Placebo morality

There was a fascinating article in Wired Magazine in August about the increasing potency of placebo.

On the face of it, that sounds like mad chatter: a pill that is little more than sugar increasing in efficacy? With no pharmacologically provable mode of action or reason why?

Physician: steel thyself. Drugs are not your only tools any more.

We could easily adduce philosopho-quackery commentary along similar lines to the author's conclusion, namely that: 'the brain is really clever' and 'we don't understand it all, Horatio'.

But that only adds fuel to the fire of pseudo-science, and as anyone with a Hotmail account will know, there are all too many opportunities to increase your penis size with a blue diamond pill made out of bits of dandelion and alsatian. Or worse.

At least, that was the reason I fled Hotmail for Gmail.

I digress. Because the thought I wanted to ponder in this post was not precisely about the above phenomenon, but about the moral conundrum of offering someone with a life-threatening condition a sugar pill.

Even in the face of (apparently) more placebo peculiarities like this one, when you're dealing with illnesses as serious as cancer there will still be a statistically significant number of people who will think they're being given a pill that could make them better, only for it (up until recently) to do bugger all.

The moral conundrum is made more difficult still when you compare people's willingness to take part in trials where placebos are given. This article, on a sample of women asked to be recruited to an HRT trial, suggests that - at least in situations that are not immediately life-threatening - willingness does indeed drop.

This is not just because of perceived risk to self, either, but also the sense that the altruistic and research purpose of the trial would somehow be less.

And all this is, to my mind at least, understandable. I just don't comprehend the fact that most trials are against placebo rather than an existing competitor drug - where you would at least have some hope of being treated.

It's not even as if proving yourself against sugar pills is as easy as it once was...

3rd March 2010 ADDITION: a interesting post on other Placebo morality issues - http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/03/placebo-effect-ethics-medical-treatment.html

Barometer dogs

I'm a big fan of alternative indicators.

About a decade ago, my Scottish economist friend and man of extremes, 'The Highlander', declared his favourite alternative economic indicator to be 'the number of cranes visible on the skyline of any given city'. The more cranes, the better the local economy.

This Monday, I spent the day at Pfizer's swanky Richard Rogers designed UK headquarters in Walton Oaks - which is its own village. Sod any of that being located in a village. Simply create one for yourself and use that fact, together with your sinuous, swirling, glass and steel atrium in main reception as an alternative indicator of your success.

On the way home just before 5pm I was main-lining some Radio 4 comfort listening in the car, and an article on 'dogs' cropped up, heralded by Loudon Wainwright squawking about how they're man's best friend.

Original, Loudon, thanks for that announcement.

But, despite an unusually poor turn from the sire of such a talented musical family, I've started liking dogs more in the past few months as I've been introduced to some really rather splendid critters who've proved beyond reasonable doubt that they're not all slobber, bark and fart...

...so I continued listening.

I was told that, since Tony Blair came to power in 1997, sales of cat food have overtaken those of dog food, with the inevitable conclusion that cats have overtaken dogs as the UK's most popular pet.

The reporter went on to discuss the hackneyed attributes of feline vs. canine; about how one will spurn you while the other will always be waiting for your return; how with one you never know where you stand whereas the other is yours for life.

He expanded out from there to observe (quite correctly, in my parents' view) that Labour, under Blair in particular, have been friends of the Town but not of the Country. Fans of fast and transient living rather spouses of long-baked traditions.

Take-away vs. casserole.

And from the above points he rapidly drew the inference that the decline in popularity of dogs is a direct indication of how we, under this Labour government, have abdicated our sense of long-term responsibility to faithful friends and chosen instead the independent, sleeker and more changeling ways of pretty young felines.

Dogs, he felt, were alternative indicators of a society that has lost its values. Slobber and all.

Polar bears and poor fundraising

This is a disturbing ad. And one that's garnering a lot of publicity today as the residents of Tunbridge Wells reach for their green ink and fashion numerous letters of complaint (365 to the ASA at last count) about animal cruelty and unnecessary violence.

Plane Stupid is a loose affiliation of climactically concerned individuals who want to stop excessive plane travel. They don't think the government is doing enough and so they're taking 'direct action' to stop it. 'Shocking' ads like these are a pretty good way of getting their point across.

You get the picture.

But what annoys me most is the utter lack of thought that's been given to the 'what happens next' bit. The fundraising bit. The pay-off. The proposition. The call to action.

Call it what you will.

So here I am, potentially sharing their concerns about plane travel, and so I find out who they are and go to their website. All very logical stuff. So TV ad has, if you like, worked. I'm happy to be one of those people for whom this works; someone who's not so turned off by the violence that I jam my fingers in my ears, cover my eyes, sing la la la and do nothing (and there'll be plenty of those).

Once I get there I naturally want to find out what they do. The 'about us' bit shows them waving a big banner of protest. Fine, I get that. They do protests. They do 'direct action' as well, which is a bit murkier and smacks of 'Fathers for Justice'.

But what should I, as a concerned individual, be expected to do - and why?

This is where the stupidity resides. Because they ask me to take a leap of faith. In their words:

'So we're asking for your money, which we'll spend on an action next spring, to remind them that we won't take their airport expansion plans lying down'

Now, hang on, you're not even going to tell me what this action is?! I've come this far and all you can be bothered to do in return for asking for my cash is promise 'an action' sometime next year?

What will it be? Another banner? A protest? More polar bear ads? How much do they cost? I've no idea.

Sorry, not good enough. Marketing - and fundraising - 'fail'.

If you're going to create a stir, at least make sure you've got a reasonable opportunity for people to side with you and do something meaningful.

Otherwise you might as well be a bunch of con artists, trying to extort cash from us on the flimsiest of premises. (Now there's an idea.)

