When people ask me what I am looking for in a planner the list of important attributes has traditionally been exhaustive. So in an attempt to simplify things and shorten interviews I have recently taken to issuing a three-point description.

1) Safe looking people with dangerous minds.

This is an old phrase we used to use at HHCL back in the day and I still love it. It implies people that have every appearance of normality and sanity but that are a bit fucked up in the head, or at the very least have minds that are capable of doing some very interesting and potentially dangerous things.

2) Crafty with the craft skills

As far as I am concerned good planning is still about the ability to hunt down powerful and interesting insights or revelations about people, brands or the wider world and fashion brand and communication ideas from this raw material. These are the craft skills of the planner and the core competencies of anyone that uses the title – everything else is just styling.

3) Forward thinking mother fuckers

If you read my stuff you will know this is a description that Julian Cope uses about himself and I have appropriated as the best job description for a planner. No one has yet let me put in on a business card but it can only be a matter of time. Forward thinking mother fucker implies a curiosity and enthusiasm for the future and the world of ‘what if’ without demanding that you set up permanent residence there.

See if this works for you.

“The results of the experiment are now in and they are consistent: austerity doesn’t work” Mark Blyth, Austerity: The history of a Dangerous Idea

On the day that the Queen’s Speech offered few answers to the real political question of our time, here are a few personal thoughts about the way that Labour should be responding.

That Britain is in serious trouble is beyond contest. An economy that barely survived the banking crisis has been systematically destroyed by the Coalition whose policies on debt reduction through extreme austerity have comprehensively failed.

As our economy flat-lines, the economic theory on which Osbourne’s obsession with austerity was based has been discredited, the IMF has demanded that the Chancellor rethinks his insane plan and our credit rating has been put through the ringer. And that’s to say nothing about the real suffering of real people in our country. The number of those out of work piles up relentlessly and for those in work the only prospect ahead are incomes that are progressively eroded as inflation eats away at the value of their wages.

It therefore comes as no surprise that support for the Coalition parties has collapsed as witnessed both in serial opinion polls and last week’s local and by-elections. On Thursday the Conservatives lost control of ten councils and put over 300 councillors out to grass, while in the South Shields by election the Liberal Democrats came seventh, a performance so poor they lost their deposit.

What is more of a surprise is that the Labour party is not doing better. Sure their opinion poll rating repeatedly stand at around 40% (the magic number beyond which electoral chances look very rosy) but on Thursday they narrowly missed their target of taking 300 new council seats and in South Shields, they simply held a seat, that has been theirs since 1935 but with a reduced majority. At this rate a Labour majority cannot be guaranteed in 2015 even with the United Kingdom Independence Party (to give it its full and fully ridiculous title) splitting the natural Tory vote (as the SDP did Labour’s in the 1980s to Thatcher’s advantage).

The real truth is that right now the Labour Party does not look like a Government in waiting and specifically on the economy it doesn’t look like the solution that we all need. Of course it is political orthodoxy that two years out from a general election the opposition should not talk specifics because its usually enough to let the Government measure out the rope with which wishes to hang itself. However, these are extraordinary and truly desperate times. Anger towards the Government will not be enough to take Milliband to Number Ten as it took Hollande to the Elysee Palace. For one thing the protest vote is going to UKIP not Labour and for another the country deserves more than a repository for anger. We are crying out for help, hope and to hear a plan that might get this country on its feet again.

And for my money this means drawing the battle lines between growth and austerity. This is the only political question that matters right now but one upon which Labour has been too half hearted. In 2010 they let the Tories make them the scape-goats for the economic crisis and dictate the terms of debate. Back then there was no question that deficit and debt reduction were the order of the day, the question was simply how humane to make the cuts. And my concern is that they are letting the Tories take the high ground again rather than dictate terms themselves. As recently as last week Ed Milliband denied that he would borrow more than the Tories, Labour’s response but the Tory agenda.

The political and economic choice must be made clearer to the electorate. And its not one between harsh austerity that doesn’t work and gentle austerity that doesn’t work but between two diametrically opposed economic paths, one that pursues debt and deficit reduction and one that pursues growth by any means possible. While the Tories continually seek to blur the distinction, it’s imperative that voters are made to see that these are mutually exclusive aims – and that means facing up to the need for debt funded public spending. That doesn’t mean avoiding the need to address the structural deficit or a longer term desire to reduce the national debt but right now the State must take the lead in kick starting the economy, as FD Roosevelt said “Government cannot afford to wait until it has lost the power to act”.

