One of the most moving presentations at the APG judging this year saw several of the industry titans, who were judging, wiping a secret tear away.

Evan Kearney from O&M Memac explained the thinking behind the Sprite Cricket Stars competition in UAE. Designed to drive penetration amongst immigrant labourers, Kearney painted an emotional picture of men, miles away from home, working to build luxury buildings for a pittance, who have little in their lives of any pleasure bar cricket.

It’s a story worth watching on YouTube for the targeting insight and the monumental and inclusive execution.

It’s clear from the story, for those in ignorance as I was, the huge esteem cricket and its star players are held in across the world.

This week one of those stars just hung up his bat.  Sachin Tendulkar, who retired this month, is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest cricketers of his generation.  Writing at bbc.co.uk author and politician Sashi Tharoor holds nothing back in his eulogy of the cricket star.  He says “Tendulkar was the diminutive colossus who showed his countrymen that an Indian, too, could be the world’s best. He was elevated to God in the country’s cricketing pantheon.” And concludes :  “Thanks to his extraordinary achievements, he has raised the bar for all who have followed him. He came in when a heroic defeat was more common than a blazing triumph. He leaves having made winning the new normal.”

Well, it must be of interest therefore, especially in a sport notorious for statistic geeks, that the stats suggest that Tendulkar wasn’t that outstanding.  Of course it all depends how you look at it, and he’s certainly a very good cricketer, yet his batting average was 53.78.  Australia’s Donald Bradman averaged 99.94.  You can examine the detailed statistics here, but the conclusion places Tendulkar as 29th greatest in the ICC player ratings, not quite the world’s best.

How then has he attained such a reputation for greatness?  Mail writer Harcharan Chandhoke  says he was simply in the right place at the right time.  His career coincided with the resurgence of the Indian economy as one of the BRIC nations dominating the 21st century.   He provided the focus for a nation as it rose to prominence on a global stage.

Two lessons here for the workplace.  First, be careful to look at the facts behind someone’s reputation.  Our industry is scattered with people living well on their reputation which might be based on one or two moments of greatness followed by years of stasis.  Secondly, you can’t just measure greatness by statistics.  There’s more to becoming a hero than facts and figures.  Being in the right place at the right time of course helps.  Being a focus for hopes and dreams is essential.

I’ve been invited to give the key note speech at this year’s MRG conference in December.  If you’re going I look forward to seeing you there.  I’m flattered to be asked, and the organisers have given me an open brief, what an opportunity!

The theme of the conference is “Celebrating the best media research of 2013″ which has left me contemplating what it takes to be the best in media research.  I don’t think the MRG needs me to announce that we’re in times of great change or that the expectations of media research from the planning and buying community have risen exponentially in these days of “real time”, “neuroscience” and “big data”.

Is “best” the simplest, most proximate explanation, or is “best” the most truthful?  The industry wants the former often for pragmatic reasons.  If it’s simple and scale-able it’s useful for planning and trading. This simplistic approach based on a need for trading standard has delivered solid growth for the advertising industry.

If it’s simple it may be less truthful.  For a very good reason, which is that the truth about how people make decisions is complicated.

The drive for truth (which I think we all know I favour) leads inevitably to more complexity. Understanding what truly motivates people can help with predicting future behaviour which is a basic requirement of media research.  After all planners and buyers don’t just want to understand what has happened.  They want to predict what will happen in order to create better outcomes for future campaigns.

In the excellent collection “This explains everything” edited by John Brockman, two of the contributors provide an explanation for why this is easier said than done.  David M. Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, writes of “Overlapping solutions”, where the brain is not made up of separate parts that each deal with different activities ie one area for language, another for face recognition etc. Instead he says : “The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting.  It provides multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world.”

This is echoed by psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris who explains that the “modular” brain is the root reason for a good deal of the drama in our lives and our literature, movies, plays and soap operas.  It is what leads one part of us to do something that another part of us knows is wrong.  The affair, the cream cake, the hangover and the speeding ticket all come about because if a bit of our brain is arguing against rash behaviour, another part of our brain is all for it.  We do have an angel and a devil on either shoulder arguing about what we should do.  In Romeo and Juliet the Capulets and Montagues had a longstanding family feud.  So the “belonging” instinct or human drive in our hero and heroine would have dictated more hatred.  Yet the “young love” or should I just call it the “sex” drive in the same characters drove Shakespeare’s plot line.

This sheds a different light on our hopes from media research.  We can’t expect to explain everything, whatever the developments in techniques in neuroscience or big data, not unless or until we can predict the outcomes of those internal “neural” battles that Eagleman describes.

Current best practice media research might be good enough.  Good enough for trading and good enough for broad predictions.  I want the truth however and new developments are challenging the heritage businesses as they should.

If you’d like to tell me your current view of media research for my keynote please comment below.

Entropy never decreases.

This is the second law of thermodynamics.

Entropy is the idea that everything tends to drift into chaos or disorder.  This is certainly true of my desk.  And kitchen.  The classic example from the kitchen is a dropped cup.  It will smash into pieces and however long you leave those pieces there they will never reassemble into something you can drink a cup of tea from.  Or imagine a black ink blot dropped into a cup of water.  The blackness will dissipate and never reassemble.

The second law, that entropy never decreases,  is very elegant.  Essentially entropy doesn’t experience entropy.  In fact for the universe as a whole entropy is increasing.

The law that entropy never decreases is a paradox.  It appears to contradict itself and yet it is observably true.   For many years scientists were puzzled by it.  Nineteenth century physicists believed that the fundamental laws of physics should be reversible.  So if entropy can increase, the laws of physics should mean that it must be able to decrease.  But every experience tells you otherwise.

