- Page 22 of 35 - Radical thinking for the brand advice business

04/01/2008Uncategorized

The adliterate address 2008

Greetings adliterate readers everywhere and a belated happy New Year.

I’m not in the habit of writing self referential posts but a little bit of an agenda for the year never goes amiss.

2008 marks the third year in the life of this website, starting as it did in March 2005. And my sincere hope is that I can continue to deliver a relatively frequent diet of new ideas, contrary thinking and unpalatable opinions.

It also sees me take up gainful employment once more as I am now Director of Strategy for Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK, so can once again trouble the ad industry from the inside.

Now conventional wisdom suggests this will see a decline in blogging activity. I really hope not. In fact, having had nine months outside the ad industry doing brand consultancy, I found it more difficult to generate content with all that free blogging time that when I was working in an agency.

I guess the easy bit about blogging is finding the time, the difficult bit is finding the ideas – because if you have an idea then the time finds itself.

And being surrounded by the world of brands and everyday brand problems is always more conducive to having ideas than being at home with the mac.

So fear not readers – the online journey goes onward.

And, of course, if there is anything that you’d like to see more or less of this year drop me a line.

07/12/2007Provocations

The death of serendipity

by Richard30 Comments

Serendipity is not only a beautiful word it is a very beautiful thing.

One of the great delights of life, serendipity ploughs a furrow between co-incidence on the one hand and fate on the other while being part of neither.

But I’m rather afraid that it is progressively disappearing from our lives, collateral damage in the quest to deliver and receive ever more relevant entertainment and communications.

27/11/2007Brands

Minnows in a world of giants

by Richard4 Comments

I did a panel session a few weeks ago with Russell at Promax, the annual conference and awards for the TV promotional people in the UK.

We were on the same bill (well they were on the main stage and we were in the studio) as some real giants of the media world – Will Gompertz (who heads up Tate Media), Emily Bell (the genius behind the Guardian’s mastery of the world of online journalism) and the legendary Stephen Berlin Johnson (he of ‘The Ghost Map’ and ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ fame).

I was scared of messing up so I made some notes about the subjects we were due to cover and I thought I’d post them. They are a bit scrappy but if you are interested you will get the general drift.

25/11/2007Brands

Why we love Innocent

by Richard17 Comments

The marketing community are often accused of being rather over enthusiastic about Innocent – harbouring feelings about it that aren’t perhaps shared by the wider world.

Indeed you would have been hard pressed to find people out side the North London media community at this summer’s Innocent Village Fete, I even spotted James Murdoch there.

21/11/2007Provocations

I don’t want you to be my friend on facebook

by Richard28 Comments

When I say I don’t want you to be my friend I don’t mean you, dear readers.

I mean brands.

Even lovely Innocent thinks I might want to chum up to them on the social network de jour and I don’t, I’m sorry I don’t.

08/11/200712/05/2012Articles and columns, Provocations

Emotion is the greatest form of interaction

by Richard19 Comments

Image courtesy of Ali K I recently had the pleasure of judging two sets of industry accolades. The first was the Account Planning Group’s Creative…

31/10/2007Advertising, Planning

Coherence is more important than consistency

by Richard11 Comments

One of the things that I always bang on about without really thinking about it in depth is the idea that Clients and agencies need to place less emphasis on consistency and more on coherence. So I thought I’d worry this one out a bit.

18/10/2007Articles and columns

Are brand ideas too big for advertising?

by Richard18 Comments

This my most recent column for New Media Age . In it I expand on the idea, that you will also find in the Battle of Big Thinking speech, that brand ideas now too big for advertising.

11/10/2007Planning

Battle of Big Thinking

by Richard1 Comment

If anyone is interested I have uploaded my speech from The APG’s Battle of Big Thinking as well as the slides.

For regular readers many of the themes will be very familiar.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

05/10/2007Uncategorized

Wisdom must be caught not taught

by Richard4 Comments

I’m in love with the aphoristic form as you well know. And I think they are extremely handy in our business. Certainly in persuading people of a point of view or course of action – such as David Ogilvy’s why keep a dog and bark yourself, or Bill Bernbach’s we must stop believing in what we sell and start selling what we believe in.

The are also great in framing strategies, approaches and ideas – no one is interested in your positioning, they only want to know your position or Coherence is more important than consistency for example. And on occasions great brand thoughts can take an aphoristic form, I’d argue they are the ones that get remembered best.

So imagine my delight when Russell gave me “The World in a phrase – A brief history of the aphorism” by James Geary.

02/10/2007Planning

A short story about provenance

by Richard7 Comments

I recently enjoyed an evening at Leith’s cookery school in well heeled Kensington.

All in all a very good evening matching wine to food even if I stood out like an ad man at a posh cookery school wine tasting night.

Anyway, there was rather a fascinating story about accessibility, commodification and provenance that I thought I would share with you, my brand loving friends.

Image courtesy of Rune T

29/09/2007Advertising

Reporting from the digital front line

by Richard7 Comments

I still maintain that very few people in advertising agencies really understand what clever digital agencies can do for their clients.

And I had this further drummed into me last week as one of the judges of the NMA and Marketing Week’s Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards.

So I thought I’d jot down some observations on the work from the perspective of a planner from an above the line tradition trying to understand what is going on.