet tones of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones singing London’s Calling.
To be honest I think it’s because of the inaccurate tags iTunes puts on the tracks. Jose Gonzalez is alternative punk apparently. So until I can be arsed to go through and change the genres it won’t get used I’m afraid. It’s almost there though.
I’ve only just come across this, but Leland posted this a while ago about the taxonomy of planners. Thanks to Adam for flagging it on the Plannersphere. I find stuff like this really interesting and I was particularly intrigued to see how I might fair doing the Myers-Briggs test. The Myers-Briggs test is used by Mckinsey to assess the cognitive processes of candidates.
According to Leland’s description my hunch would be I’m somewhere in between ‘emotional’ and ‘relationship acumen.’ So after a brief search on zee veb, I managed to find this very rough version of a Carl Jung and Isabel Myers-Briggs personality test.
I came out, so to speak, as a ENFP
Strength of the preferences %
Extroverted 56
Intuitive 75
Feeling 25
Perceiving 11
This means I’m apparently…
- Moderately expressed extrovert
- Distinctively expressed intuitive personality
- Moderately expressed feeling personality
- Slightly expressed perceiving personality
I think it’s actually scarily accurate. I agree that I am all of the amazing things it says I am ; ) It categorises me as a Champion Idealist. Which after reading makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. This part being my favourite:
‘This type is found in only about 3 percent of the general population (the top 3 or the bottom 3 I wonder?), but they have great influence because of their extraordinary impact on others. Champions are inclined to go everywhere and look into everything that has to do with the advance of good and the retreat of evil in the world. They can’t bear to miss out on what is going on around them; they must experience, first hand, all the significant social events that affect our lives. And then they are eager to relate the stories they’ve uncovered, hoping to disclose the “truth” of people and issues, and to advocate causes.’
Now I don’t know much about art. I’m interested in it, I appreciate it and I like what I like, but I don’t know what is good or bad. So apologies if this post screams of ignorance, but after reading this about Marcel Duchamp it got me thinking about the kind of art that those of us in communications are paid to produce and what we could learn from him. Duchamp had a really interesting perspective on art and it seems pretty relevant given the debate surrounding the future of planning, agencies and the general changes in modern marketing.
This post isn’t about commercial art versus art, or intended to suggest that visual art is dead. I simply found Duchamp’s perspective thought provoking. How’s that for sitting on the fence!
Whilst Duchamp eventually came to despise retinal art and the bourgeois, he started off by wanting to create a new kind of art that engaged the mind. Duchamp wondered if he could create works of art that were not conventionally works of art. This became known as conceptual art.
According to the Oxford English dictionary a concept is: “an idea of something formed mentally, combining all its characteristics or particulars.” This suggests to me that there are many different elements to the concept and not just visual and copy. Seems obvious and straightforward. So why the debate about who owns ideas?
In my agency, concepts are the things we review. No reason why it’s called this over creative it just is and always has been. I would argue that in a ‘traditional process’ quite often what is reviewed isn’t really a concept – at least not just yet. All the other ‘characteristics’ and ‘particulars’ haven’t been developed, such as the media for arguments sakes. It’s essentially just an idea at this stage. In other words a concept can’t be CREATED without varying perspectives and input.
Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ are also something we can learn from. He purposefully aimed to break every rule in art in order to engage people’s minds in unpredictable ways so he could provoke the observer to participate and think rather than it just being aesthetic to the eye. And to top it off he believed in art that was free of pretence and artifice. He’s a clever bloke in my book.
However, probably one of the most interesting beliefs of Duchamp is that art occurs at the juncture of the artists’ intention and the observer’s response, ultimately making them a co-creator. If ever there is something that would unite people in agencies today and describe what we should all be striving for in communications this is it. Perhaps this is the art we should get more awards for?
I watched Dangerous Knowledge last night, an absolutely brilliant documentary on an increasingly good BBC Four. it’s bound to be be repeated at least 20 times so keep your eyes peeled. It’s planning porn and certainly stirs up a bit of quant v qual, positivist v naturalist debate.
Presenter David Malone took us on an insightful journey into the lives of four genius mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. All of them managed to create a storm up back in the day by questioning whether or not there are somethings in the world mathematics cannot know and that there will always be problems outside of human logic. Some of their personal battles with unexplainable entities such as homosexuality, religion and social oppression arguably forced them to question their own beliefs and the concept of certainty.
Tragically these guys went insane and eventually killed themselves in their quest to prove a number of theories such as infinity. Essentially they were trying to use mathematics to prove the limitations of mathematics, logic to prove logic is illogical and when they continuously looked for certainty all they found was uncertainty. All sounds enough to screw any one’s head up.
…of Marketing Direct
This magazine normally sits in the pile of things I’ll flick through if I have the time and to be honest, I very rarely get to this one. But while I was having a sort out I caught sight of my name literally plastered all over the front page.
It’s a great piece of personalised DM in my opinion and to be honest I agree with most of it. I am the best planner ever, I am cool and I should be Prime Minister. I’m not sure about loving Southampton though, only parts of it.
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