Interlude #2

Following on from the monumentally successful Interlude #1 here, I thought I'd add some more little links.


For this one I told the recipients:

That some people need a hit;
Some people are in a God damn hurry;
Everyone loves Berries;
You need to make your consumers feel like putty in your hands;
Without [the product], life has no joy, no hope, no nowt;
We brainstormed a lot;
We worked very quickly indeed;
... but we never mixed our drinks.


I love doing this. It allows me to try and make my addled mind into something that has elements of logic attached to it.

A presentation what I wrote

I know it takes a while for blogs to take off - especially in this world where it seems every creative has one - so to my literally myriad* readers - here's a treat. It's a presentation that I co-wrote with Charlie and Rory (my partner for Fairbrand) and presented to the quite large Nike last week.

The purpose of it wasn't to answer the massive 'good/ green' debate but to cause some discussion and give some perspectives. From that point of view I think it was very successful.

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* In this case 'myriad' means literally 1 or 2.

A touch of glass

On Saturday I undertook the most British of pastimes. I watched a game of football.

This isn't a rare occurrence for me. I watch quite a lot of football... actually being a Newcastle United fan I should write "I watch quite a lot of football being played by the opposition" but we won't go into the quality on show by the team I support. That really would bore you to tears...

Anyway, Saturday was like any other away day. I met a friend, we visited a couple of bars, had a chat and then wandered to the game. We watched our team give glimpses of quality play (that led is into yet another false sense of optimism) and we walked our 3-0 losers. We then walked back to a bar, had a few more drinks and then went our separate ways. All very very normal to a football fan... and the result very very normal for a Newcastle United fan.

After leaving my friend I went and met another friend for a couple of drinks to wind down the day out. Only after raising a glass with him did I realise that it was nearly 8pm, I'd been out for nearly 8 hours and that was the first time I'd had a glass in my hand. Everywhere else had given us plastic drinking vessels. Even when we bought bottles they were decanted into a plastic. (Not enjoying entry-level drinks like Carling and Fosters leads to the issue of having a bottle of Beck's decanted into a pint pot. This obviously means you buy 2 bottles and get them poured into the same plastic which in turn means you pay £6 for a pint.)

The ticket for the game was £32, we spent roughly the same on beer each, the pies and hotdogs were £3 each and we had a padded seat. A highly middle class, expensive and sensible day out. Yet, it seems that we're not trusted with glass. Of course it only takes one incident to occur to set the wheels in motion, but where we were has a lot of 'Home Only' bars (particularly popular in London) - and as far as i could tell - they had glasses. So - is it only us uncouth heathens from the north that aren't trusted? Maybe the locals think that because we're from the north we're used to drinking from cow horns or something?

The power of a good presentation

This morning I had to give a presentation to my PGCERT class at St. Martins.
As Russell mentions here, planners do a lot of presentations. They sort of become second nature and you sort of know that you're ok at them.

But just once in a while you nail one. And you feel great for it.

Earlier in the week we (me and some friends/ colleagues) presented to a room full of big bods from a big-arse company. That went well too. I'll post that at a later date, but today I just wanted to put up the slides from the presentation today.

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And to add to it - I'm not going to put up any narration. There are only images and 2 slides with text. This isn't for any vainglorious attempt to show off my presenting skills (it only took me 15 minutes to sort out) - but probably to hightlight the fact that any successful presentation needs considered, accurate narration. Oh, and Flickr and access to a digital camera are essential.

If anyone is the least bit interested - get in touch and I'll talk you through it.

Optimate graphs

Yesterday I bought a gizmo for my scooter battery. My scooter is a good few years old and thus isn't in the best condition it could be. As soon as the temperature hits sub-continental (i.e. if it's not really sunny), the battery dies.

So I bought an Optimate. I'd had them recommended to me.

This image was on the back and it gave me a great sense that this gizmo knows exactly what it's doing. I can tell by these two graphs that I've got a quality product. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they mean, but that sort of doesn't matter. They've gone to the trouble to put them on the packaging so it's good enough for me.

I'm just glad the instructions said "Plug it in and connect and the Optimate does all the work for you."

The power of music

What can I say. This blog post may be even more cliche than some of the others but I simply can't not write about it.

I'm wired this morning. I'm literally on fire. I have a presentation this afternoon that I'm working on, I have several other things to do and I didn't sleep last night because of it so have ended up on the black coffee. All of that means I'm wired. Very wired.

So I'm working away thinking about big words and marketing speak when all of a sudden I hear 4 twangs on a guitar. I stop typing. I hear it again. It's the same 4 twangs Russell says here is his favourite guitar sound.

Shine on you crazy diamond is being played a few desks away.

It's not very loud and as I type I can only hear little snippets of it. That matters not because I can fill in the gaps mentally. I know the song very well, but not as a product, as an experience. An experience that it takes me on every time I listen to it.

So now I'm wired - but in a really nice way. I'm remembering Live 8, Earls Court and the first time I heard the song and sat down and realised I'd found 'my' band. My sound. An extension of me created by others.

Marketing Nonsense

I'm not going to write too much about this because I don't really want to add any undue publicity to something this crap.




This email has just landed in my Inbox:


Ignore the pompous knob and the terrible graphics and focus on the line above. For those that can't read it it says: "theTrainline. Here's something we thought might interest you..."

Now forgive me if I'm missing something but if I use public transport do I want emails about Ultimate Trading Secrets? To me this type of marketing is exactly the type of stuff that should be culled from existence. There simply is no connection between the 1st party and the 3rd party - certainly not in the eyes of the consumer. It's junkmail pure and simple.

I thought Amazon contacting me 6 months after I'd bought a travel guide to Lisbon telling me that a travel guide to Lisbon was getting good reviews was silly (considering I'd been there a fortnight after buying the book as most people would?) - a but a travel company sending me information about Ultimate Trading Secrets? Maybe they're taking tips from George Agdgdgwngo?