Commercial Karma

Memories light the corners of my mind
Misty, water colored memories
Of the way we were.
Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were

Barbra Streisand, image: barbrastreisandpictures.com

I attended the Damien Hirst show at the Tate Modern. Flies and fags, butterflies and bling, spin and spots, drugs and death… There. You don’t need to see it now.

I walked away somewhat hollow. I felt a pang of guilt and recognition. Guilt because Hirst was in many ways the adman’s artist. Art that came with a nudge, a wink and a knowing punchline. Art as quick hit, shiny bright, paper thin. Recognition because, yes, that was Britain in the ’90s. Spin doctors and Spice Girls, boy bands and man bags, heroin chic and Shabba Ranks, lads and Loaded, puffas and Prozac, Wonderbra and Wonderwall, alcopops and Posh & Becks. Fool Britannia…. There was no god, no beauty, no other. Just money and death and irony. Things could only get worse…

I’m not sure I blame Damien Hirst. I suspect he’s a very good artist. He was very effectively holding a mirror up to us and our values. Or lack of them. And I suspect each generation gets the art it deserves. Flies and fags was maybe all we were good for in the ’90s.

Don’t you also think that we get the advertising we deserve? As an Agency, as a Client, as a culture ? When we hark back to a golden hued, bygone age of celestial communication, are we not condemning our own failure to create greatness now? When the disappointed Client fires the disappointing Agency, isn’t he or she shirking personal responsibility? When we rail against cruel fate and happenstance, when we bemoan the recession, or reach for the blame gun, shouldn’t we be looking in the mirror first?

I believe in commercial karma. That, broadly speaking, in advertising as in life, we reap what we sow. That what goes around comes around. Not for some spiritual, counter cultural, gaia-type reason. But because, though it seems trite to say it, in the long run, smart, open minded Clients, working with intelligent, lateral Agencies, for honest, worthwhile brands, will make better, more effective work. And vice versa.

I guess I have witnessed exceptions to this. The craven creative, the malevolent marketing director, the bullying business director have on occasion won the day. But overall in my experience fakes are found out, charlatans are shopped. Good prevails.

Instant karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead

John Lennon, ‘Instant Karma’

John Lennon, image: backstageol.com

Of course in the past one had to wait for hubris to be followed by inevitable nemesis. Nowadays the social web has created a kind of instant karma. Because the courtroom of public opinion is so immediate and all seeing. It shines an unforgiving, instantaneous light on the ill conceived and poorly executed. It likewise rewards the virtuous with currency and value.

I had always believed that Corporate Social Responsibility was exactly that: a responsibility that a business owed to the communities it served. I wasn’t so enamoured of more fashionable phrases like social investment because I didn’t feel ethics needed commercial justification.  And I wasn’t convinced CSR had a role in marketing or brand.

Now I have been persuaded that ethics are more than a responsibility. They are fundamental to a brand’s sustainability in a transparent, socialised world. Because increasingly consumers are unwilling to buy good products from bad people. Because in a world of commercial karma only the good Clients, good admen and good brands can win.

First published: BBH Labs 21/5/12

No. 13

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Laughing Together, Weeping Alone

William Hogarth, The Laughing Audience

Vincent Van Gogh, Old Man In Sorrow

I was at home watching a film when it happened again. A drying of the throat, a tightening of the vocal cords, the involuntary dab at the side of the eye to discover a bead of moisture forming. Yes, I was crying again.

I’m no motor racing enthusiast, but I was cracking up over the Senna documentary. The potent cocktail of youth, beauty, talent and tragedy. The story of a genius half expressed, a life half lived.

It’s a curiosity of middle age that one finds oneself weeping more frequently. Sometimes it’s prompted by the profound. But often it’s the incidental, the humdrum, the everyday. A fay costume drama, a moderately emotional screwball comedy, a random memory of Dylan, the springer spaniel, watching sparrows on the summer lawn.

