Even though "How To Work Better" by Fischli and Weiss was intended to be an ironic comment on corporate-speak, if you read it with a straight, plannerly eye, it's still a pretty good set of intentions to take with you into a creative briefing.
Do one thing at a time
Know the problem
Learn to listen
Learn to ask questions
Distinguish sense from nonsense
Accept change as inevitable
Admit mistakes
Say it simple
Be calm
Smile
I always forget the last two, so I'm adding the whole list to my new year's resolutions.
It's been fun following this account planning blog meme (plog meme?) on blog tagging, so I reckon I'd play along too, having been generously invited by Daniel Mejia at AdStructure. Here are five obscure facts about me.
In the last year of my well-rounded college education, I raised turtles, designed lighting for a feminist song revue, recorded a cassette of 18 very bad folk-rock anthems, and pulled a dead drug addict from the stall of a public toilet.
I sleep on a mattress that has now been installed in six apartments on two continents over the past eight years.
I cut my own hair, baldly badly.
My favourite meal is a Shanghainese breakfast of little trap buns, sticky rice with dried pork, Chinese crullers, and savoury soy broth.
I discovered that my burnt flesh smells like scrambled eggs, while learning to operate a six-watt argon ion laser.
It's now my turn to name five more advertising bloggers to play. Some of you I've worked with, and some of you have been invited by others to join the game, I'm sure.
I thought it would be interesting to think up some instances of branded utility from before we knew what to call them. (My good friend, Johnny, has been developing the idea for years.)
The Guinness Book of World Records. Originally published by Guinness to help settle heated, if trivial discussions in pubs where its beer is consumed, it's become a brand of its own.
Michelin Guides. Arguably a service with greater utility than the tyres they were meant to promote, people depend on the Michelin guides for hotel, sightseeing, and especially star-system restaurant advice.
Shell Defensive Driving Courses. For years, Shell has been giving out free pamphlets and holding free defensive driving courses for the public, because customers are more profitable when they don't die.
Barnes and Noble Jr. Storytime. When Barnes and Noble replaced the public library as the platonic ideal of library in America (down to the oak paneling and classical columns) they also began to provide some of the services of the public library as well. One of these has been to have free story telling sessions for children in most of their 500-plus stores.
The Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB). This is probably one of those resources that you use and don't even think about. It was bought by Amazon early during the boom, and remains a place where Amazon provides the technology, fans provide the data entry labour, and everyone else reaps the benefits of knowing every last detail of film trivia possible. Amazon gets a link from every movie or actor on the database back to a relevant DVD on sale.
I am sure there are plenty more of these examples of branded utility out there, so let's get going... please post more!
I've read in some blogs that planners should be "creative generalists", which is usually fine by me, but lately I've been thinking a lot about how to form great planning teams, and I'm starting to change my mind about leaving specialists out of planning departments.
It's very good to be a fan of test cricket this week: The Ashes are being played. For anyone not familiar with the newspaper obituary image posted above, The Ashes is one of sport's great grudge matches. In 1882, shocked that Aussie 'colonials' had bested them in cricket, the England team burned some of their cricket equipment and placed the remains in a small urn, which is now the trophy for the ongoing series between Australia and England.
I bring all of this up because the inclusion of Monty Panesar for the third of five tests in the series, has made such a big impact. Besides being the first Sikh to play test cricket for England (he's the 631st player to play for England, in case you were wondering) he's a rarity, a "left-arm orthodox spin bowler."
This is to say that he has to depend mostly on skill when throwing the ball (akin to a knucleballer in baseball), but when he gets it right, he can really hurt the other team. Even at this early stage in his career, some people are saying that he could be one of the greats.
His inclusion hasn't come without controversy, though, because he can't do much else. He's not great with the bat, and he's known to make mistakes in the field. And for not being well-rounded enough, he was left off the team for the first two tests of the series for another bowler, Ashley Giles, who is better with the bat. Many pundits have said that this approach -- selecting a team of very good all-rounders -- has cost England the series. They've brought Monty back now, but it may be too late.
This has led to me thinking about how planners are not Monty Panesars. We're hired to be generalists, not specialists. Typically, this is because planners are expected to know a little about a lot, which comes in handy when working on a variety of accounts. I suppose this is fine when you define the team as one that includes creative people and account people. In this definition, account people are the business specialists and creative people are specialists in their chosen output (like funny television commercials, or websites).
I've come to believe that building the planning function in agencies is more important than finding the right planner for a particular account. Throwing the right expert into the creative game at the right time seems to make for more wins.
