Being Beta

Exercises in the higher banter with One of 26. Elsewhere called 'poet of adland'. By a whipple-squeezer. Find out why being beta is the new alpha: betarish at googlemail dot com

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Trip the year fantastic

So, while it has been a year of stress and loss, there have been some achievements too:

Treason tails 2

A new home for him, and us;

A new green movement;

The freeing of words and exchanges;

Some poems here...

and here;

A playlet here;

and a review elsewhere;

Managed to watch some splicings too:

IMG_1004

Picture 269

as well managing to visit these places along the way.

Oh, and I fell in love with:



and


Everything Everything - Photoshop Handsome

EVERYTHING EVERYTHING | MySpace Music Videos


and





plus



and obviously:



A good score, I'd call that.

Over the time off, you should think about doing more of it:



So you're ready for next year, as:

It may be the antidepressants talking, but I'm feeling somewhat optimistic about 2010

Mostly because of this and my suspicion that it will the year of this.

See you on the other side.

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Monday, December 21, 2009

26 recommendations

from the final newsletter of 2009 can be found here; plus some opinions about poetry in advertising here.

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Review: The Horrors, HMV Forum, London



As my feet stick to the floor for the umpteenth time I think, I am not for this. Too short for this. My trousers aren't thin enough. I am not thin enough. I am the oldest young guy in the room. Or the youngest old guy. Either way, it's not for me, any more.

Then I am comforted by the sight of Faris Badwan, in white dinner jacket and the thinnest black bow tie in the world. Because I realise he is thinking the same as me.

Oh sure, this is the final, celebratory night in what has - rather against the odds - become a humdinger of a year; an album of 2009 here, a fuck you to Universal there, a near-adoration from those who feared that experimental, bloody-minded pop with clanging guitars was never to return (and, alas, HTRK's appearance suggest that as they're no longer teaching melody in drone rock school, that still could be the case.)

But you sure could have fooled me. And probably Faris too. He clings to his microphone, a fixed point in a sea of tumult. He knows he has power - from the back, the raising of his right arm at a certain angle inspires extra devotion from the pit. And yet, all the while, his head is down, his mein gloomy, undercutting his claims to permanence and grandeur with his froideur.

And this is the contradiction at the heart of The Horrors. They have the angular cheekbones and haircuts of a young Jesus and Mary Chain - but they are cold instead of confrontational. They take the sonic palette of shoegazing and manage to weld it expertly to the tones of Northern Soul. They manage to find hitherto untapped pitches of ecstasy in both, and release them with the force of bombs dropping. But they retain the cool detachment of pilots on simulated training sorties.

The nagging feeling is that this isn't enough, substantial enough, that the disappointments they've both experienced and caused, lead them to know that this moment in the sun is exactly that, a moment; and that they have stepped outside themselves, all the better to savour something that won't return.

So enjoy them while you can. For one fears that when they realise they won't have another year quite like this one, they'll decide this isn't for them any more.

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Sunday, December 20, 2009

Unfinished London: The Northern Heights Plan



For those of you who are, or ever have been, habitues of Metroland, this is a fine and spirited documentary about one of those ghost Tube projects that never made it, the Northern Heights plan. If it had come about, I'd have lived about 500 yards from one of those stations.

London's 'what-if' nostalgia is great. And also keep an eye out for the documentary's maker, Jay Foreman, of whom one assumes we'll be seeing much more of.

(Hat tip: Iain Holder)

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Friday, December 18, 2009

Commercial: Gratuitious self-publicity ahoy

Well, if I can't on my blog, where can I?

1. I have a piece in the latest edition of Smoke, that final journal of all things London. It's a leeeeetle bit off the railway tunnel. And available at all sorts of locations now.

2. I have a poem in the 'Lyrical Winds' volume of the Poetry Rivals anthology. If you can find them, well, good luck to you sir! And madam!

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Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Crossrail Pop Up Pop

A new post is up now.

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Just a reminder

that James and me a few weeks ago started Crossrail Pop Up Pop. As he so eloquently says:

We wanted to create a place where we could gather memories about gigs we've seen at the Astoria, as a sort of tribute, and as a little way of holding the Crossrail and Westminster Council to book over their promise to create a replacement music venue.


We've had a brief mentionette here. And we'd really like your gig-memories; good, bad, indifferent. All our important. When one of the cultural memes we'll be discussing this Christmas is whether this man really is the grinch who stole the music industry, remembering less-santized outposts of the media-entertainment complex (and my tongue is only partially in my cheek) takes on the hue of patriotic duty.

Ahem.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Commercial: AIS... rhapsody




Yeah, yeah, Muppets doing Bohemian Rhapsody. Yawnathon.

Instead, why not make the cream of adland play carols. With their own voiceboxes. And everything.

I take no responsibility for any nightmares you may have.

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Monday, December 07, 2009

Where Wikipedia isn't

As an addendum to my review of The Wikipedia Revolution and the story about the drop in editors on the English-language site, here's a report suggesting that there's plenty of scope for growth for the project, especially in developing world countries.

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Thursday, December 03, 2009

Welcome to Fairbank

If you haven't already, head thee over to Antigob's site, where he's posted a brilliant mix he's made, interspersing bits from a Radio 3 documentary with the cream of lo-fi, electronic and other cosmic Americana from both near and far.

'Tis hypnotically good.

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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Commercial: Advertising people don't notice

(With apologies if the following reads like this.)

