the fruits of imagination

Do more

As a nice follow-up to Clay Shirky's thoughts in that last post, the always excellent David Armano shares some good observations on the need to balance research and data with actually going out and doing stuff.

Fail more

Leland points out this great piece from HBR's list of 20 breakthrough ideas of 2007.  It's idea number 19, and it's written by the excellent Clay Shirky.  It's in defense of open-source experimentation, but not for the "wisdom of crowds" reasons people often cite.  He argues open-source is good because it encourages a lot more failing.

“In traditional business, trying anything is expensive, even if only in staff time spent discussing the idea; so some advance attempt to distinguish the successes from the failures is required. Even at firms committed to experimentation, considerable effort has to go into reducing the likelihood of failure. And because green-lighting ideas that turn out to be failures will be noticed more than killing radical but promising ones, many people err on the side of caution.

In open systems, by contrast, the cost of failure is reduced, partly because less coordination is required among the various players and partly because each player is willing to accept some of the risks of failure directly. This means that worrying about whether a new idea will succeed is unnecessary; you simply try it out. The institutional barrier between thought and action—the need to convince someone that your idea is worth giving a whirl—doesn’t exist. The low cost of trying means that participants can fail like crazy as they continue to build on their successes...

This presents a conundrum for business. Clearly, firms can’t just start trying everything. Management overhead is real, and the costs of failure can’t simply be laid at employees’ feet. As a result, open system–like innovation must necessarily continue independent of any firm’s ability to either direct or capture all of the value. Some companies’ product lines or employee structures may not allow radical experimentation, but smart managers will look for ways to take advantage of this sort of broadly distributed effort. In environments where organizations can reduce the cost of failure by farming out a problem to individuals—who may be induced to participate solely by the chance to learn new skills or to gain the respect of peers—we can expect open systems to make increasing inroads into standard commercial efforts."

It makes me wonder if agencies could ever work more like this. We tend to be the opposite of distributed: most projects are worked on by just a small core team and so failure is highly visible and risky. But it makes me wonder what would happen we approached it differently. What if instead of each project being worked on by one team, every project was opened up to the whole agency? That opens up a whole other set of problems, but it sure would be interesting.

Being nicer

I was bitching about a client last week with a few other people.  I know this may come as some surprise to the young and innocent among you, but this happens in advertising sometimes. 

This time, something interesting happened: the conversation turned to why we complain about clients, and what that does to us and the relationship.  And we realized something: it's not good, and we want to stop. 

So I'm saying it here: I'm going to stop.

Why?

Because it's negative, and negativity tends to encourage more negativity.

Because I don't want to say things behind people's backs that I wouldn't say to their face.

Because it's a small industry and you never know when a comment will come back to haunt you.

Because by focusing on the frustrating parts of the relationship, rather than the good parts, it just sets the stage for more frustration.

Because it makes us stop seeing them as other people, with their own set of pressures and fears and perspectives and ideas.

Because it sets up an us versus them dynamic, instead of one where we work together to solve a problem.

Because it's a cop-out, where we resolve ourselves of any responsibility: "It was a brilliant idea, but the client just couldn't get it."  Well, if they didn't get it, isn't it our responsibility to find another way to explain it, or to figure out where that lack of understanding lies?  (Or heaven forbid, maybe to accept that the idea wasn't actually so brilliant after all.) 

Because every person that I've ever complained about I've also learned something important from, even if what I learned was how to deal with someone difficult.

And because even the frustrating ones are paying our salaries.

Image from Toothpaste for dinner 

Gorgeous

From Fallon London, who seem to be making a nice name for themselves in doing lovely big pieces of film. 

In addition to being gorgeous, it's a great use of music too.  But the best part is, contrary to appearances, it's actually shot without digital trickery: Adland hosts some cool making-of videos.  All of which just contributes an additional layer to the enjoyment & experience of the ad, and gives us something to talk about.  This is how to do film.  Great stuff.

How to sell a mattress

The Tempur-pedic mattress is a good mattress.  It's got a unique rational benefit.  I've seen lots of magazine ads for it.  I know exactly what it does.  I know that it uses a lightweight foam compound designed by NASA.  I know that it adapts to your body shape and temperature, and distributes your weight evenly so you're suspended when you sleep.  It's supposed to be the most incredibly comfortable sleep you can get.  I've known people who swear by them.  I know all this.  But every time I've bought a mattress, I get the regular springy kind. 

Then the other day, someone we know came over to visit.  She'd just bought a Tempur-pedic mattress.  With her purchase, they gave her one of these:

... and asked her NOT to keep it, but to give it as a present to someone.  The bear is stuffed with the Tempur material.  Instantly, as I picked it up, I understood what the mattress is and does.  It feels amazing.  I got excited.  I couldn't stop touching it.  And I decided the next mattress I get will be from them.

