Disaster Recovery

I thought I was being clever putting all the music that I write on a dedicated hard drive. Until it went bust and I lost a year's worth of work. Silly Paul.

Anyway, just under a grand spent later, those miracle workers in data recovery have reunited me with my precious....

Go over here to hear the (old) fruits of my labour. 8 tracks for you to download to your itunes.

All comments gratefully received. Especially nice ones!

Strangely Familiar

Ok. Been away for far too long.... It's been a busy summer. After 7 and half years in the world of media, I've hot-footed it to a creative agency.

Now many people reckon that media agencies shall inherit the earth. (Certainly Jim Taylor and the folk at MEC). And perhaps they will be right.

But for me the future is in being able to create genuine value for the people that you want your brand to connect with. And creating value means doing something.

And for me that means being in a place where planners, creatives, designers, researchers (and semioticians, games designers, architects and any number of interesting people) can work together collaboratively to understand, plan and create that value. And yes, more often than not that means operating in fluid & digital world.

And unfortunately, whilst media agencies have loads of fantastic ideas - at the moment, my experience says that they still win or lose pitches based on their TV / Press / Radio / Outdoor guarantees. Not their ideas.

I think in the future, media buying will have to separated off again. Buying could do with a healthy dose of streamlining to bring it into this century. A big fat computer to automatically bid and book operated out of China I reckon. Maybe then communications planning can properly thrive and media agencies will inherit the earth.

But until then, I'm loving being able to actually make stuff happen.

Agency see agency do

Maybe I'm just more aware after my trip. Or maybe there really is something rippling through agency world. Once again, Soviet iconography has popped up - this time on Sky Sports' TV ads.

By my reckoning that's four major advertisers (Sky, Pizza Hut, Virgin and Ask) who are trying to spark off community revolutions of one sort or another.

It seems that Herd theory works for agency folk too.

Or maybe it's actually all those planners who have read the Herd book / blog and are now subliminally writing their creative briefs with collectivism