A wonder-full 2018

I know, I know. It's only adverts.

But next year I would love to see less of platforms, engagement, driving this or that, KPIs, journeys of various sorts, digital disruption, millennials, Thought Leadership, embracing and empowering, reaching out, roadmaps, workshops, Change Drivers, seamless experiences, content, algorithms ...

And more:

Wonder

From one of my favourite books, above:

"We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished.. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel.  It is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless."

A wonder-full 2018 to everyone!

Boxing Day, Decade, Century?

Around this time of year, I like to get nostalgic and have a look at advertising and brand communications from days gone by. Now, forgive me if I get lazy for once, but I have found a fascinating write-up of some Christmas ads all the way from the 1980s by Mike Oughton, Creative Director of McCann, in Campaign.

Have a look - you can marvel and revel in the pre-digital masterpieces of Oxo, IBM and Coca-Cola. It was a different world. But the one that makes me most nostalgic, maybe because the brand has disappeared from the UK High Street, is Woolworth's. 'The Spectacular Woolworth's Christmas Show' to be exact. It's got everything - celebrities, sports stars, technology - and tapes. Piles and piles of them.

Tapes aside, I'm quite amazed at how much technology (if you can call it that) was on offer at Woolworth's at the time. And just how much is crammed into the ad - apart from the celebrities, there are brands upon brands, and prices, and music, all-singing, all-dancing.

Now compare that with the Amazon ad above. I think it's a great piece of branding and definitely watchable, but there's also something slightly sinister about it. It's all about the boxes, and the Amazon logo, and whatever is inside those boxes doesn't get a look in. It's certainly single-minded.

Contagious, in their report on the coming trends, talk about 'Amazonification' and describe Jeff Bezos as 'The Man in the Cardboard Castle' - a reference to world domination if ever there was one. Where will Amazon go next? Banking? Pharma? Who knows?

Bots, boxes and Mr Bezos - the future belongs to you?

The Age of Confusion

If I had one wish for Christmas, or even for next year, I'd like to knock all those brands off their faux social mission bandwagons and take an axe to that plinky piano whose music always features behind such creations.

OK, maybe I'm being unseasonably miserable, and maybe the ad for Olay has a fantastic insight that will have women round the world cheering, but I find it patronising. There's the ad itself. Do people really take comments such as 'you're beautiful' and 'you've got a lovely smile' and 'I love your hair' from a random film-maker that they don't know as 'true compliments'? Oh, and incidentally, what if the film-maker had been male? Where would we have been then?

And I have never, ever heard anyone say someone has 'a lovely smile for their age.' Then the rallying call 'It's time we stop defining women by their age.' I wondered who 'we' means in this context. Who is the finger being pointed at? I can only come to the conclusion that it must be Olay pointing the finger at themselves. I wonder if they'll put their words into action?

As (Oil of) Olay, Ulay, Olaz, Ulan and maybe some other permutations and combinations, this brand has invested years in the idea of younger-looking skin.



Today, the product line-up includes products 'For fighting the 7 signs of ageing' while there are anti-wrinkle products classified into age groups 25+, 40+ and 55+. By the way, whether you're 55 or 95, you come into the 'deep wrinkles' category. Sorry.

And of course, the makers of Olay send you a wonderful magazine once you get over the age of 50, together with an incontinence pad sample. You see, they are allowed to segment and judge according to your age, but for the general public, it's a no-no.

I think Olay - or at least the people running the brand - need to work out what they stand for, and what they are offering. At the moment, the messages are mixed and contradictory. It would be a brave move, for example, to accept that many women do want to look younger, even if it's not the most PC, feminist right-on thing to want. (In the same way that many women in the Far East wish for fairer skin.)

And while much of the advertising from the last century is cringeworthy, there's a brilliant ad from the then Oil of Olay which I think captures the spirit of the brand and still works today. Better than 10,000 plinky pianos.

Colours reunited

This year, there's been rather a spate of what I'd call 'diversity' commercials, for example Levis' 'Circles' above. It's got a great soundtrack and definitely leaves you feeling good about humanity and wanting to get up and dance. So far, so good.

But the more of these rather generic-looking commercials I see, the more I get deja-vu, right back to the 80s, when I was getting up and shaking my stuff rather more frequently than I do now. And I think of The United Colours of Benetton.

Although Luciano Benetton had been going with his fashion emporium since 1969, it wasn't until 1982 that he met his partner in crimes against bland advertising, photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani. And the two of them changed the face of marketing and advertising forever.

These posters may look a little dated now (especially the clothes!). But we're going back over 30 years. Is the 2017 Levis commercial any different to this in terms of the idea behind it?

