Why don't we try meeting for coffee at Jerry's Famous Deli, 1450 Collins, at 8am on Wednesday.
I haven't done one of these for ages: every channel on the TV at the Hotel Chesterfield Miami.
So I guess we did our first OIA gig today at the Account Planning
Conference. We were supposed to talk about inspiration so we thought
we'd just get people doing stuff, especially doing stuff with their
hands, rather than 'talking about inspiration' which always seems a little
flat.
We played a couple of games, but my favourite was one I'd seen Peter Skillman talk about at TED, which completely fascinated me. (He'd said he was happy for us to do it.) According to our new data, planners are a bit ahead of Business School students, a bit behind engineers and way behind kindergarten kids. (More pictures here if anyone's interested.)
A big thanks to everyone who came along and participated so enthusiastically. We'd never done either of them before so without everyone joining it could all have been a bit shambolic. But I think it went OK.
I'm sitting in the conference, a bunch of creative directors making the same speeches that creative directors have made since the dawn of time. Make it simpler. Help us sell the work. Tell me about the audience. And they all claim to be anti-process, but it's very clear that there are deeply rigid processes embedded in their status assumptions. Creatives are in charge. Planners aren't supposed to have ideas, just create space to have ideas. Clients are supposed to pay for it.
When did planning get so deferrential? We're the future, not them.
The encouraging thing is that I think it's mostly a generational thing. Creative Directors like these are going to be grandfathered out by the imminent and inevitable demise of their agencies and the people labouring in their departments don't have the same myopia.
AAAA account planning conference
(Obviously this feeling will be modulated when some interesting creative directors get on stage, I love them)
In Miami Beach for the Account Planning Conference. It's a strange place.
It's like some sort of hyperreal version of itself. But an inadequate hyperreal version. Like you're in GTA Miami but it's not refreshing quite fast enough. You keep glancing the reality behind the frame-rate.
I'm too old for Miami. I checked into the hotel, barely able to hear my room number over the music, and wondered where the nearest good book shop was.
The fake real word installation of GTA: Miami does all the cliches. Including neon reflected in puddles. I must get a picture of that.
Anyone else here? Shall we do a coffee morning Wednesday morning?
technorati tag: AAAA account planning conference
Typepad were kind enough to feature eggbaconchipsandbeans as a featured blog this week. Very nice of them. It didn't actually seem to make that much difference to traffic which may have been due to various outages, but it's still nice.
(I know it's a bit late, blame typepad and travel). This one's a bit dry but it's well worth listening to. It's Verna Allee talking about the value networks that surround businesses and organisations, and it's about discussing the value of intangible assetts which should be of interest to any planner.
incase you missed it - assignment 8 is here.
So, the presentation at w+k is tomorrow at 5. You're all welcome, but, how do I put this? please, if you're going to come, keep your expectations low. All I'm going to do is show the websites I mentioned here and maybe talk a little about them, that's it, no clever theories, startling insights or decent jokes. So don't, you know, go out of your way.
Maybe Howard Gossage put it best:
So if you're near Brick Lane and you're not doing anything better, like going home or watching TV or sleeping and fancy being in a slightly warm room with lots of strangers listening to a man show you websites that you could just visit yourself at your own leisure, then please stop in.
Expectation management; the key to a happy life.
Secondly - coffee. No coffee morning this week, I shall be on a jet plane. But next week, Friday, 4pm, Breakfast Club, afternoon tea.