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.
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.
The Jeremy Renner store – this must be the 21st century equivalent of the celebrity infomercial on cable TV: @ Amazon.com. The Jeremy Renner store is interesting because it’s an odd choice of celebrity. More on Amazon here.
Nike China with Weiden + Kennedy did these great basketball-themed adverts
Laundry Musical. Procter & Gamble invented the soap opera back during the great depression as sponsored radio serials. They were instrumental in building P&G as a brand powerhouse. Riffing on the theme P&G Philippines launched the first ‘laundry musical’ with Broadway star Lea Salonga.
It is hard to explain how musical Filipino culture is. Wherever Flipinos are as a community, there is music. In Hong Kong they do group singing and dance routines. Music has been a huge export for the Philippines. You go to bars around the world and there will be a Filipino band who can pivot from hard rock to soulful R&B standards.
Filipinos make up most of the bands on cruise ships too, which isn’t surprising given the amount of recruitment for the shipping industry that goes in the Philippines from sailors to engineers.
TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Lee Clow on the making of Apple’s Think Different campaign. Chiat\Day still have this campaign as their calling card a quarter of a century later. The opening statement that technology is not a substitute for an idea is something that feels more relevant now. It is also interesting seeing the creatives working on MacOS Classic.
Apple used the creative process as a way to showcase the creative hardware and software used on the campaign
Microsoft Word
Quark Xpress
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat
AVID non-linear professional video editing
Claris eMailer – which was an email client similar to mail.app on macOS now. I had never used it, as I was using Netscape Communicator at the time
Irish department store Brown Thomas launches its first brand anthem film
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:
