HolyCow

The line is the wrong way round

I don't need no line!

I have been pondering the significance of new model agencies entering the market (as per Richard's thought provoking post) and also the endless debates about integration, the role of ATL Vs BTL and have come to the conclusion that the thinking is just simply wrong.

The line - as we used to know it - no longer runs from West to East - it actually runs South to North.

   

Old Model

   

New Model

You see I believe that for too long now there is a misconception around the roles of communication based on the belief that rational messaging (BTL) will lead to behaviour change following the deployment of emotional ATL communications. This is of course nonsense. 

Technology has redefined the line

The integration of digital has meant that all communications need to be emotively charged to succeed. Moving sound and image – the best drivers of emotional responses and brand ‘likeability’ no longer reside solely in ATL agencies – but in all creative agencies irrespective of their discipline. This raises an interesting dilemma for pure play digital however - they are perhaps the narrowest of all and as such struggle to recruit creative and planners from either side of the line

.

Which one are you?

Left of line or right of line:

The potential to sit more to the right or more to the left makes considerable more sense than above and below in today's world. And so - as my good buddy Patrick Collister elaborated when I showed him this - perhaps a more accurate way to differentiate agencies is as left-of-line or right-of-line.

So, reflecting left-brain/right-brain theory, left-leaning agencies will specialise more in logical, transactional messaging with right-of-line agencies concerning themselves with emotional engagement.

Left-of-line agencies create positive response to the offer or promise. Right-of-line agencies create positive response to the communication itself. Both need to be branded.

We need the vertical line:

The new vertical line assumes that every pack, e-mail and microsite will have a bearing on the brand just as every TV ad will have an influence on the nature of every offer in one-to-one communication. So I say - stop using ATL and BTL - it is unhelpful and wrong. Left and right or south and north is a much better descriptor - the question is how long will it take clients to work it out and use it to choose the best agency to solve their business problems.

Rather longer than sooner I suspect.

Excuse me sir, but have you been thinking?

 

Right then - been a long time since I rock an.... err no. I have been doing a lot of thinking and writing but not blogging. I feel guilty about it. This is for two reasons:

1) I felt that I had nothing to say that was sufficiently interesting. I shared this with Richard H at Fast Strategy and he said he was feeling similarly 'dry'. This was self-imposed and seems to be rectifying itself.

2)  My familiar patterns and rituals have been disrupted by the move to Wales, sorting a flat out in London, and generally being busy. I 'self-medicated' by connecting with the bloggeratti by posting random half formed thoughts through Twitter. It seems funny how not having the stuff around me such as my books, my pens, my sketchpad - my creative space inhibited my ability to produce cogent pieces. I now feel it is time to start again. Please don't expect too much but I do have some thoughts I want to share over the next few weeks. Thank for being patient whoever you are that has visited Holycow in the past.

(This is not my space but from http://tinyurl.com/4lyrb8 which is a fantastic slideshow of creative spaces from NYT.)

Shhhhhhh!

Silence.

No flesh on keyboard.

Been busy.

Moved house.

Broke toe.

Wrote loads.

Didn't blog though.

Got inspired again.

Toe better.

Maybe there's a correlation.

Still alive and kicking...

http://www.earthhour2008.com/

It's important, it's necessary, it saves more than money. Pass it on and post it on your blog, Digg it, Twitter it, Facebook it - spread the word. Holycow has gone black for the day too in honour of the spirit of the thing.

Check this video out too after you have visited their site. Check John's site out too where there is more info. Come on blogeratti - let's make a difference today :-)

Join us comrades...

Good Writing.

Well today is the last day for those who are up for the next big collaborative writing project from Drew (who writes one of the 25 most-read marketing blogs in the world) and Gavin (equally fabulous blogger and one of my favs) so if your up for it - click the link http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/2008/01/calling-all-aut.html and get yourself involved.

