Talent imitates, genius steals

What Do Advertising Agencies Do?

2012-01-13T17:39:25+00:00

I wrote this Viewpoint thing for the current issue of the ONECLUB magazine.

You Download What Do Advertising Agencies Do? TIGS as a convenient portable document for Kindle viewing, perhaps.

Or read it here>

VIEWPOINT / FARIS YAKOB

WHAT DO ADVERTISING AGENCIES DO?

Outside of the industry, it is little recognized that advertising agencies do not actually make television commercials—this is outsourced to production companies.

Agencies germinate, direct and manage the processes of advertising production.

However, the question is more fundamental than what do they do, but rather, what are advertising agencies for?

In 1975 Theodore Levitt wrote one of the classic texts of marketing. “Marketing Myopia” is the “quintessential big hit HBR piece”, to quote a later article about it from the self-same Harvard Business Review.

In it, Levitt points out that every industry was once a growth industry but that never seems to last, not because the market is saturated but rather because companies misinterpret the fundamental question:

“What business are you in?”

One of his key examples is the American railroads—once a mighty growth industry, it declined steeply because it failed to recognize the threat presented by the emergence and eventual affordability of cars and what was once described as:

“100 ton tubes of metal moving smoothly through the air 20,000 feet above the earth, loaded with 100 sane and solid citizens casuallydrinking martinis.”

The railroad tycoons thought they were in the business of railroads when they were really in the business of transport—they were myopically product focused instead of being customer focused.

This idea has become an adage of marketing, aphoristically captured by Levitt himself in a later article:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

It’s the same logic that might have prevented Kodak from its ignominious fall from grace. Kodak wasn’t in the “film” business that digital cameras abruptly decimated, it was in the business of capturing memories—it just didn’t realize until [possibly] too late.

Advertising agencies “make” advertisements and this is a surprisingly healthy business considering how often its demise has been trumpeted.

Indeed, television advertising in the USA grew 9.7% in 2010 according to eMarketer, bouncing back after the recession, and growth is projected to continue.

Despite time-shifting ad-skipping digital video recorders, the death of the 30-second spot has been greatly exaggerated.

That said, it’s important to remember that advertising is a drill, not a hole.

Advertising is a means, not an end, a lever designed to effect consumer behavior leading people to pay price premiums and buy more things and more often, due to the dimly understood interactions of persuasive symbols and human cognitive, social and economic behavior.

Thus, should better, more efficient, more effective solutions to the business problem of marketing products to the masses manifest, companies would be well advised to pursue them.

Advertising agencies then, either make advertising, which is a service that can be displaced, or they help corporations solve business problems with creativity, which will remain an ongoing need as long as there are corporations, but puts “advertising” agencies into a much larger competitive set alongside other business consultants, albeit with a specific competitive advantage of being able to effectively house and manage commercially creative people. Large management consultancies struggle with this for the same reason - the environment isn't usually very palatable to them.

The business of advertising remains robust for now but the business of ideas that drive business growth is evergreen.

The industry is bifurcating along these lines.

It’s a good idea to work out which business you want to be in and act accordingly.

Pure play advertising agencies should defend and leverage their core competencies inside the extant market.

Agencies that want to explore the possibilities outside this definition of the category must be willing to invest in developing new competencies to service emerging needs, increasingly at the intersection of technology and storytelling.

This blurriness is perhaps best evidenced by The One Club awarding Nike+ as one of the Best Campaigns of the Digital Decade despite, or because of the fact that it isn’t a campaign.

A technology driven product/ service extension attracts and earns attention for a brand, solving a problem with something other than “advertising.”

Both strategic routes are sensible to consider, depending on an honest analysis of the business and its strengths and assets, including its key and often overlooked intangible asset, the agency brand.

The danger comes from attempting to be all things to all customers—the essence of strategy is trade-offs, since finite resource requires finite offerings.

Worse than not making decisions is falling symptom to the “Shirky Principle”—an idea established by Clay Shirky in his book, Cognitive Surplus, and elevated to the status of principle by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired.

Shirky points out that

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Rather than solving clients’ problems, agencies that succumb to the principle spend their energies trying to maintain that the world of business and media hasn’t changed, or attempting to stymie symptoms of the change when they encounter it.

As with any corporate strategy, the road ahead for advertising depends on knowing what business you are really in and acting accordingly.

