NOW
Why Now?
Now is all about creating action. Immediate, measurable results that build brand and business simultaneously.
A convergence of disciplines to match the convergence of technology and media. We offer marketers a place to have a complete conversation about their marketing problems.
A tight leadership team that has an unusual breadth of experience. All are experts in consumer behaviour and what influences it.
A strategic approach that connects business objectives with the purchase process. We fuse the skills of brand and data planning with insights from behavioural economics.
Complete strategic consultation. Complete marketing campaigns - from TV to one-to-one, on and offline.
Meetings will be brief, processes will be collapsed, and measurement of the work's success will be built into the planning.
People
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John Townshend
One of two partners at Rapier, after 7 years at Ogilvy, Townshend helped grow the agency from 23 to 140 staff, with billings of £14 million. Rapier was voted Direct Agency of the Year three times, and has just been voted Campaign's Direct Agency of the Decade.
He is responsible for Rapier's reputation as one of the only truly integrated creative agencies in the UK. Under his direction, the agency won one of the biggest brand launches of the last decade, Virgin Media, with campaigns spanning brand TV to CRM.
Townshend has awards in a broader range of media than any other UK creative. He has TV and print work in D&AD, is in the Radio Advertising Hall of Fame, and has won Gold for his online work at the DMA Awards. He has also won all the top direct marketing awards, including Gold for responsive TV for 7 out of the last 10 years.
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Kate Waters
Waters is one of the very few strategists to have worked in advertising, direct marketing, digital and corporate reputation. She was Head of Planning at EuroRSCG, at the leading direct marketing agency, Partners Andrews Aldridge, and Strategy Director at Engine. Most recently she was a Director of Blue Rubicon, PR Agency of the Year 3 years running.
Her work on the anti-smoking campaign has saved an estimated £50m for the NHS, and she is one of the key strategists for government communications.
She has five IPA Effectiveness Awards, 2 APG Creative Strategy Awards and has been voted one of the UK's top ten planners by Campaign magazine.
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Mark Lund
Lund co-founded DLKW, the only independent agency of the last decade to make the UK top 10 billings from a standing start, and a top 10 new business performer every year for 8 years.
He helped double Vauxhall's retail market share in five years and turn Morrisons from an also-ran into the fastest growing of the big 4 supermarkets.
Lund was chairman of the Advertising Association for three years. For the last two years he has been CEO of the COI, the government's marketing agency, and the UK's biggest client. He has just completed a major review in which the organisation has been radically restructured and repurposed.
This year the COI won more IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards than any other client.
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Melissa Robertson
Melissa started her career in sales and marketing at a bakery in the Midlands, before swapping cakes for advertising in London. Her first agency was Grey, where she worked for five years on clients including SmithKline Beecham, Seagram and Mars.
She joined the newly formed MCBD in 1999 as the only member of account management, working across almost all of the agency's business, and becoming Managing Director in 2007.
Melissa has robust credentials in effectiveness, having been responsible for running Travelocity (IPA Effectiveness Awards Grand Prix winner 2005), Department of Health Tobacco Control (IPA Silver 2010) and Waitrose (IPA Gold 2010; IPA Silver 2008).
What's happening?
The ‘making of’ Florette
All the tricks were done in camera, rather than in post. But, on occasion, there were quite a few takes. The most: 34. The trickiest (over the shoulder and into the wooden holder) took 12. Hear comments from Director Simon Willows and Creative Partner, John Townshend.
Bags of Feelgood!
Check out our new ad for Florette.
Something to phone home about!
I’m on a horse – leadership for now
Tags: changing times | leadership | NOW
Leadership is never easy. In times of change the right mix of skills becomes even more elusive. This is one of those times.
Thanks to the digital revolution we are living with unprecedented connectivity, transparency and democracy of opportunity. We know more, we find out more, we communicate more and we can publish more. Connectivity, and the democracy it brings, is changing politics from the Arab Spring to e-petitions in the UK parliament.
