Looking back at 2015

I haven’t written one of these posts since 2012. Of course at the time it was meant to become a yearly thing. I’m having another go at it now I’m regularly writing here. It’s a post to wrap up the year. There might be a bit of overlap with what I wrote in a recent Sundae newsletter, I’m expanding on some of those ideas here.

It has been an interesting year. A good year on many fronts.

I started the year in the Pyrénées mountains with a lovely walk in snow shoes and a couple days later went to the Mediterranean Sea in Collioure for a walk, to appreciate the beautiful area where most of my family lives.

I had opportunities to do interesting freelance work and do it remotely at least in part, so I thought I’d stay and enjoy the area a little while longer.

I spent a lot of time with my brothers, sister, nieces, nephew and parents throughout the year. I was hesitating on where to live and what to do next. I visited a flat in Perpignan and took it immediately once I’d seen the view of the rooftops and mountains from the roof terrace. That’s where I’m sitting to write this post as well. Two of my oldest friends came to visit from Orléans and Bordeaux. I travelled for work and spent time with some of my best friends in London, and also went on a lovely weekend in Somerset.

A large part of this year was also in the context of a course I’m participating in and completing soon, the Landmark Wisdom Unlimited. The main idea of the course is to explore the qualities of a child at play and applying them to different areas of life with the maturity of adulthood.

The course comprises five weekends throughout the year in different cities in Europe, each weekend has a particular theme. In between weekends, I had weekly calls with a group of other participants in the course who lived in the South of France, we also organised weekend events, social gatherings at each others places. Another important aspect of the course are the various assignments, for example I worked on putting an autobiography together with photos for each year of my life, and displays with all the people I interacted with on a regular basis for each year.

In the course I looked at how I developed and grew as a social being, in the conversations, interactions and circles of people that make up my every day life. It’s a rich course and everything I’ve done this year was supported by the conversations I’ve had with others in the programme. I really enjoyed it and next year I’m participating in another course in the series, Partnership Explorations. If you don’t know much about these kinds of courses I’d be happy to tell you more, or for a good read, a recent article was published in the NY Times about Werner Erhardt who created these types of courses.

I redesigned the Ice Cream for Everyone website, one of my best friends redesigned the logo. I got back into tabletop roleplaying games and started contributing to a friend’s audio podcast about roleplaying games. I really enjoyed it and given I had occasionally toyed with the idea of creating some kind of audio or video show, I started thinking about what I could do. It took me several months between the first episode meant to be research back in August to nail down a format I could produce myself. It started complicated, then I brought it back to something relatively simple I personally enjoy enough that I trust I’ll keep up with it. I interview creators and thinkers in a variety of fields I’m interested in, like advertising, game design, media and strategy.

I spent time working out the kind of writing I want to do more of, as a result I’m writing at least one blog post every week, the weekly Ice Cream Sundae email newsletter, and I’m working on other kinds of articles and posts for other platforms.

I made efforts to meet new people here in Perpignan, and volunteered with the local tabletop roleplaying game club to help with the yearly convention event. I made new friends there which is excellent. I helped my sister with her wine domain, Les Arabesques. I learned a lot of how her business works. I also helped my brother Morgan with his new restaurant.

On other hand there are several things I wanted to get complete this year and failed to, chiefly my driving license. It became an ongoing drama this year. I took many lessons, took the driving test twice and failed it twice. I’m really close and if it didn’t take so long to reschedule another slot I’d probably already have it. I never thought it would be so difficult but there you go.

I intended to have a complete draft of the novel I’m writing by the end of this year and I don’t. I still have the same draft I had a year ago after NaNoWriMo. I spent a little bit more time writing towards the novel but nowhere near enough. I spent more time worrying about developing and promoting my services as a freelance strategist and consultant.

The work side has proven to be tougher than I thought it would be. It’s not working as well as I’d like it to. Spending time going back and forth between London (or other large cities) and the South of France sounded like a fantastic idea but it’s pretty difficult and tiring. Fortunately there has been positive points too: the work I’ve been doing with Framestore was and still is really interesting, I’ve done some work with a few other clients, caught up with many professional contacts and was invited to speak at the European Planning Conference in Prague.

While I’m not really getting bored of my roof terrace here, I miss the opportunities and friends in the big city. I’ve also made a conscious choice to keep writing and working in English (rather than in French).

With that in mind, and after much consideration, I’m moving back to London.

It’s weird to be moving again after just a year, looking around my flat and having to pack everything up again. It would be been even tougher to be able to take the time I did this year to work out my new website, podcast, writing, newsletter, tabletop gaming and learning to drive if I’d been in London or any other expensive large city this year, so I definitely appreciate that.

I’m looking forward to spending another New Year’s Eve in the Pyrénées mountains with friends! Once I’m back I’ll write another post about what I have in mind for 2016. I’m looking forward to whatever is coming next.

Dragonmeet 2015 Tabletop Gaming Convention

I was at the Dragonmeet tabletop gaming convention in London last weekend. I’ve started mentioning it around my blog, website and podcast that I’ve been interested in tabletop gaming for a long time and I’ve been actively getting into it this year. I’ve also started putting more time into what lessons can be brought from tabletop gaming into other areas, particularly with work in marketing strategy and planning. My talk at the European Planning Conference was about that, I’ve already mentioned I recorded it and I’m going to publish the audio as a podcast episode soon.

I met with several interesting roleplaying game designers, for some reason several of whom were science-fiction themed. I don’t know if it’s my own interest these days leading me towards those, or if there were more science-fiction themed roleplaying games who had stalls.

