Only Dead Fish

How To Make It As An Advertising Creative

 

Scamp is back. For those of you not familiar with his blog (where have you been?) Scamp's place used to be the home of some great posts on the craft of creativity and also the liveliest comments section in ad land. He went quiet on us back in June in order to write a book. The book that is now launching on May 25th, and that has just become available for pre-order. If you're at all interested in becoming an ad creative, or in how creativity should work in ad land, order it now. If it's anything like the series of Tuesday Tips (like this one) he used to write it will be brilliant. To quote Scamp himself:

"it's all about what you need to know to be a successful creative, above and beyond being good at writing ads. So it's not about craft, it's about guile. It's about how to get the best out of directors, how to find the right partner, and how to sell more of your ideas to your CD"

You can order it here.

Podcast On Agility

Agile is rapidly becoming something of a fixation of mine. This week I got together with the estimable Johnnie Moore and Robert Paterson to record a podcast on agile planning and agility in business. How and why many companies need to change in order to operate effectively in the networked world. As Johnnie says, it's a "non-linear kind of conversation exploring what makes for agility in organisations and what gets in the way".

Download the Podcast (30m, 12.3 MB)
 

The Quiet Revolution

 

"We have to stop putting sand where we need oil, sugar where

we need petrol." JP Rangaswami

Let's face it, the recession has been a wake up call for many businesses. If it hasn't, it should've been. The key challenge for many organisations of-course is to understand how much of the damage that has been wreaked is cyclical (the result of market downturn), and how much is structural (the result of markets that have changed forever). There's something else too. Another big challenge for big business that is rarely spoken about. A quiet revolution.

When I talked about the need for big business to get a whole lot more agile in its philosophy as well as it's working practices, I linked to a Paul Graham essay in which he proposes that instead of organisational success being all about economies of scale and discipline as it has been for much of history, it is the increase in speed attainable through small groups that is beginning to trump the advantages of size. Large organisations, he says, will start to do worse now because:

"...for the first time in history they're no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. If they're really ambitious, they want to start it."

If small, smart, agile start-ups have become the most progressive places and offer the best and broadest opportunities, then they will get the best people.

The reality is that organisations are now having to appeal to an audience of potential employees with very different ambitions and expectations. In his excellent post on The Facebookisation of The Enterprise, JP Rangaswami talks about an enterprise world where the workers choose their own phone, their own laptop, their own operating system. A world where the workers' identity is independent of the company they work for, where their network of relationships describe the people that they actually spend time with, where their 'company' profile looks the same as their 'web' profile. A world where you did the job you needed to do rather than the one you were just told to do. A world where the IT, HR and Finance functions had ceded control of the device, the profile, and job description. His point is that for 'Generation M' (multimedia, multitasking, mobile generation, born post 1982) "they don't have to imagine any of this. It is how they live their lives. And if we want access to their talent, we need to change".

These are the kind of norms (for what he alternatively calls the 'Net Generation') that Don Tapscott identifies as prizing freedom, customisation, collaboration, integrity, scrutiny, speed, fun and constant innovation. These expectations are universal, as applicable to institutions and corporations as they are to life. When I began my career, it was all about joining a big corporate and working hard to steadily gain more responsibility. Now, as Paul Graham says, it's not so much about people wanting to climb the corporate ladder as about those who are growing the ladder beneath them.

What many businesses forget is that the web is empowering of individuals not organisations. In his 4A's talk, Vivaki's Rishad Tobaccowala talked about the challenge the ad industry faces in attracting the best talent. Talent, he said, is very scalable: "Companies with a disproportionate share of talent win. Industries that attract a disproportionate share of talent win…The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage." 

 
Google Me by Ji Lee

And yet I see, in many of the young people I meet, a generation who are very aware of the possibilities of technology because they live it every day. Who realise that the best jobs are often filled not by agencies or advertisements but by word of mouth. Who recognise that what happens when a prospective employer Googles your name is important. Who build their own value. Who interview planning directors for their blogs. Who create stuff online. Who generate online portfolios. Who present their experience in new ways. Who have a real belief that anything is possible. Who want to work for principled, purposeful companies (the kind of companies that would do this). Who want to work for the companies that do the best work. The ones that innovate. That are not afraid to change. That grow their careers and their skills as they grow. The companies that are not about status, but about being the best you can be. The companies that are not about being corporate, but about being human.