The difficulty of all this connection and visibility is that respect is in increasingly short supply. Trust in leaders and institutions, whether government, politicians or business, has fallen to record lows. Brands themselves aren’t immune to the scrutiny that social media makes possible. Paul Polman of Unilever posed the question, ‘If social media can topple a government in three months, how long would it take to bring down a brand?’
If unprecedented democracy and connectivity characterize the challenge, they should define the style of leadership too. The world is now too tangled for even the most gifted of autocrats, and too transparent for the closed style of tyrants. In this setting, the best leadership will come from visionaries who can bring others with them. This is not because decisions are best made by many, but because in an era of change and complexity a leader needs more than one person to create the hypothesis, test it, and work out how best to put the answer into effect.
That means a small group with different talents, shared interests and a common regard for and trust in each other. One of them may be called the CEO but they should be a challenging caucus of intellectual equals, not a rubber stamp.Thus, the leader’s first, crucial task is to assemble or edit the group. The right people come before the right strategy, both because the right people will help define the right strategy and because when things change quickly the strategy may have to change as well. A quality leadership team is an asset that may need to outlast a given strategy.
The second part is connectivity and the meritocracy it creates. The reality of visionary leadership is that communication needs to be an ever larger part of it; listening to ideas as well as expressing them.
This isn’t new. That master strategist, William Shakespeare caught it in his description of Henry V before the battle of Agincourt. The speech we remember is the one before the onslaught, but Henry’s best work is done the night before when he roves the camp, doing the 14th century equivalent of management by walking about:
‘Forth he goes and visits all his host.
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
A largess universal like the sun, thawing cold fear.’
Henry’s mood of measured optimism is the key to leadership at times like now. Measured, because leaders have to be brutally honest about what’s true and what’s not, but optimistic because leadership must be about seeing and moving towards the most positive outcome from any position, however hopeless it feels.
That inner certainty comes from Purpose. A clear sense of what it is that binds the leader and led together. For Henry it was the fate of England. In the corporate world, shared purpose is unlikely to be as big or as simple. But identifying it, communicating it and sharing it is one of leadership’s most crucial roles. In changing times like these, living with more uncertainty is a necessary part of all our lives. Turning the power of that uncertainty into a dynamic purpose of shared endeavor is how leaders earn their spurs.
School Report time of year!
A lovely new client
A Goodwill Poster from Now
Technology allows us to work in ways we never dreamt of just a decade ago. This piece was designed by a 21 year old student at CalArts in San Francisco, Francesca Ramos. We met her through her design blog. A few emails led to this great piece of type design, which we are sending to friends of Now. Geography doesn’t matter. The global creative department is here.
Purpose – you didn’t know you needed, it but you do.
Apple is worth $390bn dollars today – the most valuable corporation and brand in the world. It’s a triumph of intuitively simple ideas, packaged beautifully. Products that not only work brilliantly, but make users feel better about themselves for using them.
Apple is achingly desirable not only because of what it makes, but what it stands for. Steve Jobs said Apple made technology for people who want to change the world, which is good company to be in, even if you’re writing a sales presentation.
This is what sits behind the beauty of the products; Apple’s purpose. It gives the brand a deeper meaning that illuminates and unites the flawlessness of its products, the fanaticism of its followers, the commitment of its people and the weight of social significance the brand carries.
Steve Jobs’ fellow garage based tech pioneer, David Packard summed it up like this: “I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being.”
Part of purpose is the sense of a narrative, that the company or brand is a living thing with a history and a future direction. It is also a flag under which people can rally. Brands that express purpose draw us to them because we want to be part of a cause or movement and we want something with meaning more than just a product. Google isn’t just a search engine its there to organize the world’s information. Wal-Mart is there ‘to give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and have a better life’. Butlins’ purpose is to give hard working families a week a year when they can get their sparkle back.
Purpose doesn’t only draw customers ,it unites colleagues within the organization. It’s what gives meaning to the day and a sense of belonging; it’s both summation and action standard for what they do.
