Category: Uncategorized
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The light in the window It is nine o’clock on a Thursday and the agency is lit up like a Christas tree. You can see it from the street. The blue glow of laptops. A pizza box open on the boardroom table. Someone standing with one hand on the back of a chair, nodding at…
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The dentist In the 1930s, with the world sliding into depression, John Maynard Keynes thought it would be splendid if if economists could one day be thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists. Nearly a century later, Isabella Weber has picked up that daydream and given it teeth. Her new book,…
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It’s OK to be different. Of course it is. More than OK, actually. Difference matters. Different experiences, different brains, different ways of looking at the world all matter if you want great ideas that land. But here’s the bit we seem to have forgotten. It’s OK to be normal too. Great don’t arrive like lightning…
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There is possibly nothing less disruptive than saying you want to disrupt something. Every category wants to disrupt. Every start-up is a challenger. Every leader wants to behave like a start-up. Everyone wants to break the rules. Which means breaking the rules has somehow become one of the rules. It reminds me of non-uniform days…
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When I started in agencies, most creative reviews involved a layout pad and a Sharpie. There would usually be a handful of ideas. Not twenty-seven routes. Not twelve territories. Not seventeen executions of roughly the same thought. A handful. And nothing got into the room unless the creative director thought it was worth discussing. This…
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Strategy used to be called planning. Which is probably all the evidence you need that strategy people should never be allowed anywhere near naming. Still, there was something beautifully simple about account planning. The job was, more or less, to help make the right plan rather than the wrong one. And part of the reason planning…
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It’s a dreadful Spice Girls track but also a great approach to strategy, because usually you’ll find that not only do people have two stories that need resolving, so do brands. John Yorke’s Into The Woods is worth a read if you work in marketing and/or brand communications. It’s a brilliant book on storytelling, but…
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A gentler kind of strength I grew up in agencies where it often felt like survival of the fittest. Creative directors could rule by terror. The loudest voices ruled the room. Passion for the work was treated as a licence for almost anything, and working through the night was worn like a medal of honour.…
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I had a mini epiphany after some sessions with a physio. Two actually. To begin at the beginning, I’ve had a sore shoulder for months, it started when I was swimming and, if I was a rational human being, I would have stopped and got it looked at, but oh no, I raged at my…
