Archive for March, 2010
Good week for M&S as they keep it real
It’s been a good week for M&S. Their new telly ad seems to have gone down well, with loads of positive online buzz and the track featured (Got to Be Real by Cheryl Lynn) is inching its way up the itunes chart:
The casting of the latest batch of M&S Girls seems pretty spot on too. Twiggy obviously stays on as National Treasure, then we have Dannii Minogue cast as Mum to Be, Lisa Snowdon as the Girl Next Door, Ana Beatriz Barros as Girl in Underwear and V V Brown covers off the ‘we’re really quite cool, honest’ factor.
On top of this, M&S have done a deal with Kellogg’s that will see not only Special K on shelf in the M&S food hall, but a Special K Red Dress (as seen on t’telly) on sale in store. 
I love M&S for t-shirt type basics, but I do tend to shy away from their more stylish, stand out pieces (like the jacket on the right as modelled by Lisa Snowdon) because I know that I’m buying the same top as thousands of other women. I might as well leave the M&S tag hanging off it. How about putting some really limited edition stylish pieces in the Limited Collection?
Does schooling interfere with education?
I’ve been feeling rather under-done on the formal education front recently, with my BA being trumped by friend’s, colleague’s and client’s MAs, MBAs, MScs and even PhDs.
But then I remember how my insistence that there was more than one right answer, tendency to put random magazine articles in my bibliographies and to ask ‘why’ rather a lot didn’t go down too well with academia and I think that perhaps I’d be better sticking with self development.
Via Only Dead Fish comes this great video from college drop out Dan Brown, who quit the University of Nebraska because as he put it, “my schooling was interfering with my education”:
His point is that traditionally, the majority of education was based on being told facts, memorising them and regurgitating them come examination time. Because knowledge used to mean power. Students migrated to where lecturers could be found at universities because they wanted to learn the facts that the lecturers knew.
Except that now, thanks to the internet, facts are free. Education should be more about teaching students how to access information – and more importantly, empowering them to analyse and use information creatively to make things better.
Sadly, the traditional model of ‘sit in a lecture hall with 200 other students and scribble facts down’ still abounds at UK universities – and if the proposed cuts in university funding happen, this can only get worse.
I actually did strike lucky with my degree (Business Studies at Hull Uni) – while 50% of it was lecture hall scribbling and treasure-hunt-in-the-library essays (heaven help you if someone else got the last copy of the vital textbook checked out before you got there), the rest seemed geared up to preparing us for the Real World. We worked on projects in groups, presented back with PowerPoint, did a pitch instead of a dissertation and I still use some of the analysis tools they taught me today.
Hull also had a very cool programme where in the 2nd and 3rd years you could chose one module a semester from anywhere on campus, so long as the timetable worked out. I mainly went for psychology and strategy – in hindsight it was Teach Yourself Planning.
This would go down very well with Steve Jobs, who in his commencement speech to the Stamford class of 2005 (thanks to IFIABTWC) talks about how the best thing HE ever did was drop of out college:
Steve “stopped taking the classes that didn’t interest me and began dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting”. As he puts it, “most of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on”. Thanks to Steve’s attendance at calligraphy class, the Mac was the first computer with beautiful typography.
So what I guess I’m trying to say is that education beyond the 3 Rs should be less about fact recall and box ticking and more about learning how to seek out interestingness and do something with it.
Awesome Outdoor
There’s some lovely take-a-second-glance outdoor work around at the moment.
Orange – the current campaign is no big departure for them, but this particular execution really made me smile:
ITV’s Married Single Other – I really like how each character’s situation is played out visually (apologies for the lousy picture quality, was taken from a train):
Smart Brabus – I haven’t come across any of their innovative ‘squeeze into smaller spaces’ billboards seen below, but the bog standard 48s are great, demonstrating how each car can be unique by having lots of differently styled and coloured reflections hidden in the image:
and finally Sky Supertelly – because it’s just visually gorgeous (I’m not guaranteeing this is the actual 48 sheet, but it’s the nearest I could find to it online):
How *not* to do social media
It seems that Nestle haven’t quite got the hang of this Social Media malarkey. Their facebook fan page has been hit by a lot of people not happy about Nestle’s use of palm oil and the link to rainforest destruction.
But Nestle’s problems really started when the Nestle facebook moderator responded to facebookers who had changed their profile pics to altered version of Nestle logos (‘KitKat’ becoming ‘killer for example):
A quick google search throws up 200 neagative news stories since Nestle wrote the first comment above. The moral of this story is – in social media brands don’t set the rules, users do. And you’d better be blumin sure that your moderators are on-brand, in-tune and on-message.
(via AdAge)
Pure imagination?
I’m no typographer, but I am a chocoholic and therefore noticed that the font on Cadbury’s Dairy Milk packaging changed late last year from this:
to this:
Does it remind anyone else of this:
not so perfect pitch
screengrab from the infamous agency.com Subway pitch video
I’m prepping a pitch at the moment. So I was interested to read Merry Baskin’s piece in March’s Admap about the pitch process.
Merry’s Ten Top Tips for Agencies includes ‘Rehearse. Three times- once for content and storyline, twice in front of an audience and thrice, the dress rehearsal.’ Three times? The reality of agency pitching as I’ve experienced it (in several agencies) is less about Merry’s multiple rehearsals or Jon ‘Perfect Pitch
Pitch-date-minus-21-days: Pitch brief arrives. Ignored by everyone for 3 days in order to firefight latest client crisis.
