What can we learn from Duchamp?

Now I don’t know much about art. I’m interested in it, I appreciate it and I like what I like, but I don’t know what is good or bad. So apologies if this post screams of ignorance, but after reading this about Marcel Duchamp it got me thinking about the kind of art that those of us in communications are paid to produce and what we could learn from him. Duchamp had a really interesting perspective on art and it seems pretty relevant given the debate surrounding the future of planning, agencies and the general changes in modern marketing.

This post isn’t about commercial art versus art, or intended to suggest that visual art is dead. I simply found Duchamp’s perspective thought provoking. How’s that for sitting on the fence!

Whilst Duchamp eventually came to despise retinal art and the bourgeois, he started off by wanting to create a new kind of art that engaged the mind. Duchamp wondered if he could create works of art that were not conventionally works of art. This became known as conceptual art.

According to the Oxford English dictionary a concept is: “an idea of something formed mentally, combining all its characteristics or particulars.” This suggests to me that there are many different elements to the concept and not just visual and copy. Seems obvious and straightforward. So why the debate about who owns ideas?

In my agency, concepts are the things we review. No reason why it’s called this over creative it just is and always has been. I would argue that in a ‘traditional process’ quite often what is reviewed isn’t really a concept – at least not just yet. All the other ‘characteristics’ and ‘particulars’ haven’t been developed, such as the media for arguments sakes. It’s essentially just an idea at this stage. In other words a concept can’t be CREATED without varying perspectives and input.

Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’ are also something we can learn from. He purposefully aimed to break every rule in art in order to engage people’s minds in unpredictable ways so he could provoke the observer to participate and think rather than it just being aesthetic to the eye. And to top it off he believed in art that was free of pretence and artifice. He’s a clever bloke in my book.

However, probably one of the most interesting beliefs of Duchamp is that art occurs at the juncture of the artists’ intention and the observer’s response, ultimately making them a co-creator. If ever there is something that would unite people in agencies today and describe what we should all be striving for in communications this is it. Perhaps this is the art we should get more awards for?

Dangerous Knowledge

I watched Dangerous Knowledge last night, an absolutely brilliant documentary on an increasingly good BBC Four. it's bound to be be repeated at least 20 times so keep your eyes peeled. It's planning porn and certainly stirs up a bit of quant v qual, positivist v naturalist debate.

Presenter David Malone took us on an insightful journey into the lives of four genius mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. All of them managed to create a storm up back in the day by questioning whether or not there are somethings in the world mathematics cannot know and that there will always be problems outside of human logic. Some of their personal battles with unexplainable entities such as homosexuality, religion and social oppression arguably forced them to question their own beliefs and the concept of certainty.

Tragically these guys went insane and eventually killed themselves in their quest to prove a number of theories such as infinity. Essentially they were trying to use mathematics to prove the limitations of mathematics, logic to prove logic is illogical and when they continuously looked for certainty all they found was uncertainty. All sounds enough to screw any one's head up.

I've made the front page...

...of Marketing Direct

This magazine normally sits in the pile of things I'll flick through if I have the time and to be honest, I very rarely get to this one. But while I was having a sort out I caught sight of my name literally plastered all over the front page.

It's a great piece of personalised DM in my opinion and to be honest I agree with most of it. I am the best planner ever, I am cool and I should be Prime Minister. I'm not sure about loving Southampton though, only parts of it.

A campaign against warm beer

It's all got a bit political on here of late so I thought I would lighten the mood.

I was intending to post about this after coming back from the IoW Festival in June, but I completely forgot until I was in a pub this weekend. But for those of you who have been to festivals over the last couple of summers it's likely you would have experienced Carling's campaign against warm beer. At various festivals Carling has been operating a Beer Amnesty. You can take any brand of warm beer to its tent and swap it for a nice cold Carling - even Tesco's own value brand! Admittedly after three days drinking Carling it can get a bit too much but it's a great example of a brand being generous.

It also seems quite fashionable these days for brands to adopt some kind of environmental or political position. Some of which are genuine, but often they're too far detached from the product and people's relationship with it. They are merely token gestures. So it's nice to see Carling doing something small but massively relevant and helpful. There's not much worse than drinking warm beer. OK, maybe global warming.

A campaign for communications love

Why does everything in our industry have to be so black or white? You’re a planner, a creative, a media or an account person? You’re an ad agency, digital agency, media agency, PR or a communications agency? The future is bright? We're all going to die? Blah, blah, blah, boring, boring, boring.

I posted this yesterday in response to this and there seems to be loads of other posts recently such as this, this and this which the comments go on to argue who is essentially the best in 'advertising'. But I'm starting to get fed up with how insular, petty and finger pointing everything is getting - in the blogosphere at least. We all seem to be very good at talking about who has the right to do what and who deserves to be the most loved in the industry. Ahhh, helllloooo (insert camp hand gesture). What does the client want? Do they really give a rat's ass whether or not a creative, planner, account man or even a programmer came up with the bloody idea? If that is indeed what they think they buy from an agency anyway?