We spend a lot of time endeavouring to understand young audiences, their attitude to advertising, how they consume media, and very little time applying that understanding to help shape our organisations into desirable places for them to work. Right now, companies have the luxury of a poor jobs market but for how long? If the industry is serious about wanting to attract developers, creative technologists, the people who will build the future, I think it needs to change. This generation, far more than any before it, have the tools to take control of their own careers and their own learning, and they are doing just that. If you don't believe me, watch this:

HT to Johnnie for links used in this piece.

Being Remarkable

A (dareisayit) remarkable presentation from Polle De Maagt about Being Remarkable. It contains many of the themes about which I have written in the past - about how it's not about the technology, or the channel, about being generous, the power of great storytelling. And it contains some wonderful examples. But in the end it's a lovely illustration of a point that Gareth has made well in the past - that advertising operates in the culture business. Worth taking the time.

Being Remarkable for Fontys Communicatie

View more presentations from Polle de Maagt.

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3D Printing A Whole Building

 

I find the whole idea of 3D printing rather intriguing. Not least because along with free and openly available design software and affordable technology it has the potential to redefine manufacturing. Projects like Arduino, the open-source electronics prototyping platform, and Makerbot, the first sub $1000 dollar 3D printer that can produce plastic parts from digital files, hint at the kind of distributed manufacturing model that John called 'Social Production' and that I talked about here.

But this one takes the biscuit. In Pisa, Italy, Enrico Dini has developed a machine called D-Shape which sprays a magnesium-based glue onto a thin layer of sand (at a resolution of about 25 dpi) to bind it into solid rock, which can be built up, layer over layer in a process that can include internal curves, ducting and partitions.

Its worth reading the whole story over on Blueprint. As they say, the implications are massive. Digital architecture made real. Printed buildings. Technology that makes building organic, fluid, Gaudiesque-type structures much simpler.

Dini claims that his process is four times faster than conventional building, is far more cost efficient than using cement, creates very little waste and is better for the environment.

It's a story of seven years of innovation and determination, but also near bankruptcy, investors that pulled out, and a marriage that broke down. But he's now creating real structures with his machine. Good for him. That's the kind of drive and inventiveness that creates real change.

You can read the full story here.

10 Practical Reasons To Invest In Social

 
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I'm not usually a fan of list-posts, but look at that - I've gone and written one. I penned an opinion piece for the nice people at Mediatel on some very practical reasons why content producers might want to think about putting social technologies more at the heart of their business. Mostly because my sense is that for many, it's still not. And I wanted to make it as pragmatic and as useful as I could. They've kindly let me reproduce it in full here as well. So here it is.

With the news that Facebook has just overtaken Google to become the most popular site in the US, twitter passing it's ten billionth tweet, and Foursquare announcing new analytic features for business users alongside a tie-up with Starbucks to create a whole new kind of customer rewards scheme, we've seen some interesting social technology milestones passed in the last few days. At this year's SXSW, Twitter announced a new service called @anywhere that allows site owners easy access to twitter functionality, with all its inherent real-time interactivity, without sending people to twitter.com or going via API's and third party applications.

So the socialisation of all media streams marches on. And yet, (with some notable exceptions) many content owners have some way to go to maximise the potential that social technology has for their business. Social technology tends to attract much pontification so here are ten very practical reasons why content producers of all kinds should be putting social at the centre of what they do:

1. It drives reach. Better than that, it drives engaged reach.  People don't fill in profile information, or become a fan, or follow you, unless they like what you do. The Guardian Tech twitter stream now has 1.6 million followers who like what they do.  That drives some serious traffic back to The Guardian site.  The sharing of content around networks facilitates new forms of content discovery to a broader audience through one of the most powerful forms of marketing - word of mouth.

2. Not all traffic is equal. Users who arrive via search are more likely to be looking for a specific piece of information. Once they find it they'll likely leave. Search is extremely useful but it should be complemented by social since the latter is focused around users who are already engaged, or are likely to be engaged, in what you are doing. Engaged users interact more, spend more time with you, buy more, come back often. If someone likes what you do they are more likely to click on your banners, follow your affiliate links and (dareisayit), pay for your content or the service you are offering.

3. It creates a platform. Developing a community around your content facilitates continuous interaction, customer advocacy, the enabling of data driven solutions and a ready audience for your promotions, offers, samples.