What came subsequently from the creative partnership maybe overshadowed these posters with their spirit of youthful optimism and a borderless future. As the decade turned, the idea of 'United Colours' was taken into a more controversial sphere:

And what happened in the early 90s is now advertising history: the newborn baby, the human hearts, the blood-stained uniform, the death row prisoners, the AIDs victim deathbed scene. Was it controversy for controversy's sake? And where, in all of this, were the clothes?

As an aside, for all the talk about the importance of the retail experience today, that was another area that Benetton pioneered and got absolutely right in the 1980s. Who of a certain age can ever forget the stores with their neatly-stacked piles of rainbow-coloured jumpers? It was a fashion sweet-shop if ever there was one.

Diversity, shopping experience, political and social causes - Benetton was definitely ahead of its time.

Toscani and Benetton parted ways as the millennium turned. But now they are back together, older and maybe wiser. In the new campaign, they have gone back to their roots in some ways with photography of an Italian primary school class with children from 13 different countries and 4 different continents.

It looks almost as if we could be back in 1984. But with one difference. These aren't models - this is real life.

Make of that what you will.

We're only human

It is estimated (by Gartner) that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse.

One of the things that interests me in the development of AI is just how closely we'll be able to replicate human - not just thought - but perception in all its forms.

I've recently (probably late to the game) come across some nifty resources about understanding our human quirks, from The School of Thought. The first is on the subject of Cognitive Bias and here you can find (and download a poster) 24 biases stuffing up your thinking.

These range from the 'Barnum Effect' beloved of astrologers, through to the ever more prevalent 'Group Think' and 'Just-World hypothesis', beloved of many a spat on Facebook. There are plenty of these that saw me nodding, from 'The Curse of Knowledge' to the 'Dunning-Kruger Effect.'

What can you do with this stuff? Well, of course, you can use it for your own self-knowledge - and it is always reassuring to know that you're not the only one that's fallible. Beyond that, it's vital for anyone involved in the planning and creation of brand communications. People do not behave rationally, as rational thought is only one mode of perception. By the way, I don't necessarily hold these biases to be 'bad' - they are short-cuts, which we need increasingly in an overloaded world. What is bad is not being aware of them, and being convinced we are driven only by rational thought.

And then there are Logical Fallacies, flaws in reasoning, which are also helpful to bear in mind for most of what passes for journalism today.

As The School of Thought says on its website: isn't it more important to teach children how to think rather than what to think?

Past Forward

Sometime in the 1970s, inspired by Blue Peter, I buried a time capsule in the woods at the back of our garden. Well, time capsule is a bit grand: it was a biscuit tin filled with various ephemera - a newspaper, probably, a paperback book, sweet wrappers, that sort of thing.

The only problem is that 40-plus years later, I have no idea where I buried it.

One criticism of much marketing activity is that it's terribly short-term. Even for durables and long-term services, the emphasis in today's digital world is on the now and the present and the instant. OK, there are the occasional exceptions. Ads for watches that you're just keeping 'for the next generation.' Or the promise of your own share of a barrel of whisky to enjoy in a decade or two. We've got a couple of rather nice bottles of red wine, vintage 2000, sitting in the cellar to enjoy when the boy turns 18 - not too long to wait now.

I've written a post here about taking your time, which mentions the Long Now Foundation (Founded in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility.) And here's another smart piece of thinking from Remy Martin and their agency to promote their Louis XIII cognac, which takes 100 years to make.

Two years ago, they kicked off the 100 Years campaign by producing a film starring John Malkovich which would first be released in 2115. (They are lucky they chose Mr Malkovich and not Kevin Spacey, but no doubt there will be other worries by 2115.)

And now they have teamed up with Pharrell Williams to create a music track that won't be released for 100 years. And this time there is a 'planet positive' message built-in: the disc has been pressed on unique clay vinyl (using soil from the vineyard - whatever next!) and will be stored in a water-vulnerable safe. So if we mess up, and water levels rise, our descendants won't get to hear it in November 2117.

Of course, people in 2117 may be wondering who on earth Pharrell Williams was, but still.



Now, some people may argue that it's a bit pointless spending so much on and making such a song and dance (and film) about a product few can afford. (A bottle of Louis XIII costs over £2,000.)

But advertising Concorde never did British Airways any harm.

AIBU?

One of the liveliest sections of the Mumsnet Forum discussions is the section entitled 'AIBU?' - for the uninitiated that's 'Am I Being Unreasonable?' There's everything on here from the trivial to the traumatic, and the answers rarely stop at a simple 'Yes' or 'No.' Ideally, I'd guess, one would like to be regarded as a touch unreasonable, but with justification.

On the subject of unreasonableness in the world of marketing and advertising, here is a short article in Campaign from Mick Mahoney, Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy & Mather, London. It's entitled Being Unreasonable in four easy steps and starts by quoting George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

It's implied that being unreasonable is a harder job than being reasonable. The reasonable man 'adapts' where the unreasonable one 'persists in trying.' And not only is unreasonable harder, but you're likely to be met with more resistance at the end, too. If something 'seems reasonable' it'll probably be accepted. It'll do. The boxes will be ticked and we'll move on. (Ugh.)

