aspire to enquire

Orbital at the 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony

A stand-out moment of an inspirational show

I was always very humbled to have been able to work on the Sainsbury's Paralympics site, but the real power and scale of the games hit home last night watching the ceremony. The tone, focussing on human endeavour and eccentricity seemed just right, and I liked the continuity of the Tempest link from the other opening ceremony.

Want your stuff to be shared? Make it mobile

Over the past few years, as I've got more and more involved in digital, it's been interesting how the conversations about 'mobile' have developed.

We used to think about apps (and really only about one device) in isolation from any other 'desktop website' work we were doing, whilst championing Responsive Design in internal meetings and pitches; "A nice idea, but people don't really go on real websites on their phones do they?"

That was 2009-10, and finally now the research agencies have caught up and given us some stats to say that yes, people do want to 'use the internet' from their more mobile devices. And clients are starting to get this too. So that's good.

The challenge right now seems to be this: "We get that mobile's important, but does this specific experience we're creating need to work on mobile?"

Well I have a counter question: Does the experience we're creating need to be shareable? Given that client's acceptance of social channels is probably a few years ahead of mobile, I'm guessing the answer will be yes. People seem to get now that it's a good idea to make your content malleable enough that people can re-blog, share, save, whatever. Why haven't people got that it makes sense to make your experiences relevant regardless of the device they're using?

I wonder if this will help - I've noticed amongst friends, and totally anecdotally, that there's a new kind of sharing developing around cool digital stuff: Don't just post a funny youtube video on your facebook wall, why not just get your phone out in the pub and all watch it together? If you're looking at for a romantic holiday, why not just view the web page together on an iPad in the living room?

If you want people to share and enjoy your content, it needs to be shareable not just with a like button, but with a real thumbs up in real time. And it's not just the format that needs to work - the content itself needs to recognise that people aren't necessarily sat down in front of it with time on their hands. But I think that's another blog post...

Remember Old Cardiff

Some fascinating browsing to be done in the Remember Old Cardiff Facebook page

I think the group has only been going for a few weeks, and already it has had over 7,000 likes and streams of comments on each picture. It's actually quite fascinating reading how the page owner has kept up with the demand and level of engagement, following her various posts of despair as people insist on contributing to the page in an overwhelming fashion. It's a cautionary tale for any local history groups looking to expand their reach in this way (perhaps this could work for Brixton Society?).

The stories that people are sharing alongside each photo are fascinating, and really bring to life what can sometimes feel like dated, irrelevant pictures of unfamiliar people and places.

But the pictures here also tell their own story, of a Cardiff that has constantly brushed away its history to make space for the next big thing. You could say it was a city that constantly re-invents itself. You could call it progress. You could call it keeping up with the joneses, you could call it vandalism, you could call it short-sightedness.

The Penguin Postcard Project

There's quite a cool little gift box you can buy which contains 100 postcards with different Penguin book covers on. Much like Phil Baines's book, which I love, it seems to have captured the imagination of the design / literature crowd, who find a sort of quaint excitement amongst the dog eared edges, the vintage colour palletes and the modern designs spanning nearly 80 years.

My good friend Jess had an amazing idea to capture some of this excitement, with The Penguin Postcard Project. The idea is quite simple; you sign up, she'll send you a randomly selected postcard. You then obtain and review the book, writing your review on the back of the postcard, and send it back to Jess. Her blog showcases the reviews as they come in, from all over the world.

Experience the future together

A month or so ago, respected colleague Nick Hirst won Gold in the 2012 Admap Prize for his article ‘Experience the future’. It caused a bit of a stir at the time and got me thinking about a few things myself, especially about how his ideas might be realised. I also did a lot of talking to Mark Hastings, who influenced some more of the thinking here.

There he is

To paraphrase Nick: There are two broad flavours of Brand Planner; the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘programmatic’. Traditionally the former would be found at a creative advertising agency thinking up the positioning behind slogans like ‘just do it’ and ‘every little helps’, whilst the latter has come from the world of the media agency, a bit more focussed on numbers, reach, and that kind of thing. Whilst they have both had their merits over time, there are gaps and missed opportunities in both ways of thinking, resulting in a current situation where media agencies are pitching creative work and ‘big idea’ agencies are bringing senior numbers people in to brand strategy teams.

But Nick didn’t think that either cross-pollination was really going to answer the emerging problem.

There’s a growing school of thought that has understood that we experience brands over time, in places and in different contexts. We build our relationships, as Paul Adams also says, through “many, lightweight interactions over time”.

The answer, Nick suggested, is that a form of Experience Planning becomes the future of Planning.

I agree. For a good few years now my personal grapple has been trying to understand where in an organisation I can most effectively ‘design’ how people and organisations interact. It’s something I’ve written about before. Luckily EP at Dare seems to be the right place for me.

Planning could say this if it was a person

But despite the perceived flaws, Brand Planning is a decades old discipline which has generated the stand-out communications ideas of our time, and it must continue to do so. What I understood from Nick’s piece was that these ideas need to be thought of now not as slogans, but as portable and flexible (please excuse this) ‘brand essences’ that people can engage with in a variety of contexts.

So arriving at something like a ‘customer experience objective’ in the first instance could go a long way towards answering this. From there you could brief everything in a far more creative and innovative way, as you look for ways to communicate an experience or feeling rather than a specific endline. Some are already doing this of course, in the shape of things like Gorilla and Apple.

But I’m not sure it would be exactly right for people who have so far focussed in Brand Planning to simply transition into becoming Experience Planners. Essentially I think it’s too much for one person.

The Experience Planning world has amassed years of know-how in things like User Experience, research, lab testing, and all of that stuff, and now we’re increasingly applying this digital thinking to ‘real life’ communications situations. We have this ability to go from high-level customer needs and experience objectives right down into specific moments and interactions; we use our understanding of technical underpinnings, aesthetics and user behaviour to guide people through often complex situations.

The complexities of life helpfully illustrated by this junction in Swindon

Each of these situations will be determined by a whole load of societal and brand-factors which as Experience Planners we absolutely need to understand. But I would argue that our skillsets shouldn’t be diluted by trying to develop our own techniques for uncovering and interpreting these factors into usable insight; that’s what Brand Planners are already awesome at.

So for the time being my proposal would be to explore teams of planners, just like creatives do. Brand and Experience Planners working together. Of course there will be crossover in thinking, and as we move forward and our disparate histories become more intertwined we may find we share similar spaces. Often the copywriter will contribute a visual idea, often the AD will have ideas on how the copy should work. It’s a discussion between a well-tuned team that results in a solid creative idea.

With the Brand/Experience Planning pairing, the opportunity is to work up solid long-term strategic objectives for entire brand experiences, which are simultaneously aware of market/demographic factors and behaviour/usage patterns. There are implications in terms of budgets and timelines, but the time saved in not re-establishing objectives and briefs across the life of a client would hopefully negate a lot of them.

So that sounds to me like a good way of setting ourselves up so that we’re making the most of both of our skillsets without diluting them, learning from each other, and keeping each other in check so that the experiences we create keep customer needs at heart.

What do you think?