Or is the mere fact that it's been 'on telly' enough to legitimise you? Hmm. Maybe that's what you're relying on.

I wish I could have written this in green ink...

Lipstick on pigs

I like this ad, but then it's hard not to: friendly music, beautiful people, dramatic landscape, emotive subject, touch of humour yada yada yada. Oh, and it's made in Argentina, so there's that Latin sense of flair we can allude to should we want to wallow in the backstory.

I found out about it from this site. They send me an email each week and occasionally I deign to take a peek at their proffering. And the reason I don't usually bother is the reason for this blog entry.

See, I reckon it's piss easy to make ads about chewing gum. You've got thousands of metaphors in the bank to draw on; you've got the obvious 'mouth' imagery to resort to; buying a stick of it isn't going to bankrupt you, and to the best of my knowledge, there are very few chewie manufacturers involved in sub-Saharan oil deals, military coups, drug denial, or who test their products on fluffy white bunnies.

Oh, hang on, maybe I'm being a bit unfair. Because someone in the last couple of years did make a chewing gum ad that courted controversy - remember the one about the Afro chap with a loud-haler? Apparently there were complaints to the ASA because he was being a bit racially stereotypical or somesuch nonsense. (I would link to the ad here but I can't remember the brand name, and YouTube don't seem to think that the search terms 'chewing gum ad afro loud-haler' are specific enough to conjure it up.)

Anyway, back to the point in question. The job of advertising can be described in as many ways as there are marketers alive, but the definition I'm going to use today is along the lines of: dramatising a brand's particular feature in a way that increases its audience's propensity to, at some stage, buy it.

So, well done, Topline, you've suggested that if you chew this gum it will make you so kissable that heaven and earth won't be able to pry you from your lover. And we've kind of enjoyed seeing this happen because it appeals to lots of emotions and senses - and that's why you've been awarded an average of 4.73 out of 5 by the voting public.

That, by the way, is a very high score.

Try achieving that with an ad about flu. Or cheap insurance (with the notable Meerkat exception). Or, in my case, ads about weird and wonderful diseases and drugs (usually ridden with side-effects, and costing a billion times more than a stick of chewing gum).

My point is that when you ask the public whether they like an ad, or reckon it's any 'good', they'll almost always go with the ads that involve humour, sex, big images, romance, aspirational and beautiful couple and so on. So if the product feature that you're dramatising is a 'nice taste' or 'fresher breath' then you've got a lot of potential stories and metaphors at your creative fingertips.

I doubt very much whether Top 5 Ad Forum will ever include a press ad about cures for pig diahorrea, growth hormone injections or replacement hips.

All subject matters are not created equal.

A challenge for us in the pharma marketing industry, maybe, but also an indictment on the easy job that 'Top 5' has.

And that's why I don't bother visiting the site that much: it's all pretty predictable.

The pursuit of happyness

I originally thought I’d use the above image only really for the film's name, and the fact that it suits this post’s thought, namely defining happiness.

But the more I remembered about the film, the more I felt it was appropriate. See if you agree...

I was listening to Evan Davis interview Warren Buffett on the Today programme a few days ago, and peppered within the discussion of his immense wealth were several aphorisms regarding happiness. Not a massively new tack to take, that of money vs. happiness, but never mind just this once.

The quotation I remembered was from Buffett, citing Bertrand Russell: ‘Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get’.

Not a new thought either, but, I felt, succinctly captured.

So much of what we (or, at least I) do is for the thrill of the chase. The end in itself may be totally benign or understandable, but do we really want what lies post-challenge?

This could apply to the chasing of ladies (a splendidly noble pastime) or, equally, the chasing and nailing of a business deal (less noble, but kind of necessary from time to time).

This is probably a more personal reflection on the way I’ve lived my life to date, but it’s been occupying my mind a little too much for comfort this week.

Discussing the concept with local sage-esse Alison, she said that Buddhists would make the distinction between pleasure and happiness. Sometimes the latter doesn’t always involve the former as regularly as we’d perhaps like, but there’s something intrinsically more worthwhile in pursuing it anyway.

We wondered whether these could be plausibly split short-term / long term; tactical / strategic.

Maybe.

So all of this led me to the conclusion that I’m a bit too motivated by success and pleasure right now. Do I really know what I want that will ultimately make be happy? Does it exist, or should we just try to achieve as un-broken a series of pleasures as possible?

Does it always resolve itself in having kids and a settled life? To what extent should one compromise on the partner one chooses / chooses you? Dammit, should one even compromise, or is it necessary to achieve the kids / settled-ness bit?

Metaphorically buggered if I know, but the fact that the thought won’t leave is probably a hint in itself.

The art of travel

I was reminded of the tagline of this Eurostar ad while journeying arounf Switzerland over the last couple of days: You carry your journey with you.

The campaign ran about three years ago, from memory, and although TBWA's execution of the ad is up for debate (as, frankly, are all ads; sod it, as is anything), the tagline stayed in my mind.

At the time I thought it sounded a terribly whimsical idea; I mean, you don't do that literally, and, although I'd travelled quite a bit, I'd never really thought about how the 'moving' bit affected the rest of my day.

And maybe it's a sign of getting older, or having to get on a plane every other week, but the insight behind it has finally struck me as totally accurate. Journeys are tiring - not the moving, but certainly the queueing - and it does affect your frame of mind for the meeting you're about to have or the extent to which you can be scintillating company over dinner.

But I think that I finally cracked it on this trip: I managed not to let the travelling encumber me too much. And here's why:

1. Leave a few minutes earlier for each connection or meeting; for someone who considers himself relatively skilled in the Art of Brinkmanship, this was a real change of strategy, but it made me a lot less sweaty on arrival.

