The Star of the East
There was a pub in Shoreditch…
Payback time
I really owe those British Mummy Bloggers. They have welcomed me into their arms like their own kin and what have I given them in return? Nothing.
Which is why I worry for the future of social media. So much of it, particularly Twitter, relies on a friend mutual respect and co-operation. I don’t care if the media owners lose their revenue streams, if they ever had any. But I do care about the mutual respect and co-operation. My great white hope of social media that repairs the cracks in our society is running thin.
So, for what it’s worth on a blog that no-one reads; “Thank you British Mummy bloggers, you’re the best”. Perhaps women will finally get the chance to fix us.
I want my mummy!
I’ve just applied to join the British Mommy Bloggers and I now realise that not only am I not a mommy [actually that doesn't matter] but I have studiously avoided mentioning my children in posts since about the previous millenium. Hopefully they will see how the inner turmoil caused by this omission is torturing me and embrace my commitment to holistic blogging lifestyles.
Or perhaps they’ll just dismiss me as a pretentious and pointless waste of air. I am in your hands.
fragment
The little battered leather notebook that I bought in Paris once, allows me to work out my thoughts on paper first, and look spontaneous online.
ATL agencies need to look at the origin of their descriptor. As media fragments small slices of big TV pie become crumbs. To make money from digital you need to catch the crumbs and make pie.
Ghost Riders
Some of us remember Amsterdam’s White Bicycle Plan of the 1960’s. So when white bicycles, covered in flowers, and this time chained up quite permanently, started to appear on the streets of London, my first thought was that ever nostalgic new young artists were getting up to a bit of public self promotion.
And I wasn’t completely wrong. The Ghost Bikes did indeed start out as an artist’s project in San Francisco but were quickly adopted by bike awareness groups to act as memorials to killed cyclists and warnings to motorists.
The Dutch anarchist group The Provos who were responsible for the first White Bicycle Plan had several other ‘White Plans’ including the White Victim Plan which proposed that “anyone having caused death while driving would have to build a warning memorial – memento mori – on the site of the traffic collision by carving the victim’s outline one inch deep into the pavement and filling it with white mortar.” I am sure the Californian Artist behind the renaisaance of white bicycles would have been aware of this.
So I was moved last week to see a man from Hackney Council, armed only with a bucket of quick drying line marking paint and a yellow jacket, painting white bicycles in the middle of the road near the bike mecca of London Fields. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t using a stencil; each bicycle is a unique freehand image [some are better than others]. He moved down Broadway Market through the day and I counted at least 49 fresh white bicycles on the short ride between Goldsmiths Row and London Fields Station.
So were the Council paying their respects to lost pedallers in an area once infamous for anarchist squats? Or was it a case of some more DIY bike lanes?
The good news is that East London isn’t as dangerous as some parts of London. Check out this lovingly created Googlemap mashup.
Get out of my shed
So, it’s Monday night, the madfashionbitch is in Norfolk and I’m just back from the Al Amin in Cambridge Heath Road, the curry house I’ve been patronising for over 20 years. It’s bloke time. So I tune cable TV to Dave; it’s endless repeats of QI tonight. Bliss.
But, when the ad break comes on, first up “Tena Lady” [very funny, but clearly not aimed at me], followed by some kind of shampoo [sorry I wasn't paying atention, can't remember which] which is conclusive proof that WOMEN HAVE BEEN ALLOWED INTO THE CLUBHOUSE.
Dave was supposed to be just for men, along with real ale and prog rock, but hey, it’s been so successful it’s expanded way beyond it’s target audience. I work in advertising or marketing, which relies on the continuation ad-funded content to survive, so I should be happy, shouldn’t I?
Content, I like content, but Dave don’t make much of that [John Cleese testing electric cars doesn't count].
Bear with me, I’m getting there.
Dave gets all the ad revenue, without making any new programmes. So we just end up watching repeats in ever decreasing circles [spot the cultural reference].
So there’s something to spend your digital marketing budgets on. Make some programmes. It doesn’tcost as much as you’d think.
But keep out of my shed with your banners and pop up email bulletins.
Thank you, and good night.
Fat Tuesday
Yes we’re all fed up. The extreme excitement of snow and ice [and days off] has passed, leaving us with grey skies and soggy feet. Even the people with jobs are up against the wall as their employers squeeze every last drop of work out of them rather than hire in any new talent. The big networks are waiting for financial new year’s day but are they sure it will ever dawn?
Of course there’s nothing new. When we lived in a subsistance agricultural society we’d have gobbled all our food at Christmas, or whatever pagan festival it was called, before it went bad and we’d be fighting over mouldy root vegetables.
It’s no accident that the Catholic church thought that this might be a good time to promote a bit of God fearing self denial. Why not take your pain and dedicate it to world peace or something? Give up Facebook for Lent, go on try it. The word Lent comes from the German root of long. The days get longer, or do they just seem longer without tangfastics and tizer?
Meanwhile Governments are vainly trying to feed the floundering beasts of the Banking and Automotive industries in the hope that seeing fatted cows walk through the streets will cheer us up and convince us to spend our way out of recession.
Why don’t we just invent a new religion, throw a party, kill the fatted cows and serve them in a crepe smothered with cream.
Happy Pancake day.
ps. as soon as I get over the Gastric Flu I’ll be back on the beer and pies and feeling begninly philosopical about life, work and online advertising.
How to hire creative thinkers and grow your empire
1. pick someone just like yourself
2. pick some completely different to yourself
1. is good, I like myself, so I’m going to like them, aren’t I? I’m pretty good at my job, so they’ll be great too. We’ll share values, we’ll both like the same kind of music, we’ll understand each other. We’ll agree with each other [they'll agree with me].
But won’t that be a bit boring? What if I get bored of all my music, where I get new tunes? What if their crazy shirt collection gets crazier than mine? What if I have a problem I can’t crack. My clone’s not going to have much more luck. What if there’s something I’m not very good at [god forbid] or I don’t like doing? So you go for someone who compliments you. No. they don’t say nice stuff, they form a yin to your yang or whatever. They tell you where you’re going wrong. You don’t have to listen.
In reality it’s mixture of both. I look for people with craft skills, attention to detail, graft skills, evidence of hard work [that's supposed to be me]. But I also look for something completely unexpected; a failed novelist, a Nick Cave fan [head of strategy at Chemistry], a Russian Weapons expert [Wunderman], Mr T’s nephew [TMW], a polite South African girl with a ninja alter ego [Lateral]. Yes, after a few years they will be offered huge amounts of money to go elsewhere, but hey, you can always make some more. And they take what they’ve learnt out there with them.
They are your industry PR.
Triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13)
We’ve never been able to hide behind soft measurement in digital advertising and marketing. The same servers that deliver the content are counting all the time. Page clicks, unique site visits, post view, ad impressions. There are plenty of numbers but making sense of them is where the skill lies.
The Data Analysis experts that I have been lucky enough to work with have given me an unique insight into Direct Marketing discipline. It’s a scary door, best kept firmly shut to mere mortals.
For creatives the key strategy is to set your own benchmarks. I don’t mean lower expectations, but it is vital to reach a shared agreement with a client as to what a campaign is trying to achieve. All too often internet advertising confuses hard sell click through sales with raising brand awareness. More often than not agencies themselves fall into the trap of trying to deliver both. And failing to do either. Set your own targets. Then exceed them.
