Making sense of life, & communications, online & offline
Posts tagged strategic
Are you the Mayor this Christmas?
December 22, 2010
I lost my mayorship of the office this morning… 3 days before Christmas, and I’m distraught.
The fact of the matter is that I’ve been trying exceptionally hard to compete with a colleague (thanks @ronaldzouein) and maintain this mayorship over the last 3-4 months (between trips to NY, Chicago and Riyadh) and then I woke up this morning to see the below in my Twitterstream. It’s doubly a pain because we are always very excited when we know that something pops up in the mentions section of our stream, beyond the back and forth messaging of the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people we follow More >
BDW Making Digital Work – Day 2, Afternoon
The afternoon session kicked off with Scott Prindle (@prindlescott) VP Creative technology at CP&B giving us real insight into the development of technology within the agency and the appearance (and importance) of the creative technologist.
He told us that now at CP&B, 1/3 of their digital work is on mobile and them proportion is growing; alongside this they have an expanding html 5 practice to compensate for the no flash on Apple situation.
He talked about the role of the creative technologist and his position in the new team which is made up of:
- Copywriter
- Interactive Creative
- Creative More >
Getting ready to ‘Make Digital Work’
November 28, 2010
In a couple of days I’m taking the 14 hour flight to head to New York for Colorado University’s, Boulder Digital Works Executive Workshop – Making Digital Work. This is the first time the programme has been run outside of Boulder and promises to be a hotbed of ideas and learning. The programme ran first back in August in Boulder and received rave reviews from those attending – hence the relocation for this event to New York to capture a wider audience.
My own area of interest is particularly around how ‘traditional’ advertising agencies are both integrating the digital competence to their More >
The war for digital talent in advertising
October 13, 2010
Is there enough 360 experience to go around? Are tighter criteria making the talent pool smaller for recruitment today?
It seems like everyone is chasing after the golden goose right now – the speed at which digital is invading our industry means that suddenly there is a major need for people that not only understand the medium but also how it works and how it fits into the media mix. So suddenly the marketing geek is in demand, but there is definitely segmentation within this group:
- There are those that still want to work at pure player digital agencies, here there may well be less access More >
Can you afford not to crowd-test?
October 10, 2010
The media traction that the ‘new’ Gap logo is getting should surely be a lesson to all of us in testing, crowdsourcing, or both. It has been quite a while since we have seen a rebrand take up this much media coverage, and potentially this is because people feel strongly about it. Over the weekend this has taken two further developments that will fan the flames; On the one hand, international branding firm Siegel+Gale has penned an open letter to Patrick Robinson offering their services to ‘course-correct’ the recent decision. On the flip side a rogue site entitled ‘Crap Logo‘ has popped up More >
Reinventing marketing strategy, plans and thinking
October 9, 2010
As I read the pipeline article on ‘learning to unlearn‘ it occurred to me how key this idea is when applied directly to the way we plan marketing and communications campaigns today. The last few years have seen the arrival of new channels, the prevalence of content as key to engagement and have put the consumer in charge of the way that businesses and brands communicate, but even with these dramatic changes in the marcomms landscape we have not seen an equal change in the way that marketers and brands approach their own strategy and planning. Rather than a reinvention of the way we approach More >
How do we build knowledge in the agency business?
October 7, 2010
The question of building knowledge in this industry has arisen more frequently recently, mainly as a result of expanding markets in particular areas such as digital and interactive and also as a result of the economic downturn when many people are let go or changing positions and organisations must fight hard to transfer and retain the knowledge of their clients, brands and businesses. Knowledge management itself has been around for a while, particularly in the R&D departments of product and software development organisations. I personally worked with the HP inkjet team on a pilot KM project More >
Packaging, content and delivery
October 7, 2010
Mark Zuckerberg is no Steve Jobs, and we probably knew that already. But for those of you that watched the livestream update from Facebook HQ last night (or yesterday afternoon, depending on where you were), and saw the recent Apple Keynote, or have ever seen Jobs present you will understand what I mean when I say that regardless of the content, packaging and delivery are vitally important – and this is key to every business, not just products, but also (and particularly for us) services, where the customer feels part of the intrinsic value of the product in the way that it is received.
So More >
Mad Men, and the dying art of the account exec
October 6, 2010
The more I watch Mad Men, the more I compare it to our business today and start asking myself certain questions. Some have obvious answers like the role of women, the drinking and the smoking and the overall style of life, some are very amusing in how little the business has changed in the last 50 years, but one thing that I can’t get my head around is ‘what has happened to the account executive… and why?’.
Apart from Don and Peggy, the majority of the Sterling Cooper (and now Draper Pryce) staff are represented by the high-flying account guys. Those guys who slave to win over the clients and More >
What happened to direct marketing?
I’m worried to say that I fear direct marketing as a skill has disapeared. how many people even know what a johnson box is and how to use it? In our rush to become integrated, 360 and digital we have have forgotten that a key piece of the marketing mix was about how a brand has a conversation on a one-to-one basis with a consumer.
Please don’t tell me that this is email marketing, because the majority of the 270 million hits I get on google with these two words relates to technology suppliers who are getting better at delivering you a message and also (thankfully) giving you some analysis as More >