4. SEO. More people sharing your content means more people linking to your content, which has clear SEO benefit. A good comment stream can add search-engine-friendly 'weight' to an article.

5. User insight. Consumer insight is the name of everyone's game right now. If it isn't it should be. Many online content owners know surprisingly little about exactly who is visiting their site. The socialisation of content enables a rich level of user understanding. The more you know about your users, the more you can effectively target them, the higher yield you can command, the more you move away from a commoditised view of your users.

6. An entirely new kind of development model. Social technology enables a continuous and invaluable feedback loop from your core customers. Show that you are listening, and taking action on that feedback and your users will feel involved, respected, and more inclined to come back. Some of the most interesting business and product development models now involve customers in unprecedented ways.

7. It enables differentiation. The internet is a does medium. It's not for passive consumption, it's about interaction. So thinking of your audience in terms of their level and type of engagement and interaction immediately leads you to think differently about your content, and about the value you are delivering.

8. Growing advertiser focus. Just about every forecast you look at is predicting continued advertiser interest and growing spend in social media. Forrester has forecast that Social Media investment will grow at the highest CAGR of any digital ad type (higher than mobile, search, display, e-mail). Small wonder it's been such a topic of discussion amongst the ad planning community in recent years.

9. Editorial benefits. Social functionality enhances user experience and site content. Real-time feedback, the ability to optimise, interact, react, and new ways to tell stories, campaign, and crowdsource expertise, all bring new dimensions to traditional media practice (just look at The Guardian's approach to MP's expenses, or what happened with Trafigura)

10. Your audience are already there. If you only remember one reason from this list, remember this one. At the recent 4A's conference in the US, Vivaki's Rishad Tobaccowala told agencies that they cannot allow their clients to fall behind their customers like they have done. I'd say the same could be said for many content producers. He suggests that benchmarking against our consumers makes as much if not more sense than benchmarking against our competitors.

Like digital before it, social technologies require a particular mind-set. If that sounds arrogant, I don't mean it to. But I do believe one thing: that the only way to truly understand the nuances of how social technology and digital community really work is to get stuck in and be a part of it yourself.

Mediatel opinion piece

Porous Enterprise

Interesting short film on the new world of work featuring soundbites from PB Works founder David Weekly, John Hagel, Brian Phillips and Dan Olsen. Some common themes here with my post below on agility - notably how corporations can't afford to keep moving at a slow pace, and need to increase the pace of innovation and iteration consistent with the start-ups, how much of what we have known is deteriorating and depreciating in value at an increasing rate, and how it's no longer sufficient to focus on protecting existing knowledge stocks because it's increasingly it's about knowledge flow and your assets being more and more about your relationships.

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Agile Planning

 

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The last IBM Global CEO Study ('The Enterprise Of The Future') interviewed 1,130 CEO's in 45 countries and 32 industries. It found that organisations felt bombarded by change, and that many are struggling to keep up. Eight out of ten CEOs saw significant change ahead, and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006. An inability to cope with the pace of change. That's pretty serious.

We live in exponential times. A time of accelerating change. A time when disruption is everywhere. When transformational technologies are increasingly embedded in cultural norms. A competitive landscape where your next major competitor won't be the lumbering corporate that you market-share against, but a small, agile start-up that you've never heard of. Where a single network that now connects 400 million people worldwide, didn't exist as an open platform four years ago. Where another that is less than three years old celebrates its 10 billionth piece of communication.

  

In order to be successful, said the IBM report, the enterprise of the future will be hungry for change, innovative "beyond customer imagination", disruptive by nature. Forgive my cynicism, but I find it hard to believe that most global conglomerates have the culture to continually disrupt, or even the necessary working practices to be that adaptive. Take budgets. Budget setting in most organisations is a dilatory, laborious, top-down, bottom-up process that likely takes up to 3 months to complete. By the time it's made it all the way to the top to be authorised it's 3 months out of date and largely irrelevant. Budgets do two things within organisations - they become an objective and a measure of performance. So if your budget is no longer relevant, your key objective and your measures of success are already flawed.

