Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Complicity, Consultants, Context, Craft, Crap Products In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Devious Strategy, Experience, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Mediocrity, Reputation, Strategy, Technology
A few years ago, my wife – a designer – was working for a company on a freelance project.
She met them for the briefing and they told her, “We want people to see us as innovative”.
To which she replied, “I think the only way you do that is by doing innovative things”.
Now she wasn’t saying this to be an asshole, she was trying to be helpful … but, of course, they didn’t see that, even though she was absolutely right.
OK, some companies get away with it.
There’s one I know very well who position themselves as progressive … but look a little deeper and you see the innovation is more in their language and wrapping than anything truly ground breaking. And what’s more, they do the same thing – albeit with a different skin – for different companies time and time again.
To be fair, some of what they do/did is truly progressive, but that is most definitely the exception rather than the rule because their current business model appears to be far more about duplication and replication than innovation.
And that would be fine … except they position themselves as innovation pioneers.
It works because nothing attracts conservative companies than the ability to pretend/think they’re innovative or disruptive when – as Lee Hill once brilliantly observed – all they’re really doing is simply ‘modernising to the times’.
Or said another way, they’re simply catching up to where everyone else is, rather than leaving them behind.
It’s a commercial co-dependency.
They talk to you so you can think you’re innovative and you pay them to allow them keep thinking they are.
The reason I say all this is because I recently saw this in Pudong Airport …
It’s for Austrian/American chef Wolfgang Puck and his restaurant chain.
Now Wolfgang has achieved a great deal in his life …
He is the only chef awarded the ‘Outstanding Chef of the Year’ award on multiple occasions.
His 1982 restaurant Spago – which was a revelation – created the concept of the open kitchen.
He is responsible for serving celebrities a special banquet after the Academy Awards.
All good and grand.
However for all the ‘innovation and success’ Wolfgang has achieved, his Wolfgang Puck chain is anything but … exemplified by the fact that this hoarding claims, “To be truly original is to invent the future of food … to question, to experiment” and yet all the pictures accompanying this statement are about as basic as my dress sense.
Cheeseburger.
Prawn salad.
Steak.
Now I am not saying this food won’t be tasty. But I am saying it is not original and it most definitely is not inventing the future of food.
Of course, there is a lot of [bad] marketing that is underpinned by exaggeration and hype. And I totally appreciate China loves the superlative … however, as exciting as the people behind this restaurant may be about this concept and regardless how ‘new’ this may be to China [clue: it’s not] they’re selling the illusion of innovation rather than the reality of it.
And why do I care?
Because people are falling for this shit.
And while that is their issue, the result of this is the systematic downgrading of standards and ambition.
And truth.
Where more and more people are falling for average because it’s been sold to them as exceptionalism.
And it is convenient for them to believe that because it doesn’t challenge or question, it just comforts with convenience.
The result being those who are being innovative … the ones who are trying to do things differently … are met with immediate distain and dismissal. Judged, insulted and dismissed.
Please note I am not in any way claiming to be one of these people. But I know those who truly are. And so many have failed to achieve the impact and success they deserve because the business of illusion innovation is easier to buy than actual innovation.
And while I could say that is their problem, a lot of it is because of what they refuse to do.
Like guarantee results.
Or sell one-size-fits all process.
Or blindly accept the opinion and views of people because of their title.
Or follow research methodologies that are designed for totally different scenarios.
But that happens a lot. I’ve seen it. We all have.
Which is why I think the best thing that can save marketing is maybe to stop marketing.
Stop playing the games of how so many operate.
Stop valuing convenience, complicity and popularity in favour of truth, action and change.
Stop judging people on how much cash they bring in and more on what they’ve done/do.
Stop playing down to a price rather than up to a quality.
This industry is littered with brilliant creative, innovative, progressive doers and thinkers.
They’re everywhere and yet they rarely seem to be championed or celebrated.
At best they’re viewed as a novelty. At worse, a destructive force.
The Emperor’s New Clothes may get short-term economic results.
It may keep people employed and give the C-Suite big, fat bonus cheques.
