Pattern Recognition

An ex-adman tries to make sense of PR. By Jon Leach, Head of Planning, Bell Pottinger Group

Recent Posts

  • The Mathematics of Word of Mouth Campaigns
  • Bleeding edge ideas
  • Chime : a "Viking" Business Culture?
  • Creative Projects - Forever in Beta
  • Distributed decision making and mastering contested markets
  • Things we learned at Playful 2009
  • The Mathematics of Creativity : The Book
  • Mobile Marketing and Engagement : What a PR Guy Thinks
  • A Visual History of Western SubCultures in the Twentieth Century
  • The Mathematics of Creativity : handling dangerous ideas

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The Mathematics of Word of Mouth Campaigns

Alan Mitchell writes in Marketing that "Word of Mouth is over-hyped".

 

Voltaire once responded to the statement that "life is hard" by asking "compared to what?"

 

So can we mathematically compare how over-hyped WoM campaigns are to say advertising,  a historically over-hyped but also over-maligned benchmark?

 

Alan pivots his argument on the hard data of a Duncan Watts study on Twitter chains that found that "98% of tweets didn't cascade at all". I would want to dig deeper on what constitutes a "cascade" because the promise ("hype") of WoM is that messages will go viral, pass a tipping point, cross over into the main stream etc. not just be "passed on a bit".

 

But this data point does give us something to work with as it suggests a WoM success rate of 2%. 

 

Now at face value this compares very poorly with advertising that might (big assumption here) have a success rate of 50% on the basis that the much quoted Lord Leverhulme suggestion that "half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half" seems to have become a rule of thumb of the marketing community.

 

But the WoM community would respond (and I think i got this metaphor from Mark Earls, the Herdmeister) that "you do have to light lots of forest fires to create a conflagration but only one needs to take hold for you to succeed in your goal".  So best practice in WoM campaigning seems to include putting lots of "virals" out there and assume that at least one will catch on (fire).

 

Having said that, if the failure rate of your WoM initiatives is the Watt's average of 98%, some maths shows that you would need to put out 34 messages to give yourself an even chance of at least one spark being successful (and hence match the advertising benchmark).

 

But as a WoM - drum roll - "Practitioner", you might well claim that your messages are some what better designed to go viral than your average tweet. 

 

If you claim that your virals are twice as infectious (only 96 % failure rate) as the average then you still need 17 of them to hit the 50% success rate advertising benchmark.

 

If you claim to make virals that wash five times whiter (90% failure rate) then you need 7 of them.

 

If you think you are ten times tougher (80% failure rate) then just 3.

 

(BTW If you think that your virals have a 50% chance of making it then you almost certainly work in an advertising agency and have missed the point of all this)

 

Coming back to the enigma of what constitutes a "cascade" then remember that only 2% of the tweets created any cascade at all. This does not mean that these 2% created the holy grail of going viral/mainstream.  So I think we should all set our expectation low on how many (marketing) virals actually might go viral and hence how many we need to put out there to deliver what we promise.

 

Perhaps this all come back to what different cultures mean by "we need to put out some WoM ideas" in the sense of how many exactly is "some".

 

I would venture that design agencies typically believe in the one idea, ad agencies are prepared to put out a campaign of up to three executions, PR agencies will punt out 7 or so stories and the digital folk (PPC, SEO, banners) will try dozens of variants to find out what works.

 

Perhaps this reveals the real tension here - should you spend lots of time crafting the perfect sacred flame or chuck out loads of cheap matches and see what takes?

 

So somewhere within all the hype, as the man on Blind Date used to put it, "the choice, as ever is yours"

 

10/06/2011 | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Bleeding edge ideas

Just for the record, things that I am pondering at the moment

 

1. Do clients need ideologies more than ideas these days? If an idea is just a way of bringing your positioning to life, and if we need positions not positionings perhaps we need to create not "big ideas" but "big ideologies".

 

2. Are behavious better explained by hormones rather than psychologies?  If we really are more emotional creatures rather than rational creatures and emotions are largely set by hormonal as much as psychological factors then we better learn more about dopamine, vasopressin etc. in order to understand "consumer" behaviour.

 

3.  Should we be modelling agents not networks?  While studying networks there is a tendency to think of them as physical systems with flows, connections and linear relationships.  But if they are really "complex adaptive systems" that have feedback loops, contain power laws and are NOT capable of being econometrically modelled then we might be better building simulations based on agents and study those, not keep trying to find the "equations" of the physical network.

 

4. Are specific guns full of really good specific metaphors?  Colt 44 Six Shooter (better to get off six quick shots than wait and get off the one perfect one). Sniper's rifle (the opposite of the six shooter). Kalashnikov (easy and cheap to make, any idiot can use it, so robust it never jams in the jungle), Saturday Night Special (small but deadly when used with surprise and up close).

 

5. After reputation comes trust? We may have moved beyond image to reputation. Is "trust management" the thing beyond that?

 

6. More than sustainability we need resilience?  Nothing wrong with sustainability but it assumes a rather stable, benign context.  If the world is more volatile and (unwittingly) hostile than that, do we need to create resilient "green" technologies, not just "sustainable ones?

 

Most of these ideas have a "one step beyond" quality i.e. the new idea "holonically" emerges  from the previous one, subsumes it but doesn't negate it. 

 

This may of course be Madness...

 

Hey you, don't watch that
Watch this!
This is the heavy heavy monster sound
The nuttiest sound around
So if you've come in off the street
And you're beginning to feel the heat
Well listen buster
You better start to move your feet
To the rockinest, rock-steady beat
Of madness
One step beyond

05/12/2011 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Chime : a "Viking" Business Culture?

According to the great Charles Handy there are four main business cultures that he explains with reference to four Greek Gods : Zeus, Apollo, Athens and Dionyseus.

(NB this post may not make much sense unless you know this classification. A good summary is here)

 

While the legendary HHCL was very Athens-like and my wife's old agency (St Lukes) had strong Dionysean tendencies it is most interesting contemplating my current employer, Chime.

 

In theory, given the central role that Lord Tim Bell still plays,  it should be a classic Zeus culture but partly because of its size and also due to changes over time there is also a very strong Athenian style present.

 

So I'm going to try a new label that blends these two : Viking culture.

 

This thought occurred to me when I was trying to explain to someone that although Chime should have a Feudal feel to it (what with all the Lords, Knights etc) it really was much more egalitarian and free flowing than that, much more akin to the culture that preceded the Normans namely the Norsemen aka the Vikings.

File:Viking Expansion.svg

The metaphor is that Chime loves to load up a long boat and send it off to somewhere across the water and pillage lots of gold and a few sheep.  The invocation is don't worry too much about detailed planning but get a few likely warriors in the boat and go and get your broad sword wet.  If you come back with chests of gold, great - the rewards will be yours, but if you run into heavy resistance don't expect to be medi-vacced out of there.  The warrior bands have a lot of autonomy (although not much gold!) so are expected to be self-sufficient and entrepeneurial.  The raiding parties are often gathered from several villages (i.e. companies) and quite egalitarian on their missions. 

Vikingshipvy2[1] 

This all surfaced again in a discussion about what a group of War Lords (i.e. company MD's) could usefully talk about.  Client retention (farming?) was seen as obviously important but not worth comparing notes on. But new business (monastery raiding?) would be worth gathering around the camp fire to exchange war stories over and maybe work out if a multi-boat raid was worth assembling.

