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If you ever have a look at my flickr stuff you know I like to fill an idle moment taking cloud pictures with my phone. But my cloud appreciation is nothing compared to Gavin at the Cloud Appreciation Society - one of the best looking sites on the web. The photography is stunning. (Much better than the one above. Maybe I should get a new phone.)
And now the book's finally coming out. Hurrah.
I was touring the Davies archives the other day (ie I was looking under the bed) and I found this old copy of The Idler from 1994. And then I remembered I'd written an article for it - click on the above to read it. It's rather quaint. Very cliched view of the web, you could tell I'd not lived in the States yet. What dates it even more is that on the next page there was a piece from Ivan Pope explaining things like what a URL is.
You'll have noticed the absence of video recently. Sorry about that. Lugging the camera around was too much, and it's not like my visual presence made much difference. So I've decided to try a proper audio podcast. It's got some music, some bits of radio and audio and this week features a guest appearance from Elmer Wheeler whose record (Selling the Sizzle) is as good a guide to planning as any you could hope to find.
I also try to answer a question someone sent me about the difference between advertising in the US and the UK.
Caveats: I'm still learning how to mic myself properly. My taste in music is odd. I can't mix.
The levels are a bit up and down. It's not graded yet. MP3 It's about 58 minutes and about 53 MB.
And you can subscribe in itunes by typing Russell Davies into the podcast directory. Two entries come up, I'm not the Doctor Who one. Let me know what you think.
It was one of the Queen's 80th birthday's last week so The Times did a reproduction of the paper from the day she was born. Not much has changed. Political coverage is largely identical to today and so are the ads. Or at least the strategies. I thought this was interesting. We puff on about innovative strategic hoo-hah but most of what we do is identical to strategies in use 80 years ago, or probably since the dawn of time/commerce.
Very little's changed here. You see ads like this all the time.
I like the fact that one of the reasons cited for buying a British car is that they're uniquely suited to British driving conditions. (Steering wheel placement is important for a start.)
You probably couldn't get away with saying 'medium-powered car' these days. You'd have to say something like venti-powered. Or high power to weight ratio. Or GTI.
Proper snob appeal. But for salt?
One thing I love is the modesty and reasonableness of the claims. 'Fashionable hats at moderate prices'. Who wouldn't want that. None of the modern hype that enables Chrylser to say something like it's not just a car, it's a Chrysler. (Or something, I saw a poster, I don't really remember it.)
Just reading this splendid tome and found two good entries for Richard's legendary repositionings competition.
1. Admiral Sir Edward Vernon - from rum as cause of drunkenness to rum as a cause of half-soberness
1700s. Vernon was responsible for some naval operations in 'the Americas'. The navy had always had problems with discipline there due to much shore-leave and easy availablity of rum. He decided that rather than trying to forbid his men rum he would instead give them free grog (half rum, half water). This meant that they would only be half-drunk. Which was better than completely drunk. Strategic genius.
2. William Pitt - the oceans don't divide up the British Empire, they unite it
Again 1700s. The way the British Empire was scattered all over the globe had always been seen as a problem by politicians and strategists. The Empire was connected by thin, fragile supply lines that had to be continually protected by the Navy - as opposed to the more compact Empires of some of our rivals. Pitt simply reimagined the oceans as oppotunities not problems (he should have been an account guy). He made the Empire's spread-outness an advantage - it meant we had bases all over the world from which to operate and the connectedness of the oceans gave the Navy vast playing fields on which to wage war and support British interests.
This splendid little Buddah Machine arrived yesterday. It's like a transistor radio permanently tuned into the same few ambient tracks. More info here, here and here. It's very pleasing.
But the packaging was interesting too. It made me realise that we're about to start receiving contemporary Chinese design and hybrids of Chinese/Western design in the same way that Japanese design suddenly became prominent here through video games and consumer electronics.
It's going to be interesting times.
There's nothing better than standing on posts.
Except maybe hide and seek.
I always thought the Account Planning School of the Web library was a good idea but we've let it drift into sadness recently. So I'm going to try and give it another bit of a kick start.
I've built a Squidoo lens that lists all the available books. Or you can see them at this flickr group.
The flickr group is annotated so you can see the location of each book. Hopefully. If we keep it up to date. I'm happy to pay postage to you, but you have to pay for it to come back, or, ideally, on to the next person. And you have to send a decent (at least 500 word) review that we can post with the book.
Iain Tate has also contributed some of his books to the pile, I hope he's still up for this. (But Iain, let me know if you're not). If you want to contribute some of your own just add them to the flickr group and we can spread love and co-operation throughout the planning community. Then we can move on to world peace.
And can everybody who's already got a book email me and let me know, or leave a comment here, because i've slightly lost track.
Also, if you want to see all the APSotW posts on one long page you can just go to schooloftheweb.net.
