NORTHERN PLANNER

Before you go any further, this is another coffee/tea related post, sorry.

I had an afternoon cuppa with JamesB yesterday and he pointed out this website. Coffedate.com is just that, a place where you can meet someone in a relaxed environment. I like the idea of a more relaxed, no pressure, antidote to speed dating, I can imagine being to enjoy a chat with someone, romance or not, maybe they saw this post, maybe not.

So I may have to revise previous views on coffee (but not the superiority of tea). Tea is still slow and all ritual and little rules, but coffee is slow in a different way. It’s a social thing, the framework for a relaxing chat anda catch up, maybe a more informal meeting. It’s an alternative to the social alcoholic drink, overstuffed sofas, rustling newspapers and a muffin. Put another way, even if you’re going to have tea, you nearly always ask someone out for coffee.

By the way, I wonder if someone out there could be championing proper coffee as enjoyed by generations of Americans, maybe as an antidote to faffy coffee? You know half caf, soya milk frappicinos and the like. Every hardworking American worth their salt seemed to drink strong, black coffee when I was growing up, nothing added, just coffee – or at least they did when I lived their briefly as a kid (and on any detective show too, imagine Cagney and Lacey drinking a latte). I’m Northern though, so anything simple is okay by me.

This is an article about record companies searching for formulas and equations to work out what will be a hit or not. Interesting that one outfit seems to have a system that does okay.

That’s my problem with it though – ‘okay’. Reducing music down to a safe bet reminds me of the formulaic ads I fast foward through every day. 

Knowing our place in the universe dents your confidence a bit. Ever since we proved that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around our place in the universe has seemed more and more marginal.

We’re on a spec of rock and metal, orbiting an ordinary star on the outskirts of a galaxy that has about 400 billion stars in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies. That’s before you consider the possibilty of an infinity of dimensions. Our existence is pretty irrlevant.

But when you talk about existence, you get in trouble, existence only applies to things on your relative scale. An atom in a bogey in your nose doesn’t know it’s in a nose, a bogey or even know it’s an atom. Outside it’s nucleus , the strong atomic force is meaningless, while inside an atom it’s everything and gravity doesn’t matter until you get to the tiniest distances possible.

On the very smallest scale, electrons do not exist, they are not a solid thing but a cloud of probability – since they may be here, here, or here, we have to assume they are in all those places at the same time.

In the same way, do we exist on the scale of a universe? We are invisible next to something that big, to it, are we really there? Maybe trying to understand the meaning of the universe is like a bacterium wondering about the meaning of the human gut it lives in.

Don’t know where to go to this, but I like the thought of your truths being grounded in your individual perspective. Just thinking out load, so I’ll stop.

Scott has kindly given me this Cool Brands book to have a look at. My first reaction is to reject it immediately, since I reckon calling something cool makes it anything but…

I had a read anyway and the case studies are quite good. Especially the titles, which describe the brand in sentence. It’s quite interesting to compare them as you find that some don’t do much, they don’t feel ownable. Some are brilliant compressions of something really meaty, jam-packed with possibility.

Of course pictures and associations matter, but sometimes going back to a short sentence  can help you decide if you have something extraordinary –  or just a few words.

Compare:

Innocent by name, Innocent by nature

Chanel – fashion passes, style remains

Topshop – fashion for fashion’s sake

Smile.co.uk – brightens up banking

Hakkasan – original cuisine set in sumptuous decadence

With:

Canon, at the heart of digital imaging

Blackberry – tools for success

Becks – quality and purity

Alfa Romeo  – objects of desire

There’s a texture and a language British pubs that never get’s expressed very often, a culture around ordering a drink that might be very alien to someone from another country. You must attract the attention of the barman without making any sound or waving cash at him, never ever jump the invisible queue at the bar for example.  No one is allowed to complain about the slow service unless they’re a regular, non-regular’s who try this will end up very sober and very thirsty. You know that if you don’t buy your round it won’t get mentioned, but your friends will be talking about it when you’re not there. By the way, I wonder if there’s a new convention developing now that more and more smokers have to go outside for a cigarette?

