In 2007, as the banking crisis began to reveal its ugly teeth, Haruna McWilliams and I published a paper on why clients should continue to spend during an economic downturn. Since then, we’ve had reams of IPA data and a global pandemic to deal with. As we stare down the barrel of an inflation fuelled downturn, I looked back at the article Haruna and I wrote 14 years ago to see if anything was still valid for the road ahead.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work on many great award winning marketing campaigns over the years, from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, First Direct’s Little Fella and The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Orange, to two time campaign of the year for 118 118. All won awards for both creativity and effectiveness, and like many before me, I’ve often wondered what the magic ingredients were that delivered such outstanding success.
They were all undoubtedly great clients, with great people, great ideas and great budgets. The kind you seldom see nowadays. But what there wasn’t, or at least didn’t appear to be at the time, was an outstanding, genuinely superior product. Dove’s quarter moisturising cream recipe was originally formulated to help wartime burn victims, First Direct was no longer the only phone bank in town, and actually had an inferior online offer, while Orange was fourth to market with patchy coverage when compared to established players Vodafone, Cellnet and Mercury 1-2-1. But perhaps least promising of all was 118 118, one of a slew of new market entrants to the recently deregulated telephone enquiries sector, when few saw the need to change the incumbent BT number 192 anyway. Not only was there no real distinguishing feature to the product (it was in some ways worse than the old BT service it replaced), but most people genuinely didn’t care about what number they used. In a list of category choices people might make during a given week, only their choice of petrol was seen as less important.
In my early days of planning, this would have been a real headache. I’d been trained in the old P&G school of product superiority, looking for genuine points of competitive advantage that, if backed by a big enough media spend, would persuade people to choose brand A over all the others. In each of the cases above, that wasn’t really there, at least in the beginning.
If there’s little to no competitive advantage in the product, what better place to look for differentiation than in the advertising itself. Take a stance for those on the flip side of beauty with Dove, champion customer satisfaction with First Direct, or take the high ground with Orange. But more than anything, just keep people engaged and interested, by making your promotion engaging and interesting. Which is just what 118 118 did.
I suspect that, were any of these brands to have had a genuine product advantage at the the time, they wouldn’t have been half as successful as they are today. As the saying goes, if you have no money, you have to think instead. The same goes for no discernible product advantage too. It can be daunting when you look at a marketing strategy that is largely characterised by a blank sheet of paper, but hugely liberating too. In some ways I now welcome product and service propositions where the advantage is hard to find, at least at first.
Without the constraints of product superiority to persuade people of, you are free to engage and interest them instead. No idea at first is an advantage, not a hindrance.
The fact that most of us are resistant to change is hardly new news. The advertising industry is full of prophets of doom lamenting how the industry is well and truly screwed. And yet paradoxically this is a sector whose business it is to provoke change, provide breakthroughs, and even coined the term disruption. It appears however that we are much happy when it’s somebody else’s business that’s being disrupted rather than our own.
Many people, in many industries, yearn for a return of the glory days. Times when individuals, businesses and whole sectors were flourishing. The times when it felt like we were unstoppable. It’s all to easy to ignore those rose tinted spectacles we so love to adorn when discussing such things. It’s a proven (ish) fact in my own industry that most advertising in the 70s, 80s, 90s or any other allegedly glorious decade was, in truth, shit. Many more sectors will be the same.
Change comes from movements, from numbers of disaffected people wanting to make things different. Yet for many, the most desirable change is to halt the inexorable speed of process and leave things just as they are. In other words, do nothing at all. If we simply turn to our peers for inspiration, more often than not that’s the response we’ll get, at least implicitly.
The virtual agency I work with from time to time, Pimento, is growing at an exponential rate. Others with new and different models, such as Oliver and Harbour, are seeing similar success. Their growth is being driven not from within but from the markets in which they operate. And as Kevin Chesters of Harbour points out, it’s often not the usual suspects of marketing directors that are leading the charge, but old adversaries such as procurement or project management departments that are looking for different ways of doing things.
Purists would say their relentless drive for efficiency is killing the industry, but it could be argued they are fuelling innovation and change through insisting on new structures that deliver greater speed and client responsiveness. And it’s a moot point anyway, the disruption clients bring is here to stay and we’d all better get used to dealing with it.
Years ago I had the distinction of working with Kodak, who ironically had built the world’s first digital camera. But film and processing made better margins than cameras, so they locked it away until it was too late. Change is often driven by the unlikeliest of sources. Rather than fearing it, perhaps hunting we’d do better hunting it out instead.
I met up with my old chum Neil Dawson last week who’s just started his new business Neil A Dawson and Co. A business based on collaboration, creative excellence and getting things done. As friends and colleagues are wont to do, we spent a little time reminiscing about some of the successful work we’d done in the past too.
It’s hard enough to be good, but the formula for great is an elusive one. It seems to be a happy combination of various factors: great people, great market dynamics, great teamwork, great thinking and more than a little luck along the way too. On the few special occasions where I’ve been involved in something truly special, there’s always been a unique set of circumstances that are hard to replicate. But one thing Neil and I did agree on was that making great work always felt fun and enjoyable, even if the hours were hard and long.
So rather than aiming for great, I’m wondering if it might be more productive to aim for enjoyment instead. Not in the "‘leave early and head to the pub’ way, but fostering an environment where respect, openness, honesty and an absence of fear abound. Where collective endeavour and individual brilliance both exist in harmony, rather than fight tooth and nail. If having fun was the goal, how might projects be approached differently?
Firstly, get the right people involved at the outset. The kind of people who are instinctively at ease in each other’s company. People who are not afraid to call each other out, and who take no umbrage when it happens to them either. People who you’ve known for years, or just met but hit it off straight away. Going right back to Collins and Porras’ From Good To Great, ‘Get the right people on the bus, and only then figure out where it’s going’.
Second, get everyone aligned behind a common (business) goal. ‘More sales of X’ is not a business strategy, and neither is ‘Win the pitch’. Who are you engaging with, what they are doing now, and what you need them to do in the future are vital questions in any marketing project, but ones often parked when faced with new shiny thoughts, ideas and tactics.
Third, give everyone a voice, particularly on things they don’t naturally feel comfortable with. The best results happen when no-one is afraid to call out something they instinctively feel isn’t right. But then neither is that about beating yourself up either. The best people I’ve worked with were never afraid of trying something again because they backed themselves to come up with something better each time.
Fourth, take time out to enjoy the journey. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of deadlines and deliverables that you miss what’s going on around you. Work can take you to some amazing places, both literally and figuratively, but it’s easy to pass them by. And while the journey is often rewarding on its own, it’s doubly so when the experience is shared with your team. The founders of The Caffeine Partnership realised this when they made a strict rule that no-one would engage in a project by themselves.
Finally, try and have a little perspective. Winning and doing great is hard work, and it hurts always when it doesn’t come off. That’s why it feels so good when it does. But, with time, I’ve always been able to take something away from every project I’ve been involved with. Sometimes, learning what not to do is every bit as valuable as what does work. So I always now try to think of that along the way, and what I can take to the next big thing.
None of that is going to make the pursuit of great any easier. It still takes graft, skill, imagination and more than a little luck. But not only will enjoying it make it rewarding, it’ll help tip the odds in your favour too.
Fast forward twenty years and the competition for consumer attention is more intense than ever. It’s no longer enough to buy cut through as the big consumer goods brands did, instead we need to earn it. Pretty much every piece of communication now has to work in this way, regardless of content or channel. And earning attention, let alone talkability, is the very essence of PR.
Collaboration is hardly a new concept. A quick search through TED reveals numerous talks from such luminaries as Clay Shirkey and Matt Ridley all espousing how collaboration is needed to consistently come up with breakthrough ideas. And many creative enterprises have long tried (and usually failed) to break down boundaries between departments and individuals to create different ideas.
Having worked with and for many successful creative organisations, I’ve been fortunate enough to have collaborated with some of the very best and brightest in the business. And our most famous work has always been very much a shared effort. Even those moments of individual brilliance that so often characterise great ideas usually came about because of the context created by other members of the team.
Much as Pine and Gilmore predicted in “The Experience Economy” some twenty years ago, the trend towards winning and losing together continues to gather pace. People increasingly want to work together, not compete against each other. One would have thought, then, that there had never been a better time for the quality of output of modern creative organisations, despite the significant ‘headwinds’ facing the sector as a whole.
But something else is happening to how people work together. As #williamwu tells us in his excellent story on why soil matters, the mindset that shifted from ‘my’ world to ‘our’ world is now moving towards ‘the’ world. ‘We’ is increasingly seen as no longer enough to fully meet the challenges that come our way.
For the humble creative enterprise, I suspect a closed group of individuals, even star industry names, will increasingly find it harder to compete against looser, more fluid soft networks. An ever changing cast of characters that constantly adapt to the nature of the task in front of them, and find new ways of collaborating as they do. The benefits for the end user are as compelling as for those who deliver them.
I’ve always felt at my best, professionally at least, when I’ve had my gang around me. In the modern creative enterprise, that gang is now significantly bigger. The networks I work with are more fluid than they used to be, and it’s why I launched Frank & Friends, a means of collaborating with the right individuals and organisations to solve complex strategic problems. There will be no stopping us.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work for a number of ‘mature start-ups’ recently. On paper, the story is compelling – combine the wisdom, experience and reputation of an established company with the hunger, guile and enthusiasm of new joiners to do things differently. In such circumstances it’s easy to under-estimate the degree to which old and new attitudes are hard wired, and what people say is not always what they really feel. Living a new culture that works for both is easy to say, much harder to do for real. Many fail along the way, and those that succeed are truly special.
