Dreamtival

It’s that time of year when I groan again at the hype that surrounds Glastonbury.  Rather than just direct abusive “hippie” type comments I thought I’d be proactive and think of what my dream festival would look like.  I’m sure you’ve had the debate in the pub, you’ve got to fill a festival line up.  You are entitled to creative freedom around the era the band appears from, but you are constrained by ensuring the appropriate time slot for the band (eg can’t have supergroups performing throughout the day).

Unsurprisingly, I’m naturally sceptical of music festivals.  In all honesty, I prefer a gig as I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of people drifting in and out of different artists.  Our approach to bands when we were growing up was to completely obsess about them and learn every lyric (and guitar solo) and queue up ridiculously early in the chance of catching a glimpse of a roadie or even a band member.  Utterly sad, but the inclination remains.  As such, I will stop short of my many requirements for the festival itself in terms of types of people (like me but not too much like me), facilities (loos you can safely p** in), dress code (no stone dyed clothes) etc.  However, I will make it categorically clear that any flags in the audience will not be tolerated.

Right, the music.   Rather than breaking out across different stages, I want to see all of the acts, so I only have one stage.  I also only have 2 days (Friday and Saturday) as I think Sunday is too much and would rather focus on getting on the road.  Likewise, there is no turnaround time, it is constant music.

Friday (start slowly…)

Time	Act	Reason
Midday to 1pm	James Taylor (early 70s)	At the very start of his career, a beautiful introduction to the mix of folk and alternative.  Ease people into it
1pm to 2pm	Nick Drake	Might be a bit samey after James Taylor.  But to see a young Nick Drake would have been an utter privilege.  To lay on the grass listening to such melodies and tone would be immense
2pm to 3pm	Ben Folds Five (debut album era)	A bit more noise, but an exciting new artist (at this time) with some amazing piano skills
3pm to 4pm	Fleet Foxes	Continuing the days folk theme.  Geniuses of melody.  A great band to watch with a nice afternoon drink (pimms or shandy most likely)
4pm to 5pm	Flight of the Conchords	A good bit of comedy to lighten up the afternoon before everyone settles in.  Hilarious live.  An appropriate billing for New Zealand’s second favourite folk parody band
5pm to 6.30pm	Sufjan Stevens	Not sure how good he would be live, but I’m so intrigued and desperate to see.  Again, audience screening required to ensure that only people that “get it” are in attendance.  Likely an artist that people could spoil by talking through the performance
6.30pm to 8pm	Weezer (Pinkerton era)	Lots to sing along too and switching the audience onto some loud noises.  Amazing live, would have loved to seen them at an early stage of their career.  Choosing Pinkerton so that they have more than the Blue Album to play and fill the 90 minutes
8pm to 11.30pm	REM (Monster era)	I saw them at Glastonbury in 1999, but they were missing Bill Berry who last toured on the Monster/Aneurysm tour.  Proper stadium band at the height of their game and embracing electric guitars.  Michael Stipe incredible at controlling a large audience

Saturday (it’s allowed to get a little noisy)

Time	Act	Reason
Midday to 1pm	Noah and the Whale	Beautiful music, always.  Picture them playing to a crowd waking up and in full daylight.  Sweeping strings and great melodies.  A difficult slot, but a great set up for the day
1pm to 2pm	Oasis (Definitely Maybe pre-release)	Who are these upshots?!  Presumably they’ll mouth off about Noah and the Whale (I’ll have a word with them)
2pm to 3pm	Burt Bacharach (and guest artists)	A full orchestra for some classics with a few surprise appearances (I’ve been sworn to secrecy)
3pm to 4pm	James (Laid era)	Lots of dancing and a few sing-alongs for people
4pm to 5pm	Band of Horses	Big sounds and big guitars and a little bit country
5pm to 6.30pm	Flaming Lips (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots era)	One of my favourite bands live, great energy and bound to bring a smile to everyone’s faces.  Lots of zorb action
6.30pm to 8pm	Smiths (Queen is Dead era)	Quickly restoring melancholy levels.  But what a band to see!
8pm to 11.30pm	Rolling Stones (Exile on Main St era)	I’m not 100% on this, but a band at the height of their creative powers, throwing out incredible songs that must have been electric when live.  Hopefully catch the band before they disappeared within Jagger’s ego

This line-up is only a snapshot in time, probably influenced by what I’ve listened to recently (currently listening to REM Monster and have been reading Keith Richards autobiography).  It will change before I get home, but something along these lines would satisfy me and encourage me to camp.

