The cosmologist Fred Hoyle has argued that “the universe is in a state of continuous creation” and of course this is true, with the exception of ad agencies.

Ad agencies are in a state of continuously not making anything interesting.

(I was thinking of calling this blog “The triumph of the Quite Good”. Or, “RIP, Mad Men”.)

One major reason being because the people at the top are more interested in keeping their money than in doing any decent work.

How do you get decent work out ?

You make it really, really important.

Not in a kind of “Well,  it’d be nice to win some awards” sort of way.

But in a “wake up every morning and fight anybody who gets in the way of great work” sort of way.

And you hang onto that concept like a dog with his favourite stickiest sticky stick in the whole world.

When Nijinsky choreographed the short ballet l’Apres-midi d’un Faune in 1912, the Parisian audiences hated it – but the interesting thing was the response of his impresario-manager Diaghilev. He ordered an immediate repeat of the performance.

He knew that if you submit to negative criticism, then you are lost – you have to stand up to it and reaffirm your confidence in the work.

In fact you have to regard attention – any attention – as fuel.

The oxygen of publicity, as “M+C Saatchi’s greatest client” once put it.

Perhaps those were the very same Parisian audiences who were later shocked by The Rites of Spring and who even later walked out of the first night of Waiting for Godot. Parisians seem to consider an evening of not being shocked as a waste of a good night out.

But the things which shocked those dull Parisians are now the great pillars of our cultural history.

Because inventiveness and creativity are the same thing – i.e. being new and different are the key ingredients of creativity. You have to love stuff that is different for its own sake – which is something people in marketing are always scared of.

And the way to deal with this fear, as I’ve said before, is prototyping.

One group which is having fun doing this is the global community of potheads.

New drugs are being invented all the time, not just to circumvent slow-footed legal bans, but also to anticipate them. You can join an online forum and discuss the latest innovations, copying and pasting any formula you like the look of, and then emailing it to the new breed of chemist in their labs in Shanghai – who will post the results back to you within a week. Governments and the police have virtually no hope of catching up with this trade, which runs on virtual currencies like Bitcoin – short of closing down the internet.

The reviews are interesting. Of one drug, a user wrote “no pleasant slide into rubbery nonsense, just a sudden drop off the cliff of wrongness”.

Sounds to me like a day I once spent helping an agency in the suburbs.

Lunch was a trip to Gregg’s – and that was the highlight of the day.

But a fervid and tireless experimentation is the heart of creativity.  It’s not about pretty pictures or a slogan with the words “us” or “tomorrow” in it.

Which is why agencies need to get off their backsides if they don’t want to be the generation that killed this industry.

In 1968 the students who were rioting in Paris scrawled “Be realistic, demand the impossible” on various walls.

Where’s that attitude now ?   In ad agencies it’s more like “Be reasonable … and let’s argue about the fee rather than the work”.

In the 1930s Wilhelm Reich came to believe that sexual repression – “the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” – held people back from accepting revolutionary change. It’s a notion I think would certainly hold true among the readers of the Daily Mail (whose conversations always begin with the words “The thing which worries me is …” and who are scared of anything revolutionary, even if it’s just a potter’s wheel). But it may also be true of your CEO.

If they’re not getting behind your radical attempts to market catfood, maybe they’re just not getting enough sex.

Ask them.

It’s either that, or the money.

In 1776, Adam Smith put forward the theory that the best way to increase productivity in factories was what he called “the division of labour” – dividing the process into smaller specialised segments.

In “The Wealth of Nations”, he described how it took 18 stage to make a pin. (I had no idea it was so fucking complicated. I would have thought you just went out and got a pin; but actually there are 18 stages in making one.) If one man did all 18 stages, he could make maybe one pin a day.

But if the work was split up into different parts, with each worker doing just one  task, they could each make on average nearly 5,000 pins a day.

Now,  the world is split up into those people who go “Wow, productivity just shot through the roof, my profits are gonna explode, I will be able to afford 18 new prostitutes in flats around London” – (if, say, they are a Russian oligarch) and those who go “Shit, it’s bad enough working in a pin factory but if I have to do the same bloody task every minute of the day I’m gonna go mad and shove those 5,000 pins into the buttocks of a passing stranger.”

Even Smithy himself wrote about how “the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or exercise his invention.”

This, he admitted, led to “torpor of the mind” and a loss of “tender sentiment”.

I don’t know if you’ve ever suffered from torpor of the mind, but it’s a pain in the arse.

It tends to strike early in the morning when the alarm goes off and you think “oh fuck, I’ve got to go and do one task all day in a pin factory. And I was having a really nice dream where  I invented gravity-defying hopping shoes.”

What’s all this got to do with advertising, you might say ?

Very people are tasked with producing, say, only radio ads. Let alone just pins. But I’m talking about the damage done in the pursuit of efficiency.

We’ve seen the ad industry become a lot more efficient – but at what cost ? Nowadays it can efficiently turn out bland, invisible work faster than at any time in history.

Open-plan offices are an efficient use of space. But they are claustrophobic to work in and you won’t write Mad Men or Silver Linings Playbook while you’re in them.

