Russell Davies

AAAA account planning conference

So, I think I'm going to be a speaker at the AAAA Account Planning conference in Chicago at the beginning of August.

And I was wondering if anyone who might be going had any requests about what I should talk about.

The possibilities that I've already got something on are:

How We Got To All That Fab Honda Work. (inc. the power of multidimensional brands and the value of doing creative and strategy in the same place, at the same time.)

Planning 3.1 - The Demise of Account Planning In Large Advertising Agencies and the Growth Of Creative Strategy Everywhere Else.

Strategy Beyond Words - (inc. How messages don't really matter, how post-literate cultures build good ads and how integration really happens)

Plus, some jokes, and I have a cunning plan for a game we can all play. And I guess if an interesting conversation ensues on here I can talk about that. That'd be the modern way, after all.

Or does anyone have any other requests?

closer to newsnight

Small excitement in our house. Anne's going to be on Go For It on Radio 4 (7.15, Sunday evening). Talking about We Are What We Do.

We often have this idle conversation about which of our friends is closest to appearing on Newsnight as some sort of pundit or expert. With this move Anne is a step closer, well a step closer than Radio Derby, which is all I've mangaged.

mind the ukulele

jedi_moves.mov

This is probably just for friends and family, or people who know Arthur. It's him demonstrating his Jedi skills. (But you'll be pleased to learn I've mastered the dark arts of compression and it's only 1.5MB)

trip to seattle

Drove from Portland to Seattle to visit an old friend. Very nice to see her. Stopped in first at a Starbucks and tried the new Hear Music thingy. I liked it. Though the music policy seems to have been designed to attract the music dollars of marketing professionals with little interest in music, but it's a diverting way to pass the time. And it's very easy to build and burn your own CD. Assuming you mostly want music by people who play guitars.

Then we strolled around the Fremont Solstice Festival, which is very Pacific NW. And therefor fabulous. Lots of art cars there. Many of which looked familiar from my days in Portland, though maybe the same themes tend to recur.

And, of course, there were lots of utilikilts on show. Fantastic. It's not an alternative Pacific North West event without a substantial utilikilt presence. Well done gents. (I have no hesitation in recommending the Utilikilt to you as the World's Leading Men's Unbifurcated Garment.)

when you're bored in a hotel

you take odd pictures

what happened?

Steve over at Bowblog has been wondering about his stats. He's getting 11,000 unique visitors a month. Which impresses the hell out of me. I don't think I can tell that from Typepad. They tell me I'm getting about 200 hits a day which seems pathetic by comparison. Though there's more at ebcb.

But, anyway, I've been obsessing about something else. I've been using bloglines a lot recently. Splendid service. One of the things it does is tell you how many people are using them to subscribe to a feed from your site. For ages it's been 57 people for russelldavies.com. But just yesterday I've noticed that it's now 56. I've lost someone! And it's obsessing me. What happened? What did I say? There's quite a low barrier to just leaving the subscription there so they must have very actively deleted me. it's quite depressing.

Oh well.

our own little morrisey

Arthur and I were mucking about with the ukulele (which he insists on calling a piano) when he started making up these fantastically odd songs and we started recording them.

He's currently experimenting with micro-tonalities and quite Morrisey-like lyrics ('it's hard when you're five').

What was even more fun was the look on his face when he listened back to himself on the headphones.

MP3

quiet desperation

I was cleaning out a cupboard and I found this t-shirt. It's from the days when we had (and were losing) the Microsoft account, maybe about 1999? We used to make all sorts of t-shirts for presentations in those days, all written in this nicely long-winded, thoughtful, amusing style.

But it was such a battle. We use to compromise on everything, all the time, just so we could get to the next meeting and then the next meeting and eventually get something on air. So one day, before a huge meeting some of the creatives had these t-shirts made.

I'm very proud of mine.

And I bet this sentiment feels familiar to a lot of people.

Book tag

There's now a book tag going around, like the Musical Baton. Cup Of Java tagged me, which is nice, but I'm now starting to worry the whole thing's getting a bit spammy so I'm not going to pass it on.

Anyway, it's a good opportunity for me to demonstrate what a Philistine I am...

