Only Dead Fish

Learning by Teaching

There's a bit in Dave Trott's Creative Mischief where he talks about the practice he's adopted over the years of giving classes of students briefs to work on and having them come into the agency in the evenings to present their work to the creative department. As well as being wonderfully useful to the students he says this helps to train the copywriters and art directors:

"...each class is a crash course in running a creative department. Writers and art directors have just a couple of hours to look at up to 20 campaigns. In that time they have to work out what's right or wrong about the research, the strategy, the media choice, the creative idea, the copywriting, and the art direction of each campaign. And they have to be able to explain what to do about it in a clear, simple way. Great training in fast, powerful, clear thinking."

(Even better, Trott's art director Gordon Smith likes to have the campaigns presented one at a time - but he doesn't let the person who did the work present it. He picks someone else from the group. As it's the first time they've seen the work, their ability to explain it is a great test of how clear the idea and thinking are.)

As part of what I do I've been fortunate enough to do a fair bit of workshop-driven work with clients this year. It's taken me round the world and enabled me to meet lots of fascinating people so I count myself very fortunate. If I'm honest though, the thing that has surprised me most about it all has been the amount it has taught me about all kinds of stuff I didn't know before. Teaching, it seems, really is a great way to learn.

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Being Right Means Knowing When You're Not Right Anymore

I've long been a fan of Jeff Bezos's approach toward being stubborn on vision whilst flexible on details, and playing the long game. Amazon are one of the few companies that seem to really live and breathe that.

So it was interesting to read over on the 37Signals blog the advice he gave to them during a talk he did on product strategy. The smartest people, he said, are not only open to new points of view and challenges to their own way of thinking, but they are constantly revising their understanding and reconsidering problems that they thought they'd already solved. Conversely, people who are wrong a lot of the time obsess about details that only support one point of view and are unable to climb out of that to see the bigger picture from multiple angles.

There's something there that doesn't sit well with more traditional approaches of setting a course and a strategy and then not deviating from that pre-defined plan. The tyranny of an annual planning and budgeting cycle is that as soon as circumstances change (as they inevitably will) no-one wants to look like they couldn't see it coming (least of all the most senior leaders) and it becomes attritional to deviate from the original plan. So responses become squeezed into looking like they were part of the original plan anyway, which leads to it being the wrong response. 

It's one thing being confident and stubborn as a leader in your vision for success. It takes a whole different kind of leadership confidence to consider your point of view on how you get there as temporary.

NewsWeek and the Death of Print

"Exiting print is an extremely difficult moment for all of us who love the romance of print and the unique weekly camaraderie of those hectic hours before the close on Friday night. But as we head for the 80th anniversary of Newsweek next year we must sustain the journalism that gives the magazine its purpose—and embrace the all-digital future." Tina Brown

So in the same week that the Telegraph reported that The Guardian was considering ditching print (something I find hard to believe), Newsweek went ahead and announced that after 80 years they really were ditching print editions and moving to a digital-only model. There's already been plenty written about it, most of it either of a somewhat apocalyptic nature about the fortunes of print editions or else decrying Tina Brown's stewardship and her preference for sensationalist cover stories. But I thought David Hepworth's point questioning the sanity of completely ditching your main revenue source (in times still characterised by print dollars and digital cents) in such an abrupt fashion, was a good one.

Having said that, perhaps there is something to be said for the need to make a precipitous change in direction in order to have a sufficiently radical refocus in what you do. Derek Thompson in The Atlantic compared Newsweek's predicament to that of a 747 flying between two affluent and populous metropolises ('Newsweekly Reader City and Advertiser City') that suddenly enter prolonged recession amidst a mass exodus. And in that context the reality of a huge resource overhead needed to produce a global printed news product must bite you every time you look at the monthly P & L.

But as Thompson goes on to say, in creating a paid, subscriber-only product perhaps they have answered the wrong question. Instead of asking 'how do I publish Newsweek without actually publishing Newsweek, they should have asked 'how do I continue to attract great people to do great work in this media company?'. I've already said my piece about magazines and digital. Whilst there can be little doubt that a weekly news and media title can have been at the sharp end of a change that is affecting just about every print title, I can understand the need to transition revenues and use print editions (even in decline) as 'brand anchors' whilst they "learn to fly a smaller plane or hope somebody is willing to subsidize their 747". 

