Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising For A Digital World (2021)

PRAISE FOR PAID ATTENTION 2 nd EDITION
‘Faris Yakob has long been a visionary for the advertising industry, holding
a mirror up to the way we work, both good and bad, and seeing the poten-
tial for something greater. Paid Attention clearly explores how what we do
really works, from behavioural science to the importance of curiosity and
creativity, as well as how we do it in our digital age in a way that creates
meaningful results, not just meaningless numbers. In a world where the rate
of technological change is ever faster, this new edition is a must for any
ambitious marketer, strategist or creative.’
Laura Jordan Bambach, Chief Creative Officer, Grey London
‘Faris Yakob is a rare breed, one of the brightest and most creative people
I’ve ever come across, with an absolutely huge intellect coupled with a
passion for storytelling. He sees things others don’t, like a magpie collecting
shiny things and turning them into actionable insights with real business
value. He’s also slightly crazy in the most charming way and writes in a style
that pulls the reader in, makes you think and makes you want to challenge
yourself to do better. A must-read for anyone in the communications
industry.’
Lisa Batty, Head of Brand Strategy and Planning, TikTok
‘The most stimulating and useful blueprint for genuinely fresh thinking
about advertising and communications that I have read in the last ten years.’
Adam Morgan, author of Eating the Big Fish and Founder of eatbigfish
consultancy
‘What next for media, brands and even humanity now we have reached
peak attention? Faris Yakob powerfully explains and expounds the future in
his trademark smart, witty and always-surprising tone.’
Sara Tate, CEO, TBWA London
‘Reading this book felt a little like being an intellectual pinball as I was
bounced between the worlds of psychology, philosophy, economics and
advertising history: always entertaining while also sometimes genuinely
profound. At a time when almost every pundit seems to be questioning
whether advertising has a future, Faris Yakob is offering some answers.’
Will Collin, Strategy Lead, Karmarama
‘The most useful, entertaining and insightful examination of communi

cation theory and commercial creativity that I have read. As Faris Yakob
says, as an industry we need to take a long hard look at what we want
“advertising” to be. This book provides a fascinating and inspiring explan
ation of where marketing and advertising has, and is, going very wrong.’
Catherine Coleman-Jinks, Head of Marketing Excellence, Twinings
‘Ever been on a roller coaster? They tend to hold your attention well. Slowly
scaling great heights, then wonderful views, sharp unexpected turns, fast-
paced, and great fun. Paid Attention is a roller coaster of a book – full of
ideas on ideas, it held my attention at every turn. Packed full of theories and
evidence to weigh and consider, this is the advertising/communications/ideas
book of the year.’
Adam Ferrier, Chief Strategy Officer, Cummins&Partners
Paid Attention
Innovative advertising for a digital world
SECOND EDITION
Faris Yakob
Publisher’s note
Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book
is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and author cannot accept
responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or
damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material
in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author.
First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2015 by Kogan Page Limited
Second edition published in 2022
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be repro-
duced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of
the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and
licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent
to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses:
2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street 8 W 38th Street, Suite 902 4737/23 Ansari Road
London New York, NY 10018 Daryaganj
EC1V 3RS USA New Delhi 110002
United Kingdom India
www.koganpage.com
© Faris Yakob, 2015, 2022
The right of Faris Yakob to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBNs
Hardback 978 1 3986 0252 6
Paperback 978 1 3986 0250 2
Ebook 978 1 3986 0251 9
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yakob, Faris, author.
Title: Paid attention : innovative advertising for a digital world / Faris
Yakob.
Description: Second Edition. | New York, NY : Kogan Page Inc, 2021. |
Revised edition of the author's Paid attention, 2015. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021036805 (print) | LCCN 2021036806 (ebook) | ISBN
9781398602502 (paperback) | ISBN 9781398602526 (hardback) | ISBN
9781398602519 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Advertising. | Branding (Marketing) | Electronic commerce.
Classification: LCC HF5823 .Y335 2021 (print) | LCC HF5823 (ebook) | DDC
659.1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036805
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036806
Typeset by Hong Kong FIVE Workshop, Hong Kong

Print production managed by Jellyfish
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
CONTENTS
List of toolkits viii

About the author ix
Thanks! xi
PART ONE
Paid attention 1
Introduction: Paid attention – how much is it worth? 3
01 Logocentrism: What’s in a name? 11

Brands are socially constructed ideas 16
How much is that brand in the window? 18
Persistently irrational behaviour 20
The dark side of brands 21
Brandgrams 23
PART TWO
Attention deficit disorders 25
02 Uncovering hidden persuaders: Why all market research is

wrong 27
No rational messaging 33
Research as marketing 34
Customer service is marketing 35
What brand tastes like 37
Physical persuasion (nod your head) 38
03 Advertising works in mysterious ways: Modern theories of

communication 41
The moment of truth 44
Lubricants of reason 45
vi CONTENTS
The paradox of choice 46

Blindness blindness and meta-cognitive errors 49
Disrupted expectations 51
Mind the curiosity gap 52
Pandemic, or viral is a thing that happens, not a thing that is 53
The attention market 55
The importance of being awesome 59
04 Is all advertising spam? Communication planning in an

on-demand world 60
An apologia for advertising 69
05 The spaces between: The vanishing difference between

content, media and advertising 72
Media making the world 73
Lions and language and geeks 74
The medium definitely isn’t the message, any more 75
The content republic 77
Cumulative advantage 80
Not content 81
PART THREE
Attention arts and sciences 85
06 Do things, tell people: How to behave in a world of infinite

content 87
Technology is a medium 89
Actions at scale 92
Acts of happiness 93
Platforms and products 94
07 Recombinant culture: Talent imitates, genius steals 97

Ideas are new combinations 99
Great artists steal 100
Same same but different 102
People will pay more for something people have paid attention to 104
Modern postmodernism 105
CONTENTS vii
08 Combination tools: How to have ideas:

a genius steals process 108
Liminal spaces 112
Creative tenacity 113
The planning paradox 114
The mediation generation 115
Post-postmodern advertising 116
09 Advertising for advertising: Is the industry paying

attention? 120
Seven habits of highly effective communication 121
Awarding creativity 123
Trial by jury 124
Studying cases 125
10 Integrative strategy and social brands: Be nice or leave! 127

What do advertising agencies actually do? 128
What strategy is and is not 131
Planning for the future 131
The socialization of media 134
Be nice or leave 134
Emerging cultural practices 135
Social graces 135
Cultural latency 138
Ghostwriting for brands 140
Are you engaged? 141
Back to the future of planning advertising 143
11 Prospection: Planning for the future we want 145

Ideas versus utterances 145
Low latency communication 146
Social TV 147
Reverse the polarity 148
Why? 148
Beyond the tweet 149
New principles of planning 150
A new planning toolkit 150
Marketing as social experiment 155
Where do you want to go? 157
viii CONTENTS
PART FOUR
2020 Foresight 159
12 Everything is PR 161

Ideas worth tweeting about 163
Hail to the king 164
13 The quantity, quality, qualia and cost of attention 169

The goldfish myth 169
Peak attention 171
The quality of attention 173
The function of attention 175
Time well spent 176
Context, communications and the commons 178
The true cost of attention 185
Epilogue: Talkin’ about your generation 190
References 192
Further reading 218
Index 221
LIST OF TOOLKITS
How to have ideas: a genius steals 109

Combination tool for brand behaviour 119
Seven habits of highly effective communication: what separates the great
from the good at the Effie awards? 121
How to create a case study 125
Six steps to being social 136
Questions for a new brief 154
The above toolkits are available to download in pdf format at:

www.koganpage.com/PaidAttention
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Faris is an award-winning
author, strategist, creative
director and public speaker.
Alongside his wife and
partner Rosie, he is the co-
founder of the nomadic crea-
tive consultancy Genius
Steals, built on the belief that
ideas are new combinations,
nothing comes from nothing,
and therefore one cannot in-
vent without inventory. They
have travelled to more than
40 countries since 2013,
speaking at events and con-
sulting with clients, remotely
and on location. They work
with brands like Coca-Cola,
agencies like OMD, Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, Accenture Interactive’s
Rothco and eatbigfish, media companies like Facebook and Bauer, and me-
dia trade bodies like Thinkbox and Magnetic on brand and business strat-
egy, ideas, inspiration and innovation, thought leadership, workshops and
training. They are also co-founders of the School of Stolen Genius, a digital
learning community for creative thinkers.
Faris spent five years in New York as Chief Innovation Officer of MDC
Partners and Chief Digital Officer of McCann Erickson NYC. Before that he
worked at pioneering agency Naked Communications in London, Sydney
and New York.
While in advertising he won and judged numerous awards including the
Effies, Clios, One Show and the LIAs.
He also consulted on, and featured in, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
Faris and Rosie speak at events and companies all over the world, which
is partially why they are nomadic. Their newsletter, Strands of (Stolen)
x ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Genius, was named one of the ‘7 essential reads for curious creatives’ by
HubSpot and voted one of the top community resources for strategists in the
global Planning Survey. Go to http://geniussteals.co/subscribe and subscribe
for brief bursts of inspiration in your inbox every week.
He received an MA in English from Oxford University and was the
President’s Prize winner of the IPA’s Excellence Diploma, known as the MBA
of advertising.
He is a contributing author to Digital State: How the Internet changes
everything, What is a 21st Century Brand?, Creative Superpowers: Equip
yourself for the age of creativity, and Eat Your Greens: Fact-based thinking
to improve your brand’s health. He writes a monthly column on effective
brand communication for the World Advertising Research Council and
other bylines include Fast Company, the Guardian, the Financial Times,
Campaign, AdAge, and the Economic Times of India. He was named one of
ten modern-day Mad Men by Fast Company but aspires to be less morally
bankrupt than the television show characters.
Despite living on the road, you can reliably find him on Twitter (@Faris).
For more information on Genius Steals head to www.geniussteals.co.
He hopes you find plenty of useful things to steal in the following pages,
finds writing in the third person somewhat uncomfortable, and hopes you
have a lovely day.
THANKS!
Writing a book takes a lot longer than you think. At least it did for me. So
the amount of people who have helped me along the way is truly innumer-
able. Inevitably, some of you reading this will have helped me inestimably
and will not see your names below. I’m very sorry about that. I really, really
appreciate everything you did.
Thanks, then, in no particular order, to:
My wife Rosie Yakob, for being my partner in mind, business, life and ad-
ventures. I could never have dreamed of starting our company or finish-
ing this or doing anything that we have done together without you.
Thank you for being patient with me. Especially as I was writing this
while we were setting up a company while planning a wedding while
living on the road.
My parents, who only ever asked me to find something and someone that
would make me happy, and supported me in every twist and turn of my
circuitous career. No, Dad, I don’t have a job, I have a company now. No,
I’m not cutting my dreadlocks off. Yes, Mum, I am still travelling.
To my brothers, Laith and Ramzi, whose brilliance drives me even if I don’t
see them and their families as often as I would like.
To everyone who has been kind enough to host us as we travel, especially as
I’ve been writing. My parents, Natalya, Sibilla and Aran and Max, Judy
and Erik, Lillian and Jason, Scott and Teresa, Adrian and Philippa,
Antonia and Ronan, Elmo, Rachel and Mike, and every other gracious,
generous host.
To my best men, Andrew Jackson, Ben Richards, Dave Shnaps and Neil
Mendoza, who have all inspired me more than they know.
To everyone who pointed out when they think I’m wrong.
To Polly, Paul, Marion and Mel, for keeping me sane. To everyone who has
ever reached out because they saw we were in their country or city and
made us feel at home.
To Henry Jenkins, whose book inspired me to write, and who inspired me
to teach.
xii THANKS!
To every blogger from back in the day who helped me hone my thinking,
especially Russel Davies, Richard Huntington and Mark Earls. To my
mentors, especially the Naked Boys (Will Collin, Ivan Pollard, Jon
Wilkins, Adam Ferrier) and Nick Kendall, whose IPA Excellence Diploma
got me started on this path nearly a decade ago.
To all the planners who are helping craft the craft and make the work work.
To all the strategists carving paths outside of agencies or going out on
their own.
To all the young people I’ve got to work with or speak to over the years who
decided they wanted to spend their spare time learning on courses I was
making up, and for inspiring me to be less cynical.
To my original editor, Anna Moss, who helped shape these rough-hewn
words into a book-like object and Heather, who helped me through the
second edition in difficult circumstances.
To Ashley Derrington, the incredible director of operations at Genius Steals
and author of Deaf, Tattooed and Employed!, for being brilliant, incred-
ibly organized, patient and an excellent human.
To our clients, past, present and future, for believing in us and for being
lovely.
And finally, of course, to you gentle reader, without whom this book doesn’t
really exist.
Rock ON, Faris

PART ONE
Paid attention
THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Introduction
Paid attention – how much is it worth?
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

julius caesar, william shakespeare1
Are you paying attention to the attention being paid for?

For the entirety of its history, the media industrial complex has been
aggregating human attention in order to sell this attention to advertisers.
Indeed, broadcast mass media was conceived as advertising, since radio sta-
tions were initially set up in order to encourage the sale of radio sets. Back
then anyone could buy and run a local radio transmitter. My wife’s grandfa-
ther went into business with a local tyre dealer, who was broadcasting from
his store when they weren’t serving customers. This eventually evolved into
a licensed radio station, KWTO, and then into the world’s first syndicated
music television show, the Ozark Mountain Jubilee. So, initially, the quality
of content was spotty at best. In the late 1920s the first national radio broad-
casts began in the United States and were quickly commercialized by the
newly formed National Broadcast Company and Columbia Broadcast
Service. Around the same time, innovations in manufacturing and distribu-
tion meant that consumer goods companies could sell their products all over
the country, where their reputations had not yet travelled, which left them
seeking a way to reach people all over the country with the same messages.
The media industry as we now know it was born.
On these first radio stations, and later on television, the primary content
was advertising. Individual sponsors supported each show and products
were integrated within, leading to Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts and the Camel
News Caravan. The Hit Parade was ‘lightly toasted’ and performances of
4 PAID ATTENTION
classics were known as ‘Lucky Strike Extras’. Shows were created by adver-
tising agencies for the brands. This model was inefficient for broadcasters,
who could make more money selling slices of attention to multiple sponsors,
and challenging for sponsors and their agencies. The economics of content
production became prohibitive as budgets skyrocketed an average of 500
per cent between 1949 and 1952.2 Thirty seconds of airtime was far more
affordable to fill than 60 minutes. Interruptive, ‘spot’ advertising became
(and remains) the dominant form, an idea lifted from magazine advertise-
ments that literally interrupt the flow of content to present an advertisement
on the page.
The word advertising is derived from the Latin advetere, which means to
draw attention to something (literally, to turn towards). Since the emergence
of interruption, the way advertising drew attention was by paying for atten-
tion aggregated by something else. Companies pay for your attention, and
hope you are actually paying attention. The total amount of money buying
attention globally is more than half a trillion dollars, with almost half of
that spent in the United States.
Media = bandwidth
All media, in totality, can be understood as the world’s total available band-
width. Analogue broadcasting grew linearly, as new media were invented
and techniques refined. Digital encoding allowed for far greater compres-
sion but more importantly made media an aspect of digital technology,
which accelerates exponentially.
At the same time, the tools of content creation began to be democratized
by the same drivers: professional tools found their way into the hands of the
public because their prices dropped and they became easier to use. One
defining aspect of technology is how it shifts the locus of intelligence, in
waves, from expert individuals, into objects and software that can be used
by everyone. What once required a knowledge of code, design, film-editing
software and so on, was now possible with basic computer skills.
Blogger, launching in 2003, allowed anyone to publish things directly to
the web without any knowledge of HTML. A decade later, Instagram filters
let people with no knowledge of photography, film or Photoshop create
striking images. A rush of new cultural producers filled the available media
space being created. By 2010, according to Google chief executive officer
(CEO) Eric Schmidt, mankind was creating as much content every two days
INTRODUCTION 5
as it had from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.3 This is something in

the region of five exabytes of data (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes) and this
number will continue to accelerate.
So we shifted, rapidly, from a media environment defined by scarcity to
one defined by abundance, creating a generation that, as media author Clay
Shirky has pointed out, ‘have never known a world with only three tele
vision channels, a world where the only choice a viewer had in the early
evening was which white man was going to read them the news in English’.4
Content became digital and ubiquitous and this led to the idea of an
attention economy. Content is now abundant but the human attention that
can be allocated to it is finite. Since the resource being allocated is attention,
and economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, economic
thinking began to be applied to the idea of attention.
Of course, the total amount of content in the world has long dwarfed
any individual’s ability to consume it. Thinkers from times as diverse as
Aristotle, Da Vinci, Milton and Leibniz have all been credited as the ‘last
man to have read everything’. Today, the variety and pervasive presence of
media presents the sense of an ever more fragmented body of knowledge; an
ever more fragmented, though global, culture.
As technology investor Esther Dyson has observed:
This attention economy is not the intention economy beloved of vendors, who
grab consumers’ attention in order to sell them something. Rather, attention
here has its own intrinsic, non-monetizable value. The attention economy is one
in which people spend their personal time attracting others’ attention, whether
by designing creative avatars, posting pithy comments, or accumulating ‘likes’
for their cat photos.5
And that means less attention for the advertisers who are paying for it.
According to studies, 8–18-year-olds are consuming more than seven
hours of media a day and, perhaps unsurprisingly, are consuming multiple
media concurrently.6 (It would be hard to understand how they find time for
school otherwise.)
We live immersed in media. Anyone who is trying to get the public to
notice something – whether a commercial exhortation, health message,
political appeal, or to promote their own cause or skills – offers content to
which they hope their intended audience will pay attention. While the media
industrial complex often still attracts the largest amounts of attention, it is
now in competition with content from brands, and every Tweet, Facebook
6 PAID ATTENTION
post, picture and video, on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok made by other

people. It is perhaps little wonder that attention deficit disorder (ADD; also
known as ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is one of the most
salient psychological conditions, or at least concerns, of our time: diagnoses
of ADHD have risen by 66 per cent since 2000.7 It has even been suggested
that the ‘average American attention span’ is declining because of the inter-
net.8 This, as we will see later in the book, is a confusion, but it’s based on
the feeling that we are consuming more, faster, all the time and that our pre-
cious attention seems diminished as a consequence.
Communication is persuasion
Effecting change is an inherent function of all communication, because com-
munication is persuasion. In 1948 communication theorist Harold Lasswell
described communication as having five parts:
Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect.
Channel is now used interchangeably with medium but back then channel
referred to a sense, so television, the medium, would use both the audio and
visual channel.
The communications industry concerns itself with a specific subset of
communication. Communication in its broadest sense can be defined as any
means by which ‘one mind may affect another’.9 Commercial communica-
tion can be described as the dispersion of persuasive symbols and messages
to manage mass opinion, from logos to advertising. However, this persua-
sion element is embedded in the notion of communication.
Humans have an in-built desire to spread their own ideas. There are com-
pelling anthropological reasons for this. We pass on our ideas in order ‘to
create people whose minds think like ours’,10 because this delivers an evolu-
tionary advantage: there is safety in numbers.
Any time we communicate anything to anyone, we are attempting to
change the way their brains operate. We are attempting to change their view
of the world, so that it more closely resembles our own. Every assertion,
from the notion of a deity to giving someone directions, attempts to harmo-
nize the receiver’s beliefs about the world with the transmitter’s.
The objectives of commercial communications are to influence mass
opinion and behaviour, usually purchase behaviour, increasing purchase
frequency and volume, or increasing price inelasticity of demand. Due to the
cost involved in buying attention and creating content, the most efficient
INTRODUCTION 7
drivers of change constitute more successful ideas. These ideas are increas-
ingly spread by their recipients, or the mainstream media, influencing more
behaviour as they go, ultimately creating a multiple on the impact of media
exposure and providing the brand with a competitive advantage.
Ideas grow, thrive and effect change in proportion to the amount of
attention allocated to them. They function like solidarity goods – a class of
economic goods ‘whose value increases as the number of people enjoying
them increases’.11 These ideas could be knowledge of the qualities of certain
plants, religions, brands, legends, scientific principles such as evolution,
political dogma, fashion trends, misguided beliefs about sex, rumours,
gossip, philosophy, jokes and so on. Ideas that get allocated a lot of atten-
tion tend to survive, although in recent times rapid spikes in attention are
often followed by corresponding nadirs.
The oldest and most successful idea in history provides a perfect example
of how ideas worked in a linguistic culture. The principle of reciprocity, also
known as the golden rule, is a fundamental moral tenet found in all major
religions in almost exactly the same form: ‘Treat others as you would like
to be treated.’12 It is highly generative since it can be used in almost any
decision and, as the foundation underlying every major religion, it is difficult
to envisage a more potent agent of behavioural change.
Similar to many of the ideas that have existed for thousands of years, the
golden rule is aphoristic, expressed in a concise and memorable form.
Proverbs are the oldest class of successful ideas, nuggets of wisdom that
transcend centuries and cultures. For example, versions of the proverb
‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ have appeared in more than 55 lan-
guages.13 The success of these ideas is driven partially by function and
partially by form.
Ideas that are allocated no attention at all – those that are never exposed
to anyone – make no impact on the world, by logical extension, since no one
sees them. The 50 per cent of YouTube videos with less than 500 views don’t
individually make much impact on culture.14
So attention is a powerful thing – but what kind of thing is it?
Attention is like water

Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it,
and you hope that it flows the right way.15
apollo robbins, pickpocket/illusionist
8 PAID ATTENTION
Buying attention is a way to appear inside an existing channel that has

diverted attention. (Yet another way of using channel. Or is it the same?)
Like many psychological phenomena, attention is usually understood
subjectively. Its nature can be hard to pin down, like the related idea of con-
sciousness. For example, attention seems to have both directionality and a
normative duration – if it didn’t then a disorder based on its deficit wouldn’t
make sense – but the specifics are blurry. The psychological present is esti-
mated to be about three seconds long,16 but a three-second attention span
would not be considered normal so we must be able to string these psycho-
logical ‘nows’ together into contiguous sequences.
One of the classic definitions of attention comes from William James, one
of the progenitors of modern psychology, in his book The Principles of
Psychology:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in
clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of
its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively
with others.17
As James’s appeal to common knowledge suggests, attention could only be

analysed through introspection. Modern neuroscience can show us which
areas of the brain need more oxygen when we are paying attention and this
has already demonstrated that ‘attention’ is made up of a number of differ-
ent cognitive processes.
You can pay attention to something voluntarily, or you can have it
snatched away by an explosion, or someone speaking your name across a
crowded room (the so-called cocktail party effect). You can stare right at
something, which is overt attention, and you can pretend not to while still
focusing on it, which is covert. Attention is socially directed, which is to say
you can draw someone’s attention to something by focusing your gaze on it,
which is known as joint attention. Most importantly, you have a limited
capacity for attention, which restricts how much information you can derive
from sensory stimulus at a time:
When you attend to something, it is as if your mind aims a spotlight onto it.
You actively ignore virtually everything else that is happening around your
spotlight, giving you a kind of tunnel vision.18
INTRODUCTION 9
This leads to the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, where you fail to

notice something that is fully visible because your attention has been directed
elsewhere. It is here that concerns may lie about whether someone watching
the advertisements on television is really seeing them. It is also closely related
to change blindness, where you do not notice a change in scene when your
attention is taken from it for an instant. One of the overwhelming features
of our perception, and counter-intuitive to our experience of it, is how
limited it actually is. We don’t actually see a lot of what we are looking at,
but the brain fills in these gaps all the time, both in what we see and what
we remember, in what is known as fabulation.
This slippery property, attention, is of incredible and increasing value.
Since it follows logically that ideas that are allocated no attention can have
no impact (although, as we will see, this is not entirely so, because there are
different types), attention is therefore considered a prerequisite for effecting
any change through communication. It is enshrined in the earliest, and still
dominant, cognitive model for advertising: AIDA:
A – Attention: the prospective customer’s attention is attracted.

I – Interest: the interest in that product is raised.
D – Desire: some of these prospects begin to desire the thing.
A – Action: they then do something about it, such as buying it from a shop.
Since some people are ‘lost’ at each level (less people will be interested than
see it and so on) this gave rise to the idea of a ‘purchase funnel’, where one
seeks to garner as much attention as possible, as you lose a certain percent-
age of prospects at each stage thereafter. Thus the traditional formulation of
advertising was understood to be the process of buying the most attention
of the largest number of the desired audience at the lowest possible cost. The
cognitive cascade that followed was assumed to lead to people buying
things.
This endless filling of a mythical funnel created the media industrial com-
plex and the prevalence of advertising we have in culture today, an ever-
escalating race to drown out the utterances of others, and garner the most
attention. In light of the dramatic changes to the market for ideas, this model
has begun to be supplemented, and in some cases superseded, by a subtle
transition. Instead of paying professional media companies for attention,
what if companies – and indeed individuals – could earn it for themselves?
10 PAID ATTENTION
The rest of the book

In a particularly vigorous online discussion of something I wrote, an anony-
mous commenter (aren’t they always!) accused me of being an ‘advertising
philosopher’. Although it was meant as an insult, suggesting my concerns
were ephemeral not practical, I rather liked it. While I don’t claim to be a
philosopher, this book nonetheless aspires to be a modern philosophy of
advertising – a set of beliefs that guide behaviour. Philosophy is both theory
and praxis.
In the rest of the book we will look at how brands operate and innovate
in the evolving market for ideas. We will consider:
● What kind of ideas brands are and how they have established themselves
in the attention niche left by myth.
● How much of the decision-making process happens below the threshold
of attention.
● How advertising uses attention and how it works best in a dynamic
attention market.
● A guide to what ideas are and how to have them.
● How to behave in this new world of infinite content.
● How to package ideas to attract the most attention in the advertising
industry.
● How strategy is evolving to reflect these changes as we pass the point of
‘peak attention’.
Still paying attention? Then let’s go.

01
Logocentrism
What’s in a name?
The great idea in advertising... is in the realm of myth.

leo bogart1
It is perhaps surprising that, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) is willing to

spend US $57 billion buying Gillette, and McKinsey can state that ‘intangi-
ble assets make up most of the value of M&A deals [and that] brands
account for a considerable portion of these assets’,2 there is such a degree of
uncertainty as to what is being purchased.
Uberconsultant Tom Peters has proclaimed that we are in ‘The Great Age
of the Brand’.3 Yet if you ask Google, the oracle of said age, it pulls up doz-
ens of different definitions of brand, ranging from ‘trade name: a name given
to a product or service’ to ‘the personality of an organization’ or ‘the sym-
bolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or ser-
vice’. The ‘Great Age of the Brand’ would seem to be an age of great
uncertainty.
Things were not always this complex. Brands used to be simple, as any
cowboy (or cow) could have told you. But society has evolved at a remark-
able pace in the last century and brands have evolved with them. Brands
seem to chase our own needs up Maslow’s hierarchy: from badge of origin
to transformative experience. What was a signifier of product quality can
now be shorthand for a service, an experience, a ‘sign of me’,4 a celebrity, a
country and you, gentle reader.5 Brands are everywhere and everything is
a brand. We live in a logocentric world.
12 PAID ATTENTION
Brands are the most recognizable and ubiquitous cultural force operating
today. Children are named after them,6 and their encroachment on public
space is detailed with gleeful vitriol in books such as No Logo (1999) by
Naomi Klein. Brands are reference points we use to define ourselves (‘I am
irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance... I am a juvenile lout,
I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager: I am handsome, I say, as I don
my Levi jeans’7) and identify other people (‘Only chavs wear Burberry’8).
Our comprehension of these meanings ‘demonstrates the rise to prominence
of the brand in the last century’.9 How are we to resolve this contradiction
– that as brand influence has grown, what brands are has become less
certain?
The apparent confusion is a function of the nature of the role that brands
now play. I believe that brands perform the role of myths in modern society
and therefore must be complex. Even the simplest brands, which seem to
provide only origin information or navigation assistance on the shelf,
have multiple constituent parts. Their nature reflects their ability to capture
attention.
We are ‘meaning-seeking creatures’.10 We have imagination and this leads
us to wonder about the larger context in which we exist. This can lead us
into existential despair, and since the beginning of human culture we have
constructed stories that place us in a larger setting, and thus give us the sense
that our lives have meaning. ‘Reality leaves a lot to the imagination’, as John
Lennon once quipped. These stories resolve the contradictions between dif-
ferent types of human experience, providing our lives with a meta-narrative
to explain them that is integral to all human societies. This role is now per-
formed by brands, which ‘enable us to make sense and create meanings for
ourselves in the social world of consumption in which we participate’.11
Brands are ‘ideas to live by’,12 which we look for due to our ‘tradition
hunger’.13
The emergence of brands as myths has been triggered by the decline of
standard myths in Western culture. This is also why brands began in the
West, and are spreading East, as the adherence to mythology as an organ-
izing principle is breaking down. Western modernity is ‘the child of logos’14
(the opposite of mythos in the Hellenistic tradition, it represents science and
facts). Science became the dominant paradigm for understanding the world.
But logos alone is unable to give us a sense of significance – it was myth that
gave life meaning and context. Thus society unconsciously cried out for and
ultimately created its own myths around the newly dominant force of con-
sumerism, allocating disproportionate amounts of attention to the ones that
LOGOCENTRISM 13
best filled these needs. This is why modern brands are more complex than
their older counterparts, because the role of brands is changing to fulfil the
need for, the evolutionary niche left by, myth. Logos led us to logos.
The most powerful of today’s brands developed a cohesive mythology.
Brands in the modern world are inseparable from the companies whose
‘soul’ they manifest: Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford, vowing that
Google would not be evil; Innocent Drinks’s cute packaging and grass-
covered vans; the baristas/partners at Starbucks – these are all elements of
the brand that are held together by a philosophy that guides behaviour. This
combination of narrative and values is myth.
Myths are inherently complex and polysemous; they can be interpreted in
a number of equally valid ways. They cannot be compressed into a single,
particular essence but are rather the sum total of interlinked elements. Thus,
brands cannot simply represent a single core value. Claude Lévi-Strauss (the
anthropologist, not to be confused with the founder of the denim brand)
called the constituent parts of a myth mythemes. He argued that myth is a
language of its own, not just a subset of language, as it can be broken down
and restructured, irrespective of the language it is delivered in.
I would argue that brands are a language of their own, expressed via
word or image or sound, via television or print or mouth. Brands are a
bundle of inextricable, irreducible parts we can call brandemes.
Coca-Cola is not just about happiness or refreshment. Its brandemes
might be redness; youth; Father Christmas; sharing; the liquid; the shape of
the bottle; ‘the Real Thing’; new/classic versus Pepsi; teaching the world to
sing; and many other connected ideas. Some of us will only engage with
some of these meanings. Like myths, we apply interpretation; we construct
the meaning for ourselves – and this flexibility is crucial, increasingly so in
the global brand marketplace. This is what allows so many different itera-
tions of a brand to all hold true. The story of the myth is distinct from its
form:
That story is special, because it survives any and all translations. Lévi-Strauss
says that myth can be translated, paraphrased, reduced, expanded, and
otherwise manipulated – without losing its basic shape or structure.15
Lévi-Strauss posited that: ‘it is likely that languages exist in which an entire
myth can be expressed in a single word’.16 There is – the language of brand.
Myths are constructed in a space that is both real and imagined, where
reality is magical and the impossible is real. They are experienced ritually,
14 PAID ATTENTION
via purchase or use or interaction with brand communication, which pro-

vides a bridge to the brand’s domain.
Holt suggests that we ‘buy the product to consume the myth’.17 I agree,
but would argue that brands are not the icons of myth, but the myth itself
(the logo is not the brand), and that any interaction with brand communica-
tion can function in a similar way. The Marlboro man lives in Marlboro
country, but this can no longer be directly communicated, since tobacco
advertising has been banned in much of the world. Marlboro therefore cre-
ated ‘installations’ in bars, with red sofas in front of video screens showing
scenes that evoke Marlboro country.18 While this may not feel ethical, it is
designed to provide subliminal access to an established, mythic, brand space.
The brand brand is itself a myth. This is why it is so hard to pin to a
definition, because many definitions are true and make up, collectively,
what the brand myth is. This increasingly blurry word can be used in a vari-
ety of cases in a single meeting. It can refer to a mark, a set of values and
guidelines, a set of associations in the mind, a type of advertising, a product
from a certain company or the company itself. They are the brandemes of
brand. And the brand brand helps to resolve the contradiction between
influence and clarity that we observed at the outset: the function of myth is
to ‘provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’.19 Brands
are both dominant and vague, because the things humans look to for mean-
ing must be open to interpretation, to allow them to resonate with everyone
individually.
The theory of brand/myth leads to a number of new ways of thinking. It
suggests that we must abandon the reductionism that attempts to hone
brands to a single point and instead embrace complexity. We have to leave
our onions and look for guiding principles that connect the brandemes and
corporate behaviour. It suggests we should look to develop meaning and
narrative in communications.
There are a number of parallels between advertising and literature.20 This
is because literature is the expression of stories, as advertising is the expres-
sion of brand. Stories have characters, events, settings, beginnings, middles
and ends, styles, subtexts, twists and turns – and each episode should leave
the audience wanting more. This is how we should also think about con-
structing communication; conceptually and over time.
The launch campaign for mobile brand 3 (UK) demonstrated this well:
each ad shows us more of Planet 3 (setting); the Critters (characters) are
locked in unending comic battle (plot) that exists at the peripheries of the
Japanese ‘reality’ of the brand ads; there was even a website where you
LOGOCENTRISM 15
could visit Planet 3 yourself. It helped to drive the brand from a standing
start to a major player in a crowded category.
One marketer who was cognizant of crafting a myth is Phil Knight, the
founder of Nike. Naomi Klein accuses Nike of ‘creating a corporate mythol-
ogy powerful enough to infuse meaning into... raw objects’21 – and it has.
Here’s how a young man explained his decision to get the Nike ‘swoosh’
logo tattooed over his navel: ‘I wake up every morning... look down at the
symbol, and that pumps me up for the day. It’s to remind me every day what
I have to do, which is, “Just Do It”.’22
CASE STUDY
Google became the world’s biggest brand,23 without using any traditional advertising
(until their first television commercial in the 2012 Super Bowl). Casual observers
often maintain that Google built a better mousetrap, that their superior search results
naturally drew them users and positioned them as smarter and faster.
This disregards the skill with which the Google myth was constructed. In tests,
Google rarely outperforms other search engines. The 2012 Bing campaign, BingItOn,
highlights the fact that the Microsoft search engine seems to outperform Google in
blind tests. According to their research, people choose Bing web search results over
Google nearly ‘2 to 1 in blind comparison tests’.24 Yet this seems to make very little
difference to Google’s market share, which is actually increasing.
One of the core constituents of Google’s myth – one of its brandemes – is ‘being
smarter’: built on its founders’ frozen PhDs, its name,25 its adoption by the geek
community and a careful seeding strategy. Google has always stated a clear developer
origin story, which makes it empathetic to geeks – and geeks are the early adopters
and cultural disseminators of the internet.
The young hero takes on the might of the evil empire – a classic myth. Google’s
stark homepage made the implicit statement that they weren’t in it for the money, in
contrast to all the cluttered portals of the time. They cemented this by running the site
for years without monetizing it, building the brandeme of benevolence – ‘Don’t be
Evil’.26 Its logo can change daily – eventually codified as the Google Doodle – and yet
still be Google, because the brandeme isn’t the look of the letters, it’s the fact that it
can change.
It used products like episodes, unleashing them to a fan base in carefully staged
instalments. In 2004 it launched Gmail on 1 April, which generated endless PR. Gmail
also fostered the mythic positioning of Google as Skywalker against Microsoft’s Evil
Empire: it offered 1GB of storage for free, whereas Hotmail was charging for anything
16 PAID ATTENTION
over 10MB. Earth, Maps, Drive, Glass, Inbox, even the abandoned Wave – each episode
had its own facets and staging. Demonstrating a clear understanding of Knight’s
maxim that ‘product is the most important marketing tool’,27 Google released products
to build its myth. In the years since, Google has grown to become one of the largest
companies in the world, sprawling across numerous products and acquisitions, and
ultimately dropping its internal maxim not to be evil in its mission statements. As it
grew, the original positioning became untenable since it had superseded Microsoft as
the most pervasive consumer technology brand. In 2015, Google suddenly announced
it had renamed itself Alphabet, turning Google into a subsidiary. This allowed the
company to continue to expand far outside its traditional domains, with acquisitions
like connected home company Nest. Larry Page gave the public explanation for the
name, suggesting that letters represent the first great technology, which is at the core
of how Google indexes information. That said, someone at Google once told me that
internally it was also understood as making ‘bets on alpha’, or above-market financial
returns, which suggests a very different brand than the original young upstart.
Modern brands have evolved to fulfil the role of myths for modern consum-
ers, the role of soul for modern corporations – and it is incumbent on the
advertising industry to evolve with them.
Brands are socially constructed ideas

The definition of a brand used most often is Paul Feldwick’s, the former sage
of advertising agency DDB:
A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.28
This is great because it reminds us that:
Brands... are made and owned by people... by the public... by consumers.29
This definition is part of the orthodoxy of advertising. It also led to a con-

ceptual rift between two kinds of brand equity – that which exists in some-
one’s head and that which can exist on balance sheets as a form of intangible
asset.
I don’t think this definition is entirely adequate. And I think, with a slight
reformulation, we might also be able to begin to resolve the division between
brands in our heads and brands that have a dollar value to accountants. In
LOGOCENTRISM 17
the next few lines following the above quote in the article ‘Posh Spice and
Persil’, Bullmore points out:
The image of a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar,

hold precisely the same view of the same brand.30
And of course this is absolutely true. And yet it is also not true. My image of
a particular brand will be subjective and yet it will exist in relation to an
understanding of the collective perception of the brand. Wittgenstein argued
that there is no such thing as a private language. A language that is unintel-
ligible to anyone but its originating user is logically incoherent: it couldn’t
function as a communication medium, there would be no way for a speaker
to assign meanings to its signs.31
Equally, an individual brand makes no sense. My understanding of any
brand exists in relation to the collective understanding of the brand. That
collective intentionality dictates what the brand means – it assigns a type of
status function to a product. I may personally disagree but I know what I’m
disagreeing with – the collective perception. Brands can only exist if there is
a collective perception of what they stand for.
This is what allows brands to be used in defining, or constructing, an
identity. If all that mattered is what I personally thought about the brand, it
would be unable to perform any social functions at all.
So, let’s put forward a reformulation:
A brand is a collective perception in the minds of consumers.
But how does this help to resolve the division between brands in the head
and brands on the balance sheet? Because by making it a collective percep-
tion, we can turn a brand from an opinion into a fact.
Here I’m going to steal from the philosopher John Searle, who wrote
about the construction of social reality. In essence, he argues that, collec-
tively, subjective opinions can create objective reality.
This seems counter-intuitive: how can everyone thinking something make
it real?
But in fact we do it all the time. The best example is money. Money is
only money because we all agree that it is. Its status as money is not in any
way derived from the physical qualities of the note and it is no longer linked
to a gold standard. Most money nowadays exists as magnetic impressions
on hard drives, but that doesn’t matter as long as it functions as money. As
long as it can be used to pay debts, it is money – objectively.
18 PAID ATTENTION
If I go into a shop and buy something with some cash, my belief in its
value is no longer required, it simply is money. This also can be seen to apply
to government, property, political parties, wars. All these things only exist
because we think about them in a certain way – and yet they do exist.
Similarly, a brand is a form of socially constructed reality that has attained
an objective reality, which is why it can have a monetary value that is
dependent on the totality of perceptions held about it – the total amount of
attention that has been allocated to it.
How much is that brand in the window?

Beyond purchases and goodwill on balance sheets, there are various indus-
try reports that measure the dollar value of the ideas we call brands. The
BrandZ report by research company Millward Brown is one of the most
respected, but most share a basic methodology compounded with some
proprietary data.
The BrandZ valuation uses discounted cash-flow analysis. This is the sum
of all future earnings attributable to the brand discounted to account for
risk over time. This is pretty standard accounting stuff, but, as with all finan-
cial modelling, if you look closely, it is basically certain opinions, assump-
tions and predictions, structured into a spreadsheet.
The ‘brand multiple’, for example, is derived using the proprietary brand
voltage metric, which ‘takes into account how many people are very loyal to
the brand (the brand’s bonding score) and claimed purchasing data for the
category to produce a single Brand Voltage number’.32 This means asking
lots of people what they claim to do and then using it to guess what they will
do in the future, which, as we shall see, is not a very reliable predictor.
The final formula is this:33
Brand value =
Step 1 – intangible earnings: intangible corporate earnings allocated to each
brand, based on company and analyst reports, industry studies, revenue
estimates, etc.
Multiplied by:
Step 2 – brand contribution: portion of intangible earnings attributable to
brand. This is driven by the BrandDynamics Loyalty Pyramid and category
segmentation, part of brand voltage study.
LOGOCENTRISM 19
Multiplied by:
Step 3 – brand multiple: brand earnings multiple. Calculated based on
market valuations, brand growth potential and voltage, the proprietary
metric.
The 2014 study indicated that the most valuable brands in the world were:34
1 Google – $158,843,000,000
2 Apple – $147,880,000,000
3 IBM – $107,541,000,000
4 Microsoft – $90,185,000,000
5 McDonald’s – $85,706,000,000
6 Coca-Cola – $80,683,000,000
7 Visa – $79,197,000,000
8 AT&T – $77,883,000,000
9 Marlboro – $67,341,000,000
10 Amazon – $64,255,000,000
For comparison, the 2020 study anointed the following:
1 Amazon – $415,855,000,000
2 Apple – $352,206,000,000
3 Microsoft – $326,544,000,000
4 Google – $323,601,000,000
5 Visa – $186,809,000,000
6 Alibaba – $152,525,000,000
7 Tencent – $150,978,000,000
8 Facebook – $147,190,000,000
9 McDonald’s – $129,321,000,000
10 Mastercard – $108,219,000,000
This paints an interesting picture of recent shifts in culture, as technology

brands have consolidated their dominance while Chinese brands have risen
to global prominence and smoking continues to decline. Interestingly,
Amazon was also the world’s largest advertiser in 2020. We should
20 PAID ATTENTION
remember, however, that any such number is, despite its specificity, only a
numerically expressed opinion.
Persistently irrational behaviour

The financial values attributed to brands are indicative of the economic
value they create for companies. This value is caused by creating persistent
irrational behaviours, or seemingly irrational behaviours, in customers.
Alongside the balance sheet, strong brands have been shown over time to
create price elasticity of demand. That is to say, the company can charge a
premium for the product without dramatically affecting market share.
People will pay more money for the same product. Additionally, stronger
brands with large market share, also, with very few exceptions, have more
buyers within a certain time period, and more loyalty as measured through
repeat purchase. This is known as the law of double jeopardy, which seems
to be an empirical fact in marketing (or as close to one as we have).
Initially observing popularity of Hollywood actors and media products,
researcher Andrew Ehrenberg demonstrated that the double jeopardy law
generalized for brand purchases and applies across categories as diverse as
aviation fuel and laundry detergent.35 Indeed, laundry detergent Tide’s brand
is so potent at maintaining a price premium that is has come to be used as a
currency (see case study below).
CASE STUDY
In 2012, investigators were trying to understand why supermarkets in the United

States were being robbed every month of Tide detergent – and only Tide detergent. As
with every investigation, they ‘followed the money’ only to find that Tide was the
money. Bottles of Tide had become an ad hoc street currency, with 150-ounce bottles
being exchanged for $5 or $10 worth of drugs, earning it the nickname ‘Liquid Gold’.
As New York magazine pointed out: ‘this unlikely black market would not have
formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product’.36 It turns out that despite
being considered a ‘low interest category’, people have very strong feelings about
their detergents. Tide came in the top three brands that consumers were least likely to
give up during tough times. This bond has allowed the producer, Procter & Gamble, to
charge 50 per cent more than the average detergent and yet it still outsells its nearest
competitor, which is also produced by P&G, by more than two to one.
LOGOCENTRISM 21
So, what is it about Tide that means more people will pay 50 per cent more for a
functionally parity product from the same manufacturer?
The investigating sergeant puts it well: ‘I’m a No. 1 Tide fan’, he says. ‘I don’t know
if it’s all psychological, but you can tell the difference.’37
The dark side of brands

Brands and their purveyors have long longed for authenticity, or at least to
be perceived as authentic.
Bizarrely, when discussing authenticity, and the desire that real people
have for relationships with real things, what usually happens is that adver-
tising people end up equating authenticity with grass roots, real life, non-
commercial stuff. This is odd because, by its very nature, a commercial
brand cannot be that, which means any attempts to be so are not authentic.
Being authentic as a brand, or person, is really simple. Stand for some-
thing, establish a consistent mode of behaviour and then express it through
everything you do, communications and commerce. It’s when you say one
thing and do another that you stop being authentic. To thine own self be
true. (When a brand tries to fake a grass-roots movement, which has been
done many times, it is called astroturfing.)
One way for brands to feel more authentic in how they act is to embrace
their dark side. I first encountered this idea from Adam Ferrier, a trained
psychologist, strategist and author of The Advertising Effect (2014). He
pointed out that in the 1980s brands were all yang: superficial, aspirational,
glossy – think any Pepsi commercial, think huge logos. In the 1990s brands
developed a more authentic voice, reflecting our actual values not our
aspirations, trying to stand for something beyond themselves: think Dove,
Innocent, Body Shop, Big Brother.
Following on after this manufactured authenticity then, brands can
look to embrace their shadows. Shadows are qualities deemed socially
unacceptable and thus are usually hidden, by brands and by people. But if
brands could tap into them, they would allow consumers to express and
normalize the negative feelings they all have, and thus build much stronger
relationships.
To create stronger, robust, believable brands, we can turn to the dark
side, exploring a broader range of emotions. One aspect of this can be seen
in the emergence of ‘sadvertising’.38 Pushing against the hyper-positivity and
22 PAID ATTENTION
levity modes that had once again come to dominate advertising, a raft of
advertising appeared that tried to squeeze some tears from the eyes of the
supposedly cynical consumer. Humour is a powerful advertising tool – it
captures attention through disrupted expectations, which also triggers
memory formation, and people like to laugh, so it drives favourability.
But humour is perceived as being a shallow emotion, while tragedy is the
‘highest form of art’.39
P&G created its first-ever television spot for itself – rather than one of its
brands – with its tearjerker announcement of its Olympics partnerships,
claiming to be the ‘sponsor of moms’, in an ad called ‘Best Job’.40 Dove’s
‘Real Beauty Sketches’41 – showing women describing themselves to police
sketch artists to demonstrate how critical they are of their own appearances
– brought tears to eyes all over the world, becoming the second most viewed
ad ever on YouTube.
However, it is not in the either/or that the power of myth lies. As Lévi-
Strauss pointed out, and as was later discussed by Adam Morgan in his
book Eating the Big Fish (1999),42 strong brands solve contradictions. This
is because they operate in the realm of myth, and the cultural function of
myth is to resolve contradictions. The most obvious example that many
myths try to resolve is the fact that we are alive but one day will be dead.
This thinking was enshrined in the thinking of Crispin Porter + Bogusky
– ‘agency of the decade’ (the noughties), as a ‘cultural tension’ to be solved
by the brand, or the idea, and subsequently spread throughout the industry.
Apple makes computers human. Persil makes dirt good. Dove makes
beauty universal. Nike makes everybody an athlete. Google makes infinity
manageable. Kodak makes moments last forever. Honda makes (the power
of) dreams physical. Starbucks makes luxury affordable. Virgin is a giant
that takes on the giants for the little guy. Coca-Cola makes ubiquity unique.
At the heart of many cultural tensions is the dichotomy of social beings:
how to be unique as part of a group.
Life is full of contradictions. Brands, like myths, provide a meta-narrative
that helps people to find meaning and resolve these contradictions imagina-
tively, since they cannot be solved rationally. Which is why we have Dark
M&Ms. Probably.
LOGOCENTRISM 23
Brandgrams
In Daniel Schacter’s book, Searching for Memory (1997), he puts forward a
curious description of memory. According to Schacter, memories are encoded
in the brain as engrams – essentially a neuron-firing pattern – that captures
certain elements from the experience. Certain kinds of encoding are more
likely to promote higher recall – specifically, elaborative encoding that
allows you to integrate new information with what you already know.
This explains why successful advertising often leverages existing referent
systems by making our brain process information and link it to things
already in our heads, which means there is a much better chance that we will
remember it. Something you know is linked to something you don’t.
So brand experiences will build brandgrams in our heads.
So far so good, this all feels pretty logical. But then Schacter veers off.
What he suggests is that the act of remembering is not really a recollection
– it is a new experience: ‘The cue combines with the engram to yield... an
experience that differs from either of its constituents.’43
So the cue, the piece of communication, combines with the brandgram to
create a new experience that ‘differs from either of its constituents’. People
are not simply experiencing the communication but the gestalt of the com-
munication and their pre-existing brandgram.
Now that’s what I call consumer-created content.
PART TWO
Attention deficit disorders

02
Uncovering hidden persuaders

Why all market research is wrong
No one really knows why humans do what they do.

