Emotional Destinations...

Scroll down to see a couple of great ads. Good to see them back on again...

They illustrate something pretty simple, and something I first remember learning when I was but a junior, barely hatched, egg, at O&M.

That communication is about benefit. Benefit is the thing you think about, the magical thing that creates in you a feeling.

Your search for it is where an experience begins...immersing yourself in its discovery is where the process ends.

I once worked on Shell, at Ogilvy. It was a prestigous account, and I was working for an Account Director who was the best in the agency and destined later to rise to become CEO of a vast group. I was lucky to be on the team. It was just after two famous commercials were produced, in the early 1980s. One featured a family driving home, seeking a petrol station when the fuel level drops. Kids asleep in the back, wife snoozing lazily in the warm fuggy Volvo, Dad sees the welcoming Shell pecten (yes, that's what it's called) in the twilight ahead. The key moment is the 'fuel gauge' shot...the needle lifts, and he sees it. Job done. On they go. Accompanied by The Beatles singing 'Two of Us' ("...back home, we're on our way home...") - the first time a Lennon and McCartney song had ever been used in an ad. Cheesy, perhaps a touch. But simple and brilliant.

The other featured a Wayfarer clad young man pulling into a deserted Shell petrol station high on a deserted moor. He is driving a Porsche. He does the filling up thing. Then the iconic fuel gauge shot. Then the first few bars of Steppenwolf's 'Born to be Wild' (used most famously in Easy Rider), and he pulls out on to the empty, moodily shot winding roads ahead. The kind of ad that made a spotty young local reporter called Jeremy Clarkson the man he is today...

Both of these commercials are about petrol. How do you find the benefit in a smelly, expensive liquid that you never see and you certainly don't want to spill all over your shoes? It was an era when oil companies thought the only way to sell the stuff was by giving you promotional toys, points or making claims about the mileage their fuel would give which were neither true nor ever believed. Shell, and Ogilvy, almost alone, understood that nothing is as powerful as an expression of the emotional destination of the brand.

Petrol isn't about petrol. It's about where it takes you, and how that feels. I think that remains true twenty five years later, (though the insistence of BP on pumping crude oil straight onto the Louisiana coastline at the moment may mean that other truths of the consumer-oil company relationship are perhaps more centre stage just now)

And so to these two from Virgin trains. No one iconic moment in them, though in the familiar archetype of advertising like this, they are symbol heavy (here done with tongue placed deeply in cheek). But light on generic, forgettable product points (other than in passing and where they support the central theme...buffet car, champagne, plug socket etc) they focus on the simple reasons about why we might want to make a journey, and the powerful emotions which await us on arrival...

Connect

Synectics. The art of connecting the previously unconnected to find the new...

Norwegian band + French motion graphics company + British target audience + Infographics = Brilliance.

A satisfying meal of a video. Layers and layers of it.

Why does it work? Listen to the rhythm...the timbre. The psychoacoustics as they're called. Feel the structure, the pace - reducing the song to its mechanical pulses. Then add to it visuals made of automated schematics. But just as the vocal has a sweetness above the synth line below, so too the graphics have a human charm - in their heroine.

Masterly.

I recall seeing it when it first appeared and I'm glad I've found it once more...

The suffocation of market research

We live in a New Dark Age.

I speak of Procurement and Rosters.

I've been prompted to write this piece today by something in the IJMR recently.

Before you start checking the acidity of the grapes on my desk, I should say that I have been on rosters aplenty, over the years. As I have always co-run small companies, this has been Quite A Hard Thing to achieve, but we did it. And worked with some big, bruiser brands in the UK and Europe.

And perhaps what I'm about to say has been said before. In which case I make no apologies for saying it again.

There are the apologists for the way things are. Procurement departments have been a fact of life in many other corporate functions for years. Get over yourself. Prove you're better. Then you'll be fine, they say. Meanwhile, the cost-of-everything-value-of-nothing mentality creeps forward, powered by The Recession - its Henry V Moment - and the manner in which research is bought in the UK goes into deeper lock down each month...

But even the most superficial of examinations of this approach leaves it in shreds. It has been killing something vital. And it's getting worse and worse.

Research - of whatever kind - is about people.

Infinitely complicated, infinitely extraordinary people.

People who conduct it, and people who take part in it. Everything that happens in research - everything - is about the quality of those people.

Imagine you were hiring someone to work for you, in your department. You know what the job is, you know the kind of person you want, and you want the best you can find. You write the recruitment brief.

