On the flight home from Croatia, I was doodling around some ideas that occurred off the back of the MTPW presentation.
This is one that’s interesting enough to keep pushing at.
Everyone goes clockwise nowadays. Make People Want Things.
So go anti-clockwise. Against the tide. Dave Trott called it predatory thinking during his excellent talk. Do what the others aren’t. Make Things People Want.
I was honoured to be invited to talk at IdejaX in Croatia this year. I’m just back home to lovely chunky broadband, so thought I’d upload my slides.
It’s a completely new presentation, based on a lot of the blogs posts I’ve been writing of late, and all the thinking I’ve been capturing and remixing on Artefact Cards since Autumn last year.
I’m pleased with how it went, but realised afterwards how densely packed it is. So shall be expanding the world and the thinking over the next few months.
If you go through the slides and think ‘ahh, it’s just like this example here’, I’d love to hear about it, so use that comments box, folks.
This is Apple’s welcome note to new employees. It made me think back to Sennett’s description of Antonio Stradivari which I mentioned last week.
People will only want the things you make as much as you want to make them.
(via Laura)
(This is Part III of an ongoing series: Part I here, Part II here)
What do marketers know about making things? Marketing folks and their agencies are simply the airy-fairy brand whisperers, are they not?
They don’t like getting their hands dirty with the nitty gritty of products and services. They’d much rather talk about brands as if they are some floating, mysterious gas or spirit, as they’ve done endlessly over the decades…
“[A brand] is a complex symbol that represents a variety of ideas and attributes. It tells the consumer many things, not only by the way it sounds (and its literal meaning if it has one), but, more important, via the body of associations it has built up and acquired as a public object over time”
Garner & Levy, Harvard Business Review, 1955
“A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer”
Paul Feldwick, 1991
Perhaps marketers have had a tendency to forget at times that they’re welded to a thing; a product, a service, something definable and describable.
The thing that they’re supposed to continually add more value to, so that it can be sold at a higher price over a longer period of time.
Whilst thinking about Make People Want Things beats Make Things People Want, I’ve found it helpful to think about things as having two parts to them; substance and essence.
Substance is about the atoms of a product, or the seconds spent with a service. It is the concrete reality that everyone’s experience would identifiably share.
Essence is more akin to the feelings around that thing; the people who made it, the other people who value it, the more abstract attributes that attach themselves to the concrete realities.
I’ve been thinking about this construct operating over the three eras Yochai Benkler describes in Wealth of Networks; pre-industrial, industrial, and network.
In pre-industrial times, the essence and the substance were essentially the same thing; one was inextricable from the other, the maker and his or her product were one and the same.
Think back to Antonio Stradivari from the previous post; as soon as he departed this earth, the things produced by that workshop lost a crucial something, and the business eventually died.
Then, in the industrial era through mass production, we discovered the ability to endlessly replicate the idea of one maker.
In a way, the essence was stripped from the substance of his first product, duplicated and attached to every unit produced. That duplicated essence evolved into the ‘brand’, especially when the original maker was no longer around.
It’s a little bit Cold Lazarus, in some respect: companies seeking to make a fortune by broadcasting the ideas of a long departed mind.
Anyway.
Now, the skill and the art behind that form of branding is compression.
Take the complexity of everything that happened in the creation of the product (the experience of the creators, the materials sourced and used and so on) and turn it into something that worked as a replicable pack, or within seven words on a poster, or in thirty seconds in television.
Simplify and transmit as quickly as possible.
And whilst it started being a technique around simple packaged goods, over the last thirty years the art of brand compression has crept into just about every sphere we can imagine, by and large because marketers and agencies encouraged it:
“It’s still early days: the word “brand” is still associated mainly with packaged groceries. But there are signs of hope. In the dark recesses of the human mind, in the city and amongst accountants, it is becoming apparent that the traditional balance sheet is giving a very partial view of a company’s worth.”
Stephen King, Strategic Development of Brands, 1988
They were right to do so, perhaps, in the world they could perceive; in a stable market where your options for broadcasting were TV, Print, Posters & Radio, there was no reason to think that the same powerful branding techniques and tools could be used to continually add value to the things that had existed for decades.
Then, as we know…
Everything about the world changed. You might have noticed.
Yet the techniques and tools around branding, around the essence part of anything, have by and large remained the same; focus on compression.
The thing we thought of branding itself as being has become substance and essence in messy, unending flux.
How do you apply the compression, consistency and simplicity to a brand when it seems that every time you blink everything about it has changed?
If you follow such matters, yes, the visual is a nod to the New Aesthetic, specifically thinking about a form of brand planning that only robots can see and make sense of. That rabbit hole is explored more throughly here, and here…
In short, think about the complexity around their products or services that any company or brand can now look at, instantly, virtually anywhere, in real time…
How do you process the fact that you’re meant to be looking after a neat little brand onion with four words in the centre in the face of that?
