Uncategorized

Jun 21

Story change and communication

By Alex Communication theory, content, Story, Strategy, Uncategorized

From zero to hero. The classic log line for a Hollywood storyline. Why? because there’s lots of change implicit in zeros becoming heros. A perfect example of this would be the log-line for Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Where the filthy rich meet the dirty poor. You can almost see that there will be change for both the two main characters. Without change there can be no story and without story there’s no communication. These three things go together and if you’re going to understand any one of them you need to understand them all.

Another way of looking at this is by investigating what happens when there’s no change. And by that we also mean no change in expectation. If you were to try to build a story around visiting a vending machine: You go to the a vending machine in some big building.

You select, say a Kit Kat, put your money in, and a Kit Kat duly drops onto the tray. Well, there’s no possible story that can come out of that because in no way has any expectation been thwarted or confounded. However, if a Kit Kat didn’t drop down, but something much more unexpected did, say a packet of class A drugs, you have the beginnings of a storyline .

Mar 17

Pregnant Man – the logic flow

By Gideon Todes Communications craft, Creativity, Uncategorized

“The ad made headlines all over the world when it came out. It was such a bombshell, one of the most controversial ads ever. There were questions in Parliament about the propriety of running such an ad, especially in the government’s name. It made a furore all around advertising and beyond, all over the world.

The client was delighted, even more so after it had made such a fuss, because that put it on the map. I hope it did some good. It’s weird to me that it’s made such an impact and still makes an impact. Because in photographic terms, what is it? A picture of a bloke. I find it pretty baffling really.”

Alan Brooking was the photographer of “Pregnant man”

How do you get the pregnant man from a proposition that says “Be more careful about getting your girlfriend pregnant”?

Answer: Start with every related idea around pregnancy. Especially the ones that are so obvious you no longer see them.

Especially the rule that says men don’t get pregnant. Turn this upside down.

Then exaggerate it so they get very pregnant – just like a woman close to term.

Finally, make it look the most normal thing in the world. To sum up: Start with a trope, invert it, exaggerate and normalise.

When the above process is done, you’ve created a symmetry across the impossible. On one hand your brain sees the logic of it and on the other it fights the impossibility. The power of the communication comes from this.

In another example of creating ideas by creating symmetries is shown in the following idea for Robinson’s Barley Water. This is a sketch of the ad.

The idea starts with mapping out the form of a tennis ball on an orange and then normalizing it. The visual is such so closely symmetric you hardly notice the orange dimples on the tennis ball.

Henry Ford and the car cow symmetry

Predictive text and symmetry with opposite

Jet engine and mushroom symmetry

Banksy and inversion of value sets

Jan 12

Tone Wheel

By Alex Brand, Tone, Uncategorized

In any highly competitive market, where there is a surfeit of products all competing for the same proposition, then inevitably, the propositions become hard to distinguish. In these cases a sort of exclusion principle applies. Once one successful brand has occupied one slot, the next successful product to compete in that space will have to occupy a different tonal slot.

This is where brand tonality and personality becomes the difference; When price, product, promotion etc are all identical.

To understand this graphically it helps to see tone in terms of the following wheel. It shows how brands connect to the idea of archetype, an idea originally conceived by Jung.
If you’d like to read more about the role of archetypes in brands and organisations try The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol S Pearson.

Jun 12

Working like a detective

By Alex Case Study, Uncategorized

For a great professional case it’s important the expert sees beyond where other lesser professionals get stopped blocked or fobbed off. In what is a classic twist from Murder on the Orient Express, the incriminating hankerchief bears the initial H. So it can’t possibly belong to Natalia. Or so you might think. However Poirot knows that in Russian an H is pronounced an N and so it could indeed be Natalia’s.
The premise of expertise in case history writing is that when nothing is quite what it appears only a specialist with raised levels of perception can ascertain what really is going on.

