furtherandfaster

Behavioural planning

Had lunch with Verity Johnston planning director of Iris today. Iris is only about 5 years old but has roared through to being in the top 3 sales promotion agencies though they would shudder at the description - I think they'd rather describe themselves as creativing experiences for customers. At one point Verity said she saw herself as a behavioural planner more than anything else. Which I had heard elsewhere only a few days before. I think it was Kevin Schou of  Proximity who said exactly the same thing.  Planning is mutating at speed these days and the practitioners feel less and less inclined to frame themselves in the old advertising silos. Advertising planning can make few claims to altering behaviour and only does so using large econometric models. But these two asides served to show that whatever difficulties advertising is facing in Western Europe, planning is thriving in new environments.

Network effects and Iraq related fatalities

I read a very disturbing piece about the US army in Iraq right before falling asleep and woke up early thinking about network effects.  So far 3863 US troops have been killed in Iraq. Worth comparing with 2974 fatalities in 9/11. If you recall the motive for the US invasion was originally the supposed link between El Quaeda and Saddam Hussein. But that's not the most disturbing part.

CBS has reported that in 2005 6256 US veterans killed themselves. Twice the incidence of suicide in the general population. Now there isn't a direct correlation - many of these veterans may have fought in other wars. But it is a reminder that the biggest sources of military fatalities don't come from hostile action but road accidents and suicide. The British army isn't a lot different.  If when we commemorate Flag/Remembrance/Armistice day we were to recall that for every soldier dead there is at least one other, possibly two serving soldiers or veterans who have taken their own lives - it demonstrates the pressures we put our armed forces through. Even out of the war zone.  And it means our leaders need to be network thinkers calculating collateral effects of their actions. Leaders who think causally are a liability.

Doing a job that may get you killed isn't a job I ever want to do. I'm grateful for those who take it on on my behalf.  Doing a job that may make you want to kill yourself seems worse in the scale of things.  We need to count the veteran casualties as well as the war casualties (and the civilian casualties) before declaring that military action is the only solution left.

Debriefs and how to make them better

I ran a session today for a pharmaceutical research agency on how to improve debrief presentations - it was a taster for a course I do with Mike Imms and Audrey Niven. Given how critical debriefs are it is ludicrous how encultured debriefs have become. We do them but we don't think about why we do what we do. Just a little thought is sufficient to make people realise that there really are lots of different ways of debriefing clients and most will be better than the default option we use most of the time. Powerpoint isn't the same as a written research report. Most debrief meetings play to the cleverness of the researcher not the decisions the client is going to have to make following the meeting.  It also gave me a chance to introduce the ideas from Beyond Bullets - great website by the way. But I would recommend you buy the whole book. I can't believe I haven't put it on the website yet - will do so very soon.

One of the most difficult issues about debriefing research I have discovered is that clients use research as social media - for improving their status in the host organisation whether or not the research is actually used!So what do you do - make the findings more shareable or press on to make them more decision friendly even if this isn't what most clients in the debrief want to use them for?

I phone resistance - whose phone is it anyway?

I saw the Iphone today for the first time where I could get actually get my hands on one. I'm an O2 customer and I'm out of contract. So did I get one? Nope. Its a beauty to look at. But I'm getting riled by the behaviour of Apple. designwise they're stunning. Culture wise they're as controlling as Sony.  I don't see why I should have to use Itunes to upload my tracks. Why they have disabled bluetooth to stop you putting your own content on without their permission.  I don't like brands telling me what I can and can't do.

So I went back to Nokia - and bought the N95 which can sing and dance and tell you exactly where in the world you are.  Last year was a big disaster phonewise. I bought an all singing all danceing XDA and hated it. It had to be repaired twice. So for the last 6 months I have been using a 3 year old mobile perfectly happily. Old isn't always bad. Old is familiar and usable. And it works - better than the latest kid on the block who needs support websites and phonecalls.

Naked Lunch

David Bausola of Imagination put me onto this. I can't believe I haven't watched it before. Its a very creepy film. David thought I had to watch it given my interest in turning a typewriter into a musical instrument. I get the message David - thanks very much!!

