A few years ago I was fortunate enough to go to our EMEA leadership conference in Berlin. There were a host of amazing speakers, and they were covering some astonishing ground. Everything from AI, through to the global news agenda, and ‘Millennials’. One afternoon I saw two talks that will stick with me forever. One inspiring, and one that missed the mark so spectacularly I left genuinely slack-jawed.

The conference

So, right after lunch we’re sat waiting for a spokesperson from Vice Media to take the stage. Eddy Moretti, chief creative officer at Vice, took to the stage. He spent 45 minutes talking about how todays youth (AKA ‘millennials’) have been misunderstood as being a self-centred, lazy, and uncreative generation. As the company he works for is built upon understanding this generation at an intimate level, it was an awesome talk. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone talk at length about how fragmented and misunderstood this generation was. He got a standing ovation (and there were probably only about 20 ‘millennials’ in an audience of 150).

Next up, a senior figure at a large broadcaster rushed in, having just raced across town from the airport. After a few minutes of composing himself, he began to give a different talk from what was listed in the agenda. Instead talked about the ‘millennial’ generation. It was a shame he wasn’t their for the previous talk. I think he’d have maybe thought twice before he leapt into a 60 minute take down of ‘millennials’. He said we (and it is we, I’m officially a ‘millennial’) were lazy. Work-shy. We have an enlarged sense of entitlement. We have a total lack of care for ‘The Company’. He called us a lost generation that needed spoon-feeding by ‘generation x’ and ‘boomers’.

I had never seen such a perfect demonstration of why the term ‘millennials’ was so useless. Never had it felt so obvious that my generation was almost completely misunderstood.

How had this happened?

Millennials is a confusing term because it tries to apply a socio-demographic definition to a culturally complex generation.

Before I get in too deep, my use of the word ‘culture’ is in reference to the culture that people most associate with. Pre-1960s this would’ve likely been national, religious, or racial. Post-1960s, I believe that people more strongly associated with different types of culture. Punk, Cosplay, Casual. This is a way of defining people that I believe is a more useful definition of who people are, their beliefs, and how people behave. Culture is by and large what helps people to feel like they belong. It shapes their attitudes, and it shapes their behaviours.

What has made things complicated is the internet. Now cultures fire, develop, and transform like synapses in the brain. Every connection leads to new ideas and new understanding. Every new idea contributes to the culture that person belongs to.

The reason the ‘millennial’ generation is so misunderstood is because it is culturally complex. That’s not to say that previous generations weren’t complex, or that they didn’t have cultures. But this generation see more cultures. More cultural symbols. More people. More new ideas. Those all contribute to different attitudes. This is what makes this generation the most culturally complex and difficult to understand. Cultural membership and attitudes are now far greater ways to define how to communicate with someone than their age or salary.

The post-war culture boom

It’s safe to say that those born in the post-war years built the foundations of many of the major businesses and cultural phenomena we know now. Apple, Starbucks, Nike. Rock and roll, video games, drugs. Those foundations effectively birthed popular culture. Before the 1950s culture was mainly used as a term to refer to high or low culture. High culture was high brow. It was classical art, music, theatre, philosophy, and literature. Low culture referred to popular culture; radio, TV, newspapers and magazines, pulp fiction. So everything before the 1960s was an amorphous mess of mainstream, monoculture.

Pre-1950 the global population focused on winning wars, escaping poverty, and preventing financial disasters. The generation of people born in the 1940-50s had what their parents didn’t – opportunity. Opportunity to create things; businesses, or culture. Culture now had more people to drive it, and to create sub-divisions. ‘Boomers’ set our cultural foundations.

Then in the late 1970s, 80s, and the 90s, ‘generation x’ took culture to the next level. Sub-cultures began to develop on the foundations of the ‘parent’ culture. Kraftwerk gave birth to techno. Techno gave birth to acid house. Acid house gave birth to Jungle. Jungle to Drum and Bass. This is just one strand of the cultural impact that one band had. The same happened in film. Literature. Theatre. Art. Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants, but each step up creates new directions. Each direction create new sub-cultures. Before you know it a thousand sub-cultures have been born.

It’s a cultural family tree. This is how punk (a primarily socialist, anti-facist, anti-racist culture) managed to morph into Oi! the soundtrack to the National Front. Different cultures become appropriated, re-appropriated, and developed (or in some cases devolved). This makes understanding ‘generation x’ quite complicated.

Then came the internet.

For many people born after 1980, they won’t remember life without the internet. Even if that oldest memory is of an awful dissonant dial tone. The internet is rocket fuel for culture. Every possible interest group had a forum. Every new trend had a blog dedicated to it. Every new culture had a network. This is where culture becomes accelerated and messy. It enabled people who associated to a particular culture to develop things together, regardless of their socio-demographic. When this happens, culture splinters and births more cultures.

Culture (and the cultural network someone exists within) becomes a part of self-expression. That self-expression shapes attitudes. Attitudes shape behaviour. Behaviour then shapes how people decided what they buy and the brands that they associate with. There’s a reason Vans is a the skateboard kids shoe of choice. Why Lemmy drank Jack Daniels. Why technology entrepreneurs drive Tesla’s. It’s easy to see, but difficult to understand.

“How do we connect better with Millennials?” 

If you were born in 1980, you are now 36 years old. ‘Millennials’ are becoming the primary audience for many organisations, and that will only continue. This presents a challenge if you’re a CMO who’s used socio-demographic audience data for their entire career. It’s human nature to respond to the unknown in one of two ways; learn about it, label it as ‘other’ and disassociate with it. ‘Millennials’ is, for the large part, a dissociative label.

The few organisations that have tried to get a handle on ‘millennials’ have done well. Nike, Apple, American Express. Massive brands, with huge target audiences. Where they’ve found competitive advantage is in understanding people at a cultural level. They have put culture, attitude, and behaviour before age.

So, let’s stop using ‘Millennials’ to describe people who were a certain age. Instead let’s focus on understanding the network of cultures that drive them forwards. If we’re ever going to mean something to people, we have to know more about them than their birthday and salary.

