We are people

Aleksandr Orlov can interrupt me anytime!

I have just finished Paul Adams excellent book "Grouped". You can read selected Chapters at Paul's blog here .

Grouped concisely and persuasively gathers together a wide body of research with the aim of showing readers  "how to rebuild their business around social behaviour and create products that people tell their friends about" At the heart of this is a fundamental challenge to marketers and creative agencies to rethink and re purpose advertising and content:

''Creative agencies the world over try to make content that people will spread. In order to do so, they need to understand what people share, and why. The vast majority of ''viral'' campaigns don't spread at all  and this is often because the content is factual. Many research studies have shown that people don't share facts, they share feelings"

Adams pulls together a rich and accessible array of evidence that challenges our over reliance on models that grossly exaggerate the role of rational thought and significance of brands in peoples everyday thoughts and social interactions.  From this, and a wealth of other material  Adams builds to a strong critique of 'ineterruption marketing':

"there are two main problems with interruption marketing. The first is that it is a terrible experience for people....in social settings we don't like it when people interrupt our conversations and research has shown that we don't like it when marketers do it either. The second problem with interruption marketing is that people have a limited amount of time and attention. Because more and more marketers are vying for this attention, fewer and fewer of them are heard. Instead we ignore everything and walk away from all of the choices''

Adams continues:

"Both of these problems are becoming worse. We are being bombarded by more and more information yet our capacity for remembering and processing this information remains the same."

He sums this up with this graph:

 

 

For me, this is where Adams much needed argument for re purposing marketing falters slightly. As he clearly recognises elsewhere in Grouped, in order to move things on you need to start with a realistic assessment of where things are now.  But I don't think the narrow characterisation in this graph acurately describes  how "interruption" or any other form of marketing actually works. It's simply not all about attention.

Here I think Adams may have been tempted into an over simplification to set up his advocacy of permission marketing. There is no doubt that a great deal of marketing still hangs on to an overly rationalised view of the world. But all advertising  has worked, and will continue to work, in much more expansive ways beyond attention and conscious message trasfer whether practitioners, and its critics, recognise it or not.

Paul Feldwick's excellent paper 'Exploding the Message Myth', primarily written using examples from classic UK TV advertising  (read it on the ThinkBox website here) argues powerfully for an entertainment based, 'everything communicates', model which would support many of Adams requirements for socially focused content.

Before I quote from Feldwick, here are another few key quotes from Adams  on how "environmental cues bias us" :

•  We talk about and are influenced by the things that surround us- we can influence peoples behaviour by cuing them with a specific perception. This is called priming and can be done by words, sounds or things in peoples environment
• We are influenced by how things are presented- every decision we make is framed in a certain context and this framing can radically change our perceptions and behaviour 

In "The Message Myth" Feldwick argues that the message paradigm is more a description of the culture of business (hard wired rationalism) and less about how things actually work- successful campaigns happen not because of this model but in spite of it: the message is incidental in most successful brand-building TV commercials-

"What people are experiencing and responding to is a wealth of material, visuals, music, dialogue, timing, colour, entertainment, emotions.... ads can influence our behaviour without getting our conscious attention, and without us being able to consciously remember them" 

But it is Feldwick's thoughts on the work of Paul Watzlawick and "how communication works in the context of human relationships"  that is particularly pertinent to Adam's objectives of re purposing creative content around social behaviour.   

Feldwick focuses on 3 of Watzlawicks ideas:

1. It is impossible not to communicate. "Whatever we do or whatever we don't do, intentionally or unintentionally, we are sending out signals for others to make sense of. In fact everything we do then is communication. So everything about a brand communicates and every aspect of a commercial communicates"
2. Human communication is both digital and analogue:  (NOTE: FELDWICK IS REFERENCING WORK FROM 1967 SO THESE TERMS ARE USED DIFFERENTLY THAN WE WOULD USE THEM TODAY) Digital communication is precise, it's either verbal or numerical. It's logical, conscious explicit and intellectual. We couldn't do without this clarity and precision in many contexts, but it's not the only kind of communication that we do as humans.Analogue communication might be verbal too, but it could also be visual, audible, gestural or tactile and the power of an image, or a poem or a story or a hug or a piece of music is that we're not immune to it. It's non-deniable. We experience it to a large extent through our unconscious
3.  All communication is about relationship as well as content. "And analogue communication, which includes image, gesture and tone of voice is especially crucial in influencing relationships. That's why if we see the task of advertising as building and strengthening a quasi-personal relationship between the consumer and the brand, this is going to happen predominantly through the analogue mode"

