furtherandfaster

Time for a rethink - August posting

Blogs were not designed for posting once a month but it has happened again. A frantic July and now I am off on holidays.

The real discovery of July for me was that the narrative technique I developed for writing screenplays for brands in workshops works as well in research. Respondents found it really easy to tell stories about the characters and to set up and resolve conflict situations. Result: a lovely piece of brand development research carried out very fast but with clear and rich outcomes. So I'll be using that again.

The planning book is going veerry slowly - I need enough breathing space to write an hour a day and that just hasn't been happening.

Back again..its July time

I can't believe a whole month went by without posting but there you have it.  So much has happened that June seems rather a blur now.

I've started working on the introduction to account planning - but discovered what a slow process writing can be.

I have been continuing with distance teaching of students in Madrid. And actually got to Madrid to meet those studying there only to discover that the rest  are scattered around the world in Latin America mostly. I was in Madrid to run a training course on Insight the second training course of the month.

I was going to tell you that Jon Steel got flooded out in Somerset. But the moment passed.

I blogged the Diversity in Focus MRS conferenc for WARC which you can read here for the next month before it disappears behind corporate walls for subscribers only.

I never made it to Interesting 2008 - I was rehearsing for playing the Leigh on Sea folk festival which happened last weekend so it has been a bit of a musical month.

Did a bit of a teach in on Analysis and Interpretation of research. Which was a useful reminder to me also of how critical these components are to good research and how invisible they can be to clients.

Can't remember if I told you that my two articles on Web 2.0 and Planning after 40 years are on the website. But they won't be there much longer so go and download them or get a subscription to WARC!

See you further on up the road.

Heard this morning that my Aunty Judy died last night with her family round her. It was cancer and it took a year - she last longer than anyone thought possible. I got to drop in on her after a debrief meeting last week. It is one of those bittersweet times when death is a mercy but we're going to miss her sheer guts and humour.  In the last couple of years when death is in the air I reach for two sources - John Donne's Meditations in my sickness when he was misdiagnosed with the plague and thought he was going to die and wrote a reflection and a prayer every day for 30 days till he was through it. The other is Johnny Cash - who looks at death straight in the eye. His last recordings are a treasure. Funnily enough death is a brand free area - brands don't 'do' death very well - they run for it. Even though death is part and parcel of human existence.   So this is for you Judy - go with God.

Quality time

Having been away for a few days - I did my best to spend some time with each of the children. The 10 year old proved the hardest nut to crack. When I offered to 'hang around' with her she retorted What sort of an adult  wants to hang around with a ten year old kid? The 10 year old's parent I offered? She wasn't having any of it.

So since I clearly wasn't leaving she opted to write me a message in number code - which was less than complimentary.  Nothing daunted I wrote her a post it note in number code  and stuck it on the ladder of her bunk bed.  I later found it annotated and abandoned. The observant among you will spot that the post it note had been turned into a paper plane.  She did make sure however to tell me how cheesy and obvious my message was.
So it couldn't have been all bad...

Your own personal Jesus

This week has been particularly interesting because the days have been packed but I have been running the first unit of a distance learning course with students who are in Madrid - And using a bulletin board and a place for uploading documents I had to get them thinking through the way in which research is applied before getting deep into the world of online research. Because I was deep in Sussex away from my usual broadband connection and away from a mobile phone signal - I found myself at 6am Tuesday morning trying to post the first day's questions and found the borrowed computer just didn't work. Very stressful.  But at least this meant I got a service call from the Business School's IT support guy who introduced himself as Jesus - hence my posting a recording of Johnny Cash singing this classic!  By Tuesday night I was back homeon the system with everything working normally so we seem to have got past the gremlins. Thanks Jesus -  Enjoy!

Monsters and Fair trade

I got a bit of a shock today. A neat trick of Fair Trade products is to incorporate storytelling into their packaging so the focus is on the producers rather than the product. All well and good but what if one of their fair trade producers looks like.. well Joe Stalin - surely some photoshop is required to make them look less like the biggest mass murderer of the 20th century?

