Hee-Haw Marketing

Working with Uncertainty

2011-12-13T18:26:55-07:00

The somewhat interesting, frustrating, fascinating fact of creativity in advertising is that it's something most ask for, then get at doing just about everything possible to remove all the newness, risk and unfamiliarity needed to make what we do impactful.

So that was the starting place for my Infopresse chat in Montreal. If creativty inherently means uncertainty, and we live in one of the most uncertain times in history - we might as well make it work for us rather than against us.

Without further adieu...

And of course - the slideshare if you'd like to follow along.

View more presentations from Paul McEnany.

All kinds of stuff

2011-08-07T17:54:18-06:00

Department of good quotes
Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes unpredictable things to be discovered.
-Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin of design.
-Dieter Rams

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Surround yourself with talented people and then let them step up. In our real lives we often have the luxury of time and titles to question and prod and redo. Often that makes for really great art, but it's good to be reminded that you can work from a place of fundamental trust as well.
-Association of Independent Radio

Where Music and Foodie Culture Meet
"'Obviously, you've got the total punk aesthetic of the working kitchen, with the cursing, staying up until 4 a.m., the drugs and everything,' said Dawson Ludwig, marketing director for Noise Pop. 'But it's more than that. Good music and good food are total indulgence, both providing fulfilling sensual experiences.'"

Turntable Kitchen: Pairings Box
"Introducing the Turntable Kitchen Pairings Box: a curated food and music discovery experience, delivered to your door, every month."

Teller explains the psychology of illusions

Film Psychology: The Shining, Spatial Awareness

One of the original influencer outreach programs
The Tennessee Squire Association created by Jack Daniels. From wikipedia: "A Tennessee Squire is a member of the Tennessee Squire Association, which was formed in 1956 to honor special friends of the Jack Daniel's distillery. Many prominent business and entertainment professionals are included among the membership, which is obtained only through recommendation of a current member. Squires receive a wallet card and deed certificate proclaiming them as "owner" of an unrecorded plot of land at the distillery and an honorary citizen of Moore County, Tennessee."

Music Bloggers Hack the Record Industry
"It’s not a common way to release a record, but putting out an album through a popular indie music blog is a pretty smart way to hack the traditional record industry business model. Yours Truly is just the latest indie music blog to launch a label, serving up lovingly crafted offerings and using the kind of promotional savvy that traditional record companies can’t seem to muster."

Barbie in Real Life

The Brand Filter

2011-07-20T19:53:44-06:00

Most advertising is somewhat of a constant push and pull, the story of the brand versus the insight into the audience. Brands with too much of a disconnect between these two things tend to just muddle through, bouncing from promotion to promotion without a clear identity or sense of what they’re here to do. It’s item at a price based on the idea that people want stuff, not necessarily stuff to facilitate belonging, values or any of all that fruity stuff that seems more difficult to quantify. At least those things that “feel” less like selling anyway.

But our goal is pretty simple. We’re helping brands operate more fluidly, expressing a coherent sense of self and an acute understanding of what that means for an audience, their needs and expectations.

So I thought I’d deconstruct a bit.

In a talk about David Hume, Professor Nicholas Phillipson said the following:

“All our cognitive skills are in fact acquired skills. Ordinary life, from birth to death, teaches us to exercise our various cognitive skills in order to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. They are acquired. The message in all that is that if you want to understand your own mind, it is best to start off with yourself…in looking at the history of your own belief system.”

In other words, the way we make decisions has everything to do with how we’ve experienced our past. So you can’t really understand a brand’s lens unless you also understand its history, how it got from point A to today.

The tool we’ve been using is meant as both a rallying cry of sorts and simply a way to focus new decisions based upon the important behaviors of the past. The stuff that shapes who these companies are and why they’re here.

For explanation’s sake, I’ll re-order a bit.

The first couple are super important, but also what you’d probably expect to see in something like this.

Values
What are the things that are most important? What is the brand’s moral code? For Apple this could be intuitiveness or accountability, for Google it could be experimentation.

Personality
Does the personality reflect that of their founder? CEO? How might you describe the tone of voice? If you called the company Steve or Stu and tried to describe it, what words would you use?

The next three are a package of sorts.

