I started my career working in laboratories measuring the particular attributes of a product. The focus was consistency and ensuring that the product fell into a certain range of measurements. But this focus was around consistency and fitness for purpose. When I got to read Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quality took on a difference aspect.
According to Pirsig quality, or value, as he called it, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it. It exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically.
Pirsig drew on his knowledge of western and eastern philosophy to try and define it by understanding its metaphysics. Inspired by the Tao, Pirsig proposes that value is the fundamental force in the universe. That it stimulates everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality.
He broke it down into two forms: static and dynamic quality. Quality is one, but it manifests itself in different ways.
So went much of the conversations that I had with my housemate and landlord Ian during my last year in university. I started my appreciation of quality through the influence of my father who was an engineer by both trade and inclination. Pirsig’s work tapped deep into my belief system and lodged there ever since. This was why you have this section of my site. Sometimes things grab me with regards to quality.
This gives an apparently random aspect to this category, but it isn’t really random at all.
I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.
As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.
What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?
Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?
PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?
Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.
Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?
A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market.
Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades.
Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.
What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?
With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.
There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.
If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?
Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.
Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.
Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?
In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.
I got a chance to judge the UK Young Lions advertising awards and Adforum’s PHNX awards. The Young Lions responded to a common brief with the solution viewed through their specialism:
A communications activation plan.
A creative concept.
The standard of thinking was high, but I could also see the benefit of more agencies and brand teams tasking younger members of staff to enter the campaign. I was expected to having to wade through dozens and dozens of entries; there wasn’t that many.
Adforum’s PHNX advertising awards attracted global entries and took a long time to go through the entries that I saw. I got to see a lot of good work and wanted to showcase some examples later.
PHNX were more complex in nature compared to the UK Young Lions, with many more categories.
Advertising awards mistakes.
I saw a few unforced errors:
Category -spamming – award entries were submitted for categories that they weren’t appropriate for. You would see the same work turning up category-after-category with no relevance. You could see other judges becoming frustrated in the electronic chat function that ran alongside the entries.
Link the work tightly to the challenge that the client faces. You would be surprised how many entries failed to do this.
Have your entry in a language that the judges are likely to understand. You can only get so far with Google Lens when trying to tease out winning nuance of advertising awards.
Advertising awards entries that caught my eye.
There were a number of Adforum PHNX advertising awards entries that caught my eye and some entries that inspired me.
Advertising for advertising
A few years ago, LONDON Advertising (who I have freelanced for previously) ran an advertising campaign to demonstrate the power of advertising.
This was possible due to the cheaper media rates available early on during COVID-19 as brands paused spending.
It’s a very unusual tactic outside of advertising festivals and trade publications. So it was interesting to see a Spanish agency submit a couple of films into the Adforum awards that purely showcased their craft capabilities for use on different aspects of advertising.
It’s not Studio Ghibli, but still really well done by La Caseta. It was still surprising for me to see it entered for advertising awards.
Inspiring content
Grab Thailand
Uber analogue Grab ran this advert in Thailand to promote its version of Uber Eats, showing how the app is on the side of the consumer in terms of pricing, choice and speed of delivery. It uses thai boxing as a metaphor and features Bella as the main protagonist. Bella is a much loved soap actress beloved in Thailand. Her coach in the corner is a highly regarded former thai boxer.
Lux
For me Lux beauty soap was a brand that I associated with my Granny in Ireland, who used to alternate using it alongside Oil of Olay soap.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Lux is still alive and well as a brand half-way around the world in Asia and Africa. Lux’s ‘change the angle’ campaign was a collaboration with female athletes to try and change the way they are portrayed in live sports coverage.
Mistine
Mistine is a Thai beauty brand founded in 1988. It became the go-to beauty brand in Thailand. The company sold its products via direct sales, wholesale, online, retail, and the export market. In recent years it had focused on expansion into China, but had lost touch with younger generations of Thai women. It was seen as a low-class, outdated brand. The brand team started with a campaign with a film of young generation focus group discussing on societal judgmental issues while having a make-up session. None of them chose Mistine as they were all judgmental to the brand name.The film signed off with an apologetic message to Mistine users and have been insulted by negative associations with the brand name “Sorry that my name is Mistine.”
It’s a brave move to take that raw insight and build a campaign around it.
That then drove a six-fold uptake in search volume and media impressions.
Razors are one of a series of tools that I use for problem solving. They sit alongside the idea of ‘chunking’ that is breaking a problem down into more manageable and solvable constituent parts. Razors aid in decision-making and analysis.
Razors are rules that guide your way through a problem, or ‘cut’ your way through a problem. They simplify, they not be right in all circumstances but are right in the vast majority of them.
They were first used by philosophers, but as we know more about the world around us, we have developed more razors and they have become more useful in a general context.
This is going to be hard, isn’t it?
Not really, we use razors in our lives all the time, often without thinking about them. The most famous one is Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s razor
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”
Or to put in simpler terms, out of two or more explanations, the simpler one is mostly likely to be the right one. In certain circumstances what’s simpler is a matter of perspective and culture. Secondly, Occam’s razor prioritises simplicity over accuracy.
The classic example of Occam’s Razor failing is the classic crime fiction trope of the death that looks like a suicide and is considered by authorities to be one. Yet by dogged investigation, it is actually proven to be a relatively cleverly executed murder plot.
