An article in today's Wall Street Journal, entitled "What Sneakers Say About Your Soul," addresses the trend of increasingly liberal dress codes in creative industries.



"Established companies have long hired employees whose clothing suggested they would toe the corporate line. Today, many young managers believe office attire should do pretty much the opposite: express a person's inner soul.

"To older people, young people's style can be difficult to understand. Going far beyond business casual, the clothes seem either highly informal or provocatively young -- jeans, athletic shoes, tight T-shirts and miniskirts, for instance.

"But young workers are replacing traditional business dress with their own complex sets of rules and subliminal messages. Their choices among brand-name items are meant to communicate substance. Rather than Gucci versus Allen Edmonds, for instance, the choice may involve Nike Air Force versus Chuck Taylors. (Read: urban vs. surfer.)"

Full Article.

I'll refrain from commenting, but I think one of the article's quotes from (presumably) a young, soulful, urban surfer sums it up: "You know when someone's real and when someone's corporate."

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Last week's Justice show was awesome, almost as sweaty as my Girl Talk experience (i.e. pretty damn sweaty); their set was more like the Essential Mix they did for BBC Radio 1 than the Fabric mix I posted. Gaspard and Xavier showed lots of remix love, only dropping originals of "Stress," "Waters of Nazareth," and quintessential closer "We Are Your Friends," opting for Soulwax, MSTRKRFT, Boys Noize versions of some of their other tracks. The balance of the set consisted of new/obscure, probably French, house jams; throw in DJ-staple "TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY"  a cappella, "DVNO" and of course "D.A.N.C.E." a cappellas and you have yourself quite a shindig (or is that shitshow?).



Opener, labelmate, friend and fellow Frenchman SebastiAn played a slightly more eclectic set, alternating between the bass-heavy electro he's known for and poppier stuff: he was crossfading the Justice remix of MGMT's "Electric Feel" into Gym Class Heroes' "Cupid's Chokehold" when I arrived. He's done some kickass remixes of just about everyone and is definitely one to watch.

All in all, a great time. Soulwax might have been a better show, but Justice was a better party.

Francophilia aside, I was also caught this concert on Saturday. Hercules & Love Affair were ok. No comment on the headliners.



Here's a sweet tech-house rave-up throw-down for this week:

Finally the cloak got cool.  The cloak dress at www.lindseythornburg.com however....

(Obamabot [I prefer Barack Robama] via Engadget)

It's official: Barack Hussein "Blowout" Obama will be the 44th president of the United States of America.


(Nanobamas via Flickr)

Coverage of the election is just about everywhere (including the streets), so there's nothing I can say to underscore the significance of what happened last night. But the real breakthrough was CNN's unveiling of hologram technology.

Today's the big day. I voted before work this morning and I was in and out of my local polling center in less than half an hour.

It's out of my hands now...


(Yes that's a beach, no I don't know if it's real but it's cool anyway; via Animal)

So it seems that Obama's campaign is nothing short of a phenomenon (Obamenon, anyone?) If nothing else, he'll be remembered in t-shirt form (not to devalue the huge creative inspiration he's provided for artists everywhere). Hell, there's even an Obama art blog (with some cool work, I might add).

I even did a portrait about six months ago, for my old college newspaper, for an editorial by Alice Walker:

Is it a good sign or a bad sign that we've had so many posts today?

I'm seeing Justice tonight, one day shy of Halloween but it will be a blast nonetheless. Here's a preview:



This mix was rejected by London nightclub / tastemakers Fabric, possibly because it was too short. (Insert bad joke about injustice.) Tracklist, mp3, and more details at Red Threat.

In London, the Natural History Museum's 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year has just been announced. Here are the five winning photographs.

Snow Leopard, India



Black-Crested Macaque, Sulawesi



White-tailed Eagles, Poland



Swamp Cypress - Cece Fabbro, USA

So we've all seen the proliferation of presidential candidate costumes, or rather presidential costume candidates, but here's something for someone who wants to go above and beyond lipstick on a pig:



I wonder if that outfit is in Gill's lookbook...