April Snow

This Sunday and the next I have to conduct research in two churches trying to catch people after the services who don't read a particular church newspaper - seat of the pants stuff. The churches are more than 50 miles away from me. This morning it was complicated by a fall of snow - which hit congregational numbers -and made driving hazardous - the M25 was busy for a Sunday morning - the overhead signs told us to stay at 40mph but no one was paying any attention. Somehow I got to the town where the church was. But even though by then I was running late I had to stop to take some photos of the fruit trees in blossom covered with a fresh fall of April snow.

The research itself didn't go too badly - a  positive tradeoff is that I have to go to 2 services per church to forage for respondents and it is refreshing to see how different churches can be from one another and how experimental churches are becoming.  The first service in particular was designed for young families - early in the day since most children wake up far too early! After a short service the service then moved to 'a messy time' where parents made craft objects with their children at low tables while breakfast was laid out at the side for anyone to help themselves.  Messy church is one of the experimental formats which have emerged from a movement called Fresh Expressions which is re-inventing how conventional worship is defined in the Church of England. A downside was that this is the church Jon Howard goes to but he wasn't there today.But here's a reference to his site and blog anyway!

Walkabout

Um hi well I'm back - no excuses really only managing websites, blogs and facebook is more and more like riding a bicycle. When you fall off it gets harder and harder to get on and start peddling again.  Call it walkabout. I just went off and did other things without telling you what I was up to. But I'm back on air and will try to keep you up to speed. Thanks to all of those who kept dropping in or who sent worried notes to check I wasn't in a morgue somewhere.

January and February were taken up with writing training courses mostly on the topic of web 2.0 and research and now the courses are starting to flow through There's articles in the pipeline for Market Leader and Admap but I'll talk about these a bit more when publication looms.

Sometimes you know its good to just go walkabout - not to keep the same pace of posting. Just stop for a bit. I blog therefore I am? I don't think so.  I really want to get the new version of the website up and running - lots of ideas for that but I need a couple of solid days to get CSS working properly - the web has changed so much since I started to post on the web - and I want lean pages which can bounce onto mobiles as well as PCs. And I don't want to keep leaping on and off social media trains and platforms - the writing is the fun part -and that has got rather lost in the last couple of years.  I hope I can use this blog to point at bits of writing I have put on web pages in the sure confidence that it will be still there in a couple of year's time unlike the flotsam of blogs.

Karen Brady - spotting the subtext

I usually make time to listen to Desert Island discs - as a character study the programme has never been surpassed - even when Professor Antony Clare was lifting people's heads off. Just by asking people to put on their favourite records and talk about their lives. This week it was Karen Brady's turn.  Energetic and accessible - she came across well  - dodging the obvious questions How she came to be working as a graduate trainee at Saatchi and Saatchi at the age of 18 because she couldn't be bothered with college. How she came to take over the running of a football club at the age of 23 because she talked David Sullivan into it when she had no track record in management, football is notoriously sexist and football clubs conventionally lose money.  It is clear she's a workaholic - back at work 3 days after her first baby. And she admitted that her son had wanted to destroy her blackberry last summer holiday - what a surprise. The giveaway was at the end of the show when in response to Kirsty's trademark Thank you for letting us hear your desert island discs, her response was  an  abrupt 'No. Thank you.' It was rather clear that despite the charm this had been Karen's meeting not Kirstys.

Happy New Year - new year resolutions and why I'm going back to the web

Hmm well the Christmas break is past us - its a new year and I'm looking askance at the blogs making predictions for 2008. What am I going to go this year? Well a couple of New Year resolutions - the first is to try to doodle every day. I haven't drawn anything since the age of 13 when my formal art education ended. So 2008 I intend to start to develop my graphic skills if I have any. The second is to pay a little more attention to marketing this year. I intend to put more time aside not just to do stuff but to ensure that the right people know what I'm up to - so expect me to communicate a little more regularly than I have been. The third is that I intend to readjust the balance I have been placing on facebook, blogging and websites. Basically I am midway through going back to work on the accountplanning website to redevelop it from scratch.  Why?

Firstly because the Facebook population has now passed the population of Brazil - by the end of 2008 when I supppose it will start to implode it will have passed the population of South America. As a way of staying in touch with yer mates Facebook works fine. As a way of co-ordinating the activities of the population of an entire content it is plain inadequate. As I believe advertisers will find. If advertisers know too much about you - you're going to get fed up with Facebook as a medium - if clearly they know nothing - rather like the google ads which I used to allow to appear around my website - then they can be just as annoying. Facebook is about people you know and no one I know has been crass enough to introduce any of the 100,000 brands who have entered Facebook to their friends. So as a medium for marketing and self promotion I believe Facebook is flawed.

