Archive for January, 2010
not again…
Just found out I’ve got to have my appendix out asap, so I won’t be posting for a while. I’ve turned off comments in the meantime.
02/02/2010
Feeling brighter thanks, comments back on, more posts later this week, hopefully.
Its in the (hand)bag
Great piece in today’s Sunday Times about the Unmade Beds (women who, for example have hairdryers but rarely get around to using them, yet still can scrub up pretty well when required; see Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Stella McCartney) versus the Pristine Pillows (high maintenance with fake nails, hair, boobs etc, a la Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Danni Minogue).
In her article, Shane Watson suggests that the best way to differentiate between the two tribes is to look at their handbags. Unmade Beds are lugging round enormous, overloaded handbags, last cleared out in 2007, but ready to cater for any eventuality. Pristine Pillows tend to keep their bags small and tidy – Debenhams says that the weight of the average handbag has halved in the last two years from 7lb 11 (3.5kg) to 3lb 5 (1.5kg) thanks to minimalist multitasking technology like iphones.
I think I fall somewhere between the two camps – I eat carbs and chocolate and spend most of my weekends covered in mud at the stables, but I’m also a big fan of pedicures and use products like volumising root spray on my hair. But since my handbag weighs in at nearly 6lbs, I must be leaning towards being an Unmade Bed.
It’s occurred to me that if a handbag is such a window to a woman’s personality, why aren’t we exploiting them as a research tool? There are lots of ‘contents of my bag’ sets on flickr, but obviously only confident and technically savvy women are going to be sharing there.
If we can use fridges and even wardrobes (I spent some very interesting afternoons doing Wardrobe Walk Throughs in respondent’s bedrooms as part of a project for a mail order brand a few years ago) as insight, then why can’t we persuade women to open up the final frontier and invite us into their handbags?
Client quotes of the day
feedback on creative brief sent over for client approval:
“it shouldn’t say anything in Tone of Voice as the character won’t actually be speaking”
re: brand launch campaign:
us: “and of course digital will be very important”
client: “yes and I’d like a website too”
sigh…
The weather outside (was) frightful
I’ve perhaps been guilty of overdoing the ‘oh-my-god-its-still-snowing’ posts on the blog recently (the white stuff lasted 4 ½ weeks in the end) and I can’t imagine that anyone outside the snow-bound UK would have found them particularly interesting.
But what I have found invaluable as I’ve tried to make the decision in recent weeks whether to risk the journey into work has been traffic and weather updates (complete with photos) from my friends on twitter and facebook. It’s been like a (private) public service. Ice on the A65? Traffic jams in Horsforth? Someone will kindly let me know.
pic by the lovely @LisaWisniowski
Although the local radio stations were busy collating traffic and snow news, with listeners phoning in live reports, the bit of the online world focused on the UK didn’t seem to have found a way to crowd source on the ground information in this way.
In North America, their National Weather Service has just launched a Twitter-based program to monitor tweets about severe weather (tweets are tagged #wxreport), but we don’t seem to have a UK equivalent. Time to sort it out before the next cold snap?
Come fly with me, not my ad campaign
I’ve been ruining my carbon footprint by taking quite a few internal flights down to the South West for client meetings over the last six months. One morning, I was stood in the security queue at Stupid O’Clock with the rest of the account team (all in our 20s and 30s) when a uniformed Virgin Atlantic stewardess queued up behind us.
This was a bit unusual because Virgin don’t fly from my local airport. We ended up having a chat (the queue wasn’t exactly shifting fast) and discovered that she was flying down to Gatwick to pick up her working flight at lunchtime. We then got on to remedies for jet lag (some crew swear by Berocca, but there at times when only Red Bull will do, apparently), sleep deprivation and the pros and cons of the M1 vs flying down to London. She wished us a safe flight and a good meeting and was off.
That ten minute encounter did more to foster positive brand associations with Virgin Atlantic than every single piece of marcoms I’ve seen from them. If I was flying across the Atlantic, I’d want her to be looking after me. And, crucially, it wasn’t the sexy, groomed image that Virgin so carefully cultivates for its crew that won me over:
she was just a really warm, engaging girl. I’m not suggesting that the solution to the airline industry’s woes is to put stewardesses in every airport’s road warrior security queue, but maybe the Virgin Atlantic brand could use a little more real-life warmth and down to earth personality?