This requires political bravery because it will be enormously difficult to land. However, this is nothing short of a national emergency and demands uncommonly strong leadership and a willingness to engage with difficult and potentially unpopular choices. Anything else is to treat the people of this country like children.

So while the media and back bench Tory MPs obsess with the political sideshow that is UKIP the time is right for Labour to come out fighting and with the gloves off on the only political topic worth debating – growth versus austerity.

I recently took part in a tech-start up event in which a handful of eager entrepreneurs were mixed with seasoned ad people in a suitably miserable Shoreditch basement that exhibited extensive and unresolved problems with damp.

To be frank it wasn’t up there as an experience to relish even setting the damp aside. For one thing I have a nagging feeling that the entrepreneurs got absolutely nothing out of the engagement with adland’s finest. We are inveterate cynics and the real truth is the most powerful resource any start up is profound naivety. Unless you absolutely believe that your idea is the best thing since the Sinclair C5 you might as well not bother. And so the reality is that while entrepreneurs may want help and a bit of advice they certainly don’t want their parade to be rained upon. Maybe that’s why California is a hot bed of entrepreneurialism, it’s nothing to do with Stanford and everything to do with a unique accumulation of unfettered and naive enthusiasm.

But the thing that concerned me most was the fare on offer because these were not the technology start ups I had imagined they might be. Every single one of them was really just an internet start up – an idea that used the internet as a means to reach, gather and trade in people and their behaviour. I had been hoping that there would be one or two start ups that were real business ideas based on actual consumer insight and using genuinely new technologies to solve a problem but alas no.

And it made me rather worried that in the world of marketing what we really mean when we talk about technology is simply the internet. This is fine as far as it goes but I’m pretty damn sure if you talked to an architect. a doctor or a materials scientist about new technology, the internet would not be high on the list of interesting things that they are wrestling with.

Maybe its marketing’s fault. The internet, access to it and its capacity to throw off and re-purpose data may be no great shakes in the general scheme of technological progress but it is far more profound in marketing where the genuine breakthroughs like the human genome project and hydraulic fracturing have clearly limited applicability to selling things to people.

But it still seems important that we don’t drink too much of the Kool-Aid no matter how parched our neophiliac thirst has become. I cried as must as the next person over the bit in the opening ceremony when Sir Tim Berners-Lee typed out ‘this is for everyone’ but will we really look back on this as a golden age of technological endeavour and relentless progress and is the internet the best we can do?

In his not especially enjoyable book ‘The Great Degeneration’, Niall Ferguson, who is convinced that the institutions that led to the success of the ‘Western’ economies and societies from 1500 onwards are in turn now destroying them, argues that we cannot look to technology to save our bacon tempting though this might be. He doubts that the next 25 years will see the technological advances of the past 25 years in which the internet featured rather largely. But he also points out that those 25 years (from 1986 to the present day) were nothing on the tech front in comparison to the period 1960 to 1986 that saw a man put on the moon or the previous 25 years from the mid 1930s that saw the atom split and DNA discovered. Quite frankly one could mount a pretty good argument that the industrial revolution still makes whats going on today look profoundly iterative.

No one questions that the application of connectivity and data to marketing is having a profound effect on the way we do business and in other parts of our lives too, I’m a big fan of what the Government Digital Service is doing to simplify, clarify and speed up our relationship with the State. But let’s not pretend that the internet is the finest flowering of technological endevour just because we can do some pretty cool stuff with it – the steam engine it ain’t.

I am not an economist but let’s say I am economically curious.

And I wonder whether some of the debates that are happening in the world of economics might have relevance to the world of brands and marketing. And specifically the rekindling of interest in Keynesian economics following the financial crisis and the failure of more classical or neo-classical economics to deliver growth. This is something we are acutely aware of in the UK where a Government obsessed with deficit and debt reduction choked off growth and thus taxation revenue resulting in both a triple dip recession and growing borrowing.

At the heart of the Keynesian approach is the multiplier. This suggests that moderate increases in Government expenditure, drives additional spending in the economy by a multiple of that increase. In other words to stimulate growth and pay down debt you need to drive spending into the economy rather than reduce it. This is naturally counter-intuitive for the classical economists and those running our country but it proved powerful during the great depression and may well point the way forward today.

When it comes to brands and marketing, it’s this multiplier that I am interested in but not simply as a rational virtuous circle of spending, activity, employment and taxation revenue but the emotional effect of all of this – confidence. Because what Keynesian governments are really trying to do is to inject confidence into the economy not just stimulus.

