These are difficult words. They took twenty five years to bludgeon their way to me. Then they spent two months stumbling onto the page like a paralytic with a broken leg. They make no excuses – they are my truth. And, while they reveal harm, they seek to heal. That is the only reason I share them with you as I shared them at TEDx Hackensack. If they resonate, please share them with the men in your life.

(Video is at the bottom of the article)

The secrets in which men live

How well do you really know the men in your life? Over the next few minutes, as their faces reach for you – fathers, grandfathers, brothers, sons, boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands – ask yourself, how well do I really know the men in my life?

Have you ever caught one of your life’s men crying yet snatched clarity from his tears? Have you ever seen rage grab one of your life’s men only to see it abandon him answer-less and flaccid somewhere in the distance? Has a dark silence ever captivated one of your life’s men when you needed his words, he needed his words, but the silence said everything and it was all the wrong thing?

I believe the world would be less strange if we stopped making strangers out of men. We know most men through their interests and their deeds – their heroics and their villainies – and so we brush shoulders with them as cardboard cutouts. But the secrets men live in hurt people – the men included.

So, I ask you, how well do you really know the men in your life? And if you can help them know themselves better by getting to know them better yourself, will you? Can you wade beyond their interests and their deeds to the rest of them? Will you?

Today I want to share with you secrets in which I grew up. These secrets aren’t abnormal in the happening, just in the telling. I’m ready to shed this second skin if only to encourage more men to tell their stories and so you can point to one of your life’s men and say, “Look, you’re not alone. Now, let me in.”

The empty house, the book and the disappearance

In the 1980s, I always looked forward to early morning television. I’d get up at 5am and delicately select what to watch from five channels, two of which weren’t even yet awake themselves. Inevitably, I’d land on a show like “Lost in Space” that was really good just because it was on. When the ads appeared, I’d click through the channels to see if any others had sprung to life. Sometimes I’d hang out with the ABC’s station-closed test pattern and then jump back for some wild 1960s futurism. It was a busy few hours as the rest of the house slept.

On one such morning when I was eight years old, I made my grand entrance into the living room, I looked across the backyard and I realized the rest of the house wasn’t sleeping at all. The garage was empty and I was by myself. (My dad had left a year or two earlier. I remember grabbing his leg as he calmly told me that he needed to leave. Then, I watched him walk to the same garage, get into his car and drive off.) Realizing the house was empty, I did what any man of the house would do – I sat down and watched television, and then flinched at any noise that indicated the garage door could be opening.

Later that week, a man came to the door and gave me a book. Mum was shocked that someone could hand a child a book about rape like it was a home-delivered pizza. (That book was why the garage was empty earlier in the week.) She was shocked when the psychologist helping her proposed she assist men with sexual problems and become a sexual surrogate. She was shocked when a man raped her at work a few years later and she was shocked when a man date-raped her with drugs a few years ago. But, for a woman who had lost her first fiancé in a car crash and then, in her own car crash, had smashed her face so badly a male judge said she was so ugly that no man would ever marry her, perhaps there was little shocking about any of this.

Mind you, mum was a counselor, so the shocking things men did seemed simultaneously to fascinate and to numb. My sister and I grew up with her horror stories and her books that tried to make sense of the men who lived in them. “The Peter Pan Syndrome” was one of my favorite titles. It sounded like something I wanted to catch until mum pointed out that nearly every man we knew had it. And we knew a lot of men – mum ran a single’s club back when being divorced or being middle-aged and single were essentially taboo. Broken men – and women complaining about them – were a constant, if not physically then in eaves-dropped conversations. Mum also occasionally had boyfriends, most of whom I found pretty odd. But when you repeatedly see the shock at another relationship ending dissolve into a desperate fear of growing old alone, you just stay in your room.

So, I disappeared into an empty house whose walls spoke of breaking men and suffering women. I disappeared into studies – peaking with twelve-hour marathons. I disappeared into sport – when I turned to martial arts, I hit sandbags until I bled. I disappeared into poetry, inking my depressions onto paper. I disappeared into the music of angry men – it led me to create the first full-colour hip hop magazine in Australia. With all my disappearances, sometimes I cut my arms to see if I was still there. My teachers said I disappeared into cynicism and sarcasm. They said I needed to round off my rough edges. But I don’t recall anyone standing next to me with sandpaper.

Ten years after that man handed me that book, and now in my last year of school, my sister was holed up in a nearby house because a pack of kids in the neighborhood wanted to bash her. I grabbed the only memento I had from dad – a blunt Papua New Guinean jungle knife – and took it to the streets pretending I could rescue her when I just wanted to be rescued myself. I broke down in front of my school principal the next day – the few tethers holding my family together were popping off one by one and I had no glue, just a blunt weapon.

Facing it in fits and starts

For most of my life I haven’t known what to do with any of this. I knew how to hide from it – I became a workaholic. I worked in advertising agencies by day and made a music magazine by night. I burned out every single time I published an issue. My childhood 5am television time became my bedtime and my enemy. Slowly, I started to face it – in fits and starts that are a decade old now.

The first step happened with the epiphany that I wasn’t alone. It reached me through a book called “Manhood” by Australian author, Steve Biddulph. For nearly fifteen years, this history and these emotions coated me in guilt. I felt bizarrely responsible for a lot of it – Why couldn’t I have protected my mum and my sister better? And why wasn’t anybody there to help us? I didn’t think anybody wanted to hear it because nobody did want to hear it. This was all the secret stuff of a struggling family. And all families struggle, so all families should be able to deal with it. The book “Manhood” gave me company and taught me that I was not at all alone.

(Your life’s men need to know they aren’t alone in their struggles – in the things that stir them beyond their interests and their deeds. That’s the first step in removing the stranger from them.)

The second step I took was to gently pry into the lives of other men and listen. Rather than talk about obscure samples and influences, I used hip hop to talk to men about their lives. One MC described how he felt about his mother, a former Black Panther, dying from a heroin overdose. Another talked about how his parent’s divorce affected him. He said it was the most psychological interview he’d ever done – but he didn’t refuse a question. In 2009, a few friends and I compiled a book of thirty man stories called “The Perfect Gift for a Man“, where men and women revealed some of the secrets that men live in. The book touched on parental fears, growing up an orphan, dealing with bullying, and self-harm. People listened.

