The Nigerian Prince and the Vermont Book Club

ideogram.ai

In my early days as a writer seeking publication, I used to collect rejection letters from agents and publishers. Now, this was at least 15 years ago, and some of those rejections were real “rejection slips” on pieces of paper. How very quaint.

In those days, I still harboured the notion that I might become a million-seller and one of those “he turned down The Beatles” stories. You had to be slightly deluded to even attempt to be published back then.

These days, I’m collecting the most absurd examples of AI-generated emails tempting me with literary offers I surely can’t refuse. I find these thoroughly entertaining. They’re the literary equivalent of those Nigerian Prince emails promising untold riches. 

I started getting them a couple of years ago. They weren’t particularly sophisticated to start with. Lots of characters “reaching out” with offers to “expand my reach”, “enhance my social media posts”, “elevate my website” or “take my search/metadata to the next level.” Fairly standard marketing tosh with maybe a passing flattering reference to one or other of my books thrown in.

But things are changing. The offers are getting more personalised. They’re not from some unknown marketing expert with a vaguely plausible-sounding name. They are from real authors, film production houses and book clubs. 

And they’re not content with praising my writing. These are attempts to flatter the whole weird bundle of paradoxes that is me. 

Here’s one I got last week from Israel James of the Vermont Book Club, inviting me to deliver a Masterclass that he’s helpfully paraphrased as “Intrigue by Design: Fusing Cambridge Pyschology, Retro-adventure Plotting and the Advertising Edge.”

Well, there’s a mash-up, if ever I heard one.

----------------------------------------------------

Dear Susan Imgrund (S.P. Moss),

I am Israel James, representing the Vermont Book Club. Our team spent a genuinely delighted and deeply inspired morning studying your exceptional profile with the Society of Authors, laughing along with your brilliant secret-agent wit, and tracking the wonderful mid-century atmosphere of your award-winning series, The Past is a Dangerous Country. As an international collective of middle grade authors, short story writers, commercial ghostwriters, and historical worldbuilders who constantly dissect the rhythmic nuances of pacing, subverted narrative tropes, and sharp text economy, we view your multi disciplinary career as a spectacular blueprint for modern storytellers.

We would love to invite you to headline a premier virtual spotlight masterclass focusing on the architectural mechanics of plotting a retro-style middle-grade mystery, the art of applying a Cambridge psychology framework to character motivations, and the workflow of using advertising copywriting discipline to sharpen long-form fiction.

A spotlight session with you would provide an irreplaceable, master-tier education for our global community. Our youth fiction authors are incredibly eager to learn your precise plotting framework specifically how you capture the "peril-fuelled, page-turning twists" of classic 1950s style adventure while modernizing the character dynamics for a contemporary audience. Furthermore, given your extensive background in high-level brand strategy, copywriting, and ghostwriting, our commercial fiction writers and indie authors would be profoundly privileged to study your tactical approach to text economy, punchy hooks, and the creative discipline of switching between literary short stories and commercial brand assets.

It would be an absolute honor to feature your brilliantly witty, sharply intellectual, and multi-format voice within our network. Would you be open to a virtual fireside chat, an interactive retro clue-mapping workshop, or a narrative psychology Q&A session with our global network?

With warm regards, professional admiration, and a hearty toodle pip,

Israel James

Vermont Book Club

----------------------------------------------------

I’m delighted that this AI book club are “laughing along with my brilliant secret-agent wit” and signing off with a “hearty toodle pip.”  

But though my intellect is not too bad, it’s real, human stuff, possibly inferior to this splendid “intellectual collective” who “... constantly dissect the rhythmic nuances of pacing, subverted narrative trope and sharp text economy.” Gosh. 

The ingenuity shown in combining my children’s books, my Cambridge psychology studies and my career in brand and advertising strategy is quite something. I do wonder how they would have shoe-horned further aspects of the holistic me in. 

7 things trumpet-playing taught me about the rhythmic nuances of stoytelling?

The Times ran an article recently about these scams. I do find it extraordinary that authors are taken in by this, although maybe for the writer featured in the article, it’s a smart way of getting more publicity. If you’re not proud.

Writing about the recent case of The Commonwealth Short Story competition, Ian Leslie comments on the hostility of the literary world to AI. His point is that literary people have less experience in reading AI-generated stuff, so this makes them more susceptible to scams - whether it’s Israel James and the Vermont Book Club or (possibly) the short story prize-winner with its “vacuous solemnity” and “weird metaphors that make no sense.”