Now, in reality, there has always been a constantly changing, organic nature to the substance and essence construct.
It’s just that the internet has allowed it to be supercharged, with the myriad forms of expression we all now have in our lives.
Additionally, our brand tools and techniques were never really that dynamic; compare the verbatim quotes on a quarterly brand tracker with the daily tweets for the same brand.
Rather than fight against the complexity, we’ve really got to embrace it instead.
“We are born of complexity, shaped by complexity, and interact with a world that is inexorably growing more complex.”
Bud Caddell, What Consumes Me
We can embrace complexity because we no longer need compression for a brand.
Where once we had to squeeze everything down to 30 seconds, we can now stretch anything out as wide and deep as the internet allows.
It gives us an opportunity to reframe the way we think of adding value through essence to the substance of products and services.
I’ve talked about two ideas around this before, the Labour Theory of Brand Value, and Story Quarry, which it’s worth bringing together now.
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The labour theory of value takes its roots in the thinking of Adam Smith, and is evolved by Karl Marx.
It’s the idea that a thing is worth the sum of the labours it took to create it in the first place.
(You can see why Marx liked it; it’s a great idea to protect the worker, if the efforts of his labour can only ever be sold for what they’re “worth”, as opposed to what the market dictates.)
It eventually falls down when modern economic reality determines that somethings only worth what people will pay.
Which of course is why brands evolved as discussed earlier; to add as much value as possible to the essence on top of the substance.
And the way that the brand would be developed would be by paying a trip or two to story quarry. Story quarry is where you go to dig up interesting things to use about a company or brand in its marketing.
By and large, because of the need for compression and simplicity demanded by a mass media world, you would go and look for the biggest, chunkiest big of marble you could find.
Why? Because you were after something with which to make big, impressive, inspiring things to look at, which a lot of people would find the same sort of value in. Essentially you were trying to craft the essence to fit on top of the substance, and drop it down on top.
The thing about a story quarry though is that it’s made up of all sorts of interesting things. It builds up, layer upon layer of strata, a complete history of everything you’ve done.
Nowadays, you can show people all the parts of your company you threw out of the story before that didn’t make it in because they weren’t big enough.
Where you sourced raw materials, how you processed them, how does what in the factory, little stories that happened in the making, what you do with the money besides make more of the thing… make everything that comes out a talking point for people who’ll care.
All of it adds up to the labour theory of brand value; constant, tiny, incremental layer-by-layer additions to the essence and the substance.
Perhaps, done right, it’s not just about your company, not just about your founder or creator, the one super-maker whose essence you want to capture and replicate ad infinitum.
Matt Webb’s post on Instagram as an Island Economy is a great read to understand how value (and what value!) can be created in such an incremental, piece-by-piece way.
Matt also links to John Lanchester’s piece in the LRB on “Marx at 193”…
“This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. … When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company.”
John Lanchester, Marx at 193
I could probably endlessly exemplify this line of thinking at this point, because there are so many interesting and diverse companies around on the edges of industries that do this.
But this post is long enough already.
So let’s just talk about Field Notes, which I think I first came across at a Playful conference perhaps…
In an age when everyone walks around with one, or two, or even three devices that could theoretically replace notebooks, we’re drawn to ones that we love more than ones that offer pure function.
Field Notes is a US brand of notebooks who effortlessly demonstrate the labour theory of brand value, the continual additive approach to building a layered approach to the substance of what they make.
Their films that they make to coincide with each special edition release are a great example of how to use the endless space of the internet to fill your essence with ever more life.
Watch this one, perhaps, where they talk about their original inspiration, the US farmer’s field note books:
Every Field Notes customer could spend a lot less on very similar note pads, if you were just comparing them at the substance level.
But it’s the essence of Field Notes that makes them more valuable. And that essence is added by everyone who works there, every additional nook and cranny you find to explore in the Field Notes world, and every customer who carries their Field Notes with pride.
I’m not even sure I’d know how to start describing Field Notes. But I believe in the company, in their products, in their brand (if that’s what it is).
I believe in the things they make. Because I believe it is true. And the more layers I unpeel, and discover more delights, the more I believe.
How many household name brands can you say that of?
“The internet is biased towards fact. People don’t want myths. They don’t care about your brand mythology, they care about where your product is made and what’s in it.”
Douglas Rushkoff
(Parts IV & V to follow soon…)
(this is Part II of an ongoing series… Part I is the ‘Easter Island’ post here)
I’ve been extending the thinking behind Make Things People Want beats Make People Want Things aphorism, and for simplicity’s sake (and perhaps slightly for want of a better plan) I’ve started pulling apart each word and thinking about it that way; Make, Things, People & Want. I’m going to talk about each separately. So, here we go…
In the beginning, there wasn’t any marketing. There was making. The people who produced the things were, by and large, the marketing story that went with them. The success of the marketing was inherent in the things they made.
