China Set Traps To Capture Dangerous NSA Cyberattack Weapons: New Report – the implications of China set traps for attacks and repurposing the NSA’s expensive code has seriously difficult optics. Leaked NSA tools have already been used by cybercriminals, it is likely the China set traps may faciliate it. More security related content here.
The 10,000-hour rule has been disproven. Now what? — Quartz – what another Malcolm Gladwell ‘truth’ disproved? His books are entertaining but the amount of people who take them as gospel is astounding. His works are the QAnon of middle class dinner party discussions
China’s Sinopec launches coffee brand with 27,000 locations | News | Campaign Asia – I like the way they’ve named the coffee after RON (octane) values of petrol. It harks back to the cup of joe which would have been filter coffee in a roadside diner or doughnut shop. You can take your flat whites and hipster shite and shove it up your (well you get the idea). But I do wonder if it fits in with the Chinese consumption pattern of coffee being essentially middle class in nature?
The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian – whilst people like famous computer science professor Dave Farber believes this article is ‘way off base’ – it’s an accurate reflection of policy makers views on big tech and I am surprised that the Republicans haven’t managed to rally around the idea of skewering academics, metropolitan elites and big tech.
(Account) Planning is a role focused on bringing the consumer into creative thinking. This then impacts channel choice as well. It started in advertising agencies in the mid 1960s. At the time account managers were using information provided by researchers. The problem was the poor and untimely use of the information.
The solution was to put the researcher and account manager on an equal footing. UK ad agency Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP) ‘invented planning. It was J Walter Thompson (JWT) that gave account planning its name later that year.
As is true with the story with many innovations, a similar process happened in Australia at the same time. Both were completely unconnected to each other.
The rise of planning as a discipline gave rise to a corresponding golden age in ad creative. BMP came up with the Cadbury’s Smash robots and the PG Tips chimps.
Jay Chiat of TBWA\Chiat\Day took note of the British experience and shipped it over to the US in 1982.
A couple of definitions
“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.”
Stanley Pollitt
“Planners are involved and integrated in the creation of marketing strategy and ads. Their responsibility is to bring the consumer to the forefront of the process and to inspire the team to work with the consumer in mind. The planner has a point of view about the consumer and is not shy about expressing it.”
Fortini-Campbell
I think Pollitt has it closest to right from my personal perception of plannng as a practitioner.
Now it’s unthinkable that an agency of a certain size doesn’t use planners to help the creative process.
For smaller agencies, often the creative director tries to synthesise the planning function. Often there is reverse engineering of ‘planning’ to justify creative.
Communications agencies have tried adopting some of the practices of ad agencies. They have integrated planning functions into their businesses with varying degrees of success.
The tensions between account planning and public relations as a discipline
Whilst public relations has done a good job in terms of professional bodies. It has failed to come up with a solid definition of PR:
Managing Public Relations defined public relations as ‘the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics’.
Grunig, James E. and Hunt, Todd.
The UK’s PR practitioners professional body defined it as:
Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.
Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR)
These definitions are broad and deep. Broader and deeper than what companies ask agencies to do in most cases. The discipline has a conflicted identity at its core.
That has meant that the PR industry missed out on opportunities in search and social marketing. It also means that bringing planning to PR is like building on foundations of sand.
Secondly, there are agency practices. Real-world agency practices don’t look like the theory taught by PR academics. Often the strategy and planning process is not billed to clients, so you look to do ‘minimum viable planning’. This is done by generalists. These generalists learn by doing. Clients pay for activation only. It is a progressive client that spends resources on measuring campaigns. Optimisation is often hit-and-miss, because of the role of a planner and approach to data.
But it’s not all bad
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. Fishburn Hedges (now Fleishman-Hillard Fishburn) had a number of planners. Camilla Jenssen at Brands2Life is building an interesting team over there. I fell into the planning role at Ruder Finn because its what we needed. The agency didn’t really realise it at the time and currently do a similar role now at 90Ten.
