Campaign Planning

10 Lessons

Here's a great piece about John Jay. Thanks Mison. Particularly noteworthy are the 10 lessons for young designers, which are pretty much 10 lessons for everyone in this business...

The Gestalt Principle

 

One of the reasons this translates so effectively is the use of white space. And the reason that the use of white space works so effectively is due to something called The Gestalt Principle which was identified in the 1920s. It refers to theories of visual perception and how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or "unified wholes" when certain design principles are applied. Fascinating to review or reacquaint yourself with.

 

Agile Strategy Development

 
There's a great discussion forming over at The Creative Brief Project. Lots of good insights and posts from Planners around the world about the current (and future) state of creative briefs and strategy development. A big thanks to Edward Cotton at Influx for creating and leading the group... 

It was here that I was directed to Made By Many's manifesto for agile strategy development. It's much like agile software development but for brand strategy.

That's really good, isn't it? You can read MxM's full post here. There are some quotes and insights in the post from Rework that prove helpful. One in particular helps articulate the need for a purpose driven brand strategy:

"When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument."

Nike's purpose driven strategy of "if you have a body you are an athlete" is incredibly centering. Leads to consistently great work. Which is largely why today on Creativity, Nike had three pieces of featured work from three different agencies spanning two different countries. And not only is it great work, imagine the time saved organization-wide by not constantly arguing about strategy or purpose? The concept of agile strategy development could really help more organizations craft purpose driven strategies...

Drive It Like a Race Car

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This year the Indy 500 will celebrate 100 years. The event is on May 29th. There's going to be a stamp. There's also a racing analogy that I turn to often in this business: If you're an account person in 2011 one of the best traits to have is that of a race car driver. It's one of the traits that, I believe, separates elite account management from the rest. And I don't mean just going fast.

Running an account is one of the trickiest things in the business. It's supposed to be planned out but everyday is a bit unpredictable. Some assignments require speedy action--getting around the track lightning fast. Others require slowing down in order to successfully make the turns. The magic is a balance: If you're always running agency teams in fifth gear you're going to hit lots of walls, but if you never punch it into overdrive you're going to miss opportunities and lose. One must do both.

Being a race car driver is about leadership. Knowing when to pick up the pace and produce and when to slow down and map out the strategy. Knowing when to do what comes from the gut.

My Five Things

At the beginning of every year I like to sit down and think about some general topics and questions that I'm personally curious about and want to understand better. Things to track and pursue in-depth exploration of in my own time in addition to all the other stuff I try to keep up on. If possible, I generally like the topics to tie to business in some way but in previous years I've had some that didn't. This year, five things are on my list...

Gen X: I'm a proud Gen Xer. The youngest of us is 30, the oldest is 47. We're now reaching an age where Xers will be making up the majority of leadership positions. And think of the span of development we've seen and will champion? From pre cable TV to interactive TV. From rotary dial phones to smartphones. From holograms in film to holograms in life. I love the unique balance that Gen X has. It's different than Boomers and Gen Y. I was reminded of this again last week while reading Decoded (terrific). So how does this unique position of Gen X affect our world and what do we do with this balance of experience?

The Mix of Mass Media and One-to-One: I still believe that the most successful marketing ideas are those that embrace some form of mass media promotion and some form of one-to-one engagement, all integrated together. Examples of success are everywhere. It works for big enterprise and small business. I'm continually fascinated by this: Who's doing it well and why does it work?

The Adaptive Web: I know that people report that they don't like that the web knows what they want. But what people say in surveys and what they really feel can be quite misleading. A tool that knows what we want is helpful. And finding ways to attract those who will truly find value in a product or service is good for everyone. How can this best work for consumers without being creepy, annoying and invasive?

Social Culture: Now that we're all on Facebook and participating and sharing in culture it begs the question, what is culture and how does it travel throughout the world? Why do some things trend and not others? How do we define culture--from those who create it to those who adapt it?

Us: I'm currently reading The Comfort of Things. It's about our stuff and what it means to us. Everything from family hand-me-downs that we display on our shelves to body tatoos and digital photos. It's lovely and interesting and has way more to do with anthropology than marketing. As we get more and more digital how do we make sure that we keep a healthy dose of analog?

Delicious makes exploring these questions easier to do. Sure glad they're not shutting down.

Two Great Ways To Think

I had a chance to catch up on Plannersphere blogs this weekend and I'm always amazed at all the great thinking that goes on over the course of a very short amount of time.

In doing this, there were two thoughts that particularly stood out to me which I wanted to further pass along...

First off Simon made a really interesting point in talking about trying to achieve strong brand minutes with our audiences and how that might help really hone cross-channel thinking. Considering a brand's full moment in time as it affects a consumer is a really interesting way to go about it...

If we stop thinking about broadcast and digital and experiential as separate things and just consider it in terms of ‘brand minutes’ then we can boil down the cross-media debate to one of the time people spend with a brand.