In his book “The Craftsman”, Richard Sennett (Professor of Sociology at LSE & renowned musician) talks about the workshop of Antonio Stradivari, craftsman-hero of 17th & 18th century Italy.
The instruments he produced are know by the latinised version of his name, Stradivarius (the record price paid for one is $3.6 million…)
Throughout his working life, Stradivari saw a great number of highly accomplished craftsman come through his workshop, including his own sons who never married, but remained married to their work instead.
The central part of the workshop was the man himself. Stradivari’s eyes and hands were all over that workshop, guiding the production of every instrument with either a word or a stroke (Tony Faber’s book Stradivari’s Genius highlights just how). His workshop produced the finest stringed instruments, all by hand, that perhaps will ever be played.
Now, you’d have thought that with such a fine reputation established, his sons, trained all their lives by the master luthier and with the family name to trade on, would have made a decent fist of carrying on the family business.
Yet within twenty years, the business had failed. And not because the instruments they made were poor. As Sennett notes:
“They were able to trade on his name for several years, but the business eventually foundered. He had not taught, he could not teach either of them how to be a genius. The work of theirs I’ve held and played was excellent, but no more than that.”
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
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Genius is not easily taught. Much as in the same way that Stradivari’s sons failed to build upon the creator’s legacy, so the inheritors of many companies have failed to build upon theirs.
But they didn’t necessarily need to.
20th century companies have been fortunate to grow through an age where the spirit of their first maker could be captured in an essence; a name and a slogan, and a set of attributes could be extended long after the creator themselves had shuffled off this mortal coil.
A lot of companies and brands still bear their names; Kellogg, Ford, Gillette, Heinz, McVities, Cadbury’s, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, Unilever and so on.
What we’ve seen from companies like these is less in the way of the ingenuity, drive and spark that started them off, but an increasing dominance that allows them to work out ways in which to make the things they are geared to deliver relevant for whatever culture they find themselves in.
Minimum Viable Effort, if you will. “What’s the least we can do to maintain momentum?”
Yet further extending the life of a company beyond the creative force that started it has become harder and harder. We have entered an age where the creators and makers are front and centre of their companies again.
Part of it is because there are suddenly so many newer companies around, and they are a lot more likely to have the founders at the helm, or still involved.
This is not just true of tech companies and Silicon Valley start-ups, of course, but of a lot of other companies too.
Having the founder in a company means the culture is still going to be dragged back around what they like, and crucially what they don’t.
Thousands of decisions every year will get the seal of approval, and millions of other decisions will be made by others (knowing what the answer would be if they even asked…).
Dyson springs to mind as a great (and maybe too rare) British example. James Dyson relentlessly sets a tone with the company that you wouldn’t hear in his long established competitors:
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But what happens with companies who aren’t fortunate enough to be steered by founders?
Rather than fix long term problems in their companies, one misguided response to the cult of the maker by established incumbents has been to ‘hire in’ talent to fill that role.
Except it’s not talent that might be able to do the job required.
Think of Gwen Stefani, product designer at HP. Or Jean Paul Gaultier, packaging designer for Diet Coke. Lady Gaga, creative director of Polaroid.
Or Will.I.Am, another Creative Director at Intel. When he’s not too busy judging singing competitions on television.
I’m not surprised you can’t quite believe it, Will. Neither can that nice Intel lady.
Ed Cotton raises a vital issue around this:
“…these appointments are expensive and force the brand to focus it’s attention on the efforts of one individual who certainly isn’t likely to represent the tastes, interests or desires of the majority of their consumers.”
Yet no matter how misguided it is, it’s an easy answer for a marketer to sell to a CEO.
Which is largely because, I think, increasingly the modern marketer is seen by the CEO as the ‘promotions guy’.
Nowadays, the typical CEO is far less likely to be less focussed on customers or product, but much more focused on the efficient way to keep the business running.
In 1996, 24% of CEOS from the UK FTSE 100 companies were from a financial background. By 2008, it was up to 31%. Today, in 2012, it’s 51% (Source: Robert Half CEO Report).
It’s an astonishing shift, and one everyone across the marketing discipline no doubt recognises.
And it means that the pressure on Marketing Departments and their agencies is increasingly to make the most profit from existing products and services as possible.
“Make People Want Things” comes the cry from on high.
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Actually, for all the modern elements driving this state of affairs, it not a particularly new problem. I am drawn back once more to Stephen King of JWT (who I seem to be reading, rereading and referencing a lot of late) who in 1985 a paper called “Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried?”.
King describes four types of marketing that aren’t really marketing at all.
