Three decades ago, only the brightest minds of academia could pore over the dense pages of journals in the libraries of prestigious universities. Then, with the advent of the internet and databases like LexisNexis, any university or college could distribute the same information over a telephone line. Now anyone with a smartphone can instantly download studies with pages numbering into the thousands in a matter of seconds. When was the last time you downloaded a white paper on your iPad? Did you read it in its entirety? Our data-driven economy has created data-driven businesses, data-driven thinkers, and a data-driven society. Ironically, the same technology and medium which made so much information accessible has shrunk our attention span to the length of exactly 140 characters. Yet, in another ironic twist, the internet has become a place for two-way information that relies on a loosely knit assembly of content creators. Everyone is fighting for their voice, and fighting even harder for an audience. This makes it more difficult for academics, governments, businesses, non-profits, and others that often have to tell their story in numbers. Enter the infographic. When was the last time you read a tweet, clicked on a bitly URL, and loaded a one page graphic full of facts and statistics? Did you read it in its entirety? A better question is, was it meant to be read, skimmed, or simply viewed? No longer are we living in an age of poorly constructed pie charts and bar graphs, rather we find ourselves surfing through a gallery full of canvas worthy digital graphics. In a stroke of creative and quantitative genius, advertising agencies have mashed up the strengths of their analysts and designers to creatively tell the story of their clients' research and data. They've packaged it perfectly into a compact and concise attention-getting visual format. Data visualization has entered its renaissance era. If ever there was a Michelangelo, it would be Jesse Thomas of Jess3. Checkout some of his team's work on the Jess3 blog.
Candy Chang is a New Orleans resident and innovative installation artist and community builder. Using the ultra-low-tech power of stickers, she's inviting residents to conceive of new uses for abandoned buildings and/or otherwise wasted civic spaces. Her stickers say "I Wish This Was ________" leaving the blank for anyone and everyone to lend a dream, a hope, a joke, whatever. It's super smart, simple, and engaging.
I'm a big fan of Dave Trott's blog. I see his posts as life lessons through the lens of advertising. A couple of days ago in a post on logic, he quoted Akio Morita, the founder of Sony:
“The greatest assistance I had in building my company was the total failure of nerve on the part of Western businessmen to move without research.”
And also Steve Jobs:
“It’s not the public’s job to know what they’re going to want. It’s my job to know what they’re going to want.”
We do a lot of research, but I can't help sympathizing with both thoughts above. That doesn't mean I disagree with research (which would be pretty silly for me), but I've seen my fair share of the wrong kind of research. In previous jobs, I've seen research used to dumb down breakthrough ideas and make them more mainstream. I've seen research be used to justify a client firing an agency; I've seen researchers saying that they were able to measure the effectiveness of an ad by having a few people look at a storyboard.
However, I've also seen research provide insights to doctors to improve the way they work with cancer patients. I've seen people crying in research as they discuss the difficulties of raising "problem kids". I've seen lightning bolt insights about brands that come from observing people in bars or on cruise ships (yeah, those are the best projects).
What I'm saying in a round about way is that research gets a bad rap as the enemy of creative purity...as if asking people to share an opinion sullies the integrity of an idea. That's BS.
To research or not isn't the question. There's always a time, a place and a way to make research great - the good researchers know that and the best clients too.
At the start of my career in the early 90s, I interned at a new agency in London called Mustoe Merriman Herring and Levy. I was a wannabe junior planner, so when I met with the planning director, I was determined to learn as much as I could from him. He passed on this pearl of wisdom about planning that I still remember today. He told me a story about commuting on the train during the winter. It was a dark evening and as his train slowed down to a station, he looked out the window and was able to see into the kitchen of a house near the train tracks. In the kitchen, a woman stood at the sink doing dishes. The train stopped and he was able to watch her for a moment, and she was singing (maybe to a song on the radio, maybe not). The house was close enough to the train that he was able to see the brand name of the dish detergent she was using. He ended his story by saying..."that's planning".