Purpose beyond (but not instead of) profit is likely to be one of the key signifiers of success in the next decade. If you know what yours is, burnish it, believe it and beat the drum for it. If you don’t know it, then start looking.
Butlins social media win
The Evening Standard (and Mark Lund) on how advertising got its mojo back
Read the full article at article-24026961-how-ad-land-got-its-mojo-back-in-soho.do
New Butlins ad!
Get booking!
Leap before you look: action and creativity
Last month I took part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online-based creative writing project, where participants aim to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. That’s about 175 pages, or the length of The Great Gatsby, and breaks down to 1,667 words every day.
The most impressive point made by the activity is that writing this volume (when you have a day job besides other time commitments) prohibits you from really thinking about it. This is knocking out the word count, day after day; no editing, no real researching and no worrying about quality. Anthony Trollope famously wrote 2000 words before breakfast every morning, which was frowned upon by many of his contemporaries. Art and ideas couldn’t be ‘forced’; the Muse couldn’t be conjured up every day before breakfast! But of course, while it seems as though inspiration is sudden and unpredictable, in fact we’re cultivating it every day. As long as we’re living, experiencing and absorbing other ideas, what comes out under disciplined writing/creating circumstances will be unconsciously artful, and arguably more natural, intuitive and insightful than if we were placing pressure on ourselves to wait for exactly the right idea.
It’s something the creative ‘industry’, by definition, is familiar with. An ad agency can’t very well reject a brief on the basis that ‘The Muse was just not there, darling’. But a creative ‘production line’ doesn’t necessarily produce lower quality ideas. It’s a point made by Matthew Syed’s Bounce and is summed up most simply by Gary Player: “The more I practise, the luckier I get”. As Bounce would testify, forcing that volume of writing makes artifice very difficult. What will tend to come out is from the implicit part of the brain/creative process, which is very personal and deep-rooted.
The other learning from NaNoWriMo is about motivation. Any of us could write a novel at any time (some of us do), so what’s the benefit of doing it at the same time as thousands of strangers round the world connected only virtually? The answer is in the structure and tools provided by the project. If the website could be boiled down to one core element, it would be the word count log. Simply having to log a new word count every day is motivating in itself – weight loss programmes and Bridget Jones’ Diary both know this – and NaNoWriMo then presents that word count data in a meaningful way.
The second advantage of joining an online community like this is the pooling of tips and advice. Numerous forums and daily blog updates provide stimulus techniques, help and even just problem/despair-sharing. With a shared task and deadline, all these participants can help one another on an equal level, regardless of differences in personality, lifestyle, writing style or experience.
So NaNoWriMo presents the case for winging it, creating by the seat of your pants. Of course, it’s far from structureless, which is an important point. The lesson seems to be to create a framework for action – a clear goal, deadline and support structure – and then just DO. I didn’t complete my novel in 30 days, far from it. But I did make a good start on something that I, like lots of people, have been meaning to do for a long time. Churchill put it pretty well: “The maxim ‘Nothing but perfection’ may be spelled ‘Paralysis’”.
Killing two birds with one stone: can we make advertising work twice as hard?
There is no shortage of good evidence for what makes brands grow (for a great summary of it, try Byron Sharp’s book ‘How brands grow’). What baffles me is why more people don’t follow it. Sharp’s book has as its central thesis that brands grow by growing ‘mental availability’ – ie the degree to which a brand comes to mind in relevant buying contexts – and ‘physical availability’ – simplistically, distribution.
Traditionally advertising is used to grow mental availability. But in this year’s IPA award entries there was a notable trend for using advertising to grow physical availability. The cases are fascinating in and of themselves, but what particularly interests me is why this trend should have emerged now.
An obvious hypothesis is that the challenge of a small budget forces agencies and clients to be more creative in how to use it. So, if you haven’t got sufficient budget to grow market share through your share of voice, a good alternative is to use the advertising budget in a more focused way to reach a small number of people or organisations who can in turn influence hundreds or thousands more – analogous to the targeting of ‘influencers’ online or ‘early adopter’ segments beloved of tech brands.
