The COMRADITY Journal

Working from the heart.

The mission of The COMRADITY Journal has to been to inspire. I spent several years writing posts at home, in isolation. A year ago, we opened the COMRADITY Strategy and Creative Resource Center, hoping to attract other "birds of a feather." No longer isolated, now I can write about the folks who inspire me. Inspire me to think differently.

Anthony Buzzeo thinks, as many of us do, that working means more than a paycheck. Most of us started out in the corporate world and then ventured into the more risky "gig" economy to find more meaningful rewards - or at least the freedom to choose what to work on. But Tony sort of did it reverse. A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston (where they told him upon graduating that less than 5% would be earn a living in the music profession) he started out in the "gig" economy then went back to get his MBA to win a ticket to enter the corporate world.

But now he is "rethinking work."

"Rethinking Work" is the title of an opinion piece by Barry Schwartz in the New York Times. He reprises the often reported Gallup study that: "almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be."

He goes on to share other research findings. For example:

About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital. The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” said one. “That’s what I enjoy the most.”

Recently, Anthony shared that when he takes a "gig" he doesn't just think about it 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. He dreams about it. He calls it "working from the heart."  

But, he explained, that his biggest challenge in the "gig" economy is throttling his effort back. Why?

Because the corporate world has applied scientific management movement's systems for manufacture to the professions which once capitalized on freedom to think, create, and express ideas. Today, educated, experienced professional are asked to perform to quantifiable standards, as if they are just another cog in the production line.

Importantly, most of the folks I know in the "gig" economy, will tell you that those standards are below what they could deliver. In fact, less than 20% of the projects they work on take full advantage of them as a resource.

When they offer to exceed expectations - they get the "dog look." Because most of the decision makers have only been in the business for a few years and only know the standards they are told to deliver. They aren't motivated by their bosses to learn, discover, and bring new ideas that don't fit the "standards."

Their roles are limited to meeting the "standards" for predictability. In a global operation, predictability is more efficient than exceeding expectations. Seriously, we worked on a project once where conversion rates at retail were 50%. But since the brand manager had only budgeted a 10% conversion rate they went with a less effective alternative.

What is the solution? A new way to go to work so these massive corporations have the flexibility - the agility to capitalize on the experience, and knowledge to exceed expectations and raise the standards by co-creating projects with professionals who will work on a "gig" basis. And a new way for those professionals to co-create with others to overcome hurdles to achieving those higher standards. A variable support system that takes the risk out of large corporate management teams "working from the heart."

Fresh Perspective

A fresh perspective changes how we look at a situation.

Problems become opportunities.

New York Times article "How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain" by Gretchen Reynolds, offers one way to get a fresh perspective, with proof that it works.

The Creativity Crisis. Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility by Roberta Ness demonstrates why we need a fresh perspective. The conflict between creativity and caution has tipped so far towards caution that what we think is innovation is merely tinkering. 

In the New York Times Sunday Review section, Albert Brooks writes: "We Need Optimists" in the context of presidential politics. The New York Times published our comment, which we reprint here:

Professional athletes strive to visualize winning shots instead of the losers for a reason: It works.
When we are focused on the problems, we are at best cautious and at worst, complicating an already complex system.
We should be discovering common interests instead of more reasons to argue and hate.
The artist who faces a blank canvas or piece of paper and sees nothing but problems is an artist with a creative block.
That's where we are.
In this context, leaders with the hope and competence of an artist (the trained and/or practiced artisan who knows how to realize their vision) would be a welcome relief.

A fresh perspective is a place where teams and their leaders will see opportunities they didn't see before.

 

Data and Creativity.

The hard-working woman arrived at her local grocer with a week's pay in her purse, to buy a chicken for Sunday supper. It was the end of the week for the butcher too, and he was down to his last chicken. When he put the chicken on the scale, the woman thought for a moment and asked him for a larger chicken. So he sloshed the chicken around in water until it was full and put it back on the scale, proudly announcing that this chicken was much heavier. The woman thought again and asked for both chickens. 

WARC editor Colin Grimshaw writes about the tension between data and creativity in his post about the debate exposed by the entries into the 2015 ADMAP essay contest, "Does Big Data Inspire or Hinder Creative Thinking?"

Unfortunately creativity and data can be used to deceive. But not always. 

Data can reveal the value of a product or brand that even the manufacturer is unaware of. For example, after multiple agencies unsuccessfully competed to raise the "motivation score" for a new baby product campaign, I asked for a different cross tab of the research results to pull out the perceptions of the most discerning customer, new mothers, revealing an insight that increased the "motivation score" of the new advertising. 

Creativity moves people. It can move people in ways the creators didn't expect. In "Art & Copy", Nike's Liz Dolan shares the unanticipated letters from consumers who claimed the "Just Do It" campaign inspired them.  Not just to get more exercise but to overcome the procrastination inhibiting them from self-improvement on a much grander scale. 

Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? The data or the creativity? In both of the above cases the creativity came first. The data was generated by the response to the content. The data was "opt in" or voluntarily shared. And it was in context.

That's why my vote is for creativity to come first. The data is more meaningful and actionable. Frankly, based on my experience and observations, starting with data dumbs down creativity. From the early days of copy testing to today's "KPI's",  creativity has become weighed down and distracted by data. I argued this point in the essay, "A Creativity Renaissance," which made it to the short list, but didn't win the contest. (You have to be a WARC subscriber to see my published essay, sorry, but those were the rules when I entered.)

More important than the chicken and egg debate over data and creativity, the marketing industry needs to face the elephant in the room - the myth of scale.

The media marketplace is just like the grocer trying to sell one chicken over and over again to a customer who needs much more. The scale has become dumber and dumber over the last 30 years I've been in the business. When I started in the business, reach was the important metric to predict success. Awareness was important, but conversion from awareness to loyal customer was more important to sustainable growth.

But that was when you could reach 30% of the target with $5 to 10 Million. Today that's not possible at budgets 10 times that. So we buy impressions (no matter how many are the same viewer over and over again). And who spends the money on research to measure awareness, aided or unaided, let alone customer loyalty?

To improve marketing results and the impact of creativity in business, in general, let's start by recalibrating the scale based on what is mathematically possible in today's media landscape. And let's bring all the stakeholders together - including the audience - to explore what really matters.  No one company or silo has the silver bullet. We all need to come together to reset the defaults and re-define success. 

Fresh Perspective: Fixing Opportunities

For years we've heard: to get ahead in business be a problem solver. The assumption is that when we solve problems, they go away.

Maybe that was true at some point.  But what if we have evolved to a point in time when fixing problems is having the opposite effect. They aren't going away. In fact they are compounding.

They are indeed fixed - as in cemented in place. They become dependent upon hiring lots of problem solvers to tend to them. And then there's this pernicious co-dependency of a revenue stream only existing as long as the problem is sustained.

For example, recently I read a New York Times opinion piece which shocked me by the author's complete obliviousness to how entangled the problem of end-of-life wishes paperwork has become. The author is an emergency room doctor who was arguing that a living will and a DNR is not enough. If an ambulance team brings you to the emergency room, they have to continue life-saving protocols. She was advising us to get yet another form that must be signed by a Doctor in addition to ourselves.

The unspoken message was that our wishes weren't enough to protect her from potential litigation. This is an example, in my opinion, of making an already naturally complex situation, more unnecessarily complicated - adding more paper work to fill a loophole left by another document. The problem - a conflicted family who doesn't know what to do, leaving a Doctor with no clear directive and fearful of a lawsuit - doesn't go away.

To improve this situation as well as the many complex scenarios in life and business, we need to stop this obsession with fixing problems. We need to start digging for opportunities.

In a world of unnecessary complications, opportunities are hard to find, develop, and sustain. It takes enormous effort to go against the momentum of this problem obsession culture for opportunities to persevere.

Opportunities are ideas, vulnerable from the start, that need a team with the chemistry to hold together against enormous odds to develop them, defend them, and bring them to life. We need to fix opportunity with a better process.

An opportunity needs "parents" - a team with the chemistry to overcome all the challenges, before even hatching ideas. That team needs the time to dig deeper, below all the superficial problems to find the opportunities that are being missed. And that team needs professional help to capitalize on all the communication tools we have to open the eyes of others who have been trained to see nothing but problems.

