The BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty sums him up in three words here “Charismatic, explosive, contrary”.   It is the latter that explains his brilliance for me.  Sir Alex has never acted as he was “supposed to”.  When Wayne Rooney first threatened to quit, back in 2010, Ferguson created a reality-changing “Truth Turning Point” (a pivotal moment in communications that “defies every convention .. and gets the audience to the truth quickly and easily”), which I examined in detail in my book.  McNulty goes on: “Love him or hate him, football in general and Man United in particular will be poorer for his departure.”  Of course he is hated as well as loved.  Which is characteristic for non-conformists and explains why there isn’t a richer pool of non-conformists out there. 

This matters.

According to Professor Costis Markides, speaking at a Deloitte breakfast in early May, non-conformity is the key ingredient to innovation and creativity.  Yet learning to conform is almost unavoidable.  Markides cited the landmark survey developed by George Land as a test of creativity.  Land ran his test with a set of kids over their childhood and adolescence.  Aged five 98% of the kids qualified as “creative geniuses”.  When those same kids were tested at age ten 30% were at genius level.  Aged fifteen : 12%.  That longitudinal test then ended (Land quips “because everyone got depressed..”).  But when over 1m adults were given the same test the result was 2%.

Land concluded that “non-creative behaviour is learned”.  Or, put it another way, we learn to conform.  Most of us like to conform.  Resisting conformity can be a lonely road.  Most people don’t manage it – even when conforming clearly doesn’t make any sense, as this famous Candid Camera  sketch clip shows clearly.

So here’s to the non-conformists.  To those who reject conformity, because they don’t think it’s right for them.  (Not the ones who are outside the law, that’s not what this is about). To the people who zig when everyone else zags.  Who stay mute when everyone else is singing along.  Who won’t take part in communal games and who absent themselves just as the drinking is gaining momentum. The owners of the banged up Citroen in a carpark full of BMWs.  The ones with the unusual dress sense and unpopular tastes in music.   Who don’t automatically do as they are told, and yet have a good reason.  They should be cherished and they should be encouraged.  If you can make room for them within your organisation – and research shows that they’re few and far between – they may be the ones that make the real difference in sustained innovation, creativity and competitive advantage.

As far as Google Glasses are concerned the media is torn between fear of a loss of privacy and excitement about the possibilities of augmented reality.  The first images are circulating from users tests (though the pictures are underwhelming so far).  The first user guide shows how to operate the head set, which features a clock, the weather, a camera, video calls, maps and Google Translate.  You can see the possibilities. 

Much of the writing online about Apple’s iWatch is rumour so far.  Wall Street is said to be questioning whether CEO Tim Cook can match Steve Jobs’s ability to “think different”.  But a computer on the wrist.  Sounds cooler than wearing specs.

There will be challenges for brands from computers on wrists or in glasses.  Will GG distract from outdoor advertising, or could it enhance it as second screens will enhance the effectiveness of advertising on TV?  The role advertising might have in GG is not clear yet, though having a brand that’s strong enough and consistent enough to navigate the challenges will be paramount. 

If I look round MediaCom I see more people wearing watches than wear glasses, even though nobody needs a watch to tell the time anymore.  So unless Google can quickly come up with the similar but more discreet Google Contact Lenses, Apple might win the fashion war.

Fashion perhaps but also nostalgia.  The GG vs iWatch adoption curve might have a lot to do with your childhood TV viewing affinities.  GG vs iWatch = Joe Ninety vs Captain Kirk.  Here’s hoping neither is the new ponytail.

Some things do take a little longer to get here than you expect. But that doesn’t mean they’re not coming eventually.It’s a year since my book (co-authored with Jonathan Salem Baskin) Tell the Truth, Honesty is your most powerful marketing tool, was published.  In the epilogue to the book we said “More and more marketers are turning away from easily constructed spin and digging deep into the truth of their brands.  We believe that in 5 years we’ll look back on the art of spin as an anachronism”. One year on, where are we ?

My American co-author can, like many a genuine iconoclast, be hard on what progress there has been.  In his recent new publication which tackles the very definition of brands : “Branding still only works on cattle” he writes, “It’s 2013 now, and the crisis I thought I saw has proven to be a chronic affliction.”

I’m more optimistic. I’ve just been judging some international awards so have had a window on what the industry considers worth shortlisting.  I can’t disclose brands as the judging is in progress but from the 17 strong shortlist most campaigns contained a core of truth telling, although one outlier entry actually did the very opposite. Good work is always based on truthful consumer insights.  Truth is a key criteria that distinguishes good from bad.  The question is whether the truth agenda is present in every marketing conversation? 