Free Social Listening Tools

2012-01-12T17:31:20+00:00

Social Listening Tools

View more presentations from rosie siman

Very useful little deck on free social listenting tools that some of my work family contributed to.

Enjoy.

When To Take My Name...

2012-01-11T14:48:43+00:00

Leo Burnett "When to take my name off the door" from Lobo on Vimeo.

...off the door.

Lovely.

---------------

December 1, 1967.

'When to take my name off the door'

"Somewhere along the line, after I’m finally off the premises, you – or your successors – may want to take my name off the premises, too.

You may want to call yourselves " Twain, Rogers, Sawyer and Finn, Inc."….. or "Ajax Advertising" or something.

That will certainly be OK with me – if it’s good for you.

But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.

That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising – our kind of advertising.

When you forget that the sheer fun of ad making and the lift you get out of it – the creative climate of the place – should be as important as money to the very special breed of writers and artists and business professionals who compose this company of ours – and make it tick.

When you lose that restless feeling that nothing you do is ever quite good enough.

When you lose your itch to the job well for it’s sake – regardless of the client, or money, or the effort it takes.

When you lose your passion for thoroughness…you hatred of loose ends.

When you stop reaching the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produce the fresh, the memorable and the believable effect.

When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is about.

When you are no longer what Thoreau called "a corporation with a conscience" – which means to me, a corporation of conscientious men and women.

When you begin to compromise your integrity – which has always been the heart’s blood – the very guts of this agency.

When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism – for the sake of a fast buck.

When you show the slightest sign of crudeness, inappropriateness or smart –aleckness – and you lose that subtle sense of the fitness of things.

When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big - rather that good, hard, wonderful work.

When your outlook narrows down to the number of windows – from zero to five – in the walls of your office.

When you lose your humility and become big-short wisenheimers…. a little bit too big for your boots.

When the apples come down to being just apples for eating (or for polishing) – no longer part of our tone or personality.

When you disprove of something, and start tearing the hell out of the man who did it rather than the work itself.

When you stop building on strong and vital ideas, and start a routine production line.

When you start believing that, in the interest of efficiency, a creative spirit and the urge to create can be delegated and administrated, and forget that they can only be nurtured, stimulated, and inspired.

When you start giving lip service to this being a "creative agency" and stop really being one.

Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man – the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big pencils – or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man – and thank God for him – has made the agency we now have – possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of for a moment - one of those hot, unreachable stars.

THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door. And by golly, it will be taken off the door. Even if have to materialize long enough some night to rub it out myself - on every one of our floors. And before I DE-materialize again, I will paint out that star-reaching symbol too. And burn all the stationary. Perhaps tear up a few ads in passing.

And throw every god-damned apple down the elevator shafts.

You just won’t know the place, the next morning. You’ll have to find another name."

Emotional Transmissions [Awesome Redux]

2011-12-21T14:14:25+00:00

My mate Jason runs the excellent and very useful Socialfresh.com and I just wrote this thing for them.

I originally thought I was just going to transcribe The Importance of Being Awesome Mashable talk, but as I wrote it became slightly different, focused more specifically on the nature of awesomeness, in content sharing terms.

I especially like the line from Dr Berger [the scientist who did the study that showed that awesomeness was the biggest driver of sharing from NYTimes.com] that unpacks awesomeness, partially, as disrupted expectations about the world -

[expectancy violations seem to trigger both attention and memory as our mental model of the world is forced to edit itself - see this post for more on that]

- and highlights the inherent relationship between emotion and communication:

"Emotion in general leads to transmission"

which is a rather lovely thought to leave you with for the festive season.

So - [after you've been over to SocialFresh to read the whole piece, of course] go have some emotions and tell people about them.

Ho Ho Ho.

The Taste of Branding

2011-12-05T18:19:06+00:00

I tweeted this a week or 2 ago and a bunch of people responded on Twitter saying that it had happened to them.

And then Coca-Cola decided to pull the cans citing consumer confusion and that.

All well and good in the age of very low latency consumer feedback, especially about iconic packaging.

But I didn't notice, until my mate Matt pinged it to me, that part of the consumer issue with the cans was not that they were confusing it with Diet Coke but that COKE CLASSIC TASTED DIFFERENT IN WHITE CANS.

This WSJ article mentions it in passing, The Atlantic calls it out a little more:

consumers "felt that regular Coke tasted different in the white cans".

Coke officials deny tweaking the taste, and say they only changed the can.

