Russell Davies

apples scores

Simon and I have just been through all 50 entries for Assignment 10 for the last time. And since there were so many entries I don't think we can mark each one individually. Sorry about that. Instead we've recorded about 30 minutes of audio talking about the best ones, what might be good stuff to do and what to learn from this exercise. Hopefully.

Here are the 10 propositions from the winning paper from Ben M.

1. Apples help digest everything else.

2. Eat apples. Save the trees. Reduce global warming.

3. Sweet snack, good for teeth, recycled packaging

4. Apples. Earth’s vitamin tablet.

5. Apples. The dawn of Atheism.

6. Apples. Detox since before tox.

7. Apples. Smoothies without plastic.

8. (RED) Apples

9. Apples. Faster food.

10. English apples. Fruit without emissions.

They're not all brilliant, but quite a lot of them are. More than I could have done. As we discuss in the audio a proposition is a limited tool, increasingly unsuited for building communications today but it's a really good thing to get good at. It's like a musician practicing scales. Thinking propositions teaches you to think about precis, memorable language, tangental thoughts, differentiation, all sorts of things.

Even people who don't like propositions find themselves using this kind of thing as a kind of internal headline. A way of summing up an idea.

Quite a lot of you didn't really do propositions. Many of you gave us ideas for the marketing of apples, which is fine and dandy and many of them were great ideas, but that's not really what we were looking for, this is not what this exercise was about. This was about creating pithy little communications thoughts such as those above. Similarly many of you gave us 'territories'; areas where we might find a proposition (healthiness, range, englishness, temptation, etc) but didn't distill it into a coherent thought.

This might be because lots of you didn't read the task properly, including the addenda (is that a word?) to the task we added in the comments. First rule - read the whole assignment. However, it may be that we weren't clear so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and apologise for that.

Anyway - we'll bumblingly try and explain what we mean in the audio.

BUT, although Mr Grant will think me a hopeless ludite, I think this proposition thing is well worth practising so I'm going to suggest we do it again as a quick end of November task.

The subject is Maple Syrup. Just 5 propositions. Each one just a sentence of 10 words or less.

Try and do some as good as numbers 4, 6 and 7 above. Get them in before December 8th.

Hope this makes sense, and congratulations to Ben who wins this month's challenge. Though I've not worked out what his prize is yet.

MP3

jon steel interview

Went to see Jon Steel yesterday to interview him about Perfect Pitch and other things. What a decent, self-effacing, funny, insightful, interesting man. He's my model of what a planner should be. We ended up chatting for just over an hour, and I thought I'd put it all up and not bother editing (because a) I'm lazy and b) I think he's that interesting). The book is well worth reading, as Gareth has noted. Thank you Jon.

MP3

stefan on revver

Reading Stefan's blog reminded me of this little interview I did a while back. I tried to upload it to YouTube but there were all sorts of glitches, so I've used revver instead. Which was actually quite a pleasant experience. Stefan talks about briefs, designing, greed control and Donald Duck.

apples and beyond

I've just forwarded Simon about 40 entries for Assignment 10. I think this means it's going to take us a while to get them all 'marked'. I also think that it might be a good idea for us to record a chat talking about what everyone's done. That might be more useful than 40 different documents you have to open. But we won't be able to do that until I'm back in London, which'll be the middle of November. Hope that's OK. I'll stick the next assignment up before then though. Probably next week. Many thanks to everyone for entering.

(Simon, check your email)

how do you like them apples?

You have one more day (ish) to get any entries in for Assignment 10. We've had a record entry so far, so thanks to everyone.

assignment 10 - back to basics

I've been thinking about the school of the web a bit. I'm concerned that we're trying to run before we can walk. It's all very well me banging on about complexity and compression and polyphony but it's no good if we've not learned how to write a simple proposition. And I know we can all have a go at propositions and dismiss them as irrelevant and old-fashioned, but they're basic tools. They're like scales for jazz musicians, you can't start to improvise until you're intimate with how scales and chord progressions work. And for all of us doing clever strategies for fancy brands, there's some planner on their own in an office somewhere, who's never had any training, who's just trying to work out where to start. And they're really who this is for.

So my plan is to go back to some of the basic tools of planning. Once we've mastered them we'll move on to fancier stuff. And we're going to start with propositions.