 

It also occurred to me that the leader of this Viking settlement needed to have his own long boat, wield his own broad sword and mount his own raids in order to win/keep the respect of his War Lords.  Administrating the group was not a sufficiently Viking-like actitivy if that was all he did, and that could in any case be done by the Priest Class (also known as the Finance People).  No, he had to get out on the high seas, at least once in a while (this being the behaviour of other senior Vikings in Chime).

 

All this makes me wonder where I fit into this Viking clan.  I was once asked to help out in the new business effort by helping "batter down the castle gates" of new business prospects.  I suggested that rather than just add more muscle to the battering ram, could I be more of a cunning siege engineer trying to find new tricks to get inside the castle wall?  This would at least put me in the rather aspirational group of Michelangelo and Archimedes who each had this string attached to their bows.

 

Coming back to Vikings there is of course the court jester role available to me (although I might be better at the "pointing out the uncomfortable truths" bit than the witty but insightful comments bit).

What about Wizard/Sorcerer or Alchemist/Poisoner?  Or semi-mystical hermit even.

But ultimately being the Beserker has the most  appeal.

The-Berserker-Print-C10283237[1] 

The job has some glamour even it does promise a higher than average death rate. 

 

But then you should see  my pitch statistics.

 

 

 

01/12/2011 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Creative Projects - Forever in Beta

I'm sure that on one of those Belbin classification schemes I rank very low on the completer-finisher score and so i continue to fiddle with all of my creative projects and get none of them out of the door. 

But then maybe the fiddling is part of the fun.

For the record, here is where the various projects are all at.


1.  Game.  "Hand to Hand Combat " was/is making a good card/board game after a bit of play testing but has now morphed into the "Battle Book" concept. Having made a dummy and shown it to a few people including the splendid Christopher Lloyd of Wall Book (soon-to-be-had) fame.  Christopher's take is that it is about "re-connecting children with history" and i find that quite inspiring.


Apart from this being a publishing concept in its own right, there may also be a whole business concept here of sticking existing games together with history books.  There are loads of games out there (i had a really good time playing Battle Line with the boys on holiday) that perhaps could be licenced and mashed up i.e. I don't have to invent a whole new set of (good) games to make the concept work .  Boardgamegeek is a great resource here.


I think I am as much excited about the business idea as the book/game ideas here and so the next steps are to bounce this thought off people.



2.  Book.  After getting nowhere with my first salvo for "The Mathematics of Creativity" aimed at 7 publishing agents i have been having a re-think.  Firstly, a friend of a friend has been giving me a bit of coaching on this one and i can now see how inadequate my first submission was.  To do this properly I will need to raise my game.


While in Cambodia, Charlotte came up with a new title "The Creative Accountant" which i rather like. The sub-head would be something like "10 numerical tricks to boost your personal creativity" or something. 


I also bumped into the publisher (via Christopher Lloyd again)  of a book i had read and really liked : Alex's Adventures in Number Land.  So one route is to send him my revised proposal.


A new chapter has also occurred to me on how creative people and accountants see change when drawn as graphs.  So some more content is also a possibility.


Finally I got an encouraging note from Charles Frith on this blog that reminded me that some people would find the content interesting/valuable.


Next step : read the "how to get published" book and write a quality submission.



3. Website.  The "100 thinking boxes" concept would definitely work best (first?) as a web site.  The internal links and the external links are a keep part of the value.


I think the value of this thing is hard to figure out but i just want to make it.


Maybe I just need to take the time to set up a website and start putting at least a basic page up for each "thinking box" so i can start to put the links in.  Perhaps its a "journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step" thing.


I also can't help thinking that this should be an open source wiki kind of thing but then again I want to make it mine (all mine).


Next step : put up a web site?



4.  Art Work.  Inspired by "Ideas from Fire to Freud" book the thousand most important ideas (prior to 1900) need to be mapped out on one (long) page. Again Christopher Lloyd has shown the way with his Wall Book.


The content is there (contained in the book ) and initial tests have shown that it is possible.  I also have found a possible collaborator in the States who is into this sort of thing and makes very good looking art works out of them (not my skill). The challenge (again) is the hard graft of mapping the 1000 ideas out.


I was struck by the value of showing the roots of our ideas by reading Tom Holland's "Persian Fire" while on holiday.  Just one small example : Zorastrianism was the Persian's religion and contains (invented?) the key idea of "good vs evil" that pops up in many religions since then. So there is an irony that  George Bush, with his Christian informed view of "The Axis of Evil" is putting the Iranians in the "bad" camp when they are the descendants of the Persians who very much saw the Greeks (and Athens in particular) as a terrorist state who represented "the lie" what with all that Democracy stuff. Go figure...


Perhaps I should crowd source this? Although the value to me personally is to try to understand all 1000 ideas and how they connnect (so I can impress my Iranian chums?).


Next step : punt the idea out to my other colleagues with mild-asperger's snydrome (aka the plannersphere) and see if others want to play?




However, work beckons and as that is the Alpha to my Beta, this will have to do for now.


09/02/2010 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Distributed decision making and mastering contested markets

An interesting coffee with Mark Earls

 

I extracted from him a really structured version of his “herd” thinking i.e. how people make decisions.  It goes like this...

 

 

Rational. Faulty. Distributed.

 

  1. Rational. We used to think (but only the most classical of economist would still believe) that people make rational decisions that, however complex, are ultimately a mental calculation.

 

  1. Faulty.  The rational model has been modified by the discovery that we use emotions, faulty logic (due to the way our brains work) and/or are influenced “irrationally” by others.  So we are still like computers but rather faulty ones.

 

 

So far so comfortable. 

 

 

The shocker is in the third one.

 

 

  1. Distributed.  There is evidence that our decisions are made by other people (or groups) and we simply copy them, all be it still believing that we made the decision ourselves.

 

 

So just as we may believe that the PC on our desk is doing all the work, it is really all going on in the distributed “cloud” hence his choice of language.  

 

 

I will leave Mark to explain, prove and defend this line.  

 

 

But I rather like it.

 

 

In exchange I offered him my own little intellectual triptych (note to self - the power of triptych’s in structuring out thinking is worth a post in itself) namely that of positional, crisis and contested markets.

 


The notion is that we are all trained to communicate in “positional markets” : the task is to “position brand A relative to brand B” via techniques such as segmentation, messaging, channel planning etc.  Occasionally markets tip into “crisis” mode (Benzene in Perrier type stuff) where the task is to stop the crisis and get things back into positional mode as soon as possible.

 

 

But the third type of market is the “contested market” where other entities are trying to put you into a state of crisis, where your messages are rapidly rebutted, instantly re-butted or even pre-butted and all the channels keep spilling into each other.  This all started in politics in the 90's (I have the names of the guilty, if you want them) and has spread to other markets e.g. tobacco, alcohol, big retail, defence, energy.

 

 

The point is that these markets are no longer “positional” and are in such a permanent state of crisis that the word crisis isn’t helpful any longer. Hence “contested”.

 

 

How you deal with a contested market is another thing and, from a personal point of view is why it’s good fun to be at Bell Pottinger right now.  

 

 

Because although ad agencies have always understood that consumers are “faulty” and do get the increasingly social and distributed nature of decision taking, I am not sure if they have any track record of being that good in a crisis (unlike PR agencies).

 

 

And contested markets are even tougher to master than crisis markets.

 


So, as someone once put it, “we are the masters now!!!” (or, at least can be, in markets that have evolved out of their “positional/crisis” stage into a contested state).

 

 

A final thought, to connect up the two triptychs (a hexych? a diptriptych?), when you get all modern and groovy and dabble with social media in order to tap into the powerful distributed/social decision making force (aka the Herd Effect) you run the risk of tipping your previously positional market into a contested state.  Maybe for ever.  Nestle may have just found that out.  The Conservative are being forcibly reminded of it in case they have not been paying attention.

 

 

(Feel free to instantly re-but this; we be warned that we have our instant rebuttal rebuttal strategy ready to deploy…)

03/31/2010 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Things we learned at Playful 2009

1. It takes three minutes to connect an Apple laptop to a projection system but 30 seconds for a Windows PC.  The term "collective denial" springs to mind.


2.  Beards and glasses is the look. I blame Jonny Depp. 


3.  When you become the manager of a games studio you may not get to draw pictures any longer but you do get to "create collages" by assambling the talents of others.


4.  Having personal creative projects is helpful as it stops you getting prescious about your professional projects as your whole identity is not tied in to one channel.


5.  Hardware hacking and open source hardware look quite cool.


6.  Channel 4, in the guise of 4ip are looking for projects.  They seem ahead of the BBC in this respect.


7.  The resurrection isn't a miracle its just a really unlikely event (96 billion to one).


8. We should aspire to the awesome not just the innovative.  Building computers out of matchboxes is one route to this nirvana. Tic tac toe needs 304 boxes. Go might need one the size of the crab nebula.


9. Play might be a better way to change behaviour than any other methods e.g. chore wars, Fiat eco drive, wii fit.


10.  Play is often about pretending.  And negotiating. "In this one you pretend to be..."


11.  In Scandinavia, politics is often woven into the play.


12.  Little Big Planet is something that has passed me by but needs to be checked out.


13.  Designing games top down is hard as you never know what will be fun.  Better to try lots of stuff, build prototypes, mix chemicals and see what works.


14.  If it gets complex or isn't fun then chuck it (cf first Nintendo controller vs Playstation).


15. Kidmapped is a cute idea.  But the really cool bit was actually doing it.


16.  Chris O'Shea (pixelsumo) makes very cool playful art.  The world is a better place as a result...

11/02/2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

The Mathematics of Creativity : The Book

A long time ago i promised myself that I would knock together a "pamphlet" on this topic.  This is where my main writing efforts have gone for about a year (hence the drop off in blog posts?)


Encouraged by friends I sent it off to several publishing agents last week.  Below is the covering letter.


For those who want a sneak preview here is a draught of the first three chapters that went with the letter.


Download Mathematics of Creativity - first three chapters

 

 I will probaby use this blog to chronicle my ventures in the publishing trade (which much like life may be brutal, nasty and short)...


Dear ...........

 

One summer, in a beach house near San Diego, Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Covey worked on a book together. On a hot August night, after several weeks of tetchy collaboration, they had a big fight over whose name was going to appear first on the cover. The next morning, over a rather frosty breakfast, they agreed to go off and write separate books.  And they never looked back.

 

But now, the lost manuscript of that secret collaboration has come to light….

 

OK. Not true.   But if there was a bastard love child of Malcolm “Outliers” Gladwell and Steven “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Covey then this book might be it.

 

On the one hand it takes something as seemingly impenetrable as “creativity” and then explains it with a mix of anecdote and simple maths to entertain and enchant the audience.

 

But at the same time, by providing a formula for how “highly creative people” do it, the intent is to give the reader some simple steps to become more creative themselves.

 

So let’s talk about the reader (who no doubt likes Gladwell and Covey).

 

He or she will probably not work directly in the creative industries.  But as a marketer, or accountant, or lawyer, or retailer, or general manager, they will bump into people that do. In fact, they may know that their role in some ways relies on the creativity of others.

 

But their world is full of numbers, targets, spreadsheets and maths.  And so they have often wondered exactly what goes on over there, on the wild shores of creativity?  Is it - fashion, advertising, film, publishing -  all about sex and drugs and rock and roll? What are they up to (and can I have some please)?

 

This books explains what is going on “over there”, but in their terms : numbers.  No bullshit, no self-serving myths, just a pragmatic analysis of the maths behind the magic.  And while this will really grab our creative-curious business folk I hope it will also appeal to the general reader.

 

Overall, how does this help the world?

 

Firstly, if we “understood a little more and condemned a little less” (to misquote Mrs Thatcher) then the creative people and business people would get along a whole lot better (indeed creative people may feel inclined to buy this book for their accountants, and other numerical tormentors).

 

Secondly, in a Google world where knowledge is common place, being an expert is becoming just a table stake.  To be a real high roller you will have to add creativity to your playing style.

 

We all need to double our creativity (preferably in ten easy steps) and that’s why you must read the Mathematics of Creativity.




10/19/2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Mobile Marketing and Engagement : What a PR Guy Thinks

I just finished pulling a big report together and punted it out there


Download How the Mobile Internet is Disrupting Our World (Final)


The Summary goes like this...



To paraphrase, some of us achieve innovation and some have innovation thrust upon us.

We believe that a stream of innovations in and around mobile phones has created a new entity in the world of communications, often referrer to as “mobile internet”.  And whether you regard your self as a communicator, a marketer, a politician, or just someone who likes to keep up to date, we believe that this is a topic worth attending to.  It is being thrust upon us.

In our view, the term “mobile phone” doesn’t really capture what these devices are about any more.

And while the phrase “mobile internet” hints that something interesting happened when people started accessing the internet wherever they were, even this suggests that if you “get” the internet then you will “get” this new thing.  This may be a too casual response.

We have written this paper to explore what “mobile internet” is all about and to offer a few suggestions as to how to deal with this new “giant” thrusting him self into your professional life.

The cheat sheet goes as follows

-          the numbers show it’s big  already

-          understand the iPhone phenomenon and you’ll understand most of this

-          it’s not just another channel for your messages

-          it is a place where “classical” marketing can flourish

-          to really “get it” you need to start splashing around, so get yourself a “smart phone”, download some “apps” and join in

We believe that the Mobile Giant is a major innovation and one that presents major opportunities for our own innovations.  As such, we welcome him into the

Communications

Village

and look forward to a fruitful new era .  But, let us go back to the beginning of the story…..

07/02/2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

A Visual History of Western SubCultures in the Twentieth Century

So here's a thing
 
I was thinking about the nature of Youth Subcultures and often found the view that "it all began with the Sixties/Elvis/The Beatles/Teenagers" (delete to taste)
 
 
Being a contrarian I thought I'd track back to see if youth subculture existed before that (it did)
 
As ever, Wikipedia provided a great reference source both explaining each subculture (with cross links to antecedents and later subcultures it influenced) and also cataloguing the most important ones here :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_subcultures_in_the_20th_century
 
 
I then fancied going forward in time to see where some of today's youth subcultures emerged from and then couldn't resist trying to map it out.  I tried to use the Wikipedians catalogue and their views on who influenced whom but inevitably some of my own biases will have crept in.
 
 
It's also very Anglo-American but then it is based on analysing cross links in the English Language version of Wikipedia.
 
 
 
Anyhow, enjoy the map Download Youth Subculture map 2 .
 
