Propagation Planning

Propagation Planning
Plan not for the people you reach but for the people they reach’ APG Speech by Ivan Pollard

The Bit At The Beginning
When I was lucky enough to get my first job in a great advertising agency, BMP, twenty years ago, I was introduced to the subtleties of media planning by a very smart, very drunk Irish man late one night when just the two of us were left at work.

‘Oivan,’ he said in his accent tinged in equal measure by the Blarney Stone and the Guinness, ‘What you have to understand is that media planning is just like sex. You take ages to prepare it, it is over in a hurry and you are left wondering which bits worked and which bits didn’t. You even have to ask yourself the same questions before you start. Who are you going to do it to? When, where and how are you going to do it? And, if you look anything like you, Oivan, you have to ask how much is it going to cost?’

I have held onto to that analogy (and overused that gag) throughout my whole time in planning. It has served me well. But I am now beginning to wonder if it is as apposite as it once was.

The flaw is that, quite understandably, in the late 1980s when the analogy was drawn, even the inimitable and charming Mr. Brown believed you could only have sex with one person at a time.

We were operating in an analogue age where the process of picking up communication and passing it on to your peers was a slow, uncontrolled and limited one. It revolved around the one-way presentation of a message that was picked up and promulgated over a pint, a garden fence or a school desk. Undoubtedly this was very powerful when it happened – remember The Humphreys? - but it didn’t happen all that often, it didn’t spread all that far and it didn’t get stronger as it travelled, it got weaker.

So in this environment, the Joy of Sex was a fair approximation of the media planner’s craft. Focus on the person you are trying to hit, hit them well, give them a good time and make sure they remember you. Do this in big enough numbers and you have a campaign. Don’t worry too much about what happens after that first hit once you have left the room.

All our planning, our models and our methodologies were based on that first contact, that primary connection, that initial hit. But that was then and this is now.

The world is always changing, that isn’t the interesting bit. What is interesting is the way that people are reacting to and embracing those changes. The new digital technologies are handing those people who want to use them power, speed, reach and scale like never before. Think of blogging, citizen journalism, the ‘snapperazzi’, user-generated content, web authoring and even home-made hit movies.

All of these things – and the others that are coming – are changing the game. And, unfortunately, they will change our model. The Sex Thing no longer works even in this age of swinging, dogging and ‘flesh mobs’. It is no longer just about the people we reach but about the people that they go on to reach as a result. This is increasingly evident when you think about the work beginning to be done on the relative impact of word-of-mouth vs. other means of communication (Starcom Mediavest, for example, as quoted in the FT, 19th June 06). Some studies are ranking the ‘wom effect’ as being ten times greater than that of a TV ad.

This is all well and good, but how do we plan for it? Is it just about using more digital media? And how do we use it to create more powerful campaigns?

By the way, as an aside, I wish we could all stop talking about digital as if it is another channel. ‘We could use TV, outdoor, editorial and digital’ makes about as much sense as saying ‘We could use a light, a cooker, a computer and electricity’. Digital is not a channel, it is an all pervading utility that gifts us and others new powers of action and thought. Let’s tidy this up. Maybe we can ‘go’ digital or analogue and ‘use’ TV or the Internet.

But back to the point about planning: First of all, planning for this change is easy in theory. We don’t just look at the aggregated ‘first contacts’ but try and account for the subsequent, collateral impressions and weight them appropriately. If we do this, we will have to think about three things.

•Firstly, the power of a particular channel to engage people.
•Secondly, the number of influential people that the channel reaches.
•And thirdly, the number of people they go on to reach in turn. In practice this is much more difficult, but you can see where it might lead you.

For example, imagine there is a certain audience that you are after and The Times delivers you 1,000 of them with an influence factor (i-factor) above your benchmark. At the same time, The Guardian delivers a paltry 300 of these people with an equally high i-factor. You would probably pay a lot more for The Times. But what if you then accounted for the extended audience? Let us say The Times has an extension factor (x-factor) of 1.5 but The Guardian has an x-factor of 7.5. That would mean The Times 1,000 go on to reach another 1,500 people (all with word of mouth power) but The Guardian 300 go on to reach another 2,250. So the extended audience scores are The Times = 2,500 and The Guardian = 2,550. Who would you pay more for now?
Actually turning this into a useful method for planning might be tricky for analogue media – but would be a fascinating challenge. It is much easier to see how we can do this for digital media

The second issue about how we exploit the effect is not so much about what we do with digital media but about what other people – those we call ‘consumers’ – choose to do with it.

