Games of Life

 

It’s often been observed that we learn how to live through play, starting with playing shops or house as toddlers. My childhood included games that involved a historic or sci-fi fantasy world, such as Escape from Colditz or Thunderbirds, but also games that later found direct application in the grown-up world: Monopoly or Go-The International Travel Game.

But these days, do children really aspire to be a jet-setter or propery tycoon? I was interested to hear this week about a new game, developed by a group of young entrepreneurs, whose theme is a little closer to today’s aspirations - tackling climate change.

The group in question is Carducation from a school in Kelkheim, just down the road from here. They quote the inventor of the Kindergarten concept, Friedrich Fröbel - The source of all that is good lies in play (or thereabouts) and their business idea is to educate about important issues via card games. It’s a sort of “Cards for Humanity."

The first card game is called Ecucation - a strategy game in which businesses must balance profit with environmental responsibility, and, as in real life, catastrophes such as flooding or forest fires can turn up unexpectedy to scupper the best-laid plans.

The young start-up has been declared the best school firm in Germany by the Junior-Projekt, which encourages and fosters entrepreneurial business in schools. And the cards have already been seen in the hands of Chancellor Scholz and Vice-Chancellor Habeck.

All-in-all, a neat idea, and one that a few brands could learn from in their ESG communication. All the best to Carducation for the European final in July! 

Slave to the algorithm

 

I was a latecomer to Wordle, and snuck in just before the puzzle was taken on by The New York Times. It has kept me amused for a couple of weeks, even if I’ve been kicking myself for breaking my winning streak due to US English spelling (not-twigging-of) a little while ago.

Yesterday, though, I was completely bemused. I put in a five letter word, nothing obscure, and was told that this word was not on Wordle’s list. 

The word in question: “slave.” I genuinely wondered if this was a hiccough in the software, so tried on another device. Same result. Intrigued, I searched for an explanation and found news articles to the effect that there are various words that the new owners of Wordle don’t allow - the word for a female dog, for example, or “words associated with racism” such as “slave”. 

There were, no doubt, words for the idea of “slave” long before the English language evolved. When I think of the word, yes, the Atlantic slave trade comes to mind, but I also have associations with earlier history, Roman times, and the present day - I’ve often been asked to sign documents assuring potential project partners that my little one-woman show does not involve slavery in any part of the value chain.

Then there are the more abstract uses of the word - as in that glorious 1980s anthem by Grace Jones. Metaphorical uses, figures of speech, analogies, word-plays. It’s a word with many uses, meanings, nuanaces, contexts.

I’m a writer, and I’ve commented before about the homogenisation of language, as well as the cultural poverty (am I allowed to say poverty?) society is walking into with predictive text and suggested words and phrases. It’s bad enough when suggestions come as to which words you might like to use, but when words themselves disappear from lists and dictionaries? I know language changes all the time, but I am not talking about weird obscure historical words that have had no application for the last five hundred years here.

It’s just a game. OK, it is. But if it’s a game where I have to question every five-letter word and wonder whether it could offend someone, effectively censoring my own vocabularly, then I think I’d rather go back to the Internot and find my ancient Scrabble board game where I can use whatever words I see fit.

Going overground

One of the better articles I've read about Post-COVID-19 culture is this one from Sturm und Drang. What I like here is it's not someone pontificating about the New Normal (groan) and "what we're all going to be doing/thinking" but instead outlines some of the key tensions that will be in play:

Online and Real World
Health & Safety and Getting out and living for the moment
Personal Freedom and Group monitoring
Self-reliance and solidarity
Humanity and nature

One thing that is certain is that the COVID-19 crisis will accelerate transformation and movements that are happening anyway. Take the first of Sturm & Drang's tensions - the shift online. Music and film and gaming were being created and played from bedrooms, our lives were becoming increasingly streamed and the couch potatoes and nerds were inheriting the earth.



People are learning to live without coffee to-go, or anything to-go for that matter. There's a certain power in having the world of work, leisure and everything in between at your fingertips, from the comfort of your four walls.

