Spanish Civil War, smoke bombs and Spaghetti Westerns: Papi Antonio’s stories [Ice Cream Sundae]

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 13th March 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

My name was meant to be double barrelled: Willem-Anthony.

I was named after both my grandfathers. You can probably guess Willem was my Dutch grandfather on my father’s side. Unfortunately I never knew him, he passed away before my birth. My middle name is Anthony — for some reason it was changed from my grandfather’s name Antonio. My mom told me it was also meant to be the second part of a double-barrelled name: Willem-Anthony. In my opinion that idea was sensibly corrected by whoever was working at the birth registry office that day and Anthony became my middle name.

Antonio Fernandez is my Spanish grandfather. His wife Carmen passed away before my birth. He’s still very much around though and if I’m not mistaken he’ll be celebrating his 95th birthday later this year. Today is not linked to any dates in particular; I just thought I’d write about him and my Spanish ancestry.

He was born in Almería, a city in Andalucia situated in the Southeast of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. I visited once; thinking it would be a nice idea to explore the area. It’s a port town with regular ferry and cargo connections with Northern African countries. The surrounding area boasts many greenhouses and fields growing fruit for export. Nearby is the driest area of Europe and the continents only true desert climate: El Desierto de Tabernas.

If you’ve seen Spaghetti Westerns, you’ll be familiar with the Tabernas Desert near Almería in Spain.

If you’ve watched any Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western movies, you’re pretty familiar with what the area looks like. Starting in the 1950s several film studios set up in the Tabernas Desert. I visited Mini Hollywood, whereFor a Few Dollars More was shot in 1965 and The Good, the Bad and the Uglyin 1966. They turned it into a tourist attraction though it is still occasionally used for commercial filming. There is a daily cowboy stunt show that was fun. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the area.

I also recommend going to the southeastern peninsula of Spain in the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, beautiful walks to go on in Spring or Autumn on the ancient volcanic rock cliffs and cactus pear (Barbary fig) fields. I was there in April several years ago. It was still too cold to swim in the sea but the right weather to go hiking. It would probably be really hot to walk around in the summer. Take the opportunity as I did to visit another famous film set: Playa de Mónsul, a beautiful beach where a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed. San Jose is a great base for a couple of days to explore the Natural Park. It used to be a little known secret, though I think more people have been visiting in the past few years.

I also recommend a fantastic book that begins in Almería: Andalus: Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain, by Jason Webster. A brilliant read about searching for what’s left of the thousand years of Moorish occupation during the Middle Ages in modern Spain.

My grandfather wanted to fight Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War. He was only fifteen years old.

All that said, my grandfather was only born in Andalucía. He grew up in the geographic centre of Catalonia, in Manresa. He was only fifteen when theSpanish Civil War started. He wanted to go fight Franco’s Army with the Republicans, along with his brothers, but his family didn’t let him. At least this is the story he told me. By the end of the Civil War, Franco had won and Antonio was old enough to be drafted in his army. He was sent to Spanish Morocco for training. His main goal was to rebel and he still had thoughts of joining the small band of resistance fighters, mostly operating from the Pyrenees Mountains in the Basque country and Catalonia.

Shortly after arriving in Morocco he deserted with a small group of like-minded friends. They managed to cross the border into French Morocco and hid there while looking for a boat to take them across the Mediterranean Sea. This was the middle of World War II, not many ships available or captains too keen to cross German infested waters. I recently learned from my aunt this was also the time he started playing chess. He was broke, in hiding and waiting. He played chess ever day for over two years. I also imagine him drinking a lot of mint tea though I have no evidence for that.

If I understood the last part of the story he told me correctly, they didn’t secure transport until after Operation Dragoon had taken place in August 1944, the Allied invasion of southern France. The German armies withdrew after the invasion and southern France ports slowly started operating again. Antonio arrived in Marseille; presumably late 1944 or early 1945 though don’t quote me on dates. He’d heard the Republican Spanish government in exile was based in Toulouse, so he made his way over there. I’m writing his story from memory when he told me about a few years ago and I hadn’t grilled him on dates to get a firm chronology.

He met my grandmother and stayed in Toulouse. As far as I know he never fulfilled his ambitions to join the Spanish Maquis in their guerrilla war againstFranco’s regime. He started a masonry and construction business instead, and kept playing chess. He still plays most days at the Centró Español in Toulouse. He taught me how to play when I was a child but I’ve never pursued this as an interest and I haven’t played in years. He travels a lot; he went on two Transatlantic cruises last year. He’s just gone on another trip to Spain this week.

