In November 2012, as a young designer splitting my time between interning in creative agencies in Leeds and folding t-shirts in my local GAP, I was very much on the hunt for a full-time creative role and a move down to London.

In a moment of pure serendipity, a chance twitter search for #designjobs brought up a tweet from Tash Walker searching for a junior designer to join her new start-up agency.

A portfolio submission, train down to London and two-hour chat later, I was offered the position of “Visual Planner”.

Both Tash and her first business partner, Austin, come from branding agency backgrounds, and with that, recognised the value a creative could bring to their fledgling start-up. The fact I was the first hire when the core offering is market research speaks volumes to the founding principles of the agency – a willingness to be bold, to bring together people with different backgrounds and skillsets to do something different and challenge a tired and uninspiring industry.

My first few months were challenging and fun in equal measure; we had a fresh methodology and a vocal disdain for the type of soulless qual research that occupied the market, which inevitably meant we were seen as risky and unproven. The agency was in a situation that very much matched my own – young, hungry and looking for the right people to take a leap of faith and provide the opportunity.

Time in the early days was often split between trying to get a foot in the door with industry connections, or ruminating and business-planning over pints in the Woolpack pub, who’s beer garden our first office overlooked. We were figuring out the how, but the notion that whatever we did, it had to be real, genuine, human and not overly-rationalised felt instinctive and anchoring.

The gap between where we were then and where we are now feels incredibly significant. We have grown the business from a rebellious idea to a global agency. In the decade since, there have been some fantastic and bold brands who have joined us in our challenge to the market research industry, with businesses like Asics, Mozilla and Diageo having worked closely with us for a number of years.

In the name of better and more human research, The Mix now routinely works across all five continents. Over the last ten years we have run over five hundred projects for household brands, to get marketers more excited about the people that buy their products and inspires them into action.

In practice this has looked like: a lot of missed trains, hungover flights, navigating language barriers, enduring bacterial parasites, hosting immersive breakfasts, drunken dancing on tables, flying with an inflatable igloo, watching people open presents on Christmas morning, wheeling suitcases full of camera equipment, running a half-marathon, countless boxes of blindfolds, hosting film premieres and eating Sunday roasts with people all over the UK.

As an independent business, there has always been a prevailing attitude at The Mix to make your working life work for you. It’s why we’ve worked a four-day week for five years, and this entrepreneurial spirit has always been present within our creative team. An encouragement to develop your personal passions as part of your practice. To find gaps and spaces to explore new skills and different formats.

For me personally, this meant branching out from graphic design and into filmmaking and animation, two areas I had a personal passion for but no specific outlet. I’ve since been found with a camera in my hand all over the world, shooting documentaries with marathon runners in Tokyo and filming young creatives in Lagos.

As a team we’ve co-created a fanzine with grime fanatics for Sony Music, produced podcasts for Mozilla, popped-up bars for Diageo, and built immersive experiences for Disney.

There is a complete backing to try things out, even if it doesn’t necessarily work out, because this creative freedom means the agency isn’t just sitting still, but can always be fresh and unexpected.

The scale and ambition of the work has only been matched by the agency’s ongoing commitment to build a fantastic and diverse team. Based out of a new HQ on Bermondsey Street in London, and establishing an exciting new studio in New York City, the agency is in a fantastic position.

However, after the best part of a decade, the time is now right for me to take up a new challenge. To embrace all of the experiences from being a part of the building of The Mix in its start-up days, and the entrepreneurial spirit that is so core to the ethos of this agency.

Starting up afresh myself means I’ll be right back at the beginning of this journey again, back to the deep end of uncertainty and having to prove value from the ground-up.

If the last 10 years have shown me anything, it’s the importance of having conviction and welcoming challenge and fear.

I could not be prouder of what the team have achieved in my time here, especially in my last four years as Creative Director.

Thanks to all of the team at The Mix, past and present, for all of the laughs and just being great humans. We’re in the business of people, and you’ve all made it an incredibly fun and rewarding experience for me. A huge thanks also to my partners Tash, Gemma, Sam & Maria, for the support and advice throughout our time together. You have so many exciting things in the pipeline, I have no doubt that The Mix is destined to reach even greater heights over the coming years.

