[I don't know what the above says. I'm trusting the editor/sub-editor on this one.]
I remember many years ago interning at a PR company, where a big chunk of the intern work was to help out with the press clippings.
For those of you who are post analogue, this basically involved going through every single publication, every day, looking for client brand names, and cutting out those articles that mentioned them.
I imagine this industry still exists in some form, but Google Alerts would cover off 90% of what you find, with a dramatic reduction in man hours needed.
I use TIGS for a lot of things. To think. To solicit thoughts. To aggregate fragments of myself. To distribute the same.
So here are some digital clippings.
Here's 1:
An article from AdWeek by the lovely and laconic Benjamin "Barbarian" Palmer, about the challenges of resolving different needs and points of view, specifically the distance between clients and agents.
The very first thing I was taught in this industry we aren't certain we should call AD anymore, is that the client doesn't spend her whole day thinking about the tiny part of the marketing mix that your agency's discipline represents.
They don't know what you know, that's why they hire you, and they spend a lot of their time justifying marketing spend to financial people that consider it discretionary.
It's worth remembering.
But, to my point in the piece.
One of the biggest hurdles to interesting, or integrated, work, whichever you prefer, is structural. The more complex things get, the more disciplines or departments need to be involved, the harder something is to orchestrate.
Personally, I think we should try to extend ourselves out of our specifics, as I've said before, a strategist needs to understand business, brands, behavior, media, and digital.
Strategy demands holistic thinking.
Everything is a system of inter-operating parts. Some of the biggest challenges we all face are created because everyone focuses on, and is therefore biased towards, what they do every day.
[When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.]
So I said:
"Ideas that don't fit neatly inside 'advertising' boxes," he said, "may require [those] clients who reside within marketing to orchestrate a program across innumerable departments, which brings its own set of complications."
But the same structural difficulties lie on both sides, of course, in the obvious divisions between 'media' and 'creative' and 'digital' and so on.
A separate P&L, a set of cognitive blinkers, vertical jargon: all these things prevent us from understanding that the system is more important than ANY of the parts.
So it behooves to understand how what we do fits into the system, and try to learn the languages of the other parts. At least conversationally, if not fluently.
Here's 2:
Speaking of languages I don't speak...
For any readers that do read German, there seems to be something I said in this article from Page Magazine, but my German only extends to Entschuldigung, so I have no idea what exactly I'm being quoted as saying.
I suspect it may be related, since my thinking tends to be contemporaneously self similar.
Should you be interested [and, ideally, speak German] you can get the whole article:
Download Page Magazine 09.10 FY
Download Page Magazine 09.10 FY 2
Here's 3:
Last night I was invited to the Mashable SummerMash thing by Watchitoo, a new livesteam/social collaboration platform. I did a little microinterview, and during it there was some excellent live chat commentary:
21:21 guest_av1adt: he's a brit!
21:21 Nyle: He's my vanillia twin
21:21 guest_av1adt: hahahahaha!
21:22 guest_BAN0wr: this dude is keeping it real
21:22 guest_av1adt: he's had a drink for real!
21:22 Nyle: lol
21:22 guest_BAN0wr: vans and t shirt and baby dread
21:22 Nyle: not baby dreads
21:22 Nyle: like teenage dreads
21:22 guest_BAN0wr: Nah....If he's a Rapper we'd call him Baby Dread!!!
21:22 guest_av1adt: oh wow... is he on drugs? he's talking kinda fast!
