Author: Monticello

The Unexpected Hits You Between The Eyes?

Beyond the braying and braggadocio, and like it or not, Donald Trump’s win was a victory for authenticity.

And that should be a reminder to us all.

Yes, he said something awful things.

And it appears that he has done some awful things.

It may even be that he plans to do some more awful things, now that he is, to all intents and purposes, the Leader (Elect) Of The Free World.

Say what you like about him, but one thing is for sure: he doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not.

Contrast that with his erstwhile opponent.

Hilary Clinton launched her campaign with a short film (now no longer available, interestingly) that was squarely, one might even say cynically, aimed at showing empathy with ‘regular Americans’, particularly women.

So far, grist to the mill – the classic political video.

But then we cut to the accomplished former Senator and First Lady, and she begins to speak, setting the tone for the rest of her long, arduous campaign:

‘the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.
Everyday Americans need a champion; and I want to be that champion.’

Errr….what?

Hillary Clinton is a graduate of Yale. She is a lawyer. She is a former First Lady of the state of Arkansas and of the United States. She is a former Senator for New York, and until 2013 was the most senior diplomat in the world, bar none. She and her husband are millionaires and their daughter Chelsea lives in a $10m apartment in Manhattan.

I don’t begrudge them any of that. Nor would I describe myself as a Trump supporter.

My point is non-partisan, and it is this:

Americans are not stupid.

They know what everyday life in America is like. They know what ‘Everyday Americans’ are like.

And they are not like Hillary Clinton.

This able, seriously experienced and accomplished stateswoman had a huge amount to offer the land of the free.

But being ‘ordinary’, or even ‘champion of the ordinary’, was not one of them.

Hillary Clinton is smart, and incredibly sophisticated. She should have celebrated that, been honest about it; authentic.

We all know – supposedly – about the importance of authenticity.

It’s been part of the bullshit-bingo in agency-land for some time.

Even six years ago, on writing a piece for the US Huffington Post about authenticity, I was sufficiently worried that the word strayed far enough into cliché territory that I made a clumsy attempt to aim-off for it.

I needn’t have bothered.

Today, no conference or client-agency ‘strategy session’ is complete without someone uttering the A-word, with due drama and all the associated pensive twiddling of a well-waxed Shoreditch moustache.

‘Authenticity’ has indisputably entered the lexicon of our industry. And with reason – ubiquity does not equal redundancy, after all.

And yet we don’t take our own medicine.

If we did, in the ‘echo chamber’ of our social media networks marketeers could – of course – continue to profess that they are filled with remorse, regret and trepidation; indeed any other type of emotion one might care to associate with a Trump presidency.

Except for surprise.

Nick Jefferson is a partner with Monticello

You Should Go And Love Yourself.

Humans are extremely susceptible to the power of repetition.

As the infamous saying goes – repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it.

In the business world, we often think of this as a powerful marketing tool or strategy. This is, after all, why we develop core or key messages. We hope that if we repeat the same, clear, concise messages time and again, our target customers will believe them.

Indeed, politicians put this little cognitive blip to work as often as possible.

However, in recent years the near cult-like adoption of ‘emotional equities’ has led some companies to overlook the ‘functional equities’ of their brand.

They believe their own marketing hype – and this creates a number of risks.

Perhaps no company brings this to mind more tangibly than Apple in the post-Jobs era.

A company once known for producing truly innovative products has, most recently, released a series of phones that are nearly identical to previous models, a screen produced by another company, and a litany of updates and add-ons that – at best – bring Apple products up to par with existing competitor products.

The Apple brand can probably lay claim to having one of, if not the, strongest suit of emotional brand equities out there – but growing dissatisfaction with the actual performance of the products suggests that the power of repetition has limits.

Indeed, psychology has something to say about this, too. A recent Vanderbilt study found that whilst participants were likely to believe inaccurate information, presented repeatedly, over their own preexisting knowledge (for instance, that Oslo is the capital of Finland) the introduction of critical skepticism could weaken the effect.

Where the veracity of the repeated information was brought to question, the truth could win out over the oft repeated, misinformation.

