Making sense of life, & communications, online & offline
Archive for October, 2010
Data is the new marketing drug
October 31, 2010
The title of this post is confusing, because data isn’t really new, but maybe we haven’t thought of it as a drug before. Data has been around in marketing as long as P&G and J&J have been developing new products and running focus groups, whether the data is quantitative or qualitative it has always existed, but for a long time, it was the realm of the geeks, of the dark corner research guys who scoured figures and charts trying to derive some sort of trend. Today with the advent of more data, and more tools to look at it, data has become open, available to everyone to come to their own More >
Consumers need a map and a guide
This evening I went for a run… in the dark. I had been out walking several times around the lake close to our house and I figured that if I simply stayed at the edge of the lake I would find my way home – this is a good rule of thumb (except when you haven’t looked at the map and ascertained the size of the lake). After about 45 minutes of running, the path I was on came to and end and in order to stay alongside the lake I had to clamber across some sandy banks and climb a couple of small fences. As I continued around the lake, not finding anything familiar, I wondered at what point it would More >
Onboarding for change
October 28, 2010
We are always talking about change, whether it is change for our clients as we sell them new creative or try to get them to evolve their products, or change for ourselves as agencies as we see our market, region, and industry evolving before our eyes – but with all this talk, I wonder whether we are setting ourselves up for change to happen, I wonder whether we put the right people, processes or systems in place to allow change to live and take root? A major change in the advertising business over the last 10 years has been to bring on people from different walks of life – we have after all More >
User experience in the pitch process
October 25, 2010
by LexBZ
in Advertising
My previous CEO at RMG Connect (now JWT) Claude Chaffiotte (@ClaChaf) once compared the pitch process to a visit to the doctor, saying that “rarely do you go to the doctor and he tells you the ailments of his last six patients and what he did for them” – but this is what most agencies do today: reels, credentials, case studies all looking backward and trying to show the client or prospect just how good they are going to be for them, by showing how well they tackled somebody else’s problem. But just as treating a sprained shoulder is very different from cosmetic surgery, the launch of a new More >
Why advertising needs entrepreneurs
October 25, 2010
Regardless of whether you are part of a hot-shop 17-man creative boutique, or one of a 450-man flagship office of a global agency network, the advertising business still needs more than a healthy dose of entrepreneurs – and I think the industry is forgetting that.
The challenge with this business, however large the brand name or the network, is that at the end of the day we run and act like SMEs. Small and medium sized businesses have some very different features to large corporate conglomerates mainly based around the type of people they employ and how these employees need to act on a day to More >
Tomorrow’s creative team
October 22, 2010
Back when Bill Bernbach changed the landscape of agencies by partnering art directors and copywriters we thought that this was a major revolution in agency team structure – finally the art department which had up until then really only been thought of as production took its merited role alongside the copywriters to come up with concept and creative. The next revolution in terms of agency teams is coming, and it is already happening in certain places, but unlike the creation of the art director / copywriter duo, today’s change is going to be much more dramatic because not only does it change More >
Disruption for mind and body
October 21, 2010
I went last night for my first training sesssion at Concept 10 10 here in Dubai, this is a very different approach to the gym that uses very heavy weight against isolated muscle groups, doing very slow repetitions until you reach muscle failure point – and if you can hold out for too long (2.5 minutes in their book) then the weights are increased. A little bit masochistic I may hear you say, and I’m thinking a little so this morning, but there is a lesson here, both for our bodies and our minds as it applies to what we do on a daily basis and how we can make advertising and communications More >
Has ‘integration’ become a dirty word?
October 19, 2010
In the rush to evolve the skills of the advertising industry to keep up with an ever changing number of new media channels the buzzword for the last few years has been integration, bringing other skillsets and sometimes other agencies into the fold to deliver an integrated product – whether this was branding, digital or even media. But I would argue that this approach and potentially the meaning that we are giving to the word integration is driving us in the wrong direction, potentially to very short term quick fix solutions but that are not attacking the core of the issue.
If we take a step More >
Did AOL peak too early? Are walled gardens the future?
October 17, 2010
The web is dead, long live the internet – those were the guiding words of a recent Wired article discussing the evolution of how we use the web and the internet – how the relative amount of data and information that we consume in the browser is decreasing compared to the quantity of apps and network sites that we use. If we can think of both Facebook and mobile apps as walled gardens in their own sense then it does seem like we are moving back to the days of early AOL where the online experience was very much dominated by a single interface, hub or portal. If this is the case then maybe AOL More >
Clarifying digital and mobile
October 14, 2010
It is about time that the industry stopped referring to digital and mobile as channels or as media; we are mature enough now to understand that these are not specific enough and do not group together a set of channels that can, or should, necessarily be used together.
The mobile handset exists in a number of different forms and includes a variety of different channels ranging from the basic voice and SMS, up through MMS, Bluetooth and now mobile broadband internet to apps, dependant on the OS in place – so finally mobile is purely the equipment and when we say mobile, we really mean handset More >