My grandfather is a bit of a hoarder. When I visited as a kid I was both fascinated and weirded out by the stuff in his apartment.

Antonio still lives in the same apartment my mom and her siblings grew up in, a council estate called Les Mazades. He’s a bit of a hoarder. When I visited as a kid growing up I was fascinated and weirded out by his apartment in about equal parts. It was like exploring stacks of treasure and artefacts from the past, but it was also musty, old and dusty. After close inspection most of the stuff to explore wasn’t all that exciting.

He kept huge stacks of stuff on a large wooden unit in the living room and on the main dining table. I’d take a peek, a lot of were 10–15 year old promotional supermarket or retail offers. Completely out of date. He’d tell me not to touch his stuff. He was never a particularly warm character. Talking about post World War II geopolitics is his favourite topic. I didn’t understand much about what he said until I studied it in high school. Before that we’d play chess, or I’d explore stuff in his apartment while my parents talked with him.

For Christmas he’d occasionally pull something out of a stack of hoarded stuff and hand it to me. More often than not it turned out to be a branded promotional watch he’s been given. I wasn’t convinced when he’d say he was keeping it for me but I’d play along and thank him. To this day he still pretends he doesn’t know who I am whenever I talk to him or visit. He also says it’s a mistake when I call him papi, given he’s way too young to be anyone’s grandfather.

I was usually a pretty nice and well-behaved kid, except for that one time. Well, maybe not the only time but this one had to do with my grandfather. I was about ten or eleven years old when he turned 70. At that point I read several kids magazines that featured gadgets and pranks of various kinds. For a short while I was fascinated with stuff from joke shops.

I used my pocket money in a joke shop to buy coloured smoke bombs that seemed pretty wicked.

We went to Toulouse for his birthday celebrations. A few days before that I used some of my pocket money in a joke shop to buy a few things, including coloured smoke bombs that seemed pretty wicked. I was with my cousin Manuel, he’s about my age and we spent a lot of time together on holidays when we were kids. In front of the Mazades’ main block of flats was a sandy and ugly play area with the strangest kids play area.

The implements looked like a kids playground from afar, but close-up you’d realise it was actually all made of concrete. We’d still go and hang out there, rasp our bums and ruin our clothes on the big concrete slide. I tested one of the smoke bombs, a yellow one, and it turned out to be pretty effective. That’s where I came up with the idea I candidly believed would surprise and delight my family around the dining table.

A couple of hours later, the large table was set for everyone. I’m not sure how many we were, I’d guess at least 12 or 15 people sitting down for the kind of all afternoon lunch we tend to have in Spanish families. In the middle of Antonio’s birthday meal, as everyone was eating Paella, I discreetly lit a purple smoke bomb and threw it under the table.

Thick purple smoke quickly rose from under the table. Let’s just say I was a slightly off the mark with my “surprise and delight” intended effect. My mischievous smile was wiped clean off my face as I realised the grown ups didn’t think this was fun at all.

My mom and aunts completely freaked out. They were terrified and thought the living room was on fire. I only realised later it was probably a healthy reaction to sudden large amounts of smoke rising from the dining table. I guess I’d have a similar reaction nowadays. Not to mention the smell wasn’t that great either. I can’t remember details of how the rest played out, but someone — maybe me, pointed out it was just supposed to be a joke, people calmed down and the smoke bomb was thrown out on the balcony. Grown ups argued whether this was funny or not, with the latter opinion winning that debate. Windows were opened to air the room. I was justifiably told off. That marked the end of my interest in stink bombs and other prank shop favourites.

On the plus side, I learned to consider what other people might think of something and how they’d appreciate it before doing it. Funny enough being to learn about people and putting myself in their shoes to consider what they’d appreciate is an important part of my job as a strategist.

As I remember it my grandfather stayed pretty calm throughout, the smoke didn’t particularly seem to disturb him. He can easily grumble and get angry, on the other hand I don’t think I’ve ever seen him show surprise. I haven’t seen him in a few years, it would be nice to go visit this year. He’s not going to be around forever and I’m pretty sure he still has many stories I don’t know about.

Do you have a close family member whose stories you haven’t heard? You might want to ask them while they’re still around.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. This is the first time I’m sending a Sundae late; I thought I’d acknowledge it. You can blame procrastination for that.

This week on the podcast, I’ve published an interesting conversation I had with Tanya DePass who created a community and movement to promote diversity in the art of gaming.

