Fireworks fizzling and the future of planning

Well, that's a grandiose title for some thoughts I've had that I have a nagging suspicion that others have expressed better. It sprang from two unconnected things.

First, we'd been spending time at work trying to understand why some social campaigns have been successful, campaigns like Drug Free America in the 1980s and anti-littering in the 1960s, to campaigns like Truth today.  And one obvious observation was that when we talked about these campaigns was that campaigns of ten years ago and older were often remembered and defined by one ad whereas it was difficult to point to one defining execution in the successful social campaigns of today.

The second thing was watching the build up to the launch of the new Cadbury ad and the reaction following it, one best characterized as a sense of being not bad but underwhelmed.

This got me thinking about the ingredients for success in communication today and the fairly clear observation that success today comes from the strategic intervention rather than the creative execution; it's about re-framing ideas and getting people to see things, and do things, differently to change behavior rather than helping find the singular, right powerfully simple execution.  A fantastic firework, thanks to media fragmentation removing the social watercooler effect of big media, no longer is enough.  It's about doing lots of stuff not one thing; about continually surprising people (the stuff John Grant talks about so well in the Brand Innovation Manifesto).

And I believe the Cadbury example shows that the worst thing today is to try and be repetitious and repeat an executional formula. Gorilla, to my mind, was successful because it was a piece of non-narrative film that made you feel joy - a surprising 60 seconds of TV based off a big strategic idea (make people feel joy).  Truck feels underwhelming to me because it was, in essence, the same execution.  The brand needed to do something different to make me feel joy again, not try and repeat the same trick.

Probably crap, but if it holds water I think it has implications for the role of planning.  For a long time there's been a lot of discussion about planning needing to move away from the development of messages.  Perhaps, the role of planning going forward is to think about the environment we are trying to create that will most likely lead to success and what things we can do to create this environment.  More about the context and ecosystem, and less about the element or elements within.  Indeed, if the recent work by Mark Earls and Duncan Watts among others is right, this creation of a more favorable set of conditions should be our first and foremost obsession as it's a much more likely and sustainable source of fire than hoping your firework explodes time after time.

Comments

[Duncan]

Spot on

[Mikej]

I think that the role of planners was always to find an emotional territory that a product / brand could play in. The truth now is finding that emotional playground is no longer just to create a message you are trying to portray in an ad. Its the way a brand behaves and this is where you are seeing the fusion of account planners and comms / connection planning. You are also seeing more planners move into product / service development as well as a way to communicate the brands emotional . This 'environment' as you have put it is still the same as previously. Its just we have expanded our executional options. Why cant we make a new product service ...like anomoly has.... or address technology /service ... like R/GA and Nikeplus. This is how a brand behaves.... but the strategy and insight is still the same as planners did to make ads....we just need to expand the context to other areas than writing another ad. If I ever get my act together. I will post a few slides on this on slideshare. Thanks for the great post gareth

[tom martin]

Great post. Totally agree that far too often we are guilty of finding an execution that works and then attempting to copy it -- usually with lackluster results.

However, I do think that if the idea IS the execution -- then there is the ability to extend a single executional approach to keep a message alive and well.

For instance, this campaign uses "spoken word" as both the idea and the execution.

http://tommartin.typepad.com/positive_disruption/2008/02/best-spot-that.html

Which allows the campaign to "have legs" without losing power from one execution to the next.

NOTE: the agency I work for produced, so I may be biased here.

The point is, with Cadbury -- the only tie from one execution to the next is the use of music. There is no tie from gorilla to cars... but then I'd agree that had they simply picked another animal, still wouldn't have been as good. Gorilla was a one trick pony kind of execution. Cadbury would have done well to acknowledge that and sent their creative teams to create other forms of "joy."

[Katy]

Great post. I think the Truth campaign, coupled with increased government regulation, has made smoking somewhat shameful. Dirty looks are much more powerful then repeating the health risks smoking causes (which everyone already knows anyway).

[Tom O'Brien]

Hi Gareth:

This post made me think of some work we have recently done on an anti-meth campaign. It started with MotiveQuest gathering all the meth related online conversations and analyzing it to understand what the core motivations and drivers around meth use. This understanding was used to "inform" what the planners did with the campaign. Take a look:

http://menotmeth.org

TO'B