I was recently interviewed by a Romanian advertising blog called iqads. Amongst other questions they asked whether I had any advice for young planners and I thought I would share this with a wider audience. They are short, sweet and incomplete.
Slightly high risk this. But I wanted somewhere to put the strategies that I love but Clients have never bought. Feel free to put to better use or simply to reflect upon my mediocrity as a planner.
In part the idea is to illustrate that good thinking should be simple, radical and well packaged – rather than the dreary meandering nothingness that characterises most stategic thinking in the ad industry.
I am going to update these gradually so that the exit of intellectual property is orderly. Enjoy.
A couple of nice chaps from a research agency called duckfoot popped by to see me recently with some research they had done on advertising and PVRs.
Real research mind – that is possibly rather helpful.
I’ve been thinking a bit about a concept that I introduced in the ‘meme doctors’ article. That of vaccinating your brand against competitive memes.
Brand vaccination might be a smart new way to think about your brand’s competition and what you can do about it.
Rather than thinking exclusively about aggressive strategies to attack and counter attack the competition, maybe thinking about how to vaccinate your brand against competitive memes makes for a much more interesting start point.
For instance one could argue that what Sky needs to do in the UK is not only to propagate its brand meme so that it is attractive to consumers but also vaccinate itself against the Freeview meme which is attacking it, that of BBC endorseed multichannel TV with no ongoing subscription.
I guess its a kind of defensive approach to life but how many times has a brand’s competitiveness in the market been undermined ‘at home’ while it was playing away aggressively trying to attract new customers?
It is time we all stopped talking about the future of advertising in a PVR world and started doing something about it. I am working on 20 concrete ideas to get people started. It may end up as a more chuncky ten or as a more Cluetrain like 95. Maybe you can help me on this?
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