mindbodysold

Sticking to your beliefs.

Not easy to do when you’re surrounded by bean counters blinded by ‘the bottom line’ and agency leadership who clearly don’t give a fuck about creativity.

The fastest way to drive any business into the ground is to go through the motions and avoid adding any true value to the work.

Awards move an agency forward a variety of ways.

i) The competitive element motivates your teams to produce great work.

ii) The recognition attracts clients faster than any other new business tool.

iii) They attract higher calibre staff.

iv) They backup the agency’s performance in a client review.

Make it a part of the agency’s goals. Because it’s top of the list for any decent creative. 

And if your goals aren’t aligned then you’re in trouble.

So it snowed a bit over here in London.

Which meant that anything that is run by or affiliated to public services decided to call in sick. No buses. No tube. Forget any overland trains. Idiot drivers with hypothermia on the motorway. Old people lying in their own frozen piss.    

And this in turn led to what the Mayor called “a mass skive”.  1 in 5 workers took the day off apparently. In London I’d say that it was closer to 4 in 5. Me included. (What – you think I’m going to RISK MY LIFE  just to get to work? You’re having a laugh son. Anyway, I’ve got snowmen to build.) 

If anyone were thinking of invading (and honestly – why would you? Have you seen the state of this place?), just wait for a light dusting. We’ll be too stunned by how you can possibly navigate your way through such treacherous conditions to do anything about it. 

Brightening up a bit already.

Christ. I’ve seen more fresh pow at a flatwarming party.

Don't worry love, it happens to everybody.

Many marketers will tell you that their profession is all about understanding customers.

In the old days (last week), they’d throw most of their budgets towards trying to collect as much information as they could about their customers.

Technology changed all this. Today you can pull in information that shows you where your products were sold at a particular price, in a certain part of town, at a certain time and by certain till operators.

Marketers now have absolutely no excuses. They know everything there is to know about their customers. They probably know more about you than your mum does.

So why are a lot of campaigns still shit?

You could argue that they have too much information – all the data and still no idea.

I remember getting a brief that was close to 25 pages in length – not including the various appendices and attachments.

The contents had literally been cut and pasted from the research report. No clear proposition or even distilled insights. Just ream after ream of numbers, bar charts and a matrix. Bosh – there you go. Ideas by tomorrow please. Thanks.

I don’t blame the suit for the complete lack of value added to this job on their part (in fact I’ve come to expect nothing of value whatsoever from that side of the office). My own eyes glazed over before the end of the first page and I desperately wanted to cut, paste and forward the entire document into the bin.

Incredibly, this brief was seen as ‘watertight’. “It’s totally comprehensive”.

‘Course it is you fuckwit. It’s comprehensively incomprehensible.

Professor Tim Calkins of the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois argues that the marketing profession needs to become less preoccupied with gathering information and more concerned with translating insight into action.

And the key to getting this right is the marketing plan… but that’s another post.

Alex Bogusky on CP+B Shredschool

Don’t be a fair-weather employer.

Any agency worth their salt will try to make some sort of gesture of goodwill at Christmas. From pulling down the shutters from the 23^rd through to new year’s day, right to taking everyone on a ski trip for a week.

For Christmas 2008, CP+B decided to give every employee a guitar. And build a site to teach them how to play.

That’s 900 guitars in total – didn’t they get the memo about the recent financial fuck up?

They could have easily cancelled Christmas this year. And who would blame them? Times are tough and going to get tougher. No time to be nice to your employees or your mum. We’ve got the stakeholders and the future of the company in mind. Etcetera.

But they’ve had a pretty good year – adding Microsoft amongst others to their roster. And its no secret that you have to be 100% committed to survive at CP+B.

So why not show your employees that their hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed?

The guitars actually look pretty decent but even if they were plucked (sorry) from the bottom of the bargain bin, I reckon that’s about £100 per guitar.

So for little bit more than forced smiles on a night out with senior management and rather less than taking everybody on an ‘I’d-rather-shoot-mercury-into-my-eyeballs-teambuilding-weekend’, they’ve managed to do something which will be appreciated by their hardworking staff.

Unless of course, you hate music.

New spot from Cadbury/Fallon

As usual, the industry response to this latest offering from the Fallon stable steers into three clear categories:

i)         Self indulgent shite

ii)       Meh. They nicked it from youtube (followed by the various links to  bizarre amateur videos submitted as evidence)

iii)      Fucking gold.

My immediate reaction was a giggle – I especially enjoyed the Kid Koala impression with the balloon.

I’d also put good money on a similar reaction by pretty much everyone else who doesn’t work in advertising.

So why the  predictable backlash?

Envy? Believe me there are many of us who would swap vital organs to have a crack on that brief.

But I think its probably more to do with the fact that everything needs to be measured nowadays. If it can’t be tracked, counted and optimised – its perceived to be worthless.

But ‘countable’ doesn’t necessarily mean accountable. Just because you can’t stick it in a spreadsheet and generate a pie chart from it doesn’t mean its not valuable.

How about stuff that’s not so easy to measure – like perception and passion?

There are certain people in my life that I actually quite like, but you would struggle to graph the results and make predictions on how much (or how little) I will like them in the next quarter.

Instead of trying to measure the impact of this ad tomorrow or even in a few months time, lets see how much impact its had on the brand this time next year and in 2011.

Hmmm… Not sure I can be bothered to migrate all the content from the old blog. 

Anyway, this seems like the perfect opportunity to ensure this one is a little more work and a little less rant.