Russell Davies

the boys of autumn

Leafy fun in Markeaton Park. With accompanying video. (1.5MB)

I left it on the bus

If anyone wants to play along with the Account Planning School Of The Web, you need to get your homework in by 11.59pm on the 15th (GMT). The first assignment is here.

I've got about half a dozen so far, I've not looked at any of them yet, but I'm expecting great things.

account planning school in the country

Here's some more podcasting video. 5 minutes of thoughts about how to influence creatives and get your ideas injected into their thought processes. This is a response to a question someone emailled me ages ago but I was too rude to reply to right away. Hope this compensates.

Here it is. (About 28MB.)

the love of numbers

Since I became 'an author' I've really started to understand people's really personal obsession with things like tracking.

You get very little feedback on what's actually happening to your book (is anyone buying it? I've still not seen it in a bookshop) so you quickly fall back on the Amazon Sales Rank. Which is an indication of how well you're doing, but like most tracking, is at best a distant surrogate for actual achievement and is poorly understood. No-one really seems to know how Sales Rank is calculated, though various people have attempted to correlate sales with ranking and work out how many books you need to sell to get to a certain postion - but all that data is for Amazon US.

All I know is my sales rank was in the 16,000s for ages, then on the 8th it went to 2555, then on the 9th it was 1351 for a bit and then went up to 653, then on the 10th it was 1559 and now it's 7226. Not that I'm checking it every 5 minutes or anything.

I'll never disregard the importance of tracking again - you can get very invested in surrogate numbers.

Comic of the Month - November 2005

I know it's not new but I do love Ministry Of Space. It's like an incredibly cynical, bitter version of Dan Dare. Warren Ellis sat down and imagined how the world would be if Britain had seized Wehrner Von Braun et al and had led the march into space. Marvelous stuff.

Board Of The Month - November 2005

I really like this Landscape deck. Very fond of the anachronism of having a typewriter on there. Don't know exactly why it seems anachronistic, but it does.

Toy Of The Month - November 2005

This is Opera Dude from Tokyo Plastic. You'll probably recognise him (her?) from one of their award winning flash animations. You can buy him here.

slime mold

I've posted about this a bit before, but I came across this CD in a drawer so I thought I'd share the whole thing.

When I was at Wieden + Kennedy there was a very cool, sporadic thing called the Slime Mold prize (US spelling). Anyone could submit proposals for something creative they wanted to do and some of them would be picked and funded. Jeff Selis got his first book paid for this way. My proposal was a little less commercially savvy but they did it anyway. I've put it all up here as my little tribute to what a great place it was to work. Don't feel you have to listen to any of it.

I don't think it works entirely, just as a set of music, but, as an audio representation of a group culture, it was a pretty decent experiment.

I got funding to send everyone in the company a blank tape, with instructions to record anything they wanted on it - music, talking, sounds, dumbness. I got all the tapes back and tried to make some bits of music that represented what it felt like to be at w+k. Kinda. All the music was built with a sampler and keyboard from the stuff people sent in - with some of the ads mxed in there too. Then I sent everyone a CD of the finished product.

The masterful Todd Waterbury then designed a lovely package for it, with a little booklet of credits and the brilliant idea of putting the original bits of tape inside the CD case.

The final songs are all below. I'm still quite pleased with most of them but some are a little dated - I was going through a bit of a big beat phase.

Listening back I realise how influenced it is by Microsoft, I was the planner on it at the time. There are Windows sounds all over it.

1. welcome to wieden+kennedy 5.3MB

Including: John Shaw swearing and talking about Kay's Bar, Becca Van Dyke saying 'an exercise in sound', Trish Adams singing 'You Are My Sunshine' and the Windows Start-Up sound used as a keyboard.

2. the odor of decaying morale 1.1MB

Including: Knox Duncan talking about giggling at Charles De Gaulle airport just before getting on a red-eye

3. thats so funny 4.7MB

Including: 'the work comes first' - god, we used to talk about that a lot, kim lilly (now kim curry) swearing and being sarcastic, voicemail feedback from a microsoft client.

4. fresh 4.3MB

Including: lots of paging, some ESPN out-takes and demo sounds from a Coke 'audio logo' they never bought.

5. when the fans go crazy 4.2MB

Including: majestic guitar work submitted by Alex Dobson, and lots of bits of 'found' audio stuff that people used to send around as email, you'll probably recognise them

6. definitely 3.1MB

Including: just lots of stuff assembled from Cedric Gairard's record collection

7. lying on the beach playing in the water 6MB

Including: David Nottoli recorded on vacation, Italian avant-garde opera recorded by Whitney Lowe

8. an amazing number of jennifers 5.3MB

Including: Jed Alger looking at the phone list and Steve Skibba's guitar

9. walking down the halls 3.6MB

Including: Bill Davenport talking and leaving me bad guitar on my voicemail, Dutch TV

10. eat that egg fast 1.9MB

Including: Joe Shands telling me a disturbing story

11. hands in your pockets, pockets in your pants 6.8MB

Including: lots of banging sounds recorded by David Kennedy in his barn, and some excerpts of interviews with his aged relatives

12. boogers 4.7MB

Including: Bob and Susan Moore singing to their kid, the Kokes kids

13. significant acid 5.1MB

Including: Evelyn Monroe Neil recalling a highlight of Oregon musical culture

14. unconcerned but not indifferent 2.4MB

This is a little story recorded for me by Steve Sandoz, who made more effort for me than anyone else in the company, which was typical. Steve died a few years back which makes this track sound horribly maudlin, which isn't a fair reflection of what a joyous bloke he was, but I thought I should leave it in. I hope it reminds people what a splendid guy Steve was. He recorded most of the odd, random, interesting sounds scattered through this CD.

15. a little dutch song 3.7MB

Including: a bunch of stuff from the Amsterdam office and Jae Goodman singing in the shower

16. do i know you? 5.2MB

Including: Jim Riswold being charming, more Steve Skibba guitar made way more funky than he'd wish, more Windows sounds

17. il gatto blu 2.2MB

Including: Italian football fans recorded by Jon Matthews

18. you do not know me 3.6MB

Including: lots of stuff from Dan & Dave's Hall Of Fame video and a poem by Will Nash

19. organised, illegal surgery 7.9MB

Including: random stuff, Bing Crosby and guitar from Steve Sandoz

(This one is only this big because it's got loads of silence in it. I wouldn't feel the need to download the whole thing, it's not worth it.)

I still have some CDs knocking around, if there are any w+k folk out there who'd like another one, just let me know.

going deaf for a fortnight

Pete Ashton is doing a brilliant project called Going Deaf For A Fortnight. He's going out to a small gig venue in Birmingham every night for two weeks, seeing bands, and he's blogging about what he finds. The first entry is here.

What an excellent idea. I need to do something like this - get myself out of the theoretical world of brands and consumers and all that nonsense and engage with the real world a bit. We all should do something like this.

sweets of the month - november 2005

I love these Sport Beans. The best products are always collisions of the unexpected - here it's energy drinks and sweeties. And I also love how seriously they take this, the Sport Beans FAQ addresses the question: how should Sport Beans jelly beans be used?"