No we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy

Local newspapers are dying. This death is accompanied by a great wailing from the usual sources who argue (without really explaining why) that local papers - even ones that are hardly read at all by the public, even on-line - are "vital to a functioning democracy". The government last year set on Dame Frances Caincross, a left-wing journalist, to look at what could be done to rescue local papers from their impending doom.

Unsurprisingly our journalist concludes that the only solution is state-funded journalism, a new regulator (staffed by worthy lefties like Dame Frances no doubt) and assorted enquiries into the evil that is Facebook (and other monstrous tech giants like Google). It is also unsurprising that, aside from one chap from the Advertising Association, the entire panel of 'experts' advising Dame Frances were journalists or media owners. The outcome of the commission is entirely predictable and won't serve, in any way, to rescue the local press.

The problem is that, despite working in businesses that depend to a greater or lesser extent on advertising, journalists seem not to have the slightest clue as to why advertisers invest their cash in the manner they do. Here's one pretty typical example from Twitter:

I think most journalists know that. They’re at the mercy of hapless publishing giants and similarly incompetent media buying agencies who are so obsessed by Facebook et al that they’ve stopped investing in what’s important.

As you can see journalism ("quality journalism" is the official management term here) is dying because those naive advertisers have been duped by Facebook and Google into shifting their spending there rather than leaving it with publications that nobody reads. Now it's true that marketers, for brand advertising at least, are pulling back from relying on Facebook and Google, but they are not shifting their spend back into print newspapers (magazines are a different matters - take note that the top four TV listings magazines sell nearly 4 million copies every week).

The reason brands are pulling away from social media is that the owners of that media are limiting the advertising's reach by manipulating the algorithms - where once millions of likes meant millions in reach, it now means thousands. Plus, with consumers shifting their attention to other social media, the responsiveness of Facebook advertising degrades - even with supposedly sophisticated targeting Facebook is using a heavy roller to crack walnuts.

There is an old joke about newspapers that the purpose of the journalism is to fill in the gaps between the advertising. We shouldn't forget that most local papers exist because they provided a vehicle for local businesses to advertise. Yes those newspapers did journalism but much of the point for the journalism was to get folk to buy the paper. I recall being told by one former local paper editor about his first assignment as a junior reporter - go to a funeral with the instruction to write down the name of as many people attending as possible. Local papers carried photographs with lots of people in because those people - and their nearest and dearest - would buy the paper.

The stock in trade of local newspapers wasn't "quality journalism", it was births, deaths and marriages, cars for sales, cinema listings, job adverts, sports results, school prize givings and evening classes. The sale adverts from the local department store were just as important (probably more so) than the report of what Alderman Smith had said about the parks department at Wednesday's Council meeting. The paper was a record of the boring mundanities of life in a community - Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has been sharing online some images from the past: football teams, ballet classes, scout troops and girl guides not councillors or MPs.

People still want all these lists, this record of everyday life, it's just that so much of it has moved elsewhere - not to Facebook (although a glimpse through community pages will show that they absolutely capture those everyday events and happenings) but to job sites and car sales sites, to direct messaging and to email. If local papers want to do their "quality journalism" maybe they need to think about how to get back the bread and butter of past times rather than try to blame social media for a demise that was predictable in the 1990s at the outset of the 'world wide web' - long before Facebook or Google came to dominate the world.

It is crazy to see the solution as some sort of state-funded cadre of local journalists producing copy that nobody reads because someone has decided that it is "quality journalism". Instead news media need to turn off the button marked "free" (and it would help here if the BBC didn't crowd out so much on-line, something Cairncross does note) and start expecting the public to pay for news. Most of them won't because they're not really that interested but if the cost is low enough there's no reason why local media cannot work. What we can't have, however, is journalists believing they've some sort of privileged position in society (all the guff about democracy and so forth) and expecting taxes to provide for them.

Oh, and next time we have an enquiry into an area where advertising is central perhaps we should put marketers in charge? What Dame Frances and her advisors have shown us is that they - mostly journalists - really haven't the faintest idea why advertisers make the spending decision they make. And I hope such a panel would conclude that we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy.

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Vote Leave's "sophisticated" campaign was the Internet age equivalent of junk mailing

Back in the day we had two sorts of client - ones who paid lip service to the idea of targeted marketing and those who tried to use targeting to improve results. The former - typically financial services businesses of one sort or another - were great clients as what they really wanted to do was shove out their sales message through every available direct marketing medium regardless of any nuanced assessment of responsiveness. Mostly this is because the levels of response that made credit card applications, investment bonds and mortgages cost-effective was very low. This is (for those who remember back then) why everyone got so royally pissed off with the likes of American Express - except us direct marketers, we were making lots of lovely print margin for churning out essentially untargeted material.

The second bunch were much more difficult as conversion to sales, cost per response, cost per new order and so forth really mattered. They used agencies like us because we were (or so we said) at the cutting edge of sophisticated targeting making use of databases, expert systems, geodemographics, psychographics and other of the assorted computer dark arts. We used all those tricks, tests and personalised gimmicks - "Yes, SIMON COOKE, you could already have won FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS in our preselected prize draw..." - we were the Red Sparrows of marketing. Today we'd probably have strangely coloured hair but back then we were more Mad Men in our dress style.

Recently a bunch of people who, it seems, hadn't realised that careful, targeted marketing doesn't require Facebook, have discovered that those databases, expert systems, geodemographics and psychometrics really do exist and have been used to target advertising by political campaigners. Indeed, today's marketing Red Sparrows have cluttered up UK and US airwaves - besplendid in their best red hair - spinning the same bollocks we were spinning back in 1992. Carefully selected statistics - "using geodemographic targeting has been shown to lift response rate by up to 150%" (from nearly nothing to very slightly more than nearly nothing) - are wheeled out wrapped in words that probably mean little in this context but sound good - algorithm, profiling, psychology. Add to this how we continue to believe Vance Packard's nonsense about secret and hidden techniques used by marketers to trick us into buying stuff we don't want to buy, and you've a recipe for otherwise intelligent people believing that somehow the Brexit vote was all down to this occult science rather than a whole load of people, for whatever reason, really not liking the European Union very much.