The team must include all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem so the outcome doesn't add unnecessary complications. Instead they should strive for ideas with mutual benefit. Inherently, this will simplify the inherent complexities of today's systems.

Before you say that is way to ambitious - I say aim for an opportunity that can be explored as a project - one that will prove this team can work together to make a real difference. Ultimately it is the team's chemistry that makes it able to find, develop, defend, and bring to life an opportunity in this entangled world of problems.

 

 

Time to explore.

Admap, a publication of WARC, an international publisher of advertising best practices, evidence and insights,  holds an essay competition each year. This year, the question posed is: "Does big data inspire or hinder creative thinking?"

Judge Marc Matthieu, SVP Marketing at Unilever and judge of the essays, complimented Admap for facing the elephant in the room:

"Kudos to Admap for picking the theme of the moment for its annual essay prize," he said. "Data or Creativity? Art or Science? Logic or Magic? This year's Admap Prize essays provided fascinating reading, comforting me further that we stand at the spring of a revolution in how we will look back at what we once held true in marketing, and smile at how innocent we were." http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/Admap_Prize_shortlist_announced.news?ID=34537

COMRADITY co-founder Katherine Warman Kern's essay, which imagines three ways data can support a "Creativity Renaissance",  made the shortlist. One of few, if not the only non-global ad agency to do so. That's pretty rewarding since it isn't as though she has a ton of spare time "/  But the most rewarding part was taking the time to imagine.

How much time each week do you look up from your desk and explore the horizon for opportunity? 

Complexity. The reason we have no time to explore, or change, or understand each other.

In yacht racing, as in business, complexity is directly related to high performance design.

A risk of high performance yachts is all those lines getting tangled up. Pull on just one of those lines and the whole mess turns into a tight knot. A knot that doesn't just slow performance. It threatens the very survival of the crew and ship.

Some may think the solution is to cut the knot. But, then the lines are too short to perform their purpose. Leaving no choice but to withdraw from the race.

An experienced racer remains calm.

Loosens the knot instead of pulling it tight.

Then gets her head out of the boat.

Where she can see the opportunity competitors missed.

And come from behind to win a sailboat race.

Collaboration Lab Implications from "Art & Copy"

"Art & Copy" is documentary by Doug Pray, featuring iconic advertising creatives talking about famous ad campaigns.

 

It came out in 2009 when everyone was focused on Big Data. But that's changed. Recently,(Internet Advertising Bureau) chief, Randall Rothenberg's called for a shift in focus to Big Content. 

 

From a business's perspective, "Big Content" is creative that actually moves the needle more than the typical digital ad campaign or FSI, .001%.  

 

How much more? Some advertising has been known to move the needle by 100%, or multiples of that. That's Big Content. And that's why business will benefit from overcoming its fear of creativity.

 

"Are you kidding?" you must be thinking.

 

Nope. I was on a team that moved the needle 300%. I was very lucky to work at Leo Burnett in the days when that was considered "THE training program." That's when I was on the team that took Bubble Tape from an insignificant novelty to hold a spot near the cash register reserved for the fastest moving confections.

 

The training program contributed a lot to my skills to organize information and manage the client and agency team. But my most significant contribution to Bubble Tape success was to stand up for an ad campaign that resonated with everyone but the Leo Burnett CEO who preferred a different campaign with a "character" to fit with all those iconic case studies of Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the Marlboro Cowboy. 

 

Those are the case studies that went to Harvard and other business schools that established many of the assumptions that Big Data technology is built on today. But they don't reveal the truth about how Big Content was conceived, developed and evolved.

 

The documentary, "Art & Copy" does. 

 

Here are the implications for the operating principles of the COMRADITY Co-Creation Labs that will mutually benefit business and creative professionals.

 

1. Raise expectations.

How many "creative briefs" or project "Scope of Work" have you seen that aim high enough to "move the needle?" Why invest in developing new more efficient ways to deliver worse results? 

2. Get out and be present in reality.

The rate of new product failure in the 1980's was as high as 70% and coincided with more new products coming out of corporate Ivory Towers instead of scrappy street-wise business people. Today's start-up failures are as high as 90% with more start-ups being designed by scrappy kids with their heads buried in devices and in isolation. Reality is ambiguous and messy, ideas that move the needle disrupt that ambiguity with ironic simplicity. Those insights come when in the moment.

