Phil is Signal's Strategy Director. He ensures that the right people are working to the best plan, guided by a precise definition of commercial purpose.

[Originally published on The Drum - 3rd July 2019]

It was no surprise that Usain Bolt’s Jamaica won gold in the men’s 4 x 100m relay at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The achievement of Japan in coming second, however, was truly remarkable.

None of the four Japanese sprinters had a personal best time of less than 10 seconds, and yet they beat the United States into third place. Individually, the Japanese were weaker than the Americans on all four stages.  were strong enough to snatch what should have been a nailed-on silver medal for the USA. The secrets of Japan’s success are a parable for teamwork and ways of working.

This article on the Spikes website describes how the Japanese relay quartet became a team of overachievers. It is a study in how elite sporting success happens at the margins. It is also a lesson in quality control. The most telling phrase is, “meticulous attention paid to baton exchanges.”

“Despite its surprise factor, Japan’s Olympic relay success did not come from nowhere. It was the result of years of  data analysis with meticulous attention paid to baton exchanges.”

I quoted this phrase as part of a talk to a client’s in-house agency about creative brief writing. A creative brief is a baton and we should pay meticulous attention to the way in which that baton is passed from its writer  the people charged with responding to it. By and large we’re talking about baton exchanges between planners and creative teams. Briefing, like baton passing, is an act of respect. It is the duty of the  to set the receiver up for success. And it is the duty of the receiver to be open, inquisitive and, well, receptive.

Respect is vital. Baton passing, whether on the track or in the agency, is more than a mechanical transaction. A ‘beautiful’ baton exchange requires more than practice and muscle memory. There is a human at each end of the baton, and only for a fleeting moment do both parties have their hands on the baton at once. That moment accounts for a tiny proportion of the whole process, but it has to go well for there to be a chance of a successful outcome. The Japanese athletes talk about the importance of making baton  personal.

“Just as important as  those baton exchanges were frequent and honest verbal exchanges between all members of the team. ‘We talked to each other all the time,” says Kiryu. ‘We can confidently talk about all thoughts, including our concerns.’”

The baton metaphor applies to any process which requires information and responsibility to be passed from one person or one team to another. In a modern agency, many of those processes involve sprints, which is both apt and ironic in the context of a post about baton exchanges.

Pretty much everything is done in sprints these days, which is not without its issues.

Removed from the context of software development, sprint is a dangerous word. Sprints stop being about focus and feedback, and become all about speed. In this way, sprints mess with the physics of creative. The first law of creative dynamics states that you can perm any two from better, faster, cheaper, but you can’t have all three. Creative sprints have people believing in the impossible, or at least the highly unlikely.

Context is everything. In a properly agile process, sprints are simply how the work gets done between the ceremonies. The ceremonies determine what gets done, in what order, by whom, and why. Less time is spent in ceremonies than in  the ceremonies have to be done right. The ceremonies are baton exchanges. They are personal and they demand respect. Respect is enshrined in the language. They are called ceremonies for a reason. There is etiquette, there are standards.

Ceremonies are a contact sport. They are bastions of humanity. They are oases of analogue discipline in a desert of Slackness.

We should all take a leaf out of the Japanese relay playbook and pay at least as much meticulous attention to our baton exchanges as we do to our sprints.

Creative briefs and the parable of the Japanese baton exchange

Signal Strategy Director Phil Adams thinks we should all take a leaf out of the Japanese relay playbook and pay as much meticulous attention to our baton exchanges as we do to our creative sprints. 

[Originally published on The Drum in March 2019]

Changing technology without changing ideology leads to ‘Scalextric transformation’. Your customers have the illusion of control from a convenient handset, but they are still driving along the same old tracks in directions that are not dictated by them.

My bank’s mobile app is pretty good. It does what I want it to do. Not all of its functions are intuitively obvious on first encounter but they are easy to learn. Recently they added the ability to pay cheques in by scanning an image. In so doing they removed the only remaining reason for me to visit a branch. Having banked with them since I was sixteen, it’s possible that I won’t look them in the eye ever again.

I’d go as far as to say that the app is the baby bear’s porridge of Fintech as far as I am concerned. It is just right. Not too hot on peripheral features, not too cold on essential functions.

