Dazzle Ships

Loss for words

The internet has, apparently, been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I really don't know where to start with this.

But I would ask you to consider the following.

The Facebook group in support of this has 5,223 members.  Or you  can go here, and watch some of the breathless videos about what the internet can do.

Now have a look at the CEOP Facebook page.  It has 20,796 'likes'.  For those that don't know CEOP is the Child Online Exploitation and Protection Centre.

Have a read.  And while you're at it, consider the findings of a report from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre from earlier this year that found that the use of social networking sites by militant hate groups has grown by 20% in the last year.

The internet can do this as well.

Of couse the internet doesn't 'do' either of these things.  The internet has no agenda or agency or motivtaion.

The sooner we realise this, the sooner we realise that progress is about changing people, not changing technology.  This is messier and harder and won't happen overnight.  But until we start addressing the right questions, it won't happen at all.

-- Toby

'New Bank Pledges To Openly Despise Its Customers'

 

So ran the fabulous headline in the Daily Mash yesterday.

'Britain's newest hight street bank has promised not to pretend to be your friend', the article began before decsending into the sort of language unfit for a blog like this.

Like all good satire, it's based in a truth.  We've talked here before about converging brands, and how corporations have stopped trying to tell you what they do and now just try to tell you what they're like.  And guess what? They're just like you.  You might call this the 'Sarah Palin' school of marketing.  Her appeal is not based on any degree of competence for the high office to which she aspired (and will aspire to again).  Her appeal is that she's just like you.

This new school of marketing spends much time emphasising 'conversations' and other friendly things. 'Time spent with' has become the new measure of success.  But is this really what successful looks like? To return to banks for a second, their most successful service innovations have been web-banking and, before that, the ATM - two things actively designed to minimise the time you spend with the 'brand'. 

Obvioulsy I don't want to be misconstrued.  These measures are not always wrong any more than they're always right.  We just have to understand customer motivation before we start asking them to commit 'time' to our brand.  Google is another instructive lesson.  They won the search wars of the early web not through superior algorithms (as some claim), but because they understood that consumers want to spend as little time on a search engine as possible - they're just a way of getting to something else.  So they didn't try to keep you on the site, or try to change into a 'portal'.  The rest is history.

For more, there's an excellent discussion of these issues on the HBR site under the provocative title 'Why Your Customers Don't Want To Talk To You', which opines that, first, companies massively over estimate the extent to which consumers want to talk to brands and second, that this approach may undermine long term loyalty.

In the meantime, perhaps we should sometimes consider the revolutionary thought that the best way to 'delight our customers' might be to spend less time with them.

(Thanks to TAC & Lloydy)

-- Toby

art for art's sake

Via Campaign, I read that Cannes is considering introducing a new category.  'Effectiveness'.

(30th July , page 22 - can't find it online).

Yes, you read that right.  Effectiveness.  Campaigns will be awarded for achieving what they set out to do.  They will be recognised for delivering on the promises that were (presumably) made to the clients who paid for them.

Anyone who's put a Cannes entry together will know that establishing the efficacy of a particular piece of work is not the most important consideration in your submission, but nevertheless the pretence is there.  It could of course be argued that creative work is different, that it can indeed be judged an some vacuous scale of 'creativity', and that that in itself is a noble endeavour.

Except, of course, it isn't. We've always been a bit embarrassed by our preoccupation with awards, which is why so much effort has been spent over the years establishing the link between creativity and effectiveness.  The Gunn Report, that league table of 'creativity', was created after Donald Gunn, then of Leo Burnett, analysed the performance of winning ads from festivals around the year and found that they were significantly more effective in business terms than the norm.  His paper presenting these findings, 'Do Award Winning Commercials Sell?' was published in 1994, and became the genesis of the Gunn Report.  The Gunn Report was born from effectiveness, not creativity.

It wasn't just Gunn.  In the Campaign article mentioned above, Richard Exon of Y&R states 'Thanks to the IPA and Thinkbox, amongst others, the evidence of a causal link between creativity and effectiveness is unassailable'.  So far, so good.

So, you'd assume that Richard, like me, thinks the idea of an Effectiveness award is ridiculous.  Well, he does.  But not for the same reasons.  He concludes 'Ultimately we need [the] separation nbetwwen Cannes and Efffectiveness awards.  When we see a campaign performing well in both, and we know taht both sets of judges have been uncompromising, we can be absolutely confident of the link between creativity and effectiveness'.

So, the link that was 'unassailable' just a few paragraphs earlier is looking slightly shakier.  All that's being said, of course, is what we already know - some work is effective, but not creative.  Some is creative, but not effective.  Some is both.

But by saying that agencies should win prizes for work that is creative but not effective is utterly idiotic.  Our entire point as a business is to employ creativity in the name of business effectiveness.  Of course there's creatively poor, but highly effective work - just ask Michael Winner - but surely we should be arguing that the application of creativity can do the job better.  So, for example, if e-sure had a meerkat, maybe they could have halved their media budget.

In a time of increasingly risk-averse clients (and agencies), suggesting that we are somehow pursuing our own agenda of art for art's sake is only going to be counter-productive, leading to less risk-taking and poorer work.

Besides there are already awards for pure creativity.  Details here. 

-- Toby