Insight anyone?

I'm interested in how much marketing folk can get hung up on this. I struggle to see what I would judge to be a genuine insight (of any sort) in much of the work advertising and marketing produces.

Something I read about recently that I do judge to be a real insight was the realisation bombers in the second world war didn't need a co-pilot because they almost never did anything. This led to a decision to replace them with an engineer. This meant pilots could be trained more quickly (less engineering to study) and it effectively doubled the available pilots to fly... For good or bad, Bomber Command could not have commanded so many planes without this insight that changed how they configured their teams.

In work life its harder. On a project I was involved in a long time ago we realised that a production company like Gorgeous didn't need to say a lot about themselves because their work spoke for itself. Instead they needed to behave like people expected them to - creative, quirky, lovable. So we built a website that had a top level navigation using talking cats. The cats were an iconic part of their identity. The cats were the navigation rather than window dressing. This created an award winning site that we ended up bandwidth gating so many people wanted to visit. It won D+AD, One Show, Cannes Cyber, etc etc, but I don't see an insight here.

Any thoughts on the importance of insight in advertising and marketing?

Proximity London's Royal Mail Mr Complete

Best use of Facebook link I've seen

Best use of Facebook link so far.

Awesome. If you have much info about yourself in Facebook for the following site to harvest...

For me, with pictures of my kids, and employment history it gets pretty damn creepy.

http://www.prototype-experience.com/

The Digital Divide

Something that has interested me for awhile within this business has been the constant division between digital and other channels. From a planning perspective it’s slightly frustrating as consumers don’t live in a channel. So why do we need to divide the thinking up between on and offline. Don’t get me wrong I think production-wise it requires specialist skills, even creatively it often requires a different way of executing ideas, but that applies to all mediums.

To some degree it’s driven by our clients business structure and our own businesses reflecting this siloed models. I think this stems partially from the ‘web 1.0’, because it involves programming IT own it, hangover.

I spent the late 90’s early naughties, working for a web build and design agency, when things such as search, paid search, SMS were just starting up (the opportunities I missed out on!!) and even then pure play agencies will pulling the wool over clients by shrouding the web in mysterious technical jargon. In reality it was a lot of direct marketing techniques being employed in a different channel.

Marketers as well as their agency partners, need to embrace the channel just like they have all of the traditional mediums. If you can search on the web, use facebook and buy things on the web – then you are someway way towards becoming digitally knowledgeable.

The opportunity DM agencies have is that they have spent years understanding (well at least they have been trying to) what drives a response out of various media channels. Predominantly they are used to working one step removed from consumers and are therefore able to adjust their thinking to the web relatively easily. My point is not to promote DM agencies, but rather to highlight the fact that consumer understanding has never been more important in delivering engaging communications.

So let’s not continue to spin the ‘digital divide’ thing, but rather focus much more on engaging consumers (that does require some different thinking) and delivering relevant communications to them.

Blog Nags

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Discuss

Off on holiday

I am going away for a couple of weeks - so over to you guys to take over. Start posting. Already some interesting thoughts ... and some disturbing ones. I will check carefully, when in a bikini, that the tops of my legs don't look like the top of an opened can of cold Campbell's Chicken Soup ...

And I think an interesting thought to pursue - why has 'innovation' become a buzz word of this decade? How is it different to invention, or 'new ideas', or experimentation. Is it because it is a process rather than an end product - and if yes, as Anon. points out, that process was surely there to put a man on the moon. Did they call it innovation then? Deb, perhaps you can throw some light?

Why another blog?

I have just spent an hour ploughing through the treacle of 'blog world' - it reminded me of being a pregnant woman at a party. One stands, dutifully listening, freezing cold sober, to yet another drunken self-satisfied twit drone on and on about himself/herself/their progeny, blissfully unaware of their audience's growing levels of boredom and irritation. At least you can close down a dull blogger, and leave them to send their witticisms out into cyberspace alone. No such luck at a dinner party.

As with most things in the virtual world, what applies in reality, is usually pretty spot on in cyberspace. A bore at a dinner party is unlikely to become relevant, interesting and astute when blogging under the cover of darkness. Hence the number of dull blogs - there's a lot of dull people out there.

So why introduce another blog to an overblogulated world? Especially an agency blog? Do we have enough interesting things to talk about at Proximity, or are we too a bunch of self-satisfied bores? Can we add value to our readers' lives - or will we, like many other 'agency blogs' state the bleeding obvious? Will anyone other than our mothers read our blog? Well let's see shall we. Let the games begin. Start by answering my question.

Why another blog?