As Craig Stead, a colleague of mine, recently said, “given the data we have access to, it’s better to flip the way we build audiences. We should start from interest data, and then layer on socio-demographic and behavioural data”. Everything is there, right in front of us, we just need to flip how we think about things.

We have more cultural data than we’ve ever had before. The pictures I post. The forums I contribute to. The messages that I tweet. The films that I rate. The friends that I have. Everything that we do online is an sign of the culture that we are part of.

If we can look beyond socio-demographics, we can begin to understand culture. If we can understand it, we can contribute to it and become part of it. That’s how you build a brand.

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

Every agency loves the concept of ‘the big idea’. It feels like the original Pokemon Go. Planners, suits, and creatives all hunting it down, with sketch pads and PowerPoint as their tools. These rare ideas are seen as a route to brand fame. Brand fame is important because famous brands are memorable. People are more likely to buy something if they remember it.

The logic is pretty simple.

How often is a ‘big idea’ an actual Big Idea, though? Most of the ‘big ideas’ I’ve worked on, seen, or read about are often just a clever idea executed well, in a suitable channel. The insight is usually based on mainstream culture (and usually called a ‘universal human truth’), and the story is told well.

How do they make brands famous though? Fame is about being known by many people. You can be famous for good reasons. Bad reasons. You can have sustained fame. 15 minutes of fame. Presumably, most marketers want to be famous for good reasons, for a sustained amount of time. They want to mean something to people.

In my experience, often, marketers equate fame with exposure. Impressions. Eyeballs.

“It’s a killer ‘big idea’, we just need people to see it and it’ll take off like a rocket.”

So we whack an enormous media budget behind the campaign, and make sure it’s as visible as possible. As many people need to see this as we can afford. The X-Factor final, the Olympics, the Superbowl. Next year; Great British Bake Off. These are all opportunities to create brand fame.

Sometimes this works. But almost all the time, it doesn’t. Even more rarely does that ‘big idea’ create sustained brand fame.

There are few ‘universal human truths’

I spent much of my early career being asked by clients to write a strategy that would send some content ‘viral’. By viral, they meant famous online. Shared by millions. After a few requests like that, I thought I should try to learn a bit more about what made things famous online. I studied network science, picked apart case studies, and tinkered with my clients campaigns.

I figured something out, most viral ideas had one of two things. They had a huge media budget (Old Spice), or they’d started in a small network of friends, and then spread from friend to friend (ALS Challenge). Those that had a massive media budget were usually shocking or entertaining. Those that spread from friend to friend usually had an amazing subcultural insight. What’s interesting is when you look at the difference in results of these two types of campaign. Huge media budget famous usually generates a fair bit of ‘earned’ media – shares and word of mouth – but little in the way of sales. Networked, culturally resonant famous often generates sustainable actual impact.

“I was there at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in ’76”

There’s a decent analogy for explaining the differences between these two – musical artists. Manufactured pop artists often produce a series of hit singles, and maybe a couple of albums. They gain tabloid fame, and produce singles that fit within a meticulously planned framework. Through marketing and media spend, they buy their fame.

Grassroots artists tend to toil away for years and years, with a loyal fanbase, but not much more. One day a spark of magic happens and they ‘crossover’ into the mainstream, and become famous. They ‘earn’ their fame through authenticity and cultural resonance. That fame tends to be much longer lasting.

What I think many brands desire is cultural resonance that results in a mainstream ‘crossover’. They want to be authentic. They want to have a loyal fanbase. To steal from the Stone Roses, they wanna be adored.

Grassroots artists don’t begin with a mainstream audience in mind. They don’t start with multi-million pound media budgets. They definitely don’t start with focus groups. They start making stuff that they think is culturally important. They make things that they think contribute to their culture. They tell actual stories, and create things that make people feel something. They don’t do this for everyone though, they do this for themselves and people like them. They do it for their cultural network.

They are additive, not derivative.

Where this becomes interesting, is when you apply network thinking to culture. Cultures are just networks of people who have a shared interest. They all contribute to the development of their own culture. They have their own language, totems, celebrities, and moral codes.

The idea of the subculture was made most famous in the 1960s with the culture of ‘the teenager’ and the explosion of ‘Beatles Mania’. Art, music, literature, fashion, sports, religion – these are the DNA strands of different cultures. These strands of DNA often make the leap from one culture to the next. There are many, many talented people who spot things in one culture and transport them to another. Hedi Slimane. Jony Ive. Le Corbusier. Banksy. To get to that point though, you have to be a part of a culture, to understand it, to respect it, and to contribute to it.

Culture is a place for brands. Many cultures use brands as an emblem of their membership. The Nike Air Max (Grime kids). The Ford Fiesta XR2 (90s boy racers). The CHANEL clutch (the Knightsbridge fashionista). The AMEX Centurion Card (elite businessmen). Red Bull (extreme sports). Lurpak (the foodie).

Cultures elevate brands. Networks make them famous.

Brands that become famous in this way, become famous with the right people. They become authentically part of a culture. They sustain that fame for much longer.

So where does this leave us?

Well if we go right back to the start, brands want fame.

Create something meaningful

Sustained and authentic fame (that hasn’t been manufactured or paid for) is about contributing something to a culture. That doesn’t have to be a big idea, but it does have to be something that adds something. That demonstrates an understanding. That isn’t driven by the idea of fame. Cultural advancement is the goal, fame is the side effect. You can’t mean something to everyone. You can mean everything to someone though, but you have to pick who.

The way we advertise is going to force us in this direction too. Soon most media channels will be addressable and programmatic. When that happens, the opportunity to impact on and contribute to specific cultures will be huge.

When I first started researching network science, I found that if you could isolate people within a network, it was easy to propagate an idea. The catch was that the data wasn’t granular enough, and we didn’t have sophisticated media technology available to reach them. Those two things are now available. We have access to the culture, the network, the individuals, and the data. We have the means to communicate with them. We no longer need to pepper the airwaves with a ‘big idea’ in the vain hope that the members of the culture that might make us famous maybe see it. Now we can use a scalpel and a paint brush.