A recent Australian campaign to get men to open up called STFU – Soften The Fck Up – led the creator Ehon to the realization that men will talk – the problem is they don’t think anybody will listen.

(Your life’s men need to know that if you pry you will listen – on their terms.)

And that’s the catch – sometimes a man will tentatively reach out but if his hand gets smacked away, he may never do it again. I took my dad away before my wife and I had our firstborn. It was the first proper one-on-one time we’d had as adults. One of his interests is collecting postcards – he even helps run a postcard club in Sydney – so he really wanted to visit a postcard fair on our trip. And somewhere on that country road, I realized that dad would only communicate with me through his interests and deeds. It hurt – I grew up in these secrets that nobody else wanted to deal with and was finally ready to talk about them. But he’d grown up in World War II in England – the stiff upper lip was a survival skill. I’m coming to accept it.

(Your life’s men may reach out in strange ways – it’s what strangers do in a strange world – so grab their hands when they do.)

To the men, this is difficult stuff.  I made a decision to be in moments that seemed painful because there’s beauty in them. I mean, I have to believe there’s beauty in them otherwise what is so much of my family’s history? One of the most difficult decisions I made to be in the pain became the time I felt the closest to a man – and he couldn’t even talk.

When they put my grandfather into palliative care and knocked him out, I decided to spend as much of his last few days with him as possible. I talked to him – or at him – I wrote for him, I massaged his hands and feet. I cuddled him. Every time he exhaled I inhaled. I imagined myself breathing him into me. When the death rattle kicked in, I counted the pauses between breaths, wishing hours for him. In his final minute – my grandmother had just stepped out of the room – he raised his head, opened his eyes, looked at my aunty and at me and then sunk back into his bed. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. (The full story: Finding beauty in watching a loved one die).

How to help a man help humankind

Secrets like these make strangers out of us – they hurt, and, in turn, make it easier to hurt. However, telling you these secrets is not the hard part. The hard part is doing something about them – something I think about every time I look into the eyes of my wife, my son and my daughter. In trying, I know I’ll fail sometimes. I’m turning a very long corner.

So, as you trawl through the faces of your life’s men, ask yourself again, how well do I really know the men in my life? What if I can help them know themselves better by getting to know them better myself? What if I can break them out of the secrets they live in so the hurt will hurt less?

Let them know they’re not alone. Let them know you’ll listen. And don’t slap away an out-held hand. The world can be less strange – you need only two ears to make it happen. And, if you succeed, then this won’t be the end of men, as some people proclaim. But it will be the end of men as we know them because we don’t know them very well.

The final wish

I dressed up for you today – I don’t often wear shirts with collars and buttons. Having worn it to a few weddings, my kids call this particular shirt my “wedding shirt”. When I wear it, they ask me who’s getting married. The thing is, it’s not my “wedding shirt”. I bought it to wear to my grandfather’s funeral, where I was fortunate enough to read a personal, rambling, slightly coherent poem that I wrote to him during those last four days in hospital. I wrote it to the rhythm of a death rattle and the rain, I cobbled it together from messy pages in a notebook, and I read it through tears and splutters to a church full of eyes hoping me on.

After the funeral, a stoic gentleman from another era grabbed me. He was crying in the way only a funeral can make you – when you cry for all your life’s losses at once before you have to hide your feelings from the sunlight outside. He shook my hand, gathered himself then said, “I wish I could have spoken to my dad like that.”

P.S. What Mahatma Gandhi said.

Thank you to the team at TEDx Hackensack for their support in sharing these words. That day was very important to me. And I hope these words can make a difference to others. Below: the TEDx Hacksensack speakers – Mark Pollard, Donnella Tilery, Staci Block and Bonnie Schwartz.

If you need help with issues like these, please contact Reachout. If you’re in Australia and want to talk to someone, try Lifeline 13 11 14 or Inspire.

Top photo courtesy Adam Foster (Creative Commons).

The video – be kind, please

What’s your favorite shape to receive or give a strategy in?

Perhaps, it’s a circle, a square, a pyramid, a doughnut, an onion, a house, or a keyhole. Maybe you like a shape in a shape – a triangle in a cloud, a doughnut in an onion, or a World of Warcraft map in a Rubix Cube. It’s amazing what you can do with strategy, isn’t it? There are so many shapes to choose from. And the great thing about strategy-in-shapes is that it makes your thinking look very deliberate, impossibly official, and crazy to mess with. But if you want to get better at strategy, it’s time you messed with your shapes.

Strategy-in-shapes is so… deliberate and hard to affect if you’re down the assembly line from it. Strategy-in-shapes-by-committee is even more difficult to argue with: “Look, we’ve spent 12 months working on this perfectly reasoned bit of thinking and it fits flawlessly into the shape. We all agreed to the shape. We’ve done what the shape wants. We can’t change it now that you have to work with it and you don’t think you have anywhere to start.”

For new planners, permission to fill in the shape is like becoming Willy Wonka of your very own strategy factory. The moment makes you giddy with power and possibility. You flirt with the idea of a pay-rise and ponder the award entry you’ll have to write later in the year. Finally, they’ve recognized your talent.

You can always tell the first time a planner is anointed filler-in-of-the-shape. Mania leaks from her pores: a sense of orgasmic clout mixed with haunting memories of the morning after she lost her virginity. She bustles around the office bumping into interns, she stays back late at work believing the dark hours will reveal the shape’s mystical cravings, she blurts out half-thoughts hoping someone latches onto them but not really wanting to hear disagreement.

“Obey the shape. Obey the shape. Obey the shape.”

Eventually, the shape draws from her all that it needs then flings her back into the hairy embrace of her broken office chair. Disheveled, she closes her laptop and promises to catch up on sleep on the weekend.