I attended a few different seminars, including announcements for Pelgrane Press and was particularly interested in finding out about a recently published collection of original story games – that’s a style of games somewhere between a board game and a roleplaying game, where players typically build a story together. It’s called Seven Wonders, an anthology of seven games from different authors. I’m interested because most of the game authors / designers are in large majority women, and because the topics were out of the ordinary fantasy or science-fiction tropes. These games propose questions like what you be ready to sacrifice to protect your family, what happens back at the village when the heroes are gone adventuring, or how dystopian societies come to be. Unfortunately the book was sold out by the afternoon when I thought of buying it, though there will be a new print run soon and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’ve heard a lot of good feedback and reviews from Sarah Newton’s game called Mindjammer. The game is already published though she is currently running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project to for new adventures to be written within the same science-fiction universe, and there’s also a novel. I just backed the project, for those interested there are several levels of participating where you can save on buying the main book and game at the moment. I talked about the project with Sarah, she has been working on it for several years and hearing the description made me think of Iain M. Banks Culture universe. I’m apparently not the first person to say that, even though Sarah hadn’t read any of those novels when she starting writing Mindjammer. If you enjoy The Culture novels, I’d recommend checking it out.

I also met Carlos of Burning Games who successfully crowdfunded a science-fiction themed roleplaying game called Faith, with the interesting fact that it presents itself like a board game, with a lot of tokens and cards typically not needed in a tabletop roleplaying game. It intends to be a half-way to introduce people to roleplaying games, which is an interesting idea. I also met with Ed of Imagine RPG and talked about his sci-fi game called Era: The Consortium, for which he wrote 500 years of detailed and playable setting history.

There were many people playing and testing all sorts of games. I had the opportunity of trying Microscope, an ‘indie’ game. It’s pretty interesting, though I’d barely call it a game; it is a methodology for narrating periods, events, and scenes in the history of a civilisation (or of whatever you want I guess). There were many interesting ideas I think I can steal for brainstorming sessions and workshops, I bought the pdf and I’m going to study this a little further.

The convention is also an opportunity for game designers to test some game prototypes. I had fun meeting with Henry and trying his wrecking ball game prototype. The principle is simple and a great idea: you have to build a tower with cubes, try to destroy other people’s towers with a wrecking ball or a demolition truck while protecting your own construction. We talked about the best way to balance this kind of game, how much the pieces should weight or what size they should be, etc. I wish Henry luck and success with the next steps, at least it seems like a great idea for a game.

I attended a live recording of the Ken and Robin talk about stuff audio podcast, both of them are quite known and successful writers and game designers, several of the games they worked on were for sale during the event as well.

It was a great day, I was just a little disappointed by the fact that the attendance seemed to be pretty old on and very male skewed. I’m not sure if it’s representative of the event in particular or of hobby gaming in the UK though. Women are typically in minority from what I could see in similar events in France, maybe 25 – 30% women, where in this event there seemed to be like half that many unfortunately. Lastly, it was almost entirely caucasians in attendance. A little too stereotypical, mostly full of aging white dudes…  Even though I believe that hobby games are evolving in a good way, generally growing as a category and becoming mainstream in the past few years, there’s probably still more that can be done to encourage new people to play these kinds of games, including women and other ethnicities.

With my friends at the French tabletop roleplaying podcast Les Voix d’Altaride we are preparing for an episode on the topic of women and roleplaying games (in France / French speaking countries) and have already collected over 300 responses from an online survey to ask people about it, I’m looking forward to analysing the results.

Happy in Vienna

I thought I’d add a theme music to this post, Röyksopp’s Happy up Here so you can listen while reading.

I took the train from Prague to Vienna last weekend, I’d never visited and it seemed like a good opportunity to catch up with old friends who live here. It was also a good excuse to take the train for a few hours, I always love a good train ride. It was a chance to see what that little part of the world between the Czech and Austrian capital cities looks like while editing some podcast recordings.

I walked around Vienna in the morning a few days ago, and was glad to stumble upon a Stefan Sagmeister exhibit at the MAK, the Austrian Applied and contemporary arts museum. Knowing the famous designer is Austrian by birth, and having seen some of his work on happiness in TED Talks, it was a perfect opportunity to check it out.

It is called The Happy Show and collects the designers thoughts, research, experiments, and ideas about happiness. He famously closes his studio every seven years to take a year off as a sabbatical and many of the works in the exhibition were produced during that time off, some of it while he lived in Bali for a year, which seemed to have been in 2008 or around that time. He shows some of this work in his TED talks, I recommend checking them out.

It was a fantastic and happy morning for me, I’m always happy to walk around the streets of a new city and it was sunny so just that put a smile on my face. The Christmas markets were open with friends and families of locals and tourists walking around having fun and gathering around small high tables to drinks warm mugs of the Christmassy spiced, slightly boozy, and variously flavoured local pünsch.

I also love checking out the food of course, and was surprised to see stalls serving warm soup in bread bowls. While I loved the idea, it didn’t occur to me as a practical kind of street food to eat on the go. I stopped to watch some people order and see how they ate it, they turned out to stop at some tables I didn’t see were there at first. More reasons to smile while walking around.

I’d been walking around the centre of town for about two hours when I came across the exhibition, a good time to stop and get warm in the museum. The exhibits also put a smile on my face. One of my favourite pieces was the “How happy are you?” yellow banana flavoured bubble-gum dispensers. Ten of them are lined up in a colorful display, numbered 1 to 10 and asking people to self select how happy they were and take a bubble-gum from that machine. It’s playful, and as Stefan wrote in comments about the piece; it might sound silly to ask though research has shown that people stating they were happy actually made them happier. I enjoyed noticing there were a lot less gum in the 8-9-10 dispensers than in the ones numbered 1-2-3, which were almost full. I stayed around a few minutes and it was fun watching people select it, visitors watched each other and smiled. Happiness, or at least smiles, are pretty infectious.

