Ogilvy & Mather India scooped the Future Foundation sponsored Special Prize for Best Use of Insight at the prestigious IPA Effectiveness Awards last night.  This special prize champions the use of insight within planning and demonstrates how effective use can provide a tangible difference to communication results – the O&M campaign stood out as an example of robust insight and its positioning at the very heart of a brand campaign. It was selected by the panel of industry judges as a demonstration of the way that a true understanding of cultural signifiers and social context can affect the nature and meaning of consumption in particular countries.

The campaign used in-depth research and insight to reposition Cadbury Dairy Milk in India, creating an association in the minds of Indian consumers of chocolate as part of the shared experience of meetha – a shared happiness ritual – rather than as a self-indulgent treat.

As judges of the award, we were delighted to see such beacon of excellence for how insight should be applied at the heart of brand direction; of a genuine ‘aha’ moment which became the inspiration of an exciting and emotionally powerful campaign. For us, the campaign demonstrates perfectly the necessity of fine tuning global brand positioning to specific market conditions, in order to create genuinely effective advertising – knowing how to balance the dynamism of wider trends and local market insights is critical for today’s global brands.

For more on the win, check out our website http://www.futurefoundation.net/press_releases/show/61.  For more on the IPA awards, http://www.ipa.co.uk/.

If you’d like to discuss ways to make insight work more effectively for your organisation, please call Karen Canty or Josie Watson on 020 3008 4889.

The Future Foundation has been monitoring an aspirational trend we call Authentiseeking for more than five years now. Born of a confluence of three other long term trends in our stable – Ethical Consumerism, Local Preference, and the Simplification of Complexity – this is about a powerful urge that many people feel to get in touch with what they believe is a more ‘real’ world. The idea of what constitutes an authentic, unmediated way of living is of course, a fascinating construct to explore and one that has multiple components. It is also driving a demand for new services amongst marketers and innovators from firms in our line of work thus creating a strong business-to-business angle to consider. More and more, it seems there is a desire amongst business people to get out of the office, away from the computer screen and to be exposed to raw and unpredictable environments and experiences – including debates, lectures and tours. The IPA recently took groups of agency heads to China and Silicon Valley as the most effective way of learning what is really happening.  The idea of consumer safaris which provide direct access to curated experiences in the same physical space as craftspeople and niche services targeted at specific consumer groups is gaining momentum – such as The Liminal Space run by artists and designers. And every night of the week, the business community in London can choose from myriad events, debates and tours ranging from art tours with House 7 (organised by the Soho House group) or high level debates with Intelligence Squared that provide privileged access to the intellectual and cultural coal face for those needing ideas, inspiration and insights.

For many consumers Authentiseeking is about a return to a more natural mode of existence –in harmony with nature and our ‘true selves’ – as an antidote to the consequences of mass production and the consumer society that shapes so much of our existence and reference points these days in what is also an increasingly urbanised world. Rural sociologists from Newcastle University working with us on a Defra-funded scenario project on the future of the countryside, described it as ‘symbolic rurality’, by which they meant the idealised image of the countryside that we all carry around in our heads, and want to be there for us, even if we find it almost impossible to leave the city these days. More than 50% agree that they feel a need to be closer to the country, rising to two thirds amongst the baby boomer age group.  This certainly contributes to desire for second homes – in an attempt to inhabit that rose- covered cottage in the country although fewer than 10% actually own one. And it doubtless drove the much-heralded ‘downshifting’ trend that was widely discussed by journalists in the quality press in the late 1990s – although by our calculations only 7% of people could ever have afforded to seriously consider this option.

There is also a more challenging explanation of the Authentiseeking trend. This proposes, following in the footsteps of the recently-deceased French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, that our daily lives in the modern world are becoming a negation of reality as we once understood it. With proliferating communications channels, now filled by signs and symbols constructed to communicate and promote the products and services of the consumer society, he argued that we effectively live in a simulacrum which simulates physical and emotional reality, but are ersatz representations and thus less able to satisfy our real needs. And the growing amount of screen time that each of us is now giving to the range of digital devices we own could be accentuating the scope and depth of the simulation possible.  We spend more than ten hours a week on average on line and nearly half of the UK population is extending that through ownership of a smart phone.  It is no surprise that many express the need to get away from it all – from the 60% who agree that they sometimes want to just switch off their phones and computers, to the 40% who now define luxury in terms of relaxation and escape rather than material goods – suggesting a wish to get behind the façade and reconnect with our true self(another potent construct in our post-Freudian age).

