Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

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.

Advanced engines + more things

Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing, Airbus jets have disrupted airlines and shaken travelers | The Seattle Times – this isn’t like the new engine in your car. The advanced engines in a jet engine are exposed to more heat and pressure than you can imagine. When you’re working on advanced engines for aircraft; you’re operating at the bleeding edge of materials and engineering. New metal alloys, titanium, engineering ceramics and carbon fibre all started in advanced engines for aircraft. What’s interesting is the way the problems have assailed multiple engine builders at the the same time. Almost as if there is a roadblock in the technium for advanced engines

Lost Liverpool #13: The Beat of Bold Street Part 2, the Mardi Gras and G-Love – Getintothis – wow I read this and it brought back a lot of memories. G-Love was the closest thing to the legendary Shoom vibe in Liverpool. It was a different kind of crowd to what you saw at the Quadrant Park or even Garlands. G-Love at the Mardi Gras is what I’ve measured every club experience against since and most of them have been miserable failures by comparison. Early Cream felt austere and corporate with its ‘no jeans’ dress code. G-Love was part 1960s love-in and part rave. It was Ibiza without even knowing where the Balearic islands were.

Crown, a new app from Tinder’s parent company, turns dating into a game | TechCrunch – yet another thing for incel subculture to complain about

Death of the landline? Why we are hanging up on the ‘home phone’ – Independent.ie – in my parents case its cheap calls to Ireland. Though its hard for them to justify the landline because of the amount of spam calls that they receive

Encrypted Messaging Apps Have Limitations You Should Know | WIRED – these limitations are well known, yet law enforcement continues to want in the clear messaging only. The fig leaf of a magic key just indicates their deliberate techno-ignorance

Nike scores big in Chinese KOL competition | Campaign Asia – Nike is killing it in China thanks to understanding local culture and global youth culture.

June 18, 2018
PornHub VPN & other things this week

PornHub are one of the more interesting brands out there at the moment. Yes I did just write that last sentence. They’ve been hosting content that might be considered transgressive but isn’t porn, they have their own clothing range and a collaboration with New York streetwear brand Richardson. Their Asa Akira t-shirt is well tasteful and office-friendly. Seriously.

They’ve now launched their own VPN service, which makes sense given what they know about getting streaming to work across networks.

2B-Alert Web – is US department of defence funded research on optimising your caffeine intake. They are looking to have personalisation options and apps in the future.

Liquid crystals can be trippy to look at through a microscope. I remember seeing something similar to this eons ago when I spent a bit of time in a Corning lab in North Wales. The lab is now a grass field next to a Toyota engine factory.

Audi is in the process of launching its new Q8 SUV. They’ve taken a leaf out of BMW’s book; creating an online-only mini-series that initially reminded me of BMW’s The Hire. Good on Audi for signing off on a project like this. I was a bit disappointed in the execution, it needs work: Q8 Unleashed.

I’ve talked here before about the market dynamics driving streetwear upmarket to the point that it resembles the eco-system around Hermes’ Birkin bags – part luxury good, part financial investment. This Google talk from Stock X riffs on the theme. Stock X aren’t alone; there are a number of competitors as well as traditional online auctions eBay and Yahoo! Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hd8lpHIIEc

June 8, 2018
The limits of the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It
The IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) has been a north star for agency strategists since it was published in 2013. It’s now been out there long enough to understand the limits of its approach. This post started with a blog post that talked about the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) role in the planning and strategy process of the ad industry.

The Long And The Short Of It Needs The Wrong And The Shit Of It. Feel free to go and have a read and come back.

The Limits

The IPA’s original research had flaws that dictated the limits in the methodology:
- Focusing purely on successes brings in biases due to the research being taken out of context. Context provided by the ‘complete’ population of good, mediocre and awful campaigns rather than award winners
- There aren’t any lessons on how not to truly mess up
TLATSOI isn’t a LinkedIn article

Its easy to throw shots over the table when someone has done a lot of work. TLATSOI isn’t an article on the ‘five morning habits of Warren Buffet’ to make you successful.

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns entered in the IPA Effectiveness awards (1980 – 2010). That would have taken them a considerable amount of time to do. They then managed to write it all up and distill it down into a very slim volume on my bookshelf.

The work is an achievement and Binet & Field deserve our gratitude and respect. Secondly, other marketing disciplines don’t have their version of TLATSOI. We couldn’t critique TLATSOI if it didn’t exist.

Let’s say we want to stand on their shoulders and build something more comprehensive than TLATSOI. Just what would it take?

The limits of working with what you have

Binet and Field worked with what they have. If you’ve ever written an award entry you’ll know pulling it together is a pain in the arse. 996 award entries represents thousands of weeks of non-billable agency time. This was also strained through their empirical experience in the business, which adds a ‘welcome’ bias.

Now imagine if that kind of rigor in terms of documentation and analysis was put into mediocre campaigns. The kind of campaign where the client logo barely makes into the agency credentials deck.

Without a major agency (nudge, nudge, wink, wink BBH) providing all their warts-and-all data, the initative won’t start.

It will be hard to get what is needed. Agency functions aren’t geared up to deliver the information. A technological solution would take a good while to put in place; and like all IT projects would have a 70% failure rate.

In an industry where careers are made and talent attracted on ‘hits’; theres a big chunk of realpolitik to address.

How would you keep a lid on the dirty laundry?

We live in a connected world. To the point that there are now likely to be four certainties. Birth, death, taxes and data breaches. Imagine a data dump, some Excel skills and what was a bit of snark would do to an agency’s reputation? The stain of an ad agency equivalent of the movie industry Gold Raspberries would likely bury careers.

What do we measure?

My friend Rob Blackie started some of the thinking on effectiveness data SLA tiers

A = Tests the objective directly using a Randomised Control Test (RCT) in a real world environment (e.g. measured at point of sale).
B = RCT tests of proximate objective (e.g. brand), direct measurement of impacts without correction for population bias or confounding factors (e.g. a sunny week drives a lot of ice cream consumption). Or case studies (independent), quality survey data on changes in behaviour, testing in an artificial environment. For instance a Nielsen Brand Lift study
C = Case studies (non-independent), data sources that may contain significant bias compared to the underlying population. For instance: Award entries.
D = Indicative data such as PR coverage, social media Likes and similar.
E = Anecdotes. Extra points for quality, and reproducibility across different suppliers / evaluators.

There are challenges capturing long-term branding factors such as advertising ‘ad stock’ or ‘carryover‘. That then takes you into fundemental questions:

How long is the minimum viable time of campaign duration to be considered for assessment?

How long should we be measuring long term branding effects? How do you measure ‘clientside’ quality issues:
- Resourcing / budgets
- Product
- Ambience in the case of client-owned channels
- Adequate quality briefs. Are the objectives written well? Are they relevant to the business
- Mission creep or changing company agendas
All of this means that getting to the greater volume of poor campaigns as well as the best is easier said than done. The best way to kick it off would be having large agencies to work together on putting together data sets.
June 6, 2018
The biggest Public Relations agencies; stuckness and market dynamics
The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

Macro picture

What the numbers suggested at a macro level were three things:
- - Overall billings growth was declining year on year
  - The amount of agencies that were appointed into the top 250 (and were dropped) declined year on year. There is less market disruption
- - The bottom 190 agencies (by size over successive years) accounted for less than half the billings of the top 25 for financial year 2017
This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness. But if you were going to buy an agency MC Group in Germany looked to be the stand out choice in terms of changing the fortunes of a large agency billings

We’re also seeing a likely tyranny of large numbers kicking in for the biggest agencies. Mid-sized agencies can be more agile due to less layers of management and less complex environmetns to worry about. They may be multi-market; but they’re not truly global. Which makes strategy and planning much easier.

PR agencies are people businesses. At the core they sell manpower by the hour. Bigger agencies have more people, which means a greater management overhead, not unlike Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month essays on software engineering. There are more processes, which have built up over time and greater inertia to change. Then you get office and intra-office real politik. You can try and keep this down, but it is a function of scale; the battle against it becomes ever harder and you can only focus on its worst excesses. It tends not to surface when its impact only goes downwards in the management structure.

