He was like an artist, a filmmaker or a painter. You could guess which way the work of art was heading but you didn’t know quite how he was going to get there – Bob Lelangue on Eddy Merckx
Merckx legacy is not one of innovation. He did not create anything new in terms of the technical side of cycling…but you don’t have to be a great innovator to be a genius – William Fotheringham
These two quotes on the cyclist Eddy Merckx from the biography Half Man, Half Bike struck a chord. When he was at the top of his profession in the early 1970′s people assumed his annihilation of his competitors was a sign of disrespect and arrogance. Merckx’s domination in cycling stemmed from his pathological fear of failure.
In some ways I see it as being similar to the concept of flow – of things coming together at the right time. Every so often we have those fleeting moments where we push ourselves outside of our limits and meet our own personal moment of ‘Souplesse‘. It is an example of craftsmanship that comes from experience that lifts the work to a new level.
We are all faced with the fear of the unknown – that moment where you go down a serendipitous path not knowing exactly what is at the end of it. We have an idea, a hunch or intuition but the path getting there is obscured.
‘Souplesse‘ implies pushing the limits of what you know further than before – or to put it another way going outside your comfort zone.
I hope to apply a little ‘Souplesse‘ in all areas of my professional and personal life in 2013.
It is time to review my Book Club Top Picks. I use the term book club loosely because there’s only me.
Truth, Lies, and Advertising – Jon Steel – A must read book if you have a passing interest in advertising and planning in particular. Jon Steel shines a light into the creative process behind a number of well known advertising campaigns
Rework – Jason Fried – David Heinemeier Hansson – Based on their experience with 37Signals and other startups Fried and Hansson provide a succinct set of rules and observations for early stage businesses.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike – William Fortheringham – 2012 was the year when I started cycling into town for work and I was recommended this book about the legendary cyclist Eddy Merckx. An outlier in his chosen field of cycling he completely rewrote the rules to become the greatest cyclist of his generation.
The Lean Startup – Eric Ries – Another startup book and I ended up reading this straight after Rework which probably explains why for me there is very little to differentiate this from Rework. Again some good practical advice if you’re looking to start your own business.
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson – With exclusive access to Jobs as his health deteriorated Isaacson’s biography is widely regarded as the definitive appraisal of Jobs’ life
2013 will hopefully provide a greater opportunity to read a broader range of books. Leaving aside the various articles and reports I read as part of my job, I miss the deeper more immersive dive into books.
Books like Retromania – asking the question whether culture is being continuously (and needlessly) recycled or David Byrne’s latest on the impact of Music and it’s affect on us are next for Book Club in 2013.
My final point concerns the herd mentality within the planning community when it comes to recommending reading. This is only natural as planning remains a tight knit community certainly within London but inevitably it is those books that sit outside of planning but indirectly run along parallel lines that are the most insightful.
In 2011 I posted a talk of Jon Steel of WPP, talking about what he values most in advertising account planning.
I had such a fantastic response to the post, that I decided to see if I could find any more of Jon Steel and his talks out there. I came across this talk in which Jon spoke at a WPP event to celebrate Planning at 40.
Where possible I’ve tried to summarise the relevant points made by Jon Steel, but I would urge people to watch the talk and make up their own minds.
Planning /Planners cannot be truly effective when working in isolation. Rather the best work comes from integrating and working with other disciplines.
The true test of planning is not in new business but in existing business. Are the right strategic decisions being made by the client?
In the absence of talented creatives, planning will never make up for solid creative ideas based on sound thinking
Discipline, research and hard work are still the cornerstone of planning as a practice
Planning is not about creativity. It is about grounded creativity
The best work comes from the tension between creatives and planning practices to challenge the work of the other
Doing the right thing has given way to doing something because in general clients tenure in charge have been shorten to a couple of years. As a result it’s very hard to embed a long-term strategy for clients.
Planning works best when it’s setting a client’s goals, whether it is communications, branding, or tackling an underlying business problem.
Is is right to disrupt the planning process on the turn of a card?
It would not be controversial to say that planners like order. By order I mean a framework or process that guides their thinking. If you look at the role of a planner, it is trying to bring order by finding some sort of truth or insight to a problem.
Just as a framework can free a planner to tackle a problem, there maybe instances where it can trap a planner into a certain pattern of thinking. Whatever model a planner does apply, the planner should shape it and not let it shape their thinking.
