Super 8 mystery

This is the new video from If Wen - a 'miserablist folk' singer who is a personal friend of mine, and whose music is, in my humble opinion, refreshingly good.

In some ways this is a shameless plug, but there are some genuine reasons why you might like to give this a few minutes of your time:

- My garden stars in it. The same garden that starred in the 1983 film The Jigsaw Man, with Michael Caine. So there's real pedigree there already.

- It's shot in Super 8, which gives it a stunning grainy quality, and even, I'm led to believe, a bit of Panavision. Pure 70's joy. Reminiscent of things with Felicity Kendal in them, and that's A Good Thing.

- There are bits of Chiswick House in there, with the rather elusive If Wen popping up in among its hedgerows.

- If Wen is also a bit of a star in his day job, but I've been told not to make that link too obvious - work it out yourself.

- And, speaking of working stuff out yourself, this is the first music video I've ever heard of that has a cryptic word game in it. No-one's worked it out to date - or even worked out why some of the letters are orange - but that's part of the interest value.

So there. Do yourself a favour, brighten up your day with a bit of 'Love Letters'. 

Mmm. Freshly brewed music. There's lovely for you.

Dead bodies

I'm 'penning' this from my seat outside the Bell and Crown in Strand on the Green. I have a sunny riverscape in front of me and a screaming child in my right ear. When I ran past here earlier the police had cordoned off the bit of the river by Kew Bridge as they were fishing out a corpse from the Thames.

Lovely river though it is, it serves as a watery grave for a surprisingly large number of people. We'll frequently hear the revving of boat engines late at night near Kew Railway Bridge next to our flats: bodies get tangled up around the bottom of the bridge pillars and it's the job of the RNLI and river police to extract the bloated mess.

Just a few years back, several dozen skulls were discovered in the 'Strand' bit of the river here. No-one really has a convincing reason why they were buried.

A bit of sunshine and a few ciders and it's easy to overlook the quotidien tragedies that flow past us.

There's cheery for you.


-- Post From My iPhone

21st Century Newswire

That's what Twitter is, I declare.

A Damascene moment a few days ago pointed me to Tweetdeck and the ability to pull together all the themes I'm interested in.

That plus the observation (thanks Robbie, Aimee, Craig) that this, by dint of the sheer volume of tweets, is primarily a listening medium. A listening medium with filters.

You can even conduct free polls on it: http://twtpoll.com/

We should contribute to make it a richer place, but that means removing all references to what we had for breakfast.

Now I can mix branded jounalism with citizen journalism and they can spar it out as to who gets the best stories first.

All I care about is being informed and entertained - and whoever does it best gets my vote.

If the technology of today gives an equal voice to all, then Twitter is the best platform we have to mix them up and cream off the best.

Churchill and iPhones

Finally got around to installing an iPhone app. From the comfort of the Churchill Arms in Notting Hill.

You're never alone with a iPhone, and it's really good to have a spare half hour - waiting for some friends and with nothing to read - to have a play around with App Store and find out what other techie wizardry there is that can make my life easier.

And not have Her Next Door upbraiding me for excessive device fiddling activity :-)

Attached: this pub has signs inside it. Surprisingly useful, especially as it's full of half-blind ex-military types today. Shame it's not in Braille.



-- Post From My iPhone

Bleeding eyes and industry-specific social marketing

Sorry folks, got to get some worky-worky things off my chest today.

Because it strikes me that there's no decent forum for pharma marketers to talk about digital media - or, more precisely, appropriate media given the market, the drug/device type, target audience etc. (after all, it's not just about digital however much my livelihood may depend on it).

Certainly nothing as useful as this one for Independent Financial Advisers: http://www.ifalife.com/

Woo hoo.

But I like the fact that it's crammed full of interesting articles that are well ordered, pertinent to the industry, and helps raise the collective bar of digital marketing.

Compare this site structure and content to the Pharma industry's highest Google-ranked forum: http://www.forums.pharma-mkting.com/showthread.php?t=1322

Frankly, it makes my eyes bleed.

There are plenty of learnings we can take from this comparison: structural, content, strategic approach, linking with social media … and these are all industry-based - not just personal / social!

Here endeth, etc etc.

Is Twitter rude?

I am frequently upbraided by Next Door Kate for using my iPhone too much in social situations.

Yup, it's so good that very often it's too tempting to dive into the various virtual yet social universes that this device offers to me by virtue of its being the #1 way of accessing the web.

But she does have a point: increasingly we're becoming permanently semi-connected. We don't all devote our attention to the task in hand, preferring instead to twiddle with our phones to check email, twitter, texts and so on.

It is, in many ways, plain rude.

But at a recent conference they asked for questions and contributions to the panel via Twitter. These were then posted on a 'Twitter Fall' app on the data projector and the best questions creamed off (so to speak).