Clearly this creates a big challenge for marketers and advertisers – how to communicate that a brand is authentic through using the very complex language of signs in a more digitally facilitated world that is creating the simulacrum itself? No wonder semioticians are becoming more widely consulted – they are becoming part of the deciphering equipment that brand managers can deploy, along with a wider tool kit of good insight and probing analysis.  Jack Daniels’ current advertising is a good example of how the emphasis on the real, the slow and heritage can work for a smaller niche brand. Divine chocolate puts the accent on their co-owing grower community – ethics and authenticity are mutually reinforcing.  And some big names are beginning to figure out what it requires them to do and it can tick another box by demonstrating transparency too. Oxfam offer visits to overseas projects as a prize for supporters in a regular draw and Asda now provide live feeds from webcams in farms and factories round the world. Authentiseeking may be well established, but it is gathering momentum in response to the spread of digital interaction and our long term responses to the reality of living in the urbanised consumer world.

To give our clients a taste of the real thing, Future Foundation will be hosting our very first consumer safari on 28th June, a curated adventure into luxury, sustainability, connoisseurship plus a futuristic food tasting.  We still have a few spaces left so if you’re interested in attending, please contact Josie Watson on 0203 008 4889.

The future of effective communication has to be about ideas, as it has always been. The best advertising is clever, interesting and creates a new perspective on the human condition relevant to a brand or proposition in some way. In the good old days there were clever creative-types who by dint of sheer genius seemed to do it naturally. Later, planning teams created disciplined approaches to generating effective ideas and processes that mere mortals could use to generate really good ideas. As time went on, and the world got more complex and interconnected, this involved greater degrees of collaboration across disciplines and more focus on really understanding the proposition as well as the way that media were evolving and would affect communication. So far, so adaptive – advertising is chock-full of intelligent, adaptable, problem solving types after all.

Equally, innovation has never been more important to the success of advertising and marketing communications. We live in a modern world where the proliferation of content, channels and media means that most messages will drown in the cacophony of noise and competition that is the saturated, always-on media environment of today. Whilst innovation has been big news for some time in the business world and the wider economy, the human tendency, as always, to define, categorise and control means that for most people the term innovation is about devising new products and services.  But in the growing space that is created by the expanding bubble of personalised digital communication, innovation must be as much about generating a rich seam of new, interesting and different ways to engage with the consumer. This engagement is key to creating the powerful social and cultural construct that is a brand and to effectively changing behaviour - whether for social, philanthropic or commercial purposes.

But now, the field of play, with networked communications and ubiquitous digital channels that reach in into every nook and cranny of the consumer psyche has got so vast and amorphous that agencies are faced with an ever-more intense challenge, perhaps, than ever before. How can they generate powerful, motivating and stand-out ideas that are so good that they can have a life of their own, provide space for consumers to play and pass on and become integrated into the cultural landscape of the day-to-day?  Because in a world where brands become verbs, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, the prize of effectiveness has to be integration into the consumers rich palette of daily repertoires and activities.  It is worth noting that many social nouns are also becoming verbs - family and community are all about what we do, rather than what we are, which gives a further clue as to the paramount importance of the active consumer in creating social and consumer reality these days.

Ideas are born from many different sources - in fact what seems to distinguish the best and most original ideas nowadays is the ability to combine insights from a range of disciplines and perspectives into a single over-arching and powerful thought or proposition that will corral consumer attention.

From research we have undertaken published in  The Future of Insight and from the workshops we have been running with our Insight Community over the past year,  we have found that the nature and role of insight is rapidly transforming from being a research-process to an idea-formulation to transform the ordinary to the special. Great emphasis is now placed on the experience of getting an insight - the “Aha!” moment as many people call it.

More and more of our clients (both agency and client-side) recognise that such breakthroughs can only come from a genuinely broad-based, open and collaborative process. This requires the right mix of skills - increasingly bringing in people from different disciplines - as well as the willingness to constantly experiment and innovate with approaches, to turning research into inspirational material and working methods to maximise the quality and range of ideas. The most important facet is then being able to capture and communicate the insight in a way that transforms the mind-set of everyone involved and this remains one of the biggest challenges facing our clients. It is almost as if insight professionals have to become marketers of their own ideas to maximise their impact.

This year the Future Foundation is sponsoring the IPA Effectiveness Awards and as part of this year’s judging panel we look forward to witnessing many examples of clever insights, ideas and impressive displays of innovation, which in order to clinch one of these coveted awards will also have had to have been clearly identified, communicated and measured in terms of their effectiveness. In particular we are delighted to be sponsoring a Special Prize at the Awards which will reward the paper where insight was at the heart of thinking and significantly influenced the return on marketing investment. Entering these Awards are no mean feat and require enormous dedication, but for companies keen to prove the power of their marketing communications, winning an IPA Effectiveness Award is the industry equivalent of an Olympic Gold.”