2. Collect pretty notes: I now have a collection of about 5 different currencies in my wallet, so don't have to worry about finding a cash point or someone not accepting cards.

3. Go native - even if only for a sentence: I've mastered a few throwaway lines in French and German (and they didn't have these in Baudelaire crit essays at university) so I can actually make a cabbie or hotel porter crack a smile in some local argot.

4. I keep laptop, novel and Economist with me at all times - so can flick between them according to mood. It's important to indulge yourself a bit, and just because it's work time doesn't mean you're always in the right mood for worky-work. You did get up extra early, after all...

5. Spotify: I salute you: new tunes, on the iPhone, no download needed, reflecting mood changes instantly.

6. Wheeled cases: zero backache, but make sure you're listening to music to avoid hearing the swearing as people trip over your extended rear footprint.

7. Near universal WiFi at airports. Perfect for updating blogs, as I'm doing in Geneva International right now, and slightly less Byzantine in the log-on process than was the case in days of yore.

8. Perfecting the belt / liquid / laptop / shoe / coin removal at security. It's about as enjoyable as a jab in your inner ear, but try to take some Schadenfreude in watching those who get all flustered / a good groping from the men in gloves. Whatever it takes to find some inner Zen.

9. Don't get up from your plane seat until most people have left the craft: you'll be standing with your neck crooked longer than you think as some inept staff member tries to line up the step mechanism with the door. This does not, however, apply to JFK airport where you need to forget all politeness and dash out as fast as possible to avoid losing vital years of your life at immigration.

10. Play Matt Hindley's Escalator Game: you've got until you reach the top of your escalator to decide which girl you'd most like to sleep with on the escalator going down. Leave it too late and you'll be saddled with the last one you see. Serious game, that.

Right, am off to the boarding gate...

Temporary utility

Above you'll see two iPhone apps:

- one from Carling, the famous 'iPint' that used the motion sensor and hi-res graphics of the iPhone to make a simple game that most people seemed to download as a way of showcasing the phone's capabilities

- and one from Spotify, the internet music service that allows you to listen to whatever you want for free (with ads) or for a tenner month with no ads at all. Now available as an iPhone app, it recognises your username and picks up where you left off listening to music on any other computer you were signed into.

Both very clever, both capturing the 'technische Zeitgeist', and both offering a degree of 'utility', as economists might say.

It's this U-word that I'd like to think about, albeit briefly. Thing is, Spotify is changing the way I listen to music. I don't have to clog up my laptop memory with songs any more, I don't have to pay a penny more than £9.99 a month for all the music I could ever want to listen to.

And the fact that it's an app on my iPhone means I'll probably use it way into the future. It's got massive utility - in every sense.

I also had the iPint as an app for a while. I don't any longer. it wasn't bad - in fact, I got a lot of laughs out of it and felt slightly more impressed with Carling as a result (although I didn't rush out and buy their lager, weak piss that it is). It's just had its day, that's all.

Its utility was short lived, and as brands experimenting with apps, maybe that's all we should aim for right now.

Do it well, but accept that very few brands have a right - or even the ability - to achieve long term utility as an application.

OR ... do we do as the Nikes of this world have done and invest in a long term utility platform?

Whatever the weather, to approach branded apps either takes commitment or the acceptance that, at best, your app will probably generate a short-term buzz and then be forgotten about as the choice widens and deepens.

The rougher the better

Unless you've been living in a cave without wifi for the last few months, you've probably seen and maybe even smirked at the proliferation of rough sketches, mostly rude, that succinctly send up aspects of our increasingly technological and politically correct society.

I suspect that these will, in the style of Family Guy, become more risque as time goes by and the appetites of their fans become whetted for ever more dangerous or obscure humour.

But it does strike me that this cartoon strip sketch genre, having featured in daily newspapers for so many years, has upped its game with the likes of Modern Toss and Cyanide and Happiness. They're, to my mind, a whole load funnier and more pointed than some of the strips you see in Metro or The Mirror, which seem drab even without comparison.

And the joy of the obscure, chillingly and scratchily explored by David Shrigley, is the perfect antidote to the annoyingly perfect corporate images we're used to seeing.

And websites such as www.b3ta.com continue to be brilliant in sending them all up.

And maybe that's just it: we like these quick, rough, insightful images precisely because it's not what we're used to seeing.

They hit on a truth, and with the minimum of effort succeed in conveying a thought.

In which case, we're really missing a trick in advertising. If the fundamental tactic we use is disruption, then we're not half as good as disrupting as we might like to think. We spend more time perfecting things so that they blend in with every other perfect image and feel far removed from stuff that really matters.

Why not be a bit rough? Why do they want to look all mendaciously sleek? Let's face it, most of them don't answer the phone or give good customer service, so in truth they're pretty damn flawed in any case.

When Joel Veitch was commissioned by Mastercard to produce the Switch/Maestro ads a few years back, I really hoped that they would usher in an era of less perfect ads. They were memorable precisely because they were a bit weird and unexpected.

Oh well.

The consumer is STILL not a moron

Brand Republic today features an article on David Ogilvy by the ever-articulate George Parker. The former's famous saying is 'The consumer is not a moron, she's your wife', and never has this been more pertinent.

Three things made me realise this in a moment of happy coincidence yesterday...

First, the ever-sharing Craig O'Brien forwarded me a link to this presentation - a whopping 237-slider on something called Post Digital Marketing - and, whilst I've only made it through the first 100 or so slides, there's a wealth of quotability going on there.

Most notable was this one: 

'As the air around our citizens thickens with unwanted messages and interruptions, the goal should not be to add to this unwantedness, but to create deliberate and appreciated value'.

Too right! Why on earth should anyone give a shit about more 'me too' nonsense? And yet, that's what the vast majority of clutz-headed advertisers do, mistakenly opting to keep their heads below the parapet, tick some corporate boxes (of which 'innovation' rarely seems to be one) and rattle the bucket of swill just a little more loudly.