My personal experience is that it is but sometimes still as a route that must be discounted for one reason or another.  Some voices still urge caution in meeting rooms around town, as if representing the consumer truth in communications should be played down, or even is a slippery slope that is to be avoided at all costs.  So there is mixed progress. I think more and more people are joining the ranks of truth tellers in communications, but the speed of the progress is unquestionably nowhere near as fast as the change in consumer behaviour. 

The reason that truth has risen up the agenda is that digital innovation and social media make this an imperative.  As Jon and I wrote in Tell the Truth : “Half a century ago, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy said, “The consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.”  Now, the consumer is the expert who knows everything about your brand.  What’s missing can be uncovered on a smartphone from a variety of sources”.  More and more sources, in fact. The latest Deloitte Media Consumer Survey : Love in a cold climate points out that device proliferation continues to grow.   The average UK citizen now owns 11.4 types of media devices (up from 9.7 in 2011).   Deloitte conclude that, despite the recessionary times, “UK consumers’ love of technology seems undiminished… and with new products such as wearable devices on the verge of commercial launch, consumers will become even more connected ”. 

More connected.  More knowledgeable about your brand.  More exacting of the truth.

According to the book of Genesis, the whole world once had a single language.  And because they had a single language they really began to get somewhere.  The people of the the city of Babel said: “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.  Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves”.  Now unfortunately for the people of the world the Lord didn’t like what was going on.  He is reported in Genesis as remarking : “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

Since then the world has been pulled apart by language.  There are over 7,000 in existence, (although most people speak one of the 11 main languages.)  Translation has been big business for centuries because there has been international trade for centuries, but especially since the demise of Latin as the main language of the educated in the West.  Although mechanical translation has existed for some time, it has always been regarded as second best by a long way.

Not now.  Google Translate is making as sweeping a change to mass market and democratic international communications as Google Search did to libraries and e-commerce.  It works in a completely different way to previous computer systems for translation, in that it doesn’t just give you the literal translation for a phrase, it gives you the most likely translation given every other translated expression that sits anywhere on the world wide web. 

In September 2009 the new White House administration issued the “Strategy for American Innovation” policy roadmap to address “The Grand Challenges of the 21^st Century”.  One of those challenges was the development of “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world – greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration”.  Google Translate is a revolutionary step forward in this challenge. 

Meanwhile what’s the state of our own media research translation ?  Our head of Business Science Jane Christian said recently that media measurement is still in silos and that this “is hampering its usefulness. Stakeholders for each comms channel are concentrating on how best to measure the effectiveness of their respective channels, given the techniques that big data and technology allow. The problem here is that each technique is different and not comparable with the others, so when marketers ask the question ‘how should I allocate my budget across channels?’, there isn’t a clear answer. What we need is joined up media measurement across all channels. Without it, all these big data driven measurement solutions aren’t as useful as they claim to be. Joined up media measurement will ensure we deploy our budget across channels most effectively. “

As far as this is concerned we must ask ourselves whether we are sitting in the Tower of Babel, with little idea of how much exactly better things would be in terms of budget allocation and effectiveness if we had a lingua franca of media measurement. 

There are barriers in the way of this of course.  Also there are new opportunities all the time to help comms directors to deliver it.  One of these is to consider whether it is necessary to change the tone of the brand now that it can speak in new ways to consumers. 

When you see a presentation from Twitter they will usually include an example of O2 doing this brilliantly.   My experience of Twitter by candlelight was that the tone of the customer service tweeters during the power cut was really human (and not corporate) and attuned to my situation (not defensive). There are other examples that we can all think of that haven’t worked so well, but let’s stick with the positives.  Let’s think about how to make it better.

At a recent “TAGtribe JAM” in Grey’s offices in Hatton Garden, we were debating the future of content.  (No small subject then.)  My view is that we will increasingly seek partnerships with media owners to create brilliant and effective campaigns.  Our recent work for Time for Change (the campaign to end mental health discrimination) was an example of this.  I’m really proud to have had some involvement in this work; our partnership with  C4, IPC and The Voice was a very different approach from traditional buyer/seller ways of working.  

My co-panellist at TAGtribe Jam Ann Handley, who is Chief Content Officer (CCO) at Marketing Profs, made a slightly different point.  She felt that every brand needs a CCO to be its voice for the consumer, and the first place she’d look for a CCO would be in journalism. 

These two perspectives may come to the same thing.  There is an opportunity for brands to use the experts in creating content for consumers (journalists and editors) to be the voice for the brand in talking to the consumer.  Author David Bellos, director of intercultural communication at Princeton writes : “Journalists think of their job as turning plain information into arresting, entertaining or readable prose suited to the culture, interests and knowledge of the people who read them”.   Substitute “content” for “prose” and “potential customers” for “people” and you get a good job description for the role of CCO for a brand.