Also: I've always liked this BV post about these Faux Punks from last year, some dafter than others (like the second to last guy, who looks like he just cruised to the CD store on his Vespa).

Every week I'm going to share looks I'm pulling for fashion shoots.  Buy them if you can.

Kate Moss for Top Shop dress. At this point Ebay is your best bet as it 'sold out in 0.0005 seconds'.   Yeah, whatever.  Make more.

But then Muji just did this and I felt like I was flicking through the pages of a great magazine, something I don't think a brand (oh, right, they're not a brand) has done with quite the same panache.

http://www.muji.com/message/

As promised, this is a follow-up to last week's post(s) about the much-anticipated (by me, at least) Soulwax concert last Friday.

I arrived shortly after midnight in hopes of catching Late of the Pier, who didn't get on stage until 45 minutes after their scheduled 12:00 set. The show was an hour and a quarter behind schedule by the time James Lavalle was on, and his forgettable DJ set only further exacerbated my exhaustion from the long day.


(via jmoranmoya)

Thankfully, Soulwax came on without a delay and proceeded to play without stopping for just under 50 minutes, which was enough time to cram in a handful of Nite Versions (of their own songs) and their remixes of LCD Soundsystem, Klaxons, Daft Punk and Justice, to name a few. I was sure they were going to close with [MGMT's] "Kids" but they concluded their relatively short set with "Another Excuse," which was fine with me. The highlight was probably the modulator solo in "Miserable Girl," one of the few times Soulwax strayed from the studio versions of their songs. Still, I enjoyed the show precisely because they were very tight-- the live 'crossfading' was a nice touch-- and they sounded great.

We read in this months Dazed Magazine that Jackie Cooper PR created the fashion strategy for Courvoisier Cognac.  Which is funny, because I thought we did that.

[With photographic credits to turdinabox.com - seriously!]

The most depressing moments?

No, it's not when you lose a pitch. The longer you are in this business, the more phlegmatic you become about this kind of thing.

No, the worst moments in our business always come six months to a year after you lose a pitch.

This is how it happens.

You are invited to solve a problem of some kind for a prospective client. You and a group of other people put a few weeks' unpaid work and quite a few tens of thousands of pounds into coming up with a solution.

And you come up with something which - well, ain't bad.

Maybe it's not a cancer cure, but it will do the job well. The solution includes ads in several media and several disciplines.. You even go beyond the call and explain that there are three or four other things the client can do, perhaps not involving advertising, which might also help solve the problem.

You spend a few thousand pounds more mocking up your proposed work. You argue about whether the headlines should end in a full stop. Whether to write full copy for the third radio script. Whether perhaps you should run another couple of vox-pops featuring the target audience. Or build a replica showroom in the presentation room.

You get up at 6am to rehearse. You are specifically told to bring the real team who will be working on the business because you will need to "hit the ground running". There is clearly no time to lose.

You present. It goes quite well. Although most of the questions come from some entirely unexpected new attendees from the client's sales department who apear to disagree with practically every sentence of the brief you received.

Never mind. Not long now. And you are told you will hear on Thursday week. It needs to be Thursday week because someone is flying over from America on Thursday week and because in clientworld, intriguingly, it's always really important to include as the final arbiter in any agency appointment someone who hasn't seen your presentation at all.

On Thursday week you don't hear a thing. You never hear a f***ing thing on Thursday week. In fact it's rule one of new business - add a week to any date you're told. But it won't be long, you know, because they're "keen to hit the ground running". They said so, didn't they?

Seven weeks later you get a phone call. If you're lucky, this is to tell you that you've lost. If you are unlucky you hear you are "down to the last two". This means you get to spend another 200 unbillable hours at the client's behest while their procurement department gets to treat you as their sex-toy. Before ringing you to tell you you've lost.

Finally they tell you why you've lost. This is never because you are too expensive (that would make them look mean) or because the strategy was wrong (that would look as though you were misbriefed). No, you lose because someone else came up with a "fabulous breakthrough creative route and they just have to work with them".