On the work front, I should be completing my current freelance work this month and I’m starting to look for new freelance project(s) in London starting next month. If you hear of anyone in need of marketing strategy and advice, please give me a shout.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Best,
Willem

The body, backbone and soul of beer brewing in Singapore [Ice Cream Sundae]

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 6th March 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

Shortly after I had settled in my new flat in Singapore a few years ago, I was out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. I stopped at Brewerkz on the Singapore River, a bit of an institution in the City-State, a brewery-pub and restaurant open since 1997.

I sat outside with a view of the river, Clarke Quay and the Saatchi & Saatchi office just across, where I worked at the time. I ordered a pint of their beer to enjoy on the terrace.

After a few minutes appreciating my surroundings, I started writing a list of things I like.

I was looking for a new hobby to keep myself busy in Singapore.

I was looking for something new to learn or practice, a new hobby to keep myself busy in Singapore outside of work. The two previous years while travelling I’d learned new skills with scuba diving and Thai massage, I thought it would be good to pursue this burgeoning tradition.

I got into drinking different kinds of British ales and beers when I first lived in London. A colleague at my first employer drank London Pride, a great example of the London porter beer style. The name porter appeared in the 18^th century and was popularised by street and river porters in London, hence the name. It’s a dark beer, quite strong and hoppy by 18^th century standards, hovering around 6.6% ABV. Shortly after for increased taxation reasons they started brewing a range of porters with different alcoholic strengths. Brewers called them “Single, double and triple Stout”. This is where the “stout” style of beer comes from, including Guinness, originally a “Double Stout London Porter” that was later exported to Ireland.

I started appreciating British ales and found out about CAMRA, The Campaign for Real Ale. They are an independent, voluntary organisation campaigning for real ale, community pubs and consumer rights. Founded in 1971, the four men who founded CAMRA were concerned that a handful of companies were taking over many pubs in the UK and standardising products with low quality and arguably bland flavoured beer.

Traditionally, British cask ales are unfiltered and unpasteurised.

Traditionally, the Great Britain is known for cask ales. This is unfiltered and unpasteurised beer conditioned and served from a cask. The carbonation is natural and no additional Co2 is added to the process. As a result they typically don’t have a lot of bubbles like German or American styles tend to have. The casks are served at room temperature, which is why I kept hearing about Britain’s “warm and flat beers” while growing up in France.

France and England having been “frenemies” for centuries I grew up hearing many such legends of the curious habits of our English neighbours, gathered from peers who had been on holidays or school exchanges there and telling us tales of the mysterious foodstuffs they consumed like jelly, Marmite and lamb in mint sauce.

I warmed up to most English foods since, except Marmite. I’ll probably never get why people inflict this upon themselves. It still fits with the overall theme given the black substance is made from spent brewer’s yeast. The process was originally discovered by a German scientist in the late nineteenth century (go figure what he was trying to accomplish when eating concentrated brewer’s yeast. I imagine it was some sort of bet).

While I worked at iris, I was lucky to be near one of the only craft beer bars in London, The Rake by Borough Market. That’s when I also started discovering craft beers from other countries such as the United States, Norway or Denmark.

In 2008 I found out about these new Scottish brewers, growing and sponsoring a few different events I attended like Twestival in 2009, now they have bars everywhere and are apparently planning to build a brewery in the U.S. as well.

You might have heard of Brewdog by now.

I was hooked on the wide variety of flavours available in unpasteurised and unfiltered craft beers.

Quite naturally, beer appeared on the list I was writing that day.

It occurred to me that I’d heard some people make their own beer at home.

I walked back home and started watching home brewing videos on Youtube to learn the basics. I also found out there were two shops in Singapore selling home brewing material.

A couple weeks later I was the proud owner of a new home brewing kit.

The basic beer-making process is surprisingly easy.

Beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage as well as probably the oldest.

After all, beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage as well as probably the oldest. After water and tea it is the third most drank beverage in the world.

Beer features in the written history of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Its main attribute being fermented cereals, some believe initial forms of beer to be as old as the first steps in agriculture of cereals. A 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicts people drinking a beverage believed to be beer through reed straws. A 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron Goddess of brewing, contains the oldest known beer recipe.

Talking about recipes, modern beer is made from four key ingredients:

1. Water, the body of beer

Water constitutes over 95% of the beverage. In fact, during the Middle Ages when water wasn’t deemed safe for consumption, people drank beer instead.

Water often contains minerals, nutrients that yeast will use to ferment the beer and give it flavour compounds. The water matters greatly to the style of flavour of the beer brewed. For example Plzen (Pilsen) in the Czech Republic is famous for having soft water and being almost completely free of minerals. That turned out to be great for making the clear and crisp Pilsener lagers the Czechs are famous for.

