This quote is from Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is talking about the weaknesses of GDP as a measure of development and arguing that one of the reasons it has been so pervasive a measure for so long is that it’s relatively easy to measure it accurately and consistently. The weaknesses of it are, hopefully, obvious. GDP as a measure of economic development does not account for development in education, health, social inequality, political agency and so on. Further, even as a measure of economic development it is fairly limited. However, it has become a near universal benchmark measure for development, simply because we can measure it. The tide is changing somewhat, but for many years, GDP growth has been the stated goal of many countries of the World. There are lots of ways you can achieve this target at the expense of long-term sustainable development – Stiglitz points out that you can easily drive GDP growth by logging your rainforests – but that’s not really development is it?
Clearly this is something research needs to reflect on. We need to be clear about what we can measure and how those measures can help, but also about what we can’t or don’t measure. In this post about action standards I talked about how making the measure the objective hugely devalues the work that we do. A scorecard approach, especially for pre-testing, loses sight of what the real objective is – great, on strategy advertising – that’s what we should be striving for, not for a high score on the parts of that we can actually measure. The rain-forest example has much in common with striving too much for efficiency in individual pieces of copy – it is important, but if it’s at the expense of the longer term campaign story and/or tone of the brand, it’s not always desirable. I can make your ad more efficient, do you want me to?
“The Moscow Art is my deadly enemy. It is the exact antithesis of what I am trying to do. They string their emotions together to give a continuous illusion of reality. I take photographs of reality and then cut them up so as to produce emotions.”
– Sergei Eisenstein
Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song. I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message. After one or two of these unsuccessful attempts, one realises that his resultant message which is not even the same message he thought up and began with, he’s now got to stick by it; because, after all, a song leaves your mouth just as soon as it leaves your hands. You’ve got to respect other people’s right to also have a message themselves.
Replace “song” with “ad” and Robert Zimmerman is your father’s brother.
Short addendum to yesterday’s post. I mentioned that it’s easy to dismiss ideas as shit out of hand – that’s true and we should take care before we do so. However, whilst we’re worshiping at the altar of ‘idea’, we should also remember that not all ideas are created equal – some ideas genuinely are shit. When people are under intense pressure to come up with one, they’re sometimes too busy singing hallelujah when one comes along that they forget to think about whether it’s actually any good or not. It does everyone involved a disservice if someone doesn’t call that turd a turd. In our business, that really should happen a long time before an ad lands in my inbox to go into everyone’s favourite pre-test. Quite often, it doesn’t – and if it is shit, I won’t be too shy to tell you.
I love creativity (I even ‘liked’ Antony Gormley on facebook the other day, I also went to Goldsmiths – if that’s not proof enough…) and I have a lot of sympathy with the view that those who possess it and the ideas they produce are both undervalued and treated with insufficient sensitivity. Indeed, working for an industry (not less a company) who have often been the guys dolling out the insensitivity, I’m acutely aware of this issue. But I do get increasingly irritated by the discourse around ‘ideas’ and the sense that to provide any critique of them is sacrilegious. When creatives say ‘you’re not creative, you just don’t understand ideas’ to defend against any criticism, it’s just like when parents tell you your opinions on education or child protection are invalid because ‘you won’t understand until you have kids’.
The ‘Creativity Complex’ is a strange mix of superiority delusions and aching self-doubt/pity at those delusions not being confirmed by others. The pathology is clear in a couple of blog posts (or at least the comments that accompany them) that I have read recently.
The first was this post from Stan Lee (@branddna). The post itself is perfectly agreeable and elicits exactly the kind of sympathy I talk about in my opening paragraph – people don’t understand how daunting ideas are, particularly coming up with them under professional pressures (I’ll return to this later). But the comment from Kate Lightfoot, to which I responded, displays the classic first symptom of the Creativity Complex – superiority delusion.
Creativity under pressure is extremely difficult and it requires a specific set of skills, skills which many of us, myself included, aren’t lucky enough to possess. But, on the other hand the ‘Suit’ (itself a semi-pejorative term, even if used with affection for the most part) at whom the comment scoffs also has a difficult job which requires a different, though equally valuable, set of skills. Though they are fairly roundly dismissed:
It’s so easy to comment on, critique, edit and change what’s already been done.
