I dream of data dumps!

 

                                                                        Image: Ideogram

There must be an unwritten rule that, one day, you’ll look back fondly on things that annoyed you when they were ubiquitous. BoneyM, Wimpy, Pixie Boots, Poodle Perms, Malibu, Wham! 

And so it is with the world of work. I used to dread those Zip-folders containing 20 or more 100-page pdfs at the start of a strategy project. The ones that landed with a virtual thud in your in-box and a chirpy message from a junior: “you might find these interesting as background to our project.” Sub-text: I haven’t read them, neither has my boss, but we’re expecting you to read, understand, digest and come back to us asap with a brilliant inisghtful Analysis and Way Forward.

I never thought I’d say “those were the days” when it came to the delightfully-named Data Dump. But, today, the Dump is as dead as a Dodo. Because you receive the whole lot (and more) pre-chewed, semi-digested and regurgitated as Workslop. As the HBR article says, Workslop transfers the effort from creator to receiver. I can vouch for this. In the last year, it’s happened a few times. And I’ve had the rather frustrating task of swilling through the Workslop, trying to make sense of it, going back in many cases to original sources (if available), checking and reading afresh to bring my experience and perspective to the case.

It’s a waste of my time, quite frankly, and worse still, it makes me feel resentful. That my modus switches from exploratory, making connections and leaps of insight/creativity to critical and nit-picking apart, like the Head Teacher marking work. 

This website would be funny if it wasn’t so painfully close to the bone. 

The mantra today (which I’m sick of hearing as so many don’t seem to practice what they preach) is “human-first, humans empowered/turbo-charged by AI”. Substack and LinkedIn are riddled with various proclaimations in various degrees of pomposity. “The Great UnPlug!” “Being human is an act of rebellion!” General whingeing about loss of “voice.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock. As they say. Are you surprised? From politicians upwards, people are lazy and don’t want to take responsibility. Tick things off rather than do them well. Get it done not get it right. (As in “Get Brexit Done.”)

As for me, I’m not joining in. What started with models and templates and frameworks to find out what’s at the heart of a brand now continues with AI. I use it here and there, of course. But, by and large, I stick with my internot methods. The best test of any brand work I do is this: 

    - is the brand identity (in whatever format) original and unique to that brand?

    - is they way I’m expressing it to my client something only I could have created? Like this, but with         my own stamp on it?

But, in the future, will I be dreaming of Workslop? I wouldn’t count it out.    

The proper way to the beach

 

I was taught the planning cycle at a relatively early age - not quite as early as my times tables, but I had it drummed into me in a similar way. 

Where are we now? (With our brand or business)

Where do we want to be?

How do we get there?

Are we getting there?

I have the feeling that because the whole area of marketing has exploded into so many specialisms, t the focus has slipped right onto “how do we get there” in its intricate detail of touchpoints, new tech, personas and all the rest without any consideration of where we’re going with this and why.

I recently had a brief that went along the lines of - we have to develop an app that’s going to do x, y & z - without any thought given to why, or even who this app might be for.

I’ve seen this wonderful picture recently from The Proper Marketing Club (Matt Dillon) , which gently reminds marketers of the starting point if you want to be the brightest brand on the beach.

Even if your business can’t afford stacks of ad-hoc quantitative surveys, desk research on markets and trends plus a couple of questions on an omnibus and a few intelligently-conducted stakeholder interviews are always a good start.

 

Off-the-peg strategies

Five years ago (gosh, how time flies when you're enjoying yourself) I wrote a couple of posts about crowd-sourcing: not crowd-sourcing the general public for ideas for a new flavour of crisps, or naming a boat, but going into a creative pool (I hesitate to say community) for design and creative ideas.

My conclusion at the time was that I was sceptical, especially when it came to what the creatives got out of it - and that the logical next step, which I rather hoped wouldn't happen, was a similar set-up for strategy.

Since then, I have joined one freelance pool for writers, and I must say upfront that I don't have a problem with the idea of freelance pools in general, and matching up freelancers to clients.

But it's the competitive element that I find destructive.