3. Patience.

It takes time for original ideas to emerge, percolate, be adopted, and resonate. The more you push the faster the roadblocks will spring up.

4. Trust your gut.

Ideas that resonate - that will ring true in the moment and over time - are hard to explain. So if it feels right - especially if you can't explain why - have confidence.

5. It takes a community.

Collaboration is the fuel that moves the needle. The more stakeholders who adopt an idea and "own it" the faster and bigger it will grow. The challenge is orchestrating all the participants for harmony. Music is full of metaphors for describing collaboration - the process and the end result. What if we looked to music to develop a better collaborative creative process? It is based on a scientifically proven common language that help multiple diverse practitioners improvise together in real time.

 

Look for an invitation to a COMRADITY screening of "Art & Copy" and discussion about how to apply these five principles to Collaboration Lab Projects. If you'd like an invitation, please leave a comment here.

Introducing The COMRADITY Collaboration Lab

The biggest hurdle advertising professionals have to overcome is the industry's reputation for bullshit.

In the past, the ads and the personalities were criticized for being BS artists. But today the trade publications, professional associations, and universities which should be objectively critiquing are not.

The industry needs self-criticism because it is a creative business. Creativity doesn't have golden rules. Even when the media landscape was simple, there was a lot of debate about creative process and how to judge creativity.

That's why the business has attracted very intelligent, thoughtful people who consider it a responsibility to figure out what works and contribute integrity to the creative business. At one time, I was told that being published by ADAGE was a true test of critical thinking and communication skills.

But that's not true anymore. Publications like ADAGE reprint press releases without investigation. As the media landscape has become very complex and uncertain, agencies, universities, professional associations, and new ad tech companies claim they are using data to make a science of creativity. The race is on to be the first with the answer and to educate the market.

But there are no answers and there is nothing to teach, yet.

Ironically, the best creative professionals I've ever worked with are the worst at tooting their own horn and very good at helping clients recognize what advertising can and can not do. They are circumspect about this race to make creativity a science.

But that doesn't mean they aren't curious and interested in experimenting.

A true experiment starts with an hypothesis. Not an objective to survive or to reduce costs or to destroy the establishment. Experiments take risk. Educated risk. A valid hypothesis based on honest observations of the past. Not case studies written to make the actors sound prescient. Not myths.

We invite all those interested in developing and funding thoughtful experiments to join the COMRADITY Strategy and Creative Resource Center Collaboration Lab.

#Fraternite

There is little coverage in the US Sunday news shows of the Paris Unity Rally. So here's a link to the live coverage on the BBC.  In Connecticut's Cablevision it is channel 104.

Here's to the power of the "we" over "I", a theme we have been encouraging in The COMRADITY Journal:
Our appeal to Ariann Huffington that she personally responded to and invited us to publish in the Huffington Post.
An inspiration to realize that a positive purpose will compel the "I's" to contribute to "we".

Good luck to all of us.

Fear of Missing Out

Buying "Innovation" requires a leap of faith.

We all know there's a temptation to make the leap because everyone else does.

But we may not realize just how irresistable the fear of missing out can be.

Or that it is so persistent today that there is an acronym for it: FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Or that there is evidence that it can blind us.

FOMO is why "Americans Can't Go Two Hours without Checking Technology Devices" according to Crucial.com: "One in four Americans becomes stressed by going longer than 30 minutes without checking their email or phone due to fear of missing out."

But more importantly, we don't perceive how compelling FOMO is: "The independent survey . . . conducted by GMI Research . . . found a disconnect among Americans when it comes to the perceptions and realities of their technology use . . . While three in four men reported having a balanced or very balanced tech-life ratio, 84 percent of men admitted to having checked a mobile device while driving . . . "

This disconnect isn't benign. It is related to "Inattentional Blindness" -  "an event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight."

In a driving fatality case in Utah, the accused driver, Reggie Shaw, has become an anit-texting law evangelist after being shocked to realize that he didn't remember texting at the time of the accident, until the evidence was presented to him in trial.