Maybe there will be a massive, irreversible shift online in all spheres of life.

Or maybe not. In the two world wars of the last century, entire young generations had their freedom curtailed by having to do their duty and go out and fight, or otherwise work night and day for the war effort. For the current young generation, COVID-19 is their war.

People of my generation used to bewail the fact that being confined to their bedroom was no longer a punishment for a teenager.

But maybe it's beginning to be. Days and weeks of unrestricted online access. Not just that, but parents, grandparents, teachers all invading the online world of the young: from making idiots of themselves on TikTok to hi-jacking YouTube for serious learning. One can sense an urge to rebel, to get out. Not going underground, but overground into the wild world of the Internot.

Perhaps this is another trend that will be accelerated by the crisis.

Who knows, maybe the young will spend their summer like Richard Jefferies' Bevis:

"It was living, not thinking. He lived it, never thinking, as the finches live their sunny life in the happy days of June. There was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground."

Just book it

I felt a particular pang of sadness this week at the news of the demise of Thomas Cook. For the people who worked there, and the people who are stranded, but also for the brand and what it stood for. There are few brand names that go back as far as Thomas Cook - 178 years all in all from its beginnings in 1841.

I've probably always been vaguely aware of the brand, but it was the game Go that consolidated that awareness. Landing on the Thomas Cook square in the game was almost as good as the jackpot in the Casino - you could buy tickets for air, sea and rail, book a car and change money to boot. I guess this was an early introduction to a kind of "everything travel-related under one roof" positioning that the brand had.

It's difficult to say what went wrong with this brand. Hubris and Ozymandias syndrome? Or simply head-in-the-sand and fear of change? In the end, it was probably a bit of both. Thomas Cook hung onto their old model and bricks & mortar when they should have hung onto the values and purpose and adapted that for the 21st century.

The irony is that the famous end line - "Don't just book it, Thomas Cook it" - is exactly what people don't want or need these days. From no-frills airlines to direct booking online.

I'm surprised booking.com didn't launch under the name justbookit.com

Will they still be around in 178 years? It seems unlikely.

Life's a game?

Moving on from my last post on measurement, it makes sense to take a look at how companies and brands use games and gaming in their communication and activities. I've posted a little about this before, here and here.

I like the way IKEA have turned something unexpected into a game in their TV ad 'Win at Sleeping,' from the agency Mother. It's clever and creative, through looking at something everyday - or everynight - in an unexpected way. And it's all done with a twinkle in the eye.

Is work a game? I'm not sure. Uber has recently come under criticism for using psychological gaming tricks to incentivise their drivers. How would you feel if you tried to log off and found that you were just a whisker away from hitting your earnings target? Would you squeeze in one more fare, even if you were feeling completely cream-crackered? Where does gamification stop being stimulating and start being sinister?

And finally, the CEO of Aviva is calling for companies to treat sustainability as a competitive sport. While his motivations are in the right place - to get companies thinking beyond the short-term pressure to make profits - I'm not sure that public league tables a la Champions League are really the way to go.

Just look at the corruption within FIFA.

'Time present and time past ...

... are both perhaps present in time future'
                               T.S.Eliot, Burnt Norton




I have noticed two examples of brands that have made news this week by combining past and present to (maybe) create the future.

I'll start with the one not absolutely everyone has heard of, which is Polaroid Swing. I've often wondered how the Polaroid brand lives on, while the Kodak brand seems to have died, or at least retired and disappeared from view. This is one reason: a nifty little app that combines the heritage of Polaroid (for the name inspiration, see the groovy ad above) with bang up-to-date technology. In this case, moving photos. These are kind of like gifs, put different. 60 frames are captured in 1 second and the picture comes to life when you tap it or get swinging your iPhone. The world of Harry Potter has nothing on this!

The people from Polaroid and their collaborators at Swing have high hopes - could this be the visual version of Twitter? The insight is that we perceive the world as a series of (very short) moments. I'm not 100% convinced, but let's see.

