Item #13: On Research

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
David Ogilvy

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.
David Ogilvy

I support research. I am also passionate about creative. And I don’t think these two statements are in opposition to each other.

We are living in an Age of Analytics. But we are also living in an Era of Creativity. And I believe that Creativity and Analytics must learn to work together – even better, they must learn how to help each other.

Here’s why research is important:

- We create for consumers – products, services, ideas, and communications. Therefore we must realize that as the masters we answer to, their input is important, and we can gather that input through research. There is no suitable proxy for the voice of the consumer (not yet at least).
- Research can help us understand what we need to create for our audience of consumers in order to deliver products, services, ideas and communications that bring value to their lives, versus piss them off or just accomplish nothing.
- Research can help us create better products, services, ideas and communications – that meet the needs or wants of our audience AND that we can feel proud of as the creators.

Here are the imperatives for research:

- Research must be done well. Research must be customized, to achieve a specific goal for a specific task with a specific audience. With research, more than ever before: ‘garbage in is garbage out’; ‘ask a bad question in a bad way and you’ll get a bad answer’;
- Research must be used well…and this does NOT mean to direct decisions. It is not smart to use research as a proxy for decision-making: strategic or creative. Research is only one of many inputs into the process of strategic and creative development. Research is a source of information and, if done well, insight which aids decision-making.

And here’s the research concern:

- The concern is that the advertising industry has traditionally held research, particularly creative research, in great doubt. While not necessarily without good reason, this has created a divide between agencies and clients around the issue of research. And because of this, over time, clients have turned to building strong direct relationships with research companies, which runs the risk of hindering the collaborative pursuit – by client, agency and research company together - of ultimately ‘creating’ products, services, ideas and communications that bring real value to consumers.

Way Forward:

- Embrace the role for research, when executed and used well, to support the development of strategies and creative solutions that will bring value to consumers. Work collectively and collaboratively as a team – client, agency and research company – to be innovative and progressive with research methods. In the interest of continuous improvement.

Item #12: On Being Responsible and Collaborative.

Only five years ago, I recall sitting in boardrooms talking about how ‘cause-related marketing’ and ‘being environmentally aware’ were factoring so heavily into our communications discussions. Words like transparency, authenticity, socially responsible and ‘green’ featured frequently in conversations.

The outcomes of these conversations included large-scale corporately sponsored and successful projects like Fashion Targets Breast Canada, the (Red) Project, and all the printing now done on recycled materials. All good.

But now I am excited to see business begin operating in a way that is consistent with the practices defining CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR advocates the adoption of business operations that “embrace responsibility for the impact of its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.” (Wikipedia) I am eagerly watching the emergence of the SuperCorp (Rosabeth Kanter), and the company that works to a triple bottom line: People, Planet and Profits.

To this end, I’ve noticed a recent increase in exchange around a couple of thoughts:

Collaborative Product Use: Movie, DVD and Video Game rental companies have been doing it for decades. Now Zipcars is making a mint off the same concept. Rent or borrow whatever you need, wherever and whenever you need it. Paris has the world’s largest collaborative bicycle use system in place – just ‘borrow’ a bike, get to where you need to go, and hand it back in.

Responsible Communications: Recently an advertising agency in Maryland launched a protest movement - ‘Stop the Adness’. The originators believe that the social contract between advertisers and consumers has been violated. We are all aware of the extent of consumer ‘tune-out’ to advertising – well, more specifically, to bad advertising. Responsible communications gets back to being successful in the essential task of communication: “a two-way process in which there is an exchange and progression of thoughts, feelings or ideas towards a mutually accepted goal or direction.” (Wikipedia)

Collaborative product uses and responsible communications – two things among many I’ll be thinking more about while I confront marketing challenges in this blossoming era of corporate social responsibility.

Item #11: Strategic Planner as Chief Synthesizer

Exploring the notion of Strategic Planner, or Strategist of any title, as Chief Synthesizer.