So what does this all mean?

For a start, Apple became known as an innovative brand because its product designers were front-and-center. They were encouraged to dream up, design, and produce innovative and exciting products. Brand and marketing was there to refine, amplify, and repeat that message until it was taken as a global truth.

Today, one could argue that Apple’s design takes a back seat to its sales and marketing – that it has flip-flopped the very process that made it so successful.

Marketing matters, of course. But it is critical that companies take a step back, once in a while, to reflect honestly on the quality of their products and services.

Apple believed its own hype, and it’s paying the price.

Melyn McKay is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a partner at Monticello LLP.

This Revolution, The Time Will Come.

The Future of…Law Firms

– by Nick West is Chief Strategy Officer at Mischon de Reya

The truth is that law firms as we know them don’t have a future if they don’t radically change their cultures – especially when it comes to technology.

This is bold, perhaps, but consider the reality: clients know that new technology is out there and they are hungry for change.

We are living through a new industrial revolution. A time of unprecedented tech development and tech adoption. Every person with a phone and access to the web is experiencing a sort of technological enlightenment where our very ideas about how life should be lived are being challenged.

It’s just inconceivable that law is immune to such forces.

But currently, several factors are holding back an effective law firm response, and in a serious way.

First, lawyers’ training tends to make them risk averse – they tend to see the dangers of technology before they see the gains.

Second, it is not in lawyers’ DNA to experiment – and law firms often do not invest in research and development like other businesses.

Third, lawyers have a pretty poor grip of finance and economics and often struggle to figure out a way to make new technology work for both them and their clients, financially speaking.

Fourth, law firms – because they are fearful of regulators – have over-invested in closed-system, over-customised, made-for-legal technology. This makes it harder, at least politically, to adopt technology that has long been widely been accepted nearly everywhere else.

Finally, legal training is, quite simply, unfit for purpose. Technology is not taught either before lawyers arrive at law firms or once they’re installed. Law firm training tends to perpetuate the idea that law is an artisanal industry where the only tool is the human brain.

Five strong forces against which anyone who wants to be successful in 21st Century legal practice has to fight.

Change will need to come from the top-down, and be actively ‘owned’ by Senior or Managing Partners and their boards.

In making such change, it is vital to use language that impresses upon lawyers that technology can set them free from the drudge elements of their work, enabling them to be more strategic.

It is also imperative to accept, publicly and from the outset, that failures will occur. The path is not straight and some things won’t work, but that’s okay; there is plenty of learning along the way.

Most importantly, it is vital to link technology with positive outcomes for the people who pay lawyers’ bills. Cognitive technology allows us to do tasks better, faster, cheaper. Firms need to get out there and make that case to clients; actively and vocally.

For those who do, the possibilities are endless – and hugely exciting.

For those who don’t….well….the best that might be said is that:

‘They had a good run’.

– with thanks to the author,  Nick West is Chief Strategy Officer at Mischon de Reya

Oobee Doo, I Wanna Be Like You?

When I arrived on campus for my first year of University, my freshman roommate asked, “are you going to send in a photo for ‘the Facebook’?”

Two months later, my little Ivy was added to a growing list of American schools connected to a website called ‘thefacebook.com’.

I never did send my photo in for the printed Facebook, a decades old tradition at Ivy League schools in the United States, but I did join the online platform almost immediately.

I watched from the beginning as Facebook expanded, added options, and evolved. Sometimes functions came that I didn’t think I needed, but did. Other times a function appear that seemed intuitive.

Today, as an expat, a significant portion of my social life takes place on a platform I gained access to at 18. It has grown up with me.

We tend to think of Facebook, and other forms of social media, as a facile but inevitable element of modern life. There has been a good deal of hand wringing over the ubiquity of social media in our lives.

Google ‘social media’ and ‘relationships’ and you will find mostly pseudoscience and self-help-style commentary decrying the likes of Instagram and Facebook for destroying or weakening human social bonds.

But what if, instead, we thought of it in terms of social bonding? How does social media hold us together, as a species?

