Participant observation and lunch
It struck me lying in a restaurant after lunch what an overlapping world we all live in.
Around the table sat a social media planner, product designer and a sociologist. Our conversation focused on developing anything to be better than it was . Those ‘things’ that make your competitors spit blood and wish they had made it themselves. I use ‘things’ here as it helps with knitting us together somewhat. Although widgets, products, research papers and communications all seem dead far way from each other our worlds link closely when you need to produce something that connects.
Interestingly what the sociologist called participant observation – which in her field mostly seemed to cover deviant behaviour, the product designer knew as a consumer closeness, and I and the social media planner knew as planning. All involve long periods of either following, viewing and recording interactions with other players, structures or items. It’s all about intimate familiarity with someone and often something. We all seek to view, with permission and learn from it.
The social media planner and I looked on with interest; this approach is something we know really well. We scoffed at the pomposity of the terminology. Participant observation total toss. Surely this is exactly what we do? Having opened my mouth way before engaging brain. It turns out (most obviously) now that the world of participant observation is pretty old, whilst us lot in advertising hark to Berbach in the 1950s and the rise of planning. Our Sociologist colleagues top trump us with their Bernbach equivalent – the Persian anthropologist Abu Rayhan al-biruni who was collating people patterns in order to solve problems a little further back in 973-1048.
The product designer, seeing me floored with historical accuracy, decided to fill me in with the history of ”industrial design” and the birth in the early 1900s of industrialised consumer products. I sat fascinated (but pretending to be bored) at the world of Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to establish a partnership between product manufacturers and design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets. It’s apparently this that built the foundation for German user centric design and creativity and placed them on a competitive footing with England and the United States.
Finding myself between established audience centric disciplines. I sought the bleeding edge with the social media planner – an online anthropologist. Her faculty of genius came mostly with names like Wolfsninjaw536, and most notably from a insightnip546 and were at the early days of defining the discipline. Just like the days when Madison Avenue was split between Bill Berbach and ‘the depth boys’ and Rosser Reeves who ran the Ted Bates agency and fronted the ‘find a USP and repeat it loads’ clan. More can be read about this in this brilliant BBC film and article. Her world was splitting into factions all trying to distill a client sellable truth, in a chaotically mobile landscape.
Whats does this all mean? That techniques of all of us are useful to all of us? That terminological transparency would help us all? Perhaps – but simply for me it that what we know to be useful is more often that not being used and bettered by many other disciplines.
A fascinating lunch with a pretty academic discussion and loads of overlap at the least. A new group of people to borrow stuff for the problems we tackle day to day at the most.

Buzzing.
How our industry is seen is a present annoyance for me. I was forced by to go to a recent boys charity do and with a load of bankers – I was turned on with multiple questions on the solid nature of what I do. Apparently ‘Media’ (said with a lightness of voice – try Frank Spencer/crossed with Dale Winton) as a sector is just nonsense. Not real work. Staggering my fellow charity goers all are in derivatives traders – pot – kettle – noir I said – infuriating them further.





