The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

As I settled down to a bloody wonderful breakfast at one of my favourite old haunts in Balmain, I opened the newspaper and came across this …

Normally I’d pass right past this sort of ad, but this time I was stopped in my tracks.

Not because it was about Hot Cross Buns.

Not because I’m a fan of Heston Blumenthal.

Not because I was interested to find out what the bloody hell Lemon Myrtle was.

No, I was transfixed because it was a ‘scratch and sniff’ ad.

SCRATCH AND BLOODY SNIFF.

I haven’t seen one of those since 1978.

And you know what, I did scratch it and the smell was pretty good.

In the old days, regardless what the ad was supposed to smell like, you were always overwhelmed by the whiff of newspaper print … but not any more, oh no, because when I gave this a good sniff, it actually spelt like Lemon Myrtle.

Mental!

OK, so I didn’t buy any but that’s more because I was flying back to Shanghai within a couple of hours than the ad not creating intrigue and – to be honest – desire so well done to Coles and their agency for doing something new/old that utilised one of the oldest, and greatest, selling attributes of food … smell.

Now normally that’s where the post would end, but the thing is, there are many people out there that would view ‘scratch and sniff’ ads as something best consigned to history.

They tend to be the same sort of people who view any ad from before 2000 as dated, irrelevant and lacking creative spark.

Those people are wrong.

In these days where we seem to spend oodles of time promoting image rather than substance, there’s something wonderful about those old ads. They demonstrated a real knowledge of what their audience needed to know/feel/see to change their habits and minds. Better yet, they took this information and created communication that spoke directly to their audience but in simple, intelligent ways.

Sure there was a lot of shit out there … but amongst all that, there was some real gold … and I’d dare to say that proportionately, there was more of that then, than there is today, despite the massive upsurge in the number of brands advertising.

We talk about adland being entrepreneurial but I don’t know if we really are.

If we were, we’d constantly be looking for ways to grow our clients business rather than focus on how to retain their advertising fee.

Of course, clients have to shoulder some of this blame because they want agencies to make them ads, not make them even more successful … which is why I kind of hate how as an industry, we constantly look to the future while jettisoning the past.

Sure, there’s something wonderful about constantly moving forward, striving for the next new thing … but if the cost of that is to classify anything that has previously worked as ‘old and wrong’, then we must all be bloody mental.

It might be old fashioned, but I still believe the basis for great communication – great communication that has real commercial value for our clients – is knowing the audience better than the client knows their audience.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cop a load of this:

I literally don’t know what bothers me more.

The fact someone describes themselves as a ‘master furrier’.

The fact they describe fur – one of the oldest products known to mankind – as modern.

The fact they use more fonts than a 5 year old let loose on Powerpoint.

The fact they use words like ‘chic’ and ‘flirtatious’.

The fact the ad looks like it was designed by Stevie Wonder.

Everything about this freaks me out … and given I’m a badly dressed person from Nottingham, that’s saying something.

It was here that he learnt an acting technique that formed the foundation for how he was to approach his craft for the rest of his career.

That technique was called method acting.

Method acting was not created by Less Strasberg – that was a Russian actor and director called Constantin Stanislavski – however he was the one who ultimately gave it its high profile and credibility.

Method acting is based on the actor drawing on their own personal emotions and memories to fully capture and represent the character’s psychological and emotional motives.

To ensure purity of this state and to minimise clichéd or contrived behaviour, actors are actively encouraged to live their life as the character – never breaking their identity until the end of filming – so that they hone their approach, understanding and behaviour to ensure total separation of who they are with who they are playing.

It’s a very confronting and challenging technique however when you look at the work of practioners like Daniel Day Lewis, Al Pacino and countless others, you appreciate the impact it makes on the actor and the resulting impact it makes on the film as a whole.

I mention this because we recently decided to see if this methodology would work for planning.

We wanted to investigate whether it would give us deeper and better understanding.

Whether it would lead to ideas that are fundamentally different to all that has gone before.

And I have to say, while it is still early days, all the signs seem to be very, very positive.

Method Planning ™

The reason we undertook this experiment is that I’ve always felt our approach to gathering insights has been flawed.

As you know, over the years I’ve tried many different approaches – from talking to prostitutes and car thieves to working with a criminal profiler to develop a technique I call circumstantial insight – however despite all that, I’ve still been painfully aware that many of my viewpoints have been based on ‘interpreting’ others actions and words rather than experiencing them in their purest form possible.

While I still passionately believe these approaches still give us better insight and clarity than things like focus groups – especially focus groups in China – the reality is that so much of what we ‘learn’ is second hand.

So when we were recently given a project that required us to understand the attitudes, mindset and behaviour of entry level white collar employees, I couldn’t help but take the opportunity to explore the method acting approach … which is why for the last 5 weeks, one of my my planners has basically been living someone else’s life.

If you were to go to Wuhan today and speak to the co-ordinators at a large local bank, they would tell you Leon is a new colleague who recently moved from Shanghai to take the first steps on his career path.

They would say this because, to them, that’s exactly what happened.

5 weeks ago we sent young Leon to a temp agency to get a new job.

To ensure he would be put forward for the sort of role we wanted for him, we constructed a backstory that was crafted to make him seem the most appropriate white-collar entry level candidate in China.

That said, we followed the learnings of Lee Strasberg by basing it on his real life because he says that makes the line between perceived truth and real truth more blurred … allowing your ‘character’ to more easily consume your real identity.

Anyway, a week later and after 3 interviews, he was on the train to Wuhan preparing to start a totally new life.

What’s different to this approach – versus adlands much loved ‘ethnographic research’ or just hanging out with various people and/or departments within a clients organisation – is that this has been designed to eradicate any wall that could come between participant and observer … hence Leon isn’t just acting out his new life between the hours of 9am-6pm, he’s sharing a house with them [3 men], eating the same food as them, surviving on the same low salary as them, learning the new banking terminology as them and – most difficult of all – wearing the same suit and tie as them.

Well, not literally the same, but you get what I mean.

4 weeks into the 6 week experiment and his new house mates/colleagues still haven’t got the faintest that Leon is really a planner from Wieden+Kennedy.

Mind you, they wouldn’t even know what a planner or Wieden+Kennedy is if we told them.

That said, it’s fair to say Leon initially found it difficult to maintain ‘in character’.

There were times where he found himself slipping into ‘planner mode’ and then worrying he’d been discovered, but fortunately for him – and us – that doesn’t appear to be the case.

He said the real turning point came when he was told off by his boss for being late and realised he was really living this life and within days, he felt it was all coming to him more easily and naturally … to the point he complained to his new housemates/colleagues about the questions and expectations he was supposedly getting from his parents about his new job.

What’s fascinating is how different his attitude and behaviour has become.

While he tells us the stories, challenges and experiences he has gone through [and is going through] he no longer talks about it in terms of observation, but personal feelings. It’s a fine line, but the difference is clear especially when he is expressing the highs, lows, gossip and politics of his new life, because he expresses them with the full force of the emotions he’s experienced or is going through.

There was one point where we were questioning something he had said about this audiences ambitions and he snapped back with …

“Not everyone has the chance to live in the big cities”.

In short, Leon is no longer observing our target audience, he is our target audience and that’s translated into him giving us information and briefs that have opened a whole new world of perspective and opportunity for the rest of us.