Second thing: a conversation with the ever-ranting Brian Dargan, whose view of the parapet is of sub-molecular proportions as he spits in the eye of convention at every turn. At a recent interview he had with a leading London ad agency, the Strategy Head there bemoaned a lack of real ideas - instead just a flow of identikit pedestrian ideas that fail to ignite even the most cursory of conversations.

Have we run out of ideas? Have they all been had? Or have all the ones in the 'traditional canon of shouty shouty advertising' been had and we're a bit nervous of omitting the big logos and headlines at every turn in favour of subtlety, warmth, art and value?

Why, oh why, do people think that 'doing more of what we've pretty much always done' is good advertising?

And the third was a David Ogilvy example pictured above: A Guinness ad that explains the difference between types of oyster. 

Does it patronise me? No, it's actually rather interesting. Does it beat me about the head, shouting at me to buy Guinness? No, instead it walks the walk of a brand I'd like to identify with because it is genuinely edifying; an intelligent brand.

Above all, I actually get something out of it. Oh, and I happen to associate Guinness with this value - and therefore like it all the more (especially with oysters).

And that was over 40 years ago - before the advent of interactive media that should, godammit, make it that much easier for brands to be useful. 

And yet all I hear in evidence of brands being useful now is Nike-fucking-Plus.

Come on. To those of who work in this fated / feted industry, I implore you: try to create one piece of advertising in your life that advances something of human value. 

It might just save the industry. And I may even be prepared to go client-side some day if that's what it takes.

Decisions based on favours

'Sure I'll sponsor you.'

'Yeah, your party sounds as though it could be a laugh. I'll swing by.'

'Reckon I should buy that one, really? The green velour one? Oh well, if you say so.'

It's just occurred to me, as my slothful mind ambles into action, that so many of the decisions we make are based on a cypher of the facts: people we know. We defer responsibility and take things as read.

We simply don't have the time to assess every situation according to what is, isn't, and could possibly be. So we make a decision based on someone else. 

Sometimes it's their advice. Sometimes it's just because it's them. We assume they've done the legwork already, or that they're worthy of our time and attention.

This occurred to me as I listen to an album by If Wen, who's a mate of mine. It's come onto my office speakers and I've actually managed to divorce the singer from the song. A few weekends ago I agreed to post the video on my blog and seed it in a few music forums. I did this as a friend, somewhat unquestioningly, as it seemed the 'right' thing to do.

But now, as I have a bit of time and space to exercise my critical faculties, I find myself wanting to evangelise a bit. 

I enjoyed having the time to make a decision myself that wasn't coloured by favour.

It's HR, stupid, not just IT

One day computers will rule the world and, should we want to, we'll all be allowed to go to that lovely looking island off Australia and put our feet up for 6 months - not just that lucky charity worker - safe in the knowledge that business is ticking along nicely at home.

Indeed, even our Facebook profiles will be run by robots - the future is already written here.

But until such a day, my digital friends, if you want your digital marketing to be any good then please, for the love of whichever flavour of god you care for, don't think that it will run itself.

If you really want your social media programme - that comprises the very best of blog-commenting, forum-influencing, content-distributing, tweet-chirping, video-mashing and app-seeding - to work, then it will take real people to roll up their sleeves and get busy with their ears and their keyboards.

Because computers really can't tell which places in the digisphere are truly worthy of our attention, and certainly can't respond suitably, and with tonal subtleties, to the conversations that are influencing opinions.

It's great that you've realised that banners and a monolithic website maketh not a digital marketing campaign (although they may tick the digital box in the eyes of your line manager if (s)he's really that stupid) ... 

...so for the time being, given we're all human, please try to invest in HR when you invest in IT.

Nobody knows anything

So said William Goldman of the entertainment industry, as he tried to sum up his experiences of Broadway and Hollywood. 

It's one of those phrases that is used time and weary time again (oh, and once more now), possibly because it can be read a number of ways - but possibly because it's usefully provocative.

According to my mate Brian Dargan (who's usually correct in these matters, I find) he meant that if the film industry knew which films were going to succeed, it wouldn't produce so many flops.

I'd like to use this phrase today to sum up where we're at with the plethora of digital stuff we're all trying to evaluate at the moment.

Here are some of the questions that nobody seems to know the answers to:

- Is Twitter worth the alleged $700m price Apple wants to pay? Will it ever be able to be monetised?

- What is good web design protocol? At a recent EFP conference in Munich, one of the senior guys at healthcare social network www.doctors.net.uk said of his site, and of Facebook, that the design mattered far less than the sheer volume of content contained within. Is he right? I know plenty of UX / IA guys who'd say no. They'd probably also counter the fact that he reckoned that Google's success wasn't down to the design of its homepage (I, for one, would argue that the simplicity propelled it into popularity far faster than if it had been as cluttered as Yahoo!, for instance).

- Speaking of Facebook, hundreds of thousands of people publicly grumble about the design refreshes it gets from time to time ... but most of us go on using it. And I, for one, tend to forget the last one quite quickly. Was it any better, or are we just pretty adaptable?

- What are the best ways for Pharma marketers (or 'communicators', to use the suggestion in my last post) to approach digital marketing? What should we do first? Blog? Tweet? Film?Listen? Respond? Build yet another sodding great website with reams of dull tiny print that no-one even visits? 

Are we sure? Are we hell. (Perhaps excepting the last one, it would seem.)

So instead we could use common sense, adduce some lessons from the past, pull in the few bits of data we may have, try to find some parallels with consumer examples, and away we go. 

Nobody knows much here and, as a result, most are too scared to try.

