The View From Here: Seminar 4 transcript

The View from Here Event – 17th May 2007
‘Is the digital revolution driving disposable relationships?’

Dermot Murnaghan

Well ladies and gentleman. Welcome to … the fourth in the View from Here seminars. It is as always … going to offer us some very fascinating insights given the calibre of the panellists who I am going to introduce you to very shortly and of course the calibre of our audience sitting out there. It is not of course a lecture. It is a presentation and the opportunity to understand the perspectives of some very deep thinkers about industry and areas related to it, think about their philosophy, their ideas on the present and the future. From a marketing perspective of course. We all love asking questions and in the first part of this seminar I will be asking the questions … We will then open it up to the floor and I am sure your minds will be buzzing with queries, questions, challenges you may have. So the last part of the seminar will be opened to you, so you will have plenty of time to pose your questions then.

Let me introduce you to our guests. On my immediate left, Michael Wall, many of you will recognise. He is President International of Fallon and as one of the Founding Partners of Fallon London, Michael helped to develop the Fallon Brand and business into one of the most respected agencies in the UK and Europe and many of course will remember Fallon for its ground breaking Sony Bravia Ads. Welcome to you Michael. Mark Earls on his left, one of the world’s foremost communications practitioners and a leading thinker about brands … And of course consumer behaviour. Now he’s been described, I like this, as one of the advertising scenes foremost contrarians and the Christopher Hitchin’s of advertising and marketing. Whatever that may mean. His first book ‘Welcome to the Creative Age’ was widely read and discussed and translated into several languages. His latest book, many of you, some of you might have it ‘Herd’ It talks about how we are at heart a weave species, suffering from the illusion of IT. And yellow and pink, have I got them in the right. Well welcome to you Mark. And many of you will recognise, Oliver James, Clinical psychologist, writer, television documentary producer, man of many parts. In his book, he has written on the subject of the problematic relationship between wealth and happiness. We choose the subject of affluencer, how to be middle class, successful and fulfilled. Some secrets there, very provocative. And last, but not least, I would like to introduce Alex Batchelor, Marketing Director of Royal Mail. Before joining Royal Mail Alex worked as Vice President of Worldwide Brands for Orange and Joint MD of Interbrand. The common fuelling of his professional career has been an appreciation for the power of brands. He has brought that perspective to his role at the Royal Mail. He is going to start us off today with some insights, some of the challenges that our guests and a few of our audience I hope will be debating today and maybe sometime to come, maybe for the rest of your working lives I suspect. Ladies and gentleman please welcome Alex Batchelor.

Alex Batchelor
Marketing Director, Royal Mail

Very kind. It is always nice to sit on the end of a panel where you are here …because you are paying the bill. So I am very grateful for your indulgence. But welcome. Thank you very much for coming along. The purpose of these really is to get some very bright people, and I have an array next to me, to come and give us some pearls of wisdom and then allow you to question them mercilessly on whether or not those things apply to your life. So please take this opportunity. But others making me think about life and as the question was ‘Is the digital revolution driving disposable relationships?’ I was thinking quite hard about my own life and it is very interesting when I try and summarise it. And actually a lot of the things that affect us all in any kind of communication are really about relevance. If someone is saying something that I …am genuinely interested in and want to listen to, that is really how it … works and the other bit of my life that you suddenly think about is about trying to spend as much time as you can doing the things that give you some sense of purpose, quality of life, whether that is through achievement. And trust me there are moments working at Royal Mail where it feels like banging your head against the wall. So you have to get some sense of achievement from that, if only when it stops!

And the other, part of your lives, I have four young children and that really led me onto the question about relationships. And I suddenly realised that actually what defines a lot of my life, are some very longstanding relationships. Mum and dad. I am lucky enough to be married for 15 years and I have these children who have been part of my life, who are 11, 10, 8 and 6. You have these long term relationships. You also think about your friends and the one sat out here tonight, with whom I have worked with for almost 20 years, who is a very good friend. And those things seem to be very longstanding.

So we are here to talk about disposable relationships and yet most of my relationships actually seem to be far from disposable, much more enduring. So when I was starting to think about this, people would then try and point out there are lots of other ways to have relationships, whether it is the person you meet in the ticket booth at the railway station, or in some internet chat room … How do you meet these people, pass by them, share a moment, share some knowledge. What is it that happens? And how many different forms of communication are there within that? So one of the interesting things I certainly learnt in my time at Orange was quite how much information you could condense into 162 character text message. When I joined Orange I had never sent a text message and by the time I had left four and a half short years later I was probably averaging 40 a day. Now that, as a kind of smoking habit, would be considered quite dangerous and as a text messaging habit I suspect is still dangerous. Because the ability of me to miscommunicate with people in those 162 characters was almost as powerful as the ability to communicate with the people in 162 characters. And there is something about the condensation of these brief moments that sometimes doesn’t make them work.

So when I think about all of this, one of the thoughts I suppose I want to leave you with in this disposable relationship environment, is that I am not convinced they are quite so disposable. I think there maybe lots of them and they may be very frequent. But actually they are all serving a purpose, it’s the difference between conversations that replace other conversations because I frankly don’t have the time to have all the conversations and conversations that simply supplement the conversations. We all have friends who you certainly don’t see for a couple of years, meet them one evening, have a fantastic night and then quite happily don’t see them for another two years. But still we have that memory of what a … fantastic evening you had, but somehow you don’t seem to have missed it enough to have done anything about it in the kind of like interim. And when I start thinking about those kind of conversations…. I suddenly start thinking that …there are only three million seconds in a year and I have just wasted quite a lot of some of yours.