What's come out now is some of the detail of Vote Leave's targeted advertising. And, it seems that Vote Leave - led by a man who tells us Marvin's brain is tiny next to his - were the sort of client we loved. The supposedly sophisticated targeting based on cunning psychology and profiling turns out to be broad brush targeting - "older men", "women", "middle aged people" and so forth. Here's a journalist completely failing to understand the entire point of marketing but, in doing so, revealing how simplistic Vote Leave's targeting was:









There's more but this will do. We were told - stern, questioning MPs interrogated visiting "experts" to ascertain this - that the Brexit campaign was uniquely cunning and sophisticated to the point of being sinister. Yet the truth is that they used the same level of targeting sophistication as Amex did in 1992 - not very much at all. This isn't to say that Vote Leave's online advertising didn't work but what's clear from this revelation is that it wasn't targeted at any level below the sort of broad brush demographics - men, women, old, young - that were used to target TV ads in the age of mass marketing. To put it another way, Vote Leave spent a lot of money flooding facebook with ads in the same manner that Amex leaflets flooded through your letter box back in the early 1990s. It wasn't sophisticated at all - for all the talk of physicists - it was the Internet age version of junk mailing, essentially spam.

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Murder, starvation, poverty, autocracy...how did communism get to be cool?

It came to a head with an attractive young journalist proclaiming on morning TV: "I'm literally a communist, you idiot". For me this seemed little different from someone popping up and saying; "of course I'm a Fascist, twit face" or "absolutely, you numpty, I'm a Nazi". Yet unlike these latter statements, saying you're a communist doesn't get shock horror reactions, The Guardian won't headline its spluttering indignation at someone being a communist. Indeed the more likely reaction is a sort of "bless, young people care so much about the downtrodden - communism is wrong but their heart's in the right place".

Communism - even in places that really ought to know better like East Berlin - is cool and trendy. Communism is cool despite its track record of economic failure, suppression of democracy, state-sponsored murder, starvation and the incarceration of political opponents. The cruelty of Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's 'Cultural Revolution', Stalin's purges and Castro's gay correction camps is set aside because, y'know, communism is cool.

Why is this - seriously, why? Here's a few thoughts with my marketing hat on.

Communism is an ideological brand and people's attachment to it isn't based on much considered analysis but on the belief that (as my Dad said years ago) "socialism just means good". And if you don't believe me, here's a response to me on Twitter following my criticism of communism:

The communist manifesto like any seminal text is not to be taken so very literally but considered and applied to the current socioeconomic climate, taking or leaving as appropriate. This just seems like adult common sense to me.

It's like the Bishop of Durham explaining how, in a very real sense there is a god but he/she/it isn't quite how it says in the bible, that's allegory. So let's explore how communism got to move from being a 19th century piece of political philosophy to a seemingly faith-based creed (despite killing about 100 million people inbetween).

Communism's brand identity has a variety of elements - workers, the people, revolution, anti-establishment - that position it well for those looking to be politically contrary (a common trait in younger people). All of the factors in communism's brand identity are positive - other than the unfortunate fact of, when put into action, its tendency to make people poorer or at least those people it hasn't killed or exiled. But the identity is strong enough to resist these unfortunate historical issues. How come?

Communism's brand associations provide a justification for the "not true communism" response to any criticism citing the Soviet Union ("Stalin wasn't really a communist"), Castro ("Cuban totalitarianism was forced on it by US aggression") or Vietnam (US aggression again). These brand associations - what do you think of when someone says 'communism' - include:

Trendy university lecturers (I recall one lecturer's opening remarks to our 'Geography of South East Asia' module - "I'm a radical Marxist geographer")

Marx and Marxism - not The Communist Manifesto but the degree to which Marx is seen as significant in economics and (especially) sociology. Communism gets academic credibility to match lecturer trendiness

Communist iconography is appealing and rebellious - Che Guevara t-shirts, the hammer and sickle, the colour red.

WW2 - the Russians were our friends and allies (sort of) so communism isn't as bad as that other totalitarianism we don't talk about except when we want to criticise slightly orange US Presidents

All the bad stuff must have been a mistake ("not real communism") because Dr Steve Rogers* is way too trendy to do anything so bad as executing shopkeepers or forcing accounts clerks to work in market gardens. And anyway Marx says (insert trite quote cut and pasted from Good Quotes or Wikipedia). "Do you like my Che t-shirt - only £9.99 down the market?"

The communist brand also has what we can call width - if you thought communism was about economics or sociology think again. Those trendy lecturers crop up everywhere and communism (or "Marxism" but in branding terms there's little difference) has something rebellious - always "challenging orthodoxy" to the point where the challenge becomes the orthodoxy - to say: in the arts, in offshoots of sociology like gender studies and media studies, in literature, language studies and doubtless archaeology.

We can take a step back and observe that communism, from its inception in Marx and Engels' manifesto, has always been predicated on the idea of violent revolution - how else are you going to get hold of the property "for the people"? But this essential violence becomes cool because some of us (especially men) get quite turned on by political violence and the people advocating the violence are rebels, cool dudes fighting for a better world.

Communism's brand is cool because the idea of using violence to remove oppression is cool (watch Star Wars if you doubt this for a second) and the flaws - communism's track record of cruel, hateful oppression - is disregarded because the iconography, identity, story and associations allow for a myth rejecting its failures, most commonly because of the actions of communism's enemy rather than because of its inherent failings. Communism is cool because its brand values allow it to resist an honest assessment of what it has done and what it means.

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Who are these joy-killers who want to ban Tony the Tiger?

