Russell Davies

video - an interesting life after planning

Sorry for lack of video last week, but here's a special treat to make-up, an interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell of Blue Artichoke Films about her planning career, her post-planning career and the connections between the two. She was a planner for ten years but has now quit that to write and direct "explicit erotic films that both men and women can enjoy".

Her planning life ranged from brands like the Indy Racing League to things like Fresh Step cat litter. Her film career (one movie completed, one almost completed) also includes an MA thesis entitled "Engaging the Body: The Possibilities and Limitations of Character-Based Theory in Explaining Pornography", being a curater at the Museum Of Sex New York and doing a lecture at Leo Burnett, Amsterdam called "Dirty Movies and How They Can Work For You"

It's about 10 minutes.

videopod version 60MB
quicktime version 15MB
audio 14MB

Assignment 6 - thinking about design

It's all go at Account Planning School of the Web Towers. Assignment 5 is due in today (Friday) and I've decided, once again, to lean on the crutch of a guest lecturer for Assignment 6.

This time the estimable folk at The Design Conspiracy. They've set the excellent task below, and, just in case it's not obvious, they've made this up :

Accidental Brand – Organarchie

In 2000 two cousins Nigel and Zac set up an organic café called Organarchie. Approximately 80% of the food they sell is organic, they don’t sell Coke or Pepsi but they do sell juices and smoothies. They sell coffee and tea, which isn’t organic but is Fairtrade.

The first café was opened in Spitalfields and they now have 7 branches. Crouch End, the City, Waterloo, Tottenham Court Rd, Chelsea and Embankment. The Chelsea one doesn’t do very well, whereas the Waterloo one is booming. Tourists coming straight off the Eurostar seem to love the place.

In 2004 they were voted the 3rd best ‘Healthy Place to Eat in London’ by Time Out. In 2005 they were voted the 2nd best.

The two founders disagree slightly on the future direction of the business. Nigel wants to close the Chelsea store, consolidate their offer and work towards selling 100% organic products. Zac wants to expand and in particular to open a café in Paris and then Brussels.

Nigel and Zac have never done any branding or marketing. The logo was designed by a friend of Zac’s when they opened (see above). The café features no promotional stuff at all and the only thing that could be tentatively called marketing is the big yellow menu board.

Which ever route they take they realise that they need to take the brand to the next level. They are aware that they have an Accidental Brand and they have called upon a brand consultancy to help them move the brand forward and give them advice on what to do next. Nigel and Zac are not wedded to the logo (Nigel doesn’t really like it) but they insist on keeping the name, obviously.

You need to decide what Nigel and Zac should do next and how they will achieve these goals. How will the brand need to change and how will the brand get to the “next level”?

Once you have your strategy you need to brief the designers, giving them a background to the brand and the new direction. Make the company come alive and really give the designers a feel for the place. The food, the customers, the atmosphere.

The brief will be a PowerPoint presentation (no word docs, no PDF’s and definitely no blogs) containing no more than 10 slides.

And that's it. Interesting isn't it? Entries are to be in by the end of April (midnight GMT). They will be judged by Ben and his fellow conspirators but send all your entries to me at the usual address: russell at russelldavies.com

idle cameraphone games

Passing time at Heathrow.

russello

Doesn't all this web2.0 remind you of a previous age? Eveything's called something like Mispellr or WebSitee which is a cute modern varient of the sweet old fifies trick of everything being called whatitwaso. Brasso. Oxo. Pudlo. Leaving out a ltter is the 21st century version of adding an O.

Still, much better than that horrible early nineties made-up word craze.

space tag

The creativespaces flickr tag is coming along nicely.

I especially like this shot.

idle nonsense about fire alarms

I'm currently wifing at a Starbucks because every fire and burglar alarm in our building is going off and they've been tripped in such an extreme manner that it seems like no-one in the country has the authority to turn them off. I think we need a Jedi Master to do it.

Which is an interesting co-incidence because our flat is right next to a Holiday Inn and last night we had another false alarm incident there. It happens quite often, maybe every three or four months. We're awoken in the night by what sounds like a huge crowd quitely muttering outside our windown. And it turns out to be exactly that. Under our window is the mustering point, so they assemble thre in our pyjamas until the fire brigade tell them they can go back in.

And it never occured to me that hotels must have false alarms all the time but that unless you work in one, or live next to one, you wouldn't really know.

Anyway. No real news or information here. Just passing time until the Jedi Master arrives.

trend hedge

Grant McCracken has written a splendid post with rules for trend-watching. His number 9 rule is this:

The trend team should be making predictions.

The people in the capital markets routinely go back and try to determine where they went wrong. They scrutinize their assumptions. They ferret out the error. Unless we wish trend watching to be one big cocktail party in which everyone merely shouts opinions at one another, something more substantial is called for.

Which made me think that someone should be building a futures/prediction market exactly like the one that DARPA suggested for security experts. Or like Celebdaq. Because there are all sorts of useful data sources which people who claim to be trend experts ought to be willing to place predictive bets on. Sources like TGI, TRU, or Yankelovich. You could buy futures in the increases or decreases in agreement with statements like 'a real man can down 8 pints in a single sitting' or all those classic TGI statements.

How hard could this be? Why aren't all the quant companies doing this? Surely they could tap into all sorts of Wisdom of Crowds predictive genius and sell it as a product. If only I was more entrepeneurial, I'd be doing it.

And then you'd have a great, objective tool for measuring a Future Lab against a Future Factory.

How much fun would that be? You'd have Trend Hedgers, Global Trend Trading, Slush Trends, Insider Trending. An Alternative Trend Market for emerging trends. TrenDaq. Brilliant.

Or is all this already happening and I've just missed it?

urban spam

This is an example of what I mean by Urban Spam (not the fact that this coffee cup is on some street furniture, I just put it there to shoot it).

We got given this cup and 'to-go sleeve' at Coffee Republic. It's got a rubbish Motorola ad on it. Motorola have spammed me, with Coffee Republic's complicity. By buying the coffee you willingly and happily get into a relationship with Coffee Republic. You don't sign up to receieve ads. I didn't get a discount from Coffee Republic for consuming this ad, though they presumably got some money from Motorola.

It's not a big deal, I'm not hugely bothered, but it's all part of the last desperate interruptive marketing arms race, which is just going to annoy every consumer on earth before the industry learns that attention needs to earned not bought.

We should all stop before someone invents a Dr Strangelovey interruptive marketing doomsday machine that we can't turn off.

clear positioning

Too many corporate positioning ideas are way too vague. This one isn't. I love this one.

And what I love about it is that this chaotic environment, which could be seen as a negative is made into a postive by the positioning. ie - if they'd promised 'holistic sewing machine solutions' this messy place would have seemed shoddy and lacklustre. But because they've said they're experts it makes them seem like real passionate tinkerers and obsessives. To me anyway.

And on the same theme; here's a joke at the expense of the US Democratic party and their horribly vague positioning. Which could stand for thousands of brands. We've all worked for brands that stand for anything.

tubemap.org

This sounds like a good idea. Maybe I can combine it with a trip to a cafe. It's like art catching up with web 2.0.