Digital is not going to kill print. But we have entered a period of rapid change without a defined end. As journalist Howard Owens once observed about newspapers, there is no transition, just constant never ending change. And that's the point.

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Is the Internet a Giant Echo Chamber?

Only if you want it to be it seems. Many believe that the web, and particularly social media, makes it uniquely easy to quarantine yourself amongst groups of likeminded people, surround yourself with positive feedback loops and avoid opposing or divergent viewpoints, in a giant echo chamber effect. Eric Barker quotes from Steven Johnson's new book (Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age) which describes an exhaustive study by two University of Chicago business professors which created a comparative 'isolation index' for various media. The internet fell right the middle, being slightly more ideologically isolating than local media (newspapers and cable news channels), but less so than national newspapers. Johnson also says that:

"...perhaps the most striking finding of the study came in its analysis of real-world communities. Neighborhoods, clubs, friends, work colleagues, family — all these groups proved to be deafening echo chambers compared with all forms of modern media. It turns out that people who spend a lot of time on political sites are as much as three times more likely to encounter diverse perspectives than people who hang out with their friends and colleagues at the bar or by the water cooler."

Fascinating.

Doing Things Your Own Way

I somehow missed this, but it's a wonderful story. When he was fifteen, John Gurdon's Science teacher wrote on his school report:

"...he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way. I believe he has ideas about becoming a Scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous..."

Last week, Prof John Gurdon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, along with Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka, for their work on stem cells. As the Telegraph pointed out, it's like the Munich schoolmaster who in 1895 said of his student “He will never amount to anything”. Who was he talking about? Albert Einstein.

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Work On Stuff That Matters

"Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations" Tim O'Reilly

This is a great short interview with Tim O'Reilly. Well worth eleven minutes of your time. I've long liked his 'clothesline paradox', the idea of creating more value than you take out, and his principles around working on stuff that matters. 

I met the guys behind The Renegade Economist last year. They're asking some pretty big questions about the economic and politcal systems of which we're all a part and have created some fascinating resources including a series of interviews with people like Noam Chomsky and Camilla Batmanghelidj, and an award-winning feature documentary called The Four Horseman, a film that "...rather than just condemning bankers, politicians or the media...puts the entire system up for discussion". And why not?

Communications Planning in 2013

The good people at WARC are keen to encourage people to start thinking early about planning themes for 2013 and so have asked me (along with a few other ad bloggers around the world) to put down a few thoughts on the subject. Tough to do justice to such a broad and forever shifting entity in 500 words so this is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are some (inevitably interlocking) themes that I think will be areas of focus and agents for change in the practice of comms planning over the next year:

1. Robots and humans.

The balance in our industry between the art and the science, the human and the automated, continues to be an ever-changing, fascinating one. The march of automation (particularly in trading through real-time bidding and optimisation) is inevitable. But I think there's some interesting work happening around the attribution of value that could impact planning quite significantly. Until now of-course, much media spend has been based on a comparatively limited understanding of the value of individual parts to a customer journey. Digital tools enable us to use data in more sophisticated ways to attribute value to the constituent parts of a broad spectrum of activity and develop a far better understanding of how they can work together.

The scale of this opportunity is like moving from being in the trombone section of an orchestra (I'm reminded of that Richard Strauss quote: “Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them") to becoming the conductor. My argument here is not that planners are equivalent to the brass section, but that they are the only ones who, along with the client, are now positioned to be the conductor for the entire orchestra. The key here of-course will be in joining up disparate data sources in order to derive decent insights, and in assesing the speed, scale and type of response. As well as algorithm and automation, that process requires very human traits of interpretation, judgement and understanding. Success in media will be measured through the art of balancing multiple metrics in order to drive uplift in the one that really matters.