david reynolds
If someone asked me... which half of my advertising is wasted I would

probably say 90% is wasted but I don’t know which 90%.
niall fitzgerald, chairman of unilever1
The drivers of human behaviour are complex, multivariate and largely sub-
conscious, which suggests that research conducted using claimed data is
not enough to gauge underlying causes or the effects of advertising.
Advertising functions in different ways depending on context, which sug-
gests that a unified theory of ‘how advertising works’ will be forever beyond
reach. That doesn’t mean that 90 per cent of advertising is wasted, simply
misunderstood.
Let’s lay this oft discussed issue to rest, shall we?
I have long espoused the view that all market research is wrong. The idea
of researching a market makes sense to anyone who is about to invest money
into engaging with one, using products, services or communications.
However, the basic idea underlying most market research is epistemologi-
cally specious. That is to say, it seems to make sense but, under examination,
it does not.
In essence, the foundation of market research is that, by asking lots
of people questions, or asking a smaller group of people more in-depth
questions, we can gather dependable insight into why they buy what they
28 ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDERS
buy, and whether or not they will buy something in the future, perhaps after
having seen some advertising.
I don’t believe this is true. For two very simple reasons:
● We don’t know why we do what we do. We make these (and most)

decisions at a subconscious level, which means, by definition, that the
operations of the process are inaccessible to our conscious minds.
That does not mean that people won’t answer, though. They will
happily answer, erroneously, in a way that seems to make sense, as their
minds create fictions to explain their own behaviour to themselves and
the interviewer.
● The gulf between claimed attitudes (and intentions) and actual behaviour
is vast. Asking people if they intend to buy something is analogous to
asking them if they intend to go to the gym – the results may not
correspond well with future behaviour. Focus groups are particularly
fraught: they create artificial data as a response to artificial situations and
social dynamics.
Why do we do what we do? It’s a staggering question that humanity has

ruminated on since it began ruminating. The fact that we don’t have an
answer yet, the existence of a substantial psychoanalytic industry and the
success of cults such as Scientology that claim to have answers all indicate
that we don’t really understand why we behave the way we do.
A desire to understand what drives purchase decisions, and thus find out
which advertising is wasteful, led to simplified models of behaviour such as
AIDA,2 and the purchase funnel (see below). Working out what motivates
people to make economic decisions is an area that lies somewhere between
psychology, sociology and economics. What is confusing is that these areas
of enquiry have very different models.
Psychologists of various flavours look to understand human cognition
and behaviour from many angles. Freud developed the therapeutic approach
known as psychoanalysis to uncover the ‘unconscious patterns of life’ that
drive behaviour.3 Psychoanalysis fell from favour in the psychological com-
munity, but in recent years the impact of the unconscious has once again
come to the fore, with books such as Subliminal (2012) by Leonard
Mlodinow4 claiming that our unconscious mind rules our behaviour.
The study of interactions between conscious and unconscious elements of
the mind in influencing behaviour have been dubbed the ‘new unconscious’,
in order to distinguish this from the old unconscious of repression that
UNCOVERING HIDDEN PERSUADERS 29
Freud was so fond of. This is not to be reductive. Clearly what we think
must have some impact on what we do – and what we buy. At least that is
what we assume, because that is how we experience it. But even that cer-
tainty is being challenged.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, in his paper, ‘The Mind’s Best Trick:
How we Experience Conscious Will’,5 puts forward the counter-intuitive
notion that what we experience as volition is an epiphenomenon – a second-
ary result of the decision being made, not the cause of it. That is to say, our
conscious attention may not even be necessary to direct our own behaviour.
This is really hard to get your head round, but various experiments sug-
gest that our experience of consciously making decisions can happen after
the decision has been made elsewhere in the brain, which turns logical mod-
els like AIDA upside down and inside out.
If it all seems terribly complicated and confusing, that’s because it is. The
brain is the most complex thing we currently know of. We know almost
nothing about how it creates the emergent property known as conscious-
ness. Combine that with the fact that it is interacting with stimuli, some of
which are the equally complex minds of others, in the ever-changing soup of
culture and commerce, and you have the most complex multivariate system
in the known universe. And it is this system that market research seeks to
decode in order to increase the efficacy of marketing. It’s little wonder that
it’s a bit tough.
Classical economics, on the other hand, is reductive. It is founded on the
concept of ‘homo economicus’ – or rational man – that acts to obtain the
highest possible well-being given all available information. This simplified
decision model created the division between psychology and economics. It
was this fissure that led psychologist Daniel Kahneman to develop what is
known as ‘behavioural economics’.
The traditional purchase funnel is an explanatory fiction: these fictions
are constructs that purport to explain phenomena. They tend to obfuscate
areas of ignorance by ‘filling in the gaps’ between antecedent and correlated
subsequent events. This is a particular problem in behavioural science due
to the creation of agents that are equivalent to the self, and thus provide no
true understanding, simply another layer. The simplification of the purchase
funnel, in its linearity, doesn’t correspond to real behaviour and doesn’t
explain drivers of behaviour.
First, people don’t act this way – numerous other factors interplay with
an assessment of needs and gain. Second, in the modern world of brand
decisions, products mostly have functional parity. Any advance made by one
is quickly followed by its competitor, so tangible benefits, and the considera-

tion thereof, give way to intangible ones in the era of brands.
Behavioural economics emerged as a challenge to the assumption of
rationality, attempting to incorporate some of the learning from psychology,
and thus it helps to further highlight some of the drivers of purchase behav-
iour. Additional motivating factors matter such as other people’s behaviour
– people do many things by observing others and copying; also incorporated
was the importance of habit in decision making.6 Mark Earls suggests that
‘the most important characteristic of mankind is that of a herd animal’,7 and
studies have shown that consumers ‘adopt patterns of routinised purchase
behaviour’.8 So, what we are seeing is that there are numerous factors that
impact consumer behaviour that operate without our direct attention.
Despite the addition of these considerations, ‘ordinary people remain tan-
talisingly unique and unpredictable’.9 So it behoves us to consider how
research may help unpick the influences on purchase decisions. The majority
of market research is based on claimed data: asking people what they think
about brand communication, whether they remember it and why they do
what they do. This is obviously flawed, since people don’t know why they
do what they do. When asked, they will generate an answer that minimizes
cognitive dissonance, or the gap between how they think they should act
and how they do. Thus people will tend to give rational reasons for the pur-
chase decisions they make in order to ‘justify [their] behaviour to [them-
selves]’.10 The spotlight of attention on past behaviour casts an inaccurate
shadow on the wall of the cave. Further, ‘the gulf between the information
we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often
vast’.11 This is what the Market Research Society suggested was responsible
for pollsters’ failure to predict the 1992 UK general election results accu-
rately – the Shy Tory Factor: people lying to researchers because they were
embarrassed about voting for the Conservative Party.
As lots of experimentally demonstrated behavioural economics shows us,
attitudes are not a good indicator of behaviour, and framing, context and
subliminal associations are hugely important drivers of choice, but we are
unaware of this. Awareness of subliminal effects negates their impact. This
is worth repeating for clarity. If we have our attention directed to subliminal
stimuli, they no longer have the same effect. Attention actually prevents
their influence.
This is ultimately why asking people if certain media will affect their
behaviour more than others is mostly pointless. Forcing people to consider
something rationally that operates on an unconscious, emotional level, is

always going to give the wrong answer.
In Consumer.ology (2010) Philip Graves examines these issues in persua-
sive detail. He points out:
Ironically, given that the consumer research that feeds it fails to take it into
account, it could be argued that most marketing leverages the unconscious
mind, and indeed it must do in order to be effective. In many consumer
experiences it is either impractical or impossible to compare the array of
products on offer. To operate efficiently, consumers rely on their unconscious
mind to make decisions.12
There are lots of examples in the book that demonstrate the impact of
unconsciously perceived variables in controlled research tests. A 1990 study
done using Nike shoes by The Smell and Taste Foundation placed two iden-
tical pairs of shoes in two identical rooms, with one difference: one was
scented with pleasant floral tones, the other unscented. According to the
study, a staggering 84 per cent of people exposed to the shoes in the scented
room expressed higher levels of preference for the shoes, and were willing to
pay $10 more for them, on average.13 It is unlikely that people believed that
the fragrance made them like the shoes more, but it seems that it did.
Despite rigorous testing of new consumer products in research, 80 per
cent of them fail. Conversely, with the product Red Bull researchers con-
cluded that ‘no other product had ever performed so poorly in consumer
testing; the look, taste, and mouth-feel were regarded as “disgusting” and
the idea that it “stimulates mind and body” didn’t persuade anyone the taste
was worth tolerating’.14 And yet by 2020 the company had sold more than
75 billion cans.
Market research is a $23 billion industry in the United States but all the
data it generates should be understood as wrong. Now, that doesn’t mean
we should get rid of all of it. Just because it’s not good at making predic-
tions, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. It just needs to be used appropriately.
Asking people questions is simply one way in which we attempt to create
a model of the infinite complexities of human behaviour. And, as George
Box said: ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’.
Asking people what they think is not a pointless mode of enquiry, it is
simply not substantive or predictive on its own. Claimed data is useful
for exploring attitudes, for understanding what people think they think.
Since they are unobservable, the only way to explore them is via careful
questioning. The Implicit Association Test developed at Harvard demon-
strates one way of exploring these and also serves to remind us that our
conscious attitudes may not be consonant with our unconscious attitudes.15
It uses questions about beliefs, and then times your responses to certain
associations to help uncover the difference between what you think you
think, and the associations your brain implicitly makes – hence the name.
This is because we now know that the brain more rapidly processes associa-
tions between things it has already linked than other associations.
However, attitudes can only be used to ‘predict behavioural intentions,
rather than actual behaviour’.16 Further, ‘individual tendencies do not neces-
sarily extrapolate to group behaviour’.17 So how are we to uncover the hid-
den persuaders of behaviour?
I believe research should be thought of as triangulation: any one reading
is unlikely to illuminate but a combination may do so. Interviews should be
supported by research that does not rely on individuals to tell researchers
anything directly and that looks at the context in which brand decisions are
made.
Ethnography is one way to ‘zero in on... customers’ unarticulated
desires’.18 As an observational mode it is not subject to the flaws inherent in
claimed data and it is ‘founded in the idea that a system’s properties cannot
necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other’,19 thus
acknowledging the importance of context. However, ethnography can be
prohibitively expensive and incorporates an additional limiting factor: the
observer effect, which suggests that ‘people change their behaviour when it
is observed’.20
Advertising is traditionally pre-tested to gauge its efficacy. Traditionally
this testing takes the form of exposure to the advertising copy and then
interviewing and surveying. Like all claimed data, this approach is hindered.
Thus this mode of research also requires a supplement, ideally in the form
of physiological response testing such as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) and galvanic skin response in order to gauge the emotive
impact of the communication, which may be beyond conscious cognition.
Millward Brown’s LINK testing stipulates the founding requirement for
all pre-testing, which is also applicable to all research into the influence of
advertising: the ‘chosen approach should be based on a sound model of how
advertising works’.21
Graves suggests that if you want to understand behaviour, you must:
● Observe actual behaviour: because claimed attitudes and intentions don’t

correlate.
● Observe it surreptitiously: for as soon as someone knows they are being
researched, their responses are suspect.
● Observe it in context: because context is such a vital driver of behaviour.
● Observe with loss factored in: saying you will buy a product in a focus
group doesn’t force you to make a choice that loss aversion will flag;
there is no opportunity cost to saying you will do something.
No rational messaging
Decades of research have demonstrated that rational messaging seems to
have little impact when changing behaviour, and that emotional response –
regardless of how it is generated – is what does. This is why modern pre-
testing tends to include automated facial coding to garner the emotional
responses of viewers to commercials.
Robert Heath, of the University of Bath, found that:
advertisements with high levels of emotional content enhanced how people felt
about brands, even when there was no real message. However, advertisements
which were low on emotional content had no effect on how favourable the
public were towards brands, even if the ad was high in news and information.
So, in advertising, it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it, that gets
results.22
Paul Feldwick, building on this in a seminal paper, ‘50 Years with the Wrong
Model’, goes further:
Somehow 30 seconds of entertaining nonsense leads to a situation where people

not only choose this brand but will pay 35% more for it. But somehow it seems
we’re not very comfortable with this. Because we all like to believe deep down
that we really choose our tea on rational product-based grounds.23
Looking for substantiation of this point, we turn to a meta-analysis – an

analysis of many other analyses – of the Institute of Practitioners in
Advertising (IPA) databank. The IPA is the trade body in the UK and hosts
the papers of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, one of the few advertising award
shows based on business efficacy, rather than creativity. The meta-analysis
concluded that: ‘The most effective advertisements of all are those with little
or no rational content’24(emphasis added).
Here is a meta-cognitive error at work – a persistent error in thinking
about how we think. Our brains like to think they are rational, and so they
explain our actions to ourselves with rational stories. Thus, we created the
‘advertising as message transmission’ model, and so we continue to lean on
product propositions as the core element of creative work.
But that’s not really how we think and, more recently, Nobel prize-
winner Daniel Kahneman’s magnum opus, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011),25
presents the emerging science behind this. His model divides consciousness
into two systems: 1 and 2. System 1 works automatically, rapidly, using
heuristics to guide decisions and thinking. System 2 is the more linear think-
ing that we use to work out maths problems, logical and slower. His work
presents a direct challenge to the messaging model of advertising, since, as
he pointed out during a talk in London: ‘You must recognise that most of
the time you are not talking to System 2. You’re talking to System 1. System
1 runs the show. That’s the one you want to move.’26
Advertising is mostly conceived, due to the persistent meta-cognitive
error of rationality, as trying to persuade System 2 – but that system rarely
makes purchase decisions. You can’t persuade System 1, that’s not the way
it learns or decides. It’s automatic and associative. This is also what causes
some of the problems with market research’s ability to be predictive – the
conditions of research activate System 2 thinking, when purchase decisions
will usually run through System 1.
Research as marketing
That which was private, can now be easily made public. It used to be that
you did research and then it informed marketing. Now research can be mar-
keting, and marketing can be research.
One new way of understanding what groups of people think they think,
instead of bespoke surveys or groups, is to undertake research on Facebook
(or any digital platform), among people who have already selected your
brand or interest. This research, as a side effect of its public nature, could
also function as marketing, for example as teasing the launch of a new prod-
uct to your existing fans. Research undertaken in front of 1 million Facebook
users is marketing.
As a general rule, it seems most appropriate to phase communication this

way. Anyone who has elected to receive communication directly from a
brand surely deserves to be told of any new announcements coming from a
brand before it hits broadcast channels. And before they are told anything,
every single person who works at the company, who is, in effect, a brand
ambassador, should have been communicated to. This inside-out approach
to communication is increasingly important when every single employee has
a social media foghorn.
Social media have a tendency to make private things public and thus cut
across legacy silos of organizations, which suggests that perhaps we need to
stop thinking about these things as separate and consider the whole field –
research, marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), customer
service – as elements of back-and-forth brand conversations.
In some ways, brands don’t really have any choice. Customers under-
stand that the same entity is operating regardless of where we encounter
them, and they have come to expect some kind of structural cohesion and
understanding among those elements. Today, the single disgruntled cus-
tomer can have disproportionate impact because of the scale and public
nature of social media, in a way that was impossible a few years ago. Equally,
brands and businesses have an opportunity to address negative issues in
a public way that could earn them additional credibility instead of being
detrimental to their business.
Customer service is marketing
CASE STUDY
When musician Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar was damaged in transit on United Airlines,
he attempted to deal with the matter using standard customer service channels. He
says that after nine months of fruitless negotiations, he decided to write a song about
it. The song ‘United Breaks Guitars’27 has had more than 12 million views on YouTube,
with more than 150,000 in the first day it was posted, which prompted United to get
in touch and try to make amends. Finally, Rob Bradford, United’s managing director of
customer solutions, telephoned Carroll to apologize and to ask if the carrier could use
the video internally for training. ‘United mentioned it hoped to learn from the incident,
and to change its customer service policy as a result of the incident.’28
So what is the moral here? What did United ‘learn from the incident’?
In some ways, it is odd that companies have customer service representatives,

since the whole function of a company is to serve customers. Normally, customer
service is actually problem resolution. Carroll claims that he was endlessly passed
around the system, each member claiming to be unable to take responsibility or make
amends, until he finally took to YouTube. As Ken Wheaton, editor of Advertising Age,
points out: ‘You should be addressing consumer complaints the right way during the
very first round... It’s always nice when these stories have a happy ending. But it
shouldn’t take public humiliation for a company to do right by its customers.’29
Perhaps the key problem in customer service is representatives who won’t

give you a name or way to contact them directly; they bounce you around
the system, leave you on hold, and finally drop the call when you become
too irritating and there’s nothing they can do.
Individuals want an easy life – humans are like electricity, following the
path of least resistance. Working in a call centre for the minimum wage
doesn’t tend to make people especially invested in the brand they represent,
so they palm off customers, get rid of them, drop the call. In fact, many
call centres offer bonuses on call volume, so it is actually going to cost an
operator money to keep talking about this problem that they haven’t been
empowered to solve.
One of the things that social media suggests is the breakdown of the
corporate firewall. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, once tweeted:
If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership
issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue.
While this is a nice thought, it’s a lot easier to be open like this if you are
small and act that way from the start. Big corporations have structures, legal
departments and other inertia that makes this hard, but there is a huge
opportunity here.
Until recently, these complaints were locked into an individual’s sphere
of influence, which was limited until social media gave everyone a voice.
However, social media are, usually, overheard, because they operate in
public by default.
So there are two directions in which this can go:
1 Companies can keep acting like one person doesn’t make a difference and
see how much time, effort and creativity that one person will deploy to
get his or her frustration out into the world, as Dave Carroll did – and see
how receptive the world is to such messaging.
2 Decide that customer service is the most important thing a company
does. The only route to long-term profit is making customers happy – so
do it in public, reach out to people, don’t put the onus on the individual
to battle through the firewall or the 800 number. Constantly monitor the
social web for people who are unsatisfied with the product or service you
sell and, as long as the complaint is justified, do what you need to do to
make them happy.
Then, customer service becomes marketing, because solving real people’s

problems in public is a compelling testament to your approach, and every
person you make happy will sing your praises across the web. In a con-
nected age, a happy customer becomes an advertisement, especially on
Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg has pointed out:
The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you
have context about what your friends are doing. That’s true for ads as well.
An advertiser can produce the best creative ad in the world, but knowing your
friends really love drinking Coke is the best endorsement for Coke you can
possibly get.30
What brand tastes like

Why do people love drinking Coca-Cola?
In Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions
(2008)31 Dan Ariely illustrates a truth that we find hard to accept, which is
that we are not rational beings. We make decisions that are seemingly irra-
tional – in the same way, again and again – because of how our brains are
hardwired: anchors and priming, emotions and context all interact to change
how we choose. All these impact behaviour while operating below the atten-
tion threshold.
One of the things Ariely highlights is the power of expectation to alter
experience. He describes a replication of the famous Coca-Cola/ Pepsi taste
tests, done with the subjects in an fMRI to record how their brain is process-
ing the experience of tasting the drinks.
In the original blind taste tests, Pepsi usually wins, but when the brands
are revealed, people prefer ‘the Real Thing’. According to the experiment
detailed in Ariely’s book, this is because the experience of consuming

branded sugar water is different from drinking sugar water alone: the Coca-
Cola brand activates different associations in the memory and emotional
parts of the brain, which contribute to the consumption experience, which
means that when you drink a Coca-Cola a part of what you are tasting is the
brand.
For Christmas 2011, Coca-Cola created some limited edition polar-bear
cans for Classic that were predominately white, rather than red. People mis-
took it for Diet Coke because it was white – and Coca-Cola pulled the cans,
citing consumer confusion. But perhaps it was more than simply confusion.
Consumers ‘felt that regular Coke tasted different in the white cans’.32
Taste, like every sensory experience, happens in the mind, so it is more
complex than just chemicals – it happens at the intersection of lots of things,
including, of course, the chemicals and your tongue, but also including less
obvious things such as expectation (being told you will love this), concepts
of value (this wine is very expensive), where you are (anchoring/priming)
and memories associated with it.
Coca-Cola officials denied changing the taste, but changing the can dra-
matically can also change the taste. Changing some of the key cues around
the product can distort the brand effect and change how people experience
the taste.
Physical persuasion (nod your head)

Start nodding your head while you read. Go on, it will be fun. Keep doing it
until you forget.
In The Tipping Point (2000) Malcolm Gladwell highlights a piece of
research that students were told was for a company making headphones.
The recruits were given headsets and asked to perform specific motions
while listening to music and a piece of editorial concerning a rise in tuition
fees. One-third of the recruits were told to nod, one-third to shake their
heads, and one-third to remain still as a control group.
Afterwards they were asked some questions in an attempt to gauge how
persuasive the editorial had been on them. The control group were unmoved
by the editorial. Those who shook their heads from side to side while listen-
ing, ostensibly to test headphones, strongly disagreed with the proposed
increase. Those who were told to nod up and down found the editorial very
persuasive. They wanted tuition fees to rise. The simple act of nodding their
heads while listening was sufficient to cause them to agree with a policy that
would take money out of their own pockets.
The authors of the study concluded that:
Television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created

repetitive vertical movements of the television viewers’ heads (eg bouncing
ball).33 (emphasis added)
This is partly to do with the way our eyes track motion. We tend to follow
curved motion along its own pathway, moving our heads slightly. For rea-
sons that remain unknown, our attention is more directed by curved motion
than rectilinear motion.34
If one bouncing ball is persuasive, how persuasive are 250,000? (Are you
still nodding?)
In 2006, Sony, with their advertising agency Fallon, launched a small
creative renaissance in their communication with the spot ‘Balls’.35 The lead
creative behind it was Juan Cabral, who tore a hole in the London advertis-
ing scene in the mid-noughties, only to vanish back to Argentina to make
‘beautiful films’, as he liked to say.
Fallon had picked up the global account, and was looking to make work
that resonated globally. Laurence Green, then planning partner of Fallon,
and one of the smartest minds in the UK advertising scene, relates how the
idea came about:
Juan Cabral (for it was he) suggested ‘we bounce thousands of balls down a hill
and film it’. We asked him to turn this mere bagatelle of an idea into a proper
script. Two weeks later, he came back with: ‘We bounce thousands of balls
down a hill and film it.’ (He was right, of course.) And so Sony’s, Fallon’s and
maybe even advertising’s fortunes shifted.36
Watching 250,000 balls bounce up and down, gently, in slow motion, to an

acoustic guitar cover of the song ‘Heartbeats’ by José González was persua-
sive enough to make Bravia the world’s bestselling TV, to push Sony back
into profit and give it back its bounce. It became one of the most loved and
awarded advertisements of all time.
Now, I’m not saying that Juan Cabral had the persuasive power of
nodding in mind when he had the idea (he may have had the David
Letterman stunt from 1996 in mind where David threw 50,000 coloured
rubber balls down a hill in San Francisco), but I am saying that nodding may
well have helped to persuade people to like the ad and to like Sony, when it
came time to buy a new television, or to give some advertising awards,
despite the fact that they were not aware of this.
(Do you agree? Are you still nodding?)
03
Advertising works in
mysterious ways
Modern theories of communication
I Watched an Ad
i watched an ad
it made me smile
i was 10% happier for a while
i watched an ad
it was a bore
far too easy to ignore
i watched an ad
it sold with sex
indistinguishable from the next
i watched an ad
i like the tune
must remember to download it soon
i watched an ad
eliciting guilt
and mourned over the milk it spilt
i watched an ad
‘call this number!’
an order i tend to cast asunder
i watched an ad
and like the rest
i denied it its request
there is no ad
that’s worked on me
all brands bark up the wrong tree
laith yakob
How do advertisements work? On the surface, advertising seems very sim-

ple. Use mass media to create awareness for the products you wish to sell,
usually focusing on some specific benefit, expressed in a creative way to
catch the attention and convince large numbers of people to buy it, increas-
ing revenue by more than the cost of the campaign.
Yet, the more we learn about how humans think, decide and behave, the
more we realize that those things are derived substantially from processes
hidden from our view. Attention is slippery. Advertising campaigns rarely
pay for themselves in the short term,1 but their effect can last for decades.
The notion of a universal model for understanding how advertising works
is misguided. The difference between the drivers of the purchase of baked
beans and a car are vast, because the difference between the nature of these
decisions is vast.
It is remarkable that the two currently favoured models of how advertis-
ing works, which in turn provide templates for how companies behave, are
diametrically opposed. On the one hand we have the engagement model.
This suggests that brands that develop deeper relationships with consumers,
that invite them into a dialogue and deliver additional content and experi-
ences, that stand for something the consumer can ally themselves to, will be
most successful. This is particularly true in today’s fragmented, attention-
starved world. Engagement is about earning attention.
On the other hand, Robert Heath has convincingly demonstrated that
‘low attention processing’ is a powerful driver of behaviour. His position
echoes, perhaps consciously, a maxim by Marshall McLuhan: ‘Any ad con-
sciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consump-
tion. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to
exercise an hypnotic spell.’ Heath suggests that overt attempts to engage
higher cognition are challenged. Those preferences we pick up subcon-
ADVERTISING WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS 43
sciously are much more powerful. He argues that the ‘perceptual and con-
ceptual elements we learn implicitly are stored as associations with the
brand’ and that ‘implicit memory is more durable than explicit memory’.2
Since implicit learning is automatic, it is functioning every time we experi-
ence an ad, whether or not we pay attention. Therefore, brands that follow
an engagement strategy are likely to be less successful than those that exist
at the peripheries of consciousness at high frequency. Heath, following
McLuhan, is suggesting that advertising should not interrupt attention
at all, in order to better slip into the mind unexamined. How are we to
reconcile these two models?
Heath’s analysis is not based on a new idea – it echoes Vance Packard’s
The Hidden Persuaders (1957) – and is supported by substantial data. It
feels intuitive since people remember jingles from their childhood but strug-
gle to remember other specifics with clarity. That said, it also makes intuitive
sense that brands that deliver value and engage in ongoing relationships
with consumers will establish favourability, a metric that historically was
shown to be a corollary of purchase intent. (This is why intuition alone is
never enough.) Who wants to buy products from companies they don’t like?
The answer is not either/or: we don’t need to reconcile the two differ-
ences. There are different models that work in different ways, and are appro-
priate for different objectives and contexts. A number of different models of
advertising are valid, and communication planning requires an understand-
ing of the differences between them. This is not a new idea either (as we’ll
see later, there are no ‘new’ ideas): ‘No single theory or group of theories can
explain it all, because advertisements work in such different ways. There is
no point in looking for an overall theory.’3
Some brands will benefit from developing engaging communication,
some from adhering to a low-involvement strategy. The question becomes
when to use which and this depends on, as it inevitably must, the consumer
and their needs. Media strategist Ben Kunz has suggested that engagement
strategies work better for consumers who have varied needs, whereas broad-
cast communication is more relevant for mass audiences who have similar
needs. He adds in personalization strategies, which are outbound messages
pushed to smaller numbers, and research-led approaches, where many peo-
ple need to research the product, usually due to higher costs (see Figure 3.1).
The important thing to remember is that each task requires the right
approach or mix of approaches. Not every problem can be solved with the
same solution set, which is a challenge for many agencies, who too often
assume their primary product is the optimal solution.
FIGURE 3.1 The information ecosystem
Outbound
Personalization Broadcast
Flow
Engagement Research
Inbound
Few Many
Scale
SOURCE: Ben Kunz/Media Associates. Used with permission
The moment of truth

When does it all pay off?
A brand, from the point of view of a person, may be considered like a
memory: every brand experience builds to develop an engram – a specific
and evolving pattern – in a person’s mind. This brandgram is triggered by
encountering additional brand cues and these cues combine with the brand-
gram to create a new experience. This final experience at point of purchase,
when the cue of the product itself combines with the brandgram, will ulti-
mately drive a purchase decision. Procter & Gamble, packaged goods giant
– and the world’s largest advertiser – calls this the ‘first moment of truth’:
the three to seven seconds when you first see a product on the shelf in
the supermarket. The Wall Street Journal suggested that ‘despite spending
billions on traditional advertising, the consumer-products giant thinks this
instant is one of its most important marketing opportunities’4 – but this
misunderstands the point. Rather, it is at this moment that the totality of all
previous brand interactions either pay off or don’t. So the nature of the
experience is what needs to be considered – what does the consumer require
when making this purchase decision?
Consumers need different brands to do different things. The vast major-

ity of purchases do not adhere to a purchase funnel at all – they are made
impulsively. Shopping at the supermarket, when confronted by innumerable
varieties of baked beans, we choose a brand ‘because it doesn’t matter that
much and it makes stuff easy’.5 To avoid pointless cognition every time we
go shopping we use brands as heuristics to shortcut decisions. Since there
is, or there is perceived to be, functional parity among the primary competi-
tors, we need to have only a very slight preference for a brand to aid the
decision.
Other purchases have different contextual needs that brands help to
fulfil. High involvement purchases, such as consumer electronics and cars,
have a longer purchase cycle, although there are indications that it is decreas-
ing thanks to better access to information. There are always a combination
of rational and emotional needs that brands satisfy. Engaging communica-
tion that helps to build stronger brand affiliations, a more developed sense
of the brand, can help to provide the consumer reassurance, both pre and
post purchase.
The needs of consumers and the drivers of their behaviour are variable.
By looking at some of the veiled aspects of attention and cognition we can
begin to understand better people and brands, and how they interact.
Lubricants of reason
It’s not emotion or reason, but always both.
Fooled by Randomness (2001) by Nassim Taleb was hailed as one of
the ‘smartest books of all time’.6 It is an exploration of the huge, under
appreciated role of randomness in life.
Taleb looks to understand the stochastic limits of epistemology. His core
thesis is that we think we know how things work, because our brains like
cause and effect so we apply a deterministic model to observations. This
leads us to make mistakes and leaves us open to being ‘blown up’ (trader
lingo for losing beyond what you believed possible) by very rare events of
huge magnitude.
Taleb dismisses classical economics as pointless due to its reliance on the
increasingly hollow rational man construct. Unfortunately, we are intellec-
tually wed to binary oppositions, so once we realized that emotions had a
role in decision making, an opposition was established between rational and
emotional persuasion in communication. Maybe we make some decisions

emotionally and some rationally?
Thanks to people such as Phineas Gage, who have had accidents that
damaged their amygdalae – the almond-shaped cluster of brain nuclei
involved in emotional reactions – we know this simply isn’t true. When
people lose access to their emotions, they are no longer capable of making
decisions. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but without
the heuristics of emotion to help us, we would never be able to decide
anything.
So it is not that there are emotional and rational sides pulling us in differ-
ent directions but that emotions are the ‘lubricants of reason’ – we can’t
think without them. This is expressed nicely in a recent theory of decision
making known as the somatic marker hypothesis:
Real-life decision making usually involves assessment, by cognitive and

emotional processes, of the incentive value of the various actions available in
particular situations. However, often situations require decisions between many
complex and conflicting alternatives, with a high degree of uncertainty and
ambiguity. In such situations, cognitive processes may become overloaded and
be unable to provide an informed option.
In these cases (and others), somatic markers can aid the decision process. In
the environment, reinforcing stimuli induce an associated physiological affective
state. These types of associations are stored as somatic markers.7
This suggests that the role of communication could be simply establishing

or reinforcing the somatic markers in association with brands, so that when
consumers encounter the decision of which toothpaste to buy, the markers
kick in and lubricate the decision, preventing paralysis and panic attack.
Brands take away the need to choose by covertly biasing cognition, thus
making our lives easier.
The paradox of choice

We have too many choices to pay attention to all of them.
In the United States (even compared to the UK) there are many more
options to choose from, especially on the supermarket shelf, which groan
under a bewildering array of alternatives in every product category. More
options = more brands = more ads.
Choice is equated to freedom, and freedom is a necessary condition to

ensure the inalienable right to pursue your own happiness. More options
mean more freedom, which means more happiness. Or so they say.
Except it doesn’t work that way.
Barry Schwartz points out in The Paradox of Choice (2004)8 that having
too many options tends to make you unhappy, which is why he argues that
hyper-capitalist economies, which sanctify individual autonomy and thus
force decisions at every possible opportunity, tend to be less happy overall.
This insight is compelling because it feels right and yet wrong – the idea
of freedom underlies the cultural foundation of Western society. Counter-
intuitively, people know that they love choice but find that they hate making
decisions.
People will do almost anything to avoid making difficult decisions – ones
where there is no clear, obviously better option. An experiment undertaken
by researchers at Columbia and Stanford universities highlights the con-
flicted drivers of consumer behaviour. In the study, shoppers at an ‘upscale
grocery store’ encounter a tasting booth that displayed either 6 or 24 differ-
ent flavours of jam to try. The 24-flavour jam table attracts more people
(‘among all those options there must be the right jam for me’) but, having
been attracted, they were forced to make a difficult decision (‘there are too
many to choose from and I just don’t care this much about jam’), which
ultimately led to the 24-flavour jam display selling one-tenth as many jars as
the 6-flavour display.9
Dramatically increasing the number of options decreases the propensity
to purchase. Decisions with lots of options cause anxiety, paralysis, prolep-
tic regret and a bunch of other negative responses. They increase the effort
invested in the decision and ultimately can diminish the enjoyment you get
from anything you do choose. The Paradox of Choice explores these nega-
tive psychological effects in detail and suggests a strategy to avoid them,
which is essentially to lower your expectations and seek to make a good
enough, rather than the best, decision (‘satisfice don’t maximize’).
But we’ve developed another way to help deal with this problem, at least
at the supermarket: brands. In advertising we spend a lot of time thinking
about what brands are and how they work – what they are for. Brands are
good for companies because they increase frequency of purchase, allow you
to charge a price premium, drive loyalty, are a defensible competitive advan-
tage and contribute significantly to the intangible asset value of a company,
as we have seen.
But what is the function for consumers? What value do they offer to indi-
viduals that creates the persistently irrational behaviour that drives share-
holder value, that means people pay more money for essentially the same
thing?
The function of brands has evolved as the nature of the economy has
evolved. In early capitalist economies, industrialization created large corpo-
rations that distribute across massive areas. Brands functioned, and still do,
as trustmarks, ensuring that you get what you expect when buying from
manufacturers.
But in hyper-capitalist economies, since we achieve functional product
parity in most categories, every minor purchase decision becomes difficult.
There is no clear, obviously better option, which makes a supermarket an
uncomfortable prospect. According to a Research International report, 46
per cent of shoppers spend more than three minutes in front of the shelf,
picking up an average of three products, when actively making a decision.
The number of brands in all categories available on supermarket shelves has
multiplied in the last 20 years. According to the Food Marketing Institute,
there are nearly 44,000 items crying out for your attention in the average
supermarket.10 Customers are trying to be responsible, informed consumers,
but multiply three minutes by the total number of grocery items in a weekly
shopping trip for a family of five, and you have a significant time and cogni-
tive burden. Additionally, as Schwartz points out, the more options, the
greater the opportunity cost associated with any single purchase (ie every
other option that solves the same need).
Brands come to the rescue. They function like heuristics – they take away
the need to make decisions, take away the pressure of pretending to our-
selves that we are rational economic agents, prevent us from breaking down
every time we want some jam. Eventually, this can lead to habitual shopping
behaviour, with customers ‘sleepwalking’ through the supermarket, buying
the same things again and again.
CASE STUDY
It was this insight – that customers buy the same things again and again – that drove
a successful advertising campaign for UK grocery retailer Sainsbury’s. Facing long-
term declining sales in 2004, AMV BBDO wanted to wake up consumers from ‘sleep
shopping’ and they used advertising asset Jamie Oliver – now a food brand in his own
right – to encourage customers to ‘Try Something New Today’. This was more than
simply an exhortation, as it was supported with recipe cards in-store, training for
150,000 staff, and point-of-sale signage, all of which provided suggestions for
something new to try. According to the IPA Effective Award it won, it generated $2.5
billion in extra revenue over six years.
Even if you don’t default to the market leading brand in the category
(although you are obviously more likely to) you can anchor the category to
it, allowing you to make a decision in relation to it. We are very bad at mak-
ing absolute decisions, and tend to make them relative to the set of options
available.
So, as emotions are the lubricants of reason, brands are the lubricants of
commerce.
Blindness blindness and meta-cognitive errors

Our attention dictates what we see, but we find it extremely hard to believe
that this is true.
Illusions often highlight features of how our attention system works. The
‘invisible gorilla’ test effectively demonstrates inattentional blindness, where
we don’t see something even though we are looking directly at it. Designed
by neuroscientists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, it consists of a
video and a set of instructions. You are asked to watch the video and count
the number of passes made by one of the teams – the video is ostensibly of
two teams playing basketball.11 When the video ends, you ask the viewer if
they noticed anything unusual. Most people do not. Then you play the video
clip again and pause it in the middle, whereupon the viewer is startled to see
that a man, dressed as a gorilla, has walked into frame, stopped to beat his
chest and then walked out again, and yet somehow you missed it. Your
attention was focused on counting passes, and so you simply don’t see the
gorilla, because your brain is actively suppressing distractors from your
task. It is important to note that it’s not because your eyes don’t fall on the
gorilla – eye-tracking studies demonstrate that people do not notice the
gorilla despite looking directly at it.
It is a phenomenon of mind, not eye. To quote two colleagues of the
neuroscientists: ‘To truly see, you must pay attention.’12 This presents com-
pelling challenges to the media unit of currency, known as impressions, as
we will see in the next chapter – they can only ever offer an ‘opportunity to
see’, which by definition is also an ‘opportunity to miss’, if people are not

paying attention.
Change blindness is a related perceptual phenomenon where we don’t see
something because our attention is elsewhere. The canonical experiment on
change blindness involves a door. Someone stops a student on campus and
asks for directions. Then, while directions are being given, workmen carry a
door between the student and the person seeking directions – at which point,
the person is replaced with someone else. Amazingly, those giving directions
almost never notice.
This is how perception works: making sense of visual data is an act of
filtering out unimportant information. In this context, our attention is
focused on directions. The reason we think it’s amazing that people don’t
notice, which is also the reason that this experiment works, is because of a
meta-cognitive error called ‘change blindness blindness’.13
We rarely notice significant changes in the visual field when our percep-
tion is disrupted by things like interruptions, saccades or their filmic equiva-
lent, tracking shots. But we tend to think we will. Even when we are shown
that we don’t. This is because it deviates from what we believe about how
we see.
We believe that our eyes beam reality directly into our brains, because
that’s how we perceive perceiving... but they don’t. Only the very centre of
our visual field sees things in detail – this is called foveal vision, after the
centre of the retina. Only when we focus on something do we ‘see’ it in
detail, and if we aren’t paying attention, we don’t even notice it then.
When we shift our attention rapidly, it triggers other perceptual glitches,
such as the stopped clock illusion. If you flick your eyes over at an analogue
clock, people often experience the illusion that the second hand freezes for
a second. The theory suggests that this is a function of how we perceive –
our brains are trying to smooth out reality. When you shift your attention,
most obviously by moving your gaze rapidly, a break in the information is
created and needs to be ‘covered up’. So your brain fills in the gap with what
follows the shift – hence the second hand stutters. A glitch in the matrix of
your mind. Our attention changes the world we see around us.
To further confuse things, both novelty and familiarity can capture atten-
tion. As we will see, things that disrupt our expectations create preferential
looking: new and improved is horrendously overused on goods packaging
because manufacturers know it hacks your attention system (as do typo-
graphic disruptions LIKE THIS). This is why consumer packaged-goods
manufacturers constantly introduce new variants, formulas and designs.
This ‘product news’ captures attention. This is also why the core creative
belief espoused by many advertising agencies is ‘disruption’ (TBWA) or to be
a black sheep, to zag when others zig (Bartle Bogle Hegarty). Alex Chaldecott,
founding partner of a great 1990s UK agency, Howell Henry Chaldecott
Lury, said that the ‘HHCL experience taught [him] you must challenge con-
vention constantly, otherwise you won’t produce anything distinctive’.14 It
seems everyone is challenging the status quo, because they want to capture
attention through novelty, but it does make you wonder what is left to be
the status quo.
Familiarity creates preference because it lessens the cognitive resources
needed to process the stimuli. This is known as the mere exposure effect –
people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are famil-
iar with them. When a stimulus feels more fluent, the way people process
decisions relating to that stimulus tend to be more intuitive and less thought
through. These mechanisms clearly underlie how some advertising works.
The complexity and varying modalities of how we allocate attention, and
how that impacts decisions, is why advertising works in mysterious ways.
Let’s look at a few.
Disrupted expectations
Disrupted expectations seem to lie at the heart of many emotional responses.
It’s what lies at the heart of most jokes:
An incongruity of register is comic on account of its recognised deviation from

the expected norm. This stress on expectations makes it feasible to reduce
the joke, for example, to the product of a set of formal criteria (a build up of
expectations followed by a disruptive punchline) without paying any heed to
what the joke is about.15
Deviation is also what triggers attention. Preferential looking, the ‘tendency

of infants and children to peer longer at something that is new, surprising or
different’,16 indicates that infants pay more attention to things they perceive
as unexpected.
A fundamental aspect of cognition is the necessity of forming expecta-
tions, based on direct or indirect experience, for how things are in the world.
Research based on this idea suggests that there are all kinds of cognitive and
affective events triggered by expectancy violation, including heightened
memory activity, which makes sense as your brain is rebuilding part of its
model of the world.
This is why comedic advertising works so well, since jokes capture atten-
tion and elicit emotion at the same time. It is also why magic works:
Magic tricks work because humans have a hardwired process of attention and
awareness that is hackable – a good magician uses your mind’s own intrinsic
properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu.17
Magicians manipulate our attention to shift focus away from where the
trick may be exposed. This is what we call misdirection. Advertising can also
be understood as the capturing and manipulation of attention, for that
which is within the spotlight is highlighted, and surrounding elements are
suppressed, as suggested by its etymological root.
Mind the curiosity gap

Curiosity is an emotional response that motivates exploration. A lot of
animals have this instinct (including cats), which suggests it is a hardwired
cognitive mechanism. As such, it is a potent communication tool: if you can
make someone curious, they become naturally inclined to do something,
which translates to shifting behaviour, moving them towards you or your
brand.
Curiosity is stimulated by making people aware of manageable gaps in
their knowledge. How does this work? First, you have to show people
enough of something to get them involved, but leave enough gaps that
people feel the need to fill in themselves. If you give people all the answers,
there’s nothing for them to do.
The New York agency Campfire, who were involved in early branded
Alternate reality games (ARGs) such as Audi’s Art of the Heist18 (where a
new car was seemingly stolen from a showroom, leading to a multilayered
online and offline scavenger hunt), and The Blair Witch Project, says the key
to great communication that is shared is ‘managing the curiosity gap’.19
Scatter information across channels, and communities will form to collect
and share it – these are the underlying principles of transmedia properties,
which are stories that play out across a number of non-linear media
channels.
CASE STUDY
This approach was embraced by JJ Abrams to promote the movie Cloverfield – a

‘monster movie for the YouTube generation’.20 The trailer seemingly found footage,
screened without warning being announced.21 Simply by not really explaining what
the film is about, or indeed what it is called, the movie triggered a flurry of media and
consumer attention six months before it was released.
The trailer became mainstream news, hailed as something that ‘transforms
marketing’.22 The film had an estimated budget of US $25 million. The unusual
marketing helped to drive the film to make $40 million in its opening weekend. It
went on to make more than $170 million.
Pandemic, or viral is a thing that happens, not a thing that is

Clients will sometimes ask for ‘viral videos’, to which one should reply ‘viral
is a thing that happens, not a thing that is’.
If people pass on your communication, it is viral, or at least has viral
potential. If they don’t, it is not. It is a measure of success. Having a viral
strategy is akin to having an Oscar strategy. You can create better chances,
but you cannot guarantee it. (At least, that is what one hopes about the
Oscars.)
If a video is not being shared, the problem is usually that it is an ad that
contains nothing people consider worth showing to their friends. People
share content for social reasons – we use content to communicate. Viral is a
behaviour of the audience not a property of the content, which is why the
metaphor does not work very well. The brand is piggybacking something
else that is being passed on – usually entertaining content or social currency.
This brings me to the launch of directory enquiry service 118-118 and the
vests, the Campaign of the Year in 2003 in the UK.23 It was created with a
number of elements we hoped would be adopted by the audience. But the bit
that was most electively shared, where consumers became the communica-
tion vector, was the vests worn by the two characters in the commercials.
People stole the vests (that were hung out for them to steal) and they wore
them – and still do. More than 10 years later, they continue to appear at
festivals all over England. (I’ve even seen one on Bondi Beach in Sydney.
That makes it a pandemic.)
But, for the sake of clarity in our metaphors, let’s get rid of the word viral
entirely. My brother, Laith Yakob, who is an epidemiologist, has pointed out
that the ‘viral’ metaphor is flawed – ideas do not propagate through popula-
tions like diseases. The metaphor is seductive and difficult to get rid of.
There are agencies that specialize in ‘viral ideas’ – including one in the
Ukraine with the unfortunate name Ebola Communications. The metaphor
reaffirms a structure of control. It implies that all you need to do is to create
something that is ‘viral’ enough and it self-propagates. This is untrue.
What we mean when something goes ‘viral’ is that lots of people choose
to share it, for their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast
our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they
pull.
As Duncan Watts, a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has
pointed out, the structure of the network is as important, and perhaps more
so, in predicting the spread of content than the nature of the content – the
same thing can succeed or fail depending on network structure. By saying
something is viral, we focus on the content itself and not on the needs of the
people that we are asking to spread ideas. As media theorist Douglas
Rushkoff says: ‘people don’t engage with each other to engage viruses; peo-
ple exchange viruses as an excuse to engage with each other’.24 Like so much
communication, it has a social function, both phatic and generous. It oper-
ates within a gift economy, where value is generated in transference. Further,
if you let people mess with your content, it is more likely to be shared
because they like to share things they are a part of. Instead of attempting to
create ‘virals’, we should be trying to understand what people would like to
spread – and why.
CASE STUDY
Any fool can make soap – it takes a clever man to sell it
Soap has ever been the archetypal advertised product. In fact, one of the founding
fathers of modern advertising, Thomas J Barratt, was a brash young marketer who
took a soap, A&F Pears, and made it, undeniably, a brand.
By 1789 Andrew Pears had devised his transparent soap, but until the middle of
the 19th century it had been very modestly advertised. In 1865, when the firm’s
annual bill for advertising was £80, Thomas J Barratt, a young man of 24, became a
partner in the firm, and ushered in a vigorous new regime. This is detailed in The
Shocking History of Advertising (1952) by ES Turner.
Barratt is on record as saying: ‘Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell
it.’ When he took over control of Pears he raised his expenditure on advertising from
£80 to £100,000 (making him, I can only imagine, the world’s most loved client) in
order to establish the brand as the default for the category, intuitively leveraging a
number of concepts that we have looked at such as low attention processing, copied
behaviours and more.
Barratt’s policy was summed up with perfect simplicity in one of his own
advertisements: ‘How do you spell soap? – Why P-E-A-R-S, of course.’ ‘Pears’ and
‘soap’ had to be linked so deeply and ineluctably in the public mind that it would be
impossible to think of one without the other.
It is wrong to say that no one reads advertisements; they are not there to be read,
but to be absorbed, just as a capsule is not meant to be tasted, but to be swallowed.
The visual attack did not satisfy Barratt, however. He decided he must have a
catchphrase that would make the whole country say ‘Pears Soap’. His staff were invited
to nominate the commonest phrases in daily use. Inevitably, someone suggested
‘Good Morning’:
The result was the notorious ‘Good Morning! Have you used Pears Soap?’, which
scourged two continents. There were many who never forgave Thomas Barratt for
debasing this traditional, friendly greeting. The sensitive shrank from saying ‘Good
Morning’, knowing that it would only spark off the exasperating counter-phrase in
the mind of the person addressed.25
The attention market

People in advertising have traditionally taken a dim view of borrowed inter-
est. The thinking was that using 20 seconds to tell a joke and the remaining
10 seconds to sell was not a great idea. There are assumptions underlying
this summary judgement:
Borrowed interest just means there’s no real value in the product or service you
offer, or at least the [advertising] agency people couldn’t find it, or were more
concerned with a ‘creative’ portfolio that might impress other ad people.26
This thinking is flawed. It assumes that the function of advertising is to

express a differentiating truth about the product or service, which makes
you want to buy it – that advertising is solely salespersonship, but it is not,
at least not any more.
No unique promises about what a product does can be maintained for

any duration. The perceived veracity of such claims on people have begun to
suffer under their endless repetition. According to research firm Nielsen’s
Global Trust in Advertising Survey, people claim that their trust in tradi-
tional advertising is in long-term decline: ‘Nearly half of consumers around
the world say they trust ads on TV (47%), in magazines (47%) and in news-
papers (46%), but those numbers dropped by 24%, 20% and 25% respec-
tively, in a relatively short period of time – between 2009 and 2011.’27
Things have not improved since then, as advertising and fake news have
become increasingly entangled. When outgoing CMO of Unilever Keith
Weed made his swan song speech at Global Marketer’s Week in 2019, he
focused on the seven deadly sins of advertising – the causes, he believes, of
37 per cent of people saying their trust in it has declined. At the 4As Decisions
20/20 Event, the global CEO of Initiative Media Mat Baxter made the same
point: ‘I think the single most important issue in the industry is that it’s got
to get back trust.’
Most startlingly, the IPSOS Veracity Index has a new contender for abso-
lute bottom: advertising professionals. In assumed truthfulness, advertising
professionals come in lower than politicians which, considering the political
situation globally, really has to sting. ‘Borrowed’ interest is a sound strategy
for attracting attention. PG Tips borrowed from the chimps, Cadbury’s from
the drumming gorilla, the burger from the King, the insurance broker
GEICO from the lizard or the caveman and so on. Leveraging existing cul-
tural artefacts – such as the expression Good Morning – and appending
your products, you borrow interest to attract attention. In fact, you could
argue that it is creating interest in something that is not itself interesting, by
connecting something relatively boring (most products, in most categories,
are by now exceedingly familiar) to something else. You can ladder up your
product benefit to a higher order value proposition, but all your competitors
could too. It is impossible to ‘own’ any such positioning as a brand:
● Clients tend to think their products are fascinating because, if you spend
your life thinking about something, it takes on great significance in your
mind.
● Agencies tend to think that what they do is interesting, but one of the first
things you learn at an agency (or should learn) is that marketing clients
only spend a fraction of their day thinking about advertising, although it
is perhaps the most visible element of their roles.
● Calling people ‘consumers’ tricks you into thinking they spend their
whole lives buying stuff, or thinking about buying stuff. But they really
are not that interested.
This is why things are so different now. We cannot really buy enough atten-
tion any more: media are too fragmented, people have become too good at
not paying us any. Instead, we are increasingly expected to earn it, to get
into the ‘consumer’s’ media streams.
Previously, the implicit value – free content in exchange for watching ads
– enabled the balanced exchange between brands and people. This model is
best encapsulated by Homer Simpson: ‘Quiet, the commercial is on... if we
don’t watch these, it’s like we’re stealing TV!’28
But that relationship has begun to break down in an on-demand world as
more viewing time is allocated to video-on-demand platforms like Netflix,
most of which do not support advertising. Wired magazine suggested that
we are now in an ‘attention economy’.29 The internet is a live, global atten-
tion market, dynamically allocating attention to those things that earn it.
Understanding how attention is being allocated across the market is the
next big frontier of analytics: Google, innumerable social media tracking
companies, behavioural targeting and retargeting intermediaries, all attempt
to track, understand and ultimately predict the allocation of attention. This
data has value – it is the commercial engine behind Google, Facebook and
most of the web. This is live, aggregate data, not survey-tracked brand
awareness scores.
It has become a cliche of the digital age: if you are not paying for an
online service, then you are the product being sold. Part of the shift we need
to embrace is wrestling more of that value back for the individual – imagine
if you could trade attention, receiving value in return.
Back during the gold rush of the first dot-com boom, a company called
All Advantage tried to redress the attention issue and balance the value
exchange by paying people to watch ads. It also compensated members for
promoting the site, which made it grow rapidly.
The company died – paying people to watch ads has been demonstrated
not to be the right way to think about value. It didn’t work years later for
mobile startup Blyk, which offered free calls and texts in exchange for
watching advertisements on your phone.
Thinking about value that way feels analogous to paying someone to be
your friend – it is still buying attention, not earning it. People don’t like to
believe they can be ‘bought’.
Moore’s Law is now the driving force of change in media. Moore’s Law
is, in fact, more a trend of hardware computing history than a law per se.
Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, described in a 1965 paper how the
amount of transistors we can squeeze on to an integrated circuit board dou-
bles roughly every two years, as the cost halves. This in turn means that
computers get faster and cheaper, and memory gets cheaper as well:
● The price of a gigabyte of memory in 1981: $300,000.

