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. 

Play up! play up! and play the game!

 

Although no-one much reads my blog apart from a few bots, I’m eternally grateful to my younger self (OK, middle-aged, let’s face facts) for starting it up. I’ve just finished reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score - review further down - and can see that I’ve been Ranting about Ratings since December 2013. 

Measurement has been a frequent theme in this blog since then - here and here for example. 

And so, to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Here’s what I thought:

----------

I first came across C. Thi Nguyen’s work a couple of years back when I read his paper on “Value Capture”. This was about the tendency in today’s world to obsess about rankings and ratings, about performance and optimisation, better and best in all areas of life. This resonated with me - the idea and danger of metrics (“indicators” from an external source) becoming goals becoming personal internal values to live by.

This book expands this line of thought - and a very good one it is, too. There is so much evidence today of people losing sight of what really matters and spending energy instead on chasing easily-measured vampiric metrics. The book is full of insight - on the distinction between goal and purpose, the psychology of games in the broadest sense, the idea of outsourcing values to an istitutional metric. And the distinction between what’s easy to measure and what really matters. 

In describing metrics, Nguyen introduces “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Rules, Scale, Parts and Control.” In work situations, we’re constantly under pressure from these four to be transparent, to be clear, to KISS. But are transparency and clarity always a good thing? Nguyen shows how transparency can undermine expertise when experts feel demand to explain and justify themselves to non-experts. We cannot understand everything, so sometimes we need to put trust in the specialists. 

“Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.” 

However, although there’s so much good stuff in this book, the author is an unapologetic games enthusiast. His boisterous ebullience starts charmingly enough with anecdotes about fly-fishing, yo-yos, rock-climbing and all manner of “weird sh*t” in the way of board and online games. But after a while this started to grate and even alienate me. Everything is “glorious” or “delicious."

I have never played D&D. At university there was a group who were into that but I wanted nothing to do with it - I was too busy living my life. I do have games I enjoy, and hobbies and pastimes that I’m quite wrapped in. But I know that others aren’t fascinated by my trumpet-playing or writing children’s adventures. I’ve never understood the “thrill" of watching others playing video games, or got into esports - and I loathe being bullied by family and friends into playing games that I really don’t fancy. 

Overall, there are some brilliant ideas here, but the book is repetitive and needs editing. I found it too black and white regarding the grey, life-sucking institutionalised metrics vs. the delightful, playful, individual world of games.

----------

I gave the book 4 stars on amazon and 3 on GoodReads (just to be perverse). As I said back then, in 2013, in remarkably few words:

I have written reviews on amazon for years, for books mostly, and I still feel uneasy about giving out stars. Quite frankly, I'd much rather just write a review of the book. But the trend is going such that the stars and ratings and averages are becoming far more important than what people actually think or feel.

It's the same in marketing. There is a growing tendency for KPIs to become goals or objectives in themselves. It becomes more important to achieve a certain score on some numerical indicator than to work out what we want to do with our brand.