In theory, accessing good thinkers ("an exclusive, worldwide community of the finest Creative Directors and Planning Directors") to solve tough strategic problems sounds fine. But if this organisation (and others like them) are throwing the client brief out to a number of "the world's best thinkers" then picking the best of what comes back (in their view) for the client, then that is worrying.

It devalues the work of any one particular planner and turns strategic thinking into a commodity that can be bought in bulk.

As a freelancer, I take pride in becoming an independent plug-in for my clients for as long as I'm working with them. I take time and care to listen and learn about their organisation - how things work today, and where their hopes and vision are leading them tomorrow. I ask lots of questions. I'm a part of the organisation for the duration, but an outward-facing one.

I see that as my responsibility, and it goes far beyond the weeks or months that I am working with the brand.

I've tracked down the 1994 all-staff memo from David Abbott that talks about the dangers of "a giant ad factory where quantity is more important than quality". It's just as relevant for strategy as it is for creative: "great work comes with ownership, understanding and time."

I may be old-school, but I firmly believe that strategy is not something where you can fail fast, test and learn and all that design-thinking tra-la-la.

Through a glass darkly

The theme to Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2018 is "Activating Brave", which is another variation on the theme of "long-term agility" - the acknowledged approach for brand growth in the 21st century.

In this article, Daniel Binns from Interbrand explains a little more about how the best brands grow:

“What are these brands doing to achieve success? They are harnessing the ability to take bold short-term action in pursuit of a clear and aligned long-term vision. The key to Activating Brave is to simultaneously look through a microscope and a telescope, and have the courage to intercept the future, not just flow with it,”

I like the idea of the simultaneous microscope and telescope - but does it miss something? Or, rather, are we in danger of missing something if we are forever looking through this lens or another - the customers lens, the consumer lens, the competitor lens. In marketing workshops these days, there seem to be more lenses than at Specsavers!

How would it be if we also used those perfectly good lenses behind the aqueous humour and looked at how brands exist out there in the real world, too?

As the Good Book says (1 Corinthians Chapter 13, v12): 
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

Red Spider Blues

It was with great sadness that I heard that one of my planning heroes, Charlie Robertson, has gone off to the great spiderweb in the sky. Charlie was one of the second generation of sparky British planners who worked in the London ad agencies of the early 80s - that generation which includes Paul Feldwick, Leslie Butterfield and Damian O'Malley.

Although I say second generation, Charlie was no follower. Having worked at the places to be in London in the 80s - BMP and BBH, he founded the planning department at the Leith agency up in Scotland, where he preferred to raise his family. Charlie already knew London wasn't the be-all and end-all of everything, and this led to his masterstroke - he founded Red Spider, the world's first virtual planning and strategy agency.

Why should strategy, and the bright minds behind it be confined to four walls in Soho, or Charlotte Street? This was pioneering with a capital P.

By the time I became associated with Red Spider, in 2003, the web had spread. I spent an enjoyable few years as an associate Spider, under the guidance of Charlie and George Shepherd, running training workshops on strategy tools and busily devising "Brand Redprints.". Those tools - which Charlie and Co. were generous enough to make public property, more or less (on the assumption that anyone can pick up a paintbrush, but only Picasso can create a Picasso) - are still being used around the world today. It was Charlie who urged me to join Facebook and a whole load of now defunct social media sites back in 2007 or so.

Charlie was astute, witty, sharp as a needle and humane. His hair seemed to have a life of its own. He didn't shy away from saying exactly what he thought and he was an enemy of both blandness and bullshit.

He'll be much missed. I'm grateful to have known him.

Change happens. Get over it.

One of the core questions for marketing people has always been centred around how to adapt and transform in an ever-changing world. There's an interesting and useful analysis here by two authors from the agency Flamingo, who have examined change in a wide variety of fields, and constructed a simple model showing four strategic directions a brand could choose - Guide, Translate, Create and Pivot - along with good examples of brands who have used those different strategies.

I like this analysis, although it does tiptoe into an area that seems to be, in my mind, rather over-played currently: that of the VUCA world "out there."