1. “Thrust Marketing is what happens in companies when the Sales Manager decides to change his title to Marketing Manager, though not his function. [It is] the sort of marketing that concerns itself only with that part of the total process that lies between the factory door and and the retailer’s shelves. It does not concern itself with what the product or brand is, its design, quality and purpose”
2. Marketing Department Marketing – “The Marketing Department was simply bolted onto the standard company organogram, with all its hierarchies and reporting lines and rigid department barriers. They understood that the company’s success depended on studying consumer’s wants… but all too often they were given little real authority”
3. Accountant’s Marketing – “Gradually the accountants drift to the top of the organisation, replacing those whose experience has been either in the company’s products or its customers. The result has been that manager’s objectives – including Marketing Managers – have increasingly been set in simple terms as the bottom-line figure on a profit and loss statement.”
4. Formula Marketing – “a form of marketing in which control is held to be more important than innovation. It is much safer to be static than dynamic; and who is going to take risks when his whole future depends on turning in the results that his distant boss is calling for?”
It pains me slightly to think back over the number of clients I’ve encountered who are forced to operate like this; a relentless focus on using marketing as simply a lever for short term profitability.
But what’s the alternative?
King’s prescription is for what he calls Real Marketing, for which he outlines four essential aspects:
1. Start with the customer – “Real Marketing’s starting point is designing a product or service to meet the wants of a group of consumers. It is adding values to the raw materials to meet the totality of those wants, both physical and psychologically. So it embraces suitability for purpose, quality, design, brand, personality, style, availability, after-sales service, ease of repair and all other aspects of a customer’s relationship with a brand”
2. Work over time - “The whole point of branding – that is, in simple terms, designing something special and putting one’s name on it – is to make it a little easier to be successful in the future than at present… Real Marketing cannot be divorced from product quality, product improvement, process improvement and manufacturing productivity.”
3. Using all the company resources – “Real Marketing cannot be thought of as a department activity. It is a matter of harnessing all of the company’s resources to satisfy customers, and of linking what the customer wants with what the company is (or can become) uniquely available to provide so that it can prosper by doing so.”
4. Innovate – “What Real Marketing is calling for is more resources devoted to innovation than normally happens, and it requires a different attitude of mind. Hierarchies, systems, rulebooks and formulae work pretty well for controlling and improving the efficiency of repeated actions. They are hopeless for inventing, experimenting with and developing something that has never happened before.”
You’ll recognise a lot of this.
It’s very similar to the things we hear nowadays about being user centric, agile, about continual testing, about fail fast, about slowly building over time*… all the things that we keep hearing about, and all really well thought through and valuable input into current marketing thinking.
Yet this King wrote about all this in 1985. We’ve known this for nearly thirty years and done precious little about it.
As Murray just noted today after attending the IPA’s latest Creative Pioneers seminar…
To be brutally honest, if you’re an agency chief or CMO spouting off about how you’ve discovered that being agile or user-centric is the answer to marketing’s problems, you should be fired on the spot for ever having thought otherwise.
But besides repeating the past, what’s most apparent from King’s prescription for Real Marketing is how much of Marketing must be rooted in MAKING.
The craft, genius and skill behind the product is the single most important thing to get right, and never more so than in an age when the quality of every single product and service is subject to the instant critical or celebratory views of millions.
We must fully reappraise and reinvent the marketing’s relationship with making and remaking THINGS, not campaigns.
Making is Marketing, Marketing is Making.
(Enjoyed this post? Read Part III in the series…)
*I’ve linked back to Bonfires & Fireworks here, because it’s yet another example of Stephen King beating someone (i.e. – me) to the punch by decades. If you want to read a better version of all the ideas you’ve ever had from thirty years ago, then buy “A Masterclass In Brand Planning”, the definitive collection of King’s essays and speeches (link is through Amazon Associates scheme, so I get a couple of pence if you do)
“This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things; that the more things it makes the bigger will be the income, whether dollar or real; and hence that the key to those lost recuperative powers lies . . . in the factory where the lathes and the drills and the fires and the hammers are. It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates.”
Forbes Magazine Editorial from 1938
(on why America had yet to recover from the depression)
(soure: No Logo)
“Manufacturing’s contribution to the ecpnomic recovery and long-term economic growth extends to other economic sectors, including commodities and professional services, through forward and backward linkages and spillover effects. America’s manufacturing companies also anchor America’s innovation ecosystem, providing demand for American researchers and a supply of R&D in the U.S. Innovation in the U.S. cannot be severed from domestic production; the two belong to an innovation system whose elements benefit each other and flourish or fail together”
from Value Added: America’s Manufacturing Future, 2012
(via Simon Carr)
It’s amazing how often we fail to learn from the mistakes our forebears made.
A box for one of the in-house Smithery projects. Excited.