Ta-ra, good luck and thanks so much for everything.

Stephen

A time before we had apocalyptic style words like ‘pandemic’, ‘quarantine’ or ‘lockdown’ in our day-to-day vocab. Before we fought over toilet roll, baked beans and hand sanitiser. Before we received a side-eye look for coughing in public. Before zoom quizzes became the ‘in thing’ to do, and then very quickly became the most tedious thing to do. Before the blur between home-life and work became all too real.

A time before all the uncertainty.

Uncertainty.

This one word still marks our everyday lives. We have uncertainty over uncertainty.

We live in a world where we can’t make plans, without fear that they will be cancelled or postponed. We can’t book a holiday, without stress that it might not be able to go ahead (and possibility of losing all that £££). We can’t go to gigs, sports events or the theatre without the risk of picking up the virus. We can’t visit our elderly loved ones, without being anxious that we might pass something on. We can’t confidently plan for our major life events. Birthdays, weddings, funerals all still to be planned cautiously.

There is no textbook manual which tells us how to react to the ‘unprecedented’ change we have seen over the past couple of years. Some people have been able to ignore it, others adapt to it, and there are those who succumb to it.

We all react differently, that’s human nature.

We all know it can be all too easy to dwell on the uncertainty. However, it is human nature that helps us adapt to adverse conditions, to focus on the positives rather than the negatives.

With this in mind we have witnessed some of the most touching acts of community spirit and togetherness.

We’ve clapped for carers, the NHS and Captain Tom. We put an NHS nurse on the front cover of vogue and have raised over £150 million for NHS Charities Together. We’ve underscored the impact COVID has had on our mental health, and have promoted looking out for one another, through campaigns like the Dave x CALM x Murdock London campaign. We’ve taken more time out for self-care. We’ve focused more on our own health and the health of our loved ones.  

The time with the people we love is even sweeter. Going for a coffee with a friend, a games night with family, hugs with your niece and nephew. It is all cherished so much more. We have come to relish in what we would previously consider mundane. We are more thankful for what and who we have in our lives. Everything that we previously took for granted, now has a new meaning.

We’ve spent more time outdoors, with a whopping 46% of people saying that they spent more time in nature (People and Nature Survey by Natural England, July 2020). We’ve explored our local areas, and we’ve been getting our 10,000 steps in. We’ve travelled to other parts of the UK with places like Cornwall, Scotland and the Lake District seeing an exponential growth in the number of tourists.

We’ve seen businesses become more flexible, with many not fully returning to the office. This gives most employees a better work-life balance. Not commuting everyday gives us more time to focus on ourselves, it means we can squeeze in that gym class, or put our pjs on that bit sooner. It all helps with our mental wellbeing. The ability to work remotely also helps businesses. It means they can hire talent from further afield and improve employee retention.

There has been a reduction in pollution. The pandemic has cleared the air somewhat, reducing the amount of smog in large cities. It has cleaned the murky water in the canals in Venice. It has given nature a tiny sigh of relief.

We know the uncertainty is still there.

However, we are learning to live with it.

We are managing it better. We are more resilient. We can reflect on the positives that has come with it. We are falling in love again with the simple things in life. And as that wise old philosopher Winnie the Pooh once said":

“[we] are braver than [we] believe, stronger than [we] seem, [and] smarter than [we] think”

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“Mummy, the Prosecco man is here”

 It’s 9am on a Sunday morning and a slightly confused Tesco delivery man is stood at my front door with five bottles of Prosecco lying flat in their blue shopping tray. This is unintentional and totally avoidable, but nonetheless sometimes a welcome perk of the fact that I hate online shopping.

