Why it's time for the Long Now

Here in adland '09, some of The Big Questions have been momentarily
shelved while we wrestle with more urgent commercial matters. Other
industries have it worse - take your pick from banking, property,
automotive. But the fact is that our business cycle gyrates around the
overall pattern of economic activity, and understandably if regrettably
so. When clients sneeze, adland catches a cold.

In these more straitened times, we could be forgiven for retrenching,
battening down the hatches, sticking to the knitting. It's a path that
tempts us, that speaks to our lazy impulse to be shaped by rather than
to shape events. Except, of course, that it's the very behaviour we
deride in others, the knee-jerk course we try to persuade or cajole them
away from. Except also, of course, that tin-hatted defeatism is
self-fulfilling: a sure-fire way of rendering our agencies and industry
less relevant, less competitive and less front-foot when recession
eventually dissipates, as it must. The road less trodden is the one to
take, because the task both for individual businesses and the industry
collective is to emerge from the dip fitter, not just leaner.

But the story so far is this. 2008 was a festival of denial and wishful
thinking; the word recession itself unspoken. Looking back, it seems
that much thinking, and not just most budgets, were frozen. Brands that
moved on to a new footing, that understood the tectonic plates were
shifting, were in a minority. The grocers were among the quickest, their
businesses blessed by real-time information from the consumer frontline.
Christmas witnessed a mad dash from retailers on to the credit-crunch
dancefloor. But it seems to be only recently, catalysed perhaps by a new
financial or calendar year, or perhaps by competitive incursion, that
the majority have followed suit. They are not too late: the jigsaw is
still up in the air as people work out their own personal and domestic
versions of Obama's "new era of responsibility". But success will belong
disproportionately to the swift.

Here on the supply side, vanity projects have been snuffed out,
priorities realigned and new, tougher questions asked not just of fees,
but of existing and prospective creative collateral. The fast-receding
tide reveals plenty of naked bathers. "Will it work?" and "how?" have
seized back their rightful place centre stage. Production money has
become "non-working capital"; reactions to Aviva's rebranding exercise
relate largely to how much the ad cost. (PS. To Ringo. Yes, you would
still have been pretty famous as Richard Starkey. You were the drummer
in The Beatles!) Gruesome euphemism abounds: people have become
headcount, stripped of their boom billing as talent.

While agencies and clients alike have been wrestling with the task of
re-setting objectives and strategies for their businesses and brands,
they have also - more subtly and some-times unconsciously - been making
judgments as to the right horizons to stare at: short, medium or
long.

Agencies, as we know, tend to prescribe long-term medicine for their
clients, since they know that most advertising (and I use the term in
its broadest sense) tends not to pay back over the very short term but
instead returns on investment by building stronger brands, which are
valuable and covetable as a flow of future revenues. That many agencies
prescribe this medicine while dosing themselves on more short-term
remedies, in thrall to their own quarterly obligations, has not escaped
our clients' notice.

Our clients, meanwhile, are perennially torn between the long and the
short view, and right now the shrill demands of "now" are the new
boardroom black. "Without the short term, there is no long term," my
very first client opined during my first recession. (The agency had been
arguing the case against transferring production of a certain
Pennsylvanian beer brand - "only ever brewed in Old Latrobe", in
glass-lined tanks, to be precise - to, er, Sunderland. Margin-enhancing
for sure ... in the short term.) Impossible as it was to refute his
statement of principle, the reverse or near-reverse is also true.
Without a clear sense of the long term, a vision of what your brand can
be (a "true North", if you like), marketing actions will tend to
commoditised pragmatism: undifferentiated fire sales and brand-depleting
promotions that mortgage your future.

More generally, a brand is, by its nature, a long-term, strategic asset
(and often a company's single-most valuable one, as countless studies
and deals underscore). Strong ones earn preference and loyalty. They
secure distribution, command a premium, win margin. More prosaically,
but no less importantly, they underpin the security and predictability
of a business. So short-term actions that damage long-term brand health
are not smart business decisions, however much their sponsors cite
"market conditions". Recessions can turn brands into commodities in the
twinkle of an eye.

Chief executives and marketing directors on their much-publicised
18-month tour of duty face a decision, then. The best consider their
legacy - the health of the brand they bequeath to future generations -
because they understand intuitively or otherwise that brands outlive
their tenure and that their actions echo down the ages. Try rescuing a
brand that has long been price-promoted or gone unnourished by
communication and you will see quite how long the odds are against
success. True brand-builders understand that to fix a roof at the
expense of your foundations is the height of folly.