Admap launched an Admap prize this year, calling for essays on ‘The Future of Planning’… and my brother Andrew and I decided we’d write something a bit provocative for it.
The shortlist has just been announced (all the best to those who’re on there, some really interesting sounding essays I can’t wait to read), and whilst unfortunately we’re not on that, it does mean that I can post it up here for you all.
Enjoy… and don’t have nightmares. It’s just a story. Isn’t it?
The Creation of Demand
John V Willshire, Smithery & Andrew J Willshire, Data2Decisions
We are masters of the exploitation of demand; making people want things. Agencies today habitually paint fresh hieroglyphs upon the brand temples constructed by our forebears. But what happens when people just stop turning up to worship?
We believe planning has a vital role to play in the creation of demand; making things people want. It can only achieve this by doing two things; creating ways to deal with the highly intensive workload caused by data overload, and by rediscovering a core ambition set out for us in the past.
What was planning?
In “The Anatomy of Account Planning”, Stephen King of JWT recalled how that department came into being at JWT in London in 1968. The agency had been running a ‘marketing department’ along the following lines:
“What we did for each of our clients included analysing marketing data and published statistics, writing marketing plans, recommending more research, and planning new product/brand development.”
Stephen King, 1989 (1)
As clients took marketing in-house, JWT set up their Account Planning team in response, concentrating on the territory closest to home; the advertising strategy or what we would call the communications strategy.
Nowadays that job is split between the many agencies crowding around the client’s table. Yet whatever sort of planner you are today, you can probably spot yourself on the simple scale King describes.
“I believe in fact that the most fundamental scale on which to judge account planners is one that runs from Grand Strategists to Advert Tweakers. And that nowadays there are rather too many agencies whose planners’ skills are much too near the advert-tweaking end of the scale”
Stephen King, 1989 (2)
In 1989, it was easy to be a tweaker. There were five clear media options, where you could test one or two creative iterations within the three channels you chose (Broadbent, 2011 (3) ). But today’s tweakers are different. They are born of necessity, rather than the desire for a quick buck, a good lunch and a simple life.
There is now too much planning to be done at the tweaker end of the scale, exploiting demand that exists already. It is important work, but the sheer volume of it means planners, agencies and clients are unable to do enough to create new demand.
Data suffocates companies and brands, and the continued and accelerating fragmentation of media is making it worse…
Planning in the future
Picture this scene; one warm autumn evening in 2020, two brothers settle down to watch the same television programme.
One brother is completely immersed in the show at 7:30pm in his Surround-Vision room (Brooker, 2011 (4) ), whilst the other rolls in from the pub at 10:30, roughly sketches the shape of a screen across the kitchen window with his finger (Samsung, 2012 (5) ), and watches it while devouring a bacon sandwich.
The same story unfolds; the same characters live or die. The brothers are still watching the same program. Aren’t they? Nothing they say about it later would alert the other to the fact that about 80% of the programme was different.
If they watched the other’s version, they would only be vaguely aware that something was different from the one they saw previously.
Yet as a result of watching the same show, their perceptions of the featured brands and products would be strikingly different. On a frame-by-frame basis, they watched a different show. Every scene is methodically screened for commercial opportunities – advertising and product placement are now utterly synonymous.
The 30-second spot has become largely irrelevant; ‘Addressable TV’, which let advertisers target specific households with TV ads (Johnston, 2011 (6) ), was nothing more than Henry Ford’s ‘faster horse’, the solution advertisers thought they wanted. As the skipping and blipping of ads became increasingly commonplace it was proven in 2018 that a campaign of 800 TVRs wasn’t actually seen by anybody…
Instead, the commercial support of advertisers is woven into the very fabric of the shows themselves. Whilst in one programme, the heroine wears Adidas, drinks Pepsi and cracks the Pentagon’s network with her Apple iWatch. In the other programme she’s clad in Nike, sated with Coca-Cola and performs her death-defying feats of silicon daredevilry with the ‘Intel Inside’ chip in her wrist.
The version of the show you see is tweaked, scene-by-scene, just for you. It pulls together the data on who you are, who you know, where you’ve been, what you’ve bought and what you’ve yet to buy, and creates the show for you in real time.
This happens across every show, every surface, every channel and every interface. Ads still exist of course, but they’re put together from a million possible options, each based on a different part of your data.
The tweakers make a million decisions about what you’re going to see today before you’re even out of bed, and they do that for everyone.
For today’s agencies, this would be an impossible task. Billions of consumers with every conceivable piece of media tailored to them and their unique data pattern.
Planning as we do today in that future isn’t humanly possible. However, nobody said that the tweakers of 2020 would be human.
The rise of the machines
The word “robot” was coined in 1920 – a century before the time we are considering – and derives from the Czech word “robota” meaning “drudgery” (7).
