The equation for perfect advertising

A few months ago Wired ran an article on "the formula that killed Wall Street". It was about an equation (the Gaussian Copula formula) which our financial institutions used to bundle up risk and thereby identify the value of sub-prime mortgages. Self evidently it didn't work, or if you believe the formula's creator David X. Li, the formula was fine but just misused.

In the new(ish) field of behavioural economics there would be some kind of explanation for this. In fact, you could probably write another equation to explain how and why the first one stopped working so spectacularly. Can we then create some sort of formula that would allow us to create the perfect ad?

A friend of mine has small holiday cottage which we sometimes borrow during the summer. Amongst the holiday reading on the bookshelves is an ancient leather bound tome entitled 'How to advertise' from the 1930s. It contains many simple and straightforward formulas for creating adverts that, if followed to the letter, would guarantee success.

Much has of course moved on since then and the word 'formulaic' is often used to describe advertising we find dull and familiar. Rarely is formulaic used positively, especially when applied to the subject of creativity. But whilst there may not be formula, perhaps there is at least a definition of creativity we can agree on. My favourite is "A mental process involving the generation of new ideas, or new association between existing ideas. The result of this (divergent) thinking should be generally both original and appropriate".

It's can't be so hard to build this into a formula can it? In which case formulaic ideas are the best ones, and highly leveraged practitioners can bring the world of communications to its knees by misusing it in the pursuit of unsustainable growth. Sound familiar?

What advertising can learn from investment banking

I've no idea what the difference between ethics and morals is. Theologians I'm sure enjoy many a field day over the church wine but for a humble communications planner such arguments exist on a higher plane than I'm capable of reaching. They are by and large an inconsequential pile of BS too.

In the world of advertising, something vaguely approaching either a moral or ethical dilemma occurs when the best advice for the client diverges from what, on the face of it, is best for the agency. We are in a service industry, and a competitive one too, so like all servants we should serve to the best of our ability right? But also, as managers of our own independent commercial practices, we also need to focus on our own back yard. Often, the two are identical but just occassionally they diverge. More importantly, what then?

It struck me that much like investment banking the answer lies in whether you take a short or long term view. Our City friends nearly brought the world to financial Armageddon through relentless short termism and a similar story is beginning to emrge in the communications sector too.

In a downturn, it's all too easy to be paralysed by fear. Of lost opportunity, of lost growth and most of all of lost clients. So the impartial advice that deep down we all long to give risks being tainted by a heavy dose of realism on the part of considering what outcome suits us best.

In the long term, offering anything other than best advice is self defeating. If we don't give it you can bet your bottom dollar somebody else will. Eventually that will lead to clients questioning just who they want to go forward with. But that's way off in the future. Most of us have to manage in shorter time frames and that's where conflict occurs.

I can't see Alistair Darling imposing any rules and regulations on how we pay ourselves so perhaps the answer lies in how get paid by our clients. Structures that reflect how long things take to happen in the real world rather than the next bonus cycle surely will lead to more and better advice.

In the end, no one wins by giving the duplicitous advice. None more so than the individuals who feel so pressurised into giving it in the first place.

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.

I've got a friend with an embarassing problem

It's amazing in the world of advertising how everyone wants to associate themselves with the coolest new bit of technology. Great ideas can come from anywhere but more often than not they involve some shiny new bit of kit that readers of Wired claim to have know about for months.

A few years ago I worked on the launch for 118118 directory enquiries, a category which according to research was less important than your choice of toilet paper or takeaway pizza, and yet it became one of the most succesful brand launches of the past decade (not sure what the new animated fellas are all about though).

But if directory enquiries is a category people fundamentally couldn't give a shit about, what happens if you're asked to promote something that people actively shy away from, like cures for constipation, haemarroid cream or this month's current topic erectile dysfunction.

The first few days of confronting the (communication) problem are usually filled with faint embarassment and a barage of innuendo and double entendres. And then something strange takes over - you focus on the work and not the problem - to such a point where it's no longer embarassing at all. In fact, you get affronted when your colleagues innevitably take the piss and argue back that to 5m men in this country ED is absolutley no joke.

And because it's such an important issue to those who experience it, the work itself is slowly but surely getting to be very good. We may even have another 118118 on our hands.

So next time you get a client asking for a campaign to promote their feminine itching / moob cure / chaffing cream (delete as appropriate) product by all means have a laugh, but don't think for a moment there isn't a good idea in there somewhere too.

In praise of the stuffed shirt

As I've gotten older and more battle weary in my advertisng career, I've become less and less tolerant of the account barons who seem to trouser huge amounts of cash for doing, well, I don't really know what. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen these guys on the creative floor for example, but they do seem to spend an awful lot of time looking at spreadsheets and talking about resource. Usually before some poor unfortunate disappears from the phone list.

Judging from the blogosphere, not to mention conversations with my firends, it would appear I'm not alone in holding this view. Recently however I've begun to observe a new phenomenon, that of the stuffed shirt who actually serves a useful business purpose. These guys are, for the first time, making my life easier rather than loading it up with the kind of useless rubbish that only they could think of. You know the kind of thing - "I think the client would really appreciate a cross tabulation of our profitability against the population of Syamese Cats in Birmingham".

They don't achieve results through actually doing the work, that responsibility still falls to the rest of us. But they do make things happen through sheer force of personalility and will power. And knowing that you've got that willpower on your side sure makes it easier to crack on with that spreadsheet.

For every one of these individuals there's a dozen of the old skool, resource heavy, productivity light stuffed shirts who mysteriously hover around success and are nowhere to seen when things get a bit hairy, but from now on I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, at least until you invite me to tabulise your resource plan in 172 countries by tomorrow.

Behavioural marketing in Canary Wharf

Amongst all the debate around Phorm and the like, last night witnessed the return of good old fashioned stealth marketing in the bars of Canary Wharf. As the usual groups of bankers downed Kirin whilst braying about the latest act of deleveraging in that strange kind of Euro language they use (Esperanto?), small groups of attractive young women moved seamlessly from table to table. They lingered no longer than a minute with each group before moving on. A few minutes later, those 'lucky' enough to have won favour found a free pass to Majingo's Gentlemen's Club in their pocket.

Later, I asked one of those handing out the tickets what criteria she used for selecting her guests . The answer was simple - they had to have a "twinkle in their eye". I pondered what kind of behaviours one might use to identify likely customers of alternative brands and found myself returning to the notion of the "killer question" - the one single thing that marks out their potential Sheba cat food apparanetly did it years ago by defning their audience as "those who buy their cats Xmas presents".

All of which reminded me that more often than not we dumb down our targeting strategies by looking at what audience characteristics we can readily measure, rather than what makes them unique.