campaign

I started writing a column for Campaign last week. (First stab is above, if you have a Brand Republic account you can find it here.) I haven’t done something this nerve-wracking for a long time. You’d think I’d be blasé about writing stuff with all the blogging I do, they only need about 440 words a week, but it’s actually rather stressful. (You'll also notice that I chickened out of anything too original for the first one, rewriting some of the stuff from the Big Thinking conference. But I'm hoping to be more original from now on.)

It’s partly that there’s an actual immovable deadline, I can’t just stick up a closed notice. Or a picture of a tree. It’s partly that I’ve been reading Campaign for 20 years and find it slightly intimidating. And it’s partly that (in my own head) you lot are pleasant blog-folk willing everyone to do well and tolerant of mistakes and the readers of Campaign are vicious industry-insiders who can’t wait to pounce on any slip or dumb idea.

I know that’s ridiculous. And that more people probably read this than read Campaign and that there’s probably quite a lot of overlap between the two, but still, that’s how I feel. (Another difference is that if I’d been writing this for Campaign I might have felt obliged to go back and edit out one of those probablys). I should also say how excited I am to be doing it. One of the reasons I left Nike was to do more writing for money and it’s rather thrilling that I’ve got some writing work this quickly.

But writing these things is also teaching me how much harder writing for print is than writing for a blog. For me, anyway.

Firstly, you can’t just link to examples. If I want to mention some esoteric new thing I have to explain it, I can’t just point to it. And there’s the same problem with credit. Quite a lot of the thoughts in the first piece came from a chat with Richard. Linking to him is easy. Explaining all that (and who he is etc which you’d have to do in a print piece) eats up too many of my 440 words.

Secondly, it’s so slow. Since I was on holiday last week I sent them two pieces at once. The one for next week is about YouTube and mentions Coke and Mentos in passing. Then today I read about the new eepybird thing, which will be out on Monday. Which instantly had me panicking that maybe I should change what I’d written, though looking at it again, I think it’s fine. But, that’s the problem; print means you can’t just bounce off events, you need to think about bigger things, ideas that might last longer than a week.

Campaign have also been very accommodating about me wanting to blog about what I’m writing, I was very keen to do that, because I find sharing work on here incredibly useful, so the plan is this:

Campaign comes out on a Thursday. My deadline is the Friday before, so I plan to put a rough version of what I’m going to write about up on here on the Monday or Tuesday before that. I’m not sure yet what ‘rough version’ will mean, it might be just some early ideas, or a mind map, or a bundle of stuff that seems related. If anyone wants to comment on that I’d be hugely grateful. I’ll put the finished pieces up on here after they’ve come out, as jpgs and text, so they’re searchable. If people want to comment on the finished version that’d be excellent too. And I’ve created a Campaign category so you’ll be able to find all the pieces at once.

(Of course I say ‘all the pieces’ it keeps occurring to me that I might suck at this and my career as a Campaign columnist will only stretch to two  weeks. Ah well. We’ll see.)

Comments

[Rob Mortimer]

Nice stuff. I like the idea of starting from a tiny spend and then working back up to a big budget.

So much better work could be made if agencies didnt have the luxury of a multi million media spend.

[doug]

what fun!

obviously you'll be feeling the pressure stepping into the big man Marquis' boots, though ;-)

[James Cherkoff]

You need an angle.

[Ben]

You're right "that's ridiculous".

It feels like you're writing whilst someone is watching. What's nice about this blog are the little 'umms' and 'don't knows' and 'not sures'. The honesty and humility that's so lacking in this industry. Sure, that's easier on Typepad than it is in the Dead Tree Press. I suppose I'm saying just write the same as you blog.

But hey, it's the first one and I don't have a column in Campaign...

[Colman]

But you were on Radio 4 Ben, twice.

[Richard Buchanan]

It's meta-physical.

[John Griffiths]

2 comments - Verity Johnston at Arc proposes zero sum budgeting - starting with the assumption that you have no money and then building your budget with ROI. I think about that a lot. The reflex spend culture of agencies (What's the budget?)is a disgrace.

But I'm also reminded of when Kay Scorah did the round of Pedigree Petfoods clients when she was head of planning at Bates to plead with them to let the agency make some ads with an original idea in them on the grounds that it would allow them to reduce their ad budgets. They thought she was mad. You see the way a marketer gets promoted is by boasting that they control budgets of x million. They want more for the money. But most marketers don't want to reduce their marketing spend - it's career suicide.

Which raises the interesting conjecture that perhaps marketing spend is too critical to be trusted to marketers (or agency types) without radical restructuring (so THAT'S what's going on?)

[Colman]

It's a brilliant way of thinking of new ideas and new thinking, but I don't understand why they are necessarily better.

I think the marketers get promoted due to budget controlled is an unhelpful caricature.