Helping brands communicate better
Work/life balance is very important to me – I'm a part-timer for various reasons, but I also definitely do better strategic work when I’m more rested, less stressed and generally feeling in control of my life. Almost anyone who has worked in a decent sized agency will have experienced emails on Sundays, late nights at … Continue reading We have to get better at work/life balance – and pitches aren’t helping
Sampling has come up a lot in my professional life recently, with grocery brands seemingly increasing both their spend and their creative focus in this area. With the Groceries Code Adjudicator keeping a careful eye on retailers who might be milking their supplier brand’s marketing budgets for their own purposes, the days of the big … Continue reading Sampling is on the up – but there’s more to the Path to Purchase than that
Professionally speaking, 2018 was not the best year and it left me of the opinion that agency employment is no more secure than freelancing. So I'm back as a hand for hire and quite a bit has changed during the two and a bit years I was Head of Whatever-we're-calling-it-this-week. The most noticeable is the … Continue reading for agencies, small is increasingly beautiful (and friendly)
A little while ago I was invited to the launch event of boutique research agency Qual Street's 'Year in the life' project. This was a year-long proactive piece of qualitative work where they spent lots of time with nine mums across London and Yorkshire who identified themselves as just about managing financially (JAM). With the … Continue reading the benefits of slow research
I was talking to a senior researcher who works for a research agency recently about how long research projects take from brief to debrief and how that doesn't sit well with marketing agencies and clients increasingly working in agile, or at least agile-ish. When the project is in a constant state of flux, timelines are tight … Continue reading Why agency projects need Agile research – and why that’s really hard to achieve
My last post Where have all the Planners gone? about the lack of trained Junior and Midweight Planners round here (due to the lack of available training and opportunities for them) resonated with a few people Up North, particularly former Planner Chris McCash, now of Breadwinner. He offered to host a Planning get-together in Leeds to … Continue reading Training the future
Up here in Yorkshire, there's loads of roles going at Senior / Midweight Planner level, but no-one to fill them. I've had many conversations recently with recruiters and agencies about this, but the reason is obvious really - no-one trained them. With the exception of Sarah at Home and Joey at CreativeRace / Intermarketing, as … Continue reading Where have all the Planners gone?
I've blogged before about how marketing agencies are very light on diversity, particularly in senior positions. I've also blogged about why agencies should be embracing #PowerPartTimers. But the two rants are connected. An agency-standard 50 hour week plus nightmare commute simply isn't do-able for many Mums, for the carers of elderly parents or for the … Continue reading Want better diversity? Embrace the Power Part-Timers
When meeting prospective Planners, I always try to find out if their brains are wired the right way to be a great Planner - are they interested in what makes people tick, problem solving, investigation and communication? Do they appreciate the link between brand comms and the bottom line? And perhaps most importantly, have they … Continue reading for Planners, gut instinct matters however experienced you are
In the age of Prince2, Basecamp, Slack, Trello and so on, the client facing role in agencies is increasingly merging with that of Project Manager. Clients are emailed, not called. Work is briefed, reviewed and presented back with minimal (actual) face time. Now this might be very handy if you're in Leeds and your biggest … Continue reading creative marketing communications is not a commodity to be project managed