In the UK, Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire is kind of the opposite in the brewing world. Their water is hard. Local water from boreholes contained high levels of dissolved salts and resulting sulphate in the mineralised water famously brings out hop flavours.

2. Malt, the backbone of beer

Beer is fermented grain. We use barley in vast majority. Malting is the process by which the harvested grains are steeped in water just long enough to begin sprouting, and then are dried again to interrupt the process.

The sprouted grain releases nutrients and sugars that would be used by the plant to grow, and that will be used to ferment into beer instead.

The malted grain can also be roasted, and depending on the time and technique, this contributes an important to part of the colour and style of the beer being made. Stouts for example contain roasted and grilled malt, giving darker colour, hints of coffee and cocoa in the flavour.

3. Hops, the beer’s personality

In antique times grain fermented beer-like drinks in France or the UK didn’t use hops. They used a variety of different foraged herbs to give the fermented drink flavour.

In 1516 Brewers and legislators in Bavaria got together to draft the “Reinheitsgebot” (“German Beer Purity Law”), stating that beer would contain water, barley malt and hops.

Hops provide the bitterness in beer as well as a great deal of flavour and aroma. It’s the flower of a plant and was first used in beer in the 9^th century. In addition to bitter, zesty, flowery, zesty and citrusy flavouring, hops have convenient antibacterial effects that preserve beer. This also helped make it a very common water replacement during the Middle-Ages.

As a side note, the hop plant is a cousin of cannabis and their flowers look similar. The active compounds in hops that are used to bitter and give aromas to beers have psychoactive effects in cannabis. Human beings have been interested in and experimenting with a variety of psychoactive substances for a long time.

4. Yeast, the beer’s soul

When they wrote the “Reinheitsgebot” in 1516, they omitted yeast. That’s because we didn’t know about it and wouldn’t find out for certain until Louis Pasteur came round to study and identify these microorganisms and their role in alcoholic fermentation in the 19^th century.

These little microbes absorb simple sugars from the barley malts and transform them into alcohol.

Yeast also provides a whole range of flavours depending on the beer styles sought. It is often the most kept secret from brewers as an important point of differentiation amongst breweries. Indeed they often purchase malted barley or hops from similar supply sources, while the recipes and know-how from the brewer matters of course, the choice of yeast can be the distinctive yet difficult to explain reason people go back to one beer rather than another brewer’s.

The difference between ales and lagers are a matter of the type of yeast used and the fermentation temperature. Ales ferment at higher temperatures (around 20-25ºC / 68-77ºF, while lagers ferment at colder temperatures (often around 10-15ºC / 50-59ºF).

Now we have all the main ingredients let’s find out about the basic beer brewing process.

First you have to measure and heat all the water you’re going to need to brew. This has been calculated in advance based on your recipe. It changes based on the volume of beer you’re brewing of course, and also depends on the material you are using.

It has been heated to a specific temperature conducive to extract most of the simple sugars from the malted barley. The target temperature approximately ranges from 65ºC (150ºF) to 76ºC (170ºF). This part of the process generally calls for pouring the warm water in a prepared recipient like a water cooler that can maintain the water’s temperature for an hour to 90 minutes.

Then you extract this sweet barley juice called the wort, and pour it into a large boiling pot.

Boiling has two functions: sterilizing the mixture and for hops to provide bitterness. When they’re boiled, the alpha acids in hops are broken down and add to the bitterness.

The brew boils for an hour to 90 minutes for most recipes, with different varieties of hops added at different stages of the boiling time depending on recipes.

From the moment you turn the stove off, the wort’s temperature has to be brought down from boiling point to approximately 20ºC (68ºF) as fast as possible in order to add the yeast.

This is a tricky time and everything in the preparation area has to be spotless clean to avoid contamination.

This is a tricky time and everything in the preparation area has to be spotless clean to avoid contamination by bacteria that can easily spoil the beer. Different techniques can be used to cool the mixture down, from throwing giant iced plastic bottles in there, to copper coils running continuous cold water. At the same time stirring the wort aerates it, which is a good thing, sufficient amounts of oxygen will stimulate the yeast and allow it to multiply and thrive.

When the wort has finally cooled down, the yeast will be able to survive in the wort. If it’s too hot, a lot of the yeast dies off. It should be dropped in and then the fermenter is hermetically sealed to prevent air into the fermenting environment. An air lock, usually with a small amount of water, lets the C02 generated by the fermenting process to evacuate while preventing air and bacteria in the fermentation environment.

