Archive for April, 2008
There IS life outside the M25
Phil Hicks of Golley Slater Cardiff has written a lovely post on Scamp’s blog about what its like to work outside London. Although its written from a Creative’s perspective, I wholeheartedly agree with him.
On the downside, client budgets do tend to be five or six rather than seven figures and we do have some truly boring B2B clients that tend to have words like ‘solutions’ in their name.
And from a Planner’s point of view, there just aren’t that many jobs (and therefore Planners) around, making it potentially a bit lonely as well as blumin difficult to recruit and equally challenging when the time comes to move jobs.
But on the upside, in Summer if I leave work at 5.30 (not everyday, obviously) I can be cantering across the moors on my horse by 6.30 while I imagine the London guys are still at their desk or sweltering on the Tube.
better for the soul than going to the gym after work
The whole Quality of Life thing is a biggie. A lot of the creatives and account handlers I work with are ex-London. Most of them realised: job in London agency + buying a house/having a baby = incompatible. Houses are cheaper, childcare (i.e. grandparents) are nearer and we are twenty minutes away from proper rolling countryside for all that fresh air malarky.
Land generally is cheaper so the office boasts a lovely garden, complete with wi-fi for al fresco client meetings in Summer and I can park/abandon my car for free in the adjacent (slightly crowded) car park.
We do tend to attract challenger brands who can’t quite stretch their budgets to the big boys in London but are up for trying all kinds of integrated coolness – even if you don’t often manage to get any TV signed off.
Then there’s the FMCG boys who have their HQs in the North and might balk at taking the TV outside London but will quite happily let you loose on almost everything else. I’ve got a CV full of brands most Planners would kill for, its just that I’ve been working with them on foodservice, promotional marketing, press or digital.
So if Having A Life matters more to you than doing the whole London thing, venture outside the M25 and discover a whole new world.
heads up
Tickets for Interesting2008 went on sale this morning. Follow the link here.
Note to PR execs – my blog is not free advertorial and it would help if you actually bothered to read it
I’ve obviously arrived (in blogosphere terms) as emails have started turning up from PR agencies looking for coverage.
Today’s missive is a classic case of how-not-to-do-it:
• They left a comment on my ‘about’ page rather than sending me an email as per the helpful ‘contact me’ box on the right
• Their comment read ‘could you please send me a contact as we would like to put [major cool brand event this Summer] on your site’
• So I emailed back asking for a bit more information and the response was ‘I understand that you covered it last year?’
• Well, I mentioned the event in passing while pointing out that I thought it’s strategy was flawed, but that’s hardly the same thing…
God help a) the client who is paying for this bad t’interweb karma and b) any PR agency who doesn’t understand bloggers. Unlike tame journos, we bite back.
What would you bin first from 2.0?
Ben over at Noisy Decent Graphics has thrown out an all-users tag:
‘what social network web 2.0 type things would you drop first and why?’
I have to say that I’m with him on his number 1 – Twitter. I tried twittering, but its just not right for me. In fact I’ve already dumped it.
The problem is that the texts I normally receive are requests for information like ‘what time is the meeting?’ which need replying to fairly quickly. I just can’t ignore the constant beeping that an active life on Twitter generates as somewhere in and amongst will be a text that actually needs replying to. But I can’t read every text/twitter as it comes in because I’m supposed to be, you know, concentrating at work.
But I’m NOT giving up without a fight:
Bloglines – I’m addicted. I love the mix of work/fun/friends feeds I’ve got on it and its ease of use. I’m also increasingly ‘clipping’ interesting blog posts rather than printing them out and storing them in my toolbox.
Flickr – not only a really useful photo storage/sharing tool but brilliant for sourcing (creative commons licensed of course) imagery for presentations.
WordPress – not because I love its usability (in fact its just got worse with a redesign), but because blogging (or quite often ranting in my case…) has connected me with so many interesting people.
Facebook – no, not for those ‘become a knight of the round table’ applications. Lots of my Uni mates moved to London and this is a great way of keeping in touch with them between visits.
What about you?
You don’t just create communities
There’s an interesting interview with Woody Harrelson in today’ Sunday Times. In it he talks about choosing to live in an environmentally conscious community in Maui which he describes as “we all get together for Thanksgiving and look after each other’s kids. It’s a real community, like one I’ve never been a part of in my life”.
This got me thinking about everybrand’s attempts to create communities online. Particularly in a jumping-on-the-bandwagon kind of way. The thing is, you don’t just create communities. You create a place where similarly-minded people can come together. Its not ‘I am brand, come worship at my website’, its ‘you love our stuff? that’s great, come and talk to us about how we can be even better and maybe connect with some people who love us too’. I know this isn’t exactly new news, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of brands that still don’t get it.
one sign does not fit all
We’ve just moved the horses into a new barn and the health and safety notices went up this week:
I think this advice ’in the event of fire’ might be a tiny bit irrelevant:
Here it goes again: oh where did you nick that ad?
The latest culprits in the ongoing ‘nick the creative from youtube and hope no-one notices’ saga has got to be whoever at JWT did the latest Berocca ads.
The agency must have assumed that they were the only people in the world who had seen OK Go’s fab video for here it goes again. Just them and the 32 million views so far on youtube then.
Disclosure: I thought twice about posting this as one my clients is part of the Bayer group who own Berocca. Then I thought s*d it, lazy creative is still lazy creative. If the ad was better than the original you could give them a bit of wiggle room, but to my eyes its worse.
Center Parcs is not just a well marketed holiday destination, its a social experiment
A group of us from Uni try and get together every year for a weekend away catching up. This time, for reasons of geography and ease of organisation, we ended up at Center Parcs.
It’s a completely fascinating place and a bit of a Planner’s dream in terms of observation opportunities. The recipe for creating a Center Parcs seems to be:
1) Take all the rose-tinted best bits that parents will remember from family holidays as kids in the 1970s – self catering, pony rides, bicycles, swimming, boating on the lake, ice creams, feeding the ducks…and add in some adrenalin sports and reassuringly familiar branded dining opportunities.
2) Provide a wide price range of accommodation and some seriously marked up activities (thirty odd quid for a pony ride, anyone?) that allow the Range Rover drivers to push the boat out on extras and the supermini families to have a cheap break with lots of cycling and thrown-in-gratis swimming
3) Build an enormous greenhouse with a zonking great pool in and heat to 80 degrees so that everyone can pretend they’re actually on holiday at a massive hotel in the Med and indulge in the traditional sunshine activities of putting towels on sunbeds and drinking lager out of plastic cups
4) Don’t allow anything to be charged to the villas/lodges/chalets, but do track and allocate to a lodge everything spent on site in order to (I imagine) create a big-brother style CRM strategy that incorporates on-site spend into customer value models
5) Create a complex one way private road system complete with roundabouts, pedestrian crossings etc…and see it ignored by anyone on a bicycle as half of the bike riders are children and therefore not familiar with the Highway Code and the other half haven’t been on a bike in ten years and are too busy concentrating on not falling off
6) Put on a ‘disco spectacular’ type stage show that allows ample opportunities for Dad Dancing. Encourage other popular Dad Activities such as Lighting The Barbeque, Packing The Car and Reading The (Centre Parcs onsite) Map.
7) Engender a British Dunkirk Spirit type mentality among guests that results in barbequing in the snow and pedaloing in a monsoon. Ensure that the most frequently repeated word by guests is ‘lovely’.
Even though it snowed and hailed and rained, we really did have a lovely time. We even managed to track down the other twenty or so thirty-somethings there (two bunches of Hens and a Stag do) to the only bar at closing time. Honestly, if you ever want to observe the Great British Public in full pelt, get down to Center Parcs and get peddling.
this is *my* morning wake-up call
This is a (rather fuzzy camerafone) pic of Alexandra Palace – a familiar sight to regular users of the East Coast Mainline and a useful reminder that Kings Cross is less than ten minutes away.
Its also my personal pick-me-up when I’ve been up since five to catch the train from Leeds and have a packed day ahead of me chasing round London. Why? Well, as the sun rises and the mist from the lake below gently clears, the glass roof goes all sparkly and lovely.
I can’t find a decent illustrative shot on flickr (this one comes closest) and all my best efforts to capture it myself have failed, so you’ll have to trust me that its all it takes to bring a smile to my face and a spring to my step.
