A Buddha in Bangkok

In 1955 or so, in the shadow of Bangkok’s Hualampong Railway Station on the edge of Chinatown, a nondescript temple called Wat Traimit had almost completed their renovations. One of the remaining tasks was to move a stucco Buddha from the yard into the newly enlarged building.

The Buddha had been too big for the old temple so it sat in the yard under a humble tin roof, ever since its arrival from another temple in the 1930s.

Now it had a proper home.

Accordingly, an engineer was contracted to calculate the weight of the Buddha and a crane hired.

A generous safety margin was added to the estimated weight.

But when the crane operator hoisted the Buddha a few feet into the air, the cable snapped.

Since it was rainy season, the Buddha fell into the heavy mud below.

It cracked in several places.

This was seen as a bad omen.

Next a tumultuous storm started.

It drenched the city all night long.

This was seen as an even worse omen.

The following morning the Abbot squelched through the mud to evaluate the situation.

Where the stucco had cracked, the rain had eroded it, making the cracks bigger.

And through one of them the Abbot could see something glistening, something that looked like gold.

Encased inside the stucco was a second Buddha.

It was 3 metres tall.

It weighed 5.5 tonnes.

It was solid gold.

Today, just the bullion value would be around $300 million and the total value, somewhere north of priceless.

Buddhism doesn’t really endorse miracles.

But the Abbot may perhaps have been forgiven if he thought he was witnessing one.

The most probable explanation for this extraordinary discovery is, perhaps sadly, a little more prosaic.

The Buddha made been sculpted during the Sukhothai period of the 13th century.

At some point, probably in the 15th century the Buddha had been camouflaged to outsmart a marauding Burmese army who were laying siege to its home city of Ayutthaya.

As we know, the Buddha survived, but over the centuries the Buddha’s provenance was forgotten.

For centuries the Buddha was thought to have little value.

For centuries people had venerated the Buddha without understanding its true nature.

Without suspecting what lay beneath the dull surface.

Without an inkling of the priceless artefact, sitting under a humble tin roof in the temple yard, for 25 odd years.

If you’re unsure what this has to do with advertising, you must read between the lines Grasshopper.

{visit the Buddha}

Who’s Zooming Who?

When it comes to prediction George Orwell was at least as good as Nostradamus. 1984 is a truly prophetic book.

It convincingly predicted the internet, food shortages, perpetual war, and stockpiled atomic weapons.

And of course it gave us Big Brother.

And Big Brother is still watching.

In Britain, the average citizen is recorded by CCTV cameras 300 times a day.

A fact that’s so well known in the UK it could be a pub trivia question.

Maybe it already is.

We're talking routine daily surveillance here, not covert ops.

And other developed nations are catching up fast.

But prediction is at best, an inexact science.

And Orwell didn’t get everything right.

Because although it’s true that most governments and many corporations have the resources to keep tabs on us 24/7 -- digital/social media increasingly gives citizens the ability to turn the tables.

The biggest example of this is WikiLeaks, about which millions of words have already been written.

And it’s by no means an isolated example.

As Congressman Anthony Weiner recently discovered, indiscrete tweets are not a good idea.

Maybe it’s the arrogance gene, but politicians especially, seem slow to grasp that there is no privacy anymore.

And where there is no privacy there has to be less secrecy.

Certainly nothing digital can be classified as secret.

It only takes a click.

And as an Original Gatester, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman astutely remarked, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”.

What was true for Watergate is truer for Weinergate.

Even riches and influence can't erase a digital footprint.

Tiger Woods’ extracurricular activities came to light through a string of text messages.

And as Ryan Giggs found out to his cost, high-priced lawyers and super injunctions are no match for 140 characters.

It's not just a prurient interest in the sex lives of celebrity sportsmen.

There's a business story too.

Sponsorships have been pulled, and some commentators claim Mr. Woods’ antics cost shareholders as much as $12 billion.

That's a sweet swing if you're short selling, and someone usually is.

Back in 1998, it took a blue dress laced with DNA to make an ass of Bill Clinton.

Now a little string of 1s and 0s can carry the impetus to unseat dynasties.

The Arab Spring was largely broken to western media via social media.

Sure, the story would have broken eventually but when people are being killed lead times are important.

The movements were also largely orchestrated through Facebook and Twitter.

