Russell Davies

evolution of note-taking

I've been thinking a bit about PDAs and phones recently. And I had a really interesting chat the other day with Iain who was enthusing about his new k800i and explaining how he'd starting using his phone to photograph contact details off his computer screen before going to a meeting, rather than printing stuff off, or writing it down. This really made sense to me. And I realised that I've been doing something similar. I've been keeping lots of notes on my phone - I've been recording the records and books I want to buy by photographing them and sending them to flickr. And then they're there whenever I want them. The only slightly awkward bit of this process is the sending to flickr, which takes a few clicks. I would love there to be a 'send to flickr' button.

And, recently, I've started writing stuff down in my notebook and shooting it with my camera. Things like shopping lists like the one above. Because pen and paper seems to aid the editing process. I can't buy everything I think I might want to buy and the shopping list is the first filter. Of course, you could argue that I should just take my notebook with me everywhere I go. And I kind of do. But there's always some occasions when you forget it, but I virtually never forget my phone.

Anyway, I'm seeing this as emergent behaviour in my life - is it happening in yours? The reason I think it works is because it harnasses quite a lot of natural behaviour:

Pressing a shutter and shooting something is easy and natural - it's a quick way to capture a bit of information. Especially information like this.

The folksonomic quality of flickr (and it's permanence) you don't have to trawl back through old notebooks is a good way of keeping/archiving stuff. And the pictures help you sort and remember the information - you get this extra information from the visuals than you would from some ordinary database.

And it's becoming clear to me that scribbling a note with pen and paper, then photographing it, is a better way of 'digitising' information than scratching away with a stylus or trying to txt anything diagramatic or whatever. I wonder if phone/PDA design is going to start addressing this way of using them. Or maybe I'm a freak.

the grammar and rhythm of roads

Just got back from seeing Cars with Arthur. Very good. Not quite as good as the Toy Stories, drags a bit in a couple of places, but still better than most of the films you'll see this year.

But the most affecting bit for me was the way they captured some of the grammar and language of American roads. No-one things of roads having grammar but they do, it's one of the things you notice if you drive a lot in two languages. Signs appear in different places, merging has a different quality, juntions have different accents and sweeps. And, when you're a passenger there's a beautiful rhythm to the interstates that this film captures in a lovely sequence early on, when Lightning's being driven across country on the back of a big Mack truck. You see the ways your car's shadow stretches, receedes and then looms up at you as the landscape changes, you see the whipping rhythm of trees giving way to crops and back to trees. You see the mountains that seem to be just ahead of you, for hours, the long lines stretching to infinity. It's really quite lovely and evocative. It made me nostalgic for the drives Anne and I used to do, up and down the US listening to NPR and baseball commentary.

Michel Gondry played with some of the same feeling in this video.

Anyway, go and see Cars, it's good.

AAAA thoughts - the perfect conference

We were trying to imagine what the best planning conference ever would be like. Here are some of the ideas:

1. It should be like a festival. Three days, in some fields somewhere warm (Not hot, warm). There'd be a main stage. A quant tent. And some beat-up vans selling dubious insights parked around the edges.

2. Costs would be kept low by making everyone bring their own tent. Ad students would be allowed in for free but they'd have to chop wood and do laundry for everyone else.

3. 20 minutes per speaker. Only exception, Paul Feldwick.

4. No Powerpoint, but speakers would be encouraged to create data presentations using rock show style lighting and lasers.

5. No planning prize, but agencies would be awarded fabulous trophies for superior BBQing.

6. Compulsory - frisbee golf, fry-ups, teams of people reenacting 'scenes from the great spreadsheets'

7. Banned - croissants, ethnography, pads and pens with hotel logos

8. Every evening the planning flag would be reverently lowered while the whole of Testing To Destruction is intoned by a male voice choir.

9. At dawn every day basic planning techniques would be taught by wise old planners doing Tai Chi.

10. Everyone would take home their version of the perfect creative brief, carved in whale bone.

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AAAA thoughts - rambling man

So, I'm in O'Hare, really missing the delights of corporate travel. (I flew to Miami on airmiles which meant flying home through Chicago. And Chicago is having a storm so who knows when the flight will leave? At least it's not cancelled yet. Jeffre's was cancelled, he has to stay the night.) If I'd flown on the Nike dollar, direct to London from Miami, I'd be home by now.

Oh well.

It gives me chance to reflect ramblingly on the AAAA Account Planning experience. And it will be rambling, I've not really had chance to sort anything out in my head.