But what it is also doing, is ensuring we fall backwards.
Not just killing our credibility, but denying a future to those who could bring us back.
And as acts of corporate hostility go, I find that one of the worst of all.
… yet despite that, it may also be one of the most thought-provoking.
And potentially scary.
Even scarier than the start of yet another week, and not because it features my voice.
[Though that is also very scary]
So errrrm, enjoy.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Apple, Attitude & Aptitude, Technology
In the last couple of months, Apple launched iOS 17.
I used to love these software updates …
I’d look up tips and tricks on the internet and spend the day messing with all the features.
But now – after all these years of updates – things are getting a bit thin on the ground and you can almost hear the scraping of the barrel in terms of what is being added or updated.
One of those is a feature that can tell if you’re holding the phone too close to your eyes.
If you are … you get this:
All good eh?
Well, not so much.
Because when you are a short-sighted fool with only one working eye, you have to put your phone pretty close to your face all the time … which means your iPhone stops what you’re looking at to tell you it’s too close to your face ALL THE TIME.
I know Apple increasingly wants to be seen as a credible health-tech company.
I get it must be increasingly difficult to create new features that impress.
I appreciate this alert has some value – and you can [thankfully] turn it off.
But it all feels a bit try-hard, a desperate attempt to have new news.
I get it, but it feels counter to what they once said about their innovation approach:
“New is easy, right is hard”.
OK, so they said it as a brilliant response to claims they were falling behind in innovation compared to brands like Samsung … but over the years, I’ve really felt their approach to innovation was more about integration than one-off gimmicks.
And it was good.
Until now … unless, of course, they’ve done a collab with Spec Savers and I get an email notifying me I need an eye-test and they’ve already booked my appointment.
Or they just automatically increase the font size … which could also be said for this blog.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Comment, Complicity, Corporate Evil, Egovertising, Fake Attitude, Grifting, Innovation, Management, Technology
Warning. This post is topical.
In fact, it may be the most topical post I’ve ever written on here for 20 years.
Please read, while sitting down in case shock overwhelms you.
This is the end of this public service announcement.
So over the years, at Wieden and R/GA, I had a few dealings with WeWork.
And while I admit at the very beginning I thought it was a genius idea – specifically the way they were creating a business that dramatically profited from sub-letting space that was designed to appeal to a particular audience who felt they deserved to work in a particular kind of environment – after I met them, I started thinking something didn’t quite add up.
Please don’t think I am trying to suggest I had any idea of the level of craziness that was going on because I didn’t … I just couldn’t understand why they kept talking about themselves as a tech company and experts in work environments and culture when they were just a new generation of business space renting organisation.
But billions were poured into them and they were the darling of so many – especially those investor/companies who love to talk about ‘disrupting categories’, despite the fact most are about as conservative as you can get.
But over time – as numerous books, documentaries and news reports have documented – WeWork was proven to be a case of Emperor’s New Clothes.
And founder ego and delusion.
Specifically one founder … because on the few occasions I met him, Miguel seemed decent and grounded, whereas Adam most certainly didn’t.
Zoom forward to today and the company has filed for bankruptcy protection.
All that money and they still fucked it.
Worse, the delusional, ego-maniac that is Adam Neumann – who took a good idea and killed it with his God complex – got to walk away with a level of wealth that will last a thousand lifetimes.
Multiple billions.
BILLIONS!
But this isn’t a post about unfairness or WeWork’s craziness – I’ve written loads about that – this is about the challenge to encourage new thinking while not being blinded by it.
We live in divisive times.
Everything seemingly turns into a war.
Those who believe and those who don’t … and that extends to new ideas.
The amount of time I’ve seen people immediately dismiss new concepts or thinking simply because they are not as perfect as something established that has had years to work through issues and train people to conform.
But by the same token, I’ve also seem people blindly back a new concept or thinking because they seemingly want to associate themselves with the topical.
We saw this last one on a grand scale with so many people on Linkedin suddenly announcing themselves as AI experts, in a desperate bid to exploit the market interest and the market lack of knowledge.