Alternatively, one could argue that the recent economic climate is in part responsible for fuelling this trend. And perhaps this is because a dual strategy, where advertising is used to grow mental and physical availability, is simply a more efficient use of funds. When times are good and markets are buoyant, advertising works hard enough if it just grows mental availability. But when times are harder, and all forms of marketing investment are challenged, including budget for things like new product development which would typically be used to justify additional listings, using whatever funds are available to perform this dual role is the most efficient strategy for growth.
What these papers show is that advertising can work in a number of different ways to influence physical availability – both indirectly by using consumer campaigns to help persuade retail / the trade to increase distribution, but also in some cases to target potential distributors directly. More importantly, the evidence for how brands grow, suggests that this could be a very effective communications strategy.
Moreover, a strategy that seeks to increase physical availability as well mental availability promises not only effectiveness but efficiency too – a two birds, with one stone strategy. And for the smart planner, therefore, two ways to demonstrate advertising accountability in these increasingly pressured financial times.
This is an edited version of the article that appears in Advertising Works 20, co-authored by me and Byron Sharp.
Droga5 Sydney Creative Spirit
There are times when you see great initiatives and just want to applaud them. This was the case for me with Droga5′s Creative Spirit push. They are encouraging all creative businesses to employ someone with disabilities.
It’s a long video, but well worth watching (I even felt a little bit weepy towards the end, but then again, I used to brim up at ‘Surprise, Surprise’).
They’ve done it in tandem with Breakthrough, a charity who champions the rights of disabled people. There is a UK branch of it, so maybe it’s time for us all to think a bit differently this side of the world?
Whose screen is it anyway?
Tags: Advertising | multi media | Premier League | television | tv | X Factor
Right now there are some very odd and counterintuitive things going on in the world of media measurement. In 2010,three years after its death was confidently predicted by all rational pundits, television increased its viewing. Last year we watched,on average, a massive two hours more per week than we had in 2009.
But we also increased the time we spent on line and on our phones – among other things sending 23% more texts. How did we do it? At a time when reportedly we are working harder than anyone else in Europe and have less leisure, where did we find so much extra time to spend with our screens?
The answer is almost certainly that it came from multi-browsing (the leisure equivalent of multi-tasking.) The average family with teenage children has six or seven screens on the go at once in the living room. Laptop, games console, phones and of course TV. We’re watching more but attending to each one less.
Multi- browsing is seen as a great opportunity for TV. The correlation of Twitter and Facebook traffic with X Factor being on is rightly heralded as a rebirth of TV’s social role. There is a lot of good chat about seizing control of the second screen and exploiting the interactivity that social media makes possible round TV.
But suppose the second screen was not the computer, but the TV itself. Suppose that the crucial focus of attention was not on the big screen with glanced forays towards the little one, but the other way round. What would that mean for TV, as its status shifted towards the background noise of radio? What would the implications be for how we advertise on television? And how would we recognize whether it’s true?
Let’s look at it in reverse order. If TV were becoming the second screen we might expect that its status in the living room would have changed. As screens became bigger, flatter and closer to the wall, TV might become more of a window to be looked at and through, a source of incidental entertainment, rather than the big square box with the little screen that we used to gather closely around with silent reverence.
The defining TV programmes might have become longer and more repetitive, so that they could reward with less sustained attention. Ideally they would have a very simple premise and a clear public result at the end so that the programme could be summed up satisfactorily even if it had scarcely been watched at all.
Interestingly, the defining commercial triumphs of the last few years – Premier League on Sky and X Factor on ITV (but also Strictly , Big Brother etc) fit this definition. They are long, colourful,noisy and repetitive, with moments of supreme drama repeated frequently and in slow motion, with a built in commentary making it easier to keep up if you’re also texting , tweeting, browsing or just bantering.