The real shape of things to come

Before you call me a shapeist, I need you to know that I’m pro-shape. I remember having shape-envy in my first months as a planner. It all seemed so… succinct and logical. I longed for the keys to my own shape. And clients appeared to find shapes and shape-process desirable in an agency: both helped structure their year and defend non-numbers thinking to the C-Level (typically logistics or sales people). Yes, shapes have sucked us all in at some point.

As shape-shifters, it makes sense that shapes seduce us. Daily pattern-play is the strategist’s remit; shape obedience is natural. However, the problem with much of our industry’s shape fixation is that it focuses on the shapes that our strategies go into more than the shapes that go into our strategies.

Brand consultants (internal and external) have field days with senior marketers desperate to believe in models and shapes. Inheriting these things is usually very frustrating. The more you see, the more you realize how much of the same thinking fills them – especially in the CPG sector. So many brands are ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ people. Their tones are so frequently ‘accessible’, ‘simple but not simplistic’ (thank you for the revealing clarification… again) and ‘confident’. So many of the insights merely justify the pre-ordained message (the number of times I’ve seen a product that has loose cholesterol-lowering claims in recent years paired with an insight of ‘people don’t know that X lowers cholesterol’…)… and, yes, they stop at a message or a trite brand essence (‘Empowering confidence’).

By all means, use the shape – but don’t let the shape use you.

The building blocks for your shapes

If you are helping a business market itself, I believe the strategist’s role is to create new meaning for that business. The fallback approach I sometimes go to is here: How to do account planning – a simple approach. Without repeating the whole thing here, the concepts I find myself playing with most now are:

• Problems
• Insights – unspoken human truths
• Strategy statements – one-line summary of the novel solution
• Brand purposes – how the brand will serve humanity
• Experience plans – how people interact with the brand and related topics
• Ideas (see How to explain an idea – a megapost) – novel concepts
• Three-act campaign structures – story-making

Most strategy I’ve worked on in recent years has required quick thinking – about 2-3 projects each year have involved more than a month’s worth of strategy. However, the amount of time you have depends on the type of agencies you work in, how many brands and projects you’re across and the type of category your clients are in.

My go-to sources for stimulus:

• Qualitative research – store visits, stakeholder interviews, consumer research, expert interviews, using the product (if you can)
• Social listening – I’m trying hard to believe otherwise but I find the most useful way to find interesting stuff socially is to sit there manually and go through a lot of stuff. My main aim is to turn up unexpected language, image sharing and behavior. I try to identify typologies for hashtags, images, communities, commenting language, abbreviations and so on.
• Keyword research – search patterns and volumes (language, seasonality, geography, etc.)
• Behavioral economics – I have various Google Scholar alerts set up and find that I can get my head around most subjects with a day of research (many papers summarize other people’s findings). Sometimes I’ll do keyword research to try to identify the language that academics use so there can be back-and-forth as you hone in. For instance, when I was trying to understand why and how people donate, a lot of the research gathers under ‘charitable giving’ and ‘altruism’ – not words I used to start my search. Websites like Physorg are useful too.
• Consumer reviews – yes, more social listening. It’s usually worth mapping the attributes that people use to rate a product or shop. Often you’ll find market research that paints another picture but your own labeling of the attributes may be more provocative.
• Business and financial points of view – find articles about the company and category, annual reports and so on.
• Analytics – website analytics, previous campaign analytics, social analytics. What content gets discovered most and why? What content converts the most and why? Where is the content opportunity?
• Always be reading – I try to have a non-fiction book going most of the time. Over the past two years, I’ve read a lot about behavioral economics, writing, screenwriting and story-making, the history of ideas, psychology and social sciences. There are anecdotes and research riddled through these sorts of books that can directly influence your thinking or give you somewhere to start. I’m also in love with Zite – a great content aggregator – and trawl it daily for news in these areas.
• Life – while it’s important not to assume you are your audience, developing the habit of paying attention in life and banking observations will come in handy. Personally, becoming a father and needing to understand a whole lot of new information and decisions has been very useful in making me pay more attention more often.

The best tools for strategy shape-making

A pencil and some paper.

When I was about 20, a guy who became my brother-in-law helped me get a $100-a-week job in a digital agency. I was making websites at the time – spending hours playing with Geocities, rudimentary HTML and even more rudimentary design. Like most other website-makers I worked with, my tendency was to jump onto the computer to think. However, Kevin encouraged us to turn our monitors off and think on paper.

How often have you owed someone a presentation and the first thing you’ve done is open PowerPoint or Keynote? And then how often have you kept making slides forgetting that you need to think through what your point is and how best to make it?

This reflex is rampant – and while, ultimately, you need to do what works for you, I’d encourage you to try the analog way for a while. Having a pencil (or pen) poised above paper (grab some photocopier orphans) is a beautiful and deliberate act, and helps you focus on what you write instead of getting distracted by the font you’ve chosen or another application blinking at you.

The other advantage of pencil and paper is that when you share your thinking, this loose format makes it feel like half-thoughts. This is excellent for two reasons: you need to be honest with yourself that they are half-thoughts (don’t latch on to your own thinking too readily), and other people will understand that you are sharing thinking with them and not just trying to convince them with some strategy shape or formal presentation.

Writing your strategy into shape

1. Gather your stimulus

You obviously need some useful information about the brand, the business objectives, the products, the competition, culture and human behavior to start with. I’ll give myself brackets of time to dig – maybe it’s a day to dig through the behavioral economics related to the subject, for example. Yes, I use the computer to save and screengrab but I’ll mindmap the most potent stuff on paper. I want something easy to carry around and point to.

2. Shape-sprint

Once I’ve grabbed some stimulus, I’ll play with it – hopefully in fast sprints (perhaps thirty minutes to an hour) – and bank some strategies, then move on and dig in other directions. I trust that my subconscious will help me find shapes when I’m on the subway, at the gym, taking a shower, and having lunch, so my aim is to fill myself with stimulus and give myself some strategies to argue about with myself. So, I tend to dig then sprint and let it all percolate… then repeat.

I love doing this but I tend to disappear from my family during this phase and I develop mini bouts of Tourrettes as I utter half-thoughts to anyone in hearing distance.

