Margaret

screengrab by phnk

I managed to watch ‘Margaret’ on the iPlayer last night and I must say I was quite impressed. BBC does some brilliant one-off dramas as I’ve previously mentioned ‘Capturing Mary‘ in November last year. ‘Margaret’ aired on Thursday but nevertheless the iPlayer is a very useful tool, especially since I don’t have a TV or recording capabilities as it’d be plain inconvenient at the number of times I move in five years.

Lindsay Duncan, the actress who plays Margaret must have had a very tough job trying to put herself in Thatcher’s shoes. For me it felt almost surreal as I was born the year (and month) when she was celebrating a decade in the office so what I knew outside history classes meant almost nothing. And even so history teachers would be reluctant in talking about her as it was too soon for them to have an objective standpoint on what had happened to the country and where it was heading. Thus I’m being very subjective in saying the film was fantastic, because it taught me things I had been unaware of, regardless of how it was filmed and any other technical details. Now I can safely say ‘I understand’ and as they kept repeating it, I know what the mood was.

Whatever your political beliefs, you should go and watch ‘Margaret‘. NAO. While it’s still there.

Time Flies

Somehow I can’t believe what happened exactly one year ago today. And I do think it all evens out after a while. NP is right in saying something that not only applies to agency work but with other things as well:

“There’s no point shaking your fists at the cruel world. Life’s unfair, get over it, get on with it.”

How to Eat a Plum

 

In case you didn't know

I found this picture on my hard drive while cleaning up stuff and remembered it was from some very strange plum brandy homebrew experiment (not mine, just fyi). But why do we need a label to tell us how plums are meant to be eaten? What happened to just grabbing one, tasting it, going yay or nay and then waiting for it to ripen if it’s not ripe yet? And what about raisins then? To me they were always dead grapes, so that makes them fruit best eaten alive?

Some Twitter Etiquette

I was worried that I’d become far too addicted to twitter to be able to live like I used to before I knew of its existence but hopefully apart from all my uninteresting updates, I haven’t or never will:

• Send updates saying I have millions of unread feeds and I’m just marking them all as read, ha. All you suckers can just keep on writing anyway. (via @samismail)
• Have long and boring conversations in @replies, usually my limit is 2-3 replies then it’s probably worth sending an email or DMs to the person;
• Say ‘I need one more follower to 100,000, who wants to follow me?’ (case in which the person should be unfollowed even though they might reach their happy count sooner or later)
• Send updates saying ‘keep the internet awake’ for me…what the hell seriously.
• Send my blog updates to twitter when people aren’t following me to read about my stupid blog posts.
• Use twuffer (or tweet buffer if you’re not familiar with stupid names that combine twitter and some other word) to send programmed updates so it looks like I’m a robot that never sleeps.
• Use the ‘twitter say hi to x’ excuse more than two times to get someone on the thing. Never used it but I know some who abuse it.
• Panic THIS MUCH that my username gets suspended while caught in a spam cloud. Or whatever.

Can’t think of more right now.

Celebrating Pancake Day

 

Yum

 

 

Sorry it’s on the 24th as it should be but I really have no time to cook pancakes midweek. And by that I mean make the pancake mixture, heat the frying pan, check pancakes, plan in advance, not buy a ’shake and make’ pancake mixture. It’s just not cool.

Discontent

First it was Baileys, now it’s Diet Coke that’s been ruined forever for me by shit advertising. Yes, Duffy’s had her moment of glory at the Brits last night, yes the Diet Coke ad premiered at about 21.50 or so, yes, it was rubbish (and the men in the comments say it so I don’t have to). The modern, trendy, stylish, whatever woman in me does not sing along to that stuff. Duffy does not really do woman empowering songs by begging for mercy.

If you’re going to give power to the ordinary women celebrate them somewhat differently.  Or at least find out  why they drink Diet Coke when they do…also what makes their bums look big

Advertising agencies that will never ever hire me: JWT London, Mother.

Die on TV

I know this is absolutely boring news and I don’t talk about trash but sadly enough I read it or see it every day in one way or another. Saying that Jade Goody stories are trash doesn’t make me feel like a bad person because I am genuinely sympathetic with her and the fact that she has terminal cancer.  Or anyone who does. Not that she’ll ever know anyway and I just join the ranks of millions or maybe just thousands of people in the UK who were emotionally touched by the drama of living and (now) dying on TV.