This is surely the real role of the brand creativity in these times of consumer austerity and economic uncertainty – to act as a confidence multiplier for businesses. Or to put it another way while it may seem counter intuitive for agencies and clients alike to deliver and demand more audacious and potent creativity when there is an air of pessimism and caution, it is precisely what is needed. For the confidence that high altitude creativity builds around a brand whether with colleagues, the trade, opinion formers or customers is capable of kick starting growth and a powerful virtuous circle of activity.

We found this on T-Mobile in the depths of the financial crisis when we started creating events like the dance in Liverpool Street station and the welcome home in Heathrow instead of banging out austerity led deal ads. Something in their exuberance and optimism caught the mood of the public and drove significant increases in sales and share. And we find it with Toyota whose growth last year dwarfs the category in part because they faced down the flat new car market and created brave new work (in particular for the GT86 sports car) that inspired the dealers and built confidence in consumers – both of which are powerfully reinforcing.

Indeed I would like to challenge the idea that many agency people have, that there are good clients and bad clients, there aren’t, there are simply confident clients and un-confident clients. And my bet is that the confident clients are the ones winning at the moment rather than the cautious and scared. Our role as agencies therefore must be to redouble our belief in and ability to produce game changing creativity and to provide the clear narrative, proof and performance metrics that help even the most confident clients take necessary creative risks

And to remind our selves that the real role of brands and creativity is to inspire and inject confidence, maybe we should dust down those economics textbooks and dub ourselves, Keynesian Marketers.

Image courtesy of Steve Hunnisett

The UK is currently gripped by one of its periodic food scandals.

For once this isn’t about food safety – no one has been feeding animal parts to other animals and therefore exposing the food chain to lethal pathogens, well not as far as we know it – but like the others it’s a by product of the obsession we have with cutting food costs at all costs.

A couple of weeks ago or the Food Standards Agency found Horse DNA in a number of economy burger products and substantial quantities of horse in some, including those of the supermarket chain Tesco.

This week Findus (a frozen food brand owned by Private Equity group Lion, whose CEO hilariously loves nothing more than a game of polo) was exposed for producing beef lasagne with next to no beef in it – the principle ingredient being horse.

It’s not about food safety because unless equine drugs are found in the meat rendering it unfit for human consumption there is nothing wrong with eating horsemeat, lots of people like it – just no one in this country.

But it is a food labelling and quality issue. It is fine to bulk out cheap meat products with horse meat, it’s just you need to make this clear to the consumer and see what happens to your sales.

And here’s what interesting to me. Because one of the historic and still relevant roles of a brand is as a guarantee of quality. Classically brands were the signatures of the person that made the product and this signature acted as a guarantee that the sugar, detergent or breakfast cereal was consistently made of the right stuff and not cut with cheap contaminants. If Heinz or Kellogg’s are much loved and respected brands today it is partly for this very reason.

When Tesco was found to be unwittingly flogging horse burgers I suspect the long term brand damage was not significant. Tesco’s brand doesn’t act in this way – its not really a guarantee of quality its the own label expression of a big retailer that sells many other burgers and many other own label products. Its a mark of value more than quality. Nothing more than a ripple of jokes in the twittersphere ensued and I doubt anyone stopped shopping at Tesco.

That is not true for Findus. Its a classic, old school, FMCG brand that exists to act as a mark of quality and reassurance. While its no longer quite the family favourite it was in my childhood, for many families buying a Findus lasagne as opposed to a Tesco one is about buying something they feel is a cut above own label, something a little bit more special. And the problem for Findus is that when the brand that acts as a guarantee of quality is nothing of the sort the brand suffers and arguably suffers for a long time. It may not be quite time to lump Findus into the bag of brands that had to be renamed because of scandal or tragedy like the jewelers Ratners or the ferry operator Townsend Thoresen, but if the product contamination reaches more of their range or equine drugs are found in the lasagnes, the brand contamination will be fatal.

All of which does call into question the role of private equity. Now there are plenty of private equity firms that value and nurture the brands they own, often bringing much needed professionalism to floundering businesses. However, it is still the case that may use the time dis-honoured method of loading the business with debt and then slashing costs to make a quick buck when they sell after a few years. At its very worst this approach leads to a lack of expertise in the business’ leadership beyond managing the balance sheet, little continuity of care for a brand that is being fattened for sale and temptation to cut costs in ways that expose the brand to long term and potentially lethal damage.

Like stuffing your lasagnes with horse meat.

The passage in Songlines in which Bruce Chatwin names the Moleskine. Image courtesy of Songlines.

