Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, China, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Consultants, Creativity, Culture, Devious Strategy, Differentiation, Diversity, Empathy, Honesty, Imagination, Innovation, Insight, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Martin Weigel, Perspective, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning, Relationships, Relevance, Resonance, Social Media, Standards, Technology, Unplanned, WeigelCampbell
A few weeks ago, the lovely/stupid folks at WARC asked me to be part of a conversation to discuss whether strategists were well equipped to embrace the opportunity that clients valued brand strategy more than any other discipline.
If you’re a WARC member, you can watch the whole discussion here, but all the panelists were asked to give a 5 minute introductory talk about their perspective on the issue.
I used no slides, but if I had, I’d have used the image at the top of this page that comes from a presentation I recently gave to Rockstar Games. Not because it’s arresting, but because if no one paid any attention to what I said, they’d still get a good idea about where I stand on things.
But for those who want to know a bit more detail, this is what I said.
_____________________________________________________________________________
“We are in an interesting situation.
We have more flavours and capabilities in strategy than ever before.
We have more opportunities to learn the craft of strategy than ever before.
And – according to reports – we have more demand from clients for strategy than ever before.
That all sounds fucking fantastic for the strategy discipline, except we continue to see …
+ Strategic thinking being given away or discounted.
+ Tighter and tighter deadlines for strategy to be concluded.
+ The abdication of strategic thought to ‘whatever the data or platform owners say’.
+ More value placed on the process of strategy than the outcome of it.
+ A reduction in strategic training and development from agencies and companies alike.
+ Huge swathes of strategists being made redundant every single day.
+ A continued reluctance to hire people of colour or people born outside of capital cities
[and when we do, we tell them they’ll only be valued if they act exactly like the incumbents]
+ And from my view, less distinctive, disruptive and long-term strategy than we’ve seen before.
So when I compare the claims ‘the strategy future is rosie’ with the reality going down all around us, something doesn’t add up.
Which leads me to think there are 3 possibilities.
1. The strategy clients want is less about strategy and more about repackaging what they’ve already decided or simply don’t want to have to deal with.
2. The strategy companies/agencies want is less about strategy and more about doing whatever will keep the client relationship happy.
3. The strategy strategists do is less about taking lateral leaps forward and more literal shuffles towards the justification of whatever our clients want to have justified.
OK, I’m being a prick … but only partially.
Somewhere along the line we all seem to have forgotten what strategy is and what it is supposed to do.
To quote my planning husband, Mr Weigel, strategy should …
+ Make things happen
+ Move things forward
+ Create new possibilities
+ Create greater value for the audience and the business.
Or said another way, strategy is about movement, momentum and direction. Where the day after a strategy is engaged, the behaviour of the company or brand is fundamentally different to the day before. A distinctive, sustainable difference designed to deliver breakthrough results born from identifying a real business problem, nuanced understanding of the audience [rather than convenient generalisations] and commercial intimacy … by that I mean knowing who the company actually is, how they operate and how they need to in these modern times.
Prof Lawrence Freedman, the author of A History of Strategy … said it best:
“Strategy is about revolution. Anything else is just tactics.”
And we’re seeing a lot of tactics these days.
And while eco-systems, frameworks, brand onions, data, D2C, UX, creative briefs, ads and comms are all parts of the strategic journey, they’re rarely THE strategy.
Nor is creating endless sub-thinking for every decision, implication or possibility because, at best – they can paralyse the potential of the strategy and end up just creating incremental change rather than fundamental or – at worse – just cause mass fucking confusion.
And don’t get me started on optimisation or user journeys or white-label solutions or writing endless decks that go nowhere … because they’re often more about keeping things the same than moving things forward.
This discipline has been my life. I believe in it and I’m employed because of it. It can create incredible opportunity and value and has some incredible talent working in it and – more excitedly – wanting to work in it. But the reality is for all the people who have strategy in their title, few are setting the stage for brilliantly creative, commercially advantageous, progressive revolution … most of us are simply executing a small part of someone else’s thinking and then going off thinking we’re hot shit.