They just build another sodding great website instead. Or don't do anything.

My point to all of this? 

We'll never know everything (for a variety of philosophical reasons - see future post on Occam's Razor vs. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems).

But knowing something is about as good as we're going to get, and I'd implore the pharma industry (and the ABPI) to start with / sanction something rather than watch every other industry sector zoom past us in terms of modern communications effectiveness.

Many films may flop, but at least the entertainment industry keeps moving with the times.

When is a marketing agency not a marketing agency?

Perhaps when it's a communications agency.

What I mean is that as soon as one mentions the word 'marketing', people's defences go up. They feel (or at least I do) that there's a sub-text to everything marketers do.

Communications, in contrast, is far less threatening. I'd wager that more people accept the need for businesses and brands to communicate - after all, it might be about more innocuous activities than trying to take money and time from you.

Not only that, but a 'communications agency' immediately has more permission to talk to other functions of a client's business than just their marketing function.

Would people believe us if we were to say we could do this? I reckon so. After all, communications is a tricky business what with all the confusion that can get in the way of a perfect transferral of meaning from one person to another, and so anyone who can make things simpler and more easily digestible may well have a role.

And that's exactly what marketers do. But it's just rather too loaded and pigeon-holed a word.

Super 8 mystery

This is the new video from If Wen - a 'miserablist folk' singer who is a personal friend of mine, and whose music is, in my humble opinion, refreshingly good.

In some ways this is a shameless plug, but there are some genuine reasons why you might like to give this a few minutes of your time:

- My garden stars in it. The same garden that starred in the 1983 film The Jigsaw Man, with Michael Caine. So there's real pedigree there already.

- It's shot in Super 8, which gives it a stunning grainy quality, and even, I'm led to believe, a bit of Panavision. Pure 70's joy. Reminiscent of things with Felicity Kendal in them, and that's A Good Thing.

- There are bits of Chiswick House in there, with the rather elusive If Wen popping up in among its hedgerows.

- If Wen is also a bit of a star in his day job, but I've been told not to make that link too obvious - work it out yourself.

- And, speaking of working stuff out yourself, this is the first music video I've ever heard of that has a cryptic word game in it. No-one's worked it out to date - or even worked out why some of the letters are orange - but that's part of the interest value.

So there. Do yourself a favour, brighten up your day with a bit of 'Love Letters'. 

Mmm. Freshly brewed music. There's lovely for you.

Dead bodies

I'm 'penning' this from my seat outside the Bell and Crown in Strand on the Green. I have a sunny riverscape in front of me and a screaming child in my right ear. When I ran past here earlier the police had cordoned off the bit of the river by Kew Bridge as they were fishing out a corpse from the Thames.

Lovely river though it is, it serves as a watery grave for a surprisingly large number of people. We'll frequently hear the revving of boat engines late at night near Kew Railway Bridge next to our flats: bodies get tangled up around the bottom of the bridge pillars and it's the job of the RNLI and river police to extract the bloated mess.

Just a few years back, several dozen skulls were discovered in the 'Strand' bit of the river here. No-one really has a convincing reason why they were buried.

A bit of sunshine and a few ciders and it's easy to overlook the quotidien tragedies that flow past us.

There's cheery for you.


-- Post From My iPhone

21st Century Newswire

That's what Twitter is, I declare.

A Damascene moment a few days ago pointed me to Tweetdeck and the ability to pull together all the themes I'm interested in.

That plus the observation (thanks Robbie, Aimee, Craig) that this, by dint of the sheer volume of tweets, is primarily a listening medium. A listening medium with filters.

You can even conduct free polls on it: http://twtpoll.com/

We should contribute to make it a richer place, but that means removing all references to what we had for breakfast.

Now I can mix branded jounalism with citizen journalism and they can spar it out as to who gets the best stories first.

All I care about is being informed and entertained - and whoever does it best gets my vote.

If the technology of today gives an equal voice to all, then Twitter is the best platform we have to mix them up and cream off the best.

Churchill and iPhones

Finally got around to installing an iPhone app. From the comfort of the Churchill Arms in Notting Hill.

You're never alone with a iPhone, and it's really good to have a spare half hour - waiting for some friends and with nothing to read - to have a play around with App Store and find out what other techie wizardry there is that can make my life easier.

And not have Her Next Door upbraiding me for excessive device fiddling activity :-)

Attached: this pub has signs inside it. Surprisingly useful, especially as it's full of half-blind ex-military types today. Shame it's not in Braille.



-- Post From My iPhone

Bleeding eyes and industry-specific social marketing

Sorry folks, got to get some worky-worky things off my chest today.

Because it strikes me that there's no decent forum for pharma marketers to talk about digital media - or, more precisely, appropriate media given the market, the drug/device type, target audience etc. (after all, it's not just about digital however much my livelihood may depend on it).

Certainly nothing as useful as this one for Independent Financial Advisers: http://www.ifalife.com/

Woo hoo.

But I like the fact that it's crammed full of interesting articles that are well ordered, pertinent to the industry, and helps raise the collective bar of digital marketing.

Compare this site structure and content to the Pharma industry's highest Google-ranked forum: http://www.forums.pharma-mkting.com/showthread.php?t=1322

Frankly, it makes my eyes bleed.

There are plenty of learnings we can take from this comparison: structural, content, strategic approach, linking with social media … and these are all industry-based - not just personal / social!

Here endeth, etc etc.

Is Twitter rude?

I am frequently upbraided by Next Door Kate for using my iPhone too much in social situations.

Yup, it's so good that very often it's too tempting to dive into the various virtual yet social universes that this device offers to me by virtue of its being the #1 way of accessing the web.

But she does have a point: increasingly we're becoming permanently semi-connected. We don't all devote our attention to the task in hand, preferring instead to twiddle with our phones to check email, twitter, texts and so on.