Ableton Live

has turned up - at some point I will be upgrading to the latest version 7.0. For those of you who have never heard of this piece of software. It converts music into its own format which it can play at any speed in the original pitch. Once you have 12 clips all playing at once - in time and in tune with each other - and with a cross fader so you can mix between two different tracks all divvied up into clips - well you wonder what the skill in DJing actually is.  Ableton is perhaps the greatest tool for creating life music - ever invented. There was a glitch in the delivery so they gave me a free synth. Now I have synthesizers coming out of my ears but it was a nice touch.  I've been wanting to get an upgrade to Ableton because it handles mp3s now - which my earlier version didn't do. So suddenly all music is malleable - and can be twisted into any shape. Digital software is changing the whole landscape - visual tools are now available for us to mash video clips in exactly the same way. We don't have to be linkers and forwarders for much longer. We can start to make and co-create. All you need is a little time.

Beowulf in 3D

Saw this in the cinema today. Nice to get back into a bit of dark ages culture which they did rather well. It is obvious that Hollywood executives have decided that we need to be wearing odd pairs of glasses for the next half dozen Hollywood spectacles.  Presumably becuase they can charge us all more for the privilege. The 3d was quite good but not that critical. I was amused that animation allows you to drop a certificate to allow more children in. If this had been real footage it would have been a 15 certificate. I've also just made another connection. Zemeckis the director has done this before. He directed the excellent Who framed Roger Rabbit!

Tricky briefs

It had to happen - you position yourself as somone who can handle tricky research issues and the briefs get harder and harder. Today's really has given me pause for thought. How to optimise two response channels telephone and internet in how they work together. Very difficult but an entirely reasonable brief. People are working across mutiple channels. How they work in combination is actually much more important than how single comms channels function. But oh so difficult to pick the pieces apart.  I've retired to put my thinking cap on!

Addressing the students of Solent university

Today I drove to Southampton to do an introductory session on account planning for the students of Solent university. I was more than a little surprised to find that most of those who were in to listen to me studied advertising and communicaitons for 3 years. The integrated marketing comms course lasts a full year. I can't get used to the volume and range of training that is now available.  In my session I gave a broad overview of planning, where it had come from and what it entailed.  I had an exclusive. Elena (see above) who had triumphed at the APG awards last week had very kindly let me use her presentation. A model of clarity on the wash and go campaign in Romania, it won a silver in the International category and took the gold for the best use of research.  I have an email from Elena enquiring of me about some technical planning issue when she was a student back in 2005 - so I read an extract from it and asked how many of the students had written similar emails. Of course they all had. I then revealed her as author of the  casestudy and made the point that at a similar development rate there was no reason why  one of them couldn't achieve the same in 2009 or 2011.  Perfect material for the audience  and I hope it was as inspiring as I had planned

There had been a bit of a giggle at the start when I had realised that I had started my first job in advertising before the entire audience barring the tutors had been born.  It didn't help when one of them came up afterwards and asked if knew Iain Dawson - with whom I had worked at ehs back in the early 1990s. It turned out to be his son.  When I asked hopefully if he was a first year - well he wasn't. So I have reach that dreadful age when I am starting to present to the children of my workmates! Time to retire!!

Marketing Society conference

Today I went to the Marketing Society conference to blog it on behalf of WARC - so if the link works for you then here's where to go. I  know conferences are supposed to stir things up a bit but I suspect the rate of change in the marcomms and media landscape is such that marketers are already confused. What we need is practical applications. Its a lot easier to remind delegates how confusing everything is. My personal highlight of the day was hearing the new commercial director of Facebook in the UK. There are 12 million Facebookers in the UK and 2 employees in total so don't expect to get him on the phone anytime soon.  He  chose to focus on the point of facebook as an application rather than flog the rather more dubious benefits to advertisers which let's face it, it would have been very easy for him to do. It was a vivid reminder of the principle much repeated during the day that the value you create for people is much more critical to your success than all the wonderful things you might say about yourself. Which I need to remember as I wield my creds presentation - the question is how do you create value for B2B clients? Without turning into a new business windbag.

