Ideas are worth little without execution

Can of worms duly opened, right?

Here’s what I think. Ideas are great. They really are. But as an intangible “thing” in your head, what good are they to me?

For an idea to have real worth, you need to execute it. All that “vision-of-the-future” crap that computer manufacturers and governments trot out on a regular basis is horseshit.

Build it, I say. Then we can judge by interacting with it just how good or bad the idea is.

Build it, because that’s how you will make money (or not).

Build it, because you don’t make the world of the future by talking about it. You make it by making it.

But for heavens sake stop doing stuff like this:

I mean, really? Are we still thinking multitouch gestures on 2D or 3D displays will be the interactivity choice for the future? That stuff is so 2007!

Is that a stylus at 4:28 and 5:03? A stylus! Really. You can do voice input on any number of devices running Android or iOS but you think a stylus is the best way to write a note to Mom?

This wrong in so many ways it defies belief why Microsoft would put it out there.

So that I don’t appear to be bashing Microsoft, let me point out that Apple themselves indulged in some navel-gazing of their own back in the day when they’d kicked Steve out. Allow me to present the Knowledge Navigator circa 1987:

It’s just as silly, although pretty prescient for something done in 1987. Do you see Siri Voice recognition in there? Multitouch? FaceTime? It just took 24 odd years to actually arrive.

And there’s the crux — many of the underlying technologies required to realize aspects of the Knowledge Navigator didn’t even exist in 1987:

• Ubiquitous broadband and high-speed cellular data to support Siri and Facetime? Nope.
• High-resolution, capacitative touch-screens? Nada.
• Wi-Fi? Hell no; Macs in 1987 used an unbelievably annoying platform called AppleTalk to network.

So, none of the stuff necessary to implement that vision actually existed back then. So why show something you can’t actually do? Leave that to the sci-fi flights of fancy.

At best, it may take very, very many years for technology to catch up with your idea. At worst, technology may head in a completely different direction leaving you looking a little bit silly. Does today’s iPad or Galaxy Tab look anything like the Navigator?

Build it, don’t talk about it. Then you’ll know what you can or can’t achieve.

Build it because the execution is what sells the idea, not the other way around.

Rant over.

 

PS: In contrast to pretty much every technology company out there, Apple – since Knowledge Navigator – have never sold an idea or a concept. They build.

Feature-creep in advertising

“Feature creep, creeping featurism or featureitis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software.[1] Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design. Viewed over a longer time period, extra or unnecessary features seem to creep into the system, beyond the initial goals.” via Wikipedia

Let’s assume you’ve got reasonable hand-eye coordination; if I tossed a single tennis ball at you, chances are you would have no trouble catching it. However, if I threw five tennis balls at you at the same time, I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t catch a single one.

And that right there is the trouble with a lot of the advertising we see today. After all the thinking that goes to getting to a single, simple refined idea, we fall into the trap of adding garbage to it.

Stop me if you’ve heard these before:

• “Put the logos of our business partners”
• “Put a starburst; we want the price to stand out”
•  ”Oh, you need to highlight that its only available for a limited time”
•  ”Please make sure you put ALL the product features in bullet points”

And on, and on and on it goes. Until something that used to look like this:

 

 

ends up like this:

 

Go ahead and tell me your ads don’t end up like that unholy mess far too often.

That’s what I’m calling “feature-creep” in advertising. A simple execution gets more and more elaborate for vaguer and vaguer reasons until it’s essentially a specification sheet for the product.

You might as well have just dressed up a few of the powerpoint slides that were shown in the briefing and run those.

And you know why this happens? One, we’re afraid to say no (to clients and bosses) and; two, that thing I wrote about earlier in the week called consensus.

The saddest thing with feature-creep is that trying so hard to be good at so many things inevitably means you end up being crap at everything.

Back to the tennis balls; if your advertising isn’t single-minded (one tennis ball) nobody, but nobody will ever figure out what you were trying to say in the first place.