Then we turn to blogs - which are self referential and which ought to have a past but despite technorati just don't. Tell me your favourite postings of 2006 - I bet you can't find them in a couple of seconds. Blogging just doesn't cut it as an indexing system.

What about websites then - were they ever that great? Well no they aren't. One of the biggest challenges is getting the architecture right - what works for 10 pages just doesn't work for several hundred. What I will say in favour of websites though is that they are as effective as they are made. And what has changed in the last couple of years has been the advent of CSS. Why? Because it means that much of the page design is being automated - which should make web pages easier to read, to update and to structure.  So I am in process of teaching myself CSS - and this year intended to develop a number of websites using the format. I may dabble in Flash but only for publishing multimedia. If you're interested in the content you'll start looking for it. And the search engines will find it and put it at the top of the list. Unlike facebook or blogs.  A fringe benefit is that CSS is also capable of delivering content to mobile devices - though I still struggle to see why it is imperative that wherever I am I have to stop and refer to  a website or go onto Amazon to buy a book - can't it wait until I get home?  BUt eventually specialised content delivered using CSS will be available for any device. So will facebook and the blogs but I still don't think they will port across as easily - and I have been posting blogs with Nokia's life blog for a few years now - its useful but not imperative and I never read blogs from my mobile.

There's only so much circulating of videos and writing on people's funwalls. In a little while we're going to have to make some new stuff. And I think we need more than social marketing containers.

Spring/Mesh Christmas Party

This evening was the closest to an office party I get this Christmas courtesy of Spring/Mesh Steve Fiona and Doug who have invited their clients and also a few mates along too. Most generous and I appreciate it!  It also gave us a chance to talk briefly about the plans for a research fringe at the MRS conference next March in London.

I caught up with Mat Coombes of WARC who told me they are just about to appoint their first editor - a classic instance of a brand which is all about information deciding to become opinionated. I think within a decade most brands will appoint a similar editor whatever business they happen to be in. For brands to be only interested in their category and themselves is very very dull. Opinion costs very little and if there is no mass audience to offend it isn't half as risky as most marketers fear.  You don't have to agree with a brand to buy it - but having an opinion makes you more interesting. There's a piece of bad news thought. You can't hire an agency supplier to choose your opinions for you. You have to do it yourself and stick to your opinions.  It is a lot cheaper than advertising and gets you a lot more attention.

Mark Earls turned up also - he only lives about 10 minutes walk away.  We haven't had a chance to shoot the breeze for a good six months - during which time his ideas about herd thinking have moved on - so I got an upgrade - we plan to put another interview on the site but since it took me the best part of 6 months to get the first one up and running don't rush at once - I'll let you know when I have it.

Obsession

I was driving past a nondescript farm on the A10 north of Royston and  saw a sign offering dolls furniture. What I found inside stunned me. Room after room of houses, furniture, kits and dolls. The internet is the main refuge for obsessives these days  but it was a treat and a half to see this in the real world with a detail that can't be matched on the web. My photos didn't come out particular well but I hope you can spot the FMCH packaging which was about the size of a thumb nail plus the advertising posters.  Quite extraordinary and each selling for  a few euros. I didn't take a picture of the satellite dishes but you can see the photocopier and the vending machine. I think there's a cashtill if you look hard enough.  I really don't have a thing about dolls houses but I'll readily give half an hour of my life to enjoy somebody else's obsession. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Getting a new perspective

This afternoon Adrian Reith who was a founder of Radioville - the specialist creative boutique sent me the links to a couple of films he had put on Youtube. He and a couple of friends had taken their families for a holiday with a difference on the streets of Durban South Africa with the street children. I had never heard street children covered before by UK children of the same age. It is very powerful. 