I agree it’s easy to just dismiss something as shit – but to provide a useful, incisive and considered critique that sharpens an idea and makes it more effective is not easy, it’s actually very difficult (which is why a lot of us trying to do so make such a hash of it!). It’s also not easy to regularly engage in difficult client meetings, negotiations on rates (which pay the Creative’s salaries as well by the way) and so on – and I’d imagine a lot of Creatives would ‘turn white at the prospect’ of trying to do that.
The problem here is a ‘your job’s easier than mine’ attitude persists in both directions and has to be dispelled. I don’t see how you can, on the one hand, be bemoaning the lack of respect given to the very complex and important process of idea generation whilst simultaneously dismissing the equally complex and important process of feedback and client management as easy.
The second symptom of the Complex is displayed by this post from the Ad Contrarian. Which as far as I can tell is just a rambling whinge about how Creatives are misunderstood and undervalued which again, implicitly undervalues the contributions that everyone else in the process makes (from the comments, it appears this particular symptom of the condition is extremely prevalent). Take this bit for example which complains that creatives
are pressured by their leaders to do “great” work. But when they do, they usually get reprimanded for not being “on strategy.”
Given that a Planner and Client, most likely aided by a number of researchers of various ilk (though most likely qualies if we’re honest), have probably (/hopefully) spent a huge amount of time, intellect and financial resource ably crafting that strategy around a motivating insight you should most definitely be reprimanded for missing it. And I’ve got news for you (well, it’s not really news, I’m probably the 3,256th person at least to tell you) – if it’s not on strategy, it isn’t great work. It might be a great idea, but it’s not a great ad. But of course, none of that matters, because we’ve confused you and hurt your feelings.
I think I understand the problem (though of course I have no ‘kids’ of my own, so maybe I don’t). The fact is, my job is just as hard as yours, but there is far less of myself in it. Creative expression is personal expression – a creative is leaving a lot more of themself on the table for review when one of their ideas is being evaluated than I am when I present some research findings. Personal expression also requires freedom and the confines of ‘Professional Creativity’ necessarily limit that with their deadlines and strategies. So as I said at the outset, I have a lot of sympathy for Stan’s plea for greater care and thought when dealing with ideas – but Creatives also need to realise that dismissing the value others add and ‘poor-me’ hand-wringing really doesn’t do them any favours in this regard.
Creatives should be more valued by the Account, Planning and research guys – but the reverse of that is also almost universally true.
If you know anyone displaying the symptoms of a Creativity Complex, please refer them to Dr. Research Geek immediately.
Today I have the day off for a combination of Ambedkar Jayanti and Baisakhi. They say there is a festival for every day of the year in India – the reality is that on some days there are several. Anyway, by way of testament to the title of my blog, I’m spending some of the day writing up a few posts I’ve been thinking about but haven’t got round to. I’ll drip feed them over the next few days.
My starting point is persuasion. Persuasion is hugely unfashionable at the moment (it has never been that fashionable in fairness, we don’t really like to be reminded our job is to sell stuff), it is under attack from any number of angles. Ehrenberg, behavioural economics, neuroscience – all these things call into question what we thought we knew about persuasion. Ehrenberg tells us behaviour leads to attitudes and not the other way around, behavioural economics tells us we’re not the super-rational post-Enlightenment thinkers we think we are – we rarely, if ever, weigh up the options and make the best possible decision, neuroscience tells us we basically buy brands because we like them – advertising is not seperate from brand memories it’s all one big jumbled up mess, so by extension, the most effective ads are ads we like not ones that persuade us. I don’t doubt that any of this is true, which led me to ask myself why then is persuasion such a good predictor of short term sales changes – why does it work?
First, let’s deal with whether it actually does work. I’m fully willing to accept that we’re unlikely to learn much about long term sales from a persuasion question and we all know they’re the bulk of any sales an ad is likely to generate. I also accept that correlation doesn’t mean causation and I’m not arguing that persuasion questions work because we’re actually persuading people to change their behaviour in the traditional sense – but virtually every pre-test uses some approach to persuasion and despite arriving at a metric through different approaches and different means, they all tend to see some relationship with a change in sales in the short term. I know lots of people used to think the world was flat (remarkably, some still do) but I think it’s unlikely that we’ve all reached the same point through very different journeys and come up with something completely meaningless. It seems more likely that persuasion metrics are telling us something meaningful – just not necessarily what we thought they were telling us.
