The recruitment of staff to MediaCityUK continues to rumble on in the news, specifically the split between local and non-local results.

The Guardian continues the story, although without much conviction.

I think it comes down to this. The best outcome for Salford is that MediaCity is a roaring success and achieves all it can do to be a magnet for world class companies.

That can only happen if world class talent is attracted to work there and it is obvious that the talent pool in Salford or even Greater Manchester does not possess some magical and unique qualities that have hitherto been invisible to everyone, the workforce included.

Elements of the media would love to write ‘told you so’ headlines about the failure of the BBC’s Salford experiment, based on the idea that you can only be brilliant if you live and work in London.

Those headlines are going to be a lot harder to write a) if the quality of programmes improves and b) a lot of the ones making the programmes are recognisably the ones who used to make the programmes in White City or Broadcasting House.

I have written before that the real challenge for the BBC will come about three to four years after the BBC is really up and running, when the initial wave of talent, decides to move on to new jobs.

If by then the skills pool in Greater Manchester cannot meet demand then the BBC MediaCity experiment will face some bigger headlines.

I was amongst the remarkably thin audience at Manchester’s Cornerhouse last night to hear Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital speak about entrepreneurship and innovation.

If there were 40 people in the room I’d be surprised and it’s hard to gloss over the fact that this reflects badly on the city when you consider that Julie is a genuinely significant figure in this field.

She was the founder of the hugely influential First Tuesday and a major investor in some ground-breaking businesses (Skype being one) as well as having a high profile through Dragon’s Den and appearances on Newsnight.

Why wasn’t the room packed to the rafters? Is Manchester’s start-up scene so stunted?

Much of what Julie said can be gleaned from her speech at TEDx and you can find out more from her new initiative Entrepreneur Country.

But what of Manchester’s start-up community?

I have been hovering in and around it for some months doing some research and development on business idea that hopefully will see some progress soon. If only I could find a developer to build the prototype….

My experience certainly echoes one of Julie’s themes that finance and technology have to work in harmony towards a business goal not with one being the means to get to the other.

But I worry that the two mind sets are quite far apart.

From a technology perspective developers are in short supply and highly variable in their approach to business development.  They are also very difficult to track down.

From a finance perspective I am sure that there are plenty of people drifting around with fag packet plans asking people to do development work on a purely speculative basis and there is the problem of how a non-developer adequately briefs and project manages a developer, something I admit to struggling with.

How many good ideas that might turn into real businesses go nowhere because the two can’t find a way to overcome that initial risk barrier?

There is a need for a regular forum where developers can meet entrepreneurs in an informal setting but with a commercial agenda, where the entrepreneurs have to come with a clear business plan and some money on the table but the developers have to commit to meeting deadlines and being responsive.

Maybe what we need is a new version of First Tuesday, not for entrepreneurs to meet VCs, but to get developers and entrepreneurs talking the same language.

Julie, do you fancy coming back to Manchester?

Who’d have expected Richard Desmond to say the most interesting, the most fundamental thing so far at the Leveson Inquiry?

What he said was utterly simple: big stories do nothing for circulation and circulation does nothing for the bottom line.

Strip away the sound and fury of everything that has gone before, the despair of the Dowlers, the comic book Paul McMullan, the idea of Hugh Grant as moral crusader and you are left with the question: What is it all for?

The horrors of some tabloid journalism have been defended as the noble pursuit of ‘the story’ even when the contentious line between ‘public interest’ and ‘prurient interest’ is not so much crossed as being where the reporter takes his marks and waits for the starting pistol.

Even major stories like the MPs expenses scandal have only a small and temporary effect on circulations.

So if muck-raking is not making money for the publisher and it’s not in the public interest and it’s clearly not in the subject’s interest, then who benefits?

The only ones left at the table are the journalist and his or her editor.

Can it really be all about an inverted vanity to win a race to the bottom (sometimes literally so)?

If there is no relationship between the front page splash and the circulation then the newspapers’ fears over regulation are considerably less valid than some of them make out (because regulation doesn’t threaten sales) and the assymetry between a regulated press and an unregulated internet less pronounced.

Put another way, if muck-raking doesn’t prompt sales it follows that the appetite for this material, even when it’s free on Twitter, cannot be infinite and is in any case fuelled by the headline in the first case. The crystal clear example of that is Ryan Giggs.  Would his name have been tweeted a million times if the story hadn’t already been running in the papers?

Twitter breaks real news but does it break tittle tattle? No, how can it? If I see a married footballer with his arm round someone I believe to be a coked-up hooker then it’s going to take a lot of luck for that to go truly viral unless it’s picked up early on by a newspaper and then we’re back to square one.