Other razors
Here’s some razors that I have found useful over time. A good many of them have come from fields beyond the study of philosophy.
Gall’s law
Gall’s law “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” John Gall was a modern-day renaissance man in turn author, scholar, and pediatrician. His law comes from a book he wrote as a critique of systems design: Systemantics: How Systems Work and How They Fail… When working on customer experience related work don’t try and cover every option first, build up complexity to cover all the options from a ‘simple system’. When dealing with clients, sell the simple system as baseline framework and see how you get on. Ironically, clients are more likely to buy the simple model and then build into it over time as an additional activity.
Hanlon’s razor
Hanlon’s razor – “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Probably more useful when pondering third party actions rather than strategy in depth, but nonetheless very useful to bear in mind in work circumstances. It featured in joke book Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong: Bk. 2 compiled by Arthur Bloch and was attributed to Robert J. Hanlon. It probably won’t get you promoted, but might keep you sane.
Hick-Hyman law
Hick-Hyman law – the time it takes for a person to make a decision is a function of the number of possible choices. Psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, found that increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. This one is handy for bearing in mind when thinking about customer experiences and engagement strategy. There is such a thing as the tyranny of choice for consumers.
Hitchen’s razor
Hitchen’s razor – what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Christopher Hitchen popularised a version of a latin proverb in his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur – what is freely asserted can be freely deserted. This works quite nicely with Sagan’s standard below in terms of providing evidence. Storytelling and narrative is important, but so is evidence for the deductive leaps sometimes involved.
Hofstadter’s law
Hofstadter’s law – “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law”. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is a book about the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. Hofstadter posits that understanding these maps could be the answer to what we’d now call general artificial intelligence. Where Hofstadter’s law comes in terms of being useful for strategists is in assessing the scope of unusual or bespoke strategic asks prior to the start of a project.
Sagan’s standard
Sagan’s standard – extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary evidence. This was popularised by Carl Sagan’s documentary series Cosmos. Sagan had also used it in essays for various publications, which were collected in the essay compilation Broca’s Brain. It encapsulates similar ideas by thinkers over the centuries. I have found this particularly helpful when reviewing colleagues decks that make big deductive leaps. The narrative might be compelling, but make sure the right amount of proof is in the right place.
Sturgeon’s revelation
Sturgeon’s revelation – ninety percent of everything is crap. The Sturgeon in question reviewed science fiction and noted that while the genre had its critics one could see a similar distribution of quality in other genres and fields. George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling made similar observations but Theodore Sturgeon got the credit. When you see mediocre advertising being derided in some LinkedIn post or other, bear in mind this observation. As for Sturgeon, while he was highly regarded in the early 1960s as a science fiction writer and script writer for the original Star Trek television series – his memory primarily lives on through his revelation.
Twyman’s law
Twyman’s law: “Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong”, an extension of the principle that “the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another”. The Twyman in question is Tony Twyman, was a veteran market researcher in the UK. For strategists that erroneous piece of data can be like a shiny metal object to a magpie. Look at how you can verify it further and if it can’t be done, seriously consider walking on by – particularly if it fails under Sagan’s standard as well.
Vierordt’s law
Vierordt’s law states that, retrospectively, “short” intervals of time tend to be overestimated, and “long” intervals of time tend to be underestimated. It’s named after Karl von Vierordt who was a 19th century German medical researcher whose body of work spanned research into blood flow and also psychology. It is worth bearing in mind and testing, particularly when you are relying on a small number of qualitative research interviews.
The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.
Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.
There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.
Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.
The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.
What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture
Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether
Culture
Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended
Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.
Health
China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire
Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.
Jeremy Deller is famous for examining 1980s events from the MIner’s strike to rave culture. Most notably his work Acid Brass, working with the William Fairey Brass Band on cover versions of early house and techno music. In this documentary he walks a group of sixth formers through the context that rave culture began in.
Jeremy Deller has hosted a reenactment of the Battle Of Orgreave and made an inflatable version of Stonehenge in a piece called Sacrilege.
Jacobs cream crackers
As a child, I would have eaten several cream crackers manufactured on this line. In more recent times the production of Jacobs products were moved abroad for cost cutting reasons. There is something mesmerising about watching the process of production.
Cyberpunk
Quinn’s Ideas exploration of Neuromancer pointed out some links that I hadn’t realised in the formation of cyberpunk as a genre and cultural force.
LA Noir
Why film noir happened when it did, and why it is so synonymous with the city of Los Angeles is explained in this documentary which features an interview with author James Eilroy.
EDC
Everyday Carry (EDC) – whilst having evolved as an online cultural phenomenon has been around for as along as men and boys have had pockets. My childhood friend Nigel was obsessing about Swiss Army knives and really small Leica binoculars back when I was in primary school. His Dad was a well-to-do dentist and Nigel fulfilled his EDC goals before coming a teen. It was only natural that it eventually became a thing when the internet came around. Kevin Kelly had been talking about cool tools on the the web for the past quarter of a century; Drop.com when it was founded over 12 years ago covered products that would be considered EDC today.
All of which leaves me more puzzled why EDC has sudden become the focus of media attention in the quality newspapers.
