Just take a look at Mashable’s partnership with Microsoft BizSpark – you’ll find a running list of a great many start-ups and their products or services, many of them have some kind of venture capital or angel investment backing their pursuits. Lots of them are also-rans, many have no idea how or when or if they’ll make money, and most will fail.  Despite this high rate of start-up failure, investors don’t appear to be slowing down in the cash injections they’re pushing into the scene.

But when it comes to who founds and funds these ventures, as has been oft-noted, the flow of cash does not run in the direction of women.  When women do found start-ups that get noticed, they tend to be part of what I’ve come to think of as the 4Fs: fashion, food, family or feminism.

Recently, Bloomberg featured some of these very successful founders in a profile called, “Stilettos Invade Startups as Niche-Shopping Sites Attract Women“.  And while any woman would find the stories of these successful women founders to be inspiring as we start to eke our way through the ‘narrow sunroofs’ that Sheryl Sandberg and others in Silicon Valley think have supplanted glass ceilings, there is also a cause for concern.

I wonder if other women entrepreneurs sigh a little when they read sentences that identify these women as part of “a growing group of women at e-commerce companies tailored to specific areas, such as food or fashion, where the female perspective is seen as vital.”

Maybe it’s because I both work in advertising as a strategic planner, the ‘voice of the consumer’ in the agency, and as an entrepreneur myself. Maybe it’s because I love technology as much as I love my shoe collection, now numbering 60 pairs. But it seems to me that limiting the market sectors to which we apply women’s perspectives to food or fashion is not simply sexist, it’s stupid.  When you leave women – who control upwards of 80% of consumer purchases – out of the conversation in nearly any market sector, you are leaving an enormous amount of money on the table.

American women control or influence 85% of purchase decisions, and globally spend nearly $20 trillion annually.  That’s a lot of money to spend on lipstick, nylons and sewing notions.

It’s a less surprising number when you consider two simple facts: women make up half the population, and they are citizens with equal political and property rights (e.g., they can enroll in universities, hold jobs, own real property, engage in contracts, open bank accounts, loans and lines of credit, and even vote). They therefore have income and spending power – and there’s lots of them.  Lots of us.

What do we spend all this money on?  According to research compiled by She-economy.com, we were influencers or purchasers of 91% of new homes, 66% of personal computers, 92% of vacations, 80% of healthcare, 65% of new cars, 89% of bank accounts, 93% of OTC pharmaceuticals.  So why aren’t we thinking of women’s perspective as vital to businesses in the areas of construction, financial products, computers and electronics, travel, healthcare, automotive and pharmaceutical?

As a planner, I moderate or attend a lot of focus groups; indeed, in six years in brand consultancies that underpinned our work with primary qualitative research, I literally moderated hundreds of groups and interviews across a variety of market sectors. There are certain areas where we brief our recruiters to supply a high quota of women: consumer packaged goods, TV shows, fashion, and pharmaceuticals.  Products aimed at children mean we talk to moms; food and CPG manufacturers and retailers, like Kraft or Wal-mart, are almost exclusively interested in moms, who wield the check book and steer the shopping cart.  It’s understood that women are the ones buying the bologna and the body wash; we take for granted that moms handle family health decisions, take the kids to the doctor’s office, and make the trips to the pharmacy.  We know they watch a lot of TV, and do most of the clothes shopping. We know that women are also the primary influencers of their husbands, friends, children and parents. And most importantly to our business, we know that the clients in these sectors want to hear from them, because they want to market to them.

But there were plenty of categories in which we are at best sneaking in women, usually with the instruction under the gender field, “recruit a good mix.”  Logistics and shipping, enterprise software, automotive, consumer electronics, even some liquor brands, are categories in which the marketing and advertising world simply presume men are the primary consumers.

Often, as strategists spending most of our work lives talking to people out in the world, we know that women are significant purchasers or influencers in these categories as well.  However, our clients base many of these targeting decisions on consumer segmentations; often, a 55/45 male skew is enough to suggest that they need only address or hear from men.  Worse, targets that are defined by job titles like ‘small business owner’ or ‘IT decision-maker’ or ‘business decision maker’ (usually meaning the C-suite), or even ‘shipping manager’ are assumed to be male; we typically don’t even screen on the basis of gender, and rarely meet a woman as a result.  The presumption becomes the rule.

Our clients don’t have a problem with that. It reinforces the picture in their heads, and our lack of an attempt to talk to women keeps that picture in focus, because qualitative research in focus group facilities, behind one-way mirrors, is often the only occasion our clients ever have for seeing consumers “up close.”

But there is another side to these stereotypes.  Gilt Groupe, One Kings Lane and Rent the Runway are regarded as successful businesses (in the e-commerce spaces of daily deals and fashion/design, of course)… now. When Susan Lyne left Martha Stewart Omnimedia for Gilt Groupe in 2008, Patricia Sellers wrote: “Since Susan Lyne made a big name for herself at the top of ABC Entertainment and then Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, her move to the CEO position at tiny Gilt Groupe seems to be a head scratcher. Have you heard of this year-old startup? I hadn’t.”  While the article goes on to speak positively about Gilt’s prospects and business model, it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of a move to Gilt as a career move. One Kings Lane, among others, benefited from Gilt’s early and continued success in defining a business category.

In late June, Business Insider ran a story about a new start-up, under the headline: “Here’s Proof That Any Ridiculous Idea Can Get Funding Right Now“.  The article is much more positive than the headline about Naturally Curly Network, a social network for people with curly, kinky and wavy hair to connect with content, products, stylists, and each other. However, Business Insider seems baffled: “What’s more astounding is that NaturallyCurly says it was profitable and cash-flow positive last year.”

By the way, this is not the first round of funding for the site (really four sites), who obtained $1.2 million in the second round, after a $2 million initial investment. It’s an established business – and a profitable one.