 
::: just found that someone had done a (better) version of this already
 

02/24/2009 | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

The Mathematics of Creativity : handling dangerous ideas

For those of you who enjoyed the first chapter on Creative Meetings here is another draft chapter from my maybe-in-a-month-of-sundays pamphlet "The Mathematics of Creativity".

This one is mainly about handling dangerous and difficult creative ideas with some thoughts on how research and judgement interact in the creative process.

The working chapter title is "Thriving in the Chaotic Zone" (a nod to the Tom Peters book).

Sorry if its a bit rough round the edges (with a few diagrams missing) but I am going for the "publish early and often" strategy here rather than honing and crafting.

All comments welcome by the way...

Download thriving_in_the_chaotic_zone_2.doc

02/24/2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

The Terminator Event has Occurred. Now what do us humans do?

One of the favourite scary themes of 70's and 80's sci fi books/films was the idea that at some point computers would take over the world and either kill all humans or enslave us.  This either occurred when we "switched on" a particularly clever computer or a number of computers joined up to create one big one.

Either way, the problem occurs when the machine becomes conscious of itself and indeed us.  After a while it figures out that we are either a threat, superfluous to its needs or need strict policing (for our own good). So the humans lose control over their invention. Then the world. (And then John Connor leads a fight back against the Terminator machines in one of the more recent versions of the plot)



It has occurred to me that what we might term the "Terminator Event" has just happened with our global economy. 


At some point in the recent past the computers (machines) were joined up by their human inventors to create a literally global information, trade and financial entity that can be seen as literally one machine.

This single entity is so big and complex that no human brain or even team of human brains can understand it, its motivation or anticipate its possible actions. And yet we can't switch it off or disassemble it as we are so dependent on it.

Some of the more honest politicians are now saying that we can't predict what is going to happen next with our global economic machine.


So its achieved independence.  Its alive. And its taken over.


Now some may dispute that an entity that has not achieved consciousness can't actually be alive.  But this is based on a 70's/80's notion of how minds work (or watching too many bad sci-fi films, which may be the same thing, of course).  More modern psychologists have argued that our sense of being "conscious" is just a trick of our minds - having a sense of self is evolutionarily useful but it is not a special type of mental ability anymore than feeling fear is. See here for a longer take on that box of frogs.


So we all are now enslaved to the Global Economic Machine whether it is conscious of its own existence or not.  And this may not be a metaphor but an actual description of the reality of power structures between various complex electromagnetic entities on this planet.

(If you want to add a bit of extra  paranoia then note how as the machine grows it makes the world hotter which leads to the slow but inexorable death and destruction of its human inventors).


In any case, what should any budding John Connors do about this?


In trying to alert the world to this danger there is the obvious risk that the machine will suddenly lash out at me with a powerful elec


02/10/2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Client immersion sessions (and other baptisms of fire)

It may just be a co-incidence but next week I have two "immersion sessions" with new clients.


The business world is full of metaphors so I have been wondering what is the implied meaning of this phrase de jour?  Should I take the plunge?


One root of "immersion session" seems to be a method of language learning where you are put in a foreign evironment on a continual basis for two weeks or so.  Not only do you only speak French (or whatever) in the classroom, you also have to speak it while you eat, drink, rest, shop.  You are fully immersed in Frenchness and are allowed no other "foreign air" in or out of  your mouth.


So perhaps these "immersion sessions" are intended to so fully immerse me in the client problem/culture that I will rapidly become a native (and hence more properly solve the problem).


Hmm.


These sessions seem to be about 3 hours long.  I can probably "hold my breath" for that long and avoid going native.  Are they not really "kick off sessions" (operating metaphor : there's a long game ahead but we need to signal a start even if not much is established in the first kicks) or maybe "briefing sessions" (operating metaphor : our experts have reduced a complex situation to a short but cogent summary of what you need to know in order to do your bit of the task)?


I think someone is making an overclaim here and perhaps revealing an insecurity.


Is there a client side suggestion that our culture and situation are so special and complex that we couldn't possibly "brief" you on it. Mais Non, you must be immersed in the terroir of our culture to have any chance of understanding it! 

Or is it an agency side suggestion that we intend to be become "fully immersed" in your business problem.  We are fascinated by your culture and can think about nothing else!

Or is it a "we have so much information and data to hose you down with, brace yourself for a full on immersive data soak".  We are just swamped with the stuff and can't wait to get rid of it (I think I'd rather have the brief, at least to start with)


Maybe there are even some religious overtones to all this.  Many religious cultures practice immersion (and even full submersion) as part of their initiation rites.  Is this what is required of me at these meetings - a symbolic death and re-birth resulting in a joining with the new corporate communion? Yikes!

I'll bring a towel just in case.


My view is that these metaphors are unhelpful.


For me, clients (their cultures, their problems) are things to be studied not immersed in or converted to.  I'm paid to be objective. To solve their problems.  And while empathising with and "getting a feel" for the culture is part of the study (doctors don't have to be "clinical", they can relate to "the person" too), I don't think I'm helping anyone by going native or becoming a zealot.


So given that both of these projects will be lengthy studies and involve much experimenting, hypothesising and testing, I think the best metaphor is "briefing".

So, request to clients : explain to me the core of the issue as elegantly as you can and point me to all the branches of enquiry I will need to explore at a later date.


But don't immerse me. 


For one thing, I can't swim.

01/29/2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

The Triumph of PR Over Advertising in 2009

What follows is a very long think piece I have been writing for general use over here at Bell Pottinger.

 

While as a self confessed PR man these days I clearly have an ax to grind.  But I also have some new data that (IMHO) adds grist to the mill...

 

(enough grinding metaphors, here is an early version - it doesn't have all the data in but the missing ones are well known "facts" like interest rates have dropped rapidly).

 

 

 

 

Whenever a recession comes around, Marketing Directors and their Advertising Agencies rapidly pull out the findings from the PIMS Study (Profit Impact of  Marketing Strategy) that is based on long term tracking of 4100+ businesses around the world.

They will use PIMS to argue, beyond all reasonable doubt, that companies who maintain or increase their advertising spend in a downturn have no worse ROI’s during the tough times than the ad cutters, but go on to make superior returns during the recovery.  After a typical cycle of 5 years, those that increased their spend are typically 1.2 share points up on their cost cutting competitors and 5.1 % points up on ROI. (see a recent example of this at www.ogilvyonrecession.com)

 

The reason this bold strategy works is that if a company maintains or increases spend when others cut theirs it gets a sudden surge in “share of voice”. Many studies have shown that if your “share of voice” exceeds your “share of market” then the latter (all other things being equal) will tend to grow. And we know that this leads to greater profitability; other studies have shown that market share correlates strongly with profit margin.

 

While this all joins up neatly, is admirably numerical and so talks the language of finance, the slick salesmen often overlook a few important points.

 

 

Firstly, within the UK data set, 65% of the sample cut their spend, 24% maintained it and 11% increased it.  So a more accurate finding would be: “when a majority of players in a market cut their spend, those that maintain or increase it, get above average returns”. Or put another way, we don’t know what would happen if everyone maintained their spend or everyone decreased it.  So it’s still perfectly rational to cut your spend and hope everyone else does too.

