On our final day there I found this slogan/truth, emblazoned on a bronzed window.

A perfectly Danish thought. High ambition, aesthetic intent, inclusive socialist principles.

I took it to mean space not only in the physical sense, but the temporal sense too. Taking the time necessary to influence the way things look and feel.

My wife and I spent three days there, having left our children with their grandparents. We wandered. We drank coffee. We ate amazing food – which, like the city’s furniture, is sculpted, designed, thought through.

We cycled. We sat. We poked around the endless nooks and crannies that are there to be found, hidden within the wide, open neighbourhoods that make up this flat, calm, cool city.

All this encapsulated on a window to a store selling beautifully designed furniture.

This is not surprising: beautifully designed furniture is difficult to avoid in Copenhagen. Especially chairs. Perhaps, thinking about it now, there’s a reason that chairs are so central to Danish design. The functionalist credo – purpose combined with ideals – requires contemplation, and these are definitely chairs in which to sit and think.

But I love this sign because it sums up something interesting about Copenhagen’s fascination with design, which is as much about itself as it is for its users. Its design principles, as well as its output, are on show.

Arne Jacobsen chairs and Poul Henningson artichoke lights are everywhere, of course, but the reason for their ubiquity isn’t that far from the surface. This is furniture that’s as much a product of a nation’s ideals as its tax system is, or the fact that cars give way to bikes on the road.

Copenhagen’s design seeks to bring about a more ideal society. If you doubt this, a quick trip to the design museum reveals that Henningson had even prescribed the necessary conditions.  It’s a brilliant list: “social awareness, sexual liberation, terrace houses, technological progress, cheap everyday objects, kites, jazz, light and enlightenment.”

Yup, that pretty much covers it, I think.

Especially kites.

In Copenhagen things seem intended. London feels chaotic and accidental by comparison, a product of clashing ideologies and a nasty, brutish architectural state of nature.

Here the concept of the idea follows through to execution of the experience. The thinking is the making is the using.

All this has got me thinking – and I’m not really even sure why – of what Russell Davies has been talking about recently: the product is the service is the marketing.

He is primarily talking about the Government Digital Service, of course. A Design Award winner, possibly kind of even functionalist the way it is rendered.

I take this to mean that what is inherent in the reason the product exists should be present in the way it is experienced, which in turn informs the way – and why – it is promoted to the other people.

I saw this explicitly when we were lucky enough to enjoy a private tour of two sites owned by the design company, Fritz Hansen. The office itself is beautiful. It houses an archive that can be accessed by art students, and  a display of all the chairs made by the company over the last century or so.

We also went to the factory, where they make the wooden chairs. Operations are about to get shipped to Poland so getting to see it before it goes felt like a real honour. Our guide talked us through the whole process. The wood arrives like this…

Seven individual pieces of wood are glued together, using cotton to strengthen each piece, to make 7-sheet ply. Veneers cover the front and back. Then it gets cut.

Then a mold steams and bends the wood into shape.

It is sanded and rubbed into a recognisable shape.

Then painted.

Until you end up with a variety of colours and finishes.

This was intoxicating stuff.

Witnessing or fetishising the manufacturing process isn’t new in marketing, of course. Jack Daniel’s have been doing it for years. Provenance and connoisseurship seem inherently valuable today. But this isn’t all craftsmanship. Machines and robots were incorporated years ago.

And although their products are premium these days, the Fritz Hansen ethos actually requires them to reconcile quality and accessibility. All the chairs are made the same way as both a guarantee of quality and to streamline the production process, keeping costs down.

What becomes clear, watching the process, is that what commands the premium is not just the time or the cost, but the commitment to the design. There are still twenty separate points at which human intervention occurs. That’s twenty opportunities to spot and eliminate any sub-standard pieces.

And it is this attention, this particularity, that you pay for.

The design is rigorously adhered to because it is so self-evidently a good thing. It is a good thing because of the sheer ineffable pleasure it generates. And pleasure is important, because it ensures that society values beautiful things.

Imagine if all brands started with that. Not with delineations between service, brand and marketing. But with a design principle, a point of view on the world that its products made manifest.

An ambition to make everything they did an execution of a belief, or an aesthetic.