In his 1998 book, ‘Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,’ Robin Dunbar suggested that language evolved in humans as a response to the pressures of social grooming.

On average, our ape cousins spend huge amounts of time engaged in ‘reciprocal grooming’. This grooming is thought to improve social bonds, as well as hygiene.

Lehmann, Korstjens, and Dunbar found that primate groups of more than 40 members struggled to maintain a sustainable balance between grooming and foraging. This, in turn, works effectively to limit group size in the long term.

Humans, Dunbar suggests, needed to overcome this challenge because of their smaller, weaker bodies. Humans do best in bigger groups (approximately 150, according to Dunbar), but the time required to maintain group cohesion in such a group through grooming, would have led to starvation.

Perhaps, Dunbar says, humans developed speech as a means of sociality – not only of communication. This, in turn, has allowed us to increase our group size, and our chances of surviving in the wild.

Has social media replaced speech as the latest iteration of social grooming?

It has been difficult to perform high-quality research on social media. This is largely due to the nature of its use – people need to be observed in real time (i.e. when they post) and over a longer period of time than most commercial research allows to really understand the impact of social media on people’s social relationships, identities, and actions.

Furthermore, it helps to look at more than one group of people at once. Looking backward through troves of preexisting data, tends to reflect the researchers’ own view of reality, not reality itself. We’ve titled this phenomenon ‘Dead Data’, and you can read more about it here.

This is, in part, why a study, the “Why We Post” project, published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London, provides fascinating insight into what is really happening to human sociality now that social media is so commonplace.

Researchers worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. As is common for anthropologists, they lived alongside the families and communities they studied.

The result is a far more nuanced, and a far kinder, view of the impact of social media on social relationships, individual and group behavior. To date, 15 key discoveries have been shared by Miller’s team – many of which fly in the face of long-held beliefs about social media and society.

The entire site is worth perusing, but here are a few of our favorite findings:

  • Social media is not making us more individualistic

“Popular opinion tends to regard social media as making us more individualistic and narcissistic. Individual-based social networking is said to have grown at the expense of more traditional groups. We found this in some instances, but more commonly we found social media being used to reinforce traditional groups, such as family, caste and tribe and to repair the ruptures created by migration and mobility.”

Selfies might not be the end of civilization, after all.

  •  It’s the people who use social media who create it, not the developers of platforms

Social media developers can suggest the form sociality takes through their design, but ultimately, they cannot control the way the way that users interact across the platform.

In general, this is an important rule of social media-thumb – you do not control or even really own the platforms you create for social interaction.

  • Public social media is conservative

 The team writes, “The public-facing areas of social media platforms, such as Facebook Timelines, tend to be conservative, and in many of our research sites people avoid political postings.”

This finding contradicts many general assumptions about social media as a perceived extension of ‘the media’ at large, which is believed by many to have a liberal or progressive bias.

Indeed, it makes sense that people censor themselves in a social setting, despite common-sense suggestions that people are more likely to engage in abusive and anti-social behaviors online. Miller’s finding suggests that it is not the nature of the platform, but rather the ability to act anonymously the brings out bad behavior.

  • We used to just talk, now we talk photos

According to Miller’s researchers, “Social media has shifted human communication towards the visual at the expense of text and voice. Now a photo can become the core of our conversation.”

As the old saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. If speech enabled humans to evolve more rapidly because it was a more efficient means of sharing information and building social bonds, it’s not difficult to imagine that the move toward sharing real-time photos and images could similarly catapult human development and cooperation into the future.

  • Social media promotes social commerce – not all commerce

Businesses have long-struggled to define a cogent social media strategy. Indeed, entire agencies have sprung up around the offer that there is a right and a wrong way for businesses to use social media.

Miller’s team suggest that this may not be the case. Rather, social media can be positive for certain types of businesses, “Social media helps to develop aspects of commerce that are facilitated by expanding personal networks, such as peer-to-peer selling. The impact on other forms of commerce is more variable.”

  • People feel social media is now somewhere they live, as well as a means for communication

Miller’s researchers write, “Social media is not just a technology for communicating or entertainment. It’s now a place where we spend our time. For some people, such as those living away from their family, it can become the main place they live.”