Using this broader communications context those engaged in creating "content that spreads" can actually learn a lot from some classic "interruption" based traditional marketing. The examples Feldwick uses in his paper (PG Tips Chimps, Budweiser Whaaats Up etc.) and other popular favourites like the Smash Martians  (I still have a birthday card from my mum with the Smash Martians on the front....) and Compare the Meerkat  transcend their message and work by framing on a grand scale, becoming part of our culture and changing the context in which we make decisions. Just for fun, here are the Chimps and the Martians

  

 

  

And here is Aleksandr Orlov, perhaps the recent gold standard for integrated creative ideas. This ad has been viewed 525,855 times on YouTube and Aleksandr has over half  a million fans on Facebook and 40,000 followers on Twitter. Apart from those last couple of social media stats how much  has really changed since the Chimps and the Martians....?

 

So interruption is not only about attention and message transfer.  And it is not necessarily incompatible with  social influence if the content is rich and interesting enough. As Shiv Singh from Pepsi recognises in his recent Harvard Business Review blog, marketing will be welcomed if it is entertaining and offers a ''narrative arc'' that ads something to the conversation:

"Increasingly, consumers care most about items like what's trending in pop culture, what's about to become really important, and what music, entertainment, sports or celebrities they need to care about. All this typically breaks online today. Reflecting that and sharing it with wider audiences in ways that correlate to the brand's objective, is going to become a new role for TV advertising. It's going to give street credibility to the brands. It's going to start with those 15-second spots but soon all advertising will cover this"

Adams concludes Grouped by arguing that "we need to move away from interuption models, and towards permission models".  He feels this is the only way to deal with the  increasing breakdown in trust he sees between people and marketers.

Trust is a real issue. But I don't think the solution is so obvious or dichotomous. Marketing definitely needs to move from monologue to dialogue and pay more attention to people's real lives and what matters to them.

But the truly skilled conversationalist doesn't only speak when he has been spoken to, and  he doesn't build trust by merely agreeing with or reinforcing the prevailing opinion of the group.  He challenges, offers new perspectives  by connecting with the group through what he is saying, but also the way he is saying it.

In this context I still see a legitimate and important role for "interruption"marketing. It certainly needs to be rescued from the reductionist tenets of the rational messaging paradigm.  But when it is working at its full, expansive, potential  as an "aesthetic whole", providing a "narrative arc" for the brand in peoples wider day to day cultural lives, it still has a key role to play in social influence.   

The Master Switch:why social media research needs to know its media history

On ESOMAR’s guidelines on social media research (see here)  I am instinctively in agreement with people like Vision Critical’s Ray Pointer who  urges ‘the whole of commercial market research to match the 21st Century, rather than try to keep shoehorning the new world into the old constructs’.

But, of course, this is easier said than done. Innovation is not a benign cumulative process. It creates many more losers than winners.  Regulation is not only about ethics. It is also about commercial survival. And lessons from the 20^th century can tell us a great deal about the pitfalls to avoid in the 21^st.

Tim Wu hammers these points home in 'The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires'. Wu delivers profound warnings from media history: not just for traditionalists but for the digital revolutionaries and their assumptions of an inherently open future.

Inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of innovation and the inevitability of ‘creative destruction’  as the driving force of capitalist competition, Wu describes  a recurring economic cycle of competition  where every revolutionary media of the 20^th century (radio, telephone, television etc.) started out open and unrestricted only to end up closed and consolidated in the hands of the few.

‘In the natural course of things, the new only rarely supplements the old; it usually destroys it. The old, however, doesn’t, as it were, simply give up but rather tried to forestall death or co-opt its usurper-a la Kronos…

Crucially regulation is a key tool in this process

‘allying itself with the state, a dominant industrial force can turn a potentially destructive technology into a tool for perpetuating domination and delaying death’  

 

Unfortunately for market research, it is by no means, a ‘dominant industrial force’. But social media cross cuts many dominant industrial forces and certainly represents one of MRs greatest sources of ‘creative destruction’.

Many researchers have a burning desire to embrace the new world. But they are simply unable to do so because of their legacy business models which are, when all is said and done, built around the production of neatly packaged consumer data rather than the organic creation of meaning from naturally evolving behaviour and attitudes

So in this context it’s worth thinking about what is really motivating ESOMAR and other professional bodies like the UK’s MRS who have published similar guidelines. As much as they appear to be about, ethics, data protection and privacy the guidelines can also be seen as rather transparent and desperate attempt to reach for the consumer insight master switch.

