Five things brands can learn from Superheroes

May 4, 2010 Leave a Comment

I came across some old files the other day (actual files, sheathed in manila). One contained a presentation called ‘Five things brands can learn from Superheroes’. I seem to remember delivering it a Marketing Conference for a brewery client, at about the time Tobey Maguire was a spiderling.

I thought it was still mildly interesting so summarised it:

Superheroes are known for one thing.

This seems to be pretty much universal. You don’t get equivocal superheroes. You tend not to find characters like ‘Batman, who’s also a little bit turtlesque’, or ‘Volcano Man, who’s also quite tornadoey’. Superheroes are known for one thing alone. Why? Because it gives innocent people one reason to remember them, and guilty people one reason to fear them.

Which is handy for brands, too. If you’re known for one thing, you’ll be that much more memorable for customers. And if you’re really good at that one thing, you’ll be that much more feared by competitors.

A good Superhero is a consistent Superhero.

There’s a scene in pretty much every movie in the genre in which the Superhero does something out of character. He spurns the assistance of his one human ally. He reacts with unnecessary violence to an innocent foe. He ignores the call for help when he is most needed.

This is the point at which his superness is questioned. It’s not the severity of the act that matters. It’s the inconsistency. Often it’s nothing more than a change in modus operandi, but the response is usually pretty extreme. The backlash begins. The townspeople revolt. The superhero is ostracised.

It’s because we fear that our heroes will let us down.  And inconsistent behaviour is the first sign that this might be about to happen.

Which also applies to brands. The reaction to inconsistency in brand behaviour is also extreme, because unconsciously we put a lot of faith in brands.  They’re shorthand, simplifying choice.  We know we can buy familiar brands without thinking about it because we know what we’re going to get. We rely on that. So when a brand does something out of character we’re being let down and our reaction is often disproportionately extreme.

A good Superhero understands theatre.

Superheroes are masters of theatre. Capes, masks and the ability to shoot stuff out of your wrists seem to be popular flourishes. You seldom find an understated superhero, for the simple reason that as a superhero your appearances are somewhat limited.  You’re in the business of being extraordinary, and you need to take every opportunity to cement that impression. So you have to go out on a theatrical limb, make yourself extraordinary, accepting the risk that in so doing you might be polarising.

And so with brands.  Your appearances in someone’s life are limited.   So the onus is on you to make yourself extraordinary (assuming this is your ambition). Which means being memorable. Which in turn means embracing the value of theatre, understanding that being memorable in how you present yourself makes it easier to be remembered for what you do.

Every Superhero needs a back story.

We love the story of how a superhero comes to be. It informs everything. History makes sense of the present.  Why those particular super abilities? What is she triumphing over? What will her weakness be? While we like to watch what a superhero can do, we also like to understand why she chooses to do it.

Brands are exactly the same. Every product originated somewhere, every idea was a response to a problem, every graphic symbolises something.  And every brand should strive to have an interesting story to tell.  Because while we’re interested in what a brand can do, we’re also interested in how a brand was created that could do it.

Every Superhero has a weakness.

It’s part of a superhero’s character to have a weakness.  (It’s also handy to have a nemesis to exploit that vulnerability.) This weakness exists solely to make the superhero more human, more normal.  But it’s also often the bit that’s most endearing about them, simply because it’s universal. It plays to the fact that while we admire people for their strengths, we like them for their weaknesses.

Which is something very few brands seem prepared to embrace.  Proud brand managers crave perfection in their charges.  But I think weakness, or even fallibility, is a great thing in a brand. Shared weakness is something we bond over, which is why brands often bounce back so well from a seemingly calamitous public failing – Virgin Blue, Cadbury, possibly even Toyota. Brands become much easier to relate to, and embrace, when they don’t pretend to be perfect. Because weakness, at least as much as love, is the universal language.

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John Lewis – Woman TVC

April 27, 2010 Leave a Comment

It probably helps to know the background to this John Lewis campaign (I’m a bit hazy on the ‘lifelong commitment’ promise), but this is just beautifully done. Adam & Eve’s the agency, Blink’s the production company.

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The perfect modern agency metaphor?

April 25, 2010 Leave a Comment

I think I may have just stumbled onto the perfect modern agency metaphor.

Above is a two-headed bobtail lizard.  It’s a rare mutation.  Effectively it’s one (relatively) healthy body with two quite independent heads.

The two heads eat separately, but given their attachment, almost always from the same source. It struggles to move quickly, or with any great co-ordination, because both heads exert some control over the back legs.  The two heads often try and attack each other, either scrapping over the same piece of food, or out of frustration at their desire to fully control the body’s movement.  These attacks are quite brutal and very likely to kill the lizard.

So you’ve got one body with two heads that struggles to move quickly or precisely, squabbles over its share of the pie, has a tendency to attack itself over disagreements in direction and, as a result, is very likely to die of self-inflicted wounds.

Yep, that is the perfect modern agency metaphor.

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Nike, Tiger and Earl

April 11, 2010 2 Comments

Lots of discussion this week regarding the Nike’s new Tiger Woods commercial I’m a bit torn.  Well, not so much torn as contradicted.

I hate the execution.  But I admire Nike for doing something.

I admire them because they’ve been nothing if not consistent.  The first Nike spot featuring Tiger – ‘Hello World’ – clearly established a bigger agenda for Tiger and the brand. Tiger was never going to be about just golf and Nike embraced this. To confront the issue he’s dealing with, which again is clearly bigger than golf, feels reasonable, genuine in fact, given that history.

Nike also stuck by Tiger.  They were one of the few sponsors to unequivocally support him, to have a view, whether you liked it or not, about how they saw his indiscretions.  So again it seems genuine for them to support him in this way, too.

This was the biggest return to sport I can remember.  Thursday at the Masters was huge. It would actually seem odd for Nike not to have had something to say about it, even though it would possibly have been easier to just say nothing. So I also admire Nike for fronting up, for doing this knowing that it would annoy, and probably offend, a lot of people. But I like that Nike is prepared to put the focus on its core audience, knowing that anyone who’s really aggrieved about it was never a ‘Nike person’ to begin with. There aren’t many brands that would have that conviction.

And it’s compelling viewing. Like it or not, it’s hard to look away from, and it’s even harder to not have an opinion about.

But there’s one reason why I don’t like the execution.

I don’t like the way they’ve appropriated his Father.  He’s dead.  Who knows what his thoughts on Tiger’s behaviour might be?  He might (and I think this is just possible) be massively disappointed, dismayed that a son he once predicted would do ‘more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity’ has instead done something tediously tawdry and commonplace. What I would imagine his Father would not be is largely detached. It seems unlikely he’d be mildly curious to understand ‘what you’re thinking was’. It seems more likely he’d be pretty angry.

But I don’t know that. And nor does Nike.  Which is why I think it’s pretty offensive that they’ve assumed any kind of view on his behalf.

I say make the ad. Continue to explore what it is to be a sportsman living a life that’s so much bigger than sport. Tackle the subjects that are easier left alone. Support Tiger in whatever way you feel is right.

Just don’t appropriate a dead man’s voice to do it.

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I closed my Twitter account.

March 25, 2010 1 Comment

I closed my Twitter account about a month ago.

I did it for a couple of reasons, one of which I suspect must be very common.

The first was that what I was tweeting had drifted into an unfortunate territory. I found there was a risk for me in the way in that Twitter works, a dangerous confluence of immediacy, brevity and superficial community. I’d become one of those tiresome characters who feels the need to chip into conversations at a dinner party with what he thinks are witticisms, but are actually inanities. It was just too easy to say something off the cuff, which would be OK but for the fact that it’s being shared with the world, and so rather than the mild contempt of a few fellow diners you find you have a large group of people thinking you’re a twat. And because it’s often ostensibly a ‘direct’ conversation (even when you’re not DMing) you get lulled into thinking that it’s a private conversation, when it obviously is entirely public.

And worse than the inanities, I’d become snide. Twitter was all a bit insular, lots of advertising people talking to advertising people (with the grandstanding and one-upping that goes along with it) making comments that wouldn’t be at all outlandish when shared between a few friends with the context considered, but that were quite childish when shared with the world-at-large with the context removed.

Part of the problem is that Twitter has no nuance. When I make a throwaway comment to friend, experience informs meaning – there’s a tone of voice, a nod and a wink, an understanding of what I really mean, or, more importantly, the tone with which I mean it. But there’s none of that when a tweet or a post is read. It’s cold and literal.

None of this would be such a problem if not for the way in which Social Media has changed our attitude towards opinion. To state the obvious, one of the benefits of Social Media is its ability to let people share opinion. But one of the increasingly apparent downsides is the concomitant capacity for those opinions to be judged. We have a mechanism that encourages people to share opinions, quickly and widely – at a basic level encouraging people to say what they’re thinking without really thinking about what they’re saying. But then that same system fuels the judgement of what they say, treating them no longer as throwaway comments but as considered opinion.