There can be few readers who haven't heard about VUCA from some source or another, but in case you haven't, the acronym stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

This acronym didn't come from some marketing consultant, but from the U.S. Military, in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s.

Is this really how we want to see the world we're operating in? Are our brands weapons in some kind of war?

I don't think so.

What if we thought of it this way:

For 'Volatile', read 'Spontaneous'

For 'Uncertain', read 'Surprising'

For 'Complex', read 'Diverse'

And for 'Ambiguous', read 'Enigmatic'

Because it's not us against them, there is no world "out there", "external" and "internal". We are all part of the world.

It's the role of brands not to provide stability in the sense of stasis and resistance to change, but rather to provide a clear purpose and direction as part of a wonderful, multi-facetted, animated, rich and mysterious world.

Blimey, did I really say that?

I'm reading a delightful novel at the moment: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The story is that of a Russian aristocrat who is placed under indefinite house arrest by the Communists in the 1920s for writing a subversive poem. And that house arrest is in one of the grandest hotels in Moscow. The story rambles around the hotel with the Count, the eccentric characters he meets and the absurd situations in which he finds himself.

One such is the Second Meeting of the First Congress of the Moscow Branch of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers. The Union's Charter is under discussion, particularly the 7th sentence of the 2nd paragraph, which concludes with what we marketeers (shhhh!) might call a Mission:

"... to facilitate communication and trade across the provinces."

And, oh dear, does the word 'facilitate' ever come in for some stick! Far too tepid and prim to suggest pounding steel and rippling manly muscles and shovelling coal! Some alternatives are suggested, such as to spur, to propel and to empower, which all come into hot debate. Eventually:

"... a suggestion came from a shy-looking lad in the tenth row that perhaps 'to facilitate' could be replaced with 'to enable and ensure.' This pairing, the lad explained (while his cheeks grew red as a raspberry), might encompass not only the laying of rails and the manning of engines, but the ongoing maintenance of the system ..."

And so, after more hot debate, the alternative is adopted.

If that one amused you, you may also find that this tickles your fancy, too. Perfect for collecting a few meaningless phrases to throw into the next strategy meeting. And I don't think many of us can put our hands on our hearts and say we've never used this kind of lingo.

I'm convinced that when researchers from the future find some of our strategy documents, they'll be as bemused as if those documents were in Russian - or Ancient Greek.

Talking of which ...

Artificial vs. Intelligence

The APG UK's forthcoming conference to be held on 25th May, is entitled 'Strategy vs. Robots'. The publicity features the clever idea of a Top Trumps -style card, comparing a robot with a human strategic planner. The robot (slightly) out-trumps Ms Mills on intelligence and processing power while our human hero wins hands down on creativity and sense of humour.

It promises to be a good event, with such people as Kate Fox (of 'Watching the English' fame) and Steve Hilton (whose has published a book entitled 'More Human'). I'm not sure who is going to be representing or sticking up for the robots, but maybe they will invite a special guest from Japan.

Apparently, McCann Japan have appointed an AI robot as a creative director. This new employee will be 'mining and analysing creative databases of adverts to find the best commercials for products and messages.' I am still not entirely sure this isn't a wind-up, as the 'new employees meeting' where AI-CD ß was due to appear was April 1st, which seems a bit fishy to me. However, stranger things have happened.

I've blogged a couple of times about where I stand on the planning - or even creativity - by AI and algorithm debate, here and here .

I'm old enough now not to worry about my own job being taken over by a robot. But I guess in the end, there always has to be someone human working to design and build the robots.

Or does there?

From here to arrogance

When writing a strategy, or a plan, particularly one of those that's meant to motivate and gee up a whole department of people, it's very easy to over-estimate the significance of now.This isn't surprising, perhaps, as one of the first questions you ask when developing a strategy is: Where are we now?

The inevitable consequence is that we determine 'now' to be of the utmost importance and load this arbitrary point in time with meaning. I've done it more than enough times - and here's another example, in the Manifest for Change from the new APG chair, Dom Boyd, entitled Future. Now.

I'm not against the sort of claims that 'there's never been a more exciting time to be in this industry' as a way to motivate people, but I am a little cynical about whether such statements are universally applicable.

