Life moves pretty fast

I recently asked ex-DDB Global Brand Planning Director (and possibly the greatest planner of our age) Paul Feldwick an unashamedly loaded question about whether “creative and planner intuition is a better predictor of effectiveness than pre-testing?”

As usual his response was awesome:

Do we know exactly how predictive any pre-testing method is? There’s little information in the public domain that lets us make an objective estimate of their success rates, or what levels of false negatives or false positives they generate.

But I find reasons to believe that even the best of them fall short of the high predictive standards that they implicitly lead us to expect. The dominant methods are based on models of message transmission and conscious attention that have been seriously challenged, and we also know that there is a negative correlation between IPA Effectiveness Awards success and the use of pre-testing, especially quantitative.

So I would agree that pre-testing, as practised, is much more fallible than its proponents would like us to believe. But I’m not quite convinced by your alternative formula, either. Let me try to explain why.

The use of quantified research to make advertising decisions is an example of ‘technical rationality’ – the common assumption that a ‘professional’ approach means that ‘experts’ study the science, learn the rules, and then apply them rigorously. In some cases, this is an approach that works. But as MIT Professor Donald Schön showed thirty years ago in his groundbreaking book, The Reflective Practitioner, it fails to describe what skilled professionals actually do much of the time, across a wide variety of fields, from medicine to architecture to town planning to psychotherapy – simply because the reality they are dealing with is too complex for any rule-based approach to be effective. So what do they do instead? This is what Schön set out to explore, wanting to go beyond the conventional phrases that don’t really tell us anything. As he wrote in his preface: “When people use terms such as ‘art’ or ‘intuition’, they usually intend to terminate discussion, rather than to open up inquiry.”

So when you ascribe success to ‘creative and planner intuition’, it doesn’t really tell us much about how to make decisions. What is this thing called ‘intuition’? How is it acquired and how is it practised? And why is it a unique property of people with particular job titles? Is the client’s intuition worth nothing, or the account director’s? Or the chairman’s wife’s? And while all these different actors might be insisting that they alone know best, where is the audience in all this?

I’d prefer to open up inquiry here, to use Schön’s phrase: rather than assume that anyone or any role mysteriously has the answer, to explore how good advertising decisions are taken, as a guide to improving practice. We could begin by acknowledging that advertising decisions are difficult. Difficult politically, because a lot of different stakeholders are involved and because the outcomes are more than usually public. Difficult technically, because there is no single, simple model of how ads work, and in attempting to explain them, we rapidly encounter the mysteries of the human brain, social psychology, aesthetics, and a whole lot of other stuff nobody fully comprehends. But as in other fields, we still have to make decisions based on imperfect knowledge. Simply saying no, on the grounds that you still don’t know enough, isn’t good decision-making.

I would like to suggest that good advertising decisions have less to do with the ‘intuition’ of any individual, and much more to do with the quality of the conversation that is allowed to take place between those who share responsibility for the outcome. Research should inform that conversation, but not replace it. The process of judgement should involve data (qualitative and quantitative), well grounded theoretical perspectives, observation, experiment, hunch (or taste, or gut-feel, or even intuition), but above all, dialogue and learning.

This would have something in common with what Schön called ‘reflection in action’. He discovered that the work of skilled professionals did not consist in having a sudden revelation, but in trying things out, talking things through, playing about, testing ideas and so allowing the ‘right’ solution to emerge. To do this as a group requires that its members practise certain habits. They need to listen well, to avoid becoming too attached to their own ideas, to accept uncertainty and to take risks. Holding the conversational space open until a consensus emerges, and staying open to data or observations that invite us to consider that we may have been mistaken, are not things that all agency or marketing people find easy to do.

But it may be that the best chance of improving the quality of advertising decisions lies in paying attention to these processes and seeking to improve them.

The article is on Warc here

I’ve been given a brief for a mini-Ted type event.

The brief is for a presentation on ‘how do agencies turn a one-line idea into a fully formed creative masterpiece?’

It’s basically a question about how agencies make stuff and the processes we go through.

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at how our answer to this question might have evolved over the years.

i.e. Industrial Media Age v. Digital Age

Here’s an initial brain-dump. Would be great to get additional thoughts / input / challenges from anyone who fancies. You can email me directly at david@lifemovesprettyfast.net or simply comment below. The only incentive I can offer would be my eternal gratitude / a pint if you live in London (your choice).

Industrial Media Age
- Halcyon days of advertising
- Characterised by closed media-environments. Very distinct processes.
- Ideas produced in a way akin to mass manufacturing. Agencies structured for scale.
- Content bound to a fixed place in time and space. Transient.
- Control the overriding factor i.e. all the actors know their parts (organised around disciplines)
- “Creative” seen as a department.
- Creativity seen as a product.
- Usually the “one line” was a ‘message’ or a USP that could differentiate brands / products (i.e. how we get from A to B)
The greater the emotional innovation the more chance the communication would build brand relationships

Digital Age
- Open source environments = no more rigid structures = unpredictable pathways.
- Improvisation becomes the norm & collaboration is key.
- Flexibility replaces control. Agencies structured for speed.
- The concepts of TIME and PLACE have changed immensely.
- Ideas grow – connect – and augment.
- Their form can be temporary / open to reinterpretation.
- Creativity is no longer a product: It’s the character of the process / a rebellion against rationality and uniformity
- No more creative departments. Creative people on a team.
- The “one line” becomes a problem to be solved / an area of potential / a tension to resolve / a more exciting future our brand could exist within

Implications for agencies
- The challenge is no longer to build efficiencies into the system, but to find ways to break the patterns of routine behaviour that the system creates.
- Collaboration is absolutely vital to creativity (new ideas = neurons firing in new sequences).
- We need to embrace uncertainty / relinquish control at various points along the way
- Agencies should empower people to fail.
- Sometimes the process will be choreographed and beautiful, sometimes chaotic and ugly / unconventional
- The ‘one line’ that agencies use acts as the triangulation station for the teams. A kind of a self-organising tool for the non-linear nature of what we are trying to achieve.

The main focus is obviously the ‘implications for agencies’ section. Would be great to hear examples, builds, etc on this section in particular.

Thank you

Thought this post warranted a follow-up.

Culture can be defined as the beliefs, values, or other frames of reference by which we make sense of our experiences. It also concerns how we communicate these values and ideas.

Mass media are centrally involved in the production of modern culture: What is produced is influenced by cultural values; how the texts are formed and represented are influenced in the same way, and the readings of the texts are also subject to both abstract and particular cultural viewpoints (depending on the viewer, listener, etc).

In other words, as popular culture and media images dominate the age, they also dominate our sense of reality and our attempts to ‘make sense’ of who and what we are (Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation is a great, albeit challenging discourse on the subject).

For postmodernists, culture reveals far more about consumerism than economics. In particular, the belief that people buy and consume “things” (objects) has now evolved to people buying and consuming signs and symbols; i.e. it is not products themselves that encourage purchase, but the codes of meaning they signify, and the images and symbols produced whilst consuming.

Hence there is an increasing need to examine consumers and how they use brands and images in relation to their cultural world, rather than putting the spotlight on cognitive understanding, which centres on individuals explaining and articulating their attitudes and behaviour in isolation.

Semiotics – the science of interpreting signs and symbols – aims to identify the often unspoken codes that exist in any given market or brand space, and can help us to undertand this cultural world: How are brands presented? How is the category represented by brands? What associations and values are linked to them? How do these relate to other significant elements in the marketplace?

Through examining signs and what they mean and signal to consumers, semiotics can reveal often overlooked meanings and emergent cultural codes. This can help planners to develop a strategy that can enhance the cultural capital and meaning of a brand.

The biggest obstacle to developing a cultural strategy will be convincing the marketing community to pay greater attention to a brand’s cultural relevance than to pyramids, positionings, and so on; a challenge that semioticians could really help with by opening up their expertise and focussing on actionable delivery of semiotic learnings.

Back in 2009 whilst I was working on the launch of Sony Ericsson’s new music service, PlayNow Plus, I stumbled upon this fabulous David Bowie article in the New York Times. His “music like water” quote served as perfect inspiration for us to go on and produce this.

Fast-forward several years and, as part of Ericsson’s 2020 project, media futurist Gerd Leonhard has used Bowie’s analogy to emphasise how music consumption is moving entirely to the cloud.