I mentioned playful already, and to me this was a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, playfulness and happiness are intertwined in their crafting.

I came across a brilliant article, a thanksgiving acknowledgement for the advertising industry by Tom Demetriou, it’s an interesting and fun read I could relate to having lived similar situations in my work too.

He shares this award acceptance speech from Jerry Seinfeld, also a lot of fun. Cynical perhaps, though I mention as relevant in the same post it because he talks about the small moments of happiness advertising can provide.

“In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. […] In between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy”

I’m not sure I see it as happiness when I’m in the thick of working on advertising or marketing a product, though typically a common thread with all great and memorable pieces of advertising is that they put a smile on people’s faces regardless of the product or service being advertised.

Beyond the ironic humour, there is definitely something to be said for appreciating happiness moment by moment, and then to be able to laugh at the irony of the often nonsensical things I do in the world of advertising, which I think also holds true for a lot of people in other lines of work.

The quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off comes to mind as a good way to complete this post:

“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.”

In Prague for the European Planning Conference

I just had a fantastic week attending the 2^nd edition of the European Planning Conference in Prague this week. I was able to arrive a couple of days early and enjoy walking around and soaking in the atmosphere of old Prague earlier this week. The morning I arrived was bright blue skies and cold crisp weather, perfect for wandering and appreciating the architecture. As it started clouding over in the afternoon, I settled in a coffee shop to get some work done, particularly to write my conference talk. I had a few notes and generally knew what I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t properly prepared the work and the presentation just yet.

I met Kristijan who organizes the EPC a couple of years ago while we both worked for Saatchi & Saatchi in Asia. He was based in Vietnam, and I was on a business trip to Ho Chi Minh City, talking to wealthy car enthusiasts for market research purposes. A colleagues told me to get in touch with Kris, who was nice enough to take some time to show me around and sit down for dinner and a few beers while we talked shop. We kept in touch after that, he was about to move back to Macedonia where he’s from and told me at the time that he had a few ideas about organizing an event for planners in Europe. It was brilliant to have that perspective, given I often think of the centre of Europe in London or maybe Paris, and forget about the whole of central and eastern Europe that I don’t know well at all.

I was happy Kris invited me to speak at the conference, it was an enriching and fun two day event, I met fantastic people from all over the old continent: France, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Macedonia, etc. Kris told me the event was only one day long last year; he felt it was very rushed so he thought he’d try spreading it over two days this year. It was brilliant to also meet Jane (pronounced Y-a-nee or something I can’t actually write phonetically), Kris’ new business partner, they are in the process of creating a new agency, we talked about their new plans and I wish them the best in their new venture.

Tom Theys of FCB Global opened the conference with a talk he is testing and preparing for the upcoming Eurobest festival. I’m not going to give too many details before Eurobest, but it’s all about providing experiences and thinking ways to creative advertising and promotional pieces that will have an effect on changing people’s behaviours. This Nivea case study that I hadn’t seen is a great example of the kind of things he talked about:

Varia from Sid Lee in Amsterdam talked next, about the kind immersive and meaningful brand experiences they work on in the agency famously (at least partially) funded by Cirque du Soleil, who know a thing or two about creating memorable shows and experiences, like the Absolut Nights series of branded events for the famous vodka.

We ended the first morning with one of the two more academically inclined talks of the conference, Michael is working on a Phd, had recently interviews international diplomats to learn about their jobs, and studied the origins and principles of diplomacy. He told us of the lessons he drew from the world of international diplomacy and strategic planners could learn from it.

We had two energetic and brilliant talks in the afternoon from Achim Shauerte of BBH London and then Boris Nihom of Achtung! Amsterdam, both with interesting approaches and case studies from their respective agencies with slick, smart and fun presentations. Achim is really sharp, and Boris infectiously passionate. Boris shows us several interesting and practical case studies, like this stroller video. Before that Achim  had told us of the process they went through at BBH to create this pretty bold (and possibly kind of disturbing) advert for Audi:

I’m adding these videos to illustrate a few case studies and ads, though  they don’t do justice to the talks of course, there was more to it than that.

We all went for a nice dinner and beers to a nearby bar and restaurant in the evening to pursue geeky talks about advertising, marketing, branding, and more.

Friday Katharina started the day with a very interesting talk and an academic history lesson, as in the telling us of the principles of studying and learning history and the ways in which the discipline can be applied to develop foresight.

Robert who co-founded the idea crowd sourcing platform Future Bakery followed to tell us about his burgeoning nw business. He used to work for traditional advertising agencies in Prague for a long time before creative this new online platform a year ago. I wasn’t sure I understood what it was at first, and the more he told us about it, the more interested I was. It’s an online community – I guess à la Quora where he poses relatively simple questions to the audience of participants related to client briefs in order to crowdsource ideas and possible solutions to their business problems from a wide variety of locations and experiences. They’re not solutions or any replacement for the work of an agency or a creative professional, but they’re potentially ideas and perspectives you wouldn’t have considered otherwise. I was definitely left wanting to find out more about it.

It was a privilege to have Richard join us for a talk about whether it is more important for planners to be interesting or right. He lighted the room up with his enthusiastic energy and it was brilliant to have his perspective about planning and strategy today, as well as his comments on several pieces of great strategic work out of the APG awards case studies this year.

