Author Archives: grnthei

Latest Lessons from Erwin Ephron

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Volume 4, Issue 15

This last Monday I was presented with the Erwin Ephron Demystification Award by the Advertising Research Foundation. Naturally, I was tipped off in advance, and had organized my thoughts about what I would say.

Bill Harvey receives The ARF's first Erwin Ephron Demystification Award - June 9, 2014
Bill Harvey, recipient of the first Erwin Ephron Demystification
Award, with Gayle Fuguitt, CEO and President of the ARF.

(On the subject of acceptance speeches my mind always goes back to Sally Fields’ Oscar acceptance speech in which she emoted “You… like me!”)

For those of you who did not know Erwin, who passed on some months ago, he was one of the thought leaders of the advertising industry, known best for his ability to express himself so that not only did everyone understand him, his arguments were inarguable. He was also a great friend and mentor of mine. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had so many great mentors. The Universe sure has treated me nice since I acknowledged its sentience.

For those of you who weren’t there on Monday, here’s approximately what I said, with some unintentional omissions and a couple of new thoughts as I write this:

Thanks ARF, everyone involved, for this award. Thanks Erwin for teaching me how to demystify a little bit. I’m working at it. No one can do it like you could, buddy.

Interestingly, the last conversation I had with Erwin sort of presaged that there would be an Erwin Ephron Demystification Award. I was in a hotel room in Manhattan and my cell rang. It was him. He said that he and I still had some unfinished work to do together with the ARF. He said that the keyword is simplicity, that we need to get back to the basics of brand building (sales and long-term brand equity), and resist the attractiveness of all the new things that distract us from getting the brand to be more successful by making wise creative and media decisions. He expressed concern about how much time we spend reading or talking about new technologies. He didn’t object to including new stuff in the conversation, he just didn’t want us to go goggle-eyed and indecisive and to spend all our time that way. He knew how much hard work it takes to make brands succeed better.

I’ve been applying his advice. I have people editing my ravings to help me demystify more (hopefully). There are large blocks of time in which I refuse to even glance at email and instead focus on the biggest priorities. I studied Erwin’s book, Media Planning – From Recency to Engagement, again for more clues. Of course, I love his first chapter, since he wrote it about me. How can you not love a friend who does that? But it was in his second chapter, on page 8, where I found that any brand can gain 5% to 10% more cost effectiveness by geotargeting. It’s still true. Five to ten percent is a lot considering that typical mature brand domestic growth is almost zero percent. Back to basics. With partners, I’m developing hyperlocal automation partly inspired by Erwin. Actually we are not claiming 5-10% but only a minimum of 2%. Not to revise the master, but he wrote that a while ago when mature brands were still growing domestically. Today the game is a lot harder. What is really needed goes beyond what media and creative people can do. What is really needed is new product development focused on healthy sustainable environmentally-friendly and animal-friendly products more than on advertising to fuel a new growth cycle.

Let me leave you with a tip as to how to be next to win the Erwin Ephron Demystification Award. Write something that de-confuses us, something simple yet profound. Take the mystery out of something we are grappling with. Or at least, help us organize our confusion.

Thanks again to all!

The ARF is a great organization that nurtures the actual and potential brilliant scientists in the industry. Marketing science is every much a science as behavioral economics, and the two are interlocking fields of psychology.

Wishing you all great joy at your work!

Bill

PS — In my Myers blog (link below takes you to the most recent post in that series) I will soon publish a supplement to this post focusing on the technical comments I made, which are of interest to marketers and possibly of less interest to most people.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Resiliency, Situational Awareness, Mission, and Positive Emotion

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Volume 4, Issue 14

The word “resiliency” has risen in usage within the U.S. military. It means the ability to quickly spring back from traumatizing experiences and function at Flow state levels. This connotes a degree of toughness, mental toughness. A physical weakling with low resistance to pain might nevertheless have enough mental toughness to be more resilient than a battle-hardened athlete with high resistance to pain.

Mental toughness means enough non-attachment to not be enslaved by attachment. Slavery to attachment to this life can make one act in a cowardly fashion, as can slavery to attachment to the opinions of you held by those who know of you. Mind Magic spends a chapter on methods to clean out these slaveries, increasing mental toughness and resiliency.

As slavery to attachment is lessened, the Observer state emerges from the layers of internal distraction and conservation-of-energy-driven avoidance of giving attention internally, which prevailed in the reign of our various slaveries.

The air forces of the world use the term “situational awareness” to essentially mean the same thing I mean by “Observer state”. However they are not as interested in understanding the process and heightening it as much as I am. The term is applied to those fighter pilots who during a three-dimensional dogfight maintain a sense of where everybody is and the vector on which they are traveling. To do that requires at least Observer state and in the most situationally aware fighter pilots, Flow state.

The emotional state of the individual moving from the slaveries into these higher states is at first a relief from negative emotion. There may then be a period of emotionlessness that makes one feel as if one’s compass has been lost. What, then, am I here for, the individual may ask, now that the false drivers of attachment have been vitiated.