His comments (which you can hear on the video below) suggest Sony Ericsson were several years ahead with their PlayNow Plus innovation. More importantly though, they highlight that the digitisation of music (amongst other things) is enabling us to experience the benefits of owner-less consumption.

The desire to be free from the hassle and the ties of ownership won’t just stop at digital products though!

From transportation to travel, tools to technology and fashion to farming – there are few industries that aren’t being shaken up by someone providing consumers with what they want, when they want it, without having to possess them.

The benefits to consumers are that we can try multiple products, be freed from maintenance, and incur lower upfront costs – yet still have the same experience at the moment of use.

Given how quickly the music industry was flipped upside-down it’s worth considering whether your product could be re-engineered as a service and, if so, what the value chain might look like, who your potential partners could be, and what role the social environment would play.

The recent debates surrounding our government’s interest in Choice Architecture are certainly interesting: This one in particular. However, the assertion that “Nudge” is a dark art for modifying societal behaviour is – on the whole – irrelevant.

Nudging works on the principle that by making changes in the way choices are presented, the automatic system in the brain is guided to produce certain kinds of behaviour. So for example, whether information is presented in terms of losses – ‘10% of patients who receive this treatment die’ – or gains – ‘90% of patients who receive this treatment survive’ – will affect emotional responses to it.

However, the Nudge approach can only work on very simple behaviours: ones where the automatic system can be guided without any input from the controlled system. Very few behaviours are simple enough to be influenced in this manner and that is why Nudge as an approach would not be comprehensive enough for manipulating (for instance) smokers to stop smoking.

Furthermore, whilst Nudge is a smarter way to think about economical incentives, it doesn’t enable governments to plan for widespread behavioural change (i.e. beyond the individual) because of the complexity and dynamic nature of networks. Once the network takes over the outcomes are entirely unpredictable.

If the government does intend to enable individuals to make better decisions, then the only way to do this is through an approach called the Reflexive Holistic Model.

Whereas Nudge is a passive tool, the Reflexive Holistic Model is an active tool.

By becoming more aware of how our brains operate and by being attentive to the myriad of influences and subtle forces that may affect our judgement and behaviour, we will be far better placed to make improved decisions for ourselves.

So, rather than the conspiracy theories of behaviour modification, the discussion should be about the opportunity we have for behavioural enlightenment.

Was reminded of a Russell Ackoff quote today,

It is better to do the right thing wrongly, than the wrong thing better and better. When one does the wrong thing right, one’s error is reinforced, which encourages further improvement in pursuit of the wrong end

Does this resonate with anyone? Yeah, thought so…

Faris said recently that the basic idea underlying all market research is epistemologically specious. I agree. In fact, I believe that it’s time to embrace a radical change in the whole marketing paradigm. Don’t get me wrong, there are some bright spots out there that ‘get it’. However, as the man said, ‘the future’s already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’. We haven’t quite reached the tipping point.

The problem comes from classical marketing thinking which causes us to break everything into component parts. Actually, the scientific revolution (mechanism, determinism, objectivism, reductivism, etc) created a whole plethora of ideas and assumptions that became expersions of the modern cultural paradigm. The mutually reinforcing nature of these aspects discourages awareness and questioning of the paradigm itself, because reality and norms are defined and constantly reiterated.

But, it’s time for the big push!

Holism – the opposite of reductionism – which led to systems thinking, suggests that valid knowledge and meaningful understanding comes from building up whole pictures of phenomenon, not by breaking them into parts.

If we consider marketing through the lens of systems thinking, we would possibly conclude that many of the problems we see are actually symptoms of systemic failure, rather than errors that require fixes. As such, many of the dominant views of marketing thinking are flawed and dysfunctional.

So, rather than carrying on regardless, what might we do?

Well, we might consider,
- being more flexible, accepting uncertainty, and not trying to control everything but participate in and learn from change (in most human and most natural systems it is impossible to predict outcomes)
- attempting to look at multiple causes, ‘knock-on’ effects, and feedback loops involved in change
- balancing intellect with intuition, and rationality with non-rational ways of knowing

Of course this is a huge ask for clients with a CEO asking why the numbers are down!

But as Einstein said,

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them

The fact of the matter is that what we already ‘know’ frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand. The things we make are an extension of the manner in which we think. So, if you want to ‘make stuff’ that people never believed possible, you need to think different!