Russell Davies

a planner? happy? earning enough?

This is one of those 'just for planners' posts. Heather LeFevre of The Martin Agency is doing a brilliant thing. Here's the text of her email:

Hello Planners! It's time for the third annual planner survey. If you haven't participated before, the survey is designed to let us all see what planners at different agencies think about their jobs, understand what drives salaries, and hopefully learn more about how our discipline is changing. Each year it has grown and changed. 192 people participated last year and you are all receiving this email by blind copy. If you are not a planner, we're hopeful that you can forward this email to the planners you know. The first link below will send you to the survey - please only take the survey if you are working as a planner (freelance and those who work outside the US are welcome). The second link captures your email so I can send you the results and your answers stay anonymous. Please forward this email to all the planners you know, and if you have a blog, would you post the links so we can get the most responses possible? Please feel free to email me with questions and as always, thanks for playing!

Take the survey here. Enter your email here. This is one of those things that gets better the more people play, so please link to it and pass it along.

brand handling

Here's the Campaign thing from last week. (Ignore the email address on there, they seem determined to stop people getting in touch with me.)

I always thought 'account handler' was a rather revealing term. There aren't many other things that get handlers. Circus animals do. And B-list celebrities. But not much else, just 'accounts' in advertising agencies. And it seems to sum up some of the seedy cliches of the business. You sense that someone who's 'handling' an account is not really there to serve the needs of the client organisation, they're there to persuade it to spend more money, or to not change agency, or to indulge some creative whim or other. Maybe that's why there don't seem to be so many people calling themselves account handlers these days, I guess if you were genuinely good at that kind of manipulative handling you'd be smart enough to ditch the label.

I mention 'handling' because it seems like the perfect word to describe one of the pointless terrors of the modern marketing world; the tendency to endlessly debate and delineate the characteristics and minutiae of the brand, while completely failing to connect with any genuine business problem. I've come to think of this as Brand Handling; a kind of academic game which sucks everyone in but which only results in the Brand being Handled; that is pummeled, fondled and massaged through endless meetings and PowerPoint decks but with no substantive change happening in the real world. I bet you know what I mean. If you suspect you might have become involved in this perilous activity here are five telltale indications of early-stage Brand Handling: 

1. You spend massive amounts of time debating which shape would be best used to clarify your brand model. More than one vegetable is on the list of potential shapes.

2. It takes longer to explain what your brand stands for than to explain what your product does. And doing so seems more important to you.

3. You've been involved in long meetings and furious email exchanges about whether the fifth of your brand values should be 'fun' or 'funny'. You don't see anything amusing in this.

4. You understand the semiotics of your product label but not the list of ingredients on the back.

5. You've worked on a piece of business for 6 months and the most creative thing you've done is put interesting pictures in PowerPoint.

I don't mean to point fingers here, because we've all done it. But this tendency to indulge in pointless theory is all the more dangerous when we're confronted with a commercial landscape that demands immediate and constant action. Spend too long Handling your Brand and you'll forget about serving your customer.

the first 50 interesting tickets

Thanks again for all the helpful advice. Lots of people have recommended eventbrite (based on a personal experience) so I'm going to try that out. There's a site for the conference here - and you can use it to buy tickets, but I've only put 50 on for sale for now, just to see if it works properly. (The eventbrite site only contains skeletal information at the moment, the start and ending times are just rough guesses, we'll obviously keep you up to date with that stuff as we work it out.)

If you have any problems with booking a ticket via the site please let me know ASAP.

However, if you're one of those first 50 to book you'll get yourself one of these exclusive red badges when you arrive at the event. So you'll be able to swank around with a mildly exclusive air. I figure you deserve some reward for buying a ticket to an event about which you know almost nothing.

Of course this scheme will look rather optimistic if we don't actually manage to sell 50 tickets. At this point the badges will quickly become eternal reminders of my hubris and I will curse the very sight of them.

UPDATE: The first 50 sold out in about four hours. Blimey. And eventbrite seems to be working very well so we'll carry on with it. I've added another category of tickets - Enthusiasts -  for those of you who are still enthusiastic enough to book before we've worked out who the speakers are or anything. You too will get a reward - perhaps a different coloured badge.

I've also registered the thing on Upcoming. You can go there and announce your interest even if you're not yet willing to buy a ticket, and you can see who else might be coming, which is always nice.

In other interesting news, lots of people have kindly volunteered their services as speakers or general helpers, for which I'm hugely grateful. I'm just concentrating on basic logistics at the moment and will start thinking properly about content next week. So if I've not got back to you about any of that, very sorry. Will do shortly.

(And I went to an ether07 event on Sunday and realised that just the 07 is cooler than the full 2007. Oh well, I've bought the URL now, I'm not forking out for another one.)

grant needs help

Grant McCracken is looking for someone to help him with a food ethnography project. The job description from him - "What I need is someone who can help with translation, linguistic and cultural, for France, Germany, and Belgium in in-home ethnographic interviews.  The product category is food.  The project will take about 3 weeks, so it's full time.  And the timing is soon, starting maybe as soon as the 26th.  A genuine passion for ethnography, consumers, and contemporary culture is called for."

Get in touch with him via his blog. (Click on About This Blog and scroll down for his email.)

coffee

I was nervously but happily overwhelmed by coffee morning today. We must have had 30 or 40 people, most of whom I'd never met before. Some of whom I've still not met. Sorry about that. I'm not a natural host. And it seems I was  also too overwhelmed to take a decent picture.

The folk with the laptop were just sitting there when coffee morning descended on them, and assimilated them in a borg-like fashion. Which I was embarrassed by until it became clear that they'd been twittering Graham and he'd told them who we were and made introductions via twitter.

