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.