Choose the future Faris Yakob

Admap

Shortlisted, Admap Prize 2012

Choose the future

Faris Yakob

Prospection, the act of looking forward in time, is a quintessentially human endeavour. Some consider it the quintessential

human endeavour: "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future."1

"The fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future brains are, in essence, anticipation machines."2

We spend much of our time projecting ourselves forward to motivate ourselves to reach towards our desired future, using the

lens of that future as a way to understand what we should be doing now. Mankind is characterised by its nature as a planner.

This brief is an expression of the planning discipline's current anxieties and the industry's collective desire to steer its own path

into the future. As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We can motivate ourselves by imagining less

pleasant tomorrows, of eroding relevance and margins, and thus engage in prophylactic behaviour.

1. Planning is a young discipline reaching a moment of inflection, precipitated by a number of drivers. The increasing

complexity of the landscape has led to a fragmentation of strategy across disciplines and departments. Integration being a

top CMO concern3, and the clarification in the brief4, are symptoms of this problem5.

"There definitely is a problem where you have a multi-agency structure team where there are planners in each of the

respective disciplines."6

2. Recent developments in behavioural economics and psychology suggest that models we have historically used to understand how advertising works are wrong.

Advertising as both "salesmanship in print" and "message transmission" has been fundamentally challenged7. Psychology and advertising research suggests consciously held attitudes do not necessarily change behaviour, despite the counter-intuitive

experience of conscious will8 (figure 1) but that feelings, relationships and associations are more important behavioural

drivers, which are less influenced by messaging and more by 'metacommunication'9, and that heuristics, biases10 and social

copying 11 are equally important, which mostly operate outside our own experience of them.

Choose the futureFaris YakobAdmapShortlisted, Admap Prize 2012

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[Source: Behavioural Mapping Model: I'll Have What She's Having, Bentley, Earls, O'Brien, 2012]

These findings contradict our internal perceptions of choice and action, leading to persistent meta-cognitive errors12 in how we approach advertising, and lay bare the problems of market research that attempts to unpick unconscious drivers by

interrogating the conscious mind13.

3. The 'radical decentralisation of the economics of cultural production14' that has been an ongoing effect of the proliferation of communication and creation technologies has fundamentally unbalanced the traditional communications and marketing

equilibria. This has been endlessly examined15, but most salient to this discussion are two elements: diminished cultural

latency, which means that content cycles through culture and decays faster16; and the end of content scarcity that Moore's

Law has wrought17.

Inherent to the concept of planning is looking forward at what is now a fast-moving, inherently unpredictable network of

interoperating elements, leading people to embrace a speculative portfolio, 'many little fires' approach to advertising.

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Increased speed begs for iteration and optimisation - but planning always did.

This model makes sense when thinking of creative products released into the protean network18, but a 90%+ failure rate isn't commercially sustainable for agencies in totality. The whole point of planning was/is to get better odds of success by basing

ideas on something.

Content scarcity has given way to overload, fixed channels of communication have dissolved into fluid networks, and captive audiences have now become active participants in consumer-driven conversations.

This requires a new course of action for brands, new marketing imperatives and rightly gives pause to those tasked with

making the work, work.

If we return to the roots of planning, its intentions, rather than the current articulation, we see the desire to ground our work in

the rigour businesses require to invest considerable sums of money, to understand human behaviour and provide a robust

model for influencing it. It cannot be just 'gut feel'. Rather than dismantling planning into endless experimentation, we need a

new way of understanding the world.

In light of all the challenges to established thinking, the response from planning mustn't be an abandonment of trying to

understand, lest we accept that not only have we been wrong, but we can never be right.

"There was a lot of thinking about how communication worked in the 1960s and 1970s. It feels like, now, it's all practice and no

theory. If we want to professionalise as an industry, we need to pay more attention to how communication actually works in

this new world."19

Planning must be about the new rigour, understanding, and inspiration;

How do we create value?

How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels?

How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just brand utterances?

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IDEAS VERSUS UTTERANCES

Advertising is a means, not an end, a lever designed to effect consumer behaviour leading people to pay price premiums and

buy more things, more often, due to the dimly understood interactions of ideas and human cognitive, social and economic

behaviour.

We sell ideas but we conflate ideas with articulations. This is dangerous because the nature of advertising is changing

rapidly, leaving us open to being unable to compete amongst new varieties of articulation that are increasingly important.