I thought of that the other day when I came across this wonderful series of short films about the lives of New Yorkers run in the NYT back in the summer of 2009. It showed me that even though we are often looking for big insights or truths that resonate with huge numbers of people, it's the individual stories within that reveal the gold. The piece is called 1 in 8 million. A belated Happy New Year from Egg - 2010 has started like 2009 finished, hence the rather late first post of the year!
From a business point of view, the last year has essentially been about the economy and what we were once told was the worst recession since the Great Depression. I've long held the belief that the depth of recessions are manifestations of our own fears, i.e. we're told there's a big recession, so we slow our spending and boy, wow, we're suddenly in a recession. I'm not discounting all the significant economic indicators, but I believe false pessimism leads to a deeper hole than one we might originally have been in. So I was interested and chagrined to see this graph, courtesy of the Societé Générale which shows how economists are largely far more optimistic about recessions than the reality.
As James Montier, the author of the report wrote, "when you look at their record, it's clear that the three blind mice have more credibility". A question I'll pose now and try to answer later is this...if economists can be this wrong about predicting future behavior, how about brands?
I was reading Scamp's blog the other day and he was referring to this long, but brilliant article by Paul Feldwick. Anyone who works in communications should read Paul Feldwick- he's written for years on brands and his wisdom is timeless, regardless of how technology changes. I still use his division of "strategic idea, creative idea and executional idea" in creative development research. Feldwick's article basically debunks any advertising (or research of such), that is based on communicating a rational message, because he doesn't fundamentally believe that rational messages work to convince us of anything. Instead, he argues that emotional associations are what matter and all successful brand building advertising is based on this...intentionally or not. A lot of his examples are from the UK in the 70s and 80s, so they rang true for me, but he discusses the Wassup campaign from Bud a few years ago as a perfect example that readers of the Dozen should understand. The original Bud campaign and its many spin offs had no product message, no mention of hops, barley, glacial spring water, brewing method or whatever- but was still hugely successful because it built positive sociability associations with the brand. Scamp (a creative director at BBH in London) calls for briefs to state these desired associations rather than "main message communication". This obviously has implications for how we research advertising. It interested me, because when I think back to all the creative development research I've done, when I ask people to play back the "main thing the ad was telling you about brand Y", I know when the work is succeeding when they describe an association (makes brand Y seem sophisticated, or when I want to stand out, I'll buy brand Y) vs. when they play back a rational thought. These emotional associations can then be linked back to that individual's life in a much richer and more evocative way and arguably this makes communicating at this level more powerful. Feldwick's theory holds water in lots of categories - even in automotive, where you'd imagine that rational claims would be crucial to helping people justify their purchase. Remember these two gems that work entirely at an emotional level. The only place I can think rational claims can work is after you've just spent money - it helps soften the blow. But for me, it always all about heart over head, which is why I also drink Guinness and eat Cadbury chocolate.
