Russell Davies

Adliterate

When I first started this site I imagined it would be a repository of smart thinking, intellectual rigour and provocative ideas - all focused on the discipline and practise of account planning. Instead, of course, it became a random bunch of disconnected observations, apostrophe errors and photos from hotel windows.

But if you were looking for such a site you could do no better than visit adliterate; Richard Huntington's brilliant new blog.

He's a top planner and he writes like a charm. I'd especially recommend scrolling down to the 'the ads are as good as the programmes' entry and downloading the accompanying chart.

The UK ad business should be ashamed.

talent

This man creates the most fantastic websites. Some you'll probably know (10x10 and wordcount). Some you might not. My favourite is oralfix. A mint company that really seems to know how to talk to people. And the pages from his sketchbook (see above) are just gorgeous.

walking down madison

This is a man after my own heart. (Though all I've managed is Up The Edgeware Road and Around The Congestion Charging Zone.) And here's a great little New Yorker piece about him.

dear bbc

I'm sure Steve's already blogged about this but it's worth saying again. Hurrah for the BBC and their listen again stuff and even more hurrahs for the In Our Time site and the huge wealth of incredible material they're making available for free. Particular favourites are youth, politeness, pi and bohemia.

fun with demography

I know it's geeky but I'm really enjoying the IT Conversations website. There's a lot of very arcane, very technical audio. But there are also some real nuggets in there - like this audio presentation from Joseph Chamie, the UN's head demographer. Firstly, it's just interesting; demography is such powerful stuff, most trend stuff is so wishy-washy while demography feels both inevitable and important. Secondly, he presents it really well. It's a great example of someone making technical stuff really personal and compelling.

we are what we do

We've been working with We Are What We Do for a couple of years now and it's finally starting to happen. (All due to them, all we did was go to a few meetings, spout some opinions and do some ads.) The book's on Richard and Judy today. David and Eugenie who started it and got it going are extra-ordinary people. We've got some ads running in the Standard next week on their behalf which I'll post when I get some jpgs from traffic. In the meantime, go to the site, buy the book, do an action.

gawd bless em

I'd like to direct your attention to an absolutely splendid organisation. The History of Advertising Trust. A group of wonderfully eccentric archivists and librarians busily preserving the detritus of one of the most ephemeral and disposable industries there is. Most of their archive is stored in old Nissin huts in Norfolk, but they're rapidly getting stuff online, and it's stuff you can't find anywhere else. I especially love the Wilfred M Freyer archive. Be fantastic to see illustrations like this being done today.

showstudio

taking liberty's is a great project from showstudio. the signs explain it all really. i took these a while back but was reminded of it by things.

and this is me. 12 noon on Feb 26th. very cold day. on my way to a meeting.

grey day

Today (Tuesday 24th ) is grey tuesday. The website explains it like this:

It's time for music fans to stand up and demand change from the music industry's copyright cartel.

Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

Danger Mouse’s album is one of the most "respectful" and undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work

Whatever the legal rights and wrongs a) it's a really interesting thing to listen to b) copyright legislation is going to have to change if the music industry is going to survive

time, clock of the heart

an original idea for a clock. really well executed.