Russell Davies

blag interview

I love the way blogging connects you with new people. A few weeks ago Sarah from Blag magazine emailed to say hello and introduce Blag because she'd been pointed at m'blog by Stef and Tom from Big Al's. And I'd been thinking that you've all probably heard enough planners banging on about brand polyphony and such so I thought it'd be interesting to interview some people who are building a really fascinating media property. And they kindly agreed. So here it is. I will confess to be a little intimidated interviewing professional interviewers but it seemed to go OK.

Blag is created with great passion, smarts and integrity by Sally A. Edwards and Sarah J. Edwards and you can tell they love what they do, which is probably why they're very good at it. It's a top magazine, you should try and get hold of a copy. We talked about Blag, obviously, about magazines generally (including nostalgia for great magazines of the 80s/90s like Sky, early Arena, Details and Raygun) and about how they don't mind crossing and/or blurring the line between advertising and editorial because their readers are savvy enough to know what's going on and they don't carry ordinary advertising in the magazine. (I think they're working out some of the ways brands and media owners are going to have to work together in a less interruptive world). I really enjoyed it, I suspect planners don't spend enough time talking to media creators. We should do more of it. It's a bit noisy in the background because the quietest place we could find in Covent Garden was a pub and it wasn't as quiet as we'd hoped, but I still think it's listenable.

MP3

Big thanks to Sally and Sarah for the time.

We also talked about little remembered but rather splendid 80s/90s TV programme Star Test; so I thought I'd add a little bit of that from YouTube featuring my hero, Martin Fry.

failure

This post is by way of an apology. I'm way behind with my marking and all sorts. I owe you responses on the Maple Syrup assignment, and the last one. And I'm planning to write up some thoughts on the creative brief thing really soon. And I've not done anything about Post Of The Year, too late do you think? Just wait for Post Of The Month for January?

I have no excuses except for laziness, feckless time-wasting, being slightly over-whelmed by the response and the need to make a living. It's harder to get this stuff done when you're working for yourself rather than slacking off under the corporate yoke. I will get everything done just a bit after as soon as possible. Sorry.

In the meantime, respect to ilike for pointing out the Library Card Generator used above which is a thing of wonder and beauty.

want to work at sledge?

Sledge are looking for a freelance planner. Details are over there on the left, in the distributed village notices.

media panic

The Long View is always a captivating programme but I particularly like this weeks - comparing the media scares surrounding video games now and those combining that disreputable purveyor of sex and alternate worlds; the novel in the 18th century, specifically Samuel Richardson's Pamela. It also points out the evils of the sofa, of which I'd not previously been aware.

the macworld experience

I could imagine watching football like this. Lots of people describing it to me, and some other people commenting on the descriptions. I suspect pithy, evocative twittering is going to be a valuable skill for journalism2.0.

down

This was on the till in a hardware store. I like the now embedded assumption that a new computer will just cause problems.

mysteries and puzzles

If you're only an occasional New Yorker reader then get yourself to your local magazinery and get this issue. There's some marvelous stuff in there. Gladwell on Enron, Denby on the future of cinema, Gopnik on watching and thinking about football.

I especially like the idea Gladwell talks about - the difference between a mystery and a puzzle, not thinking about that distinction causes a lot of the arguments about the efficacy of market research.

phones, the slow train and the modern antiquarian

I was playing with BuddyPing just after Christmas. While we were driving back down the M4.  BuddyPing is a way of sharing where you are via your mobile, based on your proximity to a cellphone tower. So I idly pinged them on some anonymous strip of the motorway and got this response:

Water Orton? It immediately reminded me of a Flanders And Swann song - Slow Train (though I think the definitive version is by The King's Singers). Slow Train is an affectionate lament for the railway stations lost through the Beeching Cuts, it lists a bunch of eccentric and evocative English place names; Millers Dale, Kirby Muxloe, Mow Cop, Scholar Green, Midsomer Norton, etc which instantly take you back instantly to a pre-motorway connection to place which I, for one, have never actually experienced but still like the idea of.

It turns out from pinging buddyping that celltowers have similar names, on that single stretch of motorway I passed Widney Manor, Bishops Tachbrook, Ambrosden, Ludgershall, Waterperry and Loudwater. All great names that could have found a place in Slow Train. At first glance this seems wrong and counter-intuitive. Cell towers lurk at the far edges of the popular imagination as dark, probably malicious, impersonal things. Yet they're not that different to railway stations; communications technologies plonked down on the landscape but intimately connected to and dependent on that landscape. That tower/station has to be there if the whole thing is going to work.

What buddyping accidentally does is reveal the antique landscape beneath the technology, something that presumably the phone networks have little interest in, but which is actually quite powerful. It's not a geographical connection in the click-here-for-the-nearest-dry-cleaner sense (or the this-yellow-sticker-points-to-something-digital sense) but it's a reminder of the communities which have lived in and created the landscape we whizz through.

I suspect this is on my mind because I've been reading Unmitigated England and England In Particular
as half-hearted research for IDOTO. (Why are these books always just about England? Don't they have the stamina to cross any borders?) England In Particular's subtitle is 'A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive' and it's written by the folk behind Common Ground, a noble group, but one I suspect that has little affection for mobile phone towers. Maybe they should reconsider that, maybe there's an opportunity to reconnect to localness via cell technology in the same way there was via the railways. Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian is concerned with even more ancient connections but already has its huge database of megalithic sites integrated with Google Earth. I'd love to feel a connection to The Modern Antiquarian through my k800i. Maybe the mobile phone will become some kind of psycho-geographical dowsing rod.  Anyone want to sell that idea to Orange?

quite pleased with this

crossover

There was a CSI crossover episode on 5 last night - Vegas and Miami - I love a crossover. I think my favourite was probably Homicide and Law And Order. Or The Practice and Ally McBeal.

I wonder why more programmes don't do this. Particularly those from within the same production entity. Why weren't there more interactions between the people of Camberwick Green and Trumpton? This only really started with Chigley, probably for cost-saving reasons. And why wasn't their more inter-agency co-operation between Spectrum, International Rescue and WASP?  One would have hoped more joined-up world-saving would be possible by 2065.

I like the way it suggests a bigger fictional world and it's obviously something programme makers like to do - and they're seeing opportunities to do in other places. I wonder why more brands haven't done this? Or have they and I'm missing something?