Man from Carphone Warehouse duets with Pavarotti

I came rather late to the story of Paul Potts the awkward man in the cheap suit with the divine voice who won Britain's Got Talent this last summer.  I'm really not going to use this post as a platform to rave about him. Only to point you to this film of him on Youtube mashed with the late great Pavarotti. Wrapped up in the narrative about Paul Potts is the notion that he was so lacking in confidence he just worked in a Carphone Warehouse shop in South Wales. Only half true - he was a manager so he couldn't have been all that shy and retiring but that's the telly for you. And then its the usual reality TV rags to riches narrative.

I have 2 points to make here. What have Carphone Warehouse done about having a member of staff who has probably got one of the biggest human interest stories of the year?  A missed opportunity surely. And secondly look how customer generated content is helping to go on promoting him. And how easy it is for someone who knows how to cut two films together to just get on and do it. I have huge faith in customer generated content - the best of it is so much better than the professional kind. But how do we professionals ride the tiger? Enjoy the clip.

New book section in accountplanning.net

Now I have a little breathing space I am in a position to be able to update the website at long last. One of the first things I have added is a gallery of Business Fiction books. Relevant because in recent reads I have reviewed The Marketing Code and Kingdom.com and I am all set to read and review David Taylor's Where's the Sausage. You may not have thought of fiction as a suitable area for thinking and learning about business but there's some good stuff out there and some very entertaining material as well.

Down by the river

This morning I looked in on Claire Lettice a planner with who I used to work at Carlson group in Putney many years ago. She's still in Putney has a pad on the Thames no less. So we sat by the river talking projects - hers involve muesli and vineyards (mine are mundane by comparison). But if this is work then well it sure beats a day job!

One of the things we discussed was the Create more than you consume idea I am now contemplating how I can turn into something more tangible. I have even secured the URL for createmore.co.uk so watch this space! It rather looked as if Claire is well ahead of the curve and planning business start up ideas that would do exactly that - help people to create more with what she was providing.

Facebook get together - advertising, and piano playing in a brothel

This was a facebook meet the first of its kind. The group on Facebook (you should be able to work out the name from the title of this blog!) is around the 3,000 mark. Ogilvy funded the whole thing which was a smart thing to do. They staked the basement of the Slug and Lettuce out so you had to sign in - get your photo taken with a sheet of A4 with your name and you had to sign in a second time to get a free beer. Business case wise they only need a couple of new signings from it and they'll have done very nicely saving on headhunters fees. Something like 140 people had said they would come but the numbers didn't look anything close to that. Always the problem with converting web contact to face to face - the spirit is willing but the body can't get organised. It was still easily the biggest web getogether I had been to - and remember I have organised a few of my own to drink the profits from the sales of the books on the www.planningaboveandbeyond.com now www.accountplanning.net website. So well done to Nick Fell for getting the whole thing going. I caught up with Will Humphrey but didn't manage to say hello to Rory before he left the venue having addressed the throng.

Blog life balance -

Um well after an indecent interval hello.  This I suppose is what ought to be called a continuity posting where I make some account of myself in the weeks since the August bank holiday at the end of August when I last posted.  Without apology I plead work pressures. Facebook is absurdly easy to update with the status field. But for the last 3 weeks I have been charging around running workshops, training and a rather interesting research project. Expect some posts which will appear in the timeline in the next few days and will eventually be retrofitted to when they really happened.  There's been a bit of reading and pondering which I'll be coming back to. I've had a coffee with author David Taylor about his new book Where's the sausage and his trilogy Brand Gym Brand stretch and Brand vision.  And a lunch with Peter Wells who briefed me on what Nilewide are up to. Its not like I've not been up to the usual things. I just haven't had time to write about them.

Sometimes there isn't enough time to live and to write about living. What is quite interesting I think is that there hasn't been a lot of time to absorb advertising. I don't just mean I've been too busy to watch the telly. I'm not seeing DM, been travelling outside of cities so not seeing posters. Newspapers are a big disapointment these days because they mostly carry offers not advertsing so there's nothign to absorb.   Not a lot of commercial radio is making it into the car. I haven't been on the internet that much and the anti popup software has ensured that when I do I don't get interupted. Advertising just isn't making it through the bubble. And I'm wondering for how many other people this is also true.  What I am looking forward to is space and quality time. At which point I want to encounter some clever exchanges with brands with something interesting to say. I wonder who will find me and what they will say to me when they do.