The primary fermentation takes a few days and generates a scum of dead yeast that accumulates to the surface of the brew. If the recipe calls for it, this can be the time to add hops to brew in the fermenter like tea. It’s called “dry hopping” and gives the beer citrusy aromas. It is a popular process with the American-styled pale ales and IPAs (India Pale Ale).

Leave the brew a few more days and it will be ready to be bottled. A small amount of brewer’s sugar is typically added during the bottling process to encourage any residual yeast to finish fermentation and creates Co2 in the bottle, giving the beer its final carbonation level. Bottles should be left to complete fermentation for a few weeks before being drank.

All in all the process takes three to six weeks from the brewing day to the day you can invite friends around to taste.

In Singapore, I typically alternated between traditional and original beer styles. Even though I didn’t completely master main styles like pale ales, I enjoyed experimenting with ingredients.

My most original recipes included a brown ale with pecan nuts and maple syrup; and a bourbon and vanilla pod oatmeal stout. The latter was like a dessert beer and quite delicious.

I haven’t brewed since I left Singapore and I miss it now.

I haven’t brewed since I left Singapore and I miss it now. I hope to brew again once I’m settled in my new place in London. I love that while it’s fairly easy to make a drinkable beer, there’s a whole world to learn in order to make different styles of beers and it takes mastery to be able to reproduce the same beer again and again. I’ll tell you once I start again and maybe offer to send you some samples to taste it.

I hope you enjoyed reading, enjoy the rest of your weekend! If you have beer, drink with moderation of course.

If you’d like to listen to something I’ve just published a new episode of the podcast, an interview with Philippa White. She founded The International Exchange (TIE), a fascinating organisation that works with creative communications professionals and places them with non-profit organisations in developing countries in need of their skills.

Cheers,
Willem

My Top Strength is Ideation [Ice Cream Sundae]

Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre photostream

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 21st February 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right hand column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

After some consideration for this week’s topic I started thinking about strengths, what I’m good at.
More specifically, you may have heard of Gallup’s Strengthsfinder (If you haven’t I’ll tell you about it now). Gallup is a management consulting company, and they are particularly known for their opinion polls. One of their founders also came up with this idea of analysing the data from over a million one on one in-depth interviews with professionals from just about every field you can imagine and turned it into Strengthsfinder.

The premise is pretty simple: rather than spending so much time and energy in our lives on what we are not good at, let’s focus on our strengths instead.

Out of their research, they identified and developed 34 of what they’re calling “strength themes”. For the most part, the themes are described and organised differently from the way we usually think of strengths. They’re both interesting and thought provoking.

You can take an online test and they tell you what your top five strengths are. There’s also an option to unveil the order of all 34 themes. I’ve done both. I’d say the top five is entirely sufficient to begin with.

As an experiment, I thought it could be fun to start a short strengths series to write about mine and attempt to illustrate them in writing.

I probably won’t do the five in a row; I’ll come back to it whenever I feel is appropriate.

Let’s start with my top strength: Ideation.

I took the test once with the first edition in 2006 and then a few years later when the 2^nd edition of the book was published in 2010. Both times ideation came out first.

In case you’re wondering if ideation is a proper word, it’s both in the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

From the Gallup Strengthsfinder the Ideation theme is described as such:

“People exceptionally talented in the ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.”

A friend who reads this newsletter told me he particularly enjoys the way in which I jump from one topic to another and then tie them together.

I make these connections as I’m writing and I’m not planning them half the time, they just come naturally.

The word idea has Greek roots, and means form, or pattern.

One of the dictionary definitions for idea is a thought, plan, or suggestion about what to do.

By now, you might already have the image of a light bulb come to mind.

Unless I just turned that light bulb on by writing it and you reading?

I’m not sure where it comes from, though signs point to the inventiveness and popularity of Edison when he invented the light bulb, often represented above him in photography portraits.

This was popularised even further in cartoons and then animations, with symbols representing characters’ thoughts and emotions. I read this interesting article that specifically attributes the light bulb idea to the animated character Felix the Cat. It’s an interesting theory though I think drawn cartoon characters with ideas likely came first. I don’t have any proof, it’s just an opinion.

Edison’s light bulbs were all the rage at the turn of the twentieth century. If you wonder what they look like, I’m pretty certain you’ve seen one recently. A hundred years later, they have made a serious comeback and are totally in fashion now. Almost every new popular bar and restaurant features large Edison lights. They’re the ones with complex and winding filaments, lit in a warm deep yellow or orange glow. For some reason most of the recent coffee shops, microbrewery pubs and trendy bars feature these kinds of lights.

