Archive for January, 2009
Get your teeth into Being Human
Last night I stumbled across the first episode of Being Human on BBC3 and I’m hooked. It’s a quirky, dark, comic tale about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost living together in a house in Bristol. If you liked Torchwood, Shallow Grave or This Life, it should be right up your street.
If you’re in the UK you can catch up with the first episode on BBCiplayer here and the content rich microsite is here.
PS What is it with vampires at the moment? What with the latest Underworld pre/sequel, Twilight, ITV’s Demons and the forthcoming Lesbian Vampire Killers, you can’t move for the undead. At this rate, they’ll have to bring back Buffy…
The naming of things is a difficult matter
I’ve been pondering recently – why do we have ‘shorthand’ names for some places and people but not for others?
At work, for example we have The Coffee Man, Sandwich Man (or occasionally Sandwich Lady), Sewing Lady and CityLink Man. Then there’s The Book People, who have cut out the middle man and handily named their business with the appropriate shortcut.
Everyone at work knows where The Octagon and The Chapel are, but we can’t come up with a better name for where Production sit than ‘at the bottom of the stairs near the back door’. I also don’t recall anyone coming up with a handy moniker for the man who delivers lunches for meetings or the cleaning company’s team leader.
At the stables, there’s The Back Lady (the equine physiotherapist, just back from tending the British mounts at the Olympics) and The Feed Man (the lorry driver from the feed merchants), plus Top Land, Bottom Land and Third Field, but the blacksmith is not called The Shoeing Man, nor the instructor The Teaching Lady.
Which reminds me of how the announcement of the arrival of The Sandwich Man can be a good guide to the culture of a business. At my last agency, the reception staff were ex-cabin crew, resulting in daily tannoys that ran (complete with authentic bing bong noise), “would all staff please be advised that sandwiches are now available in the café area”. At my current place, we get an all users email that simply reads ‘the sandwich man is here’. :-)
Happiness is hummable
I love cheesy musicals. Any form of entertainment where people spontaneously burst into cheerful song for no particular reason is just my kind of thing.
I’m not alone – the Society of London Theatre recently announced that box office receipts in 2008 were up 3% year on year, with attendance also up at 13.8M, much of this attributed to such cheerful shows as Hairspray and High School Musical.
On the celluloid front, Mama Mia is now the fastest selling DVD of all time in the UK, selling 10 copies a second on its release day. It’s also the highest grossing film ever at the UK box office.
Apparently musical rhythms make the brain’s reward systems kick in to decrease pain and produce pleasurable responses via nature’s own version of morphine. In short, music makes you happy. Add energetic dancing and a bit of sparkle and you get the kind of feel good factor that should come free on the NHS.
Not only that, but in every musical there are lessons to be learnt – Mary Poppins is a tale for our times, with a banker father suspicious of a money-making scheme that sounds good to be true; according to the HSM equal opportunities gang “we’re all different in a good way” and it nearly always ends happily ever after.
Although I doubt that box office receipts will remain as buoyant in the next 12 months, the Musical Movement its still something to watch out for. Singalonga escapism, anyone?
Straight from the (horse editor’s) mouth
On my newish extra ‘day off’, among other things I’ve recently been working on a submission for a horsey magazine. I have to report that (based on this experience), magazine editors are much better than the average client at understanding and communicating their brand effectively.
This particular editor managed to condense her brand and its values into six words. I’m sure she has brand onions, pyramids and/or personalities knocking around her office somewhere too, but it’s a nice change from most clients I come across who cop out and send you a 10MB powerpoint presentation instead…
Spotify: everyone loves free, legal music
Thanks to a shout out from James via facebook, I’ve been playing with Spotify and I’m hooked. Its like lastfm crossed with itunes, but with a superior selection of cheesy musical soundtracks : -)
Sadly I can’t download it to the work laptop (draconian IT policies), but I’m loving it on my home PC. Even better, it’s FREE, legal and all you have to do in return is listen to or view an ad (mostly public service announcements about direct.gov) every 20 mins or so.
What’s more, there’s no buffering and the interface is easy to get the hang of. I suppose in a perfect world you’d be able to access your Spotify account from any online computer, but maybe that’s asking a bit much…
Interested? It’s still in beta but you can sign up for an invite here or stump up for a premium, ad-free subscription at £10/month. Which, considering how much I spend on itunes, is quite reasonable.