I sat next to a guy on the plane a while ago. A formal, serious looking man with one of those bulky lawyer’s briefcases that mean money and business. He obviously travelled a lot. After take-off he set out his paraphernalia for in-flight comfort: his unguents, earplugs and blindfold. He refused food, switched on a monitor and proceeded to cry profusely all the way through Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I’m not sure about the psychology or physiology of Middle Aged Weeping. Could it be the remembrance of things past, the wisdom of age, the diminution of testosterone, the proximity of death, the fear of apocalypse? Or all of the above simultaneously tugging at the heart strings and demanding a tune?

I’d like to say I’ve gained some lasting benefit or resolution from my weeping, that I am more in touch with my emotions, more at one with myself. But, whilst I am certainly curious about it, I don’t feel any farther down the road to self knowledge. Tears are not enough.

                                                 Maxine Brown

I cry alone

When no one else can hear me

When friends come by to cheer me

I smile and say I feel OK.

Maxine Brown, I Cry Alone

With the exception of a few funerals, like Maxine Brown I have always cried alone. Context evaporates, time stalls, the world closes in. Melancholy is a matter of silent isolation.

Conversely I only laugh with others. To share the joke, to join the fun, to feel peels of laughter rippling through the crowd. The greatest highs are the ones we share. And solitary laughter is the surest sign of oncoming madness. As the guy on the 19 bus giggles out loud at the contents of his book, one edges along the seat a little farther, grips the handrail a little tighter. I suspect more people write LOL than do it.

Take a look at anyone’s Facebook photos and you’ll see a curiously hedonistic sense of self. The laughter, smiles, gatherings and getaways of friends and family. Darker thoughts and feelings are generally suppressed. It’s a redacted life.

I wonder what does this mean? Are we instinctively predisposed to share our highs and keep the lows to ourselves? Are some feelings inherently more private and others more public? Are there natural limits to the social?

I’m aware, of course, that some societies cry more freely than mine. Perhaps others laugh more privately too. And conventions are changing. We live in an age where the instinct to share has extended beyond the joyous and celebratory. Oprah’s openness, misery memoirs, celebrity confessions. Some have speculated that the  social era may lead us to happier personal lives, that in our free expression on the web, we’re engaged in some kind of mass therapy: we’re producing the best adjusted generation since before The Fall.

Nonetheless, I share the growing concern that our transparent world poses challenges in the area of privacy. Hitherto much of the debate has centred around personal data, unsolicited targeting, embarrassing photos. I suspect privacy may represent a more profound issue than this. Privacy is a matter of personal identity. And in order to prevent identity theft in the truest sense, we need to protect the arcane, opaque, mysterious elements of our own lives. In her new book, Quiet, Susan Cain suggests that the ‘world that can’t stop talking’ underestimates introverts. I agree.

Van the Man once sang about the  ’Inarticulate Speech of the Heart’. I had grown up thinking that any belief needed a justification, that an emotion wasn’t properly felt unless it could be articulated, that one couldn’t recover from a trauma unless one could describe it. Now I treasure the unexplained, the unspoken, the unthought.

First Published: BBH Labs 02/04/12

No. 12

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Pretentious? Nous?

Philosophy, Salvator Rosa

When I went to school there were the Sports Guys and the Music Guys.

The Sports Guys liked doing circuit training, spraying Ralgex and making noises with their studs in the shower. The Music Guys wore heavy tweed overcoats, pored over the NME crossword and argued about the relative merits of Joy Division and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King. I liked both categories, but fundamentally I guess I was a Music Guy.

I went to college equipped with Country Born hair gel, ‘fu shoes and Radio London mix tapes. I covered my walls with album covers from Wah, Defunkt and Echo and the Bunnymen. I danced all night to James Brown and Washington Go Go. (Mine was an awkward, heavy-shoe shuffle that alienated girls more than it attracted them.)

I confess I became somewhat pretentious. But I imagine it was an innocent sort of pretentiousness. A love of words and ideas and debate. Of music, books and film.