What happens online is real life. Our shifting understanding of social media space – from game-scape to real-space – has profound implications for everything from identity to law. 

  • Each social media platform only makes sense in relation to alternative platforms and the media

 When it comes to social media, once again, platform functions may be less important than the cultural expectations and ecosystems of meaning that have sprung up around them, “Most people now use a range of platforms to organize their relationships or genres of posting.

We are also now judged as to which media or platform we decide to use, making this a social and moral issue. We call this ‘polymedia’.”

So what does it mean?

Miller’s team have produced a fascinating look into the role of social media in our lives, and the impact of our lives on the evolution of social media. Indeed, it is this kind of longitudinal, multi-site research that will continue to offer opportunities for understanding – and anticipating – changes in human sociality, identity, and behavior.

If history tells us anything, it is that changes in the production of social bonds can produce profound evolutionary leaps.

So keep ‘liking’ and sharing photos – it’s probably the new social grooming.

And you don’t want to get stuck picking your own fleas.

 

Melyn McKay is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a partner with Monticello LLP.

Whatever Happened To…?

My Dad once told me that he thought there were three types of people in this world:

There are the people who make things happen.

There are the people who watch things happen.

And there are the people who say ‘What happened?!’.

We’d like to think that the people who make things happen are the people in the top jobs.

But too often they aren’t.

Instead, the keys to many of our supposedly leading organisations have long since been handed over to the people who watch things happen.

And this presents a huge problem.

Because the people who watch things happen, by definition, thrive on the status quo. They are creatures of the vested interest.

So when it comes to making change, they get in the way. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I’ve got a friend who is trying to make much-needed change in her organisation.

Any external observer would recognise that the change required is fundamental; indeed, existential. My friend is enthusiastic about bringing this change about, and day-in, day-out pours every ounce of her energy into that task.

Her boss and her ‘business partners’ in HR tell her that they want to see this change too, and that they ‘support her’ in her efforts. Indeed, making this change is one of her ‘key objectives’, signed off in the tedious annual ‘Business Plan’ for her team.

But in fact, at every opportunity, her boss and HR stymie her – with pointless process, endless forms, rounds of meetings, ‘organisational consistency’, Byzantine sign-off hierarchies, poisonous little ‘catch-ups’, budget reviews which only go one way; the list goes on.

They may or may not be doing it deliberately. But they do it instinctively, because by definition change requires leaving the stasis of the comfort zone.

Intellectually, her boss and HR may well understand the case for change. Frankly, it would be difficult not to. And they’re spending a lot of money on a very expensive ‘change programme’.

But the sad truth is that they kind of like things how they are. They know how to operate them, understand ‘the system’.

And so the change that they need will not come about. My friend is on the corporate equivalent of an M.C. Escher staircase.

Leaders and people of influence like HR can say what they like. But people don’t listen to what you say. They look at what you do.

And if what you do is block, brake and bollock on, then they will understand your true intentions.

Talking about change – but actively not making it – is both pointless and cowardly.

It is also exceedingly self-defeating.

Because my friend will be ok. Very soon, she will move on, taking her huge talent and energy to somewhere where the leadership is genuinely interested in making things happen.

And the people who watch things happen will sign her card and go to her leaving drinks and then go back to their desks and carry on with business-as-usual.

They will, no doubt, keep talking about whatever they believe they need to be seen to be talking about – in order to keep watching things happen.

The problem for them is that there comes a point where you can’t watch things happen any more.

Suddenly, you find that the world has changed, and you haven’t changed with it.

And then you’re left saying:

‘What happened?!’

– this piece first kindly published by The Huffington Post

Monticello LLP

Paperback Writer.

The Future of….The Written Word
– by James Lumley 

“The most rigorous instruction in prose writing that I ever received came, not from any schoolteacher or university tutor, least of all from writing school. It came from the classically educated senior officers on the top floor of MI5’s headquarters in Curzon Street, Mayfair, who seized on my reports with gleeful pedantry, heaping contempt upon my dangling clauses and gratuitous adverbs, scoring the margins of my deathless prose with such comments as redundant – omit – sloppy  -do you really mean this?  No editor I have since encountered was so exacting, or so right.”

