on failure

Here's a good quote from an interview with Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes in the Sunday Times. Wise beyond his 23 years.

Vaguely related post: your daily aphorisms.

marketeers of the years

My favourite marketeers at the minute, in no particular order..

Radiohead. Do marketing in the very best way possible, without even thinking about it and by being themselves.

Peter Kay. Sold exactly the same stand up show on DVD three times over without anyone noticing and then found out how to get into the top 10 of the pop charts and made some more money doing that.

Tibetan market stall holders. If you ever go to the market in Lhasa you'll find that Tibetan market stall holders are some of the best marketeers in the world. Using the winning combination of cowboy hats, gold teeth, genuine smiles & warmth and the ultimate lead in for new prospects "looky, looky, cheapy, cheapy".

from the miraculous to the mundane

Here's a very quick thought spurred from watching Evan Williams TED talk on the tube this morning.

"Twitter lets people talk about everything from the miraculous to the mundane", for example...

miraculous

mundane

The mundane outweighs the miraculous by quite a bit though, life by its very nature is filled with more mundane events than miraculous. 

Most brands prefer to talk about the miraculous rather than the mundane though (big telly ads are miraculous), they're the ones struggling with social media. The ones who are quite happy to talk about the mundane (and do it with frequency) are the ones flourishing. Like those Zappos folk.

more democratised donation

Here's a good bit of democratised donation I spotted at Waitrose last night. Every one who buys something gets a green token and can choose to vote for which local community project they'd like Waitrose to support.

They're doing something very similar at the new gorilla kingdom bit of London Zoo at the minute about gorilla projects, but I didn't take a photo of that I'm afraid.

what's your frequency kenneth?

 

I was thinking about frequency the other day whilst catching up with my RSS feeds. Particularly how some feeds have different frequencies to others. Seth's blog for example comes at you thick and fast and I don't always have time to keep up with it. Which is a shame as I'm missing some good thinking (that's my fault not his though).

It made me wonder if frequency is ever considered as an objective for a communications brief, and if not should it be? 'What's the best frequency for this messaging?' type of stuff. For example at innocent we try to stick to making one blog post per day as a rule, we won't post stuff for the sake of it to just meet the rule but that's our blog's general frequency. Stuff like twitter has a much higher frequency but can also be very sporadic.

I'm kind of noticing that the people I'm following are turning down their blogging frequencies and upping their twittering frequencies. Kind of a sign of the times I imagine but I miss reading blog posts with pictures and longer formed thoughts and stuff.

It's also been making me think about sustainable frequencies. I've spoken about wearing stuff in and not out before, and long term 'always on' type communications. These also take long term resource commitments though particularly suited to in-house teams. What about stuff like the compare the meerkat twitter feed? Is this a sustainable frequency? I kind of assume it's being maintained by a copy writer in an agency so unless the client is prepared to keep funding it it's going to have to be turned off one day. But if it's continuing to get engagement why would they? I suppose the question is where is the line drawn when it's no longer worth the investment and you let the followers go. The vast majority for campaigns are time specific these days, so by their very nature have to come on an end. Or perhaps this is changing?

Anyway my own frequency for this blog tends to be once a week at the minute. Until next week.

why i liked the internets this week

My laptop broke this week, just wouldn't start, couldn't get past the grey screen with the apple logo no matter what concoction of keys I held down. The mighty internets let me download a step by step guide into how to take it apart, fix it and put it back together again. Saving me a few hundred quid in repair charges and the long wait of sending it off somewhere.

I quite enjoyed the tinkering as well. Thank you open source knowledge.

now that's what i call marketing 32

This is the best thing I've seen in a long time.

sweeping statements

A definition of a sweeping statement: A sweeping statement is a statement that makes a wide-ranging and complete comment about something, or more often, everything. Unfortunately, it is very common for people to make these sorts of statements when they, in fact, are talking about minor groups rather than "everybody".

Here's a sweeping statement we're probably all to familiar with (or something of its like)... 'Consumers are demanding to be more connected and want more open relationships with brands, but on their own terms'.

They're not. They're getting drunk and being sick on my front door step every Friday night, they're eating Monster Much and reading Top Gear magazine, they're having sex and hoovering behind the sofa. They've got other more important things to do before worrying about demanding open relationships with brands basically. 

I bought a packet of BBQ Mini Cheddars last night, I was hungry and in no way want to be more connected and forge an open relationship with McVites on my own terms. Right, I'm off the eat some Monster Munch and read Top Gear magazine now.

value of craft

 

We all like a bit of craft. I like craft, monocle likes craft, you like craft and Rough Trade like craft. So here's a lovely bit of craft I received this week. It's Rough Trade's Album Club album of the month for March by The Low Anthem. 

It's crafty because each of the 5000 limited copies has been hand painted and numbered, and because Rough Trade managed to procure these exclusive copies from the unsigned band which must have ment talking the someone on the phone a few times. It's all about the passion.

animalphabet

Here's an alphabet made of animals by a bunch of people who are particularly good with a pencil and paper. I especially like J, P and V. As found on Marcus's blog (who did the Z)