Although it’s also questioned whether the judges of said competition are not averse to a bit of AI themselves:

But in the end, maybe the literary world shouldn’t worry. Most readers of literary fiction have to believe the short story or novel is written by a human being in order to care. 

I haven’t had any too-good-to-be-true offers of brand strategy work yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long.
 

The brand pecking order

 

Photo by Sid Balachandran on Unsplash

If I worked for a brand, especially a stonking big global brand, I think I’d be a little choosy about whose brand ranking system I chose to hang my hat on. Of course, there are almost as many brand ranking systems as there are brands these days.

In an idle moment, I had a look at the brand hit parade of a couple of the big players in the brand ranking game. The Big Daddy (Interbrand) and relative new kid on the block Kantar (BrandZ). 

Now, both of these have a black box to calculate brand value, but from what I can tell, these are on the same principle - factor in financial value/analysis, plus the brand strength/equity and role/contribution of the brand. And Bob’s your uncle, or something.

The Top 20s look like this:

OK, at the top of the table, we’ve got AMAG, or GAMA - not “MAGA” this year (to the relief of many).

And there are one or two brand positions where the two rankers are more-or-less in agreement - Instagram, Oracle, McDonald’s, YouTube.

But then there are some huge discrepancies. Coca-Cola is No. 7 Interbrand, No. 20 Kantar. For Facebook and Nvidia, the pattern is reversed - (Facebook 19/6, Nvidia 15/5). 

And whole categories - Luxury Brands (Louis Vuitton 12 on Interbrand, 32 on Kantar), consumer electronics (Samsung 5 on Interbrand, 61 on Kantar). 

Finally, look at cars. Toyota is 6 on Interbrand, 84 on Kantar. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are 10 and 14 respectively on Interbrand but don’t even make the Top 100 in Kantar.

Perhaps there are some methodological things I’ve missed, such as eligibility criteria - quite possible.

But I wonder how much is due to the two rankers’ beliefs as to what constitutes a strong brand? Is it coincidence that Interbrand - who’ve been in this game since the last century - have more substantial legacy-type brands in the Top 20? 

Whatever the answer, it just goes to show there are many ways to value a brand.

I wonder if anyone has done a ranking of the brand rankers? 

 

RETROWURST: My finest hour? January 1994

 I’m not sure what my finest hour was in my brand and advertising career (or maybe it’s yet to come, ha, ha!). But when it comes to Market Research, which is where I started out, I think it has to be this one.

It wasn’t an hour, more like 72 of them, not to mention all the conceptualisation, preparation and follow-up. Back in January 1994, I convened the MRS course on Advertising Research. 6 speakers, and delegates from client companies, market research, advertising and media agencies. 

You can see from the biography I submitted that I wasn’t taking myself too seriously. I encouraged the other speakers to do the same:

But the subject-matter - the whys and wherefores and state of play of advertising research 32 years ago - we did take seriously. People (or their companies) were shelling out good money for this. 

I started the course with a barrage of headlines of the “Is research killing advertising?” genre. And kicked the whole thing off with the comment “We could be forgiven for thinking this is the serial killers’ convention.”

This debate, of course, is still raging (or whatever one does on LinkedIn) today, as I now suspect it was raging thirty years previous to my course, back in the 1960s. And one thing that I was careful to do in the course was to look at the various advertising research methodologies, qual and quant. When should each be used? What’s the overall objective of each? The over-riding theme of the course was that it’s not simply “advertising research” but “people’s response to advertising/ideas” research. And that creative development research, for example, is used for deeper understanding of how people respond, and why - and how it can be improved. Not evaluation.

Fast forward 32 years and the plot has been well-and-truly lost. There may well still be MRS courses, but all I see flapping around the internet are flocks of White Papers. Many of these are shrill opinion pieces, given a veneer of scientific credibility through the addition of spurious charts, graphs and data tables.

Some of them are from individuals and organisations who I’d respected up to now.

This is an extract from The Cure for Dull 

 

“Only quant can truly measure dull”. 

Well, yes, only quant can truly measure anything. The clue is in the name. 

The paper goes on to state “Quantitative emotional measurement tends to produce stronger feeling, while over-reliance on focus groups can push work toward consensus and safety.”

