Today, the colleagues from Saatchi & Saatchi Bulgaria put a huge smile on my face with something very creative and super-well targeted. For those of you who do not read Bulgarian, this is a mock news site which features one article about Saatchi & Saatchi Bulgaria winning 4 awards at the Cannes Lions Ad Festival. Loosely translated, the second paragraph of the story goes on to say that Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi’s Global Executive Director said that 2010 was as a whole a great year for the agency. He also acknowledged that a great contribution to the success of the Bulgarian branch was the enthusiastic Client Service Director who in only one year managed to greatly motivate the team.  The last paragraph invites you to e-mail your CV if you see yourself as the Client Service Director whom Kevin Roberts is thanking.

There is obviously no need to comment on the creative approach of the agency. A testament to the fact that the piece was very well targeted is the fact that most of the comments were along the lines of “You go guys, Bulgaria is proud of you” – people who are not in the profession and only read the first paragraph. There were very few comments which said “Whoa, what an awesome idea”, and my guess is, they were left by people who work in advertising and therefore cared to read the whole “article”.

Very simple, yet brilliant. Unfortunately I have to admit that this is an exception to the general picture of Bulgarian advertising. Most of the ads on our market are either incredibly poor locally done campaigns or badly adapted irrelevant foreign campaigns which just fail and lead to ridicule.

I’ve often wondered … Why are we less creative?

In March, I was in London and I couldn’t stop admiring the creative genius that governs their ad market. You can notice this about almost any other country out there if you flip through the archives of any given Ad Festival.

I have two theories to answer my question: one is that life in Bulgaria is simply not … interesting. I remember every single day of the 6 years I spent in Paris as I was leaving my place in the mornings, I wondered what surprise was out there for me today. And I was never disappointed. Same goes for London. My friend Maria who lives there now told me that one day, as she was coming back from work, suddenly all the lights on a street were dimmed and U2 appeared on a rooftop, performed 4 songs, and then disappeared and life went back to normal. Cool stuff like that simply does not happen in Bulgaria. At least not on a daily basis. Perhaps if it did, we would have more inspiration from the things that surround us, and we would be more bold and creative.

Another possible explanation lies in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: the fact that creativity is in the last tier of needs – after you’ve secured more basic things like … you know … food, a roof over your head, and employment. Unfortunately, Bulgaria is still a very poor country and most of people’s creativity is channeled towards basic survival.

This question has been bothering me for a while. We Bulgarians are really fun and interesting people (no bias here whatsoever). But why do our colleagues abroad come up with better, cooler, braver ideas?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

At the last Marketing Innovation Forum Martin Lindstrom talked about knowing your audience and making ads they will relate to. Now I know this sounds like the usual ad seminar babble, however, he gave specific examples. One of them was toothpaste ads that feature people brushing their teeth in the shower. Turns out only 4% of the people in the world do that (I’m actually one of them). But the ad doesn’t really speak directly to the other 96% and there, my friends, we have a problem.

Now I really wonder what demographic do these type of ads speak to?

Your average human being? I mean, if you were to go see your son’s performance, why wouldn’t you throw the detergent with which you wash his clothes in your bag? You know – just in case someone falsely assumes he’s got a new shirt on his back … WTF??? There’s another clip that features two hot chicks in a night club. Sure enough, they are roommates and one of them has a bottle of detergent in her handbag. In a NIGHTCLUB for crying out loud. Next time I go out, I’ll be sure to toss my detergent in with the other essentials for the night. Which reminds me not to pick up the 3-liter pack – for logistics’ sake.

The third annual Marketing Innovation Forum organized by Economedia took place yesterday. And by common consensus it was the best one so far.

The tradition started off in with a bang in 2007 – the first Marketing stars to talk to a large audience of Bulgarian marketers were Sergio Zyman (Zyman group, former Coca-Cola Marketing manager) and Guy Kawasaki (Apple Marketing manager). 2008 saw the father of guerilla marketing Jay Levinson. Yesterday we had the immense pleasure of listening to Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi and Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology and one of this year’s TIME magazine 100 most powerful people.

I go to many such events. On the respective day’s morning I get all fidgety … I always hope that I will be impressed, that I’ll learn something new, that I will be surprised. Usually, I leave disappointed. Yesterday was a first!

The two speakers had a completely different approach in their presentations. Kevin won his audience with his sense of humor and light-hearted style of communication. However it was Martin who had everyone’s undivided attention. Never have I seen 500 people at the same place who barely move and hold their breath for an hour and a half. He went from whispering to yelling in a split second, his high-tech presentation was superbly delivered in a unique Broadway manner with a pleasant Danish accent. One thing kept bugging me though: the guy does not look a day over 25 (turned out he’s nearly 40).