Tom and Richard both talked about the campaign to encourage women to practice sports in the UK from FCB, and, it’s worth checking out if you haven’t come across it:

Michail then told us of his original methodologies to create a compelling and original brand value proposition, including ways to cooperate with clients to create stronger value. It was very interesting and his models seem rich.

Finally, it was time for my talk closing the conference. I’d prepared a talk about what strategic planners can learn from tabletop games, one of my passions. I’ve actually recorded myself, hopefully I will be able to soon publish this as an episode to my podcast so in the meantime I’ll keep the details quiet.

I learned a lot and got time to meet and talk shop with amazing professionals in their fields. The European Planning Conference is really one of those where I’m not sure if I should just keep a secret because it was great to be with a relatively small committee and spend more time getting to know people properly as well as explore planning & strategy topics in depth, but at the same time it is a brilliant event and definitely deserves to have more European planners join for the conference next year! I hope I can go next year, I loved Prague and would happily go back. Look out for next year, I recommend it!

Back to Back Planning & Strategy Nights at Google

 

I’ve spent the past two evenings at the now familiar Google UK large meeting room for planning & strategy focused evenings of talks. That plus several brilliant interview recordings for the podcast and my brain is buzzing somewhere between wired and fried right now.

On Tuesday was the Account Planning Group’s Noisy Thinking event with the theme of “Planning in a Post-Capitalist World”. I attended the APG “Think like a CSO” event last week with Matt Willifer, CSO of the Engine group advertising agency WCRS, and that was great. Matt showed the us real working pitch decks and took us through the process of developing the strategy and creative for real client projects. It was a great morning event and enriching to see other people’s work. It’s quite rare for agencies and clients to be ready to share this kind of work to an audience, even when agreed to be confidential as it was for this event.

Back to Noisy Thinking this week, it was a pretty lofty theme so I wasn’t sure what to expect or if I’d understand much of it. I wasn’t even sure what post-capitalism meant, even though I’d vaguely heard the word. Even now I’d probably try to nod sagely if I heard someone say it and pretend something like being so torn on the topic that words couldn’t even properly express my opinion. I would generously let said person express their opinion on the matter, listen attentively and do my best to get what they’re talking about.

Apparently the term was coined (or popularised perhaps?) by author and journalist Paul Mason with a book published this year and titled Post-Capitalism: A Guide to our Future.

The first person speaking was Kirsty Fuller, the co-founder and co-CEO of Flamingo, who also sponsor the Noisy Thinking series of events. Flamingo is a insight and strategy consultancy, as I understand it they run large consumer research projects and advise businesses about people and culture to help them build better brands. Kirsty talked about social change becoming of increasing importance for businesses and brands, more than lip-service or greenwashing. She cited examples like Unilever and their Sustainable Living Plan. They are considered leaders in declaring and implementing significant plans towards reducing environmental footprint throughout their business and many brands.

The second speaker was Fern Miller, Chief Strategy and Insight Officer for DigitasLBi, a large digital agency and part of the Publicis Groupe. Fern told us of a really interesting piece of research they conducted with young people in several parts of the world and the influence social media and trends such as taking selfies was having on their behaviour, their self-image, confidence, and the way they see the world through the lenses of selfies and social networks.

The last speaker was Tracey Follows, APG Chair and Futurist at AnyDayNow – not the 2012 homonymic movie, but a consultancy she founded. They are a futures company specialising in the future of communications, media, and brands. Tracey started with the Paul Mason book reference, which most of the audience hadn’t read. It was an interesting theory talk about an idea that society is moving from being consumer-led to being user-led, and society perhaps moving to what Tracey called a ‘Capitalist +” model rather than “Post-Capitalist”.

I’m not too sure what the combination of talks really means for planners and the discipline in this “post-capitalist” world but it was certainly interesting. The more experienced I become in my job as a strategist, the more I think that while many elements of society are becoming complex, as long as businesses and organisations want to sell their stuff / ideas / services to people then there will be a role for me and other planners / strategists to help them understand how best to do that.

I caught up with John Griffiths at the end of the evening, and talked about some of the latest interviews of some of the first advertising account planners in preparation for the book he is working on with Tracey and that I’m really looking forward to, 98% Pure Potato.

Yesterday was the popular series curated by Neil Perkin of Only Dead Fish, Google Firestarters. I couldn’t help but notice that the room was full for this event compared to about half full the day before. The theme was “Mobile UX is eating the world” and again with three speakers, interestingly an all male panel compared to an all-female panel the previous day. I don’t mean any conclusions by the observations, I’m not sure if it had to do with the event organisers, themes, or more likely there was no particular reason for the observations.

The first speaker was Daniel O’Connell, Digital Experience Director at Barclays Bank. It was an inspired and excellent talk, brilliant to have the perspective of someone who used to work for an agency, now works on the client side, and telling us of the way large brands function that is so different from agencies. They have one of the best mobile banking apps around, and he explained some of the difficulties involved in getting new digital products through extensive cycles of testing and quality assurance, that represent magnitutes of time, effort and budget larger than the design side that – at least more traditional agencies (and maybe all of them) focus on.

Second we had Kartik, User experience architect and mobile specialist at DigitasLBi – interestingly the agency that had representatives at both evenings. Kartik had to take over from a colleague at the last minute. They had selected what they believed to be some of the best mobile user experience applications available at the moment, including favourites such as Citymapper, the game Monument Valley (Download it now, it’s beautiful!), Uber and Airbnb.

