NORTHERN PLANNER

In Pr Week this week, there’s an article on how the PR sector is losing out on word of mouth marketing, just like it failed to "seize ownership" of the internet as a comms tool. Now I’m not being funny, but isn’t PR supposed to be ABOUT word of mouth? Maybe trying to "seize ownership" instead of being part of a team could be the problem…

Meanwhile, heres an example of getting consumers to do your marketing for you.

This postcard was on Beccy’s cabinet at work, she loved the hamsters on TV enough to actually pick this up from somewhere, I see it and I’m thinking of swapping banks…you get the picture.

Someone at work read this blog for the first time this week, she got interested (easilly pleased) and read the whole thing, starting with the latest post and finishing with the first. The feedback was interesting and largely okay.

Apparently it’s a lot different from the beginning in April. At first it was a bit unsure of itself and talked about what it thought people wanted to hear. Then it started to get a rythm and momentum, it seemed to gain the confidence to say what it really thought. Since October -ish, it’s got all reflective. I never really thought about this before, but it really does take a while to feel confident about putting your thoughts up here, at least for me. Looking back I can see how posts reflect my frame of mind at that time, whether I like it or not. I never thought blogging would tell you things about yourself, but looking back it really does.

I’m naturally a shy person, until I get to know people, or feel confident with what I’m doing, I tend avoid saying much and listen. A younger version of me would always apologise   before speaking in meetings. Now I feel I know enough to have a right to speak. Blogging has been a bit like that, I feel happier about thinking out loud now. So love it or hateit, I’m going to carry on.

Even worse than my sad breathing Darth Vader thing from Empire, Helen has exposed my obsession with science. Not content,  I’m going to make it worse by admitting I love working on apparently dull products or services. Anyone can sell trainers, but when you have to make boring stuff interesting, it’s a real challenge. My favourite client (not down to the marketing manager’s resemblance to Wonder Woman of course), used to sell computer software to labs, not only was it a kick to produce some great B2B advertising for them it was a personal Matterhorn to understand what the hell the product actually did.

I’ve already mentioned that I learned loads working on homebuilding, considered the career graveyard by some. Not is it great practice, doing strategy on the stuff no one else wants to provides a chance to try new stuff while no one is looking. You’ll also get the undying gratitude of the creative teams you’ll be working with, since they’ll escape the mind clamp of boredom and will be able to try something new too.

I think that ads and design can be a useful singpost for what’s happening in our culture, sometimes they can influence them of course. Some people I know actually use ad breaks to get a flavour for what’s going on.

I know a lot of architects that think like this too. Of course they’re building things for people to live and work in, but they do more than that. The aesthetics of a building can have a profound effect on how you feel, or what you think about a place. When I think of city, or even country, I remember three things: the people, the food and the buildings.

They can add to, enrich your environment, or they can ruin it. Even worse, they can just ‘be there’.

I saw these quotes from beck’s futures and really liked them:

• The duty of an architect is to make it beautiful
• Beauty if the promise of happiness
• The best buildings make us sad: they remind us how incomplete and compromised the rest of our lives are
• A good building is like a good piece of music, it can make us cry
• The world will only become beautiful when property developers become architects

This taxi driver was marginally funny the other week. He got very, very lost, and he had an asphyxiating cocktail of air fresheners. As soon as I Stu giggling to himself, I couldn’t help joining in . The harder I tried to stop, the worse it got, especially when Kirsten joined in. How come something mildly amusing became so rib tickling?

This morning I heard that they’ve discovered that the reason for infectious laughing like this. It’s all linked to human empathy – a way for groups to get closer together.

When we see others display a strong wave of emotion, our bodies are biologically hardwired to feel it too. This imperative is stronger for positive emotions than negative. So although we may sometimes feel our lips quiver when we someone crying from time to time, we’re more likely to join in infectious laughing or singing along to together.

