July 2010
2 posts
Tradition
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” - Gustav Mahler
(Thanks to Entartete Musik)
May 2010
1 post
March 2010
1 post
Watch
January 2010
1 post
Google + Content rights = does not compute?
Well that’s the way it used to be.
The announcement last week that YouTube has signed a deal with the Indian Premier League (IPL) for live coverage of their cricket games is surely an unequivocal signal that this is about to change.
The ownership of sports broadcast rights has been the central motive force for the growth of Sky over the past 20 years, and the combination of...
November 2009
1 post
Peperami eats agency business model!
There’s been a lot of discussion in the agency world about Peperami’s (Unilever) move into Crowd Sourcing for its next advertising campaign, an initiative announced in August this year with a prize pot of $10,000.
The brief was issued and entries gathered via Idea Bounty, a site that’s well worth investigating if you’ve not yet done so.
Opinion of Peperami’s motives...
September 2009
2 posts
Two Blue chips wrestle the social media monster. ...
Interesting developments this week from Proctor & Gamble and Mothercare, both of whom have, in different ways, taken steps to address the question of how to have vibrant online communities around their brand(s).
In Mothercare’s case, they have bought a ‘pregnancy and parenting social media site’ called Gurgle. P&G have taken the build rather than buy route, working with...
Listening in (corporate eavesdroppers).
We spend quite a lot of time at Harvest using and assessing monitoring tools such as Jodange, Radian6, SentimentMetrics, and other like them. Measuring ‘sentiment’ is a hot area for good reasons, as the ability to ‘listen’ to your consumers’ conversations can’t be ignored (is in fact more like a responsibility), and new applications to help us do this seem to...
June 2009
3 posts
riversimple - an open source car
A new two seater, hydrogen fuel cell powered city car was launched in central London today.
riversimple is the brain child -and love child too perhaps - of Hugo Spowers, who has spent 10 years pursuing his inspiringly holistic vision for the future of personal transport. The riversimple team, whose first prototype we saw at the launch, has been supported for the past 3 years with funding and in...
Watchriversimple launch, London 16th March 2009. Hugo Spowers speaks, and drives the car.
Augmented Reality; a marketing tool, or just for...
I’ve had an entertaining half-hour this morning playing around with the Augmented Reality (awful term, but it kind of does what the tin says) experience offered by GE of all people, marketing their Ecological credentials.
Here I am moving my sheet of paper around while GE’s windmills turn, and the sun shines on the screen and also seems (worryingly, given that it’s a hologram)...
May 2009
1 post
Brands that go phut! in the night, and the...
There’s an article in the Times today, reporting on Santander’s plans to ‘scrap’ some of its sub-brands in the UK - Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley are all going, and their branches will be rebranded Santander.
The overall tone of the article strikes me as both a bit jingoistic - Spanish banking group scraps historic British banks - and also...
March 2009
3 posts
Twitter client wars opens new front with Facebook...
There’s lots of noise around Twitter today about Tweetdeck’s latest development in its functionality - an integration with Facebook’s status updates.
@Mashable has published good article, Facebook Integration Arrives on TweetDeck, which highlights some interesting aspects of this development; Tweetdeck is effectively becoming an IM client, for example.
I have had a quick play...
The old guard fights back
When the going gets… Well things are more than tough for many, and the business re-engineering that the inexorable rise of digital has brought to many or most business sectors is often being hastened by the recession.
In the past 24 hours, we’ve seen the latest bout in the long-running feud between the aged (but beautifully preserved) L’Oreal (in the Euro corner, representing...
Brands and satire
The devil has the best tunes, and the satirist is more entertaining (or should be, if they want to keep working) than the politicians and public figures whose excesses and inadaquecies they expose.
For brands, the same rules apply, and there are in reality few big brands who can afford to be consistently incisive, witty, scabrous or entertaining, without running foul of their customers, own...
February 2009
2 posts
Value propositions; what can a cup of coffee teach...
I bought two cups of coffee on my way to work this morning. The first at a stall in a provincial railway station. My usual black Americano (why is it called that, Wikipedia doesn’t know?) cost me £1.50, and the brew served-up was watery and insipid. English coffee of the old school. I didn’t finish it.
Matters improved though, as an hour later I was cycling away from the Monmouth...
2 tags
Mutability – Social Media’s true meaning?
I’m slightly sorry to be adding to the tsunami of comments and articles concerning Twitter’s onward march, but I cannot contain myself, so great is my excitement about what’s going on out there.
An article by David Pogue (@pogue) in the New York Times this week headlined “Twitter? It’s What You Make It” tells us that a large number of the features that define...
January 2009
3 posts
Corporate illiteracy
The always pithy Ian Jindal has a post today where he expresses his amazement at illiterate copy in a recruitment ad;
http://www.innoparticularorder.com/illiterate-ad/
Ian has removed names to protect the innocent, but I’m not going to be so polite with my own recent example of shoddy, should-know-better grammatical standards. Here’s an email I received a few days ago from Waitrose,...
Beware the homophone.
Attended a meeting yesterday at the Guardian’s knockout new offices, ‘Kings Place’, in up-and-coming north King’s Cross: a flagship for regeneration, and a quite stunning piece of working architecture. The centre of the building is a soaring public atrium, with a cafe and tables, and this bringing the outside in seemed to me to have a significantly beneficial effect on the space,...
