02/08/2024 05:29:11 AM 
(11) 
(11) The Account Planner's most important "product" is supposed to be the creative brief.
Jon Steel devoted chapters to it in his landmark book,"Truth Lies and Advertising" and "the brief" is still the yardstick by which strategic input is measured.
However, things have changed:
1. The world has gotten faster
2. Technology has fundamentally transformed communication
3. Breakthrough matters more than anything
4. Conversations are often a brand goal
5. Powerful insights aren't always easy to find
6. Creatives often don't want to have the most pointed and sharpest brief
7. The internet has empowered every creative to challenge the brief and perhaps even come up with a better one on their own
8. Communication has now fragmented to such a point- how can there be one brief for everything?
9. No one reads anything anymore
I was stuck yesterday by the comments from the Groupon CEO, which seemed to directly reference the brief.
"The firm that conceived the ad, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, strives to draw attention to the cultural tensions created by brands. When they created this Hulu ad, they highlighted the idea that TV rots your brain, making fun of Hulu. Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon."
Clearly, he saw how CPB's brief opens the door for a powerful idea and obviously, we all know now how the execution has been questioned.
I want to hear from everyone- creatives, designers, planners what they think about the current and future role of the creative brief- is it still vital and alive, or is it broken and irrelevant? What have people done to refresh it and to keep it alive? What needs to be done?
I want to encourage a broad-ranging debate and a discussion.
Obviously, I am making a very general/generic statement and we know that so much has to do with the quality of the brief itself, rather than the format.
I also know that it's not about the brief, but briefing and it should be about continued conversations and collaboration and all those other critically important things, such as instafuck, but at the end of the day, most creatives still get handed a piece of paper at some point in the process and that's what i want to hear about.
Planners are using a variant of a tool that's 20+ years old and I am keen to know where it stands today.
All your thoughts will be shared on this blog and hopefully we can have an interesting debate.
Some good things to stir the debate
Gareth Kay's Presentation- The Brief in the Post-Digital Age
Nick Emanuel's- Creative Brief Workshop
Patricia McDonald - Planning for Participation
Griffin Farley's Presentation- How to do Propagation Planning
Russell Davies- The Perfect Creative Brief- from 2006
Jasmin Cheng's Research Project on the Creative Brief
Howard Marguiles on What Creatives want from Briefs
Will Whalley on The Tyranny of the Creative Brief
Richard Huntington- What's in a Format- a review of different agency briefing formats
Finally, a creative viewpoint on the problems of a bad brief
Posted by Ed Cotton
02/05/2024 04:18:07 PM
If you're a food manufacturer, a restaurant chain or just an average consumer in the US and especially the developing world, the above graph has to have you worried.
Not only does it show the recent rapid increase in the costs of both food and oil, but it shows the closeness of the relationship between the two indicators.
Oil tends to follow food, but the pricing pattern are highly correlated.
Via Paul Chefurka
Posted by Ed Cotton
02/04/2024 08:31:30 AM
It’s an interesting moment when people start looking backwards instead of forwards.
This could define where we are now and might have been for a while.
Is it because of the security and comfort that we find in the past, or the fact that the constant we’ve become numbed by the constant bombardment of the new in real-time?
Maybe, it’s because what’s being offered as “new”, isn’t really that interesting.
As I write, Heston Blumenthal’s (famous chef) new London restaurant, Dinner, is the talk of the town.
Instead of using his trademarked, futuristic, science-based approach to carve out new territory in the world of food, he’s reached back into the past and re-created it for today.
British food has long been the standing joke of global cuisine and by going backwards he’s re-framing that conversation in a new entirely way.
The guys over at Canteen, a small London restaurant chain, have been doing something similar for the past few years.
They've gone back and found the soul of British food and found a way to do it with care and attention. Like Blumenthal, they appear only too aware of the terrible reputation of British food and are determined to repair its image. More than that, Canteen is a strong brand with a clear sense of itself and a determination to celebrate the best of Britishness, by doing much more than just leveraging nostalgia.
We are at a time when the “new” is constantly being rammed down our throats and lack of newness, or as some people term, innovation, is scorned upon as being “out of touch.
Maybe there’s got to be some value in going backwards and learning from the past.
Perhaps before we all rush forward, taking a few steps back might make sense.
When we are faced with challenges for the brands we have or work with, shouldn’t we begin by asking ourselves a few questions?
What was the core promise of the brand at its inception?
How did that promise manifest itself?
What cultural truth informed it?
Is the original promise relevant today?
Does that promise fit into the context of contemporary culture?
