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NY Times: Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All

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Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All

An ad for Apple was used for a study of consumers’ biometric responses.

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By STUART ELLIOTT

Published: March 31, 2008

 

NEVER mind brainstorms. These days, Madison Avenue is all about brain waves.

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Related

Accounts, People, Miscellany (March 31, 2008)

   

That may be overstated, but it is no exaggeration that agencies and advertisers are growing more interested in neuroscience in their never-ending efforts to improve effectiveness.

The ardor of the ad business to adopt the technical tools of biometrics — measuring brain waves, galvanic skin response, eye movements, pulse rates and the like — is increasing as consumer spending, the engine of the American economy, slows.

In other words, in hard times ads must work harder to move the merchandise.

“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel,” said Joel Kades, vice president for strategic planning and consumer insight at Virgin Mobile USA in Warren, N.J.

“I’m not such a huge fan of ad testing,” he added, but measuring biological responses is “absolutely useful.”

The curiosity about neuroscientific ways to determine how ads work — or fail to work — will be on display this week at the 54th annual convention and exposition of the Advertising Research Foundation. The agenda for the conference is filled with presentations on better methods to determine how consumers engage with ads (and vice versa).

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“In many ways, we’re testing advertising the way we were testing advertising when I was at Procter & Gamble 22 years ago,” said Frank Stagliano, executive vice president for the Nielsen Entertainment Television Group in New York, part of the Nielsen Company.

Neuroscience can provide “a more accurate way to understand what consumers really like,” Mr. Stagliano said, which helps to produce ads and programs that “break through the clutter” rather than contribute to it.

Last month, Nielsen bought a stake in NeuroFocus, a company that specializes in brain-wave research and works for clients like Scottrade, the brokerage firm.

“We measure attention, second by second; how emotionally engaged you are with what you’re watching, whether it’s a commercial, a movie or a TV show; and memory retention,” said A. K. Pradeep, chief executive at NeuroFocus in Berkeley, Calif.

A company that competes with NeuroFocus, the EmSense Corporation, hopes to demonstrate such usefulness in a discussion on Monday at the research foundation’s convention.

Executives of EmSense, which also tries to measure consumer response to ads through biometric techniques, will present the results of a study of how award-winning ads.

For the study, EmSense surveyed 200 people, ages 18 to 54, in New York and San Francisco. The study measured their biosensory responses to 19 commercials that won awards last year at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France, and ads that won Effie Awards last year from the New York the American Marketing Association.

The study looked at spots like a commercial for Apple with characters playing “PC” and “Mac”; the “I Feel Pretty” spot for Nike, with Maria Sharapova, and  a commercial for Tide with a talking stain on a man’s shirt.

On Madison Avenue, Cannes awards, known as Lions, are usually perceived as honoring creativity and Effie winners are typically deemed to reward effectiveness. The EmSense study sought to weigh the value of those emotional and cognitive approaches.

Some findings reinforced the conventional wisdom, said Elissa Moses, chief analytics officer at EmSense in Westport, Conn., which works for clients like Virgin Mobile USA and Coca-Cola.

Winners of Effies “tend to be a little less emotional and use rational claims a bit more” than winners at Cannes, Ms. Moses said, and ads that won Lions tended to be much better liked than their Effie counterparts.

But surprisingly, “there are very important similarities” between the two types of winners, she added, which can help guide future campaigns.

Fifteen of the 19 Cannes and Effie winners engaged consumers faster than average spots, Ms. Moses said. “Typically, a spot engages with viewers in 5 to 7 seconds. The Cannes and Effie ads engaged, whether emotionally or cognitively, in 1.5 seconds.”

Whichever award the commercials won, they had an equal effect on purchase consideration and on brand favorability, Ms. Moses said.

Although winners of Lions are replete with emotional appeals meant to engage viewers, they also use what Ms. Moses called a “cognitive jolt,” a twist or surprise, to earn interest.

For example, viewers were startled by a car crash in a Volkswagen spot and by a dropped call in a Cingular ad.

Some consumer advocates question the role of biometrics in ad research. They worry that blending “Weird Science” with “Mad Men” will give marketers an unfair advantage over consumers.

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“The role of neuromarketing is to understand how people feel and react,” Ms. Moses said. “It in no way sets out to meddle with normal, natural response mechanisms.”

Her opinion was echoed by Robert E. Knight, the director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also the chief science adviser at NeuroFocus.

“We’re not trying to predict an individual’s thoughts and actions and we’re not trying to input messages,” Dr.  Knight said.

Before Nielsen teamed up with NeuroFocus, Mr. Stagliano said, “we were concerned how people would respond,” but after a test at the CBS Television City research laboratory in Las Vegas, the reaction was “overwhelmingly positive.”

“Respondents didn’t feel like they were being probed or anything,” Mr. Stagliano said.

FT: Silicon feels the power of the sun

Silicon feels the power of the sun 

By Chris Nuttall

Published: March 24 2008 19:08 | Last updated: March 24 2008 19:08

Applied Materials is winning itself a place in the sun with a high-stakes gamble on expansion into the solar industry.

As the world’s biggest maker of equipment for the semiconductor ind­­ustry, Silicon Valley-based Applied Materials is used to providing tools that help others to be creative. But a $1.9bn (£959m, €1.2bn)factory order, understood to be from a Chinese consortium, impressed analysts this month and showed Applied becoming more directly involved with solar.