Last and definitely not least, my friend and ex-colleague Ume gave the best talk of both evenings – particularly because he shared an amazing project with us, including the process they have been going through at Us Two where he works. He works at a studio called Us Two, that interestingly designed the Barclays mobile application mentioned earlier, as well as the Monument Valley game. In a way they were the star of this mobile UX evening, which I think is entirely deserved. I also consider them friends given I’ve met them when they were only four or five people and starting to hire more people at the time. Ume had just started working on this project a year ago when I caught up with him last, and it was awesome to hear of the progress. He has been working on creating an open technology standard for the visually impaired to independently navigate their way through public spaces, in particular public transport. It’s a new non-profit organisation created in partnership with Us Two and the RLSB (Royal London Society for Blind People), called Wayfindr.

They have been conducting extensive research and testing with visually impaired and blind people to find a way to use technology in a consistent way and that can be used and repeated as an open standard, so that wayfinding applications like Google Maps or Citymapper can one day include audio instructions combined with beacons set in train stations that signal to the app to give audio navigation instructions to the person listening. Finding out about the research process and the current results was fascinating. They are looking for more sponsors as well as organisations that work with visually impaired and blind people to support their project, so if you know anyone that can help tell them to get in touch.

The project is visionary because it is exploring user experience and interfaces beyond the screens most of us are locked to with audio, working to include people rather than design exclusive products (that’s from Ume) and it’s solving a real user problem, empowering people to be more confident and independent in their use of public transports.

 

Brain Surfing & Strategist Survey

Image Credit: Afu007

 

After a hiatus for a couple of years, the Strategist Survey (formerly Planner Survey) is back! If you’re a strategist, whatever the industry you’re working in we’d love to hear from you! The more strategists complete it, the better!

I joined Heather‘s team to support with the survey a few years ago, because I always enjoy meeting other strategic planners. Having access to the earlier survey results was very useful. It’s a way of participating in the community and I’m looking forward to the results of this year’s.

Heather has also just published a book, Brain Surfing. I was lucky to get an advance copy and just posted a review on Amazon. I’m copying my review below. Go get your copy now!

Brain Surfing is a fantastic combination of some of my favourite topics: travelling and marketing / advertising strategy. I always enjoy meeting fellow strategists around the world with whom I have interesting and enriching conversations over coffee, so this is like a concentrated expresso drip version of coffee meeting goodness in one book I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.

Heather has gathered and synthesised learnings from nine amazing professionals from different parts of the world, the kind of endeavour that takes, well in this case two weeks per person – 18 weeks – plus travelling and writing time after wards. All the best bits of that in a thoroughly enjoyable read. I just couldn’t put the book after starting and read it in a weekend.

The story flows seamlessly with a chapter per mentor, from Hong Kong to Edinburgh by way of a few other destinations around Europe, Asia, and the US. Each of the nine strategists have different specialisms in fields such as branding, business innovation, social media, advertising, and marketing. Each one of them contributed valuable stories and lessons to end their chapter. The conversations, research (including other must read book references), remarks and insights into the current state and evolution of the role of strategy and strategists in the creative communications industry are fantastic.

I highly recommend reading it, definitely a must for strategists in this field of work! Beyond that, I think it’s definitely relevant to anyone interested in business communications, perhaps for people who are questioning what they’re up to in their careers as well, and finally maybe for people who will enjoy a fun and novel approach to a travel book.

In the Shipping Business

I read this article from Dave Trott in Campaign yesterday. He writes about content and makes excellent points about the advertising & marketing’s current obsession with this fabulous buzzword. It seems here to stay and agencies have built specialisms; based on it, so I’m not even sure it still qualifies as a buzz actually.

I’m also reading Bob Hoffman’s Men are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey at the moment and catching up on some of his blog posts I hadn’t read yet. I really like the Ad Contrarian. He really loves content too, so much so he publishes content on his blog for free first and then sells the same content in a book later. Genius. A virtuous circle I’m happy to participate in.

Dave’s article reminded me of a couple of Bob’s posts, where he dubbed “content” just the same old stuff we already had on the internet, only rebranded. Dave goes for a lorry (truck) metaphor that works really well too.

Both pretty much come to the same conclusion: it’s ultimately just stuff.

I agree it seems to be one of those buzzwords used to generalise and obfuscate advertising and marketing activities. Like we’re trying to disguise the fact we’re here to sell stuff, first and foremost. I’m not even pointing fingers, I’ve used the word in meetings many times, because it’s part of the jargon now. Even when I make a conscious effort to avoid it, it may well come into the conversation sooner than I think, and sometimes I feel like I almost need to use the buzzwords sometimes to be taken seriously.

I don’t have anything against content at all. How could I if it’s just stuff? It’s too wide a topic to even have an opinion about. Thinking about it, things I love could be categorised in two broad categories: people and content. I thought maybe weather might be another category but then realised the weather could perhaps be considered the content of the atmosphere or immediate environment. And even people start as the content of a womb and finish as the content of some urn or box. Someone with more scientific knowledge can correct me or add more accurate information.

I enjoyed Dave’s description of the creative industry’s fascination with ever improving delivery systems that become more important than what is being delivered. Similarly many catch-all words like content, used to simplify an increasingly complex communication and media landscape, are practical shorthands but it’s important to remember they often come at the price of clarity.

This is also making me think of Pepsico’s president of global beverages Brad Jakeman recent rant at a conference where he mostly berated agencies in the advertising and marketing industry for interrupting his Youtube videos. He also doesn’t like the word advertising. As if advertising wasn’t built on interruptions in the first place. Nobody ever wants the interruptions, nor do they want to be sold to. Yet people generally understand that they’re getting something for free or at a low cost in exchange for the course of activities to be interrupted for advertising and promotional messages. That’s the deal. It works for pre-rolls online, for ads on TV, or for interrupting your usual shopping experience with a 2 for 1 promotion. At the same time he’s saying the industry should be disruptive. Isn’t it the same thing?