Sunny Jim - the original cereal cartoon character here in stuffed toy form

I could launch into a full scale rant at the raft of proposals from the Health Select Committee aimed at combating child obesity - ad bans, mandatory reformulation, restrictions on fast food takeaways and a ghastly, ignorant polemic about the fiction that is "junk food". It is everything we should loathe about modern government, what Chris Snowdon describes as:

...taking a bunch of policies that do not work and piling them on top of another bunch of policies that do not work in the hope that some weird alchemy turns them into more than the sum of their useless parts

Among this "whole systems approach" is the proposal to stop food manufacturers using cartoon characters in their marketing:

Cartoon characters should be banned from promoting junk food to improve childhood obesity rates, a leading group of MPs has suggested.

The Health and Social Care Select Committee has called for a ban on "brand-generated characters or licensed TV and film characters" which are used to promote foods high in fat, sugar or salt on broadcast and non-broadcast media.

It would mark the death of Tony the Tiger and the Honey Monster as represents the worst sort of crass interventionism - annoying fussbucketry that won't make a jot of difference to obesity. I know this because cartoon characters have been used to promote breakfast cereals since Sunny Jim first sprang into life in 1902.

The characters we're familiar with - Coco the Monkey, the Honey Monster, Snap, Crackle and Pop, and the legend that is Tony the Tiger - have all been around for decades or more. Tony first told us Frosties were Grrrrrreat back in 1954, the Rice Krispies kids (originally goblins but, hey, what's the difference) date from 1930 and the Honey Monster began insisting Henry McGee "tell 'em about the honey, mummy" in 1976. Even Coco - a latecomer (succeeding Tusk the Elephant) - arrived on our cereal packets in 1991. None of these wonderful, child-friendly characters has made children fat, all they've done is give children a smile and helped mums' make a brand choice.


Now a bunch of joyless nannying fussbuckets led by the self-appoint Nanny-in-Chief, Sarah Wollaston want to put an end to all this fun because they like banning stuff and want children to have dull lives featuring uplifting, nanny-approved diets that don't involve anything that looks like it might appeal to those children. Yes folks, Sarah and the Fussbuckets want eating to be a boring, unpleasant, state-approved thing rather than any kind of pleasure. And all to deal with an almost entirely fictional obesity crisis.


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The best 21st century political campaigns will owe more to Saul Alinsky and Readers Digest than Cambridge Analytica

The Cambridge Analytica story has now transmogrified into a good old-fashioned story about how a political campaign some folk didn't like might have broken some rules (I suspect it probably hasn't but, as ever, I'm ready for surprise). The more interesting part of the story, the bit about the use of sophisticated database marketing in politics, has got itself sidelined while the screams of defeated and unreconciled Remain supporters - or in the USA disappointed Clinton enthusiasts and anti-Trump mavens - echo round the halls.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of the latest sensationalised allegations about the referendum campaign with its deliberate conflation of different actions at different times, use of gossip and repetition of allegations already investigated. Mostly because it's not all that important - the UK probably needs to rework its rules on political marketing at elections to reflect modern practices but that's about it really.

Much more important is the question as to whether the ideas, methods and approaches being pushed by the likes of Cambridge Analytica are effective and, if they are, whether we should be concerned about how they will affect the conduct of our public political debate. For a starter, here's Jamie Bartlett from Demos writing in The Spectator:

The shift towards big data elections has profound consequences for the whole of modern politics. If every voter is reduced to a data point who receives not real messages from politicians, but machine–generated adverts finely tuned towards personality and mood, then elections become little more than a software war. And the more politics is a question of smart analysis and nudges rather than argument, the more power shifts away from those with good ideas and toward those with good money or good data skills.

Bartlett has a point but I suspect he is overegging it a bit. The Spectator article describes a pretty standard data-driven direct marketing campaign little different from those we were designing for clients 25 years ago:

Cambridge had a database of around 5,000 data points on 200 million Americans and combined it with the Republican Party’s own voter data to build dozens of these highly focused universes and model how ‘persuadable’ its members were. (For example, analysts discovered during the race that a preference for cars made in the US was a solid indication of a potential Trump voter). Creative types then designed specialised ads for these universes, based on the specific things they were thought to care about. Every-thing was tested, retested, redesigned. They sent out thousands of versions of fund-raising emails or Facebook ads, working out what performed best. They tried donate pages with red buttons, green buttons, yellow buttons. They even tested which unflattering picture of Hillary worked best.

It sounds scary when you set it out like this but the reality is that, although we should absolutely be bothered about data protection and security, these methods really don't make the scale of difference that companies like Cambridge Analytica are wont to claim:

Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

And those numbers I cited are response figures - people actually responding, doing something we've asked them to do - the reality with message advertising such as that used in political campaigns is that the level of inattention is several orders of magnitude greater (one of the depressing things for advertisers is the realisation that nearly all their carefully constructued 'reach' results merely in people completely ignoring the advertising). This is essentially what political scientists Kalla & Broockman found:

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.

All that noise. All those messages. Billions spent on advertising. And there's no evidence that it makes a blind bit of difference to the outcome (as an ad man I'm not entirely convinced but as a political campaigner it's very unusual for the actual campaign to change much - the 2017 general election is an outlier in this). I note that Bartlett comments that Trump's victory was based on very small margins in three or four key states - not a new phenomenon as fans of hanging chads will remember. But we can't isolate the impact of different campaign elements - TV coverage, advertising and the ground campaign including 'get out the vote' activity.

When we look at the UK, the debate is about the referendum (of course, Vote Leave is very clear that it didn't use Cambridge Analytica or their style of psychometrics-based targeting) where perhaps the communications rules are different. That being said, the outcome was determined largely by unprecedentedly high turnout among older, working class voters - to be blunt, these are those least likely to be influenced by social media activity because they're not using social media (about half of 50-60 year olds and a third of over 65s).

It seems to me that, with the end of the mass media age, political campaigning will change. It also seems to me that very few political marketers have begun to grasp the significance of this change - it's not merely Jamie Bartlett's worry about what might be called the 'agora' but more that social media democratises political debate in a way not liked or expected by the dominant media forms. But first we need to put to bed the idea that algorithmic targeting is the marketing equivalent of a ninth level magic user spell.