I try not to latch onto one line of thinking too early. One way to avoid early shape-latching is to give yourself a number of strategies to hit in a certain period of time. Perhaps you can come up with ten strategies in a day or two. Then you must find peace in the turbulence and force those ten lines of thinking out.

Stephen King talks about writing with the door closed, however, I find it useful to close the door and think, open it to share and debate, and then close it to hone it. Every now and then you’ll work with a bunch of people and can consistently deliver great thinking without closing the door ever. Still, at some point, someone will need to take the thinking and write it down in a way that compels others.

What actually gets written during a shape-sprint? As little as possible. I aim for unexpected shapes and may simply jump off one behavior or insight to a strategy and then bank it. And then I may try to summarize the strategy in a word – brutal reductionism.

Let’s look at an example – Patagonia makes for an interesting study. I haven’t worked with them so I may be completely off the mark, however, I was watching videos of the CEO a while back and was curious about his ideas. Whether or not this is written in their brand strategy, the insight that drives Patagonia is this: getting people out into Mother Nature makes them more interested in protecting it. So Patagonia’s purpose is to arm people with the clothing and equipment to help them get the most out of adventures with Mother Nature. The purpose is born from a belief that the world won’t save itself – people need to up their ante. And if they follow through on the CEO’s own ideas (as they appear to), the company is not merely an outdoor-wear brand – they’re really an environmental activism company. And with those few thoughts in place – you can start to describe how the business (and the people in it) will behave – what content makes sense, which products, what sorts of CSR activity. If you were bold, you’d try to measure how many adventures in nature that people who buy Patagonia take – and you’d try to compare it to other brands as well as prove to what degree Patagonians helped the environment.

So, in a Patagonia shape-sprint, that one CEO quote would lead to this one strategy which we’ll call ‘the environmental activism’ strategy. I’d park it and try to find another nine – some of which may come off image-sharing behavior, or research about what motivates people to help the environment, and so on.

My checkpoints:

• Is it based in truth? Yes – the CEO’s own words.
• Is it unique and unexpected? Yes. Well, at this stage, I’m not familiar with a brand in the same category as Patagonia that talks about being an environmental activist. If we ended up liking this area, we’d double-check its uniqueness.
• Can we do something with it? Yes. It’s a strong purpose and leads to a lot of ideas about helping people take adventures in the outdoors. We’d then define what sorts of adventures for what sorts of people.

3. Re-write your shapes – This time, with paradox!

Last year, I was preparing for a pitch and found myself stuck in meetings about a pitch presentation riddled with long words. I started translating the marketing speak and brand fluff into plain English, to which someone said: “Oh, that’s nice. Let’s make the presentation folks-y.” I replied: “The aim is for people to understand it.” (For more, read Word traps planners plan themselves into)

Marketing-speak is not your friend. It is a sign of insecurity and lack of clarity. To shape strong strategy, you need to embrace strong, visual language. Where lateral thinking is bringing things together in a way that hasn’t existed before (and that is useful), I often try to play with words that don’t typically fit together but make interesting new sense when they do – paradoxes.

Perhaps, you have stumbled on provocative strategies in your shape-sprint. Test yourself to write them differently and even more provocatively. Again, give yourself a number to aim for. Take your favorite three strategies and re-write them ten times each. Keep making them shorter and punchier. Play with words that don’t seem to belong – make new shapes.

4. Shape your argument in a short story

Strategy is an argument. So, why not get your argument straight before you present it? If your team favors one or two strategies from the steps above, take the strategies and write one- to two-page stories for them. Take someone on the journey you’ve been on: from the problem, to the twist, to the ‘what if we…?’, to the imaginative answer (or argument). An hour or two will be all you need but it will help you get your thoughts together in a more compelling way. Again, don’t just settle for the first words out of your head. Re-write them.

5. Finally, determine the shape of your presentation

The ultimate shape your strategy needs to take will depend on many factors. I have presented a hand-drawn mindmap on a page to discuss different ideas (it led to great discussions and a new strategy), I have hand-drawn entire presentations (sometimes scanned and PowerPoint’ed, sometimes presented on paper), I have participated in a pitch where the creative director had the idea to dress up three rooms and the presentation was… us.

When your clients are large and bureaucratic, you’ll often have to present and re-present your thinking to different stakeholders. Much of the time, people will present your thinking up the ladder without you even being there. In these situations, I’m increasingly of the belief that some sort of video is the best shape for a strategy to take. Manifesto videos are slippery little things – they’re great tools to make clients feel good about their jobs but often risk becoming ads.

How do you shape up?

It’s been a while since I’ve written and I was desperate to get something out… today. I’d love to hear how you force better shapes out of your strategy. What techniques do you use? Also, I realize how theoretical this article is. If you know a brand that does good, makes good, doesn’t compete with any of my clients, excites me and would be happy for me to run them through this exercise publicly… let me know.

Photo courtesy Alessandro Pinna.

If you want people to talk about your business and brand, you need to explore making social ideas.

A guest post by Ben Phillips, a skateboarder trapped in the hairdo of a post-ironic digital strategist wandering the Continent, making ideas so social they like each other’s statuses on Facebook.

If you’re reading this, then it’s likely you work in advertising, media or marketing. If so, then your working life consists of coming up with, selling and executing commercial ideas. Mark has posted in some detail about ideas (How to explain an idea) before. This article intends to extend his thinking on the topic, focusing on a specific type of idea that’s particularly in vogue: the social idea.

We’ll cover:

1. The definition of a social idea
2. Why social ideas are important
3. Five ways to create a social idea
4. Your view on how to create social ideas

Part 1: Definition

Social idea: a novel concept that enables a unique, participative form of interaction between 2 or more people.

As an illustrative (and brilliant) example WWF’s Earth Hour is a social idea for many reasons, but most notably because it encouraged people to get together, and host lights-out events.

It’s important to differentiate between social objects and social ideas. A social object is what people talk to each other about. If you and I see a sporting event and talk about it, the sporting event is the social object. However, the sporting event isn’t necessarily an idea.

All social ideas are social objects but not all social objects are social ideas. Clear?

