@markcridge \ muck and brass

Footprint

2011-08-23T16:40:02+01:00

I love fresh Orange Juice. The fresher the better. Whilst I don’t go as far as squeezing my own oranges every morning along with a warm croissant I can easily get through a carton a day, the smooth version of course not the one with the bits in it.

It has however been playing on my mind recently that shifting all that heavy liquid around the world in planes can’t be the smartest thing to do. I wasn’t worried about it as such, more a nagging itch at the back of my brain suggesting that something wasn’t quite right.

So when I was confronted with a big black footprint on the side of my last purchase it gave me a bit of a kick up the proverbial. There in unequivocal language I learned that each glass of my lovely orange nectar was producing around 400g of carbon emissions per serving. That’s at least a whopping 1.6kg per carton, more than it’s own weight in emissions every single time.

I don’t know about you but that sounds like a shockingly large amount, especially if at my current rate of consumption I’m kicking out about a third of a tonne of carbon a year just for a sweet treat with breakfast.

Of course I have other choices. The label helpfully pointed out that by moving to the ‘from concentrate juice’ I could reduce things down to more manageable 150g per serving. Let’s be honest though, it’s just not the same, too bitter and syrupy. Instead perhaps I should consider switching to the delights of pressed English Apple juice, freely available, just as tasty and surely not as heavy an impact. Or of course if I could show a little more willpower I could just drink a little bit less.

This time around to my modest shame after pausing for thought in the checkout queue I still went ahead and bought the fresh stuff. When faced with the same choice again in the future, I’m pretty sure I’ll select an alternative. The question is will I have the willpower to act?

Our imperative has moved from selling more stuff to more people, which was pretty much the lot of indiscriminate broadcast media, to selling more stuff to the right people through careful targeting and digital media. The challenge today is sell a lot less stuff to just the right people and that will involve a lot more than just providing a lower impact alternative further down the aisle.

I’d like nothing more than to believe that all we need to do is provide enough information to let people make the smarter choice, however from my own behaviour even when presented with the facts it is clear that consumer choice alone won’t be enough.

At some point we need to recognise that our industry does not play a passive role. At some point we need to make our own individual choices about which products we help to advertise. At some point we need to choose to sell a bit less.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

Still fun

2011-05-27T21:53:27+01:00

We’ve moved office recently. Quite a big move for us - all the way from sunny Shoreditch to a perch high above deepest adland. They say a change is as good as a rest, an opportunity to refresh and get your energy back and that has certainly been the case for us so far as we discover the strange new restaurants and cafes of ‘Upper Noho’

We moved the same week that the lovely chaps from Creative Social were hosting an evening entitled ‘The Internet Used to be Fun, What Happened?’ I had hoped to go along, unfortunately I got caught up in my usual diet of spreadsheets, strategy documents and forecasts – the irony was not lost on me.

So whilst I could not be there in person, it did at least cause me to stop and consider the proposition. This question obviously came served with a healthy dollop of sarcasm, but also a touch of melancholy, a pining for paradise lost.

As the internet has gone from the secret sauce on the side to the main course, the expectations of what it can deliver have rightfully increased and come to be respected. Those involved in producing it have adopted an air of increased professionalism and competency because frankly the stakes are undoubtedly higher than they ever have been.

More investment comes with more expectation of higher returns and more substantial impacts. Failure is less tolerated. Our desire to always be in Beta can become stifled by the need for things to work straight out of the box first time.

The search for people who can make this happen ensures that the competition for talent continues to be fiercely contested, which can put the handbrake on the pace of change as we scramble around trying to hold on to people rather than pushing forward.

A maverick attitude around digital can be harder to maintain, but whilst it may not be the Wild West anymore, there are still ample frontiers out there to be explored.

Being the centre of attention comes with disproportionate leverage, the ability to make things happen and attract investment. Rather than slow the march of digital progress this odd moment we are all in is likely to prove to have been a tipping point into a period of accelerated change, where we can actually get things done.

Ambitions are there to be achieved. Outcomes are there to be delivered.

The trick is to do all of this without losing our sense of humor along the way!

It’s incumbent on all of us now to not get bogged down in the complexities of making everything work together. Its time to get the Jesters hat back on, strike up a smile and start having fun again.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

America twice

2011-04-09T16:20:02+01:00

I’ve been on the road a bit too much recently and my travels have taken me to America twice in the past month.

Sadly I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend the geek-fest that is SXSW, however I did manage two trips that partly made up for that missed opportunity. The first was to the West Coast to spend a few days visiting Facebook, the second to the East Coast where as part of the trip we visited the MIT Media Lab.
Both organizations use innovation to drive everything that they do. How they go about harnessing this creative spark is quite different in each case.

Facebook surprised me. It’s rare to find a company, especially one with such a high-profile that maintains such a clear and dedicated focus. What they tried to convince us was that the day Facebook starts to hire ad-agency creatives is the day they will have failed in their mission. Instead they harness the collective efforts of just over 2,000 people most of whom are engineers, in a process of iteration, experimentation and just plain trying things out. This effort is channeled towards improving and developing their platform rather than worrying about what ends up on the platform itself.

