A literate journey

"He's much nicer in real life than he is online".

This comment, made during IPA 4 to Richard Huntington, encapsulates the difference between the supposedly controversial, poky, conflictive author of Adliterate; and the real, warm, friendly – and opinionated – guy that, by day, is in charge of strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi.

Where this mismatch between perception and reality comes from, is in Adliterate: Huntington's passionate, and discursive blog that celebrates its sixth birthday this year. From that particular grain of blogs that sprouted up mid way through the last decade, Adliterate has a distinctive, personal voice - and then some. If blogging is about bringing a distinctive voice to life, then it has clearly succeeded. And, while the blog may be a more amplified, extreme version of Huntington in real life, he doesn't shy away from making sharp, opinionated points in real life either. It's almost as if both the "real" and the "Adliterate" selves are, in a sense, validating each other.

But, for Huntington, blogging has provided a way to give focus and a sense of purpose to a nascent community, as well as provide a platform to encapsulate current thinking.

"All of a sudden, in the early part of the last decade, all those thoughts you had on your way to the tube that were slightly random and weird: suddenly, there was a place to write them down and put them out. It was a gift to planners, because blogging was all about the random shit that you were thinking.

"It coalesced into a global community, which was really powerful, because planning is quite isolated - except in agencies like this, where there are fucking loads of them, and there's a strong planning tradition and there are a lot of people around. Suddenly, blogging provided a sense of community for planners around the globe. You would have a thought, put it out there, people would feed back, and you would build your idea.

"It also gave a more democratic approach. Shortly before I got into the business, the only way that you could touch advertising was if your uncle worked in it, or if you read Campaign every Thursday. All of a sudden, people who were interested in advertising had these quite senior people become available. I love it [blogging]. It allows me to deliver a part of my personality that I can't necessarily do elsewhere: to be more contrary, more of an outsider."

Adliterate started after Huntington was invited to participate in a panel at a financial services conference. The panel's role was to promote their discipline as the best place for a client's marketing budget. His reaction was to create something more long-lasting than a short defence of his practice, which spawned the blog.

It is clear from anyone's perspective that advertising has seen a great deal of change since 2005. As Huntington points out, one of the key – but often unreported – findings of the period is the ability of agencies of all sizes to address and respond to new impacts and threats. The notable agencies of preceding decades are (mostly) still here, and, if anything, the successive and considerable threats to their business, whether quick-fire or sustained and mainly driven by a digitally-enabled society, has enabled them to be stronger, while also needing them to be more agile. It's as if the entrepreneurial ethic of "Fail fast" has been embroidered and framed on agency walls for years, but no-one quite understood why it was there.

Now that agencies understand how to work with, and communicate to, a digitally-enabled society, they have successfully delivered on the start of a new agenda, rather than the end. The new challenge, according to Huntington, will be to implement: to take a newly-formed understanding of technology and consumers, and to apply this knowledge to large clients in mass markets. Small, specialist work in small, specialist agencies will deliver a certain set of headlines, but it won't be where the really important work happens that drives mass change.

The point that we have now reached, according to Huntington, is for agencies to ask themselves how they get to a new endpoint. Embarking on such a fundamental journey requires a thorough analysis and re-analysis of the agency within its market.

"The agency world divides into people who clients ask the big questions of, and people who clients don't. The big questions are: 'How do I sell more of this?', 'How do I solve a fundamental problem where people think my brand is old-fashioned?', 'How do I get kids to stop binge drinking?' - as opposed to the agencies who are fucking brilliant, but will always be asked to activate, or just do something with an idea. What we're doing now is the tidying up: what is the process by which less conventional solutions are delivered within agencies such as this, to clients that matter? The future for many agencies is to turn themselves into one that asks the fundamental questions, or to simply turn themselves into a production company."

Best laid plans

Huntington's ethic is "being right is important, but being interesting is essential". While it's a nice mantra for practically anyone, it's especially important for planners, as it's what they do; it's their currency. Great advertising can be made (and indeed, much has been made) without planning, making the pressure to deliver that much greater for a discipline which came late. For clients to be given new ways of looking at the world and new thinking about the brand, planners have to think, convince, persuade, and entertain. While it's easy to refer to these activities in a jaundiced way as "soft skills", they couldn't be any more hard if your discipline is a relatively new one that could be eliminated from a process where the end product will still have commercial and creative relevance without you.

Further, as Huntington illustrates, the discipline has itself undergone substantial change in recent years. Originally and deeply set in qualitative research, planners were delivering results by data transformation. What we are seeing now is the discipline going full circle: as data becomes increasingly important to both brands and agencies, it can add visibility and context to something that before was more driven by a more personal level of insight.

With more being thrown into the pot, the clear challenge of being interesting remains at the core. "I fundamentally believe that it is the social currency of our time. For so long, brands didn't need to be interesting, because they could buy their way into our lives." As brands simply cannot just spend money to push themselves in front of people any more, the dividend to be gained from being interesting becomes greater. Huntington admits that his start point is often that a brand has to have a point of view, as Adliterate has. This result is, at the start of the process, to think through what would be the most interesting thing that one could say about this brand, right now.

However, "Interesting" doesn't mean naturally logical or obvious The example which Huntington gives is Iceland's call at around the turn of the century to ban genetically-modified soya. This wasn't necessarily to do with resistance from Iceland's customers, but it gave the brand a voice, a point of view that gave it traction, and a voice within a debate that it was often separated from. The polarisation that Huntington gives – at least on Adliterate - is strikingly clear: be interesting, or consider there to be no point in doing anything.