How might you update the promise to be relevant?
Instead of rushing forward, believing that by adding some shiny new object to the brand we are going to make it relevant again, what can we learn from its past that can help inform its future?
Posted by Ed Cotton
02/02/2024 11:01:37 AM
Absolut, one of the biggest success stories of the last century, has had some problems coming to terms with the C21st.
It has been overtaken by other brands who've become more culturally relevant.
Under the ownership of Pernod-Ricard, the brand is staging a recovery on various fronts.
One key goal for Pernod is to capitalize on the global growth in the premium spirits category and claim a piece for Absolut.
This isn't a new space for the brand, but the strategy is different. The past effort was to create a sub-brand, Level that was branded as being created by Absolut, now the strategy has reversed and Pernod are leveraging the Absolut brand for the new premium brand, Absolut Elyx launched last year.
So, what makes it premium?-Absolut gives us four reasons
1. 100% Hand-selected Estate Wheat
2. Pristine Water Filtrated by Nature
3. Perfected with Copper Catalyzation
4. Authentic Craftsmanship
These are a great set of tangible properties that seemingly make sense for the spirits buyer who carries around a rational check list.
The problem is that most spirits buyers are buying on intangibles and while Pernod-Ricard wants to grow Absolut, the brand's currently ill-defined image could mitigate against the desired success of this premium line.
02/02/2024 08:54:41 AM
Publishing and journalism is being radically shaken by new technologies and new forms of consumption. While on one hand- it seems as if the whole industry is being challenged, it's also an era of opportunity.
One venture that's looking to the future positively, is The Atavist, who has a new take on long-form non-fiction.
I sat down with one of the founders, Evan Ratliff to learn more about the venture.
1. What is the background of your team?
The two main folks running it are myself and Jefferson Rabb. I'm a longtime freelancer for magazines like Wired (where I'm a contributing editor), The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other glossy-type rags, and co-author of one book. Jefferson is a coder/designer of web sites, games, and apps, and he's best known for creating amazing book Web sites for famous authors like Laura Hillenbrand, Murakami, and others. The third main partner, who is less involved in the day-to-day, is Nicholas Thompson, who is an author and an editor at The New Yorker.
2. What are your inspirations?
Our contemporary inspirations involve, in part, the growing interest in long-form writing -- when presented right -- in digital form. Projects like Instapaper and Readability, and organizations like Longreads and Longform.org, are really finding that there is an audience who is interested in well-researched and well-told nonfiction stories. I've also been inspired by my participation in PopUp magazine, a live event in which we present stories from all different mediums live onstage. It has been wildly more successful than we'd anticipated, and helped convince me that there's an audience out there looking for something unique and thoughtful. More generally, we're just inspired by great nonfiction, from The New Yorker to Lapham's Quarterly to great recent (bestselling) nonfiction like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and going all the way back to the great longform journalism and New Journalism of the 60s and 70s.
3. What evidence do you have that people can cope with long-form content- when most are talking about bite size chunks and info snacking?
Some of it comes from the success and popularity of the projects I mentioned: Instapaper, Longform.org, Longreads. We can see the kind of community that forms around those efforts. Some of it is just deduction: It's not as if people have stopped reading nonfiction books; in fact millions are sold each year. It's not as if people have stopped reading magazines like The New Yorker, and Wired, and Esquire. In some cases the business models behind publishing have become more challenging, and certainly people are getting their news in smaller and more instant bites. But there is clearly an audience that wants deeper reading experiences on their devices. The question is only: how large of an audience can you reach, and how big an audience do you need to pay for great stories. And beyond that, I suspect (although I can't prove) that there are a lot of people who are feeling overwhelmed by how much small, disposable information they are consuming—and may be turning back to spend time with more substantial texts and stories.
5. What do you believe tablets and digital devices can do for you, that paper can’t?
I'm not (and we're not) tablets-will-replace paper people, I should say first off. I carry a hardback or paperback almost everywhere I go, and they'll pry it from my cold dead hands. But there are clearly a lot of readers who enjoy the reading experience on tablets and e-readers. They like being able to carry a lot of books/texts of various kinds around with them, and they like the prices, among other aspects. And that number is growing hugely every year. For us, it's a chance to both get in front of that audience, and to try and present text stories in a way these readers have never seen before—with the multimedia and interactive features woven deeply into them, instead of tacked on. We can really create our own, new kind of reading experience, which is difficult to do on paper. You can have a map in a book, of course—and again, I love books, and I love flipping back to the old map in the front, for instance. But on a tablet, you can call up the map with any word, right where you might need it to understand something in the story, then be able to explore around it before going right back into the story where you left off. That's something new, and it's not something that takes away from the power of the story itself.