Obviously pretentiousness is somewhat silly and self-important, but that’s part of its charm. Look at Salvator Rosa in the self portrait above from the National Gallery. He’s painted himself as a sensitive, brooding philosopher , braving a dark, stormy world. He’s carrying a Latin inscription (natch) that reads ‘Keep silent unless you have something more important to say than silence’. How absurd, how pretentious, how cool…

Self Portrait in a Turban, Duncan Grant 1961 Estate of Duncan Grant courtesy Henrietta Garnett

Last summer I visited Charleston, the Sussex country home and social hub of the Bloomsbury art set between the wars. They painted the walls and furniture, they painted each other, they discussed pacifism, ballet and the global financial crisis. They made a show of drinking coffee rather than tea. To be honest I didn’t love all the decorative artwork and I wasn’t too sure about their sleeping arrangements. But I had to admire the fact that they had a view about the world, a design for living.

When I left college I fell into advertising as I thought it was one of the few professions where we Music Guys were welcome. Advertising is an art not a science, it’s creative persuasion, lateral thought. Advertising folk cultivated curious facial hair, absurd spectacles and MA1 Flight Jackets. I felt at home.

In the ’90s our Agency produced the Levi’s campaign and I recall it referencing Ansel Adams, Hunter S Thompson, Rodchenko, Bill Brandt, Burt Lancaster and more besides. Pretentious perhaps, but also bracing stuff.

Now let’s be clear. I’m certainly not a subscriber to the view that advertising is art. At its best it’s creativity applied to a commercial end. But I do believe that creativity needs to be inspired, catalysed and nourished by a broader set of cultural references and ideas.

Of late I’ve begun to  wonder whether we Music Guys have lost our way and our voice a little. I’m concerned that there may not be enough people discussing arthouse movies, German dance troupes, experimental theatre. Shouldn’t the Agency be abuzz with fevered debate about Hockney and Hirst? Shouldn’t creative reviews be inspired by more  than YouTube? I worry in fact that we have become less pretentious.

Perhaps people work so hard nowadays that they don’t have time to develop what Denis Healey called a ‘hinterland’. Maybe it’s straitened times. We want to be seen as sensible, rational, commercial. Maybe it’s Anglo Saxon reserve. We apply a blanket pejorative to anything slightly outside the norms of conversation and thought. Perhaps it’s British anti-intellectualism. Our TV is dominated by unreality shows, costume anti-dramas, middle brow mundanity (what Simon Schama recently labelled ‘cultural necrophilia’). Our Queen prefers Lambourn to Glyndebourne. Our Prime Minister prefers tennis to Tennyson. And his favourite read is a cook book. Maybe we’re just too busy jogging.

Whatever the source of the problem, l’ve come to rue this loss of pretentiousness. I wish people more often cited the marginal and the maddening, the absurd and the abstruse from the world of art, academia and literature. Not just because it’s interesting, challenging, funny. But because today’s obscure eccentric is tomorrow’s bright young thing. Because creativity’s favourite bedfellows are difference and diversity.

So I’ve determined that I’m going to be pretentious in 2012. And I’ll encourage everyone else to do the same.

Honi soit qui mal y pense…

First published: BBH Labs  10/02/2012

No. 11

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I Feel For You

Jules et Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut) image courtesy of Curzon Cinemas

I was watching the splendid Truffault film, Jules et Jim. There’s a scene in which Jules, courting the mercurial Catherine, endeavours to impress her.

‘Catherine, I understand you’, he says.

Catherine replies,’But I don’t want to be understood.’

I paused for thought. Don’t we spend our lives trying to understand consumers? What if, like Catherine, they don’t want to be understood? Understanding implies explanation, logic, rationality. And, critically, it suggests control. Which is precisely, I suspect, why Catherine didn’t want to be understood.

As a young Planner I’m not sure I completely understood the behaviour, ethics and attitudes of British consumers. But I did feel a strong sense of empathy with them. I felt for them in a way. I wonder now whether I’ve lost some of that natural, instinctive judgement. I wonder whether, in a data fuelled world, we have a diminished regard for feelings in our engagement with consumers.

A Latin friend of mine occasionally dismisses films she did not enjoy with the simple assertion that she ‘did not feel it’. As an Anglo Saxon I was originally somewhat nonplussed. Surely a fuller explanation would help? Similarly we were always taught to grill Clients on their responses to work, to demand that they account for their instinctive immediate reactions. Now I wonder whether I have been wrong on both counts: in the way I expect my friends to assess movies and my Clients to judge work.

Shouldn’t  feelings always trump understanding? Shouldn’t feelings suffice?