Tweet or twit?
Techie’s house catches fire, so naturally he tweets about it. Twitter world is alight (sorry) with excitement. http://twurl.nl/d20i7k
Initially I was in two minds as to whether there’s any significance in this story; it seemed like a case of “Wow! Something real actually happened!”.
On reflection, I’m going to put my natural scepticism outside with the frost and...
December 2008
11 posts
Magazine publishing business models (again)
Here’s today’s weekly email from Car Magazine (probably the most respected of the ‘serious’ monthly automotive titles in the UK).
You can’t miss the Facebook and Twitter logos; hell, they’re bigger than the editor!
The promotion of a Twitter channel in this way is a significant step, and one that is probably ready to be called a twend (ha!). The...
Lean team, leaner times
Woolworth’s marketing team of 4 face the axe. 4! Perhaps if they’d invested a bit more in marketing there’d still be a Woolies. http://poprl.com/8lb
Google to 'ditch neutrality'?
There’s a piece on Brand Republic published yesterday:
“NEW YORK - Google has denied that it is working on a plan to speed up the delivery of its own content, which could end the way that all traffic on the internet is treated the same.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Google has approached cable and phone companies in the US with a proposal to create a fast lane...
Quality market research, in a tin
The generous Joanna Burton brought a tin of Quality Street into Harvest’s Soho office this morning.
A couple of hours later, the combined efforts of 40 people had left the tin looking thusly:
Clearly the blue ones (coconut) and the golden brown (toffee) are out of favour with the Harvest Digital demograph. Nestle, I hope you’re paying attention.
Postgate postscript : lessons in creativity
The death a few days ago of Oliver Postgate (obits) has prompted an outpouring of middle-aged nostalgia that I am unable to prevent myself from adding to.
For me, it is not just the TV programmes that have stayed with me from childhood (my favourite is the surreal genius of the Clangers, whose fluty sing-song voices still echo in my memory), I aso loved the books, in particular Noggin the Nog,...
Sark, the movie
When I heard a report about Sark’s first democratic election on BBC Radio 3 news yesterday morning (the move away from feudalism, a single ballot box serving the entire island etc.), the story sounded to me like the scenario for an Ealing comedy, or at least one of those locally based dramas that seem such a integral part of British cinema culture (Local Hero, Whisky Galore!, Calendar Girls...
Kosmix - a 'browse engine'
I tweeted yesterday about Kosmix : Taking a look at http://www.kosmix.com/ - the new Google? Purleeesss. Describes itself as “beta-ish”, which is quite charming.
First result of this was a polite tweet back from a Kosmix staffer; the second time in a day that this has happened to me (the other instance was Yuuguu). Clearly monitoring and responding to Twitter references is now...
the good gym
In a recent tweet I was wondering where it was I had read news of a site that connects runners with the elderly and needy on their running routes.
@markrocky helped me out; the good gym, a brilliantly simple idea that could really work.
Oh, and where I read about it was in a blog post by Andy Hobsbawm of Green Thing, about Social Innovation Camp (‘social technology for social...
Recruitment blues?
The last two or three weeks have seen a flurry of news stories about redundancies in the digital agency world. After years of 30-40% growth this is undoubtedly a chill wind in the industry.
When the going gets tough… the recruitment ‘consultants’ get on the phone, and email, and phone, and etc.
So the volume of email and phone calls from ‘placement’...
Update on adwords trademark infringement story.
Twitter entry 8th Dec 08: Interflora sues M&S and flowers Direct for trademark infringement on adwords; a test case post-Google’s policy change? http://poprl.com/7Yj
Update 9th Dec 08 : Latest from BrandRepublic.com suggest this really could be the test case. I suspect others who have issued legal warnings will wait to see how the Interflora suit plays out.
Tomorrow's Green Economy
Last night I went to an event put on by Tomorrow’s Company at the East India Club in St James’ Square, a Victorian palazzo built as a club for officers of the East India Company in 1849.
The do was held in the Smoking Room, but of course there was no smoke and no East India Company officers for that matter, so Tomorrow was under discussion surrounded by a host of yesterdays.
The...
November 2008
3 posts
Digital magazine distribution.
News from Marketing magazine today that UK retail giant ASDA has opened a digital download magazine store, powered by John Menzies Digital.
Sounds interesting, so what’s going on in the digital magazine distribution space?
A bit of a dig around yields some slightly surprising (to me) observations…
Digital versions of magazines are sold for the same price as they are off the...
Here's a 'wordle' of our internal company weekly...
With thanks to the splendidly easy to use Wordle application.
These visualisation techniques seem to develop at dizzying speed. Will the recession throttle investment in innovations of this kind? A lot of the significant stuff that’s changed the digital landscape over the past 3-4 years was born in the dot-com crash aftermath, so perhaps not.
Blog, or else...
Common sense and my marketing training both encourage my natural instinct to Zag while others Zig; so having failed to get blogging for the past several years, it’s fitting that this first posting from me should follow a piece on Wired trumpeting the death of blogging. Let’s hope I can squeeze through the door of the bloggatorium without being crushed by the crowds rushing for the exit.
And...