The biggest cliché in advertising is not lunching at the Ivy, drinking chilled rose on the Carlton Terrace or doing coke with the intern in the toilets at the Christmas party. The biggest cliché in advertising is the Moleskine notebook.

Once the preserve of the planning class, in which it is now both compulsory and ubiquitous, the Moleskine has spread faster than syphilis through the account handlers and onto the client community. Rare indeed is it to be in any kind of advertising meeting where a Moleskine is absent.

So I am more than aware that my predilection for the notebooks of Bruce Chatwin and Ernest Hemingway mark me out as an out an out advertising wanker far more than a transporter full of Porsches ever could.

But obsessed with them I am and so I thought I’d mark this, my Moleskine anniversary. By which I mean it is ten years to the month that I first started using Moleskine notebooks and ten years to the month that I stopped using any other notebook whatsoever. You may well dip in and out of the gorgeous little black hardback notebook from time to time, much like you occasionally treat yourself to good single malt whisky, but I mainline the fucking things. My office sports an entire cabinet that houses Moleskines and contains every one I have written in since the beginning of 2003. Behind its sliding doors are every single thing I have thought or doodled over the past decade – including notes from every client meeting, creative review and pitch. It’s the closest thing I get to displaying serial killer behaviour – that and the two bodies under the patio in a house in Tufnell Park.

In the true definition of a Lovemark I find Moleskines both irreplaceable and irresistible. And frankly rather inspirational.

Quite apart from the pure sensual thrill of removing the plastic cover and paper band from a new Moleskine and turning its crisp, cream pages for the first time, Moleskines serve two very specific purposes for me. They help me to think and think what I am thinking is good.

The first point is perhaps understandable, the format and nature of the pages allow just the right sort of canvas to capture notes from a meeting as well as sketch out ideas and fiddle with thoughts for diagrams, models and presentations. Sometimes I work down the page using the lines for formality and sometimes I work in landscape – perfect for drafting presentations and weirdly enough research debriefs or creative reviews – you can get more on a double page and draw more links between ideas.

The second point is, I concede, rather more bizarre and in a sense delusional – what on earth is the point of thinking your thinking good, surely all that matters is whether it is or not?

When I was at University I gave the college library a wide berth. A magnificent structure, it was built in 1624 and houses the College’s collection of rare manuscripts and early printed texts gathered over the course of 500 years. And it’s absolutely the place to be if you want to study rare manuscripts and early printed texts gathered over the course of 500 years but it was fucking useless if you wanted to scrape a decent geography degree. However, there was one time in the year when I used the library religiously and that was during exam revision. You see sitting down at the same benches and tables as Wordsworth or Wilberforce and with the weight of hundreds of years of learning and endeavour figuratively and literally around me made me feel a little more studious, focused and clever. And that helped my revision.

And so it is with Moleskines. Whenever I go through the ritual of turning a fresh page of silky smooth acid free paper and begin to write or draw, always but always with a fountain pen and ink, the book puts me in a productive space and creates expectation. This is not dissimilar to the rituals the choreographer Tywla Tharp refers to in ‘the creative habit’ as a ‘little creative crutches’ – the routines and habits that help you think, in her case  about cutting-edge contemporary dance and me about differentiating parity products. Of course the page is often then filled with absolute drivel, to do lists and hastily copied down telephone numbers but that never ruins the ritual or dents the expectation – even drivel looks clever in a Moleskine.

Put simply, I use Moleskine notebooks both constantly and exclusively because they put me in the mood and in some small way kick my brain into gear. And when they are not doing any of this I simply love the feel of inking those pages with the same simple physical joy of a two-year old squishing play-doh through their hands.

The Moleskine stash can be seen in this this Vine

The original Forward thinking motherfucker.

I gave a little talk at an APG (Account Planning Group) event recently. It’s a regular series of talks called Noisy Thinking and I shared the bill with Craig Mawdsley, Rachel Hatton, Russell Davies and Malcolm White, a pretty impressive line up in the world of planning. I talked about 3 of my heroes – George Orwell, Julian Cope and James Dyson – about whom I have been meaning to write for ages. This gave me the impetus to get on with it albeit in talk form rather than as a post.

So here are the slides:

And here is the video of the talk:

The rather superior efforts from the other protagonists can be found on the APG website here.

I’d also be interested in understanding who your heroes are – professionally, personally or both.

Earlier this year we turned our attention to the state of the British High Street and the parlous situation that many of our high streets are in, with 25% failing and another 11% in decline.

But instead of talking with the retail gurus and the shoppers of today we focused exclusively on the shoppers, shopkeepers and retail entrepreneurs of the future, Britons aged 16-29.