Then someone from Procurement emails you to say that you can only hire this person from the three companies from which the last three successful applicants came.

Of course, such a thing would never happen. But just imagine it did. What might be the motivation behind such an edict? At its heart would be fear, and conservatism. And lack of trust - in you, the manager, hiring. Implicit would be the belief that you would quite likely mess things up if you went off piste. Hire a crazy person perhaps. Offer them a salary of £2 million and as many bananas as they can eat? The last three companies produced perfectly fine candidates thank you, the logic might go. All of them brought with them the technical or craft skills you needed before. None of them wanted a stupid salary. You'll be fine. Just buy a new employee from them, like a box of copier paper.

Insane?

This is exactly what the closed shop of rosters does. And the thinking is essentially the same. At its heart is the belief that what happened in the past will always be good enough for what will happen in the future. At its heart is the obsession with not dropping the ball, and much less interest in taking that ball and scoring with it.

Now there are some good agencies on rosters. No question of that.

But I'd submit that if they were that good, you'd be hiring them anyway - without the need for a roster. They'd prove their worth every time.

And of course, there are some 'not so good' agencies on rosters. I used to work in the world of advertising, as a Planner. Even then, the roster culture was taking hold, especially amongst the big corporates. I can remember many ocassions when my heart - sometimes even my client's heart - would sink because someone somewhere within the company had dictated that a certain project should be handled by a certain research company.

And the project would duly take place, and the results would duly be mundane, or tired, or superficial, or in some other way disappointing. Any chance of fertile, breakthrough thinking had somewhere had a pillow pressed firmly over its face.

The winner? You tell me. Not the client, not the business, not the customer.

And then there's the response 'Yes, but if you were good enough/doing something different enough, you could make a case to be on the roster'.

They always say that don't they? Something 'different'. 

This one needs demolishing with both barrels.

Apart from the whole Equity-card style paradox of never getting a chance to prove that you have something to offer until someone actually hires you, there is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of qualitative research here.

Qualitative research can, and often does, make a clear, measurable difference to a client's business. Insight, connections, truths discovered in it unlock problems, open up opportunities, change the landscape, every day of the week.

But the manner and mechanism by which good researchers do this has usually got much less to do with shiny, eye catching new techniques or 'products', which can be branded, publicised, and shown to a Procurement Dept ("Look we definitely haven't got any agency that makes people not brush their teeth for a year and then make a movie about it or interviews people under water wearing aqualungs" etc...) than with the quality of the grey matter inside the researcher's head.

We're talking about the researcher's ability to THINK. Clearly, imaginatively, openly. We're talking about their vision, imagination, and instincts. We're talking about their experience - and by that I do not mean simply years accumulated, but breadth, of markets, brands, life. The 25 year old who has spent a year digging wells in Africa alongside her two years learning the ropes of 'research' has  learned something worth hearing about. The 55 year old who has come into research after three other successful careers in catering, publishing and market gardening has too.

Can you write this stuff down on a form?

"We'd like to use these people because they just seem to really get what we're about as a business, because we have chemistry with them, because they seem to exhibit real flair and imagination and we're confident they'll do a great job".

See what happens.

More often that not, such an appeal to a Procurement department won't even get to first base. Where's the shiny new toy? Who's to say that the people already on the roster can do all this just as well...

And that, actually, gets to the nub of it. Who's to say? Well you, actually.

You, the Research Buyer.

You the person actually hired to think about this stuff, to have a view, to make the best decisions.

You the person whose career is going to languish if all the research you commission is kind of, well, er, just ok.

You whose company is going to hit the skids because the competitor down the road is thinking these things through in an open minded, unconstrained way, and has the scope to get the best people in each time...

That's right - your opinion isn't good enough though. They. Don't. Trust. You.

And as for where I'm sitting...well here's another home truth about all this. And it's something that researchers are terrified of saying. Terrified.

We don't really have any shiny new things to show you.

Read that right? We don't. Sure, we have approaches, techniques, all that. But then so have all our competitors. Glittery ones, in some cases.

The real news is about what we have lodged firmly between our ears.The stuff that we bring into play to decide which approaches to use, and having used them, how you can use what they revealed.

I haven't found a way of writing it down on a form yet. Or taking it to a Procurement manager and saying "There! Look! That's the thing!"

But then, I'm not sure than any of the great researchers from whom I learned my trade, learned about what was really important in this business (people like Chrissie Burns, Roddy Glen, the late Prosper Riley-Smith) could do it either.

And nor, I suspect, would they try.