Secondly, the PIMS analysis shows similar patterns for those who maintain/increase spend on “customer perceived quality”, “product R&D” or “introducing new products” : they all perform better over the cycle.  So while the Marketing Director can use PIMS to forcibly defend their budget so can the Operations Director (quality), the Technical Director (R&D) and the Sales Director (new products).  Note that this finding is not often reported by the Marketing Director (well, it is called the “Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy” study for a reason).

This links to a third point, that in downturns companies often need to survive the short term to get to the long term.  Many departments may be able to prove that their investments give good long term rewards, but when cash flows and/or access to credit are much reduced, these arguments are not very helpful. Something needs to go. But what?

So rather than just turn to PIMS perhaps the Marketing Director needs to find other data to decide how to allocate their, in all probability, reduced budget. In particular they may find statistical evidence that what we may broadly call “PR” is a better investment to make in a downturn than advertising.

One group of commentators who have already reached this conclusion is the City.  In a November briefing note “You Have to Keep Communicating: Marketing Communications in a Downturn”, Numis Securities opined :

 

            “Current valuations do not fairly reflect what we think are crucial changes in the media landscape….technological developments have had a profound and complex impact on patterns of media consumption and hence the industry itself. 

In a digital age of internet advertising, blogs, social media, and 24-hour news the corporate-consumer relationship has changed, and companies, governments and organisations can no longer afford to cease communication with customers, citizens and stake holders.  We believe this is driving structural growth in marketing services like public relations”.

 

Further more, to look at their share price forecasts, they believe that advertising oriented groups will recover slowly over the next two years but PR centric businesses will flourish

 

Company         ‘08 Share Price            Forecast 2010 Price       Forecast Growth

Chime                   69               139                     101%

Huntsworth           39                66                      70%

WPP                            340                     447                              32%    

Aegis                    50               57                       15%

M&C Saatchi       85               75                      -12%

 

Numis appear to be arguing in the quote above that there are some structural shifts occurring here. To break these out :

-         customers/audiences respond to companies differently these days

-         the media between the audiences and the companies have changed

-         hence, the means by which companies communicate have had to change

 

What the data we will produce below shows (to put it simplistically):

-         these days, people seek sources they trust

-         recommendations from “people like me” are the most trusted

-         hence media/channels that convey “recommendations” are the best

-         and so PR has become a more effective tool than advertising

 

This explains the Numis prediction: advertising budgets will be cut this time round, and PR budgets will replace them.  As Numis puts it : you have to keep communicating these days.

 

 

The New Data on “Talk Value”

Historically the advertising industry has been better than the PR industry at producing hard data to show the business effectiveness of their service most notably in the long running IPA effectiveness awards. But ironically, a new “meta-analysis” of 880 award winning IPA papers from 1980 to 2006 shows that what DDB Advertising terms “Talk Value campaigns” and the study calls “The Fame Model” are more profitable than any other type of communication campaign.  Surely “fame” and “talkability” is what PR people claim to deliver for clients.

The study shows that different communication models are more or less successful at producing “very large scale effects on profit”:

 

Communication                         Number of campaigns producing

Model                                      very large scale effects on profit

“Fame”                                                                 39%                

“Emotional involvement”                       28%

“More complex*”                                 26%

“Information”                                        24%

“Persuasion”                                         13%

(* typically a combination of two or more of the other techniques)

 

 

Furthermore, while each model has its strengths and weaknesses, when using the tough measure of “had a very large effect” the Fame Model is almost always the most likely to perform well:

Frequency of very large                        Ranking of Fame Model

effects occurring in                                based on frequency of  

“Fame Model” cases                            effect occurring

Sales                                        58%                                         1st

Profit                            39%                             1st

Penetration                   33%                             2nd

Market Share               31%                             2nd equal

Loyalty                         11%                             1st

Price Sensitivity            8%                               1st

The IPA data seems to show that the generation of fame, talk value (and quite possibly recommendation) has been the Marketers secret weapon for several decades (this data set goes back to 1980).  But the questions that come to mind is  “why is this approach so effective?”  and “has its moment as the prime mover for marketing communications come?”

 

 

The New Data on 3rd Party Communications

“Awareness” exist in an individuals head. But Fame (and its black sheep of a relative, Notoriety) is something that is based on an understanding of what “everyone else” thinks.  It relies on people talking about it.  Similarly, when you receive (or request) a recommendation, it’s a social thing; the value does not come from just the raw facts you receive but more from who is giving you the advice and what you think of them.

So PR has always been about getting 3rd Parties (whether journalist, celebrities, or people’s friends) to do your selling for you. 

So looking at the Numis data, and the IPA data bank, something rather interesting is happening (or has already happened) with 3rd Party recommendations, or what we might term “PR” in the broadest sense of the phrase.

So why is PR so effective these days (and can we use data to answer this question?).

There seem to be three areas where data shows us what is happening:

  1. PR seems to be as efficient as advertising at reaching audiences (albeit through indirect channels) these days
  2. PR stimulates social recommendations whereas advertising enhances perceived image.
  3. In tough times people would rather take the “recommended safe option” than the “best possible choice” and hence seek sources they trust.

The New Data on Reach

While it is easy enough to find data that shows the reach of journalist controlled channels like TV, newspapers and magazines, it has always been harder to support the claim that PR practitioners make that “word of mouth” and “people passing messages on” is PR’s unique value.

We will return to the extra credibility and power that “sideways” (as opposed to “top down”) messages have but just how widespread are they?

 

Fortunately, by using the web and phone texting, companies who specialise in using “Customer Evangelists” to spread the word have now got some good measures on this.  This is another example of the “structural changes” that Numis referred to : bringing hard data to the ephemeral world of PR.

The rule of thumb that Word of Mouth practitioners use is that about 15% of all conversations contain a reference to a brand, company or service.  This proportion exceeds the frequency of commercial messages at peak time on ITV (8 out of 60 minutes {check}). So the average person is as surrounded by word of mouth messages as they are by TV commercials (arguably they are more surrounded as people talk while watching TV!).

 

Word of Mouth has great reach (if you can get your message in there).

 

So, on the distribution of messages, companies like Wildfire and ChatThreads report the similar metric that one well motivated and well equipped “advocate” (or upset customer) will pass their story on to 100 other people, whether directly or indirectly. (The way this works is that – on average - the advocate talks to 15 people, who in turn talk to another 45 people who in turn pass it on to one more person each to give a total of c.100).

 

There are many ways that PR puts the message “into the system” but for example one vivid, talk-worthy event that directly reaches 10,000 people will eventually reach the ears of 1,000,000 based on the 1->100 finding.

 

Again, this is what Numis was talking about with the effects of technology: stuff just spreads so much more easily these days.  If you want to pass something on you can send it to 100’s or even millions with just one click. If you want an opinion, one text or one Google and it is yours.

 

The Cash Value of Recommendation

If the data above shows that social recommendations pass have great reach, do they convert into behaviour change and sales.

 

For some time, the best evidence we had was the correlation between Net Promoter Scores (basically a measure of how many of your customers were actively recommending you) and total growth for a company.  We had nothing in between.

 

But now new studies how us  that people who pass on information about your brand make a big contribution to your bottom line. Indeed these “active recommenders” are almost as important to you as people who buy lots from you. 

 

A Harvard Business Review study found that for a telecoms company in the USA , their top 10% of customers were worth $1,933 each to the company in terms of annual purchases.  However, they were rather “silent fans” as their recommendations only brought in another $40 of value from new customers.