● The price of a gigabyte of memory in 2010: $0.10.30
● In 2014, Google offered cloud storage of a giga-byte of memory for
$0.026.
This tendency to exponentiate is the biggest driver of change in your world

and it is really, really weird. Nothing else changes like this. Cars don’t get
twice as fast and half as expensive every two years. Neither do refrigerators.
In fact, nothing does except computers, specifically transistors. And now so
does media, because ever since media became digital, and therefore a func-
tion of memory, the amount of available media bandwidth is also a function
of Moore’s Law.
With the internet, we have, essentially, infinite media space. And, practi-
cally, infinite amounts of content, thanks to that media we call social. We are
in a stage of transition, where human interpersonal networks are going to
supplement or even to some degree substitute commercial broadcast net-
works. Facebook is turning itself into a media browser, where content being
shared is the primary way we see anything – over half of all content sharing
online is done on Facebook.31
Media products act like solidarity goods. If no one sees it, it’s not worth
anything. The more it spreads, the more eyeballs it accrues, the more it is
worth. Thanks to filtering algorithms like Facebook’s, which decides what
appears in your Facebook feed, if content is not shared it may not get seen
at all. As media professor Henry Jenkins has written: ‘If it doesn’t spread, it’s
dead.’32 The algorithms are constantly revised, but one constant has been
that they tend to add weight to content that has been shared electively by
your friends.
The importance of being awesome

Did you know that the word ‘awesome’ used to mean roughly the same
thing as terrible? Both were used interchangeably to describe the presence of
God – something that inspired awe and terror. It is in this sense that awe-
someness is important for brands, media, ideas and people – because of a
fundamental shift in the nature of the mediascape.
Everyone is making content and culture all the time, which presents new
kinds of challenges – how do you get any attention in an infinite space?
Awesomeness is (at least part of) the answer. It turns out that emotions
spread, and that awesome content is the most spreadable.
Studies done by the New York Times show that the most shared articles
on their site are ones that inspire awe.33 Specifically, things that are epic in
scope and require ‘mental accommodation by forcing the reader to view the
world in a different way’.
‘They’re seeking emotional communion’, said Dr Berger, professor of
marketing at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania: ‘Emotion in general
leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion... If I’ve just read
this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to
talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feel-
ing of awe.’34
So if you want people to see and share your content – make it awesome.
04
Is all advertising spam?

Communication planning in an on-demand world
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

simone weil
If we extend current trends in media fragmentation, channel-centric think-

ing by the advertising industry could lead to both the end of advertising as
it is currently conceived and the emergence of a new model of communica-
tion. The media-industrial complex has historically delineated itself by
channel. Press is one channel, with associated planners and buyers and crea-
tives who work best in it. Television is another. Somehow ‘digital’ became
another but it is not – rather it functionally subsumes other channels – all
media will become ‘digital’.
Ultimately media channels will become redundant constructs and new
designations will have to be created, based on an understanding of people’s
relationship with content and how they consume it. While this signals the
decline of traditional media planning (because dictating when and where
content will be encountered becomes impossible for much of an on-demand
world), it also indicates that strategic communications planning will become
crucial to reach and develop solutions for consumers.
The rapid proliferation of media channels is well documented and shows
no sign of abating. ‘We now live in a society where almost anything may be
explored for its potential as a medium’1 – and in an attempt to find unclut-
tered space to communicate, brands have moved further and further beyond
traditional channels.
IS ALL ADVERTISING SPAM? 61
Digital technology has changed the nature of what we understand as a

medium. The internet is inherently bidirectional – anyone who receives can
also broadcast. It works in a fundamentally different way to the media we
knew before. It is not simply a new channel to push messages down but an
ever-growing suite of channels that have infinite space and no fixed form.
Anything that can be mediated can be rendered in bits.
Traditional media planning is a product of the pre-digital age. Its princi-
pal aims, ‘to faithfully (without distortion) transmit messages [and] to reach
specified target audiences... with most effect, least waste [and] least cost’,2
indicate the assumptions upon which the practice is based. Namely, that
channels are not dynamic contributors to meaning and that, ultimately, the
efficient transmission of messages to receptive consumers is the goal.
The underlying assumption that this relies on is the impression – one set
of eyeballs seeing a brand message once. This is a conceit implying that an
impression delivered via any channel is equal. Thus, gross ratings points
(GRPs) may be totalled up across channels for a campaign. They are ‘directly
calculated by summing the ratings of individual ads in a campaign’.3 They
measure both reach and frequency, which is to say the percentage of the
target audience reached and the average number of times they saw an adver-
tisement. If an ‘ad campaign results in 50% of the target seeing the advertis-
ing 3 times on average, then the campaign’s size was 150 GRPs’.4
The idea that all impressions are equal is patently false, as it pays no
attention to how people actually parse media. If media planning is simply
about delivering efficiencies, it will become a function that can be replicated
by software. Indeed, programmatic media buying has already taken the
industry by storm in the United States, where software dynamically bids and
allocates digital creative inventory in fractions of a second, through a bewil-
dering array of networks and other ‘ad-tech’ intermediaries. The complexity
and opacity of these supply chains mean that they are ripe for and rife with
fraud.
Constructs such as ‘demand-side platforms’ – trading desks for digital
advertising inventory that manage multiple exchanges – allow media agen-
cies to arbitrage value out of inventory by appending data to display ads,
based on the previous behaviour of the viewer, thereby increasing relevance
and accuracy.
Unfortunately, because so much technology is involved, no one really
has any idea what is going on with the billions of fragments of attention
being bought and sold. In 2020, digital spend made up more than half of
all advertising spend in the United States, totalling more than $110 billion,
according to Group M. The vast majority of this goes to Google, Facebook
and Amazon. However, it’s difficult to know how much is really ever seen.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade body for digital advertising
that created the standardized units that allowed digital media to be used
across the web, admits that: ‘about 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake,
the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit
sites’.5 That means more than $15 billion is being spent by software to buy
the simulation of attention from other pieces of software! Research by
Comscore suggests that 31 per cent of online ads are unseen because they
cannot be seen – they are placed in areas of the site that users cannot see.6
The total number of digital advertisements served (sent from a server to
a webpage being viewed) was 5.3 trillion in 2013 in the United States alone.
That is about 14.5 billion digital ads every day.7
This is a staggering amount of exhortations. Since then no research has
even attempted to estimate the total amount of digital impressions being
served. We are dealing with numbers that are increasingly abstract and
removed from any understanding of how these pieces of communication
might be impacting people and each other. And all this is only possible due
to the earlier sleight of hand that made impressions into a currency in the
first place.
It was this insight into the implausibility of the impression’s nominal
fungibility that led to the use of qualitative research as an input into com-
munications planning, which helped planners to understand ‘the quality of
the media environment within which a brand appears’.8 However, we need
to move beyond the idea of confronting consumers.
The military vocabulary of media planning – targets, campaigns, execu-
tions – exposes an underlying assumption: brands are at war with consum-
ers. The proliferation of media outside the traditional has often been akin to
ambushing consumers in unexpected places (suitably known as guerrilla
marketing).9 Indeed, Russell Davies, the former head of strategy and insight
at advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy (W&K), has co-opted a term for
this: urban spam.10 I believe we can extend the definition further. I believe
we can describe all advertising as spam.
While considering direct mail, it became clear to me that the key differen-
tiator of whether I would open and read it was whether or not I had
requested it. If I had opted in, then the communication was welcome.
However, commercial messaging sent to me that I did not request, is junk
mail or spam, which is irritating and increasingly filtered out by email

clients. This is at the heart of Seth Godin’s concept of permission marketing.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) took a step beyond the tra-
ditional model of media planning. It advises the ‘strategic co-ordination of
all marketing messages and the alignment of all methods of communicat-
ing’.11 While this goal of semiotic and strategic unity is worthwhile, it is no
longer adequate as it does not address the problems associated with using
ever-increasing amounts of interruption to capture finite amounts of atten-
tion.
As Seth Godin comments: ‘As the marketplace for advertising gets increas-
ingly more cluttered, it becomes increasingly difficult to interrupt the con-
sumer.’12 As Godin goes on to point out, the response from brands has been
to increase levels of spend on interruption, an escalating battle. Broadcast
interruption marketing is ‘unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant... commercial
advertising in mass quantities’13 – which, online, is a definition of spam.
As all channels become digital, some consumers will extend the definition
of spam to them, and can use technology to block it out. According to
Statista, 26 per cent of all US internet users use some kind of ad-blocking
software on their connected devices.14 This rises to 45 per cent per cent
among 15–25-year-olds, and 42 per cent of 26–33-year-olds. This costs pub-
lishers vast sums in unmonetized viewers. New browsers such as Brave and
UC come with ad-blocking features as standard. According to monitoring
company PageFair, UC has 405 million users worldwide.15 As the battle
continues, ‘the pool of people who will accept ads is smaller and smaller and
those ads get more aggressive and intrusive to target them, and then those
people get annoyed and seek out ad blockers’, says Neil O’Connor, CEO of
PageFair. ‘It’s a vicious cycle.’16
This is already beginning to be apparent on television, with the advent of
the digital video recorder (DVR). According to Forrester research, 92 per
cent of ads are skipped by DVR users.17 Increasingly, consumers have con-
trol over how they consume the content they want. Even if advertising is not
actively filtered out, it could be argued that it is cognitively filtered by those
who live in the glare of the endless war against clutter. This passage from
Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (1995), which foreshadows a
future-shocked Times Square, already seems very familiar:
Unremitting exposure to this kind of thing produced mediatron burnout among

the target audience. Instead of turning them off and giving people a break for
once, the proprietors had joined in an arms race of sorts, trying to find the
magic image that would make people ignore all the other adverts and fix raptly
on theirs. The obvious step of making their mediatrons bigger than the others
had been taken about as far as it could go... Once all the mediatrons were a
hundred feet high, the only competitive strategy that hadn’t already been pushed
to the redline was technical tricks: painfully bright flashes, jump-cuts, and
simulated 3-D phantoms that made bluff charges towards specific viewers that
didn’t seem to be paying enough attention.18
We must question this model of advertising during periods of accelerated

change. This led Steve Heyer, the chief operating officer (COO) of Coca-
Cola at the time, to maintain that: ‘in today’s marketing and media environ-
ment only the naive and foolish confuse presence with impact’. Tackling the
impression illusion he asked: ‘do we need reach and frequency – no. We need
idea driven connection with our targets.’19
The age of interruption marketing is being challenged on several fronts,
as viewership of television shifts to streaming services. Digitally empowered
consumers will question value unless the value is explicit or the trade is laid
bare, giving them the options to pay for the content or view advertising. The
escalation of brand interruption on the populace has brought about this
situation, so that consumers now actively reject commercial messaging, or at
least believe they do.
Using the internet changes the way people think about all media in rela-
tion to it. According to one study, the more spam and pop-up ads that con-
sumers encounter, the angrier they are about all forms of advertising – online
banner ads, event sponsorships, even radio and television advertising.20
The discrete nature of channels themselves is no longer an entirely useful
way to understand them. Marketers have traditionally thought of each
medium as distinct – this is why media agencies are often structured into
buying departments by medium, especially as buying attention in each
‘channel’ grows increasingly complex. With the advent of digital channels,
content can flow freely from one to the other: audio-visual content, for
example, can be consumed in innumerable ways: on televisions, computer
screens or most importantly, mobile phones. Audio can be broadcast,
streamed or downloaded as a podcast. Tablets allow for the fluid transfer of
print.
The boundaries between many of the standard channels are dissolving as
we shift to a media consumption model based on content and screens. IBM
suggests that the new world will be characterized by ‘platform-agnostic con-
tent and the fluid mobility of media experiences’.21 Increasingly, this content
is pulled by the consumer, not pushed on to them as in the broadcast model.

While there will always remain some ways to invade the consumer’s aware-
ness, for example using formats such as billboards that cannot be ‘switched
off’, thinking in these terms is ultimately flawed, as it maintains the idea of
brands locked in a battle of attrition with consumers. Developments such as
the Philips television patent that disables the ability to fast-forward through
the ads, are indicative of this kind of thinking and will generate resentment
and antipathy towards brands, which is diametrically opposed to the desired
outcome.
It also fails to take into account the fact that digital platforms have given
rise to a new kind of media consumer who rarely gives their full attention to
any one channel. Rather they give ‘continuous partial attention’22 to a num-
ber of different streams. They ‘second screen’ as most people now do, ‘watch-
ing’ television around the edges of the magic glowing rectangle in their
hand. This has major ramifications for media agencies built around specific
media silos, and further erodes the concept of the impression, which is a
‘one dimensional metric’.23 TV or print buyers become unable to suitably
assess the value of multimedia packages. Frustrated media owners who
have broken out of this single-mode mindset (how many TV channels lack
a website?) are increasingly going directly to clients with these packages.
Thus, as AdAge warned, ‘media agencies [are] in danger of becoming obsta-
cles, not enablers’, which is also why they are championing the algorithmic
approaches at one end and developing branded content specialties at the
other.24 This also presents interesting new opportunities. The connected gen-
eration are consuming more media than ever, to the point where ‘there’s
almost a discomfort with not being stimulated – a kind of “I can’t stand the
silence”.’25 They are ‘media meshing’: surveying a number of channels simul-
taneously and navigating between them – ‘to complement information, per-
spective, and emotional fulfillment’.26 Brands must respond to these dramatic
changes in consumption.
If brands can no longer force their messaging on empowered consumers,
if attention can no longer be bought in large enough quantities, how are
they to influence purchase behaviour, drive loyalty and develop and main-
tain a price premium? The problem with traditional models is that they
focus on the transmission of the message to consumers (Figure 4.1). Despite
protestations of putting consumers at the heart of this process, it ultimately
only considers the needs of the brand in this exchange. Consumer profiling
looks to understand how the various touch points via which consumers may
interact with the brand can be best utilized to influence the said consumer.
FIGURE 4.1 The traditional model of advertising
Media
Message People
This bias probably stems from the fact that only ‘the transmission of... brand
stimuli is within the control of the marketing company – their reception is
not’.27 From the consumer’s point of view, there is an unbalanced value
exchange occurring. The individual consuming the marketing message is
giving up value in the form of time and cognition: attention (Figure 4.2).
FIGURE 4.2 The value exchange of traditional advertising
Media
Message People
Value (in form of time, attention, brain time/space)
This may seem trivial but it is of great value. Value is derived from relative
scarcity and ‘attention is the scarcest resource of the 21st century’, and con-
sequently of significant value – something people are increasingly aware of.
Research by PR giant Edelman confirms that people see ‘relationships with
brands as one sided [&] limited in value’.28
Previously the value exchange came entirely from footing or supplement-
ing the cost of the content being consumed, but increasingly the array of
content options, ability to screen out interruption and the disaggregation of
content from its sponsors by technology brings this into question for people.
Therefore, communication in the connected age needs to deliver value as
well as messaging. This balances out the value exchange, making the com-
municative interaction equitable. Importantly, the value needs to be an
expression of brand behaviour, delivering the brand’s values via ‘transitive
action’.29Let’s call this value-added communication. Since it delivers value,
consumers will not avoid it and it will engender empathy for the brand, not
resentment – it is not spam. Interruption advertising will still function, no
doubt, but its use is broadened to introduce prospects and customers to
other elements and actions.
Brands often claim to desire relationships with their customers or fans.
Relationships are mutually reinforcing – providing value to both parties,
and dynamic – responding to the needs of each other over time via two-way
interaction (Figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.3 A balanced value of exchange for advertising

Value in some form
Message/
Media People
Brand
Value (in form of time, attention, brain time/space)
There are innumerable ways to deliver value and many brands have already
begun to do this. While delivering utility might be more obvious, a lot of this
value is delivered via entertainment and experiences, functions of their
emergence as distinct economic and hence added-value offerings.30
Early on, Lynx (known as Axe in the United States) championed the
movement towards delivering content that their audience will elect to engage
with. Gamekillers was a Lynx campaign that launched as a television pro-
gramme on MTV and was supported with content-driven websites.31 Half
reality show, half guide on attracting the opposite sex, they took the promise
of Axe and made it into narrative in a very different way than a traditional
advertisement. Content engines like this can create traditional advertising as
well. Brands can deliver value through facilitation. Hewlett-Packard (HP)
and Red Bull provide platforms for emerging artists.
CASE STUDY
HP’s HYPE gallery was an online and offline exhibition for digital art. Once the hottest
start-up in the world, HP had become huge and was primarily seen as an enterprise
supplier, selling printers and the world’s most expensive fluid – printer ink. In a
comparison done in 2012, HP 60 cartridges of colour ink cost US $5,654 per litre,
whereas Chanel Nº5 cost $3,180 per litre.32 HP wanted to appeal to a younger,
creative audience, hugely sceptical of the behemoth. So, instead of an advertising
campaign trying to convince them otherwise, HP opened the HYPE gallery in London’s
Brick Lane. Submissions were sought with the only stipulation that the letters H and P
had to feature somewhere in each artwork. The artists who uploaded their work would
be printed and projected for display in the physical gallery and used as advertising.
The online gallery received 4.5 million visits from 145 countries, all for the cost of a
conservative, local, advertising campaign. It won two Cannes Gold Lions, was
responsible for naming HP Client of the Year, and inspired the birth of the Titanium
category at Cannes to highlight innovative work of this nature. You can see the
evolution of this idea in HP’s 2014 Power Up campaign, a festival in New York that
celebrated the intersection of art and creativity across an ever-expanding range of

disciplines.
CASE STUDY
Red Bull have created several long-running platforms to foster and celebrate the
creativity of others. The Art of Can exhibition has similar aspects to the HYPE gallery.
This juried art contest has run every year for a decade and asks people to create works
of art using the Red Bull can as the medium. The winning entries are displayed at
exhibitions all over the world and online, of course.33 The Red Bull Music Academy is
another long-running programme where budding musicians apply to be tutored by
professionals. Alongside the core academy, it hosts workshops, creates content and
hosts live events, curates stages at festivals, runs a radio station, an online magazine
and a newsletter. This is a kind of open-sourced approach to marketing, where
customers become collaborators: their creativity is facilitated and then turned into
advertising or content. Brands are able to harness credibility, and perhaps in turn
provide fame for work that may have otherwise gone unseen. As my wife Rosie wrote
as part of a Content Marketing White Paper: ‘Memes created by consumers in a matter
of minutes are often more viewed than high-budget commercials. Brands that are able
to leverage consumers to create or co-create content on their behalf will hit the sweet
spot.’34
Intel’s Creator’s Project is another long-running facilitation platform, devel-

oped in association with Vice, the self-consciously alternative media brand.
It supports artist projects that use technology in innovative ways and has
run since 2010 at events and venues across the world, generating reams of
content and making Intel relevant to a generation that no longer worried
about the speed of their processor.
Brands need to understand the nature of the content that consumers
desire and how they want to access it. In a twist on the old model, brands
can offer consumers free or discounted third-party content if they are will-
ing to consume the advertising as well, making the old value equation more
obvious and in the hands of the viewer. This model thrives on websites such
as Salon and Hulu, where, in some instances, consumers are allowed to
select the advertising they would like to watch.
The traditional media model sees media companies using content to
build an audience to sell to advertisers. Many of these value-added
communications lead to the disintermediation of traditional channels, as

brands develop direct relationships with consumers, developing their ‘own
audience and... content to engage that audience’.35 The goal for brands is to
break down the division between their consumers and themselves, making
consumers feel like the owners and producers of the brand, which in reality
they always have been.
The question, then, for communication planning going forward, is how
to advance a company’s commercial and communication goals in a way that
delivers value for customers and culture.
An apologia for advertising

The lubrication of capitalism, the creation of emotional value around prod-
uct consumption, the ability to deploy and navigate commercial signs and
let people use them to understand themselves and each other – these are
necessary functions in modern culture.
For as long as art and culture has existed, patronage has been required
to help support it. Royalty and aristocracy would provide patronage, for a
combination of altruistic and image reasons, which allowed art to be cre-
ated and events for the masses to happen. The nature of this commercial
relationship was culturally defined – it was never a simple commercial trans-
action – and the impact a patron had on the work or event was equally
prescribed by convention.
It was, for want of a better word, subtler than simply sticking your name
on something. A patron’s taste, sophistication and grace – not just their
money – were being reflected in how the patronage would manifest.
Today, brands provide patronage, but often forget that it is not just their
money that should be evident. In almost every area of culture, brands –
rather than royalty – are now the primary means of support. In times of
economic uncertainty, in almost every arena of culture it is brand sponsor-
ship that keeps museums open, writers and artists in work, and your favour-
ite website or app in business. As researcher Danah Boyd says, ‘selling out is
meaningless’ in our modern, commercial world.36
Yes it creates exhortations to buy and, yes, the world has lots of problems
and too much stuff, at least in the parts of it most laden with brands – but
advertising is, like law and banking, something that keeps the wheels going.
If trust in advertising has diminished, trust in law and banking has plum-
meted since the great financial crisis of 2008. While advertising may be
perceived to be manipulative, it works mostly in plain sight and its

objectives are obvious. An advertising agency has never been fined billions
of dollars for working for Mexican narcoterrorists.
The work we do can increasingly direct how companies behave (as we
shall see in Chapter 6), as a function of the changes occurring in the media
environment. Tiny, incremental changes, based on changing consumer needs,
can have significant impact when they are undertaken by companies the size
of Wal-Mart. As the CEO of organic yoghurt brand Stonyfield said, when
discussing distribution via the world’s biggest retailer: ‘if you want to change
the way the world operates, you need to marshal your economic power.’37
When Wal-Mart decided to stop wasting money shipping water across the
United States, non-concentrated detergents ceased to exist almost overnight.
We have an obligation to advise our clients how best to leverage insight into
consumers and culture and communications to make them money.
If you don’t want to live in a hyper-capitalist culture, that’s great, you are
lucky enough to be in a free-enough society (probably, if you are reading
this) where you can choose, and every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind
of society you want to live in. As the documentary Food, Inc. (2008) sug-
gested, companies only ever change their behaviour in response to customer
demands. Advertising is ideally placed to help companies to shift and lever-
age demand – indeed that is, in some part, its raison d’être.
There is nothing sadder or more detrimental for the advertising industry
than the self-hating, advertising despising, advertising professional. As
Cindy Gallup has pointed out, we need to stop communicating the idea ‘that
advertising is a very bad thing’.38 We can, and should, strive to make it bet-
ter. This is the perfect time to do so, as the assumptions of the past 50 years
begin to crumble, as the sole god of shareholder value is questioned, we can
drive clients and the industry towards earning attention, creating explicit
value for companies and their customers.
And that starts with the practitioners.
Martin Boase, one of the founders of storied London advertising agency
Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP), one of the places where account planning –
the strategic function of advertising – was created in the early 1970s, put it
like this:
We believe that if you are going to invite yourself into someone’s living room
you have a duty not to shout at them or bore them or insult their intelligence.
On the other hand, if you are a charming guest and you entertain them or
amuse them or tell them something interesting, then they may like you a bit
better and then they may be more inclined to buy your brand.39
More than this even, I like to believe that advertising can be a force for good
in the world.
A long time ago, when I got into advertising, I decided that I would prefer
it if, and therefore I would work towards the idea that, advertising can be a
force for good. I mean, who wants to do something for a living that is con-
sidered to be an annoyance or indeed a cultural blight? We, as an industry,
have the chance, and I would argue the responsibility, to guide our clients to
commercial solutions that might also have a beneficial impact on the world.
Despite loving both Bill Hicks and George Carlin, I don’t think that their
side is the whole story. (I certainly don’t think marketers should all kill
themselves, as Hicks suggested.) To quote David Ogilvy: ‘Advertising is only
evil when it advertises something evil.’40 Like, say, technology, or any tool, it
is what you do with it, and how you do it, and how you think of people, and
what kind of person you end up becoming because of it.
Working in advertising can make you cynical, but if you can aspire to
look yourself in the mirror and see the kind of person your 8- or 14-year-old
self would not hate – not lie or cheat, on clients or your partner(s); treat
people and customers and clients and vendors and the world with respect;
not attack people or people’s work; not be petty and cruel; be open to the
opinions of others and be willing to change your mind; not worship money
above friendship or honour; not let your heart get hard; stay in love with
creativity; spend time working for the good of the industry, especially the
young people, as well as for your own career and the agency; treat people as
ends in themselves, not simply means; and remain thankful that there are
jobs that let you have ideas for a living and wear jeans and T-shirts to work
– then advertising is a fine profession and one to be proud of.
05
The spaces between

The vanishing difference between content,
media and advertising
Content and media are weird words. They are the antonymic binary stars
that our industries circle around, feeding off the energy they pump into cul-
ture. They don’t exist without each other. Even in the very specific sense in
which we use the words in advertising, they are both defined by what they
are not:
A medium is a vector for content.

Content is that which is mediated.
Without a medium, there is no content.
Without content, you have no media.
Content is apparently ‘king’ online but all that means is that people like stuff
more than the absence of stuff. Less facetiously, people like ideas. We liter-
ally define ourselves (homo sapiens literally means wise, or sapient, man) by
our ability to have and to hold them. But with ideas we hit another semantic
issue – there is no other word in philosophy that has quite as many different
flavours to it.
I don’t mean big ideas, or Platonic ideas. Let’s just say stuff in your head.
The desired initial result from any communication interaction. I have stuff
in my head, I want to put it in yours.
Content/media are a way to do that over time and space, to many heads
all at once. Stories are one of the oldest ways of doing that. Stories survive
because they are either entertaining (man’s life is nasty, brutish and short,
and we tend to like anything that takes our mind off that) or because they
are useful – in some cases both.
THE SPACES BETWEEN 73
Originally that usefulness meant ‘and lo did Ugggg eat of the purple bush
and verily did he die’ (I doubt that Australopithecus used a bad Shakespearean
register but you get the point), but later that came to be useful in the sense
of telling us something about ourselves.
Media making the world

Originally, media was all about recording the world. We wanted to capture
what we saw, freeze it in time and space, show other people. Analogue media
attempts to re-create the world faithfully, transposing variations in ampli-
tude and frequency to re-create the impact on our senses. It takes a property
of a medium and modulates it to transmit information.
In analogue sound recording, fluctuations in air pressure (that we hear as
sounds) strike the diaphragm of a microphone, which induces correspond-
ing fluctuations in the current produced by the electromagnetic microphone.
That current is therefore an ‘analog’ of the sound.
Digital media transmit data differently, representing everything as num-
bers, rendering that into binary: discrete on and off states that computers
recompile back into representations of the sensorial world. Eventually,
though, it became apparent that the relationship between media and the real
world, reality and simulacrum, was not one-way. A medium is a vector, a
way to spread thoughts, and these complex things we call ideas are just as
good at changing the world as they are at recording it.
This idea called digital has encroached upon the marketing industry. The
word has come a long way from the Latin for finger, to represent the great
change that is rippling through culture thanks to creation and distribution
platforms that are available to all.
The first wave of thinking about it was as something discrete: a discipline,
a department, something that simply sits alongside the rest of the marketing
world. But it’s not.
The changes begin to spill off the screen, affecting how we encounter
companies and each other, changing expectations, changing how we com-
municate and even how we think. The industry polarity that starts with
analogue and feeds down to digital needs to be entirely reversed, because
‘digital’ is what is driving the most change in the ‘real world’.
Lions and language and geeks

Language is in a state of constant flux, evolving at the edges, occasionally
ruptured by changes in culture. It contains fossils and fractures that hint
at what has been or will be important.
Within the communication industry (formerly known as advertising),
language is rapidly evolving in response to dramatic changes in the context
we operate in.
Job titles are an obvious example. Over the last few years new roles
have come into existence within advertising agencies – content strategist,
social media something, creative technologist, user experience designers,
developers, digital ninjas and chief technology strategists – to help us ser-
vice the growing need to understand and connect to consumers enabled by
technology.
The word technology has also changed. It comes from the Greek tekhno-
logia, a systematic treatment of an art. It involves both knowing and doing.
Douglas Adams, author and famous technophile, summed up well the recent
tension within it (stealing the idea from Danny Hillis, one of the fathers of
modern computing):
Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t refer to normalized technologies, such as writing, or television, but

emerging technologies that we don’t fully understand yet.
Adams pointed out why this was:
There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born
is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35
is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.1
The ‘natural order of things’ for the communication industry is perhaps best
reflected in the awards that are dispensed, most famously at the Cannes
International Advertising Festival, where the ‘great’ give Lions to the best of
the last year, hinting at their hopes for the future.
Increasingly, the big winners have ‘technology’ at their core. Obama
picked up the Grand Prix in the Titanium category in 2008, a category cre-
ated a few years prior to celebrate breakthrough ideas that point to a new
direction, with a presidential campaign that was enabled by social media
and crowdsourced participation. In 2013, the Barbarian Group won the
inaugural Innovation award with Cinder, a creative coding platform. Getin

Noble Bank won an innovation award for creating a debit card with digital
display showing your balance. While this is still an advertising festival, these
winners are made of Arduino and code as well as art and copy.
The Cyber category is both fossil and prophet (William Gibson’s neolo-
gism ‘cyberspace’ has long since fallen out of usage almost everywhere else
and the cyber category was finally retired in 2017). The winners here have
included the Fiat Eco-Drive,2 an interactive tool that pulls data from your
car and visualizes it to help you drive more efficiently, and Queensland
Tourism’s ‘Best Job in the World’,3 which promoted the islands of the Great
Barrier Reef to the world by advertising a job looking after one. Small
recruitment ads drove people to a website where they had to submit a video
application. The idea generated more than $200 million in global publicity
value for Tourism Queensland.4
Perhaps most telling is the Film category, which, unlike Radio and Press,
no longer conflates content with delivery platform. In 2007 the category
was expanded to include ‘other screens’. In 2008, for the first time, the
Grand Prix was awarded to a film that had never been shown on television.
Philips ‘Carousel’ is an interactive web film that promoted their new cin-
ema-ratio televisions with a single tracking shot through a frozen explo-
sion.5 At that time this was shocking but it has now become standard. In
2014 a web film called ‘Epic Split’, featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme doing
the splits between two Volvo trucks, won the Grand Prix in both the Film
and Cyber categories, as well as gold prizes in the PR, Promo and Activation,
Direct, and Integrated, and silver prizes in the Titanium and Media catego-
ries. It stands as a telling example of how digital has destroyed the delinea-
tions between channels.
This is ‘film’ designed for the web, where attention must be earned, where
narrative is no longer entirely linear, where technology, whatever that might
mean, is helping us to communicate in new ways, with new kinds of craft.
In fact, the cyber category became ‘digital craft’ in 2018.
The medium definitely isn’t the message, any more

Digitization has done more than erode the delineations between media – it
has freed content from its distribution platform.
Think about what we call advertising.
Its traditional form is an historical accident. The nature of what we call

advertisements was shaped by the nature and relative scarcity of the trans-
mission vectors available.
We put films on television, and attention is expensive, so we buy it in
30-second chunks, and call those advertisements. The nature of the medium
dictated both the form and length, and the time scheduling and consump-
tion grammar dictated the modality of reception, or the mindset and mood
you were in when you saw and heard and felt it.
Advertising grew up in a world where media was scarce so we got used
to compression and density being key communication skills. A brand or
advertising proposition is the densest possible articulation of an idea, the
work of a planner who has compressed everything necessary down into
the smallest possible space. A tagline opens that meaning back up again,
attempts to express as much as possible in the most memorable textual
unit.
This is why advertising has long thrived on paronomasia, or punning,
because leveraging phonic ambiguities allows you to say two different things
at the same time, and when people decode it, it feels satisfying.
However, it is worth keeping in mind that advertising comes from
advetere, so advertising should perhaps be considered anything that
draws attention to a company. We have conflated the expressions with the
intention.
Until recently, what we call media were assemblages of a number of dif-
ferent things. ‘Television’ isn’t actually a clearly defined thing as such, it’s a
sociocultural construct of at least two things: content type and distribution
platform. Books, magazines, radio all work the same way. A ‘book’ is a
bunch of words printed on paper, with a certain set of culturally defined
ideas that float around it. Until digitalness, you couldn’t separate the content
from the distribution platform – but digital ‘content’ can be unbundled.
The iPad made me realize that it is not just distribution and content, there
is a third piece: the consumption platform, the physical thing through which
content is consumed, which used to be bundled with the distribution plat-
form, but no longer needs to be.
When you are watching Stranger Things on Netflix via your Xbox 360,
or on a laptop, or screen, or projector, or iPad – are you watching television?
If so – why? If not – why not? When you are reading Dave Eggers’ The
Circle on your Kindle (or iPad) – are you reading a book? If so – why? If not
– why not? A Kindle is not a book, and yet it is all books, or can be (Amazon
launched a subscription service in 2014 that allows you to access the entire
Kindle library for US $9.99 per month). The words don’t quite fit properly
any more because they were bundled constructs that are coming undone.
You have the distribution platform: in pre-digital media these were closed
networks: book distributors, magazine distributors, cables, satellites, mobile
phone networks. With digital you just need an IP network that you can
access anywhere.
Then you have content. Digital content can take any form: text, audio,
video, experience, game and so on.
Then you have consumption platforms: screens basically.
Digital media strips content from its distribution platform, rendering eve-
rything as ones and zeros, which means, as all media inexorably becomes
‘digital’ media, all media will be platform agnostic. Content flows across
what we previously thought of as channels, and different parts of the system
can effect change in other parts, in near as-makes-no-difference to real time.
The content republic

Since the earliest days of what we used to call the information superhigh-
way, a refrain has echoed across industries. A mantra, a koan, an aphorism
of our age that guides development and business models, showing us all
how to proceed, chanted regularly, religiously, by traditional media compa-
nies especially, and increasingly by technology companies:
Content is king!
There are various other contenders for the royal positions on the web.
Context is a contender to the throne itself; technology, user interfaces,
linking, have all been proposed as queen. Increasingly it would seem that
community and connectivity both have valid claims to the crown.
Nicholas Negroponte suggested in his book Being Digital (1995) that
connections were more important than content when he explained that
the ‘true value of the network is less about information and more about
community’.6
The rights and powers of the king are unclear but I think the expression
is supposed to mean something like: ‘Content is the most important thing on
the web and if you have excellent content you will be able to make money,
either by selling it or getting some ads around it.’ This, of course, isn’t true.
Nor is it entirely untrue. That’s the way the world works with a lot of things.
Previously, we had two basic content monetization models: people pay

for it, or advertisers pay for it in return for interrupting the attention it has
aggregated. There are some very specific challenges to monetizing content
online, which are already tearing apart content industries whose output,
digitally, has low storage and bandwidth requirements. Once something
exists digitally, it can be copied, perfectly and for free, and redistributed,
which introduces a new content model, where no one gets paid – peer to
peer transmission.
The prevailing wisdom has been that once consumers get used to some-
thing being free online, they don’t want to pay for it. iTunes came along and
disproved this. Then Spotify changed our relationship with music from
ownership to access to the great jukebox in the cloud. It further demon-
strated that the way to control content was not reactionary Digital Rights
Management, but rather making accessing it simple and cheap enough. But
Spotify doesn’t stop piracy. All the lawyers of the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) cannot stop piracy, which means that the content ecosystem will
incorporate some free content floating around the web.
But there are many ways to skin a content cat.
YouTube has experimented with alternatives to straight advertising. It
has announced a test initiative to allow partners such as online university
the Khan Academy to charge for downloads. For about $1 you could get a
good-quality version of the content, and the copyright holder can set licens-
ing rights as they please. Now, think about what you are buying here – not
the content, exactly, more a set of permissions and a convenient way to reuse
that content. This is an obviously unmet need, filled by web-based providers
such as KeepVid.
It is indicative of thinking outside the old model – if you are not selling
the content, what else will people pay for? What makes content more
useful?
Bloomberg information services sell information that you can mostly get
on Google, for free,15 minutes or so later. It is not selling the content, per se,
it is selling extra time. In fact, people could record songs off the radio if they
wanted to, but they bought compact discs because that was more conveni-
ent. Then MP3s came along, and even though they were relatively poor
quality, they were more convenient.
There is going to be room for many different monetization models, based
on context and consumer desire. Hulu and Spotify have adopted hybrid
freemium modes, supported by advertising, which can be lessened or
removed by paying subscription fees. Some musicians and game developers

have offered pay-what-you-wish downloads.
Asking consumers what they want directly is, as we know, not very
enlightening – people don’t really know what they want, and are very bad at
predicting what they will want. Accenture’s Global Broadcast Survey indi-
cates that 49 per cent of consumers would rather pay for content online and
avoid advertising. So, some will pay and some won’t. As the economics of
media remain in flux, we shall continue to experience a Cambrian explosion
of business models. When media agitator Chris Morris announced his
scheme to crowdsource funding of his film Four Lions (2010), a satirical
comedy about British jihadists, because Channel 4 declined to do so, it was
both launch announcement, publicity stunt, culture hack and funding
request.
This hinted at another model: crowdfunding, raising the cost of produc-
tion in tiny increments from many people, from fans, rather than from a
studio. Just as the T-shirt website Threadless produces T-shirts at almost no
risk, by gauging interest in advance of production, content producers can
reach out into the crowd and see if people will microfinance niche content
that would never get made through the mass economics of studios. This hint
was picked up by the producers of the much-loved but ultimately cancelled
television show Veronica Mars, who used the crowdfunding platform to
source US $5.7 million for a feature film in 2013.
As the economics of cultural production continue to decentralize, as
more ‘consumers’ become ‘producers’ of content, content monetization
comes under the renewed threat of free. It is economically very difficult to
compete with people who don’t do things for money. Among the media of
the masses, content isn’t king, it’s a republic.
Of course, there is another sector that produces content, one that is seem-
ingly less concerned about models of content monetization, because it is
one: advertising. Brands have been creating the content that pays for the
content. However, most advertising is not seen as content – hence the term
branded content – because it is assumed to be undesirable. Advertising is
about selling products – content is about, well, anything that makes people
voluntarily spend time with it.
This suggests that we need to take a long hard look at what we want
‘advertising’ to be. Either we continue to fund other people’s content or we
begin to shift the emphasis in the industry. If we spent 80 per cent of budgets
on production, rather than the traditional 10 per cent, instead of using it to
buy attention, just imagine what kind of content we could create.
That said, of course, creating content that is perceived as valuable and

attracts an audience is far from simple, as any media company can tell you.
Cumulative advantage
Duncan Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The science of a connected age
(2003) and Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer (2011),
has demonstrated with ‘closed world’ experiments that not only is social
influence at least as, if not more, important than personal preference when
deciding what you like (as counter-intuitive as that might sound), but there
is an additional factor that makes it practically impossible to predict what
will be a hit:
The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences
in popularity are subject to what is called ‘cumulative advantage,’ or the ‘rich
get richer’ effect.7
This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than
another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As
a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially
enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors –
a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous ‘butterfly effect’
from chaos theory.
This is why film studies and record companies find it impossible to pre-
dict what will be a blockbuster, which led to a venture capital model of
cultural production, where studios and labels invest in 10 things on the
assumption that nine will break even or lose money but one will make
enough to recoup the losses. This is why screenwriter William Goldman
famously said of Hollywood: ‘Nobody knows anything.’ This portfolio
model is also flowing into brand thinking, especially online. The more stuff
produced the more hooks, the more chances that something will catch the
network’s attention.
The writer Cory Doctorow calls this ‘thinking like a dandelion’:
Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year,
indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without
any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they’ll get an hospitable
reception when they touch down...
The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for
reproduction is exploited!...
Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet. This
is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying. If you blow your
works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take
care of the copying costs.8
It is interesting to note that it isn’t what is actually popular that matters –

rather: ‘what people like depends on what they think other people like’9 –
and that various specific cultural signals show us what is popular, which is
why charts like Billboard’s and the New York Times bestseller list, and
awards like the Oscars, are themselves massive drivers of increased con-
sumption. This is why studios put so much money into Oscar promotion
and why some less scrupulous cultural creators and promoters will go to
even further lengths to appear in a chart, even if only for an instant.
ResultSource, for example, is a marketing consultancy who specialize in
getting books onto bestseller lists, for a fee.10
Not content
Content marketing has continued to be something of a cause to celebrate in
the advertising world since I first wrote this book. The industry conversa-
tions started in this form because of the impact of digital that we have been
talking about since around 2007, but that didn’t really get traction until
2013. It was originally presented as a threat to the industry but I suspected
rather that it would just cause evolution as we strove to find new ways to
present brand ideas to audiences in new forms.
We have considered how it impacts business models, and how content
works online in that context, and how advertising fits in, and suggested that
shifting money into production, out of media, to make things people want
to watch, might be a good idea.
Then everything got all real-time and agile and suddenly everyone had
a newsroom and was a publisher. This is not a new approach, except in
its alacrity. The Guinness Book of Records is brand content for the beer, to
settle arguments in the pub. The Michelin Guide is brand content for the
tyre company, to encourage people to drive to restaurants further afield. All
original programmes on television, before spot advertising, were branded
content.
Content is great, if a bit tiring if you try to keep up the pace of a news-
room, but my concern is that we just shifted from assuming advertising was
the solution to all problems, to assuming content is the solution.
Trying to create content that earns attention is a good idea, but it also
opens us up to being in competition for attention with an infinite amount of
content, made by everyone, of different qualities, from childish to profes-
sional. The solus function of most of this content is to aggregate attention,
because this is the only measure of the ‘quality’ of any quantum of content.
If attention is scarcer and scarcer every day, brand content has to navigate
all that as well, and then precipitate some commercial impact after.
Maybe it does present a threat to the creative advertising industry, since,
well, our other partners, the media companies that we’ve been buying atten-
tion from for all these years, also have a business model problem, and are
really good at making content, relatively fast, which is designed to attract
attention. Many now have brand content operations, such as the NYTimes
TBrand Studio, which directly compete with advertising agencies. The inter-
net promised to swallow the costs of reproduction and distribution – so we
started thinking like dandelions, squeezing out lots of tiny pieces of content,
all the time, to work into the content cadence of real people on these plat-
forms.
The biggest challenge for marketing clients today is what, out of an ever-
increasing number of options, to consider and leverage to achieve their busi-
ness goals – and how to create holistic solutions that cater for increasingly
diverse media/technology audiences, some of whom watch a lot of television
and some of whom do not. It is surprising how entrenched and oddly recid-
ivist some aspects of the industry have become, despite endlessly announc-
ing their evolution. As late as 2014, consumer-packaged goods giant Reckitt
Benckiser felt the need to restructure its relationships with advertising agen-
cies to avoid ‘TV-led thinking’.11
Perhaps it’s not that surprising. It is, after all, famously hard to get any-
one to understand something, when their income depends on not under-
standing it. Agencies are fighting for a slice of a shrinking pie, as large clients
seek to actively depress the amount of money they spend on ‘non-advertising
expenditures’ (ie agency fees).12 It is unlikely that agencies with separate
profit and loss (P&L) are really set up to collaborate, despite the consoli-
dated holding company promises, which, in light of the failed Publicis
Omnicom merger, ring increasingly hollow. Since that debacle, agencies
have begun to follow the models of consultancies, collapsing silos into a
single P&L, as Ogilvy did in 2017.
Despite the programmatic promises of the massive media buyers, very
few people outside the ad-tech and media ecosystem care about, or notice,
banners. Publishers are trying to wean themselves off their click addiction
and develop native branded content offerings. Search remains the key online
advertising driver in dollar terms, especially on mobile.
Social media have become the battlegrounds for agency ideas, precisely
because they cut across all disciplines and, unlike search, allow room for
actual ideas. Advertising, media, PR, digital, CRM, activation, and any other
agency that is characterized by discipline has laid claim to social – it is
uniquely horizontal. Social is how content flows, how customers communi-
cate with brands and each other, how ideas spread. When a company does
something badly, or well, social is where we reach out to them, and to each
other.
Social return on investment (ROI) debates rage on, but suddenly every
brand seems to be creating content as though it were some kind of panacea.
I suspect that this is simply because the apparatus of the advertising industry
has always been set up to create pieces of ‘content’, although there is an
important distinction here. Content is something a consumer would choose
to consume. Advertising is something a brand wants to say about itself.
They occasionally overlap, but rarely.
But this is not to say that broadcast television advertising, or billboards,
or radio are somehow no longer important and powerful levers. That’s
salespersonship, not strategy.
Certain audiences, especially those over the age of 50, continue to con-
sume vast swathes of real-time broadcast television as they did before.
Billboards are more important than ever for cultural impact – they cannot
be blocked or skipped. We also know how important radio still is – espe-
cially, for example, for Americans outside of New York – because everyone
drives everywhere, to everything.
Rather, understand that all media should be considered as part of one
interoperating system. Components can act upon each other in approaching
real time. Eventually all elements will be digital. The definitions we cling to,
such as television versus online video, make sense only in light of business
model Balkanization, and only for the medium term. One-third of millenni-
als – the generation born after 1980 – only watch ‘television’ on the internet,
where Netflix predicts that, eventually, there will be no advertisements.13
It is not about what you make, but what effect you have on the system.
Introducing a pervasive effect, not element, into this system is now the job
of advertising.
And, increasingly, content alone won’t be enough to do that.
PART THREE
Attention arts and sciences

06
Do things, tell people

How to behave in a world of infinite content
If content is no longer sufficient – what should brands do?

Previously, the ability to make things public, to publish, was a privileged
act. It was expensive and hard and, in many cases, illegal. When the printing
press emerged it was viewed by the status quo as a tool that should be used
to support the status quo, somewhat unsurprisingly. Unlicensed printing
presses were illegal in England until the end of the 17th century, as they still
are in Malaysia today. When the age of mass media arrived, only govern-
ments, the media-industrial complex and the advertising industry were able
to create mass culture. So, when you saw these pieces of culture, you couldn’t
help but be impressed.
The exponential impact of Moore’s Law means that the computing power
of a bespoke Silicon Graphics workstation, such as was used to create the
special effects for Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, can be approximated on
a laptop. In 2009, a filmmaker in Uruguay made a five-minute short called
Panic Attack with a US $500 budget and uploaded it to YouTube.1 It fea-
tures animated robots attacking a city – and got him noticed by a Hollywood
production company. No doubt there was an element of luck in this dande-
lion spore attracting enough attention to do so, but the fact remains that
digital technology has given every consumer the power to create content.
And it’s getting easier. As media author Clay Shirky has pointed out, what
once took an industry – publishing – now takes the press of a button on a
blogging platform. The monetary power of brands no longer buys them
that uniqueness. We can all make films and we can all create web pages.
The magic that exclusive access to this technology used to deliver has
evaporated.
88 ATTENTION ARTS AND SCIENCES
‘Content’ producers – the role traditionally taken by ad agencies in the

marketing industry – no longer have exclusive access to content creation.
That is not to say that the quality of ‘consumer generated content’ (a tell-
ingly oxymoronic term) is usually on par with Hollywood or Madison
Avenue. Rather, the gap between not being able to do something and being
able to do it is infinite, but the gap between being bad and excellent is simply
one of degree.
It is hard to be amazed with any technical wizardry on film when you
grow up with iMovie at your fingertips. The web provides a mechanism that
can absorb the cost of distribution. Advertising, or even content, as the sole
tool in the marketing box, is simply no longer sufficient to earn attention
since it now competes with practically infinite volumes of content created by
people. The mass media has been forced to make room for the media of the
masses in the attention market.
Some advertising agencies have attempted to reposition themselves in the
new world, shunning the word advertising, expanding their remit to become
purveyors of ideas providing solutions to business problems. And indeed,
they could and perhaps even should be, as we will discuss later in this chap-
ter, but expanding this definition of advertising needs different skills and,
perhaps, a different lens through which to understand the world.
Historically, the function of an advertising agency was seen as expressing,
through art and copy, truths about the product or the company in the
most compelling way. Brand informs the advertising (Figure 6.1). As the
most visible aspect of a company, it was only mistrusted when it directly
contravened a customer’s personal experience of the said company. As we
have seen, this is no longer the case. Any dissonance between promises and
delivery experienced by anyone – and then shared – erodes trust in the brand
in totality. Cumulatively, this has eroded trust in brands and advertising
overall.
This dissonance is equally exposed through social media, as every
employee of the company becomes a hole in the semi-permeable membrane
of the corporate communication department, and content, as brands look to
find things to talk about beyond endless exhortations to buy.
Douglas Rushkoff suggests this requires the abandoning of communica-
tions ‘as some separate task, and instead just doing all the right things that
you want talked about’.2 Brands will be built by behaviour... and content
that communicates that behaviour.
Behaviour, actions at scale, can be a continuing role for marketing and
their agency partners. Brands must become behavioural templates, driving
DO THINGS, TELL PEOPLE 89
FIGURE 6.1 Traditional brand platform informs advertising
Traditional brand platform

INFORMS ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING
BRAND
SERVICES
PRODUCTS
the action of the company, which should be expressed through actions and
initiatives designed to earn attention.
There are things that corporations and their agencies partners can do that
cannot be easily replicated by individuals, which do not rely on them being
vertically integrated. They still have strategic advantages in the quest for
attention: technology and scale. In a world of infinite content, actions cre-
ated at scale can become content engines. Do things in the world, then tell
people.
Technology is a medium
Technology provides a canvas that is yet to be effectively colonized by the
amateur and, as Arthur C Clarke famously pointed out, any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Technology provides
a medium to amaze and cut through the clutter of content. Technology
speaks by doing, it can be utilized to create utilities, tools, services and ideas
that earn attention (Figure 6.2).
Technology companies often tout their latest tools to brands and media
owners to help drive uptake, so brands have first user advantages. The Pepsi
TEN project is an explicit manifestation of this advantage. The consumer-
packaged goods giant established a venture fund to support and partner
with early stage technology start-ups in order to exclusively leverage the
technologies for marketing.
FIGURE 6.2 Integrative brand platform
ACTIONS ADVERTISING
Help people live better
Inform and entertain

EXPERIENCES
SERVICES
STORIES
BRAND/BELIEF
PRODUCTS
TOOLS CONTENT
SOURCE: Genius Steals
There are problems with the blurring of the technology and the commu-
nications industries. They are divided by a common language. Words that
should mean the same thing can mean something completely different to
those on either side of the divide.
Take a simple word like platform. To a communications specialist it
means an idea or theme that all messages fit into, but to a technologist it
means an underlying technology that enables other products or services to
be built on it. This means that collaboration among disciplines can seem to
be aligned when it isn’t.
In practice, creative directors trained in writing or design find themselves
being asked to review algorithms and concepts they cannot understand, as
code becomes a creative deliverable.
CASE STUDY
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) briefed their agency for a campaign to promote
the saving of trees by being more cautious about office printing – the paperless office
never having emerged. Jung Von Matt realized pretty quickly that a traditional ad
campaign – especially a print campaign, for obvious reasons – wasn’t the right
solution. Instead they worked for years to develop a bespoke file format, similar to the
popular Adobe pdf format, which simply could not be printed. Technology here speaks
volumes. The idea is a tool, something people can use, which makes the brand idea
useful to its audience.
For brands to take advantage of technology and their first-access rights to

new developments, they and their agents need to develop common under-
standing.
Often it is the role of the strategist to translate business language into
creative inspiration. Increasingly, additional translations are necessary,
evinced by the formation of new agency roles, reverse mentoring, and the
demand for management training from groups such as the HyperIsland
digital school.
There have been significant difficulties in merging the culture of advertis-
ing and digital agencies. Dare was named the digital agency of the decade in
the UK by Campaign magazine. Advertising agency MCBD was named
Effectiveness Agency of the year by the IPA. In 2010 they merged and it was
heralded as an excellent idea, creating a new model agency that understood
the narrative of advertising with the participatory and technology nous
required for innovative interactive work. Unfortunately, it faltered and
became emblematic of ‘the story of an industry that knew it had to change,
but didn’t really know how; or, for that matter, what to change into’.3
The newly formed agency struggled with developing an appropriate pro-
cess to manage such disparate outputs. It struggled to convince clients that
a full service offering was feasible or desirable. But it struggled most with
one of the key problems of all mergers, the integration of culture. John
Owen, head of strategy at Dare, later went on to write that he had come
to believe that this sort of cultural fusion was impossible, because: ‘when it
comes to culture, the choice is binary: you can be digital or you can be
advertising’. He goes on to explain how traditional advertising agencies so
often still think and how it differs from digitally born agencies:
So what do I mean by a digital culture?

