WK London are looking for a planner that does. Makes me wish I was good enough and could move to London. You would be insane not to have a go at the challenge laid down here.
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Rob wants to know what picture you think best represents China. Have a read of his post and join in, planning type people need tos stick together and help each other, plus, he's going to share collective findings, which will be interesting.
I've chosen a Ming Dynasty jar because, from a personal perspective, when I make enough money to retire early (ha!) I'll go back to university and study Chinese history, both ancient and modern, I can't think if a richer or more diverse subject.On a more serious note, what happens in China will increasingly effect everyone's lives and you can't truly understand what drives a nation, it's psysche, what it wants and how it behaves without understanding how it got here, as Simon Schama's The American Future, a History so searingly demonstrates.
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The Narcissism of Differences is a book that persuades you that the US and European nations are far more alike than they would like to believe. It's more a case of how different they aren't – most differences are based on illusionary dogma, received wisdom and untrue stereotype.
I think that's a learning for far more than would be jingoists, and the title is one of those that can be nicked for all sorts of stuff.
It matters to and for normal people, especially in the West, where we wrongly believe we're special – we're not, we're 99.9% (roughly) alike. As other's have said, that should mean planning type people should search for what unites people, not what divides them for lasting effect.
It matters for agencies who, pretty much, do the same thing but claim to be wildly different. What it different is merely what they choose to emphasise, or, more likely, what they choose to believe about themselves that isn't true at all really.
And it's very true of brands. What brand managers tend to love and obsess about is usually a slight variation on what every other brand manager believes leaving whole categories as, largely, a variation on the same thing, creating big fat category rules to break if you can find relevance with proper human truths (see the first point about people).
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Once upon a time, a certain junior planner I worked with was shamefully made redundant for no other reason that he was the easiest to get rid of. Mort, I salute you. Not only because you won through a really tough period, you ended up at DDB planning Speedy Gonzalez for Virgin Media. I'm more happy than I can say.
Often, people in this business look at what they've achieved for themselves – as a planner, you might base that on IPA's Effie's or APGs, hopefully you look a little wider than that and consider if you've done stuff you're really proud of, or when you know you've made a difference.
I'm beginning to learn that, personally, I value seeing people I've worked with and helped in a very, very small way flourish and do well. Mort's one Andreea's another. They'll say they're getting on because they ignored everything I ever said, but what they don't know is that's how I planned it all along.
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I've said in the past that's one should think very carefully before criticising someone else's work. I forgot my own rules with this post about sausages. Amidst talking about the food, I got carried away and had a go at this work for Richmond. Personally, I hate Richmond and all it represents, I hate the uniform pinkness of the sausaged in the commercial, but I did something I hate in agency people even more than Richmond sausages, I got all elitist and forgot that somone worked very hard to produce something they thought was right for the audience, who don't live in adland's ivory tower, and the client.
What made it even worse was the way John good naturedly set me straight in the comments. You cannot argue with return on investment on that scale. So John, I salute you and your patience. Next time in London, I owe you coffee and some gourmet sausages.
And I should have known better, since I was responsible for this:roundly criticised in some parts, deliverered £21 million in revenue – we knew the business problem and what we had to do and this did the job.
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One of the hardest things about this job is work life balance, which is little silly because it's essential. You can't do interesting work if you don't do interesting things and you can't really understand culture unless you actually dip into it from time to time.
It gets harder as you get older too. There's the partner who resents you not spending enough time together and, in my case, the need to spend quality time with your kids. I dread the day my little boy has to be told that Daddy can't watch his school play, or be there in his birthday; it will happen.
There's some sort of conflict between one side of who they are and another. In my case, the curiosity and need to do good work with good people makes working Up North a challenge but responsibilities as a father and husband matter too, not to mention the need to swim.
What I've learned for myself is that I'm not defines by any side of these contradictions or conflicts, what defines me IS that contradiction.
21st century is culture is porous, as are the people that live in it. We are constantly constructing and re-constucting our identities, trying new experiences on for size, playing with our appearances, sloughing off one layer of skin when it doesn't suit us anymore and taking on another…being lots of people at once. Contradiction is at at the heart of who we are and what we're becoming – embrace it.
More reason to not let your job totally define you as far as I'm concerned.
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I've been wrangling with an audience in a global segmentation for a while now. You know the scenario: drilling down and down to make them unique within the category, while forgetting the real role of the category withing their lives. As other people have said, it's not entirely useful to search for profound differences between people when we're basically alike.
Whenever you're presented with a precise presentation, with the usual pen potrait and 'helpful' indexes against whatever panel resource your region uses (TGI for me in the UK for example), I suggest you don't just leave it there.
What you have is all the things that make a supposedly different consumer, not what makes them a person. I sugegst you need to go further and find what really matters in their lives, because you're marketing to real people, find something to admire in them, find a link between the brand's beliefs and their own, a role in their lives rather what product advantage they're likely to buy into.
That's not all though: in most cases you'll have to focus on a primary and second audience (at least) and you'll have to find something that's compelling to both – which usually means finding cultural significance or proper insights into human nature.
Anyway, we are getting somewhere, to something human and true, to do with the kind of people we all turn to in a crisis, the reliable, boring ones we don't appreciate until we need them.