What do you think of Microsoft Vista? That was the question posed to a sample of 140 respondents by Microsoft researchers trying to resurrect the image of the beleaguered operating system brand, dubbed a "work in progress" by Steve Ballmer. Everyone knows the trouble that MS have had with Vista and the damage it has done to their brand - most consumers have opted to stay on XP or switch to Mac. Apple, always ready to take a pop at PCs created some wryly amusing ads about how crappy Vista was here and here. So Microsoft have created a new campaign showing off their new OS, called Mojave... or is it? Those tricky nerds weren't really launching Mojave, it was a means of duping respondents into thinking something was new. It was really just Vista in disguise. The Mojave Experiment went like this: Step 1 - Establish a Benchmark - Ask respondents what they thought of Vista - most said "crap" despite never having used it. Step 2 - Show them a "new" OS, billed as new and improved - called Mojave. Have a guide hold their hand through the demo, showing off all the coolest features. Step 3 - The Big Reveal - hey suckers, that wasn't Mojave, it was really Vista and you were completely wrong about it being crappy - as you've just seen, it's awesome! I use a PC and actually like it, despite knowing that Macs have a cooler and more creative image. I detest the smug way that Mac users assume a superiority that they are smarter, more creative and their computers never have any problems. However, I have to say that this Mojave Experiment is totally flawed. Hats off to MS for trying to address the abysmal brand image of Vista, but this wasn't the right way to do it. Here are the reasons: 1. Of course in a controlled environment, with a totally great new laptop with big processing power and a guide who knows the system backwards, Vista is going to look awesome. Wait until you're on your own and your slightly older PC crashes a million times whenever it tries to install updates, then see if you like it so much. 2. In 30 minutes or however short the experiment was, you can make something look fabulous. It's the Pepsi Challenge - on one sip, Pepsi beats Coke all the time. How about after a whole can? 3. Respondents were primed - they were told they'd be looking at something new - and therefore immediately open to it being better. When they were shown Mojave/Vista in such a great light (run by an expert on a great computer), it's inevitable that they'd give it higher marks than their perceived impression of Vista. So from a brand perspective I can see that they're trying to get good PR. From a research perspective it was badly executed and that's ultimately what I walk away thinking of Vista. Again.
We can reasonably assume that all adults living today, even those that work in marketing, were once teenagers. But it is amazing to see how soon we forget how it felt to adolesce; that above all, most teenagers want to be treated and spoken to as what they are – young adults – and not coddled, patronized or dismissed by society as we so often do. A few groundbreaking campaigns in recent years have dared to communicate with young adults as they are: intelligent, thoughtful, fully aware participants in society. Most notable of these is probably the Truth anti-smoking campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Following close in its heels, however, is this anti-binge drinking campaign (a realistic goal advocating moderation not abstinence in alcohol consumption - click on the picture to see one of the spots) launched in England introduced by Amelia Torode in her blog. Similar to the truth campaign, these TV spots de-glamorize the over-indulgence of alcohol by displaying, in naked clarity, how very unaspirational drunkenness really is. Bravo, well done. Three spots featured: The Girl's Night Out The Boy's Night Out Fashion Show
We Feel Fine[dot]org was created a couple of years ago and it's tremendous fun to navigate around. If you're not familiar with the site, it trawls all the blogs in the world for the expression "I feel" or "I am feeling" and then grabs the words that immediately follow. The site allows you to cross reference feelings by age, gender, weather, country and year - so for example you could see how 30-39 year old men in the UK were feeling in 2006 (9.4x more "positive" than normal, but also 1.3x more "weird"). It's a brilliant social project. Creator Jonathan Harris can be seen here at TED talking about it.
I had high hopes for the site for it to answer some of the most pressing questions of the current day: are we happier and more optimistic now than 2 years ago? Are people in Boulder feeling freakier than those in Chicago? The way the site gathers information made some of these comparisons difficult to make, but what struck me was less the differences between cultures, and more the commonalities between people around the world. The most often cited feeling (whether in the USA, Iraq, France or Australia...or a dozen other places I searched) was "better" - even in today's gloomy times.
The other top global feelings? "Guilty", "Bad", "Right", "Good". Sure, there's nuances between places and ages and genders but fundamentally what this told me was how similar we all are and how fundamental human truths run between us all.
So if you work in the world of brands, I challenge you not to get entirely sucked in by this little site, created by the smart Noah Briar and taking the blogosphere by storm. It's popping up everywhere. Thanks to PSFK for the original link, but I've found reference to it here, here and here. It's even been picked up by the Wall St. Journal. Based on the simple truth that brands exist as constructs in our heads, whatever you associate with a brand, is essentially that brand. The site pulls up a logo and you just enter a word or phrase that comes immediately to mind. It then generates a big tag cloud of associations with that brand. Register on the site and have a play. Hard not to get drawn in, especially to the bit that lets you guess the brand based on the tag cloud.
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