thoughts

I gave a talk at the IOF Convention a couple of weeks ago.

‘Using Insights Creatively’ was the topic.

And all the work in putting the show together made something apparent. Namely, that many of the best insights often come from a very different process to the one so many organisations pour time, effort, money and hope into.

Because we’re obsessed with deriving insight from data analysis, research and focus groups. And of course, those routes provide fantastic insights.

But. There. Is. Another. Way.

When my mum was a girl, not many young people had watches.

So they were a bit of a status symbol.

So in the summer, she and her friends would stick a watch paper template around their wrists.

Which would give them a watch tan line – so it looked like you had a watch, you just didn’t happen to be wearing it.

Want to know how to win the first round of a game of paper, scissors stone?

Hold a clenched fist out in front of you before the game starts, then put it behind your back as you begin counting. On 3, reveal your hand still in a fist shape (ie stone).

Most people will be showing scissors. Rock blunts scissors, you win.

I bring news of three incredible breakthroughs.

Bolluxtorkium, Madeupium and Sudosyencium.

What do you mean, never heard of them?

Our nation’s best scientific brains – bored of minor challenges like finding a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy – have been working tirelessly to unearth these modern miracles.

Inspired by nature, these incredible discoveries... make your hair shiny. Really shiny.

So shiny it looks healthy (even though it can't be, since hair is dead).

Have you ever tried to grow a moustache?

If you're a woman, probably not. I grew one for Movember a couple of years ago (a really charming, £30 million idea in aid of prostate cancer). It was bloody itchy though.

But in the 80s, moustaches had a resurgence in popularity. Because blokes wanted to be like Tom Selleck.

If you can’t remember (or are too young to know) why, just look at the TV title sequence for his famous Ferrari 308GTS-driving detective: http://bit.ly/HK7cw

Awesome.

I’m loving the new Diesel campaign. Its aim – well, apart from selling Diesel schmutter, obviously – is to transform the meaning of the word “stupid”, so that instead of meaning, well, stupid, it comes to mean intuitive, spontaneous, open, unpretentious, simple, bold and adventurous. To do this, it contrasts the word “stupid” with the word “smart,” which comes to mean selfish, uptight, over-analytical, inhibited overcomplicated and generally too clever by at least half and probably more like three quarters.

Best thing about watching Avatar in 3D?

According to my girlfriend, it’s that behind the dark glasses no-one can see you cry when the blue people get killed.

I enjoyed it very much – you just have to tell yourself beforehand that being the highest-grossing film ever made doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best film ever made.

Because expectation is everything. If you over-deliver on someone’s expectations, you’ve got a happy audience, cooing at computer-generated hovering mountains.

Under-deliver, and you’ve got a webbed-toed Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

I love our advertising and direct marketing for the children’s savings brand Jump. (If you don’t know it, you can see some examples on this website, at www.tangible.uk.com/case-study/jump-savings.) Over quite a few years now, it seems to me to have maintained such a high degree of freshness, of reality, of accuracy of observation into what the relationships between parents and children are actually like, that literally everything else in financial advertising – and pretty much everything else in advertising – seems stale and false by comparison.

All agency creatives understand the sense of the famous old saying “Give me the freedom of a tight brief,” variously ascribed when you Google it to David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Norman Berry and some Swedish bloke called Nystrom. The thing about tight briefs is that they leave you “free” to get on with what you’re supposed to be doing, namely coming up with great ideas, rather than doing what you actually spend half your time doing, namely figuring out what the hell it is you’re supposed to be saying and to whom.

Enjoyable controversy in the letters column of Campaign.

Firstly, my colleague Owen at Farm makes a cogent and intelligent case for marketing WITH rather than AT the consumer, predicated on our fabulous co-creative marketing model.

Secondly, Marco Scognamiglio, CEO of Rapp writes in saying ‘we’re already doing that’. This is a statement of sufficient gall to provoke me to write in asking if the millions of embittered consumers on Rapp’s innumerable mailing lists feel that they are being marketed WITH or AT?