Reel old - adventures with a reel to reel tape recorder

Spent this afternoon coaxing a reel to reel taperecorder whose age is uncertain and whose future is limited. By the time I had finished there was a mysterious and foul smelling liquid which had trickled out of the base of the recorder so I really don't think there's much more I can squeeze out of it. It has been sitting on our dining room floor for the past 3 years waiting for me to finish archiving about a dozen reel to reel tapes. I was born in Singapore and took the steamer to Japan arriving when only weeks old. My family's means of communication was letters and reel to reel tapes. So there are some gems here which represent a fragile family depository. Last time I dared to nurse the taperecorder into life,  I filled 3 minidisks - great for posterity but minidisks are as unsharable as reel to reel tape.  What has changed in the interim is that I have a digital recorder and audio editing software which can capture and clean up all of this material - there's about 8 hours worth. Then its over to my Dad who has 20 cine films to turn into AVIs and more 35mm slides than you can shake a stick at. Audio has the power to bring a whole depth of emotion which lo re photos don't carry - which is why I want to save these soundtracks of parents talking awkwardly and formally into a microphones and slice of life material of a family messing about in a 2 room Japanese house.

I really don't think digital media has made this kind of archiving any easier - its still just as hard to remember to back up photos, and get them printed and put in albums even if you don't send them off to be processed. What I can't ignore is the emotional charge of material from my childhood - I just can't let it moulder away.

Books and more books

This is getting out of hand  - John Grant very kindly mailed me his New Green Marketing Manifesto to read and review - that thudded onto the doormat this morning. Stephen King's collected works arrived yesterday - and I have to read this and unite it with the recording of the recent APG evening to launch the book. Then rather unexpectedly I got a proof copy  of Readings in Account Planning edited by  Hart Weichselbaum to check. This is so cool. The book isn't published yet - they are obviously going the selfpublished route of getting copies printed one at a time and sending them out for final checking. I have the honour of contributing a chapter which is my Admap article about planning outside of advertising which was published I think in 2003. This means that I am co-contributing with luminaries such as Malcolm Gladwell and Scott Bedbury no less. Plus Merry Baskin, Mike Hall, Paul Feldwick and Wendy Gordon. My cup runneth over. Not sure when the book is officially available but when it is I'll be sure to keep you posted. And I must remember to review Messr Gladwell more charitably next time he publishes. Planning Above and Beyond gets a fab name check as well which means I really need to sort accountplanning.net out by the end of the year and do something new.   

Audition 3.0 arrived and installed

Forgive a little technical rave but I just upgraded to the latest version of Audition the audio editing package from Adobe - for about £70. Bargain. For me the last couple of years has been a bit of a struggle for audio editing - I've had to resort to using 20 quid software which is actually fine but not that user friendly. Audition is the equivalent of getting into a Lamborgini - you can edit, fx, and mix to your hearts content - you can even master into surround sound - most of it I will never use. What I am looking forward to getting my hands on are the new editing tools taken from Photoshop - the marquee, the lassoo and the spot healing brush which enable you to literally paint out bits of the sound spectrum you don't like. Which when you're editing quotes from research groups is just unbelievable - we haven't had anything like this before. Spot the mobile phonem the air con unit the coughs and wipe them from the entire session (or turn that part of the EQ band down).  Of course it is also a doddle to fool around with old recordings and clean them up - all the software does that sort of thing these days. But there's not many packages of audio editing that come with their own guitar effects rack so you can take any recording and turn it into a Led Zeppelin solo? Why??? What for??  Sorry its a geek thing

It allows me to put a decent sound package alongside Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Now I can happily fool around with audio, images and film and mix between them all - the audio has been a real gap in Adobe's armoury and pricing their other sound application Soundbooth around the same level as Audition is just downright confusing.  I think I'm sorted now.

12 angry men

We put this on the DVD tonight- a great piece of drama, theatre and great performances from Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb and others. Also very useful in getting a discussion going about juries and why incompetent members of the public are a better bet in securing justice than a professional judiciary - a fragile concept at best. I think I paid 3 quid for the DVD the price of a single rental.