What this means is as a discipline, we’re in danger of becoming like a contestant on Love Island, initially interesting to meet but ultimately blunt, disposable and forgettable.
And while there’s many reasons for this – some beyond our control – we are contributing to it by acting like our own worst enemy. Doing things like arguing about which ‘flavour of strategy’ is the right ‘flavour of strategy’ for the modern age.
Apart from the fact most of the ‘new flavours’ are just re-badged versions of old strategic rigour – albeit with some more consideration and expression in it – this is just an argument of ego that’s distracting us from the real issue …
We can be so much more than we think we are.
We need to be so much more than we think we are.
But to realise this we need to stop thinking of strategy as if it’s engineering or simply the act of being able to think strategically … and get back to objective, distinctive and focused revolution.
I’ll leave you with one more quote from Prof Freedman:
“Strategy is getting more from a situation than the starting balance of power suggests”.
If we’re not doing that, then we’re not just kidding ourselves … but also our entire discipline and our clients trust.
And while they’re many reasons for it – as I have already mentioned – we’re all kidding ourselves a lot these days.
As with everything, what happens next is up to us. But I hope it results in us being strategically dangerous because when we’re in full flight, that’s when we’ll show how much value we can add to commerce, culture and creativity”.
Filed under: Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Communication Strategy, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail
Watch this.
Watch it all the way through.
And if you can genuinely guess who it’s for before the end – or even which category – then you are either an absolutely twisted bastard or … nope, just a twisted bastard.
Did you?
If you didn’t, go back and do it.
EVERY SECOND OF IT.
Seriously, what the fucking fuck eh?
I mean, maybe it could be a contrived bank ad.
Or some bullshit life insurance company.
But Subway.
SUBWAY!!!???
That said, I do admire how they identified and expressed so many of the little things young boys do as they grow up.
Not necessarily the perv stuff, but definitely the hygienically questionable.
Which is appropriate, given this 2016 piece from Brazil, is definitely questionable.
I can’t help but feel the people behind this, should have studied this chart before they went off and made this piece of insanity.
Seriously, this is the sort of stuff that gives advertising people a bad name.
That we’re out of touch and out of our minds.
And not in a good way.
Thank god we have Uncommon’s brilliant B&Q work to remind people we can be good. We can be really, really good.
Or how people of a certain age react to having a £1 Viennetta after 25 years.
But my god, this Subway ‘thing’ is bad.
Like destroy-the-industry bad.
And while I appreciate different cultures have different ways of communicating. And brands can be seen very differently by different cultures … this is Subway.
The 6″/Foot long sandwich makers.
There’s no place in the World where they are considered servants to humanities quest for progress and understanding. Though I must admit I would love to shake the hand of whoever sold this Subway idea to the client – as well as the client who approved it.
Not because I want to congratulate them on pulling off something so stupid, but because I want to wish them luck trying to get their next job.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Brand, Brand Suicide, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Differentiation, Egovertising, Empathy, History, London, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Perspective, Point Of View, Positioning, Prejudice, Purpose, Relevance, Resonance, Social Divide
Let me start by saying I have a lot of respect for Charles and Maurice Saatchi.
What they did … the legacy they created … is, even now, amazing.
Their agency was responsible for so many of the ads that went on to define my childhood – both in good and bad ways – however, as I got older and entered the industry, I started to understand just how audacious they were in terms of what they thought the ad industry could be. And do.
Back then, their mantra was ‘Nothing Is Impossible’.
And they certainly lived up to it.
But while this led to some truly incredible work, it also led to the brothers ultimate downfall when they tried – amazingly and brilliantly – to buy Midland Bank.
There have been many reasons written about why their plan didn’t work out … and what happened subsequently … but I have to say, I’d imagine working for them at the time – with their sheer confidence, swagger and ambition – would have felt pretty intoxicating.
However this post isn’t about that, it’s about what happens when, in your quest to keep moving forward, you lose your values or self awareness and end up being a caricature of what you once were.