Do you ever find it a little sinister when modern marketers promise to translate data into knowledge, and knowledge into sales? I do. I confess ‘hidden persuasion’ has never been my bag. I don’t aspire to that level of control. Of course we all want the web to be all-knowing, but should I want it to know all about me? Personally I don’t want the web to know me; I want it to feel me. And I find the prospect of an empathetic, all-feeling web increasingly attractive. Who am I to talk? I’m generally uncomfortable with unfiltered emotional expression. I shudder at the prospect of corporate hugs. Nonetheless, I return to work with a modest resolution: in 2012 I want to base more of my judgements on empathy and feeling, rather than on logic and understanding. And I’d like the web to do the same please.

Chaka was, as ever, right all along. ‘I feel for you’…

First published: BBH Labs 13/01/2012

No. 10

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To Sleep, To Dream

Girl Sleeping, by Tamara de Lempicka

‘O sleep,why dost thou leave me?
Why thy visionary joys remove?
O sleep again deceive me,
To my arms restore my wand’ring love’

I recently attended a concert in which these words of Congreve were sung in a beautiful Handel aria. I’m sure we can all relate to the sentiment: sleep is a place of joyful deceptions and re-found loves; it’s a place for escaping, forgetting, recovering, refocusing. However harsh the work environment, however stressful the unrelenting day, I have always been sustained by the promise of sleep, its welcoming embrace, its warm repose. In fact I have a singular talent for napping at will and I have inherited from my mother the habit of the Sunday afternoon kip. I like to drift off on the sofa, newspaper on my lap, to the sound of children’s chatter and roller bags from the pavement outside.

I have long felt that sleep is an area of untapped opportunity for brands. We spend a third of our lives sleeping, but we’re increasingly concerned by our ability to get enough of it, at the right quality. One can’t help but be underwhelmed by the plethora of scented candles, quack remedies and orthopaedic pillows that currently constitute the ‘sleep sector’. Can’t we do better than this? Surely space is not the final frontier; it’s sleep.

When, many years ago, BBH first embarked on our efforts to develop brand ideas that could cross borders, we had to overcome the argument that cultural difference abhorred generalisation. We observed that, whilst all markets are indeed diverse and varied, there are often strong consistencies around aspiration, belief and hope: we are united in dreams, but divided by reality. It’s a creative tension that I continue to find useful.

This is not to say that my relationship with sleep and dreams has always been positive. As a child I was cursed by a recurrent nightmare : my father, padded up, in cricket whites, being chased down the stairs by a crocodile. Not pleasant perhaps, but at least it was interesting.

When I was a young researcher there were guys who put respondents to sleep, hypnotised them in order to probe the deeper, darker unspoken truths of brands. I confess I felt at the time that this was all somewhat daft. Nonetheless I can’t help but admire the intent.

I sometimes wonder if the ‘always on’ digital age is depriving brands of the opportunity to pause and ponder, recover and refocus. I’m concerned that nowadays we fail to find the time and space for our brands to sleep and dream. As we reduce everything to rational reckoners, KPIs and capabilities, are we cultivating brands without conflict or contradiction, brands without personality or human frailty? Are we creating an Age of the Anodyne? Pity the insomniac brand, cursed to roam the earth in the endless waking sunshine of unforgiving rationality.

It seems reasonable to suggest that, whilst brands today should naturally seek to deliver immediacy and reciprocity, utility and individuality, they should also find room to rest, relax and restore; to dream the illogical and impossible; to yearn for lost loves and found hopes.

‘Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I’m tired and I
I want to go to bed…’

Asleep, Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr

First published: BBH Labs: 02/08/2011

No. 9

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Is That All There Is?

‘Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is.’

Is That All There Is? Leiber & Stoller

Peggy Lee, image via peggylee.com

I remember the first time I heard Peggy Lee singing the classic Leiber and Stoller number, ‘Is That All There Is?’. The heroine relates how, through the course of her life, experiences that may initially have been exciting, had in fact turned out rather tiresome. From her home burning down, to going to the circus, to falling in love. It’s a hymn to disappointment and apathy. Like most teenagers I had spent large chunks of my short time on the planet lying in my room being incredibly bored. In amongst the bubble gum pop and dinosaur rock of Radio 1, a song that celebrated ennui was a rare and precious thing.

