The COMRADITY Journal

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.

 

 

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.

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.

Productivity may not be all it is cracked up to be.

On Wednesday, October 1st, about 60 folks made time to "get creative" at a "Working Innovation Session" in the COMRADITY Big Idea Room. The purpose was to generate ideas to "Motivate a Multigenerational Workforce".  

It was well attended by a diverse group from business, creative, and education worlds.  The Ideation leader, Bryan Mattimore, engaged everyone to participate and generate several ideas which we will report on in another post.

There were a lot of ideas.

Bryan has developed his methodology specifically to generate a lot of ideas in a short period of time. Because that's what business managers are asked to do - produce more in less time. But Bryan will tell you that the real secret to his methodology is that it inspires a few really golden nuggets.

What if productivity as a metric for performance - as a goal to aim for - isn't very productive?

Consider the "Productivity Paradox"

The concept is sometimes referred to as the Solow computer paradox in reference to Robert Solow's 1987 quip, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."^[2] The paradox has been defined as the “discrepancy between measures of investment in information technology and measures of output at the national level.”^[3]

Economists differ on their explanation of lack of productivity growth associated with Information Computer Technology.

In the ECONOMIST article, "Productivity:Technology isn't Working"  there are three theories summarized:

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.

That sounds plausible, but for now the productivity statistics do not bear it out. John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.

An insight occured to me when reading this third economist's explanation:

Robert Gordon of Northwestern University suggests that recent innovation is simply less impressive than it seems, and certainly not powerful enough to offset the effects of demographic change, inequality and sovereign indebtedness. Progress in ICT, he argues, is less transformative than any of the three major technologies of the second Industrial Revolution (electrification, cars and wireless communications).

When electricity, cars, and wireless communication were invented and popularized the inventors and buyers  weren't thinking about being more productive at work. They were thinking of the benefits of being able to see at night (when people were not working), escaping the farm for the city (to expand personal horizons), and broadcasting over the air news and entertainment (which has nothing to do with work). The fact that these technologies also improved productivity at work were consequences - not the compelling inspiration behind these inventions.

Maybe the bigger reason for the lack of productivity growth is that business is so busy being productive and measuring productivity that it has eliminated the time and space to imagine altering someone's life for the better. Or put another way, the best strategy to improve productivity may not be aiming for more productivity, but by defining a compelling purpose and making the time and space to explore it.

 

 

The Elephant in the Room

 

It was six men of Indostan 

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation 

Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl: 

“God bless me! but the Elephant 
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,

Cried, “Ho! what have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

To me ’tis mighty clear

This wonder of an Elephant 
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal, 

And happening to take 

The squirming trunk within his hands, 

Thus boldly up and spake:

“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand, 

And felt about the knee. 

“What most this wondrous beast is like 
Is mighty plain,” quoth he; 

“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant 
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said: “E’en the blindest man 

Can tell what this resembles most; 

Deny the fact who can 

This marvel of an Elephant 
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun 

About the beast to grope, 

Than, seizing on the swinging tail 

That fell within his scope,

“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion 

Exceeding stiff and strong, 

Though each was partly in the right, 

And all were in the wrong!

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/the-elephant-rhyme.htm

We're reading about the hurdles to creativity in business. Reportedly (links Mercanta Communication in Sweden), a "review of the rapidly growing body of research into creativity and innovation in the workplace" suggests that the most significant hurdle is not a lack of ideas. "The vast majority of companies operating today are not doing a good job of translating creative ideas into solutions that improve the firms’ performance," according to one of the reserachers, Jing Zhou of Rice University Business School.

As in the elephant rhyme, many ideas are partly right. But without clear vision, each idea's author lacks a holistic perspective. They are motivated to sell their perspective instead of a desire to find something in another's idea that can make theirs even better. 

A holistic perspective has clarity of vision and motivates collaboration. 

Understandably most businesses and creative professionals fear collaboration. It can be a huge time waster and doesn't necessarily result in the clarity needed for everyone to paddle in the same direction.

That's why process is valuable to both business and creative professionals. When collaborators have a roadmap, they are more likely to use their creative time more productively.