…I remember having a party to celebrate being 10,000 days old, which is in your 27th year just in case anyone [laughing] needs to remember this opportunity. But as I had written a spread sheet to work out how many days there were in a project, I plugged in my date of birth and realised at the time I was 9,900 and something days old and if I got a party organised in a month, I would have a good excuse for a party. And I think when you start thinking about it in those precious terms of seconds and days that actually how much time I have spare for some of these disposable relationships. I will want to fit in the stuff that really does matter to me and the relationships that really do matter …

Dermot Murnaghan

A lot of thoughts there Alex which I would like to take up with you in a moment. But let’s hear from the rest of our panellists first. Picking up with you Michael, are disposable relationships a threat to brands?

Michael Wall

I don’t think so because if I take a very single minded view of what my business does, which is make advertising, it is eminently disposable. A campaign runs for a number of weeks and disappears off the screen, or off a poster site or out of a magazine. It is all disposable. I think the difference is what legacy do they leave? What is the lasting impression that they create with you? It is a bit like your analogy about your friends reunited for dinner. You know you hold onto a memory of that and how special it was and probably build it up in your mind to be way bigger than the night was but it doesn’t matter how long.

Dermot Murnaghan

If there is a tidal wave of other relationships (do these) other influences get forgotten?

Michael Wall

They absolutely do and I think one of the travesties in the creative business is that most of what we see on our TV screens, when we are on line, when we read magazines is not very good and it does get washed away very, very easily.

Dermot Murnaghan

Some of the Fallon stuff?

Michael Wall

Some of it but not all of it and I think the stuff that lasts is the stuff that is creatively strong and creatively good. It is no more complicated than that in some ways.

Dermot Murnaghan

Mark in a sense you say all these guys are really barking up the wrong tree in a way. Marketing, advertising to individuals, to single consumers when they should be looking at the ‘we’, on the whole.

Mark Earls

I think that is right. The really interesting thing that is revealing to us is not the technology stuff of the RSS and all of those wonderful technical things, nor indeed the interesting new platforms that are emerging and perhaps we can talk about those a bit later, but it is actually revealing some truths about human nature which we have all missed for about 50 years, maybe longer with our Anglo Saxon view.

Dermot Murnaghan

I feel a big thought coming on.

Mark Earls

Okay big thought. If you look at how text messaging (Alex mentioned), came from nothing in just a few years, without much marketing activity. Why? Because people like to contact each other, particularly when it is cheap. They don’t have to say anything, it is much more what if often called phatic communication, it is just doing something that is communication, to interact with someone in some way without any real content. Don’t worry about misspelling, I think Alex we will come to that!

There is a service which people are really excited about right now called twitter. Does anyone use twitter here? [Answer: Yeah] About a dozen or so. Twitter is permanent forward or journal of what you are doing right now. Going to make a cup of tea, sitting in this panel discussion, bath or whatever it is. And people do this all the time with their friends. I mean it just gives an impression, it doesn’t say anything to each other, it just says what I am doing right now. Gives an impression of being part of a group. And this is the fundamental thing we miss with our obsession with I, the Anglo Saxon thing in particular, and lots of people in the marketing world, love the idea we can speak to individuals. It is wrong. We are a species that wants to be with each other. In fact influencing each other all of the time all of our lives from the moment we are born to the day we die is about other people. Thomas Schelling the Nobel Prize winning economist said in a book about 30 years ago that most human life is responding to a situation, a context which consists of other people responding to a context which consists of other people responding to a context which consists of other people.

Dermot Murnaghan

Just setting out your stall. Are you saying as Anglo Saxons then, we are being shoe horned into this when we don’t want to be?

Mark Earls

Well we have got a culture pulling us one way and the other thing is … other people. We know from the studies of happiness that other people and our interaction with them is essential. We have been stuck in the branding and marketing world assuming that what is important is what we do to them, when the truth is …what they do to each other and the lives they spend with each other that we need to both respect, enhance and support.

Dermot Murnaghan

Neatly segued to Oliver there. Oliver is there more dimension to all this? I mean with the argument that because we don’t need all this, it is making us very unhappy.

Oliver James

It is not necessarily moral but I do agree that the problem is with English speaking nations and the work that I have done with showing that based on the WHO study. From the English speaking nations on average, 23% of them have suffered mental illness in the last 12 months compared with 11.5%. Half of that as it happens (conveniently exactly half in mainland western Europe) has suffered a mental illness in the last 12 months. And that is completely down to the different kinds of social aggregations that occur in what I call selfish Capitalist or near Conservative target Liberal societies where the English speaking nations are compared with mainland western Europe which is a very, very different place. And one of the reasons I have to say is undoubtedly because since the war pretty much the Americans have spent four times more than mainland western Europe on advertising and marketing spend per capita and we’ve spent twice mainland western Europe’s spend and undoubtedly that is a factor. Separating it out from the impact of television is quite difficult to do because television is undoubtedly in itself acted as an independent variable causing a lot of damage and certainly causing us not to relate to each other so much.

But going to this central question of disposability, you see what I think that no, I think obviously technology is important… Yesterday somebody who was the great love of my life and with whom I am still very friendly was telling me about the letters I wrote to her 25 years ago when she kicked me out. Now [laughter] apparently I wasn’t very nice. Of course, now those letters wouldn’t exist. And in many ways that is a great tragedy and that depth of communication that went into letters that Royal Mail used to represent etc. you know obviously… (doesn’t exist) in this texting world.

But …I think that is a fairly shallow level at which to discuss this. Surely it should be obvious to everyone here that we are talking about the disposability of our kids. How much time do we spend with them? How much do we play with them? …How much do we interact with them or just see them as consumer producers that we are trying to prepare to educate so that they do well, so that they can earn more money blah, blah, blah. Divorce, casual sex. We have the highest rate of 15 year olds who have had sex. 38% have had sex before they are 16. And of course as the International Labour Office Report of 2004 shows … that …the quality of our working environment is appalling. You know it’s wham, bam thank you man, in the relationship between employers and employees.