It takes energy to decrease entropy.  As the full second law states : The entropy of an isolated system always rises. But put some energy in and order can be achieved – in a crystal of salt, in humans, even in galaxies

This means many important things to science.  I think it can also be observed in the culture of the workplace.  Negative energy doesn’t decrease left to itself.  Positive energy needs to be continually reinforced.  At MediaCom we have the much loved Freshness programme (scary pumpkins and the roof on fire being two recent examples).

Over the last dozen years the numbers of MediaCommers have increased substantially and of course many people have joined and some have left.  Yet the essential culture of the place has stayed intact despite all the increased pressures that any media organisation has been under for the last five years.  This hasn’t happened by accident.  A lot of effort, from everyone in the company, goes into keeping our culture fresh, every day.

Workplace cultures with negative cultures tend to reinforce themselves over time.  Workplace cultures with positive cultures need energy to reinforce that culture.  This isn’t a law of physics but it is extremely likely to happen so it fits with expert thinking on the subject. This is clearly observable among organisations.  It is probably my second law of organisational culture.

The commentators are buzzing about Ferguson’s new autobiography.  Of course most of the comments are about hair dryer treatment, rifts and acrimony.  Henry Winter, the Telegraph’s football correspondent says “The main victim of Sir Alex Ferguson’s new book is Roy Keane, who receives far more than the hairdryer treatment.  He gets savaged.”

In addition the David Beckham incident is detailed of course.  When Beckham reacted badly to criticism Ferguson writes : “As usual, with David at that time, he was dismissive ..
He was around 12 feet from me. David swore. I moved towards him, and as I approached I kicked a boot. It hit him right above the eye. He rose to have a go at me and the players stopped him. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You’ve let your team down. You can argue as much as you like.’  I called him in the next day to go through the video and he still would not accept his mistake.  The next day, the story was in the press. It was in those days that I told the board David had to go.”
This black and white treatment is natural from an individual who was schooled in management in the Scottish second division in the eighties.  Of course Ferguson could be hard line with those players.  They were on about thirty quid a week and couldn’t afford to walk out or have tantrums.  Yet as Manchester United became more and more successful Ferguson was managing players earning millions.  Under the scrutiny of the media.  Of course he had more to him and his management style than the hair dryer.
I believe one essential  ingredient to his successful management style was authenticity.  Ferguson features in my book “Tell the Truth, honesty is your most powerful marketing tool.”  We describe the 2010 Rooney shock news when the story broke that he was intending to leave United, and not just for any team but for Manchester City.  The media was aflame and Rooney received death threats from fans.  Ferguson’s reaction was sterling.  He spoke so authentically to the public and not only defused the situation but turned it to his advantage in a “truth turning point” moment.  In a world where powerful players are surrounded by toadies and yes men and women imagine the advantage that speaking authentically would deliver.
You can compare Ferguson’s old style of management, of dealing with less powerful players in the last century, with marketing to consumers in a broad sense.  In the old days brands could get away with treating consumers as if all the power was on their side, with impatience, even with contempt.  These days when the power has shifted into the hands and pockets of the consumer, when the consumer has the ability to shop around for prices and information at the touch of a few clicks on their tablet or smart phone, brands need to speak authentically.  This is where long term competitive advantage lies.

Mark Earls thinks that this is nonsense. In fact “The young are a different species” is Mark Earls’ number 2 nonsense thing in his recent Twitter compilation of top marketing nonsense. The brilliant author of “Herd” has compiled a list of marketing ideas that are doing the rounds that he thinks are rubbish.  I agree that his number 1 nonsense that “TV is dead” is patently nonsense.  I agree with The Herdmeister that number 2 is a wild overstatement and generalisation.  Yet it is worth thinking about as changes in technology do affect us. Maybe, just maybe, the young are a little bit different to the rest of us.

You see we do change because of technology.  Human evolution was radicalised by the adoption of cooking food over a fire.  This made food more easily digestible which meant that we had more time to do things other than eat.  Cooking with fire changed our bodies, our brains and our use of social time.  In “Catching Fire; how cooking made us human”  Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, argues that cooked food was the turning point in the development of human physiology.

If fire helped us evolve, hand axes changed our hands.  Newly discovered bones from 1.4 million years ago show the development of an evolutionary advantage in the third metacarpal.  Humans with it could use axes more effectively.

Brian David Johnson, futurist at Intel, explained recently at Wired’s get together at Burberry books changed our capacity for oral memory.  Before we had them we had to remember and retell all the stories around the campfire.  Subsequently we could write them down and read them, which has meant that our ability to memorise epics is diminished.

Now the internet is changing our ability to remember stuff again.  There’s a lot of debate about whether the internet is making us dumber or smarter.  What is clear is that it is changing us and changing the role of education.  (What do you need to memorise anymore?).  The enormous change in the ready availability of information and opinion is already making us challenge long sacrosanct communication conventions.

There is every chance that the young will be a slightly different species.   Whilst human drives and motivations are essentially unchanging, human behaviour and expectations will evolve.

Let’s just take one media example.  Most of the current mature viewing audience have been trained to wait a week for the next episode of a much loved show.  Yet if the series is filmed and finished (not live) will the young be able to tolerate it being doled out to them at the pace that suits the content owner ie over a 22 week season?  Or to put up with a delay in viewing a show that has broken earlier in the US ? Perhaps viewing levels will be effected by the loss of the capacity amongst the young for delayed gratification on an evolutionary basis ?  There could be implications on media consumption, shopping behaviour and interests that will effect mass markets over the next decade.   With the rise of the Millennials in the work place and as consumers, that generation who have never known life without the web,  we do need to think differently about problem solving, ways of working and how to communicate.