(almost) always thinking

I won’t be able to get near a computer for the next couple of weeks, so please bear with me.  I’ve switched off comments in the meantime. 

Thanks for reading so far, I promise to get posting again soon.

PS I’ve just registered almostalwaysthinking.com, so you might need to redirect your RSS reader to this address, cheers.

• World of Warcraft is roughly the same size as the Death Star
• There are 28 billion UK coins in circulation, worth £3 ½ billion
• Boring audiobooks don’t help you get to sleep. They have to be a bit thrilling – although its OK if the writing is terrible
• ‘dongle’ and ‘waggle’ are funny words
• Rhopography is the study of the overlooked and everyday
• Hiraeth is a Welsh word that sort of means the sense of knowing you’re always in a place

and

• horses are scared of rustling crisp packets because an unevolved part of their brain tells them that the rustling sounds like a lion about to attack them

Speaking at Interesting has to rank in my Top Ten Scariest Moments, but I’m really glad I did it.

My pics from Interesting are here and the Interesting2008 flickr pool is here

So I’m off to London for Interesting 2008 tomorrow, held again at the lovely Conway Hall.  If you’re going too, please come over and say Hello.

I’m really looking forward to it – last year’s Interesting was brilliant and yes, very very Interesting too.  I’m also slightly nervous as I’m taking one of the mini speaker slots to talk abut why horses are scared of crisp packets.

To give you a little preview, I popped the general gist of my talk into the lovely wordle and it came up with this:

A big Hello to the 75% of traffic to the blog this week that apparently found its way here via an image search for Zara Phillips…

I’ve been charging up and down the M1 a lot recently and have therefore been sampling the delights of Moto’s service station network.

They’re in the process of rebranding their cafeteria offering to EDC – The Eat and Drink Co.

Looks great, huh?  Well, it looks great in isolation and probably looked fab presented on boards in the design agency’s meeting room too.

On the other hand, in situ it looks dated, down market and tired.  Actually the cropped pic above from flickr  (and by Mr Flickr himself apparently) is very kind to it.  All the values that service stations are trying to move away from seem to be covered off by this design.  Its more 4 hour old fried eggs and soggy sarnies than fresh muffins and ciabatta.

So our lesson for today is – get your design in situ and let it breathe for a bit, as you can’t design in a vacuum.

It was my birthday party yesterday.  In one of those weird party moments, all the guys ended up in the garden playing ultra-competitive croquet according to the rules of golf.

I think I loved this birthday card the most:

 My Dad is 72 and shall always be referred to on this blog simply as ‘Dad’ because he’s rather proud that if you google his name you get absolutely no results back.

 
The thing is, I’m slowly but surely turning into him.  The evidence so far:

•  Penning regular column in trade magazine (pubs for me, menswear for him), in spookily similar writing style – check.
• Driving the same brand of car that he’s bought since I was a baby – check.
• Use of phrases like “its got disaster written all over it” and “one trick too many” – check.

 
I suppose it’s all a reflection of how much he’s influenced me.  He’d have been a brilliant Planner, which is rather handy when Proposition Brickwalls strike and I need someone to bounce ideas off. There are a couple of brands around with positioning lines that owe rather more to his brilliance than mine.  I think he sees it as an extension of his Dad Duties, alongside sartorial advice, car maintenance, financial planning and nagging about healthy eating.

Happy Father’s Day Dad, I wouldn’t be Me, without You.

16 groups, in viewing, across two locations, with 12 clients and 300 pieces of stimulus all in ONE DAY.

This week I’ve been roped into helping out a little bit more with the development of the new 14-19 Diploma in Creative & Media.

I was doing a ‘What do Planners and Researchers Do?’ vox pop as part of their new fangled t’interweb online study resource thingy and I hit a bit of a brick wall when I was asked what was the best way to get into a career in Planning.

To be honest, if you’re 14 and hell-bent on being a Planner, it should automatically disqualify you from the job.  Whether new Planners arrive via an agency graduate scheme, Miami Ad School, a move across from Research or just sort of fall into it, they should have already had a bit of an Interesting life. 

I’m not talking about only considering potential planners who are over 30, just that they should have done something (anything!) apart from education with their life first.  A desire to enter Planning founded in your teens is hardly going to encourage the kind of life experiences that make you more insightful Planner.  Its also not going to result in the lightbulb moment in your mid 20s when you realise that there’s this career out there that suits your skill set, the way your brain works AND could be a lot of fun.

Any aspiring Planners out there – go write a book, start a movement, launch a business or dip your toe in an entirely different career.  You’ll either realise that there’s thousands of other cool jobs out there (and considering how few entry-level Planning jobs there are, that can only be A Good Thing), or come back a better Planner-to-be.

photo by Russell ‘Interesting’ Davies, creative commons applies

One of Yorkshire’s oldest agencies Poulters is apparently being closed by parent company Bezier.

Although it looks like a handful of staff might reappear in Bezier’s new retail offering Coutts, for the majority there must be some very long faces in their Rose Wharf offices today.

My current (enormous by regional standards) agency started life as a Poulters breakaway in the 80s and Poulters also spawned several other start-ups.  In fact nearly everyone in the comms industry in Yorkshire has worked there at one point or another.

Like any agency, Poulters (and it’s previous incarnations spanning nearly 40 years of Poulter Group, Poulter Partners and Graham Poulter Advertising) wasn’t perfect.  But I learnt an awful lot there and had a lot of fun too. 

cropped version of a pic by ex-Poulters Jim Moran on flickr