And also I think an interesting development that we should talk about tonight is the extent to which the relationship between consumer and retaile/ producer has changed. I used to have a very good relationship with Apple. Until now I’ve had a very high regard for their computers but my ipod broke down after two years and after an enormous amount of trouble I discovered that there isn’t anyone, anywhere who can repair my ipod. So I lost, really, in the battle to try and get hold of someone at Apple but as I really believed in Apple, I thought there must be somebody. And I went further and further up the hierarchy and threatened them more and more as a journalist. And still there was nobody who could repair my ipod which had nothing much wrong with it. And so what I am saying is built in obsolescence has massively increased and we are living in an environment where we are disposable as employees and we are encouraged to buy all this crap frankly. People around will argue, but what I am saying is that the two arguments dovetail: it is about poor relationships and much greater mental illness combined. So a lot of people feel like shit combined with a greater awareness of ecology and that whole issue come together very closely. The consumers now think they want, but actually don’t want a wham, bam, thank you mam relationship either with commodities or with the people who make them.

Dermot Murnaghan

Got to throw this to Michael then. Are you guilty as charged?

Michael Wall

It feels like it.

Dermot Murnaghan

For modern societies, do you always create desires where they are none?

Michael Wall

I have often heard our business referred to as the factory of lies when you talk about advertising and marketing and so forth. I think one is in danger of taking it all too seriously.... At the end of the day people buy products. They buy products at a very basic level to make the household function or to make their daily life and routine function. They buy stuff at a maybe higher end level to sort of treat themselves or to do stuff that goes with that. And in any marketplace there will be a number of competitors and in any competition people will use different means to get an advantage price. And I give people more credit than to suggest that they will be degenerative. I think we are capable of making our own choices for filtering stuff that we want to take part in, view and equally by rejecting the stuff that we don’t want. And I think that is becoming increasingly easy in the digital age. I also think there is a shift happening. We talk about trends and what have you. I would suggest, and certainly this is the best that way to cover projects and brief clients, that there is a healthy growth in honesty. And that might seem a sort of trite thing to say…

Dermot Murnaghan

The way you say that, would you tell a client, you can’t push water uphill?

Michael Wall

Yes, so Skoda for us has been a classic example of taking a brand and one of the first conversations with the client was please stop trying to say it is a souped up new car and don’t worry about the baggage and you or I the punter will buy it because it is a sexy car and partner would buy a VW. It was about fessing up and saying, we know what you think of Skodas, but that we will give you a mechanism by which you can give it a second look because underneath that badge there is a mechanically robust product. There is an incredibly competitively priced product and it will meet many of your needs whether you are a family driver or a business driver or whatever it might be. And I think that is just one example of an increasing number. Such as the Marks and Spencer’s (well the supermarket) rush to clean up their act in terms of the environment and bags and everything that goes with that. And frankly long may that continue….

Dermot Murnaghan

One could say there is a degree of cynicism about that in a sense that as Oliver was describing. Is there a yearning out there?

Michael Wall

Maybe there is but I think anybody who goes down that route of trying to use it to their advantage without taking consequence of what they should be delivering as much as selling, will be found out and will be rumbled. And I think that is great, that is one of the powers that digital, highly democratic age delivers. I think that is what makes this chapter in terms of marketing communication exciting, not scary in my opinion.

Dermot Murnaghan

Let’s continue with the relationship with brands. Mark on your analysis does it make it more difficult for people like Michael to develop the big brands given that they’re aiming at the wrong target?

Mark Earls

Well no I think there are two or three ways that make it more difficult. There are many more ways for Michael. And I have worked in similar areas as Michael with some of my clients. Many more ways to go to market. Many more ways to deliver your messages and your persuasive activities to the market place, so it is hard. Secondly there is much more cynicism and indeed I suggest a huge amount of evasion and that is one of the great positive benefits of the digital area which is actually people are choosing to be together away from brands. And I think that is something that most marketers really have resisted for a long time. I have seen it in the work that I have done for quite a while and it is now really clear online.

Dermot Murnaghan

When they are together away from brands do they then develop their own brands, smaller brands?

Mark Earls

They use brands and this is I think the sort of the future: we have got to stop thinking about the relationship between brand and consumer as being important. It is not. Real people have relationships with real people, some with animals, but mostly with people. That is it. And we can’t have that many, we can’t have that many relationships either. Robin Dumbar at Liverpool University would suggest about 50-100 is a standard human group for having a relationship of any sort. We can’t have those many relationships as commercial messages we are bombarded with. Or even services you buy regularly like standing order. You can’t get that many relationships and you wouldn’t because they are not relationships, they are transactions, bought in over a period of time which you make sense of afterwards somehow. The truth is the relationships you have with people and that is what drives people. Brands in the future and some brands really understand that and some of the people that Michael works with I know get this. Brands have to support, enhance and facilitate the relationships that people have with each other. And that is much more respectful and much less clumsy and much less rubbish to be honest.

Dermot Murnaghan

But it is the mode of communication of those brands that influences the perception of them as well?

It does absolutely. You know what it is like when you meet someone who talks to you as if you were another person. You know it must happen to you being on television. Someone talks to you ‘Have I met you before?’ And when you get talked to as if you were the other fellow, it seems really weird.

Dermot Murnaghan

Eamon Holmes, absolutely! It’s the accent.

Mark Earls

So that is disconcerting. I think there is another really big thing here which is consumers are not consumers, they are people. So when we talk to them as consumers, they naturally go ‘I am more than that’. And we talk down to them, we talk to them as a consumer, it is talking to you as just that bloke who appears on television, you know that is part of your profession, but actually it is whole lot more.

Dermot Murnaghan

I live in a box. Alex I want to put that to you then. Direct marketing, does it have a future in the digital age? Does it do all those things that Mark was talking about to the consumer. Do they think, I don’t want this, it’s junk?