You see it in how social media channels fuel controversy. There’s a momentum that drives people to share their view. The community finds an issue and lights a fire under it. But once the views start coming out there’s a parallel momentum to judge the validity of those views. At the risk of sounding ridiculously dramatic, it’s a subtle form of entrapment – Social Media facilitates the crime then casts the judgement.

I also started to get this sense of a different world. I found myself believing that a different set of rules applied, that the world of social media was creating something new, a place in which things were done quite differently. And this was beautifully self-reinforcing. I’d find myself mocking the people who ‘don’t get social media’ convincing myself that because there were people I could judge not to get it, that that must mean that there were different rules.

I thought I was fine because I had a basic principle I operated by. I’d puff out my chest and proudly say that I’d never post or tweet anything that I wouldn’t be prepared to say to someone’s face. Which was true, but missed the rather obvious point that I wasn’t saying it to their face. I was really saying it behind their back, but in a very public way. And the problem came when someone else said it to their face for me.

I don’t know who originally said it, but I’ve always loved the description of hotel rooms existing on an entirely different moral plane – the idea that things get done in hotel rooms that just wouldn’t be contemplated anywhere else, by people who know better. I guess I worry that Twitter’s a bit the same. It just has a dynamic to it that seems to draw a different line around acceptable commentary. (Tim Burrowes at Mumbrella does a lovely job of describing this phenomenon here. As one of the comments says, ‘I will endeavour to read this post at least once every three months’.)

The second reason I closed my Twitter account was that it just got so time consuming (I’m guessing this is quite common?). I realise that this is a failing of mine, not Twitter’s, but I was just never that good at being able to duck in and duck out. Once I started to make a few interesting connections via Twitter (and I did make some really interesting connections) I started to worry about the connections I was missing out on. So it all got a bit frantic, and I spent too much time on Twitter when I should have been spending time on the guitar, too much time on the keyboard when I should have been on the fret board (sorry).

So I’ve had a month off. I’ve recalibrated. I’m giving Twitter another go. And I’m trying very hard not to be concerned about what I missed out on during that month.

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When we say we’re about ‘ideas’ what do clients hear?

March 10, 2010 3 Comments

I’ve written about this before, but I’m consistently surprised by how often we use language in ways that undermine our efforts as an industry.  It surprises me because communication should be the one thing we nail – clear, precise language that explains exactly what we mean – but actually we’re often pretty bad at it.

On one level I think this is a problem for Marketing in general.  We’re an industry that’s quite comically inclined to invent language, largely in an attempt to lend weight, substance and (we hope) credibility to what we do. So we’ve invented a language that’s high on complexity and low on meaning (I highlight ‘granular’ and ‘conversation-catalysts’ as recent favourites).  In an attempt to make our discipline sound more like, well, a discipline, we’ve succumbed to the easy temptation to develop an insular language, one designed to exclude. It’s a carefully constructed façade of inside knowledge, based on the flawed logic that if we appear to know something that others don’t then that knowledge must somehow be important and valuable.

On a second level, I think there’s also an issue with the looseness of the language we use to describe what we do.  And this is closer to the point I want to make here.

I betray my age when I talk about formative years spent poring over anything I could find on the subject of advertising written by David Abbott, Tim Delaney and Indra Sinha (when he was a humble advertising copywriter). They all wrote about the importance of precision in language, the need for what we write to communicate its meaning clearly and its point powerfully.

But it’s a looseness with language that I think catches us out so often.  The precision we (should) apply when communicating on behalf of our clients’ brands is often lacking when we communicate on behalf of our own.

I think a good example is the ‘ideas agency’.

As a concept it seems to be having something of a renaissance. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve used the phrase myself, as I, like many others, have tried to describe my company in a way that makes it feels bigger, more vital, than just an advertising agency. I also absolutely agree with the endeavour, the goal of being a business that helps clients succeed, whatever form that help might take. I’ve also worked with a number of agencies that deserve the label – brilliant, diverse groups of people delivering a breadth of ideas with the potential to deliver huge client gains.  So my issue’s not with the concept, more with how we describe it.

Because I read an interview the other day in which someone was describing the change he is trying to bring about in his business, to reinvent it as an ‘ideas agency’. What he said didn’t quite make sense, not because the agency he described isn’t capable of delivering ideas both valuable and beyond advertising, but more because of how they’d arrived at ‘ideas agency’ as the description of what they want to be known as.

“We can’t be an advertising agency” he said, “because CEOs aren’t looking for ads. We need to be an ‘ideas agency’ because what CEOs are looking for is big ideas”.

Which is what didn’t make sense to me, because in my experience they’re not.  I don’t think CEOs want big ideas at all. What they’re looking for is big results.  And while I acknowledge that might seem like a rather trivial, cavilling distinction, I think it’s important for a couple of  reasons.