Every generation likes to think they are part of a 'golden age.'

Another tendency that I'll own up to, which over-emphasises the here and now is the 'from - to' way of summarising what's going on in the environment. I'm very fond of the kind of transformations:

From online and offline to always on/off

From touch points to never-ending customer journey

From USP to brand purpose

From one-way messaging to engaging conversations

And this is all OK. It's a way of looking at the world and explaining what is going on. But 'going on' is the key point here. The world is in constant change.'To' is not really an endpoint. Things will continue evolving.

I wonder if over-use of the word 'journey' is to blame. I like to remind myself that 'the map is not the territory'. Using the 'journey' metaphor or the 'from - to' construction is merely taking a snapshot on the way to a future that we can't predict, however clever we are at trend-spotting.

And maybe that's what makes our job as planners exciting, whatever age we live in.

Plannersaurus

I've often wondered about reframing my - ahem - age in this young people's business as being 'vintage' or even 'retro', both of which seem all the rage these days. Vintage Planning does have quite a ring to it.

But I've decided that I'm quite happy to be a Planning Dinosaur if that's what people want to call me. A few years ago - not quite the Jurassic Age - I blogged about this very topic - The dinosaur fights back, quoting John Hegarty's comments on Big Data.

I've found another excellent blog post on the matter, this time from Richard Huntington, In Praise of Dinosaur Planning where another creative dinosaur, Dave Trott, is quoted: 'Put a dinosaur in a field of sheep, the dinosaur f***ing wins.' Being a dinosaur is no more than believing in the fundamentals of account planning, not getting carried away by the latest fad, or metric, or technological possibility.

It's about effectiveness - doing the right thing for the brand.

And it's about inspiring and nurturing great creative work that connects with people.

Maybe what we should strive to be is an adaptable dinosaur.

Work that works

A few years back, there was an outbreak of manifestoes (or is it manifesti?). I'm not sure what the collective noun is for manifestoes, but I'll go for a manifest of manifestoes. They were everywhere, from boardroom walls to your TV screen.

But, like every fad, manifestoes were popular for a reason. They are a nifty, shorthand (usually) way of reminding you what you're about. I have recently found a great example for Planners on the Canalside View Blog. It's a few years old now, but just as relevant for Planners old and new as it was then.

The first point is the best one. Stimulate work that works. I say it's the best one as, years ago, this was our single-minded proposition for Planning at Saatchis. Note that it's about stimulation, not inspiration. There is a difference.

The other 23 points (OK, a bit much, but I always knew Planners did more work than anyone else in the agency!) are mostly good, with some gems and one or two duds (or, rather, generalisations):

Give a sh*t about the work
Create the conditions for great work
Be brave
Go beyond the brief
Speak with authority
Make research your friend
Be multi-faceted
Be a source of clarity (hooray!)
Speak the truth
Define the problem
Embrace iteration
Offer solutions, not just strategies
Shape behaviour
Deal in the specific
Cultivate many relationships
Work through conversation
Beware of Case Studies
See people not consumers (hooray!)
Balance the new and the old
Be interesting
Make something
Work comfortably in public
Have fun

Not much to it, is there?

Brand Bravery

Over the last ten years, one of my favourites amongst those email digest thingies that you sign up for is the newsletter from Contagious. It's so much more intelligent than those dreadful lists of lists that LinkedIn is convinced will appeal to me. Contagious is a magazine that's been going for 10 years now and moves from old-school marketing into the intersection between marketing, culture and technology.

The recent digest contained a link to an article from one of the co-founders, Paul Kemp-Roberston, entitled The Contagious Commandments: Ten Steps to Brand Bravery.

