Reputation, choice or effectiveness?

Apparently the government is worrying about reputation of local councils:

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=7816238

Given it’s our money they’ll be spending, I wonder whether they should be. Apparently there is no correlation between satisfaction with council services and satisfaction with councils. I can see the argument for making sure people are happy with services: they need to be used to be useful, and people won’t use services they don’t think are any good.

But it’s not as immediately clear why it’s in the public interest for people to be happy with councils. Just as brand campaigns can be a corporate indulgence, shareholder value squandered by the pride of senior management, I can see this campaign squandering public money on a private vanity project.

I guess there might be arguments to the contrary. Maybe people are less engaged with politics if they are dissatisfied with their council. Maybe people commit social crimes if they feel disenfranchised. But if that’s the case, it isn’t clear from this article.

I think this is important. Government should have a clear effectiveness mandate which makes sense to us as shareholders. Even if we devolve executive responsibility to them, we should be clear on why they’re making the decisions they’re making.

A classic example is choice. Government thinks choice is something people want. It’s at the heart of the philosophy of the modern NHS. It’s something councils also think people want. And yet. According to the article quoted above, satisfaction with a council doesn’t really depend on whether they can make their voices heard. According to research I’ve done on perceptions of the NHS, choice isn’t really as important to people as the idea of a reliable safety net. In fact people would rather they were just told where to go, as long as the basic level of care was consistent. Many suspect choice is simply a way of dressing up uneven quality of delivery.

Again, I think if the Government were clearer on exactly why choice is a good thing people might not be so suspicious. Unfortunately, though, I wonder whether they have a reason. To a lot of people it feels like inappropriate import of commercial, consumerist ideas. They might be right.

Not nailing it

Not profound, just a cock-up.

Watching a fascinating programme about oil rigs on Five (honest), I saw an ad for Toolstation, a DIY catalogue. The bit you remember, though, is the VO saying “Nail it!” in a sort of laddish, alpha voice. My girlfriend picked up on it – you don’t remember Toolstation, you remember the slogan.

So we wondered: what happens if you google “nail it”? Presumably they’ll have made sure they bought that as a search term?

Not really. In fact, what happens is you get this.

Oops. There’s a company called “Nail It.” Admittedly, they specialise in damaged nails of the human variety, rather than the engineering, and it isn’t available in the UK any more. But still. There’s no sign of Toolstation anywhere in the first three pages of Google. Major search strategy fail.

Unbranded

I’ve just discovered Hank Williams Thomas, who has been “unbranding” ads featuring African-Americans since the 1970’s.

He’s not trying to make a point about good advertising. Far from it. But it did strike me as quite a good test for good communications: does the ad work if you take the brand out?

This is the opposite of what I was taught when I started: that if you remove the brand from the ad, it should fall apart. If it doesn’t, it means the brand has no role and is simply sponsoring a piece of entertainment.

But I don’t think that’s always true anymore. Perhaps communications should have a role to play by themselves. Like the heart attack film we made for the BHF, which is now being used as a training film. Or this great tool from the Guardian, which within hours of going live was apparently reappropriated on the Spurs fan forums and spread like wildfire from there.

Both those pieces of communication, as well as doing all the things pieces of communication are meant to do, like raise awareness, actually have a role to play in people’s lives. Quite often, though, I think the presence of a brand we all care deeply about as its guardians can mask the utter redundancy and irrelevance of some communications. Removing the brand would show up pointless ads for what they were. Anything genuinely entertaining should still shine.

Fighting the good fight

Interesting post from one of the NY Times’ blogs, which picks up a piece from the Boston Globe (so this is an especially globetrotting post, boom boom). The basic idea, to save you clicking back down the trail, is that partisan government is more effective in a crisis than bipartisan government.

Why? Because ideas – at least in the history of the U.S. Government – have come from partisan causes and been battled into the mainstream. Cosy bipartisanship, while a wonderful ideal, is simply ineffective – particularly in a crisis. Partisanship brings about “the kind of strong and critical advocacy that opens public debate, forces the parties to explain their ideas, and clarifies choices”. 

That sounds like a healthy way to discuss any kind of idea. Where I work, we have an approach we call “Open”. Taken at face value, it looks like a kind of egalitarian, dreamy Utopia where a good idea can come from anywhere and everyone’s as good as anyone else. But I don’t think that’s why it’s a powerful way to work.

For me, working in an open way means people bringing partisan ideas to the table, and allowing anyone to challenge, question, add to and refine them. It isn’t quite the anarchy of the wiki, where everyone has a delete key and no-one has control. Nor is it the oligarchy of the old-school creative agency, where only Creatives can criticise and everyone else must sell.

Instead, it creates lots of arguments. People question each other. Sometimes it can be frustrating as hell, and the temptation to say “shut up” is overwhelming. As it must be in the House of Commons or the Senate when an idea is under fire.

Time will probably tell whether it delivers great ideas, though it’s already started to. But if the Boston Globe is right about partisan politics, I think we might be on to something.