The other great mainstay of television,soaps, also come close to this definition. The long running storylines, archetypal characters and omnibus editions make them easy to follow. They demand more attention than sport or reality but their richness as a source of ongoing social currency rewards the effort.
TV might then start to split into two forms of viewing. The low intensity, time specific, ‘public’ watching of sport, reality and soap and the higher intensity, non time specific, personal consumption of drama (whether fictional or real via the news). Arguably, though this will be consumed in more private, book -like form, via tablet or laptop, as you already see people doing on trains, tubes and in offices.
What does this imply for advertising on television? If it is to thrive in the knockabout, low attention world of the new TV it has to be loud both literally and metaphorically. Music tracks and jingles, high wattage celebrities and spectacle. Funny will,as ever, be good – but it will have to be really funny. I think it’s unlikely that average writing, production or camera work is going to cut it in this heightened, but less attended to world.
It’s also likely that some of the social media conventions can be used to advantage. Triggers to encourage watching of commercials in launch spots through competitions and promotions is an easy win and clearly the more the content strikes the imagination the more likely it is to become viral.
The role of television is changing radically and advertising will have to change with it. The key for advertisers and agencies is to seize it as an opportunity not let it become a threat.
Salad days!
New agency rule: all holidays at Butlin’s
Opening the door for the Elevator Pitch
Tags: coi | speed | time management
How much time do you need to make your case?
Government, where I worked, measures out time tightly. A senior civil servant explained : ‘Most people work in hour slots, but if they’re really important it’s half an hour. With ministers it’ll be fifteen minutes. If you see the Prime Minister, it’ll be five.
Whitehall is closer to LA than we thought. Hollywood also prizes the art of the high concept pitch. A $100 million movie sold in ’25 words or less.’
That’s the old paradox; the more important the decision, the less time you have. It’s not as mad as it first sounds, human beings are surprisingly good at making decisions quickly. Estate agents say that most house buying decisions happen in two minutes , love at first sight also works between people, and we all know in split seconds if a joke is funny.
Also true: the less time you have, the more should be spent preparing.
‘I’m sorry this is a long letter, I haven’t had time to write you a short one.’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill. He understood better than anyone that to make a crucial case needs time. His 1940 ratio for speech writing was 60:1. An hour of crafting to create a minute of talk.
The same is true today. The new paradox of our digital world is that the more instant and rich our information, the less time there is to consider it, and attention spans get more gnat like by the year. By necessity the high art of the short form is alive and well.
Marketers and communicators have only a few seconds to catch attention and make their case. Even on the web, with its acres of words and eternities of uncosted time, the fastest growing medium is 140 character Twitter, and the most popular video on You Tube is ‘Charlie bit my finger’ : a scant 56 seconds of childish charm.
Why is it then that in communications we’re not better at making our case in shortform? Why does a pitch presentation need an hour or more of Power point before the idea? If you really think through what it is you want to do then any case should be capable of being made in shortform.
At Now, our ambition is to make every presentation as short as we can – on the grounds that it will have been properly thought about and is therefore going to be clearer and more compelling. Life’s too short for anything else.
Help! I’m a reality TV junkie.
As Tess Alps (Chief Executive of Thinkbox) has been telling us for the past five years, the supposed death of TV at the hands of the internet was somewhat premature. Or at least, it is in my small corner of ‘North Kensington’, where I have to put my hand up and admit: ‘Hello, my name is Melissa, and I love reality TV.’
I am still reeling from this revelation, as I’ve only been aware of my disorder since Saturday night. I’m not a regular on the night-out-on-the-tiles circuit, but Saturday was one of the rare nights that I throw caution to the wind, dress up, and plan to let my hair down. Except in the taxi, all I could think about was ‘damn, I’m missing Britain’s Got Talent …. and Eurovision for that matter.’
