Choose-the-Future-Faris-Yakob-AdMap

Choose the future 

Faris Yakob 

Admap 

Shortlisted, Admap Prize 2012



Admap 

Shortlisted, Admap Prize 2012 

 



Prospection, the act of looking forward in time, is a quintessentially human endeavour. Some consider it the quintessential 

human endeavour: "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." 1 

"The fundamental purpose of brains is to produce futurebrains are, in essence, anticipation machines." 2 

We spend much of our time projecting ourselves forward to motivate ourselves to reach towards our desired future, using the 

lens of that future as a way to understand what we should be doing now. Mankind is characterised by its nature as a 

planner. 

This brief is an expression of the planning discipline's current anxieties and the industry's collective desire to steer its own path 

into the future. As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We can motivate ourselves by imagining less 

pleasant tomorrows, of eroding relevance and margins, and thus engage in prophylactic behaviour. 

1. Planning is a young discipline reaching a moment of inflection, precipitated by a number of drivers. The increasing 

complexity of the landscape has led to a fragmentation of strategy across disciplines and departments. Integration being a 

top CMO concern 3 , and the clarification in the brief 4 , are symptoms of this problem 5 . 

"There definitely is a problem where you have a multi-agency structure team where there are planners in each of the 

respective disciplines." 6 

2. Recent developments in behavioural economics and psychology suggest that models we have historically used to 

understand how advertising works are wrong. 

Advertising as both "salesmanship in print" and "message transmission" has been fundamentally challenged 7 . Psychology and 

advertising research suggests consciously held attitudes do not necessarily change behaviour, despite the counter-intuitive 

experience of conscious will 8 (figure 1) but that feelings, relationships and associations are more important behavioural 

drivers, which are less influenced by messaging and more by 'metacommunication' 9 , and that heuristics, biases 10 and social 

copying 11 are equally important, which mostly operate outside our own experience of them. 

2 

Downloaded from warc.com

[Source: Behavioural Mapping Model: I'll Have What She's Having, Bentley, Earls, O'Brien, 2012] 

These findings contradict our internal perceptions of choice and action, leading to persistent meta-cognitive errors 12 in how we 

approach advertising, and lay bare the problems of market research that attempts to unpick unconscious drivers by 

interrogating the conscious mind 13 . 

3. The 'radical decentralisation of the economics of cultural production 14 ' that has been an ongoing effect of the proliferation of 

communication and creation technologies has fundamentally unbalanced the traditional communications and marketing 

equilibria. This has been endlessly examined 15 , but most salient to this discussion are two elements: diminished cultural 

latency, which means that content cycles through culture and decays faster 16 ; and the end of content scarcity that Moore's 

Law has wrought 17 . 

Inherent to the concept of planning is looking forward at what is now a fast-moving, inherently unpredictable network of 

interoperating elements, leading people to embrace a speculative portfolio, 'many little fires' approach to advertising. 

3 


Increased speed begs for iteration and optimisation - but planning always did. 

This model makes sense when thinking of creative products released into the protean network 18 , but a 90%+ failure rate isn't 

commercially sustainable for agencies in totality. The whole point of planning was/is to get better odds of success by basing 

ideas on something. 

Content scarcity has given way to overload, fixed channels of communication have dissolved into fluid networks, and captive 

audiences have now become active participants in consumer-driven conversations. 

This requires a new course of action for brands, new marketing imperatives and rightly gives pause to those tasked with 

making the work, work. 

If we return to the roots of planning, its intentions, rather than the current articulation, we see the desire to ground our work in 

the rigour businesses require to invest considerable sums of money, to understand human behaviour and provide a robust 

model for influencing it. It cannot be just 'gut feel'. Rather than dismantling planning into endless experimentation, we need a 

new way of understanding the world. 

In light of all the challenges to established thinking, the response from planning mustn't be an abandonment of trying to 

understand, lest we accept that not only have we been wrong, but we can never be right. 

"There was a lot of thinking about how communication worked in the 1960s and 1970s. It feels like, now, it's all practice and no 

theory. If we want to professionalise as an industry, we need to pay more attention to how communication actually works in 

this new world." 19 

Planning must be about the new rigour, understanding, and inspiration; 

How do we create value? 

How do we understand participants and passives, actions and channels? 

How do we inspire brand behaviour, not just brand utterances? 

4 


IDEAS VERSUS UTTERANCES 

Advertising is a means, not an end, a lever designed to effect consumer behaviour leading people to pay price premiums and 

buy more things, more often, due to the dimly understood interactions of ideas and human cognitive, social and economic 

behaviour. 

We sell ideas but we conflate ideas with articulations. This is dangerous because the nature of advertising is changing 

rapidly, leaving us open to being unable to compete amongst new varieties of articulation that are increasingly important. 