But, see, it's not that consumers are confused in this scenario, rather that the understanding of what 'taste' actually is, is - because when you change the can too much, you change the taste.

Taste happens in the mind, so it's more complex than just chemicals - it happens at the intersection of lots of different things, including of course the chemicals and your tongue, but also including less obvious things, like expectation [you will love this] and concepts of value [this wine is very expensive] and where you are [anchoring/priming] and memories associated with it and such.

Here's a post I wrote a few years back about this [it was anchored to a stealth focus group ad where consumers claimed taste preference for diamond shape shreddies, as opposed to square ones...]:

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It illustrates the fact, that we intuitively know but that classical economics refuses to accept, that we aren't rational beings. We make decisions that are seemingly irrational, in the same way over and over again, because of how our brains are hardwired: anchors and priming, emotions and social context all interact to change how we choose.

One of the things he highlights is the power of expectation to alter experience. He describes a replication of the famous Coke/Pepsi taste tests, done with the subjects in an MRI to record how their brain is processing the experience of tasting the drinks.

We all know how it works - in blind taste tests, Pepsi usually wins, but when the brands are revealed, people prefer The Real Thing [TM].

And, according the experiment, it's because that the experience of consuming branded sugar water is different - the Coke brand activates different associations in the memory and emotional parts of the brain, which contribute to the consumption experience.

Which means that, when you drink a Coke, a part of what you are tasting is the brand.

As Coca-Cola just found out.

And, in there, somewhere, is the magic bit of good branding.

Or something.

Aggregated Atoms: Little Printer

2011-11-29T15:02:08+00:00

There are a couple of mega trends that have been forming for some time now.

Content aggregation and curation – in a world of infinite content, brands and people need to find ways to become signals in the noise: see http://www.percolate.com
Making ATOMS from BITS – turning digital things into physical things – like the MAKERBOT http://www.makerbot.com/

[UPDATE: Tom sent me a link to this Kickstarter project for a new kind of 3D printer called PrintrBOT.

which reminded me of my two previous posts on 3d printers

New Virtruvians

We, The Makers]

BergLondon have just announced a new combination of the two:

[remember – ideas are new combinations - http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/ideas-are-new-combinations.html among others]

{BergLondon is a charming prototyping and invention shop in London that works with agencies and clients to concept future things.}

It has just announced the Little Printer – an aggregator/ curator that prints you out a personal daily newspaper:

http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

Connected to the Web, Little Printer has wide range of sources available to check on your behalf. We call them “publications”.

Subscribe to your favourites and choose when you’d like them delivered.

Right on time Little Printer gathers everything it needs to prepare a neat little personalised package, printed as soon as you press the button.

You can get deliveries multiple times a day, but we find once or twice works best–like your very own morning or evening newspaper.

The content can be very personal indeed:

The design is crucial to make content consumable:

Graphic design is at the heart of everything Little Printer delivers, making the most of connectivity and print combined. Rendered in crisp black and white these tactile publications take visual cues from traditional halftone lithography and modern pixel art, whether they’re the latest international news or this week’s gossip from friends.

The fusion of technology, design, content distribution and 3D fabrication is an obvious innovation nexus to keep an eye on.

Watch the Little Printer video here.

The Importance of Being Awesome

2011-11-18T13:45:18+00:00

is the name of the talk I gave at the Mashable Media Summit.

It's about how important being awesome is and will be, for media products

[although I'm leaning into a specific, slightly archaic use of the word, when it meant something more akin to terrible

which, itself, meant something a bit different].

They've just posted it and said:

In order to capture the audience’s attention after lunch at the Mashable Media Summit, Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer of MDC Partners’ kbs+p and founding partner of Spies & Assassins, had to be awesome. Yakob is trying to do so at the intersection of technology, business, behavior and culture.

The future, according to Yakob, “belongs to the most awesome because we are in a stage of transition, where human interpersonal networks are going to substitute or supplement commercial broadcast networks.”

From art and copy to arduinos and code, Yakob talks about how and why the most shared and spreadable content in media wins.

[image lovingly lifted from here]

Ideas Having Sex Live ON Stage

2011-11-16T16:01:31+00:00

My mate Peter very kindly invited me to WSJ Idea Market event last night.

Peter just wrote the rather excellent book "Little Bets".

- a book which examines innovation and creativity at a number of very innovative companies and looks to dismantle the myth of big ideas in favor of lots of little bets -

and his fellow panelists were 3 of my favorite writers - in fact all three of them featured in my Ex Libris article a couple of post down.