Here's Kris-Stella Trump (no relation to The Donald) Program Director of the Anxieties of Democracy program at the Social Science Research Council:

The “Big 5” personality traits (which Cambridge Analytica claimed to use in its work) only predict about 5 percent of the variation in individuals’ political orientations.

...it’s possible to predict personality from online data. But a recent meta-analysis shows that even if you have access to someone’s digital footprint, you can only learn so much about their Big 5 traits. Even if your model does well at first, it will probably be out of date soon, as the things people “like” on Facebook change.

You can improve online advertisements by targeting them using personality data. But the effects tend to be small. In this successful study, researchers targeted ads, based on personality, to more than 1.5 million people; the result was about 100 additional purchases of beauty products than had they advertised without targeting.

Once you know that personality prediction probably didn’t add much value to Cambridge Analytica’s approach, then what it did starts to look a lot like the microtargeting also used by other campaigns, and which the Obama 2008 campaign in particular was famous for.

Dr Trump also makes the killing observation that Cambridge Analytica "does not seem capable of pulling off the large-scale and complex personality-based profiling operation that it claims to have mastered."

So we have a methodology that might add 5% to targeting systems that have been around for nigh on 40 years applied to an environment that works on social interaction, word-of-mouth and endorsement. The result isn't a magic wand but a system that probably won't make a jot of difference to outcomes from social media marketing. Indeed, the successful approaches to social media marketing owe more to Alinsky's theories of community organising than they do to database marketing. This focus on organisation is one reason why Momentum and Corbyn's team have been successful despite the limitations of his political offer.

The manner in which political debate is changing means that the old conduit (or rather the mass media age's conduit) for political messaging is less powerful. It's undoubtedly true that TV coverage probably had more to do with Trump's election than data marketing or social media but it no longer has the field to itself. What we get (and both Trump and Corbyn got this) is a return to the public meeting, the rally and the "impromptu" street event. It's not, as Jamie Bartlett suggests, that political debate and engagement is atomised via the Internet but rather that it will be more like the debate of times before mass media but overlain with a social media element. As a result the skill set for the campaigner will be about organisation and activism rather than slick communications and advertising.

So I guess the advice to would-be political marketers is to step away from the box of tricks that the likes of Cambridge Analytica are flogging and read Rules for Radicals, The Solid Gold Mailbox and David Ogilvy's advice on selling (it's very sexist as it was written in 1935). Then go and do a lot of listening to what people talk about (clue - it's not politics or, at least, obviously politics).

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Big Data didn't win it (my opening remarks from Battle of Ideas debate)

I guess I represent all the axes of evil on this subject – I’m a qualified Conservative Party Agent, a professional marketer specialising in direct marketing and a politician.

I’m going to tell you that big data didn’t win it. That Cambridge Analytica is selling a bog-standard set of analysis tools rebadged as ‘political’.

Database marketing is brilliant. We can analyse large data sets and apply them to useable population geography – in the UK postcode sectors contain about 2,500 to 3,000 people.

When Cambridge Analytica tells you they have a profile for every community in the USA, they are simply describing the use of these well-established and widely used geodemographics.

It’s what they sell – it’s what we were selling to UK financial services companies, mail order business and retailers back in 1990.

Better still, we can then match this profiling information to our own data – in the case of a political campaign this is likely to be voting intention information: VI Data.

What this match will tell us is where our voters live and, more importantly, where voters with similar characteristics to our voters live. We might have lots of VI Data for Tory voters across the country but none in Walsall – what the profile does is tell us, at a very localised geography, where we’re most likely to find those voters in Walsall.

This is pretty much all that Cambridge Analytica do.

The big change Cambridge Analytica offer from base geodemographics is the use of social media information.

Overlaying this data onto that geodemographics perhaps (I’m not convinced) makes that granular geographical targeting more effective.

The bit of software Cambridge Analytica uses claims to be able to draw a phychographic profile from facebook likes and text – I’m not convinced (especially since most folks activity on face book involves saying LOL a lot, going aww at cat pictures and liking your friends baby photos).

Here’s an example of the problem from a review in technology blog, The Register:

A version of this test is online here, with another that analyses language. The first 1,000 words of Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit speech from January generates a 67 per cent openness rating, making her "liberal and artistic" rather than "conservative and traditional", and a 99 per cent score for her being a man.

The truth is that the data from social media is very dirty – what these clever techie folk claim is a long way from the reality. And, regardless of quantity, having rubbish data will always give you rubbish outcomes.

What Facebook does, however, is allow us to target advertising at that same granular level – I only need to buy advertising within a few miles of high profile score communities in target areas making the advertising more efficient and perhaps more effective. It also means that if you are outside my profile you won’t see much of my advertising.

What we have here isn’t a sinister conspiracy but just a set of marketing tools applied to politics. Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

In every other respect this is little different from what we were doing nearly thirty years ago – digging into data to make our marketing better.

And it was not the main reason that Vote Leave and Donald Trump won. I see five things as mattering in effective political campaigns, only one of which is targeting.

1. Brand. Vote Leave got lucky because some journalist coined the term ‘Brexit’ giving a simple and memorable brand for the campaign. One that opponents of leaving repeated again and again. The same goes for Hillary Clinton – almost all Democrat campaign material talked about Trump – and Theresa May where the Conservatives pumped out millions of messages saying ‘May or Corbyn’

2. Call to Action. Again Vote Leave got lucky – “take back control” they said, giving people a simple action, voting to leave, that would make that possible. “Drain the swamp” said Trump. And the same goes for Corbyn (find quote)

3. Enhanced Word-of-Mouth – or ‘going viral’. Thousands of little green frogs – with all the memes and comments that went with those frogs - were probably more important to Trump’s campaign than the money he spent with Cambridge Analytica. And the same was true of Vote Leave and Corbyn – thousands of people creating and sharing memes, doing things unasked and without the campaign’s say so

4. Good targeting – yes it matters and using geography is a great way to do it in a system based on people voting locally. But, as Corbyn showed, targeting a demographic – young people – can also be pretty effective.