Every so often...

...you just come across something and smile and think...nice work.

Whilst some fumble about in the foothills of Social Media, tweeting sale items to random collections of spam-burned followers, these guys have done something genuinely fun and new. Stretched the format, you might say...

Watch and learn...I will be :-)

Measuring Social Media. Butterfly Wings and Snake Oil?

One of the few things that captured the public imagination from Chaos theory (a subject now making its second appearance on this blog (!) after this) was the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian Rainforest might ultimately be the trigger for a hurricane which devastates the Eastern seaboard of the US. The principle being that the butterfly's actions have effects, which create other effects, which create others. Starting very small, these effects are magnified throughout the system that is meteoreology, over and over, growing each time.

Ultimately, the tiniest, most incidental of activities can thus be the start of a chain of events which culminates in the biggest.

This phenomenon has been long something with which the market research industry has failed to grapple - principally because it's Too Hard*. Big on deterministic solutions, and attempts to break down markets, consumer behaviours, brand activities into their constituent parts - from which it still (often) makes linear, literalistic assumptions -  the concept of 'emergence' has failed to gain any real traction in mainstream research thinking. Emergence is the unfortunate fact that when systems operate as systems, they don't actually behave as you might expect from a simple study of the activities and reponses of their individual parts. A termite colony is an emergent system. The human body is one. The collective response to the death of Princess Diana was one. The world economy is another (and the absurd primitivity of mainstream economics in failing to recognise this - still - has been laid bare these last two years).

Many mainstream research methodologies - I mean quantitative ones chiefly, and so called 'predictive' ones specifically - complete ignore this question. And they have done for decades. And made a lot of money from so doing too. 

But here's another thing.

If you are going to try and draw some conclusions of sorts about what's going on, or what something means in a collective sense by exploring the tiny parts of a system and then rolling what you find into some big ole' conclusion, then you'd better make sure you the data you collect is accurate and means what you say it does.

If you don't, then the little errors you make will be compounded over and over and over as you scale your conclusions up. Like building a house with rotten joists, the most dangerous moment comes when you put what you've built under pressure - by constructing, say, several storeys on top of them. The rotten wood itself isn't dangerous per se. What you do with it, and what happens when you sell the house to some unsuspecting buyer, is.

But, hey, who cares? You're outta there. And when the whole thing falls down, who's to say it was the joists that caused it?

Yesterday I spent the day at the snappily titled Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp.

I've been to plenty of conferences in my time. This was, in fact, one of the best I can recall for sometime. But not because the news the speakers had to give us was good.

Social Media - talked about everywhere in marketing, and particularly within, er, Social Media - is trying to come of age. As we speak, companies large and small are queuing up to start Tweeting, or to invite fans to their FB pages. They are starting to sweat a little about the real effect of all those blog posts and forum comments. They are wondering just what the hell FourSquare is. They are worrying that the brand snapping at their heels is doing this stuff and they aren't. And so on.

Ultimately, most don't have a clue why they need to do it, they just somehow feel they do. Some are using the opportunity of this new world as essentially PR for the 21st century  - a chance to tell people things they might or might not want to know, and sell them things. A few - a very very few - are understanding that potentially what's going on is a game changer. That they are now on a two way street and that what's on offer is the chance, and the opportunity, to develop an entirely new dialogue with 'real' people - a dialogue which can help them make and sell the right things, at the right price, to people who really want to buy them, who feel loyal to that brand and who actually might give a damn.

Naturally, as the avenues expand, and the technology improves, a 'Measurement' sector has emerged. It's certainly needed. The absence of it has been one of the biggest brakes on the growth of this area, as Boardrooms look puzzled about it all and wonder whether any of their company's time and investment actually achieves anything.

Yesterday revealed for me the fairly ghastly truth on this question - confirming a hunch I'd had since I first starting looking into all this. There are many many companies out there offering funky software you can download, offering to measure the prevailing sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) pertaining to your brand. Giving you data on the number of mentions you have had, and where. Even purporting to tell you how much 'influence' you are having, via the 'influence' of those who are writing about you.

And guess what? Almost all of it is smoke and mirrors. Bullshit, as the excellent talk by Philip Sheldrake put it, in fact.

Why? Because much of the data on which these conclusions are created is flawed. Incomplete. Subjective. Even incoherent.

The query you use to define what you're looking for is usually immensely difficult to form accurately. It takes considerable crafting, and patience.