"Oooh", you think. Well, hats off to the chaps at WGHN or KGHS or whoever. They beat us fair and square. All credit to them. In fact you can't wait to see this breakthrough work. And it can't be long now because you know the client was really "keen to hit the ground running."

Six months pass. Nothing.

Another three months. Not a dickybird.

And then, finally, you see it.

Not the mutimedia integrated campaign you'd been asked to present. Not the breakthrough, blue-water strategy you'd expected....

 No, it's a single ad. It's on a tube card, or perhaps the side of a bus. And it's a total heap of crap. Shameful. Atrocious. In fact all it is a straight call to action but made mildly confusing in the name of creativity.

And that's when you experience one of the worst moments of your working life.

Because four weeks and £50,000 have resulted in an ad any half-competent creative team could have knocked off in an afternoon.

Later in the month you see two more ads the same or even worse. And then you see nothing ever again.

In fairness to the agency that beat you, they may indeed have had a great creative idea. But the odds of it making into the open air were worse than nil. Perhaps it's one of those marvellous Mexican stand-offs beloved of large organisations where the people who can approve advertising don't actually hold a budget - and vice versa.

But, whinge over, this is not a frivolous point. Because if there is one thing which could make advertising (and every other discipline) more efficient, more effective and more creative, it's the one thing we never have the balls to suggest.

The decision-making procedures at perhaps 50% of all client organisations are simply dreadful, and cost them millions by generating pointless and repetitive work to satisfy the demands of internal politics rather than the creation of brand value.

Pizza Hut was recently criticized for renaming a few branches as Pasta Hut. (I don't know why this is such a terrible idea -it seems fairly sensible to me). But one criticism was even more bizarre than most. "It's the sort of idea the Chairman's wife would come up with."

I don't know about you, but working with the Chairman's Wife sounds to me a splendid idea.

In fact outside Utah and the Middle East, the Chairman's wife has the perfect qualification for being a superb client.

There's only one of them.

As I mentioned in my last post, Soulwax is playing the Pete Tong-curated "Insiders" concert at Irving Plaza tonight. The brothers Dewaele have been pumping out both dance-rock and mash-ups (under the 2 Many DJs moniker) for more than a decade and, as electro pioneers, they keep good company: Soulwax has remixed or been remixed by Daft Punk, Justice, LCD Soundsystem, Tiga (who is playing Studio B tomorrow, I'll be there if I have the energy) and many more.



This one is going to kick ass; expect tons of blog posts titled "Part of the Weekend Never Dies" next week, QI included.

Soulwaxplosion:

Russell Brand got into a little bit of trouble for encouraging the Jonas Brothers to get on and have sex (not with each other you  understand, that would be wrong at such an impressionable age).  If you've read My Booky Wook you'll know why he feels so strongly about it.

Turns out RB received a death threat after sharing his advice to the young Disney boys.  God's love we deliver?

Anyway.  Russell Brand is performing a live stand up in New York on Nov 13th and 14th for his upcoming special on Comedy Central, and it's my gig of the week/month? until another good one comes up.

Pin Pin.

The Juan Maclean burned down the house, or rather the ballroom, on Saturday night. I had all but forgotten about the rescheduled concert at the Bowery Ballroom until I chanced upon Showtrotta's handy weekly dance posting on BrooklynVegan. Although the relatively small venue was only at 75% capacity or so, the concert was more enjoyable because I could actually move; the bass-heavy rhythms insisted that I dance and I gladly complied.



For lack of a better reference point, the Juan Maclean pulled every trick from the 80's playbook: eerie pad solos, dance-pop stabs, never-ending arpeggiators and throbbing disco basslines, often with a punk snarl and always with post-punk precision. Frontman John looked a bit stiff except when he worked his magic on the theremin. Nancy played the disco chanteuse. The other keyboardist (Holy Ghost?) expertly handled loops and effects. Meanwhile, the drummer was spectacularly limber, punctuating the synth drone with furious electronic drum fills, reminding me how much I love drum machines + live drumming.