If marketing is a battle for mental and physical availability, then the balance has tilted. Physical availability has changed dramatically. Now almost everything is physically available within 24 hours. Yet mental availability has gone crackers. People are now exposed to more than 14,000 brand messages every single day. It has never been so important to mean something to people.

Fame is important, but who you’re famous to, and how you achieve that fame has never mattered more.

Strategists need to learn how cultures and networks operate. Whoever understands the networks, understands the culture. Understand the culture, and you can create ideas that build it. Support the culture and it will support your brand. That’s how you become famous.

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

The advertising and media world has once again been set alight by new technology. This time, it’s artificial intelligence (AI). Campaign’s Gideon Spanier wrote last week that “Media agencies should be in fear of automation”, and Blackwood Seven (a widely tipped “AI SaaS media planning and buying service” – more on this later) recently launched a UK office. Both articles talk of the threats that AI poses to existing agencies and large networks (which, for full disclosure, I am part of). I’m not sure there’s as much fire as there is smoke.

First, lets address some of the terminology. Automation and AI aren’t necessarily the same things. Automation can include a basic form of AI, which is decision-making based on a set of rules or logic, but automation is a much broader church. It could be something as simple as automatically printing off a report on a Monday morning.

AI is broadly defined as a computer based system that performs tasks that would usually need human intelligence. This could mean understanding what a picture is, what someone has said, or making a decision based on a set of rules or logic.

The issue with using the two terms interchangeably is that when people see the term ‘AI’ they usually envisage an actual robot, like HAL from 2001, or Sam from Her. So immediately, we’re thrown into the future and everything is terrifying and scary. The reality is, well, quite different.

The development of AI is plotted across three major milestones; narrow, general, super-intelligence.

• Narrow AI is where an AI engine is given a set of rules or logic and completes a set of tasks limited to those rules.
• General AI is what most modern science fiction focuses on. This is where an AI engine can apply logic and reason to any subject – like humans.
• Super-intelligent AI is where the AI engine learns to teach itself. At which point we’re all doomed (well, that’s what Elon thinks).

Narrow AI is where we are right now. We can design an AI to complete simple, repetitive tasks. The breadth of the tasks it can do is determined by the corpus of information it can work from. For this reason, customer service bots are great. We can train them to understand how people ask questions in different ways, and we can feed them FAQs.

However, the AI can only respond based on its narrow design. This is why Deep Blue could beat a chess grandmaster, but couldn’t make a cup of tea after the match.

For media agencies, let’s break it into two; first automation, and then AI.

For anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in a media agency, you’ll know that there are myriad manual tasks that can be automated. Reporting, analytics dashboards, timesheets…(!) The most obvious use of automation within agencies has been programmatic. This (arguably) sits somewhere between automation and a basic narrow AI. Even this basic form of AI has opened up more opportunities for creativity. Now we have strategists, buying specialists, and creative teams working together to tell sophisticated stories using this type of logic. We’ve barely scratched the surface with what’s possible.

Artificial intelligence is the next level up. Blackwood Seven launched in the UK earlier this month to much fanfare. It describes itself as a platform that helps “advertisers to predict the impact of, execute, and measure media more effectively than humans, using a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence”. The industry press have lapped this up, presumably because the press release and interviews all mention AI a lot.

If I’m not mistaken, Blackwood Seven seems to offer what most media agencies do – except with a SaaS platform and a different pricing model. Predicting the impact of media is just modeling, and it can be done to different levels. For a narrow AI, it would need to be taught (by a human) how to analyse data, so I struggle to see how this would be better than human analysis.

Blackwood Seven claim to improve results by 25-50%, which falls in line with much of programmatic advertising. The data sources that are fed into the platform are the same that every agency has access to, and the same that they ingest into their platforms (accept we call our ‘platforms’ planners). From what I can see, the agency has just found another way to badge what every good media agency already does.

Our market is too complicated, and has too many suppliers to use a single, AI-driven platform to drive media planning and buying. For a start, there are no exchanges that trade TV, radio, non-digital OOH, or print – these are all direct buys.

When working with large volumes of data, someone still needs to identify the key insights from that data. An AI would still need to have been ‘taught’ the rules and logic of planning and strategy by a human. This is complicated stuff. Earlier this week DeepMind (Alphabet’s AI unit) announced that it had managed to solve a critical problem with AI. It had figured out how to give its AI engine a memory, so that it can make a decision, and then use the result from that decision to make another decision. Sophisticated AI media planning and strategy might be a way off yet.

So, if AI isn’t currently running any agencies, how could it in the future? I think there’s a huge opportunity for AI to augment how we currently work.

AI will mean we can run complex models of human behaviour. We’ll be able to test different hypotheses, rather than declaring a single strategic direction as the only direction to take. We’ll be able to use AI to help us identify killer differentiating factors between different cohorts of people. It should also help us spot problems, anticipating issues in advance, and avoiding unexpected results.

I want to work with an AI that can help simplify the data, so that I can do what I do best – working with clients to fix problems, build brands, and sell products and services.

Much of the conversation around automation and use of AI in media and advertising seems to be about optimization. Ensuring that media performance is as sharp as possible. Driving the highest possible return, for the lowest possible cost. Media planning and buying can be driven by AI, and the results can be exceptional (as shown with programmatic buying). But until it’s advanced significantly, AI won’t be able to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of how humans behave.

The best advertising taps into a human insight – it understands culture. Culture is an organic system very few people can understand, let alone teach to an AI. More so, it won’t be able to predict irrational behavior (for more on this, read Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan). So the power of AI-driven media planning and buying will be in the creativity and insight of a human-driven strategist. Human insight, and strategic thinking is what brings and idea to life, and lifts advertising above pure performance. If you sharpen your pencil too much, you end up with nothing but a stub.

Ultimately, I’m excited about integrating AI into our world. There are a whole host of people who like to talk about how automation and AI will replace 47% of human jobs (although if you take the time to read the report, rather than the headline, it’s not that this will happen, but that 47% of jobs contain tasks that could be automated), but I share the view of Barack Obama, who believes that AI will augment our jobs, rather than replace them (his talk with Joi Ito of MIT is eye-opening, Obama is both well briefed and incredibly insightful).

