Russell Davies

building a personal long-tail

So I realise that it's very easy to take any idea and say 'building a long-tail for X' and pretend you've got something better, but I think there's something in this.

Because I think a blog is like a personal long-tail. (And, obviously, if Chris Anderson has already said this, I apologise.)

But the great thing about a blog, or at least this one, for me, is that it's a great place to keep all the smaller, lower interest, everyday bits of your life and your thinking. I'm not posting my most important work here, or my deepest feelings. I'm posting the unconsidered trifles that occur to everyone everyday, that might turn into something, but which'll probably just blow away. And the great thing with the blog is that they just sit here until they come in handy. Or don't. And they're all searchable.

That's how I use it anyway. It's like a personal corporate archive, a searchable depository of little thoughts, quotes, images and ideas. (And it tells me that on August 25th 2003, I was almost stuck in a lift, which I wouldn't otherwise have remembered.)

And it's more than that, it's also a way of building value via accretion (how do you like that jargon?) by which I mean this:

Blogs are a tremendous way of starting things. Any little idea you have, you can start it off, in a very low effort, low key way. And maybe you'll never come back to it, but maybe you will and maybe you'll extend it and then maybe a year later, or whenever, you'll actually have achieved quite a lot. Without really meaning to.

You've built something interesting through the casual accretion of lots of tiny things, rather than the determined effort of one big thing.

Now, of course, if I got my tagging a bit better sorted out that 'personal corporate archive' could stretch across lots of things - Flickr, Backpack, plazes etc. which would be even more useful, and if that integrated with my desktop and spare hard-drives I'd be even more happy.

But anyway, welcome to my personal institutional memory. Enjoy your visit.

building a long tail for ads

This is one of those things I've been thinking about for a while, trying to come up with a good way into it. But I haven't really got one so I thought I'd just launch in and see what happens. I was reminded to write something by this great post from Gareth. But I think he's talking about a private corporate archive and I'm talking about something more public.

My basic thought: There ought to be a long tail for ads - but there isn't really.

Think of all the good, big brands that do good advertising and comms. They churn stuff out. Dozens of reasonably high quality bits of communications a year, most of which hang around for a few weeks and then completely disappear. And these are expensive bits of film or print. They've got good music and big stars and good jokes. Or whatever. You could probably stand to watch them again.

And you could defintely stand to watch them 5 or 10 or 20 years later when all the nostalgia kicks in. And at that distance even the bad ads look good. Or at least seem evocative of something or other.

I've seen the reaction you get when you show old ads to fans of a brand - they can't get enough.

And looking at a brand's history of advertising, would, I think, be a really good indication of the kind of business they are. So, as an ordinary customer, you'd imagine that you could just go to most brands corporate homepages and look at an archive of all their work, and of course, most of the time you can't.

The various buy-outs of music, artists etc mean that most ads are locked in corporate vaults never to be seen again. I remember when we did 'cog' at w+k we didn't have the rights to put the ad on our own homepage - couldn't afford it. And Honda didn't have it on theirs for very long. Fortunately someone took it into their own head to make a file of the ad available and served it up to the world. If they hadn't we wouldn't have been able to.

Obviously people like Adland are doing noble work creating an archive of stuff from now on, but imagine all those ads from the last however many years are just lost.

Now I don't know much about business affairs and buy-outs and that, I'm just a planner, but is this something that people are negotiating with artists these days? -Some kind of 'longtail buy-out'? ie we buy the rights to put this ad in a publicly accessible archive online but won't be actively promoting it, or sticking it in the Superbowl or anything. etc.

That seems like it might be an interesting idea. If we're supposed to be rethinking 'advertising' - thinking of it as 'content' (which I think we should) we also need to address the legal/copyright issues which make it so ephemeral. I also think it would make our work better if we planned on it having a life beyond the next 6 months, if we built advertising for the long-tail we might build better stuff.

Does that make sense?

(Before anyone writes in, I'm using advertising as a shortcut term for the full plethora of brand communications. Obviously.)

pomes

Since I've been banging on about the importance of planners writing well (persuasively, cogently, concisely, imaginatively) I thought I'd share a top tip that only dawned on me recently.