It's really rather good, so here are those 10 steps, with my comments:

1. Be useful, relevant and entertaining - or at least, as Meatloaf would say, two out of three ain't bad. This is what it's all about - value
2. Be generous: don't ask what's in it for you, ask what's in it for them - or better still these days, what's in it for us
3. Have a purpose - or go home
4. Join the 5% club - this is all about experimentation - but for me it's about testing in the market and "just doing it" rather than behind-the-scenes research
5. Ask heresy questions - this is an oldie but goodie - but these days, we should think about what exactly is heresy. To me, increasingly, it might be about being non-PC. Really going against the grain. Breaking some of these terribly right-on commandments, even
6. Align with behaviour - fine, just as long as you don't become a stalker
7. Good technology is not an excuse for a bad idea - Yes! I'm looking at all those pointless apps that exist "just because you can"
8. Prioritise experience over innovation - this is connected to the last one. It's all about real world, real people
9. With great data comes great responsibility - too true. Privacy is already a huge issue for brands. And, mirroring my comments on technology, don't collect data just because you can. If you're not going to use it, put your energies elsewhere.
10. Weaponize your audience - the author himself points out the irony of this one, having poured scorn on military metaphors earlier on in the article. The point is to make sure you are empowering your customers, not exploiting them, which brings us back to the bold fellows of the Light Brigade pictured.

In the end, brave brands need brave people behind them.

Beware! Engaged can be vacant.

The pursuit of engagement has become the Holy Grail for marketers, as I blogged here a few years back, and the enthusiasm for the creation of Engaging Experiences has certainly not abated. Engagement is an objective written loud and clear on many a marketing plan. Even the humble owner of a Facebook page with a couple of hundred likes is informed continually about how many people are engaged with the page that week.

But the problem arises when it comes to measurement. Engagement is a slippery fish to pin down and fit into a nice KPI pigeon hole, if you'll excuse all the mixed metaphors.

Perhaps that's because engagement has become one of these words that people use without really thinking what it means.

I looked up engagement in one dictionary and found "The act of engaging or being engaged."

The Advertising Research Foundation defined it, in March 2006 as "Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." And Wikipedia offers the following for engagement when used in a marketing context: "The extent to which a consumer has a meaningful brand experience when exposed to commercial advertising, sponsorship, television contact or other experience." This last mouthful brings to mind rats in cages having full-strength carcinogens painted on their raw flesh by sadistic scientists.

To get away from these tortuous and tautologous definitions, maybe it's easier to look at the verb rather than the noun. To engage is to occupy or attract someone's attention, from one perspective, or to participate or become in involved in, from another.

Interesting that the words attention and involved appear in this definition. Do desire and action follow? Has a wheel been reinvented somewhere?

Engagement is here to stay but it's worth questioning what is behind the word for our particular case. First of all, the question is "engaged with what?" - a piece of communication, be it a TV spot or an app,  some aspect of the brand, or the brand as a whole? And what are the terms of that "engagement"? Is it something longterm, or is it something specific to a discrete period of time. Is it short and intense, or more of a longterm undercurrent of commitment? Once you know the nature of the engagement, then you can work out how you might measure it.

Engaged can change rapidly to vacant, devoid of meaning.

Brands on the Black

Do you ever get paralysed by process, fed-up with frameworks while working on positioning a brand?

In the past, I can remember long debates about semantics - was "long-lasting" a benefit or a feature or a reason to believe? And, if it was a benefit, was it an emotional benefit or a rational benefit?

This kind of discussion usually leads nowhere and is often missing the point: what is really important about my brand? What makes people love it? What makes it indispensable?

Ulli Appelbaum is currently developing a new way (I hasten to call it a tool as actually it's more like a game) to help position brands and tell brand stories. It's currently in beta mode, so Ulli is open to thoughts, additions and subtractions.

It's called Positioning-Roulette. The thought behind it is that the act of brand positioning is as much about creativity and ideation as it is about intellect and process, although pre-given frameworks, agendas and philosophies often force marketers into thinking only along certain lines.

Positioning-Roulette helps you to find more creative solutions in a shorter space of time to a Brand Positioning task.

It's all about approaching the task from different angles - 25 of them, in fact, which are selected by random. These 25 areas include the usual suspects, such as Brand Purpose and Benefits, through to areas that you may not normally consider, such as Appeal to the Senses or Romancing how the Product Works, through to turning the task on its head - Conventions Disrupted, Problems & Paradoxes.

Just what you need, maybe, to move your brand from the red to the black.