I wrote You Are The Universe: Imagine That for everybody but especially for people who have yet to realize their greatest passion in life, for whom slavery to attachment at least makes each day a drama, albeit grueling. Liberation from the slaveries is replaced by a vacuum if one is not focused on a Mission to deliver one’s gifts to others in the highest way possible. The book explains how to find your sense of Mission and understand the context in which you are part of a larger whole in a true scientific and yet spiritually inspiring way — so that each day may be not only vibrantly dramatic but also filled with positive emotion.

May your day be filled with both vibrant drama and positive emotion!

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Inner Imagery Shorthand to Reinstate Flow

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Volume 4, Issue 14

Five hours in an airport. It’s a great way to catch up on work and then relax with a novel of speculative fiction, especially when I’m exhausted. It’s all okay until they start the delaying-the-flight game, which all too often leads to cancellation. Kristin isn’t working (on my clock) but has a little time so she starts researching the hotels nearest the airport and the probable flight alternatives, God bless her. Sure enough the flight is cancelled and I make it to the taxi stand before the horde. Only problem is that I’m going to get at best 4 hours sleep to make the flight heading to a city 1000 miles further away from home in order to change planes and get home by 5PM, right in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. Really? Ah well.

Next morning, walking through the airport toward my first plane of the day, I sense that I am feeling angry, exasperated and negative, projecting that I will run into further snags all day. Knowing that such projection will cause the snags, keeping me out of Flow, I experience something that I will describe below, laugh at myself and am back in a good mood. My eyes always go back and forth taking in as much as possible when I am in an unfamiliar setting, and on the next leftward sweep I see a flight heading to where I am going – La Guardia – leaving shortly nonstop for home. Why didn’t they put me on that flight, I wonder, and keep walking. A step later I figure I have time, why not at least check if I can get on that flight. Sure enough there is one seat.

In You Are The Universe I talk about Noia, the word I coined to mean the opposite of paranoia: yes, there are personas out there trying to do something to you, but it isn’t harm, it’s gifts. If you perceive the Universe to be a single Self playing all these roles including you, there is every reason in the world why Noia as a lens should work to help you notice these subtle gifts and clues happening constantly. Therein lies the magic. Of course, that kind of observant behavior would also be good to protect you should anyone be out to do you harm, so pragmatically, why not use that lens?

The shortest flight home and my noticing it was a gift that appeared a second after my mood shifted out of negativity, and the feeling I had at that instant was a powerful sense of synchronicity, the Universe giving me my just reward for acceptance of what is.

I said that I would describe the experience I had of shifting out of the lower state (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, or EOP, as I call it), which in fact is my reason for writing this — to share that moment of shift and what it felt like, so that it becomes a shareable psychotechnology.

A long time ago, I had established “trigger words” to remind myself of one folly or another so that when I was later in the same sort of stuckness loop I could spring those triggers to mind and it would restore the clarity and learning to frontal awareness where evasion of the lower state would be easier (despite the chemical insistence of such states).

For the situation as described, what I would say to myself in my youth was something like this: Accept What Is. That would unpack a stream of remembered relevant words that might go something like this: It is what it is. It’s not in your control. So you’re just wasting time and bringing yourself down by railing against it. It’s a useless activity not worthy of you. You’re not a fool any more. Meanwhile, in my mind I would see a goat butting a fence repeatedly. Eventually, the goat (me) calmed down.

In the airport I heard none of those words although a wispy suggestion of the goat image flashed. Another image came with it that is hard to describe. The Universe around me that ended at my skin was a solid substance and then again I too was in that substance, I am that substance. All of it was translucent and One Thing. Without words, the image conveyed that the very fact that it – the substantial Thing, the process of It – was happening, meant that it was real and everything else that could be imagined about it was not in an equal sense real. So logically, It – the happeningness – was all that truly existed., and any emotional reaction to it was a nice-to-have addition layer but not with equal realness and solidity. That image-feeling was what shifted me out of the downcast defeatist mindset.

Consciousness is the substance of the One Thing that is the primal substrate of existence. Science is even coming around to this view. Psychotechnology to guide consciousness is therefore not a crazy idea. Discovering what works and sharing it is something all of us do naturally, although not often enough, due to Acceleritis™. Yet psychotechnology is the very thing that can cure us of Acceleritis. Let’s have more of it! You can start with this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness.

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

The Need for Flow State Diplomacy

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Volume 4, Issue 13

The peacefulness of a Saturday morning, left alone to write. Even the animals inside and around the house who consider me Daddy sense the time calls for his isolation. From the back deck the feel is of a tree house. A green thicket of suddenly leafed-out trees exude exaltation in their bloomery. Through their generous expanse the river is now just barely visible as a patch of undulant sun reflection. The brook tinkles merrily downstream into the river. All’s right with the world.