If this seems obvious, consider this: you could follow the countering trend in war strategy, which is to choose generalists because it maximizes your freedom of action. The objectives of military strategy have drifted from winning ground or share and have become more concerned with controlling the conversation. In Iraq, this led to a swift victory by American forces, as light armored vehicles made quick strikes on infrastructure like radio transmitters and supply depots, wiping out the Iraqi army's ability to wage war. Teams were built to work independently, without direct supervision. Multi-functional special forces soldiers trained for each others' roles so that teams with wounded soldiers could still complete missions. (I won't comment on how that philosophy worked after the fall of the dictatorship.)
Returning to the less important world of sport, the National Football League's New England Patriots took the same approach to staffing to win multiple championships. This following description of Bill Belichick's use of multi-function players comes from a New York Times article a few years ago:
He has become a master of deception by identifying players smart enough and physically gifted enough to play several positions. He then uses them in innovative ways. During the American Football Conference championship game against the Indianapolis Colts last season, Belichick kept switching cornerback Ty Law and safety Rodney Harrison, confusing quarterback Peyton Manning and baiting him into four interceptions.
Belichick stretched the conventions of the game further this season. Way back in training camp last summer, he was already worrying about possible backups for the Patriots' defensive secondary, just in case problems arose during the season. Knowing that wide receiver Troy Brown had played a little cornerback in college, Belichick began trying him out on defense, a highly unusual approach in today's ultra-specialized N.F.L. But the move looked prescient when two key defensive backs were lost to injuries, and Brown was ready to step in, even contributing three interceptions, the second-highest total on the team.
So even a couple of years ago, I would have advised department heads to recruit all-rounders like England's Freddie Flintoff. But now I'm not so sure. Perhaps there is some middle ground to be had. Here's a rough list that I came up with for creating a successful team of strategic specialists:
Make a checklist of all the skills that you need on your team and then make sure that more than one person covers each skill.
Create partnerships of two or three specialist planners ahead of time to meet specific challenges.
Make sure everyone is fluent in at least one other planner's game.
Hold basic training so that everyone is competent and has the same vocabulary.
Any other thoughts on integrating specialists into planning departments?
There's something important that I forgot to mention about Monty Panesar, and that would be his winning enthusiasm. Because of movies like The Seven Samurai, or Ronin, being a specialist is generally regarded as a mercenary, soulless occupation. And there's a lot of superficial ways that Monty's points of difference - his wearing of a turban, for instance - could have set him apart from the rest of the team, or from English fans. But just watch his reaction after he gets a wicket and you'll see why he isn't just another specialist player. Beyond all other reasons, I am a fan of Monty because he shows how you can contribute to a team with both skill and soul.
I am a dork. This is not just conjecture. I even took a test to prove it. Like a total dork, I grew up watching TV and partaking in weird hobbies like karaoke.
And like many dorks who failed to bloom into nerds or geeks, I was never coordinated enough to play video games. Well it looks like video games have finally caught up with the dork world. The Nintendo Wii is a runaway success based on its ability to simulate... bowling?
I should disclose that the game Brain Age on my handheld Nintendo DS sadly gives me the permission to do useless, simple algebra (e.g., 2+5 = ?) for fun, daily.
Yes, thanks to Nintendo, video games no longer require us dorks to try the sequence "left, left, x, o, trigger, square" to beat our superior geek, nerd, or jock friends. We've finally won the right to play simulated doubles tennis!
This is all a way of rejoicing the dying gasps of the old order, as represented by the first-person-shooter (FPS) game. (Most of you know this genre by the game names: Doom, Unreal, Halo, Castle Wolfenstein, Duke Nuke'em, etc., ad nauseam.) They all look something like this, with just your gun showing on screen.
Perhaps this is where Sony went wrong with PS3 (which isn't doing nearly as well as Nintendo's Wii and is being sold for a massive loss per unit. The Sony PR machine is in deep denial, calling the Wii a "novelty.") They didn't take the dork segment into account. They thought that they could keep making macho shoot 'em ups for their geek audience by upping the graphics, when they forgot that really the play's the thing. And dorks have been waiting a long time for their turn to play.
Games, for whatever reason, ceased to be games and became simulations instead. And then the metaphors in these simulations dominated the interface to a point where things like playability, and fun, and challenge all but disappeared. I'm so glad they're back.
If you need any further evidence that FPS games have had their day and are on their way out, take a look at an FPS that purports to teach you algebra with the slogan, "Learn math or die trying." That's too dorky, even for me.
I really feel bad for whoever put this viral marketing site for Sony's PSP together. It had the best intentions but the effect was of your uncle at the disco, sadly.
I won't pass any further judgement other than to quote what the target audience has to say about it: "...once again, Sony proves they are completely inept." Ouch. Apparently, they even used a filter to block the words "consumer", "viral", "marketing" and the name of the agency from comments, which the community quickly figured out how to get around. More painful comments here.