What would be great to add to this is some of these artists being unknown to me at the time I sit down to listen to them.  To discover some of these acts for the first time live would be a real privilege.  It is this that I am most jealous of all festival attendees – stumbling across a new band that just blows you away, the live performance will always enhance your memories particularly if you share it with great friends.

Although it is clear that I am way too anal to fully embrace it, I’m now jealous of the festival goers…

ps even reading this back makes me realise I’ve made a number of mistakes.  Perhaps I need a third day?  Arrrgghh!

The rationalist's dilema

In the last couple of weeks I have been converted to a world of imperfection.  Flatteringly considering myself an economist, I have an obsession with efficiency.  Anyone with an equilibrium named after them is a natural hero.

The revelation has come in the value of keeping things simple.  This principle has been reinforced to me in deal structuring and price setting.  Whilst I have never actively sought to overcomplicate things (some of my colleagues and professional acquaintances may disagree), I have simply focussed on making sure that things were structured in such a way to provide people with the correct incentives.

Consequently, when it comes to partnerships I have preferred tiered revenue targets with rising shares; corporate transactions earnouts with a mix of targets to manage behaviour; and even to pricing that truly reflects value delivered.

My hope has always been to create the right balance of incentives with protection for both sides.  Whilst simplicity would have always been an ideal, for me it now becomes as important as incentive and protection.  Would it even help to have a diagram? (it’s been a long train journey)

The reality being that these three items are not always consistent.  I would now push the importance of keeping things easy to understand, and importantly (in the corporate world) easy to communicate.  One of my failings would be that when in “deal mode”, I live the deal and iterations of the structure seem completely rational.  However, all parties need to share the same understanding of the deal, and this can be undermined if it has strayed from simplicity.

It is also difficult to resist the temptation to add complexity once parties have agreed buy-in on a simple basis.  One of the partners we are dealing with has a great ability to continually make things simpler and consequently the partnership will be stronger – we are both clear on each other’s roles in the relationship.

This did slightly jar with my pretence of being an economist until I remembered the theory of the second best.  I am bound to get it wrong (pretty sure I did in my finals), but I enjoyed the way it pulled at the core of pareto economics to say that by taking a wider view on things the right result might be in general more efficient than a series of individual efficient situations.  (I defer to Wikipedia)

I have seen the value of simplicity play out in a partnership we are exploring and also in investigating pricing options (through a fascinating focus group held expertly by Rafe Offer).  In both cases, the need to balance risks and incentives were fully understood, but instead of contracting for them, both our partner and dealers recognised that these could be solved in easier ways – simply by assessing whether it is working or not.  And the key to solving this is closer communication.  Incredibly simple, but allows us to reduce the need for contracts and focus on our relationships.

Oh crap – I’ve already over complicated it.  In my head it sounded simple…

The Ronseal School of Marketing

After much hot air on this blog, it was an incredibly proud moment when the staff at motors.co.uk gathered to watch our advert broadcast during Emmerdale.  I was incredibly nervous about its screening, still suspicious that we hadn’t booked the ad, or had missed a compliance requirement on its submission.

But it screened, and it looked beautiful.  As many of us have said during the creation “it looks like a proper advert”.  We now know it to be a real advert!

We have come an incredibly long way in a short period.  Stripping back our consumer messaging to its very core and also understanding exactly where our brand fits.  motors.co.uk has always focussed on trust and reassurance, and its partnership with newspaper groups has naturally targeted it at a certain audience.  However, we have moved from having a slightly circumstantial brand positioning to a very explicit view of who our audience is.