Despite the adrenaline rush of hitting one deadline after another I'm still intensely frustrated. I need to teach myself how to use CSS and Flash. How to develop containers which instantly deposit the content to the relevant browser whether computer, PDA or mobile.  Its all very well having at least 4 conferences this autumn about Web 2.0. But who's actually going to make it happen? So much talk - but where's the innovation happening?

I'm just caught between a web/blog/facebook/hi5/linkedin and a hard place.

Heavenly books

I haven't visited the exhibition of Sacred books at the British Library yet this summer but I plan to. There's a fantastic application here where you can turn the pages of the books on the website and use a magnifying glass to get up close. Try it if your internet connection is fast enough. Last week end I was talking to Chas Bayfield (who works at Dave these days) about books in particular a campaign we had worked on together for the Scottish Bible society. A poster campaign created the interest in particular Bible stories using contemporary photography - none of that stained glass stuff. And people could go the website to read the rest of the story. Or order (and pay for) a book of the Bible story which had the same art direction as the posters. We were talking about taking the idea to another level. Imagine if you well an online book ornately decorated like the Lindisfarne gospels. With animated drawing and movies of people telling the story in their own words. Embedded right alongside the text. With spaces so those browsing could add their own commentary and notes in the margins. It wouldn't be that difficult to do - a kind of organic wikipedia full of visual links and tools. When I master Flash I'm going to try to build a page like it.

For now you'll just have to play with the application at the British Library. 

Votes for (aggressive) women - please - a cry for help

I am an aficionado of I Want One of Those (www.iwoot.com) for short with the irresistable tagline For things you don't need but really really want. Last year I made a film of my daughters knocking 7 bells out of each other with giant boxing gloves on the trampoline to the sound of the Matrix heavy metal soundrack. Sensing a promotional opportunity I sent these guys the film. And at long last they've put it into a competition with other trivial pursuits finalists who have all made movies about IWOOT products. Please take the time to go and look at Rumble - that's the name of the film and vote for it. and tell your friends to do the same. As you can see there's lots of yummy prizes and my daughters are promotionally very sensitive and aggressive with it - all help welcome. Here's the link.

Identity Freud

This is a terrible confession to make and really I haven't done it in ever so long. But last night I googled John Griffiths and discovered that I had 2 entries in the top 10. One for the website and one for this blog. Must be August. Will posting this item get me promoted even furth I wonder? Anyway looking around the top 10 I discovered egriff - and have had an exchange with another John Griffiths - who in his time has met a few other John Griffiths including one called John griffiths 6 -apparently BT had so many John Griffiths (another mention for the search engine) that they numbered them all. It is all rather weird. I'm not used to having alter egos and of course I don't. But the thing about the internet is that we're all wanting a piece of the same identity. You can't type in I want John Griffiths you know the one who shared a flat with Phil in 1994 - and get anything very coherent out of Google. So alongside the oedipus complex I think we should posit the google same name complex.

Makes me want to

Tue 07/08/2007 12:52 07082007(002)

I've never wanted to sit on the wall at my local shopping centre till they got the builders in and started issuing directives. But that's communications for you.

Why can't every day be like this

Today was a corker - I drove down to Mike Imm's cottage to work with him for the day on a training course we're writing on how to develop customer insights. He lives in an idyllic village within sight of the sea close to Arundel with Chichester and even the Isle of Wight visible. The weather was glorious. When we paused for lunch we went into the garden to gather the bits for the salad. Mike is a gardener whose interest borders on the obsessive. For dessert - icecream and fresh figs - picked from the tree - just perfection.  And when we were done Mike took me on a promenade around the village - stories about local residents past (Eleanor Farjeon, DH Lawrence, Hilaire Belloc) and current (Johnny and Claire Hornby). We dropped by Chateau Hornby but they were clearly still in London grafting so we left a business card with the nanny (which felt very Jane Austen). Walking through a village with the hollyhocks in full bloom by the roadside and a classic English country garden to be negotiated if you wanted to get to the post office it reminded my how much I love my current occupation and live in fear of having to work in an office all the time which would be a demotion and I think would lead to a different quality of work.   Then it was away to the Lewes Guitar festival to meet a couple of mates to go and see Bruce Cockburn perform (for the second time this year). As I said. Perfection.

