The first is asking about someone's intention. When you don't know them well, and you're both sitting down to discuss something, what a pointed way to center things.
The second is around attention:
OWN’s turnaround might have something to do with a concept that Winfrey considers one of her big productivity secrets: being "fully present." "I have learned that your full-on attention for any activity you choose to experience comes with a level of intensity and truth," she says. "It’s about living a present life, moment to moment—not worrying about what’s going to happen at 3 o’clock and what’s going to happen at 7 o’clock." In other words: focus. "That whole thing about multitasking? That’s a joke for me. When I try to do that, I don’t do anything well."
Great creative and media briefs are only possible when they have your full attention. Shut down the feeds, turn off the email and climb into them.
I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
Whatever the job that lands on your desk, begin by breaking it down according to the Eisenhower method, and then decide how to proceed. We often focus too strongly on the ‘urgent and important’ field, on the things that have to be dealt with immediately. Ask yourself: When will I deal with the things that are important, but not urgent? When will I take the time to deal with the important tasks before they become urgent? This is the field for strategic, long-term decisions.
I'm going to start keeping a list. It's going to be a collection of marketing posts where authors choose to say that brands should never do something, or always do something.
One of the things the world has taught us, particularly over the last 20 years, is that nearly everything isn't black or white: it's shades of gray. Part of learning and empathy is that things are, mostly, situational.
The latest in my feed: A brand should never use a hashtag. Right, it makes no sense for the World Wildlife Fund to hashtag campaigns in an attempt to connect people around the world with animals or issues. Nope, WWF is a brand, and they should NEVER use them.
Examples of "never" are everywhere. Like how a brand should NEVER use a brand extension. Because Disney had no business creating Disneyland.
You can find the same for "always".
Never and Always constrict thinking. They're most prevalent in presidential election politics, of course. Which is such a lovely topic to follow.
Sometimes I wonder if authors and publishers choose Always or Never thinking because our industry can sometimes lack confidence so we take dramatic stances in response...
One of the things that's nagged me about advertising--the industry I love--throughout my career is that there is no official certification that agencies or practitioners need to get before doing the job. Lawyers and architects show the confidence of their extended education. Advertising professionals, on the other hand, don't have anything.
But I'm quickly coming to one positive outcome of this: there's no ordained and proper way to do things. Channeled correctly, that openness is a blessing for clients because it means that a (good) agency must deeply study the brand, the business problem, the audience needs, the marketing opportunities and create a tailored solution from both proven theories and new ideas.
Always and Never have cautious roles here for once they're gone we increase our odds to make things distinctive. Approach solutions with 'yes and.' Embrace 'perhaps' and 'what if.' Get rid of the devil's advocate. Create ambitious things like this, this and this.
Of course, it is incumbent on good practitioners to know and understand the well-proven theories for only then can we use them, or know how to break from them. They help us think. But there are no shortcuts. And that's what Always and Never are... shortcuts.
It's good to understand the foundational reasons that someone might say Always or Never. Then, adorn yourself the ability to agree and use the theory sometimes, while at other times, break the shit out of either when the problems and opportunities are pointing you to do so.
Recently I logged in to Twitter and received a promoted tweet from Amazon. The tweet said "50% off today's Deal of the Day!" I clicked. Waiting for me was a product page of great deals on a clothing brand I had previously searched. There was a 50% off deal on a t-shirt. Because I have a relationship with Amazon Prime a click or two purchased that item and shipped it to my house. I clicked back in to Twitter to resume what I was doing. The whole thing took under 45 seconds.
But if you really think about it, the most common reason people don't like an ad has little to do with creativity or the message itself; it's because it's irrelevant to them.
Consider the things largely funded by advertising: the entertainment industry, the news industry, sports broadcasting, Google. Remove advertising and many of the things we like suddenly disappear. And yet advertising comes with a small price: for the last 100 years all ad buys had to contain a certain amount of waste. Are pharma ads extremely annoying to you? That's probably because you're not interested in Cialis. But you're watching football with a lot of other people.
Take a scan across the industry and the improvements in creativity, design and marketing over the last five years are notable. While the negative souls will always say that "it's not what it used to be" the truth of the matter is that it's better. Some historic campaigns may never be topped. But many of the most viral things on the web today are great advertising ideas.
The most acute challenge the industry faces today, the area that needs the most help, the most guidance and the most focus is the part that we talk about the least: media. And fixing it can have the greatest affect on people by helping them find what they want. If advertising must exist, let's at least try harder to have it be valuable and helpful to people.
In the past media teams spent their time strategizing whether to run an ad in GQ or Esquire. Last year, 22 percent of all US ad spending was digital. This is up 19 percent from the previous year. Such volume has given rise to DSPs, or demand-side platforms, which allow advertisers to buy online campaigns more efficiently, adjust in real time according to effectiveness data, and actually use strategy to inform placement.
