Culminating in a biggie transition event where the baton was handed over to the markets to start to build local plans.

Usually this would take the form of a M4/Heathrow/PowerPoint orgy/branded pads/pens/salad bar. This week has seen us kick this tradition into touch and activate using 27,000 sq. ft of The Old Truman Brewery, (that’s 4 times the size of an Olympic Swimming pool), 19 countries, 150 people, 9 sets built, 1 stage, cool caterers and a rather fun sized graffiti wall. An uber-rollout.

The opportunity proved to be a step towards us using some of the principles of experience design that Central St Martins set me up with – focus on the narrative, not just the story, examine the geography, figure out the level of covert/overt communication you want and don’t do a sticker campaign. With these in mind we have been working hand in glove with our guys on the inside to develop a journey, support and train facilitators, developed some cool stimulus and set the brand above and beneath all activities. It culminated in a pretty mind blowing 5 days, with action stations/audiences in the room for 2 of these.

As with anything new risk was present. If you want predictable then head to the Radission – they do meetings really well, just the same one. If you want Wow, then grow a pair and strive for the new. It’s been a mixture of bloody scary, buzzing like mad and organisational focus.

I was lucky enough to be host/master of ceremonies for the two days. A far easier job than the rest of the team, who I could see the other side of the footlights orchestrating the most creative meeting in my career. As we set up sessions, hired heaters, built the energy, the team made it come together like no other. Matt, Nat, James and I certainly had the odd moment  where the scale and distance from the traditional certainly caused us to need to get our shit together. But for me that has been part of the joy.

Once our ace client team left to head off on well deserved holidays, we all experienced a Ocean’s Eleven moment of reflection and classical realisation. We did it. Simply smashed it.

The pressure was most evident about an hour into our post event wash up/quiet drink that turned into a Lock Stock style session that resulted in me being banned from a restaurant for life, us highjacking a 21st birthday, a trapeze artist’s manly chest being touched up and a wine waiter pretending to be a pirate. It was surreal, only now are the receipts starting to help it all make sense.

I wish you were here to see some of the set up, ideas and scale of the event. It’s truly awesome. Truly. We are showing and telling next week to the group and beginning to plan the next wave which sees us take on 35 local markets. James (midway through 21st birthday shots with a stranger) kicked us off with an interesting idea regarding approaching our next task as an sequential experience theatre. Now there is an idea.

This has happened because ad libitum feeding and zero exercise are standard conditions in the rodent-breeding factories that provide scientists with mice (a $1.1 billion dollar industry). But why does it matter? It matters because, as Engber writes, ‘the inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today – raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics – may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.’

The problem is, so invested are researchers in the mouse that no one wants to acknowledge the possibility that there’s a problem. But if there is a problem with mice, there’s a problem with drug development: scientists chew through 88 million mice a year in experiments and drug testing, and since 1965 the number of papers involving mice and rats has more than quadrupled. According to Engber ‘we’ve arrived at something like a monoculture in biomedicine,’ the main reasons being cheapness, docility, and the mouse’s amenability to ‘the most advanced tools of genetic engineering.’

In late 2010 Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institutes of Health, established a new agency to analyse what he called the ‘pipeline problem’ in biomedicine. The problem is that ‘innovation has slowed to a trickle. It takes more than a decade, and some $800 million, to produce a viable, new drug; among the compounds considered for testing, only 1 in 10,000 come to fruition.’ Could this perhaps be because ‘rats and mice were never so good at curing disease as they were at making data for its own sake’? Of the thousands of mouse studies for tuberculosis, ‘not one has been used to pick a new drug regimen that succeeded in clinical trials.’

The geneticist and statistician Michael Festing, one of the world’s experts on inbred lab mice, notes that ‘“the more research you do on something, the more valuable it becomes.”’ ‘A format war hides in the history of biomedicine,’ Engber writes, describing how not just one species but one particular strain, the Black-6, has become the most widely used organism in drug research. The problem is, since 1999 it’s been accepted that, for one, different mice have different responses to pain (prior to that the consensus was that every kind of mouse was essentially the same). And mice have different pain responses to other rodent species. And rodent species have different pain responses humans.