My personal dream? I don’t dream big, I just dream of a timesheet bot…

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

This is technology that is very much in it’s early, novelty phase.

By most people’s reckoning, we’ve got about three to four years before these things become properly mainstream. So that’s three to four years before my gran has a wifi-connected toaster. There is, of course, a lot of excitement about all of this in the world of advertising. “Imagine what it’ll be like when we can pepper someone with radio advertising until they hit their Dash! Full attribution!” “Imagine all the data we’ll be able to capture from someone’s oven!” “Imagine how we’ll be able to adapt banner ads for kitchen mirrors!”.

As ever, lots of excitement.

I’m excited too, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a realist. If you read my last post, you’ll see that I think that there are many existential threats facing marketing, and that’s not because I like to mope about, or generate unnecessary fear, but because I actually bloody love my job, and I’d quite like to keep doing it. At least for the next thirty years, anyway. So on the other side of my excitement for our impending completed connected world, I have some mild trepidation. Again, in my last post, I mentioned the big four (GAFA) wanting to capture more time and attention from consumers, and using first party data to do that, and in turn that being a threat to marketing. As it stands, many large technology companies only have access to people (and their data) through communications hardware (the phone, the tablet, the computer), and software (OS, browser, shop, social network etc). When the time comes where there’s a bit of internet in everything, this will be different.

Earlier this year, Ben Evans wrote about artificial intelligence (or more specifically, it’s output applications, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, etc) as the third runtime. The first runtime being the browser, the second being the mobile application. The four horsemen of the marketing apocalypse (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) are betting big on artificial intelligence. It’s been in Siri forever (ever wonder how your iPhone knows what app you’d like to open?), it’s been improving search for nearly a decade, Amazon arguably created one of the earliest consumer facing AI’s with it’s recommendation engine, and Facebook is in the throes of launching ‘M’.

However, having a bit of internet in everything won’t be enough though – we’ve had connected devices for a long, long time now. To move past that, there’s going to need to be a step change. Those connected devices (be that a kettle, a home security system, or a pacemaker) are just outputs – the operating system will be built on artificial intelligence, and/or complex algorithms. The step change will be that those devices, driven by AI, will predict and / or anticipate your behaviour. You won’t need to press your Amazon Dash button, because your washing machine will know that you’re out of powder. Your Amazon fresh delivery will automatically include broccoli, because it knows you juiced the last lot this morning. Google will have a driverless cab outside your office to take you home before you’ve hailed one. Your iPhone will automatically cancel your plans when it knows you’re running late. You can see this already with Facebook Messenger alpha tests – in San Francisco, when you’re having a conversation with a friend, and agree to meet at a certain time, Messenger will pull Uber up, and ask if you’d like to book now. This is basic, but it’s indicative of where we’re heading.

Great, right? I’m not sure.

When you search for a product, be it on Amazon, Google, or Facebook, your presented with a selection of choices. Some of these will be organically listed (as they appear to be most relevant), and some of these will be paid listings (likely the product you searched for, as well as competitors). As a consumer, even when you search for a specific product, you’re presented with choices. This isn’t new. When you go into the supermarket, you’re presented with relevant choices on each aisle. When you test drive a car you physically see other cars, so you have an opportunity to change your mind. When you buy a house, you look at the one just around the corner that wasn’t on RightMove, because it had a local ‘for sale’ sign outside. You make decisions, thousands of them, every day.

When AI anticipates the decision before you make it, it will remove friction, and the sell will be that you have more time for living life. However, you’ll be ceding control to a company that makes those decisions with a commercial outcome in mind. These decisions are what created a space for marketing. We’re in the business of influencing those decisions, and reducing friction to purchase as much as possible. However, nothing removes friction as much as anticipative virtual assistants. Marketing has, for a very long time, made making a decision difficult, by demonstrating choice and highlighting benefits (and sometimes hiding drawbacks).

When this happens, marketing is going to have to work even harder in order to overcome the defaults, and not only influence a decision, but to actually create a moment for someone to realise that they can make a decision themselves. Everything we do is going to need to be actionable, direct, and effective.

Alongside being much more direct, and focused on effectiveness, arguably brand perception and image is going to become even more important than it is now. Many marketers see performance and brand as being diametrically opposed, but in the new world (and I believe, right now), we’re going to have to inextricably tie them together. We’re going to have to invest more heavily in brand to overcome defaults, but also establish your brand and product as a heuristic. We’re going to have to get a lot better at identifying intent – not just purchase intent, but intent to actually make a decision, and intent to consider that a decision must be made.

Ultimately, we’re going to have to make brands more desirable than every before, we’re going to have to understand what makes people tick, establish brands that play an active role in culture, and then make it as easy and frictionless as possible to purchase.

I’m still trying to figure out the answer to this, and where we fit, so please, let me know what you think.

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

I don’t think Denford goes far enough, personally. I would go further.

Denford says management consultancies are a big threat but its not just that they want to lead marketing strategy they’re also acquiring advertising technology companies, design studios, creative agencies, and striking direct deals with media owners.

Salesforce buying Krux this week is a huge play for taking a more prominent role in shaping how business communicate. Commerce, CRM, and media, all connected – a dream for many organisations.

As far as many media owners are concerned (especially those that refer to themselves as technology companies) they feel too many people take a cut for advertising that is carried on their platforms. In a world where these companies run an increasing amount of the advertising market why should agencies exist? Is it too much of a leap of imagination to think that they dream of being the engine that drives all of a clients advertising? Squashing agencies that take a cut of that media buy in the process and unifying everything through their unique user ID (looking at you Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)?

And while all of this is going on, the model that our industry is built upon is warping beneath our feet. We are innovating, but we’re doing it too slowly.

So these are the big challenges that agencies face over the next five years.

Having read all that, you could be forgiven for thinking that we’re in a tricky spot. You could probably be forgiven for panicking, if you work in a media agency. Worry not, though. We’re in a strong position, which can (perversely) be seen by the strength of our opponents. McKinsey, IBM, Google – these aren’t small companies nipping at our heels, and we can briefly stop to take that as a compliment, but let’s not fuck about: they’re coming for us.