It was a reminder that all of the positionings and benefits in the world sometimes can't compare to a simple experience.  In this case, I don't think the rational benefits ever really registered, because I didn't have a frame of reference.  I didn't know what that material would actually feel like, so in some dark recess of my brain it wasn't believable that it could really be that different.   But one touch was enough to change that.

There's always a way to get your experience across.  Mattresses might seem like a tough one - how do you get people to experience it without having them come into the showroom?  With a little creativity, it can be done.

Somebody likes us

Well this was a nice surprise, especially given we've posted something like twice in the last month: apparently we've won a Best Blog of the Day Award.  I must confess I'm not entirely sure what it means or who bestows this honor but heck, we're total suckers for attention and glory so we'll take it.  Thanks to the BOTDA judge(s), and to whomever nominated us. You're much too kind.

Grande soy caramel machiatto, in case you're wondering

Starbucks has been doing some interesting marketing experiments recently.  Back in December, there was that holiday pay-it-forward idea.  And now, for the next week they're giving away free t-shirts custom-printed with your regular Starbucks order.  Given how particular people get about their beverage order, not to mention how your order has almost come to be seen as an expression of your character, this seems rather genius. 

The designs are really nice, done by Mychael Knight, an up & coming designer who was originally discovered on Project Runway of all places.  There will only be a very limited edition of t-shirts made each day, so don't hold your breath.  But if you don't get one you can still download the image as wallpaper, or find out what your favourite celeb's custom drink is.

Oh, and speaking of coffee... after a hiatus for a few months there will finally be another attempt at a Toronto coffee morning next week, if anyone's interested in meeting up face to face.

Thank you

Well, it's been quite an amazing start to the year.  As you can guess from the lack of posts around here we've been in a bit of a frenzy recently.  But we're coming out of the other side of it now.  And we have some great news to report. 

On one of our pitches, we were informed this week that Allstate Canada has hired us as their Canadian agency.  This was a big win for us because it's an important client of Leo Burnett USA, and because they've actually been a client of ours for 50 years.  The reason for the pitch was because they've been largely dormant on the mass advertising front in Canada for many years, but have decided to reinvest in this country, so they wanted to hear different perspectives on getting back into the Canadian market.  And after an RFP and 2 rounds of presentations, we're delighted that they've agreed that Leo Burnett is still the best agency for the job. Congratulations to everyone who was involved over the last 2 months.

Another pitch is still underway.  And we've also been busy on our existing clients, with several major new campaign ideas in the works right now.  So we're not quite out of the woods yet.

But we wanted to take a moment to thank all of you. 

Thank you because a lot of the thinking we've been sharing with existing and prospective clients through all of this had its start here, on this blog and in various other blogs that we read and comment on.  Thank you because everyone who's participated in this experiment over the last year has in various ways contributed to our successes.  Thank you for sharing, for commenting, for linking, and most of all for listening and giving us a supportive forum to talk about and try out new ideas.

Reductions

Food writer Michael Pollan had a great article called "Unhappy Meals" in last weekend's New York Times Magazine.  While it's on a subject - how bad the modern US/UK/western diet is and how fat and unhealthy we're all getting - that's seen a lot of ink spilled already, he has a novel way of looking at the issue.  He thinks it's the science of nutrition itself that has messed up the way we eat.  It's worth the read.  It's already made me seriously reconsider my food choices.

But I also found his analysis of how science has wrecked nutrition instructive for us marketing types, because there are a surprising number of parallels to what we do.  He argues that by analysing the content of food and focusing on vitamins and nutrients, we've become too technical and reductionist and lost the bigger picture of food as a complex, dynamic, cultural relationship with each other and with nature.  And he notes that the cultures who view food as meaningful relationships are ironically much healthier than we've become by viewing food as nutrients.  Here's one passage that struck me:

...scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.    

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways... There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Doesn't this sound familiar?  Something similar happens with marketing research.  We also have a tendency to be reductionist: put in this ad; get out this shift in behaviour or opinion.  When we focus on isolated variables that we are easily measureable - awareness, purchase consideration, recall, likeability - we also lose sight of the bigger picture, the complex and ever-shifting reality of how brands and ideas and stories and meaning bounce around in people's heads and in society.  We lose sight of how brands are social constructs and part of our dynamic cultural relationships with each other.

I wonder if nutrition and market research (both softer sciences) historically have tried to take their language and structure from the hard sciences.  And perhaps what we're finding is that reductionism is not the right model for analysing these more complex relationships.  But more on that in another post.

He also takes some good swipes at the reliance of nutrition on research questionnaires that ask people to recall things they have no reason to remember, and actually have reason to lie about.  I'm guessing this will also sound familiar.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women’s Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: “Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?” Having answered yes, I was then asked, “When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?” But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, “shortening” (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn’t remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven’t been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered “medium,” was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the “medium serving sizes” to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn’t under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

It's funny (or is it sad?) because it's true.