Serendipity Book

Heathrow T5 -- sweating those details

Three quick comments on my experience of Heathrow's new Terminal 5 (unrelated to the issues they have had with luggage).

LACK OF ROAD SIGNS: There is little or no signage around the airport for cars arriving at Terminal 5 off the M4. It was blink and you'll miss it stuff. This wouldn't be such a big deal if it weren't for the fact that the entrance to T5 is actually nowhere near the other terminals. Yes, you guessed it, I got lost despite the fact that I had already been there during the build.

OVER-ENGINEERED AND DYSFUNCTIONAL SECURITY SYSTEMS: This is a beauty. Somewhat bizarrely BAA have decided to automate the movement of hand luggage through security in an attempt, presumably, to speed up the process. As you can see from the body language of the member of staff on the left of the image above this hasn't been entirely successful. The trays advance and stop on their own and any interruption by humans causes them to stop. It's clever but grossly over-engineered and most importantly, it actually takes longer than the old system. It will have to go.

PRIORITY GIVEN TO SHOPPING: You emerge from security adjacent to the frequent flyer lounges and yet BAA force the majority* of BA's most valuable customers to walk nearly a mile to get to the lounge through a shopping mall. I can only think that this is a cynical decision on the part of the retail half of the business to get business passengers to engage with the retail offer. However, they know that this is not what business passengers want from the airport.

Gripes aside, it's a vast improvement but you can't help but think that it is a bit of a missed opportunity.

As Faris points out, this lovely mashup ofthe recent Fallon / Cadbury's 'Trucks' ad with some pertinent BBC footage explains what went wrong on the first day of operation.

* those allowed access to the elite 'Concord' lounge can access the lounge without going through the mall but all other 'tiers' of BA's frequent flyer programme have to do the walk of shame.

All change

A truly great piece of communication. I can see how this could work really well in a pitch situation.

Via Toad

Cadbury's Trucks - advertising eats itself

Juan 'the man' Cabral serves up 'Mad Max' via Pixar's 'Cars' in an attempt to give us a glass and a half of joy for Cadbury's.

Whilst 'Trucks' would no doubt score pretty high on engagement when compared to most ads, it seems to lack the drama and downright audacity of 'Gorilla' or the glorious multi-sensory indulgence that was 'Balls'.

I'm not sure that 'Trucks' quite cuts it as a piece of pure spellbinding entertainment in the way that 'Gorilla' and 'Balls' do.

And I'm a gearhead with a life-long interest in aviation (sad, I know).

'Gorilla' and 'Balls' both went spectacularly viral because they were truly incredible pieces of entertainment.

'Trucks' is merely quite interesting.

The question is, will that be enough for Cadbury's given that the strategy that Fallon are using appears to lean heavilly on driving salience at the cost of creating an enduring link back to the brand.

In Hey Whipple, Luke Sullivan cautions that to be effective "your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message, it must be the sales message."

Sullivan goes on to quote a similar piece of advice from Bill Bernbach ("Stay with the product") before continuing to recommend that creatives should avoid getting "tangled up in unrelated ideas, however fanciful. There is no such thing as borrowed interest. Interest lasts as long as something is interesting. Interesting words make for a delightful sentence but not a persuasive one."

I'm sure others would no doubt disagree.

Ad Battology

It's early 2008 and in a trendy office somewhere in the vicinity of Bloomsbury a young 'creative' turns to his colleague and says: "I've got a great idea for Pot Noodle. Why don't we make an ad with a chain reaction in it? You know, sort of like those contraptions in the old Rube Goldberg cartoons. No one's ever done that before. And we could make it really of the moment by casting some chavs."

Battology: needless and tiresome repetition (esp. in writing)

Chav was the Oxford English Dictionary "word of the year" back in 2004.

YouTube analytics arrives at last

YouTube: "Today [March 26th] we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

If only you could do the same (or get limited access) for videos that others upload too.

HiPPOs kill ideas

An acronym you may not have come across which was used recently in a presentation by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP product management and marketing at Google ...