We offer things that they can’t, though. We facilitate more daily interactions with people than they do, we have greater reach, and we work across every channel – not just those that we own. Our data is different, deeper, and it covers more than just someone’s digital behaviour – it also covers those without digital behaviour too (hi gran!).

Our advantage is that we don’t just have our data, but we have the data of all of our partners too. We can also have an impact on both distribution and content. In many cases we have the same level of access that management consultancies do, but we get to see the sharp end of our work too (rather than just the first 15 slides of the strategy).

Most of all, we have our people.

People who believe in the power of media and communications.

People that want to make and distribute advertising that matters, that has an impact.

People that want to partner with our clients to help them grow, evolve, and prosper.

People who want to invent the future, not just watch it happen.

There are four key things we can do that would put our industry in better shape for the challenges above.

1. We have to realise that at the end of every ad is a person. To do this, ban the words ‘consumer’, ‘user’, and ‘audience’, and put people at the heart of your strategy and planning.
2. Use the data we have at our disposal to learn from every interaction. If we’re going to stand tall against the likes of Google and Facebook, then we should learn from what makes them so successful. Media should be our newsfeed, and we should ensure that every single interaction that a client has with a person, improves the next experience.
3. We have to stop talking about impressions as if it’s the only thing that matters. Reach matters, sure, but action matters more. If we’re to be taken seriously against the likes of BCG and Deloitte, we need to start thinking about the impact that we can have, rather than the impressions that we can buy.
4. Let’s stop inventing new ways to talk about advertising and media. Simplifying complexity should be our business, not the other way around.

As Denford says, “it’s time to replace fear of the complexity of media, with a new excitement in the opportunity of media”.

Indeed, so let’s get cracking.

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

As you read this, somewhere in the world, someone is presenting that chart and saying “marketing is so much more complicated than it used to be!”. Then looking around the room at a puzzled, and increasingly terrified audience.

“Wasn’t it easier when we just had a handful of TV channels, a few radio stations, and newspapers…”

Everyone then looks at each other in exhaustion, beads of sweat forming as they worry about how they’re going to do their jobs in such complicated times, and genuine fear as they feel like an actual fish out of water. On the hottest day of the year.

I know this scene well. I was the orchestrator of this situation at least once a week for the first six years of my career.

But four years ago I stopped.

I had started to feel like a fraud. I wasn’t trained in anything special; not an engineer, nor a doctor, or an architect. I worked in advertising and just happened to understand a bit more about the internet than some other people.

I wasn’t being malicious, and I’ve always been far too average to have a superiority complex. It’s just that when I would speak to people, it felt like I was telling them something profound and new, and the feeling that gave me was pretty intoxicating. Then I realised that the more complicated it sounded, people would (initially) think it was very, very smart. For someone that’s neither trained in marketing, or particularly smart, this felt good. What’s in the brackets in that last sentence is important though; because people would initially think it was smart. Then they’d take some time to understand and learn about whatever it was that I’d told them, and then they’d realise it wasn’t profound, just different, and actually, once you’d spent a bit of time digging around, pretty simple.

What I was effectively doing was setting off a fireworks show, and then making my audience try to repack the gunpowder afterwards.

What a massive waste of everyone’s time.

Whether it’s SnapChat filters, DMPs, or footfall attribution models: some people make it feel like magic, and magic that only they can do. Nobody likes the feeling you get when you take your car to the garage and they gasp. “Ohh that’s not good”, they say. There are a lot of people in advertising and media that do that every day.

Since I started trying to make things that sound complicated simple, there are undoubtedly less terrified faces, and instead now I’m faced with eager ones. Now people want to work together to make the new things even better. It’s hard, but I now see it as a core part of my job. I don’t want to finish a presentation and people congratulate me on ‘how smart it all sounds’, I want them to feel like what I’ve said is common sense.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of complex parts to our industry, and I often marvel at the technical ability of many of those in the industry, but the best ones take the complex and make it simple. They open it up to everyone, because they know that on their own they can only make a little difference, but with other people, from other backgrounds, they can make a huge difference.

We need more of these people. We need more translators. We need people that can take the technical, and make it simple. It takes a strong person to take something complex and make it simple. Show people how the innards work, and say ‘come on, you get it, now help me make it better’.

It wouldn’t be an article on LinkedIn with a Steve Jobs reference(!), but I feel this one is maybe a little more apt than usual. Jobs and Jony Ive famously believed that simplicity was the ultimate sophistication. I think they might’ve been onto something.

Anyone can make something simple, complicated. Very few people can make something complicated, simple. Those are the people that are going to help move the whole industry on, and do more effective, more innovative work – and that’s what I find intoxicating now.

This post originally appeared on AgencyVoices on LinkedIn.

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The era of personalisation represents an opportunity for marketers to return to the roots of marketing – to rediscover what it means to connect the right product to the right person, and to rescue the broken relationship between both parties.  In a world where technology demands new approaches to product, price, promotion and placement, delivering successfully in this new paradigm will require that we develop ‘brand elasticity’ – a brand’s ability to have a clearly defined core meaning while flexing its interpretation in different circumstances for different people.

The past ten years have seen an explosive growth in marketing technologies. One need only look at the marketing technology landscape year-on-year to realize how many new players are entering the space[1]. This trend exemplifies the increasing desire of marketers to be more advanced, to be “fitter, happier, more productive” (to steal a phrase from Radiohead).

Yet technology has become a double-edge sword.  On the one hand it is seen as the solution to a gamut of issues that face the modern marketer – ad blocking, cookie clearing, skipping and ignoring content – yet in many instances, it is precisely this poor application of technology that has caused them. By the same token, consumers are now armed with just as much technology as the marketer, and similarly, technology is seen as the solution to a gamut of issues they face, such as preserving privacy and enforcing anonymity.  Marketing sometime feels like a battlefield.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If we go back to the roots of marketing, its core purpose has always been about connecting the right consumer to the right product.  Applying Jerome McCarthy’s 4 Ps framework: to produce a product or service that consumers will want, to price it at a level that corresponds to its perceived value, to promote it amongst consumers who will have a use or need for it, and to place it where it is easily accessible to those groups of pre-qualified people.