And yet, with the current economic malaise, there has never been more reason to become more adaptive or a better time for re-invention. The fact is that with 15 years of continuous growth, many senior managers have little or no experience of working in a recession. A study by Professor Eddie Obeng (of the Henley Business School and the Design Council) in 2008 found that over 70% of senior management have very little experience of coping with such conditions. At the time of the last recession, in the early 90's, Obeng was arguing that: "We have moved as a world, from an age when we could learn faster than our local environments change to one where the local environment of individuals, organisations and governments changes faster than we can learn." As a result of this shift, he says, most of the concepts, best practices and assumptions commonly used to plan, manage, and lead us are obsolete. So you have to learn as you go, from other people, and look for patterns rather than events.

Many industries, including advertising, have gotten lazy. In his recent 4A's talk Vivaki's Rishad Tobaccowala said that we cannot allow our clients to fall behind their customers like they have done, and suggested benchmarking against the consumer rather than the competition (when did we stop doing this?):

"Our structures need to be more speedy. Speed used to kill now lack of speed kills. Lets have organizations that can iterate quickly and empower its folks to make decisions. Percolating decisions up and down an organization makes little sense"

For many brands, Adaptive Marketing shifts the emphasis away from grand, polished, flawless launches, to a continuous and diverse stream of optimised messaging and content. For agencies and client companies alike, this is a long way from inflexible annual (or longer) planning cycles. And many of those companies are a long way from having the business practices necessary to deal with the degree of responsiveness this requires.

The fact is that small companies are naturally more adaptive and agile, simply because they have to be. Paul Graham, who (as a partner in Y-Combinator) knows a thing or two about successful businesses in the new economy, points out that people are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups ("imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they'd gone to work for a big company") and that scale of improvement can change social customs. In another essay, he speaks of the fundamental shift that is taking place:

"For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones. But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size."

I think the learnings from the software industry are very instructive. It's an industry that taught other industries about the value of openess and collaboration - of learning from other people. But there is another, perhaps more fundamental lesson that analogue business needs to learn from digital business practice - agility. It's a philosophy that is embodied in the agile development movement and one that (as I've written before) is centred around some enlightened principles that many industries, not least advertising, would do well to note.

 
Agile is already an overused word. As Tim says, it is often seen as some kind of panacea. But Stuart is right in saying that it is not about process. Nor is it about productivity gain. Agile is absolutely about a philosophy. If you don't get that, you'll never be agile. As The Agile Manifesto sets out, it is a philosophy that values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software (aka outcome) over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. It's not that there isn't value in the latter, just that the former has more value.

There are some big differences between the principles that shape this philosophy (I recommend you read them), and the practices that typically characterise big business. Traditional business models set objectives which once set, rarely change, and struggle to cope with priorities that alter once the process has begun. Agile welcomes changing requirements, even late in development, because it is an opportunity to harness change for competitive advantage. Big business creates big projects that take a long time to confirm, implement, and complete. Projects are often stalled by hierarchical management processes.

Agile is focused on frequent deliverables, with a preference for shippable product and shorter cycles, and implemented at a constant pace which is measured and transparent. It is centred around the belief that the best results come from self-organising teams. Teams that reflect regularly on how to become more effective, then adjust behaviours accordingly. Projects are built around trusted, motivated individuals who are given the environment and support they need. Documentation is kept to a minimum, with face-to-face communication preferred, and a focus on simplicity - maximising the amount of work not done.

I don't claim here that agile development processes are some kind of cure-all. But I do think that business processes in many industries and organisations are woefully out-of-date and hopelessly rigid. Businesses increasingly operate in complex adaptive systems which, as Bud Caddell rightly says, are "characterized by perpetual novelty – talking of equilibrium is pointless, equilibrium in a complex adaptive system is essentially a dead system". Inflexible, long-term strategic plans are increasingly irrelevant.

Many of the really interesting business models in the new economy use radically different ways of working. Smart businesses increasingly enjoy the flexibility of using the growing number of skilled, talented, experienced individuals who consult, freelance, design, build, develop, project-manage. A model that puts them in the middle of a talent network, without the overhead. Other businesses are turning traditional models on their head by putting themselves at the centre of communities of skilled contributors and advocates formerly known as customers, enabling development cycles that are many times quicker and processes that are many times less capital intensive than industry norms.

End-user expectations are shifting (have shifted?) rapidly to real-time everything. Culture is participative. Content producers curate as well as create. Business no longer has the luxury of responding in its own time on its own terms. It is a minimum requirement to be not only responsive but inclusive. Companies are developing entirely new relationships with both their workers and their customers. Customer service is moving out of its silo. Rigid, lengthy planning cycles may suit the company, but they don't suit the customer. Marketing is adaptive. Relevance determined in the moment. How many reasons do you need?