In their various forms they are staples of science fiction, an essential part of modern manufacturing, the foundation of Internet search engines, and they are becoming increasingly common in decision support systems using sophisticated reasoning to assist humans.
One way to think of the key difference between robots and software is that robots make decisions about things. Twenty-two of the top thirty Wikipedia editors are robots (Geiger, 2011 (8) ). Algorithms increasingly control everything from the microsecond movements of the markets (Slavin, 2011 (9) ) to the news sites writing about the markets, including Forbes (Boog, 2012 (10) ), which means robots are trading stock based on things that other robots write…
It’s not that ‘the robots are coming’. To paraphrase William Gibson, ‘the robots are already here. They just aren’t evenly distributed’ (Gibson, 2003 (11) ).
By 2020 robots will be a major part of planning within agencies, particularly where there are planners and clients found to be umming and ahhing when confronted with too much data.
Where once agency floors would thrum with activity, the only noise will be the low hum of the air-conditioning units required to keep the processors cool.
Testing a hundred versions of an advertising unit will be carried out swiftly, silently, globally, with results returned in minutes not months.
In the corner of every agency research facilities are depopulated, as machines eavesdrop on the rustling discontentment around a client’s brand, and rapidly devise new deployments of advertising to address the problems.
Every agency has a virtual universe in an offshore server farm, a representation of the entire audience by individual, not by blunt socio-economic groups.
Every person is analysed and classified in an instant, and the advertising opportunities they represent are bought and sold many times before the programme transmission versions are finalised.
These robots, these algorithmic ghosts in system we’ll never see, are relentless in their pursuit of exploiting demand.
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever…”
The Terminator, 1984 (12)
Is resistance really futile?
It sounds a little terrifying, but fear not. It presents us with the greatest opportunity planning we’ll ever have to unite the two ends of the scale Stephen King described;
“At one extreme, there are the “grand strategists”, who are intellectual, aim to see the big picture, are a little bit above the fray, and almost economists. At the other are the advert- tweakers, who peer myopically at advertisements, conduct groups discussions, justify creative work to sceptical clients, and are almost qualitative researchers”
Stephen King, 1988 (13)
By “creating a body of allies, human and non-human” (Jones, 2011 (14) ), we can get the tweaking done for us, and fulfil the promise of Stephen King’s ‘grand strategists’, creating new types of demand at a time when clients need it most.
Agency robots, with real ‘agency’…
How might it work in practice? What do the robots do, and what do we do?
Firstly, what could and should planners give up of their current remit? In a linguistic turn of fate, ‘agency’ has another pertinent meaning; by giving something ‘agency’, it’s allowed to do things of its own volition. The planners must design the robots that replace some of the decisions they make, just as autopilots are designed in conjunction with real pilots.
And we’re not talking just about automation, which has become familiar to us all over the last few years. Automation is here for some channels, and will undoubtedly spread to most. But it still leaves responsibility in the hands of the planning team. It is simple to integrate with current practices because fundamentally the planning process has not changed – it has just been accelerated.
The introduction of robots is different. Where automation supplies faster, more rounded questions to planners, robots can speed answers more efficiently and effectively to whoever needs them.
For instance, we must have the ambition to replace the need to send planners on a six hour round trip to Derby to discuss and debate the minutiae of research, click-through rates, which TV spots to buy, the results of creative A/B testing, pen portraits, or which logo the client should use as their twitter avatar.
So the future can firstly be about making the simple decisions based on accumulated data with clinical speed.
But it can also be about how complex and abstract robots can inform and stimulate the creative process within agencies.
“I’ll write a program, and just ask this program to mix up the assets… I want to be surprised, I like this randomness and chance, I want that beautiful accident to happen”
Joshua Davis, Designer & Technologist (15)
Think about the way humans and machines may interact in an agency in 2020.
Robots could curate a collection of contextual pointers around briefs; something like Philter Phactory’s Weavrs (16), “your alter-egos crafted from the threads of the social web”, which are automated robots that roam the virtual world which underpins our material one, blogging about where they go and what they find there.
Or perhaps robots could use all that data that’s never used to create changing visualisations and mood boards around the task at hand, creating thousands of iterations, and tracking the forms that lead to more successful work.
And we may well get ambitious, and just reorder the entire Internet; imagine an in-house search engine that isn’t based on ‘most popular links’, but restructured by marauding algorithmic ghosts that order search results by…
…well, nobody’s really sure anymore, but as a result, there are many more moments of serendipity that inspire genuinely new ideas every time you type in a client’s brand.
All throughout the agency process, the exploitation of current demand can be honed, toned and improved by robots. So what do we free the planners up for?
The creation of demand
What unites the robots we’ve described is their reliance on the past. They need to be fed with the data of the past days, weeks and months. Their frame of reference is retrospective.
