Congratulations on your choice of reading material! Hopefully you'll like my thoughts on bits of creative advertising (often digital things), and other stuff I feel like blabbing on about.
If you're looking for our agency, Nonsense, here's where our website will eventually go once we've interviewed all our Grandmothers. (Long story - but its there to read.)
This book is awesome. Full of superb stats, some of which aren't entirely useless. Random stat: the UK ranks 18th in the world innovation index. What are we playing at?! (Special thanks to Mr Giraffe for helping with the photo.)
Its called The Economist Pocket World In Figures, and I'm gonna buy it from Amazon.
There’s a cliché in the psyche of people my age (mainly courtesy of the lovable Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses) that elder relatives’ tales of war are – without exception – boring. I tacitly bought into this, until recently re-discovering my granddad’s writings, 10 years after his death, and 20 years after I was first given them to read (but ignored them in favour of something by Roald Dahl).
So, I’m going to transcribe them into blog format – a chapter every Friday – in the hope that more people discover just how interesting, dramatic, and (as I hope the 1st series will show) funny these stories can be. And it’ll also serve to get them into a nicer looking format than the awful fake-handwriting-typewriter-photocopies-covered-in-scribbles that is the only form they currently exist in.
All posts will go in my shiny new “Granddad’s war stories" category, so you can catch up at any point (should be a link in a the sidebar).
The first series is a lighter, funnier piece he wrote for family. i.e. No gory bits. It's called 'A Taylor at War' (My Granddad's name was Robert Francis Neil Taylor - he got an OBE and was an all-round legend really). I'll do the preface tomorrow and crack on with chapter 1 next Friday.
What are they thinking? They've got four of these permanently heating the area where nobody ever stands.
Our friends at Proximity London had a nice idea for their agency Christmas card. Like so many agencies, they went for a digital one. However, its clear that they used digital because it was right for the idea they'd had - not just because they had a manic desire to use Facebook or whatever (no points for spotting one of my personal bugbears there).
You see, rather than a silly video, animation or game, they invented a little project designed to spread Christmas cheer. Basically, they cajoled a bunch of people from the agency to hit the streets pre-Xmas and pull a cracker with a complete stranger - and filmed it. (My favourite bit is where Lou Barber - who is head of client services now, I think - sits on the beach with a sign saying 'Pull a cracker', and then just waits until someone takes her up on the offer.)
Not content with an uplifting little film, Proximity asked all their friends, clients, suppliers and people-they-wanted-to-impress to do the same thing, and upload it to the relevant bit of YouTube. Naturally I got involved, but was compelled to do something sillier:
I've never been more aware of exactly how many drinks I've had on a Xmas piss up before, as I kept checking my bag to see how many crackers I'd pulled with Soho's barfolk. Obviously the booze has affected the footage somewhat, but the results are still better than my first idea: 'models' in Soho doorways seem to dislike Xmas crackers almost as much as they detest being caught on camera!
We have lots of meetings. Most of them go on too long, I think because we're all people who get childishly excited about an idea, so it only takes one or two of us to "go off on one" and that's 1/2 an hour down the toilet.
This is annoying. (Unless I'm the one who's off on one, then I don't notice it.) So, we're going to try some things to keep meetings short, sweet and efficient.
First thing - Upright Meetings. i.e. standing up. Good for short meetings, like briefings, and with the fringe benefit of making great use of wall space and blu-tack, rather than table tops. We've done a couple and they work well, especially the bit at the end where you all go off to do your bit - makes you feel a bit like an American Footballer after a huddle.
Second thing - Stupid Countdown Clock (above). This was £8 from Amazon, and comes complete with flashy blue lights and, critically, the famous sound effect. 30 seconds before the end of a meeting, hit the button on the top, and voila; an added sense of urgency.
Tried this once, and everyone hung around to play with the bloody thing. Hoping the novelty will wear off...
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