David Cornwell (John Le Carre), The Pigeon Tunnel: stories from my life.

 

When I read this passage in John Le Carre’s new autobiographical memoir I felt empathy and joy in equal measure.

I have been reading John Le Carre novels for all my adult life and have enjoyed every page of every single one of them.

Le Carre’s real name, of course, is David Cornwell. He is, by any standards, a very educated man. He was a top scholar at Dorset public school Sherborne, before fleeing England at a precociously young age to enrol at the University of Berne, where he studied languages. National Service followed, then Oxford University. Then, a stint as a French and German teacher at Eton College before he joined MI5 in which, as well as being a ground operative, he did what many of us do every day: he sat at a desk and wrote reports.

And, as far as his superiors were concerned, he couldn’t write for toffee.

So, when he started his desk job, one of Britain’s greatest post-war novelists is happy to admit that he was just like us. This is wonderfully encouraging.

Cornwell’s anecdote exposes a universal truth of working life. Almost all of us come through school and university and start our jobs not really knowing the first thing about writing. We tend to just write, without thinking about it. Weren’t we always told we were good writers anyway? So when we get our first paid job, sit at our first office desk, and write our first report, the result will usually be somewhere between “fine” and “dreadful”.

For my first job, I worked as a journalist. Writing for publication was what I had to do from the start. As such, I had my sloppiness kicked out of me early. Cornwell’s MI5 bosses were doing to him what sub-editors have done to beardless young hacks for generations, and it helped to turn him into a writer.

Most of us are not lucky enough to be belittled at an early stage in our careers by a gang of acerbic pedants, so most people’s growth as workplace writers is more gradual.

Until quite recently most of us wrote for an audience of colleagues. If we wrote lots of reports, our writing would improve, but as what we wrote was read by colleagues with similar technical experience to us, they generally understood what we were saying. We didn’t really question our writing skills, and didn’t really need to.

Things have changed.

We now live in a world of LinkedIn posts, business website articles, corporate blogs and tweets, thought leadership, and content marketing. Almost all of us are called upon to broadcast our written words: to push them out for public consumption.

More and more of us are now called upon to write things that will be read by anybody and everybody. People who don’t know our industries inside out. People who don’t know our jargon. People who need things explained properly, without being patronised. People who are going to stop reading when they encounter writing that is dense, overblown, or unclear.

Journalists and novelist have editors. Even after more than 60 years of professional writing, every word that David Cornwell publishes will be examined and prodded by someone else before being sent to be read by the world at large. Yet most of us in the normal working world send our words out for public scrutiny without that safety net.

It really isn’t fair.

So what do I suggest?

There are a few possible solutions. Some businesses employ “in house journalist” to help them craft their message. This is no bad idea as long as that journalist has the skills to mentor corporate colleagues. There is too much writing in a mid-sized business for one person, and rarely the budget for a team.

Cornwell didn’t learn to write by going to a writing class. Neither did Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway or Shakespeare. But that doesn’t mean that most of us won’t benefit from a day’s workshop with a professional writer.

But what we can do from today is to use a basic, four step process that all professional writers use a variant of.

This process is this:

Plan

Write

Review

Share

Sketch out a plan of what you are going to write, even if is is just a couple of bullet points noting the points that you must not miss, and the conclusion. Then when you start writing, you know where you are going.

Then write. The writing does not need to be perfect. Do not agonise over every word. Go from the starting point to the destination.

Review. This is often the longest part of the process. Have you made any mistakes? What could be improved? Does it say what you want it to say.

Now share it. Print it off. Hand it to a colleague. Ask if they understand it. You understand it because you know what you are trying to say. That doesn’t mean everyone else will. Listen to your colleague’s comments. Thank them. Offer to repay the favour. Make changes to your text.

If you can build this into your working routine, your writing will improve, no matter how good you are already.

Just about every writer on every newspaper in the world does this in a formal way, on a daily basis, so why shouldn’t you? Not only is it a good disciple, it can be contagious.