Clearly good things

1. The organisation was flawless. We screwed up and set-up our session in the wrong room but the organisers adapted without a hint of panic or accusation. Many thanks to them.

2. Planners are lovely. We asked a load of them to play all sorts of silly games with no real hint of a reason to do it and they just dived in with smiles and enthusiasm, when they were perfectly entitled to stare at us sullenly. Thanks to everyone who just piled in.

3. Crispin Porter do good ads. And they talk about them interestingly. I don't think they're doing anything especially new or radical but full marks to their creatives for doing good work and full marks to the planners and social scientists for making it possible.

4. Mark Earls is a treasure. Despite his eminence grise status he always trys to shake things up and say something more provocative than the norm. That (plus brains, savvy etc) is clearly why he gets decent crowds at his sessions every year.

5. It was nice to hear someone speak from the heart without being too sappy like Carl Johnson did. As someone embarking on a new business venture of my own I found that thoughtful stuff.

6. Nick Bareham is clearly enjoying discovering a new world and that's rather infectious and appealing.

7. Piers from PSFK works very hard and makes it seem effortless and fascinating.

8. Discovery is one of those media brands that understands the world it's getting into, and is preparing rather well.

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AAAA thoughts - things that struck me as odd

1. Why didn't anyone ask the guy from Cranium what song they play when they lay people off?

2. Why was Dr Bob Deutsch applauded so roundly after he extended his 40 minutes to an hour? It seemed rather a rude thing to do, compared to his cuddly anthropologist schtick.

3. And in a related point. Why did people get so long to talk? TED's genius is the 18 minute time limit. If AAAA had kept everyone to less time maybe they could have squeezed in some more interesting/sparky speakers.

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(Warning: picture is not related to post)

AAAA thoughts - a tension that seems apparent

I can imagine how hard it is to run a three-person planning department in the a smallish City where the clients are dubious and the creatives are resentful. You're probably not getting a lot of training or support, you need the Account Planning conference to be full of useful craft wisdom and opportunities to learn practical new stuff. (And you probably don't need gonzo fools like me prancing around like an idiot telling everyone to ignore the rules and just be free, man).

Equally, I can imagine that you've been planning for 20 years, you've worked at big agencies and small, you've seen trends, techniques and idiots come and go and frankly you could do with someone to shake your ideas up a bit, or at least reinvigorate you.

Those sound like two different conferences to me.

I can see that pleasing both of those constituencies and all the people in between is a tall order, but I'd have thought that something called Spark! would be lighter on the former and heavier on the latter. Less Planning 101 and more Planning 3.1.

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AAAA thoughts - what Colin from Crispin made me think about

Colin Drummond seemed like a smart and pleasant man and he made loads of sense. He's done the thing that great planners in great creative agencies always do; make the randomness seem less random. And they've done a better job of explaining it at Crispin than I ever did at w+k in Portland. Though I think they're essentially doing the same thing; creating cultural stuff that also works as selling stuff.

It made me think of another way of thinking about that which suggested an interesting definition of inspiration. (At least it's interesting to me sitting here in O'Hare, where I'd even read some Proust if there was some sitting here)

The best agencies, the agencies that do great, interesting work are basically great because they do whatever the creatives want to do. And because those people are often smart and talented what they want to do is often exactly the right thing. This changes the job of the planner. In most agencies, most of the time (ie places that are average or worse) the job of the planner is to stop the creatives doing something stupid. That's what the typical reductive, instructive creative brief is for. It trys to stop them insulting the audience, misunderstanding the audience and indulgling their creative whims in some pointless manner.

When you're working with really good creatives the task is to harness their creative whims, not constrict them. You have to accept that they're going to do whatever want, especially when they own the agency, but then your task is to make what they want be the right thing to solve the problem.

There are two ways to do this.

The first is to manipulate what they want. This is what we often call inspiration. We have to find a way to excite them about solving the right problem in the right way. This is often a surreptitious activity, but it's not any less noble or difficult because of that.

The second is to reframe the problem so that the solution the creatives have come up with anyway is actually a good solution. (Not just appearing to be a good solution, that's easier but wrong. Actually being a good solution.) This is one of the real dark arts of planning, but it often leads to really striking and effective work. There are always hundreds of good solutions to any given brand problem but the best ones are non-obvious, using the reframing effect of seemingly random creative intent is often a brilliant way of stumbling on the non-obvious.

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AAAA thoughts - the future etc

Apparently, Piers showed this post during his breakout thing and generated a ripple of applause, so I guess I wasn't alone in being disappointed with the usual platitudes from the CDs and the usual deference from the moderators.

