The Strategy Blog.
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Join the campaign against the squishies
“A widespread promiscuous devotion to the untrue” This is how best-selling writer Kurt Anderson describes post truth Trump’s America. In his recent best-selling book Fantasyland he argues that regarding facts as optional is deep rooted and centuries old in his homeland. His argument runs like this: The founding fathers fled…
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Brighton Rock: This year’s Media360 gave delegates plenty of ideas and arguments.
Lord Finklestein OBE, columnist at The Times, opened his diagnosis of Brexit at the Media360 conference which I co-chaired this May, with an old Jewish joke. A village matchmaker goes to a peasant family and says that she’s found a match for their son. “What about the daughter of the…
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Alexa, I don’t think we’re on the same page.
Alexa and I are not really getting on as well as I had hoped, or thought we would. First of all the rest of the family don’t like her listening in. Then quite often we don’t understand each other. When I asked about the forecast for rain the other day…
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“All my best decisions are made with heart, guts and taste”
“All my best decisions are made with heart, guts and taste” Instinct or algorithm? It’s a question that Karen Blackett OBE asked her three interviewees at her Chancellor’s Dinner at Portsmouth University last month. Kanya King OBE, supercool founder of the MOBOS said instinct. Sir Lenny Henry CBE fresh from…
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Kind
Just kind In a business that is under disruption, sometimes the best decision you can make is to be kind. At the IPA conference for International Women’s Day one of the key note speakers Pinky Lilani CBE, Founder, Women of the Future, talked about the importance of kindness in modern leadership. …
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Is there any purpose in campaigns with purpose?
There’s plenty of debate about campaigns with purpose. Much of it very intelligent and informed. Should marketers invest in campaigns that go beyond communicating the benefits of the product or service advertised and extend into a wider purpose for society with which the brand wants to associate? Does purpose pay…
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The long and the short of your career
Some days are more inspirational than others. In the morning my client Mark Evans, CMO at Direct Line Group, mentioned that he’d been discussing the fact that Binet and Field’s now omnipresent thinking The Long and the Short of It, was applicable to more stuff than marketing science (crucial though…
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Entering awards? Here’s one category you wish you could enter:
The if only awards Awards season is on us again (is it ever not these days?), with entries due for Campaign Media, Marketing Soc, Thinkbox, Outdoor, Festival of Media and more. Enormous effort will be made to ensure that each brilliant idea is explained properly, and the results will be…
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Why no idea is a bad idea, is a bad idea.
“No idea is a bad idea” is one of the sacred rules of brainstorming. The concept is based on the theory that ideas are like young plants. Rain too hard on them and they will wilt away. Don’t criticise. Warm them in the greenhouse of sunshine approval. This is one…
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Here’s one thing you can be certain about in 2019
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” (Yogi Berra and others). January is the month for pundits to place their best bets for the year. We need not go very far though these days to know what nonsense those bets usually amount to. In respect of outlooks and…
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True grit: does it always work to your advantage?
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never” Winston Churchill I’ve always been inspired by persistence. When you fall down, you get back up again. Yet a fact based argument in the much respected Harvard Business Review challenges this idea. Cass Business School’s professor Andre Spicer says that there’s…
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Who is your biggest critic? They might be closer to you than you think.
Often when mentoring, in a one to one, it will be clear that the mentees worst critic is the one they see very regularly, daily in fact. Often when they are tired and stressed. Often when they are at a low point. It’s the one they see in the mirror.…
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