You know the story about giving a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day or teach a man to fish and he will wipe out all the cod in the oceans? Well, we cannot be as vain as that. People don’t need us to teach them to fish – they are teaching themselves.

The power has shifted subtly but the effect of that subtle shift is enormous. We can no longer think about the people we want to talk with as ‘the target audience’. They have to be thought of as our partners in communication – not just partners in spreading the word but in modelling it, modifying it, creating it and producing it. We shouldn’t be frightened about that, we should embrace it.

We should give people tools, assets, help and permission to take our precious stuff and mash it up and start again. They should be able to do what they want with it and add their own spin to it. This is about planting the message or bits of the message in various places in such a way that people:

Pull the entire message or components of the message down
Play with the stuff we give them and get involved with it
Package it back up again in a way that reflects their take on it (even if it is just adding a comment)
Pass it on to people in their network or circle.

And in the process of doing this, the message gets stronger and more powerful as it moves on not weaker and more fragmented. There are already some smart people talking about this form of communication and are calling it Transmedia Planning (see http://farisyakob.typepad.com/ to read about it further). It kind of works like this:

Media Neutral Planning: Take the communications idea, marry it to the appropriate channels and then bring it to life in all the places that it needs to live.


Trans-media Planning: Plant some or all of the communications idea in the relevant places and prompt people to pick it up, play with it, package it up and pass it around their brand community.


This is a much more interesting model and one that is already being used (and has been for a while) by the big movie companies. Think of Trailer Trashing and movies like ‘Snakes on a Plane’. It is difficult to do because you have to give up absolute control of the creative work and be willing to collaborate with people who don’t live in London and don’t read Campaign – but it can be remarkably effective when you do let go and let them join in.

But the real play will be to combine this freeform approach to messaging with a more rigorous approach from media planning. Bring in the skills and the metrics to begin to plan for the ‘extended reach’ of the campaign, work on the new investment models and then blend in the shared creation of the message and we can get to somewhere really exciting. A smart chap at GNL, Steve Wing, gave me a good name for this –


Propagation Planning. To propagate means ‘to increase by natural process; to multiply; to pass on; to transmit’. Nice, I think. It does what it says on the tin.

The interesting bi-product of this approach is that it forces the planners, the creators, the buyers and the executors to all get back together again. It is a model that works best through collaboration – not only company to company but client to consumer.

Naked is already building the tools to combine with our creative thinking to make ‘Propagation Planning’ a powerful way of developing communication. And it is already being brought to bear, an example being the work just done with Sony Bravia. Note this is not Naked alone but a team consisting of great clients, Fallon, Freud, Tonic and OMD. Between us, we carefully planned, orchestrated and executed a campaign to do justice to the Bravia product and the Sony brand. And here’s how:

70,000 litres of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire

• June : news leaked to creative industry
• July : shoot in Glasgow with public allowed
• July +: nurturing of national PR
• July +: dedicated site Bravia-advert.com
• July +: assets (film, pictures, news, stories) released and freely ‘rippable’
• Oct 16: 70sec film launched online
• Oct 17: film launched in Champions League
• Sep+: In store support
• To date: over 2,800 blog mentions
• 4 UG edits already available on YouTube
• More, much more, to come …

Already, there are 113 separate uploads of the film onto YouTube; there are four remixes already posted; there have been 158,075 total views of the full ad to date just on YouTube. On the web, there are 135,000 mentions to date and there are 49,744 links to the Bravia-Advert site. Check this one out to see propagation in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X_vAzixa6s So it seems to be working. The message is spreading and being seen along with people’s comments and it has built and faded over time.
Bravia mentions by day.

So, the sex analogy for media planning no longer holds in a digital age. Maybe it will make a return some time in the future when shared sex will be all the vogue. You will be constantly plugged into your socio-sexual network so that when any one of you gets lucky, all the others share the same experience, the same thrill, the same excitement all at the same time. When that happens, when Propagation Planning is the norm, then I can use the ‘media planning is like sex’ gag again. And when that happens, can I be in Kirsten Dunst’s social network please?