Here's a sentence you won't see in the end of year, end of decade round-ups that will be coming our way very shortly:

“Yes, this was the decade that advertising died. Trouble is, we're still not sure how to revive it.”


What makes me say that?

Let me start by being clear.

I don't mean that marketing's dead. Far from it. There's even more of it than ever. As you've probably been trying to avoid since the moment you got up this morning.

And I don't mean that other disciplines within marketing communications are dead. Not at all.

If anything, the last 10 years have all been about three things: the rise of 'digital' (however you care to define it); the subsequent realisation that PR skills are the basic hygiene ones that are required now; and the cementing of the role of brand as the fulcrum through which all marketing efforts of an organisation are driven. To the point of idiocy, often.

But at least some of the crazy, high-falutin' language has gone.

Still, I would not be surprised if lots of companies and firms out there get by with just a PR agency, a design and/or branding agency and a web agency.

And the daddy of them all, the one that all these myriad of disciplines and sub-disciplines have sprung from; well, that's not very healthy is it?

Seriously, when was the last time that someone from outside of the industry mentioned to you an advert they'd liked? Hell, one they'd even seen? And remembered seeing? Didn't refer to DM as junk mail?

And no, spotting something posted on twitter doesn't count. Actually spent time having a conversation with you, about an ad – why they liked it, why it was memorable.

Thought so. Believe it or not, it did used to happen.

So who's to blame for this current state of woefulness?

You could say the TV industry, for only periodically making programmes that people want to watch, which means that people aren't interesting in advertising in and around them. And then expanding that mistake up to fleets of channels, unknown and unloved at the top of the EPG.

You could say the commercial radio industry, for being more concerned about consolidation than listeners, and for deciding that everyone across the country needed to hear the same things at the same time, with the result that people fled to the BBC's stations.

You could say the newspaper industry, which decided to imitate chickens confronted with an army of cleavers, dash online with commoditised product, not attempt to charge people for it, then wonder where the revenue streams had gone, sans subscriptions and display advertising.

You could say the clients, but that would be too simple and self-serving. We're the ones who've been presenting them with these 'solutions' – and the rise in use of that word, in of itself, says something.

But they do share some of the blame: wedded as the majority of them have been to a notion that only what can be measured is what matters, they demanded more and more spurious data on something which – at its finest – defies measurement.

They bought in to an idea which said that brand is and has to be the holy grail, as it adds so much value, and be damned that that value is mostly intangible.

And hell, they even showed us that – hello Innocent – it was possible to build a brand without any using any advertising whatsoever.

But mostly, we have to blame us.

After all, we're the ones who've been actively working towards the demise of our craft.

Ignoring the brand building lessons that have been coming out from the design sector for the last 15 years or so. Failing to recognise that the provision of utility, organisation of information and the editing of choice will be the three ways that brands will win in the future.

Not the old model of campaign after campaign after campaign absurdio reductum, until agency, client, customer and the wider world all collapse in a bored heap on top of each other.

I'm not alleging that we've done so knowingly. But we have done so unthinkingly. Call it the effect of the law of unintended consequences.

The unintended consequences of our industry-wide rush to embrace online display ads, and Google's text ads by the sides of searches in particular.

Why is this problematic? Isn't this the promise of data finally coming true, with all of us having the chance to experience Ogilvy's tasting of blood, only this time digitally? Targeted advertising, so we can only speak to those people who want to be spoken to and no one else? So we no longer have to be an irritant with a loudhailer, buttonholing you on the street, but instead a confidant whispering in your living room?

As it has turned out, if you only speak to the people who want to be spoken to, you rapidly run out of things to say to them. Or you play to their expectations. Or their prejudices. You don't challenge them. Or surprise them.

You create a messy, grey, indistinct sludge. Multiply that by the exponential increase in the communications that are sent out because digital channels are so cheap to use, and it's no wonder why success rates, ROI rates, whatever measure you choose, are so low.

We have managed to create advertising that people don't notice. Not as by-product. Not as a one-off. As the single core animating function that drives it.

We are spending billions creating advertising for our brands that actually looks like advertising for every other brand. We've embraced global brand management, and the creative flattening that entails without realising that people still shop, and live locally.

We hope that somehow, if we can make Google work for us, we'll square the vicious circle we've made for ourselves, without recognising that all we're doing is collectively building Google's brand.

We have ceded the ground that used to be ours. We've got so paranoid about our cost base, we fight to prove our relevancy, without realising that we still could have the whip hand in proving that no other marketing discipline can create awareness like we can.

But we seem determined to let the social media mavens take that ground from us too.

We have forgotten what John Hegarty said not so long ago, about advertising being about 'interfering in pop culture'.

It's not about targeting the right people. It's about making something so fantastic that people can't help but stop and watch and engage and be moved by it. Entertained by it. And then share it.

Because that way there's more chance they'll remember what we're trying to tell them.

And the ads we have loved this decade – the gorillas, the cakes, the meerkats, the balls – have all done that.

So we need to stop hoping that the fix for our industry, the return to the glory days will come from the engineers who'll tell us how to make algorithms work better, make our similar messages somehow work better than everyone else's similar messages. Or the social scientists that will nudge herds into crowds, and tell us things that deep down we know are common sense.

We need to trust again the eternal verities: find the unique truth, and then dramatise it in the most entertaining way possible.

We need to make advertising that people notice. On the widest possible scale. And back ourselves to the hilt that we will deliver it.

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