The order is more than five times bigger than any order the company has ever received for chip tools and demonstrates that the company’s contribution to the success of the technology could be far bigger than occurred in semiconductors. But to achieve this, Applied is undergoing a transformation of its business that includes acquisitions and offering to fit out production lines.

Mark Pinto, Applied’s chief technology officer and head of its new energy and environmental business, speaks with the enthusiasm of an inventor freed to make his dreams come true. “What is exciting about solar for our employees is that we feel like it’s in our hands, we can play a very big role,” he says.

In his previous career as a scientist in Bell Labs, the research division of phone company AT&T, Mr Pinto was frustrated by a company culture that could not get great ideas into the marketplace. Now he is seeing the impact of combining his research efforts with business development in a fast-growing industry eager to embrace new methods and technology.

With semiconductors, he says, Applied has been dependent on oth­ers to come up with “killer applications”, such as Apple and its iPhone, in order to drive industry innovation and sustain demand for transistors and the equipment that makes them. “Solar provides way less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the world’s energy needs, so the potential market is huge. The killer app is already there – if you lower the cost of solar, the market is there,” he says.

Applied believes its technology is key to making solar energy cheap­er. Announcing its expansion into solar in September 2006, Mike Splinter, chief executive, promised to cut the cost per watt of generating solar power from $3-$5 to $1. “We plan to change the cost equation for solar power through adaptation of our existing technology and new innovation in order to help make solar a more meaningful contributor to the global energy supply,” he said.

In other words, in changing its own business, it is also changing the economics of a new industry. Ap­plied was in a unique position to do this because of its knowledge of handling silicon – a base material for both semiconductors and solar panels – and because of a separate foray into making equipment for flat-panel display makers.

Applied entered this business in 1991. In semiconductors, Applied’s core expertise is in making equipment that can create depositions – thin layers of insulating material on chip wafers. A similar deposition process is needed for flat-panel displays. Applied Materials and display manufacturers discovered they could be made more cost-effectively the bigger the size of glass from which the screens were cut. Applied’s machines for making the panels have grown so big they can no longer fit even on 747 jumbo jets and are mainly assembled on site. Now variations on this equipment have been adapted for solar panels.

Mr Pinto says the company initally assumed only panels small enough to be carried up ladders and fitted on residential roofs would be needed. But the industry has told it that bigger panels are re­quired for utilities to assemble solar farms and for other commercial installations. He says a kind of Moore’s Law is at work, referring to Gordon Moore of Intel’s 1965 paper that predicted the number of transistors on a chip would double around every 18 months. This was really about costs coming down with miniaturisation. With display and solar panels, the economics are also about cost per area, with the costs falling if the panels can be cut from bigger sheets. Installation is also much cheaper with fewer, larger solar panels.

Applied is focusing on thin-film solar, which exploits the photovoltaic effect of sunlight being absorbed by materials and converted directly into electricity. Silicon only 2-3 millionths of a metre thick is deposited on a glass substrate in the thin-film process. But Applied has also hedged its photovoltaic bet by buying companies that are expert in crystalline silicon, whose cells need more silicon, around 175 millionths of a metre thick. Its acquisitions in the past two years include Italy’s Baccini, which makes test systems for manufacturers of crystalline silicon, bought for $330m, and HCT Shaping Systems, a Swiss company that cost Applied $475m for technology that cuts silicon into pieces thinner than the slimmest salami slice.

Paula Mints, solar analyst with Navigant Consulting, says Applied has done the right thing, since she expects thin-film will grab no more than 50 per cent of the market. “There is always a cost/efficiency trade-off,” she says, alluding to the fact that thin-film is cheaper in needing less silicon, but it is less efficient in converting the sun’s rays to electricity.

In thin-film solar factories, Applied’s deposition equipment ac­counts for 70 per cent of the costs. It has therefore offered to equip com­plete factories for panel-makers, while integrating the other 30 per cent worth of equipment such as conveyor belts, sourced from other suppliers. The full solar production line it offers is another departure for Applied, says Mr Splinter: “We have changed the business model here too – when we started in thin-film solar there was basically no industry, so we started off a complete line. We’ve never done this before.”

Tim Arcuri, Citigroup semiconductor equipment analyst, says the Chinese order shows Applied’s stra­tegy of offering large-scale complete solutions is working. “It has been something of a holy grail to build monster gigawatt factories using these big pieces of glass to achieve a very low cost per watt,” he says.

The first Applied-fitted factories are coming on stream this month, equipment orders are expected to be worth more than $2.5bn by 2010, and Mr Arcuri says he can easily see solar accounting for a quarter of Applied’s revenues by then. But the company faces competition from rivals such as First Solar and Oerlikon Solar and the future path of solar technology has yet to be determined.

“This is a huge gamble for us,” cautions Mr Splinter. “We are betting a lot of shareholders’ money as well as our own research and development that this is going to be big and very successful. So far, so good – it’s the greatest opportunity the company has had in many years, but I think we still have a long way to go.”

The whys and hows of cutting what a watt costs

Applied Materials’ venture into providing manufacturing equipment for the solar panel industry is part of a surge of interest in Silicon Valley in the alternative energy.

Venture capitalists have funded start-ups trying new materials and methods to convert the sun’s rays into electricity, while Cypress Semiconductor span off solar-panel provider SunPower in 2005.

Google has the largest solar panel installation of any US corporate campus and has launched an initiative to explore solar thermal power – concentrating the sun’s heat to produce electricity.

