Meme Huffer

Jon Steel on Professionalism

I was among the 300-odd souls who turned up to the Holiday Inn (!) in Bloomsbury to listen to Jon Steel speak. And very good it was too.

He didn't merely rehash bits from 'Truth Lies and Advertising' (which may have been a disappointment to some -as I left, I did hear someone muttering that they wish he'd talked more about 'how to do planning'...) and he didn't really do a 'how to pitch' presentation either (although this subject was very popular at Q&A time). Rather, he delivered a superb presentation on how so-called professionalism is getting in the way of our job (i.e. having and selling ideas). I'm not going to do an exhaustive report (I believe that the APG were recording it, so pray for a podcast sometime soon) but here are a few of the bits that I really liked:

Jon argued against the conventional marketing wisdom that "logic leads to magic". It doesn't. Worse, a fanatical belief in logic supresses the (rather large and important) role that inspiration has to play. We seem scared to say that we have ideas (and when we present them, we feel compelled to reverse-engineer in the logic flow). As you may have figured out, I'm a big fan of a using someone else's well-chosen words to get your point across, and he had a lovely quote from da Vinci: "It is by logic we prove but by intuition we discover".

I learnt about Attention Deficit Trait -that state whereby you are either being interrupted or being prepared to be interrupted. Apparently it is as intellectually debilitating as smoking two joints... Don't be afraid to turn your phone off. Don't feel obliged to constantly check your email. Create thinking time in your day.

He made the point that "experience, not information, is the source of true wisdom". So get out there and live a little. Don't be stuck at your computer. Get beyond the data. Go and see what your consumers are up to. Keep a scrapbook of things which may come in handy one day. Read more about life and less about marketing (hmm... interesting for us bloggers).

By far the most interesting part of his presentation was on presentations, particularly the fact that Powerpoint isn't really fit for purpose -it is efficient but not effective, in that it is a convenient tool for the presenter, but not for the audience. Putting bullet-pointed words on a screen makes for poor visuals and an equally poor leave-behind document. Worse, it forces you to think in a very hierarchical and linear fashion (again, all very 'logical'). He used Churchill's "we will fight them on the beaches" speech, and posited how it would have gone down had he been able to use Powerpoint -I won't try to do it justice here, but hopefully the APG will upload the charts along with Jon's speech.

Finally, there was a great story that he told about a client who asked Silverstein whether that was the best idea he could come up with. His reply? "Is your wife the best woman you could have married?"

A great night -big ups to Mr Steel and to the APG .

Beeker has also written this up, covering slightly different points to me, which is good. Go read it. Read Andrew NorthernPlanner's as well. (I like the way different bits of his speech appealed to different people...)

Time-lapse Picasso

Just stumbled across this -a fascinating insight into Picasso's process.

It was filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1955, and is part of his (uncredited) film 'The Mystery of Picasso'. There are more segments on YouTube, here, here and here.

(Speaking of Clouzot, if you've never seen 'The Wages of Fear', I highly recommend it -one of the most coolly tense films ever committed to celluloid).

Inspiration information

If you don't already own a copy of the late Alan Fletcher's book 'The Art of Looking Sideways', I'd recommend jumping on Amazon and grabbing a copy. Now.

It's the scrapbook of a genius, full of ideas, insights and observations on the nature of art, design and creativity. A veritable gallimaufry of words, quotes, images and thoughts... the ideal thing to dip into when you're looking for a little inspiration or just an interesting diversion.

I'll undoubtedly be quoting extensively from it in the coming weeks, but here's a couple of morsels to kick off with:

Misoneism: a psychiatric word for unreasoning fear and hatred of new ideas.

Doppler Effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

"Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality" -Arthur Koestler

"Personally, I always preferred inspiration to information" -Man Ray

As you'd expect from a graphic designer, its far more than just a bunch of well-chosen words, its more a "primer in visual intelligence"...

Also, I've just learnt that there is also a retrospective exhibition of his work at London's Design Museum, until February 18th. Perhaps a worthy venue for an upcoming coffee morning -what do you think, Russell?

Great Quotes for Planners #11

 

"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees"  -G.K. Chesterton

(photo courtesy of Steven Parker)

Get your free Banksy

Banksy has put up nice hi-res images of some of his pieces for free download, with the suggestion that "prints look best when done on gloss paper using the company printer ink when everyone else is at lunch".