"What is a Big Idea not? It's not a TV script. It's not a key visual. It's not an iPhone app. It's not a QR code. It's not a Facebook

app. It's not a tactic. A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. It's a world you can occupy and keep drawing on."20

PLANNING 3.0

All aspects of brand behaviour are communication and human communication is always about relationships, and less about message transmission than we believe21.

The types of 'metacommunication' most successful in building relationships are reciprocal - solving problems for people - or

imitative, creating behaviours that can be copied.

The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an infinite media space are likely to require understanding of participation, users22,

not audiences, and context23.

People aren't customers or prospects, because customers are not the same as people.

Customers are to people as waves are to water.

'Customers' are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people.

The focus of planning is 'consumer insight'; trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural

economics suggests that where and what and when are as least as important as who.

We can look to market to customer contexts as we learn to use proximity and intention data that digital exhausts will provide

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us.24

1. ONE STRATEGY

The industry has conflated 'planning' and 'strategy'. Business strategy must indicate how companies marshall finite resources

to achieve business objectives and achieve profitable growth; it does not assume advertising campaigns as an output, which

account planning traditionally does. Strategy must be holistic. Someone has to take responsibility for helping clients allocate

time and resources against different marketing disciplines if we don't then our destiny, and share of budgets, will be decided

for us.

"They're just not getting what they need from agencies, so many of them are bringing certain services in-house Services like

comms strategy and content creation are being done internally (because) agencies just aren't broad enough in their vision.25"

2. Systems Architecture

To oversee strategy and embrace the multimodal complexity of the mediascape requires more than putting the same idea in

many places. It necessitates a system design transmedia26 approach that establishes priorities and the interoperation of elements.

This combines the silos of media and advertising [and all brand behaviour that touches consumers], understanding content

and context, as well as embracing participation, social spread, and the application of technology.

[Source: F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital Works http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html]

Socially generated actions are increasingly important in a world where consumer broadcast networks are supplanting

broadcast ones.

Algorithms like Facebook's Edgerank suggest that elective viewing, commenting and sharing of brand content are going be

crucial to ensure content is seen at all. Only content that creates some kind of immediate behavioural response will filter

through the consumer content networks; content that doesn't will not appear for long in the distribution stream.

However, content alone is no longer sufficient. Previously, the ability to make things public, to publish, was a privileged act.

Only governments, the media-industrial complex and advertisers could do it. Now, everyone is making content all the time,

which presents new kinds of challenges for 'commercial meaning makers'27 for achieving salience in an infinite space.

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That isn't to say the quality of "consumer generated content" [a tellingly oxymoronic term] is on a par with Hollywood

production. Rather, the gap between not being able to do something and being able to do it is infinite, but the gap between

being bad and excellent is simply one of degree.

Content creation and distribution can no longer be the only tool brands use it's not as inherently impressive as once it was.

3. Brands are behavioural templates

Actions beget actions. Planning must be able to inform brand behaviour in totality, and look to aggregate behavioural, rather

than misleading cognitive, responses. Google search volume is a more robust measure of salience than awareness tracking.

[Source: F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital Works, http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html

The types of actions should leverage principles of 'metacommunication': reciprocity, association and social copying. Do things

for people - solve brand problems by solving consumer problems.

Introduce intermediate behaviours. Create content people find valuable; give them tools they can use.

Leverage advertising creation and distribution to disseminate ideas that can be advertised, not just advertising ideas28.

Tap cultural apertures and associations that reinforce the desired brand actions and social behaviours: moments, rituals and

beliefs can all be capitalised upon but rarely created. Early examples of this model, extensible solutions that inform advertising,

include: Pepsi Refresh29, Canon Second Shot30, Domino's Turnaround31, VW Fun Theory32, Gatorade Replay33.

The launch of the BMW ActiveE34 was informed directly by this thinking. We established BMW Documentaries to examine the issues around the future of mobility and city design with editorial credibility, creating a content stream that was built around

their interests, a series of films for the web, featuring hyper-textual additions to let users discuss and share fragments,

featuring thought-leaders that contributed their own reach and influence to the idea; mobile tools to help users considering the

car to ensure they were right for electric vehicles and explore their commuting routes; and at the same time to provide some

personalised benefits to all users - social spaces to let electric vehicle drivers share learning. In less than one month, there

were four times as many applications to buy the car as there were cars available in the USA.