Though they very much differed in areas of expertise, both speakers agreed on some topics:

1) Times of crisis are awesome (time for you to win, and win ugly);

2) In advertising you should appeal to people’s emotions, not to their rationale (always, always, always!);

3) Focus groups are completely useless (while Kevin just thought them to be a waste of resources, Martin put it very simply: people lie to you at focus groups. Sometimes subconsciously, but nonetheless most of the time they lie.)

4) Successful marketing sells experiences nowadays, and not products or brands.

Kevin summarized his advice with the words “Fail fast. Learn fast. Fix fast”. He argued that research is a waste of time and agencies and clients should work quickly if they want to stay on top of things. His personal-experience example of this was “If ever in any of the Saatchi & Saatchi subsidiaries there is a problem they cannot solve in 48 hours, they have to e-mail me. Within 24 hours I will send them the solution. I can’t promise that it will be a good solution which will work, but they still would get one in 24 hours.”

“Never give your clients what they want,” he said to a laughing-out-loud audience. Give them what they thought was impossible!

I learned that later on he shared with a smaller group of people that he found (just from a quick drive through the city) Bulgarian Outdoor advertising to be horrendous.

On the other hand, Martin Lindstrom gave a quick explanation of the science of why we buy things. He explained a huge study that he conducted prior to writing Buyology. 2000 volunteers were given a functional MRI while they were exposed to advertising messages. Their brain waves were scanned to see how they reacted to different methods in advertising – a pure scientific analyses of why we like and buy the things we like and buy. He couldn’t stress enough on the fact that our decisions are purely emotional (Kevin Robert’s estimate was 80% – and, jokingly, 101% for women) and irrational. His practical advice to marketers in this regard was to:

- use the past and not the future in advertising (the future is unknown and therefore scary, but remember how it was always sunny in the good ol’ days?)

- use somatic markers for your brand (smell, feel, sound, etc) – create experiences for your audience

- use kids in advertising (as much as possible; though personally I would disagree here)

- Never discount

Lindstrom used some interesting case studies to explain why people lie at focus groups: the rational part of their brain simply overrides the emotional part. For example: when blind-tasting Coke and Pepsi, over 90% of the respondents prefer Pepsi to Coke (the Pepsi challenge campaign was based on these blind tests). However, when you show the respondent the cans, the rational part of the brain dictates: You were wrong, of course you like Coke more. Or when some of the world’s finest sommeliers were presented with three different bottles of wine (of course filled with the same exact wine) in three price categories – super cheap, sort of medium and overpriced, all of them without exception said they prefer them according to the price tag. When they were told they drank the same wine, most of them said – Yeah, on a second thought, they did taste the same. A prime example of the rational part of the brain shamelessly lying to you.

I am so thrilled after yesterday that I can go on forever. However, as this is already a ridiculously long post, I am going to cut short the serious stuff and make it an even more ridiculously long post by giving you some of Kevin Robert’s funniest lines:

We’re in the shit. I come from New Zealand – there this is a business term.

The difference between New Zealand and Australia is that the people live in New Zealand by choice.

At the Australian customs office they ask you if you have a criminal record. Believe me, it is still a requirement to get in the country.

Everyone should be happy today. Except for Man United fans of course.

Al Gore was the only guy who got a Nobel Prize for a Powerpoint.

The further up a company you go, the stupider you get. Spend NO time talking to a CEO.

If I get a task that I don’t like I just don’t do it. I assign it to someone else. There is absolutely no point in having power unless you abuse it.

How old is your website? I bet you it’s the ugliest thing in the world.

I hate it when a brand manager walks into my room and says MY brand. Actually, I hate it when a brand manager walks into my room. Period.

Even guys in IT are human. Relatively. Bankers … nah.

Q: What is your advice to financial institutions?

A: Shoot the management and maybe you’ll be fine.

And last but not least, there was a strange Q&A exchange with a random bizarre girl (RBG)

RBG: What would you do if you work for a company that is hated by people, by media, by government?

KR: I’d leave.

RGB: Yeah, but that’s the easiest thing you can do.

KR: And probably the smartest, too.

RGB: Still?

KR: Tell me, is it tobacco?

RGB: Yeah.

KR: Then I want you to dig really deep down in yourself and find out why do you think it’s a good thing to kill people.

On that note, my friends, I’ll go have a cigarette. Out of curiosity – leave me a comment if you read all the way through here