I should explain. I am a busy mum of three. And I have developed some strategies and shortcuts to help me get through. One of which is block booking up my food delivery slots weeks in advance so that I very rarely run out of supplies to keep the Fleming family functioning! So, I add 5 bottles of Prosecco to my basket, just enough to guarantee my delivery – knowing that I have until 11.46 on Saturday evening to make the changes and swap Prosecco out for nourishing food for my family. But because I hate online shopping, there have been several occasions now, where the Tesco delivery man arrives with just my 5 bottles of prosecco. Oh, the shame!

Don’t get me wrong – I love food and cooking. Food offers so many amazing benefits.

It is therapeutic. Having a recipe to focus on can help to calm your mind and wind things down at the end of the day. There is a reason we saw so many banana bread loaves being baked during the lockdowns – it provides a sense of control and accomplishment that can give a buzz of endorphins. 

It is educational. As a family, during lockdown, worried about how much the children were missing out on by being locked up we decided to travel the world every Saturday night from the confines of our kitchen. The kids would choose a country from our map and my husband and I would try to attempt their local cuisines. The kids loved this and we learnt loads in the process.

It is a source of nourishment. As a young competitive swimmer, I had a great grounding in nutrition and using food to fuel performance, heal and repair the body. When the children were much younger, my interest in functional medicine and nutrition returned as I looked to find ways to help them recover quickly from illness or overcome allergies.

And it is brings us together. We sit down as families or get together with friends. With study after study showing the impact of families who eat together being happier and healthier with lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher levels of resilience and self-esteem1.

All super important.

So, why then is food shopping so challenging for me.  It is the combination of balancing meals that everyone in my family will eat with actually having the time needed to make them between work, school pick-up, homework and clubs. Planning food out for the week can sometimes feel like a military operation – often with the battlefield becoming the table! I need to find things which will suit all likes and dislikes and deliver some nutrition to fuel their growing bodies and minds.

I have looked and tried many techniques for this – apps, planners, getting kids involved, keeping kids at arms-lengths. Nothing was nailing it for me. I have been waiting, and willing Tesco to launch a function where I can meal plan on their app and items get added to my basket automatically. And I search on this regularly. And by pure chance, last week, I stumbled across Tesco’s five meals for £25 meal planner where they have lots of recipes - you simply click on it and it adds the ingredients to your basket. Tesco, I salute you.

The Prosecco delivery man has not been for a while now and my fussy eating children have enjoyed several new meals with my daughter last night proclaiming that your Fish Puttanesca was the best thing she has ever eaten. This was a massive, massive win for me as we have been working through some issues around food recently and I am building a nice repertoire now of things she will not be able to resist.

Why am I sharing this with you today? Well, I have seen a lot of posts recently on social media – Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram all asking the question of how people manage and this is a big source of stress for parents and people who are keen to eat a healthy and balanced diet.

Last week Tash talked about how to write a great insight and so this week I wanted to demonstrate this in action, by using this example which is relatable to many.

I want to make my family healthy and nourishing meals because they aren’t little for long and I want to set them up with healthy habits for life but I have so much to think about in any given week that thinking about, planning for and shopping for food gets relegated to bottom of my priority or completely overlooked.

Solution: Tesco five meals for £25 – your weekly shop is now as easy as adding five bottles of prosecco to your basket!

A brand living its brand promise and showing how every little helps.

Thank you Tesco.

https://realfood.tesco.com/curatedlist/5-easy-family-dinners-for-25-january-week-2.html

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Columnists from the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, as well as LinkedIn bloggers and workforce experts, have all had a crack at answering why we have one of the biggest phenomena in voluntary and structural unemployment in 20 years: why do so many in the UK want to leave their job in the next year?

Some of the predictable answers you will have heard are: poor middle management, not enough holidays, improving employee benefits, and at worst, that people need to just ‘get on with it’ and find a job, whatever that might be.

All of these concessions remind me of why I could never work for a company without a four-day work week. And although, save for the lattermost reason, these are relevant symptoms to discuss, it’s laughable how far from the bullseye the arrow’s landing, when we currently stand no further than a meter from the target.

This deliberate cognitive dissonance has been addressed by many; the likes of David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs, James Suzman in Affluence Without Abundance, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi in his book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, even John Maynard Keynes’ monumental economic theories.