But my bank has missed the most obvious function of the app, the one that is literally staring them and me in the face. The app is a glorified statement. That’s all it is really; a real-time statement with some transactional functionality on the side. Sometimes I do it deliberately, sometimes I do it as a by-product of doing something else, but I check my balance and recent transactions on an almost daily basis.

So, from the moment of its first release, even in its most minimally viable form, the app made old-school monthly statements redundant as a means for me to manage my finances.

And yet my app is sending me “unread message” notifications. The messages stay unread because I know what they say. I only get two kinds of message from my bank. One tells me that there is a new monthly statement for me to read (a pdf on an app). The other reminds me that I haven’t read it yet . Why would I want to read again information that I’ve seen several times before, that is out of date, and that is presented in an unnatural and inconvenient format?

Fine if banks are legally obliged to produce monthly statements. Fine if I sometimes need to print or send an official statement to a third party organisation. I might occasionally need to access a statement on my terms. 

But the persistent notifications are clearly being sent on the bank’s terms. The level of emphasis placed on this communication by the bank turns those pdfs into statements of the obvious. They make it obvious that the technology has changed but the underlying mentality hasn’t. This is muscle-memory marketing. And it condemns the app to being a modern mixer tap attached to antiquated lead plumbing. My bank has a ghost in its machine. The ghost of banking past is haunting the technology of banking present.

Banks are an easy target for this kind of criticism. But the principles apply to any organisation that manages a high frequency of customer transactions based on legacy principles. Changing technology without changing ideology leads to Scalextric transformation. Your customers have the illusion of control from a convenient handset, but they are still driving along the same old tracks in directions that are not dictated by them.

It takes time for large incumbent institutions, of which banks are the most visible example, to transform their way out of legacy systems and the culturally ingrained practices that come with them. However, that still leaves significant, quick-win opportunities to revisit regulatory communications with a service design mindset. Some optimism and some imagination can turn things that you have to say into things that customers are happy to hear.

Scalextric transformation. It sounds cool, but it isn't. Strategy Director Phil Adams on banking's 'ghost in the machine'. 

[Originally published on The Drum in February 2019]

A sudden, practical act of transformation

My goldfish grew too big for their tank. One listless waft of a tail was enough to propel them from one end to the other. So my parents bought a bigger one. It was a sudden, practical act of kindness.

The new tank was twice as long as the old one, but it took my goldfish a while to adjust. For days they would swim halfway and then turn back, as if the wall of the old tank was still there. It was like they didn’t get the memo. Halfway and back, halfway and back, halfway and back.

They eventually reached the outer limit of their expanded territory, but only by a series of accidental increments. Fish are notoriously bad at retaining information, but their muscle memory is evidently good. Either that or they are reluctant explorers, slow to embrace enhanced freedom and possibilities.

My goldfish were stakeholders in a transformation project. Radical change was imposed upon them from the outside. Viewed dispassionately the change was entirely positive; better conditions and no reduction in headcount. It was the opposite of downsizing. But the fish weren’t sure they liked it, so they continued behaving as they had in their previous, more constrained existence. To us the old tank looked like an outmoded silo. To the fish it felt like a comfort zone.

The brightest, most optimistic people can behave like goldfish when change is thrust upon them, even if the change is to their benefit, and especially if they don’t get the memo.

Organisational silos are like countries. They are defined by the borders between them and their neighbours. They are defined by the transactions and trades that take place across those borders. And borders are funny things. In his excellent book, Off The Map, Alastair Bonnett ruminates on the subtlety and nuance of border effects:

“Borders are about claims to land, but as soon as you draw one you limit yourself. Every border is also an act of denial, an acknowledgement of another’s rights… Borders have a far more ambivalent and complex relationship to territory; they combine both arrogance and modesty, both demand and denial.”

The border between Tajikistan and China, taken from the Pamir Highway.

We don’t experience the full extent of border effects when we fly into a foreign country. Passport control in an airport is a sterile, one-dimensional border crossing experience. Most often it is a formality.

But try crossing between former Soviet countries on foot or in a vehicle. These borders are arbitrary lines in the sand, literally so. Distant and detached, the powers that be drew straight lines in the desert with scant regard for those affected on the ground. These borders cleave families, tribes, supply chains in two. They were a sudden political act, and no one got the memo.

The border between Ukraine and Russia at Izvaryne, taken surreptitiously from the driver’s seat. 

In these places you can feel the confluence of arrogance and modesty. You are viscerally aware of the conflicting forces of demand and denial. It is thrilling in ways that passing through airport immigration will never be.

However, it is far from thrilling for the locals. Crossing back and forth on a daily basis to ply trade or visit extended family is just another part of the Central Asian grind. What the foreign traveler does with cold sweat and tight chest, they do on autopilot. The locals have their version of goldfish style muscle memory.

And if you took the borders away there would be a period of goldfish style adjustment. The removal of borders would make life easier. But it would also cause upheaval for the people who profit from their existence - the soldiers, the civil servants, the food sellers, the sole trader currency exchangers. Borders are fertile territory for cottage industry.

Organisational silos are like countries. People profit from the existence of borders between them. 

Whilst silos make no sense in the context of operational efficiency, technological change and market disruption, they do make sense to the people that occupy them. The simple, familiar structure that silos provide is reassuring. At the borders between silos, the corporate equivalent of cottage industries spring up to bypass, compensate for, and profit from the bureaucracy. In so doing they create systemic resistance to change. The new will always make less sense than the old, no matter how sensible it is to change things for the better.

Any transformation project worthy of the name involves organisational upheaval. You can describe your transformation as ‘digital’ if you like, but the most significant and most difficult aspects of the project will be organisational. The technology will be a side show by comparison. Project sponsors should over-commit to communication. Send the memos, where memo is a metaphor for good, frequent communication of all kinds. Memos about project purpose, implications and opportunities afforded should be a permanent fixture at the top of the backlog.

Systems Thinking differentiates between the surface and the substance. For transformation projects the surface is the strategy and the technology. The substance is the corporate muscle memory, the cottage industries and the other unintended human consequences of silo structures. The substance is the goldfish factor.

Successful, sustainable transformation has to be more than a sudden corporate act. In order to leave their silos willingly, and swim in a bigger tank, even the brightest, most optimistic people need to get the memo. The memo about what the change means for them. The memo about how they will be protagonists rather than pawns. The memo about the personal development opportunities that will open up as the silos close down. They can’t get too many memos.

Not sure where to start? Find out how we clarify, simplify and make change less daunting for our clients. 

Goldfish, borders, and sudden acts of transformation. 

What do organisational silos have in common with an old fish tank? Our Strategy Director Phil's thoughts on overcommitting to communication during transformation projects.

Potential clients occasionally ask us about our values. Potential employees ask us about our values all the time. And, eighteen months ago, we didn't have any.



Merging several companies into a single agency called Signal has certainly had its challenges, including existing agency values that no longer made sense. It was time to rip things up and start again.

In such circumstances, it’s impossible to do too much primary research. So, I conducted an all-staff online survey and moderated five workshops based on the survey findings. The workshops  were attended by people at all levels, across all disciplines, from each of the merged agencies and each of our three offices. Through these sessions I heard directly from about 25% of Signal staff.

Although there was a lot of nostalgia associated with what had been strong agency brands and cultures pre-merger, I was also met with cautious optimism and a constructive attitude. Most helpfully, I was left with a good grasp of the common ground on which to build. This common ground was briefed into the creative department, turned into conceptual territories, and shared back with groups of various sizes in each office.

This process resulted in a conscious decision to take an oblique approach to making money. Our company values would be the means by which we chased a vibrant culture, not cash.  This was an important decision. We believe that if we get the culture right, we’ll get the work and the client relationships right, and if we get those things right, commercial success will take care of itself.

So, now we deliberately talk about principles rather than values. We have active principles by which we manage the agency. We call them Signals because you should be able to see them in action around you. They are the lines in the sand which help us make important decisions. They have one foot in the agencies we were (because we want to keep the good bits), and one foot in the agency we aspire to be. And because we are continually evolving as a company, they are the basis of a perpetual work in progress.

For example, on the basis of our learning principle, we are in the process of redesigning our approach to people development. Every employee with line management responsibility is being externally trained in coaching techniques in order to fulfil our commitment to continuous learning. Continuous learning means continuous people development, which means regular coaching rather than annual appraisals. People will be coached on every aspect of their jobs, by people who have been equipped to do that coaching in a structured, supportive manner.

That’s more than enough preamble. The SlideShare story embedded below is designed to be an easy, self-explanatory read. It lays out where we’re at right now, where we want to end up, and how we’re going to get there.

Conceptual work on the Signals: Grant McLean and Trevor Pake. Slideshare visuals: Ian Fletcher.

The thrill of the chase - how we defined Signal's purpose and principles

The thrill of the chase - how we defined our purpose and principles

Merging several agencies into one has had its challenges, including existing values that no longer made sense. It was time to rip things up and start again.

But I have never, never ever, been driven to a website.

And yet we talk about driving traffic all the time. We treat the driving of traffic as a keystone of every digital marketing strategy. We enshrine this fallacy in strategy documents.

Driving traffic is a convenient, reassuring fiction. It is an exercise in wishful thinking. And it is a shit marketing metaphor.

It’s a metaphor that treats people like one of those sardine bait balls, corralled into a dense, unthinking sphere and pushed to the surface where dolphins, sharks and gannets can gorge on the helpless bounty.

If only digital marketing were as easy as that. If only our media spend worked to corral and push a human bait ball to the top of our conversion funnels.

People are not bait balls. They are not flocks nor involuntary herds.

As a freeman of the City Of London you can drive sheep over London Bridge.

But you can’t drive human traffic to a website. Human trafficking is illegal for lots of good reasons.

This funny post, called the About Us Page Of Every Digital Media Agency, is a list of the ridiculous, self-aggrandising terms that agencies use to describe the ways in which they add value. Its humour derives from the fact that the terms are only mildly hyperbolic. In amongst such gems as “buzz mothers” and “pivot coxswains”, are the terms “audience catalysers” and “audience cattle-isers”.

How apposite. When we do our jobs properly we do sort of catalyse audiences. We generate positive reactions that result in people wanting to take things further. But, even if we talk like we do, we don’t herd people like cattle. We don’t cattle-ise. Sadly, our shit marketing metaphor makes no distinction between the two.

Paid search doesn’t drive traffic. It directs traffic that was already actively looking for something similar to what you have to offer. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Emails and tweets don’t drive clicks. They sell the idea of clicking, they sell your link or your button, to an audience that has already signaled a degree of interest by opting in to receive said emails or by following your account. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Display ads and promoted social media posts also sell your link, your page, your content, your site, but to a cooler set of prospects. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Does this distinction matter? We spend the digital media money and the traffic arrives at our digital destination. Google Analytics confirms both the correlation and the causation. Therefore, we drove traffic did we not? QED - Quad Erat Driven.

Yes, the distinction does matter. Digital media spend does not drive traffic. It puts marketing content in front of a relevant, hopefully receptive, audience. I worry that our shit metaphor plays down the role of the content versus the media spend. It prioritises the eyeballs over the eye candy. It commoditises creativity.

Digital advertising is broken in several ways – its distribution, its measurement, its user experience. And poorly chosen, imprecise, misleading, wishful language like “driving traffic” can only serve to compound the problems.

You lead the horse to water, you don’t drive it to drink.

We talk about driving traffic all the time, but it's an exercise in wishful thinking.

Here’s a lesson from 2003 that is, if anything, more relevant now than it was back then.
Desire and diligence are useless against clarity and commitment. It is like taking knives to a gunfight.

This is the moral of a true story about the best piece of training I ever received.

The story is 12 years old and the individuals concerned have all moved on. So I have left the names in. It is a better story for it.

In 2003 my client, Barr Soft Drinks, makers of IRN-BRU and Tizer, decided to put its media planning and buying business out to pitch.

The incumbent agency had been fired because, despite being warned not to, it had made the pivotal planner on the Barr account redundant.

I was Group Account Director at The Leith Agency at the time. We were (and Leith still is) the creative agency for IRN-BRU.

I asked if I could sit in on the media pitch as an observer. To my surprise, not only did my client agree to this request, but he also asked me to be an active adviser rather than a passive observer.

Following a pitch process from the other side of the fence was a privilege and the best piece of training I've ever had.

The three pitching agencies were BLM Media, PHD and Feather Brooksbank.

They were issued a pitch brief based on media planning for the Tizer and IRN-BRU brands.

The pitch was a level playing field in that none of the agencies had any history with the client, in that all had the same brief, all had similar briefing sessions, all had equal opportunities to ask questions, all had equal access to the client throughout the process, and all had the opportunity to visit and interrogate the creative agencies for the two brands covered by the brief.

However, it is fair to say that, in the eyes of the client, Feather Brooksbank was the red hot ante post favourite.