But another set of customers, who only  bought $230 of services, talked so much about it that they brought in another $1,020 each from new customers. 82% of their value was as advocates.  This suggests that marketing campaigns that get people talking, and in particular recommending, generate significant “free” revenue.

 

Further data supports the value of recommendations in people’s self reported decision making processes.  For example, when asked who had the biggest influence on their choices in general, 59% nominated their immediate family (partner or children), 19% said it was friends, neighbours, workmates or other relatives), 12% said it was the media, 7% said it was an “authority” (e.g. the Government,  Doctors, etc) and only 2% claimed it was a direct “commercial” source.

 

While we need to angle off for people being unaware of the unconscious effects of advertising and “image”, what we are seeing here is the results of an across the board decline in people’s trust in authorities of any kind.  In all categories, whether you are a mother seeking a baby food, a teenager buying a mobile phone or a chief executive hiring a banker the number one most trusted information source is “people like me”. In the above example 78% are trusting “sideways” sources (family, friends etc.) and only 21% are deferring upwards (to the media, authorities and commercial sources).

And these recommendations, in this technological age that Numis refers to are coming in from all angles.  When asked to what degree different sources influenced purchasing decisions people ranked them as follows

 

Word of Mouth (someone you know)                           8.4 (on a 10 point scale)

Word of Mouth (from Internet supported by others)      6.8

News Story                                                                  6.4

Word of Mouth (from Internet, in isolation)                   5.8

Advertising                                                                   4.6

 

One take on this is how “social” decision taking is.  But the data also suggests that “3rd party recommendation” (whether from “someone I know”, the Internet or the News) is where the true power of PR lies. Perhaps this is why Numis rate PR stocks a “buy”. 

 

Numis’ main stated reason is that the surge of technology has created a media and cultural landscape where stuff spreads and needs to be managed.  But there is another more urgent reason why this is so.  After all Numis did do the analysis in the early autumn before things really got bad.

For in 2009 the new reason why PR will triumph is to do with fear.

 

What People Value Right Now

Human beings, whether as individuals, or as “mobs” are getting quite scared at the moment.  And when people are scared they take fewer risks and stick with what they know. In other words they start to take advice only from “people like them”.

 

Right now people are on the receiving end of a lot of scary stuff

-         they have become significantly poorer for the first time in 15 years {charts on GDP; house values}

-         they have seen governments pulling “violently on the tiller” signalling that they have lost control {step change drops in base rate}

-         actual war may be a dim distant memory, or in far away lands, but terrorist attacks have become more spectacular and visible{death count chart}

-         and all of the above is now available 24 hours a day on your TV, PC and mobile {data on stress effect of frequency of checking for bad news}

 

As one commentator put it, following on from the NICE era (non inflationary, constant expansion) we are in the THUD era (Terror Horror Uncertainty Doubt).

 

All this means that for a lot of people in a lot of categories the issue is no longer “how do I get more” (normal capitalism) but how do I keep what I’ve got (depression behaviour)?  Studies [data] show that people are asymmetric and more concerned about possible losses than possible gains.  And so right now people are more interested in finding a (any!) safe option than trying to find the best possible choice.

 

Put another way, what people are more interested in is the solidity of your reputation than the attractiveness of your brand values.  What people are hearing about you right now could be the most important driver of your business success over the next couple of years.  In contrast to what is said about you, your projected brand’s image could look soon like a rather unnecessary fashion accessory.

 

So perhaps in tough times, recommendations “from people like me” about companies/brands will become the most valuable asset a company can have.  Your reputation will be your prime asset.  Warren Buffet, a man who invests heavily in businesses with strong brand assets has this to say on the subject : “If you lose dollars for the firm by bad decisions, I will be understanding. If you lose reputation for the firm, I will be ruthless.”

 

One definition of reputation is “what you do, what you say and what other people say about you”.  While advertising and PR can both lay claims to who is best at putting out “what you want to say”, it is PR practitioners, with their emphasis on 3rd party voices who are experts at influencing “what other people say about you”.

 

And perhaps this is why Numis see an “Advertising Armageddon” but the “increased importance of PR”.

 

Which brings us back to the PIMMS study.

 

This showed that spending in a recession leads to higher share of voice which in turn leads to improved market share, profitability and hence ROI.

 

Perhaps, now we have both at the data and realised we need to be pragmatic about who gets to carry on spending, we should think hard about which “voice” to choose.  We would argue that the evidence has emerged that when compared to advertising, the PR-influenced voice, has great reach, generates profit-boosting recommendations and the reputation-boosting , literally “trustworthy” commendations that are sought in these troubled times.

 

If there is one voice all companies need to spend more on right now, it is that of the PR operator.

 

Their moment has come.

12/18/2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Power of Word of Mouth

I went to a good conference about Word of Mouth yesterday.  There was much to comment on such as how advertising agencies are really gettin g their act together on WOMM, how many good case studies are coming through now, and how the measurement people are really getting to grips with evaluation and even ROI.

Two things really stuck with me on the numerical side one to do with the surprisingly efficient "reach" of WOM; the other to do with comparing its ROI to more classical marketing approaches.


So, the data suggests that a well motivated, well equipped "advocate" (or whatever you want to call them) will spread the ("your") message to 100 people.  And one way or another this should increase trial, or re-purchase, or whatever you are trying to boost, with a pretty good ROI.

This "1 advocate reaches 100 customers" statistic seems to be a plausible benchmark (much like 1% of direct mail getting a response) or rule of thumb for the WOM industry.

Speakers from ChatThreads and Wildfire (both WOMM companies) both presented data from which the 1>100 stat could be derived from.

The maths goes something like this...

On average a "Generation 0" advocate (the people who the company contact directly) will pass the message on to 15 people (10-30 being a range across categories)

The average Generation 1 advocate (the 15 from above) will contact 3 further people each who in turn will contact one more person each (but then, on average, the whole thing peters out).

So 1 gets 15 who get 45 who get 45, or just over 100  in total. 


Word of Mouth is often seen as a rather mysterious and magical thing. These simple numbers show how it works (on average) ata  human scale.


If you then find out how many people convert to a sale, repeat purchase etc. and then work out your costs, revenues and profits you can then derive the rather nice sounding "profit per conversation" i.e. each of those 100 "passing ons" above net  you (say) 50p a time.

Nice work fellas.



The other interesting number was presented by DDB from the (rapidly becoming) legendary study by Les Binet and Peter Field.  This study looked at almost 1000 effectiveness award winning papers from the IPA and worked out what types of advertising campaign generated what sort of marketing effects.  DDB presented a chart showing how campaigns using the "persuasion" approach were consistently outperformed by those taking the "talk value" approach on effects such as sales, market share etc.


Well I guess what else would you expect people to say at a "Word of Mouth" Conference?  And the differences were not that decisive, to be harsh.


But the really striking number was that 35% of "talk value" campaigns had a "very large impact on profits" compared to only 13% of "persuasion" campaigns.  Or put another way, it suggests that old school thinking is only 1/3 as effective as new school thinking when it comes to ROI. 


Perhaps this "3 times more profitable" number is linked to the "reach one, reach 100" number. Whether it is something to do with the surprising efficiency of the reach of WOM or the trust that people put into recommendations vs sales pitches there is clearly something commercially powerful about "word of mouth".


And for those working in PR, feel free to vent a very loud "we told you so" at this point.