16 pointers to interviewing a topic holder of a case study
1. Think like a detective.
2. Assume something brilliant has happened, then sniff it out.
3. Spot the unusual
4. Get clear about the problem involved and the pain of the original situation
5. What’s at stake? Beneath the ‘nice to have’ need which triggered the engagement, there’s often a crisis brewing.
6. If another agency handled this, would the kids have gone into care? Would people continue to die unnecessarily, due to missing out on cancer treatment?
7. Probe beneath buzz phrases.
8. Seek out the raised level of perception and knowledge that goes into the brilliance. Hercules Poirot knew that H is the Russian for N, so Natalie could have owned the handkerchief with H on it.
9. Ask what people were doing at the critical moments when the idea or insight came into being.
10. Seek out what’s important, not what appears to be conventionally important.
11. Look for signs of change and transformation and ask what caused these.
12. Don’t forget to ask open questions – and wait for them to surprise you.
13. Ask questions that force the interviewee themselves to make the choice of what was really important. What one single thing contributed most. Where did the value really add? Etc.
14. Locate the passion point. The bit where the interviewee starts to get excited. You know you’re onto the MOB because they’re about to get found out.
15. Get the interviewee to talk about the parts of the story they haven’t spoken of before. If it’s fresh it’s usually more interesting.
16. Enjoy. They’ll wriggle around avoiding their brilliance, but just like a murder suspect, the interviewee will feel relieved when they’ve eventually told the truth.

Feb 15

Starting with a story

By Alex Communication theory, Communications craft, content, Funny, Thought leadership, Uncategorized, What's out there now

Masters of story don’t start with a simple fact or assertion, they weave a story that does the same thing.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks could have begun his speech by simply saying something like “all faiths have similarities, but they also have interesting differences.”
That would have been a perfectly coherent way to start a speech at an interfaith dinner. But by starting with a story that demonstrates the same thing, he does so much more than assert a first beat.
He demonstrates mastery of the story form, establishes his own character as a player at Government level, and also brings some laughs to the room. But the story is always in the service of demonstrating the first beat of the rest of his speech.

Sep 17

SEO. Things can only get better.

By Alex B2B, SEO, Uncategorized

Not so very long ago, when search engines started appearing, a rush began to stuff as many keywords into every piece of text as you possibly could. It seemed the obvious and only way to do things, was to brutalise communications and many in the copywriting community shuddered.

Those who had known or worked for old school greats like David Abbott and Tony Brignull felt a mixture of sadness and anxiety. If SEO was the future of commercial writing, it didn’t look like much fun.

There was a new generation of expert, people who said things like: “The electronic screen means no one can read anything properly anymore, so just make it as short as possible”.

And there were other types of operators who were creating link farms to try and game the system, and fool Google into bringing their business up the rankings. It seemed that the kind of intelligent, audience-based, information-rich copy with a touch of wit no longer had a place in a post Google world.
But that was then, and this is now. For the last few years SEO has been changing radically. Far from long form copy being the medium of dinosaurs, SEO actively encourages it. Now Google will penalise you if it considers blog content “thin”, by which they mean less than 600 words.

There’s now a well established relationship between the number of links you earn and the length of text you write. Long form writing is back in business, with a vengeance.

Even the number of characters allowed in the meta tags have increased in length.
But it’s not just quantity that’s gone up, it’s quality too. The last 2 years have seen the Google algorithm is increasingly understanding the hidden meaning between the lines, using Latent Semantic Indexing, LSI. So you’re well advised to avoid keyword stuffing and write properly instead.

Link farming has died a death, keyword data no longer gets provided; the many ways of gaming the search engine system come with bigger Google penalties. Black hat SEO days are numbered.
It’s back to the USP or unique selling proposition, that is now actively used in SEO in Hong Kong. Or, its journalistic equivalent, the Unique Story Proposition. In either case the writer needs to be crystal clear about what they’re offering or what a page is about.

And at the top of the whole process and quietly guiding it, is the age old principle of putting your audience’s question first, not the search query ranking first.

It’s quite possible that contrary to a lot of indications 10 years ago, we could be entering a golden age of content. Abbott and Brignull would be proud.
SEO and Language

Sep 08

Allenby said it in a sentence.

By Alex Communications craft, Mission statement, Tone, Uncategorized

In front of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem stands another equally historic building, the YMCA, where if you look closely, you’ll find an inscription. It amounts to the mission statement of the building, put there by Lord General Allenby in 1933.
Eighty years later, the same building and related organisation still has a mission statement, which nestles next to the reception desk. (see bottom of page)
But this version is much longer, difficult to understand in many places, and completely wooly in others. Was it Allenby’s military discipline or the fact he lived in a less committee-based world than meant his single sentence conveys so much more that the committee speak of the later version?

The modern mission statement: “The YMCA has a value system based on equality, human dignity, multiculturalism, and the aspiration to promote peace among nations. The organization makes no distinction between religion, race and gender and aims to embody these principles in its activities. Aware of the importance of every human being, the Y aims to develop a peaceful community in which the uniqueness of each ethnic group works together for the broader benefit of society.”