And then I started thinking about my viewing habits, and what we Sky+’d (so as not to miss a single precious repeat-at-watercooler moment), and frankly, it’s embarrassing. It’s a roll call of human humiliation: Britain’s Got Talent, X-Factor, The Apprentice, Masterchef. In the past, it’s included Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Celebrity Love Island, Strictly, What Not To Wear, and Changing Rooms. I’ve even done All Star Mr & Mrs and I’d Do Anything. I could go on. I’ve drawn the line at The Only Way Is Essex, but I’m a lone voice in the office on that one.
But the fact is that reality TV is just so very wonderful. It provides an endless supply of completely genius quotes (Melody Hossaini from the Apprentice: ‘Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the Moon’; The Hoff in BGT: ‘Breathe in God, and breathe out a smile’) and generally more journeys and I-want-this-more-than-anything-else-in-the-worlds than you could shake a stick at.
My single favourite moment ever on TV was David Watson doing an impression of David Blunkett. There was even a Facebook group called ‘DAVID J WATSON should have won Britains got talent!’ set up in his honour. They were right, the Queen would have loved it.
I love people, I hate people, I shout at the telly, and I almost choke with laughter. Amanda’s seal-claps and nose-wrinkles; the way Greg shoves in the most enormous mouthfuls of food, almost sideways; Bruno’s ridiculously over-the-top gesticulations; creations like ‘Stuart Baggs THE BRAND’. What’s not to like?
But I’m (thankfully) not the only one seduced by the gloriously pure pleasure of the spoils of slick editing and cruel producers. I was in a room full of quite grown up professionals last week, and only one person wasn’t slagging off the uselessness of the latest Apprentice candidates.
And the numbers also speak for themselves. Despite the lack of Mr Cowell this year (yes, we all miss him), BGT is still getting around 10m viewers each week. Only the Royal Wedding beat it in numbers of viewers in May. Masterchef clocked 6.6m for the final. And Eurovision doubled last year’s figures (slightly denting BGT) with 9.5m viewers and 40% of share (BGT and Eurovision combined had over 70% of viewing between 8-9pm on Saturday night) and all my mates were tweeting and retweeting like crazy (favourite quotes: @jennycolgan ‘I don’t envy Jedward’s mum, trying to get those two to bed tonight’; @floheiss ‘All the women have massive bicepseses tonight’; @deeebeeeteee ‘Cheers Georgia. I am having an epileptic fit #eurovision’).
So, there we have it. My secret is out. It’s been cathartic. TV is brilliant, the internet is brilliant, my smart phone is brilliant, and I’m going to joyously continue doing it all simultaneously. From my sofa.
Direct Line on a charm offensive
Tags: ads adwatch
Nodding dogs, elephants, sea captains and meerkats: insurance advertising has more than its fair share of characters designed to imprint themselves indelibly on our minds.
In a low-interest category, where top-of-mind awareness is critical, a brand icon or jingle – or preferably both – appear to be must-have ingredients for advertising success.
At best, these devices charm themselves into our brains; at worst, they shout louder and louder until they can’t be ignored, like infuriating melodies from bad pop songs.
It is, therefore, refreshing to see Direct Line create a campaign that appears to work in a very different way and, dare I say it, seems to engage on a slightly more emotional level. Yes, the red phone is still there, but it plays only a cameo role in the end frame. Before the familiar and relentlessly cheery jingle, there are 25 seconds of a nicely written, well-performed sketch featuring a bemused insurance salesman and a mildly comedic, Basil Fawlty-esque customer, who thinks he can do a better job than the salesman at selling insurance.
Like all good campaigns there is a strong truth at its heart: customers are becoming more wise to the tricks of the marketing trade and consequently distrustful of offers that sound too good to be true.
In this case, the offer is a ‘straightforward’ 70% no-claims bonus. The know-it-all customer likes the offer, but is unimpressed with the salesman’s pitch, so steps in to show how it should be done. In contrast to the latter’s approach, he uses ‘tricks’ and ‘gimmicks’ of the marketing trade (which we assume is a gentle dig at the competition), in the process cleverly demonstrating how straightforward Direct Line really is.