Now I missed out last year - can't remember why - but this year I shall be ensuring that I am fully engaged as I really loved The Age of Conversation. It was conceived and produced last year and it is recognized as an extraordinary publishing first with over 100 bloggers and marketing types joining together to write a page on - well conversation as it turned out.

Initially they set what they thought would be an impossible goal – to get 100 bloggers to contribute. Incredibly they received commitments from 104 authors in less than 7 days!!! I suspect it will be similar with this one. And the beautiful ('good') thing about it was that all proceeds from sales of the book were donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity with proceeds earmarked to help children in the authors’ home countries. A very 'Good' thing indeed.

Now this one is a tad different in that in the true spirit of collaboration, the collective is going to decide what the topic is going to be.

The choices are:

• Marketing Manifesto
• Why Don't People Get It?
• My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

I voted for 'Why Don't People Get it?' as I seem to spend rather a lot of time musing on that one - but thats all for the essay i will be submitting.

Look out for more information as and when it comes - but if your up for it - get yourself involved!

Linking Thinking

The ever thoughtful Jason very kindly tagged me as a thinking blogger (thanks Jason!) as part of an ongoing meme. Clever this one because of course it plays to our innate vanity.

Participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote

 

And here for your reading pleasure are 5 blogs that always get me thinking:

Mark Earls - the 'Hermeister' quite simply breathtaking in the intellectual ground he covers. He recently claimed to feel like he was riding the front of the train wind in his hair seeing things no-one else had seen. He may well be right.

David Armano - VP, Experience Design for Critial Mass and before that Agency.com and Digitas. Beautiful layouts, clear thinking, just a superb human view of everything wired. Truly inspiring.

Faris - potentially a genius rather than a thief. Exceptional, irreverent, full of clever analysis and big thinking - and a thoroughly nice chap too. Not sure if he still works for Naked. :-)

Gavin Heaton - what can you say about this chap and his blog - awesome, just full of stimulating thought provoking and interesting thinking. He writes beautifully and is absolutely one of my favourites. I have never met Gavin but I feel I know him. You must read this one.

Marcus Brown - The Kaiser. I am new to his blog and have been following him on Twitter. I have just realised I want my blog to look like his. I am totally gobsmacked. This has to be one of the best out there right now. Bloody genius.

Enjoy the links if you don't already know them. In the meantime I really need to clean this site up - its looking rubbish...

Interesting visual tool

Have been playing with this today - really neat visual tool - bit like visual thesaurus - give it a go.

A way to look at data.

As much as I enjoy observing human beings in their daily routines to provide rich and actionable insights - it is often data that holds the key to unlocking the patterns of behaviour that dictate cashflows and therefore REALLY rich insight.

I came across this snippet recently on  http://bigpicture.typepad.com/ - great site if your an investor or just interested in economics, digital media and the confluence world events have on the markets (its very American though but you can pick through it).

I think its terribly relevant for planning (not just data planning either) as I am doing just this for a project I am working on now. I have cut the original about a bit btw:

Questions you could ask yourself when looking at data:

• Do we have enough historical examples? Is the data sample statistically significant?

• Causation or Correlation? Does "X" cause "Y" to occur? Or, are we presented with two things that may have the same underlying causes? Is there even interaction between X & Y? Mostly I think this gets misunderstood - we think that X causes Y without external factors being introduced. I have seen this as a case in point several times in my planning career which has radically affected marketing decision making incorrectly.

• Coincidence? How possible is it that these two items are utterly unrelated.

• Look for differentiating elements in different time periods: What factors are similar?  What factors are different? Time lapse data is often very hard to come by but worth it if you can get it.

• Compare interest rates, inflation, sentiment, overall market trend, business cycles -- across different eras. Might that account for potentially different outcomes?

I recommend using similar trends from your clients data then overlaying things like broadband penetration or housing make up or credit card saturation etc and how it can affect a businesses profitability and speed of cashflow.