Which gets to the heart of this post which is the importance of independent, critical thinking.
Where you are supportive of new ideas and thinking but know it is OK to ask questions about actions and decisions. Not to tear things down, but to better understand what is being done.
Starting from a position of ‘they could be right’ rather than ‘they’re obviously wrong’.
Focusing on the business not the hype … which, as Lee Hill once told me … is often as simply as acknowledging ‘profit is sanity, turnover is vanity’.
Critical, independent thinking isn’t celebrated enough.
Oh we may think it is, but what often we’re seeing is blinkered ego thinking.
Not enough understanding.
Not enough knowledge.
Not enough homework.
Not enough questions.
Not enough patience.
WeWork has cost millions of people billions of dollars … and yet you can’t help but think it didn’t have to be that way.
Their original business idea was a good one.
But the promise of trillions seduced people to lose their ability to think.
Critically and independently.
I wrote about this years ago with a lesson from the master conman, Bernie Madoff:
“I succeeded because when you offer people a deal that’s too good to be true, they never want to look too hard into the facts. They say it’s because of trust. I say it’s because of greed.”
We need to encourage positive pessimism.
The ability to champion new ideas without blindly being seduced by them.
To want to help people succeed without falling into being an accomplice for any delusion or slight of hand.
It’s not hard … but the more we promote blinkered ‘framework and eco-system’ thinking, the more we lose the value of independent thinking and then everyone loses in every way possible.
Especially those who have exciting new ideas that just need our encouragement and time.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Creativity, Culture, Family, Hotels, Technology
A long time ago, I was working on an innovation brief for a prestigious car brand.
As I sat there, listening to all the engineers talking, I realised their focus was more on optimising and evolving rather than innovating.
By that I mean, they were more focused on what they do and how they could make it better and more useful than embracing issues that were bigger than just the industry that they’re in.
So I said it.
Silence and incredulity.
“So what would you suggest?” one of them asked.
Now in these situations, it can only go one of three ways.
1. You go blank.
2. You say something they’ve already done/thought about.
3. You say something that makes them stop and think.
In the vast majority of cases – let’s be honest – it tends to be numbers 1 or 2, but on this occasion, I said something that fell into the last bracket.
“What if you made the car the most private, personal space they could be?”
That shut them up.
They weren’t expecting that.
To be honest, either was I … but while they came back at me with all sorts of technological and legal reasons why this couldn’t be done or wouldn’t be wanted – from car data through to our desire to be always contactable through our digital devices – the chief engineer was suitably intrigued for him to ask me to work with them on exploring what it could mean and who it would appeal to, most.
Which led to a year of one of the most interesting projects I ever worked on.
I should point out that when I talked about privacy, it was not about ‘isolation’ … though there is a value in that … I was talking literally about privacy.
Or said another way, ‘what goes on in your car, stays in your car’.
And while there was a bunch of fascinating research and explorations that went on in the quest to see where this could end up, it never got to where I hoped it would. And it certainly never manifested into an actual product I thought it could become.
Which is why this graffiti I got sent recently, hit home:
To me, this encapsulated where my head was at.
The desire to have a place where we are assured privacy and/or solitude.
A cross between a hibernation and a cultural vacuum, if you will.
To be honest, this was all influenced by work we did for Taj Hotels back in 2007 … where we blocked all mobile access at certain Taj resorts.
Back then, it was less about social media and more about the intrusion of work on family holidays … but the premise – and benefit – was the same.
[For the record, it was only possible because of where technology and the law was at back then. Plus all customers opted into this experiment with the acknowledgement there were alternative contact methods available, even if not as convenient]
Of course, I appreciate that was slightly different to what I put forward with the car idea. That was more about having a ‘social kills switch’ when the car was more a mobile ‘black hole’ … but I do believe the value of privacy – even momentary privacy – will soon rival that of FOMO.
We’re already seeing it.
From VPN’s to quiet luxury.
Not because we don’t want to be connected with the world around us.
But because we want to feel we have greater control over it.