Experimental science does recognise certain fields where specific animals prove useful: for example armadillos in leprosy, prairie voles for autism, finches for language acquisition, but these models ‘live only at the margins of biomedicine…For most questions [the mouse is] a skeleton key that’s tried at every one of Nature’s doors.’ This despite the fact that, in the case of cancer, mice are prone to lymphomas and sarcomas as opposed to the carcinomas which are much more common in humans. Mouse tumours are much less varied than those seen in any hospital oncology department. They serve up ‘a bland and homogenized product, a fast-food version of the disease’. According to Robert Weinberg, the MIT biologist who discovered the first human oncogene and tumour suppressor gene, mice are ‘“the rate-limiting step in cancer research”’, and drug companies are ‘“wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on animal research that has little predictive value.’”

Engber’s article, which portrays both the problems with the mouse model and the ‘institutional inertia’ that prevent those problems from being formally acknowledged by the very people who would benefit most from their resolution, is essential reading.

There is almost no information on who Francesco Saroglia is and to date no one has been able to find any other examples of his work. Although he’s mentioned by numerous sources as the designer of the Woolmark, the Alliance Graphique International (AGI) attributes the logo design to Franco Grignani (1908-1999). The site suggests that he entered the competition under a pseudonym because he was a member of the jury charged with selecting the winning design. Another theory that has been put forward is that the logo was submitted by another of the panel’s judges – Spiriti.

It’s thought that Grignani was approached by Spiriti, an owner of an Italian advertising agency, and asked to design the Woolmark logo several months before the competition. Shortly afterwards, Grignani was invited to be on the judging panel only for him to see the very work he’d submitted to Spiriti months before entered by an unknown designer called Saroglia.  The story goes that he was so embarrassed that his work had been stolen that he decided to conceal the fact that it was his design. When the other jury members chose it as the winning logo, he tried to overturn the decision but in the end it was his logo that was chosen.

Years later in an exhibition on his work he displayed a sketch from his diary with nine possible Woolmark designs that he’d given to Spiriti, and which had been entered into the IWS logo competition.  Furthermore Grignani’s previous work shows that he was clearly interested in Op Art and played extensively with arrangements of black and white stripes.

The Woolmark is a timeless icon, beautiful in its simplicity. It looks clear and neat when it’s shrunk right down to fit on a label and powerful when enlarged on a billboard; most importantly it’s a great graphical mystery. And that makes it my favourite logo.

From this January onward, the Hive writing team produces a monthly review on a key text. First in the series is the 2011 Pulitzer non-fiction winner – a vivid biography of humanity’s  greatest mortal dread.

At the conclusion to his extraordinary history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born, US-based cancer specialist, posits that ‘as the fraction of those affected by cancer creeps inexorably in some nations from one in four to one in three to one in two, cancer will, indeed, be the new normal – an inevitability. The question will not be if we will encounter this immortal illness, but when.’

That Mukherjee’s book is so compelling isn’t due solely to the drama of the story he tells, but because he is alive to the efficacy of art as well as science. ‘Normal cells are identically normal,’ he writes, ‘malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.’ His repurposing of Anna Karenina’s opening line is more than a rhetorical flourish: it’s indicative of the intelligent and illustrative way he approaches his material. Like all well-executed ideas, the question it raises is “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

The Emperor of All Maladies follows cancer from the palaces of ancient Persia to the R&D campuses of modern pharmaceutical companies. The majority of the story, however, takes place in the mid-to-late 20^th century, when increased life expectancy in the western world saw the prevalence of cancer skyrocket (in third world countries cancer doesn’t even make the top 10 causes of death).

Mukherjee’s story centres on two figures who defined the post-war struggle against cancer. Sidney Farber was a paediatric pathologist who became the father of chemotherapy. Mary Lasker was a wealthy socialite and fearsome lobbyist who believed that if enough money was aimed at it, cancer could be vanquished. In 1971, after nearly 20 years of their campaigning, President Nixon declared the ‘War on Cancer’: legislation that devoted millions of dollars in federal funds to finding a cure.

Farber and Lasker’s achievement was of mixed worth. ‘Cancer,’ Mukherjee writes, ‘a shape-shifting disease of colossal diversity, was recast as a single, monolithic entity’. Scientists competed to find cures, theories of prevention were all but non-existent, and misguided treatments such as megadose chemotherapy did more harm than good.

Mukherjee’s recreation of the ambitions, disappointments and, occasionally, triumphs at each stage of the fight against cancer is one of his book’s greatest achievements. He successfully places the reader in whichever era, lab or ward he describes. He also renders cancer itself in a way that’s both horrifying and gripping. Of leukaemia he writes, ‘Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat.’