Still a chill in the morning air recalls the aggressive winter, and then the memory is beaten back like a boat against the current. A chill in the back has always felt thrilling to me, as if there is something happening to me that is glamorous and interesting. I felt that way sneaking my first subway ride to Coney Island at age 12. Standing on the platform letting the wind rip through my leather jacket gave me that thrilling chill perhaps for the first time.

Memory jump to 1984. Weston Gavin and I are the only Westerners on the ramshackle bus jammed with Chinese tourists on their way with us to the Great Wall at Badaling, outside Beijing. For some reason in the subzero temperatures the Chinese are hot and have all the windows open. Weston has apples in his pockets and gives me one and I start to eat it. The Chinese man on my right gestures that he wants a bite, so we share it. We have just signed a contract with the People’s Republic Cultural Ministry to co-produce a movie in China. That thrilling chill again…

China, the oldest continuing civilization on Earth, abounds with founts of wisdom from ages of experience. Lao Tzu. Sun Tzu. Confucius. Today China is the fastest growing winner of the derby race called Capitalism. Weston recently visited us from London, arriving at our new (to him) home on May 8. Saturday morning at breakfast he called our attention to a tiny article in The New York Times about China plunking an oil rig just off the coast of Vietnam. The three of us (including my wife Lalita) couldn’t believe that this esteemed paper would bury this story deep in its pages, and Weston wondered if perhaps Washington had put out the word to keep the story at a low profile until it figured out what to do if anything. A recent Forbes article has all of the key information.

Contemplating what ought to be the optimal American response, I remembered how the Chinese always react to meddling, and my first assumed principle was to form a response that could not be knee-jerked with the usual Chinese response, but instead could bring discussions to a higher level. Why bother just going through playing those same old tapes? Another round of that just makes China feel stronger and more contemptuous of the USA. The rest of the kids on the block can only lower their estimate of the USA for running the same losing play again. Yet this is apparently what happened. The State Department’s official statement was that China’s state-controlled oil company Cnooc’s actions were “provocative and unhelpful to the maintenance of peace and stability in the region”. China’s Xinhua news service wrote in response, “The U.S. is in no position to make irresponsible remarks on China’s affairs.” Wu Shicum, head of China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies, attributed the deployment of the oil rig at this time — despite gradually thawing relations between China and its client nation Vietnam — ironically to the Obama trip around the region. In other words, we stirred up this trouble by continuing to act as if we are the undisputed singular global superpower in all respects, whereas China wants to be an equal to the USA and anyone else. It is these key attitudes in us and in China which draw incidents like this to manifest.

Rather than place blame on individuals or countries, the Flow state way to react to the present situation is to change the game. The old game is not working. The old game is which nation has the most power. That’s testosterone talking. We need frontal lobes talking, not limbic systems. In the 21st century, we don’t need to project our influence into the Pacific in order to have influence everywhere. We’re all digitally interconnected up to the neck. We all have influence everywhere. One tweet is like the proverbial Amazonian butterfly changing the whole Earth’s weather pattern. What then is the highest way to look at what is going on so that we may transcend it?

Territoriality is built into our brains. It goes all the way back in evolution to the earliest creatures. Robert Ornstein refers to the oldest part of our brain as the Reptilian brain because we can see how reptile behavior exhibits similar patterns to those of animals at later stages of evolution such as us. Although most of us associate the term with Dr. Ornstein, the term goes back to 1936 work by Paul D. MacLean who said that the fish started the Reptilian brain and drew this picture of the brain:

Paul D. MacLean's illustration of the reptilian brain

Note that the Reptilian brain is associated with decision making! That’s how important it is. Only in Observer state and Flow state is the individual free to overcome this powerful influence within in order to see things as they are and be clear enough to solve problems such as those between nations.

Before the USA reacted, in my contemplations, I developed a scenario. The USA has a quiet talk with China, not in full public view. The USA says it understands China’s reasoning: in a brief war in 1974 China won the Paracel Islands from Vietnam, and it still feels it owns those islands. The oil rig is within the zone China considers to be the territorial waters of the Paracels, which is China. Others may dispute this claim but we start from acknowledging that we understand China’s position. As fellow stewards of Planet Earth, what guidelines or new ideas or old forgotten good ideas can we together come up with to solve the island disputes here and elsewhere in the next few centuries?

We don’t stop at having that conversation with China, we start there. Then we have the same conversation over and over again with everyone else, respecting the privacy of what we say one-on-one, while going public about our new principles. These really are our Founders’ principles of live and let live, applying reason, kindness, and understanding, giving everyone a chance to be happy.

In my scenario, China and the USA get into the Flow state during their conversation and agree that the better way for China to have played the oil rig hand would have been to talk about it first with Vietnam, agreeing to give them a discount on the oil from that rig just to show that the emotional bond is real. The USA for its part in the Flow state conversation says that in retrospect we should have visited China in that swing through the region.

This is the level at which this conversation should continue so that the two biggest kids on the block get to protect the whole block (Earth) in a way that demonstrates true leadership and how the game is to be played from now on.

“You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.”

                          —John Lennon, “Imagine”

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.