I’m off to London Town for a course next Monday and Tuesday (6th and 7th). Unfortunately it’s not a Friday so no Russell Davies coffee morning, but if anyone wants to meet up after work on Monday, or breakfast -ish on Tuesday give me a shout (Carol? Scamp?).
Thanks to Famous Rob and Michael Pollit I’m doing a bit more digging before going with Sky Broadband. I’m tensing up already as I contemplate the automated phone setups and call centres. So I’ll call NTL first because I read last week that they’ve spent millions and training staff and improving customer service. There’s such an opportunity for companies who remember how to treat people on a one to one basis, especially online or on the phone. If your customers are becoming your media, better make them happy eh?
I really liked a positioning for a cable/broadband company I’ve seen in press a few times. It was all about going the extra mile, which is a bit generic, but expressing it as ‘If you can you should’ makes it brilliant for me. I thought it was Cable and Wireless. So far so good.
But when I went on the web to look at Cable and Wireless’ site, the connection wasn’t there. So I looked at NTL and Telewest to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake. Nothing there either. And to be honest, it was hard to tell them apart anyway. Only Telewest had some art direction that was consistent accross ads and online.
The broadband market, and I’m looking at the moment, is so competitive that Sky are willing to give it away for free, but there seems little differentiation amongst the biggest players? What’s up with that? One has a great positioning but I can’t find it online – did I imagine it or is their marketing that disjointed?
Looks like I’ll be going with Sky – I’ve already got the digital. No one else seems to be able to give me anything to trust at the point of purchase.
You finish work,it’s one of those perfect car journeys with no hold ups, every traffic light is on your side. You’re two minutes away from the swimming pool, already you’re thinking about diving in and forgetting the day.
You turn the corner and it’s gridlock. You sit there for another half hour and seethe silently.
I was watching Tristan and Isolde last night. An okay film about Dark Ages English tribes at war with each other instead of uniting against the ruling Irish. While I’ll have to check my history books for the veracity of the plot line (isn’t the real legend something to do with King Arthur of Excalibur fame?), it’s a useful reminder that the best way to unite is to realise you have a common enemy.
There’s not many planners in the North of England, so we need to stick together against the opinion that you need to go to London for good thinking, Not to mention the fact that it can be a bit lonely sometimes.
So I’ll forget the ancient rifts between Manchester and Leeds (two cities in the North of England who don’t get on, not least because of football) and point you to Graham Furlong’s blog. He may reside in Manchester, but he’s another planner Up North and he gives you posts like this one on simplicity.
Stu’s been threatening to start a blog but I can’t persuade him to make the leap. In the meantime he’s decided to see if he can run 10K in 40 minutes, looks like he’s been influenced by my grasping at youth swim challenge.
I was in London on Monday for that pitch (No time to catch up with any London bloggers I’m afraid). Thankfully it went fine and we’re through to the final stage. We didn’t do finished executions, we showed them their voice, what they should feel like. It worked a treat.
There wasn’t a traditional creative team on this one, we had a planner/writer partnership from the start. If you’re reading this Russell, thanks for the all that stuff on complexity and getting the people that do executuions involved at the start, it really does produce different work. Having Stu helps too.
We were showed the ideas from another agency. It was bit surprising and and I didn’t know what to say when asked, "What do you think?". I managed to mumble something about the ideas being good but it didn’t capture what I thought the brand was about. What are you supposed to say in these situations?
The annoying thing about writers is the way they make it look so easy, curse them. You’ll need no introduction to Scamp of course, but if you can bear witnessing someone else making it look like a doddle, have a look at find One Woman Running’s blog here. She hasn’t won a D&AD yet but she’s written a fascinating post on what got her into this mess in the first place
Very busy today, so a fuller report on last night’s planning together will have to wait. It was fun and here’s some questions to ponder in the meantime:
1. Should Famous Rob’s weakness for Cointreau preclude him getting that job?
2. What did James mean when likened himself, Rob and I to Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and the famous Karl (and which one am I)?
3. How do you get the right music volume in bars? Should everyone get their own speaker, or there own louder v quieter voting buttons?
4. In future should we all leave when Gemma and Joel do to avoid stuff like the above?
5. Anyone else want to come next time?
NORTHERN PLANNER 