The book’s final section is its most optimistic and most complex. Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for proving the link between cancer and genes, which led to the subsequent identification of many oncogenes (genes with cancer-causing potential). ‘Having wandered in the darkness for decades,’ writes Mukherjee, ‘scientists had finally reached a clearing in their understanding of cancer. Medicine’s task was to continue that journey toward a new therapeutic attack.’ This came with development of drugs such as Herceptin, which targets an oncogene in a particular type of breast cancer.

But Mukherjee is too knowledgeable about cancer to be swept up in an optimism that has, time and again, proved false. Other gene-targeted therapies like Herceptin and Glivec may emerge over time, but that’s a forecast quite different to the ‘cure for cancer’ that has been dreamed of for so long. ‘This War on Cancer,’ he cautions, ‘may best be “won” by redefining victory.’

Mukherjee says the idea for his book was hatched when a patient asked him the simple question, ‘“What is it, exactly, that I am battling?”’ His answer, all 500 pages of it, is fascinating, depressing and exhilarating, and his writing on lung cancer is so affecting that, after 24 years of smoking, I haven’t had a cigarette since finishing the book six weeks ago.

Have you read this book? We’d love to have your comments.

In recognition of the difficulties young cancer patients face, eyeforpharma are hosting their first annual Mobile Health Competition. Applicants must submit an idea for a phone application that will help teenage cancer patients manage their condition and make their lives easier. To help pick the winning idea eyeforpharma have created their very own super panel, comprised of teenage cancer survivors and charitable bodies.

The competition is open to anyone working for a pharmaceutical company, advertising agency, healthcare organisation, as well as patients themselves. The winner will have the opportunity to develop their application and see it launched. They will also win $5,000, which they can donate to a cancer charity of their choice.

The Teenager Cancer Trust, PatientsLikeMe, LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance, and a host of other charitable, patient, and mobile specialist companies have partnered with eyeforpharma for the competition.

Here at Hive we welcome any initiatives aimed at improving patient care and engagement, so we urge you to get involved and spread the word.

The closing date for entries is January 3rd 2012. 

http://www.eyeforpharma.com/mobilehealth/

So how do you motivate men to maintain their health? Or, even more challengingly, how do you get them to check for prostate, bowel and testicular cancer before they’re extremely sick? In 2008 prostate cancer was the second most common cause of cancer death in men (10,168 deaths), accounting for 12% of all male deaths from cancer. Colorectal cancer caused 8,758 deaths in men in the same year, accounting for 11% of all male cancer mortality.

The Male Cancer Awareness Campaign (MCAC) is trying to get more men to take a maintenance approach to cancer by educating them on how to detect early stage symptoms. The campaign is about cancer, but it’s also about culture. In addition to providing specific information, it also aims to reduce the embarrassment that surrounds men’s attitudes towards their health.

While MCAC has created some great campaigns, such as the Near Naked Man, they recently created a viral video that makes checking for cancer sexy. JWT London teamed up with world famous photographer Rankin and model Rhian Sugden to create a video that goes a little further than your run-of-the-mill cancer campaign.

The black and white video is intimate and elegant, and the ending might just leave you stunned. It’s a smart little video because it takes what some might find embarrassing or uncomfortable and makes it seductive. I’ve already sent it on to most of my male friends, and while their reactions have been mixed none of them failed to mention it when they next saw me. And many of them, in turn, have forwarded it on to their friends.

The ad’s executed so well that if I were a man, it would make me want to put my thumb and index finger between my balls and massage them—to check for cancer of course.

The day progressed with a number of small uni style briefs, with few restrictions and constraints but a whole lot of scope – lovely! The aim here being to get us back into that early mindset we all use to have, before the commercial world took a firm grip and creative expression became more of a challenge to channel through all the rules, regulations and pressured clients!

Our final task of the day presented us with a mop and bucket and the brief headline Work, Play and Rest! A mop and bucket already works, so it was how I reflected the latter two aspects in my creation that would be assessed. My solution is pictured above.

Being a kid for a day again was truly inspiring. Tapping back into that freedom of expression was really refreshing, and is something that I’ll be aiming to do a lot more often!