With silicon currently the key material used in both semiconductors and solar panels, the Valley is in a good position to put its expertise to good use.

Mike Splinter, Applied’s chief executive and a Valley veteran, says solar reminds him of the early days of semis.

“People are jockeying for position; there are different technologies and materials and we are feeling our way,” he says.

“As the cost comes down, the solar market should scale much faster as there’s a huge market electricity, whereas then there was no computer market.”

According to Citigroup analyst Tim Arcuri: “There’s going to be a shake-out, with there being four or five different technologies and their different supply chains. But when there’s a scrum like this, I would not bet against the Valley.”

Paula Mints, solar analyst at Navigant Consulting, offers a different perspective: “Silicon Valley is a marketing term.

“I don’t think we have any more sand or processed sand than anywhere else. But we do have an area that draws interesting, capable, brilliant people to it.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Early morning brigade brings home the bacon

Early morning brigade brings home the bacon

By Rhymer Rigby

Published: March 25 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 25 2008 02:00

Almost no one has time for leisurely business lunches nowadays, says Yvonne Ike, an executive director at JPMorgan - which is why she is a "big fan" of the business breakfast. A quick lunch is often rushed and forced but a short breakfast feels relaxed and natural. "Breakfast hardly ever goes on for more than an hour and people usually get straight to the point," she says.

The business lunch - in its traditional, boozy, all-afternoon sense - has long been in decline. First went the alcoholic excess; then, with the advent of quick lunches, the third and even the second courses; now a sandwich in Starbucks can qualify as a business lunch. And, even in its stripped down form, many executives don't like to take a big chunk out of their schedule. Small wonder that many are choosing to meet and eat before they get to the office.

Sarah Gold, managing partner of CHI, an advertising agency, also prefers to do deals over coffee and croissants. "Lunches take up too much time - two hours minimum with travel - and while I like business dinners, they really do encroach on your personal life," she says.

Ms Gold, who has up to three breakfast meetings a week, says the advantages are not only to do with saving time: "It is also considerably cheaper. If you go for lunch, you'll barely get change from £100, whereas with breakfast it will be more like £30. They also just feel more part of the modern working world."

The power breakfast, in combining elements of puritanism and the competitive work ethic, has always held a powerful appeal in the US. Well-known practitioners include New York's Regency Hotel and the Bel-Air in Los Angeles.

But fashionable restaurants elsewhere are not far behind. In London, the Wolseley, the Cinnamon Club, Raoul's and Automat all cater to the early-morning business brigade. In Tokyo, the Imperial and the French Kitchen at the Grand Hyatt play host to the city's dealmakers.

Jeremy King, co-founder of the Wolseley restaurant in London's Piccadilly, says: "Lunch often has a lot of obligatory socialising attached. You see groups of men talking about anything but work for two hours and then cramming all the business into the last 10 minutes. But breakfast focuses the mind. We're even seeing people doing two or three breakfast meetings in a row."

Hotels are also reporting a breakfast boom. Claridge's says queues for breakfast often stretch out of the restaurant door: "In the past few years, it seems to have really grown. A lot of it is [down to] non-residents and it's very much a suited and booted clientèle."

Much of the growth in popularity of breakfast is down to longer working hours and shorter breaks. But Carole Stone, author of Networking: The Art of Making Friends , says there are other reasons. "It is usually much easier to get a table for breakfast and people who might say no to lunch for time reasons are happy to make breakfast. It is also much easier to have on your premises than lunch."

Ms Stone adds that although some may see business breakfasts as yet another workplace intrusion into home time, the reverse may be the case. If you get your meeting out of the way before the start of the day, by getting up 45 minutes earlier you can often leave work earlier. Doing business over breakfast makes a good impression and puts you at your desk at 9.30 with a sense of achievement under your belt.

The working breakfast's other great benefit is its relative informality. Even today's pared-down lunches can be involve a series of etiquette hurdles. Does a glass of wine say you are not serious about business? Should you have a starter? A pudding? Bottled or tap water? And at what point can you politely leave? With breakfast these worries fall by the wayside. At the first meal of the day, it is perfectly acceptable for one person to have a "full English" with three coffees while another has a meagre bowl of fruit without the two diners feeling awkward.

Ms Gold says a final reason breakfasts are better is to do with cultural change. In a fitness-conscious and more feminine workplace, "a lot of women prefer breakfasts. You feel as if you can be a lot more indulgent over them."

She adds, however, that her idea of indulgence may differ from those of many businesswomen: "I'm a northern lass, so one of the reasons I like them is because I love kippers."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Lessons from the community unlocked

Lessons from the community unlocked

By Alan Mitchell

Published: March 24 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 24 2008 02:00

W hen Andy Buck, head teacher at a state school in the UK, wanted to implement new government policies relating to community cohesion, he sought information from several sources. Finding useful answers to his questions proved difficult, however. Either he could not find the right source or the answers were no help or he did not trust their provenance.

But then he telephoned The Key, an in-novative service set up by two UK government-sponsored agencies. "I got an answer that went straight to exactly what I needed. I was able to make a decision almost instant-ly," he says, from his office at the Eastbrook-Jo Richardson Partnership school in Essex.

The Key is an experimental "prob-lem-solving community", a new type of service that tries to combine human beings' ability to understand significance and meaning with the efficiencies of new technologies. It is a break from the top-down script-driven concepts usually used in such services, with different economics and with the pot-ential to be applied to virtually any sector.