Well you try calling 10,000 people personally.

Of course the rise of citizen journalism has been well chronicled.

What interests me more is a phenomenon created as a side effect.

Because an unexpected and far-reaching consequence of the social media revolution is the answer to an old question: who watches the watchmen?

And the answer is – now we do.

And that’s what Orwell didn’t see coming.

Big Brother may still be watching us – but we’re watching Big Brother like never before.

The populous may well have more power than any time since the French Revolution.

And this levelling of the playing field is a good thing.

Unless or course you’re a dictator, dodgy politico, unscrupulous oligarch, or philandering celeb.

And if you are, watch out.

We’ve got our eye on you Pal.

Advertising--Science or Voodoo?

Taglines can be extraordinarily powerful. The best are so powerful that they enter the language, and even get spoofed.

So it’s not surprising that advertisers and agencies invest spend a lot of time prospecting for the next Think Different or Where’s the Beef?

And like any prospecting, a lot of dry holes can get drilled before you hit a gusher.

Or things can just click.

Just do it.

Is probably on most people’s top ten list, it’s certainly on Ad Age’s.

With good reason, the line was one of the marketing forces of the 80’s and 90’s driving Nike’s global sales from $ 877 million in 1988 to $9.2 billion in 1998.

So what if it was the result of happenstance rather than hard work.

The documentary Art & Copy (essential viewing for anyone with even the slightest interest in advertising history) cites Dan Wieden referencing convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s last words “Let’s do it” as the inspiration.

Morbid serendipity or not, Just do it was still an inspired piece of account planning.

Because it addresses a simple truth anyone who exercises regularly will acknowledge; there are days when you feel like just not doing it.

But what makes the line such inspired sales psychology is that 80% of athletic shoes aren’t used for sports at all.

Nike isn’t really in the athletic shoe business it’s in the sneaker business.

Just do it is an amazing piece of positioning because when Joe Sixpack drinks beer in front of the TV he is also basking in the reflected glow of athleticism.

He’s not a bombed couch potato, but an athlete on his day off.

The brilliance of this is undeniable, but so is the fact that any sneaker company could have used it.

Reebok, Adidas, Puma, anyone.

Because in spite of the brilliance, the resonance and the sales, Just do it is utterly generic.

True Wieden and Kennedy executed the campaign flawlessly.

And Nike lived by Just do it, famously signing an amateur Tiger Woods to a $40 million deal in 1996 before he had played a round of professional golf.

But no client ever says to their agency we need a good generic tagline, more likely the reverse we want a tagline that’s so integral to our brand that only we can say it.

Of course that can work too.

We try harder.

Is Number 5 on the Ad Age list.

Back in 1963 when DDB came up with this it was revolutionary.

Perhaps equally impressive is that it’s still in use today.

Except DDB didn’t actually come up with the line, Bob Townsend the president of Avis did as this 1964 article from Time attests.

Again, it may have been happenstance, but DDB had the savvy to recognise, craft and run with it.

And they needed every ounce of that savvy; Avis had lost money for the preceding 13 years.

And it was risky because back then nobody questioned that bigger was better.

Being number one was everything.

Being number two could be seen as weakness.

But being number two and trying harder, to grow, and perhaps one day become number one.

That was seen as a plucky underdog fighting for the American Dream.

And it worked.

The next year Avis made a profit of $1.2 million on revenue of $38 million and market share increased from 11 percent in 1962 to 35 percent by 1966.

The idea of trying harder because you’re number two is clearly not generic, for a start you have to be number 2, being number 3 wouldn’t work nearly as well.

And Avis really did try harder.

And when they screwed up they berated themselves for it – publicly.

Can you think of a brand that would run this mea culpa today?

I can’t.

I like that happenstance, serendipity, coincidence and luck play a bigger role in the industry than we like to admit.

I like that an accident can beat a New Coke.

And I love that advertising is a potent mixture of science and voodoo.

And that the best, is more voodoo than science.

Opportunity Knocks, Just Say No Toronto

Toronto doesn’t make your jaw drop like New York, Paris or Sydney can. It lacks that killer architectural app like the Statue of Liberty or the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower.

Instead, it creeps up on you the way Melbourne or Amsterdam or Singapore might, subtly in layers.

I like this low key cutting edge approach.

I live here.

In February 2011 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Toronto 4th of the world’s most liveable cities.