The route to audience, their community of relationships and the purity of our crystal clear, brainstormed messages is under threat. We are midst a revolution, a chance to throw it all in the air and start again. This is a Darwinian moment; those that are adapting fastest will top-trump the dinosaurs. Our ability to do new stuff is now a competitive advantage not a dangerous countercultural diversion. It’s the Wild West all over again, except with worse shoes.

Why idea?

The point of having an idea in communication is straightforward. Ideas are bread and butter to marketers. They seek to be different, striving to connect a product with a defined audience. Find a point of difference, make it come to life and get it delivered to an audience that stands some chance of impacting your bottom line.

Secret ad men

In the days of old, lunches lasted until way past 2.30pm, golf was cool, procurement focused on toilet rolls and agencies had loads of sex. This approach was fine. Ads were king. They ruled. Despite the environment changing the ad as first port of call for ideation has proved a tough, tenacious little sucker to bump off. Despite this tactic proving incredible restricting when looking for broader ideas.

It’s a shame to say that secret ad men still surround us. We still see ‘the ad as the primary brand communication’ touted all over the place. For some it’s an attitude that’s retarding our progress as communicators and as plan makers. We have moved on. Those consumer-focusing guys who piled into healthcare a while ago seem to have ignored the changes that have occurred to their old manor. TV is midst decline and that poster off the M4 has been augmented by permission based and experiential disciplines; by a channel mix that looks nothing like it did 10 years ago.

Not dead just suffering

I don’t want to consider this the death of the ad. I think it’s in manageable decline rather than on the floor choking. History tells us media don’t die, they just become increasingly unloved. After all, we do still carve words into stone, 1000 years after it was our dominant media. But as soon as we considered the requirements of the marketing mix more than the double page spread the end started. Those early days, when marketers, sought integrated campaigns and assessed them by whether all shapes and sizes of tactics spread out on a meeting room table matched or not, make us smile now. Was it all really about 4 key messages and a frequency calculation?

The beginning of the end

The beginning of the end saw agencies strive to find new terminology to cope with the changes. The birth of the horrific word; adcept, summed it up. A sticking plaster over the cracks in the idea generation landscape, a way of getting ad focused teams to come up with bigger ideas than the media booked was capable of holding. Without spilling the beans that their ‘precious’ is looking a bit sickly as the dominant tactic.

Stretch required

Perhaps our world doesn’t need another tweeting digital bore. But the proliferation of channels have done their bit to jump start evolution. One could argue that the evolution of direct mail, or sales forces could have contributed as much to this decline as digital. The ad man didn’t really grasp the requirement for the brand to be pushed into these spaces in a way that it could really work.  Why? Because what makes a great ad – doesn’t often make a good media neutral idea. The interaction that these channels require and the opportunity that they have is vastly different to a 4 second A4 connection required in the BMJ. So why use your lowest common denominator tactic to develop you idea?

It strikes me that to accuse digital of being the cause of this evolution is a bit naïve. Selling has continued to evolve at a startling pace taking in its stride the bicycle, penny post and TV. Digital although arguably more intangible, and certainly fast is not going to change the fundamental way people connect with brands. Humanity is the rate-limiting step. The need and ability to form relationships is cultural and hardwired. The way audiences assimilate attributes, experience and value remains. You could argue that brand strategy has finally caught up with humanity?

The rise of experience transparency

What digital has changed is the control we have as marketers over our messages. We are no longer the only ringmasters. Every customer we have has a platform to communicate their experience, they, are closer and more vocal to other prospective customers.  Consequently we better get our brands anchored in something more than abstract positioning. Ideally anchored in a defined idea, encompassing a need that can be supported and championed by the audience. If our views on the product and the audiences don’t match then it’s going to die. Regardless of the cunning uniqueness of the positioning.

They’re for the journey

To thrive we need to be bothered about our customers not just at point of decision but across a broader space. This means our idea has to work beyond the moment of customer acquisition. It’s not just about a tipping point. We need to make sure that the wider customer experience is known to us. If additional needs exist, we need to see them as service opportunities. Consider them part of our product offer lest they become the low point of our customer’s product experience.

Change the people, or change the people

Thankfully, most of the adcept touters have fallen by the wayside. A new type of creative has emerged – the integrated conceptualiser. Not just an ad award hungry beast but also someone who is as passionate about every opportunity along the customer’s journey. One that knows the ins and outs of channels, how each works and what elements of the story is best delivered in each. These guys are dead easy to spot. They don’t need to draw an A4 box on their pad before conceptualising. The idea is conceptual, not confined to a given media space.