2. Convergence of Paid, Owned and Earned media.

The POE model has become the default way of looking at the media world but I've always thought and said that the most interesting aspects are how they work together, and the blurred boundaries/spaces in-between. Part of this is (as McKinsey have said) about how paid media generates earned and serves as a feeder to owned. Part of it is about how agencies can get more involved in creating and designing amazing owned media experiences. Part of it is about how content flows seamlessly between all three (the atomisation of content for re-application, or through using APIs for example). The growth in importance in owned and earned media is really important for comms planning. It means different approaches - smart combinations of distributed thinking (getting your idea/content out there embedded in the fabric of the web and what people do) and classic destination thinking (the place that aggregates, augments, facilitates and dareisayit engages). It means different knowledge - experience design, UX, analytics, using measurement and data to derive insight for not just short campaigns but for ongoing creative development. It means a different relationship with the client - in order to gain full insight you need to work with the kind of data that traditionally has sat behind client firewalls. You need to see the whole picture, not just half of it. Planners are at the sharp end of this change.

Nike are most often used as the exemplar of great integrated thinking and for good reason - whilst their overall marketing and media spend has gone up, the proportion of that spend that comprises traditional paid media has gone down, and instead Nike have focused on highly participative and spreadable content and product driven initiatives that create communities and ecosystems with the product at their heart. Not every brand can be Nike, but I think what they're doing is instructive for the kind of approaches that will matter far more in comms planning.

3. Slow, fast and spiky planning.

One of the biggest challenges within this convergence is maximising the opportunity to combine the short-term 'spikes' of activity characterised by a campaigning mindset and approaches with the longer-term always-on platforms that digital is also exceptionally good at. Matt Locke has talked about the changing patterns of attention and the idea of 'slow, fast and spiky culture' - how some elements of culture accrue attention over long periods of time whereas others rapidly synchronise attention in a short period of time before it quickly moves on. At the recent Google Firestarters he took this further into how we now need to design in a different way, for new attention patterns, new behaviours and for circulation rather than distribution. Ideas and stories have always been distributed (through mass media), but they are now circulated between people, which compels planners to plan for shareability and what Matt called 'transgression'. The key dynamic here is how to optimise both short-term campaigning and long-term platforms, make them work seamlessly together, and ensure that short-term is always bringing value back to always-on (and that could mean eyeballs, interaction, participation, content, followers, data capture).

Part of that is about how a series of smaller ideas can over time become a 'long idea" (Gareth Kay calls this "ideas as unfolding stories, a stream of iterations and interactions that invite people into the process”). A whole other part is about being able to identify spikes of attention and interaction quickly, and have the capability and resource to be able to amplify and capitalise on them. I think it's fascinating that we're starting to see specialist roles such as the real-time planning director start to emerge, whose job it is to use not only customer data, but patterns derived from near real-time search behaviours and social media conversation to derive insight and benefit in far faster, and more nimble ways.

This brings into sharp focus the question of planning cycles and resource allocation. As I've said before, we need to move on from the rigidity imposed by annual planning cycles and budget in far more agile ways to allow for more experimentation and optimisation. If how we budget doesn't change, nothing will. A 70,20,10 model for resource allocation makes far more sense in the modern media world, and allows planners the elbow room they need to really do a great job for the client.

4. Content strategy and marketing

Suddenly everyone's talking about content marketing. It's not hard to see why - the shift towards content-hungry always-on platforms requires brands to use content in very different ways. If brands are becoming publishers then they need to act, think and plan like publishers. The opportunity here is for planners to work with clients to effectively combine the stock (the durable stuff) with the flow (the feed, "pieces of content, produced rapidly and at a low cost") of content. There is lots of potential here to develop new areas of expertise and utilise/develop new tools and models around the three pillars of content curation.

5. Mobile, mobile, mobile

It feels slightly disingenuous for me to talk about mobile as a separate point as I believe the critical thing about mobile is to treat it as a device, not a channel. So the real opportunity is clearly in how to use the inherent characteristics and behaviours associated with it to augment existing ideas. Spend has obviously lagged consumer behaviour considerably, and continues to do so, but perhaps we're finally starting to see the real shift happening. The opportunity gap that exists between the amount of time people spend on mobiles and the proportion of budgets allocated to it creates an opportunity gap for planners to incoporate mobile not only through existing channels such as search and display, but through compelling content, commerce and technology-driven ideas. The potential is huge. Second-screening and location-based services are just the start.