PepsiCo have already spent considerable money on cause related and social media focused marketing with the Pepsi Refresh Project a few years ago, which was a fascinating exercise. They apparently spent about $20 million on it and the main Pepsi-Cola and Diet Pepsi brands each lost 5% market share in the same year. By all means, I would love for Pepsi to stop advertising with 30 second TV ads long enough for the rest of us to observe the consequences on their sales and share value. We’d finally get a chance to see how valuable television advertising really is (I suspect it’s still extremely valuable).

Brands are competing for people’s attention to sell stuff and can make videos, images, or anything as interesting and compelling as they want, if there’s no media for people too see it, the likelihood of the stuff being seen (or I guess consumed) is close to null. I don’t know the number of Youtube videos siting there with 0 views but I bet there’s quite a few of them hanging around. And ultimately if you really want people to be interested go and focus on what your product or service is first.

This is where Dave’s truck / lorry analogy is key, there’s nothing wrong with being in the shipping business, it’s just that I think he’s right in pointing out that we might be losing view of what it’s in it. Amazon’s delivery services could be fast as lightning or dropped by a drone, but if they don’t deliver what I ordered I’ll definitely be disappointed. To bring this to a real world example, I used to work on the Subway (sandwiches) account while at Saatchi & Saatchi in Singapore. Whatever you might think of the product, it’s an interesting business because it’s entirely made of franchises, and a board of elected franchisees works alongside the brand marketing team. They have final say over what they do with their marketing budget. They are most often small to medium business owners with little time for nonsense, and it kept our work very grounded in their sales realities. When we pitched a creative idea for a campaign or worked on the annual planning, we had to show them a+b how much they stood to gain or loose with the promotions in a store, in addition to why the concept would be a good idea for the brand. I really enjoyed it. It was challenging but also offered interesting opportunities to produce measurable and effective marketing activities.

We concerned ourselves with what was carried in the lorry, how well the lorry worked, what it looked like, where it was going, and even who the stuff on board was for.

One thing is sure, if we’re really in the shipping business now it’s a good thing I’m finally bothering to learn to drive and pass my license this year.

The First Ever Paris Comic Con

 

I’ve just spent a few days in Paris catching up with friends and professional contacts, which was lovely. It’s always a pleasure coming back to visit. A few weeks ago I was planning my trip and chatting with my good friend Elo whom I was going to be staying with.

Knowing my geeky disposition, she asked if I was coming for the first ever Paris Comic-Con event. I knew nothing about it, but seeing there were tickets still going for the Friday afternoon of the event we organised to go and check it out together. Being free to organise my own schedule is one of the great pleasures and privileges of working freelance.

I heard so much about the original Comic-Con in San Diego that I was defiinitely curious. The event has become the launch platform for all the new ideas spawned out of TV shows, the grounds for testing science-fiction, fantasy, and of course comic book adaptations into movies with all the might of Marvel’s cinematic Universe. From what I’ve read over time, it has become one of the largest marketing platform to reach fans and influencers for movie studios and all sorts of video content creators – oh and there’s some comic books to check out too. I had heard of impressive experiential marketing displays and events in San Diego, like for the latest Godzilla film. I didn’t really think anything in Paris would be as amazing as an interactive experience of the new Game of Thrones TV series season through an Oculus Rift virtual reality experience, but I guess I was still hoping for something memorable along those lines.

I’m not sure when it started being such a big thing, but these events also attracts a lot of attention for the people putting increasing amounts of efforts into hand crafting elaborate costumes to recreate the ones of their favourite fantasy, video game, or comic super hero characters. According to regular news and photo updates I’d come across that seemed to be the other thing to look out for when visiting. For some reason Brooklyn Brewery was sponsoring the Paris Comic-Con cosplay competition and promoting their Defender IPA beer. Apparently they had also sponsored the New York Comic-Con, they eem to have an deal with the event organisers. I get the name of the beer is super-hero-ish so it might be good exposure. At least I was there and the right audience to be interested in craft beer so I’m probably not the only one. I was very happy to taste a new IPA and it was the best beer deal available for purchase at the event, so bonus all round.

On a side note, I highly recommend reading Beer School. it’s the story of the Brookly Brewery and a brilliant business and branding book. It’s good to go find marketing and branding inspiration outside of the marketing and advertising industry itself. Did you know Milton Glaser designed their logo?

Back to comics, we have a strong culture of our own in France (and Belgium) when it comes to graphic novels. I was raised on Asterix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke. Once I finished on those and growing a little older I graduated to series like Lieutenant Blueberry, Black Moon Chronicles, and The Meta-Barons.

Alongside this, France was the first foreign country to import Japanese manga, and for studios to partner on co-creations. American comic books are historically less popular in France, whereas the Paris Japan Expo for manga and anime is absolutely huge. The international comics festival in Angoulême is the second largest event of its kind of Europe, attracting over 200,000 visitors every year. I was surprised Comic Con was coming to Paris; I guess the event is so successful it’s expanding everywhere. I was curious about their choice of venue. It was at La Grande Halle de la Villette, which is a good location but quite small for an event like Comic-Con. 

Maybe it was their first and they didn’t want to take too much risks on the location size. Given they sold advance tickets on a website they must have known how many people were going to show up. So I think many people were surprised that for an opening time announced for 1:30pm on Friday, people were still queueing to get in 2:45pm and that the only thing to do after that was queue some more to get in the main conference room – which frankly wasn’t impressive in terms of size, just separated by what amounted to a curtain from the few and far between booths mostly selling graphic novels you can find in any book or specialty store. Apparently they have received a lot of complaints about this on the social media channels.