Where to start? Apples and pears? Chickens and eggs?

But it’s not my business to get uppity and tell today’s agency leaders what’s what. I hope instead that at least some of those course delegates still remember what they learned from us in those far-off days - and are putting it into practice or passing it on to their juniors. 

Robert, Andreas and déjà vu

 

On my way back from Canada, flying far above the endless acres of wilderness, something drew me to the film Train Dreams on the in-flight entertainment. A good choice, I think. It reminded me of the life my grandparents must have had when they emigrated to Canada in the 1930s and built up what my cousin referred to as a homestead.

But it also, strangely, reminded me somehow of home in Germany and how that all came about. Meeting my husband in an Austrian mountain hut. Gradually, it dawned on me. Train Dreams is the American cousin of A Whole Life (Ein ganzes Leben) by Robert Seethaler. 

Both are the story of one simple man’s life, with identical plot points (orphan beginnings, dangerous outdoor work, brief happiness with wife and child until disaster strikes, coming to terms - or not - with old age and the world’s progress). The overall themes of the beauty and dignity of solitude, the interaction of man and landscape are common to both. The time and feel of the settings are similar, even though the actual places are far apart.

Although Seethaler’s work came first for me (the book was published in 2015, the film followed in 2023) Denis Johnson’s novella first appeared in 2002 and was republished in a different form in 2011. So if anyone can be accused of copy-catting, it’s Seethaler and not Johnson. 

But I’m prepared to give Seethaler the benefit of the doubt. We got this frequently when I worked at the ad agency. Similar ideas would pop up all the time. Call it spirit of the age or maybe synchronicity - coincidences that seem menaingful but with no apparent causal connection. 

Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest are all the same story. And, in the same way that 19th century readers had an appetite for extra-marital affairs and their consequences, perhaps 21st century readers and viewers need stories about the simple life, about our place in nature and the satisfaction of solitude. 

To me, it’s less copy-catting and more about tuning in to our collective humanity and what’s missing from our lives.

Keep your vibes to yourself!

 At the end of the 80s, I went to Acapulco. A cheap and cheerful package trip with a friend. We attended the obligatory “welcome meeting” and got talked into coughing up for a couple of excursions.

They were both a disaster. I remember a river, the banks of which were lined with rotting dead fish. I have blotted out other details.

The next week, my friend was keen to attend the welcome meeting for a second time.

Why the heck do you want to do that? Hear about the bloody picturesque white houses nestling on the clifftops again, and get roped into more rivers and dead fishes?

No, we ignore all that. We take the cocktails and listen carefully to what she told us NOT to do. 

And so it was - a fantastic second week, riding down to the Old Town in the forbidden blue (non tourist) bus, eating real Mexican food, discovering a deserted 1950s hotel possibly with the ghost of Elvis in residence, being chased down the street by Russian sailors ...

I am naturally wary of what others might think I’d enjoy on holiday. So I don’t know why I pressed the button for the AI assistant on Trip Advisor at the weekend when investigating a Greek island I haven’t visited yet. I blame a glass of wine too many.

I could hardly shut the wretched thing up. I think it had swallowed the whole of Instagram.

... nails the “holiday rhythm”, laid-back vibe, anchor pick, prime for that lively, waterfront “boats and clinkung glasses” vibe, harbor-adjacent, strong pick, that easy combo, pairs perfectly, the most “you” option ...

Almost put me off considering that island at all. It may be unspoilt in reality, but it’s definitely been a little sullied now in my perceptions by a non-sentient bot which has certainly never had a glass of Retsina, let alone one too many.

I know I should prompt these things with a bit more info, but when I said “no serious hiking”, I meant I didn’t want to walk uphill in 40°C on a goat track for 4 hours, not that more than “200m gentle level walking” is beyond me.

I think I’ll stick to my tried and trusted approach as expressed by Stefan Zweig:

All the strangeness, all the distinctiveness of a country will utterly escape you as soon as you are led and your steps are no longer guided by the real god of travellers, chance.

Or maybe ask the Trip Advisor bot where not to go and what not to do.

 

RETROWURST: In the mind of a planner (circa 2010)

 

How does a planner’s mind work?

I’ve never been a great fan of trying to map mental processes, mainly because how one person’s brain works is not necessarily helpful for the next. 