Alex Batchelor

I am intrigued by all of this. There is a little bit here about, is it the herd that conditions the herd or is it the advertiser outside of the herd, the loud hailer that conditions that herd? And I think the reality for me when I look at it is that the herd that conditions the herd. So I think the advertiser can be careful about how much he can really have. Now if I facilitate the communication between some members of the herd and other members of the herd and I do that with things that are relevant and they are interested in and all the rest of it, then that is fine and it is very boring in our industry. We have lots of film of people getting their post and what they do with it and all that kind of stuff, trying to understand, as I am sure advised by you know psychologists, stenographers and all sorts of other people with impressive job titles about what to do with this stuff. And the reality is you will get people, a lot of them, putting mail in two piles. This is all the stuff that I am interested in and this is all the stuff that I am not interested in. And when you have a look at it, a lot of the stuff in the I am interested pile is stuff that anyone else would define as junk. But they don’t define it as junk at the point at which they have got it because it is something they are interested in. And actually I want that and I want to read it and I am going to look at it.

Dermot Murnaghan

Are you talking about identifying individuals?

Alex Batchelor

Well I think no because I think the reality is if you use what you think you know about the herd and how the herd interacts then I think you are better off. Because one of the things you were talking about was relationships and transactions. Some transactions we have in our relationships so you don’t have transactions without relationships usually. And some of them have a commercial value. Someone is paying me to come to work. But if they think they only reason I come to work is because I am being paid, then they misunderstand me and I am probably insulted by their misunderstanding of what kind of motivates me. So it is a kind of concern in that. But equally lots of transactions have no commercial value, but sometimes have considerable greater kind of emotional weight. I apologise in the midst of all these brainy people, my stuff sounds horribly focusing.

I did a scout Fete at the weekend and my wife mistakenly rang someone who she did not know. She thought she knew this person and she thought she was a mum who is in our school called Mel and she rang and asked if she could borrow her gazebo, because for any of you who didn’t come to Thames Ditton Scout Fete on Sunday, it was pissing it down with rain. This is going to make sense, trust me. So she rang this person called Mel. She gets someone she doesn’t realise, leaves a message or thinks she is leaving Mel a message. He rings back. He then offers to show up and shows up on the green with his gazebo having cycled round on his bike and he erects this gazebo and then we ask where would he like it delivered afterwards. And it turns out that she transposed two phone numbers and rang someone she had never heard of, knew nothing about, who showed up to her plea for a gazebo and brought his gazebo to the Fete. I was pretty amazed at this point. I am proud of human relationships. So I drove round afterwards with the gazebo to give it back to him and because he lives in a very rough part of town, I offer to pay him for coming over and bringing his gazebo. And he is absolutely aghast. He is Turkish, all he is interested in is that it was his community, where someone asked for my help and I came and provided my help. And I have never felt like such a tosser for offering to pay. Because what I feel was that I was trying to help and actually in a funny kind of way I wasn’t. And I think we have got to be careful that there are transactions that we have in life that have all these different values, they aren’t always about the money ones, paying for something. And the non money ones where actually I am just happy to be in a society where some random Turkish guy rung by my wife shows up with his gazebo to help. Because actually that is the society I do want to live in and I am happy. I was probably happier about that than anything else that has happened this week.

Dermot Murnaghan

Thank you for sharing that.

Oliver, it is about herd influences in your book, I always think of 2001 Space Odyssey, the one that gets the stick. Doesn’t that influence the herd as well?

Oliver James

I think that the key question is around the long debate about the extent to which advertising affects the herd or the herd affects the advertising and social scientists blame the advertising, blah, blah, blah. But I have quite a lot of sympathy with what Michael was saying, in so far as I think that advertising and marketing, particularly in this country, are fantastically creative. They are a wonderful channel for a whole lot of people to be creative and really artistic and also the viewers as he says are not completely passive idiots. Having gone around, as I was when writing my book, a lot of different nations, one thing I think we have hung onto, is that you still have to be mildly depressed to live here with some disparity. We are all competing here to try and pretend that we are the stupid one. I know because we have been set up as being bright. And so that is what you do. But we are not. Michael is right, we see the ironies and cleverness behind as viewers of these advertisements, we are not just passive consumers. Having said that, going round the world, it was very interesting and I am sure you must know a lot about this Michael because I know you are very involved internationally. But you probably know much more about it than me. But I found in China if you want to sell toothpaste you say it cleans your teeth as in the studies that show this. Whereas if you are in Hong Kong or Taiwan, you already have to start lying about what it will do. That woman will want to sleep with you or that man will want to sleep with you. It will give you a smile that will change your sex life. In Moscow they are still at the stage where with all the electronic goods for example, where most people are only buying their first computer. So they don’t have to tell a lot of lies that this PC is better than that PC, all they have to do is sell the concept of a PC and why it would be useful for you. So it is still at the level of need rather than confected wants.

Now the problem we have got into and where I think it isn’t about herd it is about political economies, is that in the English speaking world we have got so sophisticated and so far advanced that we have to tell quite a lot of untruths shall we say about what a PC might or might not be able to do. Coming full circle in a way. Michael says this and it is really interesting to me that he says that.

Dermot Murnaghan

You could say two faced?

Oliver James

I don’t care if they are cynical. It is my response if that is what they are doing. If they are nonetheless I would say to this audience, you may say I am a dreamer and that this sounds like nonsense from a non commercial psycho babbling shrink but is it not possible for you to start thinking about how the products that you are selling really do meet a fundamental psychological need? Now obviously that is very difficult if it is perfume or something, but even perfume you probably could. Beauty products probably harder. But a lot of the time, whether you are selling soap powder, these things actually have very important purposes.