It is, in many ways, plain rude.

But at a recent conference they asked for questions and contributions to the panel via Twitter. These were then posted on a 'Twitter Fall' app on the data projector and the best questions creamed off (so to speak).

Everyone in the room was head down, tapping away. But we got some good questions and some good banter going. Twitter made it easier for people to ask questions - it took away the embarrassment factor.

And that's got to be a good thing.

Oh - and no-one thought it was rude. Although it did feel like a totally different way of hosting a conference.

Back again - and here's a thought

'I kind of see what you mean' ... 'hmm, not sure I get you' ... 'nope, you've lost me'.

All phrases we're used to hearing in our British culture (whatever that is, and I actually wish people would stop bleating on about what it could possibly mean. Just shut up and be it for a while).

But - I digress - we only say those things because we're a bunch of people here in the western world who feel that the burden of making sure communication is achieved falls on the communicator rather than the receiver.

We accept that it's up to the person making a point to make it clearly otherwise we feel quite happy to ask them to repeat it, or switch off, or blame them if we don't 'get it'.

Japan, in contrast, is a country where the reverse is the case. The responsibility for achieving successful communication falls on the receiver, the hearer. If something's not clear, it's been your fault for not grasping the sense or the context.

Imagine how much easier the job of the advertiser would be if this were the case in our world...

Just because it looks right...

On the Today programme this morning Alistair Darling confidently said that the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in the States last year caused the financial crisis over there.

Well 'no', Darling. If I heard you correctly as my bathwater gurgled down the drain then this was not the cause of it. It was partly a result of it - and it happened it around the same time as things started to get really bad globally.

Similarly, most of my pharmaceutical clients keep on pouring money into various corporate websites and expensive sales rep materials - insiting that you need these if you're to have a successful drug.

Well, and I think there are a few people beginning to wake up to this now: NO. You just keep commissioning these marketing materials - and your drug sometimes does well. But one is not the cause of the other.

It's correlation at best.

You speak of ROI, Mr Client, but pretty much none of you has an idea of how to measure this. You really mean: 'does that sound a lot based on what we reckon we'll make from the drug'.

It's not even worthy of the term 'cost effective' because you don't have any end-to-end metrics in place to work out whether it was that cost that brought about the desired effect.

However, if my clients change their tune tomorrow I'd love to think that this blog post caused it.

How are you?

£1m per hour, or 10% of annual spend, is what the NHS is paying to treat diabetes and its complications, according to a BBC News article out yesterday.

Yikes that's a lot of cash. That's £24m per day. Or £8.8bn per year.

And that's just 10% of it.

So multiply it by 10 and the NHS budget is actually £88bn per year on this basis.

Although HM Treasury says that this figure is closer to £111bn.

UK GDP - a pretty good measure of how much money our economy generates each year - is estimated at just £1.4 trillion. Drilling down a bit further, total Government revenue in 2007/08 was 39.2% of this - or £548bn.

So the Government is currently paying out over 20% of ALL the money it receives from companies and individuals - many times over if you look at the combinations of direct and indirect taxes that we all end up paying on the goods and services we ultimately receive.

That's got to be more than defence. Oh yes, so it is. Over 3 times as much. Only 'Social Protection' is higher at £169bn. That's for old age pensions, unemployment and so on.

So illness, old age and unemployment make up nearly half of our taxes.

Or to put it another way, nearly half of what I pay to the government goes on looking after my health and making sure I'm able to work for as long as possible. And I'll only really be able to work as long as possible if I'm healthy - which I'll do my best to do, especially given how low the pension payments to individuals are.

So: looking after our health really is the single most important thing we can do.

No wonder most conversations start with 'how are you?'.

All change

OK. Got fed up with trying to fit ideas into a medical context, so generic observations are back.

Same rules, but more pictures.

Anyway, some recent thoughts...

I met a lovely Jewish chap in the Bell and Crown the other day who brightened up my day no end. 

I refer to his religious status up front because he wears a kippa and so this, visually at least, defines him. 

In the twenty or so minutes during which we spoke we covered the following topics: the buildings in Strand on the Green, and why there are so many 1950s houses in the middle of Victorian terraces; Fleming and the fortuitous discovery of penicillin; life on Welsh peninsulas, and German wire-haired pointers. 

Everything he noticed sparked another story, and everything became richer and more nuanced for its discussion.

He was perhaps the most intelligent and gentle fellow I've chanced upon in years. And I'll be honest with you: with all the recent hoo-ha in Israel I've not had a lot of time for Jewish sentiment of late. Extreme, I know, but there's been rather too much self-assertion of a bad type going on there. 

But this chap was how I'd imagine Rabbi Lionel Blue to be if he were to be plucked out of the radio and stuck in a pub. To my mind, the best of Jewishness (or probably anyone-ness): kind, intelligent, funny and interesting. 

Which made me sad that their Israeli brethren are giving them such a bad rap at the moment. 

Praise v. complaints

This ad prompted 458 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. Because of that, together with the legal technicality that the promotion of a prescription drug via the 'backdoor' of an application device is illegal, meant that the ads had to come down.

But I don't mind the ad. I don't find it offensive. And neither does Tony from Creative Services.

So we wondered if it would be possible to set up a rival to the ASA, or suggest to the ASA themselves that if more people wrote in in praise of an ad than wrote in to complain, then maybe the ad could stand.

Why should a few prudes from Tunbridge Wells dictate whether or not the rest of us can see something potentially useful?

Your thoughts, please...

Beyond compare

You just can't compare some things. Apples with oranges with example - well not in a meaningful way anyway. But we seem obsessed with putting everything in some kind of relative order.