It’s efficient to get rid of the maverick creatives who come up with the barking mad ideas – until you realise that without that craziness, creativity is just a production line that turns out pins.

It’s efficient not to have breaks – but people need breaks.

It’s efficient to work people really hard producing lots of ideas – but it burns them out, and you lose focus on the really great ones.

Now, I’m not advocating complete lawlessness.

Not unless you’re talking about my gravity-defying hopping shoes. All normal rules are suspended there.

No – you need a structure.  At HHCL, we had very tight processes – because we believed in the concept of “loose-tight”. Tight processes meant we could explore “loose”, i.e. unstructured, thinking.

But crucially those processes were put together by people who wanted to produce outstanding work, not just run their agency on leaner lines than the client’s procurement officers demanded, so that they could make more money.

Quantifiability in itself can damage creativity. Quantifiability leads to the notion that “if you have more, I will have less” – which is often true of  financial matters.

But it isn’t true of happiness, or love, or laughter, or creativity.

Creativity is a luxury and it needs things like – space, and time, and courage, and a sense of playfulness.

The World Wide Web, which is the most creative and amazing tool ever invented by human beings, was built on open-source thinking, i.e. sharing and collaborating. It was built by people like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who didn’t seek to make any money out of it at all.

Compare adland.

Which is sinking under a remorseless pursuit of an impossible efficiency.

And the ultimate irony is that it is not efficient at all. Most of the work produced is as disposable as an estate agent’s door drop. As a result, most clients are unhappy and would move accounts even more often than they already do, if it was easier to do so.

I remember awhile back when Russell Davies told me the biggest danger sign of writing a blog. It’s when you write about the difficulty of writing a blog.

It means you’ve completely run out of ideas.

But I reckon I’m waaaay past that, I ran out of ideas years ago. So I’d like to write about one particular reason why it’s difficult to blog.

And I don’t just mean catching my thirty-seventh cold of the winter.

Although actually this spring is one of the worst winters I’ve ever been through.

Shelley wrote – “if winter comes,/ can spring be far behind ?’ But in this case the answer is yes, fucking years behind.

I mean the hazards of mentioning real people. I blogged about an article Charles Vallance had written for Campaign recently and immediately worried that I might be offending one of the brightest beacons to burn in the advertising forest – which made me think, where DOES a beacon burn, anyway ? – so I then wrote about his new book, but couldn’t help making that jokey as well so probably compounded the insult.

And when I was researching my speech for the Contagious Now Next Why event this week – which is about how future consumers (if we can call them that, which we can’t) will be making our marketing campaigns for us – I found the best ever quote, which was about a movement “from Download to Upload”.

Unfortunately the bloke who said this was Charles Vallance, so he’ll think I’m stalking him.

(And maybe, on reflection, I am.)

I once blogged about a great day at the cricket with one of my favourite people in advertising and haven’t heard from him since. So, even if you’re nice about someone, it can backfire.

Privacy may be dead, as Eric Schmidt has said, but the murder is making a lot of people twitchy.

And then at a Groucho event to discuss the future of advertising (where I talked about rocket-powered boots and x-ray glasses) I met Elspeth Lynn, the ECD at M&C.

Elspeth is a wonderfully warm, bright person – and her presentation was a model of persuasive sanity. She said a ton of great stuff but two things I tapped into my phone while she talked – 1. figure out what the brand really stands for before you do any marketing (sounds incredibly obvious, I know, but how often does it happen ?! – her brilliant example was Chipotle) – and, 2. give your project a snappy title.

That might sound glib, but everything depends on Search, and “Whopper Sacrifice” is easier to remember and Google than “burger king social media thing linked to facebook”.

I’d give M&C my business if I knew Elspeth would be working on it.

And if I had any business to give, of course.

(Decoded is too small to throw money at ad budgets for now. That time of wilful excess will, hopefully, come.)

So now that I’ve publicly embarrassed Elspeth, she’ll avoid me like the plague.

Or avoid me like the plaque, as my spellchecker would have it.

But the reason I carry on blogging is because I just like writing. I’ve started tweeting more regularly for the same selfish reason.

I love writing, in the way that all creatives just love creating – which is why they’ll always end up getting exploited.

At the Groucho event, the lovely Sam Ball of LMFM (there I go again) told me that the porn industry wasn’t making money these days. Partly because the people involved in it love doing it so much, and there’s so many of them, that they’ve ended up giving away too much of it for free.

Ring any bells ?

How many ideas are you showing the client in your next pitch ?

I won’t mention the people at the Groucho event who jumped into the porn debate with suspiciously well-informed views on that industry.

Then they really would have a good reason to avoid me.

Suffice to say that, sadly, I was one of them.

I love the name of Charles Vallance’s new book, The Branded Gentry – all about entrepreneurs who’ve put their  names on businesses.

And I can understand why I’m not in it.

It must be because my first company, Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, had too many names (or perhaps just too many syllables) in it.

Although now I think about it, VCCP’s founder didn’t do much better.

I can remember when the director Simon Delaney opened a production company called Delaney Hart and said that all his life he’d dreamed of opening such a company but he’d had to wait a long time before finding someone called Hart.