To be what they are because of the spaces they create.

A change of speed, a change of style. A change of scene, with no regrets.

In other words, I’ve updated the look of this blog.

It was time for a change. I’d stopped liking the font. I’d grown a bit tired of the design. When I thought about what wanted the image to be, I realised I didn’t really want one after all.

I thought it time to lose some of the features in the sidebar that neither I nor anyone else was using.

Over time, whether through laziness or just plain habit, the posts here have started to become more focused on writing. Writing in order to think. They have become less focused on embedding stuff from other places in order to discuss it.

So I wanted a layout that allowed the writing a bit more room.

In the exceedingly unlikely event that anyone arrives here not sure whether they’ve come to the right place, or more likely feels duped into staying because they thought it was somewhere else, I thought I’d record the change.

To quote Bob Dylan:

It used to go like this

And now it goes like this

Otherwise everything is as it was.

It’s a good one – plus it’ll save the advertising community a fair few hours too.

It is Entinhaltlichung.

[I read about it here.]

It translates as ‘Decontentification’.

It’s been coined to describe what people see as the disappointingly anaemic policies being developed by Angela Merkel.

Risk-free, diluted, and with no vision or guiding ‘concept’.

Doing whatever she thinks will please the voters, but losing the essence of leadership in the process.

The Greens in Germany – the challenger brand, if you will – say that politics is a realm that “needs ideals, principles, values and a sense of direction”.

The lack of direction from the leader looks weak-willed and increasingly self-defeating.

It’s nakedly about hoping the people choose the leader again next time.

It’s less about leading and more about not losing your job.

This is not attractive.

People see through this.

Meaning  for those of us in marketing that there’s more than just a new made-up word to learn from this.

This is the counter-factual view of history – what might have been. What if Hitler had been killed in 1923. What if Lenin had lived for longer. This is pretty futile stuff, by and large. Too much has happened since, and it’s hypothetical anyway, but sometimes it can be useful. It’s said that history is written by the victors: you claim what you can name. The job of a historian, though, has always been to resist taking the victor’s word at face value.

The history of the internet is relatively short but full. So much has happened in the last 20 years it feels churlish to look back and ask what if something had gone differently. But for something so multi-faceted and ever-changing the internet has accrued a surprisingly coherent narrative. It’s also a narrative which contains an awful lot of untested assumptions that historians – or anyone with an analytic truth-seeking instinct – would find surprising.

Evgeny Morozov challenges these assumptions in a recent book, To Save Everything, Click Here (erm, click here). He asks us to recognise the ideology of what he refers to as ‘the internet’. There is no such thing, he says. Peer-to-peer forums have little to do with search algorithms in the methods and reasons that we use them. We have so conflated concepts like ‘sites’ and ‘networks’ and ‘open’ that our ideological perception of the ‘internet’ is highly unstable and yet at the same time incredibly resistant to anything that challenges the business models of the web’s most successful companies. We’ve been sold a benign lie by money-making organisations who use our desire to believe against us.

The evidence for the claims made by these businesses rests largely on the words and labels used to help us understand them. When I heard Morozov lecture earlier this year at the Royal Institution he reserved his greatest ire for those powerful metaphors that propagate the myth. Like ‘wiki’, for example, which prematurely and inaccurately elevates Wikipedia to a model of openness that it doesn’t warrant and that no-one is quite sure works yet. Or ‘cyberspace’, a term derived from urban planners and their fixation with the different spatial rules of virtual reality – seized on to understand and explain the internet, and now watchfully defended by an entire department within the US Dept of Defense.

I’m sure Morozov relishes being the killjoy, but his mission is a constructive one at heart. He wants people to interrogate more, be more suspicious, demand better accounts of the way things work. He wants people to think harder about the names given to things, and the claims people make on their behalf. He believes this will allow people to have a more honest and ultimately more fruitful relationship with the products and services they use on the internet.

In another new book on the history of the internet, Finn Brunton charts the history of spam. I was reading a review of it the other day when a passage leaped out at me.

It was not inevitable that malicious self-replicating code should have been called a “virus”; one researcher instead proposed the metaphor of “weeds”. That, Brunton writes, might have led us to think of “computers as gardens rather than bodies, with diverse software populations to be tended and pruned by attentive and self-reliant users [and] the professionals as agronomists, breeders, and exterminators rather than doctors at the cordon sanitaire”.