We know that the point of ideas is to deliver results.  Some CEOs agree (while some, rather cynically, believe that the point of ideas is to be interesting, results being at best a secondary motivation).  But irrespective of the CEO’s view it feels like an example of an industry failing to take its own advice.  Aren’t we confusing feature with benefit, something we regularly criticise our clients for doing?

We’ve all had the conversation.  We’ve all told a client at some point that the world at large doesn’t care what they produce, only what benefit they deliver.  We’ve all counseled clients to move past the infatuation with what they do, to focus instead on what their customers need, the problem that they can solve.

And I would argue that clients need results. That we know that ideas are fundamental to delivering results is our issue. But what matters is that ideas are our feature. Ideas are not our benefit.

To most CEOs, the world of Marketing is beset by a frustrating vagueness.  It’s not concrete and measurable. It’s notoriously difficult to predict what will work and why. It’s not spreadsheetable, or inclined to accurate modeling.  In short, Marketing’s a bit nebulous.  Which is also what ideas are. They’re leaps, bridges intended to take you somewhere new. (Which is the very thing that makes them exciting to us, and dangerous and unsettling to CEOs.)  But my worry is that our focus on ideas reinforces for CEOs this sense of vagueness. To them it’s a wooly word describing a nebulous concept.  In contrast, results sounds like a precise word describing a concrete concept.

My second issue with the concept of the ‘ideas agency’ is that it highlights a fundamental distinction in what we value.

In the world of agencies, ideas are the currency, the thing most prized, because we believe that it’s ideas that change fortunes. So we like the thought of being an ‘ideas agency’.

We do acknowledge that ideas alone are kind of worthless, and that until an idea is executed, made real, it doesn’t have actual value.  But ultimately we do believe that it’s the idea that matters, and we do love them for themselves. In the final analysis, our fondness for the idea sometimes dwarfs our enthusiasm for the result.

But I’d wager most CEOs don’t see the world this way. They see ideas as the loose start point for results. The idea matters and is necessary, but it’s the execution, the implementation, that matters at least as much. And the focus is always on the outcome. The result is the goal, and, in the final analysis, it’s the value delivered by the result that dwarfs the respect for the idea.

And this is where I worry that the language we use undermines us.  Because when we talk about an ‘ideas agency’ we do so based on our world.  And in our world idea trumps result. But when many CEOs hear us talk about an ‘ideas agency’ they interpret it based on their world. And in their world, result trumps idea.

We call ourselves an ‘ideas agency’ because we think it makes us sound bigger.  But I worry that to clients it might actually make us sound smaller.

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Overjoyed? I’m quite pleased myself

March 4, 2010 Leave a Comment

Three weeks after I first saw it I still smile at this.  A lovely way of celebrating an achievement while casually rubbing salt in the wound of a less successful competitor.

Comparative advertising is so hard to do well.  It’s just so easy to tip over the line into snark. But this does it with an admirable subtlety, delivering a nod and a wink to those car enthusiasts to whom the reference means something while making perfect sense to those to whom it doesn’t.

Very nice indeed.

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I know this isn’t news, but most Real Estate Agents are crap. Most Suits, too.

February 10, 2010 5 Comments

I’ve spent the last couple of months looking for a house. What a dispiriting experience. Not the house bit. I like houses. What’s dispiriting is having to deal with real estate agents. It’s bewildering how quickly and consistently they’re able to diminish what should be a great experience.

Because buying a house should be great. A bit nerve-wracking, yes, because there’s always an element of risk involved.  But still great because it’s all about potential – something that should improve your life, the thrill of finding something perfect, or, for that matter, something completely unexpected.

Which makes it a lot like the process of buying advertising. It’s a similar experience, commonly laced with similar disappointment, because Suits seem to make exactly the same mistakes I see real estate agents making.  Here are a few:

They don’t ask questions. And they don’t listen.

I’m amazed how often real estate agents open a conversation by talking about either themselves or the house I’ve just entered.  I’d expect them to start by asking about me, for the rather obvious reason that they, and the house, can only be relevant when they understand what it is that I’m looking for.

I’m looking for a house to solve a specific problem – the problem of my family and its related schools, hobbies and unnaturally extensive wardrobes – and only when an agent understands the specifics of my problem can they usefully talk about the property. Which you’d really want to do because when referenced against my need it sounds less like a generic house I don’t know and more like a specific house I might want to buy.

