Law of Unintended Consequences?

 

I began to question everything in March 2020 Lockdown was their mistake as it gave us all time to investigate the actual world we live in. Gave us time to go down that rabbit hole and WAKE up. My life isn’t and will never be the same there is no going back to sleep once awake

— Bev (@bevscotland) December 4, 2022

Winston Churchill Research

I think it was Tom who mentioned the speech impediment, and that is born out in this TV 1950 re-election piece, of and by Winston Churchill, as it were

The follow up Ottawa 'Piece' is preposterous. Look at the Grand Poobah behind him, sitting in a propitiously large seat (Bless). And bless your little legs as well.

If we meet in real life, and should you be a Winnie expert. 

Ask me about the debunking research. 

It's troubling.

Qualitative Depth Interviews & First Hand Testimony

I generally have to sit through around five depth interviews to secure one good testimony. The reasons I reject the others are quite harsh. The respondent might be ego-driven, incoherent, looking to make a name or a profit for themselves, or just attention seeking.

All of these characteristics are associated with deep state disinformation characters too so that makes it easier to spot those respondents who quietly and powerfully lay out their testimony in a compelling and robust manner much as if a top advertising agency were pitching for an premium butter account with a solid reasoning for believing them.

This testimony falls under that category.

Bilderberg 2013 , NATO & Nazis - An Essential Interview

Superb interview at Bilderberg 2013 with Former BBC journalist Tony Gosling. Lots of bombshell information. Keep a pen handy in case you want to check out his references.

Research

I got talking to a creative friend of mine who has just finished a big shoot in China, and we veered onto the subject of dross-quality Chinese advertising in mainland PRC. But don't let me shape your opinion go to Youtube or Youku and see if you can dig out something that has anything to say. 

It's pretty much all pants, which for a nation of 1.3 billion people and a LOT of ads says something doesn't it? I talked about it bluntly over here, but there's a few more reasons why "safety first" is king of the mill. You might also find something in my Asian research posts over here, here and here.

In any case we got talking about a particular BBDO style of blockbuster commercial that uses a method I don't want to specifically mention here but which was researched by the client in China and amazingly the answer was that it wasn't as effective as real ideas.

Well of course we know that but it's amazingly hard to prove this because one would need a parallel universe and an A/B split to see which one is most effective to prove beyond doubt which is more effective but in any case I thought that it would be wise to point out that we can make research prove anything if we want and in the case of quantitative methodologies it's nothing more than a cloak for mediocrity to rule.

This Youtube clip is not new but I want to bookmark it for future reference on my blog so I can just share it with people who aren't convinced by what I'm trying to say in the hope that they will take the road less travelled. It's riskier but not if a proper conversation about how to solve any fears takes places. But that's a conversation that takes both time and courage. I'm also not anti research but a cookie cutter approacher gives cookie cutter advertising.

Are You Tooled Up?

I did bookmark this a day or so ago on delicious and subsequently discovered that Katie has done an excellent presentation which we can now share. It's great if only for further stimulating the debate on social media metrics but equally opens up the increasingly important conclusion that the elusive measurement methodology we seek, may well not be the cast iron approach we've been used to in the past with frequency and reach.

It should involve some common sense, creative problem solving and untried combinations of quantitative data, with in my mind, qualitative classification of engagement too.

I think one of the Tweets that Gavin or Katie gave out was something about social media measurement being as "easy or as difficult as you want". This sounds eminently sensible to a creative planner more interested in execution than spreadsheets of what are invariably inconclusive and contradictory data (That we often see nervous clients can never get enough off).

I've been mulling over an approach that any day now is threatening to materialize into a seminal (and wildly popular) post about the topic and which I've mentioned, here and here in the comments.

It might well include an unusual methodology for combining pre-billing and post communications efficacy measurement. Recombinant invoicing if you will.

This of course is a wild and probably foolhardy attempt at publicly committing myself to actually spilling some of the stuff that has been going on in my head apart from the the notion that scarcity of disposable income theoretically shreds the need to advertise in the ways we have been programmed to accept as the norm during the 20th and early 21st century.

In the mean time check out the presentation that Katie has done for us.

Social Media Monitoring Tools Evaluation

View more presentations from RCM77.

Mea Culpa

This post is over a year late but reading Scamp's blog has prompted me to get on and do the right thing. You may remember (if there’s any of you left) that I was doing some groups around the UK last summer in 2007 that I wrote about here. It was on my birthday and I remember it well, not because it was 'my day' which matters little to me given how much I’ve just generally celebrated life, but because a few of you called me in Edinburgh to wish me happy birthday and I realised that my blogging friends were just as important if not more important than the ones I’d met in a different order of media. We certainly stay in touch much more frequently. Maybe email decimated the urge to keep contact and blogging added some context to communication. That's another post. A good one too.