Agency-specific hypothesis

This next part was inspired by David Brain’s post on the performance of large agencies.

PR seems to be acquired in a more tactical manner than previously. This has been happening for a number of reasons.

A decline in Full Metal Jacket syndrome in comms planning. This nonsensical quote about Vietnamese people in Full Metal Jacket makes similar false assumptions. I’ve seen similar false assumptions in past global comms campaign planning that I have seen. Usually that meant creating something in the US and then expecting it to work on a fraction of the budget elsewhere. This means that there is less international work for agency networks. This has a negative impact on inter-office best practice transfer and building relationships.

The influence of Byron Sharp. For many consumer marketers, How Brands Grow – based on years of marketing science research is the bible. When you look at Sharp’s work there are a couple of clear points when you use public relations as a tactic.

Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) has changed the marketing planning game. It pits public relations campaign efficiency and effectiveness versus other disciplines in sharp focus. In addition, some organisations have mistaken ZBB as a one-way ratchet tightening marketing spend. ZBB isn’t about continual cost-cutting, but continual optimisation – something that seems to have been lost in translation.

PR agencies haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity afforded by digital and social for a number of reasons:
- There is a tension. Between the focus on financial efficiency and effectiveness that the macro numbers suggest versus the investment in tools and personnel required. Where are the studios, strategists, planners and media desks?
- There has been an expertise drain across the industry as agencies deskill; paying new people into roles less than the person who previously filled it. This means that over time there is a trench in expertise between office leaders and the rest of the team, making it harder for the office to scale and a loss of institutional knowledge. This has led to a lack of diversity in thinking amongst many PRs; let alone gender, race and age diversity. From experience I’ve found that digital natives aren’t necessarily the best digital strategists
- Clients haven’t embraced the change. Social in particular sits elsewhere amongst the marketing team. There is a similar division with paid media. The focus (particularly in Europe) on performance marketing over brand marketing hasn’t helped. Hubspot-style content marketing is a reductive process that isn’t the friend of PR agencies; despite their expertise in content
- The window of opportunity closes as organic reach declines. Social media marketing effectiveness requires paid media budget. Agencies have jumped in too late with insufficient confidence. Traditional senior management agency PRs have been curiously hung up on this. Yet we see: corporate communications as adverts in the FT and WSJ and consumer PRs do paid advertorials and paid product placement
More information
David Brain’s post: Why Are The Biggest Global PR Agencies Stuck? Does It Matter?
Holmes Report
And more related content here.
May 28, 2018
Strategic News Service & things this week

Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service; a George Gilderesque subscription newsletter, the likes of which were very popular in the mid to late 1990s. The Strategic News Service process is an interesting ‘anti algorithmic’ analysis in action. A counter point to the world that Google now represents, I don’t buy all that Anderson and the Strategic News Service says, but this is very interesting to watch.

The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.

— Stewart Brand via Simon Willison. It seemed very appropriate when considering the Google Duplex demonstrations from the other week.

It’s Nice That | Gucci and Frieze team up on major new video series, The Second Summer of Love – well worth a view

Singapore’s utopian clean looking city and high quality Japanese animation are a marriage made in heaven. Makoto Shinkai directed this for the forthcoming Singapore Thomson East Coast Line on behalf of Japanese construction giant Taisei Corporation. More Japan related content here.

This would usually be the part where I would talk about how I am looking forward to Deadpool. But I won’t. I wanted to marvel at the collective hullucination of Deadpool marketing. Deadpool marketing isn’t trying to get you to go and see the film, but instead brings elements of the film to you. Once you are properly tuned in, it then makes perfect sense to see the film. The problem is that there are so many fragments from DVD rewraps to teasers and TV appearances that it would be impossible to capture or choose a favourite.

Instead I am going to share a video of the Korean show King of Masked Singer, where Ryan Reynolds preformed Tomorrow from the musical Annie in a unicorn mask.

Fans in show panel and the audience lost their shit

May 18, 2018