Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

London tube - late again

Given that that we are almost a decade into the 21st century, why on earth are London Underground so proud that they are: "...Moving Into The 21st Century."
Shouldn't they be there already?

We-Think: we are what we share

Sometimes you read a book and it just connects with you.

I remember years ago getting that feeling when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto for the first time and loved the thought that: "All markets are conversations" - simple genius!

I had the same feeling with Charlie Leadbetter's We-Think.

If you haven't read it,  buy a copy now or download the first chapters from his site.

It's great stuff, really well-written and persuasive. Full of analogies and examples, it is one of the best Web 2.0 tracts that I have read.  It is also an example of collaborative creativity as it was developed together with 257 We Think wiki-users, who provided fresh insights and obersvations and corroborated stories.

"The web matters because it allows more people to share ideas with more people in more ways...at its root most creativity is collaborative; it is not usually the product of a lone individuals flash of insight...our capacity for collaborative creativity will become even more powerful because the opportunities to engage are expanding...the generation who have grown up with these ideas will have as their motto: We think, therefore we are."

The central premise of "WE ARE WHAT WE SHARE" is spot on.

In the 20th century we were judged as individuals by what we owned, our material possessions.

In 21st century we will be judged both on what we produce and what we share.

"We are what we share" as it is through the recognition and esteem of others whose opinion that we value which ensures that the prorogation of ideas continue.

I was fascinated by chapter 2 in which Leadbetter explores the origin of We-Think: he describes it a peculiar mixture of the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek. Have a read and see if you agree.

And if you work in the comms world and don't know the story about the origins of the civil war between Apple and (as was then known) Micro-soft, have a read about the Home Brew Computer Club, you should educate yourself fast.

Just brilliant.

You've probably gathered by now, I really enjoyed this book. In fact I think that it's a must-read actually.

I would be really interested in any thoughts from other people who have read We-Think or maybe seen Charles talk at TED etc.

My Starbucks order

Love the fact that the consumer  (me!) is in control:

"One tall soy milk sugar free vanilla latte no foam to go please"

What is your regular Starbucks order?

Kids Company - Camila Batmanghelidjh

Camila has been a bit of a personal heroine of mine for a while now.  We live  close to the estates in and around Peckham where Camila and Kids Company (which she founded in 1996) do most of their youth out-reach work.

Kids Company has gone into some of the most deprived areas of London and made a genuine movement of social change. Working with what she calls "lone children", children with effectively no functioning parent, Camila has inspired and empowered a generation.  It was really eye-opening talking to her about the kids that she works with.  She talked about Maslows hierarchy of needs and the fact that the majority of families that she works with are functioning at the most basic Survival level -  worrying about paying the rent, if the bailiffs are on their way and whether their kids will be stabbed when they play outside. 

I am interested in VCCP becoming a partner to Kids Company - offering financial support, but also providing work opportunities. One of the things that Camila was talking about was the fact that these kids need to have the opportunities to engage with a wider social and working world outside of their estates. We talked about offering kids the chance to come and do work experience in VCCP. I think its a brilliant idea. When we pitched the School Food Trust we had two teenagers from a Comprehensive in Deptford working with us on the  pitch, it helped to keep us creatively and strategically honest and they provided a constant stream of brilliant ideas.  They were also the people that we used to do research with other kids as we felt that teenagers open up much more honestly with other teenagers.  They helped us win the pitch no doubt about it.

I'd be interested to know if any other agencies do something like this either with Kids Company or other organizations like  Kids Company. 

Planning for Good - activating the Plannersphere

Mark and I have been working to set up the UK branch of Planning For Good.

It's taken a little longer to get off the ground than perhaps we'd have liked, mainly due to the fact that both of us are working like idiots and always seem to be on a plane, train or automobile to some place or other.

Luckily Michelle is now helping us - have a read of her blog Grad In The City, its good stuff - so hopefully we may be able to actually be able to set up PFG sessions and email people with the right details.

Anyway, with that in mind the next session of Planning For Good is on:

THURSDAY 8TH MAY

3PM

THE BREAKFAST CLUB, Soho (Unless someone can offer up a room in a central agency and maybe some coffee and tea!)