But on one level it’s a shame I wasn’t in the book. As Jon Claydon’s very entertaining review in Campaign put it, “I’ve yet to meet a successful eponymous entrepreneur who wasn’t afflicted in some part by … vanity, hubris, intransigence, ego” – and I like to think I could have demonstrated all of them if Charles had picked up the phone to have a chat.

Jon’s review mentioned a list of what he called the “big beasts” of advertising eponyms – “Saatchi and Saatchi, Abbott and Mead, Bartle and Hegarty, Wight and Collins, Howell and Henry, Boase, Trott, Lowe.”

I’m very flattered to be listed in that bestiary, but one wonders what sort of book would have resulted had Charles stuck purely to adland. Since a great many of them are recluses, it would probably have been a shorter volume.

However, eponymy is no longer in fashion in this part of the forest. It’s a wonder it ever was, really, when you consider agencies like Messner Vettere Berger McNamee Testicle, which was very successful in New York in the 1990s, despite causing nervous breakdowns in the poor people who had to answer the phones for them.

Incidentally, Dave Testicle left before the agency became famous, to be replaced by Bob Schmetterer. That was the turning point for them.

But one wonders if agencies losing their testicles is perhaps a symptom of the new fashion to call oneself Bathplug or Buttplug or something similar.

If your real name is publicly associated with every piece of work that goes out of the agency, it does focus your mind.

(Particularly, I grant you, if your name is Buttplug.)

Anyway, I’ve moved with the times and called my code-in-a-day company Decoded rather than fight over whether it should be Parsons Peters Henry Blackwell or Henry Parsons Blackwell Peters.

Because if I learnt anything at all during the 12 years when we were having fun at HHCL, it was to make sure that your name went into one of the first two slots – because that’s how people referred to ad agencies.

Wight Collins … Doyle Dane … Abbott Mead.

Even Bartle Bogle.

Of course it was clearly ridiculous that John Hegarty would ever be forgotten in the name of the greatest agency to open its doors in London.

But I notice that when he set up his very successful wine business, he called it “Hegarty Chamans”.

And after a short Google, I’m not even sure that “Chamans” is a real person.

That’s one answer to being left off your agency’s name for 30 years – set up a business with someone non-existent.

I’m thinking of opening Henry Bananaface next week, but if anyone wants to meet Trevor Bananaface, I’m afraid he’s stuck in an all-day client meeting in Slough.

And a final thought on names.

I’ve noticed that my washing up liquid has a new slogan emblazoned on the bottle – “Behind You All The Way”. It’s a lovely sentiment, but I just wonder how wise it is, when the name of the brand is Fairy ?

Or maybe I’m just being too sensitive.

For anyone with weapon-grade hypochondria like me, getting through the winter is quite tricky.

At one stage I even had a bit of a brush with quantitative easing.

There are only two things which got me through it – thinking about creativity and watching naked ping pong on Sky Sports 3.

Since Sky Sports doesn’t broadcast naked ping pong nearly often enough, it’s a good job I get a few shots of my other addiction.

In fact this week I came across some thinking on creativity which I’d never come across before.

But before that I’d like to touch on A) the best model for agencies and B) a great idea for clients – not that either of these topics is remotely interesting, when you’ve got a stinking cold and the naked ping pong has been bumped to make way for darts.

I was having coffee with someone from Brooklyn Brothers agency the other day who told me how the agency is split up into “Make it up” and “Make it happen”. I love that.

It reminded me a bit of Mother and its Mothers, and also of The App Business which has a table of strategic thinkers and a table of developers – both tables in the same room, within paper-aeroplane-chucking distance of each other.

Love all that.

If you just make sure that the thinkers can communicate with the makers (by understanding the basics of code, for instance) – you’re 98% of the way towards an agile prototyping culture which is exactly what’s needed.

Think up an idea. Make it the same day. Put it out there.

B) is a new company called AUFI, whose founders I met for coffee, and which is a kind of farmers’ market for 50 small, cool, independent creative companies with a focus on high-end creativity.

I’ve mentioned it to a couple of clients who both bit my arm off – so there’s a need there, which raises interesting questions about creativity in our industry.

The big agencies can hire great creative talent – but can they foster it and sell it to clients ?

Finally, let me ask you this – what’s a better embodiment of creativity – Mozart composing minuets aged 6, or my mate Jim making a Spanish omelette ?

Most people would probably say Mozart, but actually that model of creativity can be stifling, exclusive and discouraging. For instance, I couldn’t play ‘Three Blind Mice’ on the xylophone aged 6, so I pretty much gave up on music completely.

But actually the future of creativity lies in encouraging the experimentation and joy in creativity which exists in everybody.

A few years ago, virtually nobody in this country explored truly experimental cooking. Now huge numbers of people do.

In my view, coding is the next cooking.

In the not too distant future, vast numbers of people who we’ve previously thought of as “targets” or “consumers” won’t just want to interact with our campaigns. They’ll want to make them.

Which, in my view, is a good thing.