The Key is being provided by Ten UK, a lifestyle services company that has also laun-ched a "green concierge", which answers people's questions about how to make their lifestyle greener using the same principles.

The core principles behind The Key - a tightly focused community facing similar problems and letting individuals' questions define the con-tent of the information provided - could be applied to countless other situations in public and private sectors, says James Crab-tree, director of public policy at the Institute of Public Policy Research. It was as a former policy adviser at the UK prime minister's policy unit that he became interested in The Key's innovative principles.

In The Key's first phase, school leaders phone or e-mail questions to researchers who find the best possible answer from official sources, experts and published res-earch. The researchers, some of whom are former school leaders, compile a full answer, with references, sources and suggestions for further reading, and tag it for future reference.

At first sight, the model looks econ-omic nonsense. Paying for hum--an beings to research answers to tricky questions from potentially 20,000 school leaders, one by one, would be expensive.But they are all facing similar problems; and the more times a question comes up, the lower the cost per answer. The aim is to manage the resulting information so that each ans-wer adds to an ever-expanding knowledge base. In the first four weeks, half the questions required new research. At three months, nearly 90 per cent could be answer-ed using existing content.

Now The Key is moving to its second phase. Previously answered questions are being transferred to the internet so school leaders can access the knowledge base directly.

If this phase works, the researchers will be needed only to answer new questions and to update ans-wers to old ones. The goal is to turn ignorance (individuals' questions) into a valuable resource. "It frees users from having to keep on reinventing the wheel," says Mr Buck.

So far, in the 1,200 schools in the pilot, the experiment seems to be working. Research by the Training and Development Agency for Schools, one of the two government agencies running The Key, reports nine out of 10 users saying it has saved an average of five hours per question. In addition, most say it has improved the way the school works because better decisions are made more quickly. Some say it is "like having another member of staff", says Yvette Tomlinson, The Key's project leader at the TDA.

Making the principles work re-mains a challenge, however. "Everything about the service has to be designed by the user," says Ms Tomlinson. This applies not only to information content but to the structure of the website (designed around number and type of questions asked), and the language (the words actually used by school leaders in their questions, rather than the language used by policymakers or government officials).

Cost management is crucial if the problem-solving community concept is to work economically. If a community is too diffuse, the same questions will not be repeated and costs will quickly spiral. Costs will also rise too high if too many users continue to opt for phone and e-mail questions rather than web self-service. On the other hand, if the volume of phone and e-mail questions falls too low, the knowledge base will be less useful.

The big question, however, is whether politicians and civil servants will let policy implementers rather than policymakers set the information agenda in this way. It is vital that users remain confident that answers remain free from bias.

"There has to be a sense of ownership, of the profession talking to itself. If it's seen as pushing a government agenda it will lose credibility immediately," says Mr Buck.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Non Sequitur

Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes

FT: Iran's elite paper over the economic cracks

Iran's elite paper over the economic cracks

By Anna Fifield in Tehran

Published: March 14 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 14 2008 02:00

In the upmarket neighbourhoods of northern Tehran, where women in Hermes headscarves can be seen driving their Mercedes past high-walled mansions, one would hardly guess that Iran's economy is in trouble.

But growth is slowing, inflation has spiralled beyond 20 per cent and unemployment remains a problem. These challenges, and the difficulties they are creating for ordinary -Iranians, will be at the forefront of many voters' minds as they head to the polls today for parliamentary elections.

However, the happy coincidence of a sharp rise in house prices - estate agents say prices at the top end of the market have doubled in the past two years - and record oil prices has created a feeling of new-found prosperity among Iran's elite.

Iran has seen several tides of new money over the course of its turbulent modern history, most starkly during the years of the Shah but also after the Islamic revolution of 1979.

The new generation of nouveaux riches are flourishing thanks to timely investments in real estate - and to the new business opportunities, legal or otherwise, that are opening up in the commercial environment created partly by the US-led crackdown on Iranian trade.

"The contractors who own these properties build the apartments and sell them immediately," says Sina Shafie, an estate agent in Farmaniyeh, one of Tehran's smartest suburbs.

In northern Tehran, it seems that every second block contains the skeleton of a new apartment tower or the sound of an old one being modernised. Mr Shafie just sold a four-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment for $2.6m (£1.3m).

Property prices in the capital, home to 12m people, have rocketed over the past couple of years, partly due to the general reluctance to invest in the Tehran stock exchange at a time of such political turbulence, and partly because of rising oil prices. This has led to a general increase in liquidity as well as increased profits for those with contracts linked to the state-run oil industry.

"We've sold three-quarters of these apartments already," says Navid Shoghi, a sales consultant at the almost-completed Tehran Tower, where the average flat costs about $2m.

"Most of the people who are buying here are businessmen who do business in other countries."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: 'I love the speed and the noise'

'I love the speed and the noise'

By James Allen

Published: March 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2008 02:00

In early March 1986, the dynamic Formula One racing team owner Frank Williams broke his neck in a road accident in the south of France. It left him paralysed from the neck down at the age of 43. As his grief-stricken wife Ginny stood at his bedside, attempting to come to terms with the situation, he told her: "As I see it, I have had 40 years of one sort of life, now I shall have another 40 years of a different kind of life."

Twenty-two years on, Sir Frank Williams's new life is remarkable for how similar it is to his old life. Since 1986, his team, Williams, has won seven constructors' world championships and five drivers' world titles, triumphing in 91 grands prix in the process. His name is still above the door and he is still in charge.