(New tracks streaming at RCRD LBL)

While I only recognized two songs, singles "Tito's Way" and "Give Me Every Little Thing," from their 2005 debut Less Than Human, The Juan Maclean has once again taken an ostensibly outdated aesthetic to a new level. I couldn't quite identify what it was until halfway through the 15-minute disco odyssey that concluded their 70-minute set, when I realized that the studied, borderline pedantic, retro-futurism fetish was not ironic but, in fact, authentic.

The Juan Maclean is playing Santos Party House tonight as part of DFA Records' CMJ showcase, catch them if you can.



So that was the best show I've been to in a while, but it could easily be outdone by Soulwax (referenced in the title of this post), who I'm seeing on Friday. I've been looking forward to it for a while now and I will report back with all of the sordid details.

Here's their remix of MGMT's megahit "Kids," which I actually think is one of their weaker remixes:



Plus a bonus track, the "Nite Version" of "E Talking" featuring Nancy from The Juan Maclean & LCD Soundsystem:

I finally got around to checking out the pop-up gallery installation 'Outsiders' at Bowery and Houston, which Gill recommended some time ago. It was supposed to close a week and a half ago but will remain open until this Friday due to popular demand, and I can see why.



The show is curated by Lazarides Gallery of London, who specialize in contemporary street art and represent such artists as Banksy, Stanley Donwood of Radiohead fame, and Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett. There's also a couple small drawings by Blu, who I've been obsessed with lately (another link to his video mural here), as well as some ironic/iconic sculptures by another great public artist, Mark Jenkins (work pictured above and below). The more traditional graffiti stuff by the rest of the Laz, Inc. crew is also top-notch.



There isn't much I can say about it except that I would highly recommend it, it's free and a 5-minute detour from Soho or LES is definitely worth the trip.

Also, Irina Blok on Swiss Miss (love it or hate it?) and Streetsy's 40+ Street Artists You Should Know.

You may have noticed the preponderance of music posts this week, which is strange because I feel like it's been a slow week for music in the office.

I've been following TV on the Radio, poster boys of the Brooklyn indie scene, since their brilliant debut EP, Young Liars.  Although their sound has changed a bit over the past five years, their latest effort, Dear Science, is quite solid and probably couldn't have been made by any other band.

TV on the Radio has been getting lots of press (and acclaim) lately, due partly to the three sold-out shows they played this week. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see them this time around-- to be honest, I wasn't that impressed when I saw them a few years back, but apparently they now live up to the hype.



We also have a new trick up our sleeve: I'm trying out the quintessential web 2.0 site Imeem to post tracks to the blog. Here's a mashup I came across this week that I rather like. Enjoy!

I suppose there isn't much I can say about Radiohead (my favorite band, by some measures) that hasn't been said before, but the results are in for their recent marketing experiment: Thom Yorke & co. have sold (or given away) over three million copies of In Rainbows, physical and otherwise.

Their 7th LP was released last year shortly after they announced that fans could pay as much as they wanted to download it. The digital release alone proved to be more lucrative than their previous record, 2003's Hail to the Thief. For better or for worse, this is attributed more to marketing than the merits of the music itself.

No word on exact numbers for the pay-as-you-wish system, but apparently there were still more downloads via torrents than downloads from the official In Rainbows microsite.

I think I paid $6 for it.

Some much better pics at Brooklyn Vegan, here

The comments are great, I so very nearly went to the second night, looks like I missed another great set but I just couldn't believe it would top Saturday night. Possibly a mistake!

Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls close today. He took New York City by storm this summer, with a retrospective at MoMA and P.S.1, though the waterfalls were probably the most polarizing-- if only because they were the most public-- work on display. Of the Eliasson work that I've seen (which, admittedly, is not that much), I like the frozen car the best.

Gothamist reflects and Curbed rates the waterfalls.


(via Seg Fault)

Once in a while a gig comes along that transports you. Saturday night was one of those rare experiences that makes live music life affirming. It was a trip back to a harsh, driving, sound that viscerally grabbed me as a young boy, just as I was starting to discover music for myself, and, a realization now of how completely right I was, (without knowing it). Killing Joke formed because, as they said on stage, "we were paranoid of an authoritarian state". It was this sense of dislocation of being at odds with the world and really angry about it that makes them sound the way they do.