Part 2: Why social ideas are important

Before we get practical, social ideas are important for 3 reasons.

1.We are super social apes

Humans are designed to be social. We are shaped through interaction with others from the moment we are born. Most of our lives are made up of other people (not brands, business or political concerns) and most of what we do is determined by this context. (For more, read Mark Earls’s ‘Herd’).

Social ideas align with intrinsic human qualities.

2. People are saturated with one-way advertising messages

The prevailing consensus is that 3000 one-way messages hit us each day. If you aren’t creating an idea that fosters interaction between people, it’s likely you’ll be lost in the wash.

3. We’re more connected to a greater peer set than ever

It’s important to state here that social ideas live between people, not on social networks. However social networks are a fertile ground for them to come to life because of the ease and scale of our connectedness.

So – for these 3 reasons (these are just a start), social ideas demand consideration.

Now let’s consider practical ways in which we can create them, with a few examples along the way.

Part 3: Five ways to create a social idea

Way 1: Create something that enables people to tell a story about themselves in a unique way

One of the most observable human insights from dinner party environments and digital social channels is that people absolutely love to tell stories about themselves. When this is gratuitous it becomes hugely polarizing, but it’s also pivotal to creating and growing social connections with others. We tell a story about ourselves, they listen, they tell a story about themselves, we listen – a relationship is formed. There are about 1.8 million status updates posted to Facebook every minute. Irrespective of how cynics will label this torrent, the behavioral trend is glaringly obvious.

From a brand perspective, if we can give people a way to tell a story about themselves we can channel this fundamental desire, and they’re going to want to share this with friends and family. However, since we are in advertising and evil [Only Ben is evil - Mark], we have to sell something, so we must consider a product attribute or the advertising idea in the composition of the narrative.

One of the best examples of this recently is the campaign for the Intel core i5 processor. The product positioning is “Visibly Smart” – the chip delivers a stunning visual performance. So we combine the positioning, with our consumer insight “people love to tell stories about themselves”, sprinkle some creative magic and we get Intel’s Museum of Me. The Museum of Me is a “visibly smart” and incredibly cool way for me to tell the story of my Facebook social life that I naturally want to share with others and tell people about.

Way 2: Give people a platform to create something, to remix something, to personalize or customize something

When we create something, not only do we have a sense of ownership over it but we’re often proud of it. Do you remember when you were young, and you’d create finger painting masterpieces in kindergarten? You’d run home to your parents and excitedly show them what you’d done in the hope that it would adorn the kitchen fridge. Whilst the manifestations of this behavior have changed, I think the psychological drivers remain largely consistent. When we create stuff, we want to share it with others and the fruits of our creativity will be the reason we talk to other people.

The spectrum of creation is essentially unlimited, but again the creation should relate to the advertising idea or a product truth. Two wildly different illustrative examples here. (Disclaimer: I work for the agency that developed the first campaign.)

1. 13ème RUE ‘Je Tue un Ami’

13ème RUE is a crime entertainment cable television station in France. To increase the number of viewers, they developed a campaign with the advertising idea “Uncover the detective in you”. The digital creative execution Je Tue un Ami (I kill a friend) enabled participants to create short murder mysteries involving their own friends (their friends were killed in a particularly graphic fashion which added to the appeal). This unique platform for enabling creativity nurtured a personal involvement with the advertising idea and helped turn the site into a hit (no pun intended) with over 20 million unique visits.

2. Walkers ‘Do Us a Flavour’

In the UK, Walkers Do Us a Flavour is a more family-friendly approach to creativity. I’m not sure of the exact articulation of the advertising idea but the simplicity of the creative platform (suggest a new flavour of crisps) as well as the incentive (£50K + 1% of the flavour’s profits for life + fame) delivered one of the biggest social ideas in British advertising history as participants and on-lookers discussed and sampled the various suggestions. The numbers were pretty astounding: during the height of the campaign period, Walkers was selling 12 million bags of crisps a day.

Way 3: Start a movement or a debate

When you start a debate, when you start a movement, when you go against the grain, you’re creating a talking point. You’re challenging people to consider their point of view, and implicitly encouraging them to share that point of view with their peer set. Outside of a campaign perspective, this is also a particularly effective community management technique (for example, “Coca Cola is better with ice. True or False?”).

A couple of points. First, I think this is one of the more difficult methods to do correctly. Second, as with the first two principles we’ve discussed, the debate should relate to an advertising idea or a brand belief. Again, two examples here.

1. Kenneth Cole’s ‘Where Do You Stand?’

Kenneth Cole’s ‘Where Do You Stand?’ campaign asked a series of controversial questions of users about gun ownership, gay rights and protests. The participation rates were strong, and the campaign generated significant amounts of PR. That said, and I’m not intimately familiar with the Kenneth Cole brand, the debate seems to focus more on controversy for controversy’s sake, than on a consistent brand belief.

2. Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty created a participative debate that challenged society’s views on women and questioned conventional notions of beauty. This was a debate that corresponded directly to the brand belief “Real beauty for real women” and through the course of the debate, participants were acutely aware of what the brand stood for and what it believed in. From a brand belief perspective, I think Dove’s focused debate is more effective than Kenneth Cole’s. (Disclaimer: Unilever is a client of the agency I work for.)

Way 4: An idea or challenge that requires co-operation or rewards working together

The vast majority of human accomplishments have relied on our ability to work together. When we work as teams, we not only achieve brilliant things that would have been inconceivable had we been working alone, but teamwork also delivers a shared sense of purpose and camaraderie between team members. In addition to the fundamental benefits of social ideas that we spoke about at the start of this post, ideas that require teamwork nurture camaraderie, and when that camaraderie is an exploration or a demonstration of an advertising or brand idea – the results can be pretty impressive.

There are plenty of brand games and Alternative Reality Games that operate on this principle but my favorite case is Coca Cola’s Friendship machine, a social idea that requires real-world physical co-operation. The brand idea here is ‘friendship’, with the product acting as an enabler and a facilitator of this. The execution rewards teamwork between friends (with two-for-one Cokes) and gives both participant and viewer a warm, strong association between Coke and friendship.