Process: To Synthesize

- To combine the parts into a coherent whole;

- The pulling together of ideas or information to develop a common framework for understanding or to create a new idea; 


- A thinking skill in Bloom's Taxonomy including generalizing from given facts, relating knowledge from several areas, and using old ideas to create new ones.

Outcome: A Synthesis

- A deduction requiring reasoning from the general to the particular, or from cause to effect; 


- The formation of something complex or coherent by combining simpler things; the examining and combining of processed information with other information and intelligence for final interpretation;

- Involving or of the nature of synthesis as opposed to analysis.

Person: The Synthesizer

- An intellectual who synthesizes or uses synthetic methods;

- The synthesizer extracts the equivalent logic circuit functions from a library and connects them together to form a complete circuit.




(www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/subject/analyze_this.phtml; www.peninsula.wednet.edu/learningteaching/curriculum/CurricDocsWrtg/Preschool/6.Glossary.doc; www.sd54.org/eo/literacy/continuum/essentials_glossary.htm)(wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn;
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/synthesis
; P.S.Welch)(www.ami.ac.uk/courses/topics/0100_gls/glossary/glosss.htm)

Item #10: Insight Into An Experience

I recently set up an old turntable in my house. I also acquired a small number of vinyl records to launch my collection. The experience felt remarkably structured and also extremely satisfying, so I mapped it. And I find that this provides a path from the discovery of a need, to having that need satisfied, as well as some clues to the kind of content that might follow that journey and the emotional experience surrounding it.

Point A: NEED. My digital music collection was leaving me intensely unsatisfied. I was consuming new music voraciously and finding decreasing levels of satisfaction with each new discovery. I was very bored. But loving music so much, also increasingly frustrated.

Point B: SHARE. I found I was sharing my frustration freely with anyone who would listen. It started with me asking my reliable go-to music-lovers for recommendations on new music, which I continued to purchase, and which continued to leave me unsatisfied.

Point C: DISCOVER. One music-lover who I was talking to launched into discussion about records, and a passionate conveyance of his love for the hobby. I felt it, and decided I would get a turntable and some records. That would be the cure for my state of music boredom.

Point D: PLAN. Excitement Ensued. The process of discovery became my focus: where would I get this turntable, should I get an old one or a new one; maybe my Dad has one in the basement. And think of all the old music I’ll be able to listen to.

Point E: ACQUIRE. Acquired Turntable and Records. Admittedly, there was a mini-crash of excitement around here. Once I had the pieces that would relieve my music boredom state, I had nothing to be immediately excited about. I had a wait until it was actually hooked up and a record was playing. This was kind of a flat stage in the process.

Point F: EXPERIENCE. Turntable Installed and Record Playing. Joy Ensued. My experience came to full bloom. And what made it so full? Just like any good positioning strategy: part need satisfaction i.e.: cure for my state of music boredom, but mostly an emotional experience.

Next post: The Anatomy of an Experience.

Item #9: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Once every few years, I find a book that takes my breath away. And one of those came along for me, by fluke more than anything, recently. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was sitting there amongst many others on its display table in a downtown bookstore. Something drew me to it: something made me buy it, and then reading it gave me moments of absolute elevation. I saw words brought together on a page in such a way that I’ve never seen before. I experienced a story that was so finely woven that I can only wonder at the finesse of the magical mind behind it. The clear recommendation is to go read it, revel in it, lap up every poetic line… but in the meantime, captured here is some of its splendor, out of context and thus not nearly full in its experience, but a taste nonetheless. (Slight spoiler alert)

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend the rest of his life answering.”

“She said: Maybe I shouldn’t make up everything because that made it hard to believe anything.”

“Out of habit, I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren’t there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.”

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away.”

“To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”

“The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.”

“Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”

“Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”

“The fact that you got a little happier today doesn’t change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you’re the happiest and the saddest you’ve ever been in your whole life.”

“What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you’ve ever been?” “Of course I am. Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.”

“As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.”

“He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original.”

“At the end, all that’s left of you is your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”

“(If you don’t know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?)”