The Drip Edition 13

Sjoe. What a week. (have I said this every week for the past two months?)

Well, it was.

It’s now Monday morning and I am frantically trying to finish this, after getting about 98% of the way there last night.

I spent the week last week writing case studies for an RFI (request for information), trying to mine our Dropbox folders and gather data and results for campaigns across the business. For those of you who don’t know, RFI’s are requests from corporates for submission of services from an agency, and are generally precursors to pitches, used by corporates to weed out the agencies they don’t think will fit their business, and prevent agencies from investing overly in a creative pitch.

There are also RFPs, which require an actual creative pitch as well. Often, yuo simply don’t know the scale of the submission. Some of them are one pagers, and others (like the two I am currently working on) require days and days of work.

What a wild ride. I went deep into the Dropbox folders, called everybody in our business to mine their memories of campaigns they’ve worked on, across every division, and back into old reports to pull all the results together. I feel like Sherlock Holmes.

What I have learned from this process is that we as a business have worked on some incredibly powerful, successful and exciting campaigns – we just are not great at talking about them! I struggled to pick from the volume of case studies to select the best ones, because there were actually so many wonderful examples of campaigns across the business. It was truly inspiring, and I hope to take you through them all soon.

But that’s for another time.

For now you can look forward to some exciting articles to get those little grey cells working.

One of my absolute favourite finds this week has been the Business Insights blog, which is a behavioural economics blog dedicated to unpacking case studies of projects that aim to use behavioural insights to enact organizational change.

Other things you can look forward to seeing this week: a report on social and digital trends to watch out for in 2020; habits that kill your dreams; how to become more minimalist and happier; updates to photoshop and illustrator that are making all the designers ludicrously happy; and then MORE on behaviour science.

And so – as they say in show business – on with the show.

9 Ways to Become Unsatisfied In Life

I do a lot of reading on the topics of self-improvement, creating your destiny, increasing productivity, journaling and anything else that can help me with my career and personal growth.

Part of this is looking at areas which may be holding you back from growth. Daniel Kahneman’s research on happiness is a wonderful insight into the science and human experience of happiness – both our lived experience, and the remembered experience (two different things). You can watch the Ted Talk here. He talks about how some people are happier than others, and how we process happiness and see happiness in our lives.

This blog post talks about how we can become more satisfied with life through looking at the areas in our lives that might be making us less satisfied.

Speaking of being more satisfied, there are also a few things that you can do to prevent squashing your own dreams.
The author covers topics like hiding your true self; trying to be someone else; listening to the voice of doubt in our heads, which can cause self-doubt, and how to rather listen to others and get a realistic view of what is actually happening by seeking unbiased feedback for your work; accepting change in your work life and not fighting against I; letting go of the notion of perfectionism and managing your attention properly.

It also explores seeking support for areas where you are not as talented as you would like to be. Support from others who know more and can assist you can be a great way to learn, grow and be better.

Social Media Trends 2020

Read this thoroughly researched report on social trends for 2020. I always find these things a little trite, as they are under-researched, regurgitated drivel written by social media teams that simply rehash other people’s thoughts. But this has the thoughts of a bunch of advertising heavy-weights, and for the most part is really interesting.

150%;”>Download the full report here

Some of the insights below:

The launch of new social channel like Tik Tok are the next generation of social media. Tik Tok already has over 500 million monthly active users, and honestly I feel old. I still can’t quite figure out what it is, but from what Bryce has told me (my source of all things cool and youth-oriented),it seems quite an innocent platform used for sharing short form video content, with a slant towards lip-syncing and I don’t get it.

Social media wellness and unplugging – youth audiences now expect that brands become more mindful of how they use and should social media, encouraging people to switch off as well as plug in, asking them to remain mindful of their mental health..

AR and VR will be used effectively. There is a great example of a campaign by German Rail, which used AR to find local destinations which looked similar to popular global destinations, encouraging people to travel locally.

Gen Z will only engage if you pivot your strategy – brands need tone seen to take risks; change with them; social-lead marketing and voice search will dominate.

Micro-influencers – go small to go big. How this is only now a trend is beyond me. We’ve been talking about this since 2015, but I suppose it is still a trend, and brands are only learning now that niche, smaller influencers are better at engaging audiences than big celeb-style influencers.

Adobe Updates – Creative Cloud 2020 is Here 

Designers, animators, creatives… strap in.Adobe has made updates, and (I gather from the reaction of the designers in our office last week) this is a big deal!

What’s new in Photoshop 2020

• Properties Panel with  repackaged top tasks into a central location
• Redesigned Preset Panels (although users can revert back to Legacy settings!
• Smart Object Convert to Layers
• Enhancements to Warp Transform
• Lens Blur addition
• Adjustment layers for curves and brightness/contrast for 32-bit images
• Consistent Transform Behavior
• Smart Object and Layer Comp Tracking

Bryce and Juanita’s favourite update: the delete background / magic wand tool has had a major update, which means it actually works now! No more hours of gruelling deep-etching, but rather some simple refinement. Brilliant!

Photoshop for iPad has also launched, which is exciting for people who want to design using an iPad? (I don’t know how fast current iPads are, but that seems like it will be an incredibly frustrating process)

How Behaviour Science Can Make Better Managers

66% of American workers have checked out of their jobs.

66%!!!

I rearely use more than one exclamation point, but this warrants it. Guys, that is nuts.

The answer to engaging employees goes far beyond more money; bonus payments; job flexibility and whatever else.

It sits in transformational leadership. As a manager, I have often felt like an impostor. I’ve been managing people since incredibly early in my career, and always felt as though I lacked the proper skills and ability. Apparently your effective manager can make employees more motivated and productive, and instill pride, challenge ideas, communicating optimism about future goals, and allow employees to think outside the box.

How?

Be prepared:If a manager is unprepared, this will lead to employees feeling directionless. Hiring managers need training on effective leadership.

Create engaged workers through transformational leadership. This happens through empowewring employees, giving them, the tools they need to be effective.

The article is a great read,so do yourself a favour.

insights blog

This is a haven for anyone interested in why consumers and citizens make the decisions they do, looking at irrationality as a driver, heuristics, biases and insights and then using nudging behaviour to create change, without deep significant price dips or the stick and carrot approach. Rather, it aims to make simple changes to design and copy, and the way we communicate, in order to nudge people to make a shift in behaviour.

There are Case studies across industries, and I found them incredibly insightful and inspiring. 

The one I found most intriguing was when they worked with an organization to reduce sexual harassment at universities through social norm majority theory.

The team partnered with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation ;in Australia, and with two local universities, and looked at the fact that most people want to do something to stop sexual harassment, but often don’t want to get involved. Only 20% of bystanders will step in. They tested five behaviourally-driven informed emails to staff and students.

Recipients either saw a ‘majority norm’ message, for example: “Most of us studying on campus think it’s right to call someone out for making sexist jokes or comments … And 78% said they themselves would intervene if they saw sexism and sexual harassment on campus”, or a ‘minority norm’ message, for example: “Most of us studying on campus think it’s right to call someone out for making sexist jokes or comments … But only 46% of us actually do”.

This was then compared to a control group. The results showed that people who received the majority norms email were more likely to take action.

Rates of active bystanding after witnessing sexual harassment in previous 8 weeks:

Read more here.

And that is that!

Please don’t @ me, I’ll be busy working on another pitch this week.

So long, farewell, etc…