Monticello LLP

Get Outta My Way.

My Dad once told me that he thought there were three types of people in this world:

There are the people who make things happen.

There are the people who watch things happen.

And there are the people who say ‘What happened?!’.

We’d like to think that the people who make things happen are the people in the top jobs.

But too often they aren’t.

Instead, the keys to many of our supposedly leading organisations have long since been handed over to the people who watch things happen.

And this presents a huge problem.

Because the people who watch things happen, by definition, thrive on the status quo. They are creatures of the vested interest.

So when it comes to making change, they get in the way. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I’ve got a friend who is trying to make much-needed change in her organisation.

Any external observer would recognise that the change required is fundamental; indeed, existential. My friend is enthusiastic about bringing this change about, and day-in, day-out pours every ounce of her energy into that task.

Her boss and her ‘business partners’ in HR tell her that they want to see this change too, and that they ‘support her’ in her efforts. Indeed, making this change is one of her ‘key objectives’, signed off in the tedious annual ‘Business Plan’ for her team.

But in fact, at every opportunity, her boss and HR stymie her – with pointless process, endless forms, rounds of meetings, ‘organisational consistency’, Byzantine sign-off hierarchies, poisonous little ‘catch-ups’, budget reviews which only go one way; the list goes on.

They may or may not be doing it deliberately. But they do it instinctively, because by definition change requires leaving the stasis of the comfort zone.

Intellectually, her boss and HR may well understand the case for change. Frankly, it would be difficult not to. And they’re spending a lot of money on a very expensive ‘change programme’.

But the sad truth is that they kind of like things how they are. They know how to operate them, understand ‘the system’.

And so the change that they need will not come about. My friend is on the corporate equivalent of an M.C. Escher staircase.

Leaders and people of influence like HR can say what they like. But people don’t listen to what you say. They look at what you do.

And if what you do is block, brake and bollock on, then they will understand your true intentions.

Talking about change – but actively not making it – is both pointless and cowardly.

It is also exceedingly self-defeating.

Because my friend will be ok. Very soon, she will move on, taking her huge talent and energy to somewhere where the leadership is genuinely interested in making things happen.

And the people who watch things happen will sign her card and go to her leaving drinks and then go back to their desks and carry on with business-as-usual.

They will, no doubt, keep talking about whatever they believe they need to be seen to be talking about – in order to keep watching things happen.

The problem for them is that there comes a point where you can’t watch things happen any more.

Suddenly, you find that the world has changed, and you haven’t changed with it.

And then you’re left saying:

‘What happened?!’

– this piece first kindly published by The Huffington Post

It Ain’t What You Do.

The best leaders focus, almost exclusively, on culture.

Culture is the way your business behaves. Especially when no one is looking.

Culture is the attitude with which your team comes to work, it is the generosity of spirit they do or don’t show to their coworkers; it is, as a whole, is the way you as a group of people think, act and interact.

It’s not what you say. It’s what you do.

And this matters, a great deal, because culture is how, as a leader, you actually get things done.

If you have a positive, can-do culture that is generous, permissive and creative then your vision for your business – your ‘Shining City On A Hill’ – is so much more likely to be realised.

Without it, your ideas – no matter how ‘good’ – will remain just that; ideas.

Because, as the song says, in the end, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

That’s what get results.

Monticello LLP

All I Wanna Do Is….

The Future of….The Olympics
– by Derek Bouchard-Hall, CEO, USA Cycling 

Even the most casual observers of the Olympics will note that the Games have evolved significantly over the last couple decades.

Perhaps the most obvious is sports included. The IOC has had explicit objectives to keep the Games relevant to younger audiences, broaden their appeal, and include a wider range of countries participating – and added and dropped sports as a result.

Another commonly observed change is the professionalization of Olympic sport, with each successive Olympiad demonstrating the advancement athletes are making in developing every element of their craft through full-time focus and access to greater resources.

But in the 16 years between when I competed in the Sydney Olympics in track cycling to when I went to Rio as the CEO of USA Cycling, I have witnessed several more subtle trends in the Olympic Movement that would likely be missed by the casual sporting fan.

