That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed the ride. It was at times purposeful. I met some good people, had some great conversations. And I got to see some interesting places. I have become a richer person because of it. And that’s what I think is meant by the biblical phrase “rich young man.”

And yes it’s time to move on. With a little sadness, but that’s a natural human emotion after having done something for so many years. And I had my wisdom teeth removed last week. They say it can take two weeks to recover from it. Perhaps I needed to create a marker of this change.

Now I am free to say publicly what I think. So let’s get back to some somewhat regularly commentary.
In the tradition of DINA, I shall sign off

D.P.S-P

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The Space Merchants (Sf Masterworks)

I read The Space Merchants on my last trip up to New York just recently. It’s a tale of a copywriter who’s made it onto the board. Set 100 years in the future it describes a world in which two advertising agencies run everything. They are large corporations and its interesting that two of the agency holding companies are now in the Business Week Global 500. The premise is that their power comes from their ability to control the mass’s mind. Set against them are the consies, which I imagine derives from conservationists, who are in subversive defiance of a purely materialistic and consumption driven culture. It’s a fun read even if it were only because there is not a lot of fiction about advertising. I had no idea that the authors were famous for science fiction, but thought instead that they were themselves copywriters with the way they laxed lyrical about the poetic ability of copywriters. In all, quick and fun.

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This book is gripping from beginning to end. It’s an account of an agency pitching for a piece of business written as a series of e-mails. The characters are bordering on stereotypical 80s agency – larger than life and indulgent in their vices. The creative director at one point is caught with his pants down in his office. There’s a nerdy CEO from Oslo offering his advice on the pitch. Even more bizarre is that I hired a planner who worked at the agency during the time in question. I reckon the book should be banned, at least to clients.

Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign

I wept when I read this. This is a true account of a pitch for the Subaru business. There are four very different pitch strategies. The author was given unusual access into all of the agencies and the client to write this book. But the book doesn’t stop there, it goes on to tell of Weiden & Kennedy’s tortured
relationship with the client up until they lost the account. That such an iconic agency would expose its underbelly to the author and thence to the world was refreshing in a world where agencies are agressively defensive of their image. Read and learn.

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I believe that Maslow was only partially right. In the physical being there is only one fundamental drive – the continuity of its genes, even stronger than the instinct to survive. which is why male spiders will let themselves be eaten by the female. And there is one fundamental tool – intelligent awareness.

However to procreate this the physical being will have to survive long enough to procreate and ensure the survival of its kin to adulthood. And importantly it may have to beat any competition through successful differentiation. To further the chances of offspring survival one more strategy is introduced co-operation. These are our fundamental physical drives: procreation, survival, differentiation, cooperation. These last two create a powerful tension that demands one more thing from the physical being: intelligence.

Consumption at this point is all about achieving one of these four ends. Smoking a cigar for example may be a status symbol, or it maybe a sublimation of the sexual act.

Intelligence now drives the spiral. It is the point on which the ohers rotate or grow. And from which some interesting things emerge. Intelligence also inceases the capacity for awareness. When this is applied to the urge to differentiate within a community the entity becomes self-aware. “I am that.”

This significantly steps up the drive to aquire. Now that the entity has acquired a sense of self, along with the other types of consumption he pursues that self through consumption as a means to expression. Ultimately finding what he or she thinks of as more improved ways to differentiate. But the more different the entity becomes the more isolated. In order to deal with this the sense of community changes. The community of birth may be abandoned in search of like minds. However, also the mind begins to occupy itself with values and he or she moulds him or herself around a set of values. The “that” becomes a lot more subtle.

And now consumption also becomes about community. But because the individual has become highly differentiated, community is difficult. This is a very modern phenomenon. Blogs are an indication of the search for community at this stage.

Yet this identification with values doesn’t come all at once. First is the realisation that this must happen and there are attempts to achieve this. The person will read different material, they may go on courses, perhaps seek out religion. But other drives are more pressing in the beginning. And empty time may be painful, so the indiviual will seek to escape back into cosumption that reflects the quest. And the need for distraction will also drive consumption.