Disengagement party

I know this is going to make me sound like a grumpy old so and so but we went to an engagement party last night which in the hour we were there turned into the party from hell.  The happy couple had an alcholic mother apiece and one of them was given a drink. That's when it all got gruesome. The couple went into the middle of the dancefloor to dance but mum wouldn't leave her darling boy alone so it turned into a bit a threesome on the dancefloor. Then mum got a bit upset and went outside and apparently went and stamped on the head of a local (literally) so he went off to get his mates. In the mean time the bridal party and the groom party were proceeding at a 10 metre distance hurling abuse at one another for not managing the mother issue better.  Englishness is about feeling embarassed and guilty about the whole thing when really it wasn't the fault of any of us - just caught in the crossfire. The vending machine in the loo was particularly interesting but I'd forgotten my camera and mobile so couldn't take a picture for you. The marketing strategy clearly covered all the bases. Condom on the left, herbal viagra in the middle and nurofen on the right. Which reads green amber and red in my book.

Too posh to pay

Greg Rowland gave me this bon mot. Too posh to pay is when you have a longstanding relationship with a client who becomes so senior that they no longer have day to day budget responsibility so cannot be tapped for lucractive projects. Of course we still love 'em!

Amsterdam Mk 2

Since the Amsterdam in the Old Town was being renovated we relocated to a bar next to the Atheneum also owned by the same group. There I met Diana Ceasu and Bogdana Botnar - leading planner bloggers both now working at McCanns. I told them about the Eastern European report in London's version of Campaign magazine where Romania hadn't had a particularly good write up - but then the main mention was of some senior McCanns honcho who came to Bucharest and got bitten by a street dog so had to have the full anti-rabies treatment. So didn't make much of Romania after that. This story causes much hilarity because the packs of wild dogs roaming the streets of Bucharest are a real feature here - even turning up as gags in advertising. Apparently when he announced his mad dog bite at McCanns expecting sympathy he was told he was lucky. A Japanese tourist had died of a dog bite in Bucharest the previous year.   I therefore include shot of wild dogs which clearly I was giving a wide berth to.

Might be worth keeping an eye on eh?

Had a creds meeting with a jewellery company this morning. Interesting hearing how the jewellery trade is having to change. What I found slightly more disturbing was a couple of hours later leafing through the Week - wonderful magazine - only to read a piece about the fact that the world's supplies of silver are going to run out in 10 years. Silver is used for industry as well as for jewellery so the pressure is on. Assuming this piece of news is true - it would probably be a good idea for those in the category to start to think about what the alternatives are.  scary stuff. Without silver there would be a massive gap in jeweller's armoury.

2020 hindsight - Wedding anniversary July 1987

Blimey - married for 20 years - and so busy at present that I am reduced to leaving flowers in the house as I run for the train - and opening a bottle at 10pm after getting in from a busy day. Expecting to make up for it in Prague in a couple of weeks time.

Missing wet wipes

At the school fete today I ran into Phil a friend who was polishing off an icecream. He was bewailing the fact that now his kids are growing up his wife Nicola doesn't carry a change bag on her person. So there's no wetwipes just when you need them. Sad but true - it gave me a wetwipe twinge as well.

something quite interesting..

Advice to the twitterers posted on Russell Davies blog as part of the set up for the Interesting 2007 event. I just happened to notice that it has been scooped into the google search  abstract:

1) Get a twitter account
2) Add russell davies as your friend. Don't worry, you can always delete him later ;^)
3) Write 'interesting2007' (without quotes) at the start of your tweet. That copies your tweet to interesting
4) To follow the interesting2007 conversation, add interesting as your friend or subscribe to this rss feed
5) That's it!

Russell we wouldn't do that to you!

accountancy 1 accountplanning 0

Forgive me reverend planners for I have failed. I have been stalking the ultimate domain name for 7 years now. Accountplanning.com was registered back in 2000 by some individual at Harrison Love - a US agency which went through a couple of takeovers. I tried to track the owner down but he had long since moved on. I spent £100 to bid for the name - and lost it when the dotcom concerned changed its terms of business and kept the money in return for sweet FA. Finally I decided I had wasted enough time and money and stalked the domain name when it came up in Feb of this year. Then discovered that when a domain name lapses you still can't get your mitts on it - its the most crooked business imaginable.  And here it is finally attached to a website - promoting accountancy courses. I can't bear it.  For those of you brethren with a yen for a little terrorist action can I urge you to do lots of click throughs and make voluble enquiries about why there are no proper account planning links.  With a bit of luck he'll get the picture and sell the domaine on - but if he has the soul of an accountant then I doubt it.