@StevenBJohnson: author of seminal "Everything Bad is Good For You" and "Where Good Ideas Come From".

@MattWRidley: author of equally seminal "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters", "The Red Queen" and, more recently, "The Rational Optimist".

@JonahLeher: author of "How We Decide"

All of which have studied creativity and innovation in different ways.

In essence, all of them espouse a recombinant view of creativity - ideas are new combinations.

This is why ideas evolve covergently across the globe - certain pre-conditions have to exist [such as intermediate technologies] for ideas to come about.

This is why Ridley says that "Ideas have Sex" and that the key driver of innovation is open exchange - trading, commerce, intermingling.

Johnson points out that all "ideas are works of bricolage".

Lehrer pointed out that cities are drivers of innovation for the same reason - lots of diverse ideas and people are randomly intermingling - Jane Jacob's classic idea.

He also made the point, recently referenced by Seth, that cities don't die but corporations do - the average life span of a Fortune100 company is 42 years.

Leher posits this is because as companies grow innovation per capita drops, whereas it doesn't in cities.

He went on to talk about the defining characteristics of success:

1. GRIT [persistence]

2. Picking the right goals to move persisently toward.

[See his Wired piece here on that]

Peter pointed to the process that Pixar calls "plussing" - getting everyone to share their ideas and progress daily and then letting anyone build on them, or suggest a different direction, using the key improv tenet of 'Yes, And" - which is a way to handle criticism of ideas that doesn't shut people down using negativity.

[Take the idea, agree, and then build]

Their final tips on innovation:

@StevenBJohnson: Expand and diversify your social network - the more, different, non-adjacent to your own knowledge, ideas you come into contact with, the more interesting your ideas can be.

@MattWRidley: Be Open to Exchange - trade ideas, swap stories, look for ways and places to exchange.

@JonahLeher: Take long showers.

This requires a little explanation.

All models of creativity incorporate this 'long shower' - a moment of relaxation where you are not actively thinking about the problem, indicated by increased alpha wave activity, where the EUREKA moment manifests.

In essence, in order to facilitate non-obvious connections within the 'adjacent possible' [within the viable solution space]

- that is to say, ideas -

You put your mind against the problem hard for a while, fill it with everything that might be useful, and then take some time to relax, to NOT think about it, to allow ideas to recombine and thus geminate.

Long showers are often reported to be the locus of insight - also see long walks, or anything else you find relaxing that is not working on the problem.

@PeterSims: Abandom the endless quest for the sasquatch of big ideas, and focus on placing lots of little bets.

Not Valid Unless Signed

2011-11-11T14:03:32+00:00

Te dx technologies of identity

View more presentations from Faris Yakob.

So I did a little talk at TEDx Silicon Alley.

As is usually the case nowadays, we were asked to talk about technology and creativity and that.

The specific brief was unexpected uses of technology.

As I suspected people were mostly talking about widgets and API and so on - all of which is groovy but I wanted to be non-obvious.

So, riffing on a point I've made before, I point out the most important human technology is writing.

It's the only truly pervasive technology - the only one we use inside the operation of our own minds to help us thing, which is a staggering idea.

[For a while I thought we thought only in words, but now I don't.

That school of thought is called Linguistic Determinism.

However it's not entirely true, I don't think, since we do think without articulation, but we find it difficult to articulate those thoughts, for very obvious reasons.

Feelings, for examples, are clearly a kind of thought that doesn't articulate itself linguistically as we experience it.]

Writing was invented, probably a few times in different unrelated places

[this is a cultural form of Covergent Evolution]

but definitely in ancient Mesopotamia

[which means 'between two rivers' and is a toponym for the area of the world between the rivers Tigres and Euphrates, mostly in modern day Iraq, which was the true cradle of modern civilisation, lest we forget]

in about 3500BC.

This form of writing was very simple: marks in clay tablets, known as Cuneiform.

Based on the records we have, it seems likely that it was invented for inventory management - to know how much stuff people had, for trade and taxation purposes.

As soon as it was invented, it created a new problem, the solution to which was the very first unexpected usage of technology.

To whit, they created clay databases, and as soon as you have data you need to be able to authenticate it.

And so signatures were invented.

Signatures were an identity technology that authenticated the writing - originally they looked like the seal thing above - they were rolled into the clay to create a unique pattern.

They rapidly evolved into:

And, 5 and half thousand years later, they are still essentially the same.