Wherever you stand in this relatively local difficulty, when we think about the true nature of ‘the Cycle’ that Wu describes we are left with a starkly realist perspective of how commercial competition around media and new technology works.  Regulatory control is a key battleground in the fight for competitive advantage and there are few areas where the stakes have ever been higher than they are in social media. Moreover, assumptions that any technology is inherently more open than another are dangerously naïve.

In concluding Wu leaves us with this warning:

‘The internet with its uniquely open design has led to a moment when all other information networks have converged upon it….this ‘convergence’ was universally thought a good thing but it’s dangers have now revealed themselves as well. With every sort of political, social, cultural and economic transaction having to one degree or another gone digital this proposes an awesome dependence on a single network and no less vital need to preserve it’s openness from imperial designs…our demand for bandwidth- the new black gold- is insatiable. Let us then not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek dominion over those resources we can’t do without  

So ESOMAR may be guilty of  mixing up ethics with an attempt to reassert control for a model that is being left behind by rapidly evolving technology and human behaviour.

But social media and newmr evangelists can't make any claims for the high ground based on any imagined inherent openness in new technology. And even the most ardent will surely conclude that genuine and fierce debate and competition around regulation is a healthy sign. The fewer conflicting voices there are, the more likely it is that someone has their hands poised on the switch.

So in the end my attitude to ESOMARs guidelines is a bit like an album review I read years ago- the critic concluded ‘I don’t like it much, but I am glad it’s on the shelf’.

Tidy Up! And over 100 other ways Brian Eno could inspire creativity in the era of ‘real time’ and ‘big data’

If you have read my modest collection of posts so far you will have gathered that I am a big fan of John Gray’s ‘Obliquity’. It seems to me that Gray makes an irrefutable case for the power of unintended consequences across all facets of business. I take three key points from Gray:

• The world is simply too complex for us to know or predict all of the consequences of our actions
• Most of our business practices and processes don’t reflect this reality.
• Working in an overly direct way, focussed on narrowly defined objectives, ignores this fundamental truth and results in less successful outcomes

I have been convinced by the power of unintended outcomes since I read all of the great Scottish enlightenment thinkers for my degree at Glasgow University in the early 90’s. I have also spent a great deal of my career working with quantitative market research data and, therefore, working within a business culture that is striving  for the elusive metrics and models that can offer genuine ROI through the reliable ‘prediction’ of outcomes.  

 So I feel a powerful ambivalence when I reflect on much of the new thinking around ‘real time’ and ‘big data’ in marketing and newmr. There is no doubt that big data has the potential to offer unprecedented support for decision making. Deep, rich, unmediated and accessible data is good. But the way we are operationalizing it could be a problem.

Marketing and big data’s rapidly growing range of algorithms and  dash boarded decision tools,  risks marginalising  the serendipity that seems to drive a great deal of game-changing  thinking and innovation. If we are not careful, even the more modest breakthroughs that provide new perspectives on our work on a day to day basis could be harder to come by. In this sense, obliquity is being designed out of our professional lives.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. There is nothing inherent in data or technology that is anti-creativity or anti obliquity. I was watching Brian Eno being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight the other day. Eno’s whole career is founded on harnessing new ideas and technology to invent new disciplines and genres.  He was on Newsnight to talk about whether creativity is heightened in challenging economic times. But in his own oblique way he ended up making more interesting connections about technology’s role in his latest projects around ‘generative music’ and open source methods of creative collaboration.      

 

The crucial thing about Eno is that he gets these breakthrough outcomes because of the way he approaches new information and technology. Obliquity is built in to everything he does. Back in the 1970’s along with the British painter Peter Schmidt, Eno realised that the pressure introduced by commercial objectives and deadlines (the clock ticking on expensive studio time etc.) was causing him to lose touch with his most productive methods of working.

The solution was the development of a set of Oblique Strategy Cards that were designed to jog the memory about alternative ways of working:

‘The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

You can read more on the origins of Oblique Strategy cards here or on Eno’s own website.

Does any of this sound familiar? If Eno recognised these blockages and pressures in the liberal avant garde music scene of the 70’s what is the impact on the time poor research or marketing exec in the world of real time big data? Surely we need to be equally disciplined and systematic in building scope for obliquity into our data enabled decision making processes.

Eno and Schmidt envisioned oblique strategies as a collaborative process from the outset. There are also lots of places where you can access the original cards and user contributed strategies online. Try this one. Many of the cards are, naturally, a bit more specific to the ‘creative’ arts. But there are remarkably few that won’t make you think about your own work in a different way. Here is a selection of the ones I was presented with when I tried it today:

• ‘state the problem as clearly as possible’
• ‘don’t be frightened of clichés
• ‘use your own ideas’
• ‘How would someone else do it?’
• ‘Tidy up’

I am not suggesting that a pack of cards is the answer to preserving creative thinking in the commercial world. But I do think that championing oblique processes is of critical importance. And I would love to find out what would happen if we integrated random oblique strategies into our real time dashboards!