Feather Brooksbank had offices in Edinburgh and Manchester, so they were close to the two creative agencies concerned (Leith handled IRN-BRU from Edinburgh, BDH/TBWA handled Tizer out of Manchester).

Their Edinburgh base meant that they understood the iconic status of IRN-BRU in Scotland.

And their Manchester office was close to the client whose marketing team was based not far away in Atherton.

A level playing field does not preclude the client from favouritism.

I met with each of the pitching agencies to talk them through the advertising strategy and creative work for IRN-BRU.

At the time the brand proposition for IRN-BRU was along the lines of “Likeable Maverick” and we were running ads like this.

My (admittedly foggy) memory of the meetings with Feather Brooksbank and BLM is that we pretty much went through the motions. I talked the strategy, showed the ads, answered some questions. They were polite about the work and made some intelligent observations without actually giving anything away in terms of their pitch thinking.

Jonathan Durden (the D in PHD) came up to Edinburgh with his pitch team. And I could tell that he really got what we were trying to do with the ads. He was genuinely enthusiastic. I remember him describing our work as “fresh as a daisy”, which sounded great in his London accent. And he wasn’t afraid to think out loud about how media planning could most effectively put the ads on an appropriate pedestal.

Nigel (the client - RIP) called me after the meetings and asked who I thought would win the pitch.

Fast forward to the actual pitch presentations.

I don’t remember the BLM pitch. And that is not down to the fog of time. I don’t think I remembered much about the BLM pitch an hour after they pitched it. Which is not to disparage them in any way. I suspect that most pitch presentations are forgotten shortly after they are pitched because most pitch presentations are instantly forgettable.

I remember the Feather Brooksbank pitch not for what they said but for how much work they had done. They had thrown the kitchen sink at it and then some.

It was the pitch presentation epitome of “never mind the quality, feel the weight”.

I think my jaw may have literally dropped at the time and money that had clearly been invested. No stone, no data source, no form of primary research had been left unturned.

They had done surveys, focus groups and they had original video content with high production values, back in the days when you couldn’t just knock that stuff out on a MacBook.

Just like BLM we couldn’t remember what their strategy was or even whether they had actually made any concrete recommendations even a short while after the presentation.

Nonetheless they hadn’t made any mistakes and their desire and commitment were palpable. They may not have smashed it out of the park, but they hadn’t lost it at this point either.

They didn’t make any attempt to impress with the amount of work they had done.

Instead they won the pitch in the first five minutes.

Their pitch was presented as a boxing card with two “bouts”.

Jonathan Durden talked us through the card.

“Bout one. Tizer. Boys versus Girls.”

Basically they had narrowed the media strategy for Tizer down to a single question.

Given the brand, given the commercial objectives and given the available budget, do we target boys or do we target girls?

They plumped for boys but I don’t remember the detail and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the clarity of thought, the memorability of the presentation and the preparedness to commit to a point of view.

Good strategy is about sacrifice and PHD’s strategy entailed the sacrifice of an entire gender.

“Bout two. IRN-BRU. Safe versus Dangerous.”

“You have dangerous creative work but you are running it in safe, predictable places.”

They went on to present a pre-Internet plan for how to efficiently reach teenagers through guerilla media planning - the backs of bus seats and such like.

PHD’s pitch was short, clear and committed.

They were opinionated in all the right ways and none of the wrong ways.

In the end the pitch was no contest. And PHD are still AG Barr’s media agency 12 years later.

Twelve years later I ask myself the same questions before every presentation.

“What will the audience remember 15 minutes after I stop talking?”

Twelve years later I ask myself the same question about every pitch.

“How will a client who is present at the pitch summarise our presentation two days later to a client who wasn’t?”

Having non-delusional answers to these questions wins pitches. Kidding yourself about these issues loses them.

Strip it back. Start with a bang. Tell a story. Make it mnemonic. 

Start with a bang and make it mnemonic. A lesson in pitching.

Phil Adams, Signal's Strategy Director, gives us a lesson learnt in 2013 that is, if anything, more relevant now than it was back then.

Phil Adams

Strategy Director

Creative briefs and the parable of the Japanese baton exchange

Scalextric transformation

Goldfish, borders, and sudden acts of transformation.

The thrill of the chase - how we defined our purpose and principles

A driving lesson

Start with a bang and make it mnemonic. A lesson in pitching.

Cheltenham

Edinburgh

London