Here, then, is a metaphor that has truly shaped the way we conceptualise the internet. Not just as fearful and powerless users, but as expectant marketers too (“make me a viral!”). But there’s a fascinating counter-factual view here. What if it really had been different? What if ‘weeds’ had taken hold, so to speak. What if clients now asked us to create ‘beds’? What if popular content was said to have ‘been pollinated’? Or what if digital experiences were ‘landscaped’?

Well, they still could. We’re really not that far into this whole ‘internet’ thing. History’s ink is not yet dry – the declared victors of today have time enough to become the couldabeenacontenders of tomorrow. Replacement metaphors aren’t necessarily the answer, of course. But if Morozov’s iconoclasm shows us anything it’s that language remains as powerful as ever, even in a world of 1s and 0s.

We just have to look beyond what we’re told, to think for ourselves.

Comedians see things differently. They can reframe familiar things into something fresh.

They collide bits of the world together to create something new, be it absurd or profound.

Last night I was at an event, run by the lovely people at Twitter, that really brought this comparison home for me.

It was called #FurtherFaster. Four talks – three from social media practitioners at agencies, and one from a comedian, David Schneider.

Like so many other joke writers has found Twitter to be a fertile and receptive place for his humour.

It’s particularly good for topical comics – especially satirists. The accelerating pace of news and commentary creates a perfect zone for comics who can move fast enough.

As Schneider explained it: “the multiplier of topicality is what makes it really funny.”

There was a lot in all these talks about making the most of topicality.

Speakers majored on the value of proactive planning – being equipped for reactive improvisation. Most measures of success were about how well activity had found an audience.

But there was a different subtext for me.

This was really all about how important it is for a brand to find its voice.

The case studies that really worked (Paul McCrudden‘s Dorito’s story, and the Lynx dogging tale from Mark Carroll) worked because it felt like the brands had found their place in popular culture and knew how to articulate it.

This proved invaluable when they each sweated (sorry) over the right tone to adopt when responding to respective crises.

Now I know I may get into trouble for this, but the #DancePonyDance example didn’t work quite so well for me. At heart it’s an ad idea with some social bolted on. And an app.

It was a campaign planned to begin and end, and the interactions start to fall away just as the TV stops airing.

This is not a criticism. If anything it shows how difficult it is to generate genuinely sticky brand activity within social channels.

(As an aside, there was also a nice reminder that engagement social channels with TV programmes should be considered as part of the media planning process. Imagine if TV spots were evaluated in terms of their Twitter rating as well as BARB ratings – something I talked about a while back.)

But it’s a great reminder that brands are always up against real life. This is normally far more interesting and important for anyone we might glibly consider to be our ‘audience’.

And this is where the comedy lessons come in.

1. Timing is everything. 

Schneider sees joke-telling on Twitter as akin to surfing. You need to ride the topical wave and catch it at just the right time.

Too early and the audience isn’t ready; too late and it’s old news.

He writes jokes that need to be held back for just the right news item. That takes nerve and confidence. (I for one am looking forward to the moment that’s right for his one on Gove.)

Brands’ sense of timing is important too, and it has huge implications for agencies and their resource.

How quickly should Lynx have acknowledged the fact that a masked dogger in a Channel 4 documentary was blatantly using the product as part of his, er, night-time routine? How much approval did the Nando’s community management team have to go through in order to secure an extra 5 minutes opening time on the day of Alex Ferguson’s retirement?

For brands this is a question as much of judgement as it is of spontaneity.

Judicious scheduling doesn’t always mean reacting straight away.

The phrase ‘real-time’ planning essentially derives from ‘quicker than conventional ad production methods allow’.

Now we’ve adapted to the pace that people and platforms are setting for us, perhaps we should start talking less about ‘real-time’ planning and more about ‘right-time’ planning.

2. Don’t be afraid to up the ante.

Humour, I think, is inherently transgressive.

It plays with expectations. It mashes things together in surprising ways, that sometimes skirt the boundaries of acceptability or familiarity.

