how to get a tip out of me in the recession

Employ some of the jolliest waiting staff in London, cook good food that's good value for money, have free wifi called 'lovelyleon' and write thank you at the bottom of the bill next to a smiley face. Well done Leon.

How not to: have arsey waiting staff and not enough of them, over book your restaurant so you can't even turn around a starter in less than 45 minutes, and have a credit card transaction thing that starts by asking how much tip I'm going to give you while arsey waiter hovers over me intimidating me not to press 'no tip'. Back luck nameless restaurants.

i'm in the future

Do you remember the future? Well I'm now in it and I didn't even have to buy a new telly. It's a whole new entertainment experience I tell you. Not least because I've been watching a double vision snow storm version of terrestrial telly for the last six months.

getting engaged

There still seems to be issues between advertising and digital from where I'm sitting. Advertising people are playing catch up on digital skills as quick as they can, as that seems to be what their clients want. Digital people think advertising people still don't 'get it'.

I can't see this lasting much longer to tell you the truth. I think we need to get to a balance where digital isn't called digital anymore, it's just called engagement. Advertising people get engagement so won't need to have a chip on their shoulder. And digital people can start to think about things other than websites.

In turn I also think we'll get to a point where we'll all realise digital (or engagement) isn't going to save the world (just like not spending money isn't going to get us out of a recession). It's just one more piece of a jig-saw of communications. Telly and radio still work. The profiles in facebook and twitter of people that are on the telly and radio get hundreds of thousands of more followers than those that aren't. There's probably a reason for this. 

The people that succeed will be the people that get all of it and can tie it all up together in increasingly clever ways.

I'll leave you with Seth.

jamie's new thing

I've bad mouthed Jamie Oliver as much as the next man in the past but you can't deny that he's in no way adverse to actually 'doing stuff' (at quite a prolific rate), and has a great marketing team behind him.

I got this email from him last night about his latest thing called recipease. A very clever little idea that picks up on trends for local business, natural food, healthy eating and learning (in a School of Life type way). And all of which look like at quite affordable prices (about £25 a session). 

I want to go and learn his knife skills now I've got my big knife back from China. Well done James, you've won me over again.

crispy thinking

Walkers are a brand who seem to have got their heads nicely around integrated engagement at the minute. First they did an on-pack points collecting thing that drove people online to redeem. That seemed to work quite well for them so then they did the do us a flavour thing and now they're finnishing that off with vote us a flavour.

All of which is driving traffic and engagement to their site to extend the brand experience. And adding value to the product without adding cost to the purchase price. Clever.

authenticity and wossy

A great little TED talk about economic changes and authenticity here. If I was a pseudo planner I'd say that people want more and more authenticity. They want to follow the real Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry, and don't mind following the Prime Minister's digital communications team as long as they says they're the prime minister's digital communications team and don't pretend to be Gordon.

life to digital to print

They say that print is dying, just like the music industry. I think they both just need to get a bit more inventive and they'll be fine.

Here's some invention for the print industry. Ben & Rus's paper and Gwen's book.

Both of which take their entire content purely from 'tinternet.

An interesting cycle is starting to appear of real life being documented digitally in personal spaces and then being achieved off at key points and distributed in print. (Why don't the Guardian or Times do a weekly digest of all the conversations and debates they've hosted online during the week as a w/e  supplement?)

Another interesting thing is the content is a result of people simply taking notice of stuff.

Like Colemand and Jenny say it's all about taking notice of the stuff other people miss.

busman's holiday

Did you ever used to watch Busman's Holiday on the telly? They used to get 3 teams of 'professional people' in and pit them against each other every week to win a foreign holiday to somewhere kind of something to do with their job. 

Like sending nuns to go and meet the Pope in Rome for the day. Cracking stuff.

I thought I'd have a busman's holiday of my own while I was in China so I dropped into W+K Shanghai for a couple of hours for a chat and to join in their speakers series.

I had a very good chinwag with Mr Nick Barham about what's going on in China, Shanghai and W+K in China & Shanghai at the minute over a big green tea.

Then lots of people took their shoes off and came and sat on a big red octopus thing.

And I talked about some stuff to do with innocent.

Including a slide on the infamous pyramid.

Then I had my photo taken with the big model in a stripy top outside and went to eat some very spicy noodles and frogs legs with Salma.

Thanks for having me Nick and W+K Shanghai. It was fun.

Sorry about the bad quality of the pictures, Salma wants to get a new camera. One of those nice ones with the red dot logo.

i've been paired with a medium sized shire

After watching Ken's talk on creativity and education I thought I'd try and get more involved in giving something back myself this year. So I signed up for this D&AD industry and education thing.

I heard back from D&AD last week that I'd been paired up with the advertising course at Buckinghamshire New University, which should be fun. Teaching as learning and all that. I'll let you know how it goes.

half a house

Because of this incident my house has now had to be sawn in half. What does a sawn in half house look like? 

Like this I tell you.