Two side-points:

1. As we spoke about at the start of this post, social ideas live between people, not on social networks. This is a fantastic example of a real-world social idea.

2. The numbers for this campaign from direct participants are relatively small, but the strength of the idea has ensured that it’s touched hundreds of thousands online.

Way 5: A mechanic that has an incentive to share

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life…And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out… is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.” Steven Levitt, Freakonomics.

Our discussion of incentives here is less about an idea per se, and more about the system in which the idea operates. The system refers to how people interact with the idea: what they do, where they go, how they interact, the user journeys etc. There can be any number of systems that give people a reason to talk to each other and spread the word about a campaign.

As an illustrative (and the most common) example.
The idea: Your dog could be the next official mascot for brand X
The system: The dog with the most votes/views/Likes is the winner (or makes the shortlist). Every submitted dog has its own unique URL and vote counter.

Without exception, campaigns that have strong, simple incentive tiers (like the above example) are enormously successful from a volume point of view. Irrespective of the category, the prospect of fame, or victory, or prize, coupled with the system of most votes/views wins ensures rapid and wide-reaching ‘talk-ability’ of the campaign and its content.

A couple of caveats here:

1. Numbers aren’t everything and the system is not the idea. You can have a system that’s fantastic at touching millions of people, with an idea that does little for the brand.

2. When you’re creating these systems, it’s best to put a time limit on the voting or “advocacy” period. Week after week of “vote for my poochie in this campaign” is likely to frustrate and annoy rather than touch and inspire. Without tight time frames, it’s like a retargeted banner campaign without frequency capping – you’re acutely aware of a banner following you around the internet and your opinion of the advertiser adjusts accordingly.

Part 4: Your view

These five approaches, as well as the definition, are very much a work in progress. They are intended as a starting point in an exploration of a certain type of idea. With that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on social ideas and the principles you use to create them.

Ben Phillips is a senior digital planner. He works between BETC EuroRSCG in Paris and EHS 4D in London.

On the way to work today, I listened to a couple from The Bronx compare weekends. The guy played Monday Morning Hero about how much dope he had smoked. The girl, frustrated in her search for a cheap two-bedroom apartment, found a backdoor into the topic. “I remember this last place we lived in, we had no furniture except a television,” she said. “One day, my sister and I were playing video games on the floor, and these guys we knew was in there with the window shut, smoking and smoking and smoking.” The guy nodded his forehead through his grin. “Did you catch contact?” he encouraged. “Oh yeah, they was smoking so much that we caught contact. We started giggling crazy and shit, and telling stories about our uncle. It was so funny.”

Three things struck me. First, let’s get it out of the way: I’m getting old. My weekend included ‘Guess Who?’ and a Dora memory card game, writing a story with my son about moon monsters after his soccer practice, and a family dinner with the kids rolling around the restaurant because 8pm is usually bedtime. I would have understood the Bronx conversation when I was younger. Second, life in New York is tough. Between healthcare, crazy rent prices, food and other basics, people need money for drugs. No wonder many lack furniture (although I bet wall-antlers are everywhere). And, finally, I didn’t realize a television was a piece of furniture. I can’t wait for IKEA to release a make-it-yourself plasma screen. It will sit alongside their Williamsburg-inspired taxidermy and antlers collection.

All morning I wondered about the telepathic powers of her uncle, a man she needed only to mention to get a laugh. I wondered harder about the phrase “we caught contact”. You see, after I looked it up online, I realized that I have spent the past 5 months in the States trying to catch contact. I have sat in meetings feeling stupid. I have run brainstorms and left feeling stupid. Daily, words I have avoided for years marinate meeting minutes and follow-up emails. They overshadow interesting ideas. They jam the system.

You know the words I’m talking about: words made for diagrams, textbooks and teenage English essays – words made for undoing, not making. Unfortunately, many are born from MBA degrees and the corporate cultures they intend to help, as if an education is only worth the long words a person graduates with, and a word with more syllables is worth more than a word that most people understand. It isn’t – it’s the opposite.

So, I have given up trying to catch contact. I can’t learn this way of speaking by sitting in a room with others hoping to breathe it in. If a planner’s currency is ideas and our denomination is words then planners owe it to themselves to spend their words better – marketers, too. Just imagine how much time and money everyone would save: shorter emails, faster meetings, no revisiting what everyone is trying to say… we just say it. In easy words.

Here are the most common word traps that I have come across and stepped in. These days, they cause herpes on my brain.

Eight common word traps

1. You speak like God

God-complexes run rampant in advertising and marketing. It makes sense: while we’re not rolling out the Six Days of Creation every week, what we do affects the world for the better and the worse. Further, survival in the game requires Alpha behavior: sometimes you need to send in plagues to scare pharaohs. But this doesn’t excuse the use of words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘permission’.

Most used in discussions that patronize women, ‘empowerment’ doesn’t really mean anything. Say it to someone who doesn’t share your cocoon. Then tell her that your apples empower women to eat healthy. All she will hear is that apples are healthy. She’ll think you’re intelligent for using a big word so she’ll nod that she understands. But, seriously, it’s hollow – like ‘permission’, a word that smart people love to use when they are discussing behavior change. The alcohol industry loves it. “We need to give men permission to drink vodka at the start of the night instead of when the party’s kicking on if we’re to sell more.” At best, your communications will model behavior but you’re hardly giving permission. Only God can do that when it comes to men drinking vodka early.

2. You speak like Freud or, worse, you Jung like Maslow

If you’re a strategist, your job is to understand people. Academic frameworks are useful. But knowing these frameworks does not make you Maslow. Knowing these frameworks should make you less dependent on hiding slippery thinking in them. If you catch yourself saying, “This strategy is about self-actualization,” close your eyes, visually backtrack then say, “Sorry. Let me start again. This strategy is about empowering women to self-actualize their healthy selves in the act of eating an apple.” As the room draws its breath, add: “Just like Eve.” Boom! You just God-Maslow’d them.