It should be understood however that a signature is not the same thing as an autograph.

[The word autograph originally meant anthing written [graph] entirely in your own hand [auto] - but now refers to an artistic interpretation of your signature that does not have the same legal status.

Because, your signature has a legal status.

Your credit card is NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED.

Signatures remain the dominant technology of identity.

In fact, according to a retailer's deal with credit card companies, they are NOT ALLOWED to ask for any other form of ID - because:

Your signature the only form of ID you need - it is a legal form of ID and an anti-fraud mechanism, because signatures are highly stylised and hard to copy.

When I moved to the USA, I noticed something found really odd: they ALWAYS give you your card back before you sign.

In Europe, you sign, they compare your signature to the one of your card to see if it matches.

This helps prevent fraud.

[Now, I realized algorithims are also helping to prevent fraud based on behavioral profiling.]

Regardless, we sign here and no one checks.

Which led me to start the Signature Project.

In essence I sign my credit card slips with different names, or pictures, or whatever, take a picture, and post it to a Tumblr, to highlight this cultural anachromism.

Sometimes I write what I was buying:

Or simple affirmations:

And sometimes just doodles:

You get the idea. You can see lots of them on the site.

Then I talk about identity, about the idea that it's contextually fluid and digitally distributed.

But that, increasingly, your signature is being functionally replaced on the web by your Facebook Connect login - Facebook is an identity broker.

And that it brings all your friends along with you as the social graph.

Upon which graph, you are a node [in Facebook's conception] - but what struck me is how like a fingerprint it looks.

Unlike a fingerprint its dynamic, but it is always completely unique.

Then I started talking about how the internet is allowing us to tap into deployed capital surplus by enabling frictionless informations and transactions.

To whit, we've been renting out our living room on Airbandb - an entirely unexpected use of the internet.

But that this use itself created a subsequent identity problem, just like writing, except this is one of trust.

How can I come to trust a complete stranger and feel comfortable letting them into my home, especially when I'm not there?

But your networked identity provides a solution.

Because on Facebook I can see who you are in totality - across all your friends - and on Linkedin I can see where you work - I'm comfortable enough in your network to trust you.

And if you aren't on there - then I can't.

So we did it and had some very lovely guests to stay and pay.

And, unexpectedly, one of them even sent us a thank you note, in the mail and everything.

Signed at the bottom, to authenticate it, because a postcard, like a credit card, is not valid unless signed.

And then I said thanks.

All in 18 minutes.

Ex Libris...

2011-10-27T18:07:40+01:00

...is the name of a regular feature in the International Journal Of Advertising.

[SIDENOTE: Do you read it? Did you know about it? I'm increasingly keen to try and bridge the gap between the very interesting acadedmic research around advertising and the industry of advertising.

Seems like we could learn a lot from each other.]

They very lovely Professor Stephanie O'Donohoe from The University of Edinburgh reached out and asked me to do one for them and believing as I do that reading is for awesome people, how could I refuse?

The pieces is below in its entirety for convenience - if you grab the pdf you will get a bonus book review by Gareth Kay on Gary V's Thank You Economy.

Download IJA Book_Reviews September 2011 FY

EX LIBRIS

Polonius: What do you read my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

I’ve always wanted a library.

[I’m aware that Ex Libris technically means from the book of, but it can also mean from the library of.]

A library with musty leather bound books and one of those ladders on wheels.

Not Borges’ Babel, just a place to house the bodies of the books I have known and loved.

That’s one of the things I love about books in their original conception – they create their own souvenirs, a discarded carapace of content consumed, bones to be picked over and shared, or given away

[because whenever you lend someone a book, no matter how largely you write your name on the frontispiece, you know, deep down, that you have just given that book away].

To bastardize Philip Larkin, books are where we live, where we come from. As a teenager, your record collection was perhaps a more telling indication of who you are, but as an adult, your books define you, or who you want to be.

This is the gist of this column, I imagine: ask about the books to get directional hints at the mind or the man. Or the practitioner, perhaps more saliently.

What books then would you choose to define you? For the English among you, it’s very like Desert Island Discs; a challenge to represent the inestimable depth and complexity that is you and your subjective aesthetic, in all its glory, in a very small number of cultural referents.

To whit, we should begin, so let’s start with something pretentious.

First up I summon forth what is commonly accepted to be one of most complex of the great works of poetry – The Waste Land by T.S Eliot.

