14 years continuous innovation

Yes, ok it's a little cheesy but you have to admire what these guys have achieved...no mention of Knol though!

Biggest Hit at CES

So all the chatter is dying down from CES...So many tweets, too little time. Apparently and unsurprisingly it was all about big, thin, web enabled TVs, netbook and smartphone slates and Ballmer's technology troubles

However, just when you thought it was dull and duller (Job's didn't even show up), we get this!



That is Lady Gaga's business card. She is the new 'Creative Director' at Polaroid! I am glad she took the time scrub out her office and email address (ladygaga@polaroid.com) before uploading the pic to twitter. However there's something in this that feels cool.

Of course we won't see her sitting down and designing the camera, but we do know that she is a bigger brand than Polaroid right now. Polaroid is all about the spontaneity of capturing the moment. Gaga is a 'now' brand; totally individual and attention grabbing in that 'blink and you miss it' sort of way. What on the outside seems like an ill thought through stunt could be a genius move....well, at least I hope so!

Love this!

If you read this blog occasionally you will know of my love of "Pop Charts" - tunes as graphs....


Funny as hell!

For 2010 I want a......

First day back in the office, what to work on this year?

Working in a media agency you hear all that talk of '360', 'holistic' and 'integrated media'. As an industry we have been banging on about it forever. We are doing a really great job of building brand plans these days (some of our packaged goods campaigns have 40% TV and 25% digital) One thing that concerns me is that against this backdrop of a changing way people live their lives and every dollar counting clients are looking for more and more 'proof'

I suppose on one hand the consumers now find more things to do with the same amount of time as technology as enabled getting stuff done faster but the proof that it works from a measurement perspective still looks prehistoric despite all the accountable, 'digital' activity going on.

We did a really good thing about 18 months ago; we scrapped our digital department but it still seems like marketing generally is bogged down in individual channel silos....there's a digital client, with his social expert who hires a 'social' agency (kill me) and they come in with 'here's a Facebook strategy and I can give you a bucketload of data to prove while this Facebook strategy is a good thing'. Don't get me wrong, the clients and the specialists are excited about the future; it just seems so damn complicated

So what I wish for in 2010 is that big network agencies like ours take all that data we have been integrating on consumer response and build a story of it, a story that explains how people are living their life and what they really do, because even in a world of infinite choice, people still work in patterns and patterns are predictable. That's my job for 2010...what's yours?

Happy new year everyone

Would you spend $220m to make a movie?

Avatar, everyone is talking about it. It's the most expensive movie ever made. I thought we were trying to dig ourselves out of a financial crisis?!

Also what about that long tail thing? The internet opens the supply, everyone has infinite choice and flocks to all these niche products. So how come Avatar is out there and American Idol and X-Factor are getting bigger and bigger? Seems like in these tough times people need the big hits as social currency

In a world like this where you have to be a huge hit or a nice little niche, content companies have to make it big if they are spending a decent chunk of change on anything. If Avatar doesn't crack $500m it will be deemed a failure (albeit a beautiful failure). If you do 'ok' on opening weekend you get dropped from screens and then you are in a dog fight up against all the small, low budget stuff out there.

That leads to a lack of risk taking all round, which is a shame... and for that, you have to root for Jake Sully and his big blue friends from Pandora

Tiger Style

Tiger, you are crazy... untouchable? With everyone as a journalist did he ever think he was going to get away with it? Tiger Woods has been 'romantically linked' to at least 10 women, and now his image is firmly in the toilet.

Nielsen data in the US highlights that prime time television ads featuring Woods have disappeared. This is a guy that (used to) makes over $100m from Nike, Pepsi, Gillette, Gatorade and Accenture.

I'm sure that Tiger 'High performance, delivered' Woods may be desperate for privacy right now but the tweets and TMZ just won't let up. On top of that everyone blogs or microblogs so its far too juicy not to pitch in. News these days is curated at rapid speed; no one is safe so why would any 100 year old, self respecting brand associate itself with a highly paid, testoterone-fuelled sports star or actor with too much time on his hands

P&G is a company that has always taken a moral stance (remember Mr Clean?) - looks like the Tiger will be back in the wild shortly

Twitter making Dell money?

Big-box desktop maker Dell is telling us it has made $6.5m in revenue directly through Twitter since it's first tweet in 2007. That's amazing news don't you think?

$6.5m is a big number - that's the sort of number that gets the attention of the New York Times. However for a business that rakes in $61bn a year in revenue it represents 0.01% of its annual revenue. Basically, analysts like me would be hard pushed to pick that effect out of the revenue data over and above the noise - but that's the beauty of the internet...trackability!

It makes you think if those Twitter sales are truly incremental? Everyone buys a Dell online so would those customers have bought elsewhere? Had any of Dell’s other sites had seen a similar decrease in sales?

Either way, it has to be commended. Dell has embraced social and ultimately the ongoing relationships they are developing with their customers will prove more valuable than these sales, and ultimately result in even more incremental sales and less sales lost in the long run