According to the company, a global consumer packaged goods brand is sponsoring the launch of their mobile app. With a million unique visits to the sites each month, clear tie-ins for product sales, brand sponsorships, and local business promotion, Naturally Curly Network (while not helpful to my stick-straight head), presents a clear value proposition to its investors.

In the US, hair salons alone generate $19 billion in consumer spending; personal care products are a $40 billion industry, of which hair care products make up approximately a quarter of that market. This start-up, admittedly, is aimed at people with curly, kinky and wavy hair, but that’s not a small population – Naturally Curly claims it’s more than half of Americans.  Products for curly hair clearly sell – as evidenced by the empty spaces left by the few options that are chronically understocked at my local drugstore.

And it’s not simply women who struggle with styling and caring for curly hair, but men and women of a variety of ethnicities and hair types.  Retail sales of ethnic health and personal care products in the US are about $1.5 billion – but have you ever seen the ‘ethnic’ section of the hair care aisle at your local drugstore?  It’s usually at the end of the aisle, near the floor.  So in this case, we’re not just leaving money on the table by mocking investment in a service that could connect people to products and services in a multi-billion dollar consumer sector, we’re literally leaving it on the floor.

There are a few brands and businesses who aren’t going to leave that money on the table, and investors and entrepreneurs should take note.  If large companies see the potential in products and services for women and other under-served communities, then there is serious opportunity for start-ups who can, theoretically, move more quickly and be more responsive than their much larger, older cousins.

I spoke at a TIAA-CREF Forum event in April (The CMO, CTO and COO of TIAA-CREF, a retirement and financial services company, are women). The keynote speaker at the event was Joseph Coughlin, head of the MIT AgeLab.  He spoke engagingly and at length about the rise of the 50+ woman in America: she starts more businesses, controls more consumer spending, engages online  more than her husband.  Women don’t retire – at least not the way men do.  In the recent recession, women lost jobs at a slower rate than men (though they now appear to be regaining jobs at a slower rate, too). And TIAA-CREF, rightly, sees this as a huge business opportunity.

So congratulations to the start-ups, founded by women, who are finding responsive customers and investors and building successful businesses serving women and other under-served communities.  We need more investors – and the business press – to take their market segments and their customers seriously.  But wouldn’t it also be amazing if real estate, finance, automotive, technology, business-to-business were areas that investors feel are ‘where the female perspective is … vital’?

And what would it take to get there?

This was what I presented at #planningness last week.  The attendees were awesome – great energy, great ideas, loads of curiosity oozing out of everyone.  Thanks to everyone who indulged me, and to Mark and Claire for making it possible.

I was recently asked to put together some “insight generation” exercises for a training workshop. This is pretty standard fare for a planning director, the person who ‘owns the insights.’ Creative briefs now often feature sections that are titled something like, “What’s the key insight?” – into which, the planner dutifully fills in some text in order to earn her wages.

For some reason, on this particular request, I just completely stalled out.  I often, at conferences and in client meetings, or with other planners, remark on how “insights” is another crime against the English language that Adland has perpetrated upon corporate culture.  I often joke that “insights” are not just strewn about the place waiting to be spotted by brand managers and strategists; they were not left, neglected, under your chair or a stack of papers on the corner of your desk.  You can not uncover, seek, find, or land on “insights”.

Insight isn’t a noun in the sense that a car or a nickel or a pen are nouns.  It’s a noun that names a quality or capacity, like beauty, intelligence, compassion.  We tend not to pluralize and objectify these nouns, because they are not about objects.  But in Adland, we call things “insights” because we are nothing if we haven’t (great big sigh) “productized” our work.

And this is where it all goes to hell.

Planning is about Insights?

Insight is a capacity to gain accurate and deep understanding of a person or thing.  Insight, in other words, is what a good planner or creative – or hell, in a perfect world a good client or account manager – should have.  The depth of this understanding should go so far as to seem intuitive.  There are many ways one might obtain insight – through study, immersion, experience, interrogation, observation.  And these are the standard tools of the planner or market researcher or strategist.

But the work product of these processes isn’t ‘an insight’. Insight is a quality possessed by people. You want to hire planners who are insightful.  But they will not ‘uncover’ or ‘land on’ or ‘find’ insights for you, because that is not possible. The best they can be, is insightful on your behalf.

The results are embarrassing – what we call ‘insights’ are often, in fact, observations or statistics.  That women are the fastest growing segment of online gamers is not an insight.  It’s a statistic. That if you give employees effective and efficient software they’ll make the company more money isn’t an insight, it’s an observation. Yet these are often the kinds of things you’ll find in the box marked, “What is the key insight?”

A friend suggested that at the very least an insight should be a non-obvious observation.  I asked for an example. We talked through several and they all went much like this one, “Nike+ was built on the ‘insight’ that people like to listen to music when they exercise…. Wait, that’s not an insight, that’s an observation, and a damned obvious one at that.’ At least since magnetic tape, with music recorded on it, placed in a cassette, and spooled around the teeth of a Sony Walkman first appeared in 1979, it was clear that people so wanted to listen to music while exercising, they would pay top dollar for a device that would allow you to exercise like this lady:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You didn’t have to run 10 miles a day or earn a Gym Rat Badge on Foursquare in order to notice that people listen to music when working out.  Does this demonstrate a deep, intuitive and accurate understanding of a person or thing? No, not really. But it didn’t stop them from coming up with something people really like to use, either.  Which begins to suggest that maybe ‘insights’ aren’t as useful as just noticing stuff.