Now, no-one’s going to go out and get Frankie Boyle to live tweet their next signature event. But retaining some of the comedian’s remit to test, probe and cajole is going to be increasingly important.

Certain brands on Twitter live or die on the strength of their personality. Anything anodyne is death.

Personality is often the very thing that gets smoothed down as part of the approval process around advertising.

Being more playful and more experimental in social makes absolute sense. It’s what gets a reaction. It’s more likely to prompt another share, another +1.

It also allows a brand to create associations with a greater number of smaller things. TV is essentially utilitarian: the most motivating thing for the most number of people.

Jeremy Bullmore’s ‘bird’s nest’ theory of brands makes more sense. They’re made up of lots of tiny, interlocking associations. And social is tailor-made for creating new ones.

Paul McCrudden made the point when he talked about the times the Dorito’s team would stop and say, hang on, this is Dorito’s. How can we go further? How can we play with and exceed the expectations of the people who they’re interacting with.

I liked that.

3. Heckling is a gift

Hecklers give the performer the chance to prove itself. Is there a better win for a stand-up than when they deal confidently, smartly, unexpectedly and graciously with someone in the crowd?

In social it’s often the public setting the brief.

They provide the random stimulus that a brand should respond to.

When Ross Noble asked rhetorically on TV why Dorito’s had a Twitter account, and suggested people Twitter bomb them with ridiculous questions, he inadvertently gave the brand the material it needed to prove the value of it being on Twitter in the first place.

It allowed the brand to engage with culture, rather than (like 3) be forced to contrive it out of nothing.

Mark made the great point that in response to a crisis a brand has three tools: a community manager, 140 characters and someone else’s hashtag.

This kind of creative restriction should be a gift to any smart and engaged brand. It’s the kind of randomised lateral creativity that De Bono championed.

There’s something backs-to-the-wall about it. There simply isn’t the luxury of time, as there is with advertising, to over-think and second-guess what you should do. You just need to do it.

Perhaps it’s appropriate to end with a joke I once heard from a speaker.

He posited two scenarios.

In the first, a grenade is thrown into a room of 10 people with the pin pulled. The 10 people pull together, act in the moment and decide what they’re going to do.

In the second, a brick is thrown into the room. A note is attached, saying that in 1 hour a grenade will be thrown in, pin pulled.

The 1o people form a committee and spend 59 minutes arguing about what their strategy should be.

The lesson in all this?

Sometimes you just have to see the funny side.

It’s the Smiths’ debut single, Hand In Glove.

It came out on May 13th 1983. Four years later the group had split up.

In between was as creative and intensive and prolific a lifespan as any band ever had.

Four ‘proper’ albums, ten non-album singles and a B-side quality control like no-one else.

Johnny Marr wrote all the music, played all the guitars, produced most of the records and did all this while obscenely young and having great hair.

Incredibly, for much of the band’s life, he also functioned as the band’s manager.

He took care of the admin. He booked TV appearances. He scheduled studio sessions.

He ran the whole thing.

He was 19 when Hand In Glove came out, 23 and burned out when he left the group.

And all this because Morrissey didn’t trust ‘outsiders’ who could have acted as managers.

There was a moment, before breaking point hit, where Morrissey momentarily relented.

But rather than hire a manager, what Morrissey actually did was recruit second guitarist.

To play alongside Johnny at gigs.

Clearly this wasn’t the problem that needed solving.

The one thing Johnny Marr doesn’t need any help with is playing the guitar.

But bringing in someone else to do what he did need help with might have saved the band.

I always feel sad when I think about this.

A young, voraciously creative guy, born to do what he loves and brilliant at it.

Asked to fit a mold he’s not built for, for the convenience of the set-up around him.

His talent gladly used by those around him, but little attention paid to what might make him happy, most productive or even better at what he does.

I feel sad because of the lost output, the broken relationship, the unfulfilled potential.

It’s been 30 years since the Smiths emerged.

I wonder how many Johnny Marrs agencies have let go since then?

“To take responsibility for everything…. That’s hard going. It doesn’t seem like it, of course, but it’s hard going if you care about it.

That’s what hard means. It’s an expression of how much you care about the result.”

- Hugh Laurie

An actor talking about how difficult his job can be isn’t always the most edifying experience.