"What great creatives bring is a shot from the margins of culture. They mainstream stuff from the edge."

Special agent

A recent highlight of Adliterate was a discussion on the concept of "Unspecial". On the face of it, it is rather contrary to the patterns of thought and practice that Huntington desires. While brands must be interesting in a conversational cosmos dominated by chatter, the irony is that the creative execution does not have to be something which has to be beautifully crafted in order to resonate.

Part of the problem, according to Huntington, lies in a reliance on audience "instinct". If target audiences on creative briefs are just assumptions – such as a perceived audience with some cultural reference points - then the campaign will lend itself to a lens by which everything is then seen, rightly or wrongly. Ultimately, running an agency is based on betting on a creative instinct being right more times than being wrong.

"We need to be honest about this. When you brief a creative team, they probably think that 'My aunt does that, or buys that, or goes to Asda and really likes that'. What great creatives bring is a shot from the margins of culture. They mainstream stuff from the edge. If it's funny, then it's what creatives find funny. Clients for ever and a day will go, 'Our brand is very much like Outnumbered.' They really want you to inhabit that and you nod sagely and write '... bit like Outnumbered' on the creative brief. But, that is not how Outnumbered was developed."

What really irks Huntington in this debate is the increasing reliance on participatory work: the assumption that it will be great if people could undertake a particular action. "You see it in creative reviews. 'Wouldn't it be really cool if we got people to do this?' and I don't think that conversation ever took place. I can't imagine that conversation ever taking place, when Fallon were making Gorilla. I probably went something like 'This is fucking funny. Do you find this fucking funny? It's a gorilla and he's drumming. It's fucking funny'. It wasn't very 'special', and that's the genius."

It is perhaps logical to assume that participatory work lends itself to "unspecial" work in its outcome. "Democracy is clearly overrated in a generation of ideas. Crowdsourcing became a fucking enormous excuse to do nothing." That's not to suggest, however, that all participatory development is bad. Mydavidcameron is seen by Huntington as a good example of how the crowd can take and work with an idea within a set of rules. This approach, rather than a carte blanche request to develop something brilliant as long as it has an explicit brand reference, is perhaps more likely to achieve a successful outcome – because people will have an idea of what to do, and have a prism by which to engage and play with the brand.

The deepest levels of participation that anyone can ever hope to achieve are driven from an emotional response. However, what Huntington argues is that asking the question 'How can we do something that people care about, in an interesting way', rather than 'How can we get people to make their own commercials?' will lead to a much more desirable outcome for all concerned. If the campaign provokes such an emotional response, then people will make their own versions anyway, whether they were invited to or not.

Huntington strongly suggests that agencies should be more confident when it comes to creating brilliant stories which invite emotional feedback.

"If you want to engage people and let them play with your brand, then tell them a fucking brilliant story. Care about something that they care about, be interesting, let them play. Agencies have developed a whole bunch of skills to do with storytelling; They are fucking brilliant at storytelling. However, we couldn't get our heads around the fact that people also like to play with stuff. That's what we [as consumers] have been offered the opportunity to do, by changes in technology and cultural behavior When you're doing something that is genuinely good, people will play with it, and they will do everything with it".

Thinking aloud

The one work that has been most influential on Huntington's thinking is The Cluetrain Manifesto.

"'Markets are conversations' took me a while to get my head around. What the fuck were they talking about, 'markets as conversations'? Here [at Saatchi], brands are no longer built by communications, if they ever were, but they are built by conversations. Advertising's role is not to paint the brand's world view; our job is now to act as a catalyst for conversations. A dance at Liverpool Street station, is nothing more than a catalyst for conversations: more conversations, and better ones."

While the principle set by Cluetrain of markets being conversations has been quoted almost infinitely in Powerpoints and text, there is now a desire, shared by Huntington and many others, to move on from this point. Markets are indeed conversations, but, as suggested earlier, the trick is move swiftly to a conclusion. If you are invited to follow a brand on Facebook, then a lack of conclusion – for the consumer and a lack of a commercial conclusion for the brand – makes the experience a futile one. "Every great dialogue starts with a great monologue. Surely brands should be in that business. You need to finish the conversation somewhere that's more conducive: eventually you're going to want to get home from the bar."

New forms

In recent weeks, Huntington has expanded Adliterate into other media. A limited-run print version was released of Adliterate Review, a short compendium of the best posts from the past six years. Saatchi & Saatchi has now made the book available electronically. The characteristic of simply giving something away for free, the cornerstone of many a digital offering, is not simply confined to these new editions; it's in Huntington's DNA. "It's the philosophy that a load of us went through, of just giving away everything. Everything I did, I just gave away immediately, and that was a big experiment in the philosophy of a fundamental rule of modern life: you have to let go of control to gain influence. Ultimately, you get what brands have to do."

The brand of Adliterate displays many of the characteristics that Huntington urges of others. It has told an interesting story, it has deep knowledge of its target audience, and provokes an emotional response in its substantial readership.

That contrary, cage-rattling, controversial persona has certainly made an impact.

Richard Huntington is Director of Strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi. His blog is Adliterate, and he is @adliterate on Twitter. Adliterate Review is now available as a free ebook from the Saatchi website.