Build me a Bridge

It seems to be OK, even admirable these days to say you were useless at maths at school. Well, I wasn't. I was good at maths, although I couldn't add up without counting on my fingers or scribbling on paper so maybe my mental arithmetic wasn't so hot. But when it came to algebra and that sort of thing, my strategy was always to go back to first principles - what are we trying to do here?

It's worth doing the same these days in my job, as marketing communications becomes an ever more complex field. I do sometimes need to remind myself about what strategy is all about. It's about being in one place, and wanting to get to another place, then building the bridge (the strategy) to get you there.

With brand communications, those places involve people. What are people thinking, feeling and doing in relation to your brand and the market it's in at the moment? What would you like them to think, feel and do in your future - that your brand communication could potentially influence?

I sometimes get myself in a tangle, still, when thinking about objectives. "Communicate that our brand delivers XYZ benefit better than any other" isn't a communication objective, it's a message or bit of content. But what change in people's perceptions or behaviour do we want to see? That is a communication objective. Whether we can measure it such that it becomes a numerical goal is another question.

Business objectives are usually couched in the language of profit or growth. Marketing Objectives may include brand/market share, or % penetration. And these objectives need all elements of the marketing mix (4, 5, or 6 Ps depending on how you see it).

But communications objectives must relate back to something people will think, feel or do. Make the brand more famous than Victoria Beckham. Sign up a friend for the customer club. Give them a sense of self-esteem. Cry. Say yes. Say no. Dig their hand in their pocket and contribute.

And the more it's about doing, the better.

5 reasons why checklists should be delisted

Checklists and rating cards seem to have crept into just about every aspect of modern life - no sooner have you bought something over the internet, or had a conversation with a service chappie or chappess on the phone, when you're sent some kind of rating card. Restaurants and hotels, even in the most far-flung of places, beg you to rate them on TripAdvisor or to "like" their Facebook page with such an intensity that you get the impression that this is more important than you having enjoyed the experience, or getting a good tip. But these ratings are more pointless than pointless as they can be bulk-bought these days.

There are also checklists to download from the internet for everything from picking a Eurovision Song Contest winner to buying a home to having a baby.

On the work front, checklists abound too. They are usually introduced under some pretext of "having everyone singing from the same song sheet" like some weirdo culty choir. And, although their perpetrators are usually keen to point out that this is just an aid to decision-making, the sad truth is that many people use checklists and scorecards to make the decision for them. And often, getting a good scorecard seems to be an end to itself.

Why should they be delisted? Well, where to start? Checklists are a lazy way of working that avoids intelligent thought. They generate extra pointless work - who hasn't been in a meeting where the "items on the checklist" are discussed at length? They - or their perpetrators - invariably make the mistake of thinking that what can be measured is what is important. They're held up as being a shortcut, but a shortcut to what? To making a good decision? Or to have ticked a number of boxes with arbitrary  headings?

And maybe the most important reason to delist checklists is that the mere process of pre-defining categories (usually based on past experience) is a classic case of rearview mirror thinking which excludes the possible.

If the questions remain in a fixed circle of ideas, then so do the answers.

Would you rather be trusted or famous?

Victoria Beckham once said that she wanted to be as famous as Persil, an objective that she has probably more than achieved. For the former Spice Girl, fame was an end in itself, and that's fair enough. Who's to say whether it's brought happiness or any other more lasting and possibly valuable benefits.

There's evidence that, for brands, the fame route may well be easier to achieve and pay off more profitably, in the short-term at least. The IPA 2008 study "Marketing in the era of accountability" shows that brands who use "fame" as a communication objective rather than image, awareness or trust are more likely to see success where it matters - at the business end.

And "fame" may well prove a more tempting proposition for marketeers, given the tendency to move on to the next brand after a year or two. Surely it's better on your cv to show how you made Bloggo famous, the brand everyone's twittering about, rather than attempting to build something as nebulous as trust, which is surely just a synonym for the rather dull values of reliability and dependability?

Trust is a tricky objective. It's hard to pin down, it's a long-term thing and, importantly, it has to be done through-and-through, not just via communication. Every time any of your stakeholders encounter your brand or company, there is an opportunity to build or lose trust. Most companies simply aren't structured to deliver that as yet.