In any case many of you asked what work I was doing and who for. I don’t mind sharing because it’s time to wind the clock back a little and go over what for me ended up being a kind of conflict of interest. Tell the client the truth or just the agency and let the agency handle it. The former is always more costly both personally and professional, and is yet the right thing to do.

My first recommendation when seeing the brief was that NCH (formerly National Children’s Homes) were blowing a lot of money on a name change that would not be a return on investment - and that’s what I told the agency I was employed by. But it’s a little more complex than that as I discovered more each day. Unlike Barnardos who have a much higher profile, NCH are a fantastically interesting charity that work very closely with government to provide more than just homes to children; opportunities to reenter education, learn skills they need to find work as well as all the other headline grabbing work that childrens charities do, including fostering. NCH felt that the 'Homes' in their abbreviation was misleading as that was not what they really did and this prompted the name change. When dealing with government funds it’s important that the bureaucrats have a clear idea what the millions upon millions of pounds are for but that was a technical issue which I gave some recommendations on.

The difficulty of the problem was that when I turned up to present my findings to the charity I tried to convey to them that the research methodology was inappropriate for young delinquents. I was working from a discussion guide and stimulus material that was not of my own making but as I was passed the baton only the night before flying to Glasgow I had little choice but to run with it and frankly I was also presenting pro bono because I had missed one of the flights to Scotland and felt guilty about losing charity money.

In any case the findings were still fascinating and I really loved discovering the complexity of charitable issues when collaborating with government as well as learning that practically all the cool ‘head down’ get on with it people were strongly anti brand. They felt that consumerism drove a lot of the dissatisfaction that the neglected kids and their families felt with their lives.

However they all loved taking the kids to McDonalds which is a real treat for deprived children in Scotland. So there’s the context for contradiction. There’s always a context. Everything is contextual.

So I made the mistake of being blunt about my findings. One of the groups was with tagged offenders in the rougher parts of Glasgow where opportunities are slim and role models few and far between. I remember doing the group so well because the young lads were some of the trickiest people I’ve had to coax some meaning out of. They were sullen and moody but really this masked their insecurity at having some fella from London tip up and embrace their world much more quickly than they could mine. In difficult situations I like to invite the respondents to ask me any questions they like, so that I can dispel any fears they may have of looking silly when replying or just to make them more comfortable. Try as hard as I could, I couldn’t get anything out of the lads apart from one who as the leader, seemed obliged to say something. The truth was that they were emotionally immature and intellectually starved so asking them about the brand dimensions of car or financial services brands that advertised on the telly was a waste of time. I got the good stuff out of them on McDonalds and Nike and Carling Beer or Football clubs as brands but nothing that really contributed to NCH’s needs.

When presenting to the Board of NCH I made the fatal mistake of describing the boys in the Glasgow group as ‘not the sharpest tools in the box’. What I was trying to say was that it was pointless asking them for their opinions (based on similar findings from a group of girls in the hills of former coal mining communities in Wales). I was suggesting they pay attention to what and how they researched. In short how not to waste valuable money.

The committee went nuts on me and as I was there trying to tell them the work was not necessarily right, the methodology wasn’t right and that there was a huge potential to attach so much narrative and meaning around NCH (They drip with history and intersting complexity) that positioned the charity appropriately - in my view.

In any case I took offense that one overly politically correct member of the committee was losing sight of the wood for the trees and I wrapped up my presentation promptly and left it to the agency to take over the the disappointing findings I had conveyed.

I gave it a lot of thought over the next months. I thought to myself “what an idiot” that guy was for losing sight of what it was all about, over the use of what I thought was politically correct language. I think he wanted me to use ‘intellectually deprived” or something instead of the unsharp tool metaphor.

However it suddenly occurred to me one day that my own sister had taught me the power of unkind words. My sister has walking difficulties from birth, and not so long back, she called to tell me that her condition was Celebral Palsy. I had always grown up with my sister and swhat I thought was some strange condition that disabled her from walking properly, which we always thought was just some variant of spastic disability; which is a general word for a problem between the brain and muscle control. However, listening to my sister I realised that there was a proper name for it. But why did she want to give it a name now, so much later in life, surely it didn’t change anything, it sounded like there was no way it would have ever helped giving it a different name?

Well I was wrong wasn’t I. Because when she called me up all those years later, and explained to me the condition that she had, I realised all those years of with her condition referred to as spastic had been deeply painful and the name change of The Spastic Society to SCOPE (something I argued had lost it resonance) was in fact very appropriate. Sometimes hard hitting can be a little too hard hitting.