I was lucky to be able to miss all the queueing thanks to my friend Elo who did it in my place while I was having lunch on the other side of town, and I arrived right on time to get in the conference room for a talk with Jeff Mann, of Industrial Light & Magic / Star Wars fame. He made all the models for the original movies. By then she’d been queueing for over two hours. Unfortunately the talk was not impressive, the questions were pretty bland, it took time to translate into French and then he was quickly gone. Pretty disappointing. Even more so for her whohad been waiting all this time.

We checked a few stalls afte that, some cosplay costumes, and talked to the people managing the booth of Star Wars fans and cosplayers, the only worldwide organisation of fans to have official agreements to reproduce the costumes apparently.

We managed to attend a second panel with French Youtubers hosted by the French Nerd blog, launching a new web series, this time many fans were in attendance judging by the screams and ambient excitement. They screened the first episode of their new series. Elo and I looked at each other in obvious disbelief and perhaps feeling a little old and/or out of touch when the audience was so excited and we thought the whole thing was just dreadful. Poorly acted and just a bad or at least overused idea: A popular band taken over by zombie-like fans who calm down when they sing crappy pop music.

I was interested to see the show was financed by a department or company part of Endemol, a large television and media production company. I was just not into it whatsoever. In the words of Danny Glover’s The Lethal Weapon character Murtaugh: “I’m too old for this shit”. We left the conference section in bemused disbelief. The guy who seemed most excited about the whole thing was probably older than I am, so it’s probably not even an age thing. I just didn’t get it at all.

We were pretty much done by then, the event was closing down, and we were ushered out. I have to admit I’m not in a huge hurry to go to another one, though I’m really glad I’ve attended the first day of the first ever Comic-Con of my hometown of Paris. And to have been successfully targeted as a craft beer amateur at the event while I was at it.

Welcome to the Future

Happy Back to the Future day! It’s finally (or already) here!

Back to the Future Part II is one of the first films I remember seeing at the cinema (along with Tim Burton’s Batman the same year), I was 10 years old. My elder brother Björn took me to see it in Paris, and just that was already special given we lived in the far suburbs. I remember to have been really impressed with the future it imagined. I can’t believe that day is already now.

I had fun watching this video of teens reacting to the movie. I thought it’s really interesting that Back to the Future features as an important movie reference for teenagers today, to the point where at least one says he can cite all the dialogue. Another insight in there is whatever the level of the technology we use every day, because it’s every day it immediately looses the appeal of something from the future. We take thing for granted very fast, and the teens in the video are growing with devices that were impossible not so long ago, like thirty years ago actually.

It would be easy to focus on our lack of flying cars and hoverboards, but we have a lot of the things in that future, the fashion is just a little different. Video conferencing, pocket digital devices, etc. No holograms at the cinema but 3D movies have made a come back. Voice activated commands aren’t ubiquitous but they exist. It’s funny how technology is evolving fast yet at the level of a short human life it seems like ages. We don’t have tiny pizzas growing into a huge one in a microwave but that’s probably a good thing. We do have retro-style arcade games bars, but no robot waiters just yet and they hadn’t planned for the hipster beard fashion.

I think smart clothes are an experimental thing though, I think they exist in a certain way. It’s easy with hindsight to say they were pretty optimistic about the technology advances for the movie, and so they should have anyways given it makes for more interesting TV, and they wanted to keep the story within the time of the characters lives, just one generation behind and in this case another ahead.

Of course everyone myself included is writing about Back to the Future Day, and why not. That said, and while I understand some would mention it because it’s of course a big pop culture memorabilia event today, of course brands are jumping on board with ridiculous statements in social media:

The Power of Frozen, seriously..? Please abstain. It’s unnecessary. You’re just asking for people to make fun of you Iceland Foods.

Gregg’s is a chain of baked goods in the UK in case you haven’t heard of it. This is one is even better, so you’re basically saying that your food is garbage to fuel the DeLorean from BTTF?

A few brands participated in the movie back then and might have a claim on some marketing activities, but for this kind of message I’d recommend abstaining from saying anything.

There are many more bad examples I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface, I just came across these thanks to Chris via Twitter.

I enjoyed what Christopher Lloyd has to say about it as Doc Brown and I’ll finish with it, a simple message:

“The future has finally arrived. Yes, it’s different from we all thought, but don’t worry. It just means your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever what you make it, so make it a good one.”

A Few Things I Learned From My Sister on Her Vineyard

In the past year I’ve had the chance to spend more time with my sister Saskia on her vineyard, Les Arabesques. She owns a small estate in the Roussillon region of the South of France. It’s about 30km west of Perpignan, between The Corbières and the Pyrénées mountains. She is committed to growing grapes and making wine in a traditional and natural fashion. It’s still very new, this year was her third harvest. I’ve had the chance to learn more about winemaking talking with her, and occasionally helping throughout the season – so I also got some practical experience of the process.

The first thing that keeps blowing my mind is the timeline she works to. All she does is dictated by nature and seasons. Every choice she makes has an influence over her potential livelihood for the following 12 to 18 months or so. She creates the best context and environment possible, maybe give things a nudge in the right direction, and lets nature do its work.

I know it’s always been that way, but I’ve never been particularly close to nature. I’ve been used to working in large cities and advertising agency offices where the briefs are due yesterday. Everything needs to happen faster and faster. Everyone is busy and power-walking around. As soon as I arrive in a city, I walk faster from the moment I get off the plane or train. I spend time with brand clients trying to understand and explain the evolution of consumer or purchase behaviours. Peering over new and popular technologies, networks or apps that may well be obsolete or irrelevant tomorrow. Obsolescence is a recurring theme, businesses even bake it in their products, or if not release new goodies on shorter and shorter cycles to always create news and needs.

