Life out of London

This morning I'm waking up in Evershot - specifically at the Acorn Inn, or 'The Sow and Acorn' as Hardy referred to it in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. It has a skittle alley out the back, and all manner and means of obscure pub games at which, after sufficient ale and port, I found it all too easy to lose last night.

I can hear wood pigeons, I can see nothing but trees, frost and the occasional Land Rover, and I can smell wood-smoke and the beginnings of a full English breakfast.

It's amazingly beautiful, and despite the fact that it's sub-zero outside, I'm enjoying having the window open - thus allowing the fresh smells of a country winter morning to permeate the smell of morning bed.

Nice.

I've spent the last few days in the Llyn Peninsular where Next Door Kate, Next Door Graeme and Creative Director Craig (CDC) and I rented an old Welsh long house for Christmas. We climbed Snowdon on Boxing Day, cooked every meal from scratch (apart from yesterday's Little Chef breakfast en route, which, I can assure you, remains a vile and fetid place), and tried to learn phrases in Welsh  - necessary in a place where over 3/4 of the locals have Welsh as a first language.

The complete obverse of my life in London. Not really that far away, but really very different.

Demand for Planning

In my career as a planner to date, a large chunk of time has been spent explaining to the rest of the agency what it is we actually do. This tends to fall on a mixture of deaf ears (the majority), those who reckon their clients could be persuaded to buy what we do (minority #1), and those who really don't want to have what they've always done questioned in any way (minority #2).

Put simply, as a department we've had to stimulate demand in the face of apathy - after all, why would anyone want to change (the other rude 'C' word) the way they work, even if it's for the better?

So on moving to my new agency, my over-riding pleasure so far has been in witnessing the sheer demand for planning on the part of both clients and agency staff.

Why?

Because they actively want to do new stuff but don't know what new stuff they should be doing.

And that's exactly what the planning function is (or at least one of the many definitions that I like). Namely: giving people confidence and inspiration to do something different.

This might be about using new media, talking to new audiences, talking about a different part of your product or brand. But in each case, the discipline of Planning should be there to make the strategic case - a bit like a barrister - drawing on available evidence and logical extrapolation - for making this change.

This isn't to say that Planning is required in every campaign for every client. Far from it. Many teams working on many clients know what needs to be done and it's frankly rude to suggest they don't. But if you trust the people you work with - and you've done a good job in showing them what Planning can do when they need it - they'll actively want to ask for it when necessary.

Here endeth, etc. etc.

But bloody well done to Michel, whose large shoes I'm now stepping into, for getting things to this point.

Bringing it all together

Creative Director Craig came round for tea yesterday, and in between comparing hangovers and deciding which meats we'd roast in Wales during our Christmas holiday, we discussed how we've got to the stage where our disparate bits of digital activity need to be brought together.

I've now managed to update my Facebook status via Twitter via text via my mobile phone. My next step is to bring excerpts from this blog onto my Facebook wall so as to surprise and delight anyone who stumbles upon me with the sheer brilliance of the machinations of my mind. 

This afternoon I plan to see if I can synch Flickr and Facebook, possibly add in my del.icio.us tags and see what else I can achieve.

I've already put Facebook on Netvibes, and I'm trying to work out whether there's any merit or indeed possibility of linking Netvibes with iGoogle - or whether you have to choose one or another. 

Why?

Well, following on from my last post, it's become clear to me that I have far too many forms of communication - and they need to be tidied up. And the splendid thing about this open source nonsense is that most net brands can now speak to each other. 

My devices are converging, my communications brands are converging, and it's a face off between Facebook and a couple of other amalgamation tools to decide which one will win. 

Or maybe I'll just get it down to two. Even that would be acceptable.

Or maybe I should bin it all and pick up a quill pen and some parchment from Woolies or a Post Office branch before they shut down completely.

Your digital home

William Morris, of wallpaper fame, once advised: 'have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful' ... and it strikes me, having set the strategy for several websites, many microsites and countless other bits of digital furniture, that this could be a pretty useful maxim to bear in mind when embarking on any piece of digital marketing.

Increasingly the digital savvy among us are personalising our digital experiences - the very word 'homepage' suggests a place from which you usually start or to which you often return. iGoogle allows us to determine what we place on this page; our toolbars, Digg pages, Evernote accounts, suites of iPhone applications and so on leave it entirely up to us to populate them with what we find useful or amusing.