The result is a creative device that works on several levels: it charms and engages, communicates the product benefit clearly and, most impressively, portrays the brand representative as the nice guy. He is honest, clear and reasonable – the antithesis of the stereotypical insurance salesman and, increasingly, of the price comparison sites that purport to help us find our way through the multitude of brands and offers available.
Executionally, the ad is smart, with lovely performances and plenty of product and brand-related cues to aid recall and branding.
It may not be the most glamorous campaign, but is well-thought-through and better crafted than many efforts in the insurance market. Even if it doesn’t wow the creative awards judges, I hope it will earn the brand an effectiveness award and be the exception that proves the rule of how insurance advertising works.
Atoms, Rutherford and why Now is a good time to start a new sort of agency
This is Ernest Rutherford. A British scientist of rare creative genius and the father of nuclear physics, he did his early work at Cambridge before going to Canada to win the Nobel prize for Chemistry. In 1919 he was lured back to Cambridge, to head up the Cavendish Institute, and to start the work that would lead to the first splitting of the atom. After the First World War, Britain was poor and even Cambridge was short of money. As Rutherford was shown to his laboratory in the heart of the Cavendish, he asked what his annual budget would be. The dons looked a bit frosty. There was no budget they replied.
‘Ah.’ said Rutherford , famously, ‘No money. Then we shall have to think.’
Rutherford’s words have come back to me often in the last two years , as the world of marketing has moved from a cycle of expansion and expenditure to one of cutting back and retrenchment. It is often assumed by marketers that declining budgets are inevitably a bad thing and that less inevitably means less.
I don’t agree with this. In fact I believe that times of hardship can be the most creative and innovative of all. It’s why I’m sure that setting up a new business in the depths of recession is a good rather than daft idea.
It’s well known that necessity can be the mother of invention, but it may not be appreciated how deadening to creativity too much abundance can be.
If no money means we have to think, then lots of money often means that thought is actively discouraged. If you can simply do what worked well enough last year, but with a bit more weight, why would you want to change. If you can just buy the same services in again, why would you seek to create them in any other way?
Steve Jobs followed this rule. When he returned to Apple he didn’t increase the R&D budget, he cut it. Drastically. It wasn’t because he didn’t want great new products, but because he did. Cutting the budget not only made economic sense in hard times, it also made his designers and engineers think afresh. The result was the ipod, itunes and a company worth $300bn today.
Our new agency, Now, has been formed on the basis that businesses can no longer think about their communications in silos and that brands are built by customers changing what they do rather than just what they believe.
We believe that clients require a convergence of disciplines that match the convergence that is happening in technology. We offer marketers a place to have a complete conversation about their marketing problems. We’re a leadership team that has an unusual breadth of experience, and are all experts in consumer behavior, what influences it and a strategic approach that connects business objectives with the purchase process. We fuse the skills of brand and data planning with insights from behavioural economics.
As an example of this, who would have believed that in this digitally diverse world, 16-24’s would be watching 25% more television than they did back in 2005 (Thinkbox, 2011).
Of course they’re watching it surrounded by lots of other screens; phones, laptops and game consoles. The brands that win in this new world will be those that most exploit and take control of the second screen, the one that allows a richer dialogue and a fuller flow of information. And that means fusing the understanding and crafts of television advertising, social media and PR in a single communications strategy.
This is the sort of challenge and opportunity we set up Now to exploit and I believe that with budgets under more pressure and results harder to achieve, the time has never been better for people to substitute thought for money.
The spirit of Rutherford is alive and well.
The world’s best chocolate ad
This film is from a marvellous site called coolhunting.com. If you don’t want to order a bar at the end of the film, I will eat my chocolate hat. It proves how wrong this old adage about advertising is….’ If the client moans and sighs, make their logo twice the size. If they still should prove refractory, show a picture of the factory. Only in the direst cases, ever show the clients’ faces.’
This is Now
Now is an agency for the accelerated world.
Where clients are under increasing pressure to deliver results
and accountability.
Where fragmentation in the marketing industry has become the enemy
of efficiency.
Where media and channels have converged.