To deprived people and actually people in general, words can be very hurtful, so in a flash it dawned on me that the whole politically correct movement, while sometimes tedious, is based on the power of words. Particularly how hurtful they can be and I although I have already apologised fully to that lovely little agency in Soho called Baby Creative, particularly Lawrence Sassoon, who is a really top bloke, I want to do it publicly and draw attention to their client who now go by the name of Action For Children, which is a much more appropriate name for a children’s charity that does huge amounts with a less advertising budget than the Barnardo’s. I believe Barnardo's fund raising model is to spend more to raise more.

I should also apologise to my sister for being so thick.

From The Heart Not The Head - Research In Asia

Cybretron

Not so long back I was doing a depth research interview with an Asian pharmaceutical salesman at a hotel in the Hilton at Gatwick Airport. It was like pulling teeth. The ethnicity is relevant in this instance because of an opinion I’ve held for some years that I believe Western research methodology imposed on Oriental cultures is deeply flawed.

It made me remember a topic I've been meaning to post about and which might be of interest to international planners, and also I'd like to open up the debate on research methodology.

I first began to think about this some years ago because I was having a chat with the MD of a research company in Asia who said something that stopped me in my tracks. When I raised that the respondents in the focus group were very reluctant to speak, and could he think of ways to stimulate discussion he responded without hesitation, ‘use a cattle prod'.

At the time I thought this was quite a cynical view coming from a research professional that we had commissioned, but over the years I've regretted not changing the company immediately. The recruitment was bad, the research was bad and the reporting was bad. I guess I’d been warned from that off the cuff comment but wasn’t listening properly.

‘Any road’, as they say in Coronation Street. I got thinking about the whole methodology of qualitative research in Asia because of this interview with the pharmaceutical salesman. Early into the process the respondent’s behavior was guarded at best and more often not, just plain evasive in a garrulous way. I sensed that all the answers being giving were measured and unforthcoming for a strong reason. He refused to say anything negative about the organizational structure as if the discussion were a test, or a job interview.

Not content to go though the motions I tried to think of another way, because there is a propensity in Indian culture to use talking as a means of stalling for time to to think about the answer that is wanted. Often it’s an over compensatory willingness to be helpful on their part, although it achieves the opposite effect.

I tried an alternative approach, which was Socratic in so much that I waited for a clear contradiction of an earlier statement, and then asked questions that made this self evident to the respondent. Not normal interviewing technique but I’m glad I persisted.

People are contradictory by nature, Buddhism teaches us that nothing is permanent and that I'm afraid also applies to truth in a temporal sense. I hit jackpot when like a sudden tropical downpour the real stuff began to pour out of his mouth. I grabbed my pen and began madly scribbling down verbatim as much as I could get. It was priceless feedback. The respondent addressed the imbalance by being extra truthful and I realised from that point onwards he was talking from the heart and not from the head.

Getting to this point in Occidental cultures is no easy task but with a stranger in Oriental cultures, even within a validated research environment is not working with Western research methodologies. The hierarchical nature of their society, the desire not to stand out or be the exception to the rule, the value place on guarded responses that is instilled from birth all contribute to much research in Asia as little more than worthless. All the more frustrating because many research professionals in those countries, by their own cultural values are conditioned not to question the validity of the methodology. The evidence for this assertion, is the non existence of indigenous research methods in this part of the world.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between.

So what is the solution?

We now know that location based and user research, such as ethnography, is much more revealing than the sterile environment of a research agency or conference/meeting facilities or a hotel.

Here are some more suggestions that I’d urge the research industry to consider urgently in this amazing part of the planet.

Focus groups – Set up respondents to CONNECT with each other before hand, either through a moderated media like instant messaging or a more laissez faire approach like a Facebook group, allowing them to develop bonds about who they are, what they do while letting them reveal a little of their personality.

1. Depth interviews – Let the respondents get to know their interviewer through a Blog or an updated page on the website. Encourage them to join the interviewers twitter circle, an easy thing to set up for a work profile that fosters a sense of intimacy.
2. Use the low cost of doing business in Asia as a powerful follow up tool. Do focus groups that use stimulus material such as visual boards and if the first round is inconclusive, then get the creative team to work on them further and dispatch them to the respondents by COURIER for further discussion over the phone.
3. Take hard to find high income business leaders to a high end restaurant and use the occasion as a forum for them to network before moving onto the topics that the research has been commissioned for. Give and you shall receive.