Simon McCrudden has agreed to be the guest judge and set the question (and he's the planner who works with Paul, so he must be used to some rigour). Here's the task:

"The English Apple Advisory Board are coming in to see me next week to discuss how they might be able to promote apples and as a result increase sales in the UK. Not just a short-term hike, but for the forseeable future. So what I would like is for people to write ten propositions/ideas that will help the apple people achieve their objective.

Each proposition/idea can be no longer than 20 words. No supporting material is needed or allowed for the propositions. Nor any images. And it would be good to have all 10 on a single page of a word document."

Please email your entries to the address on the right and do it by November 1st. I'm trying to get back on the monthly schdule.

It seems simple, but it's tough. You can't hide behind pictures or design, you've just got to have 10 original, useful, non-obvious ideas about how to sell, re-position or re-excite people about apples.

And, since we're going back to basics I've decided to make this the beginning of a more structured programme (slightly). If you complete every school of the web assignment for the next year. (Which I imagine will be about 10 assignments). You'll get a fancy certificate for your wall and a letter of praise and enthusiasm from me (for what that's worth).

the perfect creative brief

I'm often conscious that my musings on brands and stuff can easily get a bit abstract and un-useful. All this talk of polyphonic brands and the tyranny of the big idea is fine if you're coffeeing with a bunch of smarty-pants planners but not much use if you're trying to get a campaign for a hard-nosed tyre retailer out the door and still get home in time for your child's birthday. Or something.

Anyway.

One of the regular emails I get is - what creative brief template do you use? And of course being a smarty-pants planner I tend to say that I don't believe in a standard template and it just leads to form-filing and while that's sort of true, if asked to write a brief I probably know what boxes I'd have, and how to fill them in. And anyway, there are other people out there, probably in a planning department of one who'd just like some help in what should go on a good creative brief. So I thought maybe we should try a wisdom of the crowds thing and try to build the ultimate, all-purpose, ready for anything, use-it-until-you've-learned-to-do-without-it creative brief template.

I realise that this could be a rather protracted business, because your feelings on what should go into a creative brief are intimately tied to your beliefs about how you think communication works. And that's a whole, well, thing. But it'll be interesting to try.

I suspect at some point we'll resort to wikis and voting and probably a flickr group and geotagging but I think the first move in OpenCreativeBrief2.0 should be for people to post stuff in this comments field here. The stuff I'm thinking of would include:

Sections that you think should go on a creative brief (I'm assuming we'll have sections, you know, boxes to be filled in). It doesn't have to be all of them, just your favourites.

Links to, or copies of, fine examples of the creative brief art. So this can become a bit of a Creative Brief resource.

Criteria for our ultimate brief template other than the ones I'm going to write now:

1. Let's stipulate that this is the document that accompanies a briefing. It won't simply be emailed to someone or slipped under a door. It will be accompanied by your exciting self, emoting and inspiring like crazy.

2. But it has to be complete. We can't design something that's brilliantly brief - four catchy sentences say, but is then accompanied by a forty-page document that explains everything else. This thing we're building has to contain everything the recipient needs to know to do the job we're asking of them.

3. This is a document addressed to a team of doers (let's call them creative people). We're asking them to come up with an idea or ideas that involve changing the relationship between a brand, product, service or company and some people. (I'm trying to write that has un-adcentrically as possible, does it make sense?)

How does that sound? I'm rather looking forward to this. Let's go to work.

assignment nine - feedback time

w+k london will tell you that Paul Colman is a great client and I can see why they say that. He's been the most thorough of all our judges to date, including me, and probably the most demanding. That's how you get great work, but I should warn all the entrants that they're not going to be heaped in praise. Here's the summary of this thoughts:

"On the whole all the entries were a little disappointing.  There was some good stuff in all of them, but they didn’t realise the ideas nearly as well as they could have.

I found it hard to pick a winner as they all had some strength’s, but in different areas – some had insight without strategic justification, while others had strategic justification without any real insight into the sport.

In terms of a winner I’d chose A. It didn’t cover a lot of aspects of the problem and wasn’t that well presented, but there was enough in it for me to want to know more.

A special mention should go to E, which was head and shoulders above the others in terms of presentation; brilliant use of images and succinct but powerful words. Unfortunately thought there was a lack of strategic justification, therefore it didn’t win."

