Everybody likes a story.  Everybody likes to believe that they make good decisions when they trust to their gut instinct. There was a heated debate on Any Questions last month about the closure of a local maternity unit.  It was replaced by a specialist unit 30 miles distant. There were stories, both on AQ and…

Amy Grier says that FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, applies to work too.  She describes the gut wrenching feeling that she used to experience in her teens and twenties about missing out on a really good party.  She says that this now surfaces, in her thirties, when she reads about her friends’ new start-ups,…

Delivering a point in person is quite different from saying something on email.  I’ve known people be enraged on reading a communication from a much loved colleague because their normal smiley manner of delivering a terse comment is missing from the written word. The opposite can of course also be true.  Do you find yourself…

The 1997 advert for the Teacher Training Campaign: “No-one forgets a good teacher” resonated with lots of us because of course it is absolutely true. My best teacher at school was Miss Stott.  She was only 4 foot 8, close to retirement and built like a sparrow but at the sound of her high heels…

More adblockers used by more people. Not because people hate advertising, not because advertising is more intrusive than it used to be.  Whether these two things are true or not is irrelevant.  It is because ads slow things down that you really want to get at.  Some news sites and magazines take four times longer…

2016 trend for cultural traction: Strong women on the rise. “If she doesn’t do the challenge, then Beyonce will weep” This is Vicky Pattison talking about Lady C’s first jungle challenge.  Vicky, who the Radio Times quaintly characterises as being famous for “getting drunk and shouting a lot on MTV’s Geordie Shore”, painted a picture…

The balance of power is shifting because of a step-change in how people search.  This change is enormous. It must inform our planning for brands. Search is changing The App is the start place for search now in many cases.  44% of product searches start on Amazon not Google according to Brian Beck, SVP of…

Hello there if you’ve got past the headline. You’re in the minority.  Though we often accuse the young of having a short attention span it turns out that this is not in any sense confined to that generation.  Only a couple of us get past the headline to the body copy.  That body copy, so…

Tom Goodwin, SVP at Havas in NYC, and I have never met, but we’ve disagreed about things publically on Twitter, and been in violent agreement there too.  We share a view that a bit of devil’s advocacy is important to our industry.  Last month he tweeted “Passive agreement is killing vital discussions at conferences in…

On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company? Both these questions are lifted from Jeff Sutherland’s new book “Scrum: the art of doing twice the work in half the time”. In many sectors, including media agencies, we need to do more work in less time because…

Why has the term Content roused such fury amongst some in our industry? At Time Inc’s recent Campaign summit exploring the Future of Content there was quite an argument about the term Content itself.  Some say it is yet another way of complicating matters and ask where is the exact definition.  Others enquire whether there…

It’s that time of year when we’re welcoming a whole new intake of talent into MediaCom.  Fresh from academic pursuits.  First jobbers.  Up for anything. All of them have survived at the time of writing.  There are precedents here.  I worked somewhere once where a new graduate didn’t make it through the first day –…