Are 'big ideas' bad ideas?

Richard Serra- 'The Hedgehog and the Fox'

I love modernism. I am the kind of guy who instinctively tweets ‘SAVE PRESTON BUS GARAGE!’ when I hear on Radio 4 that it is going to be demolished. My favourite place in London is the Barbican.

Being a fairly typical 40-something agency bod with heavy rimmed glasses, a growing collection of tweed jackets and a degree in politics l have, of course, developed a well -honed rationale and narrative for my love of modernism: it’s about championing a grand vision and utopianism; and lamenting that this ambition has been lost in our more pragmatic era……

But deep down I know it’s about something else: childhood memories and nostalgia. When I was a kid we lived in Cumbernauld, a New Town on the outskirts of Glasgow. We moved away when I was nine.

So, when I am intuitively navigating the labyrinth Barbican walkways, or hanging out on the South Bank, I am probably riffing off memories of my 1970’s childhood: shopping with my mum and my sisters with my brother in his push chair, lunch in the cafeteria at Woolco (the long lost department store big brother of Woolworths) or walking through the town centre to the Wimpy Bar with its red Formica tables and giant plastic tomatoes dispensing ketchup.

Passing through Cumbernauld a few years ago confronted me with the reality: nostalgia was strong and the utopian vision doesn’t stand up. On the Channel 4 programme ‘Demolition’, the entire town centre (conceived as one ‘mega-structure…) was voted the UK’s most hated building. Cumbernauld is now the preeminent case study, among countless others, of modernist utopianism gone wrong. Contrast the architect’s vision here and the present reality here:

 

So how can modernism go so wrong? Of course, there are many reasons. But in his recent book Obliquity, John Kay offers a powerful explanation of how modernism is just one example of a much wider arrogance and tendency to oversimplify the world.  Reminding us of 'Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between 'the hedgehog – who knows one big thing- and the fox- who knows many little things' (pg 132) he argues that good decision makers are the ones who recognise the limits if their knowledge.

 

Utopian modernism is a prominent example of hedgehog thinking:

 

At first sight, visionaries who seek to rebuild whole cities seem engaged in extraordinary feats of imagination. But in reality Le Corbusier’s schemes were characterised by a few ideas pursued with obsession. Interactions among people are critical, their organisation necessarily complex, our understanding of them incomplete. The planning of Le Corbusier, or Robert Moses, can be based only on a crass simplification and the repetition of familiar themes’

 

Kay extends his argument for a more oblique approach to decision making across all disciplines and walks of like- social and economic phenomena are simply too complex. Everywhere we look, the paradoxes of obliquity and unintended consequences challenge our overly rational and direct approach to the world: the happiest people do not pursue happiness, the most profitable companies are not the most profit orientated, the wealthiest people are not the most wealth orientated......

Of course, Kay's ideas on obliquity also have profound implications for how we view our professional and business life. In the highly competitive market big ideas and simple, easily accessible models are the prized currency that drives competitive advantage. As Kay puts it:

‘…explicit hedgehogs who claim to predict the future will always attract a larger audience than eclectic foxes who acknowledge they can't, even if the larger audience learns nothing from the predictions' (pg 133)

But Kay’s argument is that ‘adaptation is smarter than we are’. Our big ideas, models and abstractions are, in reality, spurious attempts at predicting business outcomes. Obliquity may seem chaotic, but it is the truly dispassionate real world approach- ‘because it acknowledges the universality of uncertainty and complexity’.

'Give me a one handed economist' goes the saying, but careful judgement really is a matter of 'on the one hand and on the other'

So, back to Preston Bus Garage... Maybe I am hard wired to love the aesthetics of modernism’s finest achievements. But I am probably going to stop short of signing the petition to save the garage. I may like it’s futuristic looks. But I don’t live in Preston. And maybe the people of Preston have worked out through decades of experience what the visionaries and planners could never know: that Preston Bus Garage is simply not a very nice place to wait for a bus in the 21^st century.

 

Commercial Types: Embrace Chaos!

Back in March I found this from Malcolm Gladwell on Big Think: 'Creative Types:Embrace Chaos'

It struck a chord with me for a couple of (opposing) reasons:

I like the reminder that creativity is hard. Creativity is a much used and abused term (see also innovation’ and I am sure you have your own favourites…..). By asserting that it is about ‘embracing chaos’ and 'reversing the normal human tendency.. to edit'. Gladwell reminds us
that genuine creativity is a rare and special thing. Even for the talented and committed it can remain an elusive goal. You get there by giving yourself a hard time: never being in your comfort zone and living with constant uncertainty and complexity without any guarantee of a pay-off.

