Creating Marketing Things for Ourselves

"Once you start conceiving of your book as a commodity, you start thinking about readers as potential buyers, as customers to be lured. This makes you try to anticipate their tastes and cater to them. In doing so, you begin to depart from your own inclinations rather than respond to what the Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, has referred to as “the stuff that won’t go away.” “It seems that the essential impulse in working is … to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find a form and structure for it.” Facing up to what haunts you and finding a form and structure for it can never be a commercial enterprise. That stuff’s too chaotic and unpredictable, too messy and gorgeous, to fit a popular template. But it’s the source of your originality and may well prove popular in the end."

Author Jeffrey Eugenides shares somewhat of a fact of creativity. it tends to work best when it's something we want ourselves. Which I think is problematic for the business we're in. Everything we do chases the whims of something or someone else. So our question then is how we "chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul" when it's not only an expression of something that burns within, but rather something meant to move someone else.

Not to get all emo on you, I think the answer is love. We don't have the luxury of chasing every eccentric act of creativity that crosses our mind, we aren't in the business of provoking for the sake of provocation. And frankly, very few can build a career on that sort of indulgence in any industry.

So love though, think of how you bought gifts for others this past Christmas. Did you hurriedly buy the first thing plausible you could find? Or did you have the most success in considering the tastes and fashions of someone you care for? Did you buy it to check a box on a list or did you buy it because you wanted to show that person that they hold some meaning for you? If your purchase is more considered, the act of both giving and receiving becomes more satisfying. Everyone wins.

The best strategists and creatives I've found are not only passionate about the work, but the joy of the work stems from something bigger than building stuff you like or building because you need a pay check. The best find something about those who will ultimately touch the things they make that they genuinely care for, admire and respect. The best work is not simply transactional, but an empathetic exchange of something of more import than selling a few widgets.

So that is the job for the New Year, to get beyond the scowls and politics, the holier than thou attitudes we sometimes take towards an audience who may seem far away and not of us. It is to stay out of the high rises and in the streets. To not imagine only soccer moms, tech geek dads and rich, extreme white teenagers when we find ideas, but to create experiences for how the rest of us, and the most of us, live, too.

Austin Kleon says of musicians, "You can ignore the audience as much as you want — just don’t expect to get on the fucking radio."

Ignore your audience all you want, just don't expect to be rewarded for it.

Interesting stuff on the internet

The Art of Science

"Both artist and scientist are revolutionaries, trying to change our perceptions and understanding of the world. Sometimes the fuel is no more than an outrage that “this must change”. Their paths often begin with a gnawing realization that something is askew in nature, which sets the traveler on a journey into the unknown to find what is missing, such as bringing about a more just and humane society."

Moderate Success is the Enemy of Breakout Success

"Sometimes what you need to solve a problem is '0 years experience' -- not 10. I saw magazine people bring a lot of baggage to the blogging revolution: they wanted to be edited and wanted to write 1,000+ word pieces! TV directors with 10 years' experience trying to shift into YouTube thought adding $10,000 in cameras and lights was the right thing to do, when they really should have focused on brainstorming creative ideas that could go viral and doing audience development."

The Insourcing Boom

"For years, too many American companies have treated the actual manufacturing of their products as incidental—a generic, interchangeable, relatively low-value part of their business. If you spec’d the item closely enough—if you created a good design, and your drawings had precision; if you hired a cheap factory and inspected for quality—who cared what language the factory workers spoke? This sounded good in theory. In practice, it was like writing a cookbook without ever cooking."

Lewis Lapham's Antidote to the Age of Buzzfeed

"The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness—against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for...BuzzFeed."

And now for a couple reasons I'm happy I didn't go into the music business (and respect musicians that much more)...

How Much Does Crowdfunding Cost Musicians?

"They've already spent more than $3,000 to shoot videos and record the first singles from the album. All told, the musicians are in for more than $5,000 just running the campaign, and another $11,000 to make good on their promises to deliver the album and rewards. That means they're a few thousand dollars in the hole."