His remarkable achievements, recognised with a knighthood in 1999, are defined not just by the victories he has enjoyed in one of the world's most competitive sports, but also by his personal victory over disability. This season, which starts tomorrow in Melbourne, will be Williams' 30th as a Formula One team boss and will feature his 600th race. It will see him overtake the legendary Enzo Ferrari, who supervised his team from 1950 until his death in 1988.

This is a remarkable feat, not least because the Williams team is one of the last of a vanishing breed in Formula One. Most F1 teams are now owned by car manufacturers and many of Williams' peers, such as Ferrari's Jean Todt, are heading for retirement and being replaced by a younger generation of professional managers. But Williams, now 65, soldiers on. And the signs are that after a three-year spell in the doldrums, his team could be on its way back to the front of the grid with a potent new car and a thrilling driver line-up of Nico Rosberg, the speedy son of former Williams World Champion Keke Rosberg, and the Japanese prospect, Kazuki Nakajima.

Williams' office is quite plain and spartan. The team's headquarters, in Grove near Oxford, used to be the offices of the pharmaceuticals company Jansen, and in the corridors leading to the management offices you feel like it still could be. Only a model of a Williams team car on a plinth betrays the true nature of business here.

Williams sits in the far corner of his office, behind a huge desk. On the wall, there are photos of Margaret Thatcher and the American sprinting legend Michael Johnson. He still takes a close interest in all aspects of his operation, although these days he refers to it as a "company", rather than a team. He wheels himself around every department of the factory, asking questions. He is often in on a Sunday, dropping in on the engineers in the wind tunnel, which works 24 hours a day, pushing them for every tiny improvement in car performance.

"I love what I do, I love F1," he says. "I love the competition. But above all it's the speed and the noise. You can work out for yourself that, driving the way I was driving in France all those years ago, I loved speed but was clearly not competent enough to do it myself. But watching these guys drive on the limit, it's such a turn-on. I am nuts about cars. I still look at a Ferrari road car and think, "Nice car." I would have killed for one when I was 22 and I used to look at them on the King's Road. But I've never owned one."

Frank Williams was born in South Shields, Tyneside, in April 1942. His parents' marriage broke down when he was very young and he attended a Roman Catholic boarding school, St Joseph's College in Dumfries, Scotland. It was an austere childhood and he was often left at school alone during the holidays. He emerged from this seclusion determined to make his mark on the world. His father, Owen, was an RAF officer and his own dream was to be a soldier. "I liked the regimentation, the discipline and the fighting. It all appealed," he says. "But I was rejected by Sandhurst. I love reading about military history, battles fought and lost and why. Wellington is my hero, he never lost, had a brilliant mind, a real gift."

Instead he turned to cars. As a boy, Williams fell in love with racing and would hitch-hike miles to watch events. But his driving career began by accident - literally. In 1961, in search of the fastest road car he could afford, he bought a race-prepared Austin A35. "I went for this car, with no intention of racing it, then I thought, 'This is a real racing car, I could race this.' So I went to Mallory Park [a circuit in Leicestershire] for my first event. It was wet and, on lap four or five, off I rolled into a bank. I climbed out of the back window and a sophisticated voice said: 'I thought you'd be joining me up here. How do you do, my name is Jonathan Williams.'"

Williams's namesake was a driver who took part in Formula Three events around Europe. He knew many of the well-known racing drivers of the time. "I became his helper in F3, went all over Europe, had a fantastic life," Williams recalls.

He progressed to running his own cars - although his early career as a team boss, in the late 1960s, was quite chaotic and he lived from hand to mouth, selling second-hand cars to raise money. At one point he was so broke that he ran his office from a telephone box after having his line disconnected. He became close friends with Piers Courage, heir to the brewing family, and together they moved into Formula One in 1970 in a deal with the De Tomaso car company. Tragically, Courage was killed while racing in the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix.

Williams refused to give up. But he knew that if he was going to succeed, he needed to design and build his own cars. The answer arrived in 1977 when he joined forces with Patrick Head, a young engineer he found working in a garage under a railway arch in London. The two formed Williams Grand Prix Engineering and landed a major sponsorship with Saudi Airlines. In 1979, the cars designed by Head started to win races and the following year the Australian driver Alan Jones won the team's first Formula One World Championship. They followed that with a second world title in 1982, won by the Finn Keke Rosberg. By 1986 the team, now known as Williams-Honda after a deal where the latter supplied engines, was one of the dominant forces in F1, along with Ferrari and McLaren.

By this time Williams, after a long struggle, was financially secure. He lived in a mansion near Newbury in Berkshire, with his wife and three children. Life was good. Then came the accident. He had been at a pre-season test session at Paul Ricard circuit near Marseille and was driving too fast en route to the airport. His rented Ford Sierra left the road and crashed, breaking his neck.

Williams was in hospital in France for 12 weeks. Before the accident, racing had been his obsession. Now it became his reason to live and to fight on. I ask him what - if anything - he misses about his former life.

"Running [he regularly competed in half marathons]," he says. "Going to the tailor - I was a vain little bugger in those days. But not much has changed really. I was out and about more back then, actively looking for money. But our method of looking for money was a lot less sophisticated in the 1970s and 1980s than it became in the 1990s."

