Are our start ups a let down?
Image courtesy of Fiat Luxe
The start up plays an almost mythical role in the world of advertising. Start ups are not simply an outlet for the professional and material ambitions of the best in the business, they are absolutely essential to the health and vitality of the industry. If advertising has managed to adapt to the changing business, consumer and communications landscape over the past century it has been largely because of its start-ups.
Continue reading "Are our start ups a let down?"
Even faster strategy
Image courtesy of Liquidrosephotography
Monday this saw the IPA Strategy Group's fast strategy conference here in London.
All in all a rather splendid occasion.
The high point was the victory of the marvellous Richard Storey in a live head to head fast strategy challenge from the UK Government on Dog Registration. It was a good reminder, if anyone needed it, that Richard is one of the most accomplished creative strategists in adland. The Planning for Good team (Mark Earls, Jon Leech, Ian Tait and Chris Forrest) came second and were outstanding, if not quite as sharp as Richard's M&C team (here is the wiki they built that morning to help them). CHI was rather out-classed and brought up the rear.
Anyway, the event made me think about my top tips for getting to strategy fast so I thought I'd share them with you. I've done 17 since it seems such an unfashionable number. Some stuff will be familiar to regular readers - but when you are creating fast strategy it doesn't do to reinvent the wheel.
Continue reading "Even faster strategy"
Fast Strategy
Image courtesy of Combined Media.
This is a little piece I did to publicise the Continue reading "Fast Strategy" Image courtesy of Below Zero.
Forgive this self indulgent post but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that has helped adliterate stay the course for three years this month, whether commenting, linking or reading. Self evidently I couldn't do it without you.
In particular your comments that offer a thoughtfulness and intelligence often lacking in the original post! And at best they not only get the debate going but take us somewhere new and far more interesting.
Incidentally looking at the 2420 comments so far, the first was from Rob Mortimer as was virtually the last. That deserves the blogging equivalent of a carriage clock.
Image courtesy of Simon Lord
Every morning as I meander to work in Charlotte Street I fortify myself for the day ahead at the Caffe Nero on Tottenham Court Road.
And every morning as I hand over the cash they parrot the same old question ‘do you have a loyalty card’. And every morning I mumble a 'no' and move onto the next question which is about muffins or other items from the pastry selection.
Continue reading "Loyalty my arse" United London's anti-salt campaign from last year. The four I's in action. I have been giving a bit of thought to a planning approach recently. Something that reflects they way I do it at the moment but nothing too heavy and contrived.
Naturally it involves alliteration and specifically the words ‘interesting’, ‘instinct’, ‘insight’ and ‘idea’..
Continue reading "The four I's" Charlotte Street, spiritual home of London's ad land. Image courtesy of Chas Folkes
Thought I'd put up two new bits of work from Saatchis in London. Visa is hot out of the edit suite, you may have clocked Carlsberg already.
Continue reading "New work from new home" Image courtesy of I owe my career in advertising to an ad.
Not to an ad that inspired me but one that I responded to. It was placed by a long gone and deservedly forgotten direct marketing agency trying to find graduate recruits many months after the above the line shops had employed all the good ones. The ad read ‘By the year 2000 90% of marketing will be direct marketing’ and I was sold.
Continue reading "Be careful what you wish for" La Danaide by August Rodin. Image courtesy of Jahsonic.
It is one of the least edifying characteristics of planning directors that they spend a lot of time creating a new briefing format for the agency or network. It is what my old boss Jim Kelly would call "displacement activity".
Continue reading "Naked briefs" A while ago I introduced the idea of brand ecosystems. These are a group of mutually reinforcing brands, usually from different sectors that co-exist and often co-operate with a high likelihood that a customer of one part of the ecosystem will become a customer of the rest of its members.
Well I have been thinking about this a little more recently.
Continue reading "Ecosystems update" Never surrender to lacklustre thinking, always know you have a better idea. Image courtesy of asboluv I like Skunk Strategies.
Or rather I like them in the absence of anything else. And you might find the approach useful especially if you are working in a difficult sector, on a difficult piece of business or at an un-inspiring agency.