It’s ironic given these light bulbs had been generally phased out because they were wasteful and didn’t produce as much light as following generations of light bulbs. We now have super long lasting and energy saving light bulbs but we’ve reverted to the old school Edison lights. That said most of them are probably the LED kind; they replicate the same shapes and style without being as wasteful from an energy perspective

I doubt a secret conclave of hospitality professionals and interior designers met and voted on the implementation of Edison light bulbs as a trend to bring back, though it is interesting to see how we imitate and reproduce what seems to be working for others.

Mimicry is one of the ways human beings learn. I’m seeing it closely at the moment with my toddler nephew; he’s quickly improving at repeating words and names he hears.

It may be one of the ways we learn, though we generally think of something new with the word idea. Repetition and ideas aren’t necessarily exact opposites but they’re certainly not synonyms either.

Ideas also hold a notion of appearing out of thin air, suddenly. Maybe in the same way flicking a switch magically turns a light bulb on. It’s not actual magic of course; among other reasons it looks like it because light travels so fast our naked eyes can’t see it.

Growing up in France, in Chemistry class I learned Lavoisier’s Law: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”

Antoine Lavoisier was a chemist in the late 18^th century generally considered “the father of modern chemistry”. His statement was meaning to show that however matter changes state, the total mass of matter remains the same. I believe it’s also known as the law of conservation of mass. Like the experiment in the second film adaptation of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Smoke, when the main protagonists who frequent the same tobacco shop in Brooklyn burn a cigarette, weight the remaining ash to try and deduce the weight of smoke (if I remember correctly). If you include the mass of the smoke and other residue regardless of their physical state, the total mass should be the same.

I believe something along the same lines happens with ideas.

We like to think new ideas are born all of a sudden and out of nowhere, but they’re more likely to be a product of all sorts of stuff coming from existing knowledge and previous experiences. Half the time we just don’t realise where these idea components come from.

I use the word stuff purposefully. I like it.

I just wondered why and checked the definition.

Stuff (noun):

1. Matter, material, articles, or activities of a specified or indeterminate kind that are being referred to, indicated, or implied.
2. The basic constituents or characteristics of something or someone.

It’s basically all-inclusive. A magic word I can use to replace almost any other word.

Just be careful not to become lazy to think about the most appropriate word and overusing this one, turning it from magic into mush, or smurf. This could be a topic to explore another time.

The Edison light bulbs in most of the restaurants I mentioned earlier dangle from long wires.

Consider this for a second; these light bulbs look like big lollipops turned upside down.

They are probably lemon or honey flavoured given their warm yellow glow.

The thought of lemons just reminded me of the citrus smells from orange and lemon trees in the streets of Seville I visited for a weekend years ago, before the Edison lights were so trendy.

Lemon was never my favourite lollipop flavour though.

When I was growing up I’d go to the village’s boulangerie to buy candy, they both had the traditional Pierrot Gourmand lollipops and the now more famous Chupa Chups brand too.

I’d generally choose the cherry flavour if they had it.

When I moved to France, the first house we lived in had a huge garden with many fruit trees, including two cherry ones. We picked the fruits and ate them straight from the tree when they were in season.

If you hold a cherry by the stem, you could imagine it’s a red Edison light bulb, in a trendy restaurant hanging from a wire.

It could be a cool look for a fruit smoothie and juice bar.

And of course cherries are a traditional topping to complete an ice cream sundae.

Everything comes from something we’ve experienced, never out of thin air.

From this perspective the new is a blend of several old we had all but forgotten about.

We naturally collect and regurgitate information, experiences and sensations in newly transformed states.

Apparently I can do that particularly well.

I certainly leverage this strength in my job.

Leading and participating in creative brainstorming sessions is something I really enjoy about being a strategist. Being in a room of people firing new ideas is energizing and compelling. It’s rich in ways that are difficult to discern while we dwell in this space of uncertainty where there are no bad answers and no concept is too silly.

The key however is to not lose sight of an agreed upon objective, without that it’s impossible to consider the quality of any given idea. Without a goal, ideas are just pointless ramblings about lollipops and Edison light bulbs.

The mush isn’t that far away from the magic.

My first step as a strategist is to ask questions that will help define my clients’ objectives.

It’s the best advice I can give you if you’re interested in coming with new ideas: first determine what your objective is. That becomes the framework your ideas can be developed in and out of, the proverbial box you can now think out of.