A Skoda, a car is an incredibly helpful thing and can really meet fundamental psychological needs. So the extent to which we are all going back to that and increasingly ecological stuff is going to start fizzing around too and people are going to be getting more real, I think that is true. And even can I put it to you that you can see yourselves as you are not hair brained people who lack any volition, you can be politically active through your activities. You are doing important things. You are providing things to the community that the community needs including jobs but also including actual products that people actually want.

And can you not at a very simple level when you are giving narratives to the general population, think of the harm that the affluenza virus does at placing too high a value on money positions, appearance, physical and social and fame? Those things are being shown in 14 different studies in different nations to make you more likely to be vulnerable to mental illness. Now at the moment if you had a narrative in your story that you are telling, whether it is a mailshot story or a television advertisement, or a story about a woman who basically chucks her husband or leaves her kid behind because she prefers her VW golf. That is actually a narrative, of which there are so many, about people being selfish and people doing things that are actually bad for them putting objects before human beings, because they become marketing characters in which they place a higher value which they are constantly trying to raise their own value, seeing themselves as a commodity and everyone else as a commodity.

That is the environment we live in in the English speaking world much more than in mainland western Europe. And what about narratives that say here is a man who actually decides to, I mean it could be a woman, who actually decides to stop working so hard and spend some time looking after his children. You might say this is just politically correct garbage, we don’t want to have to start having to think about rubbish like that about the political messages implicit in our stories. But why can’t you? Why shouldn’t you? And are you sure that it wouldn’t actually appeal to the population? Because the politicians are horribly out of sync with what the population wants on that particular issue. I talk to politicians regularly. It is really hard to get them to listen to the fact that the vast majority of parents of small children want to spend more time with them. But the politicians won’t listen.

Dermot Murnaghan

Mark do you think that kind of quality time argument is right?

Mark Earls

I think there’s loads of evidence that Oliver is on track in two senses. The first of which is that brands which build themselves around some bigger purpose than simple money or the category outperforming the medium and long term. There is the built to last study probably the most famous one. Seven and a half times the return on shareholder funds that you see from companies with the same asset base who just focus around financial or categories.

Oliver James

And those studies are very well done studies.

Mark Earls

Absolutely. And it gets repeated again and again and again. The brands that we admire in the world are all built this way. So that is the first thing. The second thing is we all know and I say this because I have been involved in an interesting little project recently which one person in the audience knows about. You have got to say that most of the new product development that we do is nonsense. There are enough products in every category and every sort. More than enough. The average UK supermarket has somewhere between 30,000-40,000 new product choices.

So what we do when we introduce a new product, we make something slightly different? No make it good, make it better, that is where the hard work goes. And rather than having to work with some of Michael’s less respectful peers and package it all neatly and pretend that it is better and exploit people in the way that Oliver is describing, what about putting that effort into making a good product, or even a brilliant product? Something that actually makes a difference rather than yet another NPD project that ends up with something which is a bit different and might last.

Dermot Murnaghan

Mark I don’t think anyone here is going to disagree with that, make a good product, potentially make the best product.

Mark Earls

I see the faces nod in the room and they all go, yeah I’m doing that! Yet another little incremental nonsense thing.

Dermot Murnaghan

You have still got to get the message across.

Mark Earls

We all know that the most powerful medium to persuade people to do things is other people. Word of mouth is one thing, behaviour generally. So that is the most powerful medium, always has been, always will be, even in the great age of American network TV, it was the most powerful thing. Now the best way to get that to work for you is not brainwashing people, but giving them something really good and building in the mechanism by which they will go and propagate the advocacy of it.

Dermot Murnaghan

But who do you target to get the word of mouth going?

Mark Earls

Well there is a number of ways to do that, a number of different models. One model says, for example, there is 10% of the, this is an American version, 10% of people who tell everyone else what to do. I don’t think that is right. There are more interesting models out there, people out there. There is a company called Spring Research, who have done some really interesting stuff on tracking different markets how different people influence stuff, like for example the wine club market, it is the bloke at the end of the garden you have the occasional conversation with over the fence. So that is interesting. The fact is that the most, and if you think about it this way. Forest fires is a good example. Forest fires we think of as unusual events so we, so we track back and go this is unusual, therefore there must be a cause; it is a match or a lighted cigarette thrown into the brush and there is somebody who did that and they are the cause. The truth is that there are lots of lit cigarettes and matches and opportunities for that to happen. It normally doesn’t.

Dermot Murnaghan

It could be lightning.

Mark Earls

But the real thing is to do stuff that real people do, not the leading edge, because they are too busy playing with their hand held devices, to influence anyone else. And we are all a bit cynical. The real choice is to find how most ordinary people if you like interact with each other. This is why Michael has done so well.

Dermot Murnaghan

Okay, going back to the technology. It is a question we ask ourselves in the BBC every day. Things are changing so fast. We don’t know the modes in which people are receiving our information. We know the viewers are still out there, there are more of them than ever before, they are drifting away from terrestrial television. They are moving to digital television, they are moving online. They are moving in many different areas. They are a difficult target then for you to attract and hit.

Michael Wall

I think the conversation often ends up, feels it ends up being either or, either you have to put everything digitally because that is where you are going to get them and you have got to forsake doing a conventional TV spot. And I think, I just don’t think it is as cut as dried as that. I think you just have to be more elastic in where you are.

Dermot Murnaghan

But let me put this to you. Do you think you could build a major brand, if a product is good, is the best, without television?

Michael Wall

Yes

Dermot Murnaghan

You could from the ground up?

Michael Wall

Yes absolutely. But…

Dermot Murnaghan

That says it all doesn’t it?

