Points of view

In most fields of human endevour, the chances of uncovering the truth are increased as more perspectives are taken into account. - Jon Steel

Seeing things through a different lens is 101, but in reality most of us are guilty of not seeing anything through any lens other than that which gets us to 'good enough' easiest or fastest in our jobs. And 9 times out of 10 that's from an ergonomically correct position staring at a Mac.

With most briefs I tend to go digging through social media. This is cool, and there are some awesome listening and visualisation tools that add some sexiness to presos and get clients buying into the thinking - but it still doesn't get you away from the desk. I love this video. John Jay talks about how we need to come down from the ivory tower and get back on street-level - hang out with real people, not just decks of strategy. So I'm taking inspiration from real people I know [that don't work in advertising].

A mate of mine Dean is a writer, and a very deep guy. He's said a lot of crazy stuff to me over the years. But something that's stuck with me was how when he was 7, he [so the story goes] burst out crying, saying to his mum "I won't ever see the world through anyone's eyes but my own." Very creepy for a little kid to say that, but also ultra profound...but mostly straight up creepy. In all seriousness though, little Dean made a solid point there - how can we possibly be satisfied with seeing a whole lifetime pass by from just one point of view?! It actually makes me feel a little upset too to be honest. So how can we step outside and see more?

My girlfriend April is an illustrator, and often says interesting stuff that I can relate to planning. The other day she told me how when something she's working on doesn't look quite right, she'll take a photo of it, or turn it upside down - seeing it from another perspective lets her step back out of what she's doing, and identify what's wrong as observer rather than artist. Cool.

Another mate, Rob Graham aka SpinFX has taught me heaps of cool life stuff - lots of it pissed in nightclubs or at some afterparty. Rob's the kind of guy who's never seemed focussed on getting better at stuff through incremental improvement. He takes giant leaps into new places, where it's infinitely different and more interesting. In the 10 years I've known him, he's kept pushing this agenda [especially as a DJ] with no sign of ever letting up.

In Truth, Lies and Advertising, Jon Steel talks about the value of being 'out of it' - getting the balance right as a planner between having your head sufficiently 'in' the business of advertising so as to make informed judgements, while at the same time being sufficiently 'out' or detached from the game to see things clearly for what they really are.

Rob showed me this at 6am in his bedroom on a boozy Thursday morning. It's a personal project he worked on this year. I really like it. I like it because he uses outside elements like sound + edits + repetition to help the viewer really step 'out of it'. To me, this video is about unearthing a frightening perspective on something we seem to have accepted over time through continued exposure and desensitisation. Very cool.


Spring Cleaning from Rob Graham on Vimeo.

So I realise I haven't offered a silver bullet so much as bang on about shit. But, I think my take away from this thought is to spend more time looking for gold outside the agency. The more you really listen to people around you [even your girlfriend or your crazy DJ mate], the more ammo you have to bring to each brief.

In the Satorialist, Scott Schuman reminds us that "one of the basic needs of people is to be understood". Nuff said.

How can we grow?

Your content is most powerful when it's not entirely yours anymore. When you move from publisher to participant. When technically you still own the table, but you no longer sit at its head. The hardest bit is getting clients to think less about reach and more on social reputation: to shift from aggregating their own noise to mobilising the wider web to syndicate contagious conversations.

Super that's simple, human and real.

Just launched a new webisode in Tasplan's Super - straight up branded content campaign. This one's about seeing the big picture.

The line "Not sweating the small stuff today is easier when there's a bigger plan for tomorrow." takes the campaign into a more emotional territory - it'll be interesting to see how it does in market.

There's a heap of campaign activity in superannuation right now, but even among the big players (with big budgets) the bar is low. The key challenges I see are:

• Making super real and tangible (something that's in part being solved by IB / mobile banking integration) 
• Creating a compelling event to overcome inertia associated with getting your super sorted
• Making super relevant by speaking in the context of what matters in peoples' real worlds right now

Fair to say that BT's probably done better than most - but I think there's still a big opportunity to seriously disrupt the category conventions. 