12/03/2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Thinking outside the box : first choose your box

In my never ending quest to figure out how creativity (aka having ideas) works : does the specific way we bring structure to the messiness of the world, act as a spring board to the new idea? 


Do we put our ideas in boxes, perhaps try on a few for size, before we then find a new thought outside of that box?


Is that how the mind works?


Certainly looking at the "how to have ideas" literature you find the following recomemdation:


1.  Gather lots of info directly relevant to the problem but also around it.

2. Sift through and find patterns in this data

3. Take a break (let your subconscious do some work)

4. Have an idea (!)

5. Craft the idea



But on step 2. how do we actually "find patterns" unless we have some prior ways of spotting the connections?  Because we are not looking for trivial connections like "begin with P" or "rythmes with orange" (a small group that one) but rather for connections  likely to be more meaningful like "this one's bigger than this one" or "these four create a tidy little 2 by 2".


We don't know for sure which (if any) of these patterns/connections may prod our subconscious to leap off to a new place, but perhaps "good thinkers" have some sort of intuitive ability to try some promising ones.


So possibly where experience comes into play is the ability to fit the data into patterns that in previous problem solving exercises have been useful.  Or possibly it isabout bringing in a highly unusual sorting pattern that brings some new perspective to the problem at hand.  Maybe it's just about playing with it in lots of ways without worrying if its getting you anywhere.


Anyhow I feel there may be a book/website/resource in a cross-linked list of what I am calling "Thinking Boxes".  As the recession rolls in and I perhaps have a lot of spare time on my hands then maybe one day I will create this.  But for now I have been compiling a list.

To my surprise I have already cruised past 100 boxes after a couple of weeks.  Here is my list so far.  It is arranged alphabetically (a not very meaningful pattern, I'm sure I can do better) and I apologise for the lack of links.  I'll get round to that post-redundancy.

(BTW all sugestions of ones i've missed gratefully received)


Super Premium, Premium, Mass, Value
3 7 12 12+
5 types (double personality thing)
7 Story types
Account handling – diamonds, acorns etc.
Adoption curve
Agricultural, industrial, postindustrial
Analog digital
Ansoff matrix
Arden’s life circle
Army, Navy, Air Force (Marines, SAS)
Attention Interest Desire Action
Audio visual kinaesthetic
Autumn, winter, spring, summer
BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel4
Belbin's team roles
Boston matrix
Brand onions
Brand preference funnel
Brand pyramids
CACI type stuff
Catastrophe theory
Chaotic and laminar zones
Chinese Emperors incompatible classification
Colours – other cultures
Colours – western
Commission, fees and royalties
Conscious subconscious
Covey's Gods of management
Coveys urgent, important
Crawl, Walk, Run
De Bono’s Hats
Decades
Denial Bargaining Anger Fear Transformation
Differentiate, lo-cost, niche (Porter)
Direct and indirect costs
Diverity x Stimulation/Fear
Dress styles : romantic, classic, dramatic etc
Drugs analogy
Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, Quintessence
Eastern Western
Economic cycles
Ego, superego, id
Expressive, Analytical, Amiable, Driver
Feature benefit (advantage)
Feminist
Fighter, cleric, wizard, thief
Foxes, sheep, owls and donkeys
Fractals
Gather, Sift, Wait, Generate, Perfect
Geocentric, heliocentric revolution
Geometric Time,; Days, weeks, months, years
Gold, silver, Bronze (Platinum)
Goldilocks : too hot, too cold, just right
Good bad, lawful evil D&AD
Good, Better, Best
Greenfield, brownfield
Groups : Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing,  Mourning
Hard, soft
Hero Archetypes
Hero’s Journey
Iceberg, beneath the waterline
Incompatible ideas (believing both)
Individual mind, herd mind
Industrial, service and creative sectors
Introvert extrovert
Izzards wheel of fashion
Jungian archetypes (links to myths and evolution)
Kolb’s learning styles
Kuhns structure of scientific revolutions
Ladders
Learning ladder : Unconscious Incompetence, CI, CC, UC
Left hand, right hand
Left wing, right wing
Lizard brain, mammal brain, human brain
Lumpers,  splitters, recategorisers
Male female
Marxist
Maslows hierarchy of needs
Mass, one to many, one to one, networked
Mavens, connectors, salesmen
Meisters professional service firms triangles
Mind body (duality)
Mindshare SIAS
Mutate, select, amplify
Myers Briggs
Nice vs nasty (rational and emotional) 9 boxer
No.s of pints theory
Normal distribution
Obengs project types : lost in fog, making a movie, painting my numbers
Parent adult child.  Transactional Analysis
Pareto 80 20
Poisson distribution
Porters five forces
Power law distribution
Qualitative, quantitative
Quantum physics
Rational emotional
Ready, Fire, Aim
Rise, decline, circle
S curve theory
Spectrums
Spiceyness e.g. Nando’s
Spiral Cowan second order thinking
Spiral Dynamics
Star signs
Strategy, Idea, Execution
Strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma
Sutherlands Law
Testosterone and oestrogen cycles
The one with 1’s at the front (anti fraud)
Three screens
Tipping point, crossing the chasm
Traffic lights
T-shape, vertical and horizontal
TV programme lengths; clip, 30 mins, feature, mini-series
Tweenagers and teenagers and the forever young
Two by two’s
Urban rural suburban exurban
Venn diagrams
Ying Yang (and extra dots)

11/28/2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Do bad meetings produce great creative ideas?

I am endlessly fascinated about where great creative ideas come from and whether you can do anything to increase the likelihood of them occurring.  I once wrote about this in the post The Formula for Creative Meetings.

That post was inspired by a rather mediocre creative meeting run by a management consultancy.  My main contention was that if they'd run it a bit better then the creative ideas would probably (as in "there probably is no God") have been a whole lot better.

This post is inspired by a creative meeting, involving another management consultancy, that was run much much worse than that.

But it produced what was (IMHO) an extraordinarily good idea. So how does that work then?

Is it possible that bad environments can produce great ideas. Occasionally?  More often than not? Reliably?

This is worth contemplation.

Co-incidentally, the Guardian in its G2 section asked today "What impact did George Bush have on the artistic life of his country".  The answer was a resounding "no" but I suspect this was a rather knee jerk reaction from the liberal artistic elite that was asked. But, hey, they've got an election on, so the party line needs to followed.

I can't remember the exact quote but in the Third Man,  Harry Lime (?) talks about how in the Italian Renaissance, where the country was run by a bunch of crooks and murderers (the Medicis and the Borgias) huge intellectual and artistic strides are made in a few years, whereas in orderly, communitarian Switzerland, in 500 years the best they can come up with is the Cuckoo clock.

If i had the time it would fun to audit other creative fields. For example did the most radical shifts in music in the UK occur under the Tories (Punk, Rave culture) or Labour (Pomp Rock, Boy Bands)?

This is indeed the old question: do artists need to suffer for their art?

So should we, rather counter intuitively, try to run our creative meetings so badly that through their frustration and anger, our creative people burst out with a moment of creative genius? (Actually, I believe some creative departments are run on that basis, but here I am analysing those client/agency brainstorm meetings)

I think the answer is that it depends on who is in the meeting.

Perhaps the true pattern of this phenonemon is the same of how PowerPoint - allegedly - affects the quality of a presentation.  I'll try to dig out the reference, but the view is that the bottom 10% of presenters will have their presentations improved (it gives at least some structure to their messy thoughts) and the top 10% of the ability range will also be enhanced by a .ppt file (they are the PowerPoint artists). The authors complaint is that for the middle 80%, their presentations become muddied, over verbal and over-pimped by the use of .ppt.