As with advertising, ‘no-one died’ should be sufficient to puncture any self-importance.

But Hugh Laurie is the most awkwardly self-deprecating performer in the world  and there’s something about his definition of difficulty (from his experience working on House)  that rings true for our world as much it does his.

(Read the full interview at the Guardian here),

If anything starts to feel too easy in advertising it’s probably because either we’ve already done it loads of times, or because we’ve started to care a little less about the result.

Or perhaps both.  Maybe they are the same thing.

It’s often easy, too, to assume that someone else, somewhere, is caring about it more than you.

Or at least caring about their bit.

But that’s not always true.

I’ve found lately that the people I want to work with most are the ones who care about the stuff that’s nothing to do with them.

Because that’s not just busybody-ness.

That’s giving a shit.

It’s the mark of someone, I think, who has a vision.

A vision of the project, rather than just an understanding of their role within in it.

They have a sense of responsibility of how the whole thing should turn out, not just the constituent parts they’re directly responsible for.

This isn’t a function of seniority, or even how ‘central’ their discipline is deemed to be.

These are simply the people who make life hard for themselves because they care more than they have to.

They are people who represent the future of agencies.

Because the future of agencies is made of people who are more than excellent practitioners.

They are people who transcend disciplines such that they see projects as representative of something bigger.

They believe sufficiently in something to to see a project through its necessary resistance: conventional thinking, departmental interests, outdated measures.

Or just the fact that it hasn’t been done loads of times.

That can be hard going.

But the best people care more than most about the result because they know what the real result is.

No matter how long or painful these operations are, patients’ memory of their experience is defined disproportionately by how it ended.

If it ended well, patients are more likely to remember the whole experience as a positive one.

I was reminded of this by a speaker at MEC’s conference last week.

Eric Whitacre is a composer, a conductor, and the man behind The Virtual Choir, an awesome crowd-sourced project that creates spellbinding choral pieces via YouTube.

The most recent piece is here.

Eric heard Daniel Kahneman speak at TED.

He was so taken with this insight about the ends of experiences that he started thinking differently about how his pieces might finish.

A play I saw on Saturday night played knowingly with this insight, too.

At the end of a one-man show, pre-loaded viewfinders (like these) were handed out.

The audience was asked to click in time with instructions. Each slide featured something related to the performance we’d just watched, ironically messing with what we’d seen.

The aim was to play with individuals’ recollection and make audience members knowingly complicit in the writer’s re-draft of our memory.

You know, like a play that billed itself as inspired by Marcel Proust and Charlie Kaufmann would. (It’s called Souvenir and it’s on this week.)

I don’t think we think enough in our world about how things end.

Even if the memory of a pitch lingers longer if you win it.

And the clues are everywhere.

Our conference was in Nice, and the protacted trek back, shuffling from coach to plane to shuttle to train to tube to home, reminded me how the emotional experience of travel can differ at either end, and affect the mood accordingly.

I was talking with Matt Locke recently about this too.

An advocate and practioner of digital storytelling, he’s interested in how good (or otherwise) we are at ending stories that are told online. By and large it’s a skill we haven’t really learned yet.

Perhaps if we did it well we’d benefit from what Kahneman noticed – the the psychological trick people play on themselves.

Matt’s background is in TV, of course.

In that world they’ve started to understand the ending insight.

What used to be called the ‘last episode in the series’ is now known as the ‘series finale’.

Pulling the plug can be an opportunity, not just something to shy away from.

I wonder when our own industry’s storytelling will become as unabashed as our own about finishing things off.

That, perhaps, as agencies we’re more comfortable talking about innovation than actually living it.

It’s a powerful idea for us, certainly. But not necessarily a state of being. Yet.

The insights and provocations came thick and fast.

That we are more comfortable with the how of innovation rather than the what.

That we find it easier to talk about it on our clients’ behalf than undertake it on our own.

That we find comfort in pretending to be so certain individually, because collectively we’re entirely uncertain about what the future holds.

That we allow ourselves to feel superior by gravitating towards what we think is significant, rather than what real people might find important.

That our own business model inhibits us from executing genuinely disruptive innovation within our own agencies.

That the only true way to disrupt our own business is by working from outside it.

