The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is one of the most thought provoking books I have read for a while that quite frankly scares the crap out of me! It is a bit of a beast to lug around in your backpack but it´s a must for anyone travelling in Central and South America.

Shedding some light on why amazing countries like Nicaragua are some of the poorest in the western hemisphere it also explains why there is so much 'I hate Bush' graffiti in most towns and cities I have been to.

Book Review - Unspeak

I think words are one of the most powerful weapons a planner can use and this is an excellent book that really gets you thinking about how to use them in a different way. It's jam packed full of euphemisms, metaphors and hidden meanings.

Journalist Steven Poole analyses how governments, 'terrorist groups', religious leaders and corporations manipulate words in order to influence behaviour, thoughts and the opinions of the 'herd'. So if you like words and political debate Unspeak this is well worth reading.

Victims of our own ‘herd’ mentality?

I’ve just started reading Mark Earl’s new book Herd. I’m only a few chapters in at the moment but it seems fascinating so far. What initially struck me is the fact that our industry is a victim of its own herd mentality, with a new, unconfirmed one trying to break out. Let me explain.

There are three things that are really getting me thinking at the moment – interestingness, marketing enthusiasm and transmedia planning. All of which are imaginatively simple but not that easy to articulate to other people, particularly if starting your own agency isn’t on your CV. The thing I love about blogging is that you can get your hands on new observations from smart people without having to wait for their book to come out.

However, I do sometimes feel a bit isolated, these approaches can be hard to diffuse until it reaches the world of print. As a young planner peddling this stuff around the agency and talking to clients about it, I find that some don’t get it, some think it’s a fad or more often than not I get a response along the lines of; ‘That’s fascinating…but lets do it the usual way instead, maybe next time’. This is then followed by a pat on the head and probably some mumblings about me being bright, enthusiastic but not having much ‘commercial awareness’.

Commercial awareness is obviously important, but I think they mix this up with not conforming to agency processes, conventions and culture, or the herd. It frustrates me that agencies and clients have constructed their own realities to such an extent that they are stopping themselves from progressing and as a result being more successful.

We all seem to have lost touch with the concept of human nature and that is why I believe these approaches are hard for people to adopt. By focusing on human nature, which is sometimes hard to understand and most of all hard to measure, they make things seem simpler. As complex people, who like to make things even more complicated, we hate anything that might be too easy for us to comprehend.

I was in Dublin over New Year and there is a quote on the monument of Oscar Wilde that really stood out: “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple and the simple thing is the right thing”. My aim for the next few weeks is to be a thorn in the side of our existing Herd mentality and try and sow the seeds of a new one. Not exactly sure what that is yet, but I do know it’s different, or at least more human.

Professionalism is killing creativity

I always try and get myself along to as many APG events as I can, but the talk from Jon Steel was one I wasn’t going to miss. Jon’s first book, Truth, Lies and Advertising, is probably in every planner’s bookcase. It’s the first book I ever read on the subject and I would recommend it to anyone interested in communications.

However, Jon’s got a new book out, The Perfect Pitch. There’s a clue for the theme of his presentation in the title. I had already read the book before the talk, so I knew what to expect, but there’s nothing better than hearing it from the horses mouth so to speak.

Even if you aren’t directly involved in pitches, it’s still a must read. Probably the most important point I took away was the concept of ‘professionalism’. Ultimately the agency environment has become too professional. It’s killing creativity and the development of ideas. We’ve all become too busy, too corporate, too logical and too analytical.

I was lucky enough to be involved in getting our agency’s planning team off the ground and I can really relate too this. Until you actually spend some time really looking at an agency’s processes you don’t realise how unproductive they can be. It’s easy for people to spend too much time organising and not enough time solving problems through simple observations, conversations and even intuition. Jon’s talk was full of common sense, but as they say, common sense isn’t that common.