It’s possible that this combining of traditional ideas into something is what I found fascinating about Sensible Object studio’s new game project on Kickstarter. Fabulous Beasts blends components of a physical balancing board game with digital elements of a world-building video game. I had the chance of meeting with Tim Burrell-Saward for an interview I published on my podcast this week, it was a fun conversation to find out about the game and their inspiration, though unfortunately there were some issues with the recording and I decided to cut a few parts of it. I’m still learning to use my audio equipment correctly and I need to invest in a new digital recorder for these cases when I meet interviewees in person.

I also got round to writing a short post about the quality of the advertising and sponsored messages in Gimlet media’s podcasts, and the way they talk about it in a few different episodes of their brilliant podcast, StartUp.

I’ve also started publishing the Ice Cream Sundae newsletter more widely online, in my blog as well as on Medium, so that more people can discover and read it. This won’t change anything to what you receive in your inbox every week, I’ll repost it online a little later so you still get to read it first if you’re signed up to the email list.

If you’re enjoyed reading this and you think a friend of yours will enjoy it too, forward it along.

If you find out about your Gallup strengths, I’d love to hear what they are, send me a reply via email, or you can also get in touch via Facebook or Twitter.

Have a great week!

Best,
Willem

Gimlet Media's brilliant sponsored messages

As you might imagine given I produce my own, I listen to quite a few podcasts. I admit I haven’t actually been actively listening to audio podcasts for that long. While I listened to a couple of shows occasionally, it’s really since I moved back to Europe from Singapore that I’ve been listening to more, checking out as many shows as I can and catching up on both the most popular ones, and a few more niche ones, like revolving around games and game design for example.

The vast majority of popular podcasts are simply funded by advertising messages. The audience is as captive as the traditional TV or radio and as far as I know ad blockers haven’t found a way to remove portions of promotional message from audio files.

The format is pretty typical in most cases, with the show host reading a message from their sponsors.

That might be why I paid attention when my friend Lauren recommended the popular StartUp show, that I had heard of, though she also mentioned that in addition to the show itself being brilliant, their way of presenting ads was too.

It’s not so often I hear friends who don’t work in advertising or marketing tell me about the awesome ways in which a company advertises.

If ever you’re not familiar with it, Gimlet Media is a company created by Alex Blumberg, who previously worked for the National Public Radio (NPR). He wished to capitalize on the opportunity he saw in the growing interest with audio podcasts and left NPR to create his own media company.

In their own words:

Gimlet Media is the premier digital media company focused on producing high quality narrative podcasts.

Their first show, StartUp (season 1) tells the story of how the company started, if you’re interested I can only highly recommend you have a listen. I listened to one episode and binged the whole first season in a couple of days. It’s that good.

The other Gimlet Media shows are hugely successful (I love them too), to the point the digital media company was voted amongst the Top 100 most innovative companies in media by Fast Company in 2015, and that’s not the only award they received, for example Apple named Mystery Show the best new podcast of 2015 in their year end awards.

Alex Blumberg talks about creating excellent audio storytelling in StartUp and in other shows where he was interviewed, such as on the Tim Ferriss Show. This is something he is committed to in the production of all Gimlet shows, and just like my friend who recommended it, I really appreciate they have the same commitment to the way they advertise for their sponsors.

Rather than reading out what often turns out to be bland sponsor messages, they go out and find people who use the products and services they’re advertising, or somehow they create small stories around the sponsors. It highlights the sponsors in an interesting way, in the same way I’m listening to Gimlet shows for their interesting stories. They integrate the sponsor in their branded space by giving it a “Gimlet audio story lifting”. Every one of their shows also features the same music preceding sponsor messages, so it’s clear what is the main story vs the sponsored message. It makes the sponsor more interesting and in turn I’m more inclined to remember and talk about the ads.

Of course they weren’t the first to create this kind of native advertising in audio podcasts, but at the moment they have my (obviously subjective) vote for being the best and most remarkable.

Now every time I see a banner or paid search ad for Audible, I think of the person interviewed who listened to audio books during her long commute from the Asian to the European side of Istanbul. If I see something about Squarespace, I’m reminded of the fun and wonderful random websites the hosts of Reply All create, like Alex Goldman‘s Goldman Gripes. It makes sense to adapt the sponsors to what their audience are looking for, which is great audio stories.