Avoid HiPPOs: A hippo kills more people than any other animal. In business, hippos kill more products & ideas than anyone, A hippo is the highest paid person’s opinion. Hippos say “I think…”

Via David Knox (a blogging P&G Brand Manager!)

Fallon's Social Media Trends Presentation

Another slideshare treat. This is a trends presentation given by Aki Spicer to his colleagues at Fallon in Minneapolis over lunch the other day (which they incidentally broadcast live by video across the internet using Yahoo! Live).

His focus is on 10 trends in social media and how to take advantage of them. Here's the takeaway for those in a hurry:

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MRS Conference = Groundhog Day?

A colleague protested to me that he was rather disappointed to hear the same old same old at the Market Research Society conference again this year:

"It was a bit like Groundhog Day. It always seems to be themed around self-flagellation over research agencies not getting close enough to client business problems, not getting an airing in the boardroom, not being an attractive option to grads, not having kept up with pace of change in other Marketing disciplines. Wish they'd stop talking about it and just do something about it!"

There were some good speakers lined up but I couldn't bring myself to attend this year largely because of the aforementioned lack of innovation in the programme. Nonetheless I was keen to read this excellent blow by blow account of the conference to see if I had missed anything interesting.

And sure enough it looks as though the conference did have its moments:

1) Andy Dexter tackled the main reason I left the research agency world in his paper where he made the point that "people businesses don’t sit well with volume based business models". The low margin, high volume business model of most major quantitative research agencies is unworkable because it offers researchers no time to think and add value to the data they collect.  The notion of an "insight factory" is clearly an oxymoron in the same way that an "idea factory" is. Andy argued that research agencies and their clients need to "admit that data is a commodity but thinking is not". Not an easy task.

2) Rupert Howell, founder of HHCL and now at ITV, told the tale of the research ITV conducted prior to running 'The Palace'. The research said it would be a hit. It flopped spectacularly.  Rupert suggested that "rather than run away, the research company should work with ITV to find out what happened and how it can be resolved in future". I wonder who he was aiming that barbed comment at?

3) Malcolm White, chairman of the APG and founder of krow, made the astute observation that "planning is currently obsessed with planners and not planning". Such introspection is clearly unhelpful but I remain unconvinced that blogging is to blame as you might expect.

4) Andrew Sharp, once of Initiative and now at PwC, quoted an analysis that claims to have demonstrated that 49% of brands that were created after 1991 were no longer in existence by 2006. The average life-span of a brand created during this period was only 4.1 years and only 11% of brands remained in existence throughout the 15 year period of the analysis.

5) And finally, my comrades at the RLF did their bit on the fringe again this year and even achieved some coverage from the official conference scribes at WARC.

A Millward Brown LINK test for Gorilla?

Meanwhile over on Millward Brown's blog, the ever provocative Charles Frith has challenged the normally unflappable Nigel Hollis to use MB's proprietary pre-testing system to test and improve upon Cadbury's "Gorilla" and make the results public!

So far Nigel has chosen to stonewall a bit by saying that it had already been successfully LINK tested but that he could not confirm or deny the results it got or whether it was changed as a result of the test. Intriguing. Perhaps someone (Mike?) could have a quiet word with Phil Rumbold and ask him to release the learnings to the industry for the greater good.

Charles suggested testing an ad that has not been tested before.  Nigel's comments on an earlier post suggested that he would be up for the challenge. Any suggestions?

Taking on the research orthodoxy

Jason Oke has started an important discussion about the shortcomings of our current use of research in marketing over on his blog.He kicked off the discussion with this deck.

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In the comments Jason argues: "The tweaks required to make research more valuable are often minor ones, but ones that are counter-intuitive to people stuck in the old frameworks. They require asking people questions that are less literal, less direct, and sometimes require asking people fewer questions altogether. They also require allowing respondents to have more fun and flow with their answers, giving up some control and direction in the research. These things can seem scary to people who don’t understand the reasons and benefits for doing so. It’s a lot easier, and easier to explain to your boss, to just ask people directly “which proposition statement do you like best.” Unfortunately it’s also completely the wrong thing to do."