I could go on. In this age of ubiquitous internet the ability for people to develop the trust that is needed to speak from the emotional heart, rather than from the rational head which is culturally conditioned to be reserved opens up opportunities that research companies need to embrace. I’ve spent far too many research debriefs observing the interested parties (anxious clients and ‘wannabe creative’ researchers) using qualitative research as mini quantitative tests. Its time to listen to planners again and be a little more creative about how we problem solve.

Long Play

ChinadoII

Late in the afternoon last week for no apparent reason the phone started ringing off the hook with work things. So I dragged my sorry rear into the West End mainly to get off my well honed reclining-position as earlier I'd been sucked into responding to Robs post to cover my partially exposed butt on brand values. Frankly I was close to bailing out Stateside for an overdue meetup, but a combination of a delayed reply that I've been waiting on, filed in 'the dog ate my emails' folder, and a sudden offer to get stuck into some charity rebranding tipped me over to taking on a gig on that meant a 4am start the next day up in Glasgow doing groups. These included in the afternoon, some young men who don't necessarily think too much about being electronically tagged while keeping a curfew - yeah Punk Planning my friends.

So far its been an exhausting but eyeopening experience and since the kickoff I've also covered Cardiff, a small mining village in the county borough of Caerphilly as well as Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham and Gloucester today. I should wrap up in a few days time but until then I've started to ask myself if the idea of an open source C.I development methodology might be an effective way to meet the objectives of keeping a very disparate bunch of people that range from local government, charity workers and young folk in need of a helping hand onboard and 'buying into' a process which one guy memorably articulated as 'reeking of insincerity' when referring to the the way 'brand' talks.

Here's the deal; most of the people that I've spoken to are really sceptical of anything that relates to marketing and the reason for that is they actually do stuff rather than waffle on about it like a lot of us ad tossers do. Its also increasingly evident that as with any change management a shiny new badge can be a reasonably useful point to coalesce around for a new direction. The reality is that unlike that rare and mythical beast called a proper brand (people getting mugged for Levis in 80's Moscow and ditto for iPods in the 3rd millennium) they probably will never be more famous than say top of mind prompted-recall within a specific charity segment, even if as I have discovered time and again since last Thursday they are off-the-richter-scale for complexity in stakeholders and financial solutions. Not to mention diversity of projects and doing a lot of hands on work.

I'm probing some architecture, platform and proposition dimensions that are not far removed from interrogation of (deep breath) third party projection of the meaning-of-meaning for say deprived young'uns with low attention spans - you get my drift? OK I'm exaggerating a tad, but that whole brand personality malarkey isn't moving mountains for me if people have to think about it. I mean personality is surely something people can spontaneously remark on and unwittingly have, acquire and possibly nurture. Surely its not something that can be scored from the nearest council estate corner gathering, and falls neatly between say a "chav" brand and one that "tells you what to do" as one group earlier today outlined when discussing those "Just do it" people. I guess I'm taking shots at some of the FMCG navel-gazing research gigs I've had to oversea in my time. But there is some overlap with whats going on here.

So in the interests of suggesting a kick-ass methodology for a participatory media process that embraces uncertainty and welcomes the digitalocracy of the web I thought I'd run the idea past you folk in case anyone else has thought about the idea of opening up the development of identity architecture real-time on the web. The immediate pluses for this method are that everyone gets a say and feels that they have been part of the consultation process, one or two egos/agendas don't hijack the process as invariably happens when settling on a least contentious communication platforms. Any thoughts? Is this taking 2.0 a bit far? Could it all go peaches up or as I really suspect, the P.R from the process could be worth considerably more than a years communication budget, given that nobody has ever done it before and that somebody will surely be extremely upset about the loss of control - which is a good thing in my book.

Other than that there are a quite a few other things kicking off and I'll leave you with the best post for ages. If any of you wannabes want to know what planning is about then check out this slice of action that absorbs people of our stargazing ilk who can't ever help stop thinking - albeit in my case pretty uselessly. It also gives me a chance to use that picture of ChinaD0II that has been lurking on my desktop before I dig out some of the great podcasts I'm still gagging to tip y'all off about.

Calton Hill Acropolis

photojenni

I'm off to Edinburgh for a week (and then Leeds after that) doing depths for the pharmaceutical industry and I'm quite excited about the trip. Although I've made it into quite a few places around the planet (Junta or no Junta), and checked out a few locations that easily qualify for the 7 wonders of the world, I'm quite psyched about eventually visiting a place that if only for the Scottish enlightenment and its influence on the founding fathers of the United States is interesting in itself, but of course there is so much more. If anyone knows any bloggers/digital ramblers or agency/marketing types that might be interested in meeting up in the evenings I'm very much going to be up for some fresh air, insights into the place/people, lager or coffee. Expect random twitters to alleviate spreadsheet revolts and general monologue iteration wear and tear.