But just because it's tricky doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted. For all manner of organisations - not just brands - trust is taking on increasing importance as the 21st century progresses. Unless people trust you and your organisation, they will not support it.

Any brand can become famous through excellent communication. But trust has to be earned.

I do wonder if any up-and-coming soap powder brand has an objective that they'd "like to be as famous as Victoria Beckham."

Get back in your plan

I'm not a fan of those interminable "role of planning" discussions, especially when they sprout appendages such as "in the digital age". I'd rather be getting on with the job than discussing and defining it. And the role of planning is actually quite simple, whether you're living in the digital or the dinosaur age.

Dave Trott's blog puts this very well. The proper role of planners, according to the legendary creative, is defining the problem, getting the question right, even questioning the question. All of that rather than fiddling and fussing with the answer.

He continues with a very flattering analogy for planners everywhere. If planners spend their time fiddling with ads, it's "the equivalent of a general in the middle of a battle going round to every soldier to check his uniform is correct."

Instead, we're advised to focus on what we're there for: being upstream, original and predatory.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with giving your opinion on a TV ad, or an app, or any executional element of such, especially if you're asked for it. You can even venture your view on how it might work.

But when you start dictating executional changes, especially if you haven't defined the problem at the outset, the battle is lost.

The Straight and Narrow

About twenty years ago, I sat with my Planning colleagues at Saatchis on one of those Awaydays where you reinvent Planning. We had some great ideas - we were going to dispense with going through linear processes and running round in circles, or cycles, and the Brave New World was going to be Quantum Planning. Great in theory, but I suspect that, a couple of decades later, most young Planners at Saatchi - or anywhere else - will still be able to draw you a Planning Cycle but may draw a blank at the suggestion of Quantum Planning.

Maybe we could have done with this new book: No Straight Lines - Making sense of our non-linear world by Alan Moore. I haven't launched into this "book" yet - of which more later - but what I've seen so far promises to be visionary: a new organisational, social and economic model based on a more human-centric, participatory society. Less about process, hierarchy and straight lines and more about networks, humanity and sustainability.

What is particularly interesting is how the "book" presents itself - as a read/write book that is described as both personal and collaborative. "No Straight Lines" is a idea, a way of thinking, which can be discussed, experienced, disputed, built-on, applied and so on through communities and workshops as well as "book" media.

It does sound as if it's worth looking into. But I do sometimes wonder why Quantum Planning never caught on. Maybe the answer is that sometimes you just want to get from A to B. And the best way is along a straight line.

Fuzzy Objectives

I'm sure I am guilty of it as the next person. I'm talking about fuzzy objectives when it comes to developing a brand communications strategy. It's often all too easy to resort to the vague, the wooly, to that that sounds impressive and "high brand" but is, on closer inspection, unspecific and probably not measurable.

Objectives like:

- to strengthen the brand image of being good quality and trusted

- to communicate the brand positioning of uniquely understanding the consumer's needs

- to consolidate perceptions of the value advantage over our competitors.

OK, I don't think I've ever been quite so fuzzy, but you get the idea. So it was very refreshing to read Charlie Snow's commentary on the recent IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards and see that, even on a relatively small budget, if you think differently, ask the right questions and, most importantly, think specifically instead of in generalities, you can make a difference.

There's the campaign to demobilise Columbian guerrillas in which the right question was "can we change the medium?" and the answer was to bring Christmas to the jungle. And then, a simple idea - can we change the usage occasion? - which worked to get people drinking a traditional bedtime drink, Ovaltine, for a daytime break. Or - can we change the role for advertising? - the Marie Curie Daffodil Appeal did just that by advertising for collectors instead of for donations.

And another commonality between all these ideas is that it's not just about getting people to think differently, or even feel differently, but about behaviour. And as behavioural change is often the trigger to perceptual change, rather than the other way around, it's no wonder that these ideas create effects that are observable.

So let's consign the wool and the Fuzzy Felt to the needlework basket and think about the active, the specific, the behavioural - and not just when the budget is limited.