My sister works with the seasons. The project cycle is a year or more and necessarily adaptive. While the general seasonal pattern is the same every year, and the tasks roughly take place in the same order, there are still a lot of variations depending on the weather. She has a direction in mind for her wines, though has to adapt to what nature throws at her.

Winter is pruning time. While the vines are sleeping it’s time for her to go through all her plots and snip off the unwanted branches. I spent a day with her last winter where I was “pre-pruning”. Basically just cutting off the major branches without going into the detail, which are important choices she makes herself. She told me pruning is the job where the most knowledge and experience is required. There are several techniques she learned while being trained in Burgundy and Provence. As I understood it, she visualises the path the sap will most probably take from the roots to the branches. This guides where she prunes to encourage the growth of branches that will bear the most and/or best fruits for the harvest. It is quite similar to pruning a bonsai actually. Now she is getting to know her vines better in the third year, she also has a better idea of the way they behaved in the last harvest, pruning also based on her experience. Most of that work is done by herself with her dog, in cold, windy yet often sunny weather. She says there’s something meditative about caring for her vines during that time of year that she really enjoys.

In parallel, winter is also time for several professional exhibits and shows. It takes a lot of time to make the wine, and it takes time to sell it too. This year she was invited to participate in what is often considered the best professional show for organic and natural winemakers, Renaissance des Appellations (Return to Terroir). The yearly event gathers many of the best natural winemakers, sommeliers, and wine importers from around the world.

And if that wasn’t enough work already, the wine from her previous harvest is slowly getting ready. She has to watch out for any sudden shifts in temperature that might upset the wine in the cellar, check and taste it on a regular basis. Christmas is luckily a quieter time where she can generally take a few days off, away from her cellar.

Spring time is mostly about fertilising and treating the vines, caring for them so that they’ll be able to be healthy, and resist trouble from fungi, diseases, or insects. That means going out before dawn to sprinkle the vines, as well as removing rocks and weeds from the plots. I tried removing weeds. It’s hard work. Stooped over with a small pickaxe hacking at the rocky terrain. It was another opportunity for her to make fun of my city like habits and general uselessness when it comes to most manual labour. It’s also bottling and labelling time for the wines from the previous harvest that are ready to be sold and drank. That’s where I’m more comfortable, particularly the drinking part of it.

The spring time work carries over into the summer, and then there’s a quieter time before harvest when many of the local winemakers can take a holiday, around late July or so. The rest is about selling wine, watching out for the weather, checking the progress of the growing fruits, watching out for any trouble that might take place, and generally gearing up for the harvest. I helped on the harvest for the first time this year. It’s tough work for the back, but it’s also a good time. It’s fun to be outside in the beautiful countryside, bantering with other grape pickers under the watchful eye of my sister’s partner. He plays the role of mock tough supervisor, to the tone of “I don’t want to see a single leaf in those baskets! We’re not brewing tea here, monsieur!”

Everything at that moment is crucial, from the grapes picked or set aside, to the choices made in the cellar. Are these grapes ready to be harvested yet? How much sugar content do they have now and how does that compare with the alcohol level I’m aiming for? How many days should these grapes ferment before being pressed? With or without the stems? These are only a few of the questions she has on her mind at that time of year. There might be more bottling beforehand too, for the wine from the previous year that wasn’t ready for consumption yet, and to make space in the cellar for the new wine.

I learned that grapes for rosé and white wine are pressed immediately after being harvested. Grapes for red wines can be pressed later, the when and how depends on the kind of wine being made. I tried the age old tradition of stomping on grapes, which is both harder work than it seems and pretty satisfying. It’s not just folklore, it serves an important purpose. Given the grapes have just been picked, the berries are still firm. The press works from the top down and is flat. Stomping the berries helps more grape juice to be extracted. If they aren’t stomped then a lot of berries can be stuck at the bottom without being pressed, and you can lose a lot of juice.

As soon as the excitement of the harvest is passed, it’s already autumn and time to keep in contact with her clients, as well as find new ones. Most wine cellars and restaurants start ordering and stocking up for the end of year holiday season. Meanwhile she also has to watch out for this year’s wine fermentation progress. Update Facebook with new photos from the harvest. Watch out for any press or worthwhile professional show opportunities. Then of course there’s the joys of year-end admin and finance.

And the cycle starts again.

As a strategist an important part of my job in advertising is to synthesise everything I learn from research for a particular brand in order to provide a direction for the creative team. While I might have the chance to do some research with people and try a product or service before a write a brief, I rarely have that much time to really experience it in the way I have with the vineyard in the past year, and even then I’ve probably only skimmed the surface. That said, I certainly have a new appreciation for working with nature that I hope I’ll be able to take into account for future work.

What I’d write in a brief is traditionally called a single-minded communication, or proposition. Most of the time it’s one sentence, as short and inspiring as possible. It encapsulates the main message to be communicated.

In this case It might be a shame to try and summarise something as complex as this process to a single short sentence. It would be near impossible to do it justice. Traditionally made wine like my sister’s should really be tasted (I recommend getting advice from a professional in a wine cellar or restaurant to try a good one). Each one is unique. You won’t necessarily like every one you try, but you’ll find one that you enjoy. If you get into it you might even have a hard time going back to mass produced wines.

Fortunately I don’t have to write a short sentence here. If you’ve read this far you may well be the kind of person that will  remember and appreciate the amount of work that goes into these wines when you taste one.