New home for 2010

http://notawhiteboard.blogspot.com/
(this was boring)

I love people

Yorkshire man complains about shagging lemon and lime on Maoam package. Priceless
http://www.brandrepublic.com/Discipline/Marketing/News/929986/Maoam-says-carnal-wrapper-complaint-genuine/

A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance

A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance

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bike

Utrecht, holland, Wednesday morning

red

Trying out Shozu as a way to publish content from Iphone onto several digital platforms.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

barefoot running

prompted by Nike's new campaign for the Nike Free running shoe, I began to become interested in barefoot running. Discovered there is a whole (small? large?) movement out there of folks who run barefoot, and perhaps also some scientific basis behind the whole thing.

Reminder to self

read this

USP or non USP?

I never quite bought into the fact that each ad should have a clear USP (Unique Selling Proposition). To me, it's always sounded like "the consumer is a bit dumb. he can only understand one simple message at a time. if you put two messages it will be too much".

But now I found that Rosser Reeves himself (the inventor of USP) puts it in a more agreeable way (quoting from branding strategy insider):

In his book, Reality in Advertising, he laments that the popularity of the USP does not reflect a wide-spread understanding of the term. He defines the USP in three parts:

* Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.
* The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique -- either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
* The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

Reeves recommended thinking of the USP as something the consumer takes from the ad, rather than as something the copywriter puts into the ad.

More agreeable, still ... a bit too simple.

Mayfly

I bought a pair of Nike Mayfly at a sample sale. 135 grams running shoes, so light it will only last 100k (and then explode?). They look like they are made of paper. You put them on and they feel like they are not there. The name comes from the mayfly, who allegedly is born, lives and dies in the space of one day. I will probably never use them, just keep them on my desk. But I love the insanity of this shoe. Reminds me of what I like about Nike.

Custom football kit

I like what these guys are doing. Damn it's good!

Twitter again

I finally managed to read Ogilvy's presentation on twitter. I did it quickly to be fair, but I was a bit disappointed. Nothing really new, or insightful or useful. I much rather enjoyed Micha's post on twitter. Just as I like his whole blog.

to do list

I haven't gone through this yet but the topic sounds interesting and I want to come back to it. So by posting it to my blog, I hope to remind to myself to check it out later. No-one reads my blog anyways so I might as well use it as a to do list :)

Ogilvy PR 360 DI Twitter Webinar

View more presentations from guestfd8f1. (tags: ogilvypr pr)

meetings again

I came to the conclusion that some of the meeting nightmare I was blogging about a few days ago is due to the fact that people arrive late (at least 15min) into meetings and are very undisciplined in meetings. I decided to tackle this meeting nightmare with a positive attitude.

I will keep at least my meetings short and sweet, by following the following five rules (which I learned by my former boss at Profero, who at the time I considered a bit of a a pain in the arse but wasn't):

1. meeting starts 5 minutes early (so everyone is there on time)
2. meeting ends 15 minutes late (so you have time to make notes, follow-ups,etc)
3. no laptops (so people listen to each other)
4. no phones (obvious one)

perhaps if I get a few people on board with this it will start making an impact

Meetings

As unexciting as it may sound, one of the biggest challenges I have at work is how to find time to sit down with people at work and talk.

Thing is, people's diaries are booked off for days and days and so even getting 4-5 people together for a few minutes is a big task. Example:



The causes? No idea. I guess it's a combination of little delegation, too many meetings, to long meetings, poor time management in meetings ... whatever it is, everyone seems to be busy meeting everyone else, all the time!

I am trying all sorts of things to get around the problem (keeping my meetings short and organised, meeting few people separately instead of all people at once, scheduling meetings early in the morning) but I have a feeling the system is still winning.

And then I wonder: if the people I am trying to meet are this busy, how must the diary of someone's really important look like? (Barack Obama, Mahatma Ghandi, you name it).

downturn game plan

copying and pasting from always interesting Freek Vermuelen: http://freekvermeulen.blogspot.com/

In a downturn, manage your revenues, not your costs

Here's a hypothesis:

In prosperous times, companies often fall victim to not being able to resist the many opportunities for growth that present themselves to them. In isolation, many initiatives with respect to new products, new markets or new customers look good but when pursued in combination they have a negative effect and hamper growth. Yet, wealthy firms find all these options difficult to resist precisely because in isolation they look so good. They have the funds to spare and therefore they are inclined to do too much of a good thing.

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, understood this well. Their best-selling product – microprocessors – had endowed them with much cash to spare. However, he resisted temptations to spend it on other initiatives and entering adjacent businesses, telling his people “this is all a distraction; focus on job 1 [microprocessors]”. It made them one of the most successful companies ever.

In a down-turn, companies should look different

However, companies in distress – such as in a downturn – often do the reverse. In academic research, we call this the “threat-rigidity” effect. They focus on their core business, shedding all other things, doing more of what they did before, and which they consider their strongest points, while trying to reduce their cost base to weather the storm, till it all blows over and they can come out of hibernation.

By itself, minimising one’s cost base is never a bad idea (also in prosperous times!) but these companies forget one thing: You have to not only manage your costs; you also need to manage your revenues. And, what’s more, the composition of a revenue base in lean times will have to look different from its composition when times are good. Where in happy times firms are often seduced to spread out too much, while they would be better off focusing on job 1, in meagre times firms are often inclined to focus too much, when diversifying one’s revenue base makes more sense.

Accessing different pockets of revenue

So why does spreading one’s revenue base in meagre times make more sense? It is, among others, because no job will be big enough to sustain the whole firm. What keeps firms afloat is accessing a variety of smaller pockets of revenues. Hence, rather than focus on job 1, hoping it will be enough to sustain the firm, the company’s effort should be aimed at identifying and creating additional sources of revenue. In the downturn, none of these additional sources will be big enough by itself. Moreover, many of these sources would not be attractive in prosperous times, because the firm would not be able to make them grow. However, this is not a time of growth, but of survival.

A diversified revenue base will also reduce dependency and with it risk. In a downturn, the probability of individual sources drying up is large, so a firm can’t afford to be focused on just one or a few of them.

But will searching for additional sources of revenue not be costly? If will not be costless but, by definition, it should not be expensive. Paradoxically, firms should not be focused on winning any big accounts, major new products or customers; they should aim for many smaller ones. They are relatively cheap to access and often the firm will already have knowledge about them; they shunned them in the past considering them too small to advance at the time.

Concurrently, this strategy of exploring multiple smaller pockets of revenue will equip firms well for the economic dawn, which will inevitably come. Their diverse revenue base has laid the foundation for new sources of growth. The firm will be able to quickly benefit from the upheaval in the economy. Many of the smaller pockets of revenue will stay small – and the firm would do well to shed quite a few of them – but the newly formed strategic landscape will be conducive to different sources of revenue than before. Although you can’t tell beforehand which ones it will be, some of the small pockets of revenue will be the new stars on the firm’s firmament.

odd

plain interesting

on digital's obsession with measuring results
http://www.adliterate.com/archives/2008/12/occasionally_i.html

spot the difference

ahrghh!

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi