This is why you work in advertising

"Don't tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse". Jacques Seguela


The picture and the oft repeated line above made me smile. I came across it in an interesting post here. The author quoting Jaron Larnier the digital visionary extensively, makes lot of interesting points. You might want to check them out.   

7 Deadly Sins Of Marketing

Tom Fishburne hits the spot every time with his cartoons. Anyone even remotely connected to marketing and communication will agree with this one too. The saddest thing is that anyone from the agency business with enough experience (>10 years) would have been a reluctant or willing accomplice to the 7 deadly sins at one point of time or the other. Sigh, the cross we all have to bear.

Digital Ninja

This video made me LOL because it is so true. You find ninjas everywhere and in every form. Brand, advertising, strategy, social media....but for these ninjas life will be boring. Behind every great bubble of hot air stands a ninja wielding a powerpoint. Or is it babble?

Out-of-focus groups

(via)

I simply cannot understand the fascination for focus groups. Very rarely does anything good come out of it. If focus groups were all it is portrayed to be why are there so many duds in terms of products, ideas and campaigns? Why do we ignore the collective wisdom that the marketing and agency teams bring to the table? Why do we overlook the wealth of knowledge waiting to be tapped from the war zone like sales, customer care etc? Why do we discount commonsense? And can respondents really be trusted?

I am not alone with my rant. There are many in the business with much stronger concerns about focus groups. I liked this example (via) that just hits the spot.

Years ago, British Airways (BA) decided to introduce a new service for its first class passengers on long haul flights. It was basically a mini fridge full of goodies so that if you woke up in the middle of the night feeling a little hungry, you could get something nice for yourself. The question was: What do we put into this little fridge?

BA dutifully did its market research and assembled several focus groups of first and business class passengers. What would you like, they asked? The response was universal. People wanted fruit or perhaps some light salads. All very good. All very healthy.

On the first flight with the new service an air hostess paused as she noticed the fridge being filled. “What are you doing?” she asked. And the person dutifully explained what was happening. The hostess laughed. “They’re lying!” she said. “They don’t want salads. Listen, I’ve being doing the London to LA route for years, and when they wake up in the middle of the night the last thing on their minds is salads.”

“But the focus groups all said …”

She shook her head and walked away. A couple of minutes later she came back with some chocolates and cakes. “Please put these in as well,” she said. “Trust me. I know my customer.”

And they did put some chocolate and cakes in and when they checked at the end of the flight, they were all gone and nobody had touched the apples or salads.

HA!

Inside Pixar

(Via) 

Pixar is what every creative organisation should aspire to become. Not only are their films critically acclaimed but are also mega-commercial successes. In the interview above you get to know the reason why. It is all about leadership and culture. This simple interview covers lot of territory and is at once fascinating and insightful.

For example, take managing ‘creative types’.

In an agency you can see some of the so-called-creative types strutting about like a peacock-on-heat throwing tantrums and in general making life miserable for everyone. Management is completely paralyzed into inaction not knowing how to deal with them. The result is that such behaviour becomes cancerous vitiating the entire atmosphere.

At Pixar, the creative process is viewed as a group effort. While there is room for creative eccentricities, they do not let it affect group dynamics. They simply fire the creative person even though he might be the best. Following is the transcript about that from the interview. 

"[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative – we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.

We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’."

Do you think an agency will dare to do this?

Do This Or Die - A message from Bill Bernbach

(Via)

This message is as relevant today as it was when Bill Bernbach wrote it decades ago. Marketing and communication(creative) without lies and hypocrisy can work magic. Bill Bernbach has proven it many a time. And so have quite a few like him. Therefore, what is stopping you?

The World Of Mobile

Sowing seeds by yiibu

View more presentations from Bryan Rieger.

Courtesy via Conrad Lisco

I couldn’t help post the above presentation for two reasons.

Reason 1: It is a great presentation of thoughts and stats that reinforces simplicity as the key to succeed in creating mobile experiences. 

Reason 2: We have been hearing the constant drone about the ‘future is mobile’. Yes, the stats are impressive and the projections even more so. Yes, at a socio-cultural-economic level the impact of mobile technology has been phenomenal. This is best represented by aid to Haiti or the service to farmers in India or m-pesa in Africa. And we know that this is just the beginning in this sphere of mobile activity.

However, brands have made very little headway in trying to tame this beast. There are examples though but they are more an exception than the norm. 

This wonderful presentation by a young strategist, Avin Narasimhan, is maybe just the answer brands need. He has provided an easy framework for us to look at people’s mobile behaviour and brands. The reason I am endorsing this POV is based on my personal experience in December 2009. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of my client’s mobile technology (3dSoc) to a prospective client, I had worked almost on the same lines as Avin has suggested in his presentation. I knew then that I had hit a sweet-spot in the approach to mobile for brands and so did my client. And when I came across Avin’s presentation sometime in 2010, it was a déjà vu of sorts.

I also think that the beginning of a new year (and a new decade) is a good time to place before you thoughts and information that I have collected on this interesting subject. So here goes: 

The amazing Mary Meeker sets the tone with some stunning stats and predictions here and here. By default most presentations today carry key slides from her presentation. Frankly, this has increased my annoyance quotient considerably, not at Mary Meeker but at these unimaginative hacks.

When an industry has astonishing growth figures, the VC’s cannot be far behind. Here’s the latest view from the highly respected Fred Wilson on the direction mobile is headed. It might seem predictable. But hey, you might want to know what the VC’s think for you to wrangle the all important $$$ with the sliver of an idea buzzing in your head.  

Academia too have strong views on the subject with MIT summing up 2010 neatly.

Youth form the largest base of mobile owners with 1.5 billion of them owning it across the globe. But do we know how they use it? For example, did you know that rural youth in India spend nearly 5 hours every day listening to music on their mobile? You can find such information about youth from across 65 countries in the amazing MobileYouth.

Tomi Ahonen is One of the leading experts on mobile and marketing. He is a rich resource of insights and information that one should tap into regularly.

Finally, the icing on the cake is this crystal-ball gazing effort on the part of guru’s on what mobile trends in 2020 will be like.

Let’s not go that far though. Let’s begin with 2011 and hope it truly ushers in the ‘decade of the mobile’. 

Happy New Year!

PS: More suggestions welcome