Of course finding people who use the products and services advertised by their sponsors was all a little experimental, so they happened to make a mistake. It wasn’t great for the company, though it makes for a brilliant episode of StartUp where they explain everything about the way they advertise sponsor messages and the behind the scenes of this unfortunate event:

 

16/02/2016 Update: I just caught up with another episode of StartUp and it happened to be exactly about the same topic. I’m not the only person interested in Gimlet Media’s advertising, and this episode is about the tricky position of advertising compared with editorial content and endorsements. It’s definitely worth listening to. These conversations have apparently led to the idea of offering paid membership to listeners in order to start diversifying their revenue basis.

And there’s more I’m catching up with: Gimlet Media also announced they were starting to produce branded content. I’ll listen to the episode and probably update this post afterwards.

My New Year Motto: "It ain't over till..."

[I’ve had some good feedback for this last Ice Cream Sundae newsletter, I thought I’d copy it here as well. If you’d like to receive the Sundae email newsletter, you can sign up here.]

I hope you had a great time for New Year’s Eve! I’m just back from the Pyrénées Mountains where I spent a few days for a tabletop gaming getaway with friends. We had a fantastic time playing games, hanging out, drinking champagne and eating cheese fondue.

Next year I might take an end of year holiday break for the newsletter but I figure I’ve only started recently so keeping my own habit of consistently writing it every week is more important than taking a break at this point.

I mentioned New Year resolutions last week. I don’t tend to make these kinds of resolutions. That said, I wrote about liking game designer John Wick’s habit of New Year mottos and I’ve been giving some thought to it.

My favourite motto in life so far is “what goes around comes around”. I like the implicit ideas of karma and cycles. As much as I like it, I probably have space to add something new now.

As I was thinking about what could be in store for 2016, I browsed a few sites for quotes and sayings. I was thinking of themes like pursuing things, finishing what I start or something along the lines of perseverance. I’m thinking of the various things I’ve started last year like this newsletter and the podcast.

I’m usually pretty good at getting excited for new projects, and not necessarily so great and pursuing them over time. I get bored after a while and want to move on. There’s probably some measure of stopping when things get too difficult, when the real work starts. This also means I don’t often (or even ever) invest enough time to master anything. On one hand I enjoy learning all sorts of different things and being a Jack-of-all-trades, but that of course also means I’m not mastering much.

As these various thoughts were rolling around my head, this phrase suddenly came to mind and is taking hold: It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. (or The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings)

That’s what the year 2016 is about. It’s my New Year motto.

I like the sound of it, and the idea(s) associated.

Don’t assume anything is over and done until it really is.

Give things everything I’ve got until the very end, and then more.

Don’t readily give up.

Don’t presume to know the outcome of an event that is still going on.

Shake out of being resigned or cynical, there’s more that can be done if it’s not over.

It’s playful and can be applied to many situations.

I find it encouraging.

The proverb is often applied to sports, and that’s apparently the environment in which it was first coined. According to this article it was the sportswriter Dan Cook around 1976 in the San Antonio News-Express. “He was trying to to buck up local basketball fans who were dejected because the San Antonio Spurs were down three games to one in the playoffs against the Washington Bullets.” Others attribute the saying to the famous baseball player Yogi Berra.

The “fat lady” comes from opera stereotypes, in this case it is believed to be down to Wagner’s famous quadrilogy of epic music dramas: Der Ring des Nibelungen. A full performance of the cycle takes place over four nights at the opera with a total playing time of over fifteen hours. The fourth and last part is Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the name is a translation of the old Norse phrase Ragnarök, basically a huge war amongst gods and heroes leading to the end and rebirth of the world. One of the main protagonists is Brünnhilde, a valkirie of the Norse mythology. The opera and whole of the Ring cycle ends with her singing a 10 to 20 minute long solo in a scene where basically everything ends in flames.

That’s when it’s over and not a second before.

I enjoy the opera. I’m not a specialist at all, but I like listening to some of the famous ones. I’ve had the chance to see La Traviata in Perpignan last year. I’ve also seen Cosí fan tutte, Tosca and Le Nozze di Figaro on stage. I haven’t seen any of Wagner’s Ring cycle. I’ll look out for what’s on at the opera in London this year. Perhaps a topic to explore in another Sundae.

I’ve also written a blog post expanding a little on one of the previous newsletters about what went on for me in 2015, and rather than repeat myself too much I’ll probably copy another version of this newsletter in my blog.

I also published the last podcast episode of 2015, an interview with James Wallis, a British game designer, writer and consultant. If you listen to and enjoy the podcast I would greatly appreciate if you could give it a rating and review on iTunes or Stitcher.

I asked this last week already but that was before the New Year. Do you have a New Year resolution or motto? Keep in touch if you have one, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for reading, I wish you all the best for 2016! Have an amazing year!!

Cheers
Willem

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.