And how would he sum up the "different kind of life" he has since experienced? "More sensible, less personal risk in driving too fast. I can't get about so much and I am very focused on the business. I think more deeply now than I did, to some extent. There are a lot of very clever people around me. When you are around people like that it really pushes you and keeps you sharp, you don't want to let the side down or have people thinking behind your back, 'I wish he would leave.'"

The past couple of years have been difficult for the Williams team. BMW, who joined forces with them in 2000, left at the end of 2005 to set up its own team and Williams slid, finishing eighth (out of 10 teams) in the 2006 championship and fourth last year (after the exclusion of McLaren for the espionage scandal). Although key sponsors stayed loyal, they made it clear that only serious improvement would keep them on board.

"It [failure] hurts financially and it weakens you for the following year," Williams says. "We had a bit of a spiral on our hands after BMW left us - it was very difficult. We stopped the slide last year and we will ratchet ourselves up again this year. We had to put our hands in our pockets to shore things up, sold a few assets."

Those assets included Williams' private jet, which made travel tolerable, allowing him to stand up on board in a special frame. Its sale paid for a new wind tunnel. Williams felt the slide keenly. Despite slipping to eighth, the team still had front-of-the-grid standards and aspirations. He is reluctant to talk about past glories, admits to feeling embarrassed that they are in the past and not the present. Familiar with the winning formula, he is determined to re-create it.

The signs from pre-season testing are that Williams has build a fast and reliable car for the coming season, which will allow the team to fight for third place in the championship behind the currently uncatchable McLaren and Ferrari teams. Williams is characteristically cagey about the team's prospects. "Our competitors are just as competitive," he says. "F1 is never easy - it's not supposed to be easy - so to think that we are going to sail into third place in the first few races is pie in the sky." Nevertheless, in Nico Rosberg the team has one of the sport's most highly prized drivers: McLaren were prepared to pay a significant premium to get him as partner to Lewis Hamilton, but he remains at Williams.

Away from the track, last season was notable for the scandal involving one of Ferrari's senior technicians passing secret technical documents to McLaren's chief designer, with whom he was planning to join forces at Honda. After being found guilty of using the material, McLaren were hit with a £50m fine and excluded from the constructors' championship by F1's governing body, the FIA, whose president is Max Mosley. Despite being rivals for more than 25 years, Williams has great sympathy for McLaren boss Ron Dennis, who has lost the most since the controversy.

"I do sympathise," he says. "Ron, to his credit, had the bottle to stand up to Max, but paid the price. I'm not having a go at Max, but Ron took him on and lost. Ron's a man who is very sincere in what he does, works very hard and has raised the standards of preparation and presentation in F1 to a very high level. It's sad it's happened to him."

Does Williams believe the sport has been damaged by the spying scandal? "It must have made some people who were fans of the sport think that it was not a pretty state of affairs," he says. "But I don't think it has derailed the train at all."

His own obsession burns on and shows no signs of dimming, although he is gradually facing up to the inevitable. "My grip loosens every year, I do a bit less and other people do a bit more, but I love it. One day I'll say 'I can't be bothered, tell the boys to go without me.' I don't see it now, but it is coming."

James Allen is the FT's Formula One correspondent and ITV Sport's lead F1 commentator

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Plumping for dumplings / Taiwanese diplomacy picks up steam

Plumping for dumplings

Published: March 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2008 02:00

Fifteen years ago I wrote about a modest restaurant called Din Tai Fung in Taipei. My friend, the late Fu Pei Mei, doyenne of Chinese cooking, insisted that Din Tai Fung made the world's tastiest xiao long bao, the famous pork dumpling with soup that is made from meat juices and stock jelly, a dish that originated in eastern China. Today, Din Tai Fung has expanded to mainland China, Japan, Singapore, the US and Indon-esia. Europeans will soon be lucky to have a taste with the opening of a branch in Paris and one in London (see article below).

I recently returned to Taipei to talk to Yang Jihua, the owner and inspiration behind Din Tai Fung. Yang's father started a business more than 50 years ago selling cooking oil to consumers, who would come to have their bottles filled. But then bottled oil was introduced and there was no more need for the business. Moving quickly, his father turned it into a restaurant that specialised in quick, delicious but inexpensive meals. At first, a chef was employed but Yang quickly learnt how to cook what he perceived as good food. His recipes came from home cooks.

I was struck by Yang's incredible passion to get things right. His joyful smile hides a sharp mind and his attention to detail. Each dumpling recipe is very precise: 1g of dough, 16g of pork with seasoning and 18 folded pleats, exactly. His quality control borders on the obsessive. Yang has experimented endlessly with different wheat flours to make the dumplings. He uses a mixture of soft and hard flour, as well as local and imported flour, which is then mixed by hand; while a special machine is used to sift the final result. His dumplings are very firm but elastic at the same time and hold the liquid without breaking. Yang also uses muslin cloth to line the bamboo steamers instead of the traditional cabbage; this helps prevent sticking.

International expansion began when Japan's Takashimaya department store group approached Yang to open a number of Din Tai Fung restaurants. This in turn brought a horde of Japanese tourists to eat at the original restaurant in Taipei. Yang was given advice from his Japanese partners on quality control, service and cleanliness. His service staff are well-dressed in neatly starched uniforms and many tend to be college graduates. They love working at Din Tai Fung because they feel it is a case study on how to run a successful business and they are well paid. Wages make up 40 per cent of Yang's expenses. When I visited the kitchen I was impressed by how immaculate it was, with all the cooks wearing clean white hats, jackets and boots.