The internet has democratised how we think, blah blah blah. I'm sure you've all heard it before. But there has been far less digital ink spilled on the two philosophies behind how we find stuff on the internet.
On one side there's the algorithm people, who generally believe that we can rank relevance based on mathematics. This is best illustrated with the Google PageRank algorithm which looks something like this:
That's an algebraic way of saying that every page is ranked based on how many pages link up to that page. And the rank of those referring pages are taken into account too, so whichever page has the biggest pyramid of links from other pages gets the most votes.
That's why when you type "happiness" into Google you get a list like this (click on picture to go to page):
Most people are happy enough with this approach, even if the very disturbing movie "Happiness" by Todd Solondz turns up first and they were really looking more for a nice poem for their parents' anniversary card. (I guess more people link to the movie than any other single link about "happiness", which says a lot about our culture.)
On the other side of the fence are the folksonomy people. They generally have people tag things however they like and then will let the larger pattern of tags do the organizing. So when you type in "happiness" on Flickr you might see this (click on picture to go to page):
This approach seems to work better on sets of similar files (like pictures) about abstract topics (like happiness). You can then drill down a bit further into folksonomic clusters, like "smile" and "babies" and "bunnies" and "puppies" if you like.
For me, the fundamental difference is how much you design people out of the process. A lot of things that are seen as great interface design (like the iPod, or OXO Good Grips, or Google) intentionally take the need for skill out. "Skill" is becoming a dirty word in design and technology.
During my time in London I found that there are a lot of things that haven't been "designed out", and a lot of them are in sport. I had a hard time understanding what "reverse spin" in cricket was, and Bookey tried to teach me, but sadly, I couldn't grasp either the topic or the cricket ball properly. (My bad explanation is that it makes the ball bounce in towards the batsman when the arm angle indicates the opposite, resulting in a wicket.)
The rules of cricket (and other sports) have evolved so that displays of skill can be made regularly. But in almost any other field of human endeavour, they've been taken out.
But aren't we supposed to be living in an age of "co-creation"?
Shouldn't people feel that some skill is required in the technology
they use? The short answer is they will, if there's a benefit.
In the case of Google, people want to be able to type in a single term and get an orderly, ranked list. The interface is absurdly simple. Most people didn't have to be taught to use it. But some of us knowledge workers (that sounds a bit dirty, doesn't it?) do gain some expertise in using Google. We play all sorts of fun Google games (like adding minus signs, quotation marks, and commands like "link:"). You will learn the tricks if you need better results.
I think that when designing interactions it's good to give several levels of interaction with a product / brand / experience / service. The first should require no skill. But as time progresses, give people more choices to make so that they can build skills in the activity you're proposing. Give them a learning path.
Flickr does this well. You can just put photos up there. But after a while you put up tags, post those photos to interest groups, and even try to get on the "interestingness" portion of the site. People go as far as to put badges on their profile pages to show how expert they are. Of course, this is on the content creation side (vs. Google, on the content finding side) but those lines are quickly blurring. But that's a whole other blog posting.
Recently readers of Digg have been enjoying the Will It Blend? channel on YouTube. After watching an entire Extra Value Meal, some hockey pucks, and a rake handle (!) demolished by the BlendTec Total Blender, I was hooked. It's back to the future. We're back to the days of product demonstration. And more than 800,000 people have watched marbles (above) being blended by host Tom Dickson (who I think might also be the company's founder).
This makes me think of Russell Davies's observation that media budgets will begin to approach zero in the future. Instead of buying infomercial spots, BlendTec is finding people online on YouTube and driving them to their website where they can subscribe to an RSS feed of blending videos. What you need is compelling (if sometimes disgusting, in this case) content.
The formula is perfect for parody: the Herb Alpert 70's horn track, the earnest man in safety goggles and white coat, and the immortal line: "Will it blend? That is the question." The good-natured spoofs have already started. Let's put culture on "smoothie" for about a month and see how BlendTec does.
It turns out that Emily Oster might be more right than she knows. As mentioned in a previous post, her research shows that using morality to understand the problem of AIDS in Africa may be less useful than looking at the epidemiology (the medical factors) of the problem.
A recent study of malaria shows a correlation that might explain why AIDS is more prevalent in African nations. Having malaria (as is more common in Africa) leads to an increased likelihood of contracting HIV and dying of AIDS.
This makes some sense as the parasite in malaria attacks red blood cells. People who survive it tend to have sickle-cell anemia (which means they are born with red blood cells that are not correctly formed, making it harder for the malaria to attack the red cells). I guess either the condition of sickle cell anemia or the transmission by mosquitoes or both has something to do with the increased spread of HIV in these regions.
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