The other thing that will happen here is that many purchases will become values based. A person may refuse certain brands because of what they represent. Nike and Macdonalds are two salient examples. Also, in the world of business the drive for profit is the equivalent of an animals need to procreate. Indeed what we are seeing is that many businesses are becoming values based which is in turn being driven by their employees.

But if you can mould yourself around values then they too are an expression of something else. The next big shift is that consumption fails the differentiated self and he or she turns the search for self-relection to pure self without object. Eventually, or maybe suddenly, the intelligent awareness drops everything and realises that all aware beings are identical. And consumption comes to an end.

It is the individual who is still searching that occupies us now. Initially, there is an awareness of wholenees, but an inability or a lack of will to pursue it. Because in this individual the pattern of consumption is beginning to change. Yes, there will be residual activity. But he or she is now looking to drop, to simplify. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud: “A cigar is becoming a cigar.” But, paradoxically, the urge to simplify will bring about its own purchases and generally more expensive.

It is not that Maslow was “wrong”, but maybe that there is a more explanatory model.

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I was in the pub the other night for a quick beer with a couple of creatives that I work with and the discussion was based around is what we do art or is what we do to sell stuff. Interestingly it was the creatives that were debating this thought. But then what is art anyway.

I argued for the art side. Because what we’re doing is trying to create something that’s of value in people’s lives and that becomes a vehicle for the selling message. This is an extension of the somewhat cynical idea that advertising needs to be entertaining because people will be more receptive to the advertising message when their entertained.

People involved in marketing can be a cynical bunch, but when they’re not they’re often passionate about the value of their product or service to the public. If what we’re offering in a communication is intrinsically of value then the product or service will have offered the communication of itself for people to have. And that may predispose them to consume something offered by the brand that has a monetary value to it.

At its simplest a brand communication may make you feel good about yourself. What else can that brand do that will make you feel good about yourself? As I see it this is one of the futures of our industry that puts human worth back into the equation.

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I’ve noticed over the years that clients only see one end of the planning spectrum.Historically, planning had two simultaneous births. One was to work with creative teams, which meant that planners were there to provide insights to creative teams and were part of the creative process. The other was to work with clients and formulate more consumer-centric marketing strategies.

The first article therefore, I believe, expressed the common view by clients that planners are there to help a client formulate communications strategies. Of course they’d want that in house. What client wouldn’t want to own their strategy. It has been strange watching research agencies struggling to own some measure of client strategy and competing with advertising agencies in that struggle. Advertising agencies don’t own client’s strategy either. What researchers miss is that an agency has two bits to understand brands: intellectual and feeling. And in many ways the feeling is much more important than all of the rationalisation that goes around what a brand is. And creatives generally do that best because their job is to speak as the brand.

But it seems that Coke has a wider view of planning than this. BBH created planning to provide deeper insight to creative teams. Planners in this model get reviewed by how well they’re contributing to the creative team. To do this job well you have to understand not just the consumer but what is influencing them and how it’s influencing them. At a superficial level that becomes influencers in the purchase decision, but at a deeper level that is what the cultural influences are and where they are coming from. This is harder, but it is a lot more interesting. Yes, this is the realm of Faith Popcorn, but it’s a lot more than that too. This is art.

However, to me planning is still more than this. Media shops are hiring planners too, because they realise that Marshall Mcluhan was right when he said “the medium is the message.” This has been oversimplified by media departments for years with clichés like: television is an emotional medium and print is rational. The problem they’re facing is that traditional media are wearing out and they’re being demanded by clients to look at multiple touchpoints. Coupled with that is that media fragmentation is leading to a need for the traditional model of reach and frequency to be at least complemented with the role of the touchpoint in consumers lives and its role for the brand. Which means that the more leading edge media shops are doing some advanced planning thinking.

The unfortunate thing is that the planning department gets stuck into one of the three parts of being a planner. This is generally due to the bias of the agency. And that’s unfortunate, because what planning offers is in fact integration. Because planners link the business needs to what will motivate a consumer (I hate that word) – across brand, message and medium. And they do that as partners in the creative process.

