this week, I have mostly been writing:
- two horsey magazine features (just finished, due out next month)
- two blog posts for work’s online PR specialism (here and here)
- an Insight piece on the New Age of Generosity (email me if you’d like a copy)
I keep worrying that I’ll accidentally send my thoughts on work/horse/life balance to a client and the latest figures on the take up of reputation monitoring to Horse magazine…
Add comment 3 December, 2009
Santa baby, stick an aggregator under my tree, for me
Trying yet again to flick round hotmail, bloglines, twitter, facebook and wordpress in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee before work starts properly in the morning, it struck me that what I really need is an aggregator.
Imagine just one, single website. With just one login. That would tell me what is going on with all my favourite social media, email and RSS accounts.
Looking back through my archives, it seems that I tried and failed to just integrate the social networking bits of my life over two years ago. And still no solution is in sight.
Santa? Hurry down the NPD lab tonight.
1 comment 1 December, 2009
all I want for Christmas is a sensible v-neck jumper…
Somewhere in my blog reader this week (I really should have saved it) there popped up a post about how perhaps this year’s crop of festive ads were a little too knowing (if you know whose post it was, please comment & I’ll link to them).
I think the post referenced in particular the new M&S ad, which is based around festive celebrity vox pops and includes Phillip Glenister’s announcement that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without “that girl prancing around in her underwear”.
By breaking the fourth wall, M&S move away from their previous festive fantasy lifestyle approach (Take That and Twiggy in a country house at Christmas and Bondesque fantasies) and sort of get back to basics, but I’m not sure that the M&S brand needs much help in the ‘sensible jumpers and nice quality stuffing for the turkey’ area.
Given that Morrisons have spent the last few years using celebrities to push shopping trolleys through unlikely locations in pursuit of their freshness message, perhaps M&S’s new chief exec will encourage something slightly more lifestyley for Christmas 2010?
Add comment 19 November, 2009
Your Horse (and friendliness) Live
I went to Your Horse Live yesterday, which is a bit like Top Gear Live, only with horses instead of cars. (Disclosure, I write occasional features and product reviews for Your Horse magazine).
Since everyone there was obviously heavily into horses, it was really interesting to see how all the usual British reservedness broke down. I happily chatted with strangers in the queue waiting to see a dressage demonstration, in the queue begging for a go on the riding simulator (there was a lot of queuing), to the proud owners of horses in the Breeds Village stables and we even had a good giggle on the bus back to the car park.
Women outnumbered men at the event about 20 to 1 but even the non-horsey husbands/boyfriends/fathers who had been dragged along (then abandoned while their female companion dived into yet another trade stand in pursuit of the perfect turnout rug) were gathering together for support and having a good natured chat/moan.
Perhaps it takes a common interest to bring out the best in us British. Does the same thing happen at Top Gear Live?
photos borrowed from here
1 comment 15 November, 2009
a glass and a half full of dogs
T’interweb can’t seem to agree whether a less sunny version of this has already been shot and/or aired in the UK, but this ad for Cadbury by Saatchi and Saatchi Sydney and Fallon London is just joyous:
1 comment 8 November, 2009
2020 vision – help needed with charidee consumer trends presentation please
I’m doing a pro bono piece of work for Traidcraft, the UK’s leading fair trade organisation. Its to help the Traidcraft board with their 10 year vision and 3 year strategic plan and the rough title of the presentation they’d like me to give is the customer environment – thinking ten years ahead.
Gulp. I know, looking ten years ahead is a bit of a finger-in-the-air exercise and with a remit that includes UK demographic trends, broad brush consumer trends, shopping behaviours, what we’re likely to be buying (food and non food) in 2020 and ethical consumers, it’s a VERY big ask.
Which is why I’d really like some help. Inspired by Neil crowdsourcing his online communities speech, I asked Traidcraft and they said that they’re happy for me to use this blog to ask if any of you might be able to help me out a little bit with this?
Have you recently stumbled across something interesting on t’interweb that relates to this? Got strong opinions on future shopping behaviors (especially mail order/online)? Are you a keen futurologist in your spare time?