I’ve always felt that advertising is a brilliantly engaging way to spend one’s life – puzzling over the conundra of brands and their relationships – but a pretty lousy spectator sport.

Because most of the stuff that comes out the far end looks like stuff that comes out of someone’s far end.

One solution is to find more Mozarts.

Another is to recognise that anybody can cook.

I’m not saying one at the expense of the other. There’s room for both.

Now I’m going to my room for some broth.

Ah. It’s 15-13 to the Lithuanians.

The first meeting I wasn’t actually at.

To my mind, those are often the best meetings.

In a Thinkbox forum on TV creativity,  John Townshend, creative partner at the agency Now, said that one of his favourite ads – Orange Tango from HHCL – happened because the agency was given the license to be playful, and he said that that didn’t occur often enough these days.

I’d like to thank John for his excellent taste, and say he’s dead right  – but I’d also like to point out that it was never QUITE that simple.

Sadly, clients didn’t turn up and say “Ah you’re the guys with the initials H, H, C and L. Feel free to try whatever you like with my brand”.

I think we had the most interesting reel in London for over 10 years because we had an amazing process.

Creative people hate hearing this. They want it to be battles of wills and storming out in a huff.

But actually it’s about having a very tight process and working closely with the client.

However,  to a lot of creatives, “process” is a dirty word.

The second meeting I WAS at, because I was speaking at it.

My friend Camilla Honey of JFDI had invited me to talk to some new business directors about making the most of your creative department.

Right at the end of the session, Gemma Morris of Brooklyn Brothers asked the killer question.

“We had one client who said they wanted “another Gorilla, another Sony Balls” – then they gave the business to a different agency and just ran a new version of their previous ad.

“What happened ?”

Grrreat question.

My answer is – don’t  blame the client.

My belief is that actually most clients do want an ad with the cut-through of a “Gorilla”. They’re not winding you up.

But they need to be taken through the right process to get there.

(Which is the responsibility of the agency.)

And there’s that word again.

That dirty word, beginning with P and ending with S.

Now the “p—–s” I’m talking about isn’t so long or unwieldy that you can’t use it.

Anyone can have a great “p——s” that wins them pitches and the envy of their colleagues.

I could even show you this “p——s” in action.

But let’s get onto the last meeting. Because that’s when it all got very real.

This was The Friday Club, one of those “ad-agency-folk meet start-ups” things – set up by a very bright and persuasive guy called Richard Fearn.

I say persuasive because he’d got a fantastic bunch of ad-folk together.

Of the 4 start-up ideas, the one I liked the most was a bike-light called Blaze that projects a signal a few yards ahead of you onto the road  – straight out of the blind spot – really cool, like having your own bat-signal.

I told the founder that her invention reminded of a very powerful Volvo campaign in the US in the 90s. Where they showed testimonials of people who were only alive because they’d been in Volvos.

What you’re selling, I said – maybe a touch melodramatically  – is life and death.

Then some bloke with a mighty impressive handlebar moustache sitting behind me said “no, that’s a bad idea – what happens if a cyclist has your light but still gets into an accident and  dies …”

And this huge hub-bub broke out.

Now that was interesting. That could have started a fascinating debate.

However, the woman running the bike light company started back-pedalling furiously and said – “I didn’t say that – he did” pointing at me like I’d said something really horrific.

I felt like one of those old HM Bateman “The man who” cartoons … In this case, the man who dared put forward an idea in a forum where supposedly bold marketing thinkers meet supposedly radical thinking entrepreneurs …

Anyway, Richard waved his hands to halt the debate .. . he had to keep order, I suppose, and we were only about 30 minutes into the day.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the bike-light inventor sided with the other guy because of his handlebar moustache ? Just a thought.)

But what I’d have liked to say is this -

There’s a value in coming up with concerns about any idea. But all interesting ideas have something difficult about them. That’s what makes them interesting.

And in this case I believe the idea is still valid.

You could use posters in cycle stores, and short clips online, with people saying “I’m still alive because of this product”.  And then have a sub-line saying ” We can’t solve the problem of cycle deaths completely – but we’re trying, one cyclist at a time”.

Or something better than that, but you get the idea.

After all, did that worry stop Volvo in the 1990s ? No, because it’s not relevant – you’re showing people who are still alive because they used the product, you’re not saying “we’re God and we can stop death ever happening to you”.

But people are going to have concerns about any interesting ideas.

There’s a myth that great ideas just emerge, pure and instantly acceptable to everyone, like the  Virgin Mary appearing in amongst the M&S sandwiches ….

Or Ant and Dec …

Doesn’t happen. You’re always going to get debate and worries.

The way round it ?

You’ve got it.

The right process.

A process led by people who know how to cherish great ideas, and who know that difficult questions have to be answered …

Of course, Blaze could always run a line that says “A rather nifty idea in the area of bike safety”.

Accurate, unarguable, no problems …. but not necessarily gonna flog those lights at £100+ a pop.

That’s why I always like to push.

As some great artist once said – a ship is safest when it’s in the harbour. But it’s not much of a ship there.