Creativity and why ideas can be so stressful

Ran a workshop this afternoon for a board of directors looking at increasing creativity. Their business is research and I realised through the pre-exercise and the workshop itself what an intimidating business creativity is. In advertising we take it as read that we work creatively. Outside of advertising you can't take it for granted and creativity can be seen as indulgent and diletante though deep down everyone would like to think that there's a little creativity inside of them busting to get out. But they're scared to be pulled down  by someone else telling them that their latest gem isn't creative at all.  My favourite moment was when showing how vital it was that ideas were shaped and protected right through to implementation, someone who identified herself as a doer commented on how stressful she found brainstorms. 'Honestly' she said. 'Every time an idea gets mentioned I start to think how we could make it work but before I can work it out someone comes up with something else.' I looked at her in disbelief - Imagine going into a brainstorm thinking that you're actually going to have to produce any or all of the ideas you come up with - you'd never get started!  Which is why it is essential that we extend the application of creativity way beyond idea generation and problem solving to problem identification, optimising and implementation. Then you'd find that there's creative people literally everywhere.

Luxury Briefing

The luxury briefing is a monthly news service which seems to have aggregated the luxury brands around itself very effectively. Today I attended their annual conference - no 13 I believe with 150 delegates. I was sitting next to Ann Marie and Sanford the CEO of Hot Diamonds. With the delegation from Tiffanys on my other side. I had a word with Peter Wallis/York of SRU who was also close by. He commented that if you tried to specialise on the luxury market you'd have problems because they never had any money for marketing or research. What they do of course is do partner promotions and PR like crazy.  So everyone knows everyone else and the trick is to pick up the smell of the hive and look as if one has been steeped in luxury before birth. I confess I wore a better watch for the day. Well it looks better even if its impossible to tell the time on it. But that's luxury for you.

I would like to take far longer than I have time to do to cover the main features of the conference. The theme was Web 2.0 - very interesting because most luxury websites look like a cross between magazine page (but not as good as a real one) and a catalogue based ecommerce site (but not as nice as a printed catalogue). And Web 2.0 is of course about the inmates taking over the asylum, customer blogs and social marketing. Which if you think about it is the last thing that luxury brands want - they want compliant customers who accept their editorial - so the day proved to be very interesting as speaker after speak tried to engage with Web 2.0 and tried not to look like a Web 1.0 luddite control freak.

After a research presentation which demonstrated that the rich are getting richer (good) and so are the rest of us (which is where the real money is) there was a panel run by Saul Klein - He was talking to the 2 CEOs of Astley Clarke, and Koodos and was supposed to be talking to someone from Stardoll. It was a shame that the Stardoll person couldn't make it because using cutouts of dolls to sell designer gear to 8 yearolds is a classic example of how web 2.0 should work and the other 2 sites weren't particularly adventurous.

Claus Sendinger of Design Hotels then did a very stimulating session on  how to make hotel websites look different from their competitors by looking at some of the latest ideas from  developers and tourism.  A simple point and well made - don't follow the category because there's really no need to.

The second panel featured Theo Fennell, the ceo of the  Rug company and the marketing director of Paul Smith. The moderator Michel Gutsatz hounded them somewhat because he was very clear what Web 2.0 was and it became equally clear that they were having none of it. The Rug company won't even sell to you online - you have to get them to your house to ensure that the rug will match.  Paul Smith is apparently flirting with posting films but is basically flogging product. And Theo Fennell  jewellers editorialise - and don't plan to do a lot else in the near future.

Brent Hoberman - yup the one from lastminute then came on to be rather coy about his new online venture mydeco which he couldn't tell us much about because he hadn't launched it yet. It is an interior design aggregator which allows you to 'try' out the products in a model of your home.

We finished the morning with a great rant from a self confessed luddit Jeffrey Miller from New York. He put in a plea for keepin luxury off line and exploring values such as intimacy as well as lofty talking down to customers as being just as important in the luxury space.