Change and innovation in organisations happens in the "very murk and muck" of everyday actions by the people in that organisation, not through a CEO strategy presentation. The real challenge for corporates is changing the very habits and processes on which they are built. Paul Graham speculates that startups might just represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Maybe. But unless change like that happens, many big businesses won't be around long enough to find out.

Re-Imagining Books

 

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"We're going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that's one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing." Craig Mod

Next week I'm going to an event on the future of publishing where my good friend Gerd Leonhard will be speaking. The publishing industry is not exactly lacking in challenges and disruptive innovation right now, with the emergence of self-publishing platforms, rapidly evolving retail models, and new applications and platforms that facilitate an abundance of new ways to tell stories many of which don't require publishers. So it was good to see Penguin re-imagining the forms that the content they create might take as forms of interaction change, facilitated through new technology - in this case the iPad. Good because this requires thinking about the content in its most basic structure and constituent parts and how those parts might recombine to inform, delight and entertain in totally different ways. As Jeremy Ettinghausen says, it's no longer enough to tinker with the ways in which books are sold and distributed - new interfaces (like the iPad) require a rethink of the very structure and form of the content itself, and how people might want to interact with it.

iPad iMagineering from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

In this excellent post on books in the age of the iPad (HT David Hieatt) Craig Mod talks about the difference between what he calls 'Formless Content' and 'Definite content'. The former, he says, doesn't have an explicit form, is divorced from layout, and can be 're-flowed' into different formats without losing any intrinsic meaning. The latter has a well-defined form which means it might be reflowable but in doing so the inherent meaning and quality may shift. At the most basic level, the former could be most novels (which are pure text), and the latter could be text that is formatted with images, graphics or charts.

 

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The difference between the two is in the interaction of the content with the page in that Formless Content doesn't see the page and its boundaries, whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it, and shifts, reshapes and resizes itself to fit the page:

"Put very simply, Formless Content is is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas…something with dimensions and limitations — and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole."

The current crop of e-readers can only cope with Formless Content. The interesting thing about the iPad is that the size and versatility of its canvas allows for well considered layouts - in other words Definite Content. And of-course in this context it's interesting to think about the implications for that other print medium that relies heavily on Definite Content - magazines. Magazines are lucky enough to be imbued with non-physical qualities and meaning that are conveyed through their physical form - the thickness, weight, smell, feel of the paper. The act of turning pages. The page as a canvas on which a good Art Director can convey meaning through layout and design, through the use of typography and colour, through the juxtaposition between elements on the page, the flow and pace of reading created by density, length and layout, the signposting, the bits that are deliberately left with nothing on them, just white space.

But it is a mistake to thoughtlessly replicate compositions, formats and layouts that have been designed for print. It may sound like an obvious thing to say but I'd argue that the history of content on the web has proved McLuhan right, that new technological environments are commonly cast in the moulds of the preceding technology (page-turning technology for example - I was never a fan of it on the web, and now there's even less reason to be - it's not the best way to navigate electronic content and imposing artificial 'page-size' boundaries to interrupt the flow of content makes little sense).

Instead we should embrace change. The internet will not kill print. Some forms of print - most likely those where the content has a intimate, inherent, complementary relationship with it's physical form - will live on. Craig Mod argues that Formless Content will go digital, and Definite Content will be split between digital and print. And that when we think about producing a book, we should embrace, exploit and be confident in its physicality. Make books that are built to last. Books that "feel whole and solid in the hands…smell like now forgotten, far away libraries…be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth…always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas." Anything less, will soon be forgotten, ignored, or superseded by the march of digital progress.

Jeremy Ettinghausen paraphrases Buckminster Fuller: "Keep doing what you've always done and you'll keep getting what you've always got". I'd go further. Ignore change and change will ignore you.

Gerd has kindly given me a limited number of tickets to the future of publishing event to giveaway. It's being held on Friday 19 March 8.30am - 12.00pm here in London - if you're interested in going along e-mail me on the link above and I'll give you the necessary details.

It's Not About Digital, Stupid!

The poster put together by Sidekick Studios for their participation in this week's Digital Inclusion conference. Amen to that.