People are pesky.

So it says if you click on the ‘People’ button in the affectionately named ‘amoeba’ flash panel on our homepage.

They are pesky, not just because they have too many shoes. They are pesky because they have a habit of surprising you and confounding your assumptions.

At Blonde we embrace this peskiness by talking to people. We talk to as many people as we can as often as we can.

And they never fail to surprise us. For which read that we always learn something useful.

That something might be a huge insight that unlocks an innovative strategy. It might be a smaller insight (for instance that b2b audiences are no fans of locked pdf documents), responding to which allows our clients to appear more thoughtful. As often as not it will be a reminder that we need to get our heads out of the emerging technology clouds and get our feet back on the average Joe ground.

Take a look at this video if you want to see just how far we can get our heads up our own bottoms if we insulate ourselves in an early-adopter world of Buzz versus Twitter blog posts and such like. It was produced by Google and asks a simple question of normal people – ‘What is a browser?’

In the recent past we have spoken to classical musicians, breast cancer sufferers, energy advisors, record company execs, independent financial advisors, journalists, high net worth individuals, social entrepreneurs, runners, higher education managers, internal stakeholders from several clients, and a whole range of ordinary folk of various shapes, sizes, backgrounds and locations.

Every conversation has been useful, having a direct impact on strategy and/or execution.

As it says on our homepage, ‘People are pesky. Everything we do is for them.’

Primary research to understand the people associated with a brief sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it can be inconvenient to the agency and/or the client that is in a blinkered hurry to use the latest technology.

We are huge fans of Forrester’s people-first approach to digital planning, and their Social Technographics model.

Understanding people’s relationships with technology (by asking them) ensures that your digital strategies are underpinned by the truth rather than wishful thinking.

Ian Leslie, the man behind the influential political Marbury blog, and author of To Be President, Quest For The Whitehouse 2008, spoke at the IPA Chairman’s reception on Monday night. He drew some interesting conclusions about what brand marketers could learn from the Obama campaign.

A couple of strands really caught my imagination.

Firstly that Obama became more than a candidate, he was a cause. He and his team made their play for the presidency on the back of the insight that this wasn’t just another 4 yearly, mechanical replacement of the occupier of the Whitehouse. Satisfaction levels with the political process and America’s standing in the world were at alarming low points. The American electorate was ready for major change. They saw what the others didn’t. The data added weight to a strong gut feel for the mood of the nation. And this insight translated into a compelling “brand” vision.

Secondly that the celebrated and ground-breaking online marketing campaign was not an end in its own right. It was a means to the end of getting people to do useful stuff in “the real world”. Ian described in fascinating detail the sophisticated techniques used to harness the latent potential of the 13 million strong database that they created and turn it into millions of individual actions.

This perhaps was the biggest achievement of the Obama campaign. To convince a highly cynical, disillusioned electorate that collectively and individually they could be a force for change.

Clearly Obama was also an exceptional candidate in many ways. The piece of film embedded below shows the genius of the man as he develops the theme of how a single voice can make a big difference. Few people, if any, in the audience had seen this before and it is intensely moving even allowing for the OTT tendencies of our cousins across the water. It’s 8 minutes long but well worth the time. The one voice theme starts about 2 minutes in.