Obviously, Yang is doing something right: queues of customers at most of his restaurants start forming well in advance of peak mealtimes. The kitchen is glassed in and you can see 30 cooks making the dumplings, with steam billowing from the large bamboo steamers. They serve an average of 2,000 customers daily (3,000 on weekends) and they produce anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 dumplings.

Fifteen years ago there was no English menu. Today, the menu comes fully illustrated with an enticing colour shot of each dish, as well as Chinese and English descriptions and numbers for easy ordering. There are about 54 dishes (a small number for a Chinese restaurant), the majority of them a variation of the dumpling and noodle dishes.

I started with classic steamed pork dumplings, the xiao long bao par excellence. They were superb, small enough so that you could simply pop them into your mouth, then enjoy as the savoury soup and juices ooze out and you slowly chew the filling of minced pork, ginger and spring onion. Heaven.

Steamed crab meat and pork dumplings are just as delicious and, if you like something lighter,the steamed vegetable and fish dumplings, consisting of minced fish paste mixed with Chinese greens, is refreshing and earthy.

Vegetarians will appreciate the mushroom vegetarian dumplings, which are a perfect marriage of smoky chopped mushroom and Chinese greens. The shrimp and pork shao-mai is a wonderful version of the open-faced dumpling that one finds regularly at dim sum luncheons but cooked in a clean, lighter and greaseless casing.

There are other dishes that are not to be missed, among them the steamed chicken soup. This is made with black skin chicken slowly steamed for almost three hours with ginger and spring onion in a rich broth. I love the Taiwanese favourite: fried pork chop. In this recipe, the meat is marinaded for a day in two types of soy sauce together with ginger, garlic, spring onion, three types of peppercorns and a touch of baking powder. It is then dusted in cornflour and deep-fried.

I asked the modest Yang what he thought of his success. He deflected my question by telling me that his biggest challenge was to maintain the highest quality everywhere that Din Tai Fung was serving its famous dumplings. Now, that is good news for all of us.

Din Tai Fung, 194 Hsin Yi Road, Sec 2, Taipei, Taiwan. Tel: +886 2321-8927 www.dintaifung.com

Din Tai Fung's other locations are in Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US

Taiwanese diplomacy picks up steam

Published: March 15 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 15 2008 02:00

Lord (David) Steel, a former leader of the Liberal Democrat party, drew his apron strings tight and seized a handful of dough. With flour-dusted hands he rolled it into a sausage shape under Yang Jihua's eagle eye, broke off walnut-sized pieces and rolled them out into circles. Next to him, David Lidington, the Conservative party's spokesman on Northern Ireland, rolled away at his own pieces of dough, as did I mine. Before long, we were placing blobs of minced pork filling in the centre of dumpling wrappers, and trying to learn how to pinch them into 18 folds. Needless to say, none of us could do it.

We had been brought together as part of a diverse crowd of British bigwigs, food writers, China hands and Taiwan expatriates to celebrate the London premiere of Din Tai Fung, the famous Taiwanese makers of delicate, steamed xiao long bao. We were also there to welcome Taipei's new representative to London, Chang Siao-Yue. She has held many diplomatic posts, being the first woman to become a full Taiwanese ambassador and its first female vice-foreign minister.

The event was always going to be an unusual mix of politics and gastronomy. It was an offshoot of an idea hatched by the French government's cultural attaché in Taipei, who, apparently smitten by Din Tai Fung dumplings, urged one of the Taiwanese vice-foreign ministers to bring their makers to Paris. Representative Chang, about to begin her tour of duty in London, caught wind of their plans and suggested that they include London on their itinerary. In the end, she actually quit Taipei two weeks earlier than planned just so that she could catch the dumpling extravaganza, which was her first official engagement in London.

Yang Jihua, the perfectionist proprietor of the Din Tai Fung chain, selected eight of his finest chefs for the European tour and arranged for a shipment of vital ingredients that could not be procured locally. Some of the party arrived early on a reconnaissance mission to source the fresh ingredients that could not be imported. Like most Chinese chefs, they complained about British pork, which, since it comes from uncastrated pigs, offends Chinese palates with its unpleasant "fishy taste" (xing wei). And they struggled to find a substitute for qing sun, a plump lettuce stem used as a vegetable: in the end they used the jade-like interiors of broccoli stalks.

Judging by the rapturous sighs of the Taiwanese expatriates with whom I shared a table that night, Yang's attempt to reproduce the Din Tai Fung formula in Europe was a triumph. "Oh, it's just like home, it's exactly as it should be!" they cried, beside themselves with joy as they guzzled wheat gluten with bamboo shoot and lily flowers, a salad made from broccoli stalks with garlic and chilli, hot-and-sour soup and, of course, xiao long bao. Yang bustled around from table to table, checking that everyone was content. "A typical Taiwanese restaurant owner," said the journalist sitting next to me.

The British politicians also seemed to be having a good time, with their aprons, floury hands and steamers full of dumplings, which suggests that the second purpose of the event was satisfactorily fulfilled - which was to introduce Chang to some valuable Westminster contacts. Lord Faulkner, co-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary British-Taiwan Group, urged the British government to disregard pressure from Beijing and recognise as a fellow democracy the small island nation of Taiwan.

Food has always been of political importance in China, and chefs have always been enlisted to serve the purposes of the state. In the distant past, making edible sacrifices to gods and ancestors was a ritual that held together the whole social and political order. The King of Tang, in the 16th century BC, is said to have been so impressed by one of his chefs, Yi Yin, that he made him prime minister.

