I have long believed that a planner’s job must continue right up to the playout of an ad – not just working on the client’s business but working on the ad itself.
For me a planner needs to be hold onto the project whilst it is in production and post production right up until the clock number is allocated.
I call this continuity planning for some inelegant reason.
There are a number of things happening this autumn to commerate the life and work of Stephen King the co (and coincidental) founder of the planning discipline (along with Stanley Pollitt).
My efforts have been focused on the inagural Stephen King Strategy Agency of the Year Award in November but the APG is also launching a collection of Stephen’s writings on the 1st of October.
So it is time to get acquinted or re-acquainted with the great man’s work – whether from this post, by buying the book from the APG or rocking up to the book launch. If you want to go to the latter (£50 including a copy of the book – loads of lumanaires are going to speak so get your planning director to cough up) email the APG pronto here .
I am a big fan of the Cadbury’s gorilla ad and fully expect to see some stonking sales results coming in thick and fast.
In the final instance I just think somethimes you need a bit of this – good old fashioned salience delivered by a fame seeking commercial.
For all the analysis, particularly online, I had overlooked they way it was perfectly built to be remixed – or simply have a new track laid over it.
So here are a few of the best remixes I could find on you tube. My personal favourite is of course Total Eclispe of the Heart.
Led Zeppelin are reforming for a one off gig at the O2 in London on November 26th, so far 20 million people have tried to get a ticket.
And here is another thing I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.
An insight in a razor campaign. I’ll leave it to you to discover but it’s one for the dad’s (like me) out there.
A mentor of mine once told me that there are only two types of planners in the world – nice planners and nasty planners.
He maintained that by far the best kind were the nasty planners.
Image courtesy of thepres6
As ‘Russell Davies lite’ I often get to fill in when the great man is otherwise engaged – weddings, after dinner speeches, visits of foreign dignatories, that kind of thing.
And so I did some holiday cover on his Campaign Magazine column recently. The first was a tongue in cheek look at the way social media is helping to build bridges within the marketing community – between disciplines and between practitioners in different countries.
I have started writing a regular column on advertising for New Media Age in the UK.
In this first article (which appeared on 26th July 2007) I comment on the way immediate and free access to the world’s creative product has destroyed the cockyness and self confidence of UK adland by showing us we no longer lead the world in this arena. In part I lay the blame on the sterility of the London agency landscape.
I had the great pleasure, along with the entirety of the North London Croc wearing classes, of spending Sunday at the Innocent Village Fete in The Regent’s Park.
All the usual stuff applies about how lovely Innocent are (too lovely perhaps?) but what interested me was the brand ecosystem that Innocent is nurturing around themselves. Not least, because I have talked about many of the companies in this ecosystem in the posts on Dynamic Micro Brands.
Time for some good old fashioned brand fawning.
Anyone from our business worth their salt knew that when Levi Roots wrapped up his presentation to the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den in March that his Reggae Reggae Sauce was a sure fire bet.
The sauce, so far made only in Levi Root’s own kitchen for sale at Nottinghill Carnival, already had all the ingredients of a Dynamic Micro Brand. All it needed was someone to get his distribution sorted and help find a manufacturer to meet the new levels of demand.
Lots of nonsense is talked about brands.
Especially these days when the entire marketing community seems to have gone beardy weirdy, believing that cosumers and brands are now best buddies. This approach largely ignores the small issue of capitalism – the way that businesses extract a profit from the consumer.
For me the primary service a brand delivers to a business is in getting consumers to do things that are irrational and often against their best interests – to trade-off price, quality or service. If not why would a business have them?
And two retail experiences pointed this up to me in their very different ways – Wholefoods Market and Ikea.
For a while now Todd Andrlick has been compiling a weekly ranking of Marketing blogs called the Power 150. Earlier this year he expanded it outside the US to create a Global Power 150, and for the first time blogs like Russell’s, John’s, Gavin’s,James’ and mine got included.
So authoritative is this ranking that Advertising Age has decided to adopt it as it’s official benchmark for marketing blogs and bloggers (in part as a way of communicating how influential or not a bloggers voice is, when quoted editorially) and will host and run the Global Power 150.
What is exciting is that the industry is starting to take the blogosphere seriously and has, in return, given it a univeral standard to judge the potency of its individual voices.
One wonders whether the UK marketing and advertising press will start to support its indigenous maketing blogs in a similar fashion, rather than seeing them as a quirky and colourful fringe activity.
The BBC is in trouble.
It stands accused of endemic audience deception – most specifically over the fabrication of phone and interactive competitions where the participants have no chance of winning and the declared winners are either fictitious or members of the production staff.
Oh and there was some argy bargy about the Royal Family as well but any opportunity to give the parasites a kicking is fine by me.