In the meantime as current owner of accountplanning.co.uk accountplanning.info and accountplanning.net I shall be at an undisclosed location licking my wounds.

Foresight - now THAT's planning

I happened upon this little treasure on the Beeb this morning. Its so happens that Lewis Hamilton didn't pop out of the woodwork this Formula 1 season and here's proof. You've probably heard that he met the head of the McClaren team aged 10 and told him he was going to be a Formula 1 driver.  Well the Lewis publicity machine was indeed wellhandled. Here are a fascinating series of films made by the children's TV programme Blue Peter as they followed his progress. Racing radiocontrol model  cars aged 7. Racing go karts aged 12, racing gokarts in the World Championship when taking his GCSEs. There's even a film of him pranging his old kart a few weeks ago - just to show that even perfection has its limits. What is so fascinating about these early films is the how focussed he is, how measured and how the qualities which he needs to compete at the top level are so visible so early. The advertising business is far too hooked on post rationalisations and happenstances. Here's a refreshing view of what happens if you have talent, vision and a steely determination to take it all the way for years if necessary.  You really couldn't have predicted that this driven 12 year old would in a decade be tipped as the world's top driver. But looking at him stroppy and sulking in the pits because he only made 6th its not suprising to see what Lewis Hamilton has become.  Pick an ambition today. Then go and make it happen.

Going into print

My 9 year old made a momentuous decision at the dinner table last night. She came out as a vegetarian. She'd been feeling sorry for lambs and rabbits for a while but tolerated cows and pigs. But clearly the inconsistency was getting to her. In the face of family scepticism and fearing being verbally outgunned she did something I thought very interesting. She went into print. She designed the above certificate, printed it out, laminated it (using MY laminator) and then placed it in her certificates book along with swimming, school, football and brownies. I had assumed she would post it in a communal place as a manifesto. It seems to be a private commitment to herself. Now us parents have got to worry about how to get proteins into a vegetarian with an aversion to vegetables. But it does show how powerful printed agreements are as private as well as public documents. You can't really do contracts on a screen. You gotta print.

Pat on the (feed)back from Ebay

Lovely email this morning. I've been given positive feedback. And the more I trade on ebay the more positive people will feel about me and the better I'll feel about myself. Hang on. I have been give a feedback score when I was a BUYER. I understand that sellers need to be policed to be honest and prompt and courteous but how interesting to give buyers positive feedback too?  Pure genius. Nick the idea and use it. All over the shop.

Sometimes its great to be a dad

Fathers day began with breakfast in bed. We found a new use for the crayon from the Interesting 2007 goodie bag - a race to move it from toe to toe across 4 pairs of feet. Later I came home to find the laptop and projector set up. 2 Fathers day cards and a first - a Fathers day powerpoint presentation -  which was a lot more focussed than a lot of powerpoints I have seen in the last year. I then had to pick a film so we spent the early part of Sunday afternoon watching Pirates of the Caribbean. Father's day was never a big deal for me growing up. I still don't send a card to my own dad having inherited the suspicion that its a US originating marketing scam. But the energy with which my family celebrates the day puts me to shame - an outpouring of creativity rather than consumption - though the choccie biccies were nice too..

Guitar playing and moderating

I was called last Friday night to ask me to pick up a guitar at a wedding the following day - one of those situations where you make the best of it - I'm really not matchfit as a musician at present.  Was reminded of this on the way home last night after running groups about holidays. Moderating is a lot like playing music in front of people - with all the same risks of failure and the need to engage those participating but concentrate on the piece at the same time. Personally I think Tuesday went better than last Saturday night but I need to work on my guitar chops.

A minute's silence - for the right to choose

Spotted an article today which pointed out the proportion of British service personnel on active service (and in body bags) who are too young to vote.  Hardly a sign of a civilized society is it? Risking your life on Blair's middle eastern adventure on £2.45 an hour (less than half the minimum wage).  Still its their choice. Shame they aren't allowed to choose the policy makers. This blog isn't about politics. But no harm in letting morality rear its head from time to time.