Perversley, I wasn't going to talk about this, I was going to post about an emerging theme within this, the joy in making things with your hands, the satisfaction of a job well done and being capable at things that matter; rather than things that are necessarilly cool. Then I read this Simon Jenkins article and realised I might as well just link to that. Oh well.
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I went to see John Simm do Hamlet last night, which was execellent.
Now, there's nothing more teeth grindingly annoying in the cinema and most certainly the theatre than people who forget or refuse to switch their mobile off. The Crucible Theatre have a great way of dealing with it. Just before the start, an intolerable ringtone assaulted our ears. Everyone looked around, desperate to pinpoint the culprit with a laser beam stare of contempt, before it gradually dawned on everyone that it had come over the louspeaker.
Then a small minority pulled out their phone and switched it off. Brilliant. Bring the full force of contempt to bear at exactly the right moment – shaming any transgressors into avoiding the emrassment at all costs.
I bet if it was done in cinemas it would be more effective in actual action than this (although the brand benefit for this campaign was huge).
Just shows what happens when you think about context and social dynamics properly….
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If you've loitered around this blog for any time and you're still here, you're probably aware I talk about food a fair bit and even throw in the odd recipe.
There's a few reasons for this, a little to do with wanting to share how easy and wonderful proper food can be, but mostly because cooking is one of my favourite things to do – I mean it's creative, it's making something, it's losing yourself in a task, it's showing people you love them and it's as endlessly exciting as world culture itself.
There's so much story in food where the recipe came from, your own experiences that wrap around it and the ingredients too – along with where it came from, how it was introduced and what context it once had.
I love this Gladwell article on coffee for that reason and I'm a fierce champion of bread in these low GI, post Atkins times (if I may, carbs are essential, it's only personal greed that makes them bad, there's nothing more satisfying that simple, well make bread, nothing filled with so much history and ritual).
Then, in a wierd confluence of seperate threads, my thoughts have returned to the sausage. Partly to do with the call to return to proper blogging, the nostalgia for the Meat Bracket that signifies that golden age, along with the fight for the sausage, but also thoughts about Marcus, the sausage champion and his heroic walk.
Any way, there are two types of sausage in my book. The great sausage that is made with quality ingredients, is probably bought from an independent butcher or a small firm that has got distribution in a large supermarket, and the mass produced, big brand or own label rubbish that is made of all meat that is only called meat thanks to dubious legal tapdancing.
The former is made with craft, care and attention, the other isn't. Trust me, you can taste the difference.
Just look at this commercial for Richmond Sausages (mass produced rubbish). Dwell for just a second on the horrific theme of nostalgic home cooked food, a generic space any food brand could fiddle with, and hopefully with a fresh point of view rather than thus dross, but lo, tear your attention away from the strategy (that was artfully proved by TGI and other wonderful data I'm sure) and just look at the sausages themselves. Perfect, each exactly the same size, with an unearthly pink hue that makes each identikit sausage look like a sunburned penis cloned from a cavalier nude sunbather. Horrific, processed rubbish. An insult to the amazing good stuff that's out there…
There's is just too much variety to pick a favourite – the Germans, the Polish, Spanish and the French have amaxing examples of smoked, cured and even just normal varieties. I love chorizo in stews, a Cassoulet can never be acceptable without good Toulouse sausages and the Italians produce sausages with a course texture that electrify pasta in a way no others can.
MY favourite happens to the ones my local butcher makes. Big juicy cumberland ones, the epitome of British sausageness. They are amazing when:
You roast them at around 170 degress for 25 minutes and put them in between two slices soft, lovingly buttered bread, with piles of onions fried slowly so they caramelise, making them outrageously sweet, with lashings of Dijon mustard cutting through that sweetness and complementing the juicy meat.
Or when you roughly peel and chop enough carrots, potatoes and sweet potato to feed you and yours well, along with a head of garlic, putting them in a casserole dish, pouring in enough hot chicken stock to nearly cover the veg, with the lid on for 40 minutes at 180 degrees, then taking the lid off, covering the veg with sausages and putting back in the oven for another half hour (or until the sausages are sizzling and nicely brown) serving with good crusty bread
Or when they're roasted on a bed of red onions, which, once the sausages are cooked, gets mixed with a bit of flour and some great quality chicken stock to make an incredible gravy (and is perfect with a dash of balsamic vinegar) – and a pile of creamy mashed potato, made with lots of butter and hot milk, or even mixed with cooked cabbage to make colcanon.
Or cooked on a barbeque, with the grill high so they cook through, served in floury buns with the humbly fantastic Heinz ketchup.
And then there's chorizo, the king of cured sausage.
Incredible just eaten as it is of course, turns a chicken sandwich into a feast, especially with good mayonnaise (and make it yourself, it's so easy and a different planet to what you can buy in a jar –
I use Nigel Slater's. It rarely fails me.
large free-range egg yolks – 2
olive oil – at least 300ml
half a lemonBut gently fry it and it will transform and tin of tomato soup, a bowl of pasta with a tomato based sauce, a risotto of you fry it with the onions at the beginning.
Ladies and gentlemen, the sausage. My God I love it it.
NORTHERN PLANNER 