"What is a Big Idea not? It's not a TV script. It's not a key visual. It's not an iPhone app. It's not a QR code. It's not a Facebook 

app. It's not a tactic. A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. It's a world you can occupy and keep drawing on." 20 

PLANNING 3.0 

All aspects of brand behaviour are communication and human communication is always about relationships, and less about 

message transmission than we believe 21 . 

The types of 'metacommunication' most successful in building relationships are reciprocal - solving problems for people - or 

imitative, creating behaviours that can be copied. 

The kinds of ideas that earn attention in an infinite media space are likely to require understanding of participation, users 22 , 

not audiences, and context 23 . 

People aren't customers or prospects, because customers are not the same as people. 

Customers are to people as waves are to water. 

'Customers' are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people. 

The focus of planning is 'consumer insight'; trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural 

economics suggests that where and what and when are as least as important as who. 

We can look to market to customer contexts as we learn to use proximity and intention data that digital exhausts will provide 

5 


us. 24 

1. ONE STRATEGY 

The industry has conflated 'planning' and 'strategy'. Business strategy must indicate how companies marshall finite resources 

to achieve business objectives and achieve profitable growth; it does not assume advertising campaigns as an output, which 

account planning traditionally does. Strategy must be holistic. Someone has to take responsibility for helping clients allocate 

time and resources against different marketing disciplines if we don't then our destiny, and share of budgets, will be decided 

for us. 

"They're just not getting what they need from agencies, so many of them are bringing certain services in-houseServices like 

comms strategy and content creation are being done internally (because) agencies just aren't broad enough in their vision. 25 " 

2. Systems Architecture 

To oversee strategy and embrace the multimodal complexity of the mediascape requires more than putting the same idea in 

many places. It necessitates a system design transmedia 26 approach that establishes priorities and the interoperation of 

elements. 

This combines the silos of media and advertising [and all brand behaviour that touches consumers], understanding content 

and context, as well as embracing participation, social spread, and the application of technology. 

[Source: F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital 

Works http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html] 

Socially generated actions are increasingly important in a world where consumer broadcast networks are supplanting 

broadcast ones. 

Algorithms like Facebook's Edgerank suggest that elective viewing, commenting and sharing of brand content are going be 

crucial to ensure content is seen at all. Only content that creates some kind of immediate behavioural response will filter 

through the consumer content networks; content that doesn't will not appear for long in the distribution stream. 

However, content alone is no longer sufficient. Previously, the ability to make things public, to publish, was a privileged act. 

Only governments, the media-industrial complex and advertisers could do it. Now, everyone is making content all the time, 

which presents new kinds of challenges for 'commercial meaning makers' 27 for achieving salience in an infinite space. 

6 


That isn't to say the quality of "consumer generated content" [a tellingly oxymoronic term] is on a par with Hollywood 

production. Rather, the gap between not being able to do something and being able to do it is infinite, but the gap between 

being bad and excellent is simply one of degree. 

Content creation and distribution can no longer be the only tool brands use it's not as inherently impressive as once it was. 

3. Brands are behavioural templates 

Actions beget actions. Planning must be able to inform brand behaviour in totality, and look to aggregate behavioural, rather 

than misleading cognitive, responses. Google search volume is a more robust measure of salience than awareness tracking. 

[Source: F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital 

Works, http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html 

The types of actions should leverage principles of 'metacommunication': reciprocity, association and social copying. Do things 

for people - solve brand problems by solving consumer problems. 

Introduce intermediate behaviours. Create content people find valuable; give them tools they can use. 

Leverage advertising creation and distribution to disseminate ideas that can be advertised, not just advertising ideas 28 . 

Tap cultural apertures and associations that reinforce the desired brand actions and social behaviours: moments, rituals and 

beliefs can all be capitalised upon but rarely created. Early examples of this model, extensible solutions that inform advertising, 

include: Pepsi Refresh 29 , Canon Second Shot 30 , Domino's Turnaround 31 , VW Fun Theory 32 , Gatorade Replay 33 . 

The launch of the BMW ActiveE 34 was informed directly by this thinking. We established BMW Documentaries to examine the 

issues around the future of mobility and city design with editorial credibility, creating a content stream that was built around 

their interests, a series of films for the web, featuring hyper-textual additions to let users discuss and share fragments, 

featuring thought-leaders that contributed their own reach and influence to the idea; mobile tools to help users considering the 

car to ensure they were right for electric vehicles and explore their commuting routes; and at the same time to provide some 

personalised benefits to all users - social spaces to let electric vehicle drivers share learning. In less than one month, there 

were four times as many applications to buy the car as there were cars available in the USA. 

4. The New Briefing 

Moving away from an assumed messaging approach, briefs must incorporate fresh insight from multiple areas and expand 

7 


their framework. 

What brand problem? Consumer problem? 

How do we drive measurable, profitable brand growth? 

Who are participants and passives? 

What provocations can we glean from their behaviour? 

Appropriate brand actions and apertures and associations? 