But it led us to a good few conversations about the way the various relationships within creative businesses will need to evolve, and it struck me that we're probably not far from a world where the distinction between planner, creative and account person will be as useful as the distinction between art director and copywriter in the average creative team. ie occasionally useful when talking about particular craft skills but increasingly mostly meaningless.

Agency 3.1 will be a loose collection of creative generalists where there'll be no particular reason where the one who can draw a bit will make the creative decisions, just as there'll be no reason where the one who's good at doing focus groups will make all the strategic decisions.

As digital agencies (and other sorts) get bigger they're tending to reproduce the mistakes of their advertising predecessors - creating specific creative departments, plonking a creative director at the top and surrounding them with all sorts of service groups. This is a smart way to get big, but it's also a quick way to get dumb. I suspect they'll realise that soon and move on, but who knows?

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which customer is always right?

I heard an interview with Terry Leahy of Tesco the other day. It kept going on about how he'd transformed Tesco by instilling a believe that 'the customer is always right' through the organisation. Which is good and everything. I like Tescos. But that 'the customer is always right' thing is one of the most annoying bromides in marketing.

Because is doesn't get at the really difficult question - which customer is always right? There are some Tesco customers who think Tesco's shouldn't open in their village; are they right? There are some who believe Tesco should use much less packaging; are they right? There is at least one person who believes people called Russell should get free cheese on demand; am I right?

Of course we may all be right, but are we right in Tesco's eyes? Probably not. The tricky decision they have to make is - which of their customers is right? And this is a harder decision than ever now. It used to be fairly straightforward - the people who spent a lot, or had a lot of influence on the business were the people who were right, the heavy users and the influencers. But now, with the rise of the blogosphere etc, there are way more infuential customers than ever (and they're harder to spot) and with the increase in Long Tail economics, your heavy users are harder to spot too.

That's the hardest decision in marketing - which customer is king?

Of course this means you very often have to ignore your customers, even the ones who think they own the brand, and my favourite example of this is Radio 4. The BBC licence fee makes defining who their customers are kind of tricky but I think this forces them back to a really clear sense of direction and coherence for the brand which results in smart, brave decisions.

For instance, there's recently been a furore over Neil Nunes, a new continuity announcer whose Caribbean accent stuck through the mass of Radio 4 RP, subtly tweaking Radio 4's stationality (my favourite ever bit of jargon). In an instant the outraged citizens of Middle England grabbed their headed writing paper and fired up their dial-up modems to denounce this innovation in the usual 'I'm-not-a-racist' stylee. These are Radio 4's heavy users, these are the people who think they own the brand, these are the people who write the newspaper columns and what have Radio 4 done? Basically, they've ignored them. Brilliant. Just like they seem to be ignoring all the people having a go at the Sports Programme in the usual intellectual-snobby way.

Listening to your customers is important, but not as important as knowing who you are, what you stand for and what you want to do.

And lest you suspect I just love Radio 4 because I think I'm the customer who's always right let me point out that despite my protestations they insist on keeping Loose Ends, Any Questions and The Food Programme on air despite them being the most annoying radio ever broadcast.

long term greedy

There's a post at the Re-imagineering blog aching with sadness at the way the Disney theme parks herd you into a shop at every possible opportunity. This is, apparently, exactly contrary to what Walt himself wanted when he built the parks. Sure he was happy to sell you stuff, but he didn't want to dislocate the theme (the point of a theme park, after all) so the stores were discrete and appropriate. Theme came first, retail second.

This reminded me of a disturbing recent trend in UK retaillers - the annoying upsell. You get to the counter of a WH Smith and the poor assistant has to say - 'since you're buying a magazine you can also buy this bar of chocolate at half-price'. (I've yet to discover a product that doesn't qualify you for an enormous bar of chocolate at half-price.) They do the same thing at HMV with half-price DVDs. I'm sure some clever management consultants have demonstrated that this yields significant ROI from the odd person that says yes. But what the model presumably doesn't reveal is that it really irritates the hell out of the rest of us. It slows the transaction down a bit, which I guess isn't the worst thing, but it just sends this horrible 'we're always selling' signal to the customer, at the point where you thought you'd already made all your decisions. They may as well just wave a big sign saying 'to us - you're just one big wallet'.

Doesn't anyone in these companies remember the old Goldman Sachs thing about long-term greedy versus short-term greedy? It's Goldman Sachs after all, not Naomi Klein, but even they recognise the value of short-term sacrifice bringing longer-term gain. ie leave your customers alone sometimes, so they'll like you a bit and come back.