brand new

Brand Tag

Noah Brier has just launched another one of his rather good  sites - good as in it's one of those 'duh, why hasn't this been done before?'.  Brand tags is based on the simple truth that brands exist in people's heads and simply asks you to post the word or phrase that comes to your mind about a bunch of brands.   It then generates a tag cloud of  all the responses.
Flicking through, there is lots of evidence of the complexity and nuance of brands, and not much of the singularity which so much marketing theory advocates (perhaps most notoriously by M&C Saatchi).  For example, I've heard that BMW was meant to be simply about performance....

UPDATE:  Noah has now reverse engineered the site here so you can try and guess the brand from its tag cloud.  Fun, and more difficult than perhaps you first think.

Brainy water

Rob just posted this, the new ad for Drench bottled water done by CHI

It's genius.  90 seconds of fun and entertainment driven by a great, fresh strategy that's at the fulcrum of the whole thing.  I think it's what people call unexpected relevance. 

Buying In

I was very kindly sent an advance copy of Rob Walker's new book, Buying In, which I've just finished reading.  Rob has written for the last few years the consistently excellent, fun and provocative Consumed column in the New York Times magazine.
Buying In, is in one way, a smart, readable exposition on the idea christened by Rob of 'murketing' ie murky marketing (think the Red Bull flying events, BzzAgents, the launch of Scion, etc.) that he has talked about weekly in his column.
But it is a much more fundamentally important book.  In it, Rob tries to explain the relationship between who we are and what we buy by trying to crack the "desire code". A relationship far more nuanced than we may care to believe.  And to do that he lays waste, with great precision and weight of evidence, to many widely held assumptions that are far too often mistaken for fact.  That we are in fact no more marketing resistant and brand proof now than we have been before. That it is in fact not what marketers do but what other people do that matters.  That brands do not simply transfer their meaning to us; rather, we, more often than we may care to believe or consciously register, give meaning to brands.

It's a great read, packed full of interviews and stories about brands from the new and relative underground (like the hundereds and etsy ) to the older and relative mainstream (Converse, Apple  and PBR).  And the section where he passes a very cool eye over his time with Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve is worth the read alone.

Until it's published in early June, you can read a sample of the book here

Farewell tim

One of the nicer things that seems to be happening to life at M! is a new tradition emerging of a video being made when someone leaves.  Tim Blount is sadly leaving us for some place I've never heard of in Boulder, CO so some of his friends in interactive decided to pay tribute to his (un)healthy unironic love of Journey.  I had to share.  Enjoy.  Especially if you have a penchant for early MTV.

Another reason to love innocent

I've prattled on in the past way too much about that wonderful English drink company, innocent.  Well, last weekend they did another lovely, simple thing to enrich their lore which was to hold their first annual gneral meeting where they invited drinkers to pay a visit to Fruit Towers.

Lots of good write ups around the blogosphere (my favorite summary is all the stuff innocent shared here) but it seemed to be a great way to talk about what they did well, what they learnt and to really involve their drinkers in some future decisions.  Everyone who went got a little annual report booklet that you can now download here, along with video and commentary .  My favorite page is the following that just nails the voice that makes the brand so special; the fun they inject into the humdrum.

Feels like it could be the first AGM/Annual Report that counts as really positive brand communications rather than the usual 'necessary' legal exercise.

A better view on investment

I posted a couple of days ago about the video of Mark Earls and Duncan Watts at the  ARF conference.  Watching this again the other night, I was struck by what I think is a brilliant analogy and piece of outsight by Scott Thomas who runs evaluation at Naked.
He makes the point that successful investment decisions today are less about a rigorous masterplan (copytesting, singular campaign you put everything behind, etc.) and more about behaving like an investor in options.  You place a lot of small bets, see which seem to be gaining traction and then scale up.  Probably something obvious I've missed before, but a much better way of talking about complexity, brand molecules and the 1 in 20 rule.  It's an analogy right for the boardroom, rather than right for a herd of planners.  And a much better map of a world where the truth is that most things fail. 

Help create some fast strategy and plan for good

One of our committee members, Mark Earls, is participating in a Fast Strategy conference in London on Monday 28th.  They will be given a brief to answer that day by the Central Office of Information (the UK Government's communications 'client'). 

Mark has assembled a crack group of planners - Jon Leach (of HHCL fame), Chris Forrest (ex DFGW and now of the excellent research company The Nursery) and Ian Tait (of Poke (and the crackunit blog)) to work on the brief as the P4G Allstars.  BUT THEY WANT YOUR HELP.
Mark wants to demonstrate the power of P4G by involving any of us with internet access (and favorable time zones) to contribute to the the thinking.  Here's the deal.
Next Monday, 10amBST brief posted on wiki site; responses by 12pm (noon) at the latest.  Mark and the team will present at 2pm BST.
Please try and contribute - it will be fun and a great demonstration of the power of P4G at work.
If you're interested please email faststrategy@planningforgood.org  and/or keep an eye on our facebook page.

Detox Boston

Finally got down to Method's  Detox Boston space (I can't bring myself to say pop up store) on Newbury Street (it's open until the end of the week so if you're in Boston get down there).

I've written before about how much I love this brand - big social mission beyond it's category, great design, built from the product up, etc. - and the store was a great way to bring it to life.

Lots of great stuff - hand cream you can only get hold of it you bring in harmful home cleaning materials to be disposed of; stuff being sold as sets in their 'plastic bag' rehab reusable bags (so of course I felt obliged to)

But my favorite thing was the cleaning confessional, where you wrote your confession for a confessional that was a photo machine.  Photos were left on the wall (including confessions from the founders)

Of course, Dustin and myself had to leave ours.

Art Lab

One of the reasons I keep using twitter is that every now and then you stumble across a great link/recommendation.  Here's an example from a twitter from Mark - the Art Lab at the University of Westminster run by David Gauntlett.

Their work is concerned with the relationship between media and culture and the construction of people's identities (some great online trading cards as a crash primer are here) .  Lots of interesting stuff, but what interested me most was some of their research techniques.  This is probably best demonstrated by their Lego research which is about building and then talking; doing then thinking.  Good discussion on why this is done and the benefits of the approach here.   

I just love

an inn with a sense of humor.

As seen at the wonderful Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, Maine.

Earls and Watts

Great video of Mark Earls and Duncan Watts from the ARF conference on how ideas spread. First of three videos; an hour well spent.

What can I say?

Red Brick Road

Sir Frank Lowe's new-ish agency The Red Brick Road have finally got their website up.  It's a fairly simple positioning around no bs, all about the work and simplicity but click on the follow the yellow brick road button for one of the better spoof, point out the lunacy of a lot of agencies and the industry sites.  It's funny because sadly it's so often true.

More evidence about the failure of TV commericals

Accenture have just published a report on television in transition (you can register for free and download it here).  It's a pretty interesting report on the changing nature of TV based on some global research.  But one chart in particular caught my eye and gave me cause for concern.  People find the commercials the worst part of the live TV experience.

Now this to me is more evidence of the trend first pointed out by some work Lowe did in the early 90s that showed the dramatic decline in people finding TV commercials as least as good as the programming it interrupted and the emergence of the 'ad avoider' (you can find the data over at adliterate). 

So, two things to think about.  One, how can we make the content we produce as an industry compelling and interesting enough for people to enjoy watching it. As I've written before, I believe this is about changing our views about how advertising works and stopping treating people as a captive audience who are excited to hear our latest lecture.  Second, if people are disliking TV commercials, shouldn't we stop thinking that a TV ad is the be all and end all; the cure to all our problems.  I know we claim as an industry that we have but our actions seem to be saying something different as we continue to fuel the broadcast machine.