When integration goes bad

There are numerous articles, posts and even books written on the subject of integration in communications. When to do it, how to do it and where to do it. And there are many practitioners in advertising who know a lot more than me about it.

Most authors argue that effective communications should either look the same (the so called matching luggage approach) or say the same thing in manners appropriate to their channel.

I can find few commentators who argue vehemently against integration. Crispin Porter + Bogusky occasionally stray close to this point, but even their fantastic work for Burger King amongst others uses consistent devices more often than not (step forward The King).

While doing some work with an anti-smoking charity recently I came across a particularly compelling case against any form of integration. The argument goes something like this. When it comes to smoking, smokers know it's bad for them. But they still don't like being reminded of the fact. Rather than give up, they look for ways to edit themselves out of the communication. They don't look like the people in the ads. They haven't got any kids or always smoke outside. That way they can convince themselves that the communication isn't referring to them and they therefore don't need to make themselves feel bad yet again.

Against this backdrop, it would be crazy to put all your eggs in one beautifully integrated basket that you know your audience are going to try and jump straight out of. A more succesful approach would be to close down as many 'escape routes' as possible so that smokers are left with nowhere to turn other than to confront their own habit. It's this approach, whether by luck or judgement, that the NHS appears to have taken by splitting its anti-smoking funding between a number of bodies with differing approaches to the problem.

So what does this tell us about how we should approach more conventional brand problems where audiences are hopefully less predisposed to disengagement? My view is that there are many parallels - sure you may not feel as strongly about a stick of deodorant as you do about cigarettes, but in our busy lives we still look for excuses to edit messages out of our consciousness. Rather than one joined up campaign try and hit people with as many different messages, via different channels and at different time as possible.

It'll lead to slightly uncomfortable agency review meetings where the wall of past and present work might end up looking like a dog's dinner, and our chums at Millward Brown might also report declines in (prompted) ad awareness, but if you want get more people to buy your argument more of the same rarely works as well as more of something else.

Why coming second is worse than coming last

I'm sure most of us in agencies have been there. You first get to hear of the McWidgets account by your local favourite intermediary and he suggests you meet the prospect in the first round of 'exploratory chemistry' meetings. Only these days there's never such a thing as a chemistry meeting anymore - with more work and thinking going into these cosy love-ins than in the entire pitch a few years ago.

Somehow over a few posh sarnies, designer mineral water and a wall's full of creative starters you're through to the next round. Ten is whittled down to six and the next meeting's only a week away. So what are you going to show them this time that you didn't before? A bit of tarting up of the most well received ideas from the first meeting, a couple of extra ideas that didn't make it before but that the prospect has hinted at, and you should be fine. Only this time you want to bring the whole thing up to more professional levels and spend a fortune in the studio to make it look more finished, and probably conduct a little research too for good measure.

A few days later the intermediary tells you you've been invited to pitch proper. The team is exhausted already but you're told that the competition really starts now. So bells are elaborately returned, and whistles finely honed. The Chief Executive is wheeled out of his stately grandeur to deliver the opening and closing remarks. A 9am, adenalin levels reach their peak and an argument is forcefully and passionately delivered. High fives all round . The team, so animated just half an hour ago, collapse into their post gig pint.

Just moments later and speculation is rife of what happens next. Fee proposals, schedules and resource plans are produced by the dozen. It was four, but now it's three and most likely two. Just a bit more research, a bit more chartage, a bit more factory walking and the prize will be ours. That's what we believe for the weeks and months that endlessly drag on, until the day the e-mail arrives from the senior suit. A close second. A fantastic team. Breakthrough ideas. Rigourous project management. And yet we didn't quite have the x-factor after all.

In a two horse race, there are only two places worth finishing: first and last. Everything else is just wasted effort. And a lot more of its wasted to come second.

The Best Chart in the World Ever!

Working for a large multinational corporation means many things, but one which was new to me when I first joined Ogilvy was the 'culture of the deck'. Presentations were no longer simple arguments to be shared face to face but instead powerpoint files ('the deck') to be reviewed, reviewed again and then sent around the world for the (countless) end-user's endless delictation.

What amazed me is just how mind-numbingly bad 99.9% of these decks are. Sure, there may be good ideas buried deep within them but they are, almost without fail, lost in amongst the tide of bullet points, indentations and that strange kind of language that is neither proper English nor thematic, but some kind of parallel universe where the word "the" has mysteriously been banned.

The leading statistician Edward Tufte has written several leading books on the visualisation of information. His paper "The Cognitive Theory of Powerpoint" blames the ubiquitous Microsoft application for everything from disrupted sleep patterns to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.

Tufte's contention is not that all visual stimulus is bad, just that Powerpoint in particular encourages us to create bad visual stimulus. So what would Edward Tufte say is the best chart in the world? That's where the map at the top of this blog comes in.

It was created 100 years before Powerpoint ever found its ways onto our computer screens and helps explain Naploean's ill fated march to Moscow in the 19th century. It plots the complex relationship between advance and retreat, geography, temperature and time in one beautiful page and is the perfect example of two of his principles: a high data ink ratio (the proportion of ink on the page that's used on the actual display of data) and the use of constant scale.

I would simply argue it's a truly inspiring way of presenting complex arguments in a way which even non-experts on the Napoleonic wars can not just understand but be fascinated by.

So next time you're looking at that co-variance anaylsis between weighted distribution and snowfall in Southern China, give a moments thought to Napoleon before firing up the ppt.