5. Finally Brexit and Trump won because their opponents ran dreadful campaigns. Theresa May did too but started too far ahead for Corbyn to catch her.

Yes targeting matters. Absolutely the generation of ‘fake news’ matters. But no, ‘Big Data’ didn’t win these elections. There is no sinister conspiracy, just a set of circumstances – good branding, viral social media, strong calls to action and awful opposing campaigns – that allowed the results we got. Targeting helps but, if we’d not seen the brand, message and memes – and the useless campaigns from Stronger In and Hillary Clinton, the results would have been different.

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To understand what's good marketing and what's bad marketing watch the rent-seekers

I'm a marketer. Got all the badges. Used to have a big job telling folk how to to it. And I'm here to remind you that there's two sorts of marketing - the good sort that's about a conversation with consumers so we can meet their needs (and maybe prompt them towards something they'd not thought about) and the bad sort that's about persuading authorities to fix the market so as to allow the client a temporary monopoly or other unfair advantage.

Of course, dear reader, I did the first sort and got plenty of flak for doing so. "Where did you get my name and address", "you're manipulating people with your clever personalisation", and "these profiling systems are exploiting people's personal data". But at no point did I collect, analyse or otherwise use data for any other purpose than to make my advertising and marketing pound stretch a little further - I just wanted to sell you what we'd got in the warehouse.

The bad marketing doesn't get the same criticism, we say little or nothing when the farmers' union lobbies for protectionism or the steel companies rant about 'unfair dumping'. Yet these businesses want to fix the market so as to profit - and that profit comes at your and my expense. It's like this:

Yet lobbying requires resources: the building and office supplies used by lobbyists, the fuel used to ferry lobbyists to and fro in their privilege-seeking efforts, but mostly the time and effort of the lobbyists themselves. And the greater the expected benefit of securing a special privilege, the greater is the amount of resources those in search of such privileges will use in that search. Such resource expenditures are beneficial to the rent-seekers themselves, for these expenditures increase these rent-seekers’ prospects of actually securing the sought-after special privileges that yield rents (that is, excess profits). But from society’s perspective these expenditures are wasteful: the building used to house lawyers who seek rents for their clients is not available to be used for genuinely productive activities (such as serving as office space for tech start-ups, or for lawyers who specialize in helping commercial clients write better contracts).

For lawyers in Don Boudreaux's screed you could insert 'lobbyists', 'PR Agencies', 'Public Affairs Consultants' and a host of other titles all dedicated to the job of getting politicians and bureaucrats to fix markets to the benefit of these agents' clients or employers.

So next time someone has a go at people like me - the good marketers who just use data and information to get you better products and services - point to the lobbyists and ask when that will stop. That is corporate welfare, market fixing and it happens at our cost - Boudreaux gives one example:

I have no idea what Mr. Stohr is paid. So let’s low-ball it – I mean really low-ball it: let’s assume that he’s paid a mere $100,000 annually. If so, then at least $33,333 worth of valuable resources – Mr. Stohr’s time, effort, and creativity – are spent simply trying to maintain that which ought not be maintained, namely, subsidies – a special privilege – for American aircraft manufacturers.

Multiply this a thousand - maybe ten thousand - times just for the USA and you see the extent to which the brilliance of us marketers is turned to the dark side promoting the market-fixing interests of large corporations, labour unions and NGOs. And then the same for every country on earth, the cost of lobbying and those fixed markets to us ordinary consumers is immense. If you want a campaign that will really change the world - put an end to rent-seeking driven by the lobby and by the avarice, the ignorance of politicians.

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An Evil Marketer comments on data analytics in political campaigning

Back in the 1970s a man called Richard Webber was working at the UK government's centre for Environmental Studies. This, more or less, was what he was doing:

I created Acorn, the first neighbourhood classification system, while working at the government's Centre for Environmental Studies in the 1970s.

People ask how it came to be a commercial application. I had organised a seminar for local authorities to show how neighbourhood data could identify areas of deprivation. Quite by chance, it attracted Ken Baker, a sampling specialist from BMRB. He was a lateral thinker and he came up with the idea that the Acorn tool would be useful for market research sampling.

I meanwhile had realised that Acorn could help predict the households most likely to respond to direct mail and door drops.

Without wanting to come over all geeky, Webber had used census data combined with the electoral register to create a classification of small neighbourhoods (based on census enumeration districts, the base geography for the national census). The principle of Webber's classification is essentially that 'birds of a feather flock together' - people in Manchester who have the same census characteristics as people in Bristol will tend to have other similar behavioural characteristics including, of course, purchasing preferences.

I know you're asking what all this has to do with Brexit (or indeed voting in general). The thing is that, as well as Webber's classification of residential neighbourhoods capturing similarities in terms of how people might respond to different marketing offers, the system also applies to the matter of how we vote. If the 'birds of a feather' principle is correct then similar areas will have similar voting behaviour.

By the end of the 1980s, we were using geodemographics (as Webber's system became known) to combine with proprietary data on customers to refine the targeting of direct marketing campaign, to improve the selection of retail sites and to manage advertising better. Without wanting to overcomplicate, customer address data was given an ACORN code and then profiled using initially a simple index (where 100 = National Average). The indices were reported at the level of postal sector (i.e. BD11 2 or ME2 7) as these were large enough to give the index validity but small enough to facilitate fine grain targeting.

For a targeted doordrop we might then take the top 300 postal sectors and, through the Royal Mail, purchase a delivery of unaddressed mail. Typically, results showed an uplift in response of 2x or 3x depending on the client. Results were less good for targeted direct mail using the electoral register - mostly because a key behavioural characteristic, responsiveness, was not captured in census data. We played other games using expert systems and the early days of data-mining too - it was just a lot slower back then!