In the decade or so that I’ve been planning we’ve seen PR agencies move to become communications agencies. I got to do cinema adverts, OOH and public transport campaigns. I got to do TV commercials that ran in in Latin America, the US and Southeast Asia.
In my current role we do paid media campaigns alongside earned media. The key difference is that we’re looking at behavioural change rather than selling a product or service – because we work in healthcare. Edelman spent a lot of money to build out a planning function. They have done amazing work in association with CAA (Creative Artists Agency).
So what does this mean for the agency?
PR agencies have repositioned themselves in the communications space. The PR name was too limiting from a commercial point-of-view. Programmes have become too ambitious to bodge the planning process. Agency management are being forced to resource planning properly. The task urgency culture of PR doesn’t die though.
I freelanced on a TV advertisng campaign to run in Southeast Asia. By the time I picked the campaign up, it had been worked on for six months in the Shanghai office. There had been three attempts coming up with a creative brief. Three sets of ad concepts were created, tested and rejected. So the challenge was thrown over to the London office. My job was to take another run at the creative brief to build a fourth set of ad concepts that would then go into testing. It went into a month of testing and then another six weeks for shoot.
This level of pre-launch focus and testing wouldn’t happen in a PR setting. The reason is because the creative is small compared to the media spend put behind the advert. But the opportunity cost in not having the creative right is large.
In the past with PR, you could create a catastrophe. A classic example would be Gerald Ratner’s after dinner speech at the IoD annual convention. Media coverage of this speech destroyed the Ratner brand he ended up pushed out of his own firm.
But the majority of the time, poor campaigns go nowhere. Press releases sat on newswires that no one ever sees and social media posts that no one engages with.
All this means that planning gets compressed timelines in communications agencies.
Data collection, analysis and synthesis has its challenges in communications agencies. You won’t have access to some of the sources you’d expect at a large ad agency. Sources like WARC, Contagious or Global Web Index. You can read more on data for comms agencies here.
The success of planning in communications is about melding two very disparate cultures. William Gibson’s ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy of books offer a vision of a possible way forward. In the book Gibson outlines the role of PR as having its finger in the zeitgeist. This has a clear analogue to the planning process.
Inside Amazon’s pitch for new audio ads in music on Alexa devices | AdAge – Amazon sells 15 and 30 second radio type adverts. It looks like a modern version of Rediffusion style radio that piped content directly into consumer homes in the post war period. Cable radio used to be a thing in the United Kingdom Barbados, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore and Hong Kong….
Forever 21 Sent Some Customers Atkins Diet Bars And People Are Very Angry | Buzzfeed News – I wonder what persuaded Atkins to come to Forever 21 with this tie-up. Is there something in their customer base demographic profile that isn’t obvious to me? I could see why at first glance Forever 21 could have seen the product drop as a ‘delight’ for customers. But in retrospect the sensitivity is understandable. It is also interesting how Forever 21 took the brunt of consumer displeasure on what was a co-promotion with Atkins.
Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.
I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.
Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:
CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.
Israeli group’s spyware ‘offers keys to Big Tech’s cloud’ | Financial Times – affects Facebook, Amazon, Apple and more. Guessing that major state actors can also do this already. Private companies like NSO basically democratises this for countries that don’t have this capability inhouse, including some of them that authoritarian in nature
Salesforce talk about a vision that’s way beyond narrow machine learning skills to something that looks much more like general purpose AI. We are told by experts that general purpose AI is still decades away. Consequently I can’t work out if this is long term concepting or snake oil….
Juul CEO: “I’m Sorry” for Teen Vaping Epidemic – “First of all, I’d tell them that I’m sorry that their child’s using the product,” Burns told CNBC during an interview for an upcoming documentary on the rise of vaping in the U.S. “It’s not intended for them. I hope there was nothing that we did that made it appealing to them. As a parent of a 16-year-old, I’m sorry for them, and I have empathy for them, in terms of what the challenges they’re going through.” – Good design attracts users of all ages….