It's a small distributed village.

I'm also conscious that coffee morning has bedded in very satisfactorily in other places, I'll do a little round-up next week. We're off to the seaside now.

interesting2007

Well, blimey, thank you all for your support and ideas on this whole conference thing. The Conway Hall folk now have the cheque in the bank so there's no going back. I've registered interesting2007.com as a placeholder domain for everything conference-related. (At the moment it's just pointing at the relevant posts from here but soon, no doubt, it'll be a cornucopia of delights.)

And though it's just a placeholder I quite like the simplicity of just interesting and the suggestion that there might, maybe, be an interesting2008. (And I like the idea of interestingnorth too.) But huge thanks for the ideas and enthusiasm, I'm mulling everything now and I'll catch up with everyone who's volunteered to speak (or volunteered someone else). And Lloyd, I'd love to talk about something Open Space. I'll get in touch.

And, I have to say thanks to Innocent for coming aboard as first sponsor, earning them official status as Platinum Fruit Refreshment In Bottles Partner.

Thank you everyone. This is exciting. (Anyone know if there's a dead simple, ordering, payment, ticketing, mailing system?)

blog vs print

Here's last week's Campaign piece.

Writing these pieces for Campaign after years of blogging has forced me to think about the relative characteristics of all this new-fangled digital stuff and good old-fashioned, grimy print. And I think the essential difference is this; digital may be flexible, conversational, speedy and cheap, but print still has this undeniable, irresistible weight and authority, an authority that's attractive to readers, advertisers and writers.

A good blog is conversational because it's porous, not just on the web, but of the web. The joy of writing one is that you don't have to explain everything, you can just link to it. If your reader wants to pursue that link she will, if she doesn't she can continue with you. The other great advantage is the way the possibility of feedback is built-in, and the real value often comes from the discussion in the comments, where your idea is really examined and refined. I suspect that's why most blog posts look so half-formed compared to print articles, they're not designed to be finished thoughts, they're offers of conversation, thought-starters, provocations. (Or at least that's what I tell myself every time I write a blog post that just dribbles to an inconclusive ending.) All that combined with the fast pace of the blogosphere and the minimal cost of entry makes it a buzzy, messy, democratic place where every good thought leads to a good conversation and every good conversation is global.

In contrast, print can often look stodgy, stale and slow, but despite that there's still something very compelling about it. And it's not just because this can be read on the loo. Partly it's because you always feel like you have to try and construct a decent argument here, make a point, explain something clearly and round it off with a snappy ending. We're not in a conversation, so I have some obligation to offer a complete idea. But the bigger difference is that the very limitations of the format help provide it's authority. There's only so much real estate available, magazines aren't cheap to make, or free to access, so editorial decisions have to be made; quality has to be determined, standards have to be set. Which means you don't get the meritocratic but mediocre sprawl of so many online publications.

These characteristics are worth thinking about when planning brand communications; it's not about costs per thousand it's about deciding whether you want to be discursive or authoritative, whether you want to start a conversation or make a case. And it's about realising that you should never promise a snappy ending if you haven't got one.

february post of the month

I have a confession to make. This month's voting was supposed to finish yesterday at 10pm. But we had internet problems yesterday and I've only now been able to check the voting. So right now, the winner's New Account Man Pop-Up. But, since it's so close, it's entirely possible that the winner at the official closing time was Where's The £ in Yoof. So I think the fairest thing is to declare a draw and say you're both winners. And say you're both entitled to display this fine logo on your own site. That fair enough?

a possible date for your diary

The TED conference has just finished in Monterery. Sounds like a fantastic lot of speakers. I was lucky enough to go last year and I'd put aside the money to go again this year. But, a while ago, it occurred to me that I could take that money and we could maybe organise a conference of our own here in the UK, which might be even more interesting. Or at least easier to get to.

So this is the plan:

We've booked the Conway Hall for the 16th of June. Which is a Saturday. It'll be about £20 to get in. I want to make it something almost anyone can afford.

The plan is to have all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things. I'm hoping to find fascinating people and to just ask them to speak about something they care about. I want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, musics, jokes and whatever. There will be 20 minute slots and 3 minute slots. Some people will play music or sing. And some people who can't be there will be asked to send three minute videos. Perhaps. I reckon we can squeeze a lot of interestingness into a day. And then have a party afterwards.

But it'll all be down to the goodwill and enthusiasm of the speakers anyway, because I won't be able to pay any of them.

The hall is paid for, seats and presentation stuff will be paid for. But that's the 'TED money' soaked up.  After that I'm hoping to find sponsors to chip in, not to pay money and put up a logo but to provide things like wifi, smoothies, or cakes. And it'd be great if someone would like to film it properly, or podcast it, or do nice drawings. I don't think we'll be having name badges, branded pens or lime cordial so we won't worry about them.

I think that's about it for now. It's June the 16th. If you think you might come it'd be nice if you'd comment below, just so we can start to get a sense of numbers. And I'll soon get round to setting up paypal for tickets and upcoming and all that sort of thing. If you can think of someone we should ask to speak, that'd be great too. Or maybe you want to speak? I've already asked some people but I think they all thought I was joking so I'm going to ask again now I've written this.

And we need a name for it. I'm not sure The Conference Of Interestingness is good enough. Any suggestions?

notices

If you're only reading the RSS feeds (and who can blame you?) I should point out that there's a few interesting looking jobs in the distributed village notices section on the left hand side of m'blog. There's this job at Innocent. One at Propeller. And others at Lowe, Modernista and Dare. And I've got a few more to stick up this week. Just so you know.