Everyone in the room was head down, tapping away. But we got some good questions and some good banter going. Twitter made it easier for people to ask questions - it took away the embarrassment factor.

And that's got to be a good thing.

Oh - and no-one thought it was rude. Although it did feel like a totally different way of hosting a conference.

Back again - and here's a thought

'I kind of see what you mean' ... 'hmm, not sure I get you' ... 'nope, you've lost me'.

All phrases we're used to hearing in our British culture (whatever that is, and I actually wish people would stop bleating on about what it could possibly mean. Just shut up and be it for a while).

But - I digress - we only say those things because we're a bunch of people here in the western world who feel that the burden of making sure communication is achieved falls on the communicator rather than the receiver.

We accept that it's up to the person making a point to make it clearly otherwise we feel quite happy to ask them to repeat it, or switch off, or blame them if we don't 'get it'.

Japan, in contrast, is a country where the reverse is the case. The responsibility for achieving successful communication falls on the receiver, the hearer. If something's not clear, it's been your fault for not grasping the sense or the context.

Imagine how much easier the job of the advertiser would be if this were the case in our world...

Just because it looks right...

On the Today programme this morning Alistair Darling confidently said that the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in the States last year caused the financial crisis over there.

Well 'no', Darling. If I heard you correctly as my bathwater gurgled down the drain then this was not the cause of it. It was partly a result of it - and it happened it around the same time as things started to get really bad globally.

Similarly, most of my pharmaceutical clients keep on pouring money into various corporate websites and expensive sales rep materials - insiting that you need these if you're to have a successful drug.

Well, and I think there are a few people beginning to wake up to this now: NO. You just keep commissioning these marketing materials - and your drug sometimes does well. But one is not the cause of the other.

It's correlation at best.

You speak of ROI, Mr Client, but pretty much none of you has an idea of how to measure this. You really mean: 'does that sound a lot based on what we reckon we'll make from the drug'.

It's not even worthy of the term 'cost effective' because you don't have any end-to-end metrics in place to work out whether it was that cost that brought about the desired effect.

However, if my clients change their tune tomorrow I'd love to think that this blog post caused it.

How are you?

£1m per hour, or 10% of annual spend, is what the NHS is paying to treat diabetes and its complications, according to a BBC News article out yesterday.

Yikes that's a lot of cash. That's £24m per day. Or £8.8bn per year.

And that's just 10% of it.

So multiply it by 10 and the NHS budget is actually £88bn per year on this basis.

Although HM Treasury says that this figure is closer to £111bn.

UK GDP - a pretty good measure of how much money our economy generates each year - is estimated at just £1.4 trillion. Drilling down a bit further, total Government revenue in 2007/08 was 39.2% of this - or £548bn.

So the Government is currently paying out over 20% of ALL the money it receives from companies and individuals - many times over if you look at the combinations of direct and indirect taxes that we all end up paying on the goods and services we ultimately receive.

That's got to be more than defence. Oh yes, so it is. Over 3 times as much. Only 'Social Protection' is higher at £169bn. That's for old age pensions, unemployment and so on.

So illness, old age and unemployment make up nearly half of our taxes.

Or to put it another way, nearly half of what I pay to the government goes on looking after my health and making sure I'm able to work for as long as possible. And I'll only really be able to work as long as possible if I'm healthy - which I'll do my best to do, especially given how low the pension payments to individuals are.

So: looking after our health really is the single most important thing we can do.

No wonder most conversations start with 'how are you?'.

All change

OK. Got fed up with trying to fit ideas into a medical context, so generic observations are back.

Same rules, but more pictures.

Anyway, some recent thoughts...

I met a lovely Jewish chap in the Bell and Crown the other day who brightened up my day no end. 

I refer to his religious status up front because he wears a kippa and so this, visually at least, defines him. 

In the twenty or so minutes during which we spoke we covered the following topics: the buildings in Strand on the Green, and why there are so many 1950s houses in the middle of Victorian terraces; Fleming and the fortuitous discovery of penicillin; life on Welsh peninsulas, and German wire-haired pointers. 

Everything he noticed sparked another story, and everything became richer and more nuanced for its discussion.

He was perhaps the most intelligent and gentle fellow I've chanced upon in years. And I'll be honest with you: with all the recent hoo-ha in Israel I've not had a lot of time for Jewish sentiment of late. Extreme, I know, but there's been rather too much self-assertion of a bad type going on there. 

But this chap was how I'd imagine Rabbi Lionel Blue to be if he were to be plucked out of the radio and stuck in a pub. To my mind, the best of Jewishness (or probably anyone-ness): kind, intelligent, funny and interesting. 

Which made me sad that their Israeli brethren are giving them such a bad rap at the moment.