I watched TV for Britain on Christmas Day.  I spent hours sofa bound doing my best to improve my average hours viewed to somewhere near the UK average.   I didn’t manage to watch the all the UK’s biggest shows however.  I missed Strictly (don’t understand it at all) and the Queen.  Non-consolidated ratings showed…

One of the most moving presentations at the APG judging this year saw several of the industry titans, who were judging, wiping a secret tear away. Evan Kearney from O&M Memac explained the thinking behind the Sprite Cricket Stars competition in UAE. Designed to drive penetration amongst immigrant labourers, Kearney painted an emotional picture of…

I’ve been invited to give the key note speech at this year’s MRG conference in December.  If you’re going I look forward to seeing you there.  I’m flattered to be asked, and the organisers have given me an open brief, what an opportunity!   The theme of the conference is “Celebrating the best media research…

Entropy never decreases. This is the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is the idea that everything tends to drift into chaos or disorder.  This is certainly true of my desk.  And kitchen.  The classic example from the kitchen is a dropped cup.  It will smash into pieces and however long you leave those pieces there…

The commentators are buzzing about Ferguson’s new autobiography.  Of course most of the comments are about hair dryer treatment, rifts and acrimony.  Henry Winter, the Telegraph’s football correspondent says “The main victim of Sir Alex Ferguson’s new book is Roy Keane, who receives far more than the hairdryer treatment.  He gets savaged.” In addition the David Beckham incident…

Mark Earls thinks that this is nonsense. In fact “The young are a different species” is Mark Earls’ number 2 nonsense thing in his recent Twitter compilation of top marketing nonsense. The brilliant author of “Herd” has compiled a list of marketing ideas that are doing the rounds that he thinks are rubbish.  I agree that…

The future solution to too much business travel ? Not better video conferencing, not a Humanoid Android look-a-like but perhaps an adorable cuddly toy version of yourself. Back in 2009 there were lots of predictions that business travel would lose out to new forms of video conferencing.  Indeed when judging the recent APG awards there…

Uh oh.  Once again Alfred Ignoble is telling CKinniburgh off. Alfred is the Twitterbot created by Chris Kinniburgh, a law student in the US.  Chris has most of his life hooked up by telematics and Alfred responds to the information he gets about how much exercise Chris has managed daily, how many hours he’s spent…

I’ve been judging awards recently : Media Week and APG.  And later on this month it’s the Newsworks awards (still time to enter).  It is always a privilege to be a judge.  Great to hear about the best thinking of the industry. What does it take to win an award?  Russell Davies (who has probably…

Many of the senior people who I work with started in the planning game when there weren’t that many media to plan.  TV, Print, Radio, Outdoor, Cinema. A staple chart from those days used in way too many presentations (and which I hated, but was made to include more often than I would have liked)…

My regular readers will be aware of the reasons that I missed Google’s annual Zeitgeist festival again. (NFI)  However I don’t like to miss out on the spirit of the times and the highlight video from the event is open to everyone to view. (Theme – Rethink and Reset including: “Do we want a society…

The 3 essential components of a brilliant strategy are Tactics, Tactics and Tactics. Speaking as a strategist I can categorically state that it doesn’t matter how beautiful and effective the strategy is in principle.  Until it is executed, with effective tactics, it is nothing but froth. Dave Trott takes great pride in his new book…