It begins to explain a lot, from football chants to the reason a funny film makes you chuckle on your own, but laugh out loud in a group. It may even explain why I found myself actually enjoying a Take That concert last year (Her Indoors wanted to go), although the hordes of screaming hormonal women may have had something to do with it too.

Maybe it’s a confidence thing, but I get nervous when there’s no one around to bounce things off. As a one man department it can get very lonely, but there is the freedom to make your own decisions. It’s liberating, but I’m the kind of person that needs other points of view. I’d written a proposal thingy yesterday and got into a bit of a panic when there was no one around to take a look before I sent it on.

I was listening to some old Prince stuff on tape, and I realised how good he used to be when there was a manager, a record label and a sound engineer to tell him when he was wrong. He used to be surround himself with other musicians and steal ideas all the time. Now he’s no one to push against his music’s a bit of a joke.

There’s been a fair bit of chat around recently on celebrities promoting good causes, the Red thing and famous people telling us how to live in general. My initial reaction is to tell celebs to get lost and keep their opinions to themselves. BUT…

The sad truth is that we live in world where celebrities are the new royalty. Celeb driven magazines sell by the truckload, people like Colleen Rooney have their own columns in magazines and people listen. As far as I’m aware, AIDS was never accepted as a heterosexual problem until Magic Johnson admitted he was HIV. Drop the Debt didn’t really become a live issue until Bono made it one (and God isn’t he annoying?). As much as Live Aid could have been about self serving musicians getting a fair bit of free marketing, it brought the issue to wider attention than would have been possible otherwise.

I wish we didn’t need famous people to tell us what’s a serious issue,and what isn’t, or brands for that matter, but if that what it takes, should we embrace it more?

While we’re on the subject of music and radio, this commercial for Radio 2 is breathtaking. It’s also at least as good as the Perfect Day ad for the  1997. Proper pieces of entertaining film you want to watch again and again. Got me thinking what my supergroup would be, hard to choose, although it most certainly would not be like The Travelling Wilberies.

During the last couple of weeks I’ve been driving a car with a tapedeck instead of a CD player. At first this was a pain, then it got quite good. Firstly because I’m listening to the radio more, not only more Radio 4 but the odd foray into Radio 2. One surprise was Chris Evans, no longer smug, nasty or annoying, but rather inclusive, a good listener and some fine music. Even better, the tapedeck is making me fall back in love with music I haven’t listened to for ages.

When Cd’s came in, there was lots of tapes I never bothered to upgrade. I also spent hours and hours making my own compilations. Without the nifty ability to jump around the tracks you want, tapes force you to listen to the whole thing. This means you listen to an album as it was intended, and pay more attention to the songs you were not that keen on. I loved listening to ‘New York’ by Lou Reed the other day, it’s supposed to consumed all in one go, and I remembered why. I dug up ‘Songs for Drella’ the duet he did with John Cale when Andy Warhol died – I’d forgotten  it even existed, yet it’s some of the most beautiful, poignant music ever made. Never have two people buried the hatchet with such dignity.

Some of my compilation tapes are more than ten years old, now I’m older I don’t have to cringe at some on guilty pleasures buried there. Gems like Echobelly, Gene, the underrated Eg (ex-Brother Beyond would you believe), and proudly revisiting Lloyd Cole.  I Haven’t listened to any Suede tracks for ages and out pumped ‘Trash’, as fresh as it was in the summer of ’93, there’s the Beatles’ ‘Here comes the Sun’ that I played after I finished my finals.  Some of the songs here are the soundtrack to days as a student, struggling to make ends meet in London, and other things that make me who I am.

I often recoil with horror when I find myself thinking that music isn’t as good as it used to be (not Echobelly obviously) but I realise now that that the music then represents days that will never come again. That’s not saying that life was better then, just different. So what comes out now will never be the same. There’s some good stuff, but since I’ll never again be sharing a Camden flat with a mad Frenchman and a city trader who plays wargames in his spare time, nor study enough for my finals- and I definitely won’t be dumped by Nina Chorzelewski again, it will never mean as much to me as the music I listened to back then.