So there you have it. That's ended up being somewhat more than 500 words (oops) but as I said at the start, whilst this is not an exhaustive list, it reflects the areas I think will matter. There is plenty more around how I see the role of agencies developing around data, technology, skills and culture in the Progression of Agency Value research and report I did earlier this year.

As always, I'm interested to also know what you think. But for now, here's one final thought on this - what an amazing time it is to be a planner.

Are We Living in a Low Innovation Age?

I gave a keynote last week at the rather wonderful Google Squared programme on the subject of technological disruption and chose to dedicate my latest column in New Media Age to the subject:

"With so much written about digital and technological disruption we take it as read that we are living in an age of unprecedented innovation. But are we? Working in the communications industry it’s hard to believe anything other than that the Internet has completely rewired a multitude of markets and succeeded in bringing forth an unparalleled level of product and service innovation...Yet there are some persistent voices making the case that...in years to come we could well look back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a time distinctly lacking in groundbreaking inventions that truly impacted the way in which we live our lives."

I'm rather intrigued by the thought that we might be living in a 'low innovation age'. It's so antithetical to so much that we hear and read. Yet as I say in the column it is a persistently argued thesis, notably by the likes of Justin Fox earlier this year in Wired, author Neal Stephenson, and Tyler Cowen, who (in the The Great Stagnation) has compared advances in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century such as the internal combustion engine, aircraft, electrical engineering, television, the telephone, cameras and so on, with those of the digital age and suggested that we're on a "technological plateau".

It's an interesting question, but I'm less convinced by these arguments. One of the points I make in the column is that digital has the potential to disrupt so many different markets so fundamentally that the sheer breadth of change is impossible to anticipate. And that (like electricity) it is only when new structures and models are built from the bottom up with the new technology at their heart that we really see the full potential of what it can bring. Mary Meeker, in her latest Internet Trends deck, talked about the 're-imagination of nearly everything' but some of these disruptions will take longer than others, and I'm quite sure there are many we have no sight of at all. Andrew Grill recently linked to an interesting report by the Australian arm of Deloitte (Digital Disruption - Short Fuse, Big Bang) which makes a similar point about variably paced disruption with some sectors experiencing immediate and explosive transformation whilst others see more incremental change. But they make the point:

 "The digital economy isn’t just about speeding up communication across borders or changing the skills workers need; it’s about changing the very nature of consumption, competition and how markets work. More profoundly, it is also driving a significant shift in the balance of power between organisations and individuals."

When I was reading around the NMA piece I happened across Nicholas Carr's rather fascinating concept of a 'Hierarchy of Innovation', which runs parallel to Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.

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Carr argues that whilst the borders between layers in the hierarchy are inevitably blurry, we have over time shifted from innovating around technologies of survival (at the bottom of the pyramid) to technologies of the self (self-expression, leisure related, identity management, personalisation, self improvement and so on, at the top). These innovations have a tendency toward producing smaller-scale, less visible breakthroughs and so rather than seeing a decline in innovation, we have witnessed a shift in its focus.

I'm left wondering if the type of innovation we've seen in the digital age has indeed been less tangible, but whether some of the interesting early stage developments that blur virtual and real-world (data and quantified self, wearable tech, internet of things) may be where it all starts to become far more tangible.

I'm interested to know what you think. Are we really living in a low innovation age? 

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Post Of The Month - September 2012 - The Winner

Noah Brier's excellent talk on the interest graph for brands took an early lead in this month's vote for Post Of The Month, and despite a good showing for Tim Malbon's post on lessons learned at MadeByMany, it proved an unassailable one. So well done Noah - you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall Of Fame. Thanks everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - September 2012 - The Vote

Thanks all for the nominations. Our shortlist this month is between:

The Interest Graph for Brands from Noah Brier

We Are Five Years Old. Here's What We Learnt by Tim Malbon

Graft and Craft: What Makes a Planner from Martin Weigel

While I was Sleeping - A Tale of Modern 'Manufacturing' by Chris Thorpe

Startup = Growth from Paul Graham

How To Die With No Regrets from Amir Khella

And you can vote below: