Martin Cole of WPP on Visual Business at the PSFK Conference London

In this 28 minute video from the PSFK Conference London, Martin Cole of WPP explains why looks matter; why we all work in the beauty industry; and why this makes it so hard to make great stuff happen.

Click To Play

This session was like looking at something from a totally different angle - it felt recently hatched, an idea still being polished round the edges:

• Martin recently made a documentary for Channel 4 called “In search of cool“.
• “Clients have got their heads around what we do… that’s why digital is so interesting, as they haven’t yet so we can charge them for it”…   His presentation was about an idea he’s still working through about a way of repositioning what it is that ad agencies are actually selling/doing.  Used the example of Kim Jones (fashion designer) who said that what he has which makes him worth paying is “visual taste”… a way of approach the world & looking at it; a way to make something appear cool.
• He spent a while riffing about the history of how we got to a visual culture…  visual things (coins, rugs, wallpaintings…) among first sign of an emerging culture.  In the distant past it used to be an uncommon necessity (eg money) or a luxury.  But starting in Victorian era it began to shift….  Vicoriana; fairs/freakshows which were all about ‘looking’, Brunel bridges weren’t just designed for function but also for beauty, etc.  Hindenberg disaster first simultaneous media event - first time a video of something that happened spread all over the world within (few days).
• Today we have a visual culture…  Cities are profoundly visual environments & bulk of people live in cities… He did a nice graphic of how much of our wiorld is screen based.  eg: Days per year spent looking at a screen (for US)…. TV 70 days.  For TV, cinema, games… 110 days.   How many screens per person (adding up all the TVs, mobiles, PCs in the world) … by 2010 one screen each.
• “Most people don’t read the internet, they scan it.  They use it more like a picture than a book”
• Because we’ve got visual culture, we’ve got visual business…. the value of companies are tied to visual things… But we’ve got no visual businessmen!  Traditional approaches to business & even training (MBA) do nothing to develop your visual skills.  Businesses don’t understand it themselves but starting to understand now that it has value for their business… Given that visual skills are at the heart of what creative agencies have, this is where can earn big $$$.    In Silicon Valley, companies are starting now “looking for Art Director type skills to be on their Boards”
• Examples of beauty being key for business success:  Motorola Razor ; “Google wasn’t successful because it had a better search technology; it was a beautiful interface”  (actually I disagree with him on this, I think it had and needed both)…    It used to be said that form follows function… but now this isn’t necessarily true because people like using beautiful things.  Eg: research done in Japan and then again in Israel about ATMs.  One ATM was designed to be beautiful but not work very well, bad interface with things not lined up, too many clicks etc.  The other was designed to be ugly but work brilliantly.  In both studies in reality, people much preferred the beautiful one and thought it worked better!

Audience Notes

Andrew Hovells commented:

Martin Cole gave us some food for thought on Visual Business. His argument was that humans have always used images to navigate around their world - and the rise of the city and Web 2.0 actually means we’re becoming more visual. So we should use the fact that we’re really good at visual stuff more - it’s the one thing clients who are getting OK at agencies do can never replicate.

The AdLads learned:

• Society is profoundly visual and always has been.
• We spend more and more time in front of screens, but never really look at them, we scan.
• Become a visual expert, make everything you do simple and elegant.
• Beauty is key in everything, we gravitate towards beauty in all its forms.