Campaign’s new feature “View from the top/View from the bottom” sounds to me like it belongs in a fetish magazine for people who enjoy pain – but then again, that pretty much sums up Campaign.

This week Charles Vallance  (in the dom position) was to be seen extolling the virtues of TV advertising.

Now, for me Charles Vallance is one of the 3 brightest people working full-time in advertising.  (I exclude myself, obviously – because I’m not in it full-time.) The second is whoever thought up the name “Mother”,  and the third is you, dear reader, for being smart enough to occasionally glance at this blog.

Charles was taking a stance against dry data-driven BOGOFs – and in particular, Karl Heiselman of Wolff Olins, who’d declared that by 2020 an intense focus on advertising ROI would create “a hyper-aggressive transactions-focussed battlefield”.

That description sounds to me like most meetings that happen in advertising right now, although sometimes there are biscuits.  However, Charles was rightly pointing out the need for brands to use  “charm, wit, imagination, aesthetics and personality”.  So far, so good.  Ad agencies have these qualities in abundance. But then he said “like it or not, the old-fashioned TV ad is still about the best vehicle you’ll find for doing this”.

He’s almost certainly right about this – for now – but I feel uncomfortable hearing it.

I’ve been inveighing against paid-for media pretty much since that was the only media you COULD get.  Because I distrust the interruptive model, and I believe in what William Gibson said about the future of media  -  which was that “the essence of digital is interactivity”.

I.e. the revolution that’s happened in all media in the last 20 years isn’t just down to understanding code.  (Anybody can do that – and, if pushed, I could probably tell you a company that will teach you in a day). That should all be taken for granted. The revolution lies in the fact that digital media are about 2-way communication, and paid-for media presupposes a one-way lecture – with the advertiser on top, as a Campaign BDSM fetishist might say.

Digital media undercuts all this and takes away the comforting notion of the passive audience, sitting there ready to absorb 30 seconds of pack-shot or an ad in which dentists confront people on Victoria station to talk about plaque on their rear teeth.

However, I totally agree with Charles in the need to engage. And his words made me think.
Then on Thursday last week I found myself  judging Creative Review’s Best of 2012 -  and I was on the panel looking at traditional advertising. (What someone on another jury called “the intravenous drip of paid-for advertising”.)
Unsurprisingly, I saw some outstanding TV ads (Guardian pigs, P&G mums, IKEA toys, the Axe Super Sensories campaign, etc)   – all these campaigns have performed marketing miracles, despite working in the old-fashioned one-way model.

But I suppose I struggle to believe in the passive audience as an ongoing business model. Well OK, maybe for the Super Bowl – which is once a year, in America.  I believe that most people don’t usually like being interrupted to be sold to. Even if 80% of the ads in the TV breaks were great, one dentist on Platform 7 and I’m outta there.

But the ad industry DOES have this incredible talent to do all the things which Charles quite rightly values. Apart from the conventional and brilliant TV ads mentioned above, there were outstanding pieces of less conventional work like the shocking WCRS 3-D cinema ad for Women’s Aid (which brings technology in to support a massively emotional area) and the Paddy Power “Chav Tranquilliser” film, which probably wouldn’t get anywhere near a paid-for schedule because of its boldness, but will get huge traction in earned media, for the simple reason that it’s fucking funny.

Innovative and Shocking:

Women’s Aid

Fucking Funny:

Paddy Power

For me, it’s not really about whether there’s life in the old dog of paid-for media – my view is that this will hang around for a while yet, like an old dog on a sofa, maybe smelling funny but somehow we’re all still fond of it.

(After all, the ROI of advertising is a scary business and paid-for media offer the illusion of “delivery”.)

But it’s more about whether you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Because, if you took that outstanding strategic and creative talent and got it working in the wider seas of general culture – especially but not exclusively in interactive media -  you’d be unstoppable.

As Charles’ agency has been, with Meerkat.

So Charles, I suspect we’re not fighting over this, like dogs and meerkats. I suspect we’re probably in violent agreement.

As all good BDSM fans like to be.

How do you like the new Campaign mini ?

I think it looks great. Punchy, business-like. But it needs to keep what Claire did so brilliantly to help this ever-lovin’ ever-changin’ industry. I.e., 3 or 4 pieces each week by industry experts, talking about how things are changing around digital.

There were always great articles, every week. I didn’t always read them of course – life’s too short and my diary looks like it was written by a lunatic. But I’d keep each issue for 4 weeks while I felt guilty about not reading them.

And even if I just read the first two paragraphs and the last one, I learnt something.

On the negative side,  I was a bit worried to see “Turkey of the Week” suddenly pop up on page 3.

It would be fine if it pointed out the really shitty ads, the 95% of ads which are bland and boring and as risk-averse as a pensioner with a bad hip on an icy pavement carrying a tray full of throwing knives and red ants.

But I worry that it’ll take cheap pops at stuff which is pushing the boundaries.

Remember what Mark Zuckerberg said – “What would you do if you couldn’t fail ?” That’s the head-set any creative industry needs.

It needs the support you give a child – not the lampooning you give your peers over a pint.

It doesn’t need a blame culture – particularly one where creatives and risk-takers take most of the blame.