I remember the first time I heard the Clash sing ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’. I was simultaneously shocked and excited. Could one really so publicly proclaim disappointment with the home of rock’n'roll, the land of the free, the country that had given us Barry Manilow, Boz Scaggs and The Sound Of Bread? Was that acceptable? Was that legal?

I remember the first time I saw the painting Ennui by Walter Sickert. The bored couple cannot be bothered to look at each other. One stares into space and the other at the wall. The blank generation. Tedium in oils. And yet so utterly compelling.

Ennui, by Walter Sickert

It’s a curious thing. Apathy, boredom and tedium seem such dull, passive, inert qualities. Yet they can be exciting, inspiring, disruptive.

And I wonder whether this particular truth is lost on us and our world. We claim to be consumer experts. But are we not in denial of the fact that most consumers, most of the time are just not that into our brand or category? They just don’t care. We sustain a myth that the primary communication challenge is lack of attention, when really, more often than not, it’s lack of interest.

I started my career as a Market Researcher and occasionally I had to conduct focus groups to establish names and positioning concepts for industrial paints. I well recall the blank stares, the listless body language, the echoing silence. ‘Just call it paint’, one chap suggested.

I have often felt that a wholehearted recognition of the true level of consumer disinterest might conversely be the platform to build transformative engagement. Surely we can turn apathy, ennui and boredom into a positive force, a force for good. Would not an honest acceptance of the diminished role a brand or category plays in consumers’ lives encourage us to think harder about utility, experience and reward?

Whilst I am keen to embrace and celebrate the apathy at the heart of many markets, I’m conscious that within our own business failing to care can be corrosive. John Bartle in his closing address to BBH some years ago warned that ‘the opposite of creativity is cynicism.’ And I’m sure he was right.

As I have aged I’ve noticed, regrettably, an increasing inclination to dismiss the new and original as familiar and derivative. We veterans are cursed by the ability to see antecedents, to cite failed precedent. ‘We tried that and it didn’t work’. Far from the wisdom of age, we suffer the scepticism of age. It’s a cancer. And we must cut it out if we are to sustain our careers.

When I first joined the business I fell in love with the bright eyed enthusiasm that characterised ad people. They seemed to share a particular genetic strain, high on hope and positive thinking, resilient to any disappointment. Like Weebles they wobbled, but they wouldn’t fall down.

I once read about a West Coast experiment where half of the sample took a test fortified by free hamburgers and the other half tackled the same test without sustenance. It transpired that the burgered sample significantly outperformed the unburgered and the researchers concluded that happier people work more effectively.

Being an enthusiastic adman, I’ll not pause to address the obvious shortcomings of this experiment. But I do agree with the key finding. The longer I have worked in this business, the more I have come to believe that  enthusiasm is the critical factor that drives success.

We have a saying here that ‘positive people have bigger, better ideas’. I believe it’s true.

‘Is that all there is?’ you may well ask. Well, yes it is.

First published: BBH Labs: 29/6/2011

No 8

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Whose Ad Is It Anyway?

     Tamara Rojo Courtesy of Charlotte Macmillan

Last week I attended a talk by the magnificent Royal Ballet dancer, Tamara Rojo.

As a child growing up in Madrid she had not been aware of ballet and had stumbled into her first dance academy somewhat by chance. She immediately fell in love with the art form and became a diligent pupil. Observing her enthusiasm for dance, her parents took her to a performance of Swan Lake by a visiting Russian company.

The young Tamara was, however, disappointed and upset by the experience. She loved ballet, but had never imagined that it was to be crafted into stories and performed in front of other people. She thought ballet was, as she had experienced it in class, an entirely personal thing, a beautiful private escape.

Subsequently Tamara’s teachers would tell her that she was there to entertain the audiences, not herself.  But one could not help concluding that Tamara’s exceptional ability to inspire others was derived in part from her determination to do something for herself.

Inevitably when we discuss modern communication, we spend most of our time considering whether we are properly reflecting the truth of the brand or engaging the interest and participation of the audience. And rightly so.  But doesn’t it help, a little at least, to be motivated by our own interest, enthusiasm and sense of pride?