I mean not insisting on creative director sign-off for everything and elevating the
role of the creative team above all other disciplines in the idea-generation phase.
I mean empowering multidisciplinary teams to work in fast, fluid ways, with
different people taking the lead depending on the nature of the brief.4
This cultural mismatch is not just about process. It leads to endless, point-
less, arguments about the death of advertising, or the impact of digital, or
who owns the idea, or who is lead agency – each agency defending their own
business model and place at the table. It moves the industry further away
from the integrative marketing communications planning that is needed in
this environment. The fragmentation of marketing solutions is why, accord-
ing to a survey of chief marketing officers, integration is the most important
thing they want from their agencies and among the top reasons that they
pick or dismiss them.5
The field of user experience design looks at enhancing customer satisfac-
tion and loyalty by improving the usability and pleasure in the interactions
between customers and products or services. Some see this as bridging the
gap between product design and traditional marketing. Mapping a con-
sumer journey, their step-by-step experience of a product or service, is a tool
that has been adopted by communication planners dealing with the com-
plexity of the modern landscape.
CASE STUDY
Airline Virgin America revamped its web storefront to make using it more intuitive
across different devices, with a focus on making the arduous task of booking travel
easier and faster. Booking travel is increasingly complex, due to the number of options
available and the dynamic pricing models of the industry. Research by the Boston
Consulting Group suggests that a customer spends, on average, 42 hours online to
research, plan and book a four-day trip, which is both staggering and unpleasant.6 So,
faster and easier is a huge boon and the Virgin brand is further bolstered by its other
stated ambition for the site: to make every task ‘fun-erer’.7
Actions at scale
Brands still have an advantage over empowered consumers – their ability to
deliver scale. Ironically this can be most powerful when delivered in tradi-
tional broadcast media environments because consumers cannot access
them directly, as they can with online environments.
Digital channels may now deliver massive reach but the almost infinite
nature of the web means that individual elements can lack the cultural
impact of television and the associated media that reports on it. Fragmentation
leads to the counter-intuitive fact that things can be incredibly popular on
the internet and yet you and I may never hear about them.
CASE STUDY
Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl campaign is a classic example of using scale. Leveraging
the consumer’s ability to make films Doritos then incentivizes them to participate by
giving them the opportunity to see their ad in the biggest TV event of the year. The
campaign has been running for seven years. (Longevity is another sign of a powerful
idea in a world of accelerating news cycles and diminished attention spans.)
Scale can be delivered via access. Tablets and laptops, for all their ability to
democratize the creation of content, will not get you close to the big stars, although
Twitter disrupts even this advantage. Brands can leverage their corporate might to
provide access to things that an individual’s money cannot buy. Coca-Cola experimented
with this when they sponsored a live online recording session with the band Maroon
5. The band composed and recorded a track, aided by feedback and suggestions from
people in real time.
In the age of the empowered consumer, brands need to identify what they can do
that consumers cannot, how they can add something to their lives. Technology may be
part of the answer, if brands and technologists can learn to speak the same language,
but it could also be via the appropriate actions at scale that gives consumers something
that even the latest laptop, tablet or mobile cannot offer.
Scale can be utilized to do things so far beyond the scope of individuals that it
generates content that is truly awe inspiring. In October 2012, energy drink Red Bull
created one of the greatest marketing actions of all time. It was called Stratos,8 and
consisted of skydiver Felix Baumgartner breaking the world free-fall record by jumping
out of a capsule suspended 24 miles above the surface of the earth. A project seven
years in the making, it captured the attention of the world. As he plummeted
earthward, reaching speeds in excess of 800 miles an hour, the jump was broadcast
on more than 40 television stations across 50 countries. A record 8 million people
watched it live on YouTube. It organically created more than 2.5 million social media
mentions, front page news worth millions of dollars and immediately became a
cultural object. It has been suggested that it is the ‘most successful marketing
campaign of all time’, indelibly linked to the Red Bull brand and its long-running slogan
‘Red Bull Gives You Wings’. On the one-year anniversary of the jump, Red Bull released
a secondary burst of content, including a powerful point-of-view video of Felix’s
experience.
Acts of happiness
While actions that are epic in scale such as Stratos are awesome, smaller
actions that make real people happy in the real world can also be very effec-
tive at generating attention.
CASE STUDY
Coca-Cola has very successfully championed this model, creating a series of video
vignettes about very surprising vending machines. Beginning in 2010, Coca-Cola
wanted to find ways to reach teens through social media, understanding that content
is not searched for but shared. As a global brand manager explained, they ‘wanted to
give [fans] something that would spread a bit of happiness and something they could
pass on to their friends to keep the happiness flowing’.9 The most successful element
of this digital campaign was footage of an activation that had been set up at St John’s
University, a private school in Queens, New York. An ordinary-looking Coca-Cola
vending machine was installed in the cafeteria and surreptitiously filmed. (One
assumes that the people involved signed releases once all was revealed.) Unsuspecting
students would go up to the machine, put in some money to buy a Coca-Cola, but the
machine dispensed happiness instead – in the form of surprise gifts, such as a 6-foot-
long sandwich, a bouquet of flowers, 20 bottles of Coca-Cola or a pizza. The students
were clearly surprised and delighted, and because the gifts came in large quantities,
they shared them. Their reactions were charming and clearly real – and real things
done in the real world to real people seem to have increased impact in a digitally
driven world. (It used to be the ‘Real Thing’, remember?)
The film cost about $50,000, a fraction of the cost of a broadcast advertisement,
and achieved significant organic reach, viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube.
Viewers from all over the world saw and shared it, and it was eventually used on
television, reversing the traditional direction of advertising, from television to online
(which is, as we shall see later, the way things should usually be done). It spawned a
whole series of similar activations, all of which performed well and all of which
imparted some aspect of shared happiness.
Another, very different, kind of action helped Coca-Cola to express that drinks are
better shared. They created a can that splits in two so that you can literally share a can.
Platforms and products

Let’s go back to that term that gets used to mean so many different things:
platform. A new definition of this term, at the intersection of business and
technology, had begun to manifest by 2014. Platforms, when understood as
the ‘rules and infrastructure that facilitate interactions among network
users’10 have been hailed as the future of marketing by Adrian Ho, one of the
founders of Zeus Jones, a new model agency from Minneapolis. It built on
the idea that the definition of a brand had evolved from a construct of mes-
saging and perception, to a guiding principle that creates ‘experiences and
communities centered on a core purpose’.11 As they say: ‘if platforms are the
future of business then brands aren’t just a way to describe “what you do,”
they are a way to describe “what we can do together”.’12
CASE STUDY
The Nikon Film Festival was an early attempt I worked on to create a platform that
enabled brands and people to work together. Nikon had been running a successful
series of television commercials featuring Ashton Kutcher. I had recently joined
McCann New York to help them think about the impact of digital, blessed with the
baroque title Executive Vice President Chief Technology Strategist (there was a concern
that the more usual title of Chief Digital Officer might upset some creative directors).
We got a new brief for the newly launching Nikon D5000, their first Digital SLR camera
that could shoot HD film.
The CEO of Nikon at the time was very fond of Ashton. The client briefed us in for
yet another TV spot featuring Kutcher, to launch a new camera that could record HD
moving pictures. I begged them to let us develop an online film festival instead, based
on the far from ground-breaking insight that people who might specifically want a
camera that shot HD film might be interested in shooting HD film.
This was in 2009 and Twitter had just popped into the popular consciousness
thanks to the race to be the first to reach 1 million followers, a race that was won by
none other than Kutcher. Thus, an idea began to coalesce, and I managed to convince
the CEO that we should do a film festival, built around Twitter and its impact on media,
and have Kutcher kick it off by actually making a film, rather than pretending to in an
advertisement.
I explained to the CEO that Twitter was indeed ‘cool’ when he asked, and he gave
us his blessing. This is one of the great things about having the CEO as the client, they
can just sign off on things by themselves. What good CEOs are usually best at is making
decisions (and then selling those decisions to the market).
The festival launched with a Tweet from Kutcher sharing his film and directing
others to post a film that showed ‘a day through their lens’ in 140 seconds, echoing
the character limit of Twitter, for a top prize of $100,000. With that much money at
stake, we were hoping we would get a lot of high-quality entries, but we were
staggered by the response. We received more than 48 hours of film, with a huge range
of ideas. There was a round of voting, followed by a panel of judges, so each contestant
was out there trying to promote their own films hard through their social channels.
This is one of the keys of social engagement, inspiring individuals to promote and
propagate your brand idea to their networks.
After millions of views, winners were chosen and awarded. Here’s where the story
gets a little sad. We had built a new film format and platform to host it and a community
coalesced around it. But back then we were still operating in the mindset of traditional
advertising, of campaigns that start and then finish, not platforms that provide
ongoing value and communication opportunities for the brand and the community.
So, once the campaign was over, the site came down.
However, this story has an unexpected happy ending. While working on this book
in France, I Googled the project to look at some of the press coverage and, thanks to
localized search, discovered that the French Nikon team had also used the idea and
were still running the film festival and web platform five years later. A platform that
provides persistent value for participants.
07
Recombinant culture
Talent imitates, genius steals
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as

photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism
as fashion and the media, events as television.
Things seem only to exist by the virtue of this strange destiny. You
wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy
in some other world.
jean baudrillard
I believe that ideas are new combinations. I believe that stealing is genius,
but copying is the reserve of the uninspired.
I believe originality is a Romantic notion, often depicted as Athena
springing forth fully formed from the mind of Zeus, and just as mythical.
When something is perceived as original, what we mean is that it is unex-
pected, novel to that person, not that is has no antecedents. Psychological
novelty is not historical novelty; things that are new to you are almost cer-
tainly not new.
I believe, like the postmodernists, that you can attempt to create a higher
order of meaning by standing on the semantic foundations of other crea-
tions, employing referents instead of starting from scratch.
I believe that the remix is the dominant cultural construct of a digital age,
bits endlessly co-mingling with bits.
The idea of the remix can be traced back at least as far as the philosopher
John Locke. Back in the 17th century, he posited that human imagination
was a sampler and sequencer – cutting and pasting perceived reality into
new constructs.
FIGURE 7.1 Good ideas are non-obvious, non-trivial combinations
THE AREA OF AWESOME
AVERAGE IDEAS
OBVIOUS IDEAS
THE PROBLEM
ZONE OF IDEAS THAT AREN’T POSSIBLE OR DON’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM
SOURCE: Genius Steals
All ideas work like this. The archaeology of any idea involves decompiling
it into its constituent elements. Creating ideas is the same process reversed:
● Jonah Lehrer points out in How We Decide (2009) that ‘from the
perspective of the brain – new ideas are just several old ideas had at the
same time’.1
● Stephen Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From (2011), has explored
the notion that only some ideas are possible at any moment – he calls this
solution space the ‘adjacent possible’.2
The most obvious combinations, the most obvious ideas and the most
obvious creative solutions to a brief sit at the nearest edge of the adjacent
possible. This is why the first round of responses to the same brief tend to be
so similar, again and again. This is why so many ideas are the same, copying,
either conscious or unconscious, blending with convergent evolution, as
minds tackle the same problems in different places.
How, then, to have better ideas? Better, more unusual, more interesting,
more differentiating ideas exist at the furthest viable extremes of the adja-
cent possible (Figure 7.1).
So, in order to get them you must:
● Expose yourself to the most diverse set of influences possible, and allow
luck to lead you.
● Get past all the obvious ideas first.
RECOMBINANT CULTURE 99
Ideas are new combinations
Being creative is not a magical skill, it is simply a way of thinking, a process,

one that combines things in non-obvious ways in order to achieve some-
thing useful or beautiful or both.
When someone remarks on how creative something is, it is usually
because the combination is particularly non-obvious to the person making
the remark. The combination has to work, somehow, has to find the similar-
ity that holds the two disparate ideas together. Finding the connection
between two disparate things is the flash, the eureka moment of insight, the
feeling of having an idea.
This is why Aristotle thought that ‘the greatest thing by far is to have a
command of metaphor’,3 because you have to be able to find similarity in
difference. Metaphors are at the heart of thoughts, of new ideas. Remember,
even memories, engrams, are being remixed and remade every time they are
recalled. This is why, when James Webb Young sat down to write a tech-
nique for producing ideas, he expressed quite clearly that ‘ideas are new
combinations’.
Innovative ideas are associative: ‘What the innovators have in common is
that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations
that nobody else has quite put together before.’4 Researchers describe this
ability to connect ideas as ‘associating’, and believe ‘it is key to innovators’
ability’ to create non-obvious combinations.5
Crucially, finding non-obvious connections tends to mean that the mind
doing the mixing has knowledge of concepts in areas that are not directly
adjacent.
Let’s go back to John Locke and his essay concerning human understand-
ing. Locke is the godfather of remix culture. He set out to establish a model
of the human mind and understand where ideas come from, essentially as a
direct response to innatism, which suggested ideas are in your mind when
you are born, put there by some divinity. Locke wanted to apply the newly
scientific principles of empiricism to the mind, rather than relying on super-
stition. He hoped to develop a more robust epistemology of science, by
examining the limitations, reliability and scope of the human mind. The
idea he came to, his most famous image, was describing the mind as being,
originally, a tabula rasa.
(Suggesting that all minds were born blank had an obvious political ana-
logue: that all men are born equal. Indeed, Locke’s work had a profound
impact on the thinking and writing of the founding fathers of the United
States. Several sections of the Declaration of Independence are stolen almost

verbatim from Locke.)
If minds are blank, where then do ideas come from? You steal them.
Ronald Burt’s theory of ‘where to get a good idea’ helps to explain that it
is probably stolen: ‘The usual image of creativity is that it’s some sort of
genetic gift, some heroic act, but creativity is an import–export game. It’s
not a creation game.’6 It is the act of transposing something onto a new
frame of reference that often renders it valuable: ‘The trick is, can you get an
idea which is mundane and well-known in one place to another place where
people would get value out of it?’7
Burt’s line of enquiry stretches back at least as far as Locke, who wanted
to understand where ideas come from, although he had a broader definition
of idea in mind – essentially the object of any thought. His answer was from
sensation and reflection. Simple ideas are experienced directly by the senses
– horse, for example – and then we use our mental facility to combine them
to build more complex, abstract ideas – take a horn and a horse and you’ve
got a unicorn, even though you have never encountered one in real life.
All ideas are iterative and accretive, built on that which came before.
Your imagination is a remix engine, and the less obvious the working remix,
the more tension between the pieces, the more ‘creative’ the idea seems to us.
This is why, to quote Burt again: ‘People who live in the intersection of
social worlds, are at higher risk of having good ideas.’ So being a bridge
among different groups, exposing yourself to lots of difference, is necessary
but not sufficient for having ideas.
The tabula rasa idea finds its antecedent in an Aristotelian maxim: ‘there
is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses’.8 This was
built upon hundreds of years later by Leibniz, in reference to Locke’s usage,
to include ‘except the intellect itself’.9 Your unique idea engine can take the
same sources as the person next to you and come up with something differ-
ent, which is the infinite novelty of recombinant thinking, but also reminds
you that you have to exercise the creative faculty, learning and combining.
Art is one way of doing this.
Great artists steal

Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their
affairs by imitation, even though they cannot entirely keep to the tracks of
others or emulate the prowess of their models. So a prudent man should
always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have
been outstanding. If his own prowess fails to compare with theirs, at least
it has an air of greatness about it.
the prince, niccolò machiavelli
Banksy steals great art and becomes a greater artist:
CASE STUDY
In June 2009, the English graffiti prankster and self-styled ‘art terrorist’ known only as
Banksy had his first official exhibition in Bristol.
Banksy’s previous displays in art galleries had been guerrilla incursions – illegally
installed pieces designed, at least in part, to deride the elitist exclusivity of the
environments.
The pieces themselves are part of a larger process – the surreptitious hanging, the
context, all combine to create the meanings that Banksy wishes to manufacture.
In March 2005, disguised as a British pensioner, in raincoat and fake beard, he
‘donated’ pieces to four museums in New York on the same day. Each piece was a
remix, a comment on the work in that museum. At the Museum of Modern Art he left
behind a soup can, styled on Warhol’s own endlessly replicated Campbell’s Soup Cans,
but drawing its cultural cues from the UK supermarket Tesco. (The name Tesco is itself
a mash-up of the founder’s first supplier, TE Stockwell, and his surname Cohen. It is
usually claimed to have been a mash-up of his wife’s name, Tessa, and their surname,
but Lady Cohen’s name was Sarah.)
In May 2005 Banksy hit the British Museum, leaving behind a ‘cave painting’ that
denoted ‘a stick man chasing a wildebeest and pushing a shopping cart’, attributed to
‘Banksymus Maximus’ in Gallery 49. (The British Museum later added the piece to its
permanent collection, creating, in effect, an anti-theft.)
When invited to put on a legal exhibit at Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery,
Banksy’s response was characteristically irreverent and referential. Riffing off his
earlier covert museum work, this show was put together in semi-secret and took the
sensibility of graffiti to the gallery.
Graffiti can be considered the inverse of found art. In found art, the objet trouvé is
removed from its normal surroundings and, recontextualized by the artist – such as
the urinal becomes a fountain – it becomes ‘readymade’ art. Street art takes the
opposite approach – it is the canvas that is found and, through illegal daubing and
stencilled slogans, the world becomes the gallery.
Banksy’s work in particular makes dynamic use of context. When he spray-painted

‘This is not a photo opportunity’ at various picturesque locations, he encompassed the
whole landscape, and subverted the old Kodak signage that attempted to do the same.
So when given a gallery in which to exhibit, it was perhaps inevitable that the
gallery, that art itself, would become the canvas. Many of his pieces were, in effect,
graffiti on other pieces of art: remixes. The title of the show pays testament to this: it
was called Banksy versus Bristol Museum. Referencing the naming convention of
soundclashes and mash-ups, Banksy’s entire show was a remix of the Bristol Museum.
And with one sculpture in particular, he acknowledged his role as part of our
unending culture of recombinance. On a stone slab, he engraved a quotation (attributed
to Pablo Picasso):
THE BAD ARTISTS IMITATE, THE GREAT ARTISTS STEAL
He signed it Pablo Picasso and then scrawled out his name and scratched ‘Banksy’
beneath.
Banksy stole the idea and made it his own, volunteering himself for inclusion in
the canon of great artists. The show was one of the top 30 most visited exhibitions in
the world in 2009 – the first time the Bristol Museum has ever appeared on the list.
The incredible success of the show is testament not only to Banksy’s meteoric rise but
also the increased saliency of recombinant culture. Banksy has gone on to be arguably
the world’s most famous street artist and his work regularly sells in galleries for vast
sums. In 2020, his piece ‘Show Me the Monet’, a parody of Monet’s impressionist
water lilies with a shopping trolley and traffic cone dumped in the river, sold at auction
for just under $10 million. It is part of a series of works based on other artists’ works.
Genius continues to steal.
Same same but different

Warhol took the idea of iterative artwork and productized it. He applied
Ford’s manufacturing model to the business of art. As John Cale, who
founded The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, once said: ‘it wasn’t called
the Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly line for the silkscreens
happened.’10
Warhol was unashamedly recombinant. The Pop Art movement was
predicated on the democratization of art through the reappropriation of
popular culture: Pop is short for popular. His production line churned out
endless variants of the same silkscreens, each the same but slightly different.
He mass-produced art, echoing the mass media and mass market that sprang
into existence in the 1950s and 1960s. (Later in his career he collaborated
with Jean-Michel Basquiat, letting the young art-world celebrity remix his
beloved prints.)
Warhol’s repetitive production-line style called into question the image
of the artist as divinely inspired genius, or even as craftsperson. It called
into question the sanctity of originality, and he delighted in this blasphemy,
boasting about his minimal involvement in his work and his army of assis-
tants. His Do It Yourself series of paintings, based on popular painting-by-
numbers kits, further explored this idea.
Even within single works, Warhol explores the idea of versions and itera-
tion, creating multi-image quadtychs of celebrities such as Elvis Presley,
Marilyn Monroe (and, inevitably for the master of self-branding, himself)
and of even more famous things, namely packaged goods: Campbell’s Soup
and Coca-Cola.
These multi-chromatic quadtychs became one of the defining creative
frameworks of the Pop Art movement, which have been endlessly reiterated
since. To promote a Warhol retrospective Tate Modern, in partnership with
agencies Naked Communications and Poke London, created a Warholizer
on their website. It let anyone upload a photo of themselves and turned
it into a colourful quadtych, which was then displayed for 15 minutes on
the Tate Modern homepage – giving participants their 15 minutes, and
megabytes, of fame: ‘We like to think that perhaps this is the kind of thing
that Andy might have done if he’d had computers and stuff. Sort of like a
modern-day factory.’11
That was in 2002. Since then, the tools of content production, manipula-
tion and distribution have changed dramatically – for the simpler. Today, if
someone wants to create a Warholized self-portrait and have it displayed
online they need only to launch the Photobooth application on a Macbook
– it has a ‘Pop Art’ effect that will automatically turn a picture captured on
the embedded iSight camera into a multicoloured quadtych – snap a picture
and upload it.
Warhol’s work has inspired countless reproductions of its reproductions.
In a thoroughly modern expression of inspiration, Ken Solomon painted
a watercolour of the Google Image Search results page for the keyword
‘Warhol’ – re-aggregating the disparate Warholian pieces according to the
ranking of the Google algorithm, which is dictated in large part by the
number of links each image has to it.
Warhol was a branding genius, very consciously turning himself into an

art brand. He was not doing this just to appease his childhood insecurities
(although that was probably part of it). It was because he approached art
as a business: ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is
the best art.’12
In his book – The Philosophy of Andy Warhol – he makes the branding
point even more explicitly. He talks about being jealous of ‘Levi and Strauss.
I wish I could invent something like blue jeans. Something to be remem-
bered for. Something mass.’13
This is a wonderful sentiment – art not for the elite but for everyone – but
also very commercially minded. It is echoed in a quote from Posh Spice –
who said she wanted to be ‘as famous as Persil’ – as Jeremy Bullmore pointed
out.14 Packaged-goods brands are more famous than any celebrity will ever be.
All POPular artists understand that the value of any work of art, like the
value of a brand, is entirely socially created – it only has value because we
agree that it does. Which means that the entire art industry is predicated on
a very simple value equation: people will pay more for something people
have paid attention to.
People will pay more for something people

have paid attention to
Correspondingly, the more people have heard of the artist and his or her
work, the more it is worth. So the business of art is fame, to become popular,
to make itself famous, to create brands, to attract attention. As you may
have guessed, I think this mechanism underlies a lot of culture, especially
advertising.
Advertising is not art. Advertising agencies are not in the business of
making cool stuff, they are in the business of making money for clients,
using creativity. That said, successful art is also very commercially minded,
by definition, since success ultimately is measured by the prices an artist can
sell their work for. This is not, perhaps, aesthetic success, but if the perfect
piece of art lies somewhere, forever unseen, its impact on culture is assumed
to be limited.
In a world where mainstream media is increasingly supplemented by the
media of the masses, one of the leverage points for creativity is earning
attention, beyond that which has been paid for. This means that, as with art,
the business of advertising is fame.
Modern postmodernism
In which we look at what was stolen from postmodernism.

The idea that ‘Talent Imitates, [but] Genius Steals’ has been, in recombi-
nant fashion, attributed to various different people, in various different
forms. Morrissey used it as the title of one of his albums, in a form attrib-
uted to Oscar Wilde: Talent Borrows, Genius Steals. The Picasso version
that Banksy appropriated is among the most famous, but it is also attributed
to TS Eliot, in the form of ‘good poets borrow, great poets steal’.
In fact, none of them seem to have said it, exactly, but like the recom
binant idea it has been endlessly reiterated and put into the mouths of
authorities.
The fauxtation seems to be derived from something that Eliot did write,
however, in a piece published in his collection of criticism, The Sacred Wood
(1920). In his essay on Elizabethan dramatist Philip Massinger, Eliot
attempts to establish some grounds upon which to judge creative work, and
so in turn judge the judgements. An earlier critic, Alfred Cruickshank, sug-
gested that Massinger’s work was ‘inferior’, partially at least because it was
perceived to be derivative. To which Eliot responds: ‘One of the surest of
tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature
poets steal... A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time,
or alien in language, or diverse in interest.’15
With his usual precision, Eliot captures a crucial component of the post-
modern view of culture, one that continues to echo throughout our increas-
ingly digital mediascape, and makes clear the distinction between copying
and stealing. Imitation defaces, stealing makes something better, ‘or at least
something different’. The key is that something else is created, something
‘new’.
When genius steals, a new whole is created, not simply a mismatched
bricolage. There is communication between the disparate elements, which
add to the whole. Stealing from remote sources – in time, language or inter-
est – adds to the dynamic tension being created between the elements, but
the broader the sources, the harder it can be to create cohesion among them.
This is why the consultancy I founded with my wife is called Genius
Steals. It is built on what we believe about innovation. We look to the broad-
est range of sources when we help to craft solutions for our clients – and
build from them, rather than starting from scratch.
Imitation disguises the debt it owes. Stealing takes and repurposes, recon-
textualizes – it revels in the reference. Recognizing the source becomes an
integral part of the meaning being constructed. In this sense, stealing is

hypertextual and meta-textual – it links to other texts outside itself, stand-
ing on the semantic foundations previously established.
Stealing multiplies meaning, copying does not.
Postmodernism posits culture as a self-conscious stock house of signs.
The insight that words had no inherent relationship to the concepts they
denote cleaved signifier from signified. Since meaning is impossible to defin-
itively assign, texts pull established signifiers into service as referents:
Thanks to the processes which led to postmodernism, all culture is a buffet

table. It is not so much what the chef prepares but what the diner puts together
as his or her meal that counts; appropriation is an act of creativity. Because
everything is in quotes in postmodernism, the allusion may be the most
important literary device of our age.16
Postmodernism is considered by some to be a reaction to, or assimilation of,

our intensely mediated culture. Postmodernism questions the foundations of
cultural and artistic forms through self-referential irony and the juxtaposi-
tion of elements from popular culture and technology.
Digital culture is increasingly postmodern in this sense – cultural arte-
facts are made up of allusions, references and quotations. On the internet,
memes are endless iterations of the same thing, each only making sense
within the framework of that meme. The challenge is to interpret or subvert
imagery and text in a uniquely interesting, or funny, way. Eliot himself was
pre-postmodern, but modernism was also concerned with exploring the
multiplicity of different viewpoints – his masterpiece The Waste Land was
originally titled He Do The Police In Different Voices – that recombination
offers, and the extensive use of quotation, allusion and reference, which
brought up the perennial question of plagiarism: is it imitation or stealing?
On this point:
Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so

carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s
contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism,
except modernism without the anxiety?17
This lack of anxiety about stealing typifies postmodern and today’s think-
ing. An understanding that everything that came before is contained in the
works of the present is fundamental to a postmodern understanding of art,
culture, technology and innovation. The technologies that are changing our
world are themselves built on endless iteration and recombination from

within, and inspiration from without. Steve Jobs, arguably one of the prin-
cipal architects of the emerging mediascape thanks to innovations such as
iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad, has always been clear about the need to
steal:
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to

the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to
what you’re doing... we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.18
Steve goes on to outline some of the key elements of creative thinking:
● Iteration: building on what came before, looking at what works and

starting there, rather than from scratch.
● Recombination: blending different elements together to create a new
whole.
● Inspiration: looking to fields ‘diverse in interest’ for sources to recombine.
The development of media technologies in the last two decades that enable
the instantaneous and simple reproduction of content have facilitated the
emergence of a generation of idea prosumers (a term denoting a blend of
producer and consumer, first coined by Alvin Toffler) for whom remixing is
the default way to express themselves. Normalized by habitual usage of
control+C and control+V shortcuts on their keyboard, a cut’n’paste genera-
tion has emerged for whom pre-existing media products are as colours on a
palette.
The tools required to manufacture meaning have been put into the hands
of a whole generation, and their primary mode of expression is postmodern:
allusion and quotation, samples and soundbites – they remix culture to cre-
ate it. TikTok has a suite of features that allow any user to easily grab any
element from an existing video and incorporate it into their own. It’s a plat-
form designed for remixing from the outset. Further, it abstracted various
complex video editing tools into simple effects and filters that anyone can
easily use. The democratization of creativity inevitably marches on, acceler-
ated by mobile interfaces that necessitate simplicity.
But this free and easy remixing of culture is not simply a function of the
times, or technologies. While it seems that this recombinant culture is just
dawning, it is merely a renaissance. Modern media technologies are simply
shedding light on what is a much more fundamental idea – that culture is,
that all ideas are, inherently recombinant and that it cannot be otherwise.
08
Combination tools
How to have ideas: a genius steals process
And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
a midsummer night’s dream (act v, scene 1), william shakespeare
Since, somewhat unusually, I have worked as both a planner and as a crea-

tive director, I have a bilateral view of the strategic idea-creation process
that is at least one half of the heart of the advertising agency offering (the
other half being the management of implementation and orchestration).
I want to build on James Webb Young’s technique for producing ideas,
exploring more of the elements that lead to the ‘A-Ha’ moment, in order to
make the mechanics of having ideas easier for everyone. As legendary adman
Jay Chiat once said: ‘creative is not a department’.1 Advertising creatives of
various flavours have specific craft skills that are very valuable, but conflat-
ing that with having ideas, which should be the dominion of everyone at a
creative company and indeed everyone else, diminishes us.
COMBINATION TOOLS 109
TOOLKIT How to have ideas: a genius steals
The Genius Steals creative process is broken down into six steps, as set out
below.
1. Define the problem
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow
a solution.
(attributed to george bernard shaw but probably a fauxtation)
Creative ideas in advertising exist to solve problems, usually specific business

problems. The ideas must address the drivers and/or barriers to business
growth in some fashion. The foundation of any solution is how the problem is
defined. The application of creative thinking begins here, with the formulation,
because how you define a problem determines if and how you can solve it.
A good problem statement needs to encapsulate the issue and objective,
and inspire the appropriate solution. It should avoid jargon and be phrased to
be as generative as possible. There is a famous and probably apocryphal story
of a Toyota executive who asked his teams to brainstorm ‘ways to increase
their productivity’. This proved unfruitful, until he rephrased it as ‘ways to
make your job easier’, which led to many, many suggestions.
Creating behavioural objectives can help to focus ideas. Will Collin, one of
the founders of Naked, explains it well. He pointed out that the business
objective might be to sell 15 per cent more mayonnaise but that phrasing it as
‘getting people to try mayo on their fries’2 will be far more inspirational for
creating solutions.
2. Frame the metaphor, extract the abstraction, look for patterns
Our brains think in metaphors, in connections, and often the best ideas are
patterns that have been established elsewhere that are matched onto the
problem at hand. In order to do this, we have to abstract things out of the
specific into the general, and where else these patterns may have been
implemented. This framing then allows for the next stage, finding the right
inspiration and outspiration, from different times, places, categories and so on.
3. Iteration, inspiration and outspiration
The components of new ideas are always other ideas. I think of them as pieces
of Lego. You can make anything out of Lego, but in order to make specific
things, you need specific pieces. Looking at the most successful attempts to
solve similar pattern problems in the past is the first place to look for ideas
that can be evolved or iterated. In the venture capital (VC) business this is
known as ‘pattern matching’, where an investor uses patterns and experiences
from the past to make decisions about investment opportunities.
Finding the right inspiration, the right Lego, is a crucial and ongoing part of
any creative process. It is an adage in advertising that you must look outside
advertising for inspiration. This is both true and not true.
As professionals it behoves us to be aware of the best work that is
happening in our field, and the award shows make this easy for us. (This is
part of their value, as we shall explore in Chapter 9.) This is inspiration. That
said, we obviously want a much larger gene, or Lego, pool than this so we
need stimulus from further fields: art, technology, design – all of culture is
open and available online.
In genetic engineering, the process of introducing unrelated genetic
material into an organism or breeding line is called outcrossing. It increases
genetic diversity, therefore reducing the probability of being subject to disease
or genetic abnormalities. This is why I call inspiration from outside outspiration.
Every weird thing you are interested in, every niche of culture you geek about,
is part of your stock house. Based on the abstraction, the pattern discerned in
stage 2, you can begin to select and compile appropriate outspiration.
The point, again, is to find elements diverse in field and interest to apply to
the problem. Outspiration can also come from inside the world of advertising,
by looking at similar problems from very different categories or cultures.
The ‘apple’ game is a good way to get the iterative creative juices flowing
(and to avoid hackneyed phrases like ‘creative juices flowing’, except possibly
in relation to fruit-based creativity games). Divide a piece of paper into boxes,
one for each member of the team or group. Everyone must draw something in
each box to the brief ‘apple’, with the only other condition being that you
cannot repeat anything already drawn. By pushing things endlessly, soon the
obvious apples give way to more metaphorical interpretations of the brief be
it an Apple iPhone or the Big Apple or Fiona Apple (and once in workshop
‘apple-bottom jeans’, which remains a personal favourite).
4. Recombination: blend and blend again
This is the forge, where ideas are smelted from disparate pieces. Every creation
begins as a connection. Almost all brainstorm and creativity tools focus on
stimulating non-obvious connections to see if they crystallize into ideas.
Naturally creatively minded people make these more obscure connections
more naturally, but it is a process that everyone can be guided through, and a
faculty that gets better the more you use it. Using the elements gathered
above, every idea and piece of inspiration or outspiration, you can create a
very simple combination engine by writing them all on separate cards and
shuffling them, or laying them out on a table and seeing if you can connect
two cards together into a new idea:
● Random input: this can be added into the mix, by simply selecting them
from a dictionary and force-fitting them to the elements at hand.
● A–Z ideas: volume can be mustered with the A–Z game, where you create
an idea for each letter of the alphabet in a short time.
● Write in silence: another volume driver, get everyone to write down their
ideas privately for five minutes before any discussion or team
brainstorming.
● Reverse brainstorming: looks for patterns in the negatives, looking through
the antonym lens. Take the problem definition and reverse it. Instead of
‘How can we solve this?’, ask ‘How could we cause it or make it worse?’
Rather than ‘What’s the best idea?’, ask ‘What’s the worst possible thing we
could do?’; ‘How could we create the opposite to what we want?’ Use this
to stimulate ideas, which can then be reversed to look for actual solutions.
5. Incubation: stop thinking, distract yourself, get out of your groove

Every creative process has this element. Once you or a team have forced your
collective minds at a problem for some time, you begin to create ruts for your
thinking as you move towards articulating a solution. This is when you should
take a break and, importantly, think of other things. The classic bathtub eureka
moment, the long brisk walk, the moment in the shower, the advice to sleep
on it – these are all specifics for this general step.
When your brain stops actively working for a while, other more random
connections start to get made by the combination engine of your
subconscious, which naturally thinks laterally. Distracting your conscious mind,
having a drink perhaps, suppresses the internal censor that stops some ideas
coming to mind.
6. Articulation and judgement: is it good? Will it blend further?

How is it to be articulated?
Ideas are fragile, the best must be protected beyond gestation or they wither
and die. Once the most fruitful ideas are selected, based on how well they
seem to solve the problem and how non-obvious they are, the ideas can be
nurtured into existence. As Shakespeare observed, ideas need names and a
‘local habitation’. A look and feel, an elevator description, a key visual in

context, all help ideas come to life. Usually it is the ideas with names and
contexts that stand out to the creative director, to the client and to the world
at large.
Liminal spaces
These are the places in between, where different cultures mix and interact,
where personalities shimmer and become more fluid, where hybrid forms
are created.
I stole the term liminal spaces from the delightful Watching the English
(2004) by Kate Fox.3 (I would suggest that this is essential reading for any-
one trying to understand people or consumers or anything at all in England.)
The book unpicks the underlying rules of social grammar that dictate
English behaviour, and anyone who lives in England will recognize them
instantly when reading it, in particular the ‘Importance of Not Being Earnest’
rule, which helps to explain our pathological reliance on irony.
Fox is an avid people watcher, as social anthropologists tend to be – as
advertising people should also be – and she spends a great deal of time in
pubs, covertly noting conversations and behaviours.
What she discovers is that pubs are liminal spaces – places where the
boundaries blur and normal social rules are overturned. So at the bar you
can talk to a random stranger without seeming strange by doing so. People
interact. You don’t have to be drunk to do so, although we do use alcohol to
facilitate this process. There is a communal sense of well-being and a break-
ing down of barriers that typifies a liminal space.
And then I started thinking, why aren’t brand experiences like that? I’ve
been to more than I can remember and people tend to co-exist – not interact
– at these things as there is no central, collective experience.
But if a brand could curate a social experience in a liminal space, that was
somehow more than a show or a festival, that was an immersive, collective
transgression of the normal rules of social behaviour, wouldn’t that be an
incredibly powerful driver?
Couldn’t the right experience help to turn customers into fans? Indeed, in
the broadest sense, isn’t that the only thing that ever can?
Brainstorms as liminal spaces

Equally, the role of the brainstorm facilitator is to create a liminal space, to
bring together different points of view, different ideas, and help them to
blend together in a structured, guided way.
The idea and term brainstorming was popularized by Alex Osborn (the
O in global agency network BBDO) in the 1950s and it has become a staple
tool of all creative industries. However, it is often done without preparation
and structure, with poor, if any, facilitation, which leads to lacklustre results,
groupthink, and wasted time and emotion. This led to a backlash of sorts,
championed by Jonah Lehrer in Imagine: How Creativity Works,4 that
brainstorming doesn’t work.
Having scripted and facilitated hundreds of workshops, I disagree. A
well-planned workshop, with the relevant inputs, works excellently for cer-
tain things.
One of those things is getting to the interesting parts of the adjacent pos-
sible, as fast as possible. Getting the right mix of components and people
involved from the start. Blowing through all the most obvious ideas first in
order to save the team time.
This is why volume – quantities of concepts – is an important objective.
The most compelling are then refined and developed in a more linear way.
The facilitator must spend time in advance working through stages 1–3 of
the creative process (as set out in the toolkit box above: ‘How to have ideas:
a genius steals’), and the workshop helps with stages 4 and 5.
Part of stage 6, judgement, can be done in stages: a simple vote in the
room, and then more creative direction and refinement following, with
pieces of ideas aggregated into larger concepts as appropriate. Of the 100
ideas generated, only 5–10 concepts should emerge.
People often say there are no bad ideas in brainstorms. This is obviously
not true; there are many, many bad ideas in brainstorms. And that’s the
point.
Creative tenacity
I once saw Adam Morgan, champion of challenger brands, and author
of Eating the Big Fish (1999) and The Pirate Inside (2004) give a talk on a
boat on the River Thames. It was very good – a case study in how to use
illustrative anecdotes to communicate your points, but there was one bit I
particularly latched on to: a concept he called creative tenacity.
It means finding a better way of getting through to someone or to an
organization – if someone doesn’t get your point, find a better way to com-
municate it. If someone slams the door in your face, don’t keep banging on
it – find the window.
When he said it, I thought he meant having the tenacity to push through
good creative ideas, which isn’t what he meant – creative tenacity is a noun
phrase in this context (be creative about your tenaciousness). But because I
work in the communications industry my brain parsed it incorrectly – crea-
tive has a slightly different, and in fact, narrower meaning than it used to
have. Within this context it means the people in the creative department,
and the work they produce.
It reminds you not to get frustrated when a client/anyone doesn’t get you
straight away. He used a wonderful example – sadly I forget who it was
attributed to:
When I hear no, I take it as request for more information.
It also reminded me of how much what you do channels how you think and
how you interpret what you hear. Speaking of which...
The planning paradox

The account planner is often billed as ‘the voice of the consumer’ within
an advertising agency – that ever-elusive man or woman on the omnibus.
But when I walk down one of the tunnels in a Tube station, my head swings
back and forth looking from ad to ad, to see what’s out there, to see if I can
work out the thinking behind them.
When I read a newspaper, I look at the ads. When I read a magazine, I
look at the ads. When I see an interactive ad in an iPad app, I even some-
times click on it, to see what it does.
Real people don’t.
Try it for yourself – next time you are on the Tube, see if anyone even
glances at those ads in the tunnels. The only people paying attention, actively,
are sure to be advertising practitioners of some kind.
The longer you work as a planner, the longer you work in advertising,
the less like an average ‘consumer’ you are in the way that you attend to
advertising, which is probably worth bearing in mind when judging the

impact of ideas.
The mediation generation

Virginia Woolf once said that ‘nothing has happened until it has been
described’.5 It seems like the rest of the world has caught up with her
thought. We endlessly refract ourselves, mediate our lives, to reach out and
connect, and then begin to construct ourselves in response to what seems to
drive attention our way.
We are making ourselves through mediation.
Online everyone is famous, but some are more famous than others. It’s
really easy to tell who, because everything is enumerated. As people, we
have always thought socially – seeing ourselves through the eyes of others.
Increasingly it seems that without mediation, nothing feels real.
The next time you are at a concert – look at all the people capturing the
moment on their smartphones, to mediate and broadcast it, to remember it
and share it, to continue to create themselves with it – even firsthand experi-
ences require mediation.
The MTV generation was dubbed thus because of the media it consumed.
The Myspace Generation (now Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and
Instagram and TikTok) is perhaps better understood as The Mediation
Generation because of its tendency to endlessly mediate itself, because of the
media it produces. As a character from Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle puts
it: ‘You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance,
watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking
and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing
much else.’6
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested that endless mechan-
ical reproductions of everything make it impossible to tell fantasy from real-
ity – the copies become reality. He called this hyperreality, a kind of reality
by proxy, and he said that we had already created a world of simulated
stimuli. Umberto Eco called the same idea ‘the authentic fake’.
This idea is explored in Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York
(2008), where the director creates and re-creates his own reality in an
attempt to understand it and himself. Understanding that the web is public
and permanent is embedded in this mediation generation but culturally,
rather than individually, we seem to be hurtling into hyper(linked) reality.
We Live in Public is a documentary film that looks at this culture through

the lens of a single man’s experiments in endless exposure. Josh Harris made
millions in the first dot-com boom and ploughed the money into projects
designed to foreshadow the world he predicted would be created by the web.
First he set up Pseudo – a web-based television network, in the days of
dial-up – then later he built a bunker-like hotel commune called Quiet,
where people were filmed 24 hours per day, in every room and activity, and
populated it with various art installations and some very strange people
(think proto Big Brother via a psychedelic lens).
After that he and his girlfriend wired their apartment with sensor-enabled
motorized cameras that filmed their every move and streamed it on
WeLiveinPublic.com. What he was trying to experiment with, portray,
pioneer, sell, was his vision of how the web would change the world,
which was that everyone would be watching everyone else, all the time – a
polypanopticon.
Perhaps only in our media reflections do we get to see ourselves as we
want to be, or perhaps as we want others to see us, which, as in both films,
will probably have some very odd effects on our sense of identity at some
point – the attention becomes both addictive and a burden.
Eventually, Josh Harris experienced a breakdown that he attributed to
his ‘media addiction’ – consuming and producing himself as an endless feed.
He abandoned the web and moved to Ethiopia, a self-imposed rehab –
media cold turkey.
We are re-creating our culture as an infinity mirror – a mise en abyme,
recursive reproductions becoming reality. This means we should probably
keep an eye out for signs of cultural breakdown. Fortunately, this shouldn’t
be too hard since we will be watching ourselves watching each other
watching ourselves.
Post-postmodern advertising
The idea that culture is an endless reiteration of old sources is not new (that
wouldn’t make any sense): ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts
are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quota-
tion’, wrote Oscar Wilde.7
But postmodern expression is also characterized by an ironic self-
awareness and use of representation – a kind of nudge and a wink to the
reader or viewer – that expresses the elusiveness of true meanings.
I think advertising moved into a postmodern mode a long time ago. It has
become more and more self-conscious in its self-consciousness for the same
reasons that brought about postmodernism in the first place: uncertainty, a
lack of absolutes, a feeling that progress is unlikely. The abandonment of
anxiety about appropriation could almost be seen as an ‘end of (advertising)
times’ expression.
Every moment in history tends to feel transitional. It seems to be a natu-
ral human tendency to feel like Janus, looking backwards at the past and
forwards into the future at the same time, applying an ongoing narrative
progression to history and, by inference, putting ourselves at an inflection
point, at the death and birth of paradigms.
Which is why I’m always a little sceptical of my own tendency to believe
that things are changing for the awesome. But my optimism (or possibly
meliorism) should and does overcome my scepticism. It has to, because opti-
mism is a necessary delusion for us humans, to keep us motivated enough to
create, or do anything. I have to believe, in isolation as I write, that there are
readers out there for this book.
The rules that advertising formalized since its inception are slowly break-
ing down and the modernist certainty of beneficent progress has given way
to an industry typified by questions about our validity. This manifests in ads
that are either ashamed to be ads (see: any beautiful piece of film ad or any
piece of branded content) or ads that overcome their shame by being grossly
self-aware (see: the bizarre Barry Scott shouting about Cillit Bang).
So what happens next? According to Alan Kirby:
Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed
supreme importance on] the author, [Note: we may read author as brand] even
when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the
culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they
become a partial or whole author of it.8
This makes sense of the prevailing trend towards the consumer ‘being in
control’ of communication. In postmodern communication the brand reap-
propriates signs but still remains the central control and focus of the text.
Whereas in post-postmodern communication – or pseudo-modern – the
consumer is an integral part of the creation of the text:
Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action
the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes
all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose
content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or

listener.9
The shift to this pseudo-modern mode of communication has been facili-

tated by emerging communication technologies that allows for traditional
media to become interactive. Thus its ultimate expression is online:
The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its

central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through
pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through
cultural products which has never existed before and never will again.10
This is why pseudo-modern communications tend to lean towards co-

creation, interaction, engagement – consumers are integral to the construc-
tion of the texts – and this reaches far beyond the sudden explosion of
user-generated content advertising campaigns.
For example, Google leveraged consumer input online before deciding
on their very first television advertisement. It almost always makes sense
to launch any film online before it hits television, but then the two work
powerfully together. This is because the online audience is still interested in
discovery and primacy. In order to share something, you have to have the
sense that it hasn’t already been seen by everyone. The TV audience, how-
ever, doesn’t really care if a film has been online already, because the internet
is an infinite space, and the modality of consumption is different.
Google ran their first-ever TV spot ‘Parisian Love’ during Super Bowl
2010, having first conceived of it as an ‘online film’ according to CEO Eric
Schmidt,11 which they ran alongside others to see which earned the greatest
number of views, before making the winner a Super Bowl spot.
It has since become de rigueur to launch your Super Bowl spot online
first. Volkswagen’s ‘The Force’ spot,12 featuring a child dressed as Darth
Vader, hijacked the conversation around advertising in Super Bowl 2011,
because it was launched weeks in advance.
In 2013, Coca-Cola more fully adopted a pseudo-modern mode, launch-
ing their Super Bowl spot even earlier, and inviting the audience to decide
what happens. The 60-second ‘Mirage’ features three teams racing across
the desert towards a giant Coca-Cola bottle, which as the title suggests, is a
mirage. The viewer is then given control of the resolution. They were directed
to CokeChase.com, where they could vote on which will ‘win’ the Coca-
Cola.
We can offer people the sense that they are in control of their interaction
with the brand and that their interaction, their attention, is a requisite con-
dition for its existence.
Because, ultimately, they are and it is.
TOOLKIT Combination tool for brand behaviour
Let’s look back at the elements of the brand behaviour model.