This is easier said then done. I’ve been exploring the idea of introducing disruption into the planning process. My preferred approach is Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. Imagine a deck of a 101 unique cards each with an aphorism or suggestion that can be applied. These suggestions could be quite prescriptive such as:
or conceptual:
Eno applied the techniques with David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy albums (Low, Heroes, Lodger) on a number of different recordings. This lateral form of thinking was explained by Eno.
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.¹
Does the lateral form of thinking sit at odds with critical thinking at the heart of planning? In graft and craft: What makes a planner, Martin Weigel talks of the role of a planner being defined by technique and craft over time.
He talks passionately of planning as a discipline, and I see no reason why Oblique Strategies cannot supplement the core craft of planning.
planning must be stimulating, imaginative, intuitive and opinionated
Adding an element of disruption to planning is not going to be right for every scenario and my recommendation is that it should be used sparingly. I tend to use Oblique Strategies when I’m stuck in rut or a pattern of thinking. That is when it effectively guides my train of thinking into unfamiliar and uncomfortable areas.
Originally Oblique Strategies came beautifully boxed up however not very practical if you’re out and about.
I see a lot of ways in which you can experiment with the structure and form of OS. I like the idea of having a cut down version or a set of personalised suggestions that a planner can use to disrupt the planning process.
With this in mind I’ve ordered Artefact Cards from John Willshire. I like the physicality of having a deck of cards to hand and the fact that you can easily add or takeaway suggestions.
It’s not disruption for the sake of it more a case of changing a thought’s trajectory. Jurgen Habermas said it best:
Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.
Recently I went to the V&A to check out the Heatherwick Studio Exhibition – Designing the Extraordinary. For a planner, like me, this was a brilliant insight into how architecture, furniture, engineering, sculpture and urban planning converge and diverge. What resonated for me was how some of the techniques and processes inform planning and creativity within the advertising world.
The key thing from the Studio’s creative output is just how engrained the process of research, prototyping, and industrial collaboration is.
There’s an interview with Thomas Heatherwick in which he explains that you can only truly understand another craft if you actually get involved. In his case he had a go at welding that enabled him to find out the limitation of what you can or can’t do. That hands on experience made it a lot easier for Heatherwick to collaborate with professional welders to get the desired effect he was after.
Planning too often gets bogged down in quantitative and qualitative research. It’s not enough to be book smart and to roll off the latest stats. Rather planners should get involved in making things, in pulling things apart in order to get a better understanding. Russel Davies has written an excellent list that  touches on this point very well.
The conundrum for disaffected planners is taking the opportunities that might otherwise limit their role to be a fraction of their true value in offering strategic solutions. I couldn’t help but sympathise with Marci Ikeler’s post on the frustrations that made her leave agency life as a planner.
We can all read the same reports, the same Campaign article, the same write ups on who were the big successes at the Cannes Lions Festival. These can all lead to germinating solid ideas for planners, but it is having the vision to look beyond these that offers an interesting inflection point for planning and creativity.
The new and the different are always the lifeblood of advertising. Agencies would like the end of history in that they seldom advise brands to talk about their history or the past directly. It is always safer if it is couched in more softer tones of a brand’s ‘heritage’ or classic with a modern twist.
I’ve had to face up to the fact that I’ve become a product of my time. Whenever I start planning a piece of research for a client or an article on invisibleinkdigital, I always start to map out my disparate thoughts on paper. For all my pretensions as a digital planner I find it hard to truly articulate myself directly on a keyboard. A sense of ‘flow’ comes through committing my thoughts to paper, which I’ll then type up.
Clearly it is not just people who feel the hand of history on their shoulders. Detroit City has experienced a population drop of 25% from 2000-2010. Detroit is a city whose fortunes and losses have been acutely defined by modern history. Once the car manufacturing capital of the US, if not the world, it has fallen on hard times. The history of its rise and fall is in the process of being captured by Detropia. A documentary film currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.
Whether it is crowd sourcing the funding for a historical documentary, what’s become clear is that capturing the past has become a more interactive and inclusive activity. The scale with which it is possible to digitise history through film, sound and the written word is truly amazing. Books that have never been scanned because they are optically difficult for computers to read and understand are being validated by people entering the words via CAPTCHA forms (link to TEDtalk).
Just as archeologists have to dig through layers of history, we are now accumulating layers of ‘digital history’. This history can take the form of the personal; Facebook Timeline, the private; should Google ever wish to publish a person’s web data; or the collective such as HistoryPin.
