The Strategy Blog.
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If so much is fake, who or what can we rely on?
There really isn’t much to rely on any more. For thousands of years people have had faith in kings, gods, priests or shamans. In the last decade we’ve heard time and again that people have lost faith in religious institutions, government, authority, and the monarchy. We understand instead that consumers…
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UK TV viewers will see 1 trillion TV ads in 2012
This is the cute soundbite from Deloitte’s TV predictions at Edinburgh this August. Let’s remember how to put 1 trillion into context. If 1 million seconds is11.5 days, and 1 billion seconds is 32 years, then 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years. So that’s a lot of TV ads then.…
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Are tablets the future of advertising?
At a drinks party recently one magazine editor confided in me that he thought the future business model for his magazine lay in diversification of services. Conferences and events have long been used by Media Week to generate added revenues. (Have you booked your table yet ?) This kind of…
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Lessons from The Pitch
The Pitch got mixed reviews from critics. The hour long unscripted shows on Sky Atlantic showed a behind the scenes view of two creative agencies pitching for a US client’s business. Jonathan Bernstein writing in the Guardian said “The Pitch is so boring it would drive Don Draper to drink”. (See…
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The Marketing Truth Deficit is greater than I thought.
“Truth in advertising has long been something to ignore or interpret creatively, if not intentionally avoid altogether”. When Jonathan Salem Baskin and I wrote the opening words to our book Tell the Truth we did so out of a strong sense that the marketing industry was not reacting fast enough…
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Media Planning is more important than ever.
So there was no great exploitation of “situationism” over the Jubilee weekend then, or certainly nothing that captured my attention (aside from the advertised notion that the Queen, like so many of the rest of us, eats Mexican). It doesn’t seem like 35 years since the Sex Pistols “revolutionised” pop…
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Lessons from TV
The current series of Mad Men goes from strength to strength. This week’s episode (and I won’t spoil it for anyone who has yet to catch up with SkyPlus) was breathtaking. And last week’s was a subtly pitched lesson in the politics of feminism at work (how else would she…
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God save the Queen
In 1977 a boat left Charing Cross pier to head down the River Thames. On the boat the Sex Pistols and invited guests. Later, as the boat passed the Houses of Parliament, the band played Anarchy in the UK as loudly as they could. Shortly afterwards the police boats moved…
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Hello Stevie
This is not a blog about greeting Stevie Gladdis, our well known joint head of Challenge and Innovation. Instead a welcome to Stevie, the start up that turns your social network feeds into “beautiful television experience”. Or in other words flipboard for telly. As Jem Lloyd Williams remarked to me, whether…
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NFI again
May 2012 and once again I am not invited to Google Zeitgeist conference. How on earth am I to stay on top of what the zeitgeist actually is without 3 days in May rubbing shoulders with world leaders and media CEOs? Oh I know, its OK, I can ask an…
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England is West Brom (not Chelsea)
Imagine that you are about to make a critical senior appointment for your company. In fact an appointment that is widely regarded as the most crucial and high profile in the industry. Getting the right man (or woman) for the job is essential to your immediate future success. You…
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“I’ll say one thing for him, he has the courage of his ignorance”
This is one of my favourite lines from the classic movie “A Face in the Crowd”, which I watched for the first time this weekend, and which I hugely recommend. Directed in 1957 by Elia Kazan it tells the story of a drifter who finds fame and fortune when randomly…
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