 

Real-world creativity is dealing with constraints.

A couple of days ago (Sunday, 30th November, 2011) I sat down to talk to some young up-and-coming creatives about how to pitch for, and charge for work, and I was only too happy to dish out my two cents worth.

Then came that question that’s always asked: ‘what do you think about spec-work?’ For those not in the know “spec-work” is speculative work. Pie-in-the-sky thinking. No brief, no client, just a showcase of talent.

Now, I’ve written at some length here about why I believe spec-work is great for the creative mind and should be encouraged, but I’ve never had a look at the flip side of the coin.

Here’s the thing: we work in a world that is full of constraints – technical, logical, fiscal. Spec-work ignores all that in favour of voyages of pure fantasy.

All that freedom goes away in light of production and media budgets, language-barriers, cultural differences, the dreaded “Brand Guidelines,” or “Visual Identity System,” and so on and so forth.

These are all constraints that your creativity will push up against until you turn grey. But, this is the “box” within which you must work. There are no ifs-and-buts about the legal issues concerning depicting minors in certain situations. There is no magic trick that will enable you to produce your epic two minute television commercial on a budget of U$ 10,000 or even 20,000. It can not be done.

The real trick is actually achieving something memorable and beautiful and to the point, within all of the constraints that you will always have imposed on you. And, trust me – having had the less than pleasant experience of wading through the entire Diageo Marketing Code – there can be a hell of a lot of constraints!

But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the teams working on Smirnoff Vodka and Johnnie Walker from doing some truly heroic work.

It’s always very easy to say something can’t be done because of some rule or regulation, but how about exploring what can be done within the regulations? How about not bothering to think “outside the box” and instead thoroughly exploring every nook and cranny of the box you are in instead?

After all, once you venture outside of one box, you’ll only find yourself in another slightly larger, slightly differently shaped one.

And, in truth, the box you really need to think out of isn’t the one imposed by the real-world constraints, it’s more likely one that you have imposed on yourself. Free yourself from that one first.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t do spec-work. I’m saying it’s a lot easier to be “creative” when there are no boundaries. Being creative within a very specific set of rules, now that takes some doing.

Oh, and when a client next asks you to think outside the box, politely tell them that there is no such thing and point them here.

Consensus makes no one happy.

There’s this saying, “a camel is a horse designed by committee,” that I particularly like, and while it might seem to be overly critical of committees, it does have a very valid point.

Far too often projects suffer from what I’ll call staff-bloat; where more and more people are added to the job.

Then what happens is we start to try and incorporate everybody’s ideas into the project. Next thing you know, you’ve got some frankensteinian creation filled with logical inconsistencies and which is indecipherably complex.

With so many cooks messing around with the broth, we often lose sight of what the whole purpose of the project was in the first place. We lose direction.

And the inevitable result is a mess that nobody likes in its entirety. No doubt everybody likes their “contribution”, but nobody – absolutely nobody – will ever like the whole thing.

That’s why you need a strong, focused leader and a tight dedicated team. Call the Steve Jobs‘ and Richard Bransons of this world arrogant assholes all you like, but there’s no denying their achievements. What are the chances they would have succeeded if they incorporated every half-baked idea from every meaningless brainstorm they probably never, ever sat in?

A lot of the unnecessarily complex commercials we see on TV today are borne of exactly such consensus-building group-think, and they are rubbish. They take a simple, clear idea and like a dodgy bartender watering down your whiskey, they dilute it until you can barely taste anything.

Committees simply don’t add value to the creative process.

Consider this from David Ogilvy: “Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.”

Indeed.

Moving Furniture

Picture this. You and your significant other have moved into a new place.

You’ve bought new furniture, curtains, even a new cheeky welcome mat to put outside the door. You get the movers to arrange everything just so and it’s smiles and high-fives all round.

You get up and go to work the next day, and when you get home, your partner would like you to move the furniture around. So you comply and it’s back to being all-good.