Leveson has got a tough job on his hands because whatever form of regulation comes out of it will be howled down by a press which seems to be in that most dangerous place, of believing its own PR that this stuff (the content likely to be regulated) matters to anyone outside the newsroom and it must be protected.

Good luck to Leveson and good luck to all the journalists doing good work that is actually valued and appreciated by their readers as worth coming back for more. That is what keeps the advertisers happy and everyone in jobs.  I hope you are not drowned out by some of the prima donnas we have seen take the stand, who it is now obvious, are living in the past.

What Can Traffic Engineering Teach Marketing?

We have all experienced it. You approach a big traffic junction and the lights turn red.

You sit there for a few minutes, experiencing perhaps resignation, perhaps frustration depending on how late you are.

Or, you approach the junction and realise that the lights are out. You experience very different feelings. Your attention levels soar, you need your wits about and you feel a small feeling of triumph as you sail through, almost certainly quicker than if the lights had been working properly.

There is something less obvious at work here too.

A normally functioning junction is a colossal waste of resource. Only half the road is ever in use. Time is wasted, fuel is burnt uselessly as cars brake and sit there idling.

I began to think about this as a metaphor for marketing during a radio documentary last week on the concept of shared space in traffic management, where boundaries between vehicles and pedestrians are blurred by taking out kerbs and road markings and signs.

In one startling example in the Netherlands, the fence around a primary school had been taken down and the playground extended across the road that ran alongside it.

Imagine pitching that idea to the parents.

This is radical thinking but it works. Motorists reduce their speed because the perceived risk level goes up and they start to make eye contact with other drivers, pedestrians start to be more aware of their surroundings and both types of road user share their responsibilities.

Radical, yes but also utterly simple. It stops treating road users like imbeciles and embraces how humans respond to risk.

This kind of thinking has been around for a few years now but it is still very much a rarity because it is strongly counter-intuitive to the idea that pedestrians and motorists must be kept as separate species.

Nobody has proven that separation is the best way to do it, but it is heresy to suggest otherwise.

The analogy with marketing is obvious.

Businesses intuitively believe that inputs must have outputs, that there is a rational relationship between action and reaction, because we are conditioned to value rational behaviour in a business situation.

I have written before about the brilliant insight of Doc Searls who encapsulated decades of marketing wrong-headedness in a single tweet.

He asked: “If you ‘track’, ‘capture’ ‘drive’ and ‘lock in’ customers that you ‘own’ and ‘manage’, of what business are you speaking?”

The answer is of course, slavery and I’m sure everyone reading this has used at least one of those terms in the last month in relation to what you are trying to achieve from a campaign.

Everyone will agree that slavery is appalling but this is unconscious segregation of people into binary types – customer/non-customer behaviours and with it, an expectation that they will comply.

What the traffic engineers realised is that humans are hard-wired to embrace risk, because risk is associated with discovery and reward. Therefore humans will keep adding to risk until they are happy, in other words they will continue to drive ever more recklessly until they reach the level they are happy with. It’s why people speed up between speed bumps, even though they know it doesn’t make sense.

The response of traffic engineers is ever more control, regulation and boxing in and the response of drivers is ever more counter-productive ways of driving which actually brings with it unintended and uncontrolled risk.

For marketers, this has become the expectation that if I spend money doing something I expect a predictable, measurable reaction from customers when all the evidence is that this is exceedingly difficult to prove.

A more enlightened approach might be to ask, ‘what if we stopped trying to push people into doing something and shared the risk?’

Co-creation with customers is the ideal when you have a long term relationship with them, but what if you’re pushing frozen peas?

It can work in FMCG, just ask Coke who after some initial hesitancy about the college craze for adding Mentos to Diet Coke with explosive effects overcame what they saw as disrespect to the brand and began to embrace this.

By saying ‘OK, your game, your rules’ Coke became relevant to people in new ways as the craze grew.

It works just as well in perhaps the polar opposite to a consumer brand, nuclear waste.

Long before the advent of social media I handled the communications around the decommissioning of the Windscale nuclear reactor, possibly the most contentious nuclear site in the UK.

A major part of the programme was to move huge radioactive loads along public roads, effectively cutting off villages close to the site for long periods and in some instances having a 200 tonne piece of nuclear hardware go within a metre of your door.

We did all the usual things – ads in the local paper, press briefings, public meetings and so on. Today we’d have had a Facebook page, Twitter feed, Youtube Channel, the whole deal.

But none of it would have been any good if we hadn’t decided to share the risk with the community. The nuclear industry traditionally operates and communicates on the basis of D.A.D. – Decide, Announce, Defend.

We chose to be open, transparent and very flexible in our communications on a major engineering programme that was changing daily due to severe weather.

The most effective communication we had was to issue a daily bulletin every morning at 7.00am and put it in the shop windows of the local bakers, paper-shop and so on. In it we listed what we was happening that day and every comment we’d received on the phone the previous day and what we were going to do about it.

