The Strategy Blog.
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The good, the bad, and the ugly.
A few weeks ago I entered the hallowed premises of the Groucho club courtesy of IPC Media’s Lisa Batty. Lisa runs a book club and she’d invited me, and top creative Dave Dye to talk about our books. (Mine, Tell the Truth, was published last year. Dye’s on truth…
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Don’t count your chickens in a 9 block grid
The 9 block grid is Jack Welch’s famous method for evaluating staff. There are two criteria : Potential and Performance. Those who excel at both are in the top right hand corner. Those who fail at both are in the bottom left hand. If you’re one of the three best…
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What do you learn at an awayday?
Recent trailers for The Apprentice show the candidates organising corporate awaydays for “major clients”. I’ve been to my fair share of awaydays over the years, several of which certainly had elements at least that might have been organised by people with similar levels of ambition and professionalism to those currently…
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The impact of directness
One cold dark night, in the closing years of the last century, I and a few brave colleagues (including Matt Mee, then an outdoor expert, now our Global CSO) took an unconventional approach to the marketing of the Converse All Star. We projected the advertising, guerrilla style, on to the…
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A Total Eclipse of the Media Rationale ?
Britain’s Eurovision dreams have been dashed again. No great surprise that Bonnie’s song came 19th out of 26. That won’t have caused a total eclipse of the national heart. What is a surprise is that academic research from a noted music college has conclusively proved that this is a perfectly…
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Here’s to the non-conformists
So one of football’s managerial greats has gone. Ferguson’s era is finally over. The BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty sums him up in three words here “Charismatic, explosive, contrary”. It is the latter that explains his brilliance for me. Sir Alex has never acted as he was “supposed to”. …
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Google Glasses or iWatch? Which one’s better? There’s only one way to find out….
In a meeting with our digital heads last week speculation was rife on this issue. It boils down I think ultimately to functionality, though fashion clearly has a role in establishing who wins this next zeitgeist battle. As far as Google Glasses are concerned the media is torn between fear…
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The marketing spring is nigh and is running on digital
Spring seems finally to have arrived. There’s blossom everywhere as I write (I am aware it could be snowing again by the time you read this!) and there is smile on the face of Londoners who have been braced against the cold for too long so far this year. Some…
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Never mind big data, what we need in media are data that speak the same language.
Media research may be improving in accuracy in silos but overall we are building the Tower of Babel. According to the book of Genesis, the whole world once had a single language. And because they had a single language they really began to get somewhere. The people of the the…
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It is so important, of course, to have perspective.
It is impossible not to warm instantly to Katie Kempner. She is head of global communications for ad agency CP+B but also the creator and host of an online show called “Perspectives with Katie Kempner” (www.katiekempner-perspectives.com). The show’s mission is to inspire and empower working women. She asked me to…
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Representing the consumer truth
A year ago my co-author Jonathan Salem Baskin told Economist Summit delegates that the job of marketing was to represent consumer truth within the organisation. Not to make ads that spin the truth, not in fact only just to make ads at all, but to influence all aspects of marcomms…
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The new imperative for great consumer insight
I’ve recently been chatting to one of the all-time gurus of media strategy about the state of planning in the industry. He worries that good consumer insight is being overshadowed by big data, that the exciting developments in this field will lead to real deep human insight being of less…
For your bookshelf