The next day, or next week or month, you come home and your partner would like the furniture moved around again. With a weary sigh you comply.

And the pattern repeats itself a couple of times until one of you (hopefully both) realise that there’s a bit of a problem. Something’s not quite right. Either the furniture’s all wrong for the house or the house is all wrong for the furniture or the two of you are all wrong for the house and the furniture.

You’ve got to start over. Maybe get new furniture, or move to a new place, but you really, really do have to start over. “Tweaking” and shuffling and rearranging is not going to solve the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong – and by fundamental I mean going back to first principles: the house and the furniture.

If the little mental picture painted above makes sense to you, ask yourself this: why do you keep doing it at work?

No, really. How many revisions, amends and edits does it take before you realise that you’re on the wrong track, or your client is on the wrong track, or that the brief was wrong in the first place?

You need to learn to recognise when the fundamentals are flawed. And have the courage to say “screw this, let’s start again.” Rip-up the brief and write a new one.

Anything else is just masochism.

The numbers game

The human mind is a funny old thing when it comes to numbers. Pretty much everyone can visualize one, two, ten, twenty even a hundred. But when you start tossing in much larger numbers – ten thousand, twenty thousand, five million – it becomes increasingly difficult to have any appreciation of the number apart from the fact that it is large.

This problem becomes even worse when you start to apply large numbers to people. I can probably name about 100 people I know, though it might take me a while. And I feel a far greater concern when the news reports that a family of five perished than when I read about 200,000 people displaced by flooding.

There’s a numbness that creeps in at a certain threshold of magnitude when the number becomes an abstract concept and not a tangible, appreciable thing.

Because of this, it bothers me no end when a brief lands on my desk with stuff like this (and I promise this is from a real brief):

 

TARGET AUDIENCE

Who do you want us to talk to and influence

1. Demographics- Mass market, class B, C1,C2, D
2. Psychographics-Aged between 20-29 years, they live in urban and peri urban areas- Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu mostly.
3. Lifestyle, they are mostly small SME’s or self employed in their small businesses, use public means of transport, listen to radio most of the time and watch/ listen to news.
4. Relevant Insights- Inflation rates very high and therefore they need affordable means of communication
5. Differences in decision making levels
6. Potential Volume: high subscriptions if offer is well communicated.

 

That target audience, by my reckoning, amounts to something like 70% of the population of the country’s three largest cities. So that would be about 3.5 million people. That’s 3,500,000 people who are your target audience. Can you wrap your head around this number? I definitely can’t and I’m really good with numbers.

What ever happened to defining your target audience (a term I particularly hate as well) by picking an exemplar?

Meet John

1. John lives in Kawangware (an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi) and runs a small electronics repair shop in Kilimani (an uptown residential and commercial district). He earns about 20,000 kshs a month and either takes a bus to the houses where he works, or rides his bicycle.
2. John faces the same problems faced by most Kenyans these days: rising inflation and crippling cost-of-living expenses, so his disposable income has been severely affected in recent months.
3. This means the best time to try and get him to make a purchase would be at the end of the month when some money’s come in and he’s not too hard up.”

Now, you tell me: which of the two descriptions could you write an ad to? The faceless 3.5 million, or John?

I know who I’d write for.

David Ogilvy famously said “the consumer isn’t a moron, she is your wife” to which I’d add the consumer isn’t a statistic, either.

It’s such a pity nobody in the ad industry seems to know or care who their “customers” are any more.

 

A letter to the consumer

Dear friend,

We’ve been through a lot together and I’d like to say that I’m very grateful that you’ve stuck with me through thick and thin.

Or maybe you haven’t. Maybe I let you down with promises that I didn’t keep. Or maybe I made you look cheap because I was prostituting myself around with those buy-one-get-one-free “deals.”

For this, I am sorry. Let me make it up to you.

Let me be true to the values that attracted you to me in the first place. Let me be a part of your life that you like because I don’t intrude, I don’t impose and I don’t berate or nag.