I’ve seen it happen.
I once worked with an advertising great who ended up believing everything they did was great, simply because they did it.
It didn’t take long before they were phoning in their work.
Not caring about what was going on around them.
Saying whatever they wanted because they believed whatever they said was wanted.
It was pretty tragic and I remember a very horrible conversation between us, where I said he had become the beast he had been obsessed with slaying.
It didn’t go well for me.
And, within a year, it didn’t go well for him … when his deluded arrogance took a step too far and his actions and behaviors couldn’t be ignored any longer.
Nowadays I occasionally see him spouting racist shit about immigration and foreign workers, which I find even more shocking given he spent so many years living across the World, not to mention – if rumours are to be believed – doing unspeakable things with certain people when he was in Asia.
But this isn’t a post about an old, short-lived, delusional colleague – nor it is to suggest the Saatchi brothers are anything like my old, delusional colleague … however this is about the moment [at least for me] when the Saatchi brothers revealed they may have not grown with the times, but were lost in old times.
This.
It was early Jan, 1990.
Saatchi was – I believe – the biggest agency in the World.
And the World was changing.
The party of the 80’s was over and everyone was trying to work out what the next decade had in store. One thing that had already started to happen was the fall of communism.
Protests had been happening throughout 1989 and they continued to gain momentum when, in November of that year, The Berlin Wall – a symbol of Communist/Western ideals – fell.
And it was on that wall Saatchi had placed that ad.
Not on the Western side, but the Eastern.
It wasn’t up for long, but they paid to have it there.
A way of showing their mantra.
An act of deliberate provocation for shock value.
An attempt to keep the spirit of 80’s excess alive.
A claim it was welcoming East German’s to independence and choice.
But the problem was, it wasn’t the 80’s anymore and so it came off as an act of commercial vulgarity. An act of cynical shamelessness to try and capture the headlines. And suddenly, the agency that could do no wrong suddenly went from being audacious to trying too hard.
Or said another way, Saatchi’s were trying to hold on to the past rather than lead the future.
Can you imagine an agency doing that now?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of them out there that have a complete lack of self awareness … not to mention another bunch whose entire business model appears to be ‘doing things first’ … regardless of its value to culture, creativity or commerce … however I doubt even those guys would think doing this would be a good idea today.
Or at least I hope not.
And that’s why I believe a positioning is not as good as a point of view.
Because positioning’s are set in stone.
They don’t move with the times … they stand firm, shouting their same tune regardless of what is going on. But a point of view is different. There’s flex in that. It lets you express what you believe, but how you express it is shaped by what is going on around it.
There’s longevity in a point of view.
There’s resonance in a point of view.
There’s less need to shock, because you always speak what others are trying to say.
Saatchi’s continue to do great work.
Saatchi’s continues to be filled with great people.
But I’ll always wonder what they could have been if they’d not crossed the line from audacious to caricature.
You can read the story of the Berlin Wall ad, here.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Brand, Brand Suicide, Business, China, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Corporate Evil, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Design, Differentiation, Emotion, Empathy, England, Fake Attitude, Fulfillment, Hope, Imagination, Innocence, Innovation, Insight, Loyalty, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Only In Adland, Perspective, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Positioning, Premium, Professionalism, Relevance, Research, Resonance, Supermarkets
Above is a point of sale sign from a local supermarket.
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT!!!
What a pile of utter shite.
Noticeable for it’s stupidity rather than it’s inspiration.
The sort of stuff you would expect from a 5 year old writing jokes for a Christmas Cracker, than a company with well paid staff, responsible for the commercial growth of an organisation.
So who is to blame?
Well there are many who should feel a sense of shame – from ad agencies to research companies to clients – however when I think of who started this horribleness to begin, I can’t help but feel it was at the hands of the marketing department.
Of course even they are not totally to blame.
The C-Suite, with their demands and expectations have a lot to answer for … almost as much as the investors, who say they want the companies they invest in to be good companies but they better make increasing profits every quarter.