Learn to write poetry.

I bought a copy of Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled' and it's perfect. I managed to get through two years of A-level Shakespeare and a lifetime of Radio 4 without ever really understanding iambic pentameter and he explained it in half an hour by making me write my own. Brilliant. And it made me realise that all the great persuasive language I've read for work had something poetic about it. Obviously it was all touched with the dead hand of commerce, but there was still a rhythm and a drive to it - something determined and crafted about the phrases. Anyone brought up in English can't help but feel the stir of the old iambic pentameter and anything written with an understanding of those rhythms is bound to be more resonant than the average bit of marketing jargon.

And poetry is all about compression; about getting a lot of thought into a few words - which is something else you need to be able to do.

I think I've gotten away with this kind of stuff so far because my first job was writing jokes and jokes have a kind of persuasive rhythm to them too, and I've always thought a good brief had the drive of a good joke. But poetry's probably a better, more flexible discipline; and you can learn it all from Mr Fry's marvelous book.

Get it on your Christmas list while there's still time.

for when you're flying a plane

I always like to find mnemonics and heuristics from other industiries and see if I can apply them to planning, because

a) I like typing and saying both heuristic and mnemonic

and

b) other industires tend to be about proper things that actually matter to people in some important way so they tend to have applied decent thought to coming up with some sound advice.

And I was reminded of the thing pilots in trouble are always told the other day - Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. And this seemed very apposite to the life of the planner. Especially in these days of over-communication and too many pointless meetings. (NB: not too many meetings, meetings are a good thing, but too many pointless meetings.)

What it means ( I believe) to a pilot is : first fly the plane, make sure it's level, not going to crash and you know where you are, then figure out where you want to go, and start heading there, then, and only then, get on the radio and start asking for help etc. Otherwise you'll confuse yourself, miss something vital, screw up somehow and your communications will be useless and/or counter-productive.

I think similar advice might be useful for planners approaching a brand problem. First thing: work out where you are, what's going on, do you know the stuff you need to know to 'keep the plane in the air', second thing: work out where you think you need to go and start heading there, start writing that down, start working towards that solution. Then, and only then, do you start asking the world their opinion - whether it be your colleagues or consumers or whatever.

Because (and I'm a huge believer in lots of conversation and lots of collaboration) if you collaborate too soon you'll end up nowhere. You'll spend so much time exploring so many options and opinions that you'll fly the plane into the ground. People will quite happily throw all sorts of ideas at you because they're not flying the plane, they don't really care if it crashes or not. So you've got to go into those conversations knowing where you want to go. You should look for help with how you get there, how you can land succesfully etc. If they've got a better idea then fine, but you should have something in your head to start with.

So there we have a planning lesson - Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Anyone else got anything we can steal from other industries? Do think there are any valuable shortcuts in the world of Yellow Fats?

broken leon (not really)

There's a great post over at Brand Autopsy about a new book called Broken Windows.

The post splendidly explains and summarises the idea in the book (probably making the book redundant) which is that the broken window theory of crime prevention and policing is also applicable to branding. ie that seemingly small things actually make a huge difference. Not a completely startling thought, but one we should all remember.

So, I'd just finished reading that and saw an example for myself.

I went to Leon for coffee, which is rightly getting rave reviews, it's a fantastic place. Great food, nice design, friendly people. So I went to fill out one of their lovely feedback cards.

I especially liked the way they offered to 'gently update' you via email. Very nice touch. And then I noticed they'd left the apostrophe out of 'here's' and my positivity came to a screaming halt. Which I know is massively, unreasonably pedantic, but that's what happened. The tiniest, smallest, most miniscule of errors, but it made a difference to me (and now I'm blogging about it).

Why does it matter? Firstly, retail is detail, you want people to pay attention to this stuff. Secondly, it's the context. It's on a feedback form. I'm less worried about that kind of thing on a blog (this one for instance is dense with errors) because free-form, unchecked writing is part of the blog-context, but a feedback form is something that should be checked and rechecked and rechecked.

Or am I just being an arse? Probably.