I can’t pin down when or why I would have drawn this up, but it’s definitely 21st century. 

Looking at it today, I’d say yes, it still works for me. It starts off with a sort of melting pot involving Jung’s four functions.

Then there’s that “Simplifier”. Not sure I’d call it that any more. It sounds too much like dumbing-down. And a bit patronising. Maybe “Clarifier” is better? Incidentally, I’d love to know what I meant at the time by “A4 thinking”. Obviously a buzzword that buzzed off into the great blue yonder.

Finally, there’s “Insight.” Without an “s”. Sparking Inspiration and hence Ideas and Innovation.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Quo vadis, qual?

 

“The mechanisation of qualitative research”

“The sanitisation of real human beings.”

These are a couple of pages from Wendy Gordon’s excellent Goodthinking A Guide to Qualitative Research, published in 1999. The latter section ends as follows:

We study consumer behaviour as David Attenborough studies gorilla behaviour - sometimes in hushed awe and sometimes with cruel laughter. By using the word “consumer”, we attempt to objectify human beings and persuade ourselves that we understand people as individuals, when in fact we have often drawn stereotypical and numerically based approximations.

David Attenborough is still out there studying gorilla behaviour but Wendy Gordon is sadly no longer with us. I wonder what she’d have made of qualitative research in the world of AI and synthetic respondents?

There’s certainly a lot going on in qual, which is in itself healthy. I’ve pulled out four examples of the directions various agencies and individuals are taking. What these have in common is that they’re all emphasising the uniquely human characteristics that are key to brand growth - so far, synthetic sales are not a thing, as they say.

REVOLUTION! The Billion Person Focus Group (Abi Awomosu)

From the claim upwards, outwards, downwards, everywaywards, this approach is mind-boggling however I look at it.

Abi Awomosu has worked at Meta, Uber, Apple and Co. , has written a book How not to use AI   and runs a consultancy called Data, Art and Soul. 

It’s a completely different perspective on AI, radical and dare I say it, political. Less about “extraction” (I had never thought about AI in those terms, but now I think about all that “scraping” ...) and more about listening and going where people speak unfiltered. This includes “dark data” and IRL (now there’s an idea Wendy would definitely approve of!).

This course (although it’s not really a course, more an induction into a way of thinking and working) will enable you to set up your “own OS with agents, workflows and cookbooks”. A first for me, reading through this is “digital body language” which includes "cursor hesitation" and "rage clicks”. 

DIGITAL DOPPELGANGER: Juno (Michelle Gilmore)

Juno is a little easier for me to get my head around. What Michelle Gilmore has done here is essentially created a doppelganger, encoding her craft as an experienced qualitative researcher into “Juno”, and training her to run expert interviews. So Juno doesn’t just run surveys, she carries out qualitative interviews - listens, thinks then acts. Juno “tracks emotion, detects hesitation and knows when to probe, and when to hold back. The way an expert researcher would.”

There are options for recruitment of respondents, including drawing from a global panel of 3m people. I assume none of these are synthetic ;)

Here’s an 8-minute video of how it all works.

EMPOWERING RESEARCHERS: Quallie.ai “Good work made easy"

There are undoubtably a few outfits like Quallie.ai about. This is a support system for qual researchers taking care of the “donkey work.” “Don’t let hours of qualitative research overwhelm you.”

The philosophy, is hey, let’s not pick sides, AI is here to stay. Our platform can help you speed up the process, leaving you with more time for the insight and brain work. The platform can transcribe (in 40 languages), summarise, interrogate the transcripts, organise and analyse. 

HYBRID: Source Nine

Most of the big research players have embedded AI in their products and services - and the smaller specialised qualitative agencies are doing that too. Source Nine have a product they’re calling Signal Insight - “for when you have no time or budget for full quality, and “synthetic AI” isn’t enough.”

It’s a combination of desk research, in-depths and Source Nine’s propriety tools. 

The trick here is that the AI isn’t an add-on - it’s embedded in the agency’s ethos, in this case “Building brand equity grounded in emotion.”

So there we go. There’s plenty going on. And what is cheering is that all of these, and others like them have gone beyond flogging improved efficiency. They are all looking for genuine human understanding - and I for one hope I’ll hear less disparging remarks about “focus groups” and more positive comments about the qual(ity) of market research in the future.