APG Contrarian Thinking Event - My Review

Interesting day at the Royal Institute which I dragged myself to from my sick bed yesterday.

It was the APG, Contrarian Thinking - billed as a series of talks by "iconoclasts who challenge convention and insist on new thinking, often in the face of considerable resistance" it was a top line up. I've been too busy to attend this in previous years but being between projects I managed to attend, and stay almost till the end too - so here's my notes.

*Please correct or add if you were there, and I've misrepresented something here*

First up, after an intro from Matt Tanter, APG Chair, was Professor Nick Chater, of Warwick Business School and author of the The Mind Is Flat.

He challenged a long and tightly held assumption about the way our minds work. He told us that unconscious was an illusion. Chater believes that "The brain is continually churning through new patterns – can only perceive one pattern at a time. Secondly, the brain is continually engaging and reengaging.” His view is that human beings are really self deluded on the spot creators or expert conjurors, who summon up incredibly complex illusions instantaneously but then trick ourselves into then imagining it is because they are merely referencing or accessing long since archived associations, whereas the mind is making it up. On the face of it this challenged a whole edifice of ideas in cognitive science, somatic markers, embodied cognition, neural nets, so I was sceptical, but I'm intrigued to buy his book now.

Then Victoria Garnett Detective Superintendent and founder of Police Now came on and gave us an irreverent look at her experience of policing from the ground up saying that bits of it were like Bodyguard 'but with a lot less shagging'. She balanced the jocular with the serious and gave us an insight into her vision for compassionate policing and how to maintain professionalism amongst the inevitable stress, and compassion fatigue. She tackled the organizational obstacles of Hierarchy, Blame (with Brene Brown as the reference) and Violence and showed how the police force too often (and sometimes unwittingly) contribute to the contagion of violence - which she quoted someone as saying was ‘a tragic suicidal expression of an unmet need’ rather than short circuiting it. And ended by asking the APG audience to get in touch to help her in transforming the Police into a Learning Organization. Oh, and I should also probably mention that she was responsible for the Take 90 Public Service message on dealing constructively with anger. OOMMM... (breathe in, breathe out)

Then we had Nils Leonard of Uncommon quoted Banksy on advertising. Who said that he'd been driven by something a client said to him at a pitch, that he wanted to work for a company ‘that people in the real world are glad exists’ and he'd been led to found HALO – ‘the coffee company keeping George Clooney up at night’ and that we should aspire to being part of the solution rather than being seen as ‘shadowy perverted advisors’ – delightful description. Quoting the film Network he says that we need to ‘find the stuff that pisses you off and channel it into your vision’. Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No better how good you are it’s only going to end up with it shitting on the board and strutting around like it won. Great presentation with relevant GIFs and CAPS on every slide. Reminded me of a talk I’ve seen Trevor Beattie give at the Cultural Insight Forum before on returning the punk to comms. But nevertheless it was a very slick, finely delivered talk.

Clive Stafford-Smith, Human Rights Lawyer and Founder at Reprieve, then gave us a tremendously witty speech and showed us some cute pictures of his son. He also showed up some of the absurdities of US law, the iniquity of low grade criminal state defense provision in the South . He told us his hair raising stories about interviewing Medellin assassins and his Dad trying to sabotage his career. He ended by asking us for our help in propagating the messages of the 174 death row inmates executed in the USA who in their last words declared that the State was about to execute an innocent person. He left us with an aphorism.

1. Those with power are generally afraid
2. They behave badly to protect their power
3. The worse it is, the better it is

Margaret Heffernan warned us about wilful blindness and how it is behind industrial disasters, corporate collapses and moral lapses like the scourge of sexual harassment in Hollywood and Microsofts missing of innovation opportunities. Margaret is an excellent speaker with multiple TED Talks. She talked about conflict avoidance and her work in researching whistleblowers who are pretty ordinary people and how we could all do it.

Then, citing Dr. Alice Stewart, the doctor who exposed the risk of X-Rays as the cause of childhood cancer and flying in the face of the conventional wisdom, vested interest and the self image of doctors of people who help rather than harm people. it was 25 years after the publication of her Lancet paper that British Medical establishment abandoned the X-Rays. She wrote that Alice Stewart needed to fight and to work with a statistician called George Neil who was an ornery antagonistic who tested the data to destruction. He said, "my job is to prove her wrong" - he actually sought disconfirmation and saw his job as creating conflict - it was only in being not able to prove her wrong that he could give her the confidence that she was right. She urges every one of us into this creative collaboration something that requires a scrapper contrarian in order to stress test ideas make them stronger.

Then it was Mark Ritson who came on stage with fire in his belly a slayed a whole bunch of sacred cows – starting with those who call themselves 'Guru'. He excoriated the 'numpties' who trot out terms like 'digital marketing' but cannot define 'digital’ in a world where JC Decaux billboards also use digital screens and backed this up with a bunch of CMOs who concur. He then took us back to brass tacks by quoting the seminal P&G McElroy Memo (1931) setting out the principles of Brand management, suggesting it should be 33% Diagnosis, 33% Strategy and 33% Tactics. He stressed how hard it was to get brand strategy right because it is multiplicative – Diagnosis, Strategy and Tactics can all go wrong but only one of them needs to go wrong for the whole thing not to work. He talked about (preaching to the choir here!) how deluded brand managers often are about their brands, how they see their brands often through rose tinted spectacles - like parents who maintain that ugly babies are in fact handsome because of the oxytocin - and why they often need outside help in the form of qual data (which can be in the form of a semiotics reports too I would say). He also bemoaned the fact the proper brand strategy has been effectively abandoned by most UK companies and perverted in favour of tactics which amounts to 'jingly jangly' Virtual Reality and bitcoin! In contrast, he bigged up the importance of Brand Meaning and the resulting salience and image based on a combination of distinctiveness AND differentiation. Not one or the other! This explains a lot of stuff I have senses in business development the last few years but I've not seen articulated so clearly. He argued that Brand Purpose was overplayed, in most brands not sustainable and should not supersede the Positioning - a simple term that still retains its usefulness - rubbishing a recent Unilever post on Brand Activism in doing so.

And he attacked the facile nature of lazy binaries such as traditional versus new media differentiation versus distinctiveness – or long term brand building versus short term sales activation arguing that of course it is a judicious balance of the two. And that the actual effectiveness of social media and online videos in performance vs expectation of ad people was ‘relatively shithouse’. He was magnanimous and barely mentioned that he’d won the Festival Of Marketing debate vs Byron Sharpe. His only misstep was having rubbished ‘agile’ strategy and then praised KFC for its FCK riposte to the chicken shortage, though I guess Mark would probably argue that was a tactical flourish rather than a strategic shift…

But all in all quite a masterclass in marketing from the Ritson. Some profanity, but a lot of profundity. I'd only skim read some of his articles before, so it nice to see him in the flesh. And I agree about simplification over elaboration, but unfortch it turns out: simple ain't easy!

All in all heady stuff - so intoxicating I had to leave, lurgy getting worse, for some fresh air.

Unfortunately I left before Martin Weigel, head of Planning at Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam and the panel with Bridget Angear, Chief Strategy Officer at AMV BBDO.

But I guess the videos will be up before too long on: https://www.apg.org.uk