-17 days: Designated Account Director requests Dream Team for pitch. DayDream Team and half the creative resource actually required assigned.
-16: Team kick off meeting called. But takes a week to find gap in everyone’s diary.
-15: Read 148 page powerpoint briefing document and accompanying three research debriefs. Not clear which research methodology used or when it took place so of limited use, but will have to refer to in pitch or will loose points.
-13: No budget for fresh research, so recruit next door neighbour’s hairdresser and the receptionist’s dog for depth interviews.
-8: Pitch team kick off meeting actually happens. Result of meeting – everyone needs to do some work before we can have another meeting.
-6: Creative brief written. Due to multiple audiences and channel outputs required by pitch, brief is four pages long. Major editing required.
-5: Brief Creative. They ‘challenge’ the client’s brief. Remind them of the difference between wining a pitch and actually producing effective work.
-4: Start writing presentation/leave behind. Writer’s block.
-4: Creative First Thoughts. Some ideas total genius and some less so. The bad ones are going to take a lot of getting rid of.
-3: Creative Second Thoughts. They bring their CD in for Extra Fire Power. Agree compromise. Consider alternative career in United Nations, Hostage Negotiation etc.
-3: Show first draft of presentation to agency VIP. He has had a better idea, but not thought to mention it until now. Rewrite presentation, incorporating VIP’s ideas and post-rationalising change in creative direction.
-3: Check someone has booked a visualiser. The fast-and-good guy is booked on another job. We have the good-but-slower guy.
-2: Double check someone has booked trains/planes/hotels etc. Point out that perhaps we won’t be at our best having got up at 4.30am to catch the train.
-1: Should be rehearsing now, but visualiser is still wielding his felt tips, have run out of spray mount and agency VIP would like to make a ‘few tweaks’ to the powerpoint.
-1 (late): Sending out for pizza.
-1 (even later): Hunting for an A2 artwork bag. Might have more luck hunting for Loch Ness Monster.
Pitch Day! : Got boards, laptop with presentation, projector and pitch team all together and heading out the door. We can always rehearse on the train, right?
Did you plan to be a Planner?
In the days before everything got blogtastic and before SupNorth, Interesting, APSotW and the Miami Ad School Planning Bootcamp, I don’t think Planning was the kind of career that you, ahem, planned to enter. Every Planner I know over the age of 28ish seems to have somehow fallen into it as a career by accident.
I left Uni convinced I wanted to work in PR, then nine months into my first PR job I got rescued from typing-contact-reports-and-cold-calling-regional-journos-hell when the agency’s board level Planner suggested that I might like to work with him instead. He took me on my first client away-day a week later and I did some very speedy learning on the job, with a few MRS courses thrown in for good measure. Ten years later, I’m still at it.
I’m curious – how did everyone else end up as a Planner?
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
I’ve been thinking a lot about how agencies are organised and subsequently reorganised recently and about how their systems work (or in some cases, don’t).
Looking back at the agencies I’ve worked for, I’ve seen a LOT of different approaches to the organising and running of an Integrated Northern Marketing Agency and none of them were perfect. The one thing all of these agencies did have in common was that they changed their minds about the Right Way To Do It fairly frequently.
From the point of view of someone who has never been privy to agency board meetings, management accounts and the like, it has been very easy to view yet another reshuffle and/or rebranding as about as likely to be effective as rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. In fact, given that both my previous employers went bust after I left them, perhaps that was closer to the truth than I realised at the time…
But organisations can’t stay still, they must move forward – or else slip backwards. One of the pioneers of modern Social Psychology Kurt Lewin had a three stage theory of change – Unfreeze, Change, (Re)Freeze. In simple terms, this was all about getting an organisation prepared for change and wanting to make the change, leaping into the Great Unknown, then establishing stability once the change had been made.
But this rather implies that Change is a starting-and-stopping kind of thing. Whereas these days Change can be more like a constant state of flux. Clients change their ways of working (shifts from pitches to tenders and fees to projects for example); technology advances; the economy tanks. The environment has changed and so the organisation must change to accommodate (and ideally anticipate) it.
So agencies tend to operate in a near-constant state of Flux. In the last ten years, I’ve only worked for three agencies, but have got through fourteen desks, six brands, nine reorganisations and ten rounds of redundancies.
Perhaps the agency model is going to have to become something more fluid and more adaptive to constant change. Desks, organisation structures, salaried jobs and prescriptive agency brandings don’t really fit with the demands of constant flux. There has to be a better way. Perhaps we need to look at organisational structures that embrace change itself?
Choices, choices
by garlandcannon on flickr, CC applies
This job, this career, this industry – it’s all about making choices:
- choose to stay where you are and see what happens, or go for an interview when the recruiter phones
- choose to live in the sticks, with fresh air, affordable accommodation and family nearby or upsticks to London for better career prospects
- choose to be true to yourself or to toe the agency line
- choose keeping your head down or the open warfare of office politics
- choose ambition – but for success or balance (you probably can’t have both)
- choose recommending the right solution or the one that makes the agency most money
- chose staying late to been seen to do so or staying late when it matters
- choose to jump on every bandwagon or to beware the Emperor’s New Clothes
Choose living life to the full. You chose this career. But don’t let it make your choices for you.