These trends are less obvious than new sports and the pace of breaking world records, but I believe they are actually more significant to the long term health and popularity of the Olympics.

The first is increasingly effective anti-doping efforts. Most sports fans understand that doping exists in professional sport, and the Russian doping scandal certainly kept the issue front and center in Rio.

Certainly, some have lost their passion for some sports because of associations with doping. But what I’m seeing is that anti-doping efforts are actually working, and things are improving. Not all sports are at the same place in their journey from denial of a problem to effective anti-doping, but all are on the journey and those out front are making enormous strides.

I believe cycling is the clear leader among all sports in anti-doping. No other sport is doing as much and is having as much impact. The only problem is, we’ve learned that effective anti-doping is expensive, difficult to execute, and significantly inconveniences athletes. Gone are the days when you can catch dopers by having them pee in a cup on race day.

Now, to combat modern methods that include the slight tweaking of naturally occurring hormones already within us all (vs. taking an exogenous compound whose mere presence in urine signifies cheating), regular exhaustive blood screening and unannounced out of competition testing is required.

But these methods work, and they will serve to restore confidence in what we are watching. Over time, I believe doping can and will be controlled – but it will take time and significant investment.

The second trend is the rise of women’s sport. With each successive Olympics, the women are drawing closer to men in terms of opportunity, support, and fan appeal. While in most professional sports women lag woefully and unjustly behind their male peers in this regard, at the Olympics they are much closer.

A key driver of this is focus on medals – with no difference being paid between the value of a men’s vs. a women’s earned. Many countries are therefore investing in developing their women’s sport, and opportunities are growing for women athletes. A good example is my organization, USA Cycling – we are actually now focusing more effort and resources on women’s cycling than in men’s.

The final, and perhaps most significant trend in terms shaping the Games over time, is country level sport specialization. Countries are increasing focusing a disproportionate amount of resource on those sports in which they have the highest medal hopes and, significantly, abandoning the others.

They are doing this to maximize medals earned for money invested – because countries are increasingly measuring themselves by medal count alone. Spending money on a sport whose highest placed athlete finishes 4th is considered a waste – no medal, no return.

The impact of this trend is that you are seeing some countries develop dominant positions in certain sports while ceasing to support others. Perhaps the best example of this is the UK, which has become dominant in track cycling (winning 6 of the 10 available Golds in Rio) by spending roughly 5-10x annually vs. its nearest peers.

On the other hand, it provides little or no support for a sport like basketball, which some argue would have greater impact on encouraging urban sport participation – though provide no medals (and no “return”).

If these trends play themselves out as I expect them to over the next couple decades, I see the future of the Olympics as one where doping is no longer a major story nor a major determiner of success.

I see the Olympics leading the world in promoting women’s sport and the gap between male and female opportunities shrinking. But I fear this progress will be offset by country level specialization leading to a polarization of national participation whereby a handful of countries dominate each sport.

Any given event might not feel like a competition between all nations, but instead simply a showcase for whichever handful of nations chose to focus on that event to win medals.

Like so many human endeavors, the Olympics will simultaneously demonstrate great progress and new challenges.

– with thanks to the author, Derek Bouchard-Hall, CEO at USA Cycling

A Little Less Conversation….

There is no value in values.

Well, that’s not quite true. What I mean is that there is no value in writing down your corporate values.

Because values are something you live, something you do.

Let me ask you a question – do you have values in your family?

I bet you do.

And they’re strong, right? Stronger, no doubt, than the ‘corporate values’ you see emblazoned on the office wall every time you walk through reception?

But, and I’m willing to bet a fair amount on this, you haven’t written your family values down, have you?

Because you don’t need to.

Because either you live these values, day in, day out, eat-sleep-breathe them, kind-of-without-thinking-about-it, or, very simply, they are not your values.

The same is true of corporate values. Writing down that you are ‘innovative’ (or whatever else – ‘innovative’ is just the value du jour) does not make you innovative. Often, indeed, it only confirms that you are not – because those people and corporations who are truly innovative are just doing it, getting on with it: innovating. They don’t have say they are doing something. Because they are actually doing something.

