one part truth, two parts mixer

Not cool

2009-12-31T16:13:00+00:00

In this day and age I'm really not happy about receiving messages like this (23 hours and 20 minutes after making a purchase):

"Regrettably we must inform you that the item that you ordered with us is no longer available. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and would explain that due to the sale there has been a very high demand for this particular item. Our website only updates once every 24 hours which means that some items that have sold out may still appear online."

Our website only updates every 24 hours?!? Bad Browns.

Something borrowed

2009-12-30T01:36:37+00:00

Over the next few days I suspect you will be subjected random things I saw in Mumbai as I sort through my India photos (of which there aren't many, my trip being more a whirlwind tour of the homes of friends and family by taxi rather than traveller's wander on foot). These may or may not be interesting.Who knows.

Vodafone offering the equivalent of Orange Wednesdays:

When I was working on PruHealth we ran a regional campaign in London, and I always felt that they should re-run it in other areas as a cost-effective readymade campaign. I like the idea of reusing stuff that works on people who haven't seen it before. Not anything new I guess, but a mental note to keep my eyes peeled for the sort of stuff that can be transposed.

A role by any other name

2009-12-29T20:09:18+00:00

Random bit of information from India part 1: I discovered that two of Bollywood's biggest actors have 'lucky character names'. Salman Khan is 'Prem' in loads of his films and Shah Rukh often goes by the moniker 'Rahul'. Apparently they do this because these are the characters who made them famous, but it's a bit like Tom Cruise being called Maverick in every movie that he does. I guess Bollywood films are more vehicles for actors than serious opportunities to act so it's not that weird.

On the topic of Bollywood, it's also weird that old dudes like Aamir Khan are still playing college students. I also saw Kareena Kapoor in CST Airport, she was very unassuming.

All quiet on the blog front

2009-12-13T12:58:00+00:00

I'll be here for the next two weeks:

I love the power of photos to distort. The Mumbai I visit looks nothing like that. And yes, that haze is smog. Lovely.

The magic number

2009-12-10T09:01:00+00:00

The only good thing about being ill is that you get to finally catch up with all that stuff you've meant to read. Came across this in last month's Wired. Humour me and play along...

Think of a number.

Double it.

Add 12.

Divide it by 2.

Subtract the original number.

What's the number you've got? 6? I thought so.

I remember stuff like that from the playground. But it still has the capacity to make me smile. Simple magic and reason tricks, things that delight, equations that equal 'boobless' on calcuators - need to find a place for these in my adult life. But I always thought that 3 was the magic number?

Linked gameworlds

2009-12-09T13:31:30+00:00

I realise that Johnny meant this as a joke:

But, why not? If there is one Zynga universe in which you have one wallet but lots of different ways of earning cash (via different games), are people more likely to play two games? They currently just try and spam you into doing it. I must admit here, that I am mildy addicted to Farmville. I find a Cyworld/Habbo-like pleasure in my little farm. Yes, I'm sad. You never have to speak to me again.

Carrots

2009-12-09T11:42:00+00:00

I was discussing school trips with Mellie the other day, and a funny thing struck me about the school trips at my secondary school, Latymer. Let me list out the ones I can remember:

Latin - Florence, Rome, Sorrento
Art - rotating between Bilbao and New York/Washington
Geography - Iceland
RE - Israel
PE - Barbados (?!?)
Media Studies - Hollywood (started after I'd left, or else I blatantly would have done Media Studies A-level)

History may have gone to Normandy, I can't remember. It strikes me that there is more incentive to do the leftfield, less academic subjects. I'm not really sure what the reasoning is behind this. Studying classic subjects is reward in itself? If you didn't do Media Studies at A-level, you'll probably get a place at a better university and therefore probably do better in life, so who needs a trip to LA when you're 17? Although I'm not sure students think like that.

Which got me thinking, that if we want kids to take up science and maths shouldn't we making them more attractive options? I'm not just saying throw a trip to Brazil into the curriculum (although it couldn't hurt), and I realise a straw poll of one, slightly odd school is not going to back anything up, but shouldn't the classical faculties look at offering, ahem, bribes of some sort. They might be the straw that gets an able but multi-talented student to choose maths over PE.

Model making

2009-12-07T17:30:00+00:00

Finally catching up with my RSS. I have been doing a lot of 'mark all as read', but obviously not for today and tomorrow, where I found this gem (funny how 1,000+ unread posts makes you evaluate which blogs you really like). Amazing papercraft heads by Eric Testroete:

A revolution

2009-12-06T18:01:00+00:00

I finally made it down to the SHOWstudio exhibition at Somerset House (it ends on the 20 December). Fashion exhibitions are generally a bit weird, because a gallery isn't necessarily the best place to experience fashion - it's not a static medium and means less once removed from humans, but... SHOWstudio are one of the most interesting conceptual forces in fashion, and the exhibition raised some interesting bits and pieces. One of the key things about SHOWstudio is that they demystify the creative process by making it visible.