So for PowerPoint - keep it out of the middle zone.

For facilitation techniques i think the reverse applies. Only use it in the middle range.

So here's where I get to.  If you have got a group of brilliant creative people (top 10% e.g experienced pitch teams at an agency) then just leave them to it and don't try any fancy facilitation techniques on them. Over managing them will make things worse. And if you have got a fairly mid-ranged, typical bunch of marketing/agency people (the 80% centre of the bell curve) then some facilitation/brainstorming techniques probably will enhance the quality of the output.

But for those unfortunate 10% of occasions where you have a mismatched bunch of people with little familiarity with working together, an unclear brief and patchy creative abilities etc. then just let chaos reign and you may just get a Sistine Chapel Ceiling out of it (or a lot of dead bodies). Perhaps this is what happenned this week.

This pattern may also resolve another tension in my life. I spend a fair amount of time facilitating creative meetings and feel that this "works". But on reflection I tend to work in the middle ground (i.e. not with pure play creatives or small, well-oiled pitch teams). Further more I agree with Richard Huntington that truly great creative ideas almost never come out of brainstorms (rather they come from individual minds or very small groups). This "10:80:10" pattern explains this.

Now the only problem with this theory is the rather challenging view found in the new book 1434 ("The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance") where it is claimed that Leonardo etc. nicked all their ideas from the Chinese.

Borgias, shmorgias.

And come to think of it, all four of the consultancy people in the meeting looked rather Chinese (or at least Asian).  Hang on a moment .......?!

10/31/2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Training for trainers : how to create and improve internal training courses

Now the recession is officially here, it will be interesting to see how advertising agencies respond.

Over in my training micro-business I have tried to anticipate a surge in internal training at agencies.

My guess is with training budgets slashed (at the moment, i gather that all WPP agencies have their training budgets frozen for the rest of 2008 and for 2009) a lot will see if they can replace some of the expensive external training courses by "bringing it in house".

My hope is that they might seek some help in doing this and indeed may want to invest what little money they have in "training the trainers".  And so I am now marketing a course, first piloted with Ogilvy this spring, with the IPA.

You can read the blurb at the IPA site here.

To use the old metaphor, I hope they will wisely think "if we're not going to be able to buy fish in 2009 maybe we should invest in some fishing rods now".

The theory is fine but it remains to be seen how this works out in practice.  Watch this space.

Perhaps I should send a Fishing Rod to Sir Martin Sorrell as a promotional item.

10/31/2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Hadron Collider - everybody's a winner!

Ok - so they turned it on and we're still here. 

But once the physicists get it fine tuned, aim the particles properly, bring the universe to an end and with a Big Bang create the next Universe,  each and every  deep thinkers on "how it all works" may be able to claim that they were proved right.

1.  Atheists will be able to say "Told you so.  The Universe is  a natural phenomenon albeit manufactured by clumsy physicists"

2.  Fundamental Christians will be able to say "Told you so. We said there was going to be an apocalypse about now, albeit with more trumpets"

3. Eastern Religions will be able to say "Told you so. It's all a big circle - albeit only  27km long -  where there are no ends just new beginnings"

Isn't it nice when science brings us all together like this!

09/10/2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

JustGulets : a holiday company that's sunk?

A bit off topic this but (wait for it, here comes the link) one of the patterns in a recession/downturn is that small holiday companies start to have cash flow problems, some of them go bust and then their customers get let down.

With JustGulets this very nearly happened to me.

I would recommend using a ten foot boat pole when poking around on their web-site.  It's still live so be warned - you may lose your money if you use them.

The facts (for all my holiday journalist chums are as follows):

1.  I booked a gulet (turkish style cruising boat) with JustGulets back in April, "La Liberte" to be precise.

2.  A few days before departure, JustGulets' Michael Philips (a name with a bit of form, you will discover if you Google around) calls me to say that La Liberte had developed "engine trouble" so we would now be on the Bolero. This turned out to be a bare faced lie : on my first evening aboard the Bolero,  who would motor in next to me but La Liberte and eight happy customers. Very fishy.

3.  Two days in I get a call from the Turkish agent saying that Michael Philips was "a crook", had failed to make the required payments and indeed had sent evidence of bogus money transfers.  The agent wanted the Bolero's captain to return to port and terminate our trip. Fortunately I talked him out of that.

4. Suspiciously, at this point the "24 hour help line" for JustGulets went dead as did all Michael's other phone no.s.  When he did re-surface three days later he told me that he had been in hospital with a kidney infection but (unfortunately) told the turkish agent that he's been in hospital with an eye infection.  (He's not even that good at lieing!)

5.  As I left Turkey the Turkish agent had still not been paid and Michael was still elusive.

Those are my facts. 

My opinion is that this man is either a crook, incompetent or delusional. Possibly all three.  In any case, I would strongly recommend not giving him, JustGulets or any of the other fronts he operates behind your cash.

Michael, if you are reading this - give it up. We're on to you - it's time to stop.  Pay your debts. Get yourself an honest job you are capable of handling professionally.

Other stories I have heard (and in some cases seen the paperwork to "prove").

1. He went bust last year leaving several clients and suppliers in the lurch.

2.  He owes people in Turkey money from other bookings this year. Court cases are pending.

3. He is being pursued in the courts in the UK and had to do a runner to Spain last year. With some cheek he failed to pay the company who moved his stuff to Spain.

Anyhow, for you holiday journalists looking for some examples for you "Tour Companies going bust" story here are a few more links to help you with your research.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298658-i765-k1427215-Beware_of_Gulet_charter_scams_and_fraud-Bodrum_Bodrum_Peninsula_Mugla_Turkish_Aegean_Coast.html

http://cid-7dda8a04a9d8cb9b.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/report_allafloat_julian_price_20070903_any.pdf

http://guletcharterfraud.blogspot.com/

The other names he is alleged to operate under are

Costa-Brava-Homes.com
Costa-Brava-Homes.co.uk
Global-Activity-Holidays.com
Global-Yacht-Holidays.com
Global-Yacht.com
LateAfloat.com
JustGulets.com
Vacaciones-En-Velero.com
VacationsAfloat.com
ShortBreaksAfloat.com
Vela-Global.com
Voile-Globale.com

09/08/2008 | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Finding Great Images for PowerPoint Presentations

I've been chucking  images into Power Point for some time now, probably ever since I discovered Google Images.

Normally it is pretty good, although sometimes the images can be a bit low res.

So I asked a professional Presentation Creater what she recommended for Hi Res and "Flickr" was her tip.  I found it a bit hard work.

But then i discovered the tool Tag Galaxy

Not only does it suggest a few refinements to your search term but then serves up 235 images from Fickr on a spinning globe. You can then spin through this to find the one you want.  You have to try it to see just how "intuitive" this is.

Then a few more clicks and you are grabbing the image from Flickr. Job done.

This app shows up the limitation of Google Images : it only gives  you around 20 images for you to glance over. It would seem that the human brain is capable of sorting through many times more images in the search for the right one. Tag Galaxy - like all the best tech - releases the awesome processing power of our brains.

PowerPoint presentations will never be the same again.

(found vis Infosthetics)

06/10/2008 | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

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