Tools like my Howto category morphed out of a few things. I learned about the power of helpful content from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. At the heart of the Whole Earth ethos was sharing useful knowledge and tools for a person. Editor Kevin Kelly kept the Whole Earth ethos alive through his involvement with The WeLL, Wired magazine and his Cool Tools blog and book.
A second aspect of it was my natural inclination to share useful things or processes. I started writing this blog to explore the media so that I could advise clients so its roots were in the idea of channels as a useful tools mentality.
The third reason was my Dad. As a child my Dad who is a mechanical fitter by trade instilled into me a deep sense of quality in things, in ideas and in people. The idea of quality as an intrinsic thing was accelerated by my career in the UK’s dying manufacturing sector prior to going to college and having read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that put words to something I had felt and been driven by. Consequently I tend to gravitate to simple, overthought and overly engineered things like a Rolex Sea-Dweller watch, Carhartt jeans or the modern Victorinox Swiss army knife. My ‘iconoclastic’ view of quality continues to drive
Tools content tends to come when I am sharing things that I have found through work or solving a problem in my personal life. I have talked about tools elsewhere too, notably Kevin Kelly’s What’s in my NOW newsletter.
The Michelin Snow Sock or to give it its proper name SOS GRIP(R) Evolution does a similar job to studded tyres or snow chains (often called RUD Chains after the German company RUD Ketten – a famous manufacturer of snow chains).
The Michelin Snow Sock looks much easier to store and fit than snow chains and is likely to be less damaging to road surfaces. This new Michelin Snow Sock seems to rely on the black bands across the face of the tyre.
A key difference is that snow chains can also be used in really muddy conditions and can be used to protect the tyres in hard surfaces such as quarries and mines – although this is usually the domain of a specialist product. You can’t doe these things with the Michelin Snow Sock.
Inspecting a car before purchase
Interesting tips on inspecting a car that you are interested in buying. Its interesting how democratised specialist tools have become.
Twitter
Professor Scott Galloway talks to Christiane Amanpour about the current economy and the rollercoaster moves at Twitter. My favourite quote from this, describing the recession as a ‘Patagonia vest’ recession affecting knowledge workers the most so far.
Junya Watanabe Menswear Fall/Winter 2022
I am about 10 months late to this, but Junya Watanabe did a menswear collaboration with Jay Kaye from Jamiroquai mirroring his mid-to-late 1990s style. Its a mix of indigenous wear that was popular from gap year students (or people who wanted that boho look), rave culture and Goa trance, sports wear and technical outdoor clothing.
Here is the mini video look book that Junya Watanable made for the menswear collection.
Here is the original video for Virtual Insanity
Behind the scenes on how the Virtual Insanity video was made. How the effect was achieved was quite surprising.
Shakatak
I didn’t realise how popular jazz fusion group Shakatak was in Japan. To me there where pre-house UK dance music. I found this Japanese festival performance by them.
The Tokyo Crossover Festival was was originally organised by the Kyoto Jazz Massive member Shuya Okino.
It was April 2002. I was invited to the Future Jazz Festival held at Zagreb, Croatia. The well select lineup for this 3-days event was Victor Davies, Jessica Lauren, Rainer Truby, Azymuth, Zero dB and many more. The huge success all owed to Eddy & Duss and their incredible local support attracted 1500 enthusiastic people each day! Frankly, and forgive my ignorance, I was quite shocked. This was Zagreb, Croatia. The media that I was exposed to depict the negative image of an on-going civil war for all what I remember. Needless to say, I was inspired and at the same time wondered why Japan never had such festivals. Sure we have money-flowing mainstream Rock Festivals and Techno Festivals but nothing such as Deep House or Future Jazz festivals – which is surprising especially when Japan holds the biggest market share for such music. What is more depressing is that the “traditional” Jazz summer festival seems to be loosing its energy every year… I waited. I thought someone would eventually do the future-jazz festival here in Japan. There were few attempts but did not leave strong impact. Waited few more years…and thought it was time for me to take some action. I called it “Tokyo Crossover Jazz Festival”! This is the first year and I am treating it as an introduction or presentation for the successful year to come. Therefore, it will not be a gigantic outside “typical” festival but the main purpose for this first festival is to cause Crossover Jazz awareness and for artists who have same music vision to gather together. Of course, I am aiming for the fan-pleasing exciting showcases. We have a good “crossover” jazz scene in Japan and I want the fans, all over the world, to know. In the future, the festival will feature artists from Jazz, Techno, Hip- Hop, House and the music will cross all over – the ideal festival that I keep visioning and working hard for! At the end though, all I want for everyone and myself is to…have a good time!