The generation of geodemographic systems that followed the original census-based ACORN system (e.g. SuperProfiles, MOSAIC) began to add in other large data sources such as credit data and 'psychographic' survey data - some may recall the retailed questionnaires incentivised with free prize draws that collected this information. Targeting extended beyond shared residential characteristics to details about financial services, indebtedness and preferences around holidays, cars, fmcg products and lifestyle choices (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, political parties began to make use of these systems to improve the targeting of election campaigning especially in areas where they lacked good quality 'voting intention' (VI) data. The same essential methodology was used as that I was using for mail order and financial services companies - a database of VI details was profiles against MOSAIC to provide improved campaign targeting in places with no canvass. This might be used on a national basis to decide which local council by-elections to target or at the constituency level to improve the effectiveness of limited resources thereby allowing the broadening of target seat campaigns.

Which I guess brings us to this conclusion from an article about a marketing analytics business who may or may not have been active during the recent EU Referendum:

Is it the case that our elections will increasingly be decided by the whims of billionaires, operating in the shadows, behind the scenes, using their fortunes to decide our fate?

To appreciate why this is unlikely, we need to go back to how marketing analytics work, which is at the aggregate level. I appreciate, as a marketing professional, how we all want to believe advertising has become like the opening scenes in Minority Report but the reality is that aggregate data really doesn't provide the means to manipulate what we think. Rather, geodemographics, psychographics and marketing analytics enable us marketers to better target those people who are already predisposed to buy our product (or vote for our cause).

The big change from the stuff we were doing with mag tapes and mainframe computers in 1989 is the availability of information from social media (most usually Facebook). Again this is aggregate data - Facebook doesn't sell your details to marketing analytics businesses - but the sophistication of the data makes the targeting of messages all the more precise as does the ability to analyse public profiles without Facebook's permission. But even with this level of analysis, we still haven't 'manipulated' your opinion merely targeted our message more precisely to people more likely to respond positively to that message.

We are right to express concerns about whether the use of analytics has crossed over into misuse of personal data and it appears the UK's Information Commissioner is doing just that. But the likely truth (given it is not in Facebook's interest to share personal data and this is illegal in the EU) is that analytics companies are simply doing just what we were doing as direct marketers 30 years ago - using information to target our messages a little better. Back then it was all seen as a bit sinister ('where did you get my name from...') and nothing has changed except that there's more information, faster computers and social media. You can always find a computing academic (note, not a marketer) do do the full on evil empire stuff:

A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel, and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”

The truth is a deal more prosaic. Marketers ask customers about their lives, social media use and so forth then profile this against aggregate data from various sources to produce targeting information - where geographically or behaviourally we can go looking for folk like those customers we've surveyed. I so want us marketers and ad men to be master manipulators, able to switch your mind at the push of an analytical button or the twitch of an algorhithm. But we're not like that at all, we're not even that good at using big data.

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Why Remain lost (more evidence of bad marketing)

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Politico has done a long interview - really a cobbling together of three interviews - with Craig Oliver who, we're told, ran the 'Stronger In' campaign having previously between the PM's communications guru. Oliver's background is as a TV producer - reports tell us a very good TV producer - which, unless my education is wrong, isn't a professional marketing role. And, it's true that while Oliver did some good (well sort of) stuff getting the then PM on the telly this is a long way removed from running a comprehensive marketing campaign - which is what Remain needed.

How completely separated Oliver is from any understanding of marketing is shown in this paragraph:

That week, one of Oliver’s trump cards had flopped. A senior MP, Sarah Wollaston, had defected from the Leave camp because of its dubious claim that leaving the EU would save £350 million a week that could be spent on the NHS. He had given the story to the Times, thinking it would lead their front page, but instead they buried it and splashed on a wealthy Tory donor endorsing Brexit (even though the Times ultimately endorsed Remain).

So someone who nobody outside Oliver's bubble knew existed 'defecting' was a 'trump card'? As if Mrs Smith on Branksholme estate in Hull knew or cared. If Oliver had been running a decent campaign, he'd have known what the problem was, known why Remain weren't getting traction with undecided voters (let alone shifting wobbly Leave voters). The Politico piece sets out how wrong:

Remainers came across as “too mean,” an adviser to the Leave campaign told me later. The clips just played to Leave’s argument that Remain was trying to keep voters scared.

The core of Oliver's campaign - a media war - wasn't working and all people like Oliver and Will Straw (another marketing know-nothing who ran Stronger In) could do was what they knew: more media, more attacks, more clips on the evening news.

It's clear from the interview that Oliver isn't about to admit to error and is writing a book - presumably 80,000 words of self-justification over the disaster of the campaign to remain in the EU.

When people look at the Leave campaign they focus on the divisions (Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Grassroots Out) and the clunky media campaign filled with faux pas and dominated by defensiveness over a factual error they'd committed to at the start of the campaign - the £350m claim. But Leave got something else right - it got its message through to two important targets: non- or occasional voters, and voters who hadn't decided.

What we see from Oliver is complacency and a failure to realise that referendum campaigns are not like general elections. The latter are driven as much by personality - could you see Ed Miliband waving in front of Downing Street - as by policy. Referendums aren't, they're driven by policy and what people see as policy - by trying to turn the campaign into an attack on Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Craig Oliver and his team completely misread how people respond when asked a policy question.

In the end there were lots of reasons for Remain throwing away its advantage but it seems to me that the biggest reason was that the campaign not only lacked a marketing strategy worth the name but was led by people who wouldn't recognise marketing if it danced before them in a tutu.

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More on why Remain lost (clue - it wasn't the media)

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It had seemed that we were getting to grips with the reasons behind the Brexit vote. Once we'd got over the cries of pain and anguish from disappointed Remain supporters, a narrative began to emerge. This narrative took us beyond the simplistic line of 'it was immigration that won it for Leave' to some more sophisticated assessments of voting patterns and behaviours. Added to this were appraisals - from outside and inside the two campaigns - of the marketing strategies and tactics used to promote Leave or Remain.