Michael Wall

But the caveats will be what is the context of it? What category is it in? What is its credentials? Who is the target market? And once you have got that stuff then you can build your footprint of what you want to do with it. But there is still a truth in a good old fashioned television spot will hit more people in the right way than anything else…I will take that Sony example of the bouncing balls. You know I think largely it was helped for a number of reasons. It was a product that had a point of difference, colour. It was from a brand that people liked and respected and wanted to like again. All that stuff, fine. But it travelled around the world before we had even finished doing the shoot. And it was out there as word of mouth and it was out there on blogs and it was out there as clips on Youtube and Flickr and all these digital age media. But we still bought a Champions League spot up at Man U and had a load of perimeter boards with bouncing balls on it and that is because they both supported each other. They were both part of the mix and it helped kind of turbo charge the ad.

Dermot Murnaghan

I just get a sense from you though, talking about that interaction and word of mouth… Where is the modern water cooler? Is it still in the office? Is it still…

Michael Wall

It may sound really old fashioned view, but I would say it is in the idea. For me the idea is the water cooler. Where the conversation is happening, whether that is online, whether it is ‘Did you see it on the telly last night?’ is it a journalist who has picked up on it? All of that is the floxum and jetsam of how it is delivered. For me it is the idea that generates the water cooler discussion and then how it is packaged and where it is seen that is just different ways of getting into it.

Dermot Murnaghan

Let’s open the conversation up as we are running out of time. I am sure there are many of you out there with questions, thoughts, observations. We have got some microphones dotted around the room. Who would like to put something to our panel?

Question
Pete Wilson
Team Spirit

Do you think it is dangerous for brands to try and follow peoples relationships into the virtual worlds, the second lives and places like that?

Dermot Murnaghan

Let’s open with Mark.

Mark Earls

Yes. I mean for example a power brand that has had its store burnt down a number of times. I think of it as with real human relationships, as opposed to this silly brand human thing, An agenda was set, as opposed to grovelling, too much grovelling isn’t attractive and also the mutuality that says you don’t want to speak to me right now. You are off having fun on your own, that is fine. That seems to me to be a good thing that brands need to learn as opposed to find new ways to reach you and because after a while it does just get really annoying. And anyone who spends any amount of time online knows how annoying that is.

Dermot Murnaghan

Oliver?

Oliver James

I have no idea. I don’t know anything about that. Probably just as well.

Dermot Murnaghan

Alex?

Alex Batchelor

I will cancel the Post Office we are trying to build …[laughter]

Dermot Murnaghan

Let’s have another question?

Charlie Hoult
Loewy

I was at school with Alex so that’s how long I have been hanging around! There has been a lot of talk because it is advertising led on that side of things a bit about PUSH, that the question over there was about second life or web 2.0 and PULL. And I think it is interesting how I consume media now with my Google alerts that I have set up and that gives me. People talk about blogs being a bit weird and a bit train spotterish, but actually if I like pylons around the countryside I can be an expert on that because there are websites on that sort of stuff. And so I think change in relationships rather than disposability. I can have a real intense relationship with the things that I like and so now with other stuff. I set that as an issue rather than a question.

Response

I take it and maybe I am in danger of talking about the PUSH model, but I kind of take it as read that we are just in a really interesting phase of transition and because we have lots of different applications available to us because the degree of specialism is at a level that it has never been before and my access at a freedom it has never been before. And I think the good thing about that, whether I am still old fashioned by pushing out messages is that everyone will decide. It is an incredibly democratic era you know and technology fuels that. But our appetite fuels that more than anything else. So I think that is really exciting, because what it does is whatever I do as an old fashioned bloke pushing stuff. It has to be of the highest quality. It has to be at the highest level of interest, it has to be absolutely relevant, it can’t be bullshit, it can’t deceive you, it can’t be a conceit. And I just think it is leads to a much more refreshing, much more dynamic, much more interesting market place. Whether you are zoning now or I am pushing stuff to you, we have both got to work hard to get to a place that meets your requirement to talk about pylons.

Dermot Murnaghan

Do you go along with what Alex has said about disposability as not necessarily a problem, it can be enabling and a discipline as well?

Alex Batchelor

I think it is also much more about complementality. Certainly when I first kind of arrived in this debate and suddenly realised I was a media owner as the owner of the Royal Mail brand and responsibility I hadn’t really thought about it before. But what really drives it for me is not trying to spend my life going, it’s better than telly, or it is better than radio or it is actually. If you are going to do telly, do some direct mail as well because we are a big bunch of the customer base that will make what you did on telly seem a lot more relevant, or personal or give them some action to do. And whether that is I don’t know, John Lewis sending mini catalogues out to get people to do online. Because John Lewis keeps going, go online and no one goes online. So send a mini catalogue and then they go and look online to try and find you know. It is that kind of thing that we have got to get better at stringing some of these things together so that they are complementary parts of communication that you do, rather than just one. And I think a good example for me would be powerpoint say, god forbid, I haven’t had any powerpoint tonight except for one slide, and it never moved. Quite relieved. So that kind of stuff that works. Sometimes it is a different dialogue and if we all stood up and faced the other way that would seem like a very different conversation as well.

Dermot Murnaghan

So Oliver, I love pillons.com - it is an enabling, isn’t it?

Oliver James

I think the problem is we are gagging for intimate human relationships and we are trying to use the internet, often pornography being the most obvious, but in all sorts of ways. We are trying to use the internet now to compensate for the lack of those relationships. It is a tragedy that I think in 1950, 60% of women said that if a man was nice in other ways but they didn’t love him, they would marry him. In I think about 2000 when the survey was done again only 10% of women would marry a man they didn’t love. Think of how relationships have changed in that period, the divorce rate has gone up tremendously. We are craving love. The 2004 Christmas number one contained the line ‘The dreams in which I am dying are the best I ever have’. ‘It’s a mad world’ is generally felt to be the case. And so I think you are right of course that it is in some ways it has become a much more democratic world because of all these technologies, but of course as we full know, the politicians are a million miles away from being. So, in a sense, we are perhaps searching and perhaps that is the way we are going to get out of this mess. Because I do feel that we are going to get out of this mess, I really do feel quite optimistic, not just because I am a wildly optimistic person, but I really think the combination of ecology and so many of us feeling like shit will mean that okay it is democratic, but we end up being like me, when trying to deal with my Apple problem, I spent such a long time on the phone. You know we are on these 0845 numbers solving our financial services, all these other problems, you know. It is democratic and yet it isn’t. So it is kind of very, very mixed the fact that all this, a slight contradiction about this that is interesting. It is this consuming on your own, that it is creating everybody seems to be saying, the we society we are talking about.