This will flow through the company to inform product design, tone of any messaging as well as providing the sales team with confidence to know the value and identity of our leads for dealers.  At its core we want to promote “smart, safe and easy car search”.  Additionally, we want people to engage with our brand around some of the emotions of car ownership and buying.  Not all car owners are experts on the specifications, but we all possess hundreds of memories and feelings about our car.

However, I get ahead of myself and make this sound all too fluffy.  I want to reassure you of how basic the first line of our brief was – “we want people to know what motors.co.uk does”.   Fortunately, the team at A&N Creative were able to nail this point quickly and grant us the luxury of thinking more about our brand messaging and positioning.  Thanks to their creative ideas and the research activity led by our head of research, Dermot Kelleher, we were able to be much smarter.

The result is a campaign that after almost 2 weeks on air has seen a significant increase in traffic, engagement and response.  People are also remembering the brand with 150%+ increase in direct and branded search traffic.  This has been an amazing response from a medium that is often pitched for medium-long term brand building.  There is still work to be done in understanding the data and being able to optimise future campaigns, but the initial signs are overwhelmingly positive.

The title of the blog isn’t as crazy as you think.  Production costs were tight and the deadlines even tighter.  The back-up plan was me addressing the camera, pleading with people to come to motors.co.uk.  Perhaps one day … but only if I move into mattress sales.

How accurate is Three Men and a Baby?

After a 5 (plus 9ish) month sentence, Bianca was finally treated to a night out.  Her prison officer Ted left with me and me alone.  Sure I’ve spent lots of time with Ted before, but usually I have had the emergency button of “the boob” if things got out of hand.

Ted slept on the way to drop Bianca off, probably a good thing as it struck her that she was going to be Ted’less for the next few hours.  I decided to kick off my good, responsible parenting immediately and drove home the long way to make sure that he slept for at least 30 minutes.

A weary Ted woke to finally realise that his mother wasn’t around.  There was a weird 10 minutes where Ted was still a little sleepy, a little confused and quiet as he wondered why a) his dad was around on a week day and b) his mummy hadn’t come back.

Ashamedly, I settled with him on my lap and had a quick glance at work emails until Ted wrestled the iPhone from me and into his mouth.  He was back in the room.  The giggles started and he recommenced his quest to steal my glasses.  Even as I type I struggle to see the screen through his grubby fingerprints over my specs.

The next 3 hours were brilliant.  We laughed.  He climbed me.  He dribbled on me (lots).  We played with his toys.  He even played exceptionally patiently whilst I tried to work the steriliser and make his bottle without burning myself.  I knew I’d taken too long and was feeling nervous when I heard a screech from the living room.  My senses went on high alert, was Ted beginning to feel abandoned?  Nope, he’d reached over, got a toy in his mouth and seemed to be laughing at Friends on the TV.  As I rushed in, he stopped, smiled at me and then turned back towards the TV.

I think this summarised the whole thing.  He absolutely bossed our afternoon together.  He held the bottle I tried to feed him with.  He reached for the toys he wanted to play with.  He threw himself backwards when he wanted to play “row row row your boat”.  And even rubbed his eyes 5 minutes before he was due his bath as if to say “I’m not sure you’re aware of the schedule, but I’d quite like my bath now”. 

The sad thing is that once asleep, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but do some work.  I keep looking at the monitor wondering if he’ll wake up wanting to play again.  (he did wake up and he just wanted milk – but only at an acceptable temperature, so I had to make a second bottle)   

I know that it would be incredibly difficult to do this all day every day as Bianca does so naturally (and excellently), but I felt privileged to have this special bit of father/son time.  I hope he enjoyed it and that he’ll let me have another go – frankly, it’s his decision.

Here's a pic of my boss, commanding from his high chair

*****

Incidentally – how weird is this?  I was trying to find the scene from 3 Men and a Baby where Tom Selleck stares blindly at the selection of nappies and formula in a supermarket, when I found this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2f__k0Pnw

apparently a whole internet craze about a ghost boy in the film.  I am freaking out.