Making Cents

"But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with those changes, a potential end-run around the industry's problems seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold on to 100% of their rights and royalties, as we have."

The Agility Myth

“If you look at the creative process outside of traditional advertising, you’ll find a gap. And where there are gaps, there can be opportunities. Why does it take agencies months to work out a single campaign, when it seems Silicon Valley can kickstart an entirely new company in the same amount of time? In the same time frame, gaming companies pull together thousands of iterations of Call Of Dutyand Farmville. Sitcoms can turn out dozens of scripts. And so forth.

What agencies must take immediate responsibility for is the change in hierarchies happening outside of the agency brain tunnel. Top-down assembly line processing is a remnant from the rusty industrial age, and no longer works in the fluid, spreadable hoodoo environments of the information era.” - Patrick Hanlon, Google Says It's Time for Agencies to Get Agile, Forbes

This drives me almost as crazy as the ridiculous "utility or bust" snake oil that sold agencies the idea that storytelling is for chumps, tools are the only things that matter. Like don’t teach math, just build better calculators. Sounds good on paper, but leaves you with a bunch of idiots. 

First, agencies are not startups. Startups aren't even startups, at least not in the romantic view in which they’re presented here. They imagine the myth of the entrepreneur while dismissing the months or years it takes even the most succesful to find their footing. Even then, they fail at a higher rate than would be sustainable for our industry. If you expect to stay in business long with 1 success to 100 epic failures, good luck.

Second, most startups are building stuff they themselves want. In Paul Graham’s post on growth in startups, he said “Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established.”

In other words, it’s a combination of perspective and circumstance. Neither easily gained, especially not at the rate suggested here.

We spend most of our time making things that need to move people other than ourselves. Pretending that you can create things that matter to someone else by wielding only an expert knowledge of a technology is just absurd.

I believe that agility matters. I believe that companies that can grow and adapt to changes happening around them usually win. I believe that relentlessly iterating and staying ruthless with our ideas matters more today than in any other time in our history.

That doesn’t mean that every part of the process of making advertising-like things should be treated the same. It's not always useful to throw a bunch of people in the room and expect anything of value to come back. Agility is not an end unto itself. 

A secret sauce for faster ideas is a story the industry wants to believe in, just like the flash of a brilliant insight or the power of creative genius. But if we rely on miracles rather than the tenacity and grit to both find and produce good ideas, I have trouble seeing how the products we make improve rather than continue to decline.

We need to understand when to run. When enough information is enough. When we have the right problem to solve or the right ideas to execute. Maybe then is when speed becomes more of an imperative. Otherwise, dollars are too scarce and too important to risk for the sake of speed alone.

photo by kurichan+

Good Problems and the Core Thought

As many of you know, I'm a big believer that the better the problem, the more likely you are to get to work that works. Wrongheaded problems leave us in a ditch. Boring problems invite uninspired solutions. And when you only ask advertising questions, unsurprisingly - you get lots of advertising answers. The best of the best understand the value in taking the time to get the question right. 

With that, here's a presentation I did to get the point across the girls and boys of Twist a few months back. Hopefully you'll find some value in it, too.

[slideshare id=14075358&w=512&h=421&fb=0&mw=0&mh=0&style=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;&sc=no]

Out and About

The 22 Rules of Storytelling, according to Pixar

#6 What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#18 You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#22 What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

The Greatness of Bernbach on advertising and creatiivity

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUs5-3Y6vxM]

Happiness is being a loser

"Another problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own or other people's – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success. Bookshops are stuffed with autobiographical volumes such as the one released in 2006 by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis, entitled How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom Of One Of Britain's Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs. It's an entertaining read, conveying a similar message to many of the others: that to make a fortune what you need is stubbornness and a willingness to take risks. But research by the Oxford management theorist Jerker Denrell suggests that these are just as likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. It's just that the failures don't write books. You rarely see autobiographies of people who took risks that then didn't work out."

