The Strategy Blog.
-
What is the worst thing you’ve ever done in the office?
How would you feel if a prospective boss asked you that? How honest could you be? And would you expect to be offered the job as a result? And what is the point to such a question? Interviews are useless. You’d never judge whether an athlete should compete in the…
-
Don’t fix the problem, eliminate the cause of the problem.
Since the launch of the Government Digital Service in 2012, the digital transformation engine for the UK government, there has been a significant step change in online services. Try applying for a driving licence online, if you haven’t done it recently, you’ll be shocked at how easy it is now. …
-
More VOD questions than answers from media owners
Media research is never perfect, never has been. Depending on the starting perspective of the critic, mud can be thrown because the panel is too small; only a diary snapshot of a limited window in time; too broad in the questions asked (“have you seen just the front page of…
-
Using data today
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…
-
I want your job – or do I?
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…
-
What does your email style say about you?
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…
-
Champion moves
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…
-
Here’s 16 predictions for 2016
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…
-
2016 Strong women rise
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…
-
Apps are dead, long live the app
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…
-
8 out of 10 people only read the headline.
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…
-
I completely disagree
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…
For your bookshelf