Since FOMO is so irresistable and blinds us to reality, some liken its power to an addiction. But others contemplate that it could be even worse. Addiction is usually related to something that gives a positive reward all the time. Matt Richtel, author of 'A Deadly Wandering,' loooks at the science behind why FOMO is "so magnetic." 

You would think that if our devices delivered us lots of irrelevant or non-urgent information, we'd be conditioned to press it less.  Perservsely, we're conditionded to press it more.

He calls it "Intermittent Reinforcement" which comes from the early behavioral research of B.F. Skinner on rats.

Every parent can see the FOMO effect in their kids - evidenced by the piles of tried and discarded toys children "had to have" six months earlier. The size of that market nears $100 Billion in the US.

But FOMO drives marketers' judgements too, encouraging digital media and marketing innovation bubbles that burst. 

FOMO is a powerful barrier for innovations based on market intelligence instead of illusion.

Positioning with a Purpose.

Making sense of many marketing choices is challenging. Positioning is a strategic tool that narrows the choices.

Think of positioning as a navigation tool. It identifies where your brand belongs on the marketplace map. The simplest way to visualize a markeplace map is on two dimensions: quality and price.

A high quality/high price positioning will narrow the competitors and marketing tools, certainly. But within this competitive niche, a positioning statement with a purpose distinguishes the brand even more. For example, in the home furnishing business, one brand's purpose may be modern and smart for a young adult with a tiny, yet expensive apartment versus another brand, whose purpose is to be classic and traditional to signal affluence and prestige.

A well-defined purpose helps to inspire marketing choices which capitalize on the brand's competitive advantages.

For example, the leading bubble gum brands, shapped in discreet cubes, promoted long-lasting flavor when we launched BUBBLE TAPE. There's nothing discreet about a cannister of 6 feet of gum. We defined the brand's purpose to be "kid" cool - as in purely uninhibited, attention-getting fun. Research told us that 12 year old boys were the most uninhibited and into getting attention - i.e., the "ring leaders". Convenience stores near schools, where kids make purchase decisions uninhibitied by an adult, was their channel of choice.

We produced television ads "For You Not Them" ("them" being grown-ups) to run in the kid's television shows that 12 year old boys spent several hours a day watching. Salesforce time and efforts were concentrated on Convenience Stores.

The results were stunning. In Year I, with only Convenience Store distribution, BUBBLE TAPE became a leading bubble gum brand.

It is natural for an established brand to invest marketing dollars everywhere to defend against competitors. But consider that narrowing marketing choices to capitalize on competitive advantages could be the most effective way to get more for their money.

In the 1980's many leading consumer packaged goods brands began to see increased competition from discount brands. When increasing advertising support didn't help Procter & Gamble's SECRET antiperspirant compete with lower priced "white label" competitors, they chose to shift advertising dollars into trade promotion - i.e., discounts to maintain valuable distribution real estate, pulled through by couponing in local newspapers.

Why didn't increasing advertising work? As background, the purpose of SECRET Antiperspirant is to meet the unique antiperspirant needs of women. The "secret" is that the PH balance of women's sweat is different than men's and therefore harder to neutralize.

But the legacy advertising campaign wasn't working as hard as it did in the earlier days of the "Women's Movement".  Known internally as "Jack and Shirley", the stories were based on women's relationships with husbands. By the 1980's, (as evidenced by a plummeting birthrate), women were more likely to be working and facing relationship  issues with men like discrimination at work. The tagline "strong enough for a man but made for a woman" didn't work very hard to overcome a woman's challenge to prove that she was equal to men. And "strong enough for a man" actually contradicts the true story that a woman's antiperspirant has to work harder than a man's. (a very relevant metaphor for young women in the workplace.)

Imagine what the SECRET marketing plan would be like its packaging and advertising were updated to align with its purpose to meet the unique antiperspirant needs of women. Specifcaly to communicate that SECRET works as hard as women.

Who are the women who will most relate to this message? For example, Young High School and College athletes, young women studying in STEM subjects or entering the workforce.

Where are they most likely to buy it? Probably drug and convenience stores.

Where do they spend a lot of time? Working hard - getting in shape for their sport, studying, or at their desk.

The outcome would be a marketing plan that doesn't look anything like the competitor's. And the dollars, energy, and time spent will be concentrated on opportunities where the return on investment is highest.