After there first two albums their sound changed, I lost interest and they split up, long before I was gig-going age. This tour is the first time the original line up have been in the same room together since 1982. Within a minute of the opening track I just dived in up front and danced around for the whole two hour set. Electric atmosphere. Great night. Some very blurry pics taken with my iPhone.

If you read my She Says speech, you'll know I'm a big fan of Oasis and their Busker idea to launch the Album in NYC.  It's early days yet, but so far it looks like they still can't get a break in America - the land of Britney-Pop and Hip-Pop.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2008-10-06-oasis-profile_N.htm

After looking at Ray's weekend line up I shall be reprezenting middle youth at Killing Joke's Fillmore gig on Saturday night, what's more I'll be dropping by Elizabeth Peyton's opening at The New Museum beforehand.

Killing Joke are a band I was heavily into in my early teens, by the time I got to a gig going age they had split up, become occultists  and moved to Iceland...Their music was built round a dense, aggressive sound with heavy drumming, they were a major influence on Nirvana. I'm looking forward to finally seeing the original line up live, for the first time.

We finally got around to checking out King Khan and the Shrines, who got some press over the summer for a couple of raucous (free) concerts. They sound great on record, I hope I can catch them live at some point.



Diesel's much-hyped 30-year anniversary party is going down on Saturday with the likes of M.I.A., Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip and N.E.R.D.-- check out the NSFW viral. I enjoyed the Hot Chip show last week despite feeling a bit under the weather.

A few other good concerts will be in town this weekend. I'm going to try to catch Les Savy Fav at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday.

An anonymous street artist known simply as "Poster Boy" has been tearing up New York subway stations, in a manner of speaking. His work consists of mashed-up advertisements, which range from political to merely amusing.



Poster Boy has been at it since January, according to an article in this week's New York Magazine. Gawker, for its part, has been covering him for some time now. He also turned up in PSFK a couple weeks back.



Poster Boy is perhaps the most well-known street artist to come along since Banksy, who has also been making headlines lately for his rat murals (pictured above) and a new pop-up store/gallery in Greenwich Village, including a blurb in today's NY Times. Again, Gawker provided coverage of his true identity over the summer, and PSFK has been keeping tabs as well.

Lesser known but equally (if not more) deserving of attention is Blu, whose deceptively simple murals fuse the playful and the grotesque. I first discovered him when a friend sent me this amazing video mural (watch to see what I mean) and shortly thereafter in Print Magazine. He is also currently featured in a Lazarides pop-up gallery on Bowery, around the corner from the office, until October 26th.



Check out Streetsy for more street art.

News today that the company I worked for from 1996-2003 has merged into a unit of WPP. George and Graham are two people who really have made a difference to our industry through pioneering communications strategy. I was lucky to work there.

Rupert had mixed feelings about the Echo & the Bunnymen show on Wednesday.

Hot Chip is playing a two night stand at Terminal 5 this weekend, tickets are still on sale.

Meanwhile, Township Funk (mp3) by DJ Mujava has been on repeat here in the office.


(Photo via BrooklynVegan)

If blogging epitomizes the post-modern condition, then blogging about blogging must be post-post-modern.

A recent AdAge article provides a cursory justification for blogging, while the BuzzGain article that Ochman references is slightly more in-depth.

I don't know if we at The Joneses can quantify our blog performance against those criteria, but I think we steer clear of Ochman's own counterpoint, 10 reasons not to Blog.

So what does that make blogging about blogging about blogging?

For the fellas who didn't get through security in their wigs and high heels, here's my presentation from She Says.

Download PDF with notes.

I'd heard about the Walk Score about a year ago but I didn't try it out until it came up in the New York Observer last week.

Walk Score appraises the walkability of any given address based on proximity to amenities such as restaurants, shops, schools, etc.

Walkability, for me at least, is a large part of the appeal of New York City. My apartment in Brooklyn garnered a respectable "Very Walkable" 88/100 score, while my previous address in Atlanta was far more difficult to perambulate at a "Car-dependent" 48/100-- to be honest, I was expecting a lot lower. (It could be worse: my mom's house in the heart of suburbia scored a meager 6 points.)