What I do have an opinion about and feel the need to talk about is this: she is rumoured to get about £1m from her mass media deals, regarding full coverage of her wedding this weekend and possibly her impending death caused by a spread of cervical cancer. She decided to use the £1m to help raise her two children which to me sounds like a selfish thing to do.

Why selfish when her children obviouslly need the money? I’m not the person to say that just because I or my mum didn’t get £1m for being famous when she died, then clearly no one else should, and that £1m maybe isn’t that much BUT if you’re going to sell rights for making your life a public show then at least do it for a good cause or give us a reason to remember you other than having been made famous by a reality TV show. Millions of parents around the world die of some form of cancer and life just carries on as it always has, perhaps with a bit of struggle if you’re in a middle class family – you don’t have to be comfortably well off to be able to keep things going. And some extra struggle if you are unfortunate and poor.

When Brand & Angelina sold their baby pictures they didn’t keep any of the money because they already had plenty and £18m probably made it a whole lot different to whoever they gave it to. I know none of them were dying but that doesnt’ change much. If we want to talk about dying charitable people we can always turn to Randy Pausch who only moved his family closer to each other and lobbied in front of Congress for cancer research funding.

At least if we’re going to live with her being the subject of a lot of exposure in the next few months then at least give us some reason to make it worth our while. Like helping those unfortunate and poor. I would at least.

That is all.

iPlayer Curiosity

It’s been bugging me for a few days now: Why doesn’t the BBC come up with an iPlayer application for the iPhone/iPod in which you can subscribe to your favourite content and have it delivered, rather than asking me to go to bbc.co.uk/iplayer in my browser every time? If I want to catch up with the latest episode of something while doing whatever it’s a lot easier to have it a few taps away rather than few taps, bit of typing, bit of searching and then some more taps away.

Anyone?

Do Not Get

Rob wrote something about an ad that puzzles me to this day, and that’s Gillette’s Fusion Power Phenom with Thierry Henry, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Being ‘on top of the game’ is obviously a very important aspect here, along with the five blades and such. I wish I had worked more on men’s brands to understand shaving but I find myself at a bit of a loss here as I don’t shave and have no idea what it’s like; nevertheless there’s something about shaving and what a friend said about ‘The Firm’ with Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman when their characters both get ready to go out: one of them says ‘I look just as good as you but it takes me longer to get ready’ – which I’ve always thought was something razors could work on. But as I’m not familiar with their ads and whether it’s been done before, I’m not the one to speak.

It does make me think about RBS who splurged about £200m on celebrity endorsement before being bailed out if you’ve picked up on the news from the last few days. All this while a week ago or so they were rationalising giving out bonuses: 500 of 177,000 employees were responsible for the disaster, so the rest of the ‘best’ need to be kept within the bank but one wonders where the hell they’d go anyway in these times. £200m, on the other hand, just for using celebrity images for a bank…as Charlie Brooker would say it, RBS would make a great feature as one of the 10 biggest cocks in advertising.

So seriously, YC…

Inspiration and Thinking

I thought Neil’s Community presentation was a lovely, lovely piece of work but sadly I’ve not had the time to contribute to it, ending up marking thousands of RSS feeds as read at some point in the last few weeks. But for most of us, bloggers practicing advertising or just advertising (by that I mean comms if you want, I’m just too lazy to make the difference now but you get it) or advertising practicioners with blogs, we inevitably read each other’s posts and make efforts for our ideas and inspiration to somehow reach the outside world. One of the things I remember from a few years ago and still surprises me to this day when everyone and their mum has a blog is that despite reading pretty much the same blogs between us, you can still surprise people with something they hadn’t heard of, even if it’s just reposting some news you saw on a website (let’s say Brand Republic). It then dawns on me that even though we all read the same content, we analyse it in ways so strange it ends up being something beautiful from time to time, especially when ideas collide and we go through the whole process of forming a sort of collective knowledge.

What shocked me was this entry following Neil’s presentation in front of individuals with 3-5 years work experience: none of them had read books that we consider to be our personal bibles or could sleep with underneath our pillows.

“When the audience was asked whether they’d read “Here Comes Everybody”, nobody stuck their hand up. When they were asked whether they had read “HERD”, no-one had. “Purple Cow”? No-one. So out of 50 comms planners from across a variety of different agencies, no-one had read even one of what must surely be 3 of the most seminal marketing books of the past few years.”