Of course Coca-cola wouldn’t want to give that up.

And that’s the job I love.

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What interests me is that it seems we are on the cusp of a change in the way that people are relating to brands. People buy brands because they trust them, yet on a daily basis they feel let down by the brands they buy, especially those that can break down. Beer and cigarettes at least in New Zealand have achieved the levels of trust that people are looking for, but electronic equipment has not. So consumers are more and more saying to themselves why pay for a brand when I can get the same level of quality out of a commodity. Supermarkets are also driving this perception amongst consumers with private label brands. And manufacturers strangely enough are willing to help them out.

While this phenomenon hasn’t yet reached critical mass, it probably won’t be too long before it does so. I am seeing evidence for it on a daily basis. Women, in their role as mothers and talking to me as a household shopper, tell me that they’re teaching their children to be critical of communications. The advertising literate consumer is becoming the corporate literate consumer, which is hardly a surprise when brands on a daily basis try to pull the wool over their eyes.

The day before yesterday an e-mail arrived on my computer asking me not to buy from two major oil companies until they got their prices down. I forwarded it to one person just out of interest. She then passed it on to 25 people. If this continues then not only will the consumer lose interest in the brands, but they will begin to actively fight back. The internet has become a powerful weapon for the consumer.

It continues to surprise me that corporations still see themselves as brand owners. It seems that the lesson of Harley Davidson to the corporation is about emotional loyalty to the brand. That’s the obvious lesson. The less obvious lesson is that it’s people who buy brands that own them not the corporations who “own” the trademark. Individuals own Harley Davidsons. The company makes them so that people will buy them and then own them. The company that makes them is no more than a caretaker that earns a living from delivering what people want. When people stop buying and consequently owning a brand, that brand ceases to exist.

I’m not the only one who’s observing this. And consumers are beginning to use the new tools available to fight back. Those two converging trends lead me to think that we’re approaching the cusp of a whole new relationship between people and the brands they buy.

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There is a view that these things are narcissistic. Indeed our culture has become incredibly narcissistic. What defined Narcissus was that he became obsessed with his own reflection. Is this to say that we shouldn’t reflect upon ourselves? Reflection is instead the beginning of the meditative act in which the reflection is seen for what it is – a reflection; empty and without substance. Narcissism is not that, it is its opposite. Narcissism is the imbuing of the reflection with substance. That is to say that the illusion of the reflection becomes real in our minds.

Narcissism therefore is paying attention to a sense of self. Narcissus died while pondering his own reflection. Engaged in the world of form the larger Self died to the little self. Everything was seen within the light of his self rather than through the light of the Self of all.

Has the world become narcissistic? Perhaps the question really is are we living in a world of people who have become obsessed with their role in the world, a world that lives in reflected light or a world where people create their own light and live unselfconsciously? Do we care what clothes we wear, what car we drive, how we smell? Do we want to make sure that the image we project is just so, or is the image we project a spontaneous reflection of our inner selves?

This takes us to the changing role of brands, which once were a trade mark and now are an opportunity for what a friend of mine some ten years ago called psychic badging. There is no doubt that brands have acted as indicators of social identity. If a person owns an Audi what does that say about him, versus if he owns a Lexus. Narcissism is that the individual has reflected on his choice of brand so that it says about him what he wants to be said, whether others see it or not.

However, it could equally be argued that what is occuring here is actually a matter of affinity rather than of badging. In other words our consumer feels a bond between herself and the brand because the values which the brand expresses are similar to the consumers values rather than the image which the consumer wishes to express. We could look to how we treat friends – is it because we have affinity with them, or is it because they say something about ourselves that we want to be said.

It is this latter that I would call consumerism. Affinity on the other hand arises out of a need. At a creative level, we want to amplify our output. We want to contribute. And our contribution is made more powerful by seeking like minds. We invite criticism rather than reject it. We let go of ourselves. And yet we reflect without becoming obsessed by our reflection.

And is this blog being written as a creative expression without self thought, or is it an act of consistency with my self image and the seeking of the perfect reflection?

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