In case you don't know about Planning For Good, take a look at the UK Blog.

PFG was started in the US based out of a frustration that Planner & Friends can sometimes feel - namely that if they have to re-segment the dog food market/pickle market/chewing gum market for the hundredth time they might scream (sorry any dog food/pickle/chewing gum clients who might be reading this post!)

In a nutshell once a month we are asking people in the industry (and by "the industry" I mean media, PR, digital, experiential, advertising etc) to give up 90 minutes of their working week to spend time on a live not for profit client brief.

It will be a live brief, from a client with a budget so if any of the comms solutions presented to clients are actually bought then agencies stand a chance to actually produce the idea and make some money.

Anyway, the request that I am posting to you is - can you help spread the work about PFG and the session on the 8th May.

I am hoping that this is Web 2.0 collaboration in action...

Fingers crossed, see you there.

Will be posting the brief in the next few days as soon as we get it from the States.

Also if you have any not for profit clients that you think that we should be talking to for future briefs can you post or email and let me know.

Thanks!

Clio - Content and Contact

I LOVED being a part of the judging of the Clio Awards last week.

It was led by Johnny from Anomaly: Faris from Naked New York; Robert Wong the Global Creative Director of Google, Icaro Daria (the most awarded creative in the world last year apparently) and me.

Inspiring people; inspiring work.

Brilliant to be able to see such imaginative, innovative work from all over the world. We are NDA-ed until May and the award show in Miami, but once we are  allowed to Faris and I are  blog it and talk through the panel's thinking and reasons for specific award judgements that we made.

It was a hard one to judge, we were looking at everything from ARGs to full length feature films to blogs to bizarre pop-up Japanese retail stores and ice skating Japanese dogs (I kid you not!). How can you possibly compare stuff like that? I think that the criteria for people entering this category was stuff that people were really proud of but had no idea what traditional category it fitted into.

Chop'd is the new Innocent

I think that  Chop'd could be the new Innocent.

Both Chop'd and Innocent have really understood the current desire to have really good fresh food fast.  Busy urban professionals want  stuff that tastes amazing, but is also healthy. They are looking for  companies with clear ethics but one that doesn't feel too worthy.

When Innocent started back in 1999 Richard, Adam and Jon always talked about the way in which they were helping people to be a bit healthier, in a small and manageable way on a daily basis.  Chop'd is doing a similar thing - like providing free filtered water ( "refill not landfill"), tasty superfoods and a open and transparent approach to marketing.

.

I  had one question for them.  For all their good "green" words, I kept on seeing people throw all their rubbish into one bin and I wondered what their recycling strategy was, was a Chop'd person physically going thru all the rubbish?

So I emailed them and asked them.

Within 15 minutes this is the email that I got back:

Amelia,

Thanks.

What were you doing up at St Pancras? You guys work out of Westminster, no?

(I know at second hand some of the VCCP crew through their WCRS days - all positive feedback, don't worry!)

Glad you like the muesli. My mum brought me up on it. It's really good energy food: fast fruit sugars to pick you up then slow release oats to see you through to lunch.

Maybe try our porridge next time. Its equally different, and in summer is great with yoghurt and raspberries, mmmmm.

We are currently transitioning from PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) to rPET (recycled PET) packaging. All our salad bowls are now rPET. We hope our cups and bottles and cutlery soon will be too. We are also hoping that by 2009 we can 'close the recycling loop'.

Our manufacturers and suppliers are currently working on a plan to collect used bowls and other disposables (at the same time as delivering clean ones), to melt down and turn back into clean ones. In the meantime, we sort our instore waste, as you will hopefully have noticed at St Pancras, which the landlords then recycle accordingly.

It's just a real shame so many of our customers ignore the sorting signs and chuck any old waste in any old hole. We'll get them there in time, don't worry!

I don't know if you'd be interested in occasional lunch deliveries to VCCP, eg for internal meetings, but I know our Curzon Street team already enjoy cycling round St James Park and delivering to another couple of Westminster firms from time to time.