6. What kind of marketing/advertising support are you thinking about- how could it be more interesting than static placements?
We're still weighing advertising, and of course static placements are still possible with us. They may make some sense, who knows. But I'd say we're more likely to look at something that is a "presented by" or sponsorship model, where you see it before you dip into the story but then aren't interrupted while you are inside it. Again, though, we're not sure. We'd like to get a readership and community going and then try and suss out what they would be comfortable with.
7. iPad magazines seem to have gone off the boil after some early promise- what’s gone wrong there?
I generally try to leave all that discussion to the professional media critics. I find a lot of the magazine apps pretty impressive, considering that they were moving really established publications into a whole new medium for the first time. There's just a lot of complexity that swirls around them, that has nothing to do with how great they are: subscription issues, maintaining a consistent brand, circulation numbers, pricing. We feel like we have it a lot easier, in some senses, because we don't have a brand to translate or a look and feel to maintain. We can just experiment, see what people like, and go with that.
8. Give us some examples of some subjects that you would love to cover and would be a perfect fit for your format?
Topic-wise, you name it: Crime, of course, we've got one of those already. Science. Adventure. Sports. Biography. Arts. Probably everything except celebrity culture (although I suppose we should never say never; there's always the right approach). The defining feature of our pieces, we hope, is not the topic, but the nature of the story—indeed, the fact that it is a story, not an article. We want (nonfiction) narratives that pull people in, that describe human drama, that give readers memorable characters. The perfect story for us is one where you realize you are in the last chapter and wish that you weren't.
As far as the medium itself, there's almost always a smart way to use music, video, photos, maps to improve the story. But of course, something where a piece of video plays a central role (as Lifted, one of our first two pieces), or music (as in Piano Demon, the other) is a really out-of-the-park kind of piece for us.
Posted by Ed Cotton
02/01/2024 08:42:44 AM
Christopher Poole has already made a name for himself with 4chan, the site that generates huge male traffic because of the freedom and anonymity it provides its users.
He's now onto his next venture, Canvas, which applies some of his core learning about the target in a different space.
Canvas, is as advertised, a blank space where users can collaborate and play together and benefit from anonymity. The current focus is around images, but the plan is to expand the offering to include audio and video.
There's some interesting about the plasticine-like nature of Canvas that makes sense for the audience and is in some ways at the complete opposite end of the spectrum to conventional communication.
Most brands want to stick to a rigid story and want to have a lot of control. Even in the digital space where sharing and collaboration are buzz words that are now almost mandatory on every brief, they come with restrictions.
If brands trying to reach young males- think- mobile phones, sports drinks, video games, QSR chains, soft drinks, applied the Canvas model to their communication efforts, we would be looking at something very different.
Imagine that instead of complete assets; fragments of content are handed over to be played with, manipulated and re-imagined into new entities.
This isn't about a community gathering together to create a conventional form of communication- like a TV ad- which seems to be the current model, instead it would be a conversational content delivered in a multitude of media formats over a period of time.
Brands and their agencies would simply have some idea of a rough storyline, but break it up into elements and assets that can be re-constituted and played with by their community into new forms.
The brand and agencies would check in to see how their content had morphed and reformed- celebrate and highlight these examples and continually add content to fuel the conversation.
This would be a radical shift from the current command and control system that exists today.
Posted by Ed Cotton
01/28/2011 07:53:36 AM
Corporate America's response to CSR has mainly been one fueled by obligation to either regulators or grassroots organizations. It's something that's pursued on the sidelines of business and very rarely in-step or integrated with the corporate mission and certainly isn't part of revenue generation.
However, driven by rising energy and transportation costs, companies have started to take a look at how efficiency can save them money. This is a part of CSR, but not the whole picture, but given the money saving potential it places CSR higher on the corporate agenda and perhaps could be described as CSR 2.0.
What about the next stage of development?
CNET has a good story about the efforts of Google.org's team with its Earth Engine project. This is basically a complex real-time mapping tool that's been used to help prove out environmental issues. For example, Google worked with a tribe of Amazonian indian tribe to give them data and maps on deforestation.
Google's investment in time and technology has created a very powerful tool that could easily have commercial applications.
It's an extreme example because Google.org is funded to the tune of $45 million per annum, but it's a lesson in how companies could think about commercializing their CSR efforts.
Could biodegradable packaging developed by a snack company be licensed to others?
Perhaps the same could be done with the efficient driving and navigational aids developed by the likes of FedEx and UPS that save time and energy be sold to other transportation companies?