Broadly the reasons underlying the Leave vote began to crystalise - a lack of trust in authority, a conviction that Leave offered control and using a referendum vote to kick out at a system that served too many people poorly. Plus, of course (and this is still the most significant factor in Brexit), people wanted the UK to leave the European Union.

Alongside these reasons sits the failures of the Remain campaign - from tactical incompetence through to a strategy founded on the assumption that voters would trust 'experts', from whatever field, who advised to vote Remain. All this plus a torrent of scare stories that didn't work because the target voters simply didn't trust the messengers.

It seems, however, that we're not quite out of the woods and the discredited narrative of dumb leave voters not listening to 'experts' remains. We need to stress again that this narrative - like the narrative of old vs young - doesn't fit the facts regardless of how much people want it to. All it does it fit perceptions of those leave voters and act as wish-fulfilment for some (fortunately a declining few) looking back at the referendum.

Here is a particularly bad example of this wish-fulfilment from economist, John Van Reenan:

There are many other notable features of the Brexit vote – including the fact that Remain had a voting majority for those under 50 years of age and also in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is shocking that a constitutional rupture can be made based on 37 per cent of the eligible voters. We take decades debating and prevaricating on major infrastructure projects like Heathrow and Hinkley Point, yet are prepared to gamble with something even more important for our futures on a simple one-off in-out referendum.

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation. The only question is which other countries will now be swept along in this poisonous flood.

This screech of pain - rejecting democratic choice, conflating constitution with infrastructure investment and invoking Godwin's Law - builds on the only substantive point in Van Reenan's article, the role of the media. Like so many, Van Reenan falls for the simple belief that, in some way, it was the media that won it for Leave.

The problem is that there's little solid evidence to support the 'it was The Sun wot won it' line - that the media (keen to maintain perceptions of power) is central to the outcomes of political campaigning. Too few understand how the media influences our behaviour just as too few are able to appreciate how advertising doesn't increase aggregate demand. And we have seen a shift in media consumption with newspaper readership declining sharply and people relying on broadcast and online sources. Yet the sinister influence of newspapers is still stressed:

Most of the British press has been unrelentingly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant for decades. This built to a crescendo during the Brexit campaign with the most popular dailies like the Sun, Mail and Express little more than the propaganda arm of the Leave campaign.

Now this is simply a statement - Van Reenan doesn't present any evidence to support his contention and I'm guessing wasn't a regular reader of the three publications he accuses of bias (worth noting here that the Mail on Sunday supported Remain which doesn't fit his narrative well). Instead, Van Reenan attacks the BBC for doing its job - set out very clearly in the law - of providing balanced reportage during election campaigns. Even worse, we're told that the BBC - and I guess other broadcasters governed by balance and impartiality regulations - should abandon this because of an opinion poll, not a very good one, of economists.

Amidst all this, we should recall that during the referendum campaign, Leave advocates criticised the BBC (and other broadcasters like Sky News) for favouring arguments to Remain. You really can't win this one and the broadcasters will be quite happy to get flak from both sides in the referendum.

This isn't to say that media is unimportant - the public consistently tell pollsters that they trust broadcast media so what they say (or don't say) matters. But structured communications are only a part of any political campaign, the other part of campaigns - sometimes called, with that love of military metaphor so common to politics, the ground war - is just as important to the outcome. And it works like this:

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.

It was here that Remain performed badly. The reason why working-class voters tumbled out from council estates to vote Leave was more about word of mouth than mass media - conversations in hairdressers, in the pub, at work, at the garden gate, with family. Voting Leave was valorised - reinforced and confirmed by people's daily conversation. The failure of the Remain campaign was to rely on mainstream media to feed this conversation whereas Leave fed enough information to activists to provide a drip-drip of arguments, refutations, reinforcements and messages into those community conversations.

It is dispiriting that people in influential positions misunderstand communications so much - Remain felt position and authority were enough to get the campaign over the line and ignored the importance of trust and brand equity. And - if Van Reenan's article is anything to go by - some Remain supporters are still looking for others to blame rather than the abject failings of their own campaign. Saying it was the media simply doesn't wash.

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Why Remain lost (redux)

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Can I start firstly by saying this is a marketing view not a political one (although inevitably there'll be some politics). And secondly that Remain lost the referendum, Leave didn't win it. The campaign to stay in the European Union went from a secure opinion poll lead at the start of 2016 to losing the referendum six months later. At the outset of the campaign - which really started back in January not at the official campaign launch - Remain (or Stronger In) held all the cards. The campaign could count on the support of the three mainstream party leaders, most of the established names in politics, business, academia and science. Plus a reliable stream of celebrities happy to smile at the camera and proclaim "Stronger In".

The 'Stronger In' message - immigration aside - should also have been a winner. Thousands of foot soldiers to be recruited from the direct beneficiaries of EU members, from organisations receiving grants, from the ranks of universities. Big business, local government and the 'third sector' could be relied on to do the right thing in getting that message across.

So what went wrong? Well before some analysis from cleverer marketers than me, I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes (or qualitative analysis if you prefer).

Here in Cullingworth, the Village Hall decided to hold a referendum debate - they'd sounded out some folk in the village who all seemed keen and got a time and date (the venue, of course, would be the hall). A call to the local MP provided a Leave speaker pretty quickly and the Hall then contacted Stronger In - firing an email off to the address on that organisation's website. Nothing. No response at all. The good folk from the Hall chased - still nothing. I messaged the chief executive of the campaign, the Stronger In press office and another In twitter account. No response. Eventually, on the eve of the event, we got a limp phone message: "have you got a speaker?"

As it happened, other avenues had got us a speaker (thank you to Richard Corbett MEP for stepping up). But had we not used those avenues the event wouldn't have happened. The Stronger In campaign had failed at the very first hurdle of any campaign - not responding to enquiries. And, while Will Straw and the Stronger In press office were having a fun spat on Twitter with the much better organised (if smaller and poorer) Leave campaign, they also failed to respond to a request - from a non-partisan organisation - for campaign help.