The brand belief is the guiding principle, the belief about the world that
needs to be expressed by ideas. The elements of the model are components:
● product;
● service;
● action;
● content;
● tool;
● advertising.
A simple combination tool to open up new idea areas is to combine these in

different ways. Each combination creates a new idea area:
● Content + tool = content tool (ie that could be tools that help consumers to
create content).
● Advertising + tool = advertising tool (ie that could be tools to interact with
the advertising, like the Coca-Cola example above).
● Action + content = action content (ie content that is reportage of a brand
action).
● Product + service = product service (ie create a service extension of the
product, or a product extension of the service).
And recombine them:
● Content tool + advertising = ad campaign generated by consumers using a

content tool.
● Product service + content = content that demonstrates the service
extension, or shows people using it.
And so on. Combinatorics (the maths of combinations) shows that there are
63 possible combinations, or areas to explore, of these six elements, which
should provide plenty of starting points of ideas.
09
Advertising for advertising

Is the industry paying attention?
What are advertising awards for?
How advertising creates value is complex.

Business objectives are, for the most part, simple. Businesses like to make,
or save, money. Increasing revenue or profit are the key objectives. However,
too often in advertising, we displace these objectives with intermediate ones,
ones that come on the way to money, ones whose measurement we can con-
trol such as prompted awareness, or purchase intent, as measured by sur-
veys. If it doesn’t make, or save, money it is not a business objective, since
that is what businesses want to achieve. (There are some exceptions, such as
recruitment advertising, but for the most part, it is about money.)
Anything else is an intermediate measure, based on an assumed model of
how some kind of process works: like if more people email me maybe I will
sell them more stuff, or if loads of people like the films we put on in between
television programmes maybe they will buy more of my stuff later. Or if
people have paid attention to my brand, maybe they will pay more money
for it. But don’t forget this is a model and, as we know, all are wrong but
some are useful.
Ultimately, it depends on what you believe changes behaviour, and how
you then decide to measure that. The simplest ROI model – looking at the
cost of production, media and fees for an advertising campaign for a con-
sumer-packaged good (CPG) product and then measuring the incremental
sales attributable to that campaign, assuming a decay rate of the impact
over time after broadcast, using multivariate regression analysis to untangle
the effect of the advertising – is actually far from simple.
ADVERTISING FOR ADVERTISING 121
It also tends not to show positive results in a lot of cases, especially with
mature brands that have all the background awareness they could possibly
need, if not all the attention. But then you get things like intangible asset
value and goodwill, which also have commercial value on balance sheets
when sold, and price elasticity of demand, both of which seem to be sensi-
tive to communications.
This is why I usually laugh when someone says: ‘Digital is unproven, but
we can show that TV works!’
Seven habits of highly effective communication

In an industry where accolades are mostly bestowed by peer review and
creative judgement, we leave ourselves open to the charge that we forget
what we are here for, which is, usually, to help clients grow.
Give thanks, then, for the Effie awards (Effies), which honour the effec-
tiveness of the work we do in creating value for clients. I mean value here
very specifically, in the sense of dollars and cents required to get it out the
door and that shows, overall, that the investment (in money and time and
sweat and tears... but mostly the money) were recouped and returned upon
with interest.
In 2012 I was an Effies judge and for the first time they issued a report
with detailed analysis that unpicks some of the drivers of efficacy among the
finalists that year. What differentiates those that won a medal from those
that were pipped at the post? All the shortlisted have demonstrated efficacy
to some level, so what separates the great from the good?
TOOLKIT Seven habits of highly effective communication:

what separates the great from the good at the Effie awards?
1. Start with business objectives

Effectiveness is the capability of producing a desired result. Since we are
looking to make clients money, it makes sense to start with those objectives
and then parse them into marketing. Keeping financial and your own
innovative KPIs in mind seems to work. (Remember to establish SMART
objectives: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound.)
2. Do some interesting, useful research
As already discussed, I have a number of epistemological issues with how much

market research is done, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in research. It is
crucial that we base our solutions to problems on cogent data, as we attempt
to craft symbols and actions to solve problems.
The Silver Effie awarded to Febreze/Ambi Pur for the ‘Breathe Happy’
campaign makes this case well.1 The highly immersive research included various
kinds of olfactory research, deprivation experiments, in-home ethnographic
elements and assisted shopping. The research led directly to the creative idea,
where consumers are blindfolded, put into rooms full of foul-smelling stuff,
sprayed with Febreze and asked to describe the odours they encounter.
Research can provide inspiration as well as insight.
3. Believe in strategy
Despite certain vocal members of the industry declaiming the death of strategy,
the analysis is very clear: ‘The most salient characteristic defining gold... was
the quality of the strategy.’2
So don’t listen to people who say it is dead. (Indeed, anyone using the
‘death of’ narrative should be considered with caution.) Strategy crafts business
solutions, leveraging compelling insight into behaviour and cultural context,
informing the need for and role of advertising. As we shall see in Chapter 10,
strategy is evolving to serve the new context.
4. ‘Boldness has genius, power and magic in it’ (Goethe)
Small, scrappy companies facing off against giant corporations is a story that
plays out again and again, appearing often as Effie award winners. We all love
an underdog, but perhaps more importantly we should understand that
audacious goals – moonshots, to use a Google term – are galvanizing. Rarely
do brands have opinions, but when they do they are rewarded with attention.
Take a stand, pick a side, even when your consumers might not all share the
same opinion. When Oreo posted their rainbow Oreo in support of gay pride,
they doubled their daily fan growth.3
5. Integration as the interoperation of parts, not one idea in many places
The analysis makes the distinction between ‘woven’ and just ‘layered’ media.
We are increasingly in the age of systems and the interoperation of parts to
create a larger whole, rather than media that is ‘added together’.
6. Do it, ideally with the community, don’t just say it
As Millward Brown states: ‘The era of claim-based advertising, while not

entirely gone, is certainly not winning Effie awards.’4 The much-vaunted era of
engagement is upon us, but brands have to earn that engagement.
The ‘Curators of Sweden’ project has won awards across shows and categories.
What better way to communicate how socially liberal and fundamentally
democratic Sweden is, around the world, for almost no money, than to give
the country’s Twitter account over to a different one of its citizens every week,
with no censorship as to what they say, even when one of the participants
posted this: ‘Once my 4-year old found Marijuana and porn in my bicycle-
wagon. I keep that wagon in our basement. That was a little odd wasn’t it?’
7. Unleash creativity through constraint
The Effies, above all, value creativity in service of the goal. Winning entries
have highly focused problems that are being demonstrably solved. This is
where the business needs are alchemically transmuted into an understanding
of human behaviour.
This is where non-obvious connection is filtered through craft into the
world – and changes something. And make sure that you establish that this
solution – be it advertising or shopper marketing – is the optimal one for the
problem at hand.
Awarding creativity
As already suggested, creative awards are something of a double-edged
sword.
On the one hand, they are the highest accolades we bestow on ourselves
for what we do. We are rightly proud to give (and accept) them, as tokens of
both recognition for great work done, and indication of the kind of work we
hope the industry will do in the future.
On the other hand, since they are awarded based solely on creative judge-
ment, they leave us open to the ever-present attack that we forget what we
are here to do, which is to create business results for our clients, to provide
returns on marketing investment.
Fortunately, Donald Gunn’s eponymous report (now part of the World
Advertising Research Council), which tallies across many of the global
creative awards shows, has been fused with the IPA databank, which holds
the results of the IPA Effectiveness awards. The research shows, among
other things, that ads that win creative awards are 11 times more efficient
at delivering business success than those that don’t.5
So rejoice in the awards! For the best, most awarded work, works best.
Additionally, agencies are often criticized for focusing on awards as it
distracts them from their primary business of servicing clients. Awards are a
point of pride for agencies, a way of packaging and merchandising their
work for posterity and, importantly, they provide a metric of reputation.
Thus, agencies that win more awards attract better talent. In fact, creative
director Simon Veksner once suggested that awards per head is how crea-
tives should pick agencies to work for:
Let’s assume you are lucky enough to be offered more than one job. How do
you know which agency is better?
Well, there are lots of factors that will be particular to you – whether you
like the people, the agency’s style of work, and its location, for example. But the
most important factor, by far, is Awards Per Head.
For reasons we all understand, and have discussed many times before,
nothing will help your career more than awards. Therefore, the best agency is
the agency that wins the most awards per creative team.6
Since individuals want to win awards to help their own careers, as in every
industry, agencies that neglect them can suffer. But perhaps most impor-
tantly, while it is often claimed that clients don’t care about awards, I have
never encountered any who didn’t like them. In fact, awards help to attract
attention to ideas and agencies – they function as advertising for advertising.
So suggesting that awards distract agencies from their core business is anal-
ogous to saying that advertising is a distraction for companies since they
make and sell widgets.
Trial by jury
I have been fortunate to sit on innumerable advertising creative award
juries, including the Campaign awards, the Art Director’s Club awards, The
One Show and numerous others. I have also been privileged to chair several
of them, including the Content&Contact Jury and the Integrated Jury for
the Clio awards. I helped to create an entirely new category for the London
International awards, called ‘The NEW Category’, to highlight new kinds of
advertising.7 This is what I wrote in my judge’s comments about our hope

for the NEW:
The need was obvious – there was so much great work that just didn’t fit
anywhere else. It needed a category that could recognize it.
It’s always worth keeping an eye on things that don’t fit in elsewhere as
mutations are the key to evolution. It was very much with this in mind that we
approached the judging. We wanted to make sure the winners pointed in fruitful
possible directions; that the ideas increased the vocabulary of the industry.
We looked for ideas that created new engagement spaces between people and
companies, or that hacked existing ones; things that consumers latched on to
and spread; marketing that was of such value that people were willing to pay to
consume it (but aren’t they called products? Maybe. Perhaps the distinction is
getting blurry); and ideas that pulled new technologies into the useful service of
brands and their customers.8
Working with agencies, helping them put award entries together, demon-
strated to me how invaluable the experience of judging is when it comes to
crafting entries.
Studying cases
In the standard categories, the work is defined by medium: film, radio, out-
door and so on; but in the new categories, such definitions don’t work
because the new ideas do not sit inside boxes of the past. If an idea is a
system of participation, the craft elements itself are not enough to judge the
idea. Without the audience doing something, the ideas don’t work.
Thus, in the early years of the noughties, the case-study video emerged as
a way to package up the system and enter the newer categories for award
shows. The case study is advertising for advertising, which indicates how
they should be made.
TOOLKIT How to create a case study

A good case study tends to have:
● An objective, a problem to solve: because we are in the business of solving

problems with creativity.
● Some sense of the audience and context: because ideas that make no sense
to an American juror, for example, could be breakthrough pieces of culture
in, say, Japan.
● Insight: something gleaned or uncovered that led to the solution.
● Solution: the strategic idea that leads to creative solution.
● Execution: the work itself, or people engaging with it.
● Impact: not just whatever numbers you can muster, but something that
indicates the impact the idea had on culture and business (ie not only
impressions).
● Story and understanding: humour, surprise, empathy, and understanding the
audience (which for a case study in an award show is other advertising
folk, sitting for 10 hours a day in a dark room, watching hundreds of
videos) are all excellent elements to making better case studies, as they are
with advertisements.
Some senior creative directors now much malign the case study as distract-
ing the industry from the work itself, from the craft. The case study has
become an artefact in its own right and there are problems with this, espe-
cially when their veracity is not rigorously checked, but getting rid of them
seems impossible in an age when the nature of the work we do continues to
change. We cannot simply show the work, if the work is an experience, or a
piece of software that must be used, or a participatory programme.
To complain about the distraction of making case studies seems to me to
be, again, analogous to complaining that a company wastes time making
ads, since it distracts from their core business. Unless, of course, they mean
we should be outsourcing the case studies to other companies, as companies
do with their advertising.
10
Integrative strategy and

social brands
Be nice or leave!
We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and

underestimate the effect in the long run.
amara’s law
The emergence of a strategist at an agency characterizes a moment of ten-

sion, a grinding caused by the varying rates of change inside and outside the
organization. A strategist must be able to recommend the solution that has
the best chance of solving the problem. Strategy allocates investment as well
as insight. While many agency planning heads transmogrified into chief
strategy officers, this title change is only necessary, surely, if it means some-
thing different than that which came before. Strategy, as we shall see, informs
the need for advertising, whereas account planning informs the advertising.
This sets up a strategy function in opposition to the rest of the agency, if the
agency is predominantly allied to a set spectrum of executions, since strat-
egy must be able to recommend something else.
Even allowing the domain of the agency strategist to be communications,
this still requires considering the ever-increasing set of options and tackling
deeply embedded assumptions about what agencies do. The emergence of
integration as a problem for clients and a management function across cli-
ents and agencies is a symptom of this problem. Integration suggests putting
the disparate together. What we need now is integrative strategy that starts
holistically and selects the best solution set from the range of options, rather
than trying to put the same thing in every possible place. The ultimate ques-
tion becomes: is advertising, as we currently understand it, still the best way
to capture attention? The answer, unfortunately, is not 42.1
What do advertising agencies actually do?

Outside the industry, it is little recognized that advertising agencies do not
actually make television commercials – this is outsourced to production
companies. Advertising agencies germinate, direct and manage the processes
of advertising production. However, the question is more fundamental than
this – what are advertising agencies for?
In 1960 Harvard professor Theodore Levitt wrote his classic paper
‘Marketing Myopia’. Levitt points out that every industry was once a growth
industry but that never lasts, not because the market is saturated, but rather
because companies misinterpret the fundamental question ‘What business
are you in?’
One of his key examples is the US railroads. Once a mighty growth indus-
try, it declined steeply because it failed to recognize the threat presented
by the emergence and eventual affordability of cars and trips inside the ‘100
ton tubes of metal moving smoothly through the air 20,000 feet above the
earth, loaded with 100 sane and solid citizens casually drinking martinis’.2
The railroad tycoons thought they were in the business of railroads when
they were really in the business of transport – they were myopically product
focused instead of being customer focused. This idea has become an adage
of marketing, aphoristically captured by Levitt himself:
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
It is the same logic that might have prevented Kodak from its ignominious
fall from grace – Kodak was not in the ‘film’ business that digital cameras
abruptly destroyed, it was in the business of capturing memories – it just
didn’t adapt until much too late. This is an example of the innovator’s
dilemma, as coined by Clayton Christensen.3 Kodak was the first to develop
digital cameras but shelved the technology in order to avoid cannibalizing
its core business and confusing its existing customers. This in turn left it
open to be decimated by new entrants when the market changed.
Advertising agencies ‘make’ advertisements and this is a surprisingly
healthy business considering how often its demise has been trumpeted.
INTEGRATIVE STRATEGY AND SOCIAL BRANDS 129
Television spend in the United States, the most mature advertising market,
seems to have plateaued since 2016 at around $70 billion according to
eMarketer but this is still a huge market, even if TV is declining in overall
share as digital spend continues to grow. Despite ad-skipping digital video
recorders and the rise of streaming, the death of the 30-second spot has been
greatly exaggerated.
That said, it is important to remember that advertising is a drill, not a
hole.
Advertising is a means, not an end, a lever designed to affect consumer
behaviour leading people to pay price premiums and buy more things, more
often, due to the dimly understood interactions of persuasive symbols and
human cognitive, social and economic behaviour.
Thus, should better, more efficient, more effective solutions to the busi-
ness problem of marketing products to the masses manifest, companies
would be well advised to pursue them. Advertising agencies, then, either
‘make’ advertising, which is a service that can be displaced, or they help
corporations to solve business problems with creativity, which will remain
an ongoing need as long as there are corporations – but puts ‘advertising’
agencies into a much larger competitive set alongside other business consult-
ants, albeit with a specific competitive advantage. Agencies are able to effec-
tively house and manage commercially creative people, which management
consultancies struggle with for the same reason that corporations do – the
environment is not very palatable to them. Sensing opportunity, the large
consultancies such as Deloitte have moved to compete more directly with
advertising agencies, through the acquisition of independent agencies, most
notably the purchase of Droga5 by Accenture for $600 million.
The business of advertising remains robust for now but the business of
ideas that drive business growth is evergreen. The industry is bifurcating
along these lines.
It is a good idea to work out which business you want to be in and act
accordingly. Pure play advertising agencies should leverage their core com-
petencies inside the extant market. Agencies that want to explore the possi-
bilities outside this definition must be willing to invest in developing new
competencies to service emerging needs, increasingly at the intersection of
technology and storytelling. This blurriness is perhaps best evinced by the
ONE CLUB awarding Nike+ as the ‘digital campaign of the decade’ despite,
or because of, the fact that it is not a campaign. A technology-driven prod-
uct/service extension attracts and earns attention for a brand, solving a
problem with something other than ‘advertising’. The Nike+ FuelBand was
similarly a powerful brand idea for Nike, positioning them at the forefront
of the wearable technology and quantified self trends, but not a successful
product – it was discontinued in 2014. In 2018 this trend, which has seen
traditional creative agency fortunes decline in recent years, caused WPP to
merge their storied advertising agency Young & Rubicam with digital
agency VML, creating the mouthful that is VMLY&R. They did the same
with J Walter Thompson and direct/digital agency Wunderman to create
Wunderman Thompson (the order here seems telling). The strategy seems to
be working, since they merged Grey and AKQA in 2020.
As consultancies aggressively moved into this newly blurred market,
agencies and their holding companies have restructured around new services
like customer experience, digital transformation and technology. So it comes
to pass and advertising as traditionally understood makes up less of the
overall revenue of holding companies and even agencies over time. As WPP
CEO Mark Read explained in an investor meeting: ‘What we hear from
clients is very consistent: they want our creativity, and they want us to help
them transform their business in a world reshaped by technology. This is at
the heart of what we do. We are fundamentally repositioning WPP as a
creative transformation company.’
However, there is a danger in attempting to rebuild the chimera of the
‘full service agency’.
The essence of strategy is trade-offs, since finite resources necessitate
finite offerings. Worse than not making decisions is falling victim to the
Shirky principle – an idea established by Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive
Surplus (2010) and elevated to the status of principle by Kevin Kelly, found-
ing editor of Wired. Shirky explains that:
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.4
Rather than solving clients’ problems, then, agencies that succumb to the
principle spend their energies trying to maintain that the world of business
and media hasn’t changed, or attempting to stymie symptoms of the change
when they encounter it.
As with any corporate strategy, the road ahead for advertising depends
on knowing what business you are really in and acting accordingly.
What strategy is and is not

The word strategy comes from the Greek strategos, which translates roughly
as general, and then came to mean the art of the general. This is why MBA
types often read The Art of War (2008) by Sun Tzu.5 Or at least pretend to.
Strategy, as an idea, is simple. You have a goal you wish to achieve. You
have finite resources that can be deployed in achieving it. Strategy is simply
how.
In my early professional life I was a management consultant. While I
wasn’t a huge fan of the dress code, I did like the grounding it gave me in
strategy. I became very familiar with the BCG matrix,6 Porter’s five forces
model,7 and the tenets of business as espoused by Harvard Business School.
And, again, it’s simple. Remember, businesses exist solely to create value,
to make money. Therefore, business strategy is simply how you intend to go
about doing that, using whatever assets you have available. Everything else,
brand strategy (how to leverage the intangible asset that is brand) and crea-
tive strategy (what the proposition is that informs the advertising), exist
only in service of that.
But creative strategy concerns itself with the content, tone and messaging
of advertising, which may not be necessarily useful for creating ideas that
are something else.
Planning for the future

Account planning is a young discipline and has reached a moment of inflec-
tion. Historically, account planning played a number of roles within an
advertising agency. It is the discipline that, through research and insight,
brings the voice of the consumer into the process of developing advertising.
The planner directs and inspires the creative work so that it is more likely to
achieve the desired business result. The role was created to provide the pro-
cess of advertising development with a more rigorous foundation. Now, the
proliferation of marketing disciplines, changes to the consumer and media
environment, and our understanding of human behaviour are all changing
the parameters of the role, and indeed how we must think about advertising
in general.
The increasing complexity of the communication landscape has led to a
fragmentation of strategy across disciplines and departments, which requires
an expansion, at the very least, of traditional planning: ‘There definitely is a
problem where you have a multi-agency structure team where there are
planners in each of the respective disciplines.’8
Recent developments in behavioural economics and psychology suggest
that models we have historically used to understand how advertising works
are wrong, or at least not the whole story. Advertising as ‘salesmanship in
print’ and ‘message transmission’ are both being fundamentally challenged.9
As we explored in the first half of the book, research suggests that con-
sciously held attitudes do not necessarily change behaviour, despite the
counter-intuitive experience of conscious will,10 but that feelings, relation-
ships and associations are more important behavioural drivers, which are
less influenced by messaging and more by ‘metacommunication’,11 and that
heuristics and biases are equally important, which mostly operate outside
our own conscious experience of them.
Social copying is often the driver for truly successful marketing, since it
spreads beyond the initial receiving audience. (Remember our discussions of
viral and what it isn’t?) Once in a while, advertising transcends the stratum
reserved for commercial communication and becomes a cultural phenome-
non – quite literally something that can be seen to have an effect on culture.
My old colleague Yusuf Chuku, now EVP of Client Strategy at
NBCUniversal, and formerly Global Chief Strategy Officer of the merged
VMLY&R, upon reading my previous thoughts about the 118-118 direc-
tory-enquiries T-shirts launch campaign (discussed in Chapter 3), pointed
out that the truly viral part of the campaign, which ascended into the collec-
tive consciousness, was shouting ‘Got your number!’ at people in the street.
They did it in the ads,12 then the boys hit the streets and did it ‘in real life’.
Then everyone was doing it – it echoed across popular culture and into the
parlance. Just as it did for Pears soap all those years ago.
The ultimate aim of all commercial communication is to spread ideas
that elicit a behavioural response. Specifically, we usually want to influence
mass purchase behaviour. But if a brand can propagate some intermediate
behaviours, like getting people to shout ‘Got your number’ or ‘Wassup!’13
(as Budweiser did) at each other, then you get some additional benefits.
Before consumer-generated content was a thing, people made and shared
hundreds of ‘Wassup’ spoofs,14 spreading the brand idea much further than
the original did. The behaviour recalls and reinforces the brand, keeping the
brand salient. And, behaviour is transmissible. Humans are hardwired to
learn by imitating. The drive to copy is so powerful that, for example, when
children are shown behaviours they know are pointless to achieve required
goals in a test, they imitate them anyway.15
Monkey see, monkey do. Except actually, monkeys and primates don’t –
only people do. In extreme cases, when this behavioural imitation becomes
pathological, it is called echopraxia. We are built to copy behaviour.
CASE STUDY
Behavioural engineering of this type was at the heart of many of BBH’s successful
ideas for the deodorant Lynx/Axe. Young males are particularly prone to adopting
learned behaviours. Many Lynx ideas have imitative behaviours at their core. For the
launch of Lynx Pulse the agency invented a dance. They found a track – a remix of a
minor hit, ‘Get Down Saturday Night’ by Oliver Cheatham, called ‘Make Luv’ – and
worked with a choreographer to create a dance, one that turns a geeky guy into a bar
star. As John O’Keefe, executive creative director (ECD) at BBH at the time, said: ‘To be
easy to copy, a dance has to be modular. What proved particularly effective was that
while it was copy-able, it took numerous viewings of the... ad for the viewer to pick up
all the modules. Our target audience simply had to watch it again and again and
again.’16 The dance was seeded by brand ambassadors at student events all over
Britain before the ad launched so that the dance seemed to have emerged into culture
organically. When it did finally launch, the dance became a craze, the single went
straight to number one, and Lynx Pulse became the biggest-selling brand variant
within two weeks. The Lynx Click variant was launched on television with an
advertisement featuring Ben Affleck using a tally counter to count the number of
women who ‘check him out’. This behaviour was seeded prior to broadcast in Australia
by sponsoring an unbranded tour for a local hip-hop duo, Weapon X and Hell, who
demonstrated the behaviour that was being branded and distributed tally counters.
‘Bom Chicka Wah Wah’ was a made-up expression, uttered in the presence of arousing
people or situations. All designed to create influence through imitation.
If you want to influence behaviour, give people something to copy.

Many of these ideas about behaviour being directed by subconscious
drivers contradict our internal perceptions of choice and action, leading to
persistent meta-cognitive errors in how we approach advertising. We think
we think how we think, as it were. They lay bare the problems of market
research that attempts to unpick unconscious drivers solely by interrogating
the conscious mind.
The socialization of media

‘Social media’ – which is created by the many, rather than the few – have
been a long time coming. Henry Jenkins established the blurring of media
modalities in 2006 in his prescient book about the participatory nature of
digital media, Convergence Culture – in a digital world of democratized
creative tools and access, everyone who consumes can create, everyone who
receives can broadcast.
But it wasn’t until ‘creation’ was whittled down to 140 characters and
clipped fragments of the web, as with Twitter and Tumblr, that it became
obvious that since everyone was talking and sharing, people were expecting
content to move in concert.
In January 2011, Twitter’s new CEO crystallized the company’s vision:
‘We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important
to them.’17
One of the key tenets of a media system approach is that every new chan-
nel changes the entire system. So, because YouTube exists, how we think
about ‘television’ has to change. Regardless of whether or not your idea or
marketing campaign has a digital component – the world does.
Be nice or leave
All media are social.
<RANT>We should remember that media is the nominative plural of the
word medium. It is especially important to remember this to avoid using the
world mediums to refer to multiple media, which seems almost endemic
now, but is still wrong. Language evolves, of course, but that word already
has another meaning. So, unless many people in advertising are talking
about a group of people who claim to be able to channel the dead, it’s
wrong.</RANT>
Let’s start with the problem of naming things. We used to call ‘it’ Web 2.0,
before that consumer-generated content. Now we call ‘it’ social media. This
is still problematic.
When we use the word ‘media’ in the advertising industry it has a dimin-
ished meaning that triggers a certain set of associations and behaviours. Due
to the way we understand ‘media agencies’, when we hear the word media,
we often begin to unconsciously think of ‘something that I can buy space in
to put ads’, which is not the only way to think of social media. This is what
led to the adoption of a broader media model by said agencies, combining
Paid, Owned and Earned Media (POEM).18
Emerging cultural practices

When looking at this emerging mediascape, the tendency is to simply cata-
logue platforms. This approach is not entirely helpful. While understanding
Facebook or Twitter is important, technologies are superseded: Friendster
begat Myspace begat Facebook begat Instagram begat Snapchat begat
TikTok and so on. As Henry Jenkins has pointed out: ‘Our focus should not
be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.’19
Social media are centred on two cultural practices: conversations and
relationships – people talking to each other, one to one and one to many, and
establishing and reinforcing different kinds of relationships. These two prac-
tices are two sides of the same coin.
In anthropology there is a concept known as phatic communication,
which is highly relevant to social spaces. Advertising is, for the most part,
paradigmatically wed to the idea that communication is about the transmis-
sion of messages. However, the vast majority of communication transmits
little semantically: the dominant function of the interaction is phatic – it is
designed to establish and re-enforce relationships. Status updates do not
transmit crucial data – they just keep the relationship alive, a ping making
sure that the network is still there. I exist, I’m okay. You exist, you’re okay.
The network is open and flowing. This is the substructure of phatic interac-
tions, according to anthropologist Grant McCracken.20 Facebook’s poke
function was the ultimate phatic communication tool, where any shred of
message was stripped out from the medium.
Social graces
Brands need to consider the social media ecosystem. People are more likely
to believe a random blog post than a television commercial due to the ero-
sion of trust (as discussed in Chapter 3). As consumers spend more time
consuming each other’s content, mainstream media’s share of attention will
continue to erode. Brands need to find a way to be relevant in these spaces.
Fortunately, understanding how to behave in social media is easy. You

already know the answer because you are a social creature and because you
read the subtitle of the chapter: be nice or leave!
This is not to sound trite – being nice is an entirely different behavioural
grammar for marketers. There are two overlapping types of grammar that
dictate human behaviour. We have already challenged the myth of homo
economicus – a rational being responds to a money incentive with an
increased propensity to perform an action. Social grammar is a different
incentive framework.
An interesting feature of the two modes of behaviour, pointed out by
behavioural economist Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational,21 is that they
don’t mix. Acting commercially in social spaces can be insulting and inap-
propriate, which is perhaps why corporations, commercial entities with
commercial motivations, find it difficult to act socially.
You can easily test for yourself how poorly they mix: the next time that
someone you love cooks you a meal, in order to show appreciation and
encourage this behaviour – leave a tip. Despite what classical economics
suggests, this is unlikely to encourage the behaviour.
That said, I outline below an approach for brands looking to begin to
interact with the social world. First, however, two caveats:
● Being social needs dedicated resources – building relationships takes time

and constant attention.
● You cannot control what people say. In order to play in social spaces you
must trade control for influence – something that many corporations are
still uncomfortable with.
TOOLKIT Six steps to being social
1. Listen
People are talking about every brand. They provide conversational focal points
among the loosely connected. Free tools like Google Alerts and Twitter
searches show you what they are saying. Paid services like radian6, Expion,
Sysomos offer a larger set of functions. Like any conversation, it begins with
listening.
2. Respond
On the internet, conversations about you are often directed to you. It is expected
that you are listening, and should you encounter people reaching out, someone
should be responding to complaints and questions: 70 per cent of brands still
ignore customer complaints on Twitter,22 which, by this stage, seems rude.
3. Nurture
The first corporate response to social media was: get me one. Wal-Mart
attempted to build its own social network. This didn’t work because there was
no social object tying the network together, no reason for it to exist. As Mark
Zuckerberg has pointed out: ‘You don’t start communities. Communities already
exist... think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do.’23
If people are already out there discussing your brand, nurture them.
4. Create social objects
‘The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them
something to do’
henry jenkins24
People like to socialize and they like to do things together – the highest hope
for a social marketing effort is that it becomes a social object itself. When
launching the Nikon D40, the agency gave 200 cameras to a small town
– PictureTown – and let them find out for themselves how easy they were to
use, creating reams of social content in the process.
5. Be transparent
Let’s be very clear about this – lying is wrong, even if recent political history
seems to refute this.
Back in the early days of the social web there was a lot of shady work
creating fake grass-roots movements (digital astroturfing, if you will). I had
assumed that this was a thing of the past. However, people are always
tempted. One particularly silly example came from a marketing manager at
Belkin, a company that makes routers, who was caught offering to pay people
to write positive reviews of the products on Amazon. This is quite staggeringly
foolish. On the social web, when someone knows something, everyone knows
something. The fact that he was offering the payment on Mechanical Turk, an
online marketplace that is part of Amazon, beggars belief. Pranks, or faked
reportage, are also dangerous territory as they can precipitate a backlash.
Instead of playing a joke on your consumers, let them in on the joke.
6. Join the conversation

This can take innumerable forms. This is when the brand begins the shift from
acting like a faceless corporation and makes the transition to an appropriate
grammar for the space. It is here that content strategy begins to emerge as a
crucial new discipline. Once you have joined the conversation, you will want
to go back to listening to understand how people respond. And so, instead of a
list, it is really a cycle.
Social communication is fundamentally different. It requires a different
behavioural grammar, different skills and different staffing. To finish with a line
from Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford: ‘it is not about campaigns; it is
about commitment’.25
Cultural latency
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
gandhi
There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes to distribute

something, and the amount of time it takes for that thing to have an effect,
and consequently the amount of time that thing stays relevant and interesting.
When music was distributed as sheet music – a (literally) laborious distri-
bution mechanism, since you had to learn how to play and then perform –
popular hits stayed at the top of the charts for years. When gramophone
reproductions were introduced, the half-life of a hit decreased dramatically.
You don’t need to learn to play piano to use a disc, so this removes a
distribution bottleneck: piano and pianist. The latency decreased again each
time formats became easier to distribute, for either technological or struc-
tural reasons.
Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the
system, making it more efficient. This also seems to lead to far more rapid
cultural decay rates. In gaming, and network-based computing in general,
the term that describes the lag between a cause and effect, between the
moment when something is initiated and the moment one of the effects
can be perceived, is latency.
The lower the latency, the faster the distant computer responds, the faster
you see an effect and can respond and so on. Low latency is a good thing – it
means you don’t get killed in the game because your character didn’t move
when you told it to.
As communication technologies get faster and more pervasive, the latency
of culture is decreasing. The speed at which people could move used to
be the speed at which information travelled, which is why Pheidippides ran
26 miles to deliver news about the Battle of Marathon. The speed at which
messages could traverse distances put a limit on the latency of culture, which
in turn tended to mean that things changed more slowly.
Email messages travel at almost the speed of light as electrons along
copper wire and photons inside optical fibre. This led to things moving
faster, things changing faster, but email is point to point – even if you send it
to many people, no one oversees the message, which puts a limit on the
reduction in cultural latency – and it used to be limited to the desktop.
Now we have millions of high-resolution eyes connected to real-time
micro-broadcast messaging platforms via a mobile device and a social eager-
ness to demonstrate primacy.
Cultural latency seems to be approaching zero, at least in the more con-
nected parts of the world. I suspect this is going to have some interesting
effects, because it creates much faster feedback loops. Information, once
delivered, is both an effect and a subsequent cause, which triggers more
effects, and so on. Things like informational cascades, previously very visi-
ble in stock markets (which constantly monitor and report on themselves),
and cumulative advantages, which function when behaviour is visible to the
decision-making crowd, will inevitably become more prevalent. Things like
swine flu or Ebola can go from something no one has heard of, to something
people are searching for, to a topic of twysteria, literally overnight.
The infosphere is beginning to operate more chaotically: a dynamic,
closed, evolving system, characterized by aperiodic feedback loops that can
drive massive perturbations in the system from relatively small changes in
the initial conditions. Diminished cultural latency means that the propaga-
tion of information is so fast that the spread itself becomes the defining
aspect of the system: the rate-of-spread becomes as important as the infor-
mation itself.
The speed of medium is the message, perhaps.
Ghostwriting for brands

Ghostwriters make a living taking words from the famous and putting them
to paper. And, of course, advertising has long spoken for brands – in a very
specific context.
Now, the web allows for, and seems to insist on, direct connections with
customers, prospects, fans and detractors. This, in turn, has created a far
greater need for content, as distinct from advertising.
Content is something they want to hear; advertising is something we
want to say.
The Cannes Lions Advertising Festival announced their newest category
– Branded Content – in 2012, to reflect this rapidly growing sector of the
industry. Various agencies have created new content units staffed with for-
mer journalists to service these needs. Brands of sufficient scale have also
begun to create their own newsrooms, staffed with journalists and filmmak-
ers. Nissan was one of the earliest; Oreo, one of the most cited.
People suddenly find themselves ghostwriting for brands in a new way.
This is because, on Facebook, brand content co-mingles with consumer-
created content, which flows at a very high frequency compared to advertis-
ing – Facebook reports that the average user creates 90 pieces of content per
month26 – and rarely repeats itself.
Content strategy, in essence what the editorial function of media has
always done, is being developed for brands to maintain these ongoing rela-
tionships at the frequency the environment and audience dictates. It is a
huge challenge and opportunity for brands and their agents, as they look to
develop more depth and complexity to maintain an ongoing content stream.
With immediate feedback as to what content resonates with a community
comes the opportunity to adapt in real time. Inside the stream we can exper-
iment with much smaller fragments of content that require tiny individual
investments, and keep learning as we go.
Created content is supplemented with curated content from across the
web, helping brands to turn themselves into signals in the noise, with con-
text or commentary from the brand’s point of view appended by a commu-
nity manager and then fed to the brand’s social streams. Software companies
such as Percolate help to manage this process,27 by creating a unique set of
sources for each brand, filtering them into daily content recommendations,
and managing the process of permissions, creation and social distribution as
well.
Content can be as simple as a status update, as complex as a documen-

tary film. Some advertising, made for broadcast, is repurposed as social
content. Very occasionally this works, but usually it doesn’t because of the
difference in how they were conceived: advertising looks to say something a
company wants to say in the most appealing way possible to an audience,
whereas content starts from thinking about what the audience wants to
consume and then considers how the brand can add value to that. They start
from opposite ends.
Are you engaged?

Engagement is the thing wherein I’ll catch the attention of the consumer!
So goes the current thinking. Forget all that push stuff that we can’t break
through. There is too much clutter, too many channels, too many brands,
and 30-second spots don’t work any more anyway. Everyone either gets up
for snacks during commercials or screens them out with TiVo. I’ll use the
Web instead, and then consumers will seek me out and bathe in my brand to
their hearts’ content.
Well, maybe.
But with hundreds of millions of websites out there and a new blog
created every second, the web has become more cluttered and fragmented
than any other medium. It is no longer enough for a brand to use digital
communications merely as a platform to deliver a message or create an
experience. Now smart brands take it a giant step further: ‘They strive to
make their communication channels provide a service value, too.’28
Or so I co-wrote for an article that was published on 1 September 2006
– 25 days before Facebook was opened to people outside of academic insti-
tutions with an email address and three months before the iPhone was
announced. We were hinting at what became known as ‘branded utility’ –
but could perhaps be put under the bigger umbrella of earning attention –
using pieces of brand-created software as the primary examples.
Now, of course, brand apps are commonplace – but earning attention is
increasingly difficult and so we have begun to trade an obsession with
awareness for an obsession with engagement. We live in an oft-heralded age
of engagement but we should remind ourselves that brands don’t want
engagement, or awareness, or relationships, except as a means. Neither do
their customers.
Engagement simply indicates, perhaps, that those ever-fickle consumers

were in fact paying attention to our efforts. On Facebook, brands have to
learn how to engage on an ongoing basis, a cadence that is very different to
the campaign deployments of old.
Engagement covers a lot of different ideas, but online it is most often
measured by looking at not how many people had the opportunity to see the
idea, but rather what impact that had on their immediate behaviour (time
spent with a site or story or application, comments and approval, retweets
and so on), which is a marked improvement – looking at behavioural inter-
mediate effects in a world where everyone can both consume and produce
content seems sensible. (If a piece of branded anything falls in the stream
and no one tweets about it, did it have any effect?)
While considering how to better engage, despite the fact that consumers
are inherently participatory online, it is important to remember they also
have better things to do than to engage with brands, unless we give them a
good reason to do so (or they have unsolved issues, as we have seen). An
open letter to advertisers, posted online in 2010, for example, humorously
suggested that perhaps the manufacturers were confused as to the author’s
needs as a potential customer:
I don’t know if there’s been some terrible misunderstanding, where you got the
idea that I’d really like the prospect of coming home from work and spending
my valuable free time taking part in your stupid idea about sausages, or tea, or
washing bloody powder, or pretty much anything else for that matter. But here’s
the thing. I don’t. I don’t want to make a film, or draw a picture, or nominate a
friend. Or compose a soundtrack or re-edit your advert. Really, I don’t.29
It serves as good warning that because people can create does not mean that
they want to make advertisements for brands and agencies. As ever, the onus
is on brands to find compelling ways to earn attention. An obvious and sim-
ple mechanic that addresses the barrier to participation is something of
enough value to the audience you want to engage with. When we created
the 5.9-second film festival, embracing brevity and highlighting the 0–60
acceleration speed of a BMW 3 Series, all we had to do was offer a BMW 3
Series as a prize in order to get thousands of entries. (It seemed almost pro-
phetic when the Twitter product Vine, a six-second film-sharing app,
launched the following year. Vine was subsequently ‘sunsetted’, to use Silicon
Valley parlance, but short-form video in the form of TikTok, Reels, Fleets
and others has become the dominant mobile social media format for an
entire generation.)
Back to the future of planning advertising

Inherent to the concept of planning is looking forward at what is now
a rapidly moving inherently unpredictable network of interoperating
elements, leading people to embrace a portfolio ‘many little fires’ approach
to advertising.
This model makes sense when thinking of creative products released into
the protean network, but a 90+ per cent failure rate is not commercially
sustainable for agencies in totality. The whole point of planning is to get
better odds of success by basing ideas on something. Some agencies are call-
ing this ‘data-driven creativity’, using data (and presumably insights from
the data) to increase their chances of success.
Of course, this is what planners have always done.
Content scarcity has given way to overload, fixed channels dissolved into
fluid networks, and audiences have become participants in consumer-driven
conversations. This shift requires a new course of action for brands; it
demands new marketing imperatives and gives pause to those tasked with
making the work work.
If we return to the roots of planning we see at its heart a desire to under-
stand human behaviour and provide a robust model for influencing it.
Rather than dismantling strategy into endless experimentation, we need a
new way of understanding the world, a modern philosophy. In light of all
the challenges to established thinking, the response from planning must not
be an abandonment of trying to understand, lest we accept that not only
have we been wrong, but we can never be right.
As Rachel Hatton, Chief Strategy Officer at Oliver, an agency that builds
in-house agencies for brands, has pointed out: ‘There was a lot of thinking
about how communication worked in the 1960s and 1970s. It feels like,
now, it’s all practice and no theory. If we want to professionalise as an indus-
try, we need to pay more attention to how communication actually works in
this new world.’30
The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposi-
tion, where the grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first
television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera.
The first films were stage plays that had been filmed. The first marketing
forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broad-
cast media and applied it to a whole new space – but digital is different.
Digital is not a channel. It is a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that
will, ultimately, subsume media entirely. Digital marketing is not simply a
place to disperse symbols but rather the emergence of a new behavioural
grammar for companies, as they begin to engage with their customers in
new ways in new spaces, where everyone has a voice, even if those voices
seem drowned out by bots, trolls and reply guys much of the time.
11
Prospection
Planning for the future we want
Prospection, the act of looking forward in time, is a quintessentially human

endeavour.
Some consider it the quintessential human endeavour: ‘The human being
is the only animal that thinks about the future.’1
The philosopher Daniel Dennett notes that ‘the fundamental purpose of
brains is to produce future... brains are, in essence, anticipation machines’.2
We spend much of our time projecting forward and we do this to motivate
ourselves to reach towards our desired future, using the lens of that future
as a way to understand what we should be doing now.
Mankind is characterized by its nature as a planner.
Advertising has begun to wring its hands and discuss more its own future
as things change faster. This is an expression of the industry’s desire to steer
its own path into the future: as Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the
future is to invent it.3 We can motivate ourselves by imagining less pleasant
tomorrows, of eroding relevance and margins, and thus engage in prudent,
prophylactic behaviour now.
Ideas versus utterances

We sell ideas but we conflate ideas with articulations, concept with craft.
This is dangerous because the nature of what could be deemed advertis-
ing continues to change and, as we know, advertising is a means, not an end.
This leaves us open to being unable to compete among new varieties of
solution that are increasingly important:
What is a Big Idea not? It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an
iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. A Big
Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and
keep drawing on.4
Low latency communication

One smart response to the diminished latency of culture is low latency
advertising – work that responds to actions in one part of the media system
in other parts of that system, in approaching real time.
CASE STUDY
The Old Spice Response campaign took a low latency approach and used it to win the
internet for a couple of days. This was a follow-up to the incredibly successful Man
Your Man Could Smell like spot,5 featuring Isaiah Mustafa as the eponymous man,
which was launched online just before Super Bowl 2010 (and not on television during
it, despite what people misremember). This was a hijack campaign, designed to
counter the launch of Dove Men+Care, which had bought Super Bowl airtime. Old
Spice bought Super Bowl-related search terms to inject their film into the Super Bowl
advertising conversation.
The Old Spice Response campaign was based on a very simple idea: what if the Old
Spice man responded to tweets, on YouTube? And so he did, for three days, replying
to questions and comments from the great and interesting on Twitter, making short
comedic response videos. The vertically integrated production team at Wieden+Kennedy
wrote and made a total of 186 short films in those three days. It garnered more than
1 billion earned impressions and made Old Spice the all-time most viewed sponsored
channel on YouTube.6
Alacrity is the key here – being able not just to move fast, but to respond fast.
After that, Kraft solicited ideas, turned a tweet into a TV spot and got it on
air the same day during the Conan late night show on the US channel TBS.7
It is not just the speed – the low latency aspect – that is interesting; it is
the reversal of polarity.
PROSPECTION 147
ADVERTISING HISTORY NOTE
In Jon Steel’s excellent book Truth, Lies and Advertising (1998),8 he relates the
tale of Goodby’s campaign for Chevy’s Mexican restaurants.
They had a line ‘Fresh Mex’ that Goodby Silverstein & Partners brought to
life by shooting ads and getting them on air the same day.
That was in 1991.
Social TV
I don’t know what TV is anymore.
jay leno9
Television is an assemblage, one that is only getting more confusion with the
newly minted term ‘social TV’.
What is social TV? It remains a semantic battleground as old and new
media collide in the living room, each seeking to be dominant. The television
industry, having defended its closed network thus far, has begun to realize
that opening up to the rest of the system provides an opportunity to regain
the cultural salience and create more truly shared viewing experiences in
real time – the new water cooler effect.10
People use social media to find shows, to find other people to watch with
and to comment on shows. They may not turn on their TV there and then
just because of something they have seen on social media, though 12 per
cent of people claim to have done just that.11 Even more (17 per cent) claim
to have started to watch a show because of something they have seen on
social media, and nearly double (30 per cent) have continued watching a
programme because of social media commentary.12
Perhaps inevitably, these conversations begin to interact with the TV con-
tent. Multi-screen viewing and the ability to connect via the social web is
driving an increase in television viewing, with users using the secondary
screens to enhance the content or experience of viewing.
‘Backchannel conversations are happening, with or without marketers.
Gone are the days of couch potatoes; social TV has sparked a movement of
active and engaged consumers’, wrote my wife Rosie for Digiday, when she
was working with Bravo.13
One of the earliest examples of brands tapping into this idea came from
MTV show The Hills with backchannel, which let viewers exchange snarky
comments in real time while watching the show. A host of different start-ups
emerged looking to formalize the grammar, and provide the preferred plat-
form for social TV, but none have been as successful as Twitter, which seems
a natural successor to the water cooler.
Reverse the polarity

For the less geeky reader, ‘reversing the polarity’ is a deus ex machina device
commonly deployed in Star Trek, Doctor Who and other sci-fi series, espe-
cially where forcefields and advanced energy drives are common. It is the
last-minute solution that always solves problems because, for some reason,
future technology works better when you route the flow of energy through
it backwards.
Tweets are appearing in advertisements all over the place, which is part
of what I mean by reversing the polarity. Trident ran a print ad featuring real
tweets. Wheat Thins made YouTube videos where they tracked down fans
who had mentioned them on Twitter and delivered a truckload of Wheat
Thins to them. Twitter itself runs huge billboard campaigns of Tweets to
promote itself, and the mechanic continues to be common for brands in
general in 2021.
Informing broadcast with social, rather than looking at the social activa-
tion of broadcast. Embracing real people, real stuff, real voices. Increasingly,
I suspect, broadcast will be used to reflect what is happening in other parts
of the media system.
Why?
● Because people like being listened to (appreciation).

● Because people believe other people (endorsement).
● Because one of the reasons people engage with brands is to acquire fame
(fame).
● Because the system allows it and what can be done should be tried
(experimentation).
PROSPECTION 149
● Because, like social TV, it brings salience and real-time relevance to a

time-shifted, fragmented medium (cut-through).
● Because it reflects how people are consuming media, watching TV and
being online at the same time, tweeting and talking (media design).
● Because the new model of marketing is to do stuff for people and then tell
everyone else about it with advertising (solutions, not propositions).
(Whew.)
Which is the other part of what I mean by reversing the polarity:
● Advertising used to tell you how brands could solve your problems.
● Now it needs to solve problems and tell you about it, because everyone
knows how most products work.
Beyond the tweet

Reversing the polarity is not simply about pulling tweets into other chan-
nels. That has just been one of the easiest ways to create dynamic content
experiences that react to changes in the system. The larger opportunity
comes from understanding that media is one system, and that people like it
when brands respond to them, publicly.
We can entirely reverse the historical polarity of advertising media.
Rather than trickle down television, we build up from fragments of many
conversations, crafting broadcast stories around real people. The most inter-
esting can then be deployed in broadcast media.
One example of this way of thinking is the Domino’s Turnaround cam-
paign. The campaign starts with real customers expressing why they don’t
like Domino’s pizza. This leads to a new pizza recipe and an advertising
campaign centred on finding the original research attendees and taking them
the new recipe for their honest response. While obviously a staged experi-
ment, it is a dramatization of a reverse polarity approach.
This spread to the packaging, where pizza proverbs from customers were
inscribed on the boxes and the menus, which incorporated pictures submit-
ted by customers, rather than staged food shots.
The key thing is for brands to listen to what people are saying and then
incorporate what they say, and solutions and surprises to delight them, into
content and behaviour.
New principles of planning

The planning of advertising must be about rigour, understanding and inspi-
ration. It must constantly evolve as our understanding of behaviour and
culture evolves. As Mark Pollard wrote, it is ‘important to acknowledge that
what account planners do is part-science, part-intuition. However, it’s the
intuition that makes a planner stand out.’14
But building from beliefs, we can proceed as follows:
● How do we create value?

● How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels?
● How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just utterances?
As Feldwick points out, all aspects of brand behaviour are communicative,

and human communication is always about relationships, and less about
message transmission than we believe.15
The types of ‘meta-communication’ most successful in building relation-
ships are reciprocal (solving problems for people) or imitative (creating
behaviours that can be copied). The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an
infinite media space are likely to require understanding of participation –
users rather than audiences – and context.
People are not simply customers or prospects, because customers are not
the same as people. Customers are to people as waves are to water.
‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in
people. Successful ideas create customers by modifying behaviour. Conscious
or subconscious attention needs to be aggregated at scale to modify enough
behaviour to create significant commercial impact. Ideas spread or die in the
attention market.
A new planning toolkit
There can be only one strategy

As we have discussed already, the industry has conflated ‘planning’ and
‘strategy’. Business strategy directs how companies should marshal finite
resources to achieve business objectives and achieve profitable growth; it
does not assume advertising campaigns as an output, which account plan-
ning – at least within traditional agencies – is usually required to do. Strategy
must be holistic.
PROSPECTION 151
Systems architecture
The multimodal complexity of the mediascape requires more than putting
the same idea in many places. It necessitates an integrative system design
approach that establishes the priorities and interoperation of elements. This
needs to combine the silos of media and advertising, understanding content
and context, as well as embracing participation, social behaviour and the
impact of technology.
Socially generated actions are increasingly important in a world where
consumer broadcast networks are supplanting broadcast ones. Algorithms
like Facebook’s and every other stream-based network mean that content
people engage with will be disseminated more broadly.
Content is necessary but not sufficient. Everyone is making content all
the time, which presents new kinds of challenges for ‘commercial meaning
makers’ for achieving salience in an infinite space. Content creation and
distribution can no longer be the only tool we use.
Brands are behavioural templates

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn
reputation by trying to do hard things well.
jeff bezos, founder of amazon.com16
There are two ways to understand the relationship between ‘personality’

and ‘behaviour’: either actions are identity reflective – in that everything you
do is an expression of some irreducible, unchanging essence that is you; or
they are constitutive, in that who you are, that essence, is a function of those
actions.
I believe in processes, not fixity – like the river of Heraclitus, which you
can never cross twice. I think we are constantly evolving, changing, growing
and, therefore, I believe in actions as the things that make us who we are. I
believe brand actions are identity constitutive not identity reflective, which
means that you are what you do, and what you do changes who you are.
Actions beget actions. Strategy informs brand behaviour in totality. As
marketers, we should look to aggregate behavioural, rather than misleading
cognitive, responses. Google search volume is a far more robust measure of
salience than survey-based awareness tracking.
The types of actions should leverage principles of ‘meta-communication’:

reciprocity and social copying. Do things for people – solve a brand problem
by solving consumer problems. Introduce intermediate behaviours for
imitation. Create content that people find valuable, give them tools they
can use. Leverage advertising creation and distribution to help disseminate
– ‘ideas that can be advertised’, not just advertising ideas.17
The new briefing

The advertising brief is one of the key artefacts in an agency process. It
encapsulates the strategy and serves as the guide and yardstick for the crea-
tive work and the production it initiates. The standard advertising brief
dates back to at least the emergence of planning, and almost always answers
these questions:
● What is the problem, or opportunity?