They are the new tweakers, focussed on exploiting demand; understand what people wanted before, and make them want a bit more. They can continually shave and save crucial pounds every month. But simply exploiting demand is no way to build a robust business for the future.
“To survive, marketers themselves will have to plot the obsolescence of what now produces their livelihood”
Theodore Levitt, 1975
Our ambition must be nothing short of the creation of a new kind of demand that will cause the obsolescence of the existing demand we serve for a client.
It is only by helping clients identify, create and exploit these new opportunities that we can help them grow their business, and in turn continue our own success.
Of course, we must ask some tough questions of ourselves to do so. Are we fit for purpose? What must we become to meet this challenge? When King talks of his ‘grand strategists’, his phrase ‘almost economists’ gives us a good starting point.
“The logical outcome of the new radical economics is a need, in all types of company, for strategic imagination on the grandest scale, building up the long-lasting range of added values that makes up any brand.”
Stephen King, 198817
Over the last few years, planners have been reaching out further and wider than ever before into the fields of human understanding; economics, econometrics, psychology, anthropology, physiology, neurology and more.
We have a strong, if small, talent base within the industry, who specialise in generalism; the ability to learn a little about a lot, to wander through new disciplines finding new possibilities to reframe and help solve existing problems (Hardy, 2008)18.
If we are “almost economists”, the emphasis is firmly on the almost.
Without doubt, planners will need to be significantly more accomplished in commercial and
business planning in the future than they are now.
It’s the skills and intuitions that lie beneath some of the great, business changing ideas you’ll find in the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix winners; VCCP’s transformation of BT Cellnet into O2, BBH’s work to give Barnardos a future, or MEC’s work on the “Let’s Grow” campaign for Morrisons, to name but a few.
Yet even that won’t be enough. We must go further in our own explorations.
In 1975, the Kodak engineer Steve Sasson was showing his latest invention around the company. It was rudimentary at best, only taking blurry, pixelated, images. The company showed no interest in advancing the camera, and into the cupboard it went (19).
Nearly thirty years later, Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy on the 19th January 2012, whilst sales of standalone digital cameras has surpassed 120 million units (not counting camera phones).
We must help our clients avoid their own ‘Kodak Moment’, for it appears that it is increasingly hard for them to help themselves. We must take the best, most unique elements of a business, and make those the focus to create new types of demand amongst customers.
It is the best planners, these ‘grand strategists’, who are uniquely placed to marry up the product and service development and experimentation inside clients with the complex, changing world emerging outside.
If freed from incessant tweaking, planning could and should become the vital strategic link for companies between the CEO, the marketing department, and product development, and build platforms upon which creativity can prosper.
Existing clients will value us more, we will be more able to win new ones in new sectors of work, and we ensure that we continue to be an industry that inspires the best young talent to seek opportunities with us.
“There’s a groundswell of people in agencies who are equally passionate about creativity and business. Rather than saying ‘I’ve got an idea for a car ad’, they’ll say ‘I’ve got an idea for a car’.”
Chloe Grindle, Creative, McCann London 2011 (20)
Helping clients Make People Want Things is what we learned in the last century. The future lies in helping them Make Things People Want.
1 – King, S. (1989) “The Anatomy of Account Planning”, Admap, November
2 – King, S. (1989) “The Anatomy of Account Planning”, Admap, November
3 – Broadbent, T. (2011) “Channel Planning: Effectiveness lies in channel integration”, Admap, Jan.
4 – Brooker, C. & Huq, K. (2011) “Fifteen Million Merits” Black Mirror, Channel 4 – depicts a future where we “spend our evenings in a cell of gigantic HD monitors”
5 – Samsung’s Smart Window
6 – Johnston, N. (2011) “Addressable TV”, Admap, March
7 – Etymology of the word Robot
8 – Geiger, S. (2011) - “Bot Politics” (via Bridle, J.)
9 – Slavin, K (2011) “How Algorithms Shape Our World”, TED
10 – Boog, J (2012) “Forbes Among 30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers”
11 – Gibson, W. (2003) The Economist, December 4th
12 – The Terminator (1984), Orion Pictures
13 – King, S. (1988) “Strategic Development of Brands”, Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Account Planning, APG One Day Event, July 1988
14 – Jones, M. (2012) “Artificial Empathy”, BERG
15 – Davis, J – talking about the combination of computers, programming and generative versions to inspire
16 – Philter Phactory (2011), “Weavrs”
17 – King, S. (1988) “Strategic Development of Brands”, Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Account Planning, APG One Day Event, July 1988
18 – Hardy, S. (2008) “What Specifically do Generalists Do?”