The second anecdote is about public perception of what the vote was about. I'm sat in the sitting room of some local members - we were actually there to talk about the May local elections - and the referendum, perhaps inevitably, came up. Now these members are both elderly - 70s maybe even 80s - and they spoke about their doubts. Not selfishly but from the perspective of their children and grandchildren - "this is about twenty, thirty, forty years in the future - what sort of Britain we want for them" was the driver of their doubt. Now I don't know how this couple voted but I do know that the Stronger In campaign completely missed their perspective - the public campaign (where it was coherent) was entirely about the next few years.

I picked up this time perception time and time again but the Remain campaign stayed trapped in its short-termism - there was no message that answered my members' question: "what would a Stronger In Britain be like in twenty, thirty or forty years". Other than a sort of grandfatherly (at best) "it won't be good, you know - I wouldn't do it". And this short-termism continues after the Brexit vote - West Yorkshire Combined Authority in a report on 'Brexit implications' described 'long term' as 2017-2018.

I commented before on how the advertising folk - and Remain had access to all the top agencies, a deep well of marketing knowledge - saw the campaign as a shambles, without any positive message and focused more on personalities than on that message. Well here's another comment - focused more on tactical communications issues - from Mike Hind:

It was almost as if Remain actively wanted to exclude you if you read the Daily Express. Tepid offerings of business information and hesitant requests to support them if you’d “like to” hardly spoke of a passion to mobilise people who are generally more turned on by a direct call to arms. It didn’t work for me — and I was a financial contributor to the campaign. A despairing one.

Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.

As I started out saying - Stronger In, or Remain, began the campaign with all the advantages, all the expertise and the basis of an effective organisation. And blew it. On the evening of polling day - a few minutes after the polls had shut, the BBC interviewed Ed Miliband. It doesn't matter what the MP for Doncaster North said in the interview, it matters where it was conducted - from London. Miliband wasn't where he would have been most effective - in his constituency where he's known, influential and probably liked.

The problem now is that those who campaigned to remain a member of the EU are compounding their error. They're still preferring to paint Leave voters as thick, ill-educated, oafish bigots rather than begin the job of listening to those people. Analyses of voting that confirm this view are shared. Bad news of any sort is leapt on and spread around - whether its reports of xenophobic attacks (do note that West Yorkshire police say there's no post-referendum increase in such attacks) or some snippet of economic news, mostly opinion or anecdote, that confirms the Remain campaign's predictions of short-term doom and gloom.

Right now there's a peace to win. And it won't be won by portraying half the nation as stupid, bigoted, ignorant and selfish. It will be won by presenting the case most of us support - Britain as an outward-looking, co-operative, creative nation that's up for trade, intellectual exchange and, yes, sensibly managed immigration.

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Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

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Some stuff to read....on peer review, marketing, witches, school dinners, parks, Africa and Uber

My choice for World Book Day

Worth it just for the title alone - an interesting and depressing read about peer review and the fixing of academe:

In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

Marketing as engineering - pretty interesting even though I don't really get the argument. Certainly makes you think (apologies for the presentation behind that link - ad agencies, pah!)

So how do we re-engineer corporations so they are able to thrive? I think we need engineering thinking. Engineering is defined as ‘the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes’. It has been applied in many different areas leading to different types of engineering - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical... I think we have a new one to add to the list and that’s digital engineering.

Do you believe in witches - how it has to be someone's fault...

Meanwhile, the sciences of human behavior have not been so successful. True, many scholars now understand that social phenomena such as prices are, in Adam Ferguson’s words, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” But many ordinary humans still think that prices (and immigration, and drug use, and practically all other social phenomena) arise directly from the actions of capitalists or legislators, and thus that the ill will or goodwill of such people shapes the world directly.

How Jamie Oliver made school dinners worse:

Today, I watch my students play with tiny bowls of sugar-free jelly and fruit salad. I’m all in favour of five a day but those who deem banana and pear to be an enjoyable dessert for a 10-year-old need their head examined.

A traveller's case for Uber:

These scams all have to do with one of three things: the choice of the route, the setting of the fare, and the exchange of money. When I use Uber, all three of these issues are solved, utterly. Firstly, Uber’s satnav/GPS system tells the driver what route to take, and I as a passenger am shown the route on a map. If the driver diverts too far from that route without a good reason, I make a simple complaint, my money is refunded to me, the driver suffers reputational damage, and he does not get paid. The fare is decided by a third party (whose terms and conditions the driver has agreed to) and quoted to me in advance, either as a flat amount or a fare per mile. The “meter” is controlled by that third party, and cannot be rigged. And I pay the money to a third party, and the money is essentially held in escrow until I have completed my journey and have said I am happy with it. The driver knows he gets paid if he does his job properly, and I know that there will be no attempt to scam me over money. Because I know he is not going to scam me and he knows I am not going to scam him (and anyway, because there is recourse if one of us does) there is no reason for us to not trust one another, and we are therefore invariably polite and friendly to each other. Which makes my day nicer, and very likely his also.

All a bit boilerplate and local government speak but still any creative thinking about parks is welcome:

Accurate financial data and park user insights, working with partners who bring new skills, resources and ideas, and providing space to quickly test ideas are all necessary to find out what mix of management practices and revenue opportunities are best able to sustain their park.

There's much that's not right about Singapore but no-one can deny its success.

The year of independence was 1965. It was the ninth day of August. In a national broadcast, a tearful Lee announced the separation between Malaysia and Singapore: “The whole of my adult life… I have believed in Malaysia, in merger and the unity of these two characters, you know, it’s a people connected by geography, economics and ties of kinship.”

Want a reason to leave the EU? Forget migration - focus on the damage it does to Africa:

There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences.

African leaders would like to escape the colonial trap of being viewed simply as raw material exporters. But their efforts to add value to the materials continue to be frustrated by existing EU policies.

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