Just as the web helps to facilitate the gathering of history, the history of the web is also being captured. The waybackmachine site has collected over 150 billion web pages, stretching back to 1996.
I wonder if we will reach a point where web pages become collectable in themselves? Could you have vintage websites that are an expression of their time and place? Could internet memes escape their narrow confines to become cultural artefacts? This raises a new way of looking at the web as having a cultural history of its own making.
One of  the most controversial academic publications to have appeared in the last 25 years was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. I was always struck by how great a title that was in terms of catching people’s attention. What Fukuyama meant was history as defined by two opposing ideologies Communism and Capitalism, was effectively over with the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Liberal Capitalism had won and therefore the progress of history was to take on a new direction.
But what if this “end of history” actually referred to how we participate in capturing and documenting it? Whereas before it was the few who could talk with knowledge of ‘history’ now anybody can participate. History comes alive and reaches a vast audience as a result of the web.
Take for instance the images of Pripyat, a city abandoned in 1986 as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Time has stood still yet with the publication of the images online meant it was given a new voice and continues to do so.
The expression that history is always written by the victors, now looks to be consigned to the history books. We are now all participants in the end of history.
Once there were parking lots
Now it’s a peaceful oasis
you got it, you got it
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies
you got it, you got it
A like Zite, but I just don’t like my Zite recommendations enough. That is why I feel as a content curation tool, it doesn’t meet my expectations…just yet.
Zite is a content curation app that:
mining content from your social connections
modeling that content
modeling the community that interacts with it
modeling your interests
matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see
Here’s a screenshot of my Top Stories based on the above:
self curated stuff that I'm not really interested in?
Pretty uninspiring huh and yet the content served up is meant to be a reflection of what I like and what my peers like so why doesn’t it surprise and delight? How easy would it be to influence Zite to serve up stuff I’m more likely to be interested in? The answer is pretty hard actually. I could purge my twitter followers that has led it down the path of social media marketing but that would be extreme and antisocial. Alternatively I could wade through the content and down mark the stuff I’m not that interested in the hope of improving the overall quality.
If the main objective to go on Zite is to influence it’s output rather than to enjoy the content then it’s decision making algorithm needs to be tweaked. This is not the first time perceptive media has gone off piste. Take for example TIVO’s intuitive recording functionality which has thrown up similar issues for viewers in the US.
No, I would much rather like to think that our interests are much broader, much more diffused than those prescribed by the machine logic of Zite, the scrobbles of LastFM or Amazon Recommendations. That’s why the professional curation of Brain pickings is so much richer in terms of interesting and engaging content, probably because the team there spends over 450 hours every month trawling for stuff. There is also a subtle distinction at play, and that is Maria Popova and her team curate content that interests them and may interest us.
There is a sense of serendipity in discovering something new or surprising that take us through a particular rabbit hole or scratches an itch. Philippe Petit, describes this vividly in the documentary Man on Wire. He describes the moment when he was sitting in a dentist waiting room and came across a magazine article describing the future construction of the World Trade Centre. It was this moment that sparked his ambition to high wire between the twin towers.
Zite assumes that we like certain content until it is are told otherwise. But there is an inherent fallacy at work within this machine logic. The belief that we like being served up the same stuff without losing interest. It’s like the party bore who corners you and drones on about a particular subject matter, you may have a fleeting interest but by patience and goodwill quickly evaporates and out comes the excuse that you need a drink or the toilet.
I was fortunate to stumble upon a great presentation from Heidi Hackemer (big thanks to Neil Perkin) on her experience as an ad planner. Â What certainly resonated most for me was the need for planners to bring a fresh perspective to a campaign. Planners by and large have access to the same reports, the same tools, and the same broad principles of what planning should be. But the real value of planning comes from divergent thinking. From taking those same reports and weaving a perspective that is unique to the planner and their view on the world.
This ability to connect the dots, to find coherence from a variety of seemingly unconnected sources, reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and education. In it, he talks about the modern world’s obsession with a linear narrative – the belief that if you go to a good school you will get a good job etc. But here’s the thing what if every planner in London, went to a good school, went to good university, and went straight into planning? The chances are you would end up with consistently good advertising, but limiting the opportunity for great thinking that only comes from an outside perspective.
In an earlier post I described the 7 points on planning as described by Jon Steel. Point 5 was to have an experience of real life. Get out of the office to experience the real world and understand the people you want to experience.
By all means read every recommended guide to planning, but it’s the stuff outside of planning that makes great planners.
