Conform

I do like this blog to be mainly a channel for my own musings, but I occasionally read something that I wish I'd written and take the opportunity to pass it on.

Some time ago, I think it must have been the early 90s, I noticed that almost every print ad had the same look. That was the time, of course, when art directors started doing layouts on their Macs. It led to a certain conformity of style.

Jim Carroll, the Chairman of BBH London, remarks that a similar thing happened to cars around 1983. They all started looking the same, because they'd all been through the same wind tunnel. And in this article, well-worth a read, Jim bemoans what he calls "wind-tunnel marketing" that has resulted in a conformity of output of advertising agencies.

Expertise and judgement losing importance in favour of systems and testing, Jim says. And while we learned, back in the 80s, that branded communication should be relevant, motivating

and different, relevance, in Jim's words "has trumped difference."

Is this just another "sour grapes" agency chairman, trotting out the cliche about "research killing creativity"? No. Like me, Jim started his career in market research where I expect he received a good grounding in what research can and cannot do.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? Of course, "research" cannot do anything. It is inanimate. Nor can it speak, last time I looked, so do remember that the next time someone uses the expression "but the research says..." They probably have fairies at the bottom of the garden, too.

Devils (and angels) in the detail

I commented in a recent post that neuroscience seems to be the flavour of the year when it comes to understanding that age old question: "How does advertising work?"

While I am still incredibly cautious about anything that involves "subjects" lying in a brain scanner, unable to move more than a few mm, I was interested to see that Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, have released their first neuroscience study.

And the topline is - when it comes to creativity in advertising, the little things can make all the difference. It seems that very small details - that often cannot be recalled consciously - can have a significant effect on how people process and store an ad in the brain, and thus its eventual effectiveness. Little details, such as facial expressions, and the timing of music.

Now, I am not sure that we need a neuroscience study to tell us this. Good creatives, directors and producers know these things intuitively. But it sure as anything adds weight to the argument that quantitative pre-tests, particularly those employing storyboards, may not be testing what we want to test. I'm all for creative development research to look at the potential of an idea but I don't like the idea of people's preference for the facial expression of one orange-faced drawing of a Hausfrau over another determining the creative direction of the brand.

Creativity at Work

There seems to be a lot of creativity buzzing around the ether at the moment - or at least ideas about the creative process itself.

One book that I've come across this week is "The Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising's Big Ideas are Born" by W. Glenn Griffin and Deborah Morrison. The two professors of advertising asked hundreds of creative professionals the question: What does your creative process look like?

Their replies are fascinating, from a fly fishing metaphor to a 16-step process worthy of the best of Procter & Gamble to the totally enigmatic.

And I love this video to support Steven Johnson's "Where good ideas come from". Chance favours the connected mind - yes, indeedy!

Perhaps what is most enlightening for me is that I recognise the way I go about Planning here. Does that make me a Creative Planner or am I just in the wrong job?

The third dimension

For me, the best campaigns are not those that are merely "integrated", whatever that means. The best campaigns are those that, like people these days, flit effortlessly from the real world into the virtual world and out again, edges between one world and another blurring as they go.

But I don't think it stops at two worlds. Take the IKEA Campaign for the catalogue start from Germany - Der neue IKEA Katalog kommt nicht allein. At the centre of this campaign is (arguably) a rather traditional and old-fashioned medium - a paper catalogue. But IKEA has surrounded this medium with a story (IKEA designers coming into real German homes to do makeovers) which is played out in the real world, and on the internet via IKEA's own community and what are now known as "earned media".

It could have stopped there. But what I particularly like about this campaign is that it adds a third dimension. After virtual and real, this is a sort of hyper-reality, the world of larger-than-life. The designers don't just sidle into Germany with the next train from Malmo - they are parachuted in. And it's this hyper-reality, which uses the film medium to its best extent that adds stature, greatness and good old entertainment value to the campaign and the brand. Here's some content I couldn't have created myself. And sometimes people need that.