They all agree on a similar thing: in the future, with incredible advances in technology (which is now), we can and need to work less.

I'm going describe what the elephant in the room looks like and feels like for me, and why adopting a 4-day work week as the standard is less radical and absurd than sticking to the current 5-day doctrine of work.

Berardi argues that…

"technology enables the enhancement of social experience, and that particularly makes it possible to work less and enjoy more. But as soon as it is transliterated into economic terms, technology fuels frantic hyperactivity and competition on the one hand, and unemployment on the other"

Berardi is telling us that we need to let technology make our lives better, not just in terms of how we spend time outside of work, but how much time we have outside of work.

It’s easy to see this when we consider how increasing pressures on our finances, ‘hustle’ cultures of overwork, and the increasing difficulty in finding work that feels meaningful, paired with needing to work to survive, have had a palpable negative effect on people’s mental health.

In a poll conducted in the UK in 2020 by Personnel Today, it was found that "work-related stress is the most common form of stress in the UK – one poll found that only 1 percent of employees had never experienced it – while 1.6 million workers are suffering more generally from work-related ill health”.

Where for me, I assure you without irreverence, sleeping in on a Friday morning is a reality I thoroughly cherish. Having a cup of coffee by the windowsill and deciding whether my day will consist of kicking it with the homies, or maybe I’ll work on some music? Or maybe there’s more immediate household chores to get out of the way, much ado about it all.

Importantly, I decide. Sure, in the world we live in today these aren’t cure-alls. You might choose to do something different with your Friday, and I hope you do. Personally, having an extra day in the week to myself has done wonders for my stress levels, health, and happiness.

However, we can see with the UK’s 6-month 4-day work week trial, as well as how similar trials have been reported in the past, the primary indicators for their success are upshots in productivity and falls in absenteeism.

As more of us reclaim our Fridays, the success of 4-day work weeks will increasingly hinge on our wellbeing and happiness instead. And given that it’s probably not a leap for me to say you care about your happiness and wellbeing, and that it’s definitely not a leap for me to say I care about yours, why not start that conversation now?

But to make sure you’ll actually be better off and happier for it, a great deal of attention needs to be paid to maintaining a four-day work week. This isn’t just about putting it into company policy and sending a company-wide email. It needs contingency planning and a thorough change in the culture of an organisation and its members.

Especially if you’re a younger member of the workforce, fresh out of high school or university, with few connections to grant you security, competition between young workers is rife. The job you worked hard to earn is unfortunately a job that you know you’re easy to replace in.

That competitive survival mentality is a hard one to defeat. Of course, even for us we occasionally need to work a few hours on a Friday, though that is importantly an exception to the rule- however, if everyone thought they could get a leg up by working on Friday, the four-day week would no longer exist. The same is true for any company.

Another important topic when considering the relationship between work and mental health is the fulfilment we gain from work.

There’s a nation-wide, at times unspoken expectation that everyone should aspire to be fulfilled by their salaried work, and that anything beyond that must be confined to a hobby or become unmanageable.

This is why we talk about better work benefits like free gym memberships, more training opportunities, mental health support, better middle management, and more holiday, rather than addressing the more fundamental root of the problem; how much time we spend at work, and what that time looks like.

Speaking to people from all walks of life with a plethora of different interests and stories, figuring out a beautifully simple and compelling strategic plan, contributing to visually and emotionally striking creative campaigns, nailing that debrief and getting into an invigorating chat with a client, are just some of the things I find fulfilling about working as a strategist.

However, I also gain a huge deal of fulfilment from writing, recording, producing and performing music.

The feeling of chaos and euphoria when the strobe lights slice everything you see performing on stage into freeze frames of joy. The feeling of getting together with my friends and writing music we all get excited by and believe in.

These are things that require time, energy and planning, and things that traditional 5-day working weeks can’t accommodate comfortably.