Comment

I think that is right and what is so fascinating about being in what we call ‘the digital age’, this moment when things are changing so fast as Michael says is that nature is emerging, our real desires are emerging and businesses and marketers that want to actually retain some kind of resonance beyond this change point. It is like the narrowing of a funnel. We are going through this gap. We don’t quite know what it is going to be like the other side, but there is every sign that it could be very, very…

Dermot Murnaghan

But how do advertisers and markets measure that aggregation? How do they know it is happening? A lot of it is so far untouched. We don’t even know it has gone on?

Mark Earls

Absolutely. I think part of the problem is, and this is not an opportunity to have a go at market research. But the way we describe people are maps of how the world is and just so out of touch with reality of even our own life spent in too many marketing meetings. You know it is just not like we imagine it is. It is just, we don’t. You know.

Oliver James

I think it is so true that we live in such an really extraordinary time actually where we have had 10 years of a strange government. We are about to have two more years of it. I think that it really is an exciting time. I think people actually want things to change and though they haven’t for a very long time.

Dermot Murnaghan

Can we have another question from Gordon Brown! Now, gentleman in the middle there.

Male - Question

This is a question about 24 hour invasion and intrusion into our lives. I think over the last 20 years, certainly for me there has been a lot more intrusion. You know every room in the house has got a TV. Everywhere you go there is a mobile phone. You go and meet somebody and everyone is busy on their mobile phones. The next big wave of technology is really applying 3G and everyone is going to have incredible graphics. Advertising is going to go individually to them. And what I would be interested to hear is how does the panel think society is going to cope with the next wave of technology and its intrusion on our lives?

Dermot Murnaghan

Let’s go down the panel. Briefly if you would gentlemen?

Alex Batchelor

A terrible habit I picked up in Orange, I don’t answer my phone to people I don’t know. So you ring me on my mobile and if it doesn’t come up with who you are and it comes up with unknown or private or something like that, I just don’t answer it.

Dermot Murnaghan

Do you answer the phone at home?

Alex Batchelor

I don’t answer the phone at all. If they don’t ring me on my mobile then I know they don’t want me! [laughter]

Mark Earls

That works for me too. I am in the pecking order somewhere below the goldfish in our house so it is one of these status things. I think it is about personal. If someone is writing to me or I know who they are or ringing me and I know who they are. Or talking to me and I know who they are and then I am listening. But if I don’t know who they are and know that I probably wouldn’t be interested in what they are saying, then I will not. And I think that is quite normal. And I think we as an industry who would deal with media have got to do is say things that are interesting and talk to people we know.

Dermot Murnaghan

So that is what the next wave of technology is going to do. Oliver presumably from what you have told us about your ipod before, you would just like this generation to work?

Oliver James

Yes. For example, you meet people today. You know sometimes you think, God, what is going to happen when you listen to them, you talk to them, you hear about what they think. But possibly what will happen is simply that we will get a lot choosier. And we will be a lot harder to get hold of for the marketers and the advertisers it will be that much harder. I mean you all know this much better than I the problem of Sky Plus meaning that I don’t have to watch the adverts etc. But I think it will get more and more emotionally intelligent about this. We will become more and more aware of the problems that we are creating for ourselves through this technology. And the young, funnily enough, it might be the younger generation that are best at doing that.

Michael Wall

I think 3G is an unmitigated disaster and and has had billions of pounds, euros…

Dermot Murnaghan

Gordon Brown …. And the Treasury [all talking]

Michael Wall

In a way the market has decided and I think that is a key sort of clue. Yes there is more stuff coming for sure, but the market, ie us lot, will decide what we accept and what we don’t. But I do think we are bit caught in a generation thing as well. I mean we were having this conversation earlier about kids and my dilemma in the household at the moment is do I let my kid have a computer in the room and if we do, does she go online and blah, blah.

Dermot Murnaghan

That might not matter soon.

Michael Wall

She is just much more with it than I am and my generation because I just caught the back end of the first PCs that were coming in 6th form in computer studies. And I think this is a generational thing as well that will facilitate it and actually it is not as terrifying for them at all as it is for us.

Dermot Murnaghan

So Mark do you think consumers might get more choosy? There was that study out recently wasn’t there saying there is an enormous amount of kit that just sits in a box and doesn’t work?

Mark Earls

I think that is for us marketing folk I think that is the deal really is this technology that is webbed upon 2.0 or whatever we call it, is not for us to send messages to them or to take money off them. It is for them to do stuff with each other. And unless we get that it is going to be even worse a disaster than the one Michael describes. I really think we have really got to recognise that their world is their world.

Dermot Murnaghan

Is it mainly the young generation?

Mark Earls

I don’t know. I have got an elderly mother who has just recently discovered texting. And it is very entertaining. She does it all the time. She has discovered you can text any time day or night! Whatever time zone, your son is in!