Stereurotypes

While developing brand communications, we often have to consider the part that the provenance of the brand in question plays. And often, this can be quite different in different countries. While working on British Airways, years back, one of the difficulties of developing a global campaign was the differing perception of Britishness around the world. In the US, this could be summed up as "cute and quaint" while in Australia it centred around "colonialism and whinging Poms."

The latest "internet sensation", Mapping Stereotypes, may be a fun place to start if your brand has European roots. This is a series of maps from a Bulgarian graphic designer (he lives in London) showing Europe from seven different viewpoints. That's Germany, above.

While certainly not PC, the maps are at least a little diplomatic - I am sure that Germany is associated with arguably worse things than "dirty porn" by large sections of the US and UK populations. But what's interesting to me are the brand names that pop up - VW, Nokia and Volvo, for a start.

And what is most gratifying to me personally is that the whole of Sweden is rechristened "IKEA" as far as the Germans are concerned!

Brutality or generosity?

The celebrations for 40 years of Saatchi are underway, with a well-publicised do at the Saatchi Gallery last Thursday. It has to be said that Saatchi is a phenomenon - and I am still proud to have been a part of it.

I joined Saatchis in London in 1988, which was somewhere near the peak of their success. I learned a lot, much of which stays with me today. Saatchis were always good at getting ideas to stick in people's minds.

I suppose most of what stuck can be filed under Jeremy Sinclair's idea of "brutal simplicity of thought" which underpinned the notion of a Singled Minded Proposition and of only presenting one creative idea. I remember a short film - "Hold fast to the original idea. Do not give in to the pressures of the moment." In those days, if the one creative idea was seriously shot down in flames by the client, it was a case of "Rip it up and start again" - or even dropping the client!

I don't see so much of that these days. There are tissue meetings all over the place, pre-tissue meetings, chemistry-tissue meetings, re-briefings and God knows what. There's a lot of cut n' paste and incremental tweaking, and bolting on of this mandatory and that. Many would argue that the world has moved on. It's become more complex. "Consumers" have become more "empowered" or "savvy". Generosity, not brutality is the order of the day.

But when I look back at the way Saatchis worked in the 80s, I do wonder. Was it arrogance, or positive self-belief? Was it inflexibility or was it having the courage of your convictions? Brutal simplicity of thought can also lead to beautifully timeless, highly emotional work - "Real Fires", "Lanson" and "Intercity Relax" were three TV spots of the time that are as fresh in my mind now as then.

Times have changed. Now that we have had a real pregnant man, the poster above loses some of its shock value. In the words of the Kinks, it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. Which is why, I believe, brutal simplicity of thought - and I am not talking messages or propositions here - is our main hope against wooly, vague and indecisive thinking in communications.

The great Rock & Roll swindle 2010

A new perfume has been developed by the French fragrance company, Etat Libre d'Orange under the Sex Pistols name. Available in France and the US, the fragrance claims to "exude pure energy, pared down and pumped up by leather, shot through with heliotrope and brought back down to earth by a raunchy patchouli." The publicity material for the perfume also includes a list of must-dos for the potential wearer (resist tradition, fight conformity, express yourself with abandon...) and a reference to the "unruly turbulence of a prune."

As I see it, the only unruly turbulence that prunes are probably creating for the Sex Pistols these days is in their stomachs in combination with too much All Bran in an over-zealous middle-aged breakfast. But the perfume launch has brought plenty of comment ranging from the dreadful puns ("Pretty Fragrant") through to the disappointment that it smells of heliotrope and patchouli rather than cat piss/gasoline/stale sweat/ spilled beer/sick or cold cigarette smoke (sic.)

And there are those who are saying punk is dead.

But punk isn't dead. It's alive and laughing all its middle-aged way to the bank. And if Malcolm McLaren is turning in his grave, it's only because he's not getting his cut this time.