That’s not to say you can’t change a culture, the way a business behaves. You can. Just like you can change the way a family behaves.

But you don’t do it by writing down a load of clichéd mumbo-jumbo and then just somehow expect it to ‘happen’. You work at it, strive for it, model it constantly and continuously, you demonstrate it, relentlessly, 24/7. You hire people who reflect the culture you want, and fire those who don’t. You reward the behaviours you want to see and not those that you don’t.

It’s simple. Damned hard, and incredibly demanding in terms of leadership energy and time, but simple. So simple, in fact, that when it comes to ‘corporate values’, there is no one who has come close to putting it as succinctly as The King himself:

A little less conversation, a little more action.
Nick Jefferson is a partner with advisory firm, Monticello LLP, and a curator of The Library of Progress.

You’re Such A Lovely Audience….

The Future of….The Ad Business
– by Sam Tomlinson, Partner, PwC

No advertiser wants to buy media.

This obvious truth is easily forgotten, particularly when relaxing over your third glass of rosé at Cannes Lions, the ‘festival of creativity’. The assembled masses here are absolutely convinced that every brand – be it automotive, FMCG, retail, financial services, etc. – is absolutely crying out to spend millions on a creative agency’s brilliant idea that can then be executed across multiple media types.

But that’s palpably untrue.

What an advertiser really wants is to buy performance – to buy an outcome – to buy an improvement in brand awareness, an uptick in brand trust, more sales, greater profit. Sadly, short of selling their soul to the devil, there’s no guarantees of these outcomes, so instead they settle for buying media.

At a minimum, most advertisers would like to move from buying media, to buying an audience. The eyeballs reading the newspaper, or watching the TV, or reading the poster – or indeed, the ears listening to the radio – are far more interesting than the medium itself.

At the other end of the ad business model, there’s a media owner, who wants to sell that audience. They want to answer the basic questions that underpin any campaign – ‘How many people will see my ad? How often? Who are they?’

Sadly for the media owner, their knowledge of their own audience is frequently weak – either because their content is now being distributed via Facebook, or because they can’t track consumers across multiple channels and devices, or just because culturally their heritage was broadcast media (via television or radio or newsstand sales) rather than direct audience engagement.

This lack of audience insight – lack of first-party data, to use industry jargon – is one of the main reasons underpinning the question many media owners are now asking themselves: ‘If content is king, why is 50% of my revenue leaking between what the advertiser pays, and what I receive?’

And in the middle, between the performance-seeking advertiser and the audience-rich-but-data-poor media owner, is the media agency. Actually, there’s not just a media agency – there’s probably an agency trading desk, a DSP, an exchange, an SSP, an ad impression delivery service, and a host of other incomprehensible ad tech middlemen – but let’s stick with the agency for now.

The agency wants to sell their expertise in delivering great ad campaigns, built up over years of developing media plans and analysing results, resulting in an intuitive sense of what works, and what doesn’t.

So – buyers want performance, sellers want to deliver an engaged audience, and agencies know how to bring the two together. That’s the theory…

….instead, what we find is an advertiser’s procurement function, determined to drive the media agency’s margin to 1-2% to prove they (procurement) are delivering value; a media owner with insufficient audience insight to prove value, so instead settle for offering rebates; and an agency stuck in the middle on an unsustainably low margin.

This ad business model is broken.

If Cannes Lions showed me one thing this year, it’s that there needs to be a radical shift from buying media to buying performance.

Performance needs to be defined broadly – not as click-throughs, but as real value – as trust in a brand. That performance needs to be tracked meticulously and independently, and the media owner needs to provide an engaged, attentive audience.

And if an agency successfully uses its expertise to deliver a great campaign based on strong media owner first party data, that delivers real value – real, measurable performance – then they should be well-remunerated for that.

Procurement need to allow the discussion to move from pricing to performance.

That must be the future of the ad business model.

 – with thanks to the author, Sam Tomlinson, a partner at PwC, writing in a personal capacity