My personal hypothesis is this (emphasis on ‘my’ and ‘personal’ here) – we are not rational, we do not buy brands because we have been persuaded to do so by compelling, newsworthy creative – but we believe we are and we believe we do. Our peers in society expect us to behave in a rational and sensible way – if you’re a housewife in Pune spending an extra Rs100 on a washing powder, you’re going to have to justify that to your husband – ‘I liked it more’ doesn’t allow you to justify it to yourself, let alone him even if deep down that’s the fundamental reason you were swayed. One criticism we hear regularly is that we talk too much about what advertising does to people and not what people do with advertising – my feeling is that persuasive advertising has massive utility – it allows people to justify their irrational decisions to themselves and to their peers. It’s not telling us why people are buying, it’s telling us why people think they are buying.
Further, we know from neuroscience work we’ve done with the University of Bangor that brand memories sit in three broad buckets – knowledge, emotion and experience. We have found that a breadth of associations across these three buckets is more important than depth in any one single bucket. Effectively, the greater area of brain with firing neurons, the greater likely brand strength. Experience can be driven by advertising (through enhancement) but most advertising is probably primarily dealing with the other to. Ads that have traditionally been seen as persuasive are likely to be doing a good job with your knowledge bucket.
Broadly speaking, the emotional reaction will happen first (in fact it is this that garners our attention in the first place) and then spread across the brain into other areas where we seek to clarify what the reaction was and why we had it. Clearly if that initial emotional reaction is negative, we’ve lost – fundamentally, it’s this that drives our decisions. However, if two brands generate a positive emotion of similar proportions but one has done a better job of explaining why we feel that way (through being new, relevant, credible and different – sound familiar?) then that brand is likely to win out. Not only do we love it, but we can explain to people (including ourselves) why in terms that don’t make us sound ridiculous.
Fundamentally, there is no question that too much emphasis is placed on persuasion (for some people it’s the ONLY important metric!) given what we now know about decision making and how the brain works. I don’t think we should be afraid of admitting that. But I also think there’s a reason why measures that tell us how emotionally involving and likeable an ad is and measures of persuasion are both related to sales changes, but not related to each other. We shouldn’t be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but we should definitely be reappraising why that is and, more importantly, where our priorities should lie as a result.
I tried to come up with a clever acronym, but it’s probably a fair comment on my character that I came up with a puerile one instead – Persuasion is Social, Stupid. I’m not sure I’ve fully fleshed all this out in my own mind as yet, let alone in this post, and I’d welcome any thoughts.
I love these Ambuja Cement ads. There are a number of reasons why.
Iconography – the massive muscles on this guy, the fact that he’s holding a big concrete dam (presumably hydroelectric, symbol of a progressive new India). What more do you need to say about a cement brand? It’s a hugely efficient visual. It reminds me a bit of the Soviet propaganda posters demonstrating the strength of the working Russian people.
Ubiquity – You see it everywhere, which coupled with the clarity of the image gives it a good chance of achieving hyperfamiliarity. I particularly like it when it’s painted on the side of buildings, as it often is – wall paintings are still a massively important channel in India. You also see it on billboards in the urban centres.
It’s a cement ad – Clearly this says something about our relative positions on the development curve, but I’m fairly sure I didn’t see a single cement ad in the entire 27 years I lived in the UK. As such, for me it is novel. Having lived in India for only just over a year and a half, I could name at least 3 cement brands off the top of my head. Unfortunately not all of them have sensible ads – this JK Cement effort apparently coming straight from the Dave Knockles school of ads. I’m pretty sure cement is sold as a commodity in the UK, though sold, mixed and delivered by branded builder’s merchants, or from your local B&Q (I might be wrong about that, I’ve never actually bought cement) – I guess this is an example of a move from a society that makes things to a service economy.
Anyway, that’s probably over-analysing things a bit (obviously rare for a researcher to do that). I just like them.
Today I have the day off for a combination of 
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