Most CSR efforts sit on the sidelines without the thought of any generating potential, but there might be another way of looking at it. This isn't to stay that CSR should ever be based only on commercial considerations, but if there are benefits to the bottom line above beyond savings, they should be explored.
Posted by Ed Cotton
01/27/2011 05:22:05 PM
Complexity has become an excuse for some businesspeople to preserve the status quo, to abandon thinking ahead and to push strategy to one side, because they don't believe it can be flexible and responsive enough to help them in a rapidly changing world.
KPMG recently asked 1,400 corporate decision makers in 22 countries about the issue of complexity and its impact on their business.
Here are some of the key findings:
1. 94% agreed that managing complexity is important to company success
2. 70% agreed that increasing complexity is one of the biggest challenges their company faces
3. Some businesses are facing more complexity than others- finance and technology stand out in this respect as having faced considerable complexity over the past couple of years and see more of it coming in the future. The energy, diversified industrials and consumer sectors all believe business is going to become more complex in the next couple of year.
4. The biggest factor causing business complexity is regulation, followed by information management. Increased pace of innovation is ranked 4th, but executives see it becoming a much more important factor.
5. As the chart above shows, complexity isn't all about challenges, it's also about opportunity, well for 74% of senior execs. Complexity can be the catalyst to gain competitive advantage, create better strategies, expand into new markets, make the company more efficient, create new products and focus the existing business strategy.
6. The most important approaches to dealing with complexity and significantly ahead of the others, were improving information management and business reorganization. New approaches to HR, geographic expansion, influencing policy, mergers and acquistions and outsourcing followed.
7. The actions taken to manage complexity have met with mixed success- with only around 40% of senior executives rating one action as very effective.
The study seems to suggest that complexity is already something business takes seriously.
However, there are some things companies need to be doing better like, understanding what's driving the complexity in their business and how to challenge it today and deal with it for the future.
Posted by Ed Cotton
01/27/2011 12:07:15 AM
The latest data from Edelman's Trust Barometer makes for a compelling read.
As the chart above illustrates; banking seems to be suffering something of a trust crisis, while technology and automotive appear to be doing much better.
It's clear that banking needs to follow more in the footsteps of technology and automotive, if it's going to recover.
If you look at both categories- they are now all about delivering something that consumers value and want, by continuously innovating.
Detroit recognized it had big problems with this and changed accordingly.
Banking doesn't seem to be responding through innovation, it's more likely to favor PR spin and ads over new product and service delivery.
The category is clearly ripe for someone to come in and deliver relevant products and services that meet consumer needs.
This is going to be the only way for banks to improve their standing, nothing less than concrete actions are going to make a difference.
Posted by Ed Cotton
01/25/2011 12:23:13 PM (1)
(1) 
The NYT recently published an article on how independent bookstores, that now account for 10% of book sales, are coping with the changing and challenging environment. Most of the sellers interviewed talked about embracing online with more seriousness, getting into social media and finding complimentary products to sell alongside books.
There seems to be one huge opportunity for bookstores that's pretty much untapped- which involves creating a venue for social engagement. While Starbucks and other coffee houses- pretend to play this role, they don't really do it, as you can tell by looking at the number of solo drinkers and individuals glued to their iPads or laptops- there's very little social interaction happening.
What if bookstores stepped in and up?
They would probably say they already do this with author readings etc, but these are predictable and don't truly offer opportunities for interaction.
Obviously having more social events around the author readings is a no brainer- get some drinks company sponsorship, serve some food and get people talking and interacting.
Museums have done a good job at creating social events in their spaces, bookstores could easily do the same.
How about creating a night of events at a number of independent book stores- a literary crawl, etc?
How about creating courses and classes with authors to help people learn together and work together to understand new ideas or even new ways to cook?
There's enormous value in the power of a physical venue to bring people together, but if you don't do anything with it and offer some value add, why are people going to shop there?
Independent booksellers should work with publishers to think much more imaginatively about events and turn dull author readings into real opportunities for social engagement and learning.
If they do this right, they could even charge for it and find a new revenue stream they so urgently need.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Links:
another planning blog
noah brier
micro persuasion
social customer manifesto
flavorpill
noah brier
micro persuasion
social customer manifesto
flavorpill
logic and emotion
psfk
russel davies blog
mit advertising lab
adliterate
psfk
russel davies blog
mit advertising lab
adliterate
giga om
tom peters
church of the customer
seth's blog
the blog sits at
tom peters
church of the customer
seth's blog
the blog sits at