But don't be downhearted because a) this was a really tough task and b) Paul's comments should defintely help you get better.

I'd add this for myself; you're almost all using lots of pictures and stuff, which is great, but don't use pictures instead of using thinking. Your pictures should help to clarify or amplify the points you want to make, but you should have a really clear sense of those points. The presentations should be logical and clear without the pictures. I don't mind ambiguity in an ad but I don't think we should accept it in a strategic document.

All the entries are below, with Paul's comments. Also you should have a look at the notes that Paul wrote for himself before he started marking them (told you he was thorough). You should look at these because they illustrate the discipline that leads to great strategy. I suspect that I too often give the impression that great thinking springs from a few days mucking about blogging and drinking coffee, it doesn't, it comes from the sort of rigour Paul demonstrates  here (a word document).

MMA-A.ppt  MMA-B.ppt MMA-D.ppt MMA-E.PDF feedback_to_entry_e.doc

So, many thanks to everyone for playing. You took on a high-level of technical difficulty and not many people were brave enough to attempt it so congrats to everyone who took part.

I'll post the next assignment in the next couple of days, I think we might do some back-to-basics stuff.

the future of brands and planning

At the beginning of August I wrote this post, and promptly did nothing about it. Huge apologies. So here's my attempt to catch up and start with answering Gemma's question:

What do you think Planning will look like in ten years and how will Planners have to adapt?

Obviously most things will be the same. In any forecasting project it’s always good to start by making it clear that most things will be the same. Look at any 10 year time-span and most things are mostly the same before and after.

But here are some predictions for you, in and out of planning:

The Superbowl and Coronation Street will still be on and they’ll still be punctuated by ads. Most of those ads will still be no good. But slightly more of them will be good than now.

Seth Godin will be publishing books on an hourly basis.

Traditional quantitative research agencies will have almost entirely disappeared (though a couple will be preserved at the National Museum of Redundant Services). The sheer amount of opinion generated by whatever the blogosphere becomes will make asking people new questions pointless. The companies who mine, analyse and package that opinion will replace old school quant and everyone will hate them as much as they hate Millward Brown now.

MRI and neural imaging will be banned for market research purposes when a petfood ad makes someone’s brain explode.

Planning departments will dump their econometricians when it’s discovered that econometrics is simply a vast con perpetrated by a cabal of disgruntled mathematicians and that statistical science is more akin to astrology than astronomy. Lots of planners sigh with relief and admit they’d never really understood statistical significance anyway.

Global warming and rising ocean levels will mean that the Cannes ad festival is relocated to Bucharest. The winning ad in 2016 is a visual joke about someone falling over that no-one remembers ever seeing before.

DDB will have created a computer model of Paul Feldwick’s brain which is issued to all their planners on a memory card which goes in their phone. They will simply wave their phone over any product or brand and a genius strategy will be SMS’d to the giant simulation of Trevor Beattie running in the creative department.

Naked Inside will be named ‘Contagion Number One’ by the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta.

As Sky/Fox/Star exceeded 100% household penetration on earth News Corp executives will announce their corporate space programme (re-using abandoned Pendolino rockets from the bankrupt Virgin Galactic). Their first move will be to target planets newly discovered around Cassiopeia and to use football as a ‘galactic battering ram’. The first game scheduled for transmission to the entire galaxy is a Carling Cup clash between Nottingham Forest and Portsmouth.

The IPA Effective Awards committee will finally admit that they can’t prove whether advertising works and attempt to prove something simpler. They’ll start with the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

Neil French will start his own country.

Maurice Saatchi will be made United Nations Branding Tzar. His taskforce will go through the dictionary and issue every registered brand in the world with their own word, seemingly at random. This will be the only word each brand will be allowed to use in communications. An unofficial One Word Equity Market will be established where brands secretly trade words, Marks and Spencer will desperately try and offload ‘putrid’ but will find no takers.

Planners will be banned from blogging as the amount of content they generate exceeds the world’s storage capacity.

what will marketing become?

OK, so as of this morning when I got up and remembered to look, this is the voting tally and the vote is  officially declared closed. With 'friends with benefits' the winner and the swirly/gritty one in second place. So congrats to Vandy and Ben and can you get in touch to tell me if you can/want to go to SFO for the conference, or if you have someone else deserving to pass your pass too?