The industry has one big problem now.

It doesn’t celebrate creativity enough.

Martin Boase once described BMP, one of the greatest agencies of all time, as being structured “to protect the creatives”.

I get an image in my head of John Webster laying golden eggs high in a tower overlooking Paddington basin, and occasionally letting his hair down, to mix up various fairy stories, kids’ books and household items.

Webbo wrote a few turkeys along the way, but I doubt that they killed any brands.

These days, with a prototyping and always-beta culture, we should be encouraging experimentation – for its own sake.

If you’re going to blame creatives, blame those few middle weights who don’t want to change – as Jesus said of the poor, they will always be with us – but the IPA should do something about them.

(The creatives, I mean, not the poor. I don’t think 44 Belgrave Square is particularly well-placed to be a soup kitchen.)

You could re-train them as traffic wardens.

But generally the industry is terrible at cherishing its most valuable asset – its creative thinkers.

I was very interested to read in Metro this week some more about the IPA Creative Pioneers initiative.

This is a brilliant idea – encouraging fresh thinking, putting creativity at the heart, etc. But we need more. If we think we’re going to get up to speed with all things digital by employing a couple of savvy interns … Well …

What about the vast majority of people inside all agencies who just need a bit of support ?

That’s the point of Decoded, which I set up  with some bright friends. To help not just creatives – but everybody in this creative industry – to realise the art of the possible, by learning the basics of code.

The ad industry is already full of very intelligent people – we don’t need to put them on the crap-heap because they don’t understand how to make the most of the transformed world the industry is now working in.

We just need to train them.

It’s a bit like that theory about focusing your marketing on appealing to existing customers rather than chasing new ones – it’s generally cheaper and more effective. But the ad industry is hooked on the macho shit of “winning” new customers. And it’s also hooked on the macho shit of turfing out its existing talent base and hiring newbies.

But that’s wrong.

It’s time to take the amazing talent in our industry – and support it.

From the clients I’ve been talking to, the answer is – go and see a specialist social media agency, which is followed with amazing efficiency by step two, moaning about those agencies.

I swear, if you set up an agency specialising in social media and you  knew what you were doing and you treated clients well, you’d clean up.

But anyway.

My thoughts on this topic are a bit hazy (along with everybody else’s) but here are a couple of notions for the new year (which I’ve already christened the anus bloodyhellabis).

1. Go on a Decoded “social networks in a day” course – it’ll teach you the history of social media, show you how they work and you’ll build a social media app. (Come on, don’t act surprised – you knew I’d say that.)

2. You still need creative ideas. So ponder  these 3 things – impact, topicality and empathy.

Impact. The only question worth asking of any creative idea is this – Is it shareable ? Weird stuff gets shared, boring/selly stuff doesn’t.

“Bono is feeding miniature dachshunds to a naked Romanian pole-vaulter on a pedalo” is shareable (if technically, at this point, untrue).

“Our pork pies taste nice” probably isn’t.

Topicality.

This is a crucial part of social media – it’s all about “now”. Eckhart Tolle would love it. (Well, he would now. I wonder how he’ll feel about it in 5 years’ time ? That’s the crucial question.)

So – “what is Bono doing now ?” has an appeal, even if the answer is only “having a crap”. But this currency has speedy devaluation. What was Bono doing yesterday ? “Wiping his arse”. Who cares ?

Empathy. This is the big one.

As Campaign’s new editor Danny Rogers said in his inaugural  editorial  – ethics  will play  a crucial part in effective  advertising campaigns from now on.

He was talking about Coke’s attempt to grapple with the issue of obesity. Which I think is great. It’s like Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ or Persil’s ‘Dirt is good’ – belated but honourable attempts to clear up the mess which advertising has made in the first place.

But you have to do it and mean it – not like the backfiring load of tosh which Lance Armstrong fell into when he screwed up his big “confessional” on Oprah.

God, what a load of crap.

For the first time ever, I found myself wondering about Nike.

I want to see a little less “just do it” and a little more “maybe we should do the right thing, baby”.

“Just do it. Just be a psychopathic winner-at-all-costs”.  Er, no thanks.

I don’t particularly care about Woods’ infidelities or Armstrong’s doping – it’s the lying and bullying and arrogant attempts to manipulate us with baby-fed morsels of semi-truth which I can’t stand.

So let’s explore the topic of empathy.

In a book called “the Wonder Box” Roman Krznaric talks about the power of mass empathy in the early 1800s. His view is that slavery was abolished in Britain then because for the first time in history you saw huge numbers of people caring about OTHER PEOPLE – ie other than themselves or their immediate community.

He points out that this landmark needed two things to make it work – an audience who were open to receive the messages, and a bold marketing campaign.

The first happened more or less by accident – the British people were able to react emotionally to stories of slave hardship because they’d been through something similar.

For a century or more, the Royal Navy had just kidnapped young men from the streets and told them they’d found a new career as sailors.

Press-ganging.

Some ad agencies in Britain’s coastal towns still use similar recruitment techniques, I’m told.

