Only Dead Fish

Bill Bernbach's Resignation Letter To Grey

Bill Bernbach's 1947 letter to Grey before he started DDB:

Dear collegues,

Our agency is getting big. That's something to be happy about. But it's something to worry about, too, and I don't mind telling you I'm damned worried. I'm worried that we're going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we're going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we're going to follow history instead of making it, that we're going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I'm worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there's one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It's that creative spark that I'm so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don't want academicians. I don't want scientists. I don't want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people - writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will make a good ad better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability. The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies In the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Respectfully,

Bill Bernbach

Thanks to Umar Ghumman

Fraggl and the Magic Pyramid

It's not often that I get to write a blog post titled like a Disney movie. Anyhow, you'll recall that I've got together with the smart folk at Adaptive Lab to build a curation app for Twitter that we're calling Fraggl. The vote on whether the problem we are trying to solve is a valid one was pretty resounding with 81 votes for and 5 against, so that's good to know (thanks for the feedback).

We're now moving forward to think about how the app we build might work. Fundamental to this, as I mentioned before, will be the right combination of the key forms of curation: people (or professional curation in another context), algorithmic, and social (from the community). Our thinking is that the quality of the UX depends a lot on whether we can structure these forms of curation and then deliver or enable access to the results in the right way. We'll deal with delivery and access in a subsequent post but for now we're starting with the former.

Discussing this with the team at Adaptive Lab, we've arrived at a taxonomy of factors that can be used to determine the results:

If we were to flip this taxonomy, and think of it as our 'magic pyramid' (so to speak), it would look something like this:

The base layer of this is considering the sources of data that we are going to focus on, and those which we might apply the algorithm to. The options here vary from the widest possible context (all tweets), to just focusing on the people that I follow (as some existing services do), to taking a more focused approach and (API allowing) use Twitter lists. Part of the feedback from the initial post was around how we might incorporate the right mix of popularity and serendipity, which is something I'd also been thinking about. Another way of thinking about this is the mix between content which is popular amongst the people I follow, and content which I don't know I like but may find interesting. An early thought about this is that (API allowing) using Twitter lists could be useful here because users could plug the algorithm into their own Twitter lists, and/or they can use it to source content from pre-curated Twitter lists of people that share great content from certain areas (e.g. architecture, design, content strategy and so on).

The second layer to think about is how we construct that algorithm and the signals we will use to get us to the best content. Here we have options that range from the number of RTs a particular tweet/link has got, the number of people that have favourited a tweet, but we also have factors that might be interesting to look at such as how many followers the people doing the sharing have and so on.

Our final layer is personalisation. I'm a fan of using data (typically consumption or voting up/down) to inform content mix so that apps get smarter and more personalised over time (aka scrobbling), so it would be good to include some degree of that if we could. It's a bit like what Zite does, although the fact that after 18 months Zite has arguably got a bit too specific for me (i.e. it's become too narrow in its content mix and could benefit from widening that out slightly) is quite instructive. Any personalisation we enable therefore, needs to add enough to the mix that it enhances the curation, without detracting from the breadth of content and value of more serendipitous stuff. Perhaps a simple 'show me more of this' and 'show me less of that' is the way to start here.

We're highly unlikey to get the balance of factors absolutely right on the first go so it's inevitable that we will need to iterate. So if you want to join the beta testing group for Fraggl and get early access, you can sign up here.

In the meantime, it would be really useful to gather some feedback on this, and on the kind of curation tools and techniques that you find useful. So, a couple of key areas:

How do you currently identify valuable content? Which tools and strategies do you use?

What's good, and what's not so good about these tools and strategies?

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

Managing by Anarchy

I've done a fair bit of work over the past couple of years on how organisations can adapt structures and resourcing to better equip themselves for the world in which we find ourselves, and so I'm always interested to read about approaches that challenge the norm. James said I should look at the way Github work, so I found and read this piece by Ryan Tomayko, Github's 'Director of Engineering' which describes a non-hierarchical, self-organising approach to resourcing and working that many would call anarchic, yet one that has some clear themes.

Thus, employees work on whatever they want, with autonomy bringing it's own kind of efficiency ('instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1) every single employee, and 2) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects'). Leadership is less about authority and more about enabling and inspiration ('lead by example as loud as possible'), which brings another kind of efficiency ('telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument...If you can't convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn't be doing it'). The currency of the workplace is trust and contribution ('…go build the thing in your head, show me how you got there, and then sell it to me and all your peers').