But this is not a charter for mindless long-termism, for fiddling while
Rome burns. Experience teaches us (well, me) that strategies premised
only on abstract future success frequently founder on short-term rocks.
(The ice-hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously attributed his success to
skating where the puck was going, rather than where it was, but it was
OK for him: he didn't have to report to the City mid-skate.) It's a cry,
rather, for tactics that support rather than fight against long-term
strategy and, most simply, for setting one's horizons appropriately.

Too sharp a distinction between short and long term is ultimately
unhelpful; to set them up in opposition is bogus. We will give best
advice to clients, and they to their stakeholders, if we understand that
short and long sit on the same continuum, with feedback loops between
them: short impacts on long and vice versa. The lens required has
probably been best described as "The Long Now", a term first minted far
beyond our industry by Brian Eno.

On arrival in New York from Europe, Eno had been so struck by their
ferocious sense of the here and now that he coined the phrases "The Big
Here" and "The Long Now" to describe and lobby for a broader world-view.
"Now," he wrote, "is never just a moment. The Long Now is the
recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and
is a seed for the future. It highlights the irony that at a time when
humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, most of our social
systems seem geared to increasingly short nows." The Long Now clock in
the Science Museum brings his sentiment to life.

Reluctant as I am to reduce such grand theory to the service of our
industry, I believe that a sense not just of now, but of The Long Now, a
seed-sowing and not just harvesting mentality, is a pretty good
description of the marketing mindset required. In recession, that is,
and beyond.

Tempting as it is just to get out there and "compete", any brand's plans
for the near term should be tempered by at least some sense of its
longer-term fortunes and destination. Marketers and their agencies must
always keep at least one eye on the future. Even in the eye of the
storm, our brains must stay trained, if not quite on "business as
usual", then at least on our ongoing endeavour: to make our clients'
brands as competitive and profitable as they can be over the short,
medium and long term. A Long Now perspective respects the needs of the
moment without surrendering to them.

Look around you and make your own judgments as to who is best navigating
these changing times. For me, the John Lewis clearance has been executed
with its customary discretion, leaving the brand's ongoing promise and
dignity intact; while Debenhams, by contrast, will find it hard to
recover premium brand turf. Holler "Everything Must Go!" and you fill
today's tills at the expense of tomorrow's. Domino's has moved smartly
to occupy the new "eat out" territory (that is, eat in); Aldi is
encouraging us not to change our lifestyle, but our supermarket. Both
are sowing the seeds of future success, not just reaping the credit
crunch's meagre harvest.

A Long Now mentality keeps us focused on the important and not just the
urgent. It's crucial enough that we do this in times of media stasis.
But at the end of a decade in which the web has marched from the margins
to the centre of our economy and society, it is mission-critical. The
current generation of advertisers is witness to the biggest rupture to
our media landscape imaginable, and few would argue that our industry
has yet established a new orthodoxy or consensus in terms of the way
that brands can now be built, budgets now assigned or content now
distributed. Instead, we hear the grinding change of gears, the squeals
of delight from the winners matched by the bleats of injustice from the
losers.

Credit crunch or no credit crunch, we're obliged to keep figuring this
stuff out: transforming our agencies and our ideas not just to keep pace
with change but ideally to be ahead of it on our clients' behalf. For
media agencies, this demands dramatically new connections thinking. For
creative agencies, dramatically new content thinking. More profoundly,
and for us all, it demands that the walls erected between media and
creative in the last decade of the 20th century, and between "digital"
and advertising in the first decade of the 21st century, be torn down.
It would be tragic if that industry reconstruc-tion project took a back
seat to short-term pragmatism. If The Long Now got outshouted by now.
That really would be fiddling while Rome burns.

- Laurence Green is the chairman of Fallon London.

THE LONG NOW FOUNDATION

The Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org) bases its core approach on the
belief that "civilisation is revving itself into a pathologically short
attention span". Blame the acceleration of technology, the short-termism
of market-driven economics and politics, or our stretched, multitasking
lifestyles. Whatever the causes, the foundation believes a balancing
corrective to the short-sightedness is needed, "some mechanism or myth
which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term
responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in
centuries".

The foundation, whose co-founder Brian Eno coined the name, was
established in 01996 and uses five-digit dates, adding the extra zero to
solve the deca-millennium bug, which will come into effect in about
8,000 years. It aims to become a counterpoint to "today's
'faster/cheaper' mindset" and promote "'slower/better' thinking". The
foundation is developing a clock that will measure time in a 10,000-year
span and has bought a mountainside in Nevada, which could eventually be
the home of this "deep time" clock.

It has also established a Library, a library "of the deep future, for
the deep future". The idea is to explore whatever may be helpful for
thinking, understanding and acting responsibly over long periods of
time.

It has a set of guiding principles, "guidelines for a long-lived,
long-valuable institution". They are: serve the long view (and the long
viewer); foster responsibility; reward patience; mind mythic depth; ally
with competition; take no sides; leverage longevity.