Thanks again for your feedback and enquiry. Please keep it coming.
Always nice to chat with customers, even if it is by email and not over a coffee!

Happy breakfasting (and lunching)

jasper wight
managing director

...................
It was a great email to receive. Really personal, really engaged and really informative.   Exactly the kind of honest answer that I was looking for. I guess that the challenge will be to keep up that kind of content and contact as and when they grow bigger.

Anyway, the food is incredibly tasty. Give it a go if you are close to Canary Wharf/Curzon Street/Spitalfields or St Pancras.

 

Thanks to Educated Community on Flickr for the images.

 

Web 1.0 Vs Web 2.0

I often get asked about the difference between Web 1 and Web 2

This is my new favourite answer:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman

Obesity - having your cake and eating it

This was in Private Eye.

Very funny.

Although technically in our defence we don't advertise red Coke, we advertise Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Minute Maid juices. Still it made me smile. My dad wanted to write a letter into Private Eye to let them that. Luckily he has been persuaded out of that course of action.

Un-bling Barbados

I blame Michael Winner and Simon Cowell.

I sort of assumed that all the people who holidayed in Barbados were bling, aging, rich lotharios.

And it's fair to say that there is a large proportion of people that we met who were like that.

But we managed to find a little fishing village where the houses were more like this:

A  vast expanse of empty white sand beach like this, and one little beachfront hotel:

And instead of bling yachts, these were the local boats:

It's a tiny  family-run hotel  called  Little Good Harbour and it is without doubt my new most favourite place in the world . We are already planning a week there in December.

But shhhh, only tell nice people please.

It is truly an utterly perfect place.

Barely Political

The US primaries are still endlessly fascinating.

Barely Political is one site/YouTube channel that I am ever so slightly addicted to. It just makes me laugh out loud.

The latest video is about the murky Irish past of Senator O'Bama.

When we were on holiday a few weeks back the only news channel that we got was Fox. Fox News sucks you in as you vegetate in front of it. It's impossible to turn it off. The O'Bama video is a great example of modern web satire. I have seen clips just like this from the Fox team about him.

Enjoy.

Speckies - award for creative work that never actually ran

Love this! For creative work that was either killed by clients, Account Directors or snotty Planners (being one I am allowed to call Planners this) Deadline is May 1st, so get hunting back for those "award-winning" ideas that never actually ran...

Clio Awards - Content & Contact

It's been a nutty pitch time at the agency recently - 2012 Olympics, AXA and government work on Obesity, added to that the fact that F and I went off to Barbados for a week to get some sun and agreed to turn off the blackberries, and that is the reason why I haven't blogged for what seems like an eternity. And it's odd because I have a ton of stuff that I wanted to share but it has been really hard to do that first post back.

Anyway, I am honoured to have been asked to be a judge for this years Clio Awards. I am the only Planner in a group of real leading-edge creatives:

• Johnny Vulkan (jury chair), partner, Anomaly, New York, US
• Ted Royer, executive creative director, Droga5, New York, US
• Taras Wayner, executive creative director, R/GA, New York, US
• Robert Wong, creative director, Google, New York, US

If I had been asked to write a description of what excites me creatively about our industry at the moment and what types of creative end products inspire me, I probably would have written something like this:

"...engaging communications created by the combination of brilliant content fused with an innovative contact strategy. Executions (that) reach beyond television and print to embrace new contact points, including gaming, branded entertainment, viral and mobile marketing, blogs, consumer-generated content, and more."

Hugely exciting.

Also daunting. On one hand who am I to say that Idea X is better than Idea Y or Idea Z, but then I guess that is what part of my job is at work.

Anyway, I have never done any kind of global judging like this - so if anyone has any tips I am happy to hear them!

The worst example of customer service ever?

Steve was coming back from Canada with his wife and 3 month old baby.

As they were on their way back to the airport to go to Heathrow, this is the email that they got from British Airways.

And that was it.

Nothing more.

No apologies.

No solution.

No nothing.

I almost didn't believe it until he sent me a copy of the email.

Just bizarre.  You can spend all the money  you like on flash advertising campaigns,  and then do  something as stupid as this.