Shuya Okino (Kyoto Jazz Massive)
Internet explained in five levels of difficulty
I showed this to my Dad and he loved it. So I thought I would share it here too.
OOPS is Meta’s online operations support system. OOPS provides access to user accounts like a sys admin on a company IT network. If you’re a Meta employee, friends or family you can get hold of a concierge service to solve account related problems. It isn’t available to outsiders.
It seems that OOPS has been used to reassign or disable accounts for profit and access wasn’t as controlled as it should be.
The Meta OOPS scandal made me wonder if OnlyFans performer Kitty Lixo had actually been gaslit about her account by Meta employees, rather than being helped out in return for sex. Lixo has gone from having an Instagram account with 199,000 followers to two smaller accounts with under 20,000 followers combined at the time of writing.
“We met up and I f**ked a couple of them and I was able to get my account back two-three times,” Kitty Lixo said, recommending others with locked accounts to continue reaching out to the platform for eventual ban reversal.
OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned by Nick Mordowanec (May 20, 2022) Newsweek
Subscription Pricing Coming to Features Your Car Already Has – a $25-per-month charge for advanced cruise control or $10 to access heated seats? What if those charges continued long after your car was paid off? …As vehicles become increasingly connected to the internet, car companies aim to rake in billions by having customers pay monthly or annual subscriptions to access certain features. Not content with the relatively low-margin business of building and selling cars, automakers are eager to pull down Silicon Valley-style profits. For automakers, the advantage of this model is clear. …Not only do they get a stream of recurring revenue for years after an initial purchase, they can hope to maintain a longer-term relationship with the customer and build brand loyalty, said Kristin Kolodge, vice president and head of auto benchmarking and mobility development at J.D. Power. – I suspect that this will only work if every car was on a lease agreement and if that’s the case then there are lots of negative impact from old cars that need to be written off that outweigh this business model. Secondly, there is an expectation that all of the vehicle will conform to Moore’s Law.
What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF??? | I, Cringely – I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass – vintage Bob Cringely
Kiwix on the App Store – this is available on Mac and iOS app stories. It allows you to view an offline version of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy modules. Ideal for when you’re unplugged.
The brand proposition is what fires creative thinking in advertising and the bane of junior planners. In fact, the brand proposition is a topic of conversation for advertising planners, in the same way that the weather is for British and Irish people. It is a source of endless debate and discussion.
Firstly, let’s discuss what’s a brand?
How you define brand would likely come down to two camps. Those that broadly agree with either of two statements that branding:
Is the act of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product or service from others
Is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company, with what people actually think about your company
The second option is closer to where my viewpoint would be, but neither are completely right or wrong. Brands have various attributes including:
Brand / customer relationships
Brand personality
Country of origin
Emotional benefits
Organisational associations
Self-expressive benefits
Symbols
User imagery
Product specific attributes that affect brand
Scope
Attributes
Uses
Quality / value
Functional benefits
JWT London’s seminal planning guide said that a brand’s appeal is built up over time by three different sorts of appeal
Appealing to the senses: feel, smell, tastes, sounds or looks
Appeals to reason: function, when would you use it, what does it contain, how does it perform
Appeals to the emotions: the brand style or nature, brand associations, what mood it evokes or satisfies, any psychological rewards for usage
How does planning come into it?
What’s a brand planner?
“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.”
The JWT Planning Guide, which can be considered to be the stone tablets of account planning as a profession were handed down written in 1974.
The planning guide said
… any systemic approach to planning advertising has to do more than simply provide controls and disciplines. It must actively stimulate imagination and creativity too.
Ok, that’s quite a big ask. But it didn’t stop there. The ideal advertising planning methods had to also fulfil four criteria
Realistic – based on ‘best practice’ and must be capable of being optimised and evolved.
Pragmatic – They must work to help people create advertising that is relevant and creative. Simple in nature, memorable and easy to follow
Fundamental – based on ‘coherent theories’ of how advertising benefits marketing, how communications works, how people collaborate productively and create new ideas
Structured – set a sand pit that imagination can work in. Chunking complexity down to simple elements and providing regular evaluation of work done
Brand proposition
Realistic, pragmatic, fundamental and structured dictate the shape and form of a planner’s tools and outputs. And sometimes we lose sight of this, which is very much the case with the brand proposition.