For more information on the IPA Effectiveness Awards or to enter, please visit www.ipaeffectivenessawards.co.uk

f you would like a copy of ‘The Future of Insight’, please email Josiew@futurefoundation.net

Being neither the beginning of a decade nor the much-awaited 2012 when finally , the London Olympics will be upon us, it is not surprising that a number of trend watchers are attempting to jazz up the idea of 2011 with a breathless list of coming trends. Actually, just from a publicity perspective, such lists are not a bad idea given the acres of news print journalists have to continue to fill at what is a generally a slow news period although this year, it seems that the continuing cold weather and snow may well be enough to plug the gap ad nauseam, if recent news programmes are anything to judge by.

The challenge for us at the Future Foundation in response to journalistic approaches for content is that our trends aren’t just for the New Year. Any trend worth its salt, as we highlighted in an earlier post, has to be strong enough for at least a three year period to make it beyond our nascent trend lab for nVision (now called  nVitro) and therefore a one year time horizon can seem too short and insignificant. In one year, we can expect to see a shift in emphasis, fads and fashions accentuated and new sentiments emerge in response to shifting political and economic conditions – but not a genuine trend playing out across the full gamut of possibilities. Thus we can be sure that Maximising, War on Waste and the Quantified Self are all going to remain big in 2011 – but it isn’t really news.

But there is a serious question that comes up again and again – particularly on scenario or strategic futures projects, when it isn’t just trends that we are looking at, but the creation of a holistic, logically consistent future world that is sufficiently different from today to inspire the imagination and serve as basis for decision making and strategy formulation. The Future of Insight report, published last month by the Future Foundation, identified that more and more insight teams are going to be acting as the think tank within – and if this is the case, the question of the most appropriate timescale will become pertinent to creating useful company-wide scenarios. Simply put, the question is how long should the future time horizon for a project be?

Having worked on over 200 futures projects in my 20 years as a forecaster – with time horizons ranging from 5 years to 350,000 (the half life of radioactive waste, which was the subject of a unique project for Nirex) – there are some general guidelines to bear in mind, although many projects just end up getting targeted for a year with nice ring to it at some sufficiently distant date to represent the future – 2020, 2025 or 2030 are all doing quite well at the moment!

By and large, it is a challenge to really create scenarios for anything less than 10 years into future, since scenario work is about describing alternative future worlds. Less than ten years can’t really provide the opportunity to imagine things being substantially different, except perhaps with technology applications. However, if there is any ambition to include quantitative measures, going beyond 10 years can be a challenge on the forecasting front.  Thus selecting a 20, 30 and even 50 (which we worked to on our Rural Futures scenarios for DEFRA) years suggest that the scenarios are designed to highlight big issues, underlying drivers and encourage long term thinking in the organisation. We found fifty years quite a stretch, but they did work to focus the mind on some radically different possible outcomes – using blue sky thinking and inviting contributions from a range of academic and long term thinkers.

Ideally too, strategic futures projects should have a minimum of a 5 year time horizon. But these often end up with a shorter term focus due to pressures on businesses and organisations and the tyranny of the three-year planning cycle. And certainly if the purpose of a project is to generate ideas for product and service developments with immediate effect then a three year view can be feasible. The question is whether resources can be mobilised fast enough to get products or services into the market to capitalise on the emerging opportunity ahead of competitors. Many of our future proofing projects (now called nViable) are really about identifying consumer needs in this time span – the emphasis increasingly in such projects is how to turn this into actionable insight and develop tangible outcomes.

The very long term view is always interesting to contemplate, and can be essential in some areas of policy and resource planning. The Nirex work we were involved in was designed exploring how consumers respond to the idea of the very long term in order to help make decisions about where radioactive waste should be stored in the short term. Actually, it proved that people are able to get to grips with these issues given the right information and conducive circumstances to think about it and debate.  Scenarios for the longer time scales are invaluable to encouraging deep thought about the environment, societal values, equity and ethics in decision making, which can benefit us all, which makes me think – perhaps we shouldn’t be obsessed with what 2011 should bring, but treat this time as a chance to think about where we are all going to be in 20, 30 or even, 50 years time. What will your brand and business be doing? Will you still be relevant, thriving and valuable to your customers in their changing lives? If the answer is no – perhaps now is the time to start imagining that world and what your place it in it might be like.