Opinion

The uncanny relationship between the Brexit and decline of many a creative agency

Who would have thought that the decision by British citizens to exit the European Union would have so may parallels with the struggles of many creative agencies. Daniel Bluzer-Fry explains.

Since Britain made it’s big decision and voted to leave the EU – causing a chain reaction of events that will have knock-on effects everywhere for some time to come – there’s been plenty of commentary about what went wrong for team remain.

One string of commentary has apportioned part of the blame to poor communication on the front of the remain camp. In fact, at the end of last week when the votes had been counted, Claire Beale, editor-in-chief of the UK’s Campaign, published an article titled Brexit vote shows catastrophic failure of communications.

Daniel Bluzer-Fry

Looking at the situation from Australia – a country with an impending election that will no doubt be impacted by Britain’s decision to leave – this moment in time has provided me with ample opportunity to explain why I believe we’re not only seeing a number of western democracies make a slew of irrational decisions that undermine the wellbeing of the majority, but why we’re witnessing so many creative agencies struggling to adapt to the current state of play and/or finding themselves in decline.

The very notion that ‘communication’ is front and centre when it comes to impacting behavioural change is ridiculous.

The point that Beale makes completely neglects the fact that no matter how good the Remain camp’s communications could have been, there are two sides to the coin, and that the Leave camp’s communications may have been just as effective at gleaning voters’ support and thus leading to the Brexit outcome we have today.

brexit voting formWhen there’s different products competing in the same category the idea that one brand’s communications can be so good it will be the core driver behind helping consumers identify what they truly need (and/or want) is just silly.

Brands will naturally have different messaging strategies and go to great lengths to avoid messages that they feel reveal weaknesses in relation to their competition, thus leaving the consumer the task of doing the ‘sometimes’* hard work, of assessing and comparing the pros and cons of what is on offer to make the best decision for themselves.

The prevailing attitude that communication is king coupled with this ‘hard work’ of having to assess/compare the pros and cons that people are left with is where it seems to be falling apart when it comes to empowering people to make the ideal choice for them in complex, high stakes categories (think superannuation, personal wealth, democracy etc).

Sure, education is of key importance when it comes to tooling up consumers to make the best call to service their needs, and this is especially vital when people don’t understand the category.

This article is not purporting that communication isn’t central to effective education, but on a more pressing note – and where Cameron and his government really fucked up – is the way the entire referendum was designed.

Smart CX and design thinking could have avoided this catastrophe, just as for many a brand, smart CX and experience design can be the saviour in a low growth world where there is little product/service differentiation.

So how is this so? With the Australian election coming up, I had an interesting experience over the weekend past that really validated my thinking on this one.

Upon catching up with my 92-year-old grandfather, the topic of the Brexit along with a discussion around Australia’s forthcoming election came into focus. When talking about the latter, my grandpa mentioned he has sent a postal vote earlier in the week and mentioned that his votes had gone towards The Australian Sex Party and One Nation (‘the one who worked in the Fish and Chip shop’ was how the latter was recounted).

australian sex party ad

Now without giving away too much around my political disposition – which I suspect I will have done before the end of this article – what struck me about this, was that at best, once the dust settles, my grandfather’s vote may be a somewhat contrary blip that has had little impact in the overall result, whilst at worst, his vote may leave him, and the bulk of this country, in a worse of position should a certain party claim victory.

Now rather than interrogating his logic and being a disrespectful asshole, I took this as a moment to enquire around how a good-hearted Australian – an Australian who has contributed far more to the country than I probably ever will, having fought across multiple fronts in WWII – could have arrived at this, and garner his thoughts on how we could create mechanisms to ensure his interests are protected when he visits the ballot box in a democracy where voting is mandatory?

Where did we arrive? Let’s just say that that after a relatively simple two-minute discussion, we were in agreement that prior to submitting their vote, all voters should respond to a few simple, politically neutral questions to illustrate their comprehension of what social and economic ramifications of their vote will be**.

If say, there are five questions and all five are answered correctly, than 100% of the vote is counted. If three of five are answered correctly, 60% of the vote is counted. If less than three of five are answered correctly the vote is dismissed, given the voter clearly has no fucking idea about how their vote will impact the country and themselves.

Lindsay Lohan Twitter BrexitAs you can see, this is a design element that actually protects people, and a nation, from the ignorance of others and potentially themselves (not to mention may go some way in reducing the impact of the propaganda that gets pumped out on the airwaves, replacing it with a more positive level of civic participation (although that’s another article).

So on the Brexit front, as the data reveals the many of those who voted Leave were less educated and aware of the consequences of their vote, I ask why, in 2016, with the digital tools and capabilities that exist, that when such a big referendum was going to happen, David Cameron didn’t push for a fool-proof system designed to ensure that the opinions of the uninformed couldn’t shape the outcome?

If he’d done this, the result could have quite possibly been very different. And even if it wasn’t, at least Britain and the world would have been able to take this result seriously (not as a the not-so-funny joke-reality that it has become).

Had these steps been taken, the government could have immunised its population from some of the absurd propaganda that was peddled and prevented people from making an ill-informed decision that may not have been in their best interests.

the simpsons brexit twitterTo go back to Beale’s point on communication, had the referendum design been done in a considered way, irrespective of whether the quality of comms improved or degraded from either the Leave or Remain side, the government would have reduced the prevalence of the bullshit being peddled, because those peddling it would have known damn well that if any people bought into it, the power of their vote would have inevitably been reduced when answering the questionnaire (or idiot screener as I like to say).

Now tying this back to creative agencies, what becomes apparent is that it is this as an industry; there is a penchant to point at communications solutions for business problems. The thing is, as most now recognise, the game has changed substantially in recent years, and is continually evolving.

As Bill Bernbach famously once said: “A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

In today’s age, that means fully-integrated agencies are better placed then those that have only a few comms capabilities that necessity forces them to pedal, but more significantly, it illustrates the teething problems many of the creative agencies are going through – which is a shift to finding creative ways beyond communications to ensure their clients can yield competitive advantage and grow.

To wrap up, it’s probably fair to say be it within the walls of any creative agency or at the level democratic process, failure to adapt to these new realities is only going to lead to more pain and suffering.

It’s high tide on evolving, given the current state of play, and the stakes are quite simply too high to fuck up … there’s a lot of jobs and people’s livelihoods at stake.

If only Australia had bothered to put more intelligent design into its democratic process then perhaps we’d be more immune to the contagion and fear of Brexit drifting down here and, most probably, leading the Australian people towards re-electing a government that has evidently delivered worse outcomes for the bulk of the population compared with what the opposition would have.

Without sound strategies and processes in place, there’s just too much being left to luck.

Daniel Bluzer-Fry is a CX strategist

*I use the word ‘sometimes’ in relation to category diversity and decision making processes. When we think of low involvement categories, we often employ heuristics and system 1 thinking to guide our decisions. To learn more, I’d highly recommend reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Sharp’s How Brands Grow.

**I have no intention to discuss the deeper mechanics around the engineering of this ‘question/screener’ process in this article. I am mindful that there are contentious elements at play here, and that clearly a number of additional considerations would have to be factored in to make this equitable for all.

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