Unfortunately, this stuff works because it makes everyone feel smarter. It also appeals to the logic-wins-every-time attitude that higher education endows on the over-educated. It works brilliantly for brand design agencies trying to justify big budgets for packaging redesign. If this is your denomination, good luck to you. Frameworks are useful but please don’t exaggerate your role in them.

3. You speak Wallflower

Perhaps you learned Wallflower growing up. Key to this language is finding the safest thing to say, and then saying something safer. If Getty Images had Getty Strategies, this is where you’d license your strategy from. You’d take a safety harness and build a strategy around it being safe – not safer, not the safest, and certainly nothing unorthodox. You go straight down the line – the line where the wall meets the floor – and you succeed: nobody notices you.

4. You speak modern Latin (or old French)

I’ve never let etymological fact get in the way of a good whinge: putting -ize and -ate at the end of a noun does not make what you say strategic. It’s a great way to distract people – add syllables to the back of a simple word and people will spend a few seconds trying to work out what you said as you slide past them having said nothing. Say it short, say it simple.

5. You speak like Fox News

The Fox News language is a triad of Folksy, Faux-Intellect and Political Rhetoric. They’re all incredibly difficult languages. To speak Fox News in strategy, you are truly brilliant. You’ll drop in a large bit of jargon – and repeat it through the meeting. You’ll try to re-frame all discussion back into your jargon. But you’ll end with a cute, inoffensive Down-South cliche to make it feel all better. It sucks when this works; deep down I’m just jealous.

6. You speak cliché – it’s a French dialect

Clichés are useful. They summarize conventional wisdom, often throwing in a word twist. But they are useful as stimulus. They are not output.

7. You speak ecstasy

A few things have amazed me about TV ads in America. First, drug ads are rampant. No wonder everyone thinks they’re sick (it’s not the quality of the ads alone making them sick). Second, everyone is selling happiness and joy. Clients like this because it makes them feel good about their products: feel-good food, good-mood food, joyful jelly, happy driving. It’s a great ploy to get through pretesting too. Few people will say they don’t want to feel happy. Thing is, it’s becoming cliché and is too convenient. Dig harder. Make people happy (if you must) but promising it is tricky.

8. You speak Globlish

My long-time favorite player of the Globlish card is the Korean tourism industry. Their taglines must start as bets: “Let’s see who can take the few English words we [Korean tourism marketers] understand and mix them together in a way that makes sense to nobody else.” The Koreans are good at brinkmanship, so it’s a bet I would not place against them. A lot of Asian technology companies do this too. CNN is rife with it. Save the Globlish for the meetings, not the communications.

What’s a planner to do?

1. Re-write the badness out of the strategy

If you want to improve at strategy, please make ‘On Writing Well‘ by William Zinsser your next read. I’m halfway through it and it is the first book I will now recommend to new and aspiring strategists. Words are critical to ideas so being able to write well is mandatory. His main point is that the “essence of writing is rewriting”. I believe it.

So, start bad. Then rewrite. Aim for ten different versions of what you started with – twenty if you’re bold. Do this when your energy is highest. Set a time limit to hack your way to brilliance. Then leave your alternatives and come back a day later. If you’re not happy, do it again. Fast flurries followed by time for your brain to let things tick over works. Share them early with other people. Park your ego next to the taco truck and receive all feedback like a sponge. You’ll squeeze something better out. See if you can get your strategy down to a handful of words with one or two syllables each.

2. Call bullshit

I try my hardest not to fall into the traps above. It happens. But it helps if your team shares an outlook about words and keeps each other in check – with a smile. Push each other to say things more vividly and more concisely. Invest time in word games.

3. Make your words pictures

It can be hard in a room of clients to call bullshit politely. Instead of saying a strategy sounds hollow, I’ll catch myself saying it doesn’t sound concrete: “I can’t see it.” You can see great strategies if you say them right. So, challenge yourself to say things more simply and more instantly visible.

Did you catch contact?

Getting high off someone else’s dope is one way to be kind to your budget. But if your currency is ideas, make sure you know your denomination. Words matter. Catch contact off better writers. They’re in books all over the place. Start with ‘On Writing Well‘ by William Zinsser then explore Stephen Kings’ ‘On Writing‘ and William Strunk’s ‘The Elements of Style‘.

What traps have you floundered in and how did you work your way out of them?

For more on self-expression in strategy, try How to explain an idea and How to do account planning – a simple approach.

Photo courtesy Koisny.

The debate about big ideas versus small ideas is dumb. It’s Fox News narrative re-framing applied to advertising. It’s a dubious act of political rhetoric that I’ve seen mostly deployed by digital agencies to make older agencies look their age; often the older agencies oblige. I’m tired of hearing it, and I’m tired of it nearly getting in the way of coming up with good stuff.

Do you know why it sometimes works?

Because the comparison is not about big ideas versus small ideas. It’s actually about a whole bunch of digital executional stuff versus a TV script.

In reality, there are only ideas and ‘some thoughts I’ve had’. There is only original thought and unoriginal thought. There are only ideas that work and ideas that don’t.

What’s an idea anyway?

Next time you hear someone use the big vs small idea rhetoric, nod politely then ask them what they think an idea is – preferably in front of the audience for whom the rhetoric was intended.

For an industry selling knowledge and thinking, I’m often amazed at how undeveloped our own understanding of what we do is – what a strategy is, what an insight is, what an idea is. Sure, plenty of people have trademarked frameworks and sound-bites that sound smart but when you ask them to not just define one of the basic words our industry operates by but to also give you an example of something they’ve done that brings it to life, often the definition that sounded smart doesn’t have a smart example to live through.

As a fan boy of Edward de Bono, the man who coined the phrase ‘lateral thinking’, I do appreciate his ideas on ideas. The easiest way to understand lateral thinking is to start with linear thinking. Linear thinking takes a topic and breaks it into its natural attributes – it follows one line of thinking (hence, linear).

Let’s take tennis. Tennis – tennis ball – tennis racquet – tennis court – Wimbledon – grass – Nadal – ball boys. And so on.

And let’s now throw in ballet. Ballet – ballerina – men in tights – Nutcracker – classical music.

Lateral thinking simply moves across the lines – from one side to the other – with the output being an idea, a novel concept.