• Any recent market environmental changes (regulation shift, financial innovation, etc.) have an impact? What might these specific changes do to the data? Particularly valuable when looking at a business that is in decline over a period of time.

• Subjective versus Objective measures: Are the factors under discussion hard numerical data, squishy or somewhere in between?  They can be both incidently but best to use it as a hypothesis then see if teh numbers can be made to fit.

• Consider things in terms of probabilities, not outcomes: Assume a causative factor resulted in a specific event (X --> Y) 7 out of 9 times. The most you can say is that when "X" occurred in the past, it has resulted in "Y" approximately 78% of the time. I tend to use the word 'probably' not 'is' in presentations - can get you out of a hole in many cases. 

• There is a difference between historical occurrence and future likelihood. It does not necessarily mean that since "X" has just occurred, there is a 78% chance that "Y" will happen. Consider: was the first X/Y occurrence really a 100% or zero? Did the second one become 100% or 50%, then next a 66% or 33%? Terribly difficult to predict this one - and this is the one that clients always ask for - the probability of future purchasing intent usually.

• Contextualize data: Sometimes a single data point -- even a mean or median -- only tells half a story. Any data point can be trending or reversing. Going higher, lower, topping, bottoming. Each of these may have differing implications for what comes next. Inflation is high, but coming down. It helps to think of data not as a still photograph, but as a frame in an ongoing film.

Have fun :-).

Google and Publicis. Not a Good Idea.

There is something slightly unsavoury about the announcement of potentially the greatest non advertising story of the year – Publicis and Google in Paris last week. It’s really is a sort of desperate ‘glory by association’ thing for Levy (think Ephialtes) and pure opportunism on behalf of Google.

Ephialtes as portrayed in 300

There is nothing good about this for advertising that I can see and particularly Publicis – its bizzare and here’s why:

1) It’s a non-exclusive partnership – so no competitive advantage to be gained for Publicis.

2) Any proposed tools would not be proprietary to them. Ditto to the above

3) It’s about money not creativity. Levy says ‘Current analytical methods are not enough to help agencies get to the right audiences on the Web, assess the impact of their ads and see a return on investment’. Its not about getting to people Mr. Levy - the job of creative advertising is to create demand for your content because it is interesting and has utility. The ‘analytics’ in future will measure Return on Involvement through dwell times primarily. Everything else is measured by sales as it always was.

4) The ‘Open source advertising’ that Google is looking forward to means that it makes it easier for everyone to become an art director and harder for agencies to make money. Personally I think this might not be a good thing.

5) Levy claims that the ad equation today was missing the technical expertise that a company like Google could bring to the creative process. So much for having paid $1.3 acquiring Digitas then.

5) They both want to ‘develop an approach to digital advertising that was both creative and technologically savvy,' a combination they reckon is apparently lacking. Thanks for lumping all agencies together in your worldview and ditto to the above.

6) ‘It could help propel the growth of digital advertising’. How very noble of Mr Levy to care so much about his competitors.

If global online ad spend reaches the predicted $49.5 billion, (up 22 percent over last year), then presumably most companies must be getting a suitable ROI anyway. We make money because we sell things people want – I just wish we would then use that money to make more ‘good things’ (see earlier post) rather than necessarily more advertising about existing sometimes mediocre goods and services. Interesting to see how this plays out in the media this week.

Curiosity - planning's elixir.

Seth talks. It really very good and worth watching: Enjoy.

'Good' Idea.

Good idea from Ogilvy & Mather Beijing

I love simple ideas. They have considerably more potency for me because I don't have to process a technique or a gag to work out what is going on (I am still partial to a few bouncing balls and hirsute drummers though obviously). Anyway, when your idea is being deployed in the name of something worthwhile such as the WWF - its potency is magnified - I feel that I want to like it - and when it's this clever - its a glass (mug) and half of pure altruistic pleasure.