But will anything change? Probably not.

These days, our obsession with 'seamlessness' and 'consistency' means that we'll feel more comfortable with reasonable ideas. It's about fitting in and following. It's about looking at the past and what worked there to generate ideas for the future.

It's actually about not needing people at all - reasonable, unreasonable or otherwise. It's how AI works.

But shouldn't our ideas be more about standing out, being unique, leading, being first? Using our innately human ability to put things together to create something new?

To quote George Bernard Shaw again:

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

The Gospel according to Powerpoint

I must make a confession. I am not a regular church-goer, either here in Germany or back in the UK. Having said that, I do have many memories of church from my childhood, and I have to say that most of those are related to what marketing people today would call the 'experience' rather than the 'communication.'

Church-related communication has always been charmingly amateur, in my experience. Amateur in a positive way: not slick, not 'professional', communication that looks hand-made. For all the 'hand-written' and 'hand-crafted' yet carefully designed communication that commercial brands and enterprises put out these days in an attempt to appear authentic, they could well take a leaf out of the local church's poster advertising the Summer Fete, or the parish magazine. It's amateur in the sense that the people producing these communications genuinely love what they are doing.

As for the 'experience' - well, that's quite different, and I'm not in any way alarmed by this inconsistency. My memories of the experience, certainly in retrospect, include feelings such as wonder at the mystery of it all and, yes, awe in its original sense. Whether it's stained glass windows, bells ringing, organ music, polished candlesticks and pews, ancient texts or stories from two thousand years ago, there is plenty to stimulate the mind, the senses and the spirit.

So imagine how I felt when I attended a church service on a recent trip to the UK (not to the beautiful church pictured above, I hasten to add) and heard the language of the boardroom and the management consultant. Now, admittedly, the management types pinched the idea of a 'vision' from the spiritual types to start with, but it was rather alarming to hear it played back in the context of a 'Vision Statement' for this particular church. Not just that, but talk of priorities and process, enablement and empowerment, roadmaps and workshops. I didn't actually hear mention of Change Drivers and KPIs but I suspect they may be part of the package.

My view of the beautiful stained glass windows was somewhat obscured by a series of posters depicting a number of 'pillars' relating to the 'Vision', which looked as if they had come from a Powerpoint design-your-own-strategy-presentation background format.

Maybe I'm over-sensitive and others less close to the world of business will welcome this more down-to-earth approach (is it?) - and maybe God moves in mysterious ways - but I would rather leave the bullshit bingo in the boardroom.

Are your roots showing?

A long time ago, when I was still in the UK and working on the British Airways account, they set up a fascinating piece of international 'Britishness' research which looked at impressions of Great Britain in a number of countries around the world. This was qualitative research, and people in each country were asked to imagine a typical British town and what the characters were like there: policeman, doctor, teenager, manual worker and so on. It was rather like that 'Heaven and Hell'  joke, one version of which you can see above. And - surprise, surprise - there was little consistency in the way Britain was seen around the world - sweet and quaint in the US, compared to pushy and arrogant in Australia.

I've just read a long article in The Guardian about the rise of nation and place branding, which appears to be a booming business. Not just from the point of view of attracting tourists, but for governments to attract investors, workers, students, or to allocate resources and increase esteem generally internally and externally, much as you would use a Brand Purpose or Position.

It's not an easy job. Apart from an uneven playing field to start with (as in the differing impressions of US and Australia in the example above),  just think how quickly the overall impression of a country can change due to a change in its leadership. Obama's USA and Trump's USA - worlds apart. Or how a personality associated with a country or place can make or break impressions. Or how a natural disaster can overshadow everything. The article quotes Naomi Klein: Diversity and debate are the enemies of branding. Is it folly to try and reduce something as complex and multi-faceted as a place to a mere brand?

As mentioned in the article, Institute for Identity are having a good try. Their work sounds like a dream job - travelling around, getting the feel of the place, talking with the people, everyone from historians to lace-makers to film-makers.

And even if it seems a step too far to attempt to distill an entire country with all its dynamism, history and diversity down to a slogan and a logo, in these days of globalisation it's increasingly important for brands to be unique and authentic. And part of that has to come from the provenance. How has where the brand came from, where it was founded, informed its purpose and values? Instid have some useful tools and techniques on their website for getting a clearer understanding of a place - through the intellect, emotions and senses.

For brands, as for people, it's important to never forget where you came from.

Recycle, reuse - and monks

Films and songs are constantly being remade or re-recorded, so why not commercials? The now defunct Yellow Pages did it a few years ago, and I've recently seen an excellent new example from Xerox.