James Suzman’s research tells us that during the pandemic, furloughed workers in the UK, “found work to do, but that work was much more satisfying than their jobs” (Vice, 2022). Switching to a 4-day week, as I’ve experienced personally, permits people to also pursue meaning and fulfilment outside of work, which puts less pressure on the workplace to provide this.

Allowing for this to be the case ultimately not only leads to a happier and more fulfilled workforce, but also to a workforce with more diverse thinking, and a greater breadth of experience to draw from.

Of course, these changes to the way we organise work and how much time we spend at work cannot happen in isolation. If working less is the way to tackle the “great resignation”, government support in the form of policies like Universal Basic Income, rolling out greater automation, and increased support for businesses in making these transitions will be necessary.

It is infinitely more absurd to stick to a 5-day work week, than to begin a conversation with your friends and colleagues about moving to 4 days instead. Given the points above, it’s fair to say the future can be hopeful and full of greater joy and fulfilment for everyone involved. The great resignation has little to do with the symptoms of how we work at this stage; it’s time to address the roots of the issue.

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Brands are a little like people. We all have our quirks and can lose our way which prompts reflection and readjustments to get back on track. And the brands I admire are the brands who veer off course and then come back stronger. As a strategist I love looking at problems to solve and a brand which has lost its way is the ultimate challenge. For me, what is interesting in these brands, is looking at the insights which drive the strategy step-change and then seeing how this translates into creative and media partnerships to bring the strategy to life.

Having worked within the not-for-profit space for the last few years, I had been tracking Cadbury’s activity and their shift in positioning from joy to back to generosity. 

“Gorilla drummer” left a mark on me and many others when it launched the brand to fame through the creative platform of “Joy” in 2007. The strategy was working well for them but was, in their own words, “not unique or ownable for the brand”.

Add an aggressive takeover, factory closures and the moving of production out of the UK and people started to fall out of love with the brand they had held so dear. A picture started to emerge which no Brand Manager wants to see - brand resonance and sales falling and penetration dropping from 73.6% in 2013 to 66.2% in 2017.

In Andy Nairn’s book Go Luck Yourself - he talks about the 40 ways in which you can stack the odds in your brands favour. And one such way is to look at a brands legacy - what gems do they have in their history which could serve you well to reinvestigate.

And this is what Cadbury and VCCP did. They went back to what is at the core of the brand.

When John Cadbury (1801 – 1889) established a manufacturing business in the early 1830’s he was a campaigner for social injustice, fighting the exploitation of child chimney sweeps, and other social ills. Helping disadvantaged communities was ingrained in Cadbury’s belief system. And this spirit of compassion, caring and generosity was as needed today as it was all those years ago. So, the brand team, and very clever strategists, chartered a course correction back to this heartland.  

Aware that this meant different things in different cultures, they carried out a big semiotic study to gain greater understanding as to how this spirit showed up in different cultures.

One key insight emerged – that the world was becoming a very polarised place. But that small acts of generosity were evident in all communities. And this is what people needed and wanted to see and hear in this time of turbulence and turmoil we were facing.  

This aligned with their product truth of a glass and half of milk in every bar and the generous spirit of the heritage of the brand. I am literally smiling writing this. When all of the arrows point in the same direction and highlight the path to take.

The other big strategic leap came from research into the psychology of generosity and its links to empathy and empathy being something which brings us closer together. Part of the brief was to reconnect the brand to their audience and this would become the core human truth which guided the strategy.

Research and insight drove the strategy and development of the generous instinct creative platform with the change from “there’s a glass and a half in every bar” to “there’s a glass and a half in everyone”.

And to me the sign of great strategy is simplicity and clarity it delivers which allows all parties to align in its delivery. The strategy here was so beautifully simple yet emotionally complex, that creative, media and partnerships were all able to take the platform and develop outstanding work from the core strategy.

Examples such as:

Mum’s birthday

Fence

Donate your words

Lockdown TV

The brand had reconnected with their audience on a human truth that ran through every culture. Sales grew significantly to 15.1% growth against a category rate of 3% in 2020 and drove penetration levels to the highest ever recorded of 74.6% in 2020. Market share increased from 14.1% in 2015 to 15.6% in 2020.  