Mister Rogers Remixed

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzXaFbxDcM]

Michael Geismar's Blackjack Strategy

"The lesson here is that whether on Wall Street or the strip in Las Vegas, it’s easy to confuse increasing the chances of winning with shifting risk. Increasing the chances of winning improves the amount you should expect as payout. Shifting the risk makes it so that most of the time you get a good payout, but every once and a while you lose catastrophically. As a culture, we should be trying to ensure that the people making financial decisions are looking to do more of the former and less of the latter, especially given the systemic consequences of recent catastrophic market collapses."

The Greatness of Jack Dorsey

"Dorsey is trying to create magic in an industry where people have not previously sought wonder and delight. In short, he hopes to pull an Apple on the entire financial world."

Photos: The Secret City that created the atomic bomb

Phil Dusenberry, Former Chairman of BBDO

"Insights as opposed to ideas. There's a difference. Ideas, valuable though they may be are a dime a dozen in business. That's certainly the case at ad agencies where ideas are the currency of the realm and even the mailroom people spit out ideas as if they were candy from a PEZ dispenser. Insight is much rarer – and therefore much more precious. In advertising a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials…more than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world."

Lifecycle of the Agency

"Brands have value only where consumers have choice." 
Economist definition of brands

I just bought myself a shiny new pair of Warrior shoes. Maybe it's the recent talk of the Chinese factory workers slavishly building Apple products, but for the first time the idea of handmade in China seems really appealing.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/41666240 w=525&h=393]

Which made me wonder where we are in the lifecycle of the ad agency. There may be 30,000 products in your local supermarket or hundreds of thousands of new product launches every year, but we are just scratching the surface of where we will be once the global middle class resembles something more like the Western middle class. The means of production will become more accessible, and we'll get perhaps millions of new products meant for audiences with fresh money to burn, including thousands of which that might break free and find their voice beyond. And as this happens - the notion of brand either becomes largely meaningless or infinitely meaningful in helping us navigate. I suspect there will be no shortage of need for people who understand why people buy, what will sell - and all those points in between.

But the question is, in a world of infinite choice - is that a role for someone representing the brand or someone representing the people those brands wish to attract. My guess is that there will still be a few big guys that help large brands find new audiences. But a vast sea of opportunity will emerge for intermediaries who actively seek new products and help them hone their message for the more well defined markets they act as brokers for.

The Working Class

Well, it's come to this. I'm busy as always, but missing all this blogging fun. Good for the soul. So in the spirit of Andrew, I think I'll just repost an email. Maybe you'll find it interesting, too.

One of our strategists at Twist found a pretty great survey of Walmart moms. One question in particular stood out to me. Or as Gillian said, "Walmart Moms were less likely to refer to themselves as middle class, and more likely to describe themselves as working class (let's get real – this probably speaks to them being more realistic and having less status anxiety than the other women surveyed – we all know America doesn't have much of a middle class. I've read other studies that have shown that most people, regardless of whether they are rich or struggling, will self-report that they are middle class)."

So I yammer on in response…

I especially love the bit around working class versus middle class. Working class is used in an almost derogatory fashion throughout most of the States. Like middle class implies you're working your way towards the upper class, whereas manufacturing types in Michigan or Pennsylvania, Miners in West Virginia, whatever – don't relate as well to the quintessential American story. Their parents did the same job. And their parents before them. And that sort of thing is a badge of honor within those communities, not a sign of stagnation.

It's partly what I love so much about the Levi's Ready to Work campaign. It took the ideals of the working class, freedom in open spaces, working with your hands – these things they were feeling like they were losing, and made it a cause for the creative class in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NY – who were just discovering those very same ideals and making them their own.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=635XItRDU7g]

We are all workers – Braddock, Pennsylvania [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMgRkYjxP5s]

Levi's workshops [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiZKlyG2r98]

Also speaks to the broader point of how we should be looking at our own jobs. It's not enough to look at a situation or an audience and understand them in a vacuum, but we're at our best when we're connecting those audiences to a larger story. Which doing that is all about all of our other inputs we bring in. What is it that our brains bring to the table that help us sift and see how one thing is like another in ways others can't.

