On my perfect day (Sunday) I went to a flea market. Which you could call fleamarketing. And I thought hm, I wonder if anyone's come up with a theory of marketing and called it that. I'm not sure if someone should or not. It's the kind of thing you could call a blog. Or the kind of nice word you could backfit a theory into, of...I don't know, sifting around old bits of cheap, dusty rubbish to find hidden treasures. Kind of nice.
I've been thinking a lot the last week about brands as by-products. (It's been a slow week). You know - like the old saying that happiness is a by-product of the right kind of human activity (rather than an achievable, primary end). Like that. Brands as by-products of the right kind of relationship building between companies &tc. and the people they want to reach. (Thinking about it properly and looking it up I realised epiphenomenon might be a nicer word but I found even myself going ephiphe-what...so I'm sticking to the less pretentious by-product. It's catchier. Sort of.)
I could write a whole lot more guff about why, but it'll all be familiar to people who get frustrated sometimes by the use of the word 'brand' (and all its conjugations) as a non-specific band aid or euphemism, or misnomer for other stuff. Stuff that's a lot simpler. Like 'products' or 'services'. Or 'things', or 'people'. Or 'logo'.
Now I don't read or write about this stuff (blog-wise) that often any more. So I'm sure lots of other people have got here already. But it was a breakthrough of sorts for me. Not so much in thinking, but in describing.
Right that's that over with then. As we were.
Something Russell said a while ago persists in my head. And now that I'm in the business of working hand in glove with creatives it's more and more at the front of my mind. It's the idea of planting ideas for people to find and appropriate. If you want to be that kind of plannner - the kind who has ideas. There's something quite sneaky about this.
Which all in all I guess makes planners the Derren Browns of communications.
So if anyone else if planning to be at any of thee, let me know. Always nice to see friendly faces at these things.
Well. It's been a busy old welcome back into the Bloom fold. Brilliant but busy. Meaning I've not had as much time as usual for posting (mine or other people's), which is a bit of a shame. And I've got this kind of backlog of posts from ages ago that I don't know if I'll ever get round to. Well I know I won't if I keep writing about writing them like this. Not sure if it's just me, but posts tend to be like stifled comments in a conversation. If you don't come out with them sooner rather than later, it's just too late. They're not as interesting or pertinent as they seemed at first.
I had a long post about jobhunting and choosing. And catching up with news I see that our Paul's done a very good one of his own. So I'll refer to that instead. But I do want to add to it under his point system.
1. Yes. And yes again. And then when you feel like goalposts are being moved in terms of being offered something that's not quite what you thought, ask yourself again what you want. In particular, if people you know well (and people you don't for that matter) look at you when you're explaining why you're leaving somewhere you love / choosing somewhere you're not sure about and shout 'WHY?' then you probably have good reason to think twice.
This overlaps with Paul's second point. My mum looked at me like I'd said I was going to prison when I said I was going to work on a certain account.
2. You owe yourself a favour to go with your heart, not your head. Lots of people would beg to differ so maybe you don't. Unless you're like me.
3. Yes again. But for me meeting planners was an introduction to a job I'd never heard of. And even if I'd heard of it before meeting them I wouldn't have been as taken with it as I was when I did. Planning is easy like this. If you meet people of any discipline though and think 'My god there are people like me! Earning a living from it!' Then it's a good sign.
4-11. Yes yes. All of that.
I'll add 12. If anyone asks you what animal (shape/colour) you'd be in a planning interview I'd probably just walk out. I was asked this and ended up answering 'a cat, but a clumsy one' and then felt cross all day that that was a completely ridiculous answer. Actually it's a completely ridiculous question. If they're that bad at figuring you out you don't want to work with them.
And yes, a 13. Know more about really interesting work out there than your interviewer. This is where moving from working with creatives from all over the world to interviewing for planning jobs worked well. It's good when you're talking about great examples of strategy not to have to resort to Honda all the time. And people love it when you can introduce them to new things. They won't have had enough time to explore them.