The first half of the twentieth century started to fray the edges of that definition through mass distribution of products, with little differentiation, at roughly similar prices. The boom in mass media platforms from the late 1960s, coupled with a change in consumption habits – less connected with utilitarian needs, and more to do with status and comfort[2] – meant that ‘broadcast’ advertising, at large groups of people who might be interested in the product or service, was possible.

Promotion, hence, became the defining P in the 4Ps framework leading to a golden era in advertising.  Yet this did not come without a trade-off.  The term ‘media wastage’ was born, and with it we shredded the original definition of marketing.  At its best, marketing became a game of selling an aspiration or an identity… and at its worst, it became a ‘throw enough at the wall and something will stick’ game.

Then came AOL. Then Google. Then YouTube. Then Facebook. And now, through advertising technology we can finally realise our dream of reaching the right person, with the right message, at the right time, and on the right screen. Most importantly, our production capabilities are also catching up.  The advent of 3D printing offers opportunities to not only promote the right product to the right person, with the right message, at the right time and on the right screen, but also to produce something that is much more bespoke and relevant to the consumer[3].  We’ve gone full circle, and we’re now back at a place where we can truly connect the right consumer to the right product, in ways we never before imagined.

Yet while technology has gone full circle, our thinking hasn’t and few are taking advantage or these new opportunities.

We need not despair as there are green shoots of positivity. Personalisation, at its core, gives marketers the opportunity to design or create a product that meets someone’s individual requirements – it is the purest definition of marketing. This exposes an interesting tension. It’s a tension between what the brand wants to collectively ‘mean’ and what an individual consumer’s interpretation of that meaning is.

This presents the modern marketer with a challenge: in a world where your brand could have a myriad of meanings, the risk is that it ends up meaning nothing. We believe that this is where ‘brand elasticity’ becomes a critical part of the marketing toolkit. Brand identity and values need to be clearly defined (if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything), yet there needs to be enough room and understanding for a marketer to accept that their brand’s identity may be open to many interpretations from different cultural groups.  The role of marketing in this new context becomes about constant evolution, and constant redefinition of the edges (based on cultural insights), but never straying too far from the core values of your brand.

So brand elasticity becomes a new measure of the strength of a brand, and its ability to stretch the edges of its values and meaning in order to adapt to different cultural groups. Too much stretch and its meaning warps, too little stretch and it means too little to too few people.

Having the correct balance of brand elasticity affords a brand a clear identity in the marketplace, but allows it to harness different interpretations with different cultural groups, to build relationships and connections, at scale.

It is what separates the HP’s and Lenovo’s of this world from the Apple’s and Google’s. It moves a brand from competing on price and product, to competing on cultural currency and credibility.

Brand elasticity has been a crucial part of many brands for at least half of the last century – what we’re talking about is not new – but as technology enables us to return to the core principles of marketing, it has never been more important for brands and marketers to think about their brand elasticity. The brands that have the best elasticity are likely to be those that see relationships as the goal, rather than share of voice and reach. Those that value their customers, and see them as people, not cookies. Those that truly deliver on the opportunity that personalisation has brought to the table.

For this to become a reality, marketing needs to fundamentally change.

The marketer of the future will need to go beyond demographics and focus groups filled with biscuits and warm beer. They will need to understand behaviours, interests, and reactions. They will need to understand how those behaviours are represented by data points, and how best to bring differing datasets together to create insights. Most importantly, they will understand the commonalities between different segments of people – they won’t be seduced by the overly idealistic idea of one-to-one communication – they’ll find a balance between individuals and segments.

As new technology begins to infiltrate the rest of the marketing toolkit, analytical and technical skills in marketers will become a ‘must have’, rather than a ‘nice to have’.

The increasingly blurred line between Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Information Officers will give rise to CDO – not Digital, but Data. They will be conversant in data management platforms and data flows, but also connected consumer journeys and programmatic advertising.

It will be data (both fast and slow) that will allow us to measure brand elasticity – the days of quarterly trackers will be numbered, as data gives rise to segment-level tracking, allowing brand elasticity to be measured, tested, and refined on a daily, if not hourly basis.

Market making and breaking decisions have never before depended so heavily on the marketer’s ability to understand the convergence of data, content, and technology. Their ability to harmonise data to elucidate multiple truths that inform that broader marketing plan will be the mark of the marketing rising star.

If we are to leverage the opportunities that technology and personalisation bring, the annual marketing plan must become a thing of the past. Its static nature and rigidity will not meet the needs of the marketer in the era of personalisation.

In its place we will need to develop living and breathing marketing systems: a set of parameters (logic-like rules) that will enable complex parts to work together seamlessly, and allow the marketer to learn and adapt constantly as data brings further knowledge. It may sound complicated, but in reality the infrastructure is already in place. Most marketing technology today requires human input into simple systems to create these sets of rules. In some cases this is represented by targeting parameters; in others as basic segmentation information and campaign objectives.

The role of the marketer will be to understand both the short and long term impact of advertising, and the effect that they have on brand elasticity. They will come to put lots of different segments at the heart of their brand, and become masters of systems thinking – ultimately, they’ll become skilled practitioners of unpicking complexity to drive incremental gains, and build stronger relationships with people than ever before. They will become gatekeepers to brands that truly matter.

It’s important to note, however, that technology won’t replace the marketer. A popular misconception is that in the not-so-distant future, marketers’ jobs will be automated, “all looked over by machines of loving grace” as Adam Curtis would put it, but people are nuanced, and meaning comes from understanding culture. If we were to allow machines to run brands, the world would be full of the most efficient brand messaging you could imagine – and that’s exactly how brands degenerate into oblivion, rather than reinvent themselves into perpetuity.

Finally, the marketer’s partners (agencies, technology companies) will need to adapt their roles as well.  Gone are the days when a marketer would provide a brief, leave it to a partner to execute, and come back to it six months later once the campaign had ended to view results. People come into contact with brands 24 hours a day. They’re forming and reforming perceptions, and building and ending relationships constantly. The shape of these partnerships needs to reflect that: marketers, their agencies, and technology providers need to become a unified team, a perfect triumvirate that leverages specialist skillsets at different points of the process.