Insight, strategy and creativity were undoubtedly the key ingredients for the brand revival, made possible by:

1)     Robust diagnosis of the problem – data driven insight which showed performance in decline due to disconnection with their audience

2)     Forensic examination of the brand – what it stands for, what is at its core, where are the connection points for engagement

3)     Research to establish cultural relevance of connection points and semiotics analysis to provide greater insight and fuel for creative development

4)     Clear, simple and concise strategy which connected the brand platform to creative proposition and clear articulation for everyone to unite around

Strategy should make the complex clear and simple with a clear roadmap and that is the core principle of this brand revival which I admire.

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Compiled with information from the following resources:

On Strategy Podcast

APG Creative Strategy Awards 2021: Donate your words  

Cadbury, a sweet tradition of giving: https://www.medalofphilanthropy.org/the-cadbury-family-a-sweet-tradition-of-giving/

Sounds obvious right?

Well not as obvious as it might seem. I don’t know about you but before opening a research agency I often found myself drifting off in a research debrief.

“Mum’s are really busy” and “I don’t like the colour red” being some of my most favourite pearls of wisdom gleaned from a 2hour market research debrief.

Brand consultancies pride themselves on being strategic, why not research agencies?

Strategy in my experience rarely crosses paths with market research.

A classic trait of most agencies is a lot of ‘you could do this’ or ‘you could do that’.

Never have so many fences been firmly sat on.

But this is all wrong.

As an industry we only really have one client. People.  

People that buy the products and services that you want to sell or get them to use.

It is our job in market research to bang the drum for utility on their behalf.  We have one job to do, which is to make the lives of people we research better.

Lord knows the world doesn’t need more stuff.  What it needs are products and services that actually do a job and even if for a brief moment, create a little bit of joy or satisfaction.

Perhaps it comes down to how we define ‘tells you something’.

What we don’t mean at The Mix is that it tells you everything we heard.

What we do mean is we tell you what you need to go and do a better job.

Might sound like a semantic but it literally amazes me that in the 21st century, market research continues to be obsessed with presenting every possible viewpoint.  Research in the 21st century, has a moral duty to observe and understand what we see but then also be able to communicate with great clarity the one thing that will make a product or service better for the people that use it.

If we don’t, we have failed and more crap stuff will keep getting produced.

So if you are on the side of utility, then you need to pay attention to the small stuff, understand the viewpoints but then make some choices.

‘The essence of strategy is sacrifice’

- David Ogilvy

Perhaps never more has this been an important phrase to remember and perhaps never more has research needed a bit of sacrifice.

“Consumers won’t say 'Here’s more ads, thanks!' They think 'I thought I’d got rid of you with the skip ad button but now I find that I haven’t because you’re in my friendship circles"

- Nils Leonard

WE ARE LIVING IN AN ATTENTION ECONOMY.

This much we know. What we don’t know or can’t appreciate is the human cost of this attention grabbing or the effect it is having on traditional business models that are not built to withstand such relentless competition.

Even marketing literature is littered with attention grabbing phrases such as ‘TV is dead!!’, ‘content is king’ and other such nonsense. We simply don’t know how to measure this effect on individuals and more problematically for business, how to really know whether marketing now has any impact at all.

In 2012 the ASA (advertising standards authority) published a report that suggested that every year, 89% of all communication in every year is not remembered. 5 years hence I can only imagine that this figure hovers around 99%.  

We are living in an arms race, an unwinnable war producing the most enormous amount of horseshit the world has ever seen. And the real victims in all of this are people.People who are bombarded with ever more disruptive messaging, ever more intrusive marketing initiatives designed to wrestle your attention from you, precisely because so many others are engaged in the same attention fracking activity.

WE HAVE TO FIND A DIFFERENT WAY.

For the sake of business and for the sake of our experience of being a human in the world today, we have to find another way of providing utility and experiences which benefit people and don’t simply drag them from their real lives against their wills.