(and full disclosure, Walmart is a client)

On Strategists as Connectors

In Tim Harford's latest article he said, "The advancing frontier of scientific knowledge forces most researchers to specialise in ever narrower fields and, as a result, collaboration between these silos is essential." As he also mentions, this isn't something happening just in science or research, but many other sectors from finance to retailing. We've progressed so far because of our ability to work together. But now we're so specialized that we're having trouble speaking to one other.

For anyone that's ever walked into a company from another industry, it doesn't take long to realize that it's not just what they do that's different, but also the entire language structure that allows them to do what they do. If splicing language was apparently so effective at creating barriers in babel, just imagine the hinderence our evolution to specialist groups can be.

So now the need for the glue is even greater, those few that bridge the gap between one person who knows how to do one thing and another who knows some complementary thing. If our world is more reliant on working together towards some end, these roles are not nice to haves but baseline essentials for progress. Especially now as a single engagement may touch everything from HR to community managers to media types and technologists working towards the same ends.

This is where strategists have to be at their best, defining meaty problems that allow various specialist types to find solutions meaningful to them, building a common language and environment that allows teams of different thinkers to work together and rallying the commitment that encourages projects to bloom.

Or as Tim finished, "Perhaps the real lesson is that promoting cross-disciplinary research need not require a mysterious blend of social-networking tools and funky collaborative architectural spaces. All that is sometimes required is a shared problem, or a shared set of tools, and, above all, the money to pay for the job to be done."

photo via carl heindl

Primacy of Work

One of those things they never tell you when you become responsible for a team is just how terribly difficult it is to not just find good people, but to know the good ones when you stumble across them. I think it's mostly just getting your own head straight as to what exactly you're looking for and why - not just in skill sets, but in the softer stuff that makes the team work or not work. Skills can be taught, attitudes are a much more difficult thing.

A couple weeks back, my cousin-in-law, the pops and I were having a backchannel discussion primarily around hiring, motivations, balance and the like. This comment from my Dad struck me as especially right on.

Back in the day, late 1960s it was, I was working for Quaker Oats, trying to hire an assistant brand manager. Quaker’s HR group gave us all a “white paper” on hiring which identified four key traits that correlated with superior performance. Can’t remember three of them (intelligence was no doubt on the list), but at the time I was struck by Number One success factor: “Primacy of work.” More than forty years ago, somebody had figured out that if a person really loves what he/she is doing, if it is wrapped into their self-image and self-esteem and idea of fulfillment, they’ll be self-motivated and very likely to outperform the wage slaves and those who have no higher goal than personal ambition. In later years, I have added Curiosity and a Sense of Humor to my list of “must-haves.”

The primacy of work. Simple, but brilliant I think. You push yourself, you operate and you work because you have no choice but to do so. It is who you are.

When asked for the meaning of life, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote,

I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

This is why purpose and vision matters. This is why when we create expectations for ourselves and our organizations we need to operate towards a greater ideal. Without living within the bigger idea, it's much more difficult to know what primacy of work means for us and instead we fall back on skill sets alone.

So adding to my list of curiosity, an openness with ideas and a proclivity for experimentation, I'll add the primacy of work, too. Heads up.

Curious to hear what you guys look for, as well.

photo via vamitos

Things are Interesting

Thomas Edison and the Original Cat Video

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

The Finest from All over the World, Made in Japan
"It used be that the Japanese offered idiosyncratic takes on foreign things. White bread was transformed into shokupan, a Platonic ideal of fluffiness, aerated and feather-light in a way that made Wonder Bread seem dense. Pasta was almost always spaghetti, perfectly cooked al dente, but typically doused with cream sauce and often served with spicy codfish roe. Foreign imports here took on a life of their own, becoming something completely different and utterly Japanese.

...That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards, realizing that the apex of bread making may not be Wonder Bread–style loaves, but pain à l'ancienne."

How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work
"Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?"

Nextpedition - A custom-made adventure from American Express

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swtq2rHOps4]

The Next Step in Copying will be Physical
"We believe that the next stop in copying will be made from digital form into physical form," The Pirate Bay declares. "It will be physical objects." 

Everything is a Remix, Part 4

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/36881035 w=524&h=295]