Helsinki came in 6th so I’m guessing weather wasn’t a criterion.

OK I can just about buy it; liveability being kind of a loosey goosey concept.

This month the accolades continued.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers named Toronto a city of opportunity.

Amazingly, according to the 10 indicators used, Toronto is the number 2 city of opportunity in the world, second only to New York.

Wow!

Really?

More opportunities than San Francisco with its proximity to Silicon Valley and access to all that venture capital?

Or Singapore, with their explosive 14.5% GDP growth in 2010?

What about Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, major players in the world’s biggest marketplace -- ever?

Hey, I’m as susceptible to flattery as anybody, but for flattery to effectively massage the ego it has to be vaguely grounded in reality.

And I’m not convinced this is.

At any rate here are some opportunity indicators the report evidently missed.

The opportunity to cheer for really bad sports teams and pay some of the highest ticket prices in North America.

The Leafs make the playoffs so rarely that even a last-minute charge ending in heroic failure will send the city delirious.

The hockey religion is strong here.

How else do you explain legions of fans that have given up on excellence but won’t give up their season tickets?

The opportunity to experience really bad gridlock, at least you can enjoy a nice view of the city while you’re stuck on the Gardiner Expressway.

If you’re stuck on the Don Valley Parkway, better get in touch with your inner Zen.

And don’t worry, with a commute time that averages 24 minutes longer than Los Angeles, you’ll have plenty of time to cultivate it.

Not only are the highways jammed, but the condition of roads in and around the city is the worst it’s been since I moved here from London in the early 1990s.

As another summer of re-surfacing delays looms, take it from me, they have better roads in the Yucatan than we have in Toronto.

Agreed, the climate is kinder on infrastructure but it’s Mexico; in the middle of a drug war.

The opportunity of paying large electricity bills while enjoying frequent power outages.

The ageing delivery system frequently fails to deliver, plunging areas of the city into darkness on an almost weekly basis.

And not only have rates increased by maybe 40% over 5 years, but the Supreme Court of Canada found Toronto Hydro guilty of gouging on late payment charges.

The solution -- a rate increase to pay off the $7.7 million in legal fees gets rubber stamped by the Ontario Energy Board.

No I’m not kidding.

Kafka must be pissing himself laughing.

The opportunity to travel on North America’s most expensive public transit, the only major transit system in the world to receive absolutely no central government funding.

Clearly successive Federal Governments know something about transit that’s escaped the rest of the world.

And let's not forget the opportunity to subsidise the rest of Canada to the tune of $8 billion a year.

While the city’s infrastructure crumbles around us the taxes we pay get spent somewhere else.

Predictably certain sections of the media are cranking up the hype wagon.

The Grid, a re-launch of a free listings magazine formally known as Eye Weekly, ran a story on the PWC study saying we won.

Actually what they said was, “The good news: We won! We won!”

The basis for this pronouncement being that NYC is unbeatable, so coming 2nd is in fact winning.

Note to Leafs.

For reasons known only to them, The Toronto Star ran a story headlined, Forget Paris.

I’m not sure if they have a beef with Paris or are randomly referencing a 1995 Billy Crystal movie that three people saw.

Did I mention I’m as susceptible to flattery as anybody, but for flattery to effectively massage the ego it has to be vaguely grounded in reality?

I just don’t think this is.

And if you live in Toronto I hope you don’t either because what this city needs is less, not more complacency.

OMG! 10 TATICU

Text Abbreviations the Industry Could Use

1. MLB – Make Logo Bigger

   Three sadistic little thumb strokes guaranteed to plunge a knife in to the heart of any Art Director.
   
   

2. TCAD – The Client’s a Dork

   TCAW –The Client’s a Wanker (UK)

   Naturally never applies to any of my clients.
   
   

3. IWIDT – I Wish I’d Done That

   Last year’s IWIDT was indubitably the sweet smell of Old Spice.
   
   

4. NAFG – Not Another Focus Group

   A less profane form of SNAFG and a perennial for those working on P&G brands.
   
   

5. SYIC – See You in Cannes

   Particularly gratifying when sent to ex partners or bosses you know for sure aren’t going.
   
   

6. IWAGL­– I Won a Gold Lion.

   Under no circumstances hit send. They’ll find out and hate you anyway, but they may hate you just a little less if you don’t spam your entire address book.
   