The Rise of Storytelling

Perhaps this is why ‘storytelling’ was so in vogue for the past few years – the industry realized that a planner can not imbue clients or creatives with insight into a group of people or a trend or a category, but that she must, nevertheless, teach them to get by in this world without offending the locals. It is a lot like learning a foreign language.  Some of us go and live in a country, forcing ourselves to be immersed in the local language and custom and idiom.  We are surrounded by not only the syntax and grammar, but the context and meaning. We can become fluent – we can tell jokes or write poetry in the language.  But most people don’t have the time or the inclination to cultivate fluency; they want to be able to ask their way to the hotel or hail a cab or order a steak. We then tell them stories and lead them through workshops until they can speak enough of the language to do this; we give them little abridged dictionaries for later, when they get stuck.  We hope some sense of the place and the people and their customs seeped in to the lessons, and that they will at least be respectful when they get there.

But we don’t hold out much hope of that. So in the end, ‘insight generation’ and ‘storytelling’ are really just products we sell, because we are in business too, and because clients feel they ought to buy them, even if they will never really use them.  Kind of like an espresso maker, or a Pilates reformer.

Insight? Strategic Idea? Creative Idea?

When I was at Hall & Partners, we deconstructed campaigns before we went out to test them, because we wanted to try to give each element its due and we wanted to find a way to fairly determine whether a campaign was succeeding.  Our approach was this:

Obviously, you want to make sure you’ve registered the business objective; clients aren’t in the business of making ads, you are.  Agency clients are in the business of managing agencies; marketing departments are in the business of commissioning marketing materials; sales departments are in the business of supporting a salesforce; and so on up and over and across the line until you get to a CMO or CEO. They, in the end, are in the business of being profitable and pleasing shareholders.  They probably ought to spend as much time on innovation and marketing as they do on profit-and-loss statements and internal politics, but in the end, they are how their bosses are incentivized, and they are probably incentivized on a business objective.

So, anyway.  After you’ve established what your clients’ bonuses are based on, you want to bring it back down to earth – what is possible for the advertising to accomplish, and what role do we want it to play in achieving that business objective?  This exercise is often the part of the job called, “managing expectations.” But it’s also the “what do we want people to believe or do” part of a creative brief; it’s not the “what is the client asking us for” part. One is about outcomes, the other is about assignments.  Don’t confuse the two.

Where things get sticky is in the difference between the strategic idea and the creative idea. (I’ve also included a media idea here because sometimes the creative idea is actually a clever use of media, not just a nice image with some clever copy.) The strategic idea is how you’re going to go about achieving the advertising objective.  Let’s think about Nike+ again.  The strategic idea is not “People like to listen to music when they run” – the strategic idea is probably something like, “Let’s entertain and reward people so they’ll use our content when working out.”

So then, what’s the creative idea?  It’s the framework for bringing that strategy to life.  In the Nike+ example, perhaps the creative idea was to build a social, interactive, content- & feedback-driven ecosystem.  The executions were the product, the playlists, the points, the platform, the app.  Some of the executions work harder to deliver on the strategy than others; you can swap these out for something that is more effective without losing the overarching creative idea or undermining the strategic idea.

All of this makes loads of sense, except we all know that this isn’t how the sausage gets made.  Probably RG/A planners did say in a meeting, ‘hey, people like to listen to their headphones when they work out, right? That’s something, isn’t it?’ and then a creative said, ‘we could make some Nike sponsored playlists’ and a tech guy said, ‘what if people could share what they were listening to or their favorite workouts or something, like on a microsite?’ and it layered on from there.  Probably there was a lot of trial and error; ideas stolen from partner agencies, pet projects folded in to please a client, weird little one-offs that got the ‘what the hell’ stamp of approval and turned out to totally rock.  I really don’t know; I wasn’t there.  But I think we forget, when writing creative briefs and talking to clients about “insights”, that the means by which you deconstruct something almost never resembles the means by which you constructed it.

The Need for Proof Before the Fact

Meanwhile, back in creative brief land…

Sometimes, you’ll see the box “Insight” followed by an arrow that points to the box that says something akin to “Brand Idea” or “Creative Idea” or what-have-you.  This suggests causality and correlation.  The ‘idea’ must arise out of the ‘insight’.  It must do this, not because it always or even often does, but because in order to assuage the doubt of client service teams and clients themselves, we must have ‘proof’ – something in which to root the creative idea.  The old belief that ideas come from some magic, catalytic moment has largely gone out of vogue.  Now you build creative ideas out of insights.  If you have enough insights, and if they are unique to your brand, and if they apply to lots of people, and if you combine them with some borrowed interest from a celebrity or location or song, and if there’s an awesome pack shot and a dead simple call to action… well, then you just won yourself the Campaign Lottery.  I mean, that’s just how it’s done.

And if it doesn’t work out? If something doesn’t ring true? If it feels ‘complicated’? Well you have three possible routes to go:

• Blame the planners because “the insights were wrong”
• Blame the creatives because “the work was off brief”
• Blame the clients because “they didn’t brief you correctly”

Which is what happens when you let people like this guy run the industry for a few decades:

So everyone is now in the business of minimizing risk – and the most common approach seems to be to believe that if we’re all holding hands when we jump off the cliff, then we’ll somehow all survive the fall.  So we buy in to ‘an insight’, and then we start circling the wagons.  I’ve been asked by clients in the past to come up with a model that will indicate how many people I think will see all the parts of the campaign – which isn’t unusual – but then to somehow work some analytics hoodoo and tell them at what level of spend, and in which combination of channels, the campaign will ‘work’.  Despite not being an analytics jockey or a media planner, I can get a group of people together to guess about reach and frequency and clicks and CTRs and even guess about likelihood of repeat visits or time on site, if they have enough analogous historical data and a person who has enough free time that we can justify torturing them with such a futile task.  But these are vanity metrics; I have no idea – if people view and click and return at the rates we predict – whether that will mean that they:

• Remember or recognize it
• Care about it
• Believe it
• Talk about it
• Act on it

Back to the Beginning

Okay, I’ve belabored my point. “Insights” is poor English.  Most things labeled “insight” aren’t; they’re observations.  ”Insights” are a way for planning departments to demonstrate that they, too, make stuff, and that the campaign is built on and out of this stuff, and that therefore clients should pay for planning.  Clients demand “insights” as proof the creative idea will work.  We’ve all put our money on black and are letting it ride.  But if we go back 15 years, and that’s really not so long ago, people didn’t talk about “insights” at all. The core components of a creative brief were, according to the APG’s book How to Plan Advertising :

• Why are you advertising (the objectives)?
• Who are you trying to influence (the target audience)?
• What do you want to communicate about the brand (the message)?
• Why do you think people will believe it (the reasons to believe/proof points)?
• How do you want to say it (tone & manner)?
• What do you think people will say after seeing/hearing it (the desired outcome)?
• What can’t you say/do, and what do you have to say/do (the so-called ‘mandatories’)?