But what I found fascinating coming back to Western markets from Asian – specifically China – was how little ambition there really was.
Oh companies would talk about it – wax lyrical about it – but when you delved a little deeper, you saw there wasn’t much there.
Instead the focus was far more about defending rather than growing, corporate convenience rather than customer understanding, explaining rather than communicating and short-term conformity rather than long term change.
But of course, ad agencies need to take their blame for this situation as well.
Too many doing whatever clients want rather than what they need.
Profiting from process over creativity.
Celebrating speed over substance.
What makes it worse is some think this leads to good work.
Effective work. Using ‘proof’ that ignores the myriad of small, separate elements that combine to drive success so they can place themselves on a self-appointed pedestal.
But there are some who have a bit more self-awareness.
Who know what they’re doing is not as good as it could be.
Or should be.
But rather than face their responsibility in all of this, they blame others for how this came about … turning to questionable research that is based on a few tweets, a couple of chats around the agency or claims every single person on the planet can have their attitudes and behaviours characterised by a singular colour or some other bollocks.
And from this, they will claim the public don’t care about smart stuff.
That they ‘don’t understand’ good ideas and writing.
They they’re simply not interested in creativity and ideas.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
I’ve got to tell you, I’m absolutely over it.
I’m over the focus on the lowest common denominator.
Let’s face it, life would be pretty horrible and boring if that is how we really operated … and contrary to popular belief, we don’t.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t elements of predictability in what we do, but to ignore the nuance … to suggest everything we aspire to is exactly the same, delivered via an identical approach … is just plain bullshit.
But here’s the kicker, because more clients and agencies seems to be adopting this approach.
White labelling, phoned-in solutions with a cool sounding names that actively destroys any sense of differentiation and distinctiveness of their brand from countless competitors while also directly insulting the intelligence of the customers they rely on to survive.
I get it’s less hassle to just agree with clients.
I get that having income coming in right now is very important.
I get that a single point-of-sale sign is not going to change the world.
But when we are willing to allow our standards to be determined by how quick we can make money, then all we’re doing is ensuring the long-term value of our industry – and the talented people in it or wanting to be in it – dies even more quickly.
And that’s why I am also over people being quick to piss on anyone trying to do something different.
Claiming it’s self indulgent.
Labelling it a failure before it’s even run.
Saying it won’t appeal to the audience … despite not knowing the brand, the brief, the audience or how people actually think or act outside of some hypothetical customer journey / strategic framework of convenience.
And yet, when you look at the brands, the work and the agencies who consistently resonate deeply and authentically with culture and drive long-term loyalty, growth and profit – it’s the usual suspects and a few newbies, like Nils and the fabulous folks at Uncommon.
Yes our job is to help our clients achieve more than they hoped. Yes our job is to attract rather than repel. But our job is also to help build the future for our clients … influencing, shaping and – sometimes – forcing dramatic change even before the masses are quite ready for it, which means doing work that challenges and provokes for all the right reasons … sometimes asking questions of the audience rather than boring them into beige submission.
And while I acknowledge there are risks in all of that, I personally believe it is far riskier to dumb everything down to it’s lowest common denominator, because every single thing we love, respect and covet has come from someone or something doing something different.
Whether that’s an idea, a product, a story or a new way of looking at the World … it has come from people who understood who we are but take us further than we imagined, pushing the journey and the story with every new chapter of what they create.
They could have taken the easy route.
They could have focused on optimising the rewards.
They could have spent their time ‘removing friction from the transactional process’.
But they didn’t. Or at least, they didn’t just focus on that.
They embraced the risk to create something bigger and more unexpectedly resonant.
Or should I say unexpectedly resonant by those judging them, because they knew exactly where they were going.
And this is why the people who are so quick to dismiss anyone trying to do something new need to understand their actions say far more about who they are and what they value than anything else. And in an industry that is fighting for its life, I put my faith in those using creativity to change the game rather than those who just talk about violation of some old rules.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brilliant Marketing Ideas In History, Comment, Communication Strategy, Corporate Evil, Crap Marketing Ideas From History!, Creativity, Culture, Loyalty, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Membership
Loyalty.
