Pink Air

Planning engines

If you're anything like me, you may have sometimes wondered, "Why can't I just get a robot to do this planning work?". If you're even more like me, your co-workers have also asked this question. I haven't yet found a planning robot (and why isn't there software that can scan a document and enter snarky parenthetical asides at appropriate points like this?) but I have found a few engines, small devices that do a little bit of the mental lifting for me.

One of my first engines was the Nike Brief-O-Matic. It's a set of brand-relevant concepts (e.g. play, war, teamwork, injury) arranged in a 2x2 chart. Each cell represents the equation of two concepts (e.g. play is war, play is teamwork). That equation could then be the focus of a communications brief. It is a testament to the complex coherence of the Nike brand that so many of the cells immediately suggest recognizably Nike campaigns, both existing and potential. But you could also use such an engine to help develop a brand into something more interesting, something usefully coherent without being boringly consistent. A largely mechanical process like this one can throw up a ton of rich, generative, striking and unexpected possibilities within a bounded idea space.

And where did I get the original concepts? Many of them came from another engine, one of my favorites, the indispensable Lexical FreeNet. It's like a thesaurus on steroids, completely based on word relations as they exist on the Web. So again, "thoughtless" crashing together of data produce a lot of interesting noise. Try it out the next time you're struggling to find a new way to connect Product A with Brand Value B. Read the fascinating technical notes. Lexical FreeNet is an engine's engine: an interesting thing that makes more interesting things.

I'd be very interested in hearing of any planning engines you may have found or invented.

The Blue Apple

Apple's "I'm a Mac/PC" ads are lovely to look at, amusing and go right to the heart of Apple's corporate kulturkampf. While each ad is broadly focused on a technical superiority claim, the real message is in the characterization: Macs are for cool people. PC's are for, well, uncool people.

As Seth Stevenson pointed out on Slate, there's a bit of a cultural faux pas here, as uncool is the new cool. PC guy, played by John Hodgman of The Daily Show (and really, how cool is that?) does get all the laugh lines and is actually more likeable than his hipster counterpart. But I think Stevenson is missing the point when he faults the ads on the reverse likeability gap. For me, the kindly portrayal of PC guy is part of Apple's "Make love in order to make war" strategy of running Windows and Office, making sure iTunes and iPods work on pc's, generally making nice on the network and protocols front, etc. It's a great strategy and these ads pay it off.

Having said all that, there is more than a little condescension in the ads which, in my experience, accurately reflects the attitude shared by Apple and many of its fans. Is that a problem for Apple? I don't know. Because at this point my mind keeps wandering to parallels with the Liberal/Conservative divide in America. And here I believe that condescension is a problem. When I listen to Apple dude in these ads, I hear the voice of Liberal America. He's saying things that I agree with. He's saying things that I think are important. I'm more than willing to buy what he's offering. But I'd rather have a beer with the other guy.

Conflict + beauty = interesting

A lovely quote from Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man, a series of essays on the state of English football circa 1965:

What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art.