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End of another year

So, another end of year approaches.  Haven't blogged anyway near enough recently which I fear means I'm thinking and doing less stuff than in the past.  Need to remedy that next year.  

Anyway, I'm heading back to Blighty for a week or so.  Will try and get blogging again properly in 2010.  If you happen to be in London with nothing much to do on Monday January 4th I'm going to grab a cuppa with some friends at The Breakfast Club in Hoxton around 10am.  Feel free to come and say hello.

One thought/resolution for 2010 from a great Economist article - we tend to aim at the 'missing middle' of the market far too often whether we realize it or not.  And that is a rather empty and unsuccessful thing to shoot at.

Happy Holidays and a terrific New Year to everyone.

Time to leave SF for a few days

I guess it's time to leave San Francisco for Xmas when your wife stumbles across this 'brilliant' Xmas promotion. It's got every marketing trend of the decade built in - participation, value exchange and a big social mission. I wonder if Dave Knockles has found himself a new job?

 
 

We're heading back to the UK for a few weeks.  May well do coffee in London on Monday January 4th.  Details to follow in case you're so inclined.

Mag+

The thinking around the possibilities for user experiences and interfaces seems to be one of the most exciting things to me at the moment.  And here's some more quite brilliant thinking from BERG about how technology can revitalize magazines.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Spur episode 4 - what's the real value of planning?

Chief Culture Officer

  
 

Grant McCracken is one of my heroes.  He's got a different perspective and depth of thought that has helped me think differently and more critically about people, brands and culture.  His last couple of books have shaped my thinking and his blog is a must read.

Anyway, he has a new book - Chief Culture Officer - that has just come out.  It makes the argument that business doesn't take the business of culture very seriously.  Too often it's outsourced (often to an ad agency) or becomes a niche of one siloed discipline (eg marketing) and to make it an integral part of an organization every company needs a Chief Culture Officer.

It's perhaps his most accessible and important book so far.  It builds a case for a Chief Culture Officer and then describes the tools that role will need.  The chapter on slow and fast culture, and our tendency to obsess about the latter and ignore the more critical former, is a must read.  

If you work in advertising or marketing, you work in the culture business, whether you like it or not.  And this is a must read.

Are Planners just glorified researchers?

Part 3 of Spur, the film on planners from Redscout, is now up on psfk.

Wake up call

Some new-ish Comscore data feels like a rather big wake-up call.  If 8% of internet users account for 85% of clicks, why do we ignore the vast majority of web users in our metrics for display ads?  We are still, far too often, applying old DR methodology to non-DR communication.  We really need to begin to build better metrics, not just in terms of 'brand effect' but also in what people do offline not simply online.  It's something CMOs are looking for - a recent survey by the CMO Club shows that nearly 2/3 of CMOs say their most significant challenge with digital is understanding how online marketing programs impact people offline.  Yet we still treat 'online' as it's own discrete world far too often.  Yes, online is fantastic in part because it is measurable, but just because we can measure something doesn't mean it's always the right thing to measure.

Band as franchise

Following on a musical vein, I was a little shocked last week to see that the Sugababes, a fairly big band in the UK, have lost their last remaining original member but are carrying on to make a new album.  You could argue that this is merely the natural conclusion of how the music industry has treated brands as entertainment franchises.  I rather prefer the thought someone left on their wikipedia entry: "a hollow, machine-like representation of the music industry's deconstruction of music as an art form".  Maybe this is all OK if we believe bands are brands but when the product's fundamentally different surely the brand should be as well?

Time to get out of the distribution business

Really interesting piece of analysis by The Times Lab on the changing landscape of revenue in the music business (in the UK) between artists and the industry.  

 
 

A few things jumped out at me:

1.  It's the graph the music industry doesn't want you to see.  It shows how artist revenues have actually increased in the era of file sharing while the revenue going to the industry has decreased.  So, if you're business model is purely one of content distribution it's perhaps time to exit.