● Who are we talking to?
● What should the advertising achieve?
● What is the single thought we want to leave the audience with?
● What will make them believe this?
The form and content of the brief has been remarkably stable, as it moved
through the industry across agencies and decades. This is problematic for
several reasons. One of the ironies of advertising, evidenced by the lack of
differentiation in brief formats from different agencies, is that agencies have
a hard time differentiating themselves. The irony being, of course, that they
sell differentiation services to clients that sell functionally parity products.
I was once in a training session with heads of various agencies about win-
ning new business. When it came time for questions, one raised his hand and
asked something like this: ‘The problem we face is that we offer the same set
of services as our competitors, and so find it hard to differentiate during
pitches. What is your advice?’
I couldn’t contain myself: You sell that service to clients. Physician heal
thyself.
The problem stems from the fact that many agencies, faced with increas-
ing competition, economic pressure and diminished margins, don’t adhere
to a set of values as once they did, don’t anchor their work and processes to
a set of beliefs about how people, the world, business, brands and advertis-
ing work. Steve Henry, one of the founders of HHCL, puts it like this:
PROSPECTION 153
They did a survey recently of what clients thought of their advertising agency
counterparts and the word that came top was smarmy... [as in] not having
any principles. Bill Bernbach, the brightest man ever to work in our industry,
famously said ‘a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money’. Most
agency chiefs are more like Groucho Marx who said ‘These are my principles.
If you don’t like them, I have others.’18
The other problem that the reification of the brief suggests is that is hasn’t
embraced the fact that things have changed a great deal. As Gareth Kay,
former chief strategy officer of GS&P and co-founder of Chapter, has
pointed out, all similar briefs make similar assumptions:19
● a problem to be solved with advertising;

● ‘consumers’ to ‘target’;
● a message to say at them;
● reasons to believe;
● tone of voice;
● hopefully some idea of which media have been selected.
(One of the unfortunate aspects of the division between ‘creative’ agencies

and ‘media agencies’ is that a client may ask for ideas that solve the brief,
but will have already committed media spend in certain channels, which
dictates the nature of the solution.)
Since the possible creative solutions to a business problem now far extend
beyond traditional media placements, and our understanding of human
behaviour and decision sciences suggest that rational messaging is not the
core element of persuasive communication, I suggest we need a new way to
approach briefs.
This is mine, based on what I believe, but it is important to remember
that a map is not the territory. A brief is a cognitive tool to help create solu-
tions for clients that work, not a form to be slavishly filled out. As Richard
Huntingdon, chief strategy officer of Saatchi & Saatchi London, once com-
mented on my blog: ‘Sorry to be so blunt but you write a great brief by hav-
ing a great idea. I have never had any truck with briefing formats because
they turn planners into form fillers.’
Moving away from an assumed messaging approach, which we know is
partially based on meta-cognitive errors, briefs will incorporate fresh insight
from multiple areas and expand their framework.
TOOLKIT Questions for a new brief
Briefs can be thought of as both a question or an answer. The process is asking

for a creative solution to a problem. However, the brief to the agency is not
the creative brief, which needs to establish much tighter parameters. Based on
research, instinct, budgets, context, objectives – that is to say, strategy – the
solution space needs to be defined by the creative brief:
● What is brand problem? What are related consumer problems? How can we
solve for both?
● What does success look like? Tangible, measurable?
● Who are participants and passives?
● What provocations can we glean from their behaviour?
● What are the appropriate brand actions and apertures?
● What is the desired behavioural response?
Figure 11.1 shows a template I created of this brief, which can also be found
online at: http://bit.ly/ANEWBRIEF.
FIGURE 11.1 A new brief format
IN BRIEF One line summary of the brief IDEA BRIEF
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN?

What needs to happen? What’s the business challenge and marketing task? Why does this brief exist?
COMMUNITY INSIGHT BRAND INSIGHT CULTURE INSIGHT SOCIAL INSIGHT

What do we know What is the brand’s POV? What is the relevant What is being discussed
matters to the How does it behave in element of culture to tap in social media about
community we wish the world? What makes into? The tension that this brand and topic?
to engage? it special? What does it can be solved? The Who are the influential
What do they see as do that no one else movement that can be voices?
valuable? does? harnessed/created? What is the sentiment?
BRAND ACTION BRAND TERRITORY

What’s the key thing the brand wishes to do for the What are the key media for this community? What
community? How will it stimulate conversations and are the best channels for achieving the business
participation? How is it verbing? objectives? What media should we create?
What should we not overlook?
WHAT IS THE KEY BEHAVIOUR WE WISH TO CREATE?

What do we want the community to do? Be as specific as possible. If it is buy more frequently – when, and
for what? Are there intermediate behaviours that will help gauge successful engagement with the
community? Google searches (what terms), social activity, store traffic, social media volume.
PROSPECTION 155
Briefing is a collaborative process and the process is as important as the

document, as are the dynamics of the groups involved. Generative proposi-
tions that inform actions and apertures, relevant inspiration, a collaborative
environment and a strong point of view are all factors in helping to concept
and craft successful ideas.
Marketing as social experiment
CASE STUDY
An approach embracing actions, ads, content and tools was instrumental in the
development of the launch campaign for BMW’s first electric vehicle, the ActiveE.
Working as one of both the strategy and creative directors on this, I have a particularly
holistic view of its development.
The launch had a number of elements that made it challenging. The electric vehicle
(EV) was to be a limited field test in the United States and communication needed to
begin more than a year before the car would be available, due to competitive pressure
in the market. The core BMW driver is motivated by performance but that wasn’t
something we could guarantee here. As a beta product it might have glitches, indeed
the purpose of the field trial was to road-test the new design, to inform development
on the mass electric vehicles coming down the line.
On a field-test-sized launch budget we needed to collate a relevant customer base.
The initial thinking at the time led towards a green positioning. The Nissan Leaf, clearly
named using such a strategy, had just launched. However, greenwashing from too
many brands had begun to create a backlash. Indeed, we found a way to position
against the market this way. Sustainability, as a movement, by its very definition,
could be understood as holding things back:
You don’t want your marriage to be sustainable. You want it to be evolving, nurturing,
learning.20
So we would position the ActiveE as a symbol of progress, not sustainability. The

customer base we needed would consist of people who had a beta-tester mindset,
who wouldn’t mind any problems the car might have. Rather, the motivation comes
from early access and a desire to be involved in making things better. Participants in
the future of mobility. We called them Electronauts and would work with them for the
next few years.
The entire programme was conceived as a social experiment, a collective engineering

project that would help to inform next generation cars. The pioneers we needed to
court considered themselves well informed, and looked to learn things from niche
media before the rest of the world hears about it. Thus, traditional advertising would
have been strategically incorrect and wasteful.
First we began a relevant content-driven conversation around the core topics of
mobility, design and technology in order to attract the appropriate community. We
created a series of films for and of the web, short hypertextual fragments, under the
banner we created: BMW Documentaries. There were 25 influential voices invited to
take part, including Marissa Mayer (formerly of Google, now CEO of Yahoo!), Buzz
Aldrin (yes, the astronaut), Chris Anderson (then editor of Wired magazine), Naveen
Selvadurai (one of the founders of Foursquare) and Robin Chase (the founder of
Zipcar) – all of whom were given free rein to express their points of view, whether or
not it aligned with BMW’s. They also helped to distribute the content using their own
social footprint.
The films were seeded as content exclusives online, appearing as content in the
appropriate environments for the community we wanted to create, including Wired
and The Atlantic. The films led us to the second phase, creating a tool for drivers
considering buying an EV. One of the big barriers to adoption that we uncovered was
‘range anxiety’, an irrational fear of being caught short without a way to charge the
car, despite the fact that it will go 100 miles on a single charge (and the vast majority
of Americans drive less than 40 miles each day). So we created a mobile phone
application and corresponding web dashboard to let users track their own drives and
assuage their fears: ‘How clever is an app that lets consumers track their driving habits
and daily driving distances to assuage their trepidation about driving a battery-
powered car?’21
BMW received 11 times more applications for the car than were available, and all
were leased in less than two months. The final phase continued, highlighting the
stories of these drivers, using their real voices and passion to continue to build
excitement for the coming range of electric vehicles, just as the data from the cars and
app would help to build those cars.
Innovative work works, for the client and the agency. The agency went on to win
more awards, in multiple categories, for that than for any other piece of work from the
previous five years.
PROSPECTION 157
Where do you want to go?

The future of the industry comes down to understanding the seemingly
simple answer to the question: what business are we in?
Since advertising is a lever, it follows that if we find a better one we
should use it. Buying attention is no longer sufficient, no one has enough
money to out-shout the rest of culture. Advertising used to work simply
because it could reliably garner enough attention. Now the need to leverage
creativity and make difficult strategic choices about how to allocate time
and money has never been greater.
Advertising is in no way dead. Indeed, the advertising agency structure is
perfectly suited for a complex age. Since agencies separate ideas from execu-
tions, an agency can, in theory, work to create any kind of idea, as long as it
is capable of having that kind of idea.
Agencies are not dead. What is dead is an agency process that can only
end in traditional advertising. The world is too complex for that to work for
every problem. Ultimately, agencies will embrace a broader palette and work
with clients to create value using creativity, in whatever is the most appro-
priate form.
If strategic planning is able to navigate and guide that transition, if
agencies are in the business of profitable brand growth, if they can help
brands to behave in new ways, if they have the breadth of vision clients need
– then the future of advertising is bright.
At least for those paying attention.
PART FOUR
2020 Foresight
12
Everything is PR
As the sheer volume of media grows exponentially, the challenge of acquir-

ing attention grows in lockstep, since there is a finite amount to go around.
Whether understood as a commodity or a commons, there is a finite number
of awake humans to allocate attention to life, media and advertising. If we
have indeed reached ‘peak attention’ in mature media markets like the
United States and the UK, how much attention is that? Considering the
mythical number of total advertisements we see every day, usually quoted as
somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 but without validating research, how
much of the available attention are they competing for?
Attention research company Lumen undertook an extensive cross-media

analysis in 2021 to establish just how much attention is acquired by
advertising from any individual on average. By taking media usage and ad
exposure data from the UK IPA Touchpoints database and combining it with
attention estimates from their primary research, establishing the amount of
time exposed to various media and how much attention people on average
dedicate to those channels, they calculated that of the 960 minutes of
cumulative media exposure an individual experiences, only 10 minutes are
committed to commercials.
This equates to roughly 1 per cent of an average person’s attention a day
(which seems minuscule considering the amount of ‘ads’ one supposedly
consumes in that time) and yet advertising manages to create significant value
for brands. As the founder of Lumen Mike Follett wrote when he sent me the
data, it’s ‘such a small amount, but it builds up over time: brands are built like
stalactites, not edifices.’
162 2020 FORESIGHT
At the same time, the world has developed an endless appetite for extremely
breaking news and politicians and publishers have rushed to feed it. Breaking
news is now a constant state of being. Considering how hard it is to allocate
any attention to the things I actually have to do because the current volume
of crises is so high, how much harder is it, I ponder, to get some for the
brands we serve?
In early 2021, for example, the outgoing President of the United States
took umbrage with his ‘lame duck’ designation and encouraged his support-
ers to ‘stop the steal’ on social media. Dean Obeidallah wrote on NBC that
‘Trump’s election lies are an attempted coup’1 and the social media compa-
nies seem to have agreed that his comments violated their policies. Facebook
and Twitter have now suspended the 45th President’s accounts.
It is the very seriousness of those last sentences, and that they involve our
industry, that makes it hard to allocate any cognitive space for a new fast-
food value menu or the Toyotathon. But that is the operating environment
for brand communication, as it has been these four long years at the very
least, and it seems likely to continue. How do things work now, and how
can they work better, when we can no longer even agree broadly as a society
what is true and what is false?
All is narrative, but most stories vanish in a nano-news cycle. In Nothing
Is True and Everything Is Possible, a book about Russian media, Peter
Pomerantsev writes that ‘Everything is PR’ has become the favourite phrase
of the new Russia: ‘Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a com-
munism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and
oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.’2
This woke cynicism is the ultimate product of what the RAND corpora-
tion calls Russia’s ‘firehose of falsehood’3 communication strategy, con-
stantly producing lies at high volume, in every possible channel, with no
consistency. Indeed, that’s very much the point: to disabuse the populace of
the notion that they can rely on anything they hear, from whatever source.
How can brands communicate in this environment, in light of the fact that
brand itself is a form of strategic consistency and corporations are not poli-
ticians or rogue nations, protected from any consequences of lying directly
to the public?
The flip side of this, that everything is PR, is that everything communi-
cates. Every action a company takes, every fine they pay, or political dona-
tion they make, every Tweet the CEO sends: everything is PR. The prophet
of our times, George Orwell, said it first: ‘Journalism is printing what some-
one else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.’ Except,
of course, he never wrote or said that. It’s a ‘fauxtation’, without any refer-
EVERYTHING IS PR 163
ent, like so many quotes and facts we get fed online. As we have long known
in advertising, repetition is powerful. The more we see something the more
we tend to like it – the mere exposure effect. Listen to a lie enough times and
you begin to believe it’s true – the illusory truth effect.
Under Armour’s stock price never recovered after the founder Kevin
Plank fired out a tweet in support of the then newly inaugurated President
Trump, which triggered an immediate backlash from his paid celebrity
spokespeople of colour, forcing him to issue an apology. Plank subsequently
stepped down from his role as CEO. Advertisers have paused media spend
across social media in light of the attacks on the Capitol. Everything is
PR because, in an age of crises, everything is crisis communication.
Ideas worth tweeting about

When Alex Bogusky was creative director of the agency that bears his name,
Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), he insisted on being read the press release
before seeing the creative work. If the press release was uninspiring, he
would refuse to look at the work. Bogusky understood that the role of
advertising is to make things famous. In the ad-saturated environment of the
noughties, the decade of which he was crowned creative director, the best
way to ensure that was to make advertising generate its own PR.
Bogusky (with his head of planning at the time Tom Birk) codified the beliefs
for Crispin Porter + Bogusky:
Rule 1: Surprise vs Repetition

Rule 2: Ideas as Currency vs Investment as Currency
Rule 3: Idea Obsolescence vs Idea Extension
Rule 4: Innovation vs Consistency
Rule 5: Conversation vs Announcement
Rule 6: Cultural Relevance vs Endorsement
Rule 7: Advertising and Publicity vs Advertising
Rule 8: News is the Pipeline vs News in the Pipeline
Rule 9: Everything is Branding vs There is Branding and Other Stuff
Rule 10: Ideas Dictate a Medium vs The Medium Dictates Ideas
164 2020 FORESIGHT
If an idea wasn’t newsworthy, it wasn’t good enough. Fame is a crucial mul-

tiplier for media and effectiveness, according to Les Binet from DDB, whose
research suggests that famous work, when advertising precipitates conversa-
tions in the media and among people, can quadruple the efficiency of mar-
keting budgets.4
Bogusky’s approach has become the dominant form of ‘integrated’ idea in
the industry. Ideas that inform advertising and earn news coverage win
across categories at awards shows, and generate business results.
Cannes Grand Prix winners like Amex’s Small Business Saturday, REI’s
OptOutside, and ideas that were never entered into shows but that would
have definitely won (like Red Bull’s Stratos project) are all something some-
what new. They are ideas that are not confined to media, to execution and
craft. They exist as actions in the world, not just utterances in media. Actions
are a way to rebuild trust in brands because they feel real – slightly removed
from the taint of fake news – and in turn they can inform advertising, con-
tent and generate PR. Everything a company does should be considered for
its impact on the public, not just whether it will get picked up in the press.
The public now is the media and relating to it is every company’s challenge.
We’ve seen an endless stream of creative ideas from Burger King working in
this new paradigm.
Hail to the king

In the endlessly subjective and, hence, contentious discourse of marketing,
nothing has been quite as polarizing of late, politics aside, as Burger King.
The recent story is that having been acquired by famously parsimonious
private equity raiders in 2010, Burger King went on a cost-cutting and con-
vention-breaking journey. Brazilian 3G’s famous ‘zero-based budgeting’
approach managed to take out 25 per cent of Burger King’s management
and administrative costs between 2011 and 2013.5
Then, Fernando Machado hailed the king: ‘I had some friends at Burger
King and I grew up being a fan of Burger King and the work from [their
former agency] CPB – that iconic work from 10, 12 years ago. But they’d
been a little quiet for a few years so then I called one of the guys in leader-
ship who was a good friend and I said, “I think you have an amazing brand
and I’d love to help modernize it.”’6
The industry response to Fernando Machado’s tenure at Burger King has
been mixed, with the perhaps somewhat churlish social media commentary
bemoaning the continual stream of attention-grabbing ‘stunts’ that often

call out McDonald’s. The Whopper Secret campaign revealed that there had
been a Big Mac hidden behind every Whopper in every Burger King ad in
the UK that year. In Brazil, Burger King launched an app that encouraged
customers to ‘burn’ McDonald’s billboards via augmented reality on their
phone. A Burger King ad would appear in its place and users were rewarded
with a free Whopper. In Germany, Burger King used the launch of the horror
movie IT, featuring a demonic clown, to remind the audience to never ‘trust
a clown’, with a cinema activation projected onto the screen.7 The CEO of
a network agency flagship office reached out to me to ask what I thought
because he was torn between admiring the ‘experimentation and all the
doing’ but wondering if it all added up to growth. When something has been
this oft-discussed it’s hard to come at it fresh but we can start by thinking
strategically, by seeing what we can know, and then perhaps what we might
want to find out.
McDonald’s and Burger King are famous rivals like Coke and Pepsi and,
similarly, one is much bigger than the other. The market capitalization of
McDonald’s is by far the biggest of the fast-food restaurants, valued at $168
billion. It operates 39,000 restaurants in 120 countries, 80 per cent of which
are franchises.
Burger King started franchising a year earlier than McDonald’s in 1954
but has only 19,000 stores, almost all of which are now franchises thanks to
3G (because this reduces operating costs on their balance sheet). Burger
King has half the physical availability of McDonald’s, which is particularly
significant when considering impulse-driven spend. In mental availability
terms, McDonald’s commands far greater share of search, spends far more
on media and those Golden Arches are the most valuable restaurant brand
in the world.
Let’s consider some of the advertising that helped rejuvenate the Burger
King brand. The new Burger King burger, McWhopper, challenged
McDonald’s to collaborate on a burger for World Peace Day in a print ad
that led to a much wider integrated campaign:
● We saw Google Home smart speakers activated from a television ad.

● Proud Whopper featured a rainbow wrapper and the same burger
carrying the message ‘We Are All the Same Inside’.
● A stunt advertisement labelled ‘Whopper Detour’ ran during the Super
Bowl and used geofence technologies to create a ‘guerrilla out-of-home’
campaign that gave consumers the chance to order 1-cent Whoppers
166 2020 FORESIGHT
using the Burger King App – but only while within 600 feet of a
McDonald’s. This used the larger physical availability of McDonald’s
against them and drove 1.5 million app downloads in 9 days and the
most store traffic in years. Burger King estimated a 37–1 return on
investment for the campaign.8
● In 2020 we had the epic set piece designed to stir up conversations about
artificial ingredients – the gorgeous, repellent time lapse of a mouldy
Whopper. It caused an immediate outpouring of commentary, accusing
the brand of shock tactics.
You may be thinking, Well, why not?

Supposedly because you don’t want attention at the expense of longer-
term negative shifts in perception or, even worse, something that will actively
prevent sales. However, historically speaking, it is hard to find any advertis-
ing campaign that has had strong negative effects on sales, despite the cur-
rent vogue for cancel culture and boycotts. Doing anything is usually better
than doing nothing.
The mouldy Whopper was named Best in Show at the One Show in 2020,
with three different agencies sharing the award. Burger King became well
known for removing preservatives, even though it had not yet done so – and
McDonald’s had.
There have been fistfuls of awards; the brand is outperforming rivals in
terms of store openings, volume growth and share price. So, what’s the
problem? Are these ‘just stunts’? Why is that a problem? One of the impos-
sible-to-ignore aspects of the creative strategy is speed and volume. Alongside
the big set pieces there are a stream of smaller activations. During the pan-
demic Burger King published an appeal in France, asking their customers to
buy from McDonald’s and local restaurants to support the struggling sector.
At the same time, if you said ‘cancelled clown’ three times in front of the
mirror in certain Burger King restrooms in Scandinavia, the lights would
have dimmed and a vision of Ronald McDonald would have appeared.9
From the outset there has been a pretty clear and sensible strategy articu-
lated by Machado, based on a sober assessment of the brand’s situation:
‘The biggest risk is to do something that doesn’t get noticed. If I were to
compete just with media money, I would lose the war before the first battle
starts because there’s bigger players in this category. If I want to get noticed
I need to do bold things.’10 Burger King was the sixth-highest category
spender on media in 2013, a long way behind McDonald’s at the top, with
Subway, Wendy’s, KFC and Taco Bell also spending more.
In a cacophonous media environment, when you can’t outspend, you

amplify. One way is to make advertising conceived for its PR potential.
When Ogilvy quipped that he didn’t want people talking about his ads, but
rather buying his clients’ products, he was operating in a scarce media envi-
ronment where acquiring mass audiences was simple. If you can’t afford to
win on share of voice, you need a strategy to use advertising differently,
looking for untapped opportunities, creative amplification and/or aiming at
mainstream (or social) media for uplift.
Burger King was named Cannes ‘Creative Marketer of the Year’ in 2017.
Machado provided this comment on Twitter, questioning why the industry
seems resistant to the king having it his way:
I find it funny when people react to an idea we did by saying ‘but did it sell?’
The answer usually is ‘yes’ (even though sometimes that was not even the
objective). If you don’t believe creativity drives results, maybe you are in the
wrong job. Just saying... #marketing.11
He followed that up with a reminder of who still calls the shots, and their
approach to wasting money, tweeting, ‘Our largest shareholder is a private
equity company. “Sell or else”. (That’s a phrase from David Ogilvy)’.12
Machado has built a series of relationships with creative agencies around
the world that allow the brand to approve and activate remarkable work,
remarkably quickly. The continual flow of press releases gives Burger King
local salience bumps in between bigger campaigns. Speed works well in
environments of ongoing uncertainty, speaking to the agility that marketers
increasingly say they want. We’ve often said we should light lots of fires and
see what works – and they are flame-grilling apace.
This is the essence of the strategic approach known as OODA (Observe,
Orient, Decide, Act), which was developed on the battlefield. It’s predicated
on the mandate to decide and act faster than your competitors. By getting
‘inside their OODA loop’ you paralyse them from acting because you keep
changing the battlefield. At least, that’s the idea. Is Burger King inside the
McDonald’s OODA loop? Are they just being a classic challenger brand?
Are they simply activating ideas outside of standard media, using media like
print and digital in tactical ways that drive salience and/or get customers
using new sales channels for Burger King?
Machado has a non-traditional approach but a much-vaunted love of
creativity in the service of commerce. Each of these ‘stunts’ ties back to strat-
egy, linked to hero products, new channels or competitive trolling, with the
168 2020 FORESIGHT
goal of disrupting cultural conversations to drive salience. To do so consist-

ently requires pushing into territories people find polarizing. That’s how the
news works.
Perhaps what some industry observers don’t like, beyond obvious jeal-
ousy, is the beginnings of a different way to think about campaigns. One
that doesn’t run and run with the same creative template across 30-second
spots for years. One that requires new ideas that grab attention every time,
tied back to strategy, without the guardrails of media. One that has interest-
ing implications for how agencies manage accounts – and even win them.
Reportedly, Machado bought the McWhopper idea thanks to an unsolicited
email pitch video from Y&R NZ. Was that idea a print ad or something
more? The products of creativity clients want from agencies aren’t art and
copy but attention and commerce.
The strategy seems to be working, commercially, creatively and cultur-
ally, both externally and among the agencies. Perhaps based on what we
know, we might seek to find out how that process, and those relationships,
work. Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it, and that’s the point.
13
The quantity, quality, qualia and

cost of attention
The goldfish myth

It is a truth, universally acknowledged in the media and advertising industry,
that humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. This is unfor-
tunate, and somewhat ironic, since it is fake news.
In 2015, an insight team at Microsoft Canada released a report called
‘Attention Spans’ which included this shocking statistic.1 It made headlines
all over the world, from Time magazine2 to the Guardian.3 It continues to
worm its way into innumerable agency and media company presentations.
It’s a striking image, appending something that feels true to something we
think we know, bolstered by association to a reputable source. It is a case
study in how fake news spreads because it is false in every conceivable way.
The Microsoft report was based on studying brain activity but the head-
line was not derived from that research. It is sourced to a company called
Statistic Brain, which appears, upon visiting the site, to be a research com-
pany. A chart with the fishy fact appears there. A reverse image search leads
to the source of the claim, a software manual called Building Information
Modeling and Construction Management. Here the chart is sourced to the
National Center for Biotechnology Information and US Library of Medicine
but when asked, both denied any knowledge of research that supports it
(BBC, 2017).4 The goldfish fact was a fabricated factoid.
The comparison doesn’t even make sense. First of all, you think you
know that a goldfish has a short attention span, but think carefully – don’t
you mean you think goldfish have an eight-second memory? The factoid
adapts that piece of folk knowledge to suit its persuasive purpose. Further,
it turns out that goldfish do not even have short memories! Quite the
170 2020 FORESIGHT
contrary, they are ‘a model system for studying the process of memory for-
mation, exactly because they have a memory’, according to Professor Felicity
Huntingford at the University of Glasgow (BBC, 2017).5
Motivated reasoning means we want to believe certain things more than
others. ‘That’s why I can’t concentrate!’ we thought. ‘It’s not that we are
distracted by the innumerable options of modern media, it’s that our atten-
tion spans have been eroded.’ What do we think we are even saying?
Scientists don’t recognize the idea of a normative ‘attention span’. How
much attention we apply to something depends on what we are trying to
achieve – it is task-dependent. As Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, ‘This whole
idea of an attention span is a misnomer. People have an infinite attention
span if you are entertaining them.’6 It’s a psychological faculty evolved over
millions of years, but it’s changed dramatically in 10? If it were getting
shorter, why are films getting longer? How do surgeons or marathon video
gamers manage?
Equally, motivation may underlie the endless repetition of this falsehood
by digital media platforms with a vested interest in convincing advertisers
that three seconds is a suitable length for an ad unit because that is the aver-
age amount of viewing they garner in the feed, usually slightly less on mobile.
These viewing averages, according to recent research, are ‘the natural point
at which viewer attention diminishes on that particular platform and is a
true reflection of the platform experience and/or modal differences, rather
than any reflection of ad length.’7 When this is taken into account, it leads
one to understand that those parameters are limits of the platform, not new
information about human attention spans. Further, it makes clear that ‘try-
ing to place a longer ad on a platform that naturally delivers shorter time
spent viewing is a waste of time’, which should give advertisers pause as
they seek to efficiently redeploy their television commercials into any chan-
nel that accepts video.
Our susceptibility to believe this nonsense indicates how dim our under-
standing of attention truly is. The lie feels true, which increasingly has cur-
rency, because we are suddenly faced with abundance, where very recently
there was scarcity. We live surrounded by innumerable channels all clamour-
ing for attention to flow to them.
THE QUANTITY, QUALITY, QUALIA AND COST OF ATTENTION 171
Peak attention
The very earliest mention of an attention economy applied exclusively to the
online world. In 1999, Wired ran a prescient piece suggesting that ‘the econ-
omy of attention – not information – is the natural economy of cyberspace’.
It went to post that things would necessarily be different because ‘attention
has its own behaviour, its own dynamics, its own consequences. An econ-
omy built on it will be different than the familiar material-based one’.8
We live in a world with many more options and we find it harder to
maintain focus because there are always alternatives at the touch of a button
tempting us towards novelty or outrage. There were, of course, always alter-
natives available, but having them in our hand at all times is something new.
Every tiny bit of our attention takes something from us, and we have a
limited amount of time and cognitive resources each day. That’s why Satya
Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, wrote in a memo to all his employees that
we are moving ‘from a world where computing power was scarce to a place
where it is now almost limitless and the true scarce commodity is increas-
ingly human attention’.9
We consent to trade our attention for subsidized content – that’s the
value proposition for advertising for the consumer – except with billboards.
That’s why David Ogilvy hated them, because there is no consent and no
immediate value transferred to the individual. In his classic Confessions of
an Advertising Man, he claimed that when he retired he would ‘start a secret
society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent
motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon’.10
Howard Gossage, the advertising sage of San Francisco, had a similar
point of view. ‘What is the difference,’ he wrote, ‘between seeing an ad on a
billboard and seeing an ad in a magazine? The answer, in a word, is permis-
sion – or, in three words, freedom of choice’.11 It wasn’t until Jean-Claude
Decaux created a better value exchange by using some of the money from
billboards to pay for street furniture and other civic amenities that govern-
ments and culture embraced them more comfortably, making his the biggest
outdoor media company in the world to this day.
Media companies have always aggregated and sold attention but this was
limited by the amount of time spent consuming media, and by interest, and
by language. The emergence of ad networks and social platforms created a
new kind of attention mining company that could operate globally without
producing content – simply by being an aggregator or indexer – which
brought with it tremendous profits. Thus, the battle for attention intensified,
172 2020 FORESIGHT
as other companies began to understand the commercial value of attention

at global scale. That’s why philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote that
‘figuring out ways to capture and hold people’s attention is the centre of
contemporary capitalism’.12 Some of the biggest, most powerful companies
in the world, developing breakthrough technologies like self-driving cars,
advanced machine learning algorithms and facial recognition, are funded
almost entirely by the brokering of human attention.
Media consumption has been growing for years, as new channels and
technologies crept into previously unoccupied attention niches. We can now
Tweet from the toilet, Snap from the sofa, and email from, well, everywhere.
In the face of plenty, we gorge ourselves, on food or information, because we
evolved when it was relatively scarce and existentially valuable. Variety also
matters because ‘the more options we have, the more us hungry, hungry
hominids will eat in general’.13
But attention is a function of an awake consciousness and there are only
so many hours in the day. This is why growth in total time spent consuming
media has plateaued. According to eMarketer, ‘growth in consumers’ total
time spent with media has nearly stalled’, increasing by only one minute
between 2018 and 2019.14 We can consider that a proxy for ‘peak attention’,
a zero sum game in which attention is always being acquired from some-
thing else that has it. Thus, the arms race escalates, as advertisers compete
for attention.
At the same time, an ever-growing number of advertisements have been
shoved into this aggregated pool of attention. The last time a total figure
was estimated, Comscore claimed that 5.3 trillion digital impressions were
served in the United States alone in 2012.15 Trillions (that’s US so it means
thousands of billions) of ads being served to 300 million people. Well, sort
of. More than 50 per cent of ads are non-viewable, one-third are fraudulent,
and one study found that only 35 per cent of digital display ads received any
views at all. ‘Only 9 per cent of ads received more than a second’s worth of
attention’, which suggests that the price of those genuine impressions has
been miscalculated by an order of magnitude – they are far more expensive
than they appear.16
Despite only being measurable by unreliable proxies, human attention
has become the world’s biggest commodity, funding the corporate behe-
moths of our time.
Since impressions only measure potential – an ‘opportunity to see’ – more
robust measures for attention have been developed, such as ‘attention min-
utes’ or time spent, in counterpoint to IAB guidelines that insist one second
of exposure should count. But even this only measures an aspect of attention
– duration. ‘Time spent is a useful, but blunt, measure,’ according to Tim
Elkington, chief strategy officer at the IAB. ‘Attention looks beyond that.’17
The quality of attention

Attention is a challenging idea to explore because, as the focused end of
human consciousness, it can only be experienced subjectively and is, beyond
that, philosophically impossible to prove exists in other people. That’s why
‘love is the quality of attention we pay to things’.18 It’s also what makes
measuring it hard, which is why we end up with proxies, with impressions
measuring potential and duration measuring time spent. The corollary of its
subjective nature is that each of us can – and should – explore our own
attention in order to learn more about it. The qualia of your attention – the
internal and subjective component of the experience – is uniquely, exclu-
sively yours. Learning more about it allows us to regain some of the control
of our media diet. This also brings the nature of measuring something so
subjective, abstract, and essentially qualitative, into question – because
attention is not binary, it is not simply on or off, and it comes in various
flavours and levels of intensity. Over time, researchers have come to the
understanding that it’s not a single process but rather a group of sub-
processes. There are five types of attention psychologists broadly agree
upon, primarily based on a hierarchical model derived from clinical research.
Attention is the ability to select and concentrate on stimuli and is ‘a core
process underlying competence in higher-order cognitive abilities, including
learning, social processing, memory, perception, and problem solving’.19 In
this clinical model, there are three core components and two higher-order
components.
Focused attention is directing and responding to specific stimuli, whereas
sustained attention is the ability to maintain vigilance to stimuli over time,
which allows one to read or work by holding and using information in
working memory. Selective attention refers to the ability to ignore some
stimuli to focus on others. The higher-order components are divided and
alternating, where divided attention allows one to do two things at once,
listening to a lecture and taking notes for example, and alternating attention
lets one switch between separate tasks.20
Intensity is usually understood as a measure of the quality of attention,
the amount of cognitive processing being deployed, the amount of focus
required. Some media experiences require higher levels of attention by their
FIGURE 13.1 The axes of attention
AXES OF ATTENTION
GOD OF WAR
QUALITY LONGREADS SETTLERS OF CATAN [72 HRS]
[10+ MINS] (BOARD GAME) •
FULL
• [3+ HRS]
•
PAID ATTENTION
KILLING EVE
AVENGERS: BY FARIS YAKOB
[45 MINS]
HIGH ENDGAME [4–5 HRS]
•
[3 HRS 4 MINS] •
PODCAST •
MOANA
[30 MINS]
[1 HR 53 MINS]
MEDIUM •
•
YOUTUBE VIDEO
[4 MINS]
TV AD
LOW BILLBOARD [30 SECS] •
[6 SECS] •
•
• ‘ VIEWABLE’ DIGITAL ADVERTISING DISPLAY IMPRESSIONS [2 SECS] DURATION
SECONDS MINUTES HOURS DAYS
GENIUSSTEALS.CO @FARIS
nature: video games need focused attention in order for one’s avatar to sur-
vive. Some garner higher levels based on context, like watching films in the
darkened room of a cinema with commercial and social reminders to turn
off your phone. Reading is more participatory than passively consuming
video and thus requires more attention, and so on. The chart below is a
subjective mapping of duration and intensity, to demonstrate how digital
advertising impressions can be compared to other, longer media experiences
that require higher cognition.
The function of attention

Why do we pay attention to some things and not others? To get things done,
at least in part. According to Dr Gemma Briggs, ‘how much attention we
apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.’21 Regardless
of how exactly it works, it evolved to keep us alive, like every human faculty.
Attention can be applied consciously to achieve tasks at hand, which means
it is a tool of the intentions. But it can also be snatched away without voli-
tion, when we hear an alarm or a bear. This is called a ‘phasic alert’ and
keeps us out of danger. It relies on pattern recognition so as to rely on lower
energy consumption for your brain while maintaining an always-on base
level of vigilance.
From this, we understand there are different routes to attracting attention
– relevance and interruption being the most obvious, with emotional arousal
being a key feature of both. ‘We choose what we pay attention to, so the act
of focusing is wedded to our life, our identity projects and goals. We find
that consumers can pay attention to media because they want to realize
their goals. These goals may be functional in nature (utilitarian goals) or
emotional (value-expressive goals).’22
In narrative, crucial for video advertising, there are three key components
in attracting and retaining attention for those 30, 60 or 120 seconds.
Research by Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer of research company
System 1, covers centuries of art history and offers an exhaustive analysis of
decades of television advertising for emotional resonance and commercial
uplift (whether a three-second digital ad unit is able to convey narrative in a
commercially effective way is yet to be shown). According to Wood, those
components are heavily associated with right brain processing, which also
handles most types of attention processing, and make intuitive sense to
anyone familiar with stories:
176 2020 FORESIGHT
The most effective, attention-winning video advertising is advertising which

foregrounds Character, Incident and Place – that can be described by who is
involved, what happens and where it is set… This means rewarding vigilance by
giving us strong and engaging characters whose fates we anticipate; rewarding
alertness by presenting the unexpected; and rewarding sustained attention by
immersing us in a scene that unfolds in a determinable place.23
We live in an age of endless interruptions, notifications, emails, advertise-

ments, updates, news and so on, which all tend to operate by taking our
attention away from the goal we had at hand, be it work or leisure related.
That is, of course, the inherent nature of interruptive advertising. In such an
environment, the arms race continues to spiral, and our attention is being
deflected further away from our goals, through the use of manipulative
design patterns, psychological tricks and creative pyrotechnics.
Time well spent

Every waking moment is explored and mined by media entities driven by the
need for growth to get more of your attention and algorithms that learn
how to hack it. In the battle for attention, editors and engineers have learned
that emotional arousal is key. Stoking anger and fear and creating an unend-
ing sense of urgency with never-ending breaking news cycles and infinite
‘news’ feeds keeps people engaged. But, as author Charles Stross wrote,
‘There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my
ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it’s not going to leave me
well disposed to the messenger.’24
Further, the nature of the digital advertising ecosystem is predicated on
invasive tracking of personal data, which consumers opt in to but without
knowing, or indeed being able to know, what it actually means:
Privacy of data simply cannot be negotiated person by person, especially

because there’s no meaningful informed consent. People cannot comprehend
what their data will reveal especially *in conjunction* with other data. Even
companies do not know this, so they cannot inform anyone.’25
This is all because attention has come to be understood as a commodity to

be exploited, a resource to be mined. But should it be? Our attention is finite
on a per capita (and collective) basis – and how we choose to deploy it is
how we spend our lives. The more our attention is consumed, the less time
and cognitive resources we have left to think with. According to Tristan

Harris, formerly a technology ethicist at Google and the founder of the
Centre for Humane Technology, the metaphorical framing of attention as a
commodity is dehumanizing, in a similar way as conflating person with con-
sumer is: ‘Attention is consciousness, it’s experience and to think of it as a
commodity is itself so dehumanizing. It’s like taking whatever is unexplain-
able about the human experience and saying let’s sell that: Let’s sell the core
thing to our human experience.’26
Understanding it as a commodity is ‘one way of conceiving of our time.
But it’s also a quantification that tramples across other, qualitative ques-
tions.’27 Even the original call for the attention economy in ‘Attention
Shoppers!’ recognized that.28 As the author explained:
Attention comes in many forms: love, recognition, heeding, obedience,

thoughtfulness, caring, praising, watching over, attending to one’s desires,
aiding, advising, critical appraisal, assistance in developing new skills, et cetera.
An army sergeant ordering troops doesn’t want the kind of attention Madonna
seeks. And neither desires the sort I do as I write this.
Considering how much time we now spend living in media as people, and
attempting to attract and manage attention as activists and advertisers, our
understanding of it seems to have become more shallow as it collapsed into
economic metaphors.
Part of what attention is, beyond a resource to be mined, is the faculty by
which we encounter the world and as such it impacts who we are and the
ultimate quality of our life. ‘There is now little question that how one uses
one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person
one becomes. Our minds – our lives – are largely shaped by how we use
them.’ 29 Ancient disciplines of attention such as meditation are increasingly
being used to help navigate the rapacious environment we find ourselves in.
With all these demands on our attention, people feel like they have less
free time, especially in the United States, where media consumption has
plateaued and where people work the longest hours.30 Media consumption
has also plateaued in the UK, which, coincidentally, has the longest working
hours in Europe. We haven’t left time for ourselves and are seeing now a
counter trend of digital detoxing and mindfulness. Ten years ago, either
would be considered fringe behaviours but they are now increasingly com-
mon and culturally resonant. Free time has become screen time and numer-
ous studies have begun to demonstrate that this is making us less happy and
178 2020 FORESIGHT
more anxious. The ‘constant noise from the internet and social media likely
serve to amp up people’s anxiety and angst’, according to Dr Harsh Trivedi
(CEO of Sheppard Pratt Health System)31 and prolonged social media use
makes people unhappy, whereas small amounts (under one hour a day) seem
to increase happiness.32 Things involving humans are rarely black and white.
Further, the framing of attention solely as a resource leads us towards its
exhaustive exploitation, because this is the nature of capitalism, which tends
towards reductionism. Our metaphors inform our behaviour:
In defining attention as the contents of a global reservoir, slopping

interchangeably between the brains of every human being alive. Where is the
space, here, for the idea of attention as a mutual construction more akin to
empathy than budgetary expenditure – or for those unregistered moments in
which we attend to ourselves, to the space around us, or to nothing at all?33
When so much of our day is mediated, our attention consumed, do we end

up ‘starved of reality’, as author and technology pioneer Jaron Lanier has
suggested?34
Attention is not a commodity like coal or oil, it is an aspect of humanity.
However, like physical natural resources, mining it at scale has consequences
for us all, individually and culturally. Every quantum of attention that is
used by a company leaves us with less for ourselves. Instead of making
active choices, we may tend towards a passive state, being fed whatever the
stream, algorithm or television channel wants to show us.
With more cognitive surplus, we’re able to actively engage with media
that adds to our lives. Research across platforms shows that the more agency
we feel we have, the more active the media consumptions and participation
choices we make, the happier we tend to feel afterwards.35 There is a social
component to the utilization, which renders it, if it is a resource, more akin
to a commons than a commodity and a tragedy of that commons has already
occurred.
Context, communications and the commons

Both the immediate and macro context impact how communication is
received. People report feeling as though there is never enough time, that
they are always busy. The overall cultural climate is increasingly character-
ized by stress and anxiety, by feeling burned out from constant, escalating
media stimuli, the always-on demands of connected working and social

media performance and, of course, politics.
A side effect of the political climate, especially in the United States and
the UK since 2015, has been an increase in news consumption, but a recent
survey from the American Psychological Association found that, for many
Americans, ‘news consumption has a downside’:
More than half of Americans say the news causes them stress, and many report
feeling anxiety, fatigue or sleep loss as a result, the survey shows. Yet one in
10 adults checks the news every hour, and fully 20% of Americans report
‘constantly’ monitoring their social media feeds — which often exposes them to
the latest news headlines, whether they like it or not.36
Despite it making us feel worse, we have evolved to seek out new news, and
the current environment exacerbates our existing tendencies:
So, if the evidence suggests the news can stress people out, why do they keep
going back for more? The human brain is wired to pay attention to information
that scares or unsettles us – a concept known as ‘negativity bias’. In a state
of nature, our survival depends on finding rewards and avoiding harm, but
avoiding harm takes priority.37
Due to confirmation and negativity bias – and a host of other manipulated

heuristics – we tend to be drawn to these preceding types of content.
However, the suitability of these environments for brand communication
has been questioned, because the immediate context of news is so distress-
ing, and because news channels have become polarized and driven towards
more extreme positions, which impacts both brand safety and communica-
tion impact.
Studies show that ‘the positive influence of media context on reception of
ads and brands increases when a particular text (editorial, news story, com-
mentary) elicits positive emotions when consumers have a low level of
engagement with the product advertised’. When you have limited existing
feelings towards a brand, congruency between the ad and context impact
your feelings about it. That doesn’t mean that all negative news is bad for
brands, however, and advertisers using broad block lists that prevent their
advertising from appearing near contentious topics helps throttle funding to
journalism. Rather, the congruency effect suggests that advertising that suits
its context works better. Advertising that is sad works better in context of
180 2020 FORESIGHT
sad content, and advertising that is happy works better in context of happy
content.
When we are stressed we tend to shift attention more frequently, and
when lacking sleep we tend to check Facebook more often.38 Our cognitive
resources are being depleted, making us less able to muster the willpower
required to manage our own attention. That’s why I created the Media
Pyramid, using research on how certain media consumption affects psycho-
logical well-being, as a tool to help people allocate their attention with
intention.
NB: This is abstract and subjective, flawed by confusions of channel
and content. However, the research it is based on suggests we are drawn to
junk food of the mind just as we are of the body and that we report feeling
happier afterwards when we are actively engaged in choice (Netflix), con-
sumption (reading) or active socializing (interpersonal communications as
opposed to Facebook Newsfeed). Adapted from the Food Pyramid.
While not designed as a planning tool, the pyramid can help apply a
set of qualitative filters to media and communication planning. Strategic
communications planning considers context, channel effects, historical prof-
itability, and numerous other criteria beyond target audience, cost, reach
and frequency when developing a communication and investment plan.
The object is to leverage different communications tools appropriately to
maximize their integrated effectiveness, rather than settling for the media
efficiency of reaching the target audience as cheaply as possible, which could
be established by a spreadsheet or an algorithm.
There are a number of ways to understand the media pyramid’s primary
vector. It was designed to balance media consumption in order to maximize
reported psychological well-being. Like the original food pyramid, the
media near the top makes people feel bad after extended consumption and
media towards the bottom tends to make people feel better. Since we process
information differently depending on context, it follows that medium has an
impact on the efficacy of brand communication.
Additionally, it maps well against a spectrum of passive to active con-
sumption and to attention levels and quality (which includes viewability,
context, modality and anything else relevant to the effect). The level and
quality of the attention being bought is an important consideration that the
cost of impressions doesn’t necessarily reflect. The quality of attention isn’t
properly priced.
FIGURE 13.2 The Media Pyramid
THE MEDIA PYRAMID SUGGESTED CONSUMPTION
BAD INFO
PEOPLE TEND TO CONSUME MEDIA THAT SUPPORTS
WARS
FOR THEIR EXISTING VIEWS BUT ANY CONTENT WHERE NO INFO-TOXIC-ATION
IDEOLOGY LEADS TO FALSEHOOD IS BAD FOR YOU GOOP
YOU
MAILONLINE
SOCIAL NEWS
HEAVY SOCIAL MEDIA AND ROLLING NEWS NEW YORK 1/2
FACEBOOK CONSUMPTION
CONSUMPTION DECREASES WELL-BEING POST HR
YOUTUBE TWITTER CNN
MESSAGING TV
INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION IS NBC 1
FACEBOOK INTERACTION
GOOD, SPAM BAD, BROADCAST TV IS OK CBS HR
MESSENGER ABC
STREAMING GAMING
CHOOSING WHAT YOU WATCH, NETFLIX PLAYSTATION 2
PARTICIPATION
SHOW/MOVIES, PLAYING GAMES HBO MAX XBOX HRS
DISNEY+ NINTENDO
PODCASTS/DOCS QUALITY JOURNALISM MAGAZINES

EDUCATION, HOBBIES, NON- NATGEO 3
NEW YORK TIMES SCIENTIFIC EDIFICATION
FICTION, JOURNALISM NPR HRS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AMERICAN
BBD
BOOKS, CHATS, ART,

ACTUALIZATION
THEATRE = AWESOME
NB: This is abstract and subjective, flawed by confusions of channel and content. However, the research it is based on suggests we are drawn to junk food of
the mind just as we are the body and that we report feeling happier afterwards when we are actively engaged in choice [Netflix], consumption [reading] or
active socializing [interpersonal communications as opposed to Facebook Newsfeed].
FIGURE 13.3 The Media Planning Pyramid
THE MEDIA PLANNING PYRAMID SUGGESTED BUDGET & ROLES
BAD BRANDS REACHING PEOPLE IN THESE INFO

ENVIRONMENTS ARE TAINTED BY ASSOCIATION WARS
FOR 0% INFO-TOXIC-ATION
WITH FALSEHOODS AND INCREASINGLY SUBJECT GOOP
YOU TO BOYCOTTS
MAILONLINE
SOCIAL NEWS
BRAND SAFETY, LOW ATTENTION, NEWS ENVIRONMENT, CUSTOMER SERVICE, SHORT TERM
FACEBOOK NEW YORK
AD BLOCKING, AD SKIPPING, ONLINE VID LOW EMOTIONAL POST 10% ACTIVATION, PR, DR, CIRCULARS,
RESPONSE, TABLOID ENVIRONMENT, FAKE NEWS YOUTUBE TWITTER CNN PLATFORM SPECIFIC IDEAS
MESSAGING TV
NBC
MASS REACH BRANDING,
DM & EMAIL EFFECTIVE BUT SPAM IS BAD, TV #1
EFFECTIVENESS BUT AD LOAD IRRITATION, DVRs FACEBOOK CBS
40% CONVERSION, EMAIL AS
MESSENGER ABC CONTENT
STREAMING GAMING
CULTURAL SALIENCE,
CINEMA EMOTIONAL IMPACT, NETFLIX/ NETFLIX PLAYSTATION
FILM CO-PRO, GAMING CHALLENGES
10% STATURE, PLATFORM,
HBO MAX XBOX
DISNEY+ NINTENDO CONTENT ENGINES
PODCASTS/DOCS QUALITY JOURNALISM MAGAZINES

PODCASTS, RADIO #2 EFFECTIVE, NATGEO TRUST. AUTHORITY,
NEW YORK TIMES SCIENTIFIC 30%
NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES NPR LEARNING CONTEXT
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AMERICAN
BBD
LOVE TERM
SPONSORSHIP & EVENTS
BRAND IMPACT BUT SLOW
10% VALUES
BRANDING
NB: This is abstract and subjective, flawed by confusions of channel and content. However, the research it is based on suggests we are drawn to junk food of
the mind just as we are the body and that we report feeling happier afterwards when we are actively engaged in choice [Netflix], consumption [reading] or
active socializing [interpersonal communications as opposed to Facebook Newsfeed].
FIGURE 13.4 The Media Attention Spectrum

