HEAD BLOG

“Well it seemed important to you” was perhaps not the best answer I could give when, after I’d proposes marriage, my soon-to-be-wife asked what had changed after fourteen years of just stepping out.

In the interim I’ve had plenty more opportunities to put my foot in it and these days I’m more inclined to request time to think of a suitable response.

In the fast moving world of marketing, however, the pressure is on to have all of the answers, all of the time. It’s during job interviews, pitches and brain-storming sessions where the answers are needed quickly and full-formed. It’s during these situations when having them can often be most dangerous because when answers struggle to breathe, opinions can jump in and cause the damage.

All too often you and I have offered an opinion out of simple panic. The need to appear knowledgeable on all things, to have covered all bases on your chosen subject, is addictive.

Yet to do so undermines the process of discussion. It doesn’t allow for other viewpoints and has a tendency to work in absolutes – a dangerous thing in a profession that is (rightly so) fluid in its approaches.

So take your time. Think about it. If you don’t have the answer then that’s ok. Somebody has raised an important point and a little research won’t hurt. We aren’t operating on someone here so having the answer isn’t critical. Venture an opinion, by all means, but make it clear that’s what you are doing and reserve the right to change your mind after due consideration.

It’s worth thinking about it, first.

In the car, early one morning, my friend told me his boss had been trying to persuade him not to retire next year. The boss explained that he had never had any complaints about that one plant (my friend loads aggregates, it’s typically a one person per plant job and you need to be everything from labourer to customer care manager).

So, no complaints. Not a single customer had to call in ten years to ask where their concrete was.

The boss said he wished he had more people like my friend and asked why he was so different to every other plant manager in the group.

My friend explained that he lived by a simple tagline (he didn’t use that term) which was ‘deliver the promise’. If a customer had been promised a load and my friend was running late then the customer still received it as promised, even if it meant working late (and loads are never, unlike taxis, promised as being just around the corner).

My friend is one of those people, rare in my experience, who pose a real problem to management. They are indispensable in their current roles but would be invaluable ‘higher up’ in a training or management role.

Such a simple philosophy can underpin any other brand. I’m writing this whilst stood across the platform from a billboard proclaiming NatWest’s charter commitments as they make promises (I wish they were different promises really but that’s a separate matter) which presumably they will deliver.

Advertising can sometimes be an attempt to make something from nothing, an attempt to hoodwink the consumer into buying something they do not need (or at least desire). ‘Deliver the promise’ is the antidote to this. It cuts through to the core of what any brand should be offering and enables campaigns to be bold and uncynical knowing that what they are selling will deliver the promise of reliability, genuine interest, comfort – whatever it is the product has set out to do.

A kitchen gadget, the sort we all buy, might therefore, through a deliver the promise strategy, be designed to genuinely change the way we peel or slice rather than being discarded after a few tries.

My friend has promised to retire next year. I’d hope his company wishes that this one time, it’s a promise he doesn’t deliver.

Read part one of the Head First review here.

Perhaps the bravest part of examining our creative service meant proving ourselves in new ways. The landscape of advertising and design is changing rapidly and, whilst we still believe the idea should always come before the technology, it has to be recognised that being able to understand how that technology is affecting society can make all the difference from a strategic point of view.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in social media.

So we set out to see how ideas could impact upon something as big as Twitter.

That’s when Super Twario was born.

In creating Super Twario, we wanted to show clients how a single exciting idea, bravely realised and confidently pitched, could resonate with people.

It did.

Even before Apple opted to run it as a featured app the test videos had been viewed over fifty thousand times and most every magazine had run a feature. Word of mouth carried the name of Super Twario right around the world and the Twitter searches we were running were moving faster than we’d ever expected.

We set out to get noticed.

We succeeded.

The meetings and conversations we have had since have been exciting and more apps, different apps, are in development.

All from the conviction we have that anything can benefit from a bit of exciting thinking.

What a year it has been.

So how’s your year been?

It’s not been the best has it? We have seen many companies, much admired companies, go under and many talented designers, game creators and writers have lost their jobs.

Recession has presented us with a whole bunch of challenges (are they still challenges or is the latest term “opportunities”?)

Whatever, it’s been tough.

At Head First we had to examine every part of what we stood for and what we offered in order to stand out.

And stay standing.

For a company that services such large brands that was quite the challenge. Early on we realised that “we aim to excite” was more relevant than ever before. We had to excite and we had to encourage our clients to excite.

As a result we began to talk to people, one on one, to show them the opportunities available by exciting people. We came up with ideas, often unsolicited, and threw them at the people we wanted to work for. It didn’t matter whether these were paid for ideas or even potential ideas. What mattered was that they were exciting ideas.

We ranged from suggesting ways for companies to open up new dialogues with their markets to examining what their real business actually was.

And if a client called us to a job we sometimes turned them away.

Not empty handed of course. But with an idea they could implement on their own.

An exciting idea.

For such a small company, Head First often punches above its own weight. There are few projects we have balked at.

That’s because we know that along with the ideas comes production.

You could say that Head First is about ideas in production.

When one of us comes up with an idea, someone else is thinking how to make it work.

Our clients seem to like this approach.

It means they don’t get one dimensional production. They get the responsive, thinking approach to production.

That’s much more exciting.

There was a period, a long period, back in the history of advertising when certain things held true. An ad could give advice, for example, or have an opinion and the agency would be pretty certain it would be received as intended. If they made a claim that doctors smoked cigarettes because they were good for your health then you and I would simply just accept this as a fact. If the agency, on behalf of their corporate overlords, assured us that the oil pouring out of a hole in the seabed was actually beneficial to the sea life, well, who could doubt the printed word?

Authority was absolute. At least for the purposes of selling.