Continue reading "Advice for young planners - Skunk Strategies" My father and I were talking recently and he suddenly produced a note he has carried in his wallet for the last 30 years. And this is it, 'the workers plea', in all its typewriter written glory.
I thought you might be interested in it whether you are an employer or an employee. It seems to encapsulate a basic code of conduct between people and hell it might even work in other relationships. For what it is worth the conversation we were having was actually about the relationship between the governed and the state.
This is my first NMA column for the year and its about measuring the effectiveness of digital campaigns. Obviously there is quite a tongue in cheek theme about bringing the digital geeks and the research geeks together but the serious points are about looking beyond intermediate metrics, the folly of accountability and need for greater ambition in digital campaigns.
As ever, enjoy.
Continue reading "Boring people know the most interesting things" Now that I am safely ensconced in my new advertising home I thought I'd put up some stuff from United London - the short lived but rather fun shop that closed its doors in April last year. While it bore very little resemblance to HHCL, the agency from which it was formed, one of its key qualities was that it retained a ferocious commitment to top draw planning that was one of the reasons that HHCL was so good in its day.
Continue reading "United we fell" Ah yes, the advocate.
I have let it fall a bit by the wayside recently but the new year seems a good time to get it going again and on Cadbury’s of course because we can now start to get a feel for whether the work was strategic folly or enormously well endowed in the selling department.
Continue reading "The Advocate - January" Greetings adliterate readers everywhere and a belated happy New Year.
I'm not in the habit of writing self referential posts but a little bit of an agenda for the year never goes amiss.
2008 marks the third year in the life of this website, starting as it did in March 2005. And my sincere hope is that I can continue to deliver a relatively frequent diet of new ideas, contrary thinking and unpalatable opinions.
It also sees me take up gainful employment once more as I am now Director of Strategy for Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK, so can once again trouble the ad industry from the inside.
Now conventional wisdom suggests this will see a decline in blogging activity. I really hope not. In fact, having had nine months outside the ad industry doing brand consultancy, I found it more difficult to generate content with all that free blogging time that when I was working in an agency.
I guess the easy bit about blogging is finding the time, the difficult bit is finding the ideas - because if you have an idea then the time finds itself.
And being surrounded by the world of brands and everyday brand problems is always more conducive to having ideas than being at home with the mac.
So fear not readers - the online journey goes onward.
And, of course, if there is anything that you'd like to see more or less of this year drop me a line.
Serendipity is not only a beautiful word it is a very beautiful thing.
One of the great delights of life, serendipity ploughs a furrow between co-incidence on the one hand and fate on the other while being part of neither.
But I’m rather afraid that it is progressively disappearing from our lives, collateral damage in the quest to deliver and receive ever more relevant entertainment and communications.
Continue reading "The death of serendipity" I did a panel session a few weeks ago with Russell at Promax, the annual conference and awards for the TV promotional people in the UK.
We were on the same bill (well they were on the main stage and we were in the studio) as some real giants of the media world - Will Gompertz (who heads up Tate Media), Emily Bell (the genius behind the Guardian’s mastery of the world of online journalism) and the legendary Stephen Berlin Johnson (he of ‘The Ghost Map’ and ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ fame).
I was scared of messing up so I made some notes about the subjects we were due to cover and I thought I’d post them. They are a bit scrappy but if you are interested you will get the general drift.
Continue reading "Minnows in a world of giants" The marketing community are often accused of being rather over enthusiastic about Innocent - harbouring feelings about it that aren't perhaps shared by the wider world.
Indeed you would have been hard pressed to find people out side the North London media community at this summer's Innocent Village Fete, I even spotted James Murdoch there.
Continue reading "Why we love Innocent" When I say I don't want you to be my friend I don't mean you, dear readers.
I mean brands.
Even lovely Innocent thinks I might want to chum up to them on the social network de jour and I don't, I'm sorry I don't.
Continue reading "I don't want you to be my friend on facebook" I recently had the pleasure of judging two sets of industry accolades.
The first was the Account Planning Group’s Creative Strategy awards and the second, New Media Age's Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards, at which I was the above the line cuckoo in the digital nest.