After lunch Tyler Brule the founder of Monocle magazine dazzled by talking about how he launched a magazine when print was supposed to be over and the web the emerging medium. A really interesting presentation about how to make offline magazines engaging while providing online content and promotional material to get his subscription base into the content. They are putting 30 second commercials on the site for the main magazine stories. Made for a fraction of the price of offline commercials but working as headers to engage people in print stories. Very interesting. The magazine also uses 5 different kinds of paper stock - in other words turning up touchy feely values and collectability. One of the highlights of the day

The second panel featured Amanda Gore of PSFK, Jason Campbell of the JC report and Tamara Heber Percy of mrandmrssmith.com Of all of these PSFK is the closest to web 2.0 because at least they have harnessed their subscriber base in rating news items and also meeting simultaneously round the world to brainstorm emerging trends. Great stuff. Tamara was scandalised that some Welsh subscribers of hers were opting to meet each other and to review and sample local restaurants and hotels. Not much chance of Web 2.0 happening with mrandmrssmith any time soon!

Dee Salomon  from Condenet  gave what was a thinly disguised sales presentation for the Conde Nast online presence. There was a lot of good thinking but in the end I wish her casestudies had been Conde led ones because I foudn the advertiser led examples rather predictable and safe. It rather sounded as if Conde Nast would have done a better job with some online advertorial.

James Ogilvy the publisher of the Luxury Briefing and chair for the day interviewed Natalie Massenet founder of netaporter.com.  She had  spoken in 2000 at an earlier luxury briefing conference when she was just starting up the site.  So it was an interesting contrast now the site has become one of the leading fashion sites selling designer clothes to women  round the world - they claim 70,000 sales a month.  I'm not sure I learned that much from what she said about why she had been successful when  most similar attempts have failed.  Again netaporter is happy that there are half a dozen netaporter groups on Facebook but it doesn't intend to facilitate them any time soon. So no marks for Web 2.0

The day closed with a presentation and summary from the Future Foundation - they were pressed for time and we were tired so I feel that a lot of good things were said but didn't necessarily stick because of the timing pressures.

All in all a good day. A little crowded for my liking - if you knew lots of people no problem but we seemed to spend much of the day negotiating 2 flights of stairs to get in and out of the presentation room. I think the most interesting idea came from Jeffrey Miller. Luxury doesn't have to be about talking down to people - it can be about intimacy too. And with the mobile phone (barely mentioned during the day) becoming a mainstream communications channel it is essential that a brand gets the focal distance right - this is a personal device. People pay premiums for privacy and personal services - they don't just pay for posh.

Bag O mags

Treated myself to a bunch of magazines - a good thing to do if you have the cash. To do it well you really ought to do it randomly but well I got distracted.

1. I got the Economist because I wanted to read their special report on Religion in Public life - quite funny because in the USA its normal. Its only here where we huff and puff about religion being private - which it isn't.

2. Within the price I got their lifestyle magazine "Intelligent Life" <Yuck> - because I'm a sucker for a sales promotion. I actually hate lifestyle magazines - just because I have income to match their demographic doesn't make me an automatic target for the silly baubles advertisers try to make me insecure enough to buy - but hey the ad revenue pays for the magazine so its like luxury graffiti spam you have to tolerate.  Apparently intelligent people are interested in wine, cars and furniture. Oh and hunting wild boar with dogs.

3. I bought a web design mag to find the latest about emerging standards in web design mobile platforms and the rest - though it doesn't seem to be moving on as fast as I had thought - it still seems to be a shakedown of CSS with Flash - there's a lot of jostling between the apps to sort out workflow - but that isn't going to change your smartphone or browser interface anytime soon - its geek talk.

4. Wired magazine - less accessible than I remember- it chockful of ads. My personally destested favourite is the Epson press campaign where a series of morons namecheck themselves by the serial number of their Epson printer because now people look at them differently. I assume this kind of s*** is ironic but there's a pendulum swing against irony at present. I was going to blog about a couple of ads from a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon I saw on the tube - Ad 1 flat chested girl looks miserable. Ad 2 plastic chested girl looks delighted. Who makes up this kind of crap? And does it still work? I bet it does. Back to Epson and the tagline - everyone's got an Epsonality. Discover yours at epsonality.com. No thanks. This from the company that offers to exceed your vision. Wired would do everyone a favour by banning this kind of landfill material.

5. Harvard Business Review - last month which had an article of CSOs chief strategy officers. Who are apparently all the rage in corporate America. Apparently they're better than strategists because they go out and get it to work. Sounds a lot like planners to me. Sheesh it has taken 40 years to work our way up the corporate tree.