Desired behavioural response? 

[Source: F Yakob; Exemplar] 

However, briefing is a collaborative process, not a reified document, and generative propositions that inform actions and 

apertures, as well as a solution architecture and inspiration, are all mandatory in helping craft articulations as diverse as we 

will require in 2020. 

The future of planning is linked to the future of the industry, and comes down to understanding the seemingly simple answer to 

the question: what business are we in? 

Since advertising is a lever, then it follows that, should better, more efficient, more effective solutions manifest to the business 

problem of marketing products to the masses, companies would be well advised to pursue them 35 . 

If strategic planning is able to navigate and indeed guide that transition, if agencies are truly in the business of profitable brand 

growth, if we choose to maintain the breadth of vision clients are demanding, then the future of planning is bright. 

FOOTNOTE 

1. Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, Page 4 

2. Consciousness Explained, D Dennett, [[[ broken link ]]] http://www.princeton.edu/~stcweb/html/pope02essay.html 

3. http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/cmos-increase-spending-social-media-integration-still-lacking 

4. "For clarity, planning encompasses the disciplines of account planning, media planning, communications planning, 

8 


strategic planning, brand planning, digital planning and integrated planning." Clearly these are different things, which 

speaks to the fragmentation and need for integration. 

5. http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/social-media-and-integration-chief-among-marketers-priorities 

6. Future of Planning: A Conversation, Admap Feb 2010 

7. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising R Heath & P Feldwick 

http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2007-03.pdf 

8. The Mind's Greatest Trick - How We Experience Conscious Will, D Wegner, Harvard Dept of Psych 

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/pdfs/trick.pdf 

9. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising R Heath & P Feldwick 


10. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 

11. I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behavior, R. Alexander Bentley, Mark Earls and Michael J. O'Brien MIT 

Press October 2011 

12. F Yakob, Strategy for A Post Digital Age or Persistent Metacognitive Errors in Advertising: Boulder Digital Works 

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/weve-been-wrong-all-along.html 

13. For a detailed analysis see Consumerology by Philip Graves http://philipgraves.net/discussion/tag/consumer-ology 

14. Yochai Benkler - The Wealth of Networks, Harvard Press http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf 

15. For a detailed exploration of participatory media consumers see I Believe the Children are the Future - IPA President's 

Prize Winning Essay http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future 

16. FYakob Cultural Latency, Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/faris-yakob/technology-strategy/culturallatency 

17. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/03/02/shirky-at-nfais-how-abundance-breaks-everything/ 

18. F Yakob - The Content Republic, Contagious Magazine 2009 http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/the-contentrepublic.html 

19. Rachel Hatton, The Future Of Planning, Admap Feb 2010 

20. http://tribalddb.com/news/blogs/don%E2%80%99t-create-an-ad-create-a-world%E2%80%A6/ 

21. 50 Years Using the Wrong Model of TV Advertising, R Heath & P Feldwick 


22. Aaron Shapiro, Users are the New Growth Engine, HBR 2011 

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/users_are_the_new_growth_engin.html 

23. F Yakob, Market to Context: IAB Keynote: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/6844.html 

24. Reality Bits - F Yakob and C Gehrt, Campaign Magazine Asia, May 2011 http://farisyakob.typepad.com/files/campaign- 

22may11-reality-bits-faris-and-corey.pdf 

25. [Source: IPA, ISBA, MAA PRCA joint report: 'Agency Remuneration' Jan 2012] 

26. For a detailed exploration of transmedia planning see I Believe the Children are the Future - IPA President's Prize 

Winning Essay http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future 

27. Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken http://www.amazon.com/Chief-Culture-Officer-Breathing- 

Corporation/dp/0465018327 

28. http://www.slideshare.net/garethk/we-need-a-new-idea-about-ideas 

29. http://www.refresheverything.com/ 

30. http://yoursecondshot.usa.canon.com/ 

9 


31. http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/ 

32. http://thefuntheory.com/ 

33. http://www.replaytheseries.com/ 

34. In the USA: http://bmwactivatethefuture.com, Winner, NEW Category, London International Awards 2011, Chiat Planning 

Awards 2011 

35. F Yakob, What do Advertising Agencies Do? OneClub Magazine, Q4 2011 

http://www.oneclub.org/#ol=/oc/magazine/articles/-what-do-advertising-agencies-doa 

Copyright Warc 2012 

Warc Ltd. 

85 Newman Street, London, United Kingdom, W1T 3EX 

Tel: +44 (0)20 7467 8100, Fax: +(0)20 7467 8101 

www.warc.com 

All rights reserved including database rights. This electronic file is for the personal use of authorised users based at the subscribing company's office location. It may not be reproduced, posted on intranets, extranets 

or the internet, e-mailed, archived or shared electronically either within the purchasers organisation or externally without express written permission from Warc. 

10

Choose-the-Future-Faris-Yakob-AdMap

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?