Now this is how to choose music for ads. Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem in the new Nike Air Jordan spot from W+K. (Nice uploading work Claudiu.)
If this doesn't work, try here...
Via Alex Ross.
It's very good to see some old faces.
This is Worsley.
And some new ones...
This is Ted.
Worsley makes it hard for you to leave once you're in. In a very literal sense.
I've had a post fermenting for ages about finding ideas and sources of inspiration. Well, not exactly fermenting. I'd written one sentence and then put it off. The thought was about finding inspiration. And I came to it from the overwhelmed feeling I get very often when marvelling at the sheer volume of material out there to get through - the good and the bad. It's reading neurosis. And not just that, but ideas neurosis. How do consistently prolific people get to be so consistently prolific? How does this person always find the good stuff to read? How do people know what to read and what to look for?
It was a terrible feeling as a student when it dawned on me that I needed to come up with my own 'new' ideas. You know, proper ones. That might be published. I nearly asked for my money back. After a semester of reading genuises, you're supposed to contribute something sensible. And valid. And if that wasn't enough, there's no way in a decade of Sundays you could cover all the material before starting to write. But when the panic subsided the most helpful thought I had was that I was the only one reading this stuff the way I read it. I was the only one making exactly the connections I was making. Which is not to say my contribution was anything other than tiny and nothing if not insubstantial. But it was original. You find little holes in things to crawl through. You piece things together that seem ridiculously abstract, refract them through your total experience, and build them into something bigger. Which is fun. Even though I've made it sound not fun.
Recently there's been a lot of uptake on Where Ideas Come From. Which Scamp put to the test. I know I'm firmly in Faris' camp when I say that we shouldn't feel bad about stealing. But I think I'm interested in what kind of thieves we need to be. We need to steal well.
Richard talks about reading weird shit. I couldn't agree more. And I think the reason why, is because if you look at anything complex properly, absolutely anything, the rewards and parallels are massive. Take music. Counterpoint. Polyphony. Compression. Take philosophy. Different minds. 'Affective' communication. Language in itself - and particularly specialist language from an alien discipline - often acts as a metaphor, or just as helpfully, a potential metaphor that falls down, for your area.
And that's why it's easy to wonder how people have enough time to go exploring weird stuff that's somehow informative for their primary interest. It's because it doesn't matter they're reading, it matters that they're reading it right. Zadie Smith wrote an interesting thing recently with an idea about ideal readers: how the task of the reader, if it's done right, is equal to that of the writer, in stature.
So I suppose what I find interesting is, yes we steal, but what kind of person does it take to steal well? The kind of person who as long as their material's rich, will get something good from it. As a headhunter I wanted a swear box in the office for the phrase Big Ideas People. Or just to start hitting people every time I heard it. It gave me this mental image of dangerously overweight people with ideas coming out of their orifices. (I'm weird like that). If what I'm on about is right, it's not ideas people we're after. (It might be partly, but that's not the half of it.) Russell's talked in this marvellous interview about how rare it is to find creative geniuses in communications in the sense of eureka-yelling Da Vinci types.
So I'm not sure what the words to call these people are. Other than creative generalists, of course. Appropriators, maybe. Channellers, magpies, assimilators, refracters, strainers, fermenters, adventurers, kaleidoscopes. Yes that's better. We need Big Kaleidescope People.
I'd like to pick the brains of all you planners and creative generalists.
What I want to know (especially in light of discussions like this) is:
What, out of all the training you ever did, was the most helpful?
What does today's planner need most in his toolkit?
They might seem obvious questions. In recruitment they always blather on about toolkits and 'skill sets', presupposing a general knowledge of what they actually are. And of course obvious ones are quant skills and qual skills, blah blah blah. And I know different kinds of planners will need different skills. But I want to know the specific things you've learned that have set you in the best stead, in your experience. If it's research skills, what exactly, and how did you learn? Anything you've found indispensable.
If you wouldn't mind sharing.
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