Serendipity Book

Predicting the future of the internet

Edelman's Steve Rubel shares his predictions for the future of the internet in a presentation he gave last week to Next 08 in Hamburg:

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Thanks to Osgur Alaz

Saving does not feel this good - even in a recession

Sure saving feels good. But it doesn't feel like this. At all. Not a bit of it. It's a totally different type of feeling good. Sorry. You feel smug. Self-satisfied. Safe. Comfortable. Prepared. Not giggly. Not puddle-dancingly joyous. OK? Winning money feels like this. Not saving your hard-earned.

The role of boredom in creativity and innovation

This is a great post from Regine at We Make Money Not Art which documents and explores the idea of 'Strategic Boredom'.

Following from Kierkegaard, Molly Wright Steenson sees boredom as an inspirational and provocative state of mind that demands a response and spurs creativity. In her talk she reports on the historic role of boredom in bringing about innovative thinking.

Renewed calls for transparency on tipping

It seems that my local branch of Pizza Express in Wimbledon is at the centre of a row about the lack of transparency in the way that restaurants distribute the tips given to staff.

It has been alleged that some restaurants (the example given by the BBC was Tootsies) keep up to 60% of the tips given to staff and the money that staff do receive is used to make up their salaries to the minimum wage.

Pizza Express (whose website proclaims that it's "a place where people matter") stands accused of firing a whistleblower for revealing that they take an 8% rake from tips.
Surely it is about time that those in the hospitality industry realised that they cannot continue these sharp practices without causing damage to their reputations?

As Dave Turnbull, a rep for the Unite union said: "I’m sure Pizza Express customers expect that the tips they leave for good service go to the staff and would be upset that the restaurant are creaming money off the top." Too right.

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.

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?