4. The New Briefing

Moving away from an assumed messaging approach, briefs must incorporate fresh insight from multiple areas and expand

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their framework.

What brand problem? Consumer problem?

How do we drive measurable, profitable brand growth?

Who are participants and passives?

What provocations can we glean from their behaviour?

Appropriate brand actions and apertures and associations?

Desired behavioural response?

[Source: F Yakob; Exemplar]

However, briefing is a collaborative process, not a reified document, and generative propositions that inform actions and

apertures, as well as a solution architecture and inspiration, are all mandatory in helping craft articulations as diverse as we

will require in 2020.

The future of planning is linked to the future of the industry, and comes down to understanding the seemingly simple answer to

the question: what business are we in?

Since advertising is a lever, then it follows that, should better, more efficient, more effective solutions manifest to the business

problem of marketing products to the masses, companies would be well advised to pursue them35.

If strategic planning is able to navigate and indeed guide that transition, if agencies are truly in the business of profitable brand

growth, if we choose to maintain the breadth of vision clients are demanding, then the future of planning is bright.

FOOTNOTE

1. Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, Page 4

2. Consciousness Explained, D Dennett, [[[ broken link ]]] http://www.princeton.edu/~stcweb/html/pope02essay.html

3. http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/cmos-increase-spending-social-media-integration-still-lacking

4. "For clarity, planning encompasses the disciplines of account planning, media planning, communications planning,

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strategic planning, brand planning, digital planning and integrated planning." Clearly these are different things, which

speaks to the fragmentation and need for integration.

5. http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/social-media-and-integration-chief-among-marketers-priorities

6. Future of Planning: A Conversation, Admap Feb 2010

7. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising R Heath & P Feldwick

http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2007-03.pdf

8. The Mind's Greatest Trick - How We Experience Conscious Will, D Wegner, Harvard Dept of Psych

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/pdfs/trick.pdf

9. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising R Heath & P Feldwick

http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2007-03.pdf

10. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman,

11. I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behavior, R. Alexander Bentley, Mark Earls and Michael J. O'Brien MIT

Press October 2011

12. F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital Works

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html

13. For a detailed analysis see Consumerology by Philip Graves http://philipgraves.net/discussion/tag/consumer-ology

14. Yochai Benkler - The Wealth of Networks, Harvard Press http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf 15. For a detailed exploration of participatory media consumers see I Believe the Children are the Future - IPA President's

Prize Winning Essay http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future

16. FYakob Cultural Latency, Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/faris-yakob/technology-strategy/cultural-

latency

17. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/03/02/shirky-at-nfais-how-abundance-breaks-everything/

18. F Yakob - The Content Republic, Contagious Magazine 2009 http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/the-content-

republic.html

19. Rachel Hatton, The Future Of Planning, Admap Feb 2010

20. http://tribalddb.com/news/blogs/don%E2%80%99t-create-an-ad-create-a-world%E2%80%A6/

21. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising, R Heath & P Feldwick

http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2007-03.pdf

22. Aaron Shapiro, Users are the New Growth Engine, HBR 2011

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/users_are_the_new_growth_engin.html

23. F Yakob, Market to Context: IAB Keynote: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/6844.html

24. Reality Bits - F Yakob and C Gehrt, Campaign Magazine Asia, May 2011 http://farisyakob.typepad.com/files/campaign-

22may11-reality-bits-faris-and-corey.pdf

25. [Source: IPA, ISBA, MAA PRCA joint report: 'Agency Remuneration' Jan 2012]

26. For a detailed exploration of transmedia planning see I Believe the Children are the Future - IPA President's Prize

Winning Essay http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future

27. Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken http://www.amazon.com/Chief-Culture-Officer-Breathing-

Corporation/dp/0465018327

28. http://www.slideshare.net/garethk/we-need-a-new-idea-about-ideas

29. http://www.refresheverything.com/

30. http://yoursecondshot.usa.canon.com/

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31. http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/

32. http://thefuntheory.com/

33. http://www.replaytheseries.com/

34. In the USA: http://bmwactivatethefuture.com, Winner, NEW Category, London International Awards 2011, Chiat Planning

Awards 2011

35. F Yakob, What do Advertising Agencies Do? OneClub Magazine, Q4 2011

http://www.oneclub.org/#ol=/oc/magazine/articles/-what-do-advertising-agencies-doa

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