And, most alarmingly, that disruption is inevitable; the only salient question is about who gets to it first and when.

Antony Mayfield shared my favourite quote of the evening, from Ted Sarandos, Netflix CEO (and MEC client, disclosure-fans).

Our strategy is to become HBO quicker than HBO become us.

That’s some strategy for the modern business.

It’s highly specific but incredibly ambitious. Convergence and disruption are assumed. It’s a very real deadline but it’s not something you can put in a calendar.

Substitute agencies for Netflix in that equation, though, and who’s the other party?

Antony reckoned it was McKinsey. He’s probably right.

But for last night demonstrated it could come from anywhere.

Luckily, for a planner, there was also bucketloads of great insight on what to do about it.

Pats broke down the characteristics of disruption, getting us thinking again about our clients’ business and the opportunity that exists in re-imagining an agency’s remit within it.

Glyn showed how agencies shouldn’t be built around skills or even disciplines, but by mindsets. Flexibility and perspective are the new art direction and copywriting.

Graeme contrasted the two natural laws that govern an agency’s world. Moore’s Law moves too fast for us to predict what’s coming – and yet it’s where we spend so much of our time. The glacial pace of Darwin’s Law gives us an opportunity to understand the stuff that doesn’t change – people and their motivation.

Phil reminded us to concentrate on ends not means – agencies should be the voice not just of the consumer but also of our clients’ commercial purpose. Big nods all round there.

Anjali articulated the role of innovation within an agency very nicely indeed – to harness technical developments and deliver stuff that’s useful with minimal wastage.

These were potent talks loaded with ‘ways in’ for people to grab hold of.

Huge thanks to Neil and all involved, as ever.

It reminded me of the time she booked a one-off session for me on ‘Persuasive Writing’.

The first exercise was the best ice-breaker I’ve ever experienced.

I thought I’d share it here in case anyone is looking for new ways to get people into an entirely different headspace for a workshop.

It worked brilliantly.

We were each handed a sheet of paper. On it were two written extracts.

One was from Raymond Chandler.

The other was from Mills & Boon.

We spent some time as a group analysing the texts.

How did they convey their information? What were the key characteristics of the language, the rhythms? What could we infer about the narrator from the way each was written?

And so on.

We then broke into pairs.

We each introduced ourselves to our new partners. Told our life stories. The big stuff, or at least the potted history.

We then had to write a mini-biography of the person we’d just met.

One of us wrote in the style of Raymond Chandler.

The other as Mills & Boon.

We then read out what we’d written to the wider group.

While the subject listened.

And that was how everyone found out who we were.

And how we each found out what we were there to do.

Enough analysis to understand what was needed.

But not so much that we became inhibited.

The perfect balance between a critical mindset and a creative one.

In planning we’re always shifting from one to the other.

And when you’re learning something new – or just trying to improve – it becomes even more important to deploy both.

Creative is doing. Dexterity at the thing itself. Practice. A bit of real-world risk. Look stupid. Get it wrong.

Construction.

Critical is fine-tuning our analytic faculties. Understanding what we’re trying to do. How it works. The component parts.

De-construction.

I hadn’t thought much about this particular connection between the course and my work until a friend tweeted a link to this piece from Times Higher Education.

It’s about the difference academia sees between ‘English’ and ‘creative writing’.

English is steeped in the tradition of critical thinking. It’s about historical context, biographical background, etc.

Creative Writing is seen as being about making things up. It is looked down on by the people involved in English.

It’s a distinction that’s so well-established that it can only be false.

Or at least unhelpful.

I think the two go together.

Sure, as individuals I imagine we probably favour one or the other.

And our instinct might be to stay in the realm where we know we’re good.

Certainly, each is easier without subjecting ourself to the other.

But we improve at a greater rate in each if we apply what we learn from both.

We write better if we read more.

We read better if we write more.

We need to develop our critical and creative faculties in tandem. They work better that way.

I am yet to use that ice-breaker exercise.

It worked because writing was the reason everyone was there.

A creative workshop for the agency might not be able to draw on the same self-identification from its participants.

But I have a renewed impulse to work out how to apply its principles the next time I run one.

Thanks to Lara for the THE link.