The other new launch needs no introduction - Pokemon Go . You can't avoid having heard about it unless you're living under a stone (although that, too, is unlikely as you're probably sharing your under-a-stone space with a funny little yellow creature.) As well as combining old (well, 90s) with new to appeal to at least a couple of generations, much has been made of the combination of real and virtual worlds. Here is one of the better articles about the success factors.

So there you have it - for a successful brand extension, maybe we have to think like a bride and combine the old, the new, the borrowed (preferably via collaboration) and the blue - or yellow.

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.

The Game of Life

One of the oldest tricks in the marketing textbook is getting people to do something boring or laborious but necessary by making it seem desirable, or fun...or a game.

It goes right back to Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, or those tricks that Mary Poppins used to make clearing up fun. And generations of inventive parents who have turned the washing up or the weeding into an army to be defeated.

Leaps in technology have enabled the gamification of many mundane tasks, including a fascinating example from Cambridge Consultants, the T-Haler. It's a way of helping asthma sufferers get the optimum dose of the drug they need from their inhaler.

Using wireless technology, information is sent to a computer loaded with a "get the ball in the hole" game, so that inhaler users can optimise their behaviour to get the correct dosage.

In this case, a spoonful of sugar, in the form of a game, really can help the medicine go down.

All I want for Christmas is...

I was going to post something deep and meaningful about insights as my last post this year, but then saw this corker on a friend's Facebook wall.

For my non-German-speaking friends, Father Christmas replies to Kevin as follows: "I've no idea what you're talking about. You're getting a book."

Wishing all readers a happy Festive Season and hope you all get what you wish for!

Worst nightmare?

One of the worst nightmares for a client is when the agency simply regurgitate something left over in the drawer that another client obviously didn't buy. Or sometimes it's a general "one size fits all" idea that can be passed from client to client with different logos until someone is dim enough to buy it, or clever enough to fire the agency. In fact, I distinctly remember one bright copywriter set up a program to generate random scripts for a client who favoured a certain straight-jacketed TV format.

Now you don't even have to waste any money on layouts. On Wheel of Concept, you're invited to "Spin the Wheel" to generate new media ideas for your favourite brand. Anything from Social Gaming to Crowd Sourcing.

I tried it for my friends at ENTEGA and got the above. I also tried it for two of my least-favoured brands and was offered "iPayPal" which will bring me "brand-centric updates" from the PayPal-centric brand as well as Augmented Reality for Ryanair. The reality of Ryanair being bad enough, I don't think I want it augmented!

So, minutes of harmless fun. Thanks to Graham Thomas for pointing it out, although I expect clients will get something rather better from Radical Company.

Surprise, Surprise

I always look forward to the IPA Excellence Diploma essays that come in a supplement with Campaign. I commented on the last lot here and I've just read the four that achieved distinction this year.

Tim Jones of BBH has a great new metaphor for a brand - instead of all those onions and keys, he's looked at gaming as a way of moving from brands as message transmission devices to behaviour change systems.

And, maybe influenced by a game or two, Simon Robertson of Dare believes that brands should embrace their Dark Side. I'm not convinced that it must always be the Dark Side, but I'm convinced that brands need an edge, a quirk, a bit that doesn't fit.

What really got me was that two of the essays, both excellent, seem at first sight to contradict each other. Sarah Morning of Agency Republic argued for the counterpart to the spatial-based Big Idea in the temporal-based Long Idea, with the reintroduction of myth and ritual into the digital world. And then James Hamilton of McCann Erikson argues the case for putting surprise and serendipity back into marketing, believing that our lives are increasingly predictable as we're driven more and more by algorithms that tell us what to read, watch, know....?

But both can be part and parcel of one brand and its communications - and maybe this is the trick. IKEA comes to mind, surprise, surprise. There are new ideas, surprising products, inspirational combinations. But the elements of ritual from KNUT to following to arrows to the hot dog at the end are there too. A seeming paradox but the key to success.