I'm worried that clients will just get sick of all the agency bollocks, inflated costs and go and bring it in house or hire consultants, creative communications thinkers or creative generalists, whatever you want to call them. Why shouldn't they if it's cheaper, quicker and arguably just as good? At least in their opinion, and to be honest that is what really matters? What's going to be left? All the thinking and even the doing will be done in house and agencies will be mere facilitators. You can see signs of it happening now. Don't quote me, but i'm sure Channel 4, ITV and Innocent have all brought disciplines in house if I recall. I've also just finished working on a pitch with a communications consultant that the client has hired to work with the agencies. He's been a nice guy, but it's a bit too prescriptive. The final outcome is essentially his idea - which has turned out OK, but not as good as it could have been if all disciplines could have collaborated and this isn't just my view.

I'm not suggesting that people like Russell and John would ever work with agencies in this way, but you can see it happening elsewhere. Why deal with the agency self appreciation society when you can work on your own interesting projects directly with brands? It's getting a bit, if you want something done, go and do it yourself. Do we really want to lose the best people to clients, irrespective of the discipline, because they can't get the job done? Is this really the world we want to live in? Then you find jobs like this going!

Again I'm probably being naive, drawing on my own short experiences and stating the obvious, but shouldn't we work in a way that allows us to simply get the job done and in my opinion enjoy doing it? I'm being petulant, but what do clients want/expect from agencies nowadays? Perhaps we should ask these questions rather than debating who deserves the crown of creative genius?

Stop War

Via Worstweatherever

I love this kind of stuff. Very Banksy.

Planners as the new creatives?

Oooh errrr missus here’s a long one…

This was a great debate at PSFK and whilst I appreciate this is purposefully controversial, I'm not sure whether the argument is really about planners being the new creatives. Perhaps it's more about challenging egos in order to find the best way for agencies to come up with new ideas? In another PSFK presentation Iain Tait spoke about why digital is better than advertising. Iain made some great points about the industrious nature of the discipline, the ability to fail small etc, but again it seemed to be more about the mindset of the modern agency versus the traditional advertising agency structure. I just think that if you were given a blank cheque to start your own agency tomorrow, irrespective of whether or not it's in digital, you wouldn't use the 'traditional advertising' structure. It's not that it doesn't work, but it doesn't work as well as it could.

I was lucky enough to get my first job in planning when the discipline was introduced to the agency only three years ago. At the time I was an account manager (that in my opinion tried to do a bit of planning) and I constantly hassled the Director to let me have one of the jobs going in the new team. Thankfully he eventually gave in. But being partly responsible for introducing planning to an agency that has done without it for 25 years was the single most difficult thing I have ever been involved in professionally. The benefit of introducing planning meant we had the opportunity to collectively review and implement a new structure. To be part of this is an invaluable experience!

Now I'm talking from an ‘integrated’ and purely personal perspective here, but my main observation was that the old agency model didn't just hinder the strategy and ideas we came up with, it was massively inefficient and actually cost the agency more money. Something that isn't actually debated much. And in the words of Pierre Reverdy: “Creativity is to think more efficiently”. So forget who owns ideas, just come up with the best ones and do it as quickly as possible. And to be honest, the working environment and culture isn’t anywhere near as good as it is now.

So we started from scratch and changed the whole approach, which is still being improved. It's frustrating, but it's hard to change this overnight. We’re lucky because we are independent and a bit leaner. But for a huge agency the thought of changing things must be like trying to turn a huge tanker round with a chubby little steering wheel the size of a 50 pence piece. It’s probably easier just to start again in some respects than to try and change an established beast of an agency. I can’t begin to imagine how hard that would be.

These are my own personal observations from where we were to where we are now and maybe I'm just being naive and stating the obvious, but here I go any way. First of all in terms of the ideas produced, very rarely was media approached creatively. It wasn't even part of the process and was simply the vehicle to carry the copy and the visuals. I think the reason why planners are being seen as more creative is because they are becoming very good generalists in terms of the media that is out there. In my opinion media is one of, if not the most important discipline at the moment and should be treated as a creative skill in the same way copy and visuals are.

I also think the relationship between brands, people and communications is the most complicated it has ever been and the old model is too restrictive when it comes to solving problems. Some people in the industry believe that clients should pay for ideas as the strategies end up transcending the entire business and changing its direction and often its fortunes? Some people also feel that agencies need to be much more involved with clients at a more strategic, business level rather than engaging with them just on image or on a transactional basis. Isn't this then about being better at solving business problems rather than ad problems? So again solving business problems should surely be treated as a creative discipline like copy and visuals?

In the same way I don't believe creatives own the ideas, I don't believe that planners should own the strategy. However, if I asked you to tell me who the most creative people in the advertising industry were you would name numerous creatives and deservedly so. But if I asked you who the most creative people in business were today I personally think they would be more like a planner than they would a creative. My point is perhaps as an industry we often define what creative means based on our own reality rather than our clients needs. And perhaps this is why ‘planners as the new creatives’ makes sense? Perhaps clients want business ideas rather than ad ideas? Maybe imaginative strategies and media are exciting them more than the copy and the visuals? Or maybe clients can relate to a planner’s take on an idea better than they can a creatives? People talk a lot about planners being the voice of the consumer, which I agree with, but to me a planner is also a bit like being the client, but without the pressure and much more time and freedom to ask questions, be objective and be brave?

And breath….