There are challenges that come from working in this way, as this post authored by a Github employee acknowledges, but as the post also notes these can be outweighed by some pretty meaningful benefits. Whilst the founders of the company set the vision, having everyone take responsibility for deciding what to work on is a way of both empowering and motivating employees. Ensuring that each person has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company means that there is a natural efficiency ('I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company'). If, as Dan Pink suggests, what really motivates people and drives high performance and satisfaction is autonomy, mastery and purpose then this is a structure designed to give employees just that:

'Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyone’s trust.'

I'm not suggesting that such an anarchic way of working would suit every organisation but I often think that there are learnings to be had from engineering driven cultures where everyone feels direct responsibility for the product and the output, a large degree of autonomy is framed within broad strategic objectives or principles, and resourcing for projects incorporates more voluntary working and is focused around small, nimble, self-organising teams. Especially for companies that are working hard to increase agility and address organisational silos (and if you're not trying to that right now you should be). They are learnings that I'd argue should be applied beyond tech teams and into wider organisational practice.

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via Compfight cc

Hackers and Casuals

Pats linked to this fascinating piece from Ajay Kulkarni at GroupMe talking about the challenges of designing for different audiences within the Android user base. Android, he says, is the 'Platypus of the mobile world...a complicated beast, a bizarre combination of two very different animals'. Those very different animals being the Hackers (early Android users who invested in the platform because of its open principles), and the Casuals (later immigrants to Android, often upgrading from feature phones because of cheaper, increasingly prolific devices).

This presents a challenge in designing services since each set of users has a very different set of behaviours and expectations:

"Hackers customize. They install their own keyboards, dialers, messaging apps, even home screens. Many are developers. They explore, they tinker. They love settings, settings, and more settings.

Casuals personalize. They like wallpapers and custom ringtones. But they don't tinker. Many are late adopters to smartphones. They use Facebook, Twitter, and other popular apps, but they don't explore new apps or technologies."

So developing for both becomes tricky: you can't just build the app for yourself; each group expects the app to do different things; it makes it harder to test; the former audience loves change, the latter doesn't.

Their solution is insightful:

• Building to reflect both sets of behaviour: "build it for Casuals and let Hackers customize it"
• Viewing the app as a Casual: "You need to get outside yourself...we try to internalize how they think and behave, so that their reactions can become our reactions."
• The importance of beta testing with casuals, not just hackers
• If Casuals sometimes take time to come round to a new feature but might end up loving it, using data to recognise the difference between that and a feature which has simply been poorly executed.

All too easy, I think, to design for one audience and forget the potentially very different behaviours and preferences of another.

Image courtesy

Let's Build Something

Maria Popova once joked that it seemed as though we'd "reached a cultural point at which every time someone uses the word 'curation' in reference to content and publishing, an actual museum curator kills a kitten". Yet it does seem that curation is becoming more important than ever, and that the growing surfeit of content means that the people and tools that help us get to the good stuff quicker and easier are more useful than ever. The challenge is how we do that. For every individual there is a different view on what defines 'good', and that in itself shifts according to context. My own opinion is that combinations of different types of content curation (the three pillars being professional, algorithmic, and social) work best to get us to that place. 

One of the (many) great things about Twitter is that it's such an excellent source of great links and content. But most of us don't have the luxury of sitting on Twitter all day so it's easy to miss the good stuff. Having something that showed me the most interesting links and updates that have been shared whilst I've been away (or shared by people I follow in different time zones) would be wonderfully useful. Lots of people have had a go at this. Twitter itself has it's Discover tab and the 'Tweets for you'. Kottke created Stellar. There's aggregators like Paper.li. I'm sure all of these have their place and inevitably we will use more than one tool, but there is nothing that quite nails it for me. The closest is probably Percolate but that has since pivoted to become a business tool (and seemingly an excellent one at that).