Many years ago I worked with the much loved and respected creative, Martin Galton. We would return, heads bowed, from another attritional Client meeting to supply the team with the customary ‘builds’. Martin, however, would only entertain a certain level of distortion of his original concept. Beyond that point he’d say: ‘Forget it. Throw that idea away and I’ll do you another one.’

Frustrating at the time, but his self-belief endured. In an era where the communications process is increasingly driven by the end user and hyper-targeting techniques, how many of us stubbornly hold on to our own vision? Is there still a time and a place to ‘dance for ourselves’?

First published: BBH Labs 16/05/11

No. 7

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Raging Against The Machine: A Manifesto For Challenging Wind Tunnel Marketing

The Mesta Machine Company Courtesy of 'Plant and product of the Mesta Machine Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania'

This is the second of a two-parter. For the introduction to Wind Tunnel Marketing, check out "Wind Tunnel Marketing"

***

1. Seek Difference In Everything We Do

“Is it different?” has been relegated to the last question, the afterthought, the bonus ball.  But the last should be first.

We should tirelessly seek difference in the people we talk to, the questions we ask, the processes we follow. “Is it different?” should be the first question we ask when we look at work  – both in terms of content and form.

2. Kick Out the Norms

We’ve become addicted to backward looking averages. But norms create a magnetic pull towards the conventional. Norms produce normal.  The new frontier doesn’t have norms, but it does have endless supplies of data, and a rich diversity of tools with which to mine it.

We should create a data-inspired future, not a norm-constrained past.

3. Only Talk to Consumers who are Predisposed to Change

Where there is change, there are people that lead and people that follow.  In research we mostly talk to followers, because there are more of them and they’re cheaper. But ultimately they are less valuable.

If we’re seeking to change markets, shouldn’t we talk exclusively to change makers?

4. Embrace Insights From Anywhere

We’ve lived for too long under the tyranny of consumer insight. Of course consumer insight can be engaging, but it can also be familiar.

Surely insights can come from anywhere and we’re just as likely to find different insights from an analysis of the brand, the category, the competition, the channel, and, above all, the task.

5. Don’t Iron Out All the Creases

The Wind Tunnel abhors rough edges.  It likes to smooth over, iron out, edit away.  But people are drawn to the irregular and eccentric.

Let’s treasure, protect and nurture the happy accident, the illogical flaw.

6. Test in the Market, Not in the Test Tube

We have known for years that the optimal way to deal with complex communication needs in a fast moving, volatile market is to test in beta.  The gamers know it and the retailers knew it before them. Now all markets are fast moving and volatile.

Let’s learn from and with the market.

7. Practice Foresight

We’ve become too accustomed to considering the world as it is now.  We need more often to be considering the possible worlds of the future.

Let’s lift our eyes to the horizon.

8. Learn to Love Risk

The Wind Tunnel is risk averse.  We have come to consider risk as something to be feared, minimised, eradicated. But risk is integral to innovation and change.  It’s integral in fact to success.

We need to learn to feel comfortable with risk again, to calibrate it, to embrace it.

9. Value Expertise, Value Inexperience

Our risk aversion has led us to overvaluing category experience and undervaluing communication expertise. But an excess of experience predisposes to the tried and tested.  Relevant difference occurs at the intersection between expert judgement and naïve enthusiasm.

Let’s listen again to the experts, whilst opening the process up to the inexperienced.

10. Hurry Up

For many years Agencies have argued that they need more time to protect quality.  But too much time compromises quality because it creates room for caveats, committees and complacency. And we’re often late before we’ve arrived.

Speed can be liberating, exciting, invigorating. Come on. Let’s go……

First published in BBH Labs 16/09/2010

No. 6

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Wind Tunnel Marketing

The Propulsion Wind Tunnel Facility - Photo by Phil Tarver

I wrote a post on BBH LABS which Campaign magazine (campaign live) asked me to expand on. This is one of two posts – on the subject. The second is a post entitled Raging Against the Machine: A Manifesto for Challenging Wind Tunnel Marketing,

Have you noticed that all the ads are looking the same?