6. National Geographic children's magazine with a pencilcase like a Tutankhamun sarcophagus on the front. My 10 year old didn't want the pencil case but has been glued to the mag ever since and quoting it. Bingo.

Afterglow

What a lovely morning - the net is alive... with the sound of cheering and backslapping after the APG awards.  I just thought I'd post the only pic I have of the Burnetts planning department (the lineup has changed a little now). The atmosphere in Burcharest must be close to fever pitch waiting for Elena to touch down and return in triumph to the agency. When they first showed me round the agency I was shown the meeting rooms each named after an advertising award and with a shelf ful of them. The Cannes room was empty  until last July but was set up anyway to spur them on. And a great environment in which to present work to clients. Imagine looking over the client's shoulder as he tries to water down the creative idea and look at that award getting further away by the minute. Now it seems they will have to set up another meeting room called the APG to house the 2 APG awards they won last night.

I was on their blog this morning and spotted this series of virals which had been put together to encourage a higher standard of creativity for a creative award competition for students. The creative idea - Send the judges some decent ads please because they don't want to have to wade through a pile of s***. Simple, cheap and quick to make and executed with aplomb - the faces and the location look familiar - the guy hurling the dead lamb is Bogdan the creative director. It's not every creative director you'll find flinging a dead sheep around in front of the office.  A nice example of the creative energy I've discovered every time I've visited Bucharest.

Watershed

APG awards 2007 are over - my highlight of the evening was watching Elena Ionita  collect a silver in the international award -  the highest award given for the category - and a gold for best use of research beating Lucozade Sport abd every other planning entry for that matter. Her table including John Bartle of BBH and Gary Duckworth  of DFGW gave her a standing ovation and toasted her with champagne - Adam Morgan of Eatbigfish and plenty of planning heads like Ali Bucknall of Leo Burnett London made a fuss over her. It was an impressive achievement to break the circle of London planning so convincingly. Proof positive that planning is indeed a global discipline and you don't have come to London to find the good stuff. Congratulations to Elena, and Razvan Matasel her collaborator, planning head and deputy MD of Burnetts in Bucharest. The Romanians have landed.

When I don't want to be interupted by ads...

is in the middle of a charge towards the German trenches in the battle of Loos. Rudyard Kipling's son played by Harry Potter aka Daniel Radcliffe is about to cop a packet creating a lifetime of guilt and regret for his writer parent. There's mud and blood and guts. And then we cut to a tasteful food shot courtesy of Sainsbury's the sponsor. Followed by Guinness new ad - very nice and the spectacular 1950s pastiche Christmas extravaganza for M&S a lovely piece of work. But clearly the media planners were hunting a good slug of audience. It just felt wrong - this is Remembrance day - I really didn't have the stomach for celebratory advertising. At the battle of big thinking one of the speakers described media planners as big game hunters trying to bag their share of the 400 ratings available on any typical month. I think we can expect many more such clumsy moments - when the audience is intermittent - expect all the big brands to elbow their way to the front - whatever you happen to be watching. Shame on you.

Essay completed this morning on experiments in worship

summarising some of the experimental work I have done in church services - importing workshopping and research facilitating techniques - I wonder if they'll give me a mark? Next essay topic is funerals - which I will be qualified to take as of next March when I'm licensed. I kid you not. Well it adds variety to the day job!

Salvador by Oliver Stone

Fired up the video projector this evening and put this on the wall. One of my favourite films - though it is a harrowing one. War movies for me either become very cynical or are variants on a kind of weird buddy road movie. I appreciate Stone's outrage. No one comes out of it well - there's always an alternative point of view - the yanks, the right wing death squads, the peaceniks - the press, and of course James Woods and James Belushi along for the ride. Kind of ironic to be watching this when Pakistan is in a state of emergency but the US and UK aren't going to do anything about it because of security issues in the region. It seems we really haven't learned anything. There's nothing objective about Stone's film but perhaps objectivity can only get you so far. Partisanship can get you further.