Total number of books owned:

Couple of thousand? Most of them products of living in Portland for five years - Portland's the place where second hand books go to die.

The Last Book I Bought:

Not The End Of The World by Christopher Brookmyre. Not really started this yet, but at the moment I'm reading a new Brookmyre every three or four days. You can race through them, they're funny and clever and full of explosions and shootings.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Imaginative, funny scifi. And the best scifi writers are like the best planners - they draw all kinds of random threads together, they imagine possible futures and they tell compelling stories.

The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I get the sense that Tutfte isn't that nice a bloke. And his stance on PowerPoint is ridiculous and over-simplistic (which is ironic given his stance on the presentation of information) but he makes the most gorgeous books ever. And they're full of wisdom and provocation.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. As with the Stephenson, except when you're dead bored, stuck at Schiphol, you can sometimes pretend you're a character in this.

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers. Brilliant book. I've read this dozens of times. About a murder at a British advertising agency in the 20s or 30s. Blustery account guys. Dilettante copywriters. Irritating clients. Drugs. They're all in here. Nothing changes.

so you're a trainee planner...

This is a response to Lisa's comment below. She's got a trainee place as a planner and she's looking for advice. I've been a bit slow about this. Sorry.

Here are some random thoughts from me, hopefully other people will add theirs. I'm hoping so because I'm not sure I'll be able to come up with anything non-obvious.

Firstly, be pleased and proud. There aren't a lot of trainee planners around and you're right I don't think people will know what to do with you. But you've done dead well to get hired, so you must have something special about you.

1. Generate enthusiasm

Planner's are mostly aspiring academics and/or intellectuals. So they're often tempted to do the cool brainy thing; all knowing cynicism and ironic detatchment. Don't be drawn in. Not many can get away with it, and it annoys the hell out of your colleagues, who'll be tempted to hate you anyway because you don't appear to have a real job.

Be enthusiastic, positive and optimistic. Do a lot of offfering to help, you won't get taken up on it a lot because it's often too much trouble to brief someone than to do it yourself. But you should offer.

2. Make friends

The obvious thing to do is suck up to all sorts of senior people and if you can make friends with impressive senior people then great, but you probably won't see enough of them to do that. So make friends with everyone you can.

Hang out with that junior creative team who no-one seems to have any time for, or that regional account person who everyone ignores. a) they've got stuff to teach you and they'll probably take the time to do it (senior people won't take time to train you and they can't remember how they did all the basic stuff anyway) b) they won't be junior forever.

It's especially important to make friends with all the people who actually get stuff done; admins, production, traffic, travel, TV, IT. A lot of your first year will be about getting documents made, or videos or stuff, you probably won't be making lots of ads or meeting lots of clients. So you need to get the agency machine working on your behalf. You need to know how to get things photocopied when the photocopiers are all broken. Or how to make that presentation you've got to do to your planning director look really cool. Don't dismiss these things as trivial or beneath you. Most of agency life is execution not strategy, you need to know how to get things done.

3. Collect ideas

You should be trying to build a personal portfolio - not just the things you've worked on, but the things you've thought of, the things you've noticed. Make sure you notice and collect everything that happens. And, make sure you collect your own opinions. Look at all the ads your agency makes, work out what you think of them, have an opinion on them. Be ready to talk about that. You should probably get yourself ready to have opinions on everything. Whether you stay where you are, or whether you move, you're going to have to get used to talking about communications and offering an opinion - so start practicing.

4. Read And Watch

You should be devouring all kinds of books and thinking about brands right now. All the usual suspects. Adam Morgan. Malcolm Gladwell. All the APG books. Mark Earls. Jon Steel. All them.

But the more interesting and useful stuff will be the documents and presentations that the people in the agency generate.

Because they'll be generating stuff about subjects that are too small for anyone to write books about. Fishfingers and Buses and Yellow Fats and Consumer Perceptions Of Interest-Rate Led Advertising.

This stuff is going be your trade so you need to start finding out what it looks and smells like. And you need to work out what's good and what's bad. Read every document you can get hold of, go to every presentation they'll let you attend. Steal from the good stuff, work out why the bad stuff's bad. Start to develop a personal presentational style before you get infected too much with plannerly-ness.

5. I've run out of steam.

Anyone got anything else?