I would like to be indispensable, but I’m sure that’s asking way too much as there are probably many suitors out there vying for you.

But if I can inspire you, change your view of the world, or make you think differently about me and others like me, then I should be content.

I’d really like to meet your friends and get to know them, but I know I’ll have to convince you that I can be trusted again. An uphill battle, I’m sure.

I promise not to sell you out. Or sell myself out. I promise to be myself, and not some other bland, off-the shelf thingamabob with no discernible character.

Then maybe, just maybe, you can love me again.

Sincerely

Your brand.

 

I f**king hate this thing “*”

The almighty asterisk. It stares at you like a particularly baleful, midget arachnid on the page. You can almost hear it doing the Dr. Evil cackle before it unleashes the horrors of litigation upon your ass.

I will not lie, I hate the asterisk. It says to me “I’m gonna get you, sucker, if you don’t read ALL the 3.5-point-size-fine-print-to-be-found-somewhere-else-in-this-publication. I. WILL. EAT. YOU. ALIVE.”

Let’s be clear, I’ve done my fair share of ads with the five-pointed-harbinger-of-doom, but I’ve never really enjoyed having to do it. It smacks of deception. “Terms and conditions apply.” Are the terms so onerous that you can’t put them in the main copy? Are the conditions so complicated that they can only be understood by someone with legal training?

If so, do you not see the problem? You are absolutely not communicating. Any time you make a promise that requires a disclaimer or forces your customer to jump through hoops, you’re just putting up more barriers.

And this is not limited to the bunch of us who work in advertising, either. Banks have got this one down pat. Why, oh, why does everything involving a financial institution have to be so complicated? I love reading, but staring at that fine-print gives me an instant headache and, crucially, doesn’t leave me any wiser, so what was the point in the first place?

Oh, sorry. Silly me. Y’all covering your asses aint’ ya? It is for your own protection that that asterisk is there. It’s not there to help the customer, it’s there to bail you out when things go south.

Well, gee, thanks for nothing.

Please get rid of the asterisk and the associated fine-print. Hire real people who speak a real language (not legalese) and get them to rewrite everything so that we can understand it. And if the mechanics of whatever you’re promoting are so complex that they need a supplementary half-page ad to explain, you might want to rethink those mechanics.

That is all. Rant over.

Cut the Crap a.k.a why I love Twitter and hate Tweetdeck

“I apologize for the length of this letter, but I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

Mark Twain

Twitter has made most of us better writers.

Brevity, that impossible thing to achieve, is enforced by that 140 character limit.

And that limit forces us to delete the egregious OMGs and LOLs found so often elsewhere (FB, I’m pointing fingers at you).

So many people I follow on Twitter would qualify to write headlines for ads and newspaper articles because they are forced to keep it short and to the point – exactly the virtues you want in a headline.

So why, then, do so many favor the recently purchased (by Twitter) client TweetDeck?

I know it lets you manage several accounts all at once, but it’s hardly the only client that lets you do that. I think it’s because people want to write more than the 140 characters (and couldn’t be bothered to set up a blog or don’t think they’ll get visitors, maybe?) because the message cannot be told in fewer letters.

I think, however, that it smacks of laziness. An unwillingness to work a bit harder a la Mr. Twain above.

But, you know what, I get it. Cutting the crap out is hard, mostly because we don’t recognize that it is crap. We humans are a funny old sort in thinking that everything we do is good. Trust me on this one; it’s not.

Be self-critical. I would go so far as to say, be your biggest critic/censor/editor and just cut out the crap. You’ll be a better creative for it.

LOL

Paul Graham on managers’ vs makers’ schedules

Absolutely spot on.

(For “makers” read “creatives” and it’s perfect for the ad industry as well)

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

Read the entire post here.

Related Articles

• Why makers should think a little bit more like managers (and vice versa) (sethgodin.typepad.com)
• Schedules (thisgoodworld.com)