The spiders which go out looking for reference to what you come up with may or may not cover anything like the 'entire' net (think about it...Google can't even do that, and is a long way off from doing so, when you include the almost infinite amount of data that is stored within elements within pages within trillions of sites).

The algorhythms that are used to define whether the person who is posting or tweeting about you is 'influential'...on this topic, in these circumstances, to this group of others...are nonsense.

The 'automated sentiment analysis' which claims to detect whether you are getting good or bad coverage is rudimentary, still unable to decode real human writing properly, understand context, intent, sarcasm, irony, or vernacular (and any focus on single word or phrase analysis is useless). Nor can it adequately unpick complex remarks, or those which might reference several brands. Nor can it take account of the fact that human beings don't always say what they mean, or do what they say.

And on top of all this, everybody does it in a completely different way, with their own proprietary software, about which they are probably not going to tell you very much (check the answer to question 2 here). As Marshall Sponder pointed out, you need only put the same query into five different platforms, and wait for their sentiment analysis to come back. You'll get five entirely different sets of data. He did it.

And on top of this, it all eventually boils down to the requirement of human beings to sit down and actually read all this stuff and then work out what everyone is really saying. Read the data that, of course, may have already been entirely, subjectively, ruined. And there's not a whole lot of time and money spent on that bit of the equation in the rush for 'intelligent' web crawlers to do it all. 

There are no common, industy-wide, protocols for collecting data, nor for defining terms, nor for providing results. What there are, are hundreds of sexy looking dashboards which will produce very plausible looking graphs, pie charts, and ranked tables. All of which you can download easily, and cut and paste for the Marketing Director. And many of which aren't worth the electricity used for the pixels which display them. Nice.

So there we are. Hyperbole? Overclaim? I'd go further. Snakeoil.

Or if you like, the rotten joist, nicely painted, buried in the masonry?


* You know the old joke?  This man is walking home from the pub one night and he sees another guy peering at the ground by his car. So he stops and asks him what he's doing, and the other chap says "I'm looking for my keys".

"Right," says our man, "Where did you lose them?"

"Over there in that bush" he says. "But the light's better here".

Social Media: The New Monologue?

Following on from the Nestle post below, I came across this

Rentokil - never the world's most glamourous brand - 'getting it wrong' with Twitter. Another example of a company trying to 'answer' back?

Social Media is billed as the birth of proper 'dialogue'. Yet the quest for dominance in the exchange continues. On the one hand, we see the emergence of organisations 'using' Social Media to further their interests - shrewdly, subtly, and with the tacit (or blind) acceptance of those they are 'using' (great example here). This, to me, is simply super smart PR with a bigger reach than ever in which everyone gets to take something home from the party.

On the other we see brands pilloried because they try and 'respond' to accusations, or even simply question the comments of their Twitter followers, or FB fans. Quite often outrage seems to then follow, and lots of media professionals write head-shaking pieces on their websites in 'sadness more than anger' about the 'naivity' of some brands etc etc.

I actually feel quite sorry for Rentokil.

Find me the dialogue in all this, will someone please?

(Cross posted from the 'We are Social' group on Linked In)

Nestle shoots itself in the foot

Oh dear Nestle.

Greenpeace outed them for using Palm Oil from felled rainforests in their products. It's an ongoing thing. Then Greenpeace put a video up on You Tube featuring someone idly biting into a Kit Kat, and blood pouring down his face. Except it's not a Kit Kat, it's an Oran Utan's finger - they live in the rain forest you see.

So what happened next?

Nestle's lawyers got You Tube to take the video down. Oh dear, again. And then it really kicked off. Nestle's Facebook page was swamped with negative comments, and demands that they stop using the Palm Oil. Worse, Nestle started deleting some negative comments, especially those who had distorted the Nestle logo as their profile pictures.

And then they started getting involved in the row itself, fuelling it, inflating it, on their FB page. Until it hit the media.

The result...

Yes, the share price fell.

The whole story is here and, frankly, pretty much everywhere else on the net already. It's already doing the rounds as the a case study in disastrous use of Social Media.

Note what Robin Grant from WeareSocial says (my bold)...

“What Nestle did in removing the video was naive. The legal recourse inflames the situation, and brands need to be aware of this. People are acting as a mob today, and the key thing is not to inflame the mob".

Let's take a look at that.

Sure, Nestle shouldn't be using Palm Oil sourced in this way. Sure, Oran Utans should protected. Yes I care. Yes I have stood in a demo (though not about this issue) with a placard myself, and been described as part of a "baying mob" (though we were anything but, frankly). And not virtually either.