   

7. DYSAA – Did You See Ad Age?

   DYSC – Did You See Campaign? (UK)

   Only used when the story you’re referring to is so glaringly obvious it requires no further explanation, like the agency you work for going belly up.
   
   

8. AIWSTDD – As I Was Saying to David Droga

   In the interests of credibility please use sparingly and ensure what follows is not completely lame.
   
   

9. ICGZ – I Can Get Zack

   Invariably used by someone with absolutely no chance of persuading Zach Galifianakis to do your commercial.
   
   

10. ISMOA ­­– I’m Starting My Own Agency

    Maybe you are, but 999 times in a thousand it’s just the Grey Goose honking.
    
    

You Really Can Suck & Blow at the Same Time

In 1781 Dr. Samuel Johnson, man of letters and compiler of the English dictionary wrote a poster announcing the auction of Thrale’s Brewery. "We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson opined, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

This aspirational phrasing did the trick and the brewery fetched £135,000 roughly equivalent to £13M today.

With rich beyond the dreams of avarice Johnson arguably invented the benefit and became an early practitioner in the trade of advertising, an industry that centuries later would think different to him about English grammar.

Some 120 years later, in 1903 King Gillette was faced with a conundrum.

His safety razor was simply too expensive for the marketplace, purchasing one would cost a working man around half his weekly wage.

Until Gillette devised an ingenious scheme to sell each razor at a loss and make his money on the blades.

So Gillette, who did not invent the safety razor, did invent the loss leader, making a considerable contribution to the creation of Marketing, (while pissing off generations of men with the inflated price of razor blades).

And for the next hundred years or so, the separate, but interrelated disciplines of Advertising and Marketing were fairly well-defined.

Advertising was a vehicle for the delivery of a message through paid media; essentially advertising pushed the message towards you.

Even when it elicited an unambigous  response, as in the case of direct mail, it was exactly that  -- a response to a media stimulus.

Marketing, on the other hand, sold you the razor and essentially pulled you towards the blade, it was more about the big picture, more about creating demand through adjusting factors like pricing and packaging, than tailoring a message.

At the risk of over simplifying things, Advertising was a push mechanism while Marketing was a pull mechanism.

(I’m referring to the sharp end of Marketing here –the sales end, and not the broader context of the Marketing Mix.)

And that was basically the status quo until the advent of web 2.0

When social media in particular, blurred the distinction between pushing and pulling, because the internet has the unsettling ability to push and pull simultaneously.

You tweet, or upload a clip to YouTube, initially your tweet or video is simply a message you’re pushing, but if it gains any traction at all, it rapidly starts exerting a pull of its own.

And if it goes viral, the pull becomes cyclonic without diminishing and in fact, accelerating the push.

This almost contradicts the old wives' tale, about the impossibility of sucking and blowing at the same time. Which goes some way to explaining why as Google's  Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt memorably said, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand.”

Because we’re hard wired to sink or swim, not sink and swim.

And the Internet is riddled with contradictions: personal and public, 0ne-to-one and one-to-many, targeted and random.

It’s hard for us to understand anything that performs so many opposite actions simultaneously - it’s just not natural to suck and blow at the same time.

Or it wasn’t until recently.

But there's a lot of fusion going on.

Are you ready for Marketising?

The Emperor’s Black Turtleneck & the Kaiser’s Diet Soda

Legend has it that brands emerged from the fog of war. Back when both sides wore similar suits of armour and visors covered their faces, it was hard to distinguish friend from foe.

Until 1127, when the Count of Anjou solved the problem by introducing a shield emblazoned with golden lions.

This decorative yet practical idea caught on, and the small but influential industry of heraldry was born.

Now the guys with the golden lions could club the guys with the black dragons with far less chance of maiming one of their own.

Medieval trade guilds rapidly adapted this heraldic system by devising their own symbols to mark the quality of goods made by their members.

During the 17th Century, war became more sophisticated as widespread use of gunpowder and muskets made armour and shields redundant.

All the major Europeans armies were kitted out in uniforms to readily distinguished friend from foe.

Brands and uniforms are still intrinsically connected.

Take major sports franchises, whether it’s the pinstripes of the Yankees, or AC Milan’s rossoneri, the brand and the uniform are indivisible.

But brands and uniforms can also interact on a more personal level.