19 – Pachal, P (2012) “How Kodak Squandered Every Single Digital Opportunity It Had” Mashable
20 – Grindle, C (2011) “How can Creativity Make Advertising More Popular”, Campaign – ‘War Of The Words’ event
When I was over in the US judging the CLIOs, Stevan Keane from Adweek kindly invited some of the judges to take part in a ‘Six Questions’ feature they do.
So here’s me, being Scottish, for Amerkins:
Oh, and here’s fellow judge Natasha Jakubowski too, saying better things in an accent Amerkins are a bit more likely to understand:
I’ll check back and put the rest of my fellow judges videos up too, when they appear.
Many years ago, I read a book called Collapse, by Jared Diamond.
The book details how, throughout history, various civilisations have caused their own demise, often by continuing to do the very thing that is destroying them.
The example that has always stuck in my mind most was that of Easter Island.
When a group of Dutch explorers first arrived in 1722, they found a population of 2,000 or so poorly equipped islanders, living on a barren grassland 64 square miles across, where no tree or bush grew larger than 10ft high. Their only transport were small, flimsy crafts made from small planks. They were trapped in the middle of the Pacific.
But they were not alone.
The explorers also found some 200 or so giant statues, some over 30ft high and weighing in at 80 tons or more, looking proudly out to sea from giant stone platforms.
It made no sense. How could such monumental achievements be built on an island with such a small population, with virtually no natural resources available to them?
Because the island hadn’t started out like that.
Various scientific research has shown that Easter Island was not always a barren grassland. It was once covered in forest, with giant palm trees. The first colonists, the Polynesians themselves, arrived in around 400 AD, no doubt aboard a magnificent long canoe. They prospered on this island paradise.
The forest, and the giant palm trees especially, would have been useful for many things; shelter, building more long canoes for hunting porpoises, and so on. Things that helped the population thrive.
As the population grew, they developed a secondary use for the wood. They started to carve the giant stone heads we all know today, the gods that they’d worship. They would use the trees to make rollers and ropes to help them manoeuvre the statues into place along the islands shores.
The statues and platforms became bigger and bigger over time. It was likely, writes Diamond, that the creation of these ever-more impressive statues was a show of oneupmanship, which culminated in the ten ton red crowns they started putting on top as a final flourish.
As the population grew, they needed more and more wood, for both practical and religious reasons.
And the wood began to run out.
It couldn’t grow as quickly as they wanted to use it. The logical decision would have been to stop building giant stone heads, and save what wood was left for life’s essentials; shelters to live in, boats to fish from.
But they didn’t. They kept on doing the things their immediate predecessors had done.
We know they kept on making and moving stone heads for as long as they could, because there are still another 700 statues in various states of completion in quarries or abandoned on ancient roads…
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I think that the reason I like this story, this warning, is that it helps us think about choice, and balance.
It rings true because we know it’s what happens when groups of people get used to doing something; it becomes very hard to get them to do something else, even if it threatens their very survival.
They don’t, or can’t, or won’t see the end coming, and yet they carry on regardless.
Marketing today faces a choice, between the balance of two things it does well.
Firstly, marketing is about the creation of demand, or Making Things People Want.
Marketing is meant to get granular about every part of a business, from every atom in the substance of what is made, every face, word, comma, picture and feeling conveyed in the essence surrounding it.
And all of it, all of it, should be for the person who matters most, the customer.
And yet…
So much of marketing, too much of marketing, is about the exploitation of demand; we Make People Want Things.
Those things are either the same things that have existed for five, ten, twenty, fifty years… clinging to relevance in the modern age because people are too scared to change them.
“Sell this”, the new marketing director is told, “and don’t fuck it up, it’s been fine up till now”.
Or worst still, it’s the new thing, a once-great idea that’s edged it’s way through an impossibly complex labyrinth of a corporation to emerge as a charred husk of the idea it began as. “Look what we’ve made” says the company to the marketing director, who’s never seen it before “now go and sell it, there’s a good chap”.
It’s not an either/or choice. Few things ever actually are, despite what people want you to think. It’s a balance, and it depends on many factors.
But here’s what I believe.
The perfect storm has arrived; economic, technological, social. It has reframed the game for every single industry. Every marketer has limited, pressured resources available, and a great deal of uncertainty around what they should do with it.
Making People Want Things is our equivalent of making and moving those giant stone heads, magnificent statues to worship. When times are good and your world is stable, it is a fine use of resources.
Making Things People Want represents your canoe, your shelter and dwellings, the things you cannot live without. The marketing fundamentals. Real marketing.
Ask yourself, what’s more important, what’s going to work best for the business you’re working on?
I reckon right now, for a lot of businesses and marketers, Make Things People Want beats Make People Want Things.
I just wonder how many are able to see the choice, and do something about it to shift the balance?
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This is Part I of an ongoing series of posts, Part II is called “Making is Marketing, Marketing is Making” and can be found here.
