As my wife and I settle into our new life here in Dubai more and more, we are on the one hand very pleasantly surprised by this hybridisation of European, North American and Arabic cultures, but on the other hand there are things from certain origins (particularly the US) that we are starting to feel…… Continue reading Has home entertaining died?
Digital is not a channel, it is part of your product
How about we start from scratch? How about we look at the different pieces of the organisation and figure out how to apply digital, mobile, social, broadband and interactive to the existing structure? How would things look different if we started from a zero sum base? To start with, I think social wouldn’t want to…… Continue reading Digital is not a channel, it is part of your product
Keys, phone, wallet – what’s in your pocket?
What are the key things that you check are in your pocket when you leave the house? In days gone by, before the era of mobile phones, before credit cards and while some people still had housekeepers, the only important thing to have on you when you left the house was money. This was what…… Continue reading Keys, phone, wallet – what’s in your pocket?
Becoming a SIF is a communications opportunity
As my personal situation takes me on the route to becoming a SIF, not a Structural Integrity Field (for the Star Trek fans) but a single income family, it strikes me how much of a communications opportunity this is, and how little work is really done, either on turning these sort of challenges into comms…… Continue reading Becoming a SIF is a communications opportunity
Data is the new marketing drug
The title of this post is confusing, because data isn’t really new, but maybe we haven’t thought of it as a drug before. Data has been around in marketing as long as P&G and J&J have been developing new products and running focus groups, whether the data is quantitative or qualitative it has always existed,…… Continue reading Data is the new marketing drug
Consumers need a map and a guide
This evening I went for a run… in the dark. I had been out walking several times around the lake close to our house and I figured that if I simply stayed at the edge of the lake I would find my way home – this is a good rule of thumb (except when you…… Continue reading Consumers need a map and a guide
Onboarding for change
We are always talking about change, whether it is change for our clients as we sell them new creative or try to get them to evolve their products, or change for ourselves as agencies as we see our market, region, and industry evolving before our eyes – but with all this talk, I wonder whether…… Continue reading Onboarding for change
User experience in the pitch process
My previous CEO at RMG Connect (now JWT) Claude Chaffiotte (@ClaChaf) once compared the pitch process to a visit to the doctor, saying that “rarely do you go to the doctor and he tells you the ailments of his last six patients and what he did for them” – but this is what most agencies…… Continue reading User experience in the pitch process
Why advertising needs entrepreneurs
Regardless of whether you are part of a hot-shop 17-man creative boutique, or one of a 450-man flagship office of a global agency network, the advertising business still needs more than a healthy dose of entrepreneurs – and I think the industry is forgetting that. The challenge with this business, however large the brand name…… Continue reading Why advertising needs entrepreneurs
Tomorrow’s creative team
Back when Bill Bernbach changed the landscape of agencies by partnering art directors and copywriters we thought that this was a major revolution in agency team structure – finally the art department which had up until then really only been thought of as production took its merited role alongside the copywriters to come up with…… Continue reading Tomorrow’s creative team