The sites that I regularly go to are either useful (BBC News, Gmail, eBay, Streetmap, Wikipedia etc.) or enrich my experience in a beauteous or fun way (Flickr, b3ta, Holy Moly). 

I would not bother going to - or at least frequenting - a site that didn't do either of these things. Yet my clients frequently give me briefs that, on the face of it, require me to communicate such boringly self-serving factoids, thoughts and opinions  - digital junk mail - that the question 'why would anyone care?' invariably pops up.

We can all opt in or opt out of digital environments in split seconds, and unless digital marketing gives us something to put in our homes that is either useful of beautiful, it won't really be asked in.

Look up

Looking out of the train by Vauxhall station this morning I could just about make out the BT Tower, which looms large next to the building in which I work (for today and tomorrow, anyway). It reminded me of this picture I took a week or so ago while wandering about Fitzrovia with my esteemed (now former) colleague Brian. 

Amazing what you can see when you look up. 

I blogged a while back about the fact you rarely appreciate the full height of buildings when walking about town - or what's going on above eye level. Naturally, we tend to focus on where we're going rather than bump into things.

But I wonder ... more and more people are checking their mobile phones as they walk around, and more and more people are getting smartphones. One of the coolest features on the iPhone seems to be the geo-location application that can tell you where you are and where you want to go.

Maybe someone could invent a similar application that advised you when it would be ocularly rewarding to look up. 

City lifespans

Damn. It's been an entire week sans blogpost. Longer than I'd hoped to go without comment, but in the heady whirl that is disentanglement from one workplace and the gentle process of 'ramping up' (as wanky execs might say) with the next, I've neglected these words and pictures.

Yesterday I was in Paris for a day - 3am get up and a 9pm return, but just about do-able at a push. Bloody freezing it was too, but lovely nonetheless to visit the scene of many youthful crimes committed by me and the other university friends I was there with.

Every time I go there I forget that bit more: I had to catch a cab from the Gare du Nord to Opera, for instance, whereas I'd have enjoyed the familiar walk a few years back. Even from the cab the streets looked different, and emerged from each other at angles I wasn't expecting. So much for the logic of Hausmann's town planning, thought I, despite the resultant elegance.

But what a vision that guy must have had. Having spent the last year working on my Dubai client, whose passions for creating radical new islands and cities are world-(in)famous (see above pictures of the building of Palm Jebel Ali and the rebuildng of Paris), I've witnessed at first hand the effort that goes into restructuring communities.

Admittedly, my client has famously had GPS guided assistance in their endeavours, but the aim of both Hausmann and HH Sheikh Mohammed was similar: to re-create a city so that it's fit for the time that it has to serve - with all the attendant infra-structural challenges. 

Is it time for London to be radically restructured?

Death of creative

True creative is no longer an option for branded advertising.

Stuff that makes you go 'wow, that's really arresting. I want some'.

There are too many restrictions. Too much lily-livered law.

We either go unbranded or we leave it to others.

Or we make more drumming Gorillas - and that takes a huge leap of faith.

So most brands just join the dull bandwagon and continue to carp on about stuff that's safe but ultimately goes unnoticed. No-one ever got sacked, but no-one got promoted either.

Information is everywhere - it's the brand's job to pull reassuringly disparate voices together. 

Content is cheap, but the trick is to find the right content that works on your behalf. 

Creativity is now about editing, sourcing this content (viz. the incipient rise of media agencies), and facilitating ... inspiring those beyond the rule of law be creative for you.

Or just being plain silly (see last post).

Just some very initial thoughts. 

I have no conclusion yet.

Stuff that really doesn't matter

So I read today on BBC news that Britney Spears gets more web searches than Obama. And, normally, if you look down the 'most emailed' and 'most read' lists on the same site, there is a rather large number of these articles about stuff that really doesn't matter or doesn't matter that much - snow in Yorkshire, and some utter toss related to X-Factor.

My mother has long enjoyed the phrase: nothing matters much, and in the end, nothing matters at all.

Jonathan Spooner, a former colleague and creative mind of some note, spoke frequently of his need for 'a holiday from the self'. Or a good excuse to enjoy an alternate reality, which he did frequently with great success.

It has long been noted that FT-reading city boys, however many are now left, take to reading a copy of The Sun within the shelter of the former's pink pages.

And so, it would seem, that we have a desire for silliness - and that the web is a great breeding ground for silliness.

My question, or point of current pondering, is how a planner - the supposed doyen of logic within a creative agency - should write strategies and creative briefs that allow for silliness to flourish. 

Because if we don't, we're missing a trick.