Come bearing gifts

On the way home tonight, I had one of those rare things: a genuinely nice, genuinely spontaneous, genuinely shared experience. It came in the form of a tube-car busker playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a reverb-drenched electric violin. I feel like a traitor saying this as a musician, but usually, the feeling I get when I jump onto a tube carriage, the doors close behind me and I realise a split-second too late that I’m going to spend the next five minutes trapped in a small metal box with someone torturing a Bob Dylan song, or reanimating the rotting, late-night corpse of rockabilly – usually, that feeling is regret.

Not tonight, though. The fiddler on the tube was good. He made a nice sound. And from there, lots of other nice things followed.

For a start, people stopped reading and listened. They smiled. They applauded. I found myself catching the eyes of strangers – not something you’d usually do on the Victoria line at 11pm unless you wanted to scare people or get scared yourself.

And then, of course, EVERYone gave him money. Willingly. I did, and immediately thought that I could have given him double. Because actually, what he’d done had been valuable to me, and probably to everyone else on the carriage.

The first thing it made me think about, off the tube and walking up Stockwell Road, was what that value was. I only gave him a couple of quid. That won’t buy you a beer in SW3, where I’d been drinking. And yet what he’d done was worth way more. It was probably worth more than a lot of gigs I’ve been to, films I’ve seen, even possibly one or two CDs I’ve bought. Even though it was transient. Rare connection with strangers, smiles, a little bit of community and aesthetic pleasure in the middle of the night in London: that’s got to be worth more than a pint of Stella.

The second thing it made me think about was something David Hackworthy had said in a talk as part of the IPA Diploma course I’m doing. He said brands should “come bearing gifts”. I guess it was a variation on the old advertising bargain: be nice to people if you’ve arrived unannounced in their living rooms, I think Paul Weinberger used to say at Lowe.

The point was, I guess, that the busker had borne a gift. Not a slick one, or a branded one, or a particularly bling one. It was just some fairly well played, cliched music. But it was worth something. It was a surprise. It changed people’s behaviour for the better, like the sun getting the man to take off his coat in Aesop’s fable. And people willingly, smilingly paid, even though times are hard at the moment.

Some brands I guess do that. Little things that make people feel grateful. But they’re generally CRM-type things, or else they’re free trial-type things outside stations. It’s not that the ulterior motive that makes them less magical than the busker. He had an ulterior motive too. He wasn’t some angel of music. He was trying to make a buck.

I think it was the irrational, joyful, aesthetic nature of what he was doing. And doing well enough that it wasn’t an imposition. He lit up an evening for a bunch of tired commuters. Not many brands genuinely do that.

Just another case of history repeating…

Went to see the Robert Opie collection at the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill the other day. Spent a little while feeling smug about how clever we all are these days, what with our ideas and our 360-degree thinking and our gorillas.

But actually they’ve kind of done most of it before. Look, branded content:

 

 

multi-platform entertainment properties:

 

 

 

 

And even engagement ideas using gaming platforms to target secondary but influential younger audiences.

 

 

 

And on the other side of the same thropenny bit, vacuous, lifestyle-oriented shite advertising for cars:

 

 

Death By PowerPoint

So we all know that bullet points are a crime in PowerPoint. You’re meant to do the minimalist thing:  a picture and a single word in Helvetica. Or just the word. Otherwise you risk being B-O-R-I-N-G.

Apparently, it could be worse. This guy thinks that poor PowerPoint was partly to blame for the Challenger disaster.

It has to do with NASA and Boeing engineers “burying” some annoying statistical technicality about the foam that hit Challenger’s wing way down among the bullet points, close to the bottom of the page. That annoying statistical stuff turned out to be rather important, as it effectively voided all the safety models and meant that Challenger, orbiting around the Earth full of blissfully unaware astronauts, was at far greater risk than everyone thought.

Apparently one of the lesser-known recommendations to come out of the Challenger disaster was that PowerPoint no longer be used as a format for technical reports.

So. Next time I see a throwaway “caution: low base size” on a tracking debrief, I might mention this. And see what everyone says.

It lives…

After one abortive attempt (not counting music ones) I’ve decided to start a blog again. I thought I’d call it set square because it has connotations that I quite like. At some point I’ll write them up and probably put them in my about. But for now, suffice it to say that it has to do with creativity, and science, and the merging of those two things. Which is sort of my job, and sort of what I’m interested in.

With that in mind, I thought I’d make my first post a bit of a “look what I found”. I started reading Godel, Escher, Bach the other day. It’s one of those books I felt the need to know a bit about. There’s quite a lot I like about it, but one of the first things I found was a really nice list of the abilities which indicate intelligence. Which I though was also quite a good list of the abilites that are essential in creative thinking. So here it is, courtesy of Douglas R. Hofstadter:

• to respond to situations very flexibly
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways
• to come up with ideas which are novel

There you go. If I do some of those things in a day, I’ve had a pretty good day.

If you’ve stumbled across this in its early days, I hope you enjoy the forthcoming randomness.