Wot no creative

I've been trying not to get too distracted by the media frenzy over THAT 2012 Olympic Logo. Till I was caught by the shrill headline this morning. Wolff Ollins appointed without showing creative work??? That did it. Absolutely. Never go to the garage without getting the mechanic to show me a car. Never go to the dentist without demanding photos of successful bridge work. Waddya mean you're a plumber and you've got no samples.  Don't come into my house.  The issue is not whether Wolff Ollins can do creative work but whether this one is any good. End of rant

My Corona or This guy's in love

A chance remark in a conversation between Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch got me scrabbling to Ebay. It was about the sounds that disappear and you don't notice they've gone. Like cash registers and typewriters. So I headed straight for Ebay and drove down to Woodford to collect my prize a day later. Isn't she beautiful? Great design wasn't invented in the 1960s - we tend to forget that. The ribbon is shot but everything else seems to be in working order.  And the sound of the typewriter is back in my life.  The big idea is to hang a microphone on the back and mash the sound - yup its time to revive the typewriter as a beatbox.  Better still I can hang a camcorder over the top lined to a projector and the audience can read the rhythms I am making. Why has no one else tried this before? Perhaps they have - Tom Waits probably did it on Swordfishtrombones. But right now I feel I have something special to shape. Even wrote a song to go with it!

the sound of the Tom tom

I've been reading Innocent when you Dream a collection of interviews with the reclusive Tom Waits - a pleasure I just can't put into words.  Here's a sample of some of the quotes which have stayed with me.

About Keith Richards playing on one of his albums: "An animal. He's part of the earth. He stands at 10 after 7 if you can imagine that. Arms at 5 o'clock, legs at 2 o'clock with no apparatus, nothing suspended. He's all below the waist. And if he doesn't feel it he'll walk away."

"When you haven't recorded in a while people want to know what you've been doing. They want a very specific answer. Like why were you late for school? The teacher wants a real answer. If you're going to make a note get it signed. The dog ate my homework. And the dog had to be operated on, we had to get the homework and dry it, and the dog is recuperating."

"The trick is to have a career and a family. Its like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night."

"Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends."

Mal-usage the only kind that counts

Just a bit of further reflection while I'm in the backwash of Adobe Live. Zeldman the neuroscience market research bod has a wonderful way of describing markets as conversations betwen the client mind and the consumer mind.  One of the worst things about going to IT events is that you are subjected to a hurricane of content about how great the product is and how you're supposed to use it. Much more interesting and much rarer at these events is what users actually do with the product when they install it.  Adobe admitted that it was only in the last couple of years they'd started to analyse the workflows of their users and how difficult it was to create an ideal workflow because so many different job functions end up using the same software. In the light of which it becomes pretty obvious that a significant proportion of usage is likely to be mal usage ie not as intended by the software architects.  I use the term mal because it is like malware - cracked and pirated softwared. And as such it is usually below the horizon. And though it will include ridiculous work intensive routines, there are also a lot of short cuts. I remember an Adobe senio honcho telling me that if I really wanted to bluescreen anything I really needed to do it in After Effects - a high end immensely complex film production tool. But you can fool with the alpha channel in any of Adobe's entry products which start at £50 and there are people who are capable enough to make these basic tools work.  And most of the artwork and webcontent you see has been developed through mal- usage - not best practice but through hacks and workaround. Despite their aspirations it is the user communities not the architects who have the final say.

Cleaning and tidying - the great reversal

I'll probably get in trouble for this but neither of them read this blog so here goes. The cleaner was due to come round today. So my wife engages in what can only be described as a bout of very quick cleaning. The cleaner in turn does a lot less cleaning than tidying. What's going on?  Well my wife (unlike me) cares about what the cleaner thinks about the state of the house because she thinks its a personal reflection on her.. The cleaner loves to create order and wants to show she's doing a great job so concentrates on the aesthetics - she does clean but she does a lot of tidying. I used to be amused about the tidying up before the cleaner came. Now I'm much more interested at the way both women interact - one cleans the other tidies - but its the other way around.