I’m not a fan of the cold. I like Autumn when it’s fresh and still a bit warm, but once the clocks chance it goes dark, miserable and cold. On the bright side, it’s a perfect excuse to cook some hearty winter warmer food.

Cassoulet is my favourite food ever,it takes an afternoon to make which is sort of half the fun. Just some time on my own making stuff.

There isn’t one agreed recipe for Cassoulet and different regions of France argue over who originated it. The recipe I use is a hybrid of something I read in the Observer, a recipe from a former French flatmate and a bit of invention. For me there’s nothing like the thick meaty taste of sausages, pork belly, bacon and duck,  and breadcrumbs mixed with garlicky beans. It almost makes you glad it’s winter (tastes better than it looks).

Meanwhile Kirsten at work’s been busy baking.

I was sorting through some cuttings and found this story about the Ig Nobel Awards. Organised by Harvard, they’re for the quirkier side of science.  The thinking and rigour is just the same, but these achievements are supposed to "make people laugh and then make them think". I like the way they use a mass of knowledge, learning and experience to make something most of us wouldn’t understand, or care about, into some brilliance, interest and relavance for us all. A useful skill for planners when you think of it.

One award went to a scientist who studied the mystery of why fingernails scraping on blackboards are excruciating, another was for a study for why spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when bent. The one I like is a teenager repellant that emits a high pitched shriek audible to younger people (our abilty to hear high frequency dwindles as we get older).

I started this blog with a vague idea of talking about life as planner outside of the London bubble, but it’s something I’ve not talked about for a while. Maybe I should do it more since it’s a different perspective to life in a big communications hub like London.

Out here, we’re watching the prolonged death of big advertising networks and the struggle for integration in London with a wry smile, since we went through it ten years ago when there wasn’t enough advertising budget to go around. Being able to do digital, DM and design as well as advertising is second nature out here, but while London agencies break new ground, we’re getting left behind when we should be seizing the initiative by the scruff of its scrawny little neck.

One problem is a kind of inverted snobbery that sticks two fingers up to anything that could be pretentious overcomplication. Complexity? Pah! Blogging? Never catch on so keep it simple!So some of the big thinking going one glides by while we remain oblivious.

Another is the continued obsession with media as commodities, "We’re good at advertising but we can also do new media". With a few notable exceptions, not enough agencies have got their heads around creating ideas and then seeing what fits. They’re still asking, "Do you want a website or maybe a shelf wobbler?". It’s a shame since many places never split up media from creative.

You don’t need me to tell you that ideas are the future of this complicated new world, or that planners can be the pioneers that make sense of it all, but I get sad at the opportunity we’re missing out on because planners are few and far between out here(and many are glorified researchers).

There’s so much going on at the moment in blogs; discussions on complexity, compression, peer to peer stuff, zero media budget, but it’s passing most of us by. While others do campaigns around YouTube, many of us don’t know what a blog is.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m relieved bloggers are generous enough to share, it’s certainly a help to me, and I’m thrilled that I’ve got Northern Planning evenings for a group hug with the other lonely planners out there. Planners are the future ever where, but doubly so out here.

Just back from a two day course in London on brainstorming. I’m still worn out, which reminds me how much of the normal working day you’re not really using your brain.

I really like these APG courses, of course you get to learn new stuff, of course you get to meet some heavy weight tutors who really know what they’re doing, but I like them for another reason too…

It’s a bit lonely being a planner, doubly so if you work ‘Up North’. It’s nice to spend some time with more people like you, swap stories and have a bit of a group hug. I feel just as stimulated from the other delegates as I do from then course content. This one was espescially good with some from The Netherlands, Sweden, Dallas and, best of all, three from Portugal who did their national dance as a penalty for being late.