Now, I must admit that, growing up on this side of the Atlantic, I've never seen the original film from 1976, in which Brother Dominic has a little help from Xerox to achieve 'a miracle.'



More than 40 years later, so not to go the way of Kodak, the brand Xerox has to re-invent itself as going way beyond photocopiers, in order to stay relevant in the 21st century. So the new campaign - sorry, platform - 'Set the Page Free' has been created. The 500 copies must now be translated, personalised, shared around the world and so on.

By taking on where the old commercial left off, Xerox stresses its pedigree, trustworthiness and reliability as well as its innovative new side.

Sometimes the best - and most effective - creativity isn't about creating something completely new:



It's been a bit of a week for monks. Here in Germany (Hessen) we had a public holiday to celebrate 500 years of the Reformation. One of Playmobil's best-selling lines has been the Martin Luther figure.

But probably the strangest Martin Luther-related packaging that I've seen is this. I may be wrong, but surely tomatoes had not yet been brought to Europe in Martin Luther's time? Or does this celebrate the 500th anniversary of that event, too?

Out and about

2016 was full of shocks for the pollsters and indeed, many bright young things working in advertising and marketing. How could we have got things so wrong? What? The collected opinions of my Facebook friends don't constitute what the Great British Public is thinking? I thought that if I 'de-friended' a few of those people whose views I didn't like, then they'd disappear into a puff of ether and I'd never have to be troubled by them again.

I blogged about the return of the Untrendy here and so far, 2017 has been full of references to bubbles, echo chambers and the like in everything from song lyrics through to advertisements (Heineken springs to mind) so I suppose at least there's awareness now that that the world is full of different views, not all of which may be palatable to us personally.

As a marketer, there's no way you can guarantee that your brand will be desired and bought only by people whose demographics appeal to you, or whose worldview co-incides with your own. So what can you do, to find out how other people tick? At the risk of sounding obvious, you have to go out and meet them, observe them, talk with them, listen to them. And not through the filter of the screen. The agency Ogilvy and Mather announced their intention, last year, of sending their planners out and about around the country, under the banner 'Get Out There.'

My first reaction as an old fogey in this world was a wry smile and something of a sense of bemusement. Surely this is what planners at ad agencies do? It appears not. Kevin Chesters, the Chief Strategy Officer at Ogilvy in London is quoted as saying that only 2% of creative briefs are informed by original first-hand research.

When on earth did we lose touch so badly?

Once I'd gulped and realised just how dire things had got, I had a look at the Get Out There blog.  There are clips and articles about Oldies in Eastbourne, the question of Brexit in Boston, Christianity in Hereford and so on. Yes, you could pick holes in stuff like the journalistic approach (picking on towns that are 'extreme' in one sense or another and packaging it all up with video clips and snappy headlines) but that's the way of the world these days. I trust that there's some good substance and insight behind the public exterior and in the end, at least they are doing something rather than debating and pontificating.

I notice the Marketing Society is re-naming its 'Brand of the Year' 'BRAVE Brand of the Year' to reward risk-taking. I'm looking forward to seeing a brand marketing to appeal to people out of the hipster London bubble.

The Artist-Scientist

In my mid-teens, I'd already come up against the rigidity of the British education system which force-fits young people at an early age into boxes labelled 'scientist', 'artist', 'linguist' - or whatever. I rebelled against this in my own quiet way by adding Art to my science A-Levels. I wrote a post earlier this year bemoaning one effect that this force-fitting seems to produce - the 'I'm crap at maths and not ashamed to say it' syndrome.

I'm asked, on occasion, what makes a good planner. I rarely look to academic qualifications, and in the past, have been as likely to choose someone with an obscure degree or even no degree at all as someone with a business degree. In fact, the business degree people I often give a harder time to as they may already have been taught to think in a certain way.

My ideal planner would fit the artist-scientist archetype. By this, I mean someone for whom thinking or intellect is not the only way of revealing 'truth', but who is equally at home with other modes of perception. The artist-scientist is a creator, inventor, dreamer and thinker simultaneously. Their focus is discovery, not prediction and pinning down 'facts.' They are people driven by wonder and curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but it's what keeps the artist-scientists going.

These people are the source of change, the people who question, the people who keep their minds open and don't always go with the flow. From Leonardo da Vinci, to Nikola Tesla, to C.G.Jung, these people feel uncomfortable with the narrow designation (which includes all those 21st century prefixes to the word planner.)

To finish, here's Joseph Campbell on the figure of Daedalus, the archetypal artist-scientist:

Most curiously, the very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bound of social judgement, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought – singlehearted, courageous and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.

And, maybe I'd want that too - 'the hero-heart at hand' - as much as this person is beyond social judgement, they should have a feeling, connectedness, empathy with their fellow human-beings.

Not much to ask, eh?