2.  The fastest growing area of revenue is that of live shows. As the post points out, "at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music".   Not sure if this is a case of more people going to shows, more shows occurring or more profitable deals for artists, but it does suggest to me that this is perhaps evidence of the fact that we tend to enjoy doing stuff together.  Perhaps music is the ultimate social good, rather than the private good record labels would like it to be.  

3. Arguably, the last century of recorded music has been an anomaly in how we consume music and we're going back to how we have always enjoyed it - live and together.  The content distributed is perhaps really no more than a calling card and artifact of something far bigger and more powerful.

Talent

The second installment of Spur from psfk and Redscout is all about talent, or what a bunch of us are looking for in planners today.

Is planning impotent?

That's the question posed in the first installment of Spur, from Redscout and psfk.  Does the way we think about and practice planning make us impotent or are we neutered by the factory like structure of some agencies?

Colin Drummond's better planning

Colin Drummond wrote a great post today about the need to start planning around a better, broader definition of interactivity.  Taps into a lot of the stuff Jason and I rambled on about at Planningness.

As I wrote in the comments, far too frequently we forget that interactive and digital are not channels but a type of communication (arguably, the only type of advertising that is true communication). And far too often we forget that it's not the technology that's interesting and meaningful, but what it's doing to culture and human behavior that's interesting and meaningful (thankfully we have Henry Jenkins and Clay Shirky around to keep reminding us).

Hugh Macleod doodled a great cartoon this week about the real power of the internet.  It's something we mustn't forget.

 
 

Victors & Spoils

 
 

So word is finally out about John Winsor's next move following CPB.  And I can't help but think it's a brilliant and bold one.  Along with the very talented and funny CPB alum Evan Fry of be fucking awesome fame (and if Dusty is right maybe the writer of the longest piece of ad copy written with the Eating The Angus Diet book) and Claudia Batten he's launched Victors and Spoils.  

It's a brilliant and bold attempt to drag crowdsourcing into the agency business, and put some innovation into the agency business.  I wish them all the best in their new adventure as the first agency built on crowdsourcing principles.  Go visit their site and become part of the creative department.

Spur - a video series about planning

A few months ago, Alain Sylvain at Redscout asked me to participate in a film they were making about the state of planning - where it is now and where it needs to go.  He got a great bunch of people to participate - including Domenico Vitale, John Gerzema,  Douglas Atkin, Dan Cherry and Paul Woolmington - and the film is going to be serialized over the next couple of months at PSFK.  The trailer is now up and the films will begin to appear every couple of weeks starting next Tuesday at Spur.

Connections Planning at Planningness

A couple of days ago I was lucky enough to talk at Planningness with Jason Oke (who foolishly asked me to talk with him).  We decided to tackle that last great agency/planning discipline, connections planning, and asked what it's role was now.

Connections Planningness

View more documents from Jason Oke.

I think Jason and I both have issues with connections planning as a discipline.  It feels that it's more of a way of thinking than a person or discipline, and merely re-inforces one of the big challenges facing agencies - niche-ing themselves in to fragmented, siloed irrelevance.  It feels like the intentions at its birth 15 or so years ago were perhaps right (and there are some really good connections planners out there helping make some fantastic work), but the model as it currently stands is not working.  (I cheekily argued that perhaps its biggest impact on culture was translating the media currency of OTS from opportunities to see to opportunities to spam).  I guess we believe that really what is needed is better models of thinking, a more collaborative process and a more diverse group of people helping shape the work.

The debate and conversation afterwards was good and provocative, ranging from does it matter what people think of comms as long as we sell stuff to what we can do to improve the average quality of work (maybe public shaming or some sort of 'bad-vertising' tax).  

I also have to share this Australian gem that Jason unearthed:

A public thanks to Jason for leading the charge on this and to Mark for making Planningness happen. Let's hope the conversation can continue and it inspires some actions.