Their innovation was focused and purposeful. It has clear direction and well articulated goals.
MIT Media Lab on the other hand is much more freeform. The same level of dedication, intellectualism and culture of experimentation, but comfortable to leave the end result as a ‘what if?’ Experimentation is valued in its own right, as you might expect from an academic environment. Doing and making is valued above all else. Yet there is no embarrassment in talking about the potential for commercialisation of their ideas should that be possible.

Their process of innovation is the point of the exercise. Dispersed and open, used to find out the question rather than just provide an answer.

As agencies we often seek to place innovation on a pedestal. Innovation is the secret-sauce. Innovation is what makes the difference, what makes us stand out from the crowd. All ideas will benefit from a sprinkling of innovation pixie dust. In most cases how agencies harness innovation is in addition to what we do day-to-day.

In the case of Facebook and MIT, innovation is what they actually do. In order to maintain that focus and to ensure the innovation is actually effective they have to choose to not to do the other things. They both recognise that innovation can’t exist as a peripheral activity, its not there to make them look good or make up for banality elsewhere.

Innovation is wasted as a discrete little package, it thrives when baked-in to everything we do.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

When is enough, enough?

2011-02-10T11:21:11+00:00

(Image by Chris Jordan)

How do you sell the idea of enough?

I don’t mean more, but enough. Just enough. Enough to be happy with, enough to be getting on with. Enough to build a business around, that might be still be here in say 40 or 50 years from now.

Advertising is used to talking about if not the best, then certainly better. We’re used to demanding the best, expecting the best, not settling for less. Enough doesn’t usually feel enough. It’s not quite the full article, not everything we might need, not everything we could possibly want.

In their book The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett pose a challenge, “Having come to the end of what higher material living standards can offer us, we are the first generation to have to find other ways of improving real quality of life.”

More isn’t making us anymore happy. Unlimited choice doesn’t make us feel any more individual. At some point we have to ask when is enough actually enough?

This is a tough question for a business that is more comfortable playing on the positive and accentuating the superior.

Umair Haque in his new book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, suggests ”In a world where anyone can make, market, and retail 10 billion kinds of jeans, socks, and T-shirts almost instantaneously, the question becomes: what is most worth producing in the first place?”

Rather than wasting our talents on getting one product chosen over another, we might be better off using these skills to better decide which products actually get made in the first place.

Right for me, feels like it should be enough for anyone, especially for any marketer coming to terms with margin pressures, resource scarcity and competition from all sides. So why aren’t more companies taking this approach?

Enough is fine for MUJI who don’t want to lure customers into believing that ‘this is best’ or ‘I must have this’. Patagonia will happily turn you away from the till by asking ‘do you really need this?’

Up until recently for most it wasn’t really possible to know how much was enough. They had no idea who was buying what, when or where. But with all kinds of data from all kinds of behaviour, matching up just the right goods to just the right needs should mean just enough for everybody.

Being so tightly woven into the fabric of our clients businesses should be pretty attractive for agencies of all sorts.

Flexing creative muscle to shift exactly what’s wanted rather than what we need to shift should be less wasteful and create more satisfaction all round, and hopefully be more lucrative as well.

Or at the very least just lucrative enough.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

Are digital agencies the new dinosaurs?

2011-02-05T14:19:01+00:00

(Image from geekologie)

This is my response when asked the question ‘Are digital agencies the new dinosaurs?’ in Campaign Magazine. As you might imagine I didn't exactly agree;

"Any agency of any shape, size or sensibility that fails to adapt to the requirements of the modern marketing age will by definition become a dinosaur. This applies as equally to digital agencies as it does to the Tyranosaurs and Brontosaurs of a more traditional bent.

The fact is that as all media has become digital, and increasingly social, the main requirement of any agency has been to expand their knowledge and insight across the full extent what is possible.

It’s less about knowing the specifics of one platform over another, rather better to understand which platform, channel or technique is relevant at that point in time and crucially knowing how best to utilise it to extend a relevant and engaging experience between brands and their consumers across all media.

This is something in my limited experience I’ve found digital agencies are particularly open-minded to. That said this is more a defining characteristic of what it means to be a modern agency, rather than digital having any particular exclusivity to this skill. This is certainly borne out by the rapidity with which the dinosaurs of the traditional world continue to hoover up digital talent!

The effect this has on digital agencies is two-fold. Firstly, agencies such as ours own become increasingly broad-minded and create work across the full gamut of media. Secondly, other digital agencies become increasingly specialised around a particular aspect of one technology or channel. Neither approach is particularly old-fashioned, and in both cases you’ll find agencies very much at the cutting edge of what is possible – hardly criteria which qualify them as potential dinosaurs.

So in summary, digital agencies are not the new dinosaurs. Instead agencies of all sorts are modernizing at the same time as some digital specialists become more adept in a series of niche endeavours."