Continue reading "Emotion is the greatest form of interaction" One of the things that I always bang on about without really thinking about it in depth is the idea that Clients and agencies need to place less emphasis on consistency and more on coherence. So I thought I’d worry this one out a bit.
Continue reading "Coherence is more important than consistency" This my most recent column for New Media Age . In it I expand on the idea, that you will also find in the Battle of Big Thinking speech, that brand ideas now too big for advertising. Continue reading "Are brand ideas too big for advertising?" If anyone is interested I have uploaded my speech from The APG's Battle of Big Thinking as well as the slides. For regular readers many of the themes will be very familiar.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
Continue reading "Battle of Big Thinking" I'm in love with the aphoristic form as you well know. And I think they are extremely handy in our business. Certainly in persuading people of a point of view or course of action - such as David Ogilvy's why keep a dog and bark yourself, or Bill Bernbach's we must stop believing in what we sell and start selling what we believe in. The are also great in framing strategies, approaches and ideas - no one is interested in your positioning, they only want to know your position or Coherence is more important than consistency for example. And on occasions great brand thoughts can take an aphoristic form, I'd argue they are the ones that get remembered best. So imagine my delight when Russell gave me "The World in a phrase - A brief history of the aphorism" by James Geary. Continue reading "Wisdom must be caught not taught" I recently enjoyed an evening at Leith's cookery school in well heeled Kensington.
All in all a very good evening matching wine to food even if I stood out like an ad man at a posh cookery school wine tasting night. Anyway, there was rather a fascinating story about accessibility, commodification and provenance that I thought I would share with you, my brand loving friends. Image courtesy of Rune T
Continue reading "A short story about provenance" I still maintain that very few people in advertising agencies really understand what clever digital agencies can do for their clients. And I had this further drummed into me last week as one of the judges of the NMA and Marketing Week's Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards. So I thought I’d jot down some observations on the work from the perspective of a planner from an above the line tradition trying to understand what is going on. Continue reading "Reporting from the digital front line" I have long believed that a planner's job must continue right up to the playout of an ad - not just working on the client's business but working on the ad itself. For me a planner needs to be hold onto the project whilst it is in production and post production right up until the clock number is allocated. I call this continuity planning for some inelegant reason. Continue reading "Many a slip twixt pre-prod and playout" There are a number of things happening this autumn to commerate the life and work of Stephen King the co (and coincidental) founder of the planning discipline (along with Stanley Pollitt).
My efforts have been focused on the inagural Stephen King Strategy Agency of the Year Award in November but the APG is also launching a collection of Stephen's writings on the 1st of October. So it is time to get acquinted or re-acquainted with the great man's work - whether from this post, by buying the book from the APG or rocking up to the book launch. If you want to go to the latter (£50 including a copy of the book - loads of lumanaires are going to speak so get your planning director to cough up) email the APG pronto here . Continue reading "Genius doesn't have a sell by date" I am a big fan of the Cadbury's gorilla ad and fully expect to see some stonking sales results coming in thick and fast. In the final instance I just think somethimes you need a bit of this - good old fashioned salience delivered by a fame seeking commercial. For all the analysis, particularly online, I had overlooked they way it was perfectly built to be remixed - or simply have a new track laid over it. So here are a few of the best remixes I could find on you tube. My personal favourite is of course Total Eclispe of the Heart.Three years young
Loyalty my arse
The four I's
New work from new home
Be careful what you wish for
Naked briefs
Ecosystems update
Image courtesy of Hans van Reenen
Advice for young planners - Skunk Strategies
The Workers Plea
Boring people know the most interesting things
United we fell
The Advocate - January
The adliterate address 2008
The death of serendipity
Minnows in a world of giants
Why we love Innocent
I don't want you to be my friend on facebook
Emotion is the greatest form of interaction
Coherence is more important than consistency
Are brand ideas too big for advertising?
Battle of Big Thinking
Wisdom must be caught not taught
A short story about provenance
Reporting from the digital front line
Many a slip twixt pre-prod and playout
Genius doesn't have a sell by date
Gorilla - those remixes in full