Of course both camps are right and wrong.  Let’s simplify the issue.  Let’s say that there are just two kinds of good comms.  One drives desire, the other harvests that desire.  Clearly data will make the latter more efficient and more effective.  Data also has a role to play in comms that build desire, but it is not only driver of those comms strategies.  Good old fashioned human insight is essential to explain and interpret the information that data can provide.  Consumer and market place understanding will continue to be sourced from all kinds of insight, some of which will be qualitative rather than quantitative, ethnographic rather than interactional, of course behavioural economics and even gut instinct.    This is true whatever the medium. 

Recently Carolyn Everson was interviewed by Ian Darby in Campaign.  She said in closing :

“When Mark [Zuckerberg] first interviewed me, he said: ‘I want the content from marketers to be as good as that from your best friend.’ That was his vision – I don’t think we’re there yet; I think it’s a long-term vision that we have to get to – but the goal is to have marketing become as integrated an experience as any content you’d get from your friends.”

I agree with Carolyn here.  We are nowhere near there yet.  Facebook users are unused to being interrupted by advertising (I’m talking brand building and desire creating advertising here, not harvesting demand or DR).  The real joy of FB is that you stay in touch with a wide circle of friends and family who constantly surprise and delight you with their updates.  You’ll be the fan of various brands or organisations that you really warm to.  But your expectation will be that the updates that they bring you will be as great as the updates from your actual friends.    This requires much stronger, more insightful, and more in depth consumer insight than any other medium.  To compete for positive attention in this environment any brand communicating on FB needs to understand you as intimately and as personally as your friends and family do. And your friends don’t track all your recent internet activity, e-commerce or supermarket receipts like big data can (or at least if they do you have the wrong kind of friends).  That isn’t how they have insight into you.

Now, some of your FB friends have known you all your life, so this is quite a big ask.  Not one that can be solely satisfied by algorithms.  I don’t think therefore that the need for great consumer insight is being overshadowed at all.  I think it’s about to have a new, invigorated, lease of life (or likes).

The two days covered a range of subjects and included David Smith’s vision of global futures (the rise and rise of the middle classes around the world), Colin Strong’s challenge of the smartness of Big Data (needs the perspective of market research), new research technologies based on neuro-marketing and facial recognition and Les Binet and Peter Field’s new take on the IPA Datamine.

My role was to question, well just about everything.  My session was titled “Are we fixating on the wrong things?” which gave me plenty of scope for challenging the status quo.  My conclusion was that we have to eliminate siloed thinking: between channels, between territories, between business units, between advertising that drives desire and advertising that harvests demand and between media industry research methodologies.

I was not the only one to think that siloes need demolishing.  I think it was a bit of a theme.  Binet and Field’s work looked at the power of Brand Response – a practice which we have championed for over a decade at MediaCom – which combines brand advertising and immediate response techniques for long term healthy return of investment.  London Business School’s Paddy Barwise reprised his philosophy that marketing is nothing without service delivery.  He also told us firmly not to speculate on our own personal experiences quoting Dr Deming who said “In God we trust, everyone else must bring data”.

The latest research from Thinkbox looked at Paid, Owned and Earned media and pointed out that being talked about happens in the real world as well as online, and the former is often kinder than the latter, so we must consider both when judging buzz for a brand.  Both are driven by TV. 

Matt Stockbridge’s fabulously entertaining client keynote on day 2 showed the absolute need to take in the whole picture before judging which elements of the marcomms mix are working and which are not.

There was a great deal covered in the two days.  My overall sense however is that unless we take a sledgehammer to the siloes and unless we drive more of a partnership approach on behalf of brands then we won’t fufill the absolute potential that new data solutions offer us.

Mat talked persuasively about the key difference good design makes.  Like so much else the secret is to make it relevant and attuned to the customer rather than merely to the needs of the organisation. 

One example he gave was of a colleague using head mounted cameras to help with the redesign of emergency admissions in hospitals.  What do you see when you’re lying down and being treated ? A dull and fusty looking ceiling.  What could you be seeing ?  All kinds of calming, or informative signage which could help your state of mind and your well being.

As Mat pointed out, violence in accident and emergency departments has been a focus of international concern and costs millions.   Even the most normal person can be wound up by delays in crowded departments, particularly if they’re accompanying a friend or family member in distress, or they are in pain themselves.  Mat’s design work for the NHS includes testing better signage in A+E about the process (who you see and when) and an indication of whether the department is busier than usual, quiet or just normal.