Nike’s recent decision to open up it’s Fuel Band API to developers throws up some fascinating opportunities for  healthcare apps to break into the mainstream. Currently available in the US, Nike’s Fuel Band measures an individual’s daily activity and produces a score which can be shared through various social networks. But by allowing the data to be made available raises the possibility of integrating it with healthcare and insurance policy providers.
The provision of healthcare by the UK government is estimated at 8% of GDP, which roughly equates to GBP100 billion. This has led to successive UK governments looking to cut the cost of the NHS, whilst on the other be seen not to excessively punish the tobacco and drinks industries through taxation. Preventative healthcare through apps that harnesses an individual’s data could feasibly reduce that cost. However persuading enough people to adopt the use of such health apps means it is highly unlikely to have an impact on reducing the overall cost of health care any time soon.
The ability to overcome the privacy concerns of individuals is key to the adoption of health apps going forward, whether it’s incentivising the consumers with rewards or providing a clear benefit. The NHS Quit Smoking App, successfully applied the idea of loss aversion to demonstrate how much money a user saves by not smoking.
Providing a suitable incentive for consumers to opt into a service in exchange for their data is nothing new. For some time now, Google has been regarded as the top dog when it comes to a value exchange model built on data. Now we are seeing that approach applied to traditional sectors. For example insurance companies are promising cheaper car insurance for consumers in exchange for a modified blackbox being hardwired into their car, that collects data on their driving habits.
Clearly as the example above demonstrates consumers are prepared to engage in a value exchange. However privacy concerns around an individual’s health cannot be underestimated. Plugging lifestyle data into a medical care program or health service demands clear value for the consumer participating. I wouldn’t discount the possibility of health insurance firms becoming lifestyle providers where consumers would be able to select their rewards above and beyond cheaper insurance rates based on how active a consumer has been over a period of time.
Delivering new ways of measuring and tailoring health programs to the need of the individual is likely to be another key trend going forward. At the Google Firestarters session earlier this year there was a talk from Adil Abrar on Sidekick Studios Buddy project. The Buddy project allows for a patient’s wellbeing to be monitored remotely by their primary contact. This serves two important activities: firstly it allows a log of a patient’s mental health to be logged over time and a programme of treatment to be devised more accurately; secondly patients are reminded to attend their assessment sessions as part of the service.
What the Buddy Project illustrates is that an effective healthcare program can be provided relatively cheaply. In July 2011 OpenIDEO Â reached out to it’s online audience to crowdsource healthcare solutions to help low income income areas of Columbia. Again what’s fascinating about some of the winning concepts is enabling medical knowledge to be easily transmitted at a low cost.
As the demand for healthcare becomes ever greater, new solutions for delivering targeted programs for individual consumers that is cost effective becomes key. Future healthcare solutions will therefore need to tread a balance between a patient’s data offering targeted value with the highly sensitive concerns patient’s have around their medical data.
I’ve spoken before on the need for agencies to become more agile in developing digital solutions for clients. As the velocity of change continues to accelerate, clients are going to insist that their agencies rise to the occasion. A second consideration is that, in the main, client’s expect the agencies they appoint to be unencumbered by internal corporate governanence that slows innovation down.
Earlier this week my agency had an external talker put forward the view that there will no longer be a need for long term strategic thinking by planners because the world will have moved on. Granted you can never say never, and indeed the role of the advertising planner may evolve into something more or something less. Indeed it has been suggested that it’s highly likely that our children in school today will perform a job or role that hasn’t come into existance yet.
But far from powering down Powerpoint or keynote for one last time, I do believe that having a long-term plan does have a valid place going forward. Jon Steel, in Truth, Lies, and Advertising, credits planners are being:
…the architects and guardians of their clients’ brands, the detectives who uncovered long-hidden clues in the data and gently coerced consumers into revealing their inner secrets, and the warriors who stood up and fought for the integrity of their strategic vision. They had the logical, analytical skills to consume and synthesize vast amounts of data, and the lateral and intuitive skills to interpret that data in an interesting and innovative way.
Being the voice of the consumer as Jon Steel says is the key distinction. There is a certain scientific creativity at work within the planners role that develops advertising and keeps it relevant. Be it digital or non digital. Applying a more Agile methodology within the planning discipline should still have the end-consumer in mind when it comes to the output that makes them compatible regardless of looking through the lens of long-term or short-term thinking.
, credits planners are being: