Experience can be a burden

I’m not sure if you have noticed, but some seriously great work is coming out of Central (well just Mexico) and South America (mostly Brazil and Argentina) at the moment.

There is this auction idea integrating with Nike +, the further you run, the bigger your bid. Then there is this low-tech retail idea from Puma. Both absolute genius in their own ways.

It’s not just the sexy brands either. They are killing it on seemingly boring products as well. There’s Scotch-Brite, offering customers at a restaurant a free dinner if they wash their own dishes.

Hellmann’s Mayonnaise is another. When a customer buys Hellmanns a recipe based on other products in your basket gets printed out on the bottom of the receipt.

I don’t believe that these countries are anymore creative than say US, UK or Australia, its just that the concept of creativity is different. This is essentially down to experience, or more specifically a lack of traditional advertising experience.

Generally speaking, their creative communities aren’t bound by previous knowledge or experience in the same way we are in many developed countries. For our markets, being experienced carries baggage and is more often than not a burden.

I do think we are hitting a turning point, but generally speaking we are waiting for a generation to get out of the way.

Some further reading How baby boomers are stifling the marketing revolution?

Thoughts?

Ratings are overrated

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Ratings and ranking systems are a part of almost every industry these days. From finance and media to sport and music, people lap these things up.

I can’t stand them myself. In my humble opinion they make people behave all weird. Like moths attracted to a burning hot light bulb. They know it might end in 3rd degree burns, but they just can’t help themselves.

On the one hand ratings make a lot of sense. Rating things attempts to show what’s good and what’s bad and what’s popular and what’s not. This allows people and companies to make more informed decisions. The problem is they are easily manipulated and arguably driven by rather shady motivations.

Whether it’s buying the latest single, making a bet, an investment or spending marketing budget, various forms of ratings heavily influence what people do.

You only have to look at the financial crisis to highlight how pointless they are.

Millions of dodgy sub-prime mortgages were given goodratings by official organisations just to keep the money rolling in. This Time quote pretty much sums things up:

“But ratings also became a stamp of actuarial approval that often let investors and regulators skimp on their own due diligence”

Now I’m know financial whizz, I work in advertising, but how does USA have a perfect credit rating despite being one of the most in-debt countries in the world, coming a whisker away from defaulting?

Media buying around TV ratings is another example of how reality is distorted. Brands spend billions buying up the ad breaks of the highest rating shows. Now I’m not against TV advertising I just think it’s way over priced for its impact.

TV has never been a better medium for advertising the media agencies and networks will tell you. Ratings are up, and more and more people are watching TV (this is true). As a result one 30 second spot in The Voice will cost you $100K to ‘reach’ approximately 2m Australian.

Why do companies do it? It’s supposedly the quickest and easiest way to reach a lot of people with your gospel. Again this is fundamentally flawed.

It’s projected. It assumes that people are actually watching the ad. You only pay for the actual TARPs/GRPs I hear you say. Have you ever met anyone that actually has one of those mythical little boxes that records the sound of the show to check you have watched the ads – of course not, but that’s beside the point. And just because it’s recorded the sound it still does not mean I have watched the ad break let alone remembered it.

Marketers aren’t very good a observing their own behaviour. The front room is full of distractions. I could have checked my emails, sent a tweet, checked my Facebook account, played Angry Birds or God forbid spoke to my Wife, made a cup of tea or had a number two.

Media agencies are even peddling this point of view about time-shifted viewing not really affecting the situation; they are just watching more TV. Who does not fast forward ads on shows you have recorded? In fact there are so many ads on some shows I have to record it because it’s impossible to watch it at the set time.

Again not to say TV isn’t a good medium, just don’t always follow the high rating shows. There is a better way. The problem is that people don’t get sacked for creating TV ads to plonk in the highest rating shows. It’s not their fault if it doesn’t work, it must be the creative, and after all media buying and TV ratings is all scientific like. Well it’s not, it’s designed to keep people in Jags and I’m amazed how the industry just takes it.

Ratings completely mislead industries and make organisations take its eyes of the bigger problem and ultimately the prize. Australian networks are more interested in driving prime time ratings on one or two shows to sell ads than creating content people want to watch.

Brands and agencies spend way too much time and money trying to fill these breaks rather actually making stuff people want.

Ratings give people an overinflated confidence and should only be used as I guide. You need to ask the tough questions even if you can’t measure stuff 100%. Take them on face value and you will get fixated on the wrong goal.

Hire this pig

I stumbled across this new magazine last week, mostly because of the well designed front cover, but it seems to have described all the great ingredients of modern day agency.

It’s also a very good read and to be honest, I’m still quite partial to thumbing the fine stock of a well made publication. It’s called the Smith Journal.a and a vailable at all good newsagents (I imagine), I throughly recommend it.

Why do we find creative problem solving hard?

Everybody wishes they could think a bit more laterally. In fact you have probably experienced that overwhelming feeling of jealousy when you see an amazing idea that is so simple you wish you’d of thunk it.

In a recent article on Wired, Jonah Lehrer highlights why the human brain can struggle to solve hard creative problems.

It also implies, at least to me, that if you want creative problem solvers in your business, you might be better off employing people with either brain damage or a drink problem.

Jonah uses this little brainteaser to highlight the point.

Move a single line so this math equation becomes true.

IV = III + III

Not too taxing on the brain right? You just move the Roman numeral to the right of V. Well try this one.

III = III + III

A bit harder? If you are in the majority of people that didn’t get this correct, the answer is to move the vertical in the plus horizontally so you create an equals.

The reason we miss the solution to problems is due to our inability to look for answers in different places. We are essentially primed to look for the answer in the familiar rather than unexpected (*cough* 30 sec TVCs…USPs…brand essences).

Work in strategy and planning? Stretch yourself

When you were young, can you remember your parents ever saying something along the lines of; ‘it’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it’

Well guess what? As always they were right and never has a truer word been said when it comes to agency folk. Particularly planners.

I’m continually amazed by how many types of strategists it takes to change the communications light bulb these days.

A GP doesn’t go; ‘Well that seems like a nasty cold, but let me consult my cold and flu specialist before I make a diagnosis.’

Yes there are times when you should engage a specialist (and I mean real specialists), but I see no reason why a modern brand planner shouldn’t get social media and vice versa. Why shouldn’t account planners know the fundamentals of user experience design and media planning? In fact I’d have it in the job description.

A GP essentially has a working knowledge of the human body. More often than not they can fix it and when they can’t, they know who to call. They don’t wheel out a brain surgeon every time someone walks in with a headache.

This is essentially what still happens in adland. Every time the Internet word gets mentioned in a client meeting all the agencies wheel out their digital and social media strategists. Probably to show they get it, partly because the rest of their team don’t, but mostly because they see it as a new revenue opportunity.

I’d love to see account planners step out of their comfort zone and learn the ins and outs of media. More importantly agencies need to move digital talent upstream and input into brand problems rather than just working on Facebook brand pages and shiny iPhone apps. Some of the best thinking on brands today comes from people with digital backgrounds and not advertising.

Just like the healthcare industry with GPs, can’t we just have smart people that get a lot of different stuff? Do we need to a strategist for every ailment a brand has?

To be honest much of this is caused by gaps in people’s knowledge and the companies they work for. You don’t know what you don’t know right? However it’s easily fixed. Keep learning new stuff and go and work in different kinds of agencies or on different projects. Trust me it’s fun.

Watching people watching TV

I’d love to see cameras on ratings boxes so we know what actually happens in an ad break. So this kind of cool.An Australian family sitting down to watch the Ariel Ping Pong Grand Final, the biggest sporting event of the year.

A magazine is an iPad that does not work

For those old farts like me (at the ripe old age of 31) that still like to peruse a magazine once in a while with a pipe and slippers might find this scary. For many people in the not too distant future, the magazine will have a very similar fate to other technologies such as vinyl, cassettes, IE6 and the horse and cart. You all look at it with romance, nostalgia and a deep down feeling that it won’t die (with the exception of IE6) but it will and become a niche media that the cool retro kids are into.

Henry Jenkins interviews Frank Rose

Frank Rose, contributing Editor at Wired has a new book out called The Art of Immersion. I haven’t got my grubby hands on it yet but if this interview (part one and part two) with Henry Jenkins is anything to go by it looks like a must read of the year.

In this interview Rose essentially discusses the concept of ‘deep media’, where people can engage with a story at any level of depth they like. Whilst the interview mostly references the entertainment industry, it’s clear that this is bubbling over into brand communications on a more regular basis. Ford, Honda and BMW are examples of an entire category adopting a kind of ‘deep media’ approach as discussed by Rose.

As a general rule, the majority of advertising has been about lowest common denominator stuff for decades. How can we reach the most people for the least effort and the lowest cost? I’ve said before that people have always had thresholds when it comes to how immersed they are willing to become in a communication. The net result of generations having grown up playing, watching or participating in more immersive stories will change people’s expectations of everything. Even the most humourous 30 second TVC is quite frankly pretty boring to many people. Hence innovations like this from W+K.

However in addition to thoughts on deep media, Rose also goes on to make some fantastic observations relating to the history and evolution of storytelling and communications.

“the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible–and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as “a sense of immediate audience participation.”

But seeing new media as a threat–that’s a pattern we fall into again and again. Now it’s video games and the Internet. Before that it was TV, and before that it was the movies, and a couple hundred years ago it was serial fiction and people like Dickens. The only constant is that whatever is new is threatening. And usually it’s considered threatening because it’s too immersive–you could get lost in it. But that’s exactly what fiction is. If it’s good enough, people are going to want to inhabit it”.

How TV ruined your life?

The ever brilliant Charlie Brooker has recently been exploring what we all know – there is in fact a massive gap bewteen what happens on TV and real life. In ‘How TV ruined your life?’ Brooker deadpans his way through iconic programming to some of the most cringing advertising ever created. Here’s my favourite episode by far.

Everything is advertising

Jess Greenwood at the recent Circus Festival brilliantly summed up how I feel these days by saying that everything is essentially advertising. Not just a TVC, but every single interaction with a customer should be treated as an opportunity to advertise in the truest sense of the word. A case in point.

Then I came across this interview with Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly where he talks about something I’ve mentioned here before. Marketing isn’t just about the promotion. There are three other forgotten Ps we should be considering as advertising. Promotion has kind of become like crack to brands and agencies, but we are undoubtedly starting to see a shift to the other stuff.

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