Perfectly pleasant, mildly amusing, gently aspirational.

The insightful reflection of real life, the pivotal role of the product, the celebration of branded benefit.

Advertising seems so very reasonable now.  Categories that were once adorned with sublime creativity are now characterised by joyless mundanity.

Some of you will recall the day in 1983 when we woke up and noticed that the cars all looked the same.  There was a simple explanation.  They’d all been through the same wind tunnel.  We nodded assent at the evident improvement in fuel efficiency, but we could not escape a weary sigh of disappointment.  Modern life is rubbish…

Are we not subjecting our communications to something equivalent: Wind Tunnel Marketing?

Have we not so formularised the process that we’re eradicating some of the elements that made advertising so effective in the first place?  And has the Recession made us more dependent still on this Wind Tunnel Marketing?

The Origins of Wind Tunnel Marketing

I guess it all began with the best intentions:  businesses taking Marketing more seriously.

Some years ago, with increasing globalisation, there was a drive to identify best demonstrated practice, to codify it and coach it. We developed acronyms, characterful shapes and ring-bound folders. We attended conferences, bunjee jumped together and went home with wittily sloganned T-shirts.

With the pressure at Board Room to demonstrate ROI, we became obsessed with proof and measurement, with norms and traffic light systems. What gets measured gets done and what gets green gets made.

Now of course the development of a common Marketing language and a culture of effectiveness has to be a good thing.  But few noticed,  as the industry professionalized, that the Cavaliers were being marginalised.  A steady stream of mavericks made their way to the exit door, their hitherto precious gut instinct no longer deemed valuable.

Few noticed, as we learned to lean more heavily on our norms and pre-tests, that expertise and judgement were a devaluing currency.

And few noticed, at least at first, that the measures designed to raise the floor of communication output were at the same time lowering the ceiling.

The researchers had taken over the asylum.

When Relevance Trumped Difference

When I was young I was taught that behavioural change could be achieved through communication that was relevant, motivating and different. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our faith in the power of difference.

There was an Age of Innocence.  An era when brand owners were driven by an obsession for product and functionality.  They had foresight, a passion for the positive impact a brand might have on consumers’ lives in the future.  And they were steeled by the competition to believe that difference was critical to commercial success.

In the face of imitation and commoditisation, it became harder to sustain rational product differentiation. Increasingly we sought difference through communicating “emotional selling propositions”. And over time we learned to excuse the absence of difference if we could at least achieve some kind of emotional resonance with consumers. In our headlong pursuit of relevance, we commissioned endless focus groups and we worshiped at the altar of consumer insight. Gradually we have arrived at an industry consensus around what makes effective communication. But it is a very narrow definition, one that emphasises consumer insight and relevance, and one that minimises or excludes  the once critical role of difference in the selling process.

Relevance has trumped difference. We now inhabit a world in which most brands in most categories approach most problems by asking the same people, the same questions, in the same way.

Is it any wonder that we keep coming up with the same answers?

Does Any of This Matter?

Perhaps it matters little that Wind Tunnel Marketing diminishes difference.  So what if it makes for a less creative, less interesting industry? So what if the ads all look the same? Surely none of this matters if the Wind Tunnel produces more effective communication.

My own conviction is that Wind Tunnel Marketing is turning communication into a numbers game, a game where scale of resource wins every time – whether that be media budget, distribution network or sales team. The cost  efficiencies of brand differentiation are notable largely by their absence. Surely in a fragile economic environment this represents an oversight.  And in an environment where increasingly we need to earn rather than buy attention, it’s lunacy.

Of course, out of a crisis comes opportunity.  And a number of Clients have already concluded that the rewards for bravery, subversion and calculated risk have never been greater.

Excepting these noble attempts to rage against the machine however, I’m concerned that at a macro level Wind Tunnel Marketing is gradually eroding the very foundations of  consumers’ affection for communication and brands. The pop combo Groove Armada memorably remarked “If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other”. I suspect we’re creating consumer fatigue through our homogenisation of our own product. Conventionally, when we see long term declining scores for brand trust and advertising enjoyment, we blame Own Label or the internet or Sky or the banks or BP or Naomi Klein.  But maybe we as a Marketing and Advertising community should look in the mirror.