The same thing is true of suits.  Your job is to make clients feel understood, confident that their very specific problem is about to be solved by the combined intellectual and creative weight of your agency.  Which means the client needs to feel like the focus of pretty much every conversation before, during and after. Because clients see what they expect to see.  If they believe they’ve been understood, they’ll approach an idea on that basis, actively looking for the ways in which the idea demonstrates that understanding.  But if they don’t feel they’ve been understood they’ll approach the idea on that basis, actively looking for reasons why the idea (or the agency) demonstrates a lack of understanding. And, not surprisingly, they’ll find what they expect to find.

Which means your job is to always be asking relevant questions, listening to the answers and demonstrating your agency’s understanding..  This also has the added benefit of making you seem smarter.

They don’t know the product.

When I talk to a real estate agent I know they didn’t design or build the house they’re selling.  But I do expect that they know a lot about designing and building in general and have an excellent working knowledge of the specific house they’re selling – like when additions were made or insulation installed.  Most don’t.

I also expect that they have a really good working knowledge of the suburb – its schools, bus routes and parks, its recent sale prices, its cycle tracks and creches. Most don’t.

If you’re a suit I expect you to know a lot about the job at hand. If we’re building a website, I expect you to know quite a lot about that process. And I also expect you to know a lot about my category, my competitors, my previous activity, my target audience and how hard my job is.

They compensate for this by pretending to know what they don’t know.

At the same time there are things that I don’t expect a real estate agent to know about. And it makes me nervous when they pretend they do. These are things that become really important if I’m seriously considering buying the house they’re selling, very specific issues requiring the expert knowledge of someone like an architect, a builder or a lawyer. I’d prefer an agent not try and bluff their way through those issues. But lots do.

If you’re a suit there are also questions clearly outside your remit. There are creative directors, agency producers, directors, photographers, programmers and all manner of very highly-skilled specialists who know more about elements of the project at hand than you do. And as a client I don’t think it’s weak that you need to consult them.  In fact, I think that’s your job.

They don’t believe in what they’re selling.

It’s a real estate agent’s job to believe in the property they’re selling. (I realise sometimes this is hard and that not all houses are created equal.)  But they’re selling the house on behalf of people to whom it’s the only house that matters.  It’s alarming how easily you can tell when someone doesn’t believe in what they’re selling. It’s not clever to betray to a potential buyer that perhaps the sellers are a little misguided, a bit too ‘close’ to the property, maybe too emotionally attached.  That’s a betrayal. But I saw several agents do exactly that.

I also get really annoyed with real estate agents who are more interested in working out whether they might have a shot at selling me a different house rather than focusing on what they should be selling. They’re the ones who can’t wait to tell you that they also have five other properties in the area. They’re focused on making a sale for themselves, not for the owner of the house. To a degree you see the same thing with suits who want to be seen as the solution.  They’re not focused on selling the idea at hand, more on making sure that the client believes that they can find the answer. So at the first sign of a client reservation, they’ve abandoned the idea they should be selling and started thinking about what other idea might be easier to sell.

If you’re a suit, it’s your job to sell the idea you’ve been entrusted with. You need to believe in it.  Again, not all ideas are created equal, but the one you’ve got right now is the idea that’s deemed right by your agency.  It’s not clever to suggest that the creatives are a bit too attached to the idea, that the planner’s missed the point, or that it’s not quite the answer you would have come up with and that you’re the person who can make sure the clients gets the ‘right’ idea in the next round of creative.  But I’ve also seen plenty of suits do this.

What you’re supposed to be selling is the idea your agency’s recommending. You’re part of the agency, so that makes it your idea too.

So that’s my experience over the last couple of months, one I would bet is shared by the majority of people who have ever bought a house. It’s not one I’ll look back on with great fondness.  It’s a process that should have been enjoyable let down by basic stuff done badly.

And I dread to think of the number of times I’ve had a variation on this conversation with agency clients, people who went into the creative development process optimistic that not only would they make an ad they could be proud of, but that they’d enjoy the process of doing so.  Instead they found the process dispiriting and got an answer they begrudged. Which only reduces the chances of getting a great ad made next time.

(I’m feeling a bit depressed now.  But this is cheering me up.)

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A great moment for advertising trainspotters.

February 8, 2010 Leave a Comment

This animation is three minutes of joy for advertising enthusiasts. It was produced by Coy! for Creative Circle.

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A few of my favourite things

February 5, 2010 Leave a Comment

Near the top of a list of my favourite things you would find advertising, Tom Ford and smoking jackets. Which explains my enthusiasm for this – an advertisement for Tom Ford Eyewear, featuring a man wearing a smoking jacket (and, the more keenly observant of you will have noted, Carolyn Murphy sporting some very fetching spectacles).

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