Perhaps because it helps us navigate this ever more complex world - the world in which Sainsbury's now puts traffic lights on food to alert the thickies to the previously unknown dangers of doughnuts.

The wireless (seems suitable to use these sort of words when having a green-ink tinged rant) was blasting out news this morning that the Government is considering reclassifying Ecstasy as a 'safer' drug than cocaine and heroine.

Class B rather than A, and therefore one league 'above' cannabis, which used to enjoy class B privileges before it was downgraded to C. Although it might pop up again soon.

I can see why drugs need to be classified for legal purposes (assuming they should remain illegal, that is), but what this over-simplification of drugs does is actually rather dangerous.

ALL drugs have side-effects, legal or otherwise. Some are mild, some severe; some mental, some physical; some temporary (we bravely say, without that long a study having been done on longer term effects), and some permanent.

Ecstasy heats your body up as it encourages increased electrical activity in the brain; coke does likewise as it causes your heart to beat faster - but the way it does this is subtley different. Cannabis acts in a totally different way, but its longer term mental effects may be even 'worse'.

What do I mean by worse? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd rather have a fucked heart than a fucked head. I really don't know. But I do know that it's not as simple as A v. B v. C.

It's too simple, and sometimes we need to avoid making things simple that shoudn't be.

Google's ill

I just googled something and every single search result told me that if I proceeded to the site then my computer would be at risk. In fact it didn't even LET me progress to a search result - I had to cut and paste the result into the URL bar.

It was a bizarre sense: Google broken? No, surely not. They're infallible. They rule the world. They're pioneers. 

And it was bloody ANNOYING that I couldn't get my information fix in the nanoseconds I'm used to.

Is it a virus? Has Google been infected and, if so, how safe are all the things I trust it to keep on my behalf? My emails, addresses, search history, my blog ... the list goes on.

The effect this has just had on me is disproportionate to the minor inconvenience that actually occurred. Perhaps we should try to wean ourselves off Google.

This much we don't know

Yesterday while writing a brief for a new anti-epilepsy drug I posted a few status updates on Facebook stating that I was finding it rather difficult to come up with a proposition. I was astounded at how many people commented on the update and how many - admittedly in a humorous way - felt that the answer should be quite simple.

Along the lines of 'this drug stops epilepsy and all the shit that goes with it'.

That would indeed have been an ideal proposition if it weren't for the facts that:

- epilepsy is the tendency of the brain to produce sudden bursts of electrical energy - but this can be caused by many different things including tumours, accidents, birth defects and infections;

- there are dozens of enti-epilepsy drugs out on the market, yet around 30% of people with epilepsy are yet to find a treatment that stops their seizures;

- some of the drugs on the market seem to work, but no-one's quite sure why or how;

- even the 'best' drugs on the market can't really claim to be efficacious in more than about 50% of patients.

I was amazed at how little we still don't know, and how that in turn makes it very difficult to come up with something useful and interesting to say that actually holds up to scrutiny.

United by devices

A few years back, when working at Whitewater in the In Memoriam fundraising department, we used to receive copies of journals as bizarrely titled as Funeral Directors Monthly and The Embalmer.

So I'm quite used to seeing niche publications and enjoy discovering those that somehow embrace a new (to me) and unknown corner of interest, industry or, quite possibly, obsession.

At my new job in healthcare marketing I'm exposed to all kinds of dark recesses of the pharmaceutical world, but I really didn't expect an old school friend - one Guy Furness - to be owner/publisher of a journal called On Drug Delivery. Yup, there's a title devoted to needles, syringes and the like - all the myriad ways in which you can stick drugs into yourself.

I like to think the Pete Doherty has a regular column.

In all seriousness, Guy and his team (comprising himself and a girl called Nicki Macadam, with whom we were also at school) write about the science of delivering pharmaceutically active ingredients to the required site in the body, in the right quantities, at the correct time and in the most effective and convenient manner.

And the coincidence is that this Wednesday I'm going to Zurich to present creative concepts to a client whose sole raison d'etre is to promote insulin and growth hormone delivery devices.

I'm looking forward to seeing Guy again. There should be loads to talk about...

Up the brand ladder and into the clouds

It's possible to do this in any field of marketing, but it's a particular danger in healthcare: taking the facts about a product, identifying their key features, deriving patient or physician benefits from these, finding a universal truth ... and ending up, before you know it, with a pivotal thought that reads something like:

'Product X gives you a better quality of life' ... or 'Product X is both effective and safe' ... or ... 'Therapy X is the simplest yet'.

And how very uninspiring these thoughts or 'propositions' are. Reductio absurdum at its very best.

This morning I had to reject a proposition that read 'simply the best'. And another one that read 'freedom to get on with life'.

Frankly, instead of being on the topic of anti-retroviral treatment, it could have been a piece of chewing gum or a tampon. And you don't want to confuse those.

So the trick when you're messing around with a 'brand ladder' or whatever species of wanky marketing tool you happen to be using, I reckon, is to stop short of the clouds and give people real sight of what the damn thing is that you're talking about.

Medicine time

Dear all

With effect from some time quite soon, the theme of this blog will change.

With any luck, this change will be A Good Thing.

Thing is, now that I'm working in the fascinating world of all things medical, the stuff I notice is necessarily to do with drugs, bodily functions, weird and wonderful apparatus and some really rather clever science.

But my job as a planner remains unchanged: to simplify things.

So my hobby as a blogger will be to put various medical observations in the glass flask of the blogosphere, place it above the hot blue flame of conciseness (and occasionally the flappy yellow flame of digression) - and boil it down to its witty (or otherwise) essence.

Watch this space...

M

America Bless God

Yewande Odusote's comment on the wall of the Facebook Group dedicated to watching the inauguration live on CNN and Facebook was one of over 121,000 comments.