Research has a large part to play. Traditional methods don’t help you see the impact of your communications on the lives of the people you are trying to interact with. They simply help you see how effectively you have hacked into someone’s life. A pretty blunt measure and definitely not one designed to improve our every day lives.

We don’t believe this pays off for business. A campaign or piece of packaging creative doesn’t exist in isolation and yet this is how we do research in marketing.  It results in more shouty messages and more irritation on the part of consumers.  Think about it, when was the last time you looked at your Facebook or Instagram feed and felt really glad to be interrupted?  People switch off at best and at worst decide to actively avoid your brand altogether on the basis that it is polluting their lives.

Our tech platform Cumulus, offers you a more empathetic way of understanding the role communications should play in the lives of the people that buy your brand. It also offers you the chance to do or say something that might improve life quality instead of just nicking someone’s attention.

I was walking through Shoreditch the other day with my husband and we saw this billboard advertising the re-release of the Sgt. Peppers album.

There was a group of people standing underneath it looking.
Unusual for a billboard I think we can all agree.

I imagined someone was being mugged or something but no.

They were looking because the billboard was literally growing.
The foliage underneath the main image was an actual flowerbed, containing real live flowers, and the central bass drum was a real physical object, not just an image of one.

Billboards don’t usually stop people in the street.
For the most part, no one takes any notice at all.
They are an unconsidered blur at worst, at best a time waster if you are waiting for the tube.

Sure we can all argue that they lodge brands in your brain without you really noticing, but on the whole, the message is lost, the point doesn’t land and according to the ASA, 89%* of the time, you may as well not have bothered.

Yep, 89% of all forms of marketing communications every single year aren’t remembered.

So when you manage to cause people to literally stop in the street, this is something to stand up and take note of.

I’ve seen this before.

Last year, I was walking past Waterloo station and the same thing occurred. This time, the billboard was a Wimbledon themed tennis court promoting the Real Fruit campaign from 2016. The tennis court was hanging off the side of the wall, with an enormous great big orange segment to boot.

The message literally broke out of the usual confines for a billboard.

It is truly remarkable that this one act of breaking out from the flat dimension can radically alter our understanding and appreciation of the message.

If we apply reason to understand why this is happening it perhaps isn’t that surprising.

There is too much stuff in the world.

An average Briton checks their smartphone 221 times a day and we consume an enormous number of messages in the 8hrs and 41 minutes we spend on screens every single day.

Our experience of the world as human beings has become increasingly over reliant on a world, which is condensed into one dimension. Be that on a screen, on a wall or in a magazine.

Like an athlete who trains every day of their life and is in peak physical condition, we have become enormously efficient at processing this vast quantity of stuff.

We efficiently discount almost everything for the sake of our sanity.
Our brains see almost nothing new or distinctive amongst a sea of stuff, which overworks our eyes and under utilizes just about every other sense.

We are selective about what we choose to engage with because if we weren’t we would probably not even be able to get out of bed.

Disagree? Scroll down and watch this video.
Pay attention to who has the ball by the end…

Notice anything?

Whilst you were merrily looking for the person with the ball and unless you’ve seen it before, what you most probably won’t have noticed is the bloke in the Gorilla suit who enters the scene and dances around for a bit.

Yes a chap in a Gorilla suit isn’t disruptive enough for your brain to choose to notice.

In this famous study, typically between 60-80% of people don’t notice the Gorilla.

And it doesn’t matter if you are educated, rich, poor, have a job that requires you to pay attention, are in the police or the bloody secret service.

Our brains simply choose not to engage with most of everything that we are presented with.

The medium dictates the way we process the information.
The medium renders almost everything invisible.

What is remarkable is how little you have to do to break the tyranny of this flat plain.

Like the Sgt. Peppers billboard, or the Robinson’s billboard.

And if this is true of advertising then the same works for information we use to try and encourage or inspire one another.

Think of the creative brief.
Or an audience portrait.

A piece of A4, a slide of powerpoint.
Some boxes. Some words.