Green Marketing manifesto and John Grant's birthday

Off to John Grant's book launch this evening - the Green Marketing Manifesto. I confess I haven't manage to keep up with his blog where he thrashed out the core structure of the Green Marketing Manifesto - I can't come anywhere near to matching his productivity.  I have recorded the interview with the marketing bod from the FT and even posted it in in their own words but don't go and look just yet because I can't get the Flash player to work properly - will tip you off as soon as I have debugged it.

The audience for the event was a curious blend of agency types and NGO types rather staring at each other across an ideological chasm. It was a treat to bump into Elena and Raluca from Burnetts in Bucharest.  Elena has come over for the APG awards - she's a finalist. But we'll just have to wait until Monday to see how it all turns out!

MRS Online research training

I managed to get myself onto the first day course the MRS has run about online qual. Run by Andrew Vincent of Waves and Graeme Lawrence and Peter Comley of Virtual Surveys.  This was a treat on 2 counts -  online research is such an emerging area that this is a rare opportunity to get despatches from the front - so it really was gold dust. The other rarity was their honesty. About what hadn't worked and where online qual was likely to go. It really is all up in the air. Full marks for their honesty as well. Wish there was more of it about. I am convinced that online research is going to change the way we think about carrying out reseach - it is very interesting watching the area develop. I was amused that last time I had seen Graeme present back in March he talked about online panels - this time he talked about resarch communities - which sounds much sexier!

choice of 3 brands of polish beer from my cornershop

Who says Hoddesdon isn't cosmopolitan?

Glued to Helvetica - BBC1 typography film

I got sucked in last night by a 40 minute film celebrating the ubiquity of Helvetica as a font. There were a few grumpies who called it fascist - the ubiquitous corporate font adopted for the Vietnam war and still just as relevant for the war in Iraq. This was a rant by typographers and type designers for whom helvetica had become a fixture. And the longer the film went on the more you became convinced that every piece of public signage out there was in Helvetica - which I gather it mostly is. They were trying to establish quite why it has become so popular. The typographers' typical answer was that the balance between figure and ground - the space between the letters is so well expressed it holds the type together. You're probably bored with reading this already but I thought it was brilliant - exactly the kind of obscure insighful programming the BBC is brilliant at.  I've now watched TV two nights in a row - which for me is the exception - I don't generally do broadcast TV until the weekend - more of this sort of thing and I would be glued more of the time.

spam spam spam is starting to get to me

This is going to sound like a right old fashioned rant but have you noticed how many fraudulent emails there are about these days? The spam filters are pretty good at pushing most of it out of sight  but what has got me going this time is how accepting we are of the stuff.

Some one mailed me today to suggest I mailed his secretary to collect the $1.6 million due to me. Soldiers in Iraq ask me to fence gold bullion for them. I get pious messages from widows in Africa who in the name of the Lord plead with me to help them out of a fix and collect a coupla million in recompense.  I know police forces are overstretched and all that but it seems we have got so used to this kind of crap that we just put up with it.  But this kind of fraud is continual and widespread and in the long term must increase our cynicism about the internet - are the only people you can trust friends of friends referred by email or who you have met in the offline world? In 1993 when William Gibson polished off his seminal work Neuromancer which among other things brought the word cyberspace into general usage could he have imagined that before you strapped on your holodeck and disappeared into the matrix you would have to clear your spam filters of the daily crap accumulating there before you had a chance of cracking the ice around a corporate mainframe. Mebbe we should start some tit for tat spamming of West Africa - there have to be a few mugs who'll fall for it......

Flying stable - the job of a company

I've been doing some work on how to get companies to be more creative. Which has given me a renewed respect for what a company is supposed to do - which is to fly stable. Companies which aren't stable don't as a rule survive very long.  The job of the leadership is to create a culture where everyone in the company knows where the company is going and what is expected of them. Trouble is that culture tends to kill ideas it doesn't recognise - that's what culture is for - to protect the organism. The job of meetings and in particular workshops and brainstorms is to ensure that new ideas are explored and survive long enough to impact on the activities of the company and to be accepted by the culture. I show a pic of the Eurofighter which has been designed to be more manoueverable because it flies unstably - I wonder if companies will ever be capable of flying unstably - or shall we stick to the regime of culture forming with occasional brainstorms?