She is one of over 1.2m people who have joined this group - and this group is just dedicated to this particular means of watching the event.

Whilst this is astounding, leading on from my following post - together with the slew of articles dedicated to analysing the world problems Obama will have to tackle when he gets into the White House - I'm interested in the role that theistic obedience will play.

Yewande invites 'God' to bless the new President and to direct him down the right road.

Abraham Lincoln said: 'I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right, but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and his nation may be on the Lord's side'.

Both of these are in stark contrast to Bush's egotistical insistence that what he is doing is happily what God would have wanted.

And Obama, in his inaugural speech just now, pledged to 'restore science to its rightful place' - a thinly-veiled attacked on the rise of Creationism I feel sure - takes a more rational take still. He spoke of 'interest and mutual respect' for the Muslim world.

He showed that America does not have a right to be right, that the Christian God is not always on its side, and is suggestive of the fact that science should not be subserviant to science.

From a religious point of view - let alone all the other points of view that can and will be taken on this address - this marks a step back down the road of humility, lined with green shoots of humanism.

No god bus

I'm a bit behind the times on this one as apparently this bus-side advertising campaign kicked off last October, but I love it.

And so does evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins.

The beginning of the antidote to centuries of mind control by the abusive clerics of Abrahamic religions.

You can read more about it here, but can you imagine driving a bus with this message through Israel or Gaza (or indeed Gazza if you're a Sun reader) right now?

Storytellers, designers and technologists

In the late '90s this book created a stir by suggesting that the Internet was more like an old-fashioned Middle East bazaar than it was the subserviant tool of big business - where people would swap stories, buy bizarre items and behave in ways that took their fancy rather than adhere to any convenient and logical norms.

How damn right they were. A quick squizz at Google's Insights for Search in 2007 shows that the most popular search terms in the UK were 'BBC', 'games' and 'eBay'. In France it's 'games', 'video' and 'yellow pages'. In Sweden it's 'lyrics', 'download' and 'youtube'.

Who could have predicted this type of randomness (unless you're predicting 'randomness' to begin with)?

Regardless of what the reasons for the national differences might be, it does suggest the need for a less conventional, straight-laced and Victorian way in which brands should conduct themsleves online.

And digital agencies, as the frequent producers of brands' digital presences, might want to order themselves in a way that reflects what people want from digital media. One suggestion I stumbled across today (which I quite like) was that there should be three main functions within such agencies: storytellers, designers and technologists.

What would this change? Well, planning and copy tasks could be conflated. Designers are sort of there already, but in the absence of data and IA functions they'd need to get to grips with visitor pathways and heatmaps. Technologists: well, if they could share their views of the future in non-binary forms of communication that would be splendid.

Just a thought...

Primary shapes, journalism, and a bloke called Wilf

I love primary shapes when it comes to expressing a thought. They make everything simple - and even complex ideas about the role of traditional journalism vs. blogging can be summed up succinctly.

I was debating what the rise of 'consumer journalism' is doing to the profession - and, in turn, how it impacts the trust we place in comment from different sources - last night. Not the sort of chat you'd normally entertain on a second date, but to my mind this augers well.

Anyway, we were discussing whether bloggers would ever displace professional journalists. If you follow the line of thinking that goes: 'people trust each other more than brands' then it would hold that, with news channels and papers being brands themselves, they would have to make way for the new blood.

But this doesn't feel right. People DO trust their news brands - for differing reasons - but, as the diagram above shows, these brands currently only play in the 'sphere of legitimate controversy.

Understandably there's little merit in playing in the core, but what bloggers are doing - unfettered by the need to toe the party line - is expanding the sphere of legitimacy by exploring the sphere of deviance (stuff the Daily Mail et al would never dare discuss e.g. the merits of immigration) in their droves.

So I don't reckon the old school model of journalism is about to be scuppered, but - thanks to the theory expressed in primary shapes - I reckon they're going to have to adopt the role of 'guide'.

Why? Well, I stumbled across this diagram by linking from Craig the Creative Director's blog to a Guardian article; from that I went to the 'feedback' section and read various comments, and from one of those I linked back to a blog (OK, a Guardian journalist blog) and serendipitously found this article - which was a link within that blog.

French Michel calls it the act of WWILFing - 'What Was I Looking For?' - when you start with one article and are led onto a raft of different topics and thoughts such that you forget what you went online to find out in the first place.

So I WILFed my way far beyond the confines of the Guardian brand - and the stuff I'm talking about now, the stuff that caught my eye was on a complete unknown's blog site.

The Guardian has probably got the most digitally savvy website of any newspaper brand, but even they're only just starting to realise the roles that their profession and their brand will have to play if they're to remain relevant as we opt to explore more and more spheres of deviance...

Bacon numbers

I'm liking the professional networking site 'Linked-In' more and more. For some I'm sure it's a useful way of tapping people for jobs, but I just like the nosiness that it affords. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to be friends with people to see what they're up to, and there are more and more people on it - and so I'm becoming nosier and nosier.

Way back when I was at university I heard about the phenomenon of 'Bacon numbers' and found it bizarre that anyone should have spent the time working out how different celebs are connected to people - least of all Kevin Bacon. Beyond the idle curiosity that underpins the 'Six Degrees of Separation', it seemed a piece of trivia that would be looked back on fondly - but have no real use.

But today as I was looking at various profiles on Linked-In, I saw that even Kevin Bacon now has his own profile. And I'm only removed from him by 3 degrees. He's even posted his Hotmail address on the site should I wish to drop him a line.

Suddenly, thanks to the power of the network, I can contact Kevin - or Kev as I now feel I can call him. He's using the same tools that we do to promote ourselves professionally. Social networking is absolutely perfect for him.

Not sure what I'll say to him yet, but it's nice to know he's not far away.