In case you missed this comment, there's no London coffee morning this week. Sorry. Though Paul and Henry are organising beer evening about 6ish at The George on D'Arblay Street.
Coffee morning next week will be in Kansas City. Specific venue to be determined once I get there and find somewhere splendid. Any suggestions from KC?
But we'll be back in London at The Breakfast Club on October 6th.
This is complete genius; Bill DeRouchey an information architect at Ziba design has a blog called History Of The Button. And it's just that, it's detailed, imaginative (and slightly obsessive) thinking about one of the things most of us mostly ignore, just the stuff I love.
(And if you've never seen what Ziba did for Umpqua Bank you should check it out.)
Man about town and gentleman entrepreneur Alex West (pictured above at a coffee morning, he won't be happy I've used this picture again) is looking for help with stuff. It sounds interesting and it's potentially cash for doing what you're doing anyway.
This is what he says:
"We are setting up a free monthly newsletter which will include a gallery of the very best non-traditional forms of branded communication (i.e. everything but print, TV, banners and pop-ups). So we want to set up an informal network of 'scouts' in as many countries as possible who when they see a great piece of work they will send it to us (as a link, as a photo, as a QuickTime etc.) with any details they can find out about it. We will then edit the selection and ask a guest editor - and scouts may be asked to be guest editors we don't just want BIg names - and if we use the work that a particular scout sent in they get $100.00 and a credit for finding the work. Really proactive scouts will be asked, and paid, to do more work such as country features, insights etc."
If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be) contact him, not me: alex at remotepeople.net
Also, we're looking for a few good folk in Europe who can answer a couple of quick questions for us. But you need to answer them on video. Ideally with a little bit of imagination - not just talking straight to camera. And you need to do it in the next couple of weeks. We can pay you a little bit for that. Anyone interested? Get in touch with me; russell at openintelligenceagency.com
thankyou for your kind attention.
I always enjoy Match Of The Day's Goal Of The Month competition and I was watching it the other day while reading Jon's lovely blog round-up.
And it struck me that we could have fun doing a Post Of The Month competition.
I'm thinking it should work like this. We all nominate our favourite posts from September on any topic relating to brands, marketing, advertising, life, culture, people, stuff. You know. Whatever. We collect those nominations by the end of the first week of October. If you could email me or comment on here, I'll build a master list. And maybe do some shortlisting if neccesary. Then we all vote, and then someone gets awarded Post Of The Month, and we'll make a nice little badge for them to display.
How does that sound? I think that'll be fun.
I think you should be able to nominate as many as you like and you can nominate yourself.
Do we need any other rules?
Update: David's done a splendid badge-thing for us. It's at the top. Many thanks David.
Some unofficial representations of brands/icons upset people, but some, like this, are completely charming. I think it must be a badge of brand success when you can be recognised even as a knitted finger puppet, when you're so well known and iconic that a folk medium can summon up your essence. Here's a good test for brand managers - if your brand was a knitted finger puppet; would anyone recognise it?
Of course it would be perfectly laudible and sensible to object to these Nila vans on the ground that they're dumb, crass and sexist. That's obviously true. But it's also worth speculating that they're probably commercially stupid too. Nila are commercial caterers. They sell/distribute food to cafes and stuff. Many of their customers (not too mention many of their staff) are presumably women, and I'd imagine quite a few of them don't find this brand presentation very appealing. Why do people still persist with this kind of rubbish? It's not like lad-mags are doing very well at the moment.
I've been sitting on this for ages trying to think of something smart I can add, but frankly I've got nothing. So I'll humbly link to these genius bits of advice from Mack and retreat to work on my idea velocity.
I wrote a while ago about the positive aspects of public living via blog. (For me anyway.) But I'd not really thought about the scarier aspects of it - like presenting in front of lots of other bloggers and waiting for the reviews to come in. On the whole people seem to have liked it, and they took better notes than I would have, but a couple of them gave me a little nudge to remember to deliver more than stuff I've already said on the blog. Good thought to hang on to.
(And I'd like to say again how grateful I was for all the help and enthusiasm from everyone there. These planning.ro pictures really captured the mood of the trip for me, thanks for the chat Costin.)
On a related note, I bumped into John Griffiths in the Apple store yesterday. We went for a coffee and talked about Romania. He was there a few months back and he told me that someone had said that our blogs were, basically, their entire planning training.
(another blogging loop coming up)
Firstly, that's obviously a tremendous honour, but secondly, it's also quite a responsibility and it made me realise I need to attach some sort of health warning to some of my posts. I often throw out thoughts on here just because they seem interesting, and to see what they look like out of my head, but it doesn't mean people should take them too seriously.
Maybe I should have a star system where Five Stars mean sensible advice that might be useful in the real world and One Star means random stuff I've made up to annoy Richard Huntington, not to be mentioned to actual clients under any circumstances.
I suspect most of my posts will be Ones or Twos. But I think most of the APSotW stuff is safe enough for public consumption.
I went down to the marvelous Bush House a week or so again and recorded a little bit about Urban Spam for a marvelous World Service programme called Culture Shock. For the next week I believe you'll be able to hear me (if you want to hear a lot of ummming and youknowing) but I'd recommend you listen anyway, because this is exactly the kind of programme the BBC do so well. All sorts of interesting cultural stuff from around the world. And it does all the work for all you global trend-hunty chaps. A must listen.
If this post was a pie chart the biggest slice (probably red) would be 'parental pride'. Then there'd be a biggish yellow slice of 'here's an interesting thing a friend of mine did', a thin blue slice of 'actually this would be a tremendous way to present qualitative research' and a pink slivver of 'aahhh'.
Stefan (you must remember Stefan) has been working on a children's book about monsters. And since he doesn't possess a child unit of his own he sent me some pdfs and asked me to show them to Arthur. I think he was hoping for some written feedback. But, since I'm a lazy tyke, I thought it would be easier just to talk Arthur through the book, record his reactions and send the mp3s to Stefan. Which I duly did and Stefan seemed very happy.
Right now, Stefan's looking for a publisher for said book and one of his contacts asked to hear some of that conversation. And Stefan, being an irresistible designer, built a lovely little webpage with an edit of the audio and some pages from the book. I think it's brilliant, but I'm biased. I also think it'd be a fantastic way to do a qualitative research debrief. If you're a fan of books check it out, if you're a publisher, publish it.