This has always been one of my gripes with things we do in university, although it’s a bit different. We’re still studying, learning, doing, and all that  but I talk to people who want to become copywriters or something and ask them if they’ve ever heard of Luke Sullivan or if they know who Howard  Gossage is. No, not a chance. I ask them if they know of other books which are not necessarily written by advertisers but are important reads, whether you want to be a copywriter or just a, er,  cultured individual. Nope. 

A while ago I pledged that when I finish school I’d stop reading literature because I was fed up with all the literary critique, text analysis, all that boring stuff you do. It worked for me for about a year and then realised that I’m kinda missing out on something but don’t really know what. It doesn’t shock me that people would rather have DVD collections than books but apart from their direct importance as information source or pure entertainment, another thing interior designers talk about (on a somewhat related note) is that books give you a feeling of ‘home’ even though they’re not exactly sustainable in terms of printing and distributing. My grandmother has an enormous book collection and even though I haven’t read 1/4 of them, seeing them on shelves in the living room fills up empty spaces. Both in the room and in my head I suppose.

Apart from rambling about books when a friend of mine said he doesn’t know anyone that hoards books, I know for one I’m amazed at how many books Russell Davies reads. His velocity is impressive and I’m glad he shares that with us. It makes me feel dumb sometimes but I look at it as something I’d like to be doing one day, granted I have the spare time.

I loved Will’s response to this and felt like I shouldn’t write an entry of my own but it’s one of those things where maybe the more we talk about it, the more others will realise we’re not doing it just because we haven’t anything else better to do. 

“I’ve been very lucky, and very fortunate in my career. Growing up with a father who worked in advertising meant that whenever I had a silly question to ask, I could ask him. So before I ever got into the business, I had a good grounding in what was acceptable practice at an ad agency and what wasn’t. Now, compare my experiences with say, the average planner at a media agency or ad agency. On a grad scheme, you’ll spend a long time learning the ropes of how an agency works (I didn’t have to, to be honest – been told about that from day dot), about how to deal with clients (ditto – when your father deals with concrete manufacturers, it makes you have a low tolerance for juniors bleating about ‘boring’ brand briefs or clients shouting ‘insight’ when something obvious is ‘discovered’) and about the process.

Well, fuck the process. The process makes you stupid. Efficient, yes. But so what? I’d rather be the lateral thinker than someone who knows how to put figures into an Excel spreadsheet or doing lots of ‘crazy builds’ in PowerPoint. It’s not to say the process isn’t something you need to be aware of, and yes – as a planner, you do need to know how to use PowerPoint and Excel. But is it the job?”

God no.

 I remember two influential events that happened when I was young(er) as significant for what made me more curious than I usually am: first was the founder of a small (at the time) ad agency in Bucharest telling us the obvious, that inspiration can come out of nowhere or the least expected places. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it that made the difference. A lot of people said about him that it’s really hard to follow his thought processes and he did made it quite obvious by leaving a lot of people dazed and confused while I sort of understood what he meant. I had to explain the ‘aha’ thing to everyone else and being 16 0r 17 at the time they must have thought I was mad.

The second was meeting someone in Leo Burnett Romania who asked us something similar -in a room with people in their mid-twenties and then me, he asked if we had read Kotler or ever heard of him. I did raise my hand as I had read him since he was just standing there on my dad’s bookshelves and people kept saying he’ll be useful to me later. Why wait then?! This person impressed me because he came across as intelligent but not arrogant and then you’d have felt really really embarrassed if you weren’t aware of something painfully obvious.

Family surely must play an important role here – and not just because having someone who works in advertising/marketing is useful but my parents kept telling me it’s better to have a mind like a sponge rather than a sieve. And that you never ever stop learning new things, whether it’s from the cleaning lady that runs the vacuum cleaner when the office is empty at 6 in the morning or friends or anyone else. Dismissing things is not the way to go (i.e saying ‘no’ to reading anything remotely work-related outside of work) and definitely not when you work in comms/advertising. You’ll find that it’s a terribly boring thing if you don’t look around to relate what you read to what you experience and viceversa. You’ll find that you lack conversation topics most of the time and life is something that pretty much all of us can relate to. 

By all means, it’s not saying everyone should start reading books straight away but it is mildly depressing when the people you’re most expecting to know things have missed out on this. I understand that we need people who do more than they think because thinking (and reading) costs money and all that stuff but in comms not thinking (in the bad sense of the word) usually results in wallpaper. If we don’t, how can we expect to get people to listen to what we have to say?