When a product hits the shelves it has been carefully designed, packaged and manufactured. With the start of the 3,894,209th (or so it seems) series of Big Brother this week, this got us thinking about how people are designed for media consumption. Past reality show successes have included Tourettes poster boy Pete Bennett, anorexic WAG Nikki Grahame, and the infamous Jade Goody. All of them possessed the now formulaic talents needed to make it into the public eye: personal tragedies, life-threatening illnesses, and utter stupidity. Having your 15 minutes now takes a simple design process. It starts with the TV auditions. After queuing for hours the wannabes are put through a process of exploitation. Those who make it through are the ones with the juiciest secrets, the least dignity, and the most desire to ‘make it’. And so, the new batch of celebrity prototypes is ready. Only the best will survive the next production stages. Once in the house/jungle/etc, the contestants are tested to the max through tasks, video diaries, and personality clashes. They are whittled down over the weeks and the ones that have sparked the most tabloid interest will make it through to the final, where one remaining guinea pig will be selected. This final product has been perfectly designed for celebrity consumption. The final stage for the short shelf-life star is a desperate attempt to cling onto their fame, usually by writing an autobiography or appearing in Nuts. After this, they are thrown into the reduced items basket, with the new batch already processed and waiting to be sold.

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Visual Editions, nicknamed VE, is an interesting new publisher which creates books that offer a new kind of reading experience. Like this one, which takes American author Jonathan Safran Foer’s forthcoming Tree of Codes and die-cuts every page to form an integral part of the storytelling. Co-created by our very own Danish Britney and her friend Anna, they say, “Our belief is that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell. With the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page do.” They have coined this ‘visual writing’ and their strapline is ‘Great looking stories’. The idea for VE came from the unnecessary divide as they saw it, between text-driven literary books and picture-driven art and design books. VE plan to publish books that others say are impossible to produce; books that aren’t worthy of being called a ‘book’; and bring heavy-reading books to life with a new visual language. In our increasingly visual culture, we really like the idea of bringing books to life in new ways and for new audiences (as Penguin are doing too).

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We’re often told about the ‘future’. Whether it’s iPads, clogs, or the latest trend from PSFK, but this is the first thing we’ve seen in a while which we actually think could be the future. The Taiwanese have designed a train that never stops at stations, which would completely transform the speed of travel. The idea is to have passengers board a connecting car that would attach to the train as it moves through a station, while another connecting car would be left behind. Passengers would leave the connecting car once they were on the move and return to it before it was time for their stop. The reason I like this concept so much is its scale. Inventions and ‘the future’ tend to be about how can we make things smaller, portable and more convenient? But what about grand aspirations. I envy the generation who could dream about something as epic as the first human to walk on the moon. Look out for the point in the video where he demonstrates using a model railway.

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After 50 years, “the crumbliest, flakiest milk chocolate in the world” is no longer. Cadbury’s Flake has dropped its iconic strapline in favour of a fashion pack approach. Flake’s new ad, which airs this week, features Russian model Yulia Lobova, suspended in air and twirling in a yellow ruffled dress made of over 200 metres of fabric. The dress was created by London designer Antony Price (who used to design costumes for Roxy Music) and was inspired by looking at the edges of a Flake bar. The campaign manages to look more like a fashion installation than a Cadbury’s ad, which is probably where the brand needed to progress to in terms of how it thinks about ‘indulgence’ (from baths to designer frocks). Infact, so fashion-y is the ad that it has been accused of ripping off the Kate Moss hologram for Alexander McQueen’s (RIP) AW06 show (a fair challenge since director Bailey Walsh did that too). Prefer the old ads? Reminisce here.

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Dragon’s Den to pitch his range of school accessories designed to help kids concentrate, it was clear that we were looking at an inventor with ambition, genius and a touch of insanity. Most of the Dragons were unimpressed with his prototype products, but Peter Jones saw potential in the entrepreneur, offering the full £100,000. Since then, Mark’s educational design company Concentrate has launched several products including a schoolbag that transforms into a chair cover (to make kids more comfortable), the voting ruler (to help kids express their opinions), and novelty pre-chewed pencils (less chewing, more concentrating). Mark popped into Mother last week to talk about how he designs things. The Pre Chewed Pencils started out as a joke idea he said, but became an overnight business and viral hit. Instead of employing an army of hard-toothed interns to help him, he developed a production process that would help keep up with demand. Now he just needs to come up with a pre-written to do list and an already updated Facebook account and we’ll all be distraction free.

