Jimmy Bullard’s call-up this week into Fabio Capello’s England squad for the World Cup qualifiers reminded me of a recent round of research that clearly illustrates how delicately we must handle our editors when their brands are under scrutiny.
The thing is, when you’re creating stimulus material to take into research - new franchises or features usually, sometimes cover treatments - the work you are undertaking is completely counter-intuitive to the brand guardian. He or she has been thoroughly schooled in producing work which completely satisfies the customer - work that answers all the questions, if you like. If they weren’t doing that effectively, let’s face it, they’d be out of a job.
But research stimulus needs to be created with the specific goal of ASKING QUESTIONS. In other words, it’s work that is set up to be unpopular; to fail. And this is the exact opposite of what your editor is used to delivering.
In my experience, once you get into the development zone, it is the editors who find this transition the hardest. They know too much about their customers and tend to find it difficult to take on board others’ suggestions because they’ve either tried it before and it’s bombed or they think they know in their guts that it’s just plain wrong.
It takes a good editor a fair few days to roll into the process though once they’ve been through it, most will admit that loosening the shackles of pragmatism is a liberating experience and they learn far more from creating testing material than safe stuff.
Anyway, we were doing some dev on Nuts and one of the areas we were looking at was football. It’s obviously a big thing in the lives of Nuts readers and yet there’s so much of it about on the telly and in the tabloids that how Nuts relates to the national sport is one of the brand’s constant challenges.
For the puposes of this round of research, one of the ideas was to co-erce a Premiership player into writing a weekly column that would tell it like it really is. The thought behind this was that the man in the street is well aware that most soccer stars’ interviews are anodyne at best, usually brokered by their kit or boot manufacturer as product promotion.
So, what Nuts needed was a universally well-liked player who would be able to get other players to reveal some stuff - probably humorous - that would make a great weekly column. After much head-screatching, the lads settled on Jimmy Bullard. He played for Fulham so there was no chance of Man U fans hating him cos he was the Chels or the Scouse or whatever. He was currently out with a bad injury so footloose as it were. And Soccer AM had done some work in establishing him as a “character”.
Now Dom, the editor, didn’t believe this would work. He brought up the subject of how tough it was to get celebs to meet weekly deadlines, how they often couldn’t come up with anything interesting and, “anyway, how much is this gonna cost?”
Much argument later, Dom was convinced that his concerns were not insurmountable and we made up the dummy pages of the Jimmy Bullard Column, putting them into the session with Nuts readers in Watford. At this point three things happened:
1. They immediately rejected Jimmy. Not famous enough. This was a splendid slap around the chops with the cold fish of reality. What were we thinking? Only the big teams and big players count.
2. We were encouraged by our readers that, in principle, the idea was a good one. “You should do it with Rio Ferdinand,” they said.
3. We gave thanks to the Almighty that we had decided to keep the development teams working on yet more dev while the research was taking place instead of letting them slope back to their day jobs, waiting for the results, then resuming. With the dev team in tact, we were immediately able to knock up the soccer column, but with Rio replacing Jimmy, and we sent it out the next night to a research group in Manchester with high hopes.
Here’s what they said:
“Rio Ferdinand! He’s a f***ing w***er!”
Doh!
But here’s what they also said and this was the killer. On the page we had Rio spouting off some stuff about Ronaldo’s new boots and there was a photo collage of Adebayor’s mad hair cuts. And the readers saw straight through it. “We can get this stuff anywhere,” they said. “What we want is someone telling us what REALLY happens in the dressing room at half time. What the manager says. Who throws what strop.”
At which point Dom, the editor, pulled the plug because… well, no player was ever going to deliver that copy to Nuts, or anyone else for that matter. Not if they wanted to maintain a lucrative career and good relationships with their team mates anyway.
And this is the other side of the coin when it comes to editors in development work. They may be the most supicious of creating the “testing” material, but they are also the wisest in deciding that an idea is just not practically deliverable.
There is only one thing worse than putting work into research that is so safe it doesn’t tell you anything, and that is putting in work that the readers love but you can never ever deliver.
In other words, be careful what you wish for because if your readers love it and then it can’t be done, you’ll have wasted your time and all you will acheieve is frustration.