GoodBrand makes good

I very much enjoyed attending Making Good, a day conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ethical agency GoodBrand last month. I hadn't realised how sophisticated CSR has become forging partnerships between corporations and NGOs so the big companies stay real and the NGOs get realist. You can see the main presentations from the day here: www.goodbrand.com/en/makinggood/presentations/

Wanted: storytellers for the web and for brands

Last night I was channel flicking across Anthony Lilley's Huw Weldon lecture abotu interactivity and the future of television which was broadcast on BBC2 - I can't find a video cast of it but here's a reference about the content.  He demolishes the notion that TV is about channels and argues that the future of TV lies in the creation of programming which create interactivity or at least much deeper involvement than the current buzz word 'engagement' would suggest. What TV can do better than user generated content is to tell stories.

Which ties in neatly with the strike of the storytellers of Hollywood - namely the screenwriters who are worried that if they don't take royalties off internet broadcasts and DVDs then their future is uncertain. It seems strange to me that storytelling can be so central to engaging audiences but that the storytellers have such little power that they need to be unionized. One of the challenges of the new media is the unbundling of storytelling so that you don't need a TV company or film studio to find a creative team to execute the story. Are storytellers as beleagured as they sound or is the corporate gravy train sliding to a standstill. Certainly they ought to be well placed.   The endangered species seems to me to be the miniaturists namely advertising creatives who have to somehow engage us long enough to namecheck the brands and to create a positive association. There will always be a role for this kind of miniaturism but if you can't get a mass audience then you really can't justify the origination costs. Enter a different kind of content creator who engages people for hours where brands express opinions, self parody and promote their passions rather than themselves. This is starting to happen all over. It just isn't at all clear whether this isn't best done inside the client organisation- agencies and intermediaries needn't apply. So  those screenwriters who get fed up with the current dispute - start posting your resumes to large corporate clients.

carbon neutral fireworks anybody?

If you don't live in the UK then you won't be aware probably that tonight is bonfire night bringing to an end an extended season during which fireworks have been let off every night - sometimes it feels like we're living in a war zone. Nov 5th used to be one night a year but now it has turned into a season.  Until now there has been a choice between buying and setting your own fireworks off or paying to attend a spectacular display put on by the local council. Until this year when environmental fervour has led to councils cancelling these events to improve their own carbon footprint. Quite how this reduces the amount of gunpowder and CO2 being flung into the air I can't really see because the public will go back home and let off 10 times as many measely little fireworks which will add a lot more carbon than would otherwise have been the case. So I'm on the lookout for carbon neutral firework displays where trees get planted for every firework detonated - absurd but it couldn't be more absurd than the posturing we are seeing from local government officials at the moment.

Exchange at my cornershop

Me: Do you sell any Mexican food?
Man behind the counter : No mate - I've never seen a Mexican round here - now if you want Polish food that would be different - there's plenty of Poles round here.

Next time I feel like eating a Chinese meal I must remember to discover how many indigenous Chinese live locally.

Jumpers - on Russell Davies blog

Russell Davies has been featuring photos of people jumping.

Its annoying not to be able to reply with anything other than words - so here's a visual reply - the Woebegone brothers - around 1989

Doppelganger will the real John Griffiths stand up?

I'm really not looking over my shoulder here but on the web your identity is to an extent shared (or should that be sharded) across those with the same name promoting all sorts of other activities.

John Griffiths on groundhog day -

John Griffiths and tuba playing  though I'm afraid I've just missed him - there's something a little whimsical about a tuba player's death being ascribed to 'valve failure' don't you think?

John Griffiths theorbo player

John Griffiths aka E-griff

John Griffiths Neuroscientist oops there's two of those even a professor

Not forgetting the politician the one in the Welsh Assembly - there's a Nigel Griffiths in Westminster not to be confused with my brother Nigel....

My favourite for now - John Griffiths conceptual artist. How many people visiting this art installation might actually think that we were one and the same person?

This really is me  courtesy of the planning.ro blog in Romania

those of you with more time on your hands than you should have,  try your own names in googlist  Its  thoroughly disorientating!