This is a presentation of the findings and a film of me delivering it – in this case at an Oystercatchers evening meeting this autumn.

By the way since all of this happened I have come across a brilliant new project called we are pop up. This online service aims to fill vacant retail space by providing landlords with a discrete way to view a whole host of interesting retail wannabes looking for short to medium term space from which they can chose and approach potential retail partners. Go check them out.

Oystercatchers Event – 1st November 2012 – Richard Huntington, Director of Strategy, Saatchi & Saatchi from Oystercatchers on Vimeo.

My style of presentation is rather frustrating.

Not only is there a lot of dancing around, swearing and nonsense at the time.

But the slides never make any sense – they are designed for talking to not reading.

So putting them on slideshare is rather pointless since you had to be there to understand them.

Nevertheless I thought I’d upload three from this year.

They were given at an IPA conference on modern briefing where I spoke about audiences, A Thinkbox conference that challenged lazy communications thinking where I spoke about all those crimes against social media and a client awayday at the beginning of the year where I spoke about the cultural and communications themes that would dominate the year.

This is the presentation itself from the IPA’s youtube channel

Heatherwick studio’s cauldron for London 2012.

Provenance has traditionally been the last resort of the strategic scoundrel. If you fancy an early lunch at the Delaunay and you simply cannot think of anything else to say about a brand you fall back on where it is from. Australian lagers, German cars, Scandinavian furniture, French sexual positions, you know the kind of thing.  It may well work but provenance leaves one with a sense of intellectual self-loathing as you wallow in national clichés.

And no other nation has presented more of provenance problem than Britain. If our understanding of other cultures is rather thin then the same has been bizarrely true of our own nation. It’s as if we have never really understood ourselves properly. Only those Brands eager to brandish their credentials as parliamentary candidates for UKIP have generally gone anywhere near British provenance and they have generally been limited to the real ale category.

No, let’s face it, the words ‘made in Britain’ have traditionally had the consumer pulling power of George Osborne at medal ceremony. For if something had actually been created in Britain our assumption was that it was badly designed, shoddily made and expensive.

And then on Sunday 9^th September I rather think this changed forever. Lord Coe, not perhaps one of the World’s greatest orators, closed London 2012 with those precise words – Made in Britain. And with this he distilled all of the success and pride of our country’s greatest summer into that tired old phrase, giving it an entirely new meaning and giving us a new national narrative.

Ever since London last held the games in 1948 our national narrative has been one of decline – of a country ‘going to the dogs’.  Wrestling with economic collapse, our precipitous decline in influence and lashings of post-colonial guilt, we felt worse than useless. Summers of love, jingoistic wars in the South Atlantic and credit booms did nothing to suggest that Britain was anything but a failure. And we knew it, creating our appalling brand of cynicism to protect ourselves from the truth, or at least allow us to stick the boot into our wounded pride before anyone else could.

But this summer that narrative fundamentally changed, once again we are palpably good at things. It’s not just about our most successful Olympic and Paralympic teams in history (or since 1908 when we made up all the rules and didn’t tell anyone else) but also the prowess of pulling off the greatest show on earth, on time and on a budget far smaller than Beijing or Rio. And while we are at it, it is also about the global dominance of our cultural exports from Adele to Downton Abbey and the success of British made brands like Mulberry and Land Rover. The efforts of our struggling Government aside, Britain is unequivocally a success and all of a sudden British provenance is once again powerful.

This is not about draping a brand in the flag, it is behaving in a way that undeniably reflects this new British narrative. A narrative that works best when paired with the spirit of Britain that was crystallised for the first time in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony.

For British spirit is no longer best understood through that horrendous cliché about keeping calm and carrying on, of understatement and ‘mustn’t grumble’ martyrdom but through the lyrics of our new unofficial national anthem, Dizzee Rascal’s Bonkers. This is the only nation on Earth that would have its head of state jump out of James Bond’s helicopter or fill the closing ceremony with roller skating nuns and Roman centurions dancing the cancan. As the New Yorker pointed out in its review of Mr Boyle’s masterpiece this is the nation of Bonkers.

Right now there are clearly short-term benefits to be had from capitalising on our elevated sense of national pride but the real rewards for British brands will not come from superficial patriotism and pageantry. There is far more to be gained from understanding and harnessing this new national narrative and from exuding the idiosyncratic spirit of British bonkersness than simply slapping the Union Jack on your packaging and thinking of England.

This post originally appeared as an article in Campaign magazine.