Essentially it highlights the effects of global warming on rising sea levels by using a heat sensitive coating on the mug. Now I dont know whether this changed actual behaviour at the United Nations Climate Conference in Bali last December, but I bet its Return on Involvement far outstripped its Return on Investment. I wish I had done this.

Holycow - that's what it means!

I am often asked why I chose the monicker 'Holycow' and I find myself rather lamely describing it relates to the Eureka moment - the feeling of elation you get after solving a particularly vexing issue or discovering something profound about human beings that can be wrapped up in marketing language and used to sell stuff - insights I think they are called. Or just something that Batman used to say - take your pick.

Anyway - it now transpires that those unusual types have been observing Rhesus monkeys again and have identified this Eureka moment as a particular piece of activity that occurs in the anterior cingulate cortex:

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Apparently the Unusuals let the monkeys choose targets on a computer screen while monitoring their brain activity. One of the targets produced a juice reward. How delightful. And of course the more they did it the more they were able to observe the effects of the moment the monkeys worked out how to get more juice - the Eureka moment. This is the extract from Science Daily (good read incidently if you like that sort of thing):

During the trials, the researchers recorded the electrical activity of hundreds of neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region known to be active in adaptive behaviors such as the shift between exploring and exploiting.

In their analysis, the researchers measured the electrophysiological activity of cells during four different types of feedback–incorrect choices, first reward, repetition of the reward, and the ending of a trial by breaking fixation on the targets.

Analyzing the results, the researchers concluded that “Our data show that ACC discriminates between different types of feedback, allowing appropriate behavioral adaptations.”

Emmanuel Procyk and colleagues published their findings in the January 24, 2008, issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press. [From ScienceDaily - Researchers Identify Brain’s ‘Eureka’ Circuitry]

So there you go - my online persona also exists as an identifyable part of people's heads that can be linked to a rather pleasurable moment. Not sure what that means really.

A different PC on the desk...

My new deskmate - Patrick 'The Man' at work

Well here we are several weeks into the New Year and my first post. Better late than never I guess. Anyway - the good news is that I have had time to think about lots of things recently and have a little black book full of musings and thoughts that I will be posting in the next couple of weeks. I have discovered Twitter - which I first thought was a nonsense but now cant do without (Zeroinfluencer and Beeker keep me amused for hours - everyone should try it!) and lots of other neat techie things which I am trialing and seeing how they work.

One thing that has been truly inspiring is having Patrick Collister (Publisher of the Big Won - formerly the Won Report, Editor of The Directory and Rory at Ogilvy before Rory - if you see what I mean) sitting in for Lady Caitlin who is off having her 3rd baby (good luck Caitlin :-) so I now share a desk with Patrick and have enjoyed bantering about all sorts of interesting stuff - Webster, Feldwick, Ogilvy, PT Barnum - you name it, how advertising works (or doesn't) things we like things we don't and this has ignited my passion for all things advertising again. Thank you Patrick.

Can't wait to share some stuff - especially an interview with Craig who has just been made head of Planning at AMV with Bridget following George's departure - superb news and a great promo for them both, plus some thoughts about FDs, value in marketing and how I have become completely convinced that Mark Earls was right about Herd behaviour as I am now firmly using the mechanics of behaviour on client bizz.

The new Head of Planning at AMV

See you on Twitter...

Look 

Oddly odd

Have been looking back at last years posts - some good some bad - mostly non-existent and then I looked at Dec 2006 and realised then things were out of kilter. andnow as I sit here again rather exhausted and wondering if I have shingles (nice huh!) whether I got it right. Nope. No chance - not nearly enough time to balance thinking - in fact not enough time to do anything like good thinking - I now need to work out why. It is extremely cathartic to write to ablog as it shows just what was in one's mind at the time. I think I need to recalibrate - things seems strangely wrong right now.

Hope everyone else is having a good time - seems like DAvid on Twitter is doing great and a few others. Need to reconnect. Soon. M.