Economics of a Rate Freeze

Today motors.co.uk announced a freezing of our rates to automotive dealers.  The decision to announce comes on the back of feedback from the market about upward pressure on their media spend.  Obviously a lot of the spend is directed to one major provider, but there has been a trend in the market due to the increasing importance of the internet in generating response for dealers.

At motors.co.uk our aim is clear – to grow quickly to provide automotive dealers with a must-have source of media and to provide consumers with the best used car search experience.  However, our approach is to do it in a collaborative, transparent manner.  We believe that by increasing the confidence of both buyers and sellers we will make the market bigger.

The realities of business mean that whilst we have frozen rates, we believe there is a commercial value to the response we provide to dealers and that we should be recompensed for this.  To generate the response that we do, we have invested millions of pounds in marketing and will continue to spend heavily (as our latest TV campaign shows).  Although the internet lowers initial barriers to entry, it is expensive business building an online brand.

Whilst our rates have been frozen, our traffic and response continue to increase.  Consequently, we are becoming cheaper by the day on a cost-per-lead basis. 

We are lucky to have the backing of one of the UK’s largest media groups, Daily Mail and General Trust, who have a rich history of creating household media brands.  This has provided us with the confidence and resources to invest in marketing, technology and staff to ensure that motors.co.uk can handle fast growth and comfortably serve thousands of dealers.

The balance we have to find as a challenger online brand is to deliver clear value to our customers whilst ensuring we generate sufficient financial return to invest in marketing and technology and also generate a commercial return appropriate to the level of risk taken.  The internet has democratised some sectors but it has also over-rewarded established brands who can bypass the vagaries of search.  Although the current long-tail of poorly populated classified sites and aggregation engines may confuse the customer, I believe that consumers and dealers both deserve choice in classified advertising.  Obviously, I hope they then choose motors.co.uk!

Insight into the upcoming TV campaign

The upcoming TV campaign continues to keep us all busy, but also incredibly excited about the prospects.  The adrenaline is flowing at a rapid rate throughout the whole business as the campaign forces us to ensure everything is set for a successful campaign.


We made the decision to go on TV relatively late (in comparative terms), but this provided a sense of urgency which has fuelled our work habits and rate of change.  It is my hope that both dealers and consumers get to see this velocity and hunger to provide a leading site for used car search.


The campaign forced us to address a number of questions about the business, from the brand message, to the consumers that we are targeting and even whether our business cards are appropriate!  Through extensive research and some soul searching we made the decision to lead with a new creative campaign.  


This was a difficult decision as Sensei was the product of lots of hard work and research. However, we believe the market has changed and the key messages of motors.co.uk need to be kept simple, to provide clarity to consumers about what we do and why they should visit.  As a young business we need to change things!


We wholeheartedly believe that the market underserves the general car buyer.  We need to remember that buying a car is a big decision with a lot of pressures.  Furthermore, we discovered that consumers are excited and scared in unison.  The consumer often believes that they are being "ripped off" or paying over the odds.  I think that as an industry, we have a job to do to show that there isn't a hidden agenda and do whatever we can to breakdown the information asymmetry.  I am confident that motors.co.uk can address this gap and we will be working with dealers to improve public perception and increase the enjoyment of the car buying process.


So ... as a result of the TV campaign, the branding across motors.co.uk and its advertising will change.  We are incredibly impressed by the efforts of AN Creative  and think that the message will be clear and simple but also very charming.  The core values of motors.co.uk have not changed, but we believe we've found some effective tools for communicating this.  Our dealers can only benefit as this increases traffic to motors.co.uk.


I'll be sure to post more as we have it for distribution, but here is a teeny sneak preview...

Welcome to DK!

Just a quick one today, to welcome the excellent insight of Dermot Kelleher to the world of Blogging.

DK is the Head of Research at motors.co.uk and has his finger tips on the wealth of data that flows through our business.  Highly recommended following for anyone interested in trends in online used car advertising ... and occasionally some rambling adoration of Spurs.