I loved the 'Banquet' project, a 'lavish fashion performance, based around a twenty-three course banquet cooked by ... Heston Blumenthal'. While it was being shot, viewers could see live footage each plate setting from directly above and hear audio from hidden mics - and then try and guess who was round for dinner. For the magazine (W) that commissioned it was a set of reportage shots by Nick Knight (see image below), but I love the game-like aspect created while the shoot was going on. The viewers of the live footage must have been the first to pick up the magazine when it hit the stands in order to find out who was involved (amongst others, Aimee Mullins, Dita von Teese, Liberty Ross and NOKI).

Cheeky course from 'Banquet', Heston Blumenthal/Ed Griffiths, 2004

I'd never come across the Design_Download project before, but it's brilliant - but also for people who are more talented with the sewing machine than me. Through the project you can download patterns by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Gareth Pugh and Junya Watanabe. Those who have made their own versions can send in photos which are posted on the SHOWstudio website. Very cool.

Casting reminded me a bit of the Liberty window display that they did a couple of years ago. It's a nice way to get people involved in the exhibition, have a reason to check out the SHOWstudio website (all the pictures are posted) and have the chance to appear in a live shoot as part of the exhibition.

Any quoted bits are from exhibition catalogue

Red herring?

2009-12-05T13:58:57+00:00

I would be surprised if you haven't heard the words 'behavioural economics' banded about over the last six months. Rory Sutherland has made it the cornerstone of his IPA presidency, and with Thaler and Sunstein the writers du jour, it is undeniably the hot topic.

I went to 44 Club talk back in June where Sutherland and Matthew Taylor from the RSA introduced behavioural theory and it's implications for advertising. I remember being massively impressed and incredibly excited by the possibility, and have kept an eye on the project as it evolves.

On Wednesday night, the 44 Club held another event, billed as examples of practical application of the theory. I have mixed feelings about the night. One one hand I came away feeling that behavioural economics is a fancy name for best practice advertising thinking (that is already going on), and on the other, armed with some interesting examples of human nature. For example, one of the practical examples of choice architecture is that choice and availability has more of an impact on preference than taste, a fact that is the driving force behind brands wanting to be the shelf of every supermarket in the land, but not a particularly new thought. Some of the advice was 'don't rip people off because they won't come back' and see people as smart, not stupid, i.e. respect the fact that they just bought something 'because I did...' - things that we as an industry should never be doing anyway.

Sutherland feels that behavioural economics is so timely because as an industry the time we spend marketing things with a relatively low behavioural element (FMCGs) is falling, and we are increasingly being asked to step up to challenges with a high behavioural element, for example, getting people to switch to Streetcar.

While I realise he wasn't being completely serious, in part of Sutherland's set up he enthused about how behavioural economics could provide our industry with a set of impressive jargon (this did spring to mind). Maybe I'm just young and naïve, but shouldn't we be looking for new ways to genuinely understand people and what influences decisions rather than a rationale to impress our clients with?

Anyway, the key take out was probably that context is more powerful than preference. And also that as a species we're bloody good at post-rationalising things. The likely consequence of a decision has little bearing on what decision we make, i.e. we don't act rationally, but we use rational reasons to justify our actions in hindsight. Isn't that part of the role of advertising, to provide the rational reason as to why we bought/did something?

As I said before there was some stuff that I liked/found useful:

That it might be a better idea to study the market/competition in detail rather than knowing your brand inside out because that's how consumers see it
Teens eat at Pizza Hut, etc, because they know what's going to happen and therefore avoid embarrassment
That the power of massive brands such as Ford, M&S is actually a license to innovate. Gave the sad example that Britain has 9% of Europe's population but eats 50% (?) of its ready meals, which was down to M&S offering them and making it acceptable
The idea that we should be challenging metrics (again, something that we should be doing anyway). I liked the idea that trains are being made more punctual because that's what customer research says, but things like wi-fi aren't considered because noone says it

A lot of the examples being given fall under the umbrella of product development and design, i.e. making forms easier to fill in, or making the last pills of a course of antibiotics blue so that patients finish it ("take the 4 white ones, followed by the 3 blue ones"). Weren't advertisers traditionally more involved with NPD back in the day? The ideas of branded utility/service marketing show that we are headed back that way.

It's beginning to feel that behavioural economics might just be a neat wrapper for the theory and practice that already makes good advertising, and that we will just be hearing the same speech in various guises over the coming year. This may be an unfair criticism at this early point in the IPA's exploration into the theory - the IPA's BETT (Beahvioural Economics Think Tank) is planning to work on some live briefs over the next two years - but I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed. I hope I'm proven wrong.

In the meantime, the IPA have made a PDF of their thinking up to date, which will bring you up to speed with where BETT are up to in their thinking: Download BE_short_FINAL_Animated