Recently re-released in an excellent iPad edition, Eliot’s post-modern challenge to the reader revels in its obscurity; every line opens up more possibilities and associations, which I have always been smitten by. The idea that a text should create more meanings, not define any absolutely, and allude meta-textually to the culture it grows from, has always been part of how I think about the dense, generative expressions of advertising.

From self-aggrandizing high culture, to high culture wrapped in low: comic books.

So much of my understanding of myth and how myth operates in culture is a function of reading about superheroes.That said, from my bookshelf with delusions of grandeur I offer up the entirety of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

Widely accepted to be one of the greatest comic book series of all time, and one of the lynchpin works that established literary credibility for the genre, its recombinant intermingling of disparate myth and popular culture, and ability to weave multi-stranded narratives that are both personal and alien, remain unparalleled.

[BONUS: Also read Understanding Comics by Scott McLoud, a wonderful exploration of the literary theory of ‘sequential art’ and one of the possible reasons that Scott ended up writing a comic book about the launch of the Google Chrome Browser, which I may have worked on.]

As a literary type person, I also harbored a desire to be great novelist.

Perhaps I still do, but I don’t think I have the right mode for long form fiction, as much as I regard it.

I stand by my favorite novel of all time: Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, ‘alchemical potboiler’, a postmodern psychedelic journey of discovery around the fringes of society, something that inspires the soul to ask questions and peer behind curtains.

[BONUS: Stone Junction also reminds of my favorite novel as a teenager, Lux the Poet by Martin Millar, which I had completely forgotten about until last week, because it is set against a backdrop of the Brixton riots in 1985.]

As I get older I find myself growing into all the clichés and reading more non-fiction, especially popular science. The book that began it all was, I think, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley.

It was this book that reminded me that, at one point, I also wanted to be a geneticist and the legacy of this leaves me very interested in recombinant processes.

Since I have been espousing a combinatorial conception of creativity for some time, I feel I should mention Ideas Are New Combinations by James Webb Young, and then probably Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson for good measure.

My brain has always shunned useful information for trivia, and Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is incredibly long AND has so many beautiful bits of trivia crammed into every page it deserves endless re-reading.

A book that had such a great impact on how I think about the brave new digital world and the people in it that I ended up teaching on the author’s postgraduate course and writing the preface to the Brazilian edition mustn’t be ignored: Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins.

Henry is one of the pre-eminent media theorists of our time, both as fan and academic, and his understanding of participatory culture is required reading for anyone hoping to understand behavior and motivation in communities online.

[Bonus: So are Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I didn’t write the preface to those though.]

Speaking of behavior, in a business built entirely around the hopeful modification of such, nothing delights me more than our recent adoption of behavioral economics as a cause célèbre. My favorite text is Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert, which charmingly reminds us how bad we are at predicting anything, especially what will make us happy.

[Bonus: Also do read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer and my most recent favorite in this general area, Everything is Obvious [Once you Know the Answer] by Duncan Watts]

Whilst we should look outside ourselves for inspiration, we should also be aware of the tradition we operate within.

To that end, the key texts for advertising are numerous but you should be fine with Truth Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel, the only book about planning you need to read, and Ubiquitous Persuaders, by George Parker, a proper history of modern advertising which sparkles with love and hatred in equal measure, and the planning blog that started a lot of other planning blogs, Russell Davies’ excellent We Are As Disappointed as You.

[Bonus: Consumer.ology by Philip Graves will help those of you that suspect all market research is wrong with evidence to support your supposition.]

Finally, the book that has touched me most in recent times, the one that I hear in my head most often when dealing with reality, the one I am most often inclined to send to friends, is called This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace, which I genuinely believe everyone would benefit from reading, and the world would benefit if everyone did.

[Bonus: Also attempt the mountain that is his magnum opus Infinite Jest, if only for the gag about sponsoring the years, which leads to dates like The Year of the Whopper and The Tucks Medicated Pad.]

References:

Ariely, D. (2008) Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York: Harper Collins

Bryson, B. (2003) A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books.

Dodge, J. (1997) Stone Junction, Edinburgh: Rebel Inc.

Eliot, T.S. (1922/2002) The Waste Land and Other Poems, London: Faber & Faber; iPad edition available via http://touchpress.com/titles/thewasteland

Gilbert, D. (2007) Stumbling on Happiness, New York: Vintage

Graves, P. (2010) Consumer.ology: The Market Research Myth, the Truth about Consumer Behaviour and the Psychology of Shopping, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press

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