What are features of processes that work in today's increasingly complex marketplaces?

How could existing businesses apply this learning to the marketing planning process?

What would a collaborative innovation process look like for new business ideas?

 

Partnering with Customers during a Crisis

Today Time Warner internet service was down. Reportedly, the company's public communications were silent until the problem was resolved.

What if companies empowered customers and service teams to partner in crisis management?

For example, by visualizing service team progress on a map and integrating customer participation in triaging priorities.

How?

1. Flatten the customer service structure. Place customer service personnel with the service people during a crisis or train the service people to communicate directly with customers during a crisis.
2. Develop an interactive map to update service restoration progress, "triage" based on customer input, and communicate where service personnel are going next.
3. Integrate existing technologies:

• Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management)
• Multipeer Connectivity through Mesh Networks, like FireChat or the local mesh network in Brooklyn's RedHook
• Real time social media image curating 
• Social Media GPS locating
• Crisis Management
• Process Improvement

In general, customers can be very understanding if they witness action being taken on their behalf and are empowered to contribute info to a triaging system.

The Price of Social Media

Today the Pope stepped down and tweeted "@Pontifex: If only everyone could experience the joy of being Christian, being loved by God who gave his Son for us!"

Who believes the Pope actually tweeted this himself? No one.  #1 loss of authenticity = Priceless.

It is understood that someone else - a paid person - tweets on behalf of the Pope.  Does the Pope direct the tweeter is there yet another person in the office of the Pope?  Surely at least one other person is authorized to write the Pope's tweets.  #2 $$ paid to hire people who tweet on behalf of a person without the time to tweet.

Social Media is about conversations. About an hour after the tweet, the most favorited response to the Pope's tweet:

@timcore: .@Pontifex If only you could clunge off, you twatting mingehead. 26 Favorites.

#3 fanning the flame of a controversy & proving a leader of a global enterprise is incapable of being sensitive to individual customer needs  = priceless

The message to any leader is crystal clear.  The price of social media is extraordinary.

 

 

 

The Communication Challenge

Delivering a message in real time is easy. Predicting if anyone will read it . . . not so much.

Technology makes communication more complicated. Crafting the message for the audience, timing the delivery, being prepared for the response are just a few of the decisions to make.

Should it be multi-media or text? With every aspect added - images, video, sound - the potential to miss the mark goes up.

Mobile is the newest communication channel, introducing the challenge of not only knowing what matters to your audience but knowing how that changes in context - the time of the day and where they are when they receive it.

The population has never been larger, the internet offers access to a global market.  These are opportunities for businesses to grow exponentially. But they aren't. 

Communication choices are abundant and the number of decisions are overwhelming to the best managers. At each point in the "go to market" process - from internal to external communications - a choice is made that affects the odds of success. A great choice at one point could be foiled entirely by a failure later on. Each of those choices could be influenced by better communications.

For the past twenty years, the digital media technology industry has promised to make communications more customized to an individual, and measure performance.  All automatically. In the commercial media market, the messages miss the mark more than 99 times out of 100. Laughingly, competitors proudly announce when they double another's response rate.  And that is still below 1%.

A Super Bowl commercial still has more impact even if we aren't really certain exactly what it is. When only a tenth of the audience finds a message relevant, the impact is more significant than almost any alternative. Since it is an event, it has the news value to start conversations.  So people talk about what they remember. When a commercial message is relevant and well executed the watercooler effect multiplies the impact exponentially - always has even before Social Media.  Now Social Media makes it possible to measure. And the one who gets rewarded is not the creator of the powerful message that gives people a reason to use social media. There is something wrong with that picture. 

So here's what I wonder.  Why are so many investing more money trying to figure out how to improve a less than 1% response rate? What if surreptitiously collecting data from the past to automate customizing a message for the future isn't effective or efficient?

How about figuring out how to replicate the power of communicating in the context of an event more frequently, on a smaller, more affordable scale?  How about measuring the watercooler effect of professionally executed communications so the creators are rewarded for their skill and have more time to mentor and teach others to do as well? 

There's a challenge I'd like to build a team to tackle.