Considering the core principles of marketing or the 4Ps can help illustrate the above in:

• Product: For intangible products or services, we can already see the brand elasticity concept in action. For example, financial service products are put together within the parameters of what the brand stands for.  Different customers may be offered different products, all of which will be consistent with the brand’s values.  For physical products this has been more challenging due to production and distribution costs, but we have seen some customisation of fashion (eg Nike ID) within the parameters of the master brand.  In the long term, the prospect of 3D printing may make much greater product personalisation a reality.

• Price: Marketers will determine pricing parameters for their products that will then be adapted to maximise the likelihood of an individual buying. This has already been a reality for many e-commerce sectors (e.g. hotel rooms, airlines) but we are likely to see it stretch to the real world as ‘smart shelves’ connect individuals in store to CRM databases and deliver personalised pricing, triggered by mobile signals.[4]

• Place: Core distribution channels will continue to be set by the brand-owner but there will be increasingly flexibility in how and, importantly, where delivery is fulfilled. E-commerce delivery will become more personalised, determining with more precision when and where you want the product delivered. We will also see the rise of aggregators such as Quiqup, which help ensure personalised delivery of items from a range of retailers.[5]

• Promotion: This has been the core focus of marketing personalisation to-date through the rise of programmatic and data-driven targeting.  The concept of brand elasticity becomes most evident here. The brand owner sets the broad parameters for how the brand can communicate and who it should be talking to, leaving the technology (increasingly AI) to identify who exactly to talk to, and what precisely to say.

Marc Andreessen famously said that software was eating the world[6], but until now it has only taken the bar snacks of marketing. This is the beginning of a perfect marriage between human intuition, technology, and artificial intelligence that allows us to deliver personalisation at scale – using data, content, and technology to harness the power of brand elasticity to co-create a brand with consumers. After all, none of us got into marketing to relentlessly retarget people with a pair of shoes that they’ve already purchased.

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[1] From 2014 to 2015, the number of marketing technology companies nearly doubled from 947 to 1,876. Personalisation vendors alone more than doubled YOY and began to incorporate chat services as part of the suite of products, which is a testament to the demand and need for innovation in this space. Source: “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2015)”, Scott Brinker, 12-Jan-2015, Chiefmartech.com (http://chiefmartec.com/2015/01/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2015/).

[2] “Designing Britain 1945-1975”, Visual Arts Data Service (http://www.vads.ac.uk/learning/designingbritain/html/crd_cultrev.html).

[3] “The third industrial revolution”,  21-Apr-2012, The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21553017).

[4] “The Second Era of Digital Retail”, Intel Labs and The Store WPP, 2015, pp. 12-13 (http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/reports/futurecasting-report-june-4.pdf).

[5] “On-Demand Delivery Service Quiqup Picks Up Backing From Delivery Hero And Global Founders Capital”, Steve O’Hear, 15-Sept-2015, TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/15/quiqup/).

[6] “Why software is eating the world”, Marc Andreessen, 20-Aug-2011, Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460).

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While most people will be paying attention to the new iOS and the revamp of iMessage, marketers should be paying close attention to two developments that have flown a little lower under the radar –the introduction of paid search results in the App Store and the redesign of Apple News.

These developments both have implications for advertisers, and mark a significant strategic move from Apple to begin competing with Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

By far the most intriguing development is the introduction of paid search placements in the App Store.

Apple has, for many years, spoken disparagingly about advertising as a revenue stream (and its efforts to monetise data through advertising with iAd was a flop too), so this move will surprise many.

But this move marks what many will see as direct posturing against Google and Facebook. Not so long ago, the big four (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) had distinct markets of their own, but as each begins to explore new revenue models, they are increasingly bumping into each other as competitors.

Each wants to ‘own’ the web (or rather create their own version of the web), and Apple will see this as a clear route to monetising one of its largest assets – the app ecosystem.

As Benedict Evans at Andreessen Horowitz recently said; the first wave of digital was web, the second wave was apps, and the third wave is likely to be bots. Apple is in a position of strength with regards to hardware and devices.

This development will provide the choke of supply that paid search relies on, and also gives it a significant opportunity to trial paid search placements – possibly with a view to introducing paid search placements into Siri.

For advertisers this is mixed news. Much like Facebook’s NewsFeed algorithm, it looks like an effort to reward creators of popular content (through the increased revenue share), and charge those with unpopular content for the opportunity to be seen.

If the decline of organic reach on Facebook’s NewsFeed is anything to go by, then every app developer should be preparing to pay for their place in the App Store in the near future.

What all advertisers should be taking from this is not that there are now paid opportunities to promote below average apps, but rather there is now an opportunity to trump competitors who have to pay to promote their apps – and putting people at the heart of everything you create as an advertiser is the first step.

The second (and most recent) announcement from Apple was the revamp of News, and this too marks a significant moment for marketers.

Everyone is trying to own the direct interface that people have with content. For Facebook, it’s the news feed, for Google it’s the results page and for Amazon it’s their devices.

The redesign of Apple News will be (as ever) carefully designed to have user experience at its heart, but the real trick will be convincing publishers that Apple News should be a primary distribution platform.

Facebook ramped up its ownership of the content interface with Instant Articles, and this looks to be Apple’s riposte to that.

After years of playing in their own territories, it finally looks like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are starting to directly compete. Things are going to get very interesting as the race to own the internet heats up, but the winner will always be those that put people at the heart of their product. The technology doesn’t matter, but Being Human always will.

Ultimately the big four represent organisations that put people at the heart of their product, and advertisers can learn from this.

One.
Some people who are talented, are also difficult to work with. However, that doesn’t mean that if you’re difficult to work with, that you’re also talented. (Many) people often get these mixed up.

Two.
There are three types of people;
1) people who wait for their turn to talk,
2) people who listen out for things others say to prove their point,
3) people who listen to others, and use the information that they provide to rebuild and refine their thinking.

I’m trying hard to be the third type of person as much as possible.

I’m sure that some people are busy. In fact, I know lots of actually busy people, but they tend to be the ones who don’t tell you that they’re busy. So why do people like us – advertising and media people – feel that we need to tell people how busy we are? Are we that busy? And if not, why do we insist on telling everyone that we are – what’s to be gained?