First published BBH Labs: 19/09/2010

No. 5

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Wind Tunnel Politics

Guardian/Dan Chung Dan Chung

It was going to be the most important Election in a generation.

It was going to break the mould of British Politics.

It should have been so exciting.

So why did it all seem so unfulfilling? Why did our eager anticipation of the first debate turn to a stifled yawn by the third? Why did our ardour for the new kid turn so quickly to complacency? Why did we shrug at the glossy manifestos, put the recycled thinking straight into the recycling bins?

This was the Sunblest Election. The Election when all the mighty forces of Marketing created three soft, medium sliced, plastic packaged loaves. Designed to please, guaranteed not to let you down. Perfectly pleasant on their own terms, but curiously unsatisfactory.

You see, all three candidates and campaigns had been put through the same Marketing Wind Tunnel.

Rolling focus groups, private polling, polished PR, whispering spin doctors, joy stick analysis…They had collectively eradicated the edges, the uncomfortable, the unpalatable.

They had created three glossy, smooth undifferentiated paradigms of  inoffensiveness.

Everyone knows that the debt needs tackling, that there are hard decisions to be made, jobs to be cut, taxes to be raised. But the focus groups said the electorate didn’t want to hear it and so the candidates didn’t want to tackle it. Efficiencies, my arse… No surprise perhaps, that an exclusive consideration of undecided voters produced indecisive outcomes; that researching marginal constituencies produced mainstream opinions; that endless focus groups produced unfocused group-think. It all seemed so timid, so spineless, so lacking in confidence.

It pains me as someone who works in the communications industry to see the techniques designed to sell soap powder applied so assiduously to such substantive matters. It pains me not just because politics ought to be a little more complicated. But also because the Marketing model that’s been applied is itself broken.

Advertising Agencies used to be in the business of finding and articulating difference. We used to help our Clients establish strong, compelling, differentiated truths. Don’t just ‘hold a mirror up to the consumer’, we said. Consumers don’t want their worldview mirrored and reinforced; they want  to be challenged, stimulated, inspired. But over the last ten years Marketing has fallen victim to formularisation and commoditisation. ’Best demonstrated practice’ has been distilled, codified, taught and tested. The researchers have taken over the asylum. The quest for difference has been replaced by the quest for inoffensiveness. Holding a mirror up to the consumer is no longer anathema; it is the recognised norm, standard practice. Have you ever wondered why the beer and car ads you used to love now look so similar, so sane, so sensible?  Well the Agencies and Marketeers that produce them have been looking for the same answers, in the same way, in the same places.

They’ve all been through the Marketing Wind Tunnel.

This was also supposed to be the first Digital Election. We had visions of grass roots participation, of new voter engagement, of a more visceral, real time debate. Indeed there was a vibrant online conversation, but it was a conversation fuelled by the big beast of telly. I guess the political establishment fell for McLuhan’s seductive aphorism: the medium is the message. They imagined that arming our MPs with Twitter accounts might send the youth of Britain into a swoon. But the truth is the medium is not the message. It communicates and amplifies the message; in some cases it prompts participation with the message. But it is not the message.

It’s obvious that Obama wasn’t successful simply because he designed a cunning digital strategy. It’s obvious that Obama hadn’t been through any Marketing Wind Tunnel. In our world we’d say he was a great product, a great brand, with a real difference, with something worth saying…

I hope, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that all Politicians, winners and losers, are humbled by this Election. I hope there is a rebellion against the insipid, spineless, formularised Wind Tunnel Politics that have deprived us of the vital engagement the electorate craves and the issues demand. They may not want to talk to the likes of us again. But if our political masters want some communication advice for next time, let’s give it to them. Get yourself a great product, with a strong sense of difference. Be confident in who you are and what you stand for. And then sing it from the rooftops (and the blogs and the Twitter feeds). You know what. People may not mind that you’re saying something different or challenging or hard to stomach. They’ll respect you for it. They may well want to talk to you about it.

And if you say it well and persuasively, they might even vote for you.

First published BBH Labs: 12/05/10

No. 4

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