I have to pull this all together in three weeks – if any of you can help out I promise to share the final presentation (minus any commercially sensitive bits) here on the blog and to fully credit anyone’s contribution, however small.
Thankyouverymuch in advance.
(my email is sevensteps at tiscali dotcodotuk)
5 comments 3 November, 2009
“We’re going to need considerably bigger buns”
A bit of fuss in the press today about London tube bosses asking for Kelly Brook’s best assets to be more substantially covered in posters for the play Calendar Girls. The producers must be thrilled as the character Kelly plays does have a little trouble adequately protecting her modesty with iced buns at the calendar photo shoot, promoting the classic line “we’re going to need considerably bigger buns”.
But it can’t have been quite enough of a story for the Daily Mail, as they seem to have decided that they can use photoshop too. Have a look and decide for yourself whether they’ve, erm, maximised Kelly’s assets for the sake of the story…
before and after the bun adjustment:
the Daily Mail’s version:
1 comment 2 November, 2009
Precision Shoppers (but possibly imprecise research)
Sitting in the hairdressers and flicking through Grazia magazine this weekend, I was surprised to read that they had commissioned an ‘exclusive survey’ into shopping habits.
In fact the article doesn’t actually reveal any kind of audience, sample size or methodology (my best guess is that they slapped a survey on the Grazia website), but the results are pretty interesting all the same.
Forget Recessionistas, for fashion forward females its now apparently all about Precision Shopping. It seems that the buy less, wear more mantra has finally caught on and 90% of these shoppers are put off by sales rails and go out of their way to avoid them. 62% want their shopping experience to be ‘calm and peaceful’ with helpful staff (not like braving Primark on a Saturday afternoon then) and 98% now won’t buy something without trying it on.
It seems that the quality over quantity message is really getting through – and in terms of the shopping experience itself as well as material goods. In fact 23% preferred an experience like a make up lesson or spa treatment to a new purchase as a pick me up.
Perhaps GIVe, with its ‘affordable luxury’ mantra, style advisors and focus on customer service might be onto something after all…
Add comment 1 November, 2009
AgencyLand – nearly broke and we need to fix it
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s becoming extremely difficult for a medium sized UK agency to actually make enough money to stay afloat. Factor in a desire to produce creative and effective work (and of course, the two things are connected) and it’s a seemingly impossible task. Why?
1) Work has massively shifted from contracts and fees to projects and tendered rosters. With every single project having to be competitively pitch/tendered for, the opportunity to charge the kind of management and creative fees that a business needs to develop and evolve (rather than merely survive) aren’t there. Price is now such a significant element of the tender appraisal process that you can’t afford to charge the sort of money you really need to keep moving onwards and upwards.
2) Many clients now seem to lack basic marketing skills and knowledge. I was a bit taken back the other week when I had to explain to one of my VIP clients what the difference between retailer press and trade press was. This seems to me to be down to a combination of spreading staff too thinly across sales and marketing functions and/or categories, putting staff with category but not specialism experience into senior roles and allowing senior staff without a marketing background to override strategic marketing recommendations whenever they see fit. Which brings me nicely to…
3) …the mantra Think Global, Act Local seems to have been replaced with Think Global And Query Everything Local, Then Act Global Anyway. See my rant about European Marketing Managers for more details.
4) Thanks to the current economic climate, in my experience every pitch seems to necessitate a pitch list of a dozen agencies and every tender has anywhere from 30 to 130 firms going after it. The economics of this just don’t add up – if the value of an average (outside London) marketing pitch is £250,000 and an agency could expect to make, say £50,000 in revenue off that, twelve agencies each spending £10,000 worth of time and resources to pitch doesn’t add up. Because the law of averages states that they’re only going to win one pitch in twelve, thus spending £120,000 to win £50,000 of revenue. I oversimplify. But you get the point.
So the agency model is, if not broken, then severely cracked.
Got any ideas about how to fix it?
1 comment 28 October, 2009