So, in a sense, it's not surprising that Taiwan should use a famous dumpling restaurant to showcase its culture and to make a good impression on international friends. But the Din Tai Fung banquet was also a reminder of Taiwan's diplomatic isolation. This small island democracy has only one full embassy in Europe - in the Vatican. The others are all "representative offices". Strangled by mainland Chinese opposition to its political activities, Taiwan has little alternative but to emphasise cultural relations. In such circumstances, a bit of dumpling diplomacy does not go amiss.

Fuchsia Dunlop's new book, 'Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China', is published by Ebury Press

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: A Hong Kong garden party

A Hong Kong garden party

As well as classic Cantonese food, the Lei Garden chain of restaurants gives Nicholas Lander an insight into the Chinese group's management style

Published: March 15 2008 01:58 | Last updated: March 15 2008 01:58

We were walking down the stairs from the Lei Garden restaurant at the CNT building in Hong Kong’s Wanchai district when an investment banker friend explained: “It’s a bull market here for taxis and restaurants at the moment. It’s hard to find a taxi after dinner unless you have already pre-booked one and, unlike even a year ago, it’s much, much harder to book a table on the day. At some places you now need to book even a week in advance.”

Neither of us could hide our enthusiasm for the dinner we had just enjoyed, even though it had begun somewhat worryingly. My request for Cantonese food had been welcomed by our friends, who had booked the table with typical consideration but they had also gone to the trouble of pre-ordering the food without realising that looking at a menu is, for any restaurant correspondent, almost as exciting as eating the food.

My disappointment lasted the couple of minutes it took to walk up the stairs and into the first-floor restaurant. It was vast, brightly-lit, packed and noisy, with a decor that can only be described as mundane. In contrast to Europe and the US, there were clusters of waiting staff everywhere. All the waiters were wired at the ear to the kitchen and reception, a link that doubtless contributed to their extraordinary efficiency throughout the evening.

Our private room was taken up by a large round table, a revolving Lazy Susan and a small, discreet but long menu. But before I really had a chance to take it all in, the conversation at our table turned to the news that Hong Kong was abolishing its duty on wine imports, which should lead to cheaper restaurant wine.

One dining companion confessed that he had missed Asian food so much on a recent business trip to the Middle East that, on his arrival back in Hong Kong, he had called in at a restaurant before going back to see his children (they would have been in bed, he added).

Another explained how a brief stint working at the Lei Garden branch in Singapore had destroyed his long-held dream of a career in the restaurant business. Until then, he had held a series of high-powered jobs in IT in the US but a love of food kept nagging away at him to make a career change. When I asked him for more specific reasons for the end of the love affair, he said: “The first thing I realised is that running a successful restaurant is not the romantic notion anyone on the outside believes it is. It’s the attention to detail in everything that is so obviously crucial. I remember most clearly the spot checks that used to take place in all of the different branches. It would be just after lunch and someone from head office would arrive unannounced, call on a particular manager and conduct a stocktake on all the chopsticks, for example. ”

The Lei Garden’s approach to keeping its chefs on their mark is quite particular. Every Wednesday afternoon, a tasting is held at one of its 18 branches throughout Asia. The head chefs are asked to produce a series of their more standard dishes and some new ones (changing the menu frequently has been another vital factor in this group’s success). In the west, the emphasis at such tastings is invariably on identifying the best and on encouraging the chefs, but here the opposite is true. The style is to highlight what is wrong as much as what is right and the chefs are often humbled rather than elevated. If the chefs begin to think they are too good, the philosophy runs, they will leave tomorrow.

Certainly, there was no mention of the chefs involved in our dinner anywhere on the menu and no sign of them at the end of the meal. Instead, the meal was a vindication of a well-run, talented kitchen working in harmony with industrious waiting staff.

There was also vindication of not just the pure, unadulterated pleasures of Cantonese food but also of the importance that the contrasting texture of the ingredients plays in the sequence of dishes. This marks a big difference between what Asians find so exciting in their food compared with people in the west.

The meal began with a series of small servings of what were referred to as appetisers and included, most memorably, crisp slivers of puffer fish and fried sheets of bean curd filled with mushrooms.

This was followed by the return of a large Alaskan king crab that had initially been brought into the room crawling over a large silver tray but now reappeared steamed and cut into mouth-sized pieces, cooked with sweet Hua Diao wine on top of a mound of beaten eggs. Contrasting textures and colours followed with a soothing dish of a poached fish puff, made from the meat of the white fish, floating in a bowl of creamy fish soup and sautéed mantis shrimp with salt and pepper. The two final dishes, steamed rice with sausage, liver and wind-dried duck, and another soup, this time of a poached cabbage in a thick broth, had been thoughtfully chosen to protect us all from the winter cold.

Subsequently, I learnt that the Lei Garden group, with numerous branches in Hong Kong, two in Guangzhou and outposts in Beijing and Singapore, was created 30 years ago by Chan Shu Kit, now in his mid-70s. The son of a general in the Kuomintang army, Chan has successfully applied the lessons he learnt in military school and as an engineer to what is obviously now a highly disciplined business – one whose management approach is also influenced by his personal beliefs, such as ensuring that his staff meals offer a good daily intake of fruit.

nick4@jancisrobinson.com

More columns at www.ft.com/lander

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008