“When you see humans interacting with other people, or with animals, there is very little feedback. It’s too infrequent and when it happens it is bad… it’s nasty…. especially in the work place… especially from boss to employee.
It’s as if there is some schedenfreude there. As if we actually take delight in people getting things wrong, so that we can then moan and groan and bitch at them.
This I would say is the biggest human foible that we have: we take the good for granted and we moan and groan at the bad”.
Since Inkling won a big Indian client that is based in Dehli I have been more than a little fascinated by the workings of that most fascinating of countries, becoming an avid reader of the Times of India online. So I found this image tweeted from the BBC today of Indians queueing for a new identity rather arresting.
Most below the poverty line Indians currently have no way to prove they exist, and in towns and villages across the country millions of them are queueing to receive unique biometric ID numbers, based among other things on iris scan & finger prints. These IDs will acknowledge them on paper for the first time ever as living and breathing human beings.
Critics fear it will create a big brother surveillance of the whole country & that it costs billions of pounds and can easily be used corruptly. While those queueing for it, are hoping that having an identity will give them access to government support and medical treatment that they can’t currently cannot benefit from; and things as simple as the opportunity to use ID to gain a mobile phone number or the right to vote, in a world where ID is mandatory.
However, either way in India, from what I have experienced a querulous, optimistic, striving, growing land, which is fast becoming a technology hub for the world what is taking place is quite simply the biggest national computerized database project in history. Whether the end result is fit for purpose remains to be seen, but it is quite a feat.
“Is it just me, or does it feel like almost every ad or piece of branded content you see these days is a brand patting itself on the back for having helped some unwitting participant enjoy a richer, better, more thrilling life experience?
Nowadays, when brands aren’t using integrated comms campaigns to make us over, revamp our houses, or pimp-up our cars, they are pulling Derren Brown-style stunts on us that will make our lives more momentarily fun, or gift us our dream job. It takes me back to a simpler time, when all brands did was tell us how great they were and what their products did. To find out if their claims were true, we had to trial the product; but the memory of those quainter ads is getting fainter and fainter.
Now that my 7-year-old can work pretty much every product in the house, including the latest apps and social technologies, then maybe brands have done all the explaining and promoting possible, and now must use interactive marketing campaigns to actively enter into and improve our lives. (It is certainly a lot more fun to watch videos of Dell’s “Piano Stairs…Enjoy the piano tunes as you climb up the stairs” than it is hear about their super-cheap super-reliable laptops).
What this high-profile form of participatory advertising has led to, is the necessity for real people’s responses to generate part of the creative end-result itself. What I mean is that the brand advertisement is not complete until people actually interact with it and show their surprise and gratitude.
Economist Umair Haque says brands must now expect that people will not ask is this product better than competitor’s offerings, or the last version; but instead: did it make me fitter, or wiser, or have more fun or improve my own or my community’s well-being? And also, was it an exciting and entertaining experience to engage with and to watch other people engaging with?
If the new trend in advertising is to provide real-life “solutions, not propositions” (Faris Yakob), then the state-of-play for marketers is no longer about creating social media activations and creating ads, but about creating ads wholly based upon social media outcomes, like this example below where Oreo’s uses a TV spot to promote an Oreo Whisper Fight Instagram campaign.
Though ultimately all of us in the comms business must remember that however sophisticated our promotional tools and techniques become “the best ad is a good product” (Alan H. Meyer)”
As posted on The Drum, an opinion piece on the future of the communications industry:
“A panel session with some sixth formers discussing the communications industry leads Jono Marcus, digital partner at marketing communications agency Inkling to offer his views on the industry of the future and how the agencies will be formed to service it.
Recently, I was asked to take part in a question and answer session with some sixth formers who were looking to get into the communications industry. The questions they asked were often: “How many ideas would I be expected to come up with in a day?”, but were very rarely: “Should I go into PR or media-buying or advertising?” The students reflected an audience that has grown up in a converged media culture and cares about great ideas, rather than great ads, or great PR stunts. A generation that presumes everything will end up on YouTube at some point anyway, whatever format it started out on.
The digital-savvy teens reflect the future of the communications industry, reliant on a combination of creativity and technical intelligence (or at least technical sensitivity). A technologist’s thinking and a creative’s inspiration does not need to come from one person, as such people are rare; but, certainly these two talents need to come from people in increasingly close proximity in the future.
The PR and newer ad agency models of the early 2000s will soon be killed-off, because they were all about being able to say in one breath a) what the idea is and b) how it could be achieved in one neat package. This was their massive competitive advantage, up to now. However, in the communications industry of the future, the emphasis will once again full firmly on the creative side, with the quality of the idea being the most valuable currency, in a landscape where digital and new technologies are making almost any type of execution possible if enough care is applied. Thinking of the idea in the first place will be what matters most. It is however, crucial that those coming up with the big ideas do eventually have the staff, contacts or network (wherever in the world those maybe) with the highly sophisticated or cutting-edge technological know-how to activate “anything is possible” ideas. Faris Yakob even put out the provocation that the technological aspect will become so important that in the future clients may judge creative on the quality of the coding behind it, not the final creative and copy.
The communications industry of the future will still have the odd agency that sells itself on the format of the end output. For example it will only execute in one format, like only producing print and TV ads, but these will be exceptions to the rule, fighting to survive in a marketplace geared to give them lower and lower returns for that narrow vision or skill-set. This view was backed up by the sixth formers I met, who saw working in marketing as an art form, not a science of having specific know-how in either just PR, or advertising or media deals. Instead, a blend of all disciplines, with enough technical awareness to see how imaginative concepts could become a reality with the new possibilities of cutting-edge technologies. Seth Godin describes this phenomena of thinking like an artist before worrying about end results in his book on the future of successful business, The Icarus Deception, describing: “a lifetime spent noticing begins to turn into the ability to see what others can’t”.
These teens, who represent the future of the communications industry, are digital natives, their smartphones are my generation’s laptops. This means that there will simply be no place in the industry in the future for those that want to dodge acquiring a mixture of computing, digital and technological skills. At the very least they must demonstrate understanding how crucial digital is in their job and offer a perspective on that. However, the future communications agency won’t just be full of technologists.
The agency of the future will be chock full of people with psychology, anthropology and art degrees. This is because in the digital age, almost every piece of communications created lives or dies in the hands of dialogue with a very active and well-heard audience, whom can each act as micro broadcasters to thousands and millions within their own digital networks. The understanding of what makes people (and groups of people) tick: their wants and dreams, becomes more important than ever. So, ultimately who better for your future ad agency than an anthropologist-artist-coding-creative-planner?
Walk around inside the communications agency of the future and you will see people not only with very different backgrounds and skillsets to the majority today’s professionals, but doing different things too. Expect to see a couple of people huddled over a new communications invention with a soldering iron, shouting across to someone rewriting the computer coding that makes it work, next to the artist who is hosting a viewing of the process, which is being beamed to millions of followers over a live-stream. In short the communications industry of tomorrow we be primarily concerned with inventing new kinds of communication solutions, not as at present with simply exploiting the current formats”.
Do we now live in an economy that doesn’t ultimately celebrate compliance, but rewards the extraordinary?
If you genuinely want to win big and achieve enduring success must you ignore the rules and shun the system? Does the “connection economy” reward those with the mindset of artists.
I hope so… the trailer for Seth Godin’s new book puts it rather snappily: “The people you truly care about, don’t value safe. They value daring. They value gasps…”
As a digital marketeer my days used to be mainly concerned with social networks, digital innovations and whether a piece of video content might go viral. Now as a joint business owner, alongside three other partners at Inkling, my concerns are a lot broader and I have learned four secrets crucial to any employee to boss convert.
1. The Future Is Now
Businesses that don’t grow are as dangerous as those making a loss, so while you are thinking of the work this year, you are also thinking: “Are we making the right decisions to do better next year?” A bit like the manager of a football team, also being the Chairman of the Club, Chief Scout and Board rolled into one.
People’s opinions change. So what might be an agreed vision for the future a month ago might take an about turn later. Surprisingly human issues my have amazingly big repercussions for the business vision. For example, if a partner in the business has a major illness then your plans to grow their area of business fastest in the year ahead, would likely be ditched, in favour of consolidation.
It is exciting not just living in the six month to a year future like you are often required to as an employee, as long as you can swap around the “future-gazing hat” between all the stakeholders in the business, as it is probably harmful for one person to spend to much time in the future, as Marty McFly knew.
2. Money Matters
Suddenly instead of highly creative people spending 99% of their time talking about creative things, a good 15% is spent talking about money, one way or another. All of a sudden George Osbourne’s announcements really matter and liberal arts bias political stances may begin slipping, as you want what is best for your business.
There will be a sliding scale in business philosophies in any partnership. For example, between one who thinks paying staff a good salary and treating them well is financial incentive enough for them; and one who thinks you must spend as much as you can afford to make staff more rewarded at your agency than anywhere else. This is human differences, but in running a business money and staff matter to keep the business alive and healthy, so constantly negotiating this sliding scale of attitudinal difference matters a lot.
It often comes down to small subtleties of motivation, every partner in a business wants it to be strong and profitable, the discussions comes over exactly how much profit, against how much reinvestment, against how much outgoing or salary levels. You’d think that deciding how much to pay yourself would not be something that would not be a really important business decision, but it is. Pay yourself too low, and you get an unrealistic sense of business profitability, too high to early and you destroy your own business.
A good financial director is worth their weight in gold – sometimes literarily, but young businesses can’t always afford them in their early days. If you can’t afford one then teaching yourself to remember five numbers each week is key: Income, Expenditure, Net Profit, Forecast Income for the quarter ahead, Target Income for year Target Net Profit For Year. Seriously off by heart.
3. Vision Is Not Static
When you start a partnership you all agree on your shared creative and business vision. And in marketing agencies it is likely to be something to do with coming up with amazing ideas, doing game-changing work and creating a business of value with proven profit record and an impressive retained client list. Big generalisation I know. However, maintaining a vision in a partnership, is like keeping romance alive in a marriage, it needs constant attention, demonstration and revisiting.
So what do you do if the vision begins changing over time between partners or if you are all agreed it has changed. Thrash it out and adapt or die. And this is the point, when you run a business you will fight to the death to maintain the clarity of your vision to the outside world, but in a partnership you must be just as passionate for the sake of the business internally; but it is a marriage, not a battle. So, joint business owners require a willingness to start and keep going with arguments (in a constructive way) setting aside any discomfort about conflict for the sake of the business. Businesses based on an apathetic, outdated or overlooked visions, go into malaise.
Maintaining a meaning, purpose and financial vision for the business in a partnership requires a sense of obsession with and self-questioning about the vision by all of them… almost all of the time.
4. Every Persons Value Counts
One of the things I hated most working for some CEOs was the sense that they were looking at you as purely a money making commodity for them, just one aspect of the whole. CEOs who see you hollistically such as one of my former bosses Mike Mathieson are rare. Employees bring all sorted of values to a company: energy, intelligence, contacts, experience and can leave a positive legacy…that all add to the bottom line outside of directly generating new business or growing existing business.
In a young or lean business every employee must be kick-ass to justify their presence. So when you run such a business, an employee that isn’t kick-ass becomes an affront that you must either develop super-fast or cut your loses on super-fast. So difficult conversations become crucial and unfortunately so to is being more ruthless than you might ever need to be as an employee. As a head of department, you have the say on hiring or firing employees in your department, but you are not ultimately paying their salary. Running a company you are, the money you are paying them is vital for keeping the business alive, a small but substantial difference – it is your money, not just your budget. Your employees are no longer for better or worse a reflection on the good or bad taste of someone in your agency, they are a reflection on YOU and the quality of YOUR business, at least while your are choosing to pay their salary.
Running a successful business is one of the most fulfilling experiences you may ever have. Running it with partners you believe in, admire and trust is a wonderful thing. If you are thinking of taking a gamble and starting your own business, let me tell you it is liberating. And if you secretly enjoy obsessing over the future, money, vision and people…it might just be for you. My final piece of advice is “ask advice”. If you haven’t started a business before, there is no way you or indeed your business partners can have all the answers. So seek out the minds and opinions of those sages who have been there and done it, possibly numerous times. I have found it an honour to run a business in partnership at Inkling so far, and am full of admiration for those who maintain exciting and growing businesses over many years.
I was walking to Beavers with my seven year old boy, William, who told me that a boy in his class was calling him names and saying he was gay, so the name calling went back and forth.
He asked me what he should say to the boy next time he called him gay, so I told him to say: “I don’t think I’m gay, but if I am, that’s no problem…”
Then William said: “Why is that no problem?”
I said: “Because it’s ok to be gay, some of your best uncles are gay, like Uncle Joshie, Uncle Benedict and Uncle Nick”.
William said: “And Uncle Tom’s gay too, isn’t he?”
I said: “No, people often think Uncle Tom’s gay, but he’s not”.
William said: “So why is Uncle Tom not gay? Is it because he’s a lean mean loving machine?”
I said: “It’s because he likes ladies in a romantic way. If you’re a gay man, you like men in a romantic way”.
William said: “So are we gay because I love you and you love me?”
I said: “No, because the way I love your mummy is different to the way I love you. The way I love your mummy is romantic love”.
William said: “So what happens with Uncle Joshie?”
I said: “Uncle Joshie might have a boyfriend or a husband whom he feels romantic love for and that’s because he’s gay. So when Alfie comes up to you and says you’re gay, tell him some of my best uncles are gay, have you got a problem with that?”