I think we’re obsessed with the lure of ‘productivity’. Of ‘inbox zero’, of no new notifications, and of having ticked off all our to-dos for today. We equate visible actions with busyness, and busyness with productivity, and productivity with value. But that’s a trap. If you’re trying to show how valuable you are by how many tasks you can do, then you’re replaceable. You’re trapped in a world of shallow work. That sort of work, as Nicholas Carr points out in both The Glass Cage, and The Shallows, is a dangerous place to be in. Shallow work is replaceable work, much of which can be automated. This is especially true in our industry.

Maybe I’m being a little bit harsh. It’s easy to fall into the shallow work trap – especially when your work doesn’t have a tangible output. I think that the reason we throw ourselves with abandon at our emails is insecurity. Our shallow work produces a tangible output – a report, an email, a conference call. But is it what we really do? Or is it what we should really be doing?

The value that you bring to your organisation is problem solving and creativity. For the most part, regardless of your job title, we all do the same job, and it centres around those two things. We fix problems and address challenges for our clients. Having worked in PR, creative, and media agencies, my experience is that we all do roughly the same job.

If we fill our days with shallow work, we won’t have time and space to think about the real task at hand. Our job is not to send emails, it is to fix problems for our clients. How can anyone leave work satisfied if all they’ve done all day is send emails and make phone calls?

Last year a friend of mine quit his job. He was about eight years into his career, in a senior role, at a respected consumer PR agency. He quit to take on a role as an apprentice barber at a barbers in Soho. “What is he thinking”, I thought. Hardly transferable skills. A totally alien environment, I thought. Another casualty of the industry, I thought. I didn’t understand. I bumped into my friend a few months after he quit, and he was beaming. I thought it was all bravado, a bit of a put on, but as we spoke his enthusiasm was palpable. He loved his new job. It was his calling. “I’ve never felt so satisfied”, he said. “I don’t have any of the distractions that I had in my agency life anymore – I can just focus on one thing, and doing one thing really well”. Five minutes later he got off the tube, and I sat thinking ‘what satisfies me?’. I’d never thought about it before, and it’s quite a hard question to answer. Ironically, it’s questions like that (the ones that are hard to answer) that I find so satisfying. Or in a less abstract way, I find solving difficult problems satisfying.

A few weeks later, I read an interview between Trevor Beattie (of BMB fame) and Nils Leonard (of Grey fame). One of Nils’ answers stuck with me. This:

–

TB: You’re a designer by trade. How big a role does design still play in your thinking?

NL: Ive is a designer. Heatherwick is a designer. McQueen was a designer. Designers actually make things. They’re not dependent. And the best ones matter outside the industry they work in. The best ones have changed how we live or given us memorable, remarkable, powerful moments. They don’t see the answer as the same every time. They are empowered, and remain open to influence and change. Advertising agencies are bad at that, so I try to bring that.

–

The idea of Nils having a trade, and making things that aren’t dependent on a client brief made me feel a bit insecure. “What is my trade?”, I thought (again, sat on the tube*). This bought me back to the shallow work versus deep work thoughts I’d been having. In Deep Work, Cal Newport discusses the sense of satisfaction that people with a craft or trade feel each day having made something. Nils was using the same sort of language, but he was plying his trade in a similar environment to mine.

So what is my trade? Well, my employer sells me as a problem solver. I make things that are often complicated, simple. I provide clients with my point of view on the challenges that they face, and the best course of action. So my trade is problem solving, but I think my craft is writing. Writing is the thing that I toil away at late at night, it’s the thing that gets me up in morning. Writing is the tool that I use to solve problems and think more creatively. So if  Trevor Beattie ever interviews me, he’ll open his question by saying “You’re a writer by trade. How big a role does writing still play in your thinking?”, and I’ll say “Trev, writing is my thinking”.

Realising what my trade and craft is was a big step. It means I can focus on honing those skills and actively trying to produce better, stronger work. I hope that should give me a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day.

I’ve read two books recently that I think provide some of the tools to honing those skills. Deep Work (as above), which introduced me to the idea of allocating a chunk of time every week to deep thinking. I’ll never escape all shallow work, but I need to develop my skills as a problem solver. For that I have to give my brain the opportunity to think about one thing for a good amount of time. I need less HITT, and more marathon training, or at the least, I need a mixture of the two.

The second book is Curious, by Ian Leslie, which I’m only half way through so far, which extols the virtues of curiosity. In fact, scrap that, not the virtues, but the necessity of curiosity. He believes that curiosity is what helps us develop as people. It helps us to make connections between different things, to make new things. There’s a lot of research that shows that learning new things develops stronger neuroplasticity. That makes the brain a type of muscle, one that grows stronger with practice, and helps us to make new connections. Connections, in turn, drive creative thinking. So to develop my trade, I need to give my brain two things; time, and interesting stuff.

So from now on I’ll be carving out at least four consecutive hours every week to dedicate to fixing one problem. I’ll also be putting as much interesting stuff in my head as possible, things like art, music, and books. Although it isn’t about ‘all you can eat’, but instead taking a focused approach, and applying epistemic curiosity.

You might be reading this now thinking ‘first world problems’, and I acknowledge that. I would never suggest that what I do for a living is comparable to that of a firefighter, a teacher, or a nurse, but the media industry has its own challenges. One of those killer challenges is satisfaction, the other is demonstrating value.

In times of increasing financial scrutiny, automation, and competition, it’s easy to be insecure. To work in a shallow way. But we must remember that we are not employed for our ability to fire out emails, arrange pointless meetings, and write empty reports.

We’re employed to solve problems and provide creative thinking, and that means swimming in the deep, at least once a week.

It’s at this point that I realise just how lucky I am. I have a job where the core parts of my role are thinking and curiosity. I can exercise my craft on a daily basis, if I choose to. I can do this with ideas for some of the worlds most interesting businesses. But luck is another subject altogether…

*There are two places where I do my best thinking; 1) the tube, and 2) the church yard near the office. Both places are ridiculously busy, but both in both places I can lose myself in thought and avoid distracting myself.