Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
Apple’s September 10 event ‘By innovation only’ marked the autumn season of premium smartphone launches. It is also a bellwether of what we can expect from the technology sector.
Mark Twain’s ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’ fits especially well in the smartphone business. From a consumer perspective Apple’s 2019/20 iPhone range is basically the same phones but with more camera features. Other vendors are going to come out with handsets with more camera and 5G modems.
All of them are going to be trapped in the same pictures-under-glass metaphor. The smartphone industry as a whole (with the iPhone as bellwether) is trapped in its own version of groundhog day.
5G? Not so fast
Whilst 5G sounds good on new handsets, there’s five points to consider:
Early generation handsets for a new wireless standards tend to have poor battery lives
5G phones are only as good as 5G networks
There aren’t applications to make use of 5G networks
A lot of mobile usage happens on home or other wi-fi networks. 5G is competing with your home broadband connection rather than your patchy cellular connection
5G isn’t really about smartphones
When you see all launches (like this picture from the Huawei Mate 30 launch); just remember the five points above and process the slick technology spin through this lens.
In Huawei’s case they’re basically launching very pretty €1,000+ 5G Mi-Fi hotspots with point-and-shoot camera functionality, since they’re an Android phone without access to Google services. The Porsche Design variants come out at closer to €2,500 – ideal for bored, but patriotic 土豪.
Price inelasticity
Apple’s iPhone X and XS models tested the the price elasticity of premium smartphones. The market spoke. This year’s prices have stayed the same rather than increasing. You could argue that the value proposition has increased through a year’s worth of bundled services. Of course, its only worth anything if you use the services.
Differentiation through services
Seven years ago I was sat in a hotel restaurant in Seoul and overheard Flipboard going through a pitch they wanted to deliver to Samsung. Samsung eventually tried out Flipboard and free content subscriptions to help sell the Galaxy S3.
Apple decided to build their own free subscription model based around streaming video. This is to:
Differentiate its new devices from competitors
Provide a recurring revenue stream from iPhone users with older devices
Utilise the massive data centres that Apple has been building for the past decade
Built to last
The use of superior materials has resulted in iPhones lasting longer. Add this to pricing and for many people, their first iPhone is a pre-owned iPhone. They are handed down in families or to older relatives. This has built Apple a large user base. The big question is whether they can turn this footprint into services.
There is a tension between new phone sales in a saturated marketplace, versus a growing base of service users.
(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.
If Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, Why Are We Living in the Past? | Newsweek – Our past keeps growing, and as it does, it continues to crowd out our present, shortening the already narrow nostalgia gap. If Tom Vanderbilt thought treating last month’s music as classic was silly, think about various #TBT (“Throwback Thursday”) posts online, which celebrate historical events that happened a mere seven days ago.
We could shrink this gap even further. Like many kids her age, my 20-year-old sister is obsessed with the 1990s. When Netflix announced that it was remaking the ABC television show Full House , she and her friends took to Facebook to share their delight that a show from “their childhood” was coming back.
This reaction struck me as odd because my sister was born in 1996: a year after the original series ended. She does the same thing with other ’90s phenomena, taking to social media to share images and songs and neon colors from a decade that she describes not as her favorite , but as her own.– more on consumer behaviour here.
WSJ City | Young Chinese Spending Creates Worrying Debt – looks like a credit bubble waiting to happen. Worrying debt in terms of personal credit doesn’t create economic value in the same way that government debt on infrastructure does. Chinese corporates also have worrying debt also has shades of bubble era Japan about it. Since consumer spending is driving China’s 6 percent growth, what would happen if the credit bubble burst?
Nicolas Roope: “A different design language is taking over” – The challenge is how brands can adapt their propositions. Architecture demonstrates the formality of this new direction: what is now a series of gestures and actions that may or may not be involved in the surface will be critical to the success of the project. How do these buildings respond to the urgent requirements of energy use reduction and waste reduction? How do they perform as stories in hyperconnected environments where reputations are established in social media? Think Instagrammable hotel rooms…
The Economist | China’s thin-skinned nationalists want to be loved and feared – Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million netizens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet, heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it can sometimes be:
I was watching the Dieter Rams documentary – Rams: Principles of Good Design by film maker Gary Hustwit and a small section jumped out at me.
I immediately thought of how Spotify and other streaming services have dramatically changed our relationship with music. Music is as good a place to start as any, Dieter Rams first sprang to prominence due to a stereo dubbed Snow White’s coffin. Streamed music is not something that is actively listened to. The music disappears without leaving a trace.
Digitisation diminishes our experience of things.
Pictures appear and disappear one after the other without leaving a trace up here (pointing to his head).
This goes insanely fast.
And maybe that’s why we can or want to, consume so much.
The world that can be perceived through the senses exudes an aura that I believe cannot be digitised.
We have to be careful now, that we rule over the digital world, and are not ruled by it.
Dieter Rams – Rams: Principles of Good Design
Of course, consumerism took off at a rate of knots way before the cellphone became mainstream let alone the smartphone. But his comments about content being ephemeral in nature, lacking in memorability or substance rang through. Rams maybe right, we’re at a time where consumer interest in analogue media formats such as the vinyl record and the cassette tape is on the rise.
There are even niche record labels that put out recordings on reel-to-reel tape for well-heeled and committed listener. As for the digital medium, the playlist is more important than the album or single, let alone the artist name. Even well established acts fail to make significant returns from streamed music. In some respects it goes back to era of the Rediffusion radio set that piped music into the consumers home, rather than ‘owned media’ from the LP to the iPod.
We’re seeing a move away from DAW (digital audio workstation) based instruments in music that Dieter Rams would likely approve of. And a move to hardware that would have been familiar to the 1970s version of Brian Eno. Despite the best efforts of Pearson Education and Amazon; consumers still love printed books.
Continued love of Dieter Rams’ and his team’s own designs at Braun and Vistoe are an illustration of that championing of the real over virtual. More on design here.
