Russell is a gent and he has done me the considerable honour of posting part of an inteview he did with me here . While the second session is here . To be honest I think the first one is rather better but you be the judge.
In a way I am finding that these interviews help hone my thinking better than posting to the blog – hope you can find something of use in here.
Thankyou to everyone that contributed to the post on brand ideas and their seeming rarity value.
I had wanted to create a definitive set of criteria for judging whether you had a proper brand idea or not. But this exercise wasn’t particularly fruitful – or at least I think its tough to try an legislate for strategic genius. And indeed as decent a list as any was included in the post I wrote about Jon Steel’s Perfect Pitch – truth, beauty, excitement, significance and persuasion if you remember.
But I really like this chart – it sort of fell out of the conversations.
“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter”. H.G. Wells
Only a year ago we were all getting hot under the collar about PVRs and the threat they posed to television advertising.
Now one talks about the PVR peril anymore.
Hogarth successfully captures the moment when, in Russell’s absence, today’s coffee morning got a little out of hand.
The Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis). With a population decline of 98% between 1970 and 1990 there are few animals more critically endangered than this.
Of all the beasts roaming free in the world of marketing there is none so rare as the brand idea.
This month I want to advocate Jamie Oliver’s favourite supermarket, or at least their latest campaign – Try Something New Today. I want to suggest…
Rebecca West, feminist, novelist and HG Wells’ lover.
Here is one of hers “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
And here are a bunch of mine largely taken from recent posts…
Purple persuasion No. 28 by clikybd. Virtually nothing to do with this post but the word of the week is beauty and I’m fed up with photos of the First World War.
I get the whole brand engagement thing.
I’ve stolen this from Jon Steel because I really like it as way to judge the quality of an idea – strategic or otherwise.
Men of the London Rifle Brigade meet the enemy in no man’s land, Christmas Day, 1914 – the Christmas day truce between German and British soldiers at which fraternisation and football were the order of the day.
Sometimes, just sometimes people who are normally at each others throats lay down their arms and come together in a spirit of unity and common purpose
And so it is with WPP conferences, especially those organised by David Muir, a man that in the parlance of the time ‘gets it’
Central though brand ideas are to the value we create for clients, advertising agencies have to be more than just idea shops. Ideas without expression serve very little purpose. Ideas have to reach the consumer in engaging and persuasive ways and that involves the agency actually producing something.
However, it is high time that we defined the craft product of our agencies by the medium in which we work rather than the media by which it is distributed – TV, press, outdoor, radio, online and the like.
Richard Dawkins seems to be the hit of the moment in the plannersphere. In particular Wistlethroughyourcomb has an excellent post on the Selfish Gene (Dawkins’s…