Oliver James

Very quickly. Big assumptions are made so much around the financial community, the commercial community is that it is all going to go on the way it has been for the last ten years. It has been a very, very strange economy. I am 53 so I can remember what it used to be like sometimes and is it not possible. I have to offer the economical story that Oxford for example claims that its share prices are going to crash eventually and they are going to stay crashed. The ecological imperative is going to warm up and get faster and faster. And so we shouldn’t assume actually that we are going to have this disposable you know this so wasteful of raw materials kind of life. That if I was involved in commerce and thinking long-term I would be thinking about, what am I going to do when the FTSE is down to 300 and things are really a lot tighter. And it is going to happen. And also that everyone in a way is going to say thank god for that, we can now. We are all feeling terribly guilty about screwing up the planet anyway. So let’s go back to basics. You know. I think there is some swell of feeling there anyway that this is bound to happen and presume. I don’t know anything about economics, but AVNA says it is going to happen anyway.

Question
Gabe Rawlinson
Head of Digital

I would like to talk to you about in terms of yeah it is all about connections. The great thing about the internet is that you can connect, a company can connect to you, you can connect to the company. And then within your circle you can connect with each other to find out information about that which you agree that in the digital age it is changing because you are allowed, it is does serve a three way kind of communication?

Panel comment

Can I take that one straight on. That is because first and foremost a two way conversation between people and people. If you are interesting enough and if you are relevant and if you play nicely, you might get invited in.

Dermot Murnaghan

Can you butt in?

Panel comment

You can butt in and it might work now and again, but by and large it is going to be a very expensive way to do it.

Gabe Rawlinson

Yeah there is a thing called interruptive marketing. You can fight your way in.

Panel comment

But the internet is built on peer to peer. It is on then speaking to them not us. And that is one of the mistakes I think that we in the digital side of the marketing world have made, assuming that somehow it is to do with us. It is not, it is them. Equally hand held devices they are built around mobile phone, they are about them not about us. And you know let’s not forget that as we go forward.

Gabe Rawlinson

Well I think that is not only from a marketing stand point. I think from my standpoint I sit down with clients and let them know. It is not about beating them over the head with a marketing message, it is getting your message out there. Do they accept it and what do they do with it. Do you agree?

Panel comment

No actually. No. I think you know you are thinking about things as if it was a channel. And it is not. Channels is the old way of thinking. These are ways by which we can behave rather than channels down which we can send messages to do things to people.

Dermot Murnaghan

We are running out of time. I just want to get a flavour. Maybe another direct question. I will take the three hands up I see.

Question
John Kieran
[?]

I was very struck by Oliver’s statistics 23% mental illness and 38% have had sex before 16. I would like to know which one of you on the panel is mad and you know let’s not know which ……

Dermot Murnaghan

No, let’s not know…

John Kieran

The thought actually was you know advertising for many years or marketing has been about great story telling, which is also a human truth. We love stories and people who are great at it and the Fallon stuff is great. And the future of interactive what Mark is talking about, peer to peer, people talking to each other is about facilitation and moderation and it is a whole different mental space. And I am struck it is wikipedia, encyclopaedia of life, friends reunited. All amateurs. Not a professional amongst them. And I just wonder what the professional industries might learn from the amateurs to get a clue about what the new world might be?

Dermot Murnaghan

How do you get into that zone?

Panel comment

I think just by shopping it, experiencing it. I mean I think that is a really interesting point. And in a way that for me makes this so exciting, you know that suddenly entrepreneurial gene has just exploded amongst people and consumers. And we all learn stuff from that as much as we might reward them with stuff in that transaction.

Dermot Murnaghan

I just want to hear from the audience. Gentleman over there?

Question
Chris Reid
Fishburn Hedges

There were a couple of things I was interested in, first I was really interested in the idea of transparency and corporate transparency going forward. I think that is inevitable. But secondly I was interested. There seems to be a theme coming through that actually the last 50-60 years of mass communication has been a blip and actually now we are going back to a time when people listen to people who they meet in a pub, in a virtual pub rather than just listen to people who are broadcasting to you or at them. Is that a fair representation of what you are saying?

Dermot Murnaghan

Can we just hold that thought to hear from the gentleman who did have the microphone.

Question
Marc Michaels
COI

Really struck by the use of the word people all the way through this because recently I wrote some creative guidance for my own team and used the word people instead of target audience. And one of my strategic consultants said ‘You know you have to turn that back to target audience’ which was really bad. What about the language of advertising, the language of marketing? Can we try and get some sort of revolution going here about how we describe what we are actually doing and thinking about the psychological needs of people as opposed to want turning into what they actually get?

Panel comment

At the perception, that is really important.

Marc Michaels

If you don’t think of people as people, you think about target audiences, fundamentally you are not actually thinking of them as humans, you are thinking of them as things to sell to.

Dermot Murnaghan

We are going to have to draw this conversation to a close very, very soon, but there was a hand waving at the back who I would like to hear from?

Comment

I would say read Erich Fromm’s book ‘The Same Society’ which tells you everything you need to know.

Andrew Warmsley
Eye Level

It is an observation that it is nice to hear that maybe brands would like to have open dialogues and transparent dialogues with consumers and tell the truth and I think the Skoda is a terrific example of how powerful that can be. But I can’t help thinking that as time moves on, they kind of don’t have the choice any more because they are just going to get found out. I think now the rules are make good products and tell the truth. Because otherwise you are going to get found out.

Comment

And present it in a way that is just having a conversation.

Dermot Murnaghan

You know what I am going to give you the last word because it is an apt phrase. I know a lot of you have got things to do after this. So we will draw the seminar to a close and I say, thank our panellists, Michael, Mark, Oliver and Alex. And thank you all for sitting listening and of course engaging with us. The conversation can continue in the bar a little bit later on with drinks and nibbles out there for you. I would say we also want to get your views on whether you feel this exercise has been worthwhile …You may have seen me fiddling with my old technology, the papers here because I have got a blog to direct you to to continue the conversation whenever you like, throughout the night tonight. It is View from Here blog. Typepad.com. And I am sure you will all be scribbling that down eagerly and so joining in that conversation.

Thank you very much indeed for being here today and thanks once again to our panel.

End of Event