But there are aspects of this incident which I find unsettling. Greenpeace - for whom this was priceless publicity - has a view. One for which it is easy to have sympathy. Nestle has a view. One for which it is much harder to feel sympathy, partly because they are a vast, profitable and fairly secretive conglomerate with a very patchy social responsibility record and a reputation as the bete noire of the socially progressive left.

Fact is though, Nestle were lynched, publically, and in the stock market, when they tried to reply, and offered some defence. The person in charge of their FB page has been hung out to dry...the general view is that he, or she, should simply have rolled over and died.

Getting stuck into the fight, when you are fighting a vast and unaccountable population of people of varying levels of knowledge, is probably not a good idea. Far better to have simply listened, and noted.

But I really don't wish to live in a world in which "the key thing is not to inflame the mob".

Mobs act without rationality, without responsibility, with a savagery and an anonymity created by their scale. No-one needs to care very much or know very much to be in a mob, but the collective power of the many can have vast power, as we are seing over and over - now that you can be in one mob, then click through to another page and join a second, from your sofa. This week a nice, right-on issue of animal rights and the environment. Nasty Nestle. Cuddly Greenpeace. Next week, a group forms to smash up the home of a pediatrician in Southern England because no-one can spell paedophile (it happened)?

I have some personal experience of  living in fear of the 'mob'. A mob, in my case, created and fuelled by reactionary and conservative society, by the right wing media, and by ignorance. Over an issue about as far removed from the one in which Nestle is involved as it's possible to be, I'd add. And many of those who piled into Nestle on this, I'd add also, might perhaps support me in my cause. I have been on the receiving end of collective hate, randomly and anonymously - words written by people with a casual fleeting prejudice who soon moved on having added their bile to the sum of bile.

The particular issue isn't, as it were, the issue, you see. It's the capacity for this to happen, and for lives to change because of the mob, for better or worse. Just ask the people of Paris in the early 1790s...

Perhaps someone might give that some thought as they see the ramparts of Evil Nestle aflame?

I doubt it though.

Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All

Happy International Women's Day - or United Nations Day for Women's Rights & International Peace (with its rather smarter moniker)

Several countries (including Russia and China) observe today as a public holiday, which is nice. IWD was first observed in 1911, a day when men stayed home with the children while their wives went out to meetings. Good to see that women were networking successfully back in 1911 too - as much of the planning for that first IWD (then observed on the 19th March) were made via WOM. Of course, at that time, one of the big issues was achieving the vote for women. (note: NZ women have had the vote since 1893)

There is still a long way to go yet to right global inequalities, but this year's theme of equal rights, equal opportunities and progress for all sounds pretty good for starters.

Onwards and upwards!

BOOKS? I couldn't eat a whole one!

Today, March 4th, is World Book Day (note, it's World Book day but this date is only celebrated in Britain and Ireland. The rest of the world apparently celebrates it on another day, understood to be in April - just so we're clear!)

Hurrah. A whole day to acknowledge the power of books and move them forward. And there are some really good things happening about books - especially for kids today...

http://nationalbooktokens.com/index.asp?m=32&c=1188

But you can't help wondering why just ONE day for the lovely world of books? When British pies get a whole week and Fair Trade a fortnight - although hastily adding that we have absolutely no issues with their time in the sun!

A recent news item revealed teachers, when they inform pupils a book must be read as part of their studies, meet responses such as eye rolling and sighing. They get asked questions like how long is it and must they? Is it true that our collective concentration spans are becoming positively gnat-like and we really can't get through a whole one anymore?

So why not indulge in the satisfying reading of a good book today, while munching on a chicken, leek and mushroom pie (pie of the day), washed down by your favourite Fair Trade coffee, while you still can?!

We'll Call You

Interesting to see the phone company Talk Talk is offering free weekly chats to its customers. The 5 minute calls are to be made by staff members who have volunteered and conversation topic is to be set by the customer - but the company promises not to try and sell services or give advice or counselling. It's aimed at older people living alone - estimated to be around 6% of Talk Talk's customer base.

While it's agreed that this kind of thing is tremendously helpful to the elderly, lonely and/or bewildered, there have also been concerns raised... Is five minutes long enough, will the volunteers be properly trained, and as customers will need a password for the service (to stop fraudulent callers), might this might get confusing ? etc.

Is it purely cynical? A gimmick? Well, Talk Talk say they're launching the scheme to "give something back" so maybe they should be given the benefit of the doubt at this stage?

We like the idea of giving something back, so good on them.