In other news, TLC actually IS all around
Shortly after Christmas, Martine McCutcheon started popping up in the ad breaks on behalf of Activia, a rather disappointing tasting yoghurt of weird consistency (I’ve tried it) that apparently aims to ‘reduce digestive discomfort’, thus stopping you feeling bloated.
Martine would like us all to make a fresh start to 2010 and give ourselves some Tummy Loving Care (see what they did there?).
The agency (Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R) must have been rather pleased that ITV2 decided to screen Love Actually on New Year’s Eve as judging by their wardrobe choices for the ad, they hired Martine’s character Natalie-off-of-the-film, rather than Martine:
film on the left, ad on the right
Having found a few ‘behind the scenes’ Activia videos on the web, it looks like we can expect more TLC advice from Martine/Natalie in the weeks to come…
Snow need to panic
If nothing else, this country is good at adversity. We know exactly what to do – PANIC!
Admittedly, its rather cold and snowy at the moment (snowfall on 20 out of the last 23 days round here and minus 10 last night). But we Brits really know how to make a drama out of a crisis.
Yesterday, my local Co-op (a largeish convenience store) sold out of bread and eggs, the government is rationing salt for gritting and thousands of schools are still shut. To illustrate the media’s approach to the whole subject, I give you:
(Via ITIABTWC . I had a rethink and put a more child friendly / suitable for work version up, but the origional is here)
But there are some rather sweet side effects to all this extreme weather; the local Chinese takeaway have built a chef style snowman outside their front door, BJL and Cheetham Bell JWT had a snowball fight and today at work there was a long row of wellies neatly lined up by the back door, waiting for the journey home.
As for work? Well most client meetings have been cancelled, the office is freezing and we don’t really feel like the Christmas break has ended properly so it’s not exactly Productivity Central, but we’re going to keep trying to get in every morning, through sheer bloody mindedness if nothing else.
MORE snow?
We’re not very good at dealing with snow in the UK. We just don’t normally get that much of it to make it worth seriously stockpiling grit, investing in snow chains or 4x4s or otherwise being prepared for inclement weather.
It’s snowed for 18 of the last 20 days here and we had another 4 inches of snow this morning. Since I own neither a 4×4 or a team of huskies and a sled, I’m snowed in (better than being snowed out like I was after the office xmas party…) and working remotely. So I chuckled when I read an all-users email that went round work today asking about good places to snowboard after work while a chum posted on facebook that he’d just watched his neighbour ski down the lane past his house.
With another week of the white stuff forecast (the Met Office are calling it an Extreme Weather Event), I don’t think I’m going to be seeing much of the office in the next few days. Which means I’m going to miss out on more fun like the agency snowball fight this lunchtime:
(thanks for the pic Craig)
Harder, better, faster, stronger
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is my predication for what AgencyLife is going to be like – no, HAS to be like – if the industry is to adapt to the realities of life in 2010.
Harder
After 2009’s redundancies and cost cutting, there will be less people around to do more work as clients start to spend again, but agencies seem to be reluctant to staff up to meet that demand. Recruitment contacts tell me that the majority of vacancies are only coming up when agencies gain a big new client and don’t have the account handling slack to accommodate them. Worryingly, this doesn’t seem to be being reflected in creative recruitment or freelancing, so it could be a particularly busy 2010 for overstretched creative departments.
Better
Being brutal, anyone who was treading water in an agency, non-essential to operations or just not that good has probably been made redundant by now. Lots of good, talented, experienced, decent people went too, but inevitably, those that remain and haven’t been tempted away by clientside salaries or voluntary redundancy packages are going to be pretty blumin good at and dedicated to their jobs. Add to that a tiny dash of New Year’s Optimism and clients being a little more open to trying new things to make their depleted budgets work harder and you have a great environment in which to produce some terrific work.
Faster
The more connected we are, the faster we communicate. As technology continues to make sharing information easier and cheaper, client expectations of how fast agencies should respond to pitches, tenders, campaigns and meeting requests seems to increase accordingly. The idea that you can have it ‘fast, good or cheap – choose two’, doesn’t seem to have been embraced clientside. And of course in the current economic climate, ‘fast, good and expensive’ isn’t going to go down very well either…
Stronger
But in these challenging conditions, the really good agencies and really good people will shine out. If agencies can adapt to the changing economy, technology and environment while still turning out great, creative, effective work, then they truly deserve to rise to the top of the pile. It’s going to be survival of the fittest – and of the fastest to adapt.