Idea planning

To cope with this change, new forms of idea planning have sprung up. New models force us to consider ideas as an adhesive wrapper for our uniqueness and supporting messages. With this have come some of the most exciting aspects of strategic development. The onus has been placed on marketers to consider their product story, the channels available to them, and deliver it. For products with a package of differentiation rather than one clear superiority this is a huge advantage. We can tell more complex stories and as long as they are based on real need not conceptual space available all is well. Models that look at splitting the story, and delivering it the audience in chunks across the channels are exciting us hugely. And its getting to the stage where you can quite easily see a time where the complete brand story exists only in two places; in marketing and in the mind of the customer. In between it’s fragmented and efficiently distributed by the best channels available. The level of planning is adding a further dimension to brand strategy where implementation and strategy are blending. Creating real challenges for those that consider 4 key messages delivered 4 times to be the best guarantee of behavioural change and early adoption, and really messing up a world where ads come first then your tactical plan.

How we cope with the changes is the next big question.  If you want to embrace these exciting times, like any moment midst change, it’s best to find a partner who is comfortable to tell you that all the answers are out there, but not yet in our grasp. Work towards a real connecting story, ways of delivering it efficiently and be comfortable with informed risk.

Tim is one of the founding partners of Elf, a group of innovative healthcare agencies. Including Hive, Ebee and Pollen that launches in September. Tim blogs regularly at hivehealth.com spend most of his time at Hive partnering a pretty awesomely progressive set of client’s. Any enthusiasm for this article or offers of work should be sent to tim.scorer@hivehealth.com, corrections or points of difference can be made direct by email to ian.busby@hivehealth.com or in person to Jas Hummel.

My bugbear with these multi day extravaganzas is with the foundation icebreaker sessions. This is more rant than thought through critique. (I am sugar rushing from some charity cake from brought over by the guys at The Nursery)

Surely we all get paid to attend, think and deliver. Surely we all consider it a default to work within a team, even an unfamiliar one. Whether that be off the cuff or after permitted thought. At no point is the voicing of ideas, public thinking and discussion considered god given, it’s not easy or natural for anyone. But it is a paid for requirement. The day job.

I increasingly struggle with the rationale for;  sharing the content of my wallet, climbing through imaginary tires, providing public facing previously unknown facts and almost feigned cardiac stress prior to a ‘colleague’ shoulder massage.

Are we all caught up in the entertainment aspect of this lunacy? This initial agenda item is slowly morphing from a simple required introduction into a corporate versions of Big Brother. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next meeting started with us all having to milk a boar. It’s getting a bit unnecessary.

You can’t manufacture or facilitate intimacy, if anything this can achieve the opposite of what’s required. Strangers soon become partners once you are midst a task. Is it unreasonable to consider human beings a social species?

As we haven’t had a poll in a while I though I would take this to you our reading public.

It’s not often that poetry smacks you in the face, seeks an ethical and moral review on your activities. Not since Pam Ayers Battery Hen has something felt this powerful (I was 7 and midst egg mayonaise sandwich).

I chucked this at a group of us last night to discuss in place of a training session on the Value Profit Chain. The crowd were mixed from the ‘it’s just not that simple crowd’ to the ‘our duty is to provide value not just proliferate useless products’.

We do market products to people often in crisis. But are we the target of this poem? It’s important for all of us to be able to hold our head high. I think that consumerism relies on creating needs that aren’t often real needs but manufactured wants. But that this categorisation often differs by person and it much more complicated than the puppet paranoid would have us believe. In this poem the mum sits centre of a manipulative environment, powerless and stupid. Whilst the corporates sit dangling the bright and shiny like fisherman at a trout farm. I am not sure that I am quite to this level of paternalism, or to this confidence in the simplicity of this situation. The mothers I have market researched have all been a little more street wise than this. Capable of identifying commercialism and opportunism. Understanding and rationalising their sometime irrational need for more into a bucket of first time mum stock piling? Or to a reaction to the basic human need to prepared pre chaos. In a capitalist world this means buying stuff, often irrelevant stuff. But acting on impulse.

This cynicism has to be answered by us as individuals. For me it means basing everything we do on a tangible human need, not just a superficial fear driven want. Am I naive? Basing what we do and how we drive genuine value, and maintaining consumer partnership at our core allows me to pass a personal test.

An interesting discussion prompted by creativity and passion.