However, I disagree ‘with Gladwell’s narrow characterisation of commercial business as necessarily outside this creative universe

Maybe he is just being realistic about the way many of us approach commercial life when he provides this notional example of the role of 'Head of Ivory Soap' at Procter & Gamble:

'your job is to sell more soap and if you get distracted by some interesting, but ultimately
marginal, subsidiary issue you won't sell as much soap....that's a world that
demands focus'

I am sure this isn’t how the teams at Unilever saw it when they came up with ‘Dirt is Good’ or Dove’s Real Women. Surely, the best way to ‘sell more soap’ (or anything else) is to be open to every
possibility in the lives of the people who use our products? I think we have the best chance of discovering these possibilities if we aspire to the same level of creativity that Gladwell reserves for ‘creative types’.

Adopting such creative principles may seem counter-intuitive and impracticable to businesses (clients or agencies) struggling with information overload. Many businesses think they need to get
more focus, to get better at editing. Of course we need techniques and approaches that can effectively navigate the overflowing river of information and data. But in pursuing this control
too many businesses end up being defined and limited by reductionist approaches
and behaviour.

Embracing chaos may be going too far, but brands and their agencies need
to acknowledge and become more comfortable with the messy dynamism of people’s
lives. The commercial world is no different from the creative world- in both if we overdo the 'focus' and editing we find ourselves in a closed world with rigid models that insulate us from the
real lives of the people we are trying to engage.’

A revolutionary idea- We are people!

We are all immersed in the rhetoric of revolution and change.
Obviously there is some really great, game changing stuff happening. But there is also a lot that seems to be impervious to change…It feels like the revolution is being exaggerated….

This, of course, is completely natural. In ‘Leading the Revolution’ Gary Hamel
identifies our existing ‘mental models’,the implicit assumptions and habits we build about the world, as a key factor influencing our ability to embrace change:

- ‘A business model is a thing. The mental model is a set of beliefs about the thing’.

- ‘Mental models spring out of and reinforce the current business model’

- ‘The more successful a company has been, the more deeply etched are its mental models’

Think of how the marketing, advertising and market research industries have grown over the last few decades-we are a success story. We have powerful ‘mental models’. And success can breed inertia even for businesses that are apparently keenly pursing innovation:

‘You can immerse yourself in what’s changing but you will only see the opportunities to leverage change in novel ways if you can escape the shackles of tradition. There is much that individuals cannot imagine simply because they are prisoners of their own dogma’.

For me, you can see these ‘mental models’ in the hard wired language and terminology marketing and research use to describe people. Terms like ‘consumer’, audience’, ‘target’, ‘respondent’, and many others, are the standard references of our business models.

But this continual process of defining people in terms of what we want from them (‘buy our stuff’, ‘listen to our message’, ‘answer our questions’) generate a narrow outlook that reduces our ability to fully ‘walk the talk’ of engagement, collaboration and dialogue.

And the disruption we are experiencing may not necessarily lead to anything more than a superficial reappraisal of our dogma. As we gain more knowledge and the world seems less certain, more ambiguous and contradictory (at once rational and emotional, social and individualistic, conscious and unconscious etc. etc.) many of us seek refuge in the safety of familiar concepts and settle
for cosmetic tweakage of traditional approaches.

If you don’t agree, think how our mental models persist into our new approaches. How many brands treat social media as simply another channel, how many research agencies have resuscitated panels and self-completion questionnaires by rebranding them as communities or mobile apps?

The genuinely innovative stuff is out there. But our implicit tendency to squeeze new learning and technology into an existing paradigm is having a profound impact on our ability to realise our full potential.

So in preparing this blog I wondered: where would I start if I wanted to step outside my dogma and the mental models of marketing and research? If I stripped everything back, what would be left?

Then I thought about recurring discussions I have had with various clients and colleagues over the years about how we rarely talk about ‘people’.

So I thought I would start there. What if we used that simple observation to continually check our dogma and mental models? How would the new ideas, new business models and transformative technology look if we set aside the illusion of control offered by our familiar constructs?

What if our businesses were genuinely open to all of the contradictory forces that real people present? What methods and approaches would stand up to this scrutiny?

Genuinely open and social business is certainly more challenging, messier and less certain. But it is also more stimulating and rewarding and may be the only way to achieve the rich engagement and understanding that we aspire to.

I hope that’s what this blog turns out to be about!