Perhaps we should create a tennis ballet? What about a new tennis serve called the Nutcracker? What about men playing tennis in tights – perhaps it would help them jump higher? What about a classical music tennis tournament?

You could throw in another random topic like gorillas and crisscross all day, pushing out new ideas left, right and center.

Now, they wouldn’t all be good – as I’ve demonstrated – but they’d actually be ideas.

So, this is the definition of creativity that I’ve latched onto because I find it to be the most practical and least steeped in mystique: it’s the bringing together of things that don’t normally exist together in a way that makes better, more useful sense. An idea is the output of this act.

Feel free to disagree with me (or de Bono) on this but I keep coming back to this definition and find it useful.

For more on what ideas exist in the advertising world, read How to explain an idea.

How do you size up an idea?

So, if an idea is a novel concept that has brought things together in a way that hasn’t existed before and that is useful, how can one idea be bigger or smaller than the other?

Is it because the idea crisscrossed more attributes from more disconnected topics? Is a tennis ballet a smaller idea than a tennis tournament where we dress gorillas up like ballerinas and the tennis players have to ride the gorillas throughout the entire match while classical music plays?

Is it because a big idea is more useful than a small idea? To more people or to a few people? Was Facebook a big idea when it started or did it become one? Is it actually an idea based on the definition above?

This brings us to impact. Is an idea big or small based on the impact it has? Measured by what?

Is it sized based on the scale of the problem it solves? Is a small solution a big idea if the problem it was trying to address was massive?

Does a big idea cost more than a small idea? Is an idea big if it’s on TV and small if it isn’t?

Is it all of the above, some of the above or something else altogether?

In years past, I have absolutely used the phrase ‘big idea’ (“We need a big idea”) but am trying to put the phrase to bed. I believe it gets used mostly to prevent the speaker from having to say what she actually means: “I want some new, unexpected thinking – not just another TV script… although, yes, we’ll have to do TV – I just don’t want you to only think about that.”

If you want to know what makes an idea big or small, you’d be best asking the people who use this divisive bit of inception for their own definition. I don’t find it useful so I won’t even hazard a guess.

What the idea size debate is really about

OK. So, to the people employing this anti-phallic word war feeling high on their sense of iconoclasm, I agree with you. I need you to know that. Well, I agree with what you’re really saying.

And what you’re really saying is: “It’s time we got beyond thinking about making one TV spot that runs for months, possibly years, and create stuff frequently that keeps people aware, interested and buying from our clients.”

Simple. Who couldn’t agree with that? Do what works more often in a world where things change all the time.

So, where do we start?

I believe that planning in the creative industries is an act of creativity. I believe ideas (as defined above) should be in the strategy from the get-go.

Too often, planners appear part-client, part-account person – putting in obvious words, insights that are post-rationalized to make the committee they report back to feel good about their business. I don’t believe this is planning; it’s head-hours burning.

If you were working on the brand Baby Bjorn (baby carriers) and noticed, as I have first hand, how the world treats men who wears babies better (grandmas give you compliments, air stewards slip you free things they’re not supposed to, cafes give you bonus banana bread, people let you cut in line), how baby-carrying is the man’s job in many (not all) relationships and how many do it with pride reserved for very few things in their lives, how women physically respond to a baby-carrying man, if you’d read research about a certain type of male ape that carries its young around to show the other male apes they’re not worth messing with, and then tried to mesh these sorts of insights into brand or product truths, out will pop ideas. In the strategy.

So, if the man is either the buyer or researcher of Baby Bjorn, perhaps the brand decides to create a content-driven community and utility to help men extract extra benefits from the world – the inside track on new-dad perks: which companies ‘put out’, what you can get and how to make the plays.

Do you think someone could write an interesting TV ad off this? Do you think you could come up with witty video content at least once a month with this? What about a daily tweet? What about a weekly blog post? An event? A book? An app?

In the 5 minutes I’ve been thinking about this example, my answer to all of those questions is, ‘yes’. Again, I’m not saying the example is any good (I’m trying to have fun with it), but for the exercise, let’s now throw it into the big-idea-versus-small-idea debate.

Is the big idea in the strategy – to position Baby Bjorn as a new dad’s perk magnet (12 months of trick or treat every day)? What if the TV ad followed a man doing this around the world for 12 months to see what would happen? What if it was interesting enough to turn into a documentary? What if that documentary was then broken down into 10 really interesting 2-minute highlights? What if a community of men sharing their own perk-getting tips was built around the documentary? What if the community came together to literally trick-or-treat the world with their babies on – but for a charity in Africa (perhaps to collect school supplies)? Which one of these ideas is big and which one of these ideas is small?

Exactly. Wrong question. We should simply be asking, is any of this any good?

Why you shouldn’t limit your ideas

First, if you’re a planner and you’re not putting ideas into strategies, I really don’t understand what your role as a planner in an agency is. If you’re just doing research, then call it so. If you’re really helping the marketing team with marketing plans, call it. If you’d have taken the above example and asked your teams to focus on how safe Baby Bjorn is or how well designed it is and left it at that then I don’t believe you’re doing planning. Thing is, that sort of planning seems to be the majority of our industry. I believe the role is supposed to be about the un-obvious made poetic and compelling.

Second, ideas (big and small) should be riddled into everything. A new twist, a new turn can be added to all executional elements – every TV spot, every blog headline, every re-Tweet.

Finally, you’d rarely ask for one idea from the creative process so why just put one idea into it? The more I do this job, the less I believe in the purity of one strategy: execution makes strategy live or die. Yes, there are planning books all over the place that are written with incredible hindsight, making the planner look sage-like, all-knowing. But I believe it’s simplistic to think there’s only one useful insight for a brand, that only one strategy can work. More rapid and earlier exploration of multiple strategies and creative ideas together is something worth exploring.

So…

The big idea versus small idea debate is not worth having. It’s hung around for a few years now but I truly hope it disappears so we can focus on the power of great thinking – and making it happen as often as possible.

For more on ideas, wander over to How to explain an idea and How to explain an idea.

Image courtesy Katherine Kirkland.