Follow the campaign

• Facebook - facebook.com/superstraightup
• YouTube - youtube.com/superstraightup
• Web - tasplan.com.au/superstraightup

Measuring Facebook impact

Here's a couple of neat ways to get a better understanding on what kind of impact you and your competitors are having on Facebook.

links.getStats

links.getStats is a simple console that uses FB's developer API to give you an indication of how many times a particular domain or URL has been shared / liked / engaged with on Facebook.

Not sure how much I trust these as absolute numbers - but a great relative indication of where things are at.

likebutton

likebutton is powered by the Facebook Like Button and Social Plugins - an easy way to see what's trending (socially or globally) on Facebook right now.

Create your own dashboards to monitor anything you're interested in - and drill down to the page-level. Awesome competitive and consumer intelligence tool.

Introvert / extrovert? Shit yes it matters!

The douches on X-Factor may have dissed him, but the reality is 18 y/o Luke O'Dell has shined more attention on their crappy show than they could ever hope to generate on their own.

The dude's song "Introvert, Extrovert Doesn't Matter" is trending like it's going out of fashion all over the web.

Why? Because whatever it was that he did last night, it hit a nerve. It actually made people feel stuff they didn't expect to feel.

Check it out (below) - 'head' is among his song titles' top associated keywords. I know what you're thinking, not because people are calling the guy a 'dick head', but because his performance is 'stuck in their heads' (I checked it out).

Big ups mate. This is the kind of badass attitude that we as marketers can learn from.

You can't polish a turd

I met a guy today who seeds video content. Fork out $0.20 - $0.50 per view,  and he'll reach out to a database of bazillions and push targeted traffic/UGC/thumbs up/pick-any-KPI at your content.

Being naive and Tasmanian, I won't lie, this service amazes me. Hedging your bets on a strategy you're not sure of. Guaranteeing the client minimum reach. Giving an already shit-hot campaign a big kickstart. How good is that?!!

Well, only as good as your content. Chucking cash at crap video might give the old view counter a headstart (provided viewers can tolerate your audiovisual nonsense for 80% of its duration), but will it start a groundswell? Will it make a point? Will it turn shit on its head? Will it be remembered?

You may as well piss your client's budget (and business) up the wall on TV.

Know a good idea when you see one (bullshit filter)

Sam, a designer mate of mine comes up with simple ideas that always seem to work. His MO is based in common sense, and he has a low tolerance for marketing bullshit - and you've gotta respect that.

Take the instance where you've created more than one idea for a job. Sometimes it's difficult to know which one is best. Sam would just apply his 'bullshit filter' - and no question, common sense should usually take you in the right direction. But raw instinct probably won't work in the boardroom, so here's some ideas on putting a rational, 'strategic' process around what you most likely already know.

Seek a bigger idea

Often, if you look closely at seemingly disparate ideas, you can unearth something more fundamental that connects them. Dig a little and you may discover that your different strategic routes could in fact just be different campaign ideas for a much deeper brand idea. So first try looking not at what the best idea is out of the bunch, but at what connects them. 

Curate the idea

Sometimes through, there's no connection to be made, and you do in fact have genuinely different ideas. In this case, here are some qualifiers to help make the right decision:

• Is the problem we're solving something that enough people care about / could care about? 
• Is it provocative? Is it something your audience could not only agree with, but talk about, debate or get involved in?
• Is it something your brand could do credibly? This idea doesn't necessarily have to be something no other brand could do - you just have to own it in a marketing sense - but it does need to be believable for your brand.
• And perhaps most importantly - as Sam would no doubt push - which idea is the simplest? Which can you explain in a sentence. But further, when succinctly articulated in one sentence, which one evokes deeper thought or gives the feeling that there's a shitload of meaning sitting behind it? 

Get the right idea across the line

I'm seeing clients often wanting agencies to present a couple of ideas - and the danger here is that they pick the one you don't want them to. Here, a smart play is giving people a choice if you want them to buy something - offering two similar things where the one you want them to buy just happens to be a little bit better.

Extending on this idea is this bit from Paul Arden's 'It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be":

"If you show him (the client) what you want and not what he wants, he'll say that's not what he asked for. If, however, you show him what he wants first, he is then relaxed and is prepared to look at what you want to sell him. Give him what he wants and he may well give you what you want. There is also the possibility that he may be right."