Anyway, read the Brand Autopsy post, it's very good.

good rules

Google's Top Ten Rules for working.

Which reminds me - top ten things aren't used enough by agencies etc when presenting. People love them, and they're the perfect structure for things like debriefs, but I don't think I've ever seen a debrief that just said - Top Ten Things To Remember From This Research.

These are good rules from Kodak too - exactly what they should be doing. Shouldn't every brand offer ten top tips for good ways of using their product.

the love of numbers

Since I became 'an author' I've really started to understand people's really personal obsession with things like tracking.

You get very little feedback on what's actually happening to your book (is anyone buying it? I've still not seen it in a bookshop) so you quickly fall back on the Amazon Sales Rank. Which is an indication of how well you're doing, but like most tracking, is at best a distant surrogate for actual achievement and is poorly understood. No-one really seems to know how Sales Rank is calculated, though various people have attempted to correlate sales with ranking and work out how many books you need to sell to get to a certain postion - but all that data is for Amazon US.

All I know is my sales rank was in the 16,000s for ages, then on the 8th it went to 2555, then on the 9th it was 1351 for a bit and then went up to 653, then on the 10th it was 1559 and now it's 7226. Not that I'm checking it every 5 minutes or anything.

I'll never disregard the importance of tracking again - you can get very invested in surrogate numbers.

authentic

Andy's appearance on Thinking Allowed (see below) was about things like 'Authenticity' and politicians, with particular reference to Boris Johnson. At the same time I was reading Interface by Neal Stephenson and found this quote about TV and authenticity. It's from a speech by a character who makes campaign commercials for politicians:

"Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average 8-year old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddam film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they’ll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they’ll crucify you.”

(Obviously I'd like to dissociate myself from opinions about American's being undereducated and lazy.)

I think this is why so much TV advertising rings false. People who tend to make bad commercials don't really understand that there are so many nuances and so much attention to detail required to make a piece of film convincing, especially when it's as densely packed as a TV ad. And people's understanding of its 'truth' or otherwise isn't at an intellectual level - it's certainly not at a level they can articulate in research - it's just something they feel because they've internalised so much of the grammer and conventions of TV.

hello future

Months and months ago I foolishly agreed to speak at the IPA Strategy group conference.

(I imagine there's something there to promote the conference but since I'm not a member of the IPA I can't get in to see. How dumb.)

The conference is all about how communications strategy will have changed by 2015. They originally wanted me to talk about demographics and cultural change and how anglo-saxon or not the world will be by then, but since that seems to require actual knowledge and work I said I couldn't do that.

Instead I've offered to talk about how planning practise might change, what tools we'll be using, what skills we'll need, where we might be working, what life as a planner might be like. Obviously, I have no idea about this either. But I've found these three illustrations of where planning life might be going. And I'm going to post some speculations on here. If anyone has anything to chuck in, I'd love to hear it.

My first thought is that blogging (or whatever it evolves into) is going to be a core planning skill very soon. I think I'd be very reluctant to hire anyone who didn't have a blog. (If I was hiring. And I'm not so don't ask.) It teaches you all sorts of good stuff - precis, collaboration, generousity. And it's a really useful communications skill for the kind of distributed businesses we're all likely to be living in.

 

account planning brands
advertising

fun with maps

Been thinking a lot about Mind Mapping recently. Partly because it's been a popular meme. Started by Jeremy Deller winning the Turner Prize.

But then picked up by journalists very quickly, because they're always looking for ways to add something visual to dry, complex stories. And MindMaps do it very well.

So here's the Times explaining relationships inside the Labour Party:

And here's the FT trying to make an engaging visual out of the broadcasting industry:

My favourite MindMapping tool is Inspiration. They think about the learning needs of kids and I find that anything designed for kids works well with advertising people. (Kidpix is a great example. Remember KidPix? - used to be much better than PowerPoint).

I use Inspiration for thinking and presenting. And it's great for making a brainstorming appear productive.

And I've just downloaded The Brain and started playing with that. Looks interesting, if a little high-powered.

There's a great resource here which links to all kinds of thinking tools like these.

And over at City Of Sound, there's a great post about mapping music. Fascinating stuff.