Jane is 34 and lives in Slough with her two children…

You could put a gorilla in there and no one would notice because no one gives a shit about Jane who is 34 from Slough.

If we want to challenge this monumental waste of time and money that happens in marketing, perhaps we need to go back to basics and think about what we are saying and to whom.

If you use boxes to dictate your brief, then you will receive boxes as your campaign.

I will tell you who hasn’t heard the phrase ‘content is king’.  That is people.

Living now, right here in the 21st century we’ve created our own perfect version of hell.

A world where we have become so distracted by the petulant shouts and screams of advertising messages that we ignore our own children, partners and friends.

Don’t worry about sleep! Get sucked into another Reddit wormhole.

Drop your phone down the toilet as your concentration lapses whilst scrolling endlessly through Instagram!

Be interrupted for the 11th time in 45minutes whilst you are listening to music/watching TV/reading an online paper.

CONTENT IS THE DISEASE OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

IT IS LIKE JAPANESE KNOTWEED.

A weed deemed so dangerous and invasive that you can’t even get a mortgage on a house that has it.

Like knotweed - where content thrives it suffocates everything else around it.  You can’t just pull it up because 50 more bits of content will sprout up in its place, seeding and re-seeding itself until all is just a mirage of re-hashed bollocks that no one needs or cares about.

The thing is, that by making more of this stuff you are literally punching yourself in the face.  Studies have shown that the cognitive losses involved in looking at your phone are worse than those of smoking a joint.  Literally the opposite of brand building.

Good brand building requires two things.

1. Distinctiveness

2. Memorability

You’ve got to be distinct from everyone else to be noticed and you’ve got to remain lodged in someone’s brain for future references when they might be considering buying something from your category. 

 The challenge is that the more content we produce, the harder it is for anyone to see anything because content is like heavy smog.  It is impenetrable, and the oxygen depletion involved makes us more stupid.

 The more content people produce the more it shapes the kinds of marketing we do, and the more the narrative is driven by simply the idea of producing content.

 You can imagine how such conversations go:

“Oh we should totally do x,y,z that will make amazing content’.

“That will literally look amazing on Instagram.”

CONTENT HAS BECOME THE MEANS AND THE END.

The result is that for the rest of us in the real world, everything becomes shittier.

Your experiences online are more annoying.

Your experiences at work are more interrupted.

Your distractedness around your own family is made worse.

When content is your obsession you forget about things that actually matter.

Like good brand experiences.

I went to a Justin Timberlake gig the other night at the O2 - it was ace.

As per usual the queues for the bars were unreasonable and they mostly serve beer anyway which isn’t my drink.

Then I spotted a new bar, called ‘The Schweppes Ultimate Mixer”, a bar selling spirits and Schweppes mixers.  They encourage you to try adding a twist to your usual drink and thus provide the ultimate spirit/mixer experience.

 I actually did a jig, I’m a G&T girl so the thought of not having to queue for an over-priced crap G&T from the beer bar filled me with great joy.

The menu showed all the options, there were pictures of heavily garnished G&T’s looking 50 shades of delicious and at £7 each, I felt like I was going to get an expensive but ultimately great drink.  This for me represents good value.

I ordered two.

What I got, was a plastic cup of gin with a warm small can of tonic. 

No ice.

No garnish. Not even a drop of lime.

Not even the smallest hint of care.

I was once served a G&T by a man called Ian (who had only one tooth), in a social club in the arse end of Wiltshire. I paid £1.50 for it and it was delivered with more aplomb and significantly more care than these mugs.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised but this for me represents the problem of content.  The whole experience was designed to look good in ‘content’.  

It was all for show. 

When content drives the conversation everyone forgets about what it is really like to make products and services that actually work. 

Like Japanese Knotweed, content should come with it’s own health warning and a threat to withdraw investment should it be detected within 100ft of the brand.  It befuddles those that work on brands and causes them to chase wildly spurious ideas that fix nothing for real life people.

We’ve got plenty of problems in the world today.

We don’t need more bad G&T’s in the world contributing to that.