LOW ATTENTION
PEOPLE ARE PASSIVE

ACTIVELY GRAB ATTENTION
VIRAL VIDEO, DR OFFERS
PERSUASION/SELLING FOCUS
PARTIAL ATTENTION/BIG SCREEN –

ENTERTAIN AND INFORM

ACTION/PRODUCT/EMOTION FOCUS
ATTENTION
STRATEGY
PARTIAL ATTENTION/SMALL SCREEN –

BRAND IMAGE/UTILITY FOCUS
PEOPLE ARE ACTIVE –

PROVIDE VALUE TO THE EXPERIENCE
EVENTS/SPONSORSHIP
BRAND VALUES FOCUS
HIGH ATTENTION
Media options at the top of the pyramid are where context is most aban-
doned in favour of efficient targeting and are fastest in building reach; this
works well for sales activation, which is corroborated by meta-analysis
from the IPA DataBank.
Paid Attention was consciously written with the aspiration of being
something other than a ‘single idea that would be better as a long blog post’
but if there is a primary thesis it is that while attention is the determinant
resource being bought, sold and allocated in advertising exchanges between
companies and people, it is a complex, precious thing and deserves respect
in its capture and utilization by brands. It is a commons that needs renewing
and protecting.
When framed this way it creates a number of novel ways of thinking
about the advertising value proposition and how consumers pay for content
and experiences, either fully, or partially, with their finite attentional
resources. A commons requires protecting to prevent its eponymous tragedy
in order that all may continue to profit from it.
Communication and context are inextricably bound in the consumption
experience, a consideration which is too often neglected in the current vogue
for producing ‘content’ to distribute through every available digital channel.
184 2020 FORESIGHT
It is a qualitatively different experience reading a book on paper vs Kindle

vs smartphone or tablet. The content is identical but the context is different.
Research suggests the mere presence of a smartphone fractures attention:
We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more
noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases. Your conscious
mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process – the process of
requiring yourself to not think about something – uses up some of your limited
cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.39
It follows that reading on paper vs digital screen has a similar impact, of

reducing the tendency to shift attention, because there are no notifications
and less temptation to ‘just check’ social media. It’s easier to not think about
something when it’s not in your hand.
Quality is a multivariate aspect of all media choices, but hopefully the
pyramid can help build quality communication plans for brands. Adding in
a robust qualitative layer turns the metrics of media and ‘growth hacking’
back into human beings.
Using communication channels to their fullest extent means adapting
ideas and creative advertising to best leverage the medium’s strengths and
weaknesses. One filter of quality is the level of attention different media
hold, which should change how brands utilize them. Using them in concert
means understanding the different roles for channels, how they work
together, and what the cumulative multiplier is.
Reframing attention as a commons that we all own reminds us to treat
it with respect for the good of all instead of attempting to monetize as
much as possible ourselves. A commons unites individual profit motives
with social protection of resources. Perhaps that simple adjustment in think-
ing can help address some of the systemic problems in the current media
environment:
If you want to solve a problem, it helps to incorporate the profit motive, which
we can do by shifting the focus of technology from exploiting the weakest links
in human psychology to a commitment to empowering users. What would
human-driven technology look like? It would empower users rather than exploit
them. Human-driven social networks would enable sharing with friends, but
without massive surveillance, filter bubbles and data insecurity.40
The true cost of attention
In early 2020, the inaugural meeting of the Attention Council was held in
London, where I saw great presentations on the recent thinking on attention
in advertising. A good deal of attention is being paid to attention of late, and
the council’s mission is to ‘promote the use of attention metrics to create
incentives that align all stakeholders in the media and advertising ecosys-
tem’. This is a focused and intelligent approach, because underlying all
media discussions are metrics, currencies and pricing.
At the heart of all media is the humble impression. In order to buy and
sell access to human attention a currency was needed. In the pre-digital
world, an impression was a set of eyeballs – one person exposed to one
ad in any medium. It allowed for cumulative and comparative analyses of
different media, which was very useful. It was also inherently probabilistic,
since one impression was only ever an opportunity to see (or miss). As
Anthony Swindells of research giant Millward Brown wrote 50 years ago,
‘One cannot study the methods of measuring media coverage without
becoming increasingly conscious of their limitations... in short, we are still
dealing in “opportunities to see” the advertisement... rather than actual
impressions made.’41
When digital media arrived, it allowed for a much more certain measure,
but we opted for one ad being served, making the presence of a person sec-
ondary. This led to years of somewhat bizarre discussions in which the idea
of ‘viewability’ was championed. Bizarre because anyone outside of a media
trading environment could have easily explained that an ad no one sees has
zero impact. We intuit that exposure, and attention, are crucial because
‘unseen is unsold’ as the old adage goes. Viewability still operates in the
realm of potential since only things that are viewable can be seen.
Online viewability measures were linked to somewhat meagre metrics
since only 50 per cent of the ad must appear for one second to count (for the
industry but probably not for consumers). Even so, average publisher view-
ability for video ads is 66 per cent, according to Google.42 Other media
don’t report on viewability because every advertisement that runs on televi-
sion appears on the screen for the duration paid for, at full screen coverage.
As an important aside, screen coverage is currently not factored into online
viewability, which is an obvious flaw, since 100 per cent on screen means
much less if the ad unit is vanishingly small. Equally, if the ad unit takes over
the whole page, it may be more likely to be skipped. The dynamics of adver-
tising online are different because the formats, modes of consumption and
186 2020 FORESIGHT
possible consumer actions are. However, viewability also applies to televi-

sion advertising. TVision is a research company that installs devices into
participants’ living rooms to measure if anyone is looking at the screen
when an ad plays. They tracked the viewing of more than 5,000 people over
six months to provide some granularity to the obvious fact that sometimes
people leave the room when the commercial break comes on to make a cup
of tea, making those ads un-viewable. The research showed that on average
only 71 per cent of television ads were playing when anyone was in the
room where it happened.43
Being viewable is necessary, but what is being viewed? Viewability only
gets us back to the original conditions of media in the sense that we can have
some confidence that the ads could even be seen – there is an ‘opportunity
to see’ – by people when we buy media, but it doesn’t tell us anything more
about whether they are.
Even if people are in the room, not all ads are being looked at. According
to TVision, only 43 per cent of television ads actually get direct line of sight.
Eye-tracking research from Lumen suggests that online ‘82 per cent were
completely missed, not recording a single moment when the user’s eyes were
fixated on them.’44
So, media have average viewability rates and average viewed rates, and
they are different. Finally, every medium has an average view time, since the
ad may be glanced at, but for how long? In planning terms, considering
attention from the outset is crucial because attention thresholds are very
different on different platforms. Some naturally garner higher attention for
longer durations and advertisers should play to the strengths of the media.
Thus, knowing how much you want and need is also key. Complex messages
will require more time and more attention. Creatives in high-attention con-
texts need do less work on grabbing attention. How much attention does
the communication require to be optimally effective – and how much should
that cost?
The metrics we use to trade create incentives in the market. The opacity
of the programmatic media buying ecosystem makes it ripe for, and rife
with, fraud and creates marketplace distortions. The cost of an impression
almost certainly doesn’t properly price the increasingly scarce resource of
chunks of aggregated human attention in the marketplace.45 By combining
viewability, viewing and time viewed measures, research company Lumen
generated a new measure that estimates the ‘attentive seconds per thousand
impressions’ (‘APM’) that each medium generates. Average dwell time varies
dramatically across media. Each 30-second television commercial gets an
FIGURE 13.5 Attentive seconds per 000 impressions

Attentive seconds per 000 impressions
7000
Seconds Attention per 000 impressions
5937
6000
5000 4524
4000
2933
3000
2149
2000
1338 1316 1150
1000
422
148
0
30”
15”
Non-Skippable 15”/20”
6” Bumper
Instagram Stories
Facebook Infeed
Instagram Infeed
Mobile Web
Desktop
TV YouTube Social Digital display
average of 14 seconds of attention on it, whereas Facebook’s data shows

that ads across their properties average less than 2 seconds, with desktop
performing slightly better than mobile. In her book The Attention Economy,
Professor Karen Nelson-Field makes it clear that many advertisers are using
Facebook incorrectly as a channel. It is not a platform for video advertising
but more a set of digital billboards flying by fleetingly. The research strongly
suggests that ‘average time viewing’ is the natural point at which viewer
attention diminishes on a particular platform and that this is a true reflec-
tion of the platform experience (eg content) and/or modal differences (eg
viewability/ux), rather than a reflection of ad length. Therefore, ‘trying to
place a longer ad on a platform that naturally delivers shorter time spent
viewing is a waste of time’.46
We can combine viewability, view rate and dwell time into a single num-
ber to compare across media. Viewability rate (%) × viewing rate (%) × av.
Dwell time (sec) × 1,000 = attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions.
(Reproduced with kind permission of Lumen Research, January 2021.)
This can be combined with the ‘cost per thousand impressions’ (‘CPM’)
using averaged media cost data from Ebiquity to create a ‘cost per thousand
188 2020 FORESIGHT
FIGURE 13.6 Cost per 000 attentive seconds

Cost per 000 attentive seconds
£25.00
£21.88
£20.00
£15.00 £13.54
£10.00
£5.10
£5.00
£1.74 £1.92 £2.04
£1.05 £1.49 £1.00
£0.00
30”
15”
Non-Skippable 15”/20”
6” Bumper
Instagram Stories
Facebook Infeed
Instagram Infeed
Mobile Web
Desktop
TV YouTube Social Digital display
seconds of attention’ (‘CPM’). Such analyses are fraught with caveats

because of the irregularities of different models and methods of measure-
ment, as the company duly notes, but give a good comparative sense of what
volume of attention, rather than opportunity, is being paid for. According to
their analysis, while television looks expensive in CPM terms, it is the cheap-
est way of buying attention, and the converse is true for video ads on web-
sites. An advertiser would need to buy about 40 desktop display ads to
generate the same amount of attention they get from an average 30-second
TV ad.
We can combine the CPM with the attentive second per 1,000 impres-
sions to create an ‘attentive CPM’ or ‘aCPM’. (Reproduced with kind per-
mission of Lumen Research, January 2021.)
We now also have data that shows the impact of variance in attention
levels. In The Attention Economy, Professor Nelson-Field’s research demon-
strates high attention doubles the incrementality rate versus low attention.
Incrementality is a measure that shows which sales would have happened
anyway without any advertising exposure using a control group, making it
a useful addition to simplistic measures like Return on Marketing Investment.
This produces an attention response curve, which also allows for planning
and pricing discussions. Low-attention impressions still have an impact,
high attention doubles that, but that variance in impact isn’t reflected in
pricing across channels.
Other new aggregate measures like quality cost per thousand (qCPM) are
beginning to rise, which is important because they price in the understand-
ing that greater impact is worth paying more for, but as Nelson-Field points
out this will only help if q is measured in a way that represents real quality,
otherwise it will overprice the opportunities. Additionally, any single inter-
mediate metric becomes subject to Goodhart’s Law, because when a meas-
ure becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measure, which is why a broader
set of evaluative measures is always necessary.
Attention is a many splendoured thing, an analogue aspect of the most
complex phenomenon known to man, our consciousness. Understanding it,
planning for it and measuring it is challenging but crucial since it is the
foundation upon which the entire advertising and media industry sits.
Balancing all these considerations, making choices about how to allocate
vast sums of money with the best chance of achieving a brand’s objectives,
while embracing the nuance of reception modality, context, human psych
ology, paying appropriate attention to the goals of consumers and being
respectful of the value of every individual’s attention is what makes com-
munication strategy a subtle, strategic craft.
EPILOGUE
Talkin’ about your generation
Generations seem to turn over pretty fast.

Well, technically I guess they don’t, since you need to be born during a
certain arbitrarily defined time period to be X or Y or whatever.
I recently saw an article that indicated that I was a millennial. This con-
fused me, since I had always known myself to be a tail-end member of
Generation X. Since the dates are arbitrary, different sources use different
years. I suddenly wondered if I had been ‘disaffected’ at all, and whether I
should be more ‘entitled’, since the media suggest these are the defining
adjectives of those generations. Then I remembered something that Clay
Shirky once said: that defining cohorts is functionally equivalent to writing
horoscopes, except about decades rather than months.
In Being Digital, Negroponte says that ‘each generation will be more
digital than the last’,1 and media generations turn over faster and faster, as
new media emerge. This is worth remembering. Whether you consider your-
self a digital immigrant or native, keep in mind that being native now is not
what will be native soon. And I mean very soon. You have to run to keep up
with an accelerating culture.
With this rate of change, when I’m asked for advice by people getting into
the industry, I try to make it useful by being vague, because only principles
will have longevity in a time of flux:
● Be nice. All the time. To everyone.

● Try to meet other nice people who are interested in the same things as you.
● Equally, converse with people who have different points of view.
● Don’t be afraid to change your mind.
● Don’t get (too) cynical.
● Stay interested in what you do.
● Stay interested in other things too.
● Never be afraid to ask questions.
EPILOGUE 191
● Reading is for awesome people.

● Write.
● Take pictures.
● Develop your own theory about how ideas work and what they are for –
but don’t fall in love with it.
● Become a geek or an expert on something – anything.
● Steal everything – every trick and idea – and make them your own.
● Travel to other parts of the world, especially places that are hard to get to.
● Have fun. Seriously. If it isn’t any fun, it won’t be any good.
● Don’t worry too much – it’s only advertising, after all.
REFERENCES
Introduction
1 Shakespeare, W (1991) Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II, Dover Publications, USA
2 Mashon, Michael [accessed 19 November 2014], Sponsor [Online]
https://web.archive.org/web/20141028224750/https://museum.tv/eotv/sponsor.
htm (archived at https://perma.cc/3EHG-TYC5)
3 Siegle, MG [accessed 19 November 2014] Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We
Create as Much Information as We Did Up To 2003 [Online] http://techcrunch.
com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/ (archived at https://perma.cc/Z3QQ-DZM8)
4 Shirky, C (2011) Cognitive Surplus: How technology makes consumers into
collaborators, Penguin Books, Reprint edition, UK
5 Dyson, Esther [accessed 19 November 2014] The Rise of the Attention
Economy [Online] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/
201212271132754429.html (archived at https://perma.cc/595T-RLN2)
6 Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds [Online] https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-
health-policy/press-release/daily-media-use-among-children-and-teens-up-
dramatically-from-five-years-ago/ (archived at https://perma.cc/H4KH-A7A8)
7 Bindley, Katherine (21 March 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] ADHD
Diagnoses in Children Up 66 Percent [Online] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2012/03/21/adhd-diagnoses-up-by-66-perent_n_1370793.html (archived at
https://perma.cc/99V6-WYFJ)
8 Mahdawi, Arwa (19 August 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Satire is
Dying Because the Internet is Killing It [Online] http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2014/aug/19/satire-tag-internet-killing-facebook-tag (archived at
https://perma.cc/5C32-D64J) (The research itself is a little spurious in its
conclusions, but it gives a sense of the pervasive feeling of the time.)
9 Shannon, C and Weaver, W (1971) The Mathematical Theory of
Communication, University of Illinois Press, USA
10 Gilbert, D (2007) Stumbling on Happiness, p 215, Vintage, USA
11 Sunstein, Cass (28 April 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Solidarity in
Consumption [Online] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_
id=224618 (archived at https://perma.cc/2GP3-LYLX)
12 This maxim is often attributed to Jesus Christ, but is much older, recorded at
least as far back as 500 bc in Analects of Confucius, chapter 15, verse 23
13 Heath, D and Heath, C (2007) Made to Stick, p 12, Random House, USA
14 Frommer, D and Kamelia, A [accessed 25 November 2014] Chart of the Day:
Half Of YouTube Videos Get Fewer Than 500 Views [Online]
REFERENCES 193
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-youtube-videos-by-
views-2009-5 (archived at https://perma.cc/797M-RD7C)
15 Green, Adam (7 January 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] A Pickpocket’s
Tale, The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins [Online] http://www.newyorker.
com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_green#ixzz2MK2AqXIV (archived
at https://perma.cc/QRP8-JLVA)
16 Trost, Matthew (1 March 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Riddle of
Experience vs. Memory: Daniel Kahneman on TED.com [Online] http://blog.
ted.com/2010/03/01/the_riddle_of_e/ (archived at https://perma.cc/2S2C-2GCC)
17 James, W (1950) The Principles of Psychology, p 403, Dover Publications, USA
18 Macknik, S and Martinez-Conde, S (2011) Sleights of Mind: What the
neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions, p 60, Picador, UK
Chapter 1
1 Bogart, L (1967) Strategy in Advertising, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, USA
2 Benson, Joseph and Foley, Jack [accessed 25 November 2014] Banking M&As:
What about the brand? [Online] https://www.marketingprofs.com/5/
bensonfoley1.asp (archived at https://perma.cc/5YKW-CREG)
3 Peters, Tom (no date) Quoted in The State of the US Consumer Report, Saatchi
& Saatchi
4 Pavitt, J (2002) Brand New, p 14, V & A Publications, UK
5 Peters, Tom (10 August 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Brand Called
You [Online] https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you (archived
at https://perma.cc/6ZHM-7HGP)
6 Geoghegan, Tom (9 November 2005) [accessed 25 November 2014] A Child
Called Ikea: Myth or Reality [Online] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
magazine/4418934.stm (archived at https://perma.cc/KVZ2-LMYP)
7 Kay, John (6 December 1996) [accessed 25 November 2014] What’s in a name?
[Online] http://www.johnkay.com/1996/12/06/whats-in-a-name (archived at
https://perma.cc/75K5-2RN6)
8 Post on Chav Scum website [accessed 2010] [Online, no longer available]
9 Pavitt, J (2002) Brand New, p 23, V & A Publications, UK
10 Armstrong, K (2006) A Short History of Myth, p 4, Canongate US, USA
11 Duckworth, G (1996) Brands and the role of advertising, in Understanding
Brands, ed Don Cowley, p 68, Kogan Page, UK
12 Grant, J (2000) The New Marketing Manifesto, p 15, Texere, UK
13 Grant, J (2000) The New Marketing Manifesto, p 15, Texere, UK
14 Armstrong, K (2006) A Short History of Myth, p 119, Canongate US, USA
15 Klages, M [accessed 25 November 2014] Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Structural
Study of Myth [Online] http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/
levi-strauss.html (archived at https://perma.cc/9JL2-VWKX)
194 REFERENCES
16 Lévi-Strauss, C (1976) Structural Anthropology Volume 2, University of

Chicago Press, USA
17 Holt, D (2003) What Becomes an Icon Most?, p4, Harvard Business Review,
reprint, USA
18 Doward, Jamie and Teuscher, Lea (25 September 2005) [accessed 25 November
2014] Tobacco firms’ subtle tactics lure smokers to their brand [Online]
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/sep/25/advertising.smoking (archived
at https://perma.cc/DET9-55S4)
19 Lévi-Strauss, C (1967) The Structural Study of Myth: Structural anthropology,
trans. Claire Jacobsen and Brooke Scheoff, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York
20 Duckworth, Gary (January 1995) [accessed 28 November 2014] How
Advertising Works, the Universe and Everything, Admap https://www.warc.
com/content/paywall/article/how_advertising_works,_the_universe_and_
everything/en-GB/3681 (archived at https://perma.cc/PT6T-H494)
21 Klein, N (2009) No Logo, p22, Picador, USA
22 Klein, N (2009) No Logo, p52, Picador, Carmine Collection, USA
23 BRANDZ [accessed 25 November 2014] Google Ranked 1st in MB Brandz
100 Top Brands Report 2014 [Online] https://www.rankingthebrands.com/
The-Brand-Rankings.aspx?rankingID=6&year=795 (archived at
https://perma.cc/48JF-KLYL)
24 Bing [Online] https://blogs.bing.com/search/2012/09/06/take-the-bing-it-on-
challenge/ (archived at https://perma.cc/5R3C-LC3K)
25 ‘Googol’ is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was
coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner,
and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination, by Kasner
and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission
to organize the immense amount of information available on the web [Online]
http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
D3NE-MN4E)
26 Google, Code of Conduct [Online] http://investor.google.com/conduct.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/7YXC-Z49N)
27 Willigan, Geraldine (July 1992) [accessed 25 November 2014] High
Performance Marketing, Interview with Phil Knight [Online] hbr.org/1992/07/
high-performance-marketing-an-interview-with-nikes-phil-knight (archived at
https://perma.cc/BL8J-94B4)
28 Feldwick, P (2002) What is Brand Equity, Anyway?, NTC Publications, UK
29 Bullmore, Jeremy (2002) [accessed 25 November 2014] Posh Spice & Persil:
The Value of Fame [Online] https://www.wpp.com/-/media/project/wpp/files/
bullmore-collection/posh_spice_and_persil.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/
KXK2-J7ZR) https://www.wpp.com/the-bullmore-collection (archived at
https://perma.cc/56RY-4CTP). Here, Jeremy Bullmore argues that every
corporate action and decision influences people’s perceptions of brands
REFERENCES 195
KXK2-J7ZR) https://www.wpp.com/the-bullmore-collection (archived at
https://perma.cc/56RY-4CTP). Here, Jeremy Bullmore argues that every
corporate action and decision influences people’s perceptions of brands.
31 For more on the private language argument, see L Wittgenstein (1953)
Philosophical Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell, UK
32 WPP.com [accessed 25 November 2014] What is Brand Voltage? [Online]
https://web.archive.org/web/20130301055904/http://www.wpp.com/wpp/
marketing/brandz/brand-voltage/ (archived at https://perma.cc/N2NR-9KPS)
33 Brown, Millward [accessed 25 November 2014] Brandz Top 100 Most
Valuable Global Brands 201 [Online] https://www.rankingthebrands.com/
The-Brand-Rankings.aspx?rankingID=6&year=304 (archived at
https://perma.cc/235T-V7WY)
34 Knoema (2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable
Global Brands 2014 [Online] https://knoema.com/infographics/ylwwafb/
most-valuable-global-brands-2014 (archived at https://perma.cc/YS4W-4FF9)
35 Ehrenberg, Andrew and Goodhardt, Gerald (January 2002) [accessed
25 November 2014] Double Jeopardy Revisited, Again Marketing Research,
14(1) p 40
36 Paynter, Ben (6 January 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] Suds For Drugs
[Online] http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
(archived at https://perma.cc/65LM-S8LK)
37 Paynter, Ben (6 January 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] Suds For Drugs
[Online] http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
(archived at https://perma.cc/65LM-S8LK)
38 Fera, Rae Ann [accessed 25 November 2014] The Rise of Sadvertising, Why
Brands are Determined to Make You Cry [Online] http://www.fastcocreate.com/
3029767/the-rise-of-sadvertising-why-brands-are-determined-to-make-you-
cry#! (archived at https://perma.cc/3FH8-Z7H9)
39 Legro, Tom (3 February 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Thursday’s
NewsHour: Joyce Carol Oates Tells ‘A Widow’s Story’ [Online] http://www.
pbs.org/newshour/art/thursdays-newshour-joyce-carol-oates-tells-widows-tale/
(archived at https://perma.cc/MKZ2-8NHM)
40 P&G (2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] P&G – Thank You Mama – Best
Job 2012 HD 2M [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ruHOaHrGnQ
(archived at https://perma.cc/3BC7-RNDW)
41 Dove (14 April 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] Dove Real Beauty
Sketches [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE (archived
at https://perma.cc/P6ZZ-7NQU)
196 REFERENCES
42 Morgan, A (2009) Eating the Big Fish: How challenger brands can compete
against brand leaders, 2nd edn, Wiley
43 Schacter, D (1997) Searching For Memory, Basic Books, USA
Chapter 2
1 Heath, R (2012) Seducing the Subconscious: The psychology of emotional
influence in advertising, Wiley-Blackwell, USA
2 Heath, RG and Hyder, P (2005) Measuring the hidden power of emotive
advertising, International Journal of Market Research, 47 (5), pp 467–86
3 Psychoanalysis [Online] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis (archived at
https://perma.cc/2AXD-S5D6)
4 Mlodinow, L (2012) Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your
behaviour, Vintage
5 Wegner, Daniel (February 2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Mind’s
Best Trick: How We Experience Conscious Will, Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
7 (2), pp 65–69 https://scholar.harvard.edu/dwegner/publications/minds-best-
trick-how-we-experience-conscious-will (archived at https://perma.cc/
D4FM-4Q8K)
6 Shah, H and Dawney, E (2005) Behavioural Economics, New Economics
Foundation https://neweconomics.org/2005/09/behavioural-economics (archived
at https://perma.cc/5PAM-6GXM)
7 Earls, Mark (2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] Advertising to the Herd:
How Understanding Our True Nature Challenges the Ways We Think about
Advertising and Market Research [Online] http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/
teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/docs/others/2003/earls2003a.pdf (archived
at https://perma.cc/GT4W-B27R)
8 Lattin, James, Ortmeyer, Gwendolyn and Montgomery, David (1987) [accessed
25 November 2014] Routinized Choice Behavior, Brand Commitment, and
Consumer Response to Promotions [Online] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/
faculty-research/working-papers/routinized-choice-behavior-brand-
commitment-consumer-response (archived at https://perma.cc/7NRB-VZZ7)
9 Gordon, W (2003) Brands on the Brain, in Brand New Brand Thinking, ed M
Baskin and M Earls, Kogan Page, UK
10 Earls, M (2003) Learning to live without the Brand, in Brand New Brand
Thinking, ed M Baskin and M Earls, Kogan Page, UK
11 Levitt, S and Dubner, S (2009) Freakonomics, p 84, Harper Perennial, USA
12 Graves, P (2010) Consumer.ology, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, USA
13 Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation Ltd [accessed 25 November
2014] [Online] http://www.smellandtaste.org/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
DP95-RE3T)
REFERENCES 197
14 Graves, P (2010) Consumer.ology, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, USA

15 Gladwell, M (2007) Blink, p 81, Back Bay Books, USA
16 Fishbein, M and Ajzen, I (1975) Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behaviour:
An introduction to theory and research, Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd), USA
17 Ball, P (2006) Critical Mass: How one thing leads to another, p 395, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, USA
18 Business Week (4 June 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Science of
Desire [Online] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-04/the-science-
of-desire (archived at https://perma.cc/8T83-4GN9)
19 Ethnography [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography (archived at
https://perma.cc/ZE3X-9Y9N)
20 Observer-expectancy effect [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_bias
(archived at https://perma.cc/MUK9-9K6G)
21 du Plessis, E (2008) The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights into How
Our Brains Respond to Advertising, Kogan Page, London
22 Heath, Robert [accessed 10 August 2021] The message in advertising is
irrelevant, new research shows [online] http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/articles/
releases/advertising-message041206.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
N7C9-Q8Q5)
23 Feldwick, Paul [accessed 25 November 2014] Exploding the Message Myth
[Online] http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1015 (archived at
https://perma.cc/7TAG-8S9Y)
24 Binet, Les and Field, Peter (June 2009) [acccessed 25 November 2014]
Empirical Generalisations about Advertising Campaign Success [Online]
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/files/binet-field-ipa-databank-empirical-
generalizations-about-advertising-campaign-success.pdf (archived at
https://perma.cc/44NU-UG6H)
25 Kahneman, D (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA
26 Green, Laurence (June 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Think Tank: Target
consumers’ ‘unconscious’ and reap the rewards [Online] http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/finance/businessclub/management-advice/9307587/Think-Tank-Target-
consumers-unconscious-and-reap-the-rewards.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
4A7A-GZVR)
27 United Breaks Guitars (6 July 2009) [accessed 23 November 2014] [Online]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo (archived at https://perma.cc/
W7U5-KFRU)
28 United Breaks Guitars [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_
Guitarscite_note-15# (archived at https://perma.cc/HDL7-U2AZ)
29 Wheaton, K (9 July 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] United Is Happy to
Answer Your Complaints After You Humiliate Them [Online] http://adage.com/
article/adages/united-airlines-happy-answer-complaints-humiliation/137817/
(archived at https://perma.cc/4QSK-S4HP)
198 REFERENCES
30 Esterl, Mike (1 December 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] A Frosty

Reception for Coca-Cola’s White Christmas Cans, Wall Street Journal [Online]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204012004577070521
211375302 (archived at https://perma.cc/H78M-4HFY)
31 Ariely, D (2008) Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our
decisions, Harper Perennial
32 Stone, Brad (24 September 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] How Facebook
Sells Your Friends [Online] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39325170/ns/business-
bloomberg_businessweek/ (archived at https://perma.cc/F857-CQT6)
33 Gladwell, M (2002) The Tipping Point, Back Bay Books, USA
34 Otero-Millan, Jorge, Macknik, Stephen, Robbins, Apollo and Martinez-Conde,
Susana (21 November 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] Stronger
Misdirection in Curved than in Straight Motion [Online] http://www.ncbi.nlm.
nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221472/ (archived at https://perma.cc/A9NA-5AUQ)
35 Sony Bravia-Balls (Hi-Res) (1 May 2008) [accessed 28 November 2014]
[Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zOrV-5vh1A (archived at
https://perma.cc/VM8P-GPWZ)
36 Burley, Jonathan (24 May 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] [Online]
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/features/1133432/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
7NUJ-H39G)
Chapter 3
1 Dyson, P (March 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Cutting Adspend in a
Recession Delays Recovery [Online] https://www.warc.com/content/paywall/
article/warc-exclusive/cutting-adspend-in-a-recession-delays-recovery/
en-gb/87700 (archived at https://perma.cc/NG7E-RX5X)
2 Heath, R (2001) The Hidden Power of Advertising, NTC Publications, UK
3 Nevill Darby, quoted in Giep Franzen (2003) Advertising frameworks, in
Brand New Brand Thinking, ed M Baskin and M Earls, Kogan Page, UK
4 Nelson, Emily and Ellison, Sarah (21 September 2005) [accessed 25 November
2014] In a Shift, Marketers Beef Up Ad Spending Inside Stores Funky Displays
and Lighting, TV Spots in Wal-Mart; Unsettling Madison Avenue [Online]
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB112725891535046751 (archived at
https://perma.cc/9WV4-Y9ZL)
5 Earls, M (2003) Learning to live without the brand, in Brand New Brand
Thinking, ed M Baskin and M Earls, Kogan Page, UK
6 Useem, Jerry (21 March 2005) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Smartest
Books We Know, Fortune Magazine [Online] http://archive.fortune.com/
magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/03/21/8254826/index.htm (archived
at https://perma.cc/M6VR-9AWP)
REFERENCES 199
7 Somatic marker hypothesis [Online] http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Somatic_

marker_hypothesis (archived at https://perma.cc/VTH9-3SLE)
8 Schwartz, B (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less, Harper Perennial
9 Iyengar, Sheena and Lepper, Mark (2000) [accessed 25 November 2014] When
Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? [Online]
https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/researcharchive/articles/882 (archived at
https://perma.cc/4794-EKUT)
10 FMI [accessed 25 November 2014] Supermarket Facts Industry Overview 2013
[Online] http://www.fmi.org/research-resources/supermarket-facts (archived at
https://perma.cc/UTR2-NZJ5)
11 Chabris, Christopher and Simons, Daniel (1999) [accessed 25 November 2014]
The Invisible Gorilla [Online] http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/2F6S-KQ8Z)
12 Macknik, S and Martinez-Conde, S (2011) Sleights of Mind: What the
neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions, p 60, Picador,
UK
13 Simons, Daniel (2000) [accessed 25 November 2014] Change Blindness
Blindness: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection
Ability [Online] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/
135062800394865 (archived at https://perma.cc/R4MA-UQSQ)
14 Campaign magazine (7 October 2005) [accessed 25 November 2014] The
Greatest Agencies of All Time [Online] http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/
news/521174/ (archived at https://perma.cc/65Z8-4L4H)
15 Glasgow, RDV (1995) Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An essay on comedy,
p 123, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, USA
16 Dobbs, David (June 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] Big Answers From
Little People [Online] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v17/
n2s/full/scientificamerican0607-4sp.html (archived at https://perma.cc/6XZ6-
SBUB)
17 Sleights of Mind [Online] http://www.sleightsofmind.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/PWW3-ML8C)
18 Audi – Art of the Heist Case Study (21 November 2010) [accessed 25
November 2014] [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5w2CNB9clw
(archived at https://perma.cc/43ZR-LWXR)
19 Sacks, Danielle [accessed 25 November 2014] Down the Rabbit Hole [Online]
http://www.fastcompany.com/58038/down-rabbit-hole (archived at
https://perma.cc/Y2MU-JMTF)
20 Lewiston Tribune (18 January 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Movie
Review: ‘Cloverfield’ is a Monster Movie for the YouTube Generation [Online]
https://lmtribune.com/a_and_e/cloverfield-is-a-clever-monster-movie-for-the-
youtube-generation/article_2711a065-9a58-58fb-abc0-f2af40d74be0.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/3HHB-V3AR)
200 REFERENCES
21 The official Cloverfield trailer (9 July 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014]

[Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvNkGm8mxiM (archived at
https://perma.cc/G8Y6-HWLW)
22 Breznican, Anthony (9 July 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] Mystifiying
Trailer Transforms Marketing [Online] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/
movies/news/2007-07-08-abrams-trailer_N.htm (archived at https://perma.cc/
66VF-X4ED)
23 Campaign (12 December 2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] Top Performers
of 2003: Campaign of the Year – 118 118 [Online] http://www.campaignlive.
co.uk/news/198184/ (archived at https://perma.cc/PHS9-JPS6)
24 Watts, D (2003) Six degrees: The science of a connected age, Nature [Online]
https://www.nature.com/articles/422265a (archived at https://perma.cc/37W7-
ZG6U)
25 Turner, ES (1952) The Shocking History of Advertising!, Michael Joseph, UK
26 Hines, Andrew (20 August 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] The role of
‘borrowed interest’ advertising [Online] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/
the-role-of-borrowed-interest-advertising/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
LU6E-CWN7)
27 Nielsen (10 April 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Consumer Trust in
Online, Social and Mobile Advertising Grows [Online] http://www.nielsen.com/
us/en/insights/news/2012/consumer-trust-in-online-social-and-mobile-
advertising-grows.html (archived at https://perma.cc/HXG8-3U76)
28 The Simpsons (2 May 2004) ‘Simple Simpson’ Episode 19, Season 15 [accessed
25 November 2014] [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_
Simpsons_%28season_15%29 (archived at https://perma.cc/L8V4-E27D)
29 Goldhaber, Michael (December 1997) [accessed 25 November 2014] Attention
Shoppers! [Online] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.
html (archived at https://perma.cc/L6V8-VCLG)
30 The Mary Sue (8 March 2011) [accessed 10 Aug 2021] The cost of a gigabyte
over the years [online] https://www.themarysue.com/gigabyte-cost-over-years/
(archived at https://perma.cc/FA6G-HBFK)
31 Dumenco, Simon (13 December 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] Add This:
Facebook Makes Up 52% of Sharing on the Web [Online] http://adage.com/
article/the-media-guy/facebook-makes-52-sharing-web/231528/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/L54P-YMBR)
32 Jenkins, H (2009) If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead (part one) media viruses and
memes [Online] http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_
dead_p.html (archived at https://perma.cc/J3F2-9ZCS)
33 Tierney, John (8 February 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] Will You Be
Emailing This Column? It’s Awesome [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/
2010/02/09/science/09tier.html (archived at https://perma.cc/A7P3-VGLP)
34 Ibid
REFERENCES 201
Chapter 4
1 Saunders, J (2004) Drowning in choice: the revolution in communications
planning, Market Leader, 24, pp 34–39
2 Media Implementation, IMC, chapter 32
3 Gross Rating Point [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_rating_point
(archived at https://perma.cc/32FS-8D25)
4 Ibid
5 Vranica, Suzanne (23 March 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] A ‘Crisis’ in
Online Ads: One-Third of Traffic Is Bogus [Online] http://online.wsj.com/news/
articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453253860786362 (archived at
https://perma.cc/KAT3-W8GR)
6 Wegert, Tessa (23 August 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] What you Need
to Know About Viewable Impressions [Online] http://www.clickz.com/clickz/
column/2200135/what-you-need-to-know-about-viewable-impressions
(archived at https://perma.cc/GMJ9-ZQ9T)
7 Ha, Anthony (14 February 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] ComScore
Says 5.3 Trillion Ads Shown In 2012, But 3 In 10 Are Never Seen [Online]
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/comscore-digital-future-2013/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/EY6V-T48N)
8 Collin, W and Wilkins, J (2000) The Use of Qualitative Research in Commercial
Media Planning, Qualitative Research in Context, Admap in conjunction with
Association for Qualitative Research (AQR), UK
9 Idea Planning not Channel Planning, presentation to ISBA conference, Kevin
Brown
10 Davies, Russell (1 December 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] We’re as
Disappointed as You Are – Thoughts of a Planner [Online] http://russelldavies.
typepad.com/planning/urban_spam/index.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
4ACZ-LHEC)
11 Baker, S and Michell, H (2000) Integrated Marketing Communications,
Routledge, UK
12 Godin, S (1999) Permission Marketing, Simon & Schuster, USA
13 Spam [Online] http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3Aspam&start=0&i
e=utf-8&oe=utf-8 (archived at https://perma.cc/FH8H-D5DK)
14 Statista (2021) Ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States from
2014 to 2021 [online] https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-
reach-usage-us/ (archived at https://perma.cc/2VDR-HRWA)
15 Blockthrough (2020) BT/PageFair 2020 Report: Growth of the blocked web
[Online] https://blockthrough.com/blog/2020-adblock-report-3/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/EF7E-994B)
16 Hill, K (2013) Use of ad blocking is on the rise, Forbes [Online]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad-blocking-is-on-
the-rise/?sh=39fc69564377 (archived at https://perma.cc/FH8H-D5DK)
202 REFERENCES
17 Forrester (2004) Forrester Research Conducts In-Depth Survey Of DVR Users

To Uncover Key Trends Impacting The Television And Advertising Industries
[Online] https://go.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-research-conducts-
in-depth-survey-of-dvr-users-to-uncover-key-trends-impacting-the-television-
and-advertising-industries/ (archived at https://perma.cc/538Z-8LE5)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-of-dvr-owners-use-the-word-love-when-
referring-to-dvr/ (archived at https://perma.cc/XS4N-3RXP)
18 Stephenson, N (1995) The Diamond Age, Bantam Spectra, USA
19 Keynote Remarks, Madison + Vine Conference, Steve Heyer, then COO Coca-Cola
20 iMedia Connection (17 April 2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] Study Says
Spam Affecting All Advertising [Online] https://web.archive.org/
web/20110907064849/https://www.imediaconnection.com/news/1690.asp
(archived at https://perma.cc/C372-7FNP)
21 IBM [accessed 25 November 2014] The End of Television As We Know It –
A Future Industry Perspective [Online] https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/
read/33917439/the-end-of-television-as-we-know-it-a-future-industry-news
(archived at https://perma.cc/W95D-3VHH)
22 A phrase coined by Linda Stone, a senior researcher at Microsoft. It is an
interesting aside that much of the most insightful thinking about the future of
media consumption is being undertaken within technology, and not traditional
media, companies.
23 IM and MIT (2002) Pathways to Measuring Consumer Behaviour in an Age of
Media Convergence, MIT, US
24 Bloom, Jonah (23 April 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] Media Agencies
in Danger of Becoming Obstacles, Not Enablers [Online] http://adage.com/
article/jonah-bloom/media-agencies-danger-obstacles-enablers/108739/
(archived at https://perma.cc/5Y6N-W7JN)
25 Time Magazine (27 March 2006) Are kids too wired for their own good?,
USA
26 Truly, Madly, Deeply Engaged, Yahoo! Summit Series [accessed 25 November
2014] [Online] https://docplayer.net/53216527-Truly-madly-deeply-engaged-
global-youth-media-and-technology.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
4XAW-SCLY)
The Value of Fame [Online] https://www.wpp.com/the-bullmore-collection
(archived at https://perma.cc/Z6AF-88EP)
28 Media Week (17 August 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] What Marketing
Directors Love [Online] http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/article/516346/
marketing-directors-love (archived at https://perma.cc/8ZZJ-28UR)
The Value of Fame [Online] https://www.wpp.com/the-bullmore-collection
(archived at https://perma.cc/Z6AF-88EP)
REFERENCES 203
30 Pine, J and Gilmore, J (1999) The Experience Economy, Work Is Theater &
Every Business a Stage, Harvard Business School Press, USA
31 Wikipedia [accessed 25 November 2014] The Gamekillers [Online]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gamekillers (archived at https://perma.cc/
9QLU-2SCM)
32 Visually (10 October 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Printer Ink – The
most Expensive Liquid in the World [Online] http://visual.ly/printer-ink-most-
expensive-liquid-world (archived at https://perma.cc/6T2K-4QUC)
33 Redbull.us (7 November 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Red Bull Art of
Can Chicago [Online] http://www.redbull.com/us/en/events/1331641437090/
red-bull-art-of-can-chicago (archived at https://perma.cc/Y96E-WZNT)
34 Yakob, Rosie (November 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Content
Marketing White Paper Rosie Yakob [Online] https://blog.360i.com/search-
marketing/360i-report-content-marketing/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
KKH2-B3YJ)
35 Griffiths, John (July 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] Brands as Media
[Online] https://web.archive.org/web/20110727083742/http://www.
planningaboveandbeyond.com/downloads/Brandsasmedia.doc (archived at
https://perma.cc/766U-6B37)
36 Boyd, Danah (27 May 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Selling Out is
Meaningless [Online] https://medium.com/message/selling-out-is-meaningless-
3450a5bc98d2 (archived at https://perma.cc/9Q4B-K9S7)
37 Kaplan, Melanie (2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] Stonyfield Farm CEO:
How an Organic Yogurt Business Can Scale [Online] https://www.zdnet.com/
article/stonyfield-farm-ceo-how-an-organic-yogurt-business-can-scale/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/36BW-C2VZ)
38 Durrani, Arif (24 October 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Cindy Gallop
tells adland: Blow yourselves up and start again [Online] www.campaignlive.
co.uk/news/1156423/ (archived at https://perma.cc/F5CA-5DFU)
39 Feldwick, Paul [accessed 25 November 2014] Exploding The Message Myth by
Paul Feldwick [Online] http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1015 (archived
at https://perma.cc/7TAG-8S9Y)
40 Ogilvy, D (1985) Ogilvy on Advertising, Vintage, UK
Chapter 5
1 Adams, Douglas (29 August 1999) [accessed 25 November 2014] How To Stop
Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet [Online] http://www.douglasadams.com/
dna/19990901-00-a.html (archived at https://perma.cc/2CEH-CHV4)
2 Fiat EcoDrive [Online] https://www.driveuconnect.eu/en/features/detail-eco-
drive (archived at https://perma.cc/T67B-NUM5)
204 REFERENCES
3 Tourism & Events Queensland [Online] https://teq.queensland.com/industry-

resources/teq-case-studies/best-job-in-the-world (archived at https://perma.cc/
PPY9-EH5D)
4 The Best Job in the World [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Job_
In_The_World (archived at https://perma.cc/R7ZX-VYMC)
5 Philips (16 April 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] Carousel Commercial –
Adam Berg Commercial of the Year Stink Digital [Online] http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=lQ3D4CqHbJM (archived at https://perma.cc/UZ5N-WGPN)
6 Negroponte, N (1995) Being Digital, Alfred A Knopf, Inc., USA
7 Watts, Duncan (15 April 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] Is Justin
Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? [Online] http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
P5CT-6DS6)
8 Doctorow, Cory (6 May 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Cory Doctorow:
Think Like a Dandelion [Online] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/05/
cory-doctorow-think-like-dandelion.html (archived at https://perma.cc/8HQB-
765J)
9 Watts, Duncan (15 April 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] Is Justin
Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/
2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
P5CT-6DS6)
10 Trachtenberg, Jeffrey (22 February 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] The
Mystery of the Book Sales Spike: How Are Some Authors Landing On Best-
Seller Lists? They’re Buying Their Way [Online] http://online.wsj.com/news/
articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544 (archived at
https://perma.cc/7LTB-H75E)
11 Neff, Jack (16 September 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] How Reckitt
Benckiser Became ‘Digital at Heart’ [Online] http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/
reckitt-benckiser-digital-heart/294958/ (archived at https://perma.cc/L3B9-
GY9V)
12 Neff, Jack (23 January 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] Unilever Ad
Spending Hits New Heights, But Agency Fees on Downward Trend [Online]
http://adage.com/article/news/unilever-ad-spending-hits-heights/239348/
(archived at https://perma.cc/BCB5-BUYG)
13 Poggi, Jeanine (19 May 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Future of
TV? No More Commercials, Says Netflix Chief Product Officer [Online]
http://adage.com/article/media/future-tv-commercials-netflix-exec/293275/
(archived at https://perma.cc/E6NR-FUGX)
REFERENCES 205
Chapter 6
1 (Panic Attack!) (2009) [accessed 3 November 2009] https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=-dadPWhEhVk (archived at https://perma.cc/6ZBD-YDTV)
2 Rushkoff, D (2013) Present Shock: When everything happens now, Penguin
Group, USA
3 Owen, John (4 September 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Learning the
Hard Way [Online] http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1310419/learning-
hard/ (archived at https://perma.cc/UYJ3-5VXX)
4 Ibid
5 Avi, Dan (4 December 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] What are 10 Great
Ad Agencies of 2013, According to CMO’s? [Online] http://www.forbes.com/
sites/avidan/2013/12/04/ten-great-agencies-of-2013/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
P9KL-5K2X)
6 Dylan, Bolden (5 February 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Digital
Road to Earning Travelers’ Trust [Online] https://www.bcg.com/en-ca/
publications/2013/transportation-travel-tourism-digital-economy-bolden-
dylan-digital-road-to-earning-travelers-trust (archived at https://perma.cc/9SEG-
8RP3)
7 Executive Traveller [accessed 25 November 2014] [Online] https://www.
executivetraveller.com/virgin-america-s-pocket-sized-boarding-pass (archived at
https://perma.cc/BE67-PJCY)
8 Mission to the Edge of Space [accessed 25 November 2014] [Online]
http://www.redbullstratos.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/6Z6Z-MRVL)
9 Digital Buzz (22 January 2010) Definition 6 Launches Coca-Cola ‘Happiness
Machine’ Video [Online} https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/
definition-6-launches-coca-cola-happiness-machine-video-81706642.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/Q7C3-JZP4)
10 Ho, Adrian (9 September 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Platforms,
Purpose, and the Future of Marketing [Online] https://www.linkedin.com/
today/post/article/20140909140935-3798012-platforms-purpose-and-the-
future-of-marketing (archived at https://perma.cc/CCX3-NWLH)
11 Ho, Adrian (Partner at Zeus Jones) (9 September 2014) [accessed 25 November
2014] Platforms, Purpose, and the Future of Marketing [Online]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140909140935-3798012-platforms-
purpose-and-the-future-of-marketing/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
CCX3-NWLH)
12 Ibid
206 REFERENCES
Chapter 7
1 Lehrer, J (2009) How We Decide, Mariner Books, USA
2 Johnson, S (2011) Where Good Ideas Come From, Riverhead Trade, USA
3 Aristotle (350 bce) Poetics (Section 3) [accessed 25 November 2014] [Online]
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.3.3.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
ETX6-J4FV)
4 Tutton, Mark (1 December 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] Learn the Five
Secrets of Innovation [Online] http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/26/
innovation.tips/index.html (archived at https://perma.cc/QZX2-692A)
5 Ibid
6 Erard, Michael (22 May 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] THINK TANK;
Where to Get a Good Idea: Steal It Outside Your Group [Online]
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/arts/22IDEA.htm (archived at
https://perma.cc/8WM6-7FQL)
7 Ibid
8 The Categories, the first logical treatise of Aristotle.
9 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, quoted in A Critical Exposition of the
Philosophy of Leibniz, Bertrand Russell (1900) Cambridge University Press, UK
10 Cale, John (12 February 2002) [accessed 25 November 2014] My 15 Minutes,
Guardian [Online] http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/feb/12/
artsfeatures.warhol (archived at https://perma.cc/U95J-BJKJ)
11 Tate Modern (April 2002) [accessed 25 November 2014 via Wayback Machine]
Warholiser [Online] https://web.archive.org/web/20030422202507/http://tate.
cix.co.uk/ (archived at https://perma.cc/39PY-TPZR)
12 Warhol, A (1977) The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back
Again), Harvest, USA
13 Warhol, A (1977) The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back
Again), Harvest, USA
M9XQ-27Z2)
15 Eliot, TS (2009) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Dodo Press,
UK
16 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame [accessed 10 August 2021] Lesson plan: Using hip
hop to introduce allusion [Online] https://web.archive.org/
web/20081210172303/http://www.rockhall.com/exhibitpast/lesson-hip-hop/
(archived at https://perma.cc/2JZC-GM49)
17 Lethem, J (2007) The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism, Harper’s Magazine,
New York [Online] https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-
influence/ (archived at https://perma.cc/HHR6-PE42)
REFERENCES 207
18 PBS Documentary (1966) [accessed 25 November 2014] Triumph of the Nerds:

The Rise of Accidental Empires [Online] http://www.pbs.org/nerds/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/EB6R-S4UD)
Chapter 8
1 He was well known for saying it, quoted in Jean Marie Dru (2007) How
Disruption Brought Order, Palgrave Macmillan, UK
2 To the author, in conversation
3 Fox, K (2004) Watching the English, Nicholas Brealey America, second edition
(2014), UK
4 Lehrer, J (2012) Imagine: How creativity works, Houghton Mifflin
5 Nicolson, Nigel [accessed 25 November 2014] Virginia Woolf By Nigel
Nicolson [Online] https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nicolson-woolf.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/TZ5X-TR57)
6 Eggers, D (2014) The Circle, Vintage
7 Wilde, O (1993) De Profundis, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
8 Kirby, Alan (2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Death of Postmodernism
and Beyond [Online] https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_
Postmodernism_And_Beyond (archived at https://perma.cc/P2NU-8MPX)
9 Ibid
10 Ibid
11 Goldman, David (8 February 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] Super Bowl
Ad Breaks Google’s TV Silence [Online] http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/08/
technology/google_superbowl_ad/ (archived at https://perma.cc/LX9R-SMSY)
12 Volkswagen (2 February 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Force:
Volkswagen Commercial [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6HugFW8rLZ8 (archived at https://perma.cc/S7JH-ZZPZ)
Chapter 9
1 Febreze Breathe Happy Campaign (14 September 2012) [accessed 25 November
2014] [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea79IcPW47M (archived at
https://perma.cc/6Q7R-4JZK)
2 Millward Brown (September 2012) 2012 Effie Report, Inaugural Edition
3 Poulsen, Mai Bruun (9 July 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] How a
Rainbow-Oreo Sparked a Boycott and Doubled the Fan Growth [Online]
http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2012/07/oreo-boycott/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/AWJ2-XP23)
208 REFERENCES
4 Yakob, F (2012) 7 habits of highly effective communication [online]

https://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/7-habits-of-highly-effective-
communication.html (archived at https://perma.cc/CQU7-E9NF)
5 Binet, Les and Carter, Sarah (November 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014]
Mythbusters: Art works [Online] http://www.warc.com/Pages/Search/
WordSearch.aspx?q=mythbuster%20art%20works (archived at https://perma.cc/
82YV-43XD)
6 Veksner, Simon (7 May 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Tuesday Tip No.
50 – How To Choose Where To Work [Online] http://scampblog.blogspot.com/
2008/05/tuesday-tip-no50-how-to-choose-where-to.html (archived at
https://perma.cc/4CNA-3JX5)
7 See what we did there?
8 London International Awards 2009 [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
London_International_Awards (archived at https://perma.cc/X9L8-5GF8)
Chapter 10
1 Brown, Celia (22 July 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] 5 Winning
Characteristics of Modern Marketing Teams [Online] http://www.forbes.com/
sites/sap/2014/07/22/5-winning-characteristics-of-modern-marketing-teams/
(archived at https://perma.cc/9YGY-G9BU)
2 Levitt, Theodore (July 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] Marketing Myopia,
Harvard Business Review [Online] hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia/ar/1
(archived at https://perma.cc/EP5J-AH4D)
3 Christensen, Clayton, Cook, Scott and Hall, Taddy (December 2005) [accessed
25 November 2014] Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and The Cure [Online]
https://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure
(archived at https://perma.cc/K6VQ-NTHN)
4 Kelly, Kevin (2 April 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Shirky Principle
[Online] http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/HV2Q-5VZL)
5 Sun Tzu (2008) The Art of War, Penguin Classics Edition
6 Also called the Growth Share Matrix, developed by the Boston Consulting
Group [Online] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
(archived at https://perma.cc/CZ5Q-R6CB)
7 Porter five forces analysis – a framework to analyse competition and guide
business strategy in an industry [Online] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_
forces_analysis (archived at https://perma.cc/R3Z4-5MGN)
8 Yakob, Faris (2010) Future of Planning a Conversation, Admap, February 2010
9 Heath, Robert and Fieldwich, Paul (2007) [accessed 25 November 2014]
50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising [Online]
REFERENCES 209
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/fifty-years-using-the-wrong-
model-of-advertising (archived at https://perma.cc/CL7V-W6R5)
10 Wegner, Daniel M (February 2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Mind’s
Best Trick – How We Experience Conscious Will, Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
7 (2), pp 65–69, https://scholar.harvard.edu/dwegner/publications/minds-best-
trick-how-we-experience-conscious-will (archived at https://perma.cc/
7NHE-4HPK)
11 Heath, Robert and Fieldwich, Paul (2007) [accessed 25 November 2014]
50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising [Online]
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/fifty-years-using-the-wrong-
model-of-advertising (archived at https://perma.cc/M3DQ-385S)
12 118 118 – Got Your Number! (4 October 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014]
[Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx2viPxfoig (archived at
https://perma.cc/4BNV-EGCR)
13 Budweiser (4 October 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] Budweiser Wassup
[Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W16qzZ7J5YQ (archived at
https://perma.cc/EN2X-FUTR)
14 One of the most viewed was the Superfriends spoof (27 July 2008) [accessed
25 November 2014] Superfriends Spoof [Online] https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Py2g74nOJPU (archived at https://perma.cc/2973-NNBP)
15 Zimmer, Carl (13 December 2005) [accessed 25 November 2014] Children
Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t [Online] http://www.
nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/13essa.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
4QZ8-TLFW)
16 Dandad.org [accessed 25 November 2014] Lynx Pulse Case Study [Online]
http://www.dandad.org/en/lynx-pulse/ (archived at https://perma.cc/QFF9-TCK3)
17 Parr, Ben (10 January 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] Twitter’s New CEO
Finally Nails Down the Company’s Long-Term Vision [Online]
http://mashable.com/2011/01/10/twitters-new-ceo-finally-nails-down-the-
companys-long-term-vision/ (archived at https://perma.cc/B3CY-W3QB)
18 This further evolved to include rented media when it became clear that you did
not own your Facebook profile, but a satisfying acronym has yet to be coined
19 Jenkins, Henry (6 November 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] Eight Traits
of the Emerging Media Landscape [Online] http://henryjenkins.org/2006/11/
eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html (archived at https://perma.cc/XAC6-
HNHP)
20 McCracken, G, Chief Culture Officer, Basic Books; first trade paper edition
(10 May 2011)
21 Ariely, D (2008) Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our
decisions, Harper Perennial
22 Baer, Jeff [accessed 25 November 2014] 70% of Companies Ignore Customer
Complaints on Twitter [Online] http://www.convinceandconvert.com/
210 REFERENCES
social-media-monitoring/70-of-companies-ignore-customer-complaints-on-
twitter/ (archived at https://perma.cc/QG7E-65GL)
23 Jarvis, Jeff (1 February 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Facebook Goes
Public: Zuckerberg in Public Parts & WWGD? [Online] http://buzzmachine.com/
2012/02/01/facebook-goes-public-zuckerberg-in-public-parts-wwgd/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/TV3L-ASBH)
24 Jenkins, Henry (12 December 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] How
Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part Two) [Online]
http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be_1.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/2WH3-F8VF)
25 Theguardian.com [accessed 25 November 2014] 5 Social Media Lessons to
Learn From Ford, Guardian [Online] http://www.theguardian.com/salesforce-
partner-zone/5-social-media-lessons-to-learn-from-ford (archived at
https://perma.cc/HTB5-JGA7)
26 IACP Center For Social Media [accessed 25 November 2014] Fun Facts
[Online] https://www.theiacp.org/resources/technology-and-social-media
(archived at https://perma.cc/FK7N-VTDA)
27 Percolate [Online] www.percolate.com (archived at https://perma.cc/C6CM-
BAPL)
28 Richards, Ben and Yakob, Faris (24 August 2006) [accessed 25 November
2014] Fill Up Your Advertool Kit [Online] http://www.mediapost.com/
publications/article/47199/the-new-next-fill-up-your-advertool-kit.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/R9XL-PXX3)
29 Brian [accessed 25 November 2014] An Open Letter To All Of Advertising And
Marketing [Online] https://www.thedenveregotist.com/news/an-open-letter-to-
all-of-advertising-and-marketing/ (archived at https://perma.cc/2E7F-YSBT)
30 Baskin, Merry (2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Future of Planning
– ADMAP Planners Roundtable: Six planning sages debate the future of their
discipline. With Will Collin, Rachel Hatton, Adam Morgan, John Owen and
Sarah Watson [Online] https://www.econbiz.de/Record/future-planning-admap-
planners-roundtable-future-planning-planning-sages-debate-future-discipline-
with-will-collin-rachel-hatton-adam-morgan-john-owen/10008381059
(archived at https://perma.cc/7AD8-ADVF)
Chapter 11
1 Gilbert, D (2007) Stumbling on Happiness, p 4, Vintage, UK
2 Dennett, D (1992) Consciousness Explained, Back Bay Books; 1st edition, USA
3 Greelish, David (2 April 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] An Interview
with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay [Online] http://techland.time.com/2013/
REFERENCES 211
04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/8NSW-QE2U)
4 Baylis, Chris (20 December 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] Don’t Create
An Ad, Create A World... [Online] https://web.archive.org/
web/20170322200751/http://ihaveanidea.org/articles/2011/12/20/
don%E2%80%99t-create-an-ad-create-a-world%E2%80%A6/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/CSV6-D8ZM)
5 Old Spice (4 February 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] Old Spice: The
Man Your Man Could Smell Like [Online] https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=owGykVbfgUE (archived at https://perma.cc/SQ8C-M2FK)
6 Wieden+Kennedy (14 July 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] Old Spice,
Digital Response [Online] http://www.wk.com/campaign/digital_response
(archived at https://perma.cc/8SDU-EU6E)
7 Wasserman, Todd (29 March 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] Kraft Mac
& Cheese Ad Based on Consumer’s Tweet Runs on Conan [VIDEO] [Online]
http://mashable.com/2011/03/29/kraft-mac-cheese-ad-conan/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/6RCQ-3HVF)
8 Steel, J (1998) Truth, Lies and Advertising: The art of account planning, Wiley
9 Collins, Scott (14 September 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] The former
late-night king returns with a relatively low-cost alternative to scripted prime-
time fare – and that has some job-jittery industry folks hoping the network’s
programming experiment fails, Los Angeles Times [Online]
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-sep-14-et-leno14-story.html
(archived at https://perma.cc/B997-AVZS)
10 Stelter, Brian (20 February 2011) [accessed 25 November 2014] TV Industry
Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers’ Attention [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/
2011/02/21/business/media/21watercooler.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
C4PS-GSQJ)
11 Yakob, Rosie (7 January 2013) [accessed 25 November 2014] 5 Social TV
Truths [Online] http://www.digiday.com/publishers/5-truths-about-social-tv/
(archived at https://perma.cc/GW42-LTSA)
14 Pollard, Mark (14 October 2010) [accessed 25 November 2014] How To Do
Account Planning – A Simple Approach [Online] http://www.markpollard.net/
how-to-do-account-planning-a-simple-approach/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
A7V4-46A3)
212 REFERENCES
15 Feldwick, P (2013) Exploding the message myth, Thinkbox [Online]

https://www.thinkbox.tv/news-and-opinion/opinion/exploding-the-myth/
(archived at https://perma.cc/X3ZZ-MEUL)
16 Bloomberg.com (1 August 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] Online Extra:
Jeff Bezos on Word-of-Mouth Power [Online] http://www.businessweek.com/
stories/2004-08-01/online-extra-jeff-bezos-on-word-of-mouth-power (archived
at https://perma.cc/8ZB2-999X)
17 Kay, Gareth (23 July 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] We Need a New
Idea About Ideas [Online] http://www.slideshare.net/garethk/we-need-a-new-
idea-about-ideas (archived at https://perma.cc/RK3K-FHMP)
18 Henry, Steve (27 March 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] Snake Oil
[Online] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024165503/http://stevehenry.
campaignlive.co.uk/2012/05/27/snake-oil/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
ET6U-T77S)
19 Kay, G (2010) The brief in the post digital age, Slideshare [Online]
https://www.slideshare.net/garethk/the-brief-in-the-post-digital-age/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/9PJQ-X7NL)
20 Vanderbilt, Tom (22 September 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Mitchell
Joachim: Redesign Cities From Scratch [Online] http://www.wired.com/politics/
law/magazine/16-10/sl_joachim (archived at https://perma.cc/3EEN-EJHU)
21 Adamson, Allen (25 April 2001) [accessed 25 November 2014] Volkswagen,
BMW Understand What It Takes to Stand Out [Online] http://www.forbes.
com/sites/allenadamson/2011/04/25/volkswagen-and-bmw-understand-it-takes-
a-compelling-story-not-numbers-to-stand-out-on-the-lot/?sh=604cd0f255ec
(archived at https://perma.cc/3QTH-4KJT)
Chapter 12
1 Obeidallah, Dean (2021) [accessed 23 April 2021] Trump’s election lies are
an attempted coup. Biden and other Democrats should say so [Online]
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-election-lies-are-attempted-
coup-biden-other-democrats-ncna1248573 (archived at https://perma.cc/
ZF72-EAKD)
2 Pomerantsev, P (2015) Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The surreal
heart of the new Russia, PublicAffairs, London
3 Paul, Christopher and Matthews, Miriam (2016) [accessed 9 February 2021]
The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ propaganda model: why it might work
and options to counter it. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation [Online]
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
X639-GD8X)
REFERENCES 213
4 Binet, Les (2020) [accessed 8 February 2021] The Short of It [Online]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OSr-Fwp7N8 (archived at https://perma.cc/
LTM7-AWVF)
5 Majaski, Christina (2020) [accessed 12 February 2021] McDonald’s vs. Burger
King: what’s the difference? Investopedia [Online] https://www.investopedia.
com/articles/markets/111015/mcdonalds-vs-burger-king-comparing-business-
models.asp (archived at https://perma.cc/KEQ3-QLVV)
6 Morrison, Maureen (2020) [accessed 9 February 2021] CMO of the Week:
Fernando Machado, Global CMO, Restaurant Brands International (Burger King,
Popeyes and Tim Hortons), Brand Innovators [Online] https://www.brand-
innovators.com/news/cmo-of-the-week-fernando-machado-global-cmo-
restaurant-brands-international-burger-king-popeyes-and-tim-hortons (archived
at https://perma.cc/FH8A-E764)
7 Mulcahy, Emma (2020) [accessed 23 April 2021] The best Burger King ads that
burned its rivals, The Drum [Online] https://www.thedrum.com/
news/2020/02/21/the-best-burger-king-ads-burned-its-rivals (archived at
https://perma.cc/7T3G-WADT)
8 Schmitt, Gabriel (2019) [accessed 12 February 2021] The strategy behind
Burger King’s Whopper Detour campaign, Contagious [Online]
https://www.contagious.com/news-and-views/burger-king-whopper-detour-
strategy-cannes-interview (archived at https://perma.cc/4ZGW-XLEN)
9 Frishberg, Hannah (2020) [accessed 9 April 2021] Ronald McDonald appears
if you say ‘canceled clown’ in Burger King mirror, New York Post [Online]
https://nypost.com/2020/10/28/ronald-mcdonald-appears-if-you-say-canceled-
clown-in-burger-king-mirror/ (archived at https://perma.cc/3HPE-26E2)
10 Morrison, Maureen (2020) [accessed 9 February 2021] CMO of the Week:
Fernando Machado, Global CMO, Restaurant Brands International
(Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons), Brand Innovators [Online]
https://www.brand-innovators.com/news/cmo-of-the-week-fernando-machado-
global-cmo-restaurant-brands-international-burger-king-popeyes-and-tim-
hortons (archived at https://perma.cc/FH8A-E764)
11 Machado, F (2020) [accessed 9 February 2021] Twitter [Online] https://twitter.com/
fer_machado123/status/1312015519856369664?lang=en (archived at
https://perma.cc/D32P-T8QM)
12 Machado, F (2020) [accessed 9 February 2021] Twitter [online]
https://twitter.com/fer_machado123/status/1312016074175635456 (archived
at https://perma.cc/A3T4-TKLL)
214 REFERENCES
Chapter 13
1 Microsoft, Consumer Insights, Canada (2015) [accessed 11 December 2020]
Attention Spans [Online] https://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-
research-report.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/FJ3Y-YFT7)
2 McSpadden, Kevin (2015) [accessed 11 December, 2020] You now have a
shorter attention span than a goldfish, Time Magazine, 14 May [Online]
https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
ZVK7-XLHV)
3 Abramson, Jill (2016) [accessed 11 December 2020] Can Hillary Clinton
convince in the age of the goldfish? Guardian, 17 May [Online] https://www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/17/hillary-clinton-policy-donald-
trump-attention-span (archived at https://perma.cc/7DQ2-LQYA)
4 Maybin, Simon (2017) [accessed 11 December 2020] Busting the attention
span myth, BBC World Service, 10 March [Online] https://www.bbc.com/news/
health-38896790 (archived at https://perma.cc/4KA6-UFUM)
6 Steinberg, Brian (2004) [accessed 21 June 2021] Questions for… Jerry Seinfeld,
Wall Street Journal [Online] https://www.wsj.com/articles/
SB108492207184115167 (archived at https://perma.cc/2S4K-ASWW)
7 Nelson-Field, K (2020) The Attention Economy and How Media Works:
Simple truths for marketers, Springer, New York, NY
8 Goldhaber, Michael (1997) [accessed 12 December 2020] Attention Shoppers!
Wired, 1 December [Online] https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/
(archived at https://perma.cc/4WYP-N8AX) (archived at https://perma.cc/
X7TM-W9JD)
9 Nadella, Satya (2014) [accessed 11 December 2020] Bold Ambition & Our
Core, The Atlantic [Online] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/
2014/07/microsofts-ceo-sent-a-3187-word-memo-and-we-read-it-so-you-dont-
have-to/374230/ (archived at https://perma.cc/5VH5-E2UQ)
10 Ogilvy, D (1963) Confessions of an Advertising Man, Southbank Publishing,
London
11 Gossage, Howard (1960) [accessed 11 December 2020] How to Look at
Billboards, Harper’s, February 1960 [Online] https://www.scenic.org/
wp-content/uploads/2019/09/How_to_Look_at_Billboards_by_Howard_
Gossage.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/JYG3-SAXV)
12 Cumming, Ed (2015) [accessed 20 June 2021] Matthew Crawford: ‘Distraction
is a kind of obesity of the mind’, Guardian [Online] https://www.theguardian.com/
media/2015/apr/12/matthew-crawford-distraction-is-a-kind-of-obesity-of-the-
mind-the-world-beyond-your-head (archived at https://perma.cc/9NMW-KY5C)
REFERENCES 215
13 Olebaum, Jed (2014) [accessed 20 June 2021] All-you-can-eat buffets: the

scourge of modern behavioral economics, Good [Online] https://www.good.is/
articles/economists-vs-buffets (archived at https://perma.cc/J6Q8-3J5K)
14 Dolliver, Mark (2019) [accessed 11 December 2020] US Time Spent with
Media 2019, eMarketer, 30 May [Online] https://www.emarketer.com/content/
us-time-spent-with-media-2019 (archived at https://perma.cc/7TK9-932E)
15 Ha, Anthony (2013) [accessed 12 December 2020] ComScore says 5.3 trillion
ads shown in 2012, but 3 in 10 are never seen, Techcrunch, 14 February
[Online] https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/comscore-digital-future-2013/
(archived at https://perma.cc/EY6V-T48N)
16 Hobbes, Thomas (2016) [accessed 12 December 2020]Marketers continue to
‘waste money’ as only 9% of digital ads are viewed for more than a second,
Marketing Week, 26 July [Online] https://www.marketingweek.
com/2016/07/26/marketers-continue-to-waste-money-as-only-9-of-digital-ads-
are-viewed-for-more-than-a-second/ (archived at https://perma.cc/UT6G-X28R)
17 WARC (2020) The WARC Guide to Planning for Attention, WARC Best
Practice, June 2020
18 McClatchy, JD (2001) Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and lesbian love poems,
Everyman’s Library, Penguin Random House, London
19 During, Genevieve and Ockhuizen, Helen (2014) [accessed 11 December 2020]
The implementation of an attention-training intervention with low socio-
economic status children in Cape Town, South Africa [Online]
http://www.psychology.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/117/
Helen.Ju-reyn.Ockhuizen.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/BJ4B-83LE)
20 During, Genevieve and Ockhuizen, Helen (2014) [accessed 11 December 2020]
The implementation of an attention-training intervention with low socio-
economic status children in Cape Town, South Africa [Online]
http://www.psychology.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/117/
Helen.Ju-reyn.Ockhuizen.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/BJ4B-83LE)
22 Dr Denegri-Knott, Janice (2018) [accessed 11 December 2020] Attention Please,
Whitepaper, Bournemouth University, 8 November [Online] https://magnetic.
media/research/studies/attention-please (archived at https://perma.cc/ZW6J-
EYG9)
23 Wood, Orlando (2020) [accessed 11 December 2020] The three keys that
unlock attention, System 1, 15 October 2020 [Online] https://system1group.com/
blog/achtung-3-keys (archived at https://perma.cc/T7KB-7STD)
24 Stross, C (2008) The Atrocity Archives, Ace, London
25 Tufekci, Zeynep (2018) Twitter [Online] https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/9579
68848757710848?lang=ca (archived at https://perma.cc/8FDT-U7CD)
216 REFERENCES
26 Harris, Tristan (2018) [accessed 11 December 2020] Attention Please: In

interview, Ted Radio Hour, NPR, 25 May [Online] https://www.npr.org/
programs/ted-radio-hour/614007696/attention-please (archived at
https://perma.cc/8JL3-3L7T)
27 Harris, Tristan (2018) [accessed 11 December 2020] Attention Please:
In interview, Ted Radio Hour, NPR, 25 May [Online] https://www.npr.org/
programs/ted-radio-hour/614007696/attention-please (archived at
https://perma.cc/8JL3-3L7T)
28 Goldhaber, Michael (1997) [accessed 12 December 2020] Attention Shoppers!
Wired, 1 December [Online] https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/
(archived at https://perma.cc/4WYP-N8AX)
29 Harris, S (2014) Waking Up: A guide to spirituality without religion, Simon &
Schuster, London
30 Weller, Chris (2017) [accessed 11 December 2020] Americans work less than ever
before but still feel like there’s no free time – and there’s a simple explanation,
Business Insider, 18 November [Online] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-
it-feels-like-you-have-no-free-time-anymore-2017-11#people-are-spending-
their-weekends-working-4 (archived at https://perma.cc/H9G6-EDDV)
31 Thompson, Dennis (2017) [accessed 12 December 2020] More Americans
suffering from stress, anxiety and depression, study finds, CBS News, 17 April
[Online] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stress-anxiety-depression-mental-
illness-increases-study-finds/ (archived at https://perma.cc/MU5F-FFVZ)
32 Twenge, Jean (2018) [accessed 12 December 2020] Why your free time
probably shouldn’t be screen time, Fast Company, 24 January [Online]
https://www.fastcompany.com/40520169/screen-time-teens-unhappiness-
research-twenge (archived at https://perma.cc/QR73-MQW3)
33 Chatfield, Tom (2013) [accessed 25 January 2021] The Attention Economy,
Aeon, 7 October [Online] https://aeon.co/essays/does-each-click-of-attention-
cost-a-bit-of-ourselves (archived at https://perma.cc/2GL6-KCN2)
34 Lanier, J (2018) [accessed 11 December 2020] Attention Please. In interview,
Ted Radio Hour, NPR, 25 May [Online] https://www.npr.org/programs/
ted-radio-hour/614007696/attention-please (archived at https://perma.cc/
8JL3-3L7T)
35 Collins, Nathan (2015) [accessed 12 December 2020] Facebook makes you sad
– if you’re the type to just sit back and watch, Pacific Standard, 25 February
[Online] https://psmag.com/social-justice/using-facebook-passively-can-make-
you-sad (archived at https://perma.cc/ART5-AZN3)
36 Heid, Markham (2018) [accessed 12 December 2020] Is it bad for you to read
the news constantly? Time Magazine, 31 January [Online] http://time.com/
5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/ (archived at https://perma.cc/SYB7-HUFT)
37 Heid, Markham (2018) [accessed 12 December 2020] Is it bad for you to read
the news constantly? Time Magazine, 31 January [Online] http://time.com/
REFERENCES 217
5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/ (archived at https://perma.cc/SYB7-

HUFT)
38 Smith, Steve (2016) [accessed 12 December 2020] Sleep and social media:
new study finds link between Facebook use and lack of sleep, Medical Daily,
5 February [Online] https://www.medicaldaily.com/social-media-facebook-lack-
sleep-372478 (archived at https://perma.cc/6EKL-3D4G)
39 Ward, Adrian et al (2017) [accessed 12 December 2020] Brain drain: the mere
presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity,
University of Chicago, 26 June [Online] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/
full/10.1086/691462 (archived at https://perma.cc/83FK-FZXE)
40 McNamee, Roger (2019) I mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I loved Facebook.
But I can’t stay silent about what’s happening, Time, 17 January [Online]
http://time.com/5505441/mark-zuckerberg-mentor-facebook-downfall/
?xid=tcoshare (archived at https://perma.cc/2XVE-CLNX)
41 [Quoted in] Green, A (1986) Media Research: what the agencies want, Admap,
WARC
42 Google (2019) [accessed 27 January 2021] Think with Google, the state of ad
viewability [Online] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/viewability/
state-of-viewability/ (archived at https://perma.cc/4X8B-YVUS)
43 IPG MediaLab (2019) [accessed 27 January 2021] Quantifying TV Viewability
[Online] https://www.tvviewability.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/H2KL-
THVK)
44 Bassett, David (2017) [accessed 12 December 2020] The value of media
environment in engaging digital display audiences, Lumen Research [Online]
https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lumenresearch-website-static/White+Pape
r+2017+Bassett%2C+D+Value+of+Media+Environment.pdf (archived at
https://perma.cc/27MN-38JY)
45 Hwang, T (2020) Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the time bomb at
the heart of the internet, FSG, USA
46 Nelson-Field, K (2020) The Attention Economy and How Media Works,
Springer Nature, Singapore
Epilogue
1 Negroponte, N (1995) Being Digital, Alfred A Knopf, Inc, USA
FURTHER READING
Books
Armstrong, K (2006) A Short History of Myth, Canongate US, first trade paper
edition, UK
Ball, P (2004) Critical Mass, Gottfried Achenwall, UK
Baudrillard, J (2010) America, Verso, new edition, USA
Dennett, D (1991) Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Co, USA
Dru, J-M (2007) How Disruption Brought Order, Palgrave Macmillan Trade, UK
Earls, M (2009) Herd, John Wiley & Sons, first updated edition, USA
Eliot, TS (1920) The Sacred Wood: Essays on poetry and criticism, Dodo Press
(2009), USA
Feldwick, P (2002) What is Brand Equity, Anyway?, NTC Publications, UK
Fox, K (2004) Watching the English, Nicholas Brealey America, second edition
(2014), UK
Gilbert, D (2006) Stumbling on Happiness, Knopf, USA
Gladwell, M (2000) The Tipping Point, Little, Brown, USA
Gladwell, M (2007) Blink, Back Bay Books, USA
Gleick, J (2011) The Information, Pantheon Books, USA; Fourth Estate, UK
Godin, S (1999) Permission Marketing, Simon & Schuster, USA
Grant, J (2000) The New Marketing Manifesto, Texere Publishing, new edition, UK
Graves, P (2010) Consumer.ology, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, UK
Heath, D and Heath, C (2007) Made to Stick, Random House, USA
Heath, R (2001) The Hidden Power of Advertising, NTC Publications, UK
Heath, R (2012) Seducing the Subconscious: The psychology of emotional influence
in advertising, Wiley-Blackwell, UK
James, W (1890) The Principles of Psychology, Macmillan and Co Ltd, UK
Jenkins, H (2006) Convergence Culture, New York University Press, USA
Jenkins, H (2013) Spreadable Media, NYU Press, USA
Johnson, S (2011) Where Good Ideas Come From, Riverhead Trade, reprint edition,
USA
Kahneman, D (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA
Klein, N (1999) No Logo, Knopf, Canada
Lehrer, J (2009) How We Decide, Mariner Books, reprint edition, USA
Levitt, S and and Dubner, S (2005) Freakonomics, William Morrow, USA
FURTHER READING 219
Macknik, S, Martinez-Conde, S and Blakeslee, S (2011) Sleights of Mind: What the

neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions, Picador, reprint
edition, UK
McCracken, G (2009) Chief Culture Officer, Basic Books, first trade paper edition
(2011) USA
McCracken, G (2012) Culturematic, Harvard Business Review Press, USA
Morgan, A (2009) Eating the Big Fish, Wiley, UK, USA
Ogilvy, D (1985) Ogilvy on Advertising, Vintage, USA
Pavitt, J (2014) Brand New, V&A Publishing, new edition, UK
Pine, J and Gilmore, J (2011) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business Review
Press, USA
Schacter, D (1996) Searching For Memory, Basic Books, USA
Schwartz, B (2004) The Paradox of Choice, Harper Perennial, USA
Shirky, C (2010) Cognitive Surplus: How technology makes consumers into
collaborators, Penguin Group, USA
Stephenson, N (1995) The Diamond Age, Bantam Spectra, USA
Thaler, R and Sunstein, C (2008) Nudge, Yale University Press, USA
Warhol, A (1975) The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
Harvest, USA
Watts, D (2012) Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer, Crown
Business, USA
Wolf, M (2003) The Entertainment Economy, Crown Business, USA
Papers
Binet, Les and Field, Peter (June 2009) [accessed 25 November 2014] Empirical
Generalisations about Advertising Campaign Success [Online] http://farisyakob.
typepad.com/files/binet-field-ipa-databank-empirical-generalizations-about-
advertising-campaign-success.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/44NU-UG6H)
Bullmore, Jeremy (2002) [accessed 25 November 2014] Posh Spice & Persil: The
Value of Fame [Online] http://www.wpp.com/wpp/marketing/branding/articles-
poshspice/ (archived at https://perma.cc/Q6DZ-7P9U)
Feldwick, Paul [accessed 25 November 2014] Exploding the Message Myth [Online]
http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1015 (archived at https://perma.cc/
7TAG-8S9Y)
Glasgow, RDV (1995) Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An essay on comedy, Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, USA
Jenkins, Henry (6 November 2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] Eight Traits of the
Emerging Media Landscape [Online] http://henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_
traits_of_the_new_media.html (archived at https://perma.cc/XAC6-HNHP)
220 FURTHER READING
Kirby, Alan (2006) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Death of Postmodernism and
Beyond [Online] https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_
And_Beyond (archived at https://perma.cc/P2NU-8MPX)
Klages, M [accessed 25 November 2014] Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Structural Study
of Myth [Online] http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/
levi-strauss.html (archived at https://perma.cc/9JL2-VWKX)
Lethem, Jonathan (February 2007) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Ecstasy of
Influence: A Plagiarism [Online] https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-
of-influence/ (archived at https://perma.cc/AEE2-WW6Q)
Levitt, Theodore (July 2004) [accessed 25 November 2014] Marketing Myopia,
Harvard Business Review [Online] hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia/ar/1
(archived at https://perma.cc/EP5J-AH4D)
Wegner, Daniel M (February 2003) [accessed 25 November 2014] The Mind’s Best
Trick – How We Experience Conscious Will [Online] https://scholar.harvard.edu/
files/dwegner/files/minds_best_trick.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/UAJ9-
VJQQ)
Resources
The World Advertising Research Council (WARC) hosts all the IPA Effectiveness
award papers – and lots of other research besides
INDEX
NB: page numbers in italic indicate figures or tables
3 (network) 14 attention, defining 8, 173

3G 164 ‘attention economy’ 5, 171
4As Decisions 20/20 Event 56 Attention Economy, The 187, 188
118-118 53, 132 attention intensity 173–75, 174
attention spans 169–70
A&F Pears 54–55 ‘attentive seconds per thousand impressions’
Abrams, JJ 53 (APM) 186–87, 187
Accenture 129 Audi 52
Adams, Douglas 74 ‘authentic fake’, the 115
ad blockers 63 authenticity 21–22
advertising, derivation of word 4, 76 ‘shadows’ 21
Advertising Effect, The 21 awe, creating 59
Affleck, Ben 133 A-Z game 111
AIDA model 9, 28, 29
AKQA 130 Banksy 101–02, 105
Aldrin, Bizz 156 Barbarian Group 75
Alibaba 19 Barratt, Thomas J 54–55
All Advantage 57 Bartle Bogle Hegarty 51
Alphabet 16 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 103
alternating attention 173 Baudrillard, Jean 97, 115
Amara’s Law 127 Baumgartner, Felix 93
Amazon 19, 151 Baxter, Mat 56
digital advertising spend 62 BBDO 113
fake reviews 137 BBH 133
Kindle subscription service 76 Beckham, Victoria (Posh Spice) 104
Ambi Pur 122 ‘behavioural economics’ 29–30
Amex 164 Being Digital 77, 190
AMV BBDO 49 Belkin 137
amygdala 46 Berger, Jonah 59
Anderson, Chris 156 Bernard Shaw, George 109
Apple 19, 141 Bernbach, Bill 153
contradictions, resolving 22 Bezos, Jeff 151
stealing 107 Big Brother 21
‘apple’ game 110 Big Idea 146
Arduino 75 Binet, Les 164
Ariely, Dan 37–38, 136 Birk, Tom 163
Aristotle 5, 99 Blair Witch Project 52
art, creation of 100–04 Blogger 4
Art Director’s Club awards 124 Bloomberg 78
Art of War, The 131 Blyk 57
association of ideas 99 BMW 142, 155–56
astroturfing 21 Boase, Martin 70
AT&T 19 Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP) 70
Attention Council 185 Body Shop 21
attention deficit disorder (ADD) 6 Bogart, Leo 11
222 INDEX
Bogusky, Alex 163, 164 contradictions, resolving 22

‘borrowing’ interest 55–56 happiness, acts of 94
Box, George 31 scale, utilizing 93
Boyd, Danah 69 cocktail party effect 8
brainstorming 113 Cognitive Surplus 130
brand behaviour toolkit 119 Coke 165
brand, defining 11, 16, 17 Collin, Will 109
collective perception, role of 17 Columbia Broadcast Service (CBS) 3
branded utility 141 communication, effect of 6–7
‘brandgrams’ 23, 4 Confessions of an Advertising Man 171
brand valuation 18–20 confirmation bias 179
BrandZ report 18 congruency effect 179
Brave 63 Consumer.ology 31
briefing 152–55 consumer generated content 88
briefing toolkit 154, 155 consumption platforms 76–77
Briggs, Gemma 175 content creation, democratization of 4
Brin, Sergey 13 content monetization 78–79
Budweiser 132 Convergence Culture 134
Bullmore, Jeremy 17, 104 cost per thousand attentive seconds (CPM)
Burberry 12 187–88, 188
Burger King 164–66, 167 covert attention 8
Burt, Ronald 100 CPB 164
Crawford, Matthew 172
Cabral, Juan 39–40 creative process toolkit 109–12
Cadbury’s 56 creative tenacity 113–14
Cale, John 102 Crispin Porter + Bogusky 22, 163
Camel 3 crowdfunding 79
Campaign awards 124 Cruickshank, Alfred 105
Campfire 52 cultural latency 138–39, 146
Cannes International Advertising Festival cumulative advantage 80
75 ‘Curators of Sweden’ 123
Carlin, George 71 curiosity 52–53
Carroll, Dave 35–36, 37 customer service 35–37
case study toolkit 125–26
Centre for Humane Technology 176 Dare 91
Chaldecott, Alex 51 data privacy 176
change blindness 9, 50 Davies, Russell 62
change blindness blindness’ 50 Da Vinci, Leonardo 5
Chase, Robin 156 DDB 164
Chevy’s 147 Decaux, Jean-Claude 171
Chiat, Jay 108 Deloitte 129
choice, paradox of 46–47 demand-side platforms 61
Christensen, Clayton 128 Dennett, Daniel 145
Chuku, Yusuf 132 Diamond Age, The 63
Cillit Bang 117 digital video recorder (DVR) 63
Cinder 75 divided attention 173
Circle, The 76, 115 Doctorow, Cory 80
Clarke, Arthur C 89 Domino’s 149
Clio awards 124 Doritos 92–93
Cloverfield 53 double jeopardy 20
Coca-Cola 19, 64, 165 Dove 21, 22, 146
brand effect, the 36–37 Droga5 129
brandemes 13 Dyson, Esther 5
consumer control 118
INDEX 223
Earls, Mark 30 Gandhi, Mohandas 138

Eating the Big Fish 22, 113 GEICO 56
Ebola Communications 54 Genius Steals 105
echopraxia 133 Getin Noble Bank 75
effective communication toolkit 121–23 Gibson, William 75
Effie awards (Effies) 121–23 Gillette 11
Eggers, Dave 76, 115 Gladwell, Malcolm 38
Ehrenberg, Andrew 20 Global Broadcast Survey 79
Eliot, T S 105, 106 Global Trust in Advertising Survey 56
Elkington, Tim 173 Godin, Seth 63
engagement model of advertising 42, 43 Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
ethnography 32 122
Everything is Obvious Once You Know the ‘golden rule’, the 7
Answer 80 goldfish, attention span of 169–70
expectancy violation 51–52 Goldman, William 80
Expion 136 Goodhart’s Law 189
Google 4, 19, 156, 177
fabulation 9 consumer input, leveraging 118
Facebook 5–6, 19, 57, 115, 141, 180 contradictions, resolving 22
ad dwell time 187 data, value of 57
content digital advertising spend 62
content strategy on 140 Google Alerts 136
filtering algorithms 58, 151 Google Home 165
digital advertising spend 62 moonshots 122
endorsements by friends 37 myth, brand as 13, 15–16
engagement on 142 search volume 151
phatic communication 135 Solomon, Ken 103
research on 34 Gossage, Howard 171
Trump, Donald 162 Graves, Philip 31, 32–33
Fallon 39 Green, Lawrence 39
Febreze 122 Grey 130
Feldwick, Paul 16, 33, 150 gross ratings points (GRPs) 61
Ferrier, Adam 21 Guinness Book of Records 81
Fiat Eco-Drive 75 Gunn, Donald 123
Fitzgerald, Niall 27
Fleets 142 Harris, Josh 116
focused attention 173 Harris, Tristan 176
focus groups 28 Hatton, Rachel 143
Follett, Mike 161 Heath, Robert 33, 42–43
Food, Inc. 70 Henry, Steve 152
Fooled by Randomness 45 Hewlett-Packard (HP) 67–68
Ford 102, 138 Heyer, Steve 64
Four Lions 79 Hicks, Bill 71
Foursquare 156 Hidden Persuaders, The 43
Fox, Kate 111 Hillis, Danny 74
‘freemium’ 78 Hills, The 148
Freud, Sigmund 28 Ho, Adrian 94
Friendster 135 Honda 22
functional magnetic resonance imaging Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL)
(fMRI) 32 51, 152
How We Decide 98
Gage, Phineas 46 Hsieh, Tony 36
Gallup, Cindy 70 Hulu 68
galvanic skin response 32 Huntingdon, Richard 153
224 INDEX
Huntingford, Felicity 170 Letterman, David 39

HyperIsland digital school 91 Levi’s 12, 104
‘hyperreality’ 115 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 13, 22
Levitt, Theodore 128
IBM 19, 64 liminal spaces 112–13
Imagine: How Creativity Works 113 LINK testing 32
Implicit Association Test 32 Locke, John 97, 99–100
impressions 61–62 London International awards 124
inattentional blindness 9, 49 ‘low attention processing’ 42–43
incrementality 188 Lucky Strike 3–4
Initiative Media 56 Lumen 161, 186
innatism 99 Lynx (Axe) 67, 133
Innocent Drinks 13, 21
innovator’s dilemma 128 Machado, Fernando 164–66, 167, 168
Instagram 6, 135 Machiavelli, Niccolò 101
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising ‘Marketing Myopia’ 128
(IPA) 33–34 market research 29
integrated marketing communications as marketing 34–35
(IMC) 63 claimed data, value of 30, 31–32
Intel 58, 68 flaws in 27–28, 29
Interactive Advertising Bureau 62 Marlboro 14, 19
‘invisible gorilla’ test 49 Maroon 5 93
IPSOS Veracity Index 56 Marx, Groucho 153
IT 165 Maslow’s hierarchy 11
Massinger, Philip 105
James, William 8 Mastercard 19
Jenkins, Henry 58, 134, 135, 137 Mayer, Marissa 156
Jobs, Steve 107 MCBD 91
job titles, advertising 74 McCracken, Grant 135
Johnson, Stephen 98 McDonald’s 19, 165–66, 167
Jung von Matt 90 McLuhan, Marshall 42
J Walter Thompson 130 Mechanical Turk 137
‘media meshing’ 65
Kahneman, Daniel 29, 34 Media Planning Pyramid 182
Kaufman, Charlie 115 Media Pyramid 180, 181
Kay, Alan 145 Mediation Generation, the 115
Kay, Gareth 153 meditation 177
KeepVid 78 mere exposure effect 51, 163
Kelly, Kevin 130 metaphor 99, 109
Khan Academy 78 Michelin Guide 81
Kirby, Alan 117 Microsoft 19, 171
Klein, Naomi 12, 15 ‘Attention Spans’ 169
Knight, Phil 15 Bing 15
Kodak 22, 128 Hotmail 15–16
Kraft 146 Milton, John 5
Kunz, Ben 43 Mlodinow, Leonard 28
Kutcher, Ashton 95 Monroe, Marilyn 103
KWTO 3 Monty, Scott 138
Moore, Gordon 58
Lanier, Jaron 178 Moore’s Law 58, 87
Lasswell, Harold 6 Morgan, Adam 22, 113
Lehrer, Jonah 98, 113 Morris, Chris 79
Leibniz, Gottfried 5 Morrissey 105
Lennon, John 12 Motion Picture Association of America
Leno, Jay 147 (MPAA) 78
INDEX 225
motivated reasoning 170 Panic Attack 87

Mustafa, Isaiah 146 Paradox of Choice, The 47
Myspace 135 paronomasia (puns) 76
myth, brand as 11–16 ‘pattern matching’ 110
brandemes 13, 14 ‘peak attention’ 161, 172
complexity, embracing 14 Pears soap 54–55, 132
contradictions, resolving 22 Pepsi 13, 21, 165
mythemes 13 brand effect, the 37–38
Pepsi TEN project 89
Nadella, Satya 171 Percolate 140
Naked Communications 103, 109 permission marketing 63
National Broadcast Company (NBC) 3 Persil 22
NBCUniversal 132 personalization strategies 43
negativity bias 179 Peters, Tom 11
Negroponte, Nicholas 77, 190 PG Tips 56
Nelson-Field, Karen 187, 188, 189 ‘phasic alert’ 175
Netflix 57, 83 phatic communication 135
Nike 15 Philips 65, 75
contradictions, resolving 22 Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The 104
Nike+ 129–30 physiological response testing 32
unconscious variables, impact of 31 Picasso, Pablo 102, 105
Nikon 137 Pirate Inside, The 113
Nikon Film Festival 95–96 Plank, Kevin 163
Nissan 155 platform-agnostic content 64–65
nodding, power of 38–40 platform, definitions of 90, 94–96
No Logo 12 Poke London 103
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible Pollard, Mark 150
162 Pomerantsev, Peter 162
New York Times Pop Art movement 102–03
TBrand Studio 82 postmodernism 105–07, 116–17
Predictably Irrational 37, 136
O’Connor, Neil 63 Presley, Elvis 103
O’Keefe, John 133 Prince, The 101
Obama, Barack 74 Principles of Psychology, The 8
Obeidallah, Dean 162 problem statement 109
Ogilvy, David 71, 82, 167, 171 Procter & Gamble (P&G) 11, 20, 22, 44
Old Spice 146 programmatic media buying 61
Oliver 143 ‘prosumers’ 107
Oliver, Jamie 48 proverbs 7
ONE CLUB 129 Pseudo 116
One Show, The 124 pseudo-modernism 117–19
OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) 167 psychoanalysis 28
Oreo 122 Publicis Omnicom merger 82
Orwell, George 162 ‘purchase funnel’ 9, 28, 29, 45
Osborn, Alex 113
‘outcrossing’ 110 quality cost per thousand (qCPM) 189
‘outspiration’ 109 Queensland Tourism 75
overt attention 8 Quiet 116
Owen, John 91
Ozark Mountain Jubilee 3 radian 6, 136
rationality, error of 33–34
Pabst Blue Ribbon 3 Read, Mark 130
Packard, Vance 43 reciprocity 7
Page, Larry 13, 16 Reckitt Benckiser 82
Paid, Owned and Earned Media (POEM) 135 recombinant thinking 100, 107, 110–11
226 INDEX
Recording Industry Association of America solidarity goods 7, 58

(RIAA) 78 Solomon, Ken 103
Red Bull somatic marker hypothesis 46
creativity, fostering 68 Sony 39–40
market research, value of 31 sponsorship 3–4
Stratos 93, 164 Spotify 78
Reels 142 Starbucks 13, 22
REI 164 Steel, Jon 147
ResultSource 81 Stephenson, Neal 63
Reynolds, David 27 Stonyfield 70
Robbins, Apollo 7 stopped clock illusion 50
Rushkoff, Douglas 54, 88 Stranger Things 76
Russian media 162 stress 180
Stross, Charles 176
Saatchi & Saatchi London 153 Subliminal 28
Sacred Wood, The 105 Sun Tzu 131
‘sadvertising’ 21–22 Swindells, Anthony 185
Sainsbury’s 48–49 Synecdoche, New York 115
Salon 68 Sysomos 136
‘satisficing’ 47 System 1 175
scale, delivering 92–93 System 1 and 2 thinking 34
Schacter, Daniel 23
Schmidt, Eric 4, 118 Taleb, Nassim 45
Schwartz, Barry 47 Tate Modern 103
Scott, Barry 117 TBWA 51
Searching for Memory 23 technology, meaning of 74
Searle, John 17 Tencent 19
‘second screen’ 65 Tesco 101
Seinfeld, Jerry 170 Thinking, Fast and Slow 34
selective attention 173 Threadless 79
Selvadurai, Naveen 156 Tide detergent 20–21
Shakespeare, William 3, 108, 111 TikTok 6, 115, 135, 142
Shirky, Clay 5, 87, 130 remixing culture 107
‘Shirky principle’ 130 Tipping Point, The 38
Shocking History of Advertising, The 54 TiVo 141
Shy Tory Factor 30 Toffler, Alvin 107
Simons, Daniel and Chabris, Christopher Toyota 109
49 Trident 148
Six Degrees 80 Trivedi, Harsh 178
smartphones 184 Trump, Donald 162, 163
Smell and Taste Foundation 31 trust in advertising 56, 88, 135
Snapchat 135, 172 ‘trustmarks’ 48
social media 34–35, 134–35, 151 Truth, Lies and Advertising 147
anxiety 178 Tumblr 134
‘corporate firewall’, the 36, 37 Turner, E S 54
filtering algorithms 58 TVision 186
phatic communication 135 Twitter 5, 93, 115, 134, 135, 148, 172
‘reversing the polarity’ 148–49 ‘corporate firewall’, the 36
short-form video 142–43 ‘Curators of Sweden’ 123
social grammar 136 customer complaints on 137
social return on investment (ROI) 83 Nikon Film Festival 95
social toolkit 136–38 searches 136
social TV 147–48 social TV 148
social reality 17–18 Trump, Donald 162
INDEX 227
‘twysteria’ 139 We Live in Public 116

Vine 142 Wheaton, Ken 36
Wheat Thins 148
UC 63 Where Good Ideas Come From 98
Under Armour 163 Wieden+Kennedy (W&K) 62
Unilever 27, 56 Wilde, Oscar 105, 116
United Airlines 35–36 Wired 130, 156
‘urban spam’ 62 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17
user experience design 92 Wood, Orlando 175
Woolf, Virginia 115
value-added communication 66–69 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 90
Van Damme, Jean Claude 75 WPP 130
Veksner, Simon 124 Wunderman 130
Veronica Mars 79 Wunderman Thompson 130
Vice 68
‘viewability’ 185–86, 187 Yahoo! 156
virality 53–54 Yakob, Laith 42, 54
Virgin 22, 92 Yakob, Rosie 68, 147
Visa 19 Young & Rubicam 130, 168
VML 130 YouTube 6, 134
VMLY&R 130, 132 attention 7
volition 29 content, charging for 78
Volkswagen 118 ‘Happiness Machine’ 94
Volvo 75 ‘Old Spice Response’ 146
‘Panic Attack’ 87
Wal-Mart 70, 137 ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ 22
Warhol, Andy 101, 102–04 Red Bull Stratos 93
Waste Land, The 106 ‘United Breaks Guitars’ 35–36
Watching the English 111
Watts, Duncan 54, 80 Zappos 37
Webb Young, James 99, 108 Zeus Jones 94
Weed, Keith 56 Zipcar 156
Wegner, Daniel 29 Zuckerberg, Mark 37, 137
Weil, Simone 60

Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising For A Digital World (2021)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising For A Digital World (2021)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PRAISE FOR PAID ATTENTION 2 nd EDITION

‘The most useful, entertaining and insightful examination of communi­

© Faris Yakob, 2015, 2022

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Hong Kong FIVE Workshop, Hong Kong

List of toolkits viii

Introduction: Paid attention – how much is it worth? 3

01 Logocentrism: What’s in a name? 11

02 Uncovering hidden persuaders: Why all market research is

03 Advertising works in mysterious ways: Modern theories of

The paradox of choice 46

04 Is all advertising spam? Communication planning in an

05 The spaces between: The vanishing difference between

06 Do things, tell people: How to behave in a world of infinite

07 Recombinant culture: Talent imitates, genius steals 97

08 Combination tools: How to have ideas:

09 Advertising for advertising: Is the industry paying

10 Integrative strategy and social brands: Be nice or leave! 127

11 Prospection: Planning for the future we want 145

12 Everything is PR 161

13 The quantity, quality, qualia and cost of attention 169

Epilogue: Talkin’ about your generation 190

How to have ideas: a genius steals 109

The above toolkits are available to download in pdf format at:

Rock ON, Faris

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

Are you paying attention to the attention being paid for?

as it had from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.3 This is something in

post, picture and video, on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok made by other

Attention is like water

Buying attention is a way to appear inside an existing channel that has

As James’s appeal to common knowledge suggests, attention could only be

This leads to the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, where you fail to

A – Attention: the prospective customer’s attention is attracted.

The rest of the book

Still paying attention? Then let’s go.

The great idea in advertising... is in the realm of myth.

It is perhaps surprising that, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) is willing to

via purchase or use or interaction with brand communication, which pro-

Brands are socially constructed ideas

A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.28

This is great because it reminds us that:

Brands... are made and owned by people... by the public... by consumers.29

This definition is part of the orthodoxy of advertising. It also led to a con-

The image of a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar,

A brand is a collective perception in the minds of consumers.

How much is that brand in the window?

For comparison, the 2020 study anointed the following:

This paints an interesting picture of recent shifts in culture, as technology

Persistently irrational behaviour

In 2012, investigators were trying to understand why supermarkets in the United

The dark side of brands

Attention deficit disorders

Uncovering hidden persuaders

No one really knows why humans do what they do.

If someone asked me... which half of my advertising is wasted I would

● We don’t know why we do what we do. We make these (and most)

Why do we do what we do? It’s a staggering question that humanity has

is quickly followed by its competitor, so tangible benefits, and the considera-

something rationally that operates on an unconscious, emotional level, is

● Observe actual behaviour: because claimed attitudes and intentions don’t

Somehow 30 seconds of entertaining nonsense leads to a situation where people

‘The most useful, entertaining and insightful examination of communi