One of the most overused, misunderstood words ever used.
At least in marketing.
Too often companies/agencies think the word – or, the modern version of it, ‘membership’ – gives them the right to churn out all manner of contrived marketing under the guise of it being for the benefit of their members … when we all know it’s just a badly disguised attempt to get people to spend more money with them.
It’s so transparent you could put it in your garden and call it a greenhouse.
But recently I saw an example of a brand that understands what being a member should mean. How it should feel.
Because contrary to what many companies seem to believe, membership is as much about give as it is take.
I’ve heard far too many people narrow it down to ‘transactional value’.
What a company gives you is in proportion to what their audience gives them.
Data for discounts.
Purchases for discounts.
Information for access to stuff. And discounts.
Mechanical. Contrived. Commercial. Soulless.
And while I get the commercial value in this approach and acknowledge some do it very well … apart from the fact it’s now condition of entry for any commercial organisation, that’s not what real membership is about, just the illusion of it. And often, this illusion isn’t even for the audience, but for the marketing department of the brand and their agency.
Having a card that gives you discounts or questionable points that – if you’re lucky – can be used for some supposed benefit or other, may increase the amount of times you transact with a brand, but it doesn’t mean the audience give a shit about them.
And maybe companies don’t care about that, they just want your money.
But they should.
Because if people are transacting purely for convenience or routine, you may find they’re susceptible to going to someone who shows they understand who they really are, not just how much money they have to spend.
Nothing highlights what real membership is like, like sport.
Yes they expect stuff from their team.
Yes they can be vocal when things go wrong.
But …
Members can deal with loss.
Members can deal with pain.
Members can even deal with scandal.
All they really want is to feel their presence counts.
That they’re seen. That they’re valued. That they’re respected.
That both parties are putting in equal amounts of graft for the common goal.
Not so the club can flog them more of their stuff, but so they can feel they play an acknowledged and accepted role in making the team better, more distinctive and more special.
And while there’s a bunch of programmes that do this – and some do involve giving discounts and access to products before they hit the market – the most powerful are where teams target members hearts, not just their wallets.
Doing stuff they value, not what they want you to value.
Stuff they didn’t have to do, but still did.
Stuff that means they went out of their way rather than expecting their members to always go out of theirs.
It doesn’t even have to be a grand gesture, it just needs to be a gesture that proves you get how important it is to them, rather than just say you do.
But here’s the best bit … when you do that properly, you find those members will want to buy more of your stuff anyway.
No need for any contrived ‘membership’ marketing.
No need to claim you are as loyal to them as they are to you.
No need to push ‘signing up’ every time they spend any amount of cash.
Because ‘transactional value’ is a byproduct of the emotional relationship you have together, not the cause.
You’d have thought brands would have got this by now, especially as the approach so many currently favour is not that different to when the internet first started and people would get inundated with ‘e-newsletters’ from brands, simply because they once handed over their email address because they were interested in a single thing they said.
I often wonder if the brands that follow this approach think Argos has the best membership program in the Universe, simply because people keep stealing pens from their stores.
If you are one of those wondering this, let me help you.
They don’t. People just steal their pens from them. Because they can.
Me included.
And yes, I appreciate someone could say that’s ‘transactional value’ but actually it’s just shitty free advertising from a shitty free pen. It’s the same approach Virgin Atlantic had with their Upper Class salt and pepper sets that literally had ‘stolen from Virgin Atlantic’ printed on the bottom of them.
Because it was free advertising. Literally included in their cost of operations.
Look, having programs in place that drives sales value is a smart thing to do.
But doing the same as everyone else and claiming people have some sort of deeper connection with you because of it, is ridiculous.
Transactional value is the opposite of what membership is really about.
Because membership isn’t just about what you have, but how it makes you feel.
Or said another way, who it makes you feel you are … who you are a part of.
And with that, have a look at this …