Aug 01

Moving a tone on

By Alex B2B, Communication theory, Communications craft, Strategy, Tone, Uncategorized

Jaguar tone book
Asthma UK
Anglian Water

One of charts that really helps when you’re discussing verbal, or indeed any type of brand identity is the one above. Based on Jungian archetypes and developed by Mark and Pearson, it forms a neat representation of different brand flavours.

The question you start with is the usual consultancy one: where are we now? The next question is where would we like to get to? If an organisation product or service is say in the ruler section, maybe they want to transform and become a mate? If they are a ruler, what sort of ruler are they? Bossy and aloof in a not good way or alternatively, aspirational in the way British Airways was, when it was at its best? Or maybe the content is such a mish-mash it doesn’t really have any distinct tone you can speak of. Maybe it’s just a big pic’n mix nothing.

These are the issues that form the basis of an audit, and obviously you need to do this in some form, even if only in a very cursory way. In the old days it was all about the branding agency auditing, presenting and ultimately delivering a verbal identity, but my view is that doesn’t really wash nowadays.

Most organisations have scores of content marketing and corporate writers and there’s no reason to leave them outside the process. This means that repositioning a company needs to be done with them in a collaborative training and exploratory way, rather than brought down from on high and ‘rolled out’.

Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘rolling something out’, it just doesn’t make any allowance for the way organisations usually work. You usually find that it’s one thing for a verbal branding agency to blithely specify a few choice phrases, that amount to general good writing practice, but it’s quite another to work through the daily diet of communications the team actually have to put out.

It’s for this reason that training, facilitation, content and verbal brand repositioning are a great combination. And you can’t really substitute them for a few standard bromides about copywriting.

Jun 22

When was the last time you chilled with a problem?

By Alex B2B, Creativity, Uncategorized

Organisations often complain they don’t have enough resources to throw at a problem but you could argue it’s the abundance of the wrong type of resource that stops the job being done really well.
The perfect and well-known example of this: the anecdote about how the US and the USSR tried to create a pen that would work in space.
While the US technologists were running a massive project to design a multimillion-dollar pen that could operate in zero G, the Soviets had opted for something much simpler for their own space mission: a pencil.
This elegant, cheap yet effective solution was like many great masterstrokes of creativity. Just as with Picasso’s bull’s head, the concept is so simple you could be forgiven for missing it.
One of the interesting facets of this anecdote is that at first it doesn’t look the way we think creativity should look. But it’s got many of the hallmarks of smart creativity. Doing more with less, questioning embedded assumptions, and making something look effortless. There are lots of learnings here for many different enterprises – not necessarily looking to go into space, but trying to solve hard problems nonetheless.
The nature of things is that when a company gets involved in optimising a process, the momentum of the process often precludes creativity. The system is wired to do the wrong thing highly efficiently rather than going back to the original problem that needed solving – and chilling with the problem for a little while.
The creative process starts when you give up being too busy to think.
Chilling with a problem is a difficult thing to explain for a time-centred organisation. “I’m actioning X, Y and Z for next week’s status meeting” – sounds so much more businessy than “I’m chilling with the problem for a little while”.
In a recent project with some Bristol physicists, we asked them to create a project to sell to a James Bond baddie. The results were fascinating. Just as with any other form of creativity there was a majority of quite interesting workaday solutions and one that stood out which we can all remember many months after. It was more or less the equivalent of the pencil.
Perhaps amongst all the clever stuff we do on the course, the most valuable insight is that to see things differently you have to start by looking at your clock differently; do less, think less and chill a bit more. Like riding a bike it’s easy when you know how.

Jun 07

Can animals be creative?

By Alex Creativity, Strategy, Uncategorized

We might not think of animals as clever enough to be creative, but this footage suggests otherwise. A group of Orca wales line up and swim in, in formation so that they create a bough wave that is big enough to flip the ice. Their reward is fresh seal.
More surprising still is the fact that sometimes the seals aren’t eaten. They are allowed to climb back on the ice and the Orcas have another go. In other words, they seem to be doing it just for the practice, or the sport.
We think of the British as the great creators of new sports. Rugby, cricket, badminton, Eaton fives, tennis, and football. Perhaps the animal kingdom has actually out performed us in creating new sports.
There are other examples of creativity in the animal kingdom too. Monkeys that send in smaller monkeys from other species to pick nuts out of small crevices. They then ‘mug’ the smaller monkey and get the nuts.
If you gave a creative team the above problems to solve, how long would it take them to come up with an answer?

Creativity and symmetry