What would an Apple product launch be without Steve Jobs in his jeans, black turtleneck and sneakers? A uniform the Emperor of Apple  has worn consistently for close to 20 years.

{Image Fast Company}

It’s a look that speaks of simplicity and authenticity, but also of the confidence to be oneself, and perhaps a dash of stubbornness or single-mindedness.

So much so, that a younger version of the look was co-opted by TBWA/Media Arts Lab in 2006, for Apple’s “Get a Mac” TV campaign, facing off against a young Bill Gates lookalike.

At which point it gets a bit confusing as to where Mr. Jobs stops and Apple starts.

Just how much Mr. Jobs' personal style has been responsible for Apple’s success is a question many financial analysts have also asked about Apple, albeit arriving at it via spreadsheets and not sneakers.

There’s another legendary figure with a uniform who’s possibly even more recognizable than Mr Jobs.

Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, or The Kaiser as he's called by  fashionistas, although I imagine not to his face. Mr Lagerfeld is also known as the hardest working man in fashion and very  possibly the world.

He also sports a similarly distinctive uniform.

True, Mr. Lagerfeld’s uniform is a little less uniform than Mr. Jobs', as it undergoes subtle variations, but it’s every bit as recognizable.

So recognizable in fact that, Mr. Lagerfeld’s trademark look can be reduced to a simple graphic silhouette on these limited edition bottles he designed for Diet Coke.

Given Mr. Lagerfeld’s whiplash thin frame, this is undoubtedly an inspired piece of cross branding.

His emblematic representation reminds me a little of Don Quixote, is it too far-fetched to imagine it adorning a shield and glinting in the early morning sunlight centuries ago, upon the field of battle?

I don’t know whether Mr. Jobs and Mr. Lagerfeld have ever met, or indeed whether they would have much in common aside from their respective uniforms and a dislike of mediocrity.

But maybe that's enough for an alliance of the uniformistos.

I can see them now, riding forth like knights of old astride their steely chargers, in a sacred and unceasing quest for excellent design.

Maybe their alliance would bear the fruit of an inspired collaboration.

Karl Lagerfeld for Apple – an iPhone 5 limited edition.

Sires, what sayest thou?

Anyone Can Draw a Tiger

Everyone knows when they have an Aha! Moment. But nobody really knows where these Aha! Ideas come from.

Or what happens at that moment when the mind recognizes a thought as a new idea.

A 2004 study by neuroscientists Mark Jung-Beeman and Edward Bowden found an increase in neural activity in the brain’s right temporal lobe occurs during these moments.

So we know there’s increased traffic in the brain, but neuroscience seems to be years away, from really understanding the genesis of ideas and answering the question, what happens in the nanosecond an idea comes into creation?

Wired editor and author, Steven Johnson tackles the question from a social and cultural perspective in this excellent animation, Where Good Ideas Come From.

And Seth Godin knows they don't come from watching television, which must be a blow over at the The Discovery Channel.

Not to be out done, by these two luminaries, over the years I’ve conducted my own field research.

I’ve enjoyed some stimulating conversations and a few beers in pursuit of the answer, with the assistance of all kinds of creative minds,  from advertising people to architects, musicians to furniture designers.

Not forgetting a couple of astrophysicists I met at a fiesta in Merida.

And the result of all this collaborative investigation is…I still don’t know.

Sometimes ideas come as a result of grinding them out “Just work the problem harder,” as Einstein said.

Sometimes they come out of the blue, while you’re driving or taking a walk, or in a dream.

And usually they come from somewhere in between the two extremes.

There are some people you work with, and you riff off each other as effortlessly as  John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

And other people you work with where the process seems to internalize and feels like pulling hens’ teeth.

Fortunately, you don't need to know where ideas come from, in order to recognize them.

About a year ago I had my own tiny Aha! Moment.

It led to a very simple theory of creativity.

The clearest way of explaining it is to imagine a child’s dot to dot drawing book.

Anyone can draw a tiger if they just connect the dots in sequence.

Remove the numbers from the dots and it becomes a little harder.

Remove the dots all together and some people can still draw a tiger if they know that’s what they’re meant to draw.

But what if they don’t?

And that’s the point.

Because my very simple theory says: creativity is connecting dots that don’t exist.

And the magical thing is – when you connect them, they do.