Wouldn't it be fun to have a go at building something to tackle this problem? I was talking to James Haycock who runs Adaptive Lab about this and he thought so too, so we're going to do just that. I'm rather happy to be partnering with Adpative Lab - they are a 'skunkworks for hire', a very smart group of creative technologists, developers and data specialists that collaborate with companies large and small (including ASOS and YouGov) to create innovative new products and services (check them out). It occurred to both James and I that a service such as this would be useful for the readers of this blog so we thought we'd make the process of building it as open as possible, and involve you in helping to shape something that you could then go on to use. It will make the process fun and really interesting, and I was a fan of the way in which MadeByMany blogged the development process of the Picle app. So I'll be blogging updates as we go, and asking for feedback that can help us to create something that is as useful as possible for everyone. I'll also be including updates on my weekly email, so if you want to make sure you don't miss out you can sign up here.

I'm rather excited to see what we might build together. So far, we have a working project title - Fraggl (nothing to do with these definitions of 'Fraggle'), and have defined the problem we are trying to solve thus:

It's impossible to be on Twitter 24 hours a day. Most of us dip in and out when we have a spare few minutes. So how can I make sure that I don't miss out on the great content shared by the people I follow? I want a way to regularly see the most useful, interesting, stimulating, original and links that have been shared amongst the people I like on Twitter. And I'd like those links to be as relevant as possible to my interests.  No existing service does this well enough for me.

A one-sentence elevator pitch is: The service that ensures you never miss the most useful content shared by people who are interested in the same things you are.

We have a few ideas as to how we propose to do this which we'll share, but for now, what we'd really like to know is this:

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Image courtesy

Redefining The Way We Think About Charity

A truly remarkable new TED talk from Dan Pallotta talking about how the way in which we view charities and charity giving is so fundamentally flawed and wholly limiting. Every now and then you hear a point of view that genuinely makes you reconsider the entire way in which you look at something. It doesn't happen often, but is all the more remarkable when it does. Extraordinary.

Speed Freak

"The Beethoven that you and I know, and that we all know, may in fact not be the Beethoven that Beethoven wanted us to know. We may be hearing his music in a way he did not intend at all."

I was rather stopped in my tracks by this short Radiolab podcast about the speed at which the famous composer's work should be played. Aged 47, steadily going deaf, and with a huge body of work already behind him, Beethoven was one of the first composers to embrace the metronome, which had just been invented. He used it to mark (and attempt to permanently fix) the tempo at which some of his most famous works should be played. The thing is, the tempo he set is much faster than that at which the pieces are traditionally played. So fast in fact, that when played at their intended pace, the work is hugely challenging to play, becomes completely different, and is almost designed to push the boundaries of comfortable listening. Almost every conductor has ignored these speeds and performed the works more slowly and with a sizeable dose of grandiosity. This practice has become so entrenched that myths have even perpetuated (since proved false) that his metronome was faulty. Amazing. There's a good exploration of some of the myths and truths around the metronome markings here.

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - The Winner

Delighted to announce that this month's winner is Martin Weigel, whose excellent post/deck on brands, humility and indifference very narrowly beat James Caig's tale of the bottom half of culture. Well done to Martin, who is on something of a roll having won last month's vote as well. Thanks everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - The Vote

Crikey. Yet another great list this month so thanks for the nominations. We also have a double nomination (James Caig) which is a true POTM rarity. So, our vote this month is between:

Big Data - The Comedic Empty Vessel and Animal Spirits by Mark Hancock

A Tale Of Humility and Indifference by Martin Weigel

Keynesian Marketing and the Business of Confidence from Richard Huntingdon

On Writing Post-Fatherhood by Austin Kleon

We've Had The Speaker Pledge, What About The Attendee Pledge? from Will Roissetter

Wisdom of the Dead vs the Living from Helen Edwards

The Bottom Half of Culture by James Caig

Tortuous metaphor #287: Four Lessons Planning can Learn from Building Bridges by James Caig

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - Nominations

It's time to nominate the best posts that you've read in the past month for Post Of The Month. If you read a post in February that you thought was particularly great, please leave the link in the comments. I've put up a starting list below, and once I have a few more I'll stick them up for a vote. I've had a few nominations sent to me already so including them, my starting five are:

Big Data - The Comedic Empty Vessel and Animal Spirits by Mark Hancock

A Tale Of Humility and Indifference by Martin Weigel

Keynesian Marketing and the Business of Confidence from Richard Huntingdon

On Writing Post-Fatherhood by Austin Kleon

We've Had The Speaker Pledge, What ABout The Attendee Pledge? from Will Roissetter

And you can nominate your own favourites below.