Nobody said, “what’s the core insight?” because that would be ridiculous.  Keen insight into the product, category and consumer will help you answer these handful of questions in a compelling, unexpected, effective or inspiring way.  And then you dump this knowledge, this summary, into a creative hopper.  Creatives should absorb as much information as they can, digest what they’ve learned and play with interesting bits, debate it with the team, mull it over. They should walk away – go do or think about something else, and let the information sink in. At some point, “usually out of nowhere” the APG book says, there’ll be an ‘aha!’ – a line or an idea from which a campaign grows.

Coda

Sounds like the perfect plan, except we’ve forgotten one thing. People do what is in their interests to do.  A planner who has never even met the target audience has no incentive to be their advocate, translator and representative.  A creative who rarely sells in his best work, only the stuff that works to the formula the client likes, has no incentive to do something unexpected. An account person who only gets his bonus if the client maintains or incrementally increases the spend each year doesn’t care what the work looks like as long as the agency makes deadlines and produces work he can sell easily.  And so, the aha moment might never come. The answers to the creative brief’s template questions might elicit only platitudes and obvious observations. The work could be trite.  The campaign could fail, or worse, be totally invisible.

We’re working in an industry that assumes a series of wrong-headed things, the least of which is that ‘insights’ are a set of collectible objects.  The industry is predicated on a belief in an assembly-line process, in which people don’t leave the building or meet customers and prospects, yet nevertheless write a brief as both subject matter and audience experts; in which a couple of people are expected to lock themselves in a room for a few hours and come out with a stroke of genius; in which everyone will instinctively understand, adopt and know how to produce that stroke of genius; and in which the produced campaign will drive the outcomes the client desires.

If the whole thing is an elaborate web of make-believe, then what difference does it make if we hijack the language? The real miracle is that this process ‘works’ to whatever degree it does.  Which is a post for another time.

[note: slight modifications made to the initial post at the request of my clients & colleagues. Originally posted October 2010.]

There’s nothing quite like having a job that people don’t quite understand.  Especially when the people who don’t understand it work in your field, in your company, or, let’s say, on your floor.

I’ve been spending some quality time with a full-service agency recently.  They needed a planning director for a pitch to an existing client – a very important pitch, in which this agency could become lead agency on the entire campaign, rather than a partner agency to another shop.

There was very little time to develop a creative brief, so I worked hard, and fast, and smart.  I looked at all the research, at the client’s objectives and at the competition.  I thought deeply about what is happening in the category, in consumer’s lives.  And then I started to tell stories – inspiring stories, exciting stories, interesting stories, intriguing stories – about what was happening in the world as it related to this category. Two days after I walked into the agency, we had a creative brief.

We presented to senior management, including the creative directors, and we got them to buy into the thinking. It felt exciting – for the agency, for the client, for the category. And more importantly it felt true – the kind of truth that makes people instinctively feel what you’re saying, not merely understand it.  It was a fun meeting.

But this, to my mind, was not the most important part – it was critical, it was a catalyst, it mattered – but it wasn’t the most important bit.  The most important bit was what happened when the creative teams had to interpret what the brief was trying to say in the form of advertising and marketing.

My emphasis was on keeping things high-level, anthemic.  Don’t go to tactics, not yet.  It was hard for them not to, as that’s what they’re asked to do most of the time. After the first meeting with the teams, the feedback I got was fascinating.

“You’re the first planner I’ve met.”

“It’s so nice to get a creative brief.”

“This is one of the most useful briefs I’ve ever been given. Usually it’s just media specs.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Can we, um, you know, ask you questions? Will you be around?”

The Muse

That’s when I saw what the bulk of my time over the next 10 days needed to be spent on – simply being available as the voice, the inspiration, the embodiment of the brief.  I joked that it was ‘helicopter parenting.’ And the contribution I ultimately made to the creative idea and to the media idea came from a few basic behaviors:

• I told them the brand story with passion – I didn’t read them the creative brief or present a research deck.  I used metaphors, I used examples, I used the language of the prototypical consumer. I made sure that the creative teams knew that I didn’t just think the brief was credible, but that I believed in it.
• I made suggestions without telling them what to do – I used the language of “what if you tried…” or “what do you think about…” or “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”  I liken it to David Letterman’s “Is this anything?” gag.  The more ideas there are, the more ideas there are.  We were well past philosophizing by this point, we needed ideas that embodied the true story we wanted to tell.
• I kept bringing them idea snacks – little artifacts of the consumer and the category that kept them in the right headspace.  Everything was done with a “check this out, ain’t it fun” approach, instead of an educational one.  I wasn’t teaching, I was sharing.
• I said no.  ”So, um, I guess we need to make a microsite.” I looked at them, dead serious, and said, “No microsites.”
• But I didn’t just say no – I showed them other cool toys they’d never played with, and demonstrated how they could, with the connective tissue of the creative idea, be woven together into a killer experience.

In other words, I served the role of the Muse – fostering ‘inspired madness’.  And it worked.  By the time we got on planes to head to the pitch, everyone in the building had caught word of what we were doing.  They wanted a piece of the action.  People had gesticulated wildly, raised their voices, talked over one another.  And they had built some amazing ideas to bring to life the creative idea.

Phase one was complete.

The Siren

The next job I had to do was just as tough.  I’d inspired the creative teams, but now I had to help seduce the clients.

And seducing 15 technology marketers is no easy task.  Especially when they are women who are probably just as smart as you are, and are dressed ten times better.

The seduction dance, in this case, was made up of some interesting pieces:

• Purring to the client that what they desperately hope is true about their brand  is true… They’re just not getting credit for all their goodness yet.
• Once you’ve pulled them close, backing away slightly, seeming a bit disinterested.  Listen, your product is great and all, but that’s not enough.
• Talking about your hotter, richer, more famous or successful exes… “When I worked on [brand you'd like to be or kill], we did …”
• But then suggesting that somehow, this client has way more going for it than that old brand.  ”What they did really wasn’t so special, nothing like what you could do.”
• And then painting a picture of the success, accolades, image and fame they will get if only they embrace this world view (that they deep down, already do, really) and champion it, take the lead and change the world/category.
• Then you unveil the prize. The beautiful and useful things that the agency will make on the client’s behalf to ensure this beautiful fate.
• Of course, you must be prepared… everyone has doubts.  You have to overcome those with a combination of reason, data and passion.  Preferably at least two of those, and one always has to be passion.
• And in the end, a kind of come-hither indifference.  This is the idea. It’s amazing. You want it. But you’re going to have to ask for it. And of course, pay for it.

In 90 minutes, we managed to do just that.  We sang our little song (literally, actually, the creatives wrote a song!) and the clients swooned and pulled free of their restraints and … gasp! … nodded their heads and smiled during our presentation.

It was striking, the roles played by what we so dully call the “account planner”. The Siren and the Muse… very different roles from the type espoused by a lot of people I hear speak within the planning community.  The desire for so long has been to find ways to “move upstream” or monetize strategy or “solve business problems” that we’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the critical role of a planner in inspiring creative work and making that work meaningful and attractive to clients.

Jaime Shuttleworth, the Chief Strategic Officer of DraftFCB in Chicago, spoke at Planning-ness a couple of weeks ago [Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 2010] about how planners can help design a culture of creativity. But his talk was actually about the role of planning in the business.  His metaphors ran from military operations to engineering to infrastructure to medicine. He spoke of making planning not merely an organ, but the circulatory system of an agency. In other words, you can’t live without us. He wanted planners to be involved in HR decisions, influencing the culture of the agency through hiring.  He wanted planners to be the consigliere to clients and account management.  He wanted, in other words, planning to be in charge.

I was struck by how much I didn’t want those things at all.  Those things were not why I became a planner.  I have influenced client business decisions, I have helped clients develop new products and services and designs and experiences.  I have helped them hire staff, I have helped them better understand how their businesses are changing, and how to adapt to that change. But that was as a strategic consultant, not as a planner.  As a planner, what I wanted to do was simple, and two-fold: I wanted to make beautiful, smart, useful, effective things; and I wanted to win over clients.

It may be time to consider two different branches of planning. There are business strategists who see themselves as members of the joint chiefs of staff, 4-star generals advising an executive on proportional response, collateral damage, resource management, offensive and defensive strategies, deployments and force multipliers.  And then there are planners (or as seems to be an increasingly popular term “creative strategists”), who must be muses and sirens, inspiring the lifeblood of advertising – the work – and seducing clients to want to be a part of that vision, to trust the agency, to admire the approach, and to, crassly enough, buy the idea and its execution.

Thoughts?

I used to ‘do innovation’ at Hall & Partners in NYC.

They decided to update their communications framework by examining how digital channels played out against it. The framework was built in 1991 by Mike Hall and I’ve always regarded it as flexible and workable and useful – because it does what a good model must do: reflect reality. Here’s the crazy walking people chart that if you’re a planner, you’ve probably seen (though you’re probably seeing a lot of the Engager model now).

We talked to people we thought might be experts on the matter and discovered a few interesting things – there were no set standards or frameworks by 2007 for understanding:

• How “digital” works
• What “digital” is good for
• What a successful “digital” campaign would achieve
• How “digital” should work with integrated communications

I was a little surprised. When I worked in a web start-up in 1999-2000 we had at least some hypotheses, but clearly the thinking hadn’t moved on much from there.

Anyway. A year or so later, the results were in. We wrote the thinking up wherever we could. And we hosted an event. I moderated.

This is all a rather long wind-up to the image that follows – my presenter’s notes for the event, which I just found during an office clean-out. (Transcript after the image.)

1. Tested lots of online comms
   Product Placement
   Event Sponsorship
   PR
   DM
   Brand Exp & Entertainment
   Design
   Advertising
2. Using our framework
3. Discovered that…
   Most is persuasion/promotion
   And therefore dull
   (Engagement (visual, dynamic interactive) is correlated with Impact on a brand)
   Online + offline = building brand relationships
4. What’s that mean?
   Online adv. is just like offline adv.!
   –> most comms is persuasion/promotion based & therefore dull/conservative
   –> when it’s engaging it tends to be more impactful for brand relationships
   –> Involvement & salience doing more for brand commitment -> offering more potential for & need for creativity

But my favorite bit is the post-it note:
Digital Summary
Now that’s sorted…
WHAT’S NEXT?
(Q&A)

While there is no way you would ever find me quoting scripture (I’m wholly unqualified), I did grow up with some of the vernacular of the church-goer. So forgive me these post titles.

Came across an interesting note in the New Yorker on the style of reporting/storytelling used in chronicling the Great Migration: that massive movement of rural ‘folks’ from the rural world of the South to the urban world of big Northern cities like Chicago and New York. The piece, a book review by Jill Lepore, entitled “The Uprooted” appears in the September 6, 2010 issue. (I’m blogging from my phone or I’d provide the links). It’s worth a read; my familiarity with the topic comes mainly from my study of the history of jazz, while in college. The form of jazz morphed as it migrated, taking on local flavor via exposure to other musical forms, ethnicities, and tempos. I am left also with a memory of finding ‘Invisible Man’ nearly impenetrable as a 16 or 17 year old, but knowing that loss, separation, disenfranchisement were central (I often find the emotion of a story comes through even when I have no idea what a story is about).

So, definitely worth a read, if only to direct my attention to books that deal with the Great Migration in depth.

But a passage stood out:

Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports… about black life in the Urban North. “Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city,” Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity; uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn’t so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don’t crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive. More to the point, she doesn’t call them folk, and for all that her work shares with Wright’s, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson’s work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary…

It seems that as brands struggle with observation, understanding, listening, and insight mining, it is struggling less with market research trends and more with journalistic ones. Brands must chronicle the lives of consumers, one assumes, as a means by which they will understand those lives. But there is a constant tension of method. We must talk to many people and canvas their attitudes and perceptions because then we will know what it means to be this consumer segment. Then we must find the right representatives of this consumer segment to help us write the story of everyone within that segment. When those stories don’t mesh, when so-called outliers appear, or worse, speak up, it feels like the foundation of the narrative wobbles, or worse, teeters and collapses.

I have a solution. Accept the work of the strategic planner (in concert with market researchers) as being as rigorous as is possible when there is an unreliable narrator and an unreliable reader. Furthermore, accept that the work of the creative brief or the segment portrait is novelistic rather than documentary. And finally, accept that the role of most marketing is not to present the world as it is, but rather to present a profoundly (and this is not about size or scope but impact/depth) altered model of the world, predicated on idealizations, simplifications, archetypes and aspiration. Verifiable accounts of how “the consumer” spends her day are only useful in juxtaposition to how she believes she spends her day, how she wishes she spent her day, what she wishes her day would mean for the day after, and what she wants that day to mean.

Then there is that next step I will always promote: the part where some smart person, some creative imagineer, puts forward an idea about some other, new, more fulfilling day, presented in an undeniably true, deeply affecting way.

So, not just novelistic, but theatrical. That’s the sweet spot. Might be helpful to discard the veneer of science and focus on the performance and persuasion. Also. might be more fun.

When you’re an account planner, this is the inevitable follow-up question to the essential, “So, what do you do?”

As a tag for the role played, it’s remarkably inadequate. If planning modifies account, then it sounds like an account management role. It conjures up media planning for some who work in agencies but don’t have planning. Nothing about the tag suggests creativity. It only barely suggests strategy. And by placing ‘account’ at the heart of the tag, it suggests a role that is solely focused on the client.

Jennifer Morozowich posted this provocation on “The Future of Planning” on the Canadian Marketing Blog. She makes the argument that all the splintered and specialized sparks the industry casts off as it tries to weld together the old and the new, is counter-productive at worst and unnecessary at best. A good planner is a good planner, or as Faris Yakob remarked, there “ain’t no flavors.”

What she thinks a good planner is, I imagine, coincides with what she thinks planning is all about:

Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client’s brand and visa versa.

True, true.

“Do you know what the role of account planning is?”

I worked for a planner at Chiat who asked me that question once. I babbled on about establishing the strategic vision for a campaign, advocating for consumers, and so on. She smiled at me, somewhat condescendingly, and said, “It’s to ensure that the work we produce is effective.”

Effectiveness, now that’s sexy. She’s not wrong; she was probably writing case studies and EFFIE submissions. The job of the planner, as she saw it, is to provide some conduit between what the client’s business objectives are, what the consumer’s desires are, and the creative idea that will guide those two forces toward each other, in a way that we can measure.

She saw this as a highly strategic role; some firms in fact call planners ‘brand strategists.’ This gets closer to the actual job, especially as it has been imagined and shaped over the past 50 years. Many firms root planning in ‘information’ as Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King did (as quoted in Morozowich’s post):

“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.” – Stanley Pollitt

Having worked in market research, I understand why agencies require ‘proof’ of a good idea. Instincts, which are honed through experience and expertise and attitudes can be a tough sell when millions of widgets and hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. So planners often must carry credentials that relate to their familiarity with different research methodologies, and their comfort levels with reading data tabs and comprehending statistical regression analysis – those hallmarks of intellectual rigor.

In the research role, I often felt duty-bound to reflect only that which we ‘heard’ in the research, and as a qualitative specialist, to hedge: of course what we believe we learned and what we believe that means is still conjecture, the sample size is not projectable. We’ll need a survey to get real numbers. As a planner, a good hunch could be killed quickly by a standard research design. Research does a good job of illuminating how things are; the person using the results of that research must be trusted to imagine how things will be. And that needs expertise and experience and attitudes, yes; but that’s not all it needs.

I knew I’d get to Mad Men eventually.

In the 4th episode of this season of Mad Men (season 4), titled “The Rejected“, Faye does a focus group with the young, single secretaries about beauty. Faye’s got all the tricks for moderating – dress well, but neutrally; be innocuous; be self-deprecating; offer them food; tell them something that seems personal; and so on. These are tricks for setting the tone and fostering comfort and (we all hope) candor.

But Faye glides right past important bits as though they weren’t there, or sees them through very conventional lenses. The first woman to reply speaks of her national/ethnic origins, her mother’s perfect skin, the routine she uses: simple – just warm enough water, and patting her skin with her fingterips. She mildly protests that despite not using soap, her mother isn’t dirty. And she implies that this is her routine, though she never describes the routine as belonging to her. For her, beauty routines are the domain of this perfect creature, her mother, and are closely tied in with culture and class. But that routine is where her mother is entirely tuned in with herself, looking at her reflection, touching her face, caring for herself in a moment that belongs to her (even if there was a small girl who once watched from the doorway). This routine, as used by the secretary, is described in a quiet voice, with a slow tempo; she blushes a little, and bows her head slightly, and smiles broadly. This is something sacred – her mother’s beauty, this private moment, were and are still awe-inspiring to her. Here we have one archetype to begin to draw.

Then the next secretary, Dotty, speaks about using a night creme at her vanity. There is a ritual here, too, that is for her something like play-acting. She describes ‘playing house’ with her boyfriend and him laughing at her for it. Faye lets this moment elide as the embittered girl next to her takes the conversation down an inevitable route: “You shouldn’t do things for them. They don’t appreciate it.”

Dotty describes their subsequent break-up, “I don’t know what he noticed… but, it wasn’t me… I guess.” The play-acting evaporated into reality. Dressing up like your beautiful mother, or a glamorous actress, or mimicking daytime soap opera starlets is fun; but it doesn’t define who you are, or what makes you special. Faye could have grappled with the physical experience of caring for your skin (e.g., your beauty) and how you feel about yourself, versus how others see you and what your beauty means to them. Dotty wanted to be loved, sure – but she wanted to be seen by a man who liked what he saw. Then Don’s secretary, Allison, takes it from there, noting that “It’s worse when they notice, sometimes.”

And down we go into the tears and commiserating that all single women in New York are said to be familiar with.

Faye predictably concludes that these girls just want to be married; link Pond’s with matrimony, she advises. She also decides to kill Peggy’s hypothesis, that the routine itself is physically satisfying (oh Peggy, that great hedonist!). Don, rightly, sneers at her, “Hello, 1925.”

He’s found the problem – Faye was looking for what was expected, she was able to identify and identify with the notion that “single girls want to be married women”… and then let the conversation end there.

But maybe there was something else, something about letting mascara and lipstick be for him, but letting Pond’s be for me; or about taking the time to care for yourself; or about confidence and youthfulness; or about stolen moments of beauty. Don rightly pushed back and decided to lead rather than follow… but then there’s the matter of what the report will say…

Maybe instead of what it is, we should ask what it could be

The core ‘product’ of the planning department was traditionally the creative brief. This is a document that should give the creative team all the information they need to develop a campaign. But pat data is not enough, the document needs to inspire.

I used to write ads, and would shake my head (rattle my brains, more like) when I saw a brief that outlined the target as “25-34, single, college educated women with $55k+HHI, living in A & B counties”. I might be able to buy media space for this target, but I can’t single out one woman and write to her based on this. I need to conjure up a woman, the woman, what her life is like, what she loves and hates, what her hopes and dreams are, how she sees herself, how she wants to be seen (of course, this should be tailored to the category or brand). And then I need to know what you want me to do. What they currently think and what we want them to think, that’s a start. Wieden’s planners used to use “The Exciting Possibility” as the springboard from strategy to creative – the face that would launch 1000 ships, to carry on all this beauty crap.

So we have a slightly different role here, one that the word ‘account’ so often seems to contradict. This is the role of the creative muse. The planner serves as the Patti Boyd or Pamela Des Barres to the creative teams’ various interpretations of rock gods. Let accounts advocate for the client – we all know who pays the bills – while we, over here, create a communal space between consumer desires, client objectives and something else… ideas.

I sometimes imagine that the best planners would be Method. They would live as the target does, speak like the target, spend time with the target, befriend the target, sleep with the target (cue, “Common People” by Pulp). They would be the target incarnate, guiding the creative team along a meditation on what would inspire them, seduce them, convince them, lure them.

Of course, it can’t always be that – the planner must pivot in this role, playing muse to both client and creatives, inspiring them to think about their business issues, the world in which we live, the trends impacting our audience and business, and the lives and aspirations of our audience in fresh ways. Done artfully, the ideal planner sets up the creative team to develop insightful, creative, break-through work, and equally sets up the client to expect and embrace it.

But as agencies scramble to solidify client relationships, move ‘upstream’ as ‘partners’ in the business, and to be quite simply taken seriously as the experts on consumers and brands that they are, I find planners are cleaving ever closer to the client, aspiring to be ‘problem-solvers’ and business partners and consultants… But while they court clients and read data tabs and steep themselves in consumer and media and technology trends, they risk neglecting the importance – sometimes even the transcendence – of great ideas artfully executed.

So yeah, digital planner, brand planner, communications planner, whatever. There ain’t no flavors. But sometimes, I feel like there ain’t much ‘flavor’ at all.

via scienceblogs.com

In the spirit and style of any self-respecting talks-to-herself-looney, I thought I’d go ahead and try to answer my own question.  How do you tell a Big Truth?  A truth that requires you to stop believing a whole lot of other things in order to believe this new replacement thing…

A few possible tactics spring to mind:

Tell a Lot of Little Truths

This is the backbone of any marketing campaign that relies on ‘pillars’ or thinks of itself as ‘educational’ – we’ll tell you about these things that we think are really important about our brand and product, and in the end you will be willing to drop everything in favor of us.

Sometimes, I suppose, that works.  When marketers attempt to educate you about the product, they are trusting in the notion that an ‘educated’ consumer is, first, something people want to be, and second, a quality that runs in their favor.  In my cervical cancer vaccine example from a couple of days ago, maybe this means backing up and spreading a few different messages:

• Eureka! We discovered something amazing! A virus causes a kind of cancer! It’s not about heredity or diet, it’s about a virus!
• You know, this virus is really common, and there are lots of kinds of it.  That wart you had frozen off your finger last year?  Same kind of virus as what we’re talking about here, only this version causes cancer… weird/kinda scary, right?
• Having a strong immune system helps some people suppress this virus on their own; but you take vitamins to keep up your immune system, right?  You get your vaccinations as a kid to help your immune system fight off chicken pox and things like that, right? Same idea.
• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Get your kids inoculated now, then breathe easy.
• Sex is intensely personal, private, and it’s a big deal.  It shouldn’t be entered into lightly – but it shouldn’t be inherently dangerous, either.  Let’s make it a little safer, so when our kids finally do become sexually active adults, they aren’t at unnecessary risk.
• More people are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year than you think – and while regular screenings will catch early signs of the disease, they don’t prevent cancer.  This vaccine prevents cancer.
• Caught early, this kind of cancer is treatable – but a lot of the time it isn’t caught early enough.  Complications of treatment for cervical cancer run from fertility/pregnancy complications to hysterectomy to death. It’s serious.
• And so on…

The problem with an ‘educated’ consumer is that there is so much information available, and so much of it is conflicting, that a consumer who tries to educate herself about a particular product may find herself even  more confused.  Confusion, I would argue, is the worst experience a person can have cognitively.  Confusion leads to frustration, skepticism, mistrust.  Confused people don’t understand why they are confused – we tend to believe that everything should be understandable, clear, simple.  When something is complicated, contradictory, or controversial, people keep it at arm’s length.  Educated consumers take one of two paths – endless ‘research’ in which they take in all the he-said/she-said without a way of judging which side is right, or sitting out the debate until an authority can weigh in.

Don’t Explain

This is related to two things I spend a lot of time thinking about: prototyping and iterating.  People do better with a prototype than with a concept.  Put the thing in their hands, implement the program, install the device, require the vaccine, launch the site/campaign/app/etc.  The implementation doesn’t have to be 100% perfect, but the product has to work.

In the case of the vaccine, the governor of Texas skipped the parental hand-wringing by mandating it for school-age girls.  It was highly controversial, parents were outraged, doctors rushed to get adequate supplies, and so on.  But it temporarily took the decision out of their hands and placed it into the government’s.  The state already mandates other childhood vaccinations, and the governor felt strongly that the high incidence of HPV infection and cervical cancer diagnoses in Texas constituted a public health interest in mandating the vaccine.  However, in the end, the state legislature overrode this executive order, stalling mandatory vaccination until 2011. Most states managed to kill or stall implementation of a mandatary vaccination scheme; even those states with opt-out provisions still find their bills lost in committee.

In the case of electric vehicles, the fact that federal dollars are available for pilot programs in providing charging stations and other incentives for driving electric vehicles, that many of the major manufacturers are going ahead with development of EVs and plug-in hybrids, and that all of this is happening nowish, all combined to leave people feeling, frankly, resigned to the new reality.  It felt like it was out of their hands, and therefore was all perfectly acceptable; maybe there would be some inconveniences, maybe they’d be annoyed, maybe things wouldn’t be perfect – but since it’s not up to them, they might as well just go along.

People do a pretty good job of adapting to change once it’s here, no matter how much time and effort they spend resisting the change.

Manage Expectations

I have an idea for a mobile app.  I like the idea, a lot of people I’ve spoken to like the idea, and now I just need to figure out how to implement it.  But – there are some people who don’t love this idea. Every once in awhile I encounter someone who doesn’t think it’s fantastic, and while this bruises my fragile little ego, the bigger lesson I take from it is that I’m not doing a good job of helping them picture what the app will be like.  I tell them what it does and what it’s for, but they can’t picture it – they can’t see it in their minds, imagine themselves or their friends using it, create an imaginary world in their minds in which this thing exists.

In my previous roles using a lot of qualitative research to help clients, I’ve seen this phenomenon frequently.  Some people are really good at taking the kernel of an idea and running with it – imagining the universe in which this idea is fully implemented, in which they use it and like it, or in which other people use it and like it.  And some people struggle with this exercise – they simply can’t imagine what it would be like.  They aren’t on board with filling the gaps for you, the inventor or the creative director or marketer.  They need someone to draw them a picture.

I wasn’t convinced about the iPad, the notion of a tablet computer, an oversized iPhone, until I saw this image:

That posture, sitting in a partial reclining position, feet just a bit up, reading the paper, and doing everything through gestures – that was enough.  I didn’t need the technology – I needed that posture.  I needed to sit like that and do that stuff.  I could already do that stuff, I just couldn’t do that stuff while sitting like that.  Am I making myself clear?  It wasn’t about the object, it was about me.  I could imagine myself sitting on a couch with that object, doing that stuff, in a comfortable position – and this was, for me, revolutionary.

It’s similar to why I bought my Kindle – check out this image:

Reading books on a digital device? Yeah, okay, big deal. But reading books on a digital device without any glare?  Sitting on the beach reading books on a digital device?  Now you’re talking.  In fact, this is my biggest peeve when it comes to the iPad – the glare on that screen when I’m in the park can be almost painful.  But this image once again was less about the device and more about me – I could imagine myself doing exactly what she’s doing, and the benefit (no glare) was compelling.

Helping people imagine what their life will look like, how they will move through the world, which chair they’ll sit on and whether they can wear sunglasses in this new world are incredibly important aspects of helping people get comfortable with any new Truth.  I suspect it’s just as important for helping people prepare themselves for a Big Truth.

And this, I suppose, is why product demonstrations and testimonials will never really go out of style – they are effective means of helping us imagine ourselves in the universe of that brand or product, in a world where this new Truth is accepted.  Marketers can help here in establishing and managing expectations, in making the abstract concrete, accessible.

…

What else?  What other modes can we employ in helping people put aside old ideas in order to adopt new ones?

[note: posted this elsewhere, too. trying to get things consolidated, and not lose stuff in the process.]

First a link – I stole it from Noah Brier, but here it is anyway – on the phrase “that’s executional.” One of my other agency favorites is, “Well, you’re not the target market.” But that’s a post for another day. Anyway – seems to me that the thinking on the other end of this link makes part of the case about why the planning and creative processes should be ‘collapsed.’ More on that later, too.