Mr Jones was worried about the road being closed when he needed to get to the dentist and could anyone offer him a lift and so on. Unsurprisingly someone offered to help Mr Jones and his fears were allayed.

Like the school in the Netherlands we tore down the fence and shared the space, not knowing what the reaction would be.

When we came to measure the communications campaign afterwards, approval ratings for the plant were at record highs (even though we had inconvenienced thousands of people over a long period) and the most popular form of communication was the photocopied leaflet, because the information had been shared within the community, peer to peer not via a formal medium like an ad.

The temptation when designing a communications plan is to be seduced by talk of ‘hard measures’ and ROI, when the real solution is the more subtle consideration of how can you share risk?

I have argued before that marketers need to understand and embrace the language of risk, but I didn’t expect a discussion of roundabouts and traffic lights to make the point so clearly.

The Bell Pottinger Problem is Everyone’s Problem.

The Evening Standard has just published a fascinating interview with Lord Bell who reveals a human, natural level of anger and frustration at the events which have engulfed Bell Pottinger this week.

It would be unwise of me to criticise or defend Bell Pottinger outright with the facts we have, but I have a strong feeling that the Independent is already over-egging the story, particularly in this morning’s edition.

I can’t imagine that the paper held back any comments today that would have shown Bell Pottinger in an even worse light, so we have to assume that what was quoted about child labour was as much of a ‘smoking gun’ as the Indy thought possible.

The fact is that Bell Pottinger’s advice seems to be, ‘first you need to change, then we can tell that story.’

You don’t have to be an expert to know that you can’t change a country’s laws and more importantly its customs overnight or even within a few years. Look around at your how problematic it already is for our lifestyles to adjust to the changes being imposed by austerity measures. The talk is of a lost decade, not a lost weekend.

It’s called realpolitik and as far as I know it isn’t the job of a PR/lobbying/public affairs company to hold a country to account even if they are advising them. That’s the job of NGOs, the FCO, the UN etc..

The question is how quickly change could be effected to know whether Bell Pottinger’s suggested timeframe was too easy, which might amount to simply talking a good job.

The problem is that what is ostensibly sound advice (at least in this instance, I make no comment about other campaigns) about communicating a change in behaviour rather than spinning a lie has been lost in the furore over the way in which this advice was delivered.

The claims about access and influence over ministers are at the very least unwise and possibly in breach of the PRCA’s code of conduct, something which their investigation will no doubt look at.

The problem revealed by the Bell Pottinger story affects everyone in the communication business, both buyers and sellers of services and lies with the way consultancies and clients conduct themselves during the briefing and pitching process.

The fact is that the right approach to this brief – if you change, we can tell the story to the right people – is that and no more.

It’s a simple, basic truth but how do you turn those few words into a powerful, persuasive pitch when you know that your competitors will be doing exactly the same thing and there’s a cool million on the table?

One way is to try to find ways to impress the prospect by elaborating and elevating the language for one thing. Every idea becomes a strategy (even when it’s a tactic) and every opinion former is ‘key’. Every journalist a ‘thought leader.’

And of course you suggest that you have greater insight or ability to influence than the next guy, even though there is no possible way of testing that. The only lever you can pull is not-so-subtle exaggeration.

The solution is a better, more open process of briefing a consultancy at the time of a pitch, because there is a direct correlation between the precision of a brief and the quantity of bullshit in the pitch.

In any context, the vaguer the question, the vaguer the response, the more reliant it has to be on nods, winks and personal chemistry (although that is very important) and the more tempting is the lever marked exaggeration. If nature abhors a vacuum, PR consultants really loathe one and will fill it with aspiration.

After all, the next pitch the client sees might have a slightly better quality of bullshit so there is value in  notching up your settings and before long you are promising the Earth and Vince Cable’s head on a plate.

If briefs specified exactly what outcomes the client desired, then the quality of response and the measurability of the campaign can only improve.

In that setting exaggeration, braggadocio or bullshit has less importance, less value.

Clients and consultancies continue to wrestle with how to measure a campaign. I suspect they are attempting what engineer’s call an end of pipe solution – fixing the problem at the outflow. More work at the briefing stage can only lead to better, agreed measures of success and almost undoubtedly a happier working relationship.

But all too often the briefing document if it exists at all is a triumph of cut and paste – different people from within the client organisation chip in their suggestions and the result is mission-creep before you’ve even started when what is need is the editor’s red pencil.

Better briefing won’t stop people believing their own PR and portraying themselves as supermen but it will make it harder for them to be tempted to do so and everyone will benefit.

The advertising industry has addressed this in the www.thegoodpitch.com initiative. The Bell Pottinger case demonstrates that there is huge potential value in PR and public affairs too.

What do you think?