Today we're witnessing the staying power of TV. At the same time, we're also witnessing TV and online video merging together, which will be valuable. With TV we know reach and frequency, but not engagement, whereas with online we have data around engagement, but how well are we at documenting viewability?
Work is now being done to tie online display advertising standards to online video, which is currently that to register as "viewable" 50 percent of the ad has to be in-view of the user for one second. Why one second? Research shows that when we're on a web page we're going to make a decision about what to do with an ad--ignore, click, leave the page--in less than a second.
Digital has also been shown to drive more reach. The IAB has Nielsen research which says that moving 15 percent of a TV budget to digital can increase reach by up to six percent while decreasing the overall CPM.
I don't believe the studies that say people prefer big web ads. I do believe that if a web ad contains something interesting and relevant to people that they don't mind it as much.
Consumers have some control here. With ad settings, we can tell Google what's interesting to us. Or, more importantly, what isn't. Not into fishing, fiber & textile arts, or foreign language study (to name a few "f" choices)? Then remove them. It's reasonable to assume that more people will do this considering it's only one click in from many ads served up today.
The tools are finally arriving where advertising can be better for people. We can tailor per person: eliminate what is irrelevant and offer what is helpful. Doing this saves money for clients. It also provides insightful data into customer behavior, which can inform marketing and brand decisions, both online and offline.
The Account Planners group on LinkedIn has a nice discussion going about When is an insight an insight? A good conversation surrounding insights is always interesting because they remain a bit of a mystery... What is the importance of insights? What are insights, really? And how do you go about finding them?
Looking for a definition of insights is difficult but Simon had some good thinking. As a noun an insight is 'a deep and intuitive understanding of a person or thing'. But the definition by Diageo is really good for marketing:
An insight is a penetrating observation about consumer behavior that can be applied to unlock growth.
If that's how it's defined than an insight is pretty important. And yet finding a good insight is very difficult. They come in many different forms...
Sometimes new or previously unused motivating facts can serve as useful insights. Such was the case for Think! traffic safety that makes us look at posted speed limits with a re-newed perspective.
Sometimes an insight is a new way of looking at existing information. This often takes incredible imagination on the part of the planner. Honda Grrr is an excellent example of this, turning 'hate' into something positive for Honda.
Often an insight comes after getting close to consumers and seeing fresh or niche uses of the product or service. Observing how some test homes used Febreze enabled P&G, after several failed hypothesis, to understand that the most intriguing use of the product for its initial launch was as a final touch after cleaning (versus covering up unpleasant smells).
And looking at milk consumption in a new way led to "Aaron Burr" and all the great got milk? spots.
Another form of insights can be realizing when and why consumers need something different because the status quo has become a bit silly. Dollar Shave Club hit a nerve by calling out multi-blade, expensive razors while the launch of the iMac showed us their famous two step set up.
There are other types of insights.
Regardless of their form great insights make us feel different. Like we've learned or discovered something new and valuable as consumers. Which is an incredibly powerful way to change behavior.
Great insights are also very easy to re-communicate to others. Jeremy Bullmore illustrates this beautifully. He cites two insights:
Insight #1: Product satisfaction arises less from inherent construction and performance than from consumers' internalised perceptions of personal utility.
Insight #2: People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.
They both mean the same thing.
The first one you can imagine in many powerpoint decks, often not going far beyond that. The second is the famous line from Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt.
The second one is inspiring and easy to remember. It also points to the fact that often the language we use to communicate insights is as important, if not more important, than the insight itself. Which doesn't mean use big words. Quite the opposite. Jeremy articulates this well:
By definition, a good creative brief contains a bold hypothesis. To generate hypotheses you need to speculate: you need to progress from the known to the unknown. But you cannot paint the future in the colours of the past. Other people's imaginations need to be engaged, excited, signed on as accomplices. And the choice of the language you use is not arbitrary and inconsequential; for an insight to have real potency, the language in which it is couched is at least as important as the inner truth itself. For an insight to have real potency, literal accuracy is less important than its power to evoke.
This point is also a good reminder that we don't always need amazing insights to produce amazing creative work. Simon reminds us of this too when he pulled a snapshot of Cannes winners--the majority of which were simply great ideas without notable insights...
There needs to be a bold idea in every brief. Which is why the best brief writers brief themselves after they write it. Can they create an ad immediately, even it's horrible? If they can't there's no way the creative team will be able to either.
The bold idea can come in the form of a new insight or also as a unique one-off thought, like the great Arnold VW example that the joy of a convertible isn't just driving it on sunny days, but enjoying a warm, nighttime sky.
Finding insights and bold creative hypothesis means that we must remain extremely close to the client's product or service and also be genuinely interested in things. As Russell once said "inspiration isn't in what you look at, it's in how you look."
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...
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.
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 hadthreepieces 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...
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.