April 2013
1 post
6 tags
Big ideas or small ones?
“The way Page sees it, a 10 percent improvement means that you’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.”
This is a quote from an interview with Larry Page in Wired magazine I read a while back.
Often in what we do for a living, we are getting clients to get to the 10% – if not less. Another quote...
February 2013
2 posts
"I wouldn't let a planner near my boardroom" →
Taking it back to first principles with the APG. Worth a watch.
Reset
They say a computer is only as smart as the people who programme it. We can’t ever programme a computer with consciousness, because we don’t understand it ourselves. To programme such a thing, we need to understand the bottom of the consciousness iceberg – the 90% of unconsciousness that exists behind the scenes.
A computer is a logical machine. A series of 1’s and 0’s. But your computer has...
January 2013
2 posts
Modern data-ing →
How one woman used maths to find love. An interesting take on how building personas using data works.
Contra Weigel
This is a post in response to an ad. The ad in question was for a job as a social strategist at W&K which was featured in an econsultancy article, that quite cheekily linked to this.
The offending slides themselves are by W&K Amsterdams very smart head of planning, Martin Weigel.
It’s an interesting set of thoughts which posits the Byron Sharpe (yet to read it myself)...
August 2012
1 post
Decentralisation or The Death of the Middle
My head of planning big brain type guy, Tom, recently wrote about ‘The Death of a Middle Man’.
He talks specifically about the ‘middle’ man role that agencies play, and how that’s getting smaller and smaller.
Perhaps the title of the article would have been adequately named ‘The Death of The Middle’. Partly because it sounds better, partly because it’s more politically correct,...
June 2012
1 post
The digital nostalgia of Instagram
What’s so magical about Instagram, I wondered. There is something about it’s retro styled set of filters for photos which has caused it to be used by millions.
At it’s core, Instagram adds a layer of old fashioned imperfection or ‘colour’ to a clean cut, sparkling and crisp digital world.
In the past, watching grainy videos or looking at old photos with sun...
April 2012
1 post
The Rare Internet
I was reading an old issue of Wired (I have an unread stack) and stumbled upon Russell Davies article - ‘Where is value now that rarity is extinct?’
An simple example of my definition of rarity: gold and other materials are scarce, of limited supply, and therefore valuable. Russell’s point is that in a digital age where everything is code replicated (as with music), where does...
March 2012
1 post
How Companies Learn Your Secrets →
Target knows their customers are pregnant before they do. Predictive analytics isn’t even the future, IBM paid $1.2 billion for SPSS, a piece of predictive analytics software, in 2010. Some follow up comments on this article here. Worth a read, especially if you add in the parallels between behavioural targeting.
The power of data is manifest - everybody burn your Nectar cards and run!
February 2012
3 posts
5 tags
Gamification and CRM
There has been a lot of talk about the benefits of gamification to businesses and to the world. Turning life into a game to create behavior change sounds like some seriously smart thinking. Especially when it comes to turning activities that are traditionally seen as difficult to get people to do for their own benefit (eating fruit, exercise, watching less of The Only Way Is Essex)
Gamification...
3 tags
Planning the future: what should your next job be?
I’ve recently added a section to the blog which is called ‘Links’.
I’ve linked to some planning blogs that I’ve been reading of late. There are some pretty interesting opinions in them that have shone a light on my small brain so take a look.
I’ve been reading those, scouring the trade press, downloading PDF creds of fancy agencies, looking at ‘new’ job titles (shopper marketing planner and...
7 tags
Future gazing at Facebook
So, amid cries of marketers of ‘this is only the beginning’, let’s future gaze on some possible scenarios for Facebook (not forgetting Google, of course!)
Zuckerberg has only just started
Facebook will undoubtedly hit a billion users soon. Despite lagging growth in developed markets like the UK. But this is a generational issue; those who would adopt have - slow growth will continue but...
January 2012
2 posts
6 tags
Big Brands, Big Data, Big Money?
A housemate of mine who has been very successful in the business of taking an online budget of X million and bringing back a return of 3 times X Million and I were having a chat. Yes, he does earn lots of money.
We spent a while geeking out about online commerce and weighted cross attribution modelling (paying for affiliates as a percentage relative to being first or last click in the journey,...
5 tags
Building brands with products: a reminder.
It seems to me that there may be a shifting in how agencies can start to create real difference in how they operate.
The shift is actually one that appears to hark back to the ‘(g)olden’ days of the advertising world.
Product development was something that advertising agencies were routinely asked to help with. They knew how to read audiences minds with their focus group wizardry. They knew...