I must admit the sense of this particularly came home to me just last week when I had an appointment for a normal check up at a clinic in Edgware that I hadn’t been to before.  The signage at the hospital when I arrived gave labyrinthine directions to a car park somewhere on the hospital estate.  I’d arrived 30 minutes early as I had driven and as I don’t go that far north that much anymore I’d allowed plenty of time.  This was just as well.  Call me dumb but I managed to park in the single remaining space in 3 car parks in a row on the hospital grounds before I, each time, noticed that there was a very small sign indicating that the spaces that happened to be free were exclusively for staff or consultants.  The fourth car park, which was for visitors and patients was of course full (with 4 cars waiting).  I finally gave up and parked on the street (which was fine because this is Edgware not central London and they let you park in Edgware).  I only just made my appointment on time however, and I was much less calm than when I’d arrived at the hospital 30 minutes before hand.  Which in turn as Mat pointed out, made it harder for me to listen to what I was being asked to do, and admittedly less smilely with the staff.   Look, I can’t complain, everything was fine for me, but I really got the point from Mat’s presentation this morning that a small tweak to the design of the communications would have just cleared this difficulty (which clearly effects dozens of people every day judging by the cars circling the hospital estate).

Better design would have solved this, better signage, or even a warning in the letter that parking isn’t to be expected on the grounds.  It isn’t just about my mood – which remained cheery throughout.  There are lots of worse examples than mine of problems caused by bad design stressing people out unnecessarily.  Staff dealing with stressed patients are more prone to morale issues understandably and absenteeism.  All of this costs money which simple good design, based on consumer truth would solve. 

I feel more inspired than ever to walk in the consumer’s shoes through every part of the strategy we design to deliver brand objectives.  You must of course listen out for the consumer’s truth, not just your own.

My love life is perfectly intact but my plans didn’t exactly pan out.  I don’t like going out for Valentine’s Day but I had planned a nice home cooked dinner (Spag Bol but with Buffalo mince (no horse) to be precise), oven roasted butternut squash and celeriac mix followed by a red velvet cake.

At 6pm we had a power cut.  Just like the 1970s.  No stove, no TV, no lights, no oven, no hot water and no heating. In every other respect my evening was nothing like the winter of discontent.

With my iPad operational I found the UK Power Networks website and was invited to tweet them for updates.

Their response was very comforting.  Instead of just sitting in the dark not knowing what was going on, I at least had the feeling that Mike and Dave @UKPowerNetworks were paying some attention to my plight.

Then up came a neighbour – hitherto unknown to me – @carriesparkle and said “Hello, I’m without power too. Whereabouts are you? I’m on the Estate and both cold and hungry.”

After a bit of banter with Carrie (can’t even go out to eat because its Valentine’s Day and restaurants full of “romantic” couples) another unknown neighbour @azeem joined the conversation saying : “I see you and @fhuszar are both having power outages in NW2”.

Turns out all three neighbours are in the comms business in one way or another.  No longer was I sitting lonely, hungry and cold in the dark.  Customer service from UK Powernetworks were at hand with cheery updates, and there was a community spirit going around in the local virtual world.  As well as my new acquaintances, I also heard from @battylala and @durranimix (thanks for the cheery comments people).

Lights came back on at 935 pm, just after we’d given up hope of home cooking and ordered pizza.

So Twitter was both a great customer service tool, and a community building vehicle. As @brucedaisley said “what an amazing episode”.

Twitter by candlelight – highly recommended in case of emergency, keep your iPad charged.

@SueU

I went to my first “Disrupterthon” last week.  When I told one colleague that this was where I was going, she said that that was how she considered every meeting that I was in.  (I’m sure that’s flattering if you think very positively about it).

This was a TV Disrupterthon run by the British Screen Advisory Council with some excellent guest speakers including Claire Enders, David Abraham, John Gisby from Magine and Group M’s Jakob Nielsen.

The debate was framed as a way of exploring what the Black Swan’s of TV would be and how and when they’d hit us.

Notably David Abraham welcomed us to a world of change, to the “meta connected data world” where one in three 16-24s have signed up to hand over their data to C4.  C4 are training a generation of viewers to interact with VOD ads in a mould breaking fashion. Equally notably Claire Enders gave us the view that it is women over 40 who drive UK culture (outside gaming), and that therefore on mainstream TV things would be slow to change.

Both views have their merits of course.  But true disruption will come from one of two sources in my view.  It is possible that the consumer will lead true disruption because they will adopt a new way of consuming TV content at scale.  Given that fairly heritage ways of watching TV content continue to grow and let’s face it to satisfy, this would depend on a real swing in technology and indeed rights distribution.     The second form of disruption will come from a disruption in heritage trading practices.  This is long overdue and indeed necessary for longterm growth.  For this it would be good to have two developments please.  We are indeed entering a world of big data of all kinds.  More and more granular information will be available to give insight into what is and what is not working.  What we still don’t have is a single audience rating measurement to feed into modelling versus sales across media to drive a simple solution to how everything works.  The second development is a move towards a shared risk trading model, not as an exception but as a mainstream choice for clients.