A definition
A brand proposition could be considered to be the foundational concept that highlights the unique identifying features of your brand.
Attributes of a good brand proposition
A good brand proposition will be:
Single-minded in purpose and being succinct – which can be a pain the 🍑
Almost, but not quite an endline
Interesting / thought provoking
An ongoing investment
Occasionally multiple – creative briefs are as much a dialogue with your creative director as they are the product of the heroic lone planner. Having multiple ways in is a good way of doing that, and there might be multiple insights that don’t easily reconcile with each other
Open to evolution – its more important to be interesting than correct, it is unlikely that you will get it right first time
Rich nuggets, stimuli, creative brief delivery and post-brief discussion
The brand proposition is a small part of the overall account planners contribution to the creative process. You could consider it a sub-set of the insightful ‘rich nuggets’ – the behavioural observations in a creative brief, which is about a quarter of the strategists contribution. Every bit of a brief that a planner writes should have these rich nuggets in it. Examples of rich nuggets that I have had in my career as a planner
Even in a digital world, people get annoyed and can be spurred into action when they find their mail has been opened
After mental health, consumers care most about having a healthy immune system. It came to fore during COVID and seems to have remained with us
Glow, the look of healthy skin due to a moist top layer of the skin can sell products in many markets. But it doesn’t work well in high-humidity tropical, and sub-tropical clients
A majority of Hong Kong beauty consumers would prefer not to interact with concession staff, they consider them to be closer to over-pushy sales people than trusted advisors
A majority of primary care practitioners (GPs) feel a degree of disgust when they see an obese patient
Chinese luxury hotel guests are likely to be younger and less formally dressed than the older western and Japanese clientele – with a dress sense that somewhat harks back to the mix-and-match approach of the Buffalo Collective
The other three quarters are:
The quality of stimulus that the planner provides – Stimulus for consumer brands might be much more visual than say prescription medicines where science facts and sandboxes of regulatory restrictions could be much more important. There is usually a good deal of discussion that goes into help writing this brief that helps filter which stimulus makes the cut and the emphasis placed on it.
Quality of delivery on the creative brief
Post-brief discussion
So the amount of ‘pain’ that junior planners have on the brand proposition is out of proportion to the brand proposition’s role in the planning process.
Criticisms of the brand proposition
Perceived solutions orientation
The brand proposition puts the emphasis on a potential answer; rather than the initial problem. And I can understand how this occurs. Going back to the JWT London Planning Guide:
Advertising involves producing a long series of unique solutions. Each piece of work requires innovation. Every script, every layout, every recommendation is Ian some way different from any that has gone before. Each client operates in a different market, and each brand in a market has different needs.
I would argue that yes the brand proposition can be perceived to be solution focused, but I’d also argue innovation means reframing and looking at a problem in a different way – this is much of the success behind Eno & Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies.
Brand proposition locks the planner in to a certain perspective
The idea is that the very act of writing a brand proposition locks the planner in to a certain perspective and consequently starts making the process of developing ideas territorial and creates unhelpful barriers.
I can see where the ‘lone heroic planner’ mode might kick in. I found it happened when I was freelancing in a team made up of freelance creative talent and there wasn’t any ‘connective tissue’ in the team.
I think that a planner needs to be humble enough to recognise that:
They don’t have a monopoly on good ideas
They are humble enough to recognise better ideas were ever they may come from
They are constantly in searching mode
Perceived traditional media focus
Propositions are considered by some to encourage to think in ‘traditional media’ by asking what should we say rather than
What might we do?
What experience might we create
What interaction might we host
My argument against this point-of-view is that its a very literal interpretation of ‘say’. If we think about person to person communication about 70 percent is non verbal cues. And I would argue that more experiential aspects fall into what we say.
Secondly, it depends on where you are in the process. For instance in many of the assignments I worked on as a freelancer, the channel had already been defined by the client and or the media agency partner who was further upstream in the decision making process.
A brief for Unilever’s Dove specified that they wanted a 30-second TV spot and online video clip. It has to contain an end ‘pour and pack shot’ which took another 5 seconds at the end of the video. For the online video clip you had to have the brand logo up front. This is very common when you are working on creating marketing assets for international markets.
OK, why Japanese KitKats?
They have one uniform brand proposition behind them, but a whole variant of different ways of solving it from a product and packaging design perspective. And, they’re really, really tasty. Japanese KitKats have the crispness I remember from my childhood eating Irish-made KitKats from the old Rowntree-Macintosh factory that was in Kilmainham, Dublin.