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The best strategy for getting what you want out of life, according to the economist John Kay, is to stop pursuing your goals. He argues that goals are best achieved indirectly, what he calls Obliquity. A few of us went to see Kay talk about this at The School of Life, in a very quirky alternative sermon that involved singing Talking Heads songs. His book on Obliquity deals with the art of decision-making in the modern age. An Aristolean thought, Kay argues that happiness is a by-product of fulfillment in work and life, not by pursuing it directly. If you look at the most profitable companies the world he says, they are not the most dedicated to profit. Even a toupee profiteer like Donald Trump says, “I don’t do it for the money. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.” The planned cities of the world like Canberra and Dubai, are dull and soulless. The great cities of the world like Paris and London, evolved of their own accord. Obliquity is being described as a revolutionary, if paradoxical concept. However, us Mother lot left John Kay at the pulpit with the distinct feeling that we’d heard it somewhere before. Is there really a difference between ‘obliquity’ and ‘serendipity’ (the happy accident)? Isn’t obliquity what John Lennon was getting at when he sang ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans’?  Perhaps John Kay would whole-heartedly agree, in which case, he’s given us one more word with which to describe the delightful art of ‘going with the flow’.

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A report on the nature of employment in 2018 by the Chartered Management Institute, predicts that companies will come to regard ‘wisdom’ as a valuable resource. Companies will try to nurture an organisational memory by arranging rituals and storytelling, and listening to the accounts of long-term employees. Technology and the semantic web will move us from information management to “managing wisdom”. Managers will then be looked to more for their foresight, emotional intelligence, leadership, and ability to deal with change, managing a more diverse workforce on a more individualised basis. They will have a role in supporting employees as work-life balance evolves into work-life integration for many of us. These ‘wisdom workers’ will be driven by an ageing population and a more uncertain, evolving marketplace. Many talented people will become “multi-employed”. Indeed, collaborative working could become so important that companies abolish positions and job titles altogether. “Instead each employee should be seen as a valuable resource, to be employed according to specific organisational needs”, the report states. Read more about work in 2018 here.

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New Scientist recently ran an article written by futurist John Casti about how collective wisdom and social mood has a profound effect on the world. His book Mood Matters, makes the radical assertion that all social events ranging from skirt lengths to the rise and fall of civilizations are biased by the attitudes a group – be that a subculture, nation, or even the world – holds toward the future. When the “social mood” is positive and people look forward to the future, events of an entirely different character tend to occur than when society is pessimistic. Perhaps then, we should be spending time and money ascertaining the ‘social mood’ of groups that affect our brands and helping them build more robust strategies for the way the world will be, rather than the way the world is?


Thanks to dan broadwood for this one.

Paul Feldwick was at Mother last week to deliver a talk on how advertising works. He called it ‘The Messaging Myth’, and in one erudite, half hour swoop, convinced us all to trust our instincts about what makes advertising successful, rather than what the econometrics and LINK tests like to tell us. If you get the chance to see Paul deliver this talk (or any other for that matter), he’s an incredible speaker and arguably, the midwife to the birth of advertising effectiveness. Paul’s argument is simply, that when advertising is effective, it appeals to the heart, not the head. Sounds obvious but as an industry we don’t do it. Despite the fact people have been talking about it for years. Effective advertising, Paul says, is about building relationships and creating associations, rather than delivering messages. It’s about the pleasure you get from the whole ad rather than whether you got the ‘message’. As he puts it, it’s “the visual, visceral power of the entire advertisement; its colour, movement, music, timing and every detail.” Almost an artist’s way of measuring effectiveness. Which is another of Paul’s points. Bill Bernbach used to say, “You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.” This got us thinking about how advertising might change if we did adopt this. If we make the emotions and associations our objective, rather than the message, this pushes the strategic process into creative development. Perhaps ‘creative partners’ in the future will be strategic, creative, engagement, and production hybrids. Uber-teams of multiple disciplines could crack whatever you throw at them. Leading to much more diverse, fluid, and perhaps creative advertising.


Thanks to sam payne for this one.


References:
Scamp
Thinkbox

In his seminal book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki convinced us that the masses would be better than the elite few at fostering innovation. Brands swift to embrace user-generated content were seen as ahead of the game. Writers like Nicholas Carr turn this thinking on its head in his essay The Ignorance of Crowds. Talented individuals, rather than crowds, they say, are still the best at innovation. One of the most compelling arguments is that the Web 2.0 model, exemplified by Wikipedia, is built on consensus rather than fact. Therefore, if the crowd says two plus two equals five, then this becomes truth, which renders Web 2.0 deeply flawed. This is one of the reasons why ‘co-creation brief’ has started to be seen as a curse rather than a blessing. So how do you make sure that “wisdom” doesn’t turn into “groupthink”? We think it’s probably about understanding what consumers are good at, and what’s best left to the experts, and where involving the customer makes business sense. The music industry is a good example of the how the wisdom of the crowd has succeeded where the short-sightedness of the elite has failed. Sites like Slice The Pie, Sell A Band and Artist Share have turned fans into investors and created a new business model for an industry in transition.


Thanks to jon miller and sarah rabia for this one.


References:
Viewpoint
Antidote


Image Credit:
The Apathist