The change in behaviour, however, was coming. Our relationship with consumerism and the companies which provided us with product after product was bound to be affected by mass media which showed us different cultures and the impact of our actions upon them. We were given the means through which we could see, test and then question the decisions our political leaders made and we could organise like never before.

These insights into how authority operated affected our relationship with advertising. Like seeing the flaws in a parent as we get older, so were we able to see how misleading the claims of advertising could be.

The past ten years has seen change of this sort again but at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has begun to affect us in ways we were not prepared for and still don’t truly understand. It may well be decades before we adjust to modern life, if such a thing is even possible anymore.

Businesses, and the advertising agencies which represent them, have reacted in different ways. A tiny few have embraced, and appear to understand, the responsibility granted by social marketing but many still adhere to the Authority model, filling their pronouncements so painfully with jargon as to make it appear archaic.

The reasoning, I believe, comes from too much love.

The people who work with these brands all respect the process too much. If a decision is made to make bottled water from tap water then, because they understand the process then they respect the decision. It’s the same logic that swallows the line about a company’s interest being its customers so why would it ever do anything to jeopardise that interest.

The balance comes not from cynicism, however. This leads to being unable to sell what the company has to sell. A cynical creative is one not in a position to see the good in a product that might lie beyond the jargon-filled nonsense.

The balance comes from questioning authority, from demanding it to explain itself in terms you can understand and by using talking points and conversation starters, not declarations.

Forgive the headline. I just wanted to be sure I got your attention.

It’s graduation season when, as the doors open and hats settle, us employers are treated to an onslaught of applicants seeking out “opportunities”.

Most of your applications take the same form: an email expressing hope for any opportunity and urging the reading of the attached covering letter, cv and portfolio.

Your letters are earnest and hopeful.

Lazy bastard students.

I don’t want earnest and hopeful. I don’t want a covering email telling me to read a covering letter. I don’t really want your CV but if you do send it then design it to have impact. Your one brief in this is to sell yourself. From email to portfolio. Sell sell sell.

Why?

Because I want to notice you.

I want you to show me you can think up the sort of concepts I have to sell to clients.

I want to see what you might be capable of.

Why?

Because I’m a lazy bastard employer.

At Head First, something we are always mindful of being is outsiders. It may seem strange to say this when most of our work is taken up with conveying the excitement of being a Japanese Samurai, a rampaging Marine or a MotoGP rider. Who amongst us is not an outsider when it comes to such rarefied pursuits? Certainly those of you reading this as a person uninterested in any sort of gaming outside football or snap! might suggest that the games we are charged with promoting are more akin with simple candy at a store in that children (for who else buys such tartly coloured things anyway?) will be drawn to the biggest buzz or lumbered with the budget title bought for them by a well meaning grandparent.

Somewhere in between all of this lies the duty of the outsider agency. Understanding where that buzz is created (and just how much money it can take to generate) is only a tiny part. In the vast, interconnected web of our consumer lives the real effort goes in knowing the many different faces of the gamer and seeing the product as they would see it rather than how the product manager would.

Yet being an outsider isn’t as easy as it might at first appear. In reality the outsider agency must not only be an outsider, but every outsider. And what a lot of outsiders there are.

A child, a teenager, a father, a mother, a single twenty-something – even that list, quickly generated, can spiral out of control and, in reality, tells us nothing. Take one: the father. Who is he? Why is he looking to play a game? What is he looking for? Does he go to the cinema? Does he buy books? Did he play games as a child and so is familiar with terms and conventions easily as complex as those of the Internet (and there’s a future article in itself)?

A person could sit down to a multiplayer game of Metro 2033 and be paired with a person they would all but despise in real life. The markers that resonate enough for them to choose something as simple as a shirt will be wildly different which leads to choices in design as to what terminology to employ, what nods to make, what visual cues to activate.

In such a world the question of how alien the main player character is takes a backseat. Indeed understanding the intricacies of the product itself can also take a backseat as our audience becomes as alien and unknowable as any blue skinned warrior robot could ever be.

Here, the outsider agency must arm itself with wit and a genuine interest in portraying the open, honest coolness of a product and fire it into the hearts of whoever walks on this strange digital battlefield.

For me it was Blade Runner. The worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and yes, even the giant of sci-fi: Blakes 7, didn’t manage alien in quite the same way. Their landscapes all seemed familiar, borrowed from the ordinary and polished or roughed up in order to appear different. Even Welsh quarries didn’t manage to pull it off properly.

Blade Runner was different. It wasn’t so much the spaceships and killer androids that made the world of Blade Runner so alien, so futuristic; it was the element of Japanese in it all.

Whether the film had quite the same effect to the Japanese, I can’t say (though I hear they go nuts for Blakes 7) but to me, young teenager as I was at the time, Blade Runner was a plausible vision of the future.

More spaceships wouldn’t have made it any more plausible, nor would more gibberish tech or plastic clothing.

All of this occurred to me just two paragraphs into Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.

The reason?

The feel of foreign.

The future can be two things: familiar (so I’m waiting for Ken Loach’s multi-million dollar space opera) or foreign. It is the latter that brings out our sense of wonder.

Just as Blade Runner forced us to experience the future through foreign eyes so is it important to retain your own outsider status when it comes to answering a brief. The world in which the client lives is not the same world in which the consumer lives. It can’t be.

The client is familiar with the sales targets and campaign aims. The client has bosses to please whether they are shareholders or marketing directors. The client is not going to be buying their own product.

Being foreign is an approach that ought to stay with you every day.

Understanding the client’s business is important, sure. But presumably the client has a pretty good grasp of her own business.

Understanding her customer, being her customer, well that’s what can deliver effective and creative thinking.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

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