That's a helpful way to think about it, isn't it? As we're crafting ideas we should ask ourselves, 'are we making the absolute most of the time we have on stage and, more importantly, are we giving people the strongest logical and emotional items to carry with them to act upon and tell others?'

Next time you craft a brief it might be worth measuring the strength of the insight against the brand minute in produces in your mind... (And it's imperative that account folks and planners always write the first ad off the brief.)

Brief writing leads me to a second interesting way to think regarding the specialness of you. Or, rather, the unspecialness of you.

Adliterate has a great post about something called Unspecial Planning. How all of us are basically, unspecial, and being unspecial can be a real benefit in planning...

I am a fan of real insight, the revelations derived from real ife not research. And the truth is that the very best place to start in deriving real insight is yourself – so called planning from within. Your forensic understanding of your own behaviour and attitudes is your best first step in understanding how to change that behaviour and those attitudes.

The post goes on to say that basically if it turns out you are indeed special in some way outside the norm then perhaps your view of things is far different from the larger audience you're tasked with being relevant to...

I suppose at its heart Unspecial is about how similar we all are. While we all have our idiosyncrasies, we aren’t that special or unique as human beings, we like being part of the herd.

Anyway, I really like those thoughts. And I'm going to try to add them to the ever-refining kaleidoscope.

Check out their original thinking here and here.

Great vs. Good

Great vs. Good

Really enjoyed this presentation by Simon. Particularly the 'enemies of great' starting on slide 54.

Seems like a terrific way to start the week...

Art, Creativity, Marketing and Such

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If you work in advertising (especially account management or brand strategy) I think you'll find reading Tolstoy's What Is Art? a valuable use of time.

In this relatively short book the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina articulates a guide that helps distinguish between what is indeed "art" and what is not.

As you can imagine, it sparked lots of debate and criticism in the early 1900s upon release but it's a fascinating read with Tolstoy's key definition of art coming down to this:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art.

I like that.

What it's basically asking is: Did the artist communicate with clarity that which was intended?

Tolstoy's definition preceded film... But this is probably art:

Moving beyond art, I believe the same guideline should be used today when we call something "creative" in marketing. Labeling something as really creative is, of course, an accolade for the idea. Is it creative? Well, are we clearly and concisely conveying our intentions? 

This sure did:

But we use the word 'creative' all the time. Perhaps too much. We just all assume everyone universally knows what it means. What Is Art? talked about this tendency too...

As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word with the greater self assurance do people use that word pretending that what is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not even worthwhile to discuss what it actually means.

Isn't that the truth when you think about it? "Cool" immediately comes to mind. (A good definition of that can be found here.)

Anyway, I revisited What Is Art? after I read Newsweek's much forwarded article, "The Creativity Crisis," which is simply the best article on creativity I've read in a very long time.

The first key takeaway from the article is their rather simple definition of creativity:  the production of something original and useful.

Excellent.

But I'm really interested in how that definition turns the corner to define creativity in marketing which is why I loved the second key takeaway from the article:  that creativity is about problem solving.

And the good news about that is, interestingly, the process of creative problem solving can be taught and practiced. It's a way of thinking that engages both sides of our brain, not just the right hemisphere.

From "The Creativity Crises":

...When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate...

So taking all of this in, I'm currently thinking about creativity in marketing as:  The creation of something original and useful that successfully solves a business problem.

I dunno... I may not like that next week but I'm going with it today. After all, a recent IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future so it's good that we all try and concisely define and understand what creativity means in 2010...

Human Communities Depend on a Diversification of Talent

There's tons to learn from Sir Ken Robinson's latest TED talk.

The subject is a revolution in education. That we need to examine going from an industrialized education model (a "manufacturing-type" format based in linearity) to one that's more of an "agricultural-type" model (an organic format where students develop their own solutions based on customized curriculums)...

"Human resources are like natural resources. They're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them. They're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves."

Can't help but think there's an interesting correlation between this and Sir Ken's talk. And the significant impact thorough embracement and application of both ideas could have. 

The Premortem

McKinsey has a good article about trusting your gut. When is it wise to do so and when should you get some facts? Midway through the piece Gary Klein, a scientist at MacroCognition, talks about something called "the premortem," which I love. We've all heard of the postmortem, that wildly fun meeting when everyone hovers around after a project to discuss things that didn't go as planned and learnings to be applied. But why don't we do premortems? Perhaps we should start...

Klein: The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and this project has failed; it’s a fiasco. Now, everybody, take two minutes and write down all the reasons why you think the project failed.”

The logic is that instead of showing people that you are smart because you can come up with a good plan, you show you’re smart by thinking of insightful reasons why this project might go south. If you make it part of your corporate culture, then you create an interesting competition: “I want to come up with some possible problem that other people haven’t even thought of.” The whole dynamic changes from trying to avoid anything that might disrupt harmony to trying to surface potential problems.