Of course, The Joneses office received a perfect score; we wouldn't have it any other way.

Apparently I'm the jealous type.
Sorry Fellas. This one's for girls only.

Christoph Buchel is known for his conceptual projects and complex large-scale installation pieces. For the Sydney Biennial 08 he invited some punk rock grannies, Jill, Violet, Joan and Wilga, to give a performance of God Save The Queen. Currently they are in discussions with the Stones for a support slot on their next tour.

Toby Young has written a piece about New York's Eurotrash in this weeks Spectator, and fortunately, has a few kinds words to say about us. Phew!


 

A couple of months ago while I was thinking about what to do for a bit of vacation I chanced on this article about a working ranch in Montana. I grew up in rural Britain and worked on farms throughout my teens, it's a way of life I've a lot of affection for, and, it immediately felt like the perfect break from New York. I'd never actually ridden a horse before, but after one week, Wild Bill and I definitely had an understanding - as he galloped across the prairie in pursuit of cows and I just basically hung on. Aside from pushing cows up hills it was great to spend some time in rural America with the people who live and work there - Lonnie, the 5th generation rancher who runs Lonesome Spur, with his wife Elaine, their wranglers, visiting the Cody rodeo and the annual Crow Indian Fair. Highly recommened (as long as you are ok getting up at 6am every day on vacation).

There has been a spate of pit bull attacks recently in NYC and a subsequent clamour to have them banned.

A few years ago I rescued a pit bull from the dog pound, in my experience pit bulls are about as vicious as our old family Labrador, in other words, not at all, which is now backed up by some evidence.

A study, published this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, concluded that sausage dogs are the most aggressive breed, with the highest incidence of biting strangers and owners. They found pit bulls have roughly the same temperament as, you guessed it, labs. Malcolm Gladwell also wrote a fascinating article a couple of years ago on what pit bulls can teach us about racial profiling, here.

This is Stella, if you come to our office you'll meet her!

Emily Bell wrote an opinion piece here in yesterday's Guardian about illegal file sharing. The central premise, and the stock response from the digerati, is muscians will make up for lost revenue from music sales with other avenues and we all have to accept the value of content is essentially nil.

I disagree, and posted the following comment at the site.

The idea that "...gatherings, merchandising, hard copy sales and new advertising models might partially make up for the end of the distribution monopolies.." is pretty much the standard line from the entertainment industry but doesn't this miss the point? Other than new advertising models all the revenue channels are an existing element of any artists income so they are not going to replace lost revenue. New advertising models are treacherous waters for any artist who's credibility is dependent on their independence from outside influences, speaking from experience, advertisers will attempt to influence the content to reflect their brand values, which 9 times out of 10 are so deliberately anodyne you can't create anything compelling. In my experience it's like watching your Dad dance at a wedding.

I believe there is something wrong with this statement, "we have to accept that the value of content is going to be essentially nil" . It's a fundamentally pessimistic, defeatist, place to start from, and, it supports the notion that you can't change people's behavior.

Getting people to see the value of the music, and why they should pay for it, is a cultural issue that can be solved with marketing communications; if people can be persuaded to kill themselves with cigarettes they can be persuaded to pay for digitally downloading music.

Last week we got tickets to see The Colbert Report. I've never been to a live TV recording before, we were told very clearly 'our job' is to laugh! Loudly. It was actually great fun, he mucks about quite a lot with the audience between segments and the professionalism of the whole operation was really impressive. It's interesting reading some of the first reviews of the show back in 2005. The recurring theme was the format and his persona might not have legs, yet three years later he's up for a bunch of Emmy's again and was recently voted 3rd most influential person in Time's Alt100 reader poll.

I think one of the reasons he is so popular, and clearly revered by the people who work on his show, is his courage. It's not just the cleverness of using Bill O'Reilly's persona to turn the tables on "Papa Bear", it takes balls to do what he did at the White House Correspondent's dinner.

Interesting use of the Segway. Members of China's armed police demonstrate a rapid deployment during an anti-terrorist drill. More pictures here.

I'm been asked a bunch of times by people in agencies, and by clients, - "what is communication strategy"?

I've always wondered why people were confused by it.

And now I know.

It's because a bunch of charlatans crossed out "media planner/buyer" on their business cards, called themselves "connections planners" or "communications strategists" and then carried on doing media planning in the same old robotic way.

"Start with the consumer", identify the most efficient media apertures (usually by manipulating crap research), allocate budget accordingly, then interrupt target with message in identified space. With hardly a passing thought given to the brand and what's being communicated. Old fashioned media planning circa 1985. It's pathetic and it's standard practice, even today.

Communications strategy is a creative process that determines how to bring the brand idea to life in the right communications channels for the audience, with give and take from both sides, and not dictated by either party. Communications strategy is based on the principle of involving and engaging the audience in an idea. It's a symbiotic process with the brand strategy, where each influences and shapes the other.

I recently stumbled on a Kind Fruit and Nut bar. Unknown to me when I bought a bar, 5% of the profits goes on projects that foster trade  between Palestinian and Israeli businesses. I think it's brilliant that something as everyday as a snack can get involved in the peace process, trade is just another word for cooperation and collaboration, so I think it'll help. Maybe PeaceWorks, which is sort of like a holding company in its infancy, could become the "Unilever" of ethical and socially responsible brands.


 

The one rule we had for Q.I. was no posts about marketing but I've already broken it, and here we go again ;)

There are three things that we've had enough of.

1. Pseudo-scientific, sophistic, communications strategy white papers and practices.

2. The flat-packed intellect, committee correct truism of "the consumer is in control".

3. And, the sheer mind bending tedium of "your brand your way" brand strategies.

Taking on the first one I recently fell upon these three charts, which kind of make the same point, one that we are all familiar with.







The one thing that always seems to get over looked is that the catalyst for "conversational marketing" is the conversational quality of the brand idea not the communications theory attached to it.

Invest in developing a brilliant creative strategy and the rest comes naturally - people will want to talk about it, remix it etc, on whatever social network they are plugged into - but it's not "engineered" by the communication strategy.

Ok, the communications strategy facilitates people sharing an idea, but then as we are endlessly told, people control and edit their own media, it follows the communications plan is controlled by them too.

But the brand idea is not "controlled" by the audience. Never. Ever. Did you ever see a great movie originated and written by the audience? What they've always had control over is whether they think its any good, or not.

All these charts illustrate what happens when you throw a bunch of money at a bad idea versus investing in creating a great idea.

What's new about that?

The simple test of all concepts is: is it an improvement?

You should be able to answer that yourself without 23 focus groups or a quant study.

Quite interesting snippet from the NYT article on Rush Limbaugh.

At a much higher rate he will weave a product into his monologue (To a caller who said he took two showers after voting for Clinton in Operation Chaos, Limbaugh responded: “If you had followed my advice and gotten a Rinnai tankless water heater, you wouldn’t have needed to take two showers. And I’ll tell you why. . . .”)

I need two showers after listening to him to wash off the snake oil. And I've got a Rinnai water heater.

As seen on a lampost near my house.

If you've read my bio you'll see I like this show, actually I'm a bit of a sucker for cooking shows, particularly Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-All and Cookin' with Coolio who kicks it up to another level.

News in today, from Popbitch the publishing world is buzzing with news that he's bringing out an eponymously titled book.

Gill recently styled this print ad for Fuse TV, with the help of my old Buick Rivera!

I've been reading Rob Walker's book 'Buying In'. There's a lot in there about the click, the consumer being in control,  consumers co-creating brands and so on. We think there is a nuance to this that gets glossed over and is really important.

A powerful, long lasting brand makes a stand, has its own point of view, it is polarizing and charismatic - all of which the brand is in control of.

The measure of a good brand idea is the degree to which people can and do get involved with it, which clearly people have some control over, and, this will to some extent effect what they think about the brand, but, it does not change the brand idea.

The brand is the author the customer is the editor.

A brief to sell McDonalds new specialty coffee to African-

Good to see Hanoi Rocks are alive and well in the horse world.