So most people back then knew someone who’d suffered from this practice and they were able to empathise with the horrors of African slaves being forcibly taken to America.

And the marketing campaign led on this aspect.

A poster was created that showed the full horrors of a slave ship (men head to toe in airless holds for weeks on end, chained together) and 10,000 copies were put up on the walls of pubs and other buildings.

As a result tens of thousands of British people got involved in what Adam Hochschild described as “the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged over many years, over someone else’s rights”.

According to Krznaric, it was “the most powerful human rights movement that the world had ever seen”.

It required the passion of some leaders like Thomas Clarkson, and some brave and relevant creative work.

If you feel like you’re working like a slave – you’re not, you have basic freedoms.

You can change stuff.

And social media is an unprecedented tool to do that.

Let’s take our briefs and turn them all into projects which seek to answer the question – not “how can I sell more dog-food ?” But “how can I make the world a better place ?”

I believe we’ll sell a lot more effectively if we do.

Normally I try to have this blog match the curmudgeonly and defeatist mood of the ad industry at large.

But every so often I get inspired by something and my mood temporarily lifts.

The annual Contagious review of the year will always lift my spirits – but by definition this is only once a year so it doesn’t have a huge impact on my general tone of voice.

Which is that of Eeyore who’s stubbed his toe coming down off coke.

The review highlights the smartest off-piste thinking of the past year and it always makes me reflect on how marketing can actually be an incredibly interesting industry.

Despite the dross on TV every night, and the soul-mangling meetings.  Here’s my subjective precis of it:

M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer service in Kenya, set up Daktari 1525  to improve access to expert medical advice in rural areas. It generated 2,000 calls a day.

(They should bring it to Hammersmith.)

Tata Docomo the telecom giant in India set up the Blood Line club – linking donors with hospitals and even victims …

Renault in France are turning themselves into the good guys of the car industry – they set up a whole string of initiatives including community transport and low cost car hire. And affordable repair schemes for those on low incomes.

Compare this with a scheme Unilever set up with Brazilian cleaners – I love it when the ad industry deigns to turn its attention to some people other than the stereotypical and practically non-existent high-income anxiety-free cool people it usually populates its world with.

Those people don’t even exist in the advertising industry anymore.

In Gothenberg the local transport authority turned everyday trams into a version of high-price tourist buses by providing an app which gave a commentary on the journey. The agency Forsman & Bodenfors said they wanted to produce “advertising that didn’t feel like advertising.”

I.e., giving customers the sense that they are not being sold to, but instead being  offered something genuinely helpful or useful.

In a similar vein in Brazil, Chevrolet offered test drives in its Rescue Drive campaign, aimed at people whose cars had just broken down. Genius.  Just when people hate their own cars the most, they get rescued by a shiny new better model.

It’d be like having Ashley Roberts as your divorce lawyer.

BUPA in Australia launched an app which dealt with the hideous and cynical world we now live in – by exposing the saturated fat, sugar and salt content in supermarket foods. Which is more or less 100% in all of them.

It became the most downloaded free app in Australia on iTunes.

On a similar kick of helping its customers, Nike produced the awesome Fuelband.  Stefan Olander, Nike VP of digital sport,  said: “We don’t start with the technology or the potential profit, we always start with the athlete”.

Something I talked about in a recent blog.

Glad someone’s paying attention.

Now if just one brand in every sector did that it would probably kill the need for marketing in 6 years.

UK insurance broker Motaquote linked up with TomTom to create a new data-driven policy – i.e. it offers better deals to safer drivers and you can monitor your points as you go. How clever is that ?

And while we’re on data, David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama, said: “I would invest in people who understand where the technology is going … (particularly) mining data.”

Not surprising considering that Nate Silver, a stats junkie working in New York, correctly predicted the electoral race’s outcome in all 60 states.

Data, said Daniel Stein of EVB, is the new creative brief.

But let’s not forget that Obama won the election because his team painted a more personal picture of their candidate.

The brief is still just the brief.

Disney Research has created a wearable system called Revel that can add tactile textures to almost any object. So your ice cream tub could feel like fur and a t-shirt could feel like naked skin.

Yes.

This is the turning point where digital takes over irrevocably. When technology can offer tactile choices, the game’s over.

Another story tells us that something called Smart Sand will self-assemble to copy certain selected objects. “Passing messages between grains to create structure”.

Right we’re actually IN a science fiction novel right now. We’ve left planet Earth.

And EVRYTHNG has created a technology whereby each object can be given its own unique digital identity.

Objects become subjects. That’s a pretty fundamental shift in a lot of shit.

Epistemology, for one thing, is now buggered.

Coke created a building you could play with in the Olympic Park. And Israeli designer Izhar Gafni made a bike out of cardboard. Apparently it’s waterproof and fireproof which helped my cynicism a bit. But I just wonder if it’s strong enough to keep Boris upright.

And Dominic Wilson designed a pair of shoes that find their own way home. Think Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz meets Britain’s binge drinking culture.

Iceland invited people to submit suggestions on a new draft constitution via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. This is the country not the supermarket and I wonder how they’ll fare with a nation run by ping-pong-playing cats, plugs for stand-up gigs and spoof Gangnam videos ?

Sweden handed over its official Twitter account to ordinary citizens, giving visitors to the country recommendations on what to do.

“Leave Sweden” was high on the list.

I’m joking, but given Sweden’s high ranking for general gloominess, it might be tricky.

Finland, between the months of October and April, would consist of two tweets – “drink lots” and “kill yourself”.

Magazina Luiza in Brazil set up a platform for friends to sell store merchandise to other friends – commission rates were between 2.5% and 4.5%. This is brilliant, and will pave the way for the future – although the sheer commerciality could actually kill social networks stone dead.

90% of people trust peer recommendations, as against 14% who trust advertisements. But what happens when the two are one ?

On more secure ground, the wonderful Unilever crowd-sourced ideas to bring safe drinking water to the world’s poorest people.

As Nietzsche said, God is dead, which means there’s a job vacancy.  And it looks like Unilever is applying.

Barclaycard set up a community-driven credit card called Ring in the US and opened up its profit and loss statements to its customers.

You probably knew that 10% of all the world’s photos were taken in the last year. But did you know that Pinterest went from 1.3 milllion users in July 2011 to 25 million users by November 2012 ?

And given that the average spend from retail shoppers was $169 from Pinterest and $95 from Facebook and $71 from Twitter, this shows the need for all marketers to have a distinct VISUAL social media strategy.

Moving to music, Coldplay’s 2012 world tour had Xylobands, wristbands that turned the audience into a visual extension of the show.

Felix Baumgartner stepped off a platform 24 miles up in space and kicked off the smartest bit of marketing of the whole year. Maybe of the decade. It took Red Bull 7 years and tens of millions of dollars, but it caught everyone’s attention. And it brought tons of research benefits.

Advertising which doesn’t feel like advertising, again.

90% of marketers agreed that content marketing would become more important next year – but only 38% said they had a content marketing strategy in place.

There you have it.

Rabbits, headlights, normal scenario.

Coca-Cola (through the always brilliant Wieden+Kennedy) created 2 animated polar bears who reacted in real time to events happening in the Superbowl. When a Pepsi ad aired, they left their seats.

The Californian Milk Board developed a campaign called Time to Go to Bed, featuring the benefits of a glass of milk and a bedtime story for kids at bedtime.

The Australian Defence Force had interactive posters which allowed passers-by to diagnose and treat virtual patients using real medical tools. A recruitment poster which was also an entrance exam.

The IKEA catalogue had great AR features, ASOS had a brilliant Scan to Shop app, and Shortlist used Blippar to feature a computer game on their cover.

Meat Pack, a sneaker retailer in Guatemala, offered huge discounts but the discount diminished rapidly over time – the customer had to run to the store to get the best deal.

Meanwhile Nieman Marcus designed a smartphone app that allowed its super-rich customers to see which staff were on duty at any one time, allowing them to pick their favourite brown-nosers.

Burberry – always ahead of the curve – set up a flagship store in Regent Street which had RFID tags triggering multimedia content and mirrors turning into screens in changing rooms.

Axe created an online graphic novel starring you.

P+G spoke compellingly of mass personalisation.

In Brazil, people purchasing Hellman’s Mayonnaise received a till receipt which used the other contents of their trolley to suggest a recipe enlivened by said mayonnaise.

Jesus I love that.

I want to go there with 3 tins of cat food, some toilet cleaner and a bottle of anti-dandruff shampoo.

Or just a trolley full of other mayonnaise jars.

Ford partnered with Roximity in the US to offer their drivers a satnav-based system which alerted drivers of nearby deals that tallied with their particular interests.

If this is based on web-surfing, expect alerts like “50% off hard-core German porn in Jim’s Bookstore for this week only”.

But these deals are personal to you, and you’re close, and you’re mobile … so they’re triple-smart.

Shopkick rewards people for pre-shopping activity like browsing. It is now the third most-used shopping app after eBay, Amazon and Groupon – but I wonder if this is a bubble which could burst.

Rewarding browsers strikes me as one of those “just-a-bit-too-smart-for-its-own-good” ideas.

Browsers aren’t giving you anything.

By contrast, Nike rewarded customers for posting stuff on social sites. Again, blurring the line between social and commercial – but at least it did have a more obvious commercial application.

Who Gives a Crap is a toilet paper brand in Australia which donates 50% of its profits to help build waste facilities in the developing world.

Of course, profits can be mucked about with. If the board of Who Gives a Crap pay themselves a million bucks a year, the developing world won’t see much change in its waste.

Steve, stop being cynical.

Let’s finish on education because we all need that on an ongoing basis (and this is where I plug Decoded, of course – we’ve got a bunch of new courses, including  social networks in a day).

Contagious gave Decoded a nice plug last year – and we were at their recent event in Kings Place – but this year they discovered Coursera, an organisation which partners with 33 universities to offer a selection of courses online – “we had a million users faster than Facebook, and faster than Instagram;  this is a wholesale change in the education ecosystem”  said Daphne Koller.

And goddamit I think she may be right.

Keep learning, folks.