I want one of these (& no, it's not an iPhone)

While everyone in the plannoblogosphere has been gushing about the iPhone, I've just found my next toy:

Yep, it's a fully-operational home entertainment system, complete with DVD/CD/MP3 player, FM radio, a pop-out iPod dock, speakers plus outputs,  etc etc. R2's lens is a home cinema projector, and check out the remote control.

via Gizmodo

"Fact-power"

I came across this ad from 1952 for the UNIVAC computer, when "fact-power" was apparently something "sensational" and "new", and "fact-powered decisions" were an executive's dream. Given that we've been having some lively office debate around the validity of 'non-fact-based assertions', it spurred me to jot down my beliefs on the topic:

I find it hard to share Remington Rand's breathless enthusiasm for "fact-power", especially as regards marketing and communications. Thanks to today's information technology, we've all got an abundance of facts and figures, right at our fingertips. Facts about the market and about the consumer. Facts about the category and about the product. We've got data galore -a whole history, collated, analysed, graphed and bullet-pointed. We've got more facts than we know what to do with.

Now, there is no doubt that facts can be are useful -there is no substitute for a through understanding of the situation, and a well-picked fact can be the nugget that leads to great work (Guinness "good things come to those who wait" is a great example).

But 'fact-powered' decisions aren't infallible -data points are but a sample of reality and therefore don't always tell the full story (Russell found a lovely quote on this: “if you want to study a river you don't take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow” ). Facts are from the past, and the past can be a notoriously unreliable augur -the world changes, occasionally very quickly (as Steve Henry puts it, 'what is = what was'). And it can be very easy to be led astray by facts -Coke obsessed over taste-test results and launched New Coke, secure in the knowledge that they were making a 'fact-powered' decision. It wasn't that their facts were wrong but that they had based their decision on the wrong facts.

Further, in today's wired infosphere, one's competitors will generally have ready access to the exact same facts that you do. To succeed in a world of over-supply and product-parity, one needs to differentiate. Clearly then, to differentiate, one needs to look beyond the commonly-held fact base.

Under these conditions, we need much more than 'fact-power'. The key skill here is not left-brained fact-sifting but right-brained contextualisation. Facts are rarely engaging in and of themselves -it is the ways in which we convey them (for an excellent example, have a look at Hans Rosling's TED presentation) and the stories we weave around them that matter. And sometimes leaving the facts and research behind will get you to a far more interesting place -as Henry Ford said, "is I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".

I believe that we need to place the value on coming up with strategic ideas (widening the horizon) rather than merely coming to strategic conclusions (reducing it). We need to use research to help us develop powerful new insights, rather than simply using it to test, assess and re-hash the existing facts. We need to value intuition, fresh-thinking and finely-honed instinct. We need non-linear thinking, creativity, and story-telling (and we need to never let the facts stand in the way of a good story!)

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will ever be to know and understand." -Einstein

UNIVAC ad courtesy of Modern Mechanix via BoingBoing

Making a difference

Risible is a woefully underused word.

By Greycap via Londonist

(Oh, and the strip at the bottom reads "you're just a grass with a badge")

Sleazy Listening podcast, episode 1

Download SleazyListeningepisode1.m4a (44974.9K)

Alternate download site here 

As promised, I sat down today and created the first Sleazy Listening podcast... 47-odd minutes of dirty grooves. It was kinda fun, but rather different from doing live radio, as you keep wanting to re-record bits and otherwise faff about... Hopefully as I get my head around Garageband better, I'll be able to achieve a better flow.

I'll try to get episode two out in a couple of weeks... I'm thinking perhaps a version excursion, exclusively of obscure/rare/odd cover versions (all suggestions welcome).

Episode One Tracklisting:

• I Wanna Make It Wit Chu - The Desert Sessions
• Strawberry Letter 23 - Shuggie Otis
• You Got That Crazy Love - Gnarls Barkley vs Candi Staton
• Heard 'Em Say (I Had To Say) - Pete Rock feat. Vanessa Sanchez
• Dust - Recloose feat. Dallas (Submariner mix)
• Drunken Guitar - The Lushes
• I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In - Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
• You Got It - De La Soul
• Oh Jah - Black Grass (Nextmen mix)
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gil Scott-Heron
• Loaded Chalice - Nuffwish
• Home, Land and Sea - Trinity Roots

Thanks to Lee and Lebowski for the encouragement.

Great Quotes for Planners (#10) updated

This one goes out to Leland over at Whistle Through Your Comb, another who appreciates a good quote every now and then.

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” -Robert F. Kennedy

Addenda: it seems that Bobby was paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw who said "You see things, and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"