Purpose
This is the rallying cry bit. What is the thing the brand could rally their community towards? What is the bigger idea the brand exists within? What does it do in service to the audience, the world? The bigger idea is important. If you’re a foundation company, you don’t just exist to pour concrete, you might rally for more stable homes. Or if your Tom’s shoes, you exist to improve the lives of children. Nike exists to make athletes better.

Motivation
This is what gives you credibility and authenticity. What is the thing from which the purpose is derived? Why should we believe that you give a shit? Often this is founder driven, and sometimes crosses over with behaviors, but this is really about things that happen inside the company that shape who they are. You could say the core brand motivation for Virgin comes directly from Richard Branson. But you could also say that GM is what it is because of a scrappy, survivor mentality stemming from the restructure.

Behaviors
Often much harder than it seems, behaviors are the outward signs of this motivation. What are the past actions the company or people within it have taken in support of that purpose? If you can’t name anything, you probably haven’t found the right purpose. Red Bull made a secret half-pipe for Shaun White. Levi’s jump-started a town. Apple’s yearly strategy retreats for the top 100 employees or DRI’s begin to define the expectations the company has for itself.

Now we have what essentially amounts to our brand filter. Probably a good place to stop. Next up, we’ll tackle the external stuff and where that fits.

Big Smarts

2011-07-01T13:12:09-06:00

From Influential to Small Connected Groups

"I feel that we’re at the beginning of a cycle in business where we move away from this idea of “influentials”, and instead focus marketing activity on small connected groups of close friends. I think this is what marketers are starting to think about, and will be the prominent theme for this decade."

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a Metaphor Program?

"The Metaphor Program may represent a nine-figure investment by the government in understanding how people use language. But that's because metaphor studies aren't light or frilly and IARPA isn't afraid of taking on unusual sounding projects if they think they might help intelligence analysts sort through and decode the tremendous amounts of data pouring into their minds."

Tesco's Home Plus Subway Virtual Store

Where Food is God

"American health food is usually said to have started with a Presbyterian minister: Sylvester Graham, who first lectured on the virtues of vegetarianism during the 1820s. (He is remembered as the namesake of the graham cracker.) It really got going in 1863 when Ellen White, a leader of several hundred Christians who called themselves the Seventh-day Adventists, said that God had revealed to her that "Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator." The Adventists became vegetarians, and by the turn of the century, two members, cereal moguls John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post (who once marketed cornflakes as "Elijah's Manna"), had laid the groundwork for the U.S. health-food industry."

How Can You Make Healthy Food More Satisfying?

"Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed."

The Package-free Grocery Store

"Focusing on the concept of “pre-cycling,” the store will encourage shoppers to bring their own containers from home, filling them up with and purchasing only the amounts of food that they need."

A Look at How Many Calories $1 Will Buy

"One dollar’s worth of Coke has 447 calories, while $1 of iceberg lettuce has just 16.5. To look at it another way, you would have to spend about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce."

How Earned Media Boosts the Branding Effect of Paid Ads

Secondary Attention and Little Boxes of Sound

"And this brilliant post from Phil made me realise how much the device oriented bits of sound design and behaviour is also focused on Primary Attention. The Walkman gave us personal soundtracks, I wouldn't be without mine, but they're a powerful drug and there's a difference between listening to sound in your head and listening to sound in the world. Maybe, in fact, there's a more important difference - between listening and hearing."

Thinking and Selling

2011-06-26T18:24:06-06:00

Andrew left this gem of a statement within the lead-in to Rob Campbell's feedback for the APSotW. Worth pulling out and letting it breathe a bit.

"I sometimes think that the so called, 'cooler' more creative agencies do themselves a disservice by not exposing the utter mania for rigorous, watertight thinking. All the great work you see isn't just a result of a mania for doing great creative work, it's about taking care of the detail. Take the famous Old Spice work. It's probably as creative and provocative as an integrated campaign gets, but don't forget it was done for P&G - one the most notoriously formulaic, risk averse clients there is. You don't get any work through clients like that, especially work like this without proven rigorous thinking."

I've always felt like this is the great untold story of some of the best work out there. Not just the final product, but all the other stuff that allows it to happen. Anyway - never really saw that mentioned with all the praise for the Old Spice campaign. Thought it was interesting.