Don’t panic, Mr Marketing
I am loving these posters-for-our-times from the team at LOVE.
Good advice for the Planning community:
And also for Creative types:
Open plan vs. open to distractions
archive image from Life magazine, hosted by google
Sam Leith in today’s Guardian has written about her experiences working in an open plan office – in essence, an ethnographic study of territorial anxiety and opportunities to acquire cake and gossip.
Sitting in our very open plan, very noisy office, trying to avoid the siren call of the chocolate chip cookies two desks down, it reminded me of everything I’ve written before about Creative Spaces. Working where you work best (and the acknowledgement that people rarely produce their best work surrounded by strip lighting and a constantly ringing phone) is all very well in theory – but what about the economic reality of cost-per-square foot of office space and the expense involved in creating break out rooms, comfy corners and giving everyone a desk-with-a-view?
In fact, google research revealed that (doh!) information flowed fastest in an office environment among people who were closely packed together.
But can we really be productive in such a busy, distracting environment? I certainly get more ‘done’ when I work from home – but then of course all that Information isn’t Flowing via me if I’m not there. On the other hand, this post and accompanying comments on mommy blogger site TheMomSpeak suggests that the average full-time homeworker isn’t exactly Productivity Central either.
Thanks to Amelia for pointing out johnnyvulkan’s coining of ‘Lurking’ – getting distracted maintaining twitter, facebook, flickr etc while at work (wherever that might be). Of course he added that as a ‘media professional’ it was all just research : -)
In the Archie Norman era, Asda apparently encouraged head office staff to wear special baseball caps when they were thinking so they wouldn’t be disturbed (reasons not to work at Asda HQ #87) and white ipod headphones have taken on a second life in OfficeLand as a ‘please don’t bother me’ sign, but its still an imperfect system.
Perhaps we’ll just have to grin and bear all the distractions – and head for the sanctity of home when it gets too much, assuming we can avoid the temptations of the TV…
Community Noticeboard
- PSFK are running a Good Ideas Salon in London on January 30th with limited numbers and a sensible ticket price. Details here.
- Russell Davies has shared highlights of a presentation he recently did for The Guardian. Part One deals with Digital moving from Screens to Objects and Part Two is about books and paper becoming interesting again because we are now empowered to create our own.
- There are a few places left on the APG ‘Account Planning Foundation and Conversion Course’ on 19th and 20th January. A highly recommended basic grounding in the theory, tools and skills that Planners require.
Spring Cleaning in Social Media
I’ve been reading lots of Social Media Predictions for 2009 (including Peter Kim’s excellent piece) and one of the trends that stood out for me was Cleansing.
I suppose it’s the digital equivalent of Spring Cleaning and a good ‘new year, new me’, kind of activity. This week I’ve found myself cleaning out my RSS feed and ‘defriending’ on facebook so my friends list is entirely composed of my actual, real-life friends and not people I last saw when we sat our GCSEs in 1993.
There’s also been a lot written about how there’s going to be a need for services that ‘sanitise’ your social media profile. One report made the very good point that the politicians of 2030 are currently at uni, posting drunken pictures of themselves on facebook. Heaven help anyone who suddenly finds fame in the next few years, only to have their facebook/ blog/ flickr/ twitter feeds mercilessly scoured for any hint of scandal.
I don’t think the majority of social media users have totally woken up to the fact that whatever they upload to the internet will be there forever.
Provenance vs. Value
In November 07 I blogged that I thought the foodservice sector were really starting to wake up to the importance of provenance.
In the grim economic reality of January 2009 I wonder whether retailers, manufacturers and everyone else in the food supply chain are going to be quite so bothered? Of course a lot of it is down to the consumer – when times are tight will choosing a ‘happy chicken’ to roast or having an organic veg box delivered become a luxury that many can no longer justify?
I’m guessing that Value is going to overtake Provenance in the importance stakes, in fact the recent rash of discountitis at all the major mults would indicate that it already has. TNS reported in December that sales of free range chicken are down but so are sales of ready meals at Asda, who recon we are entering “a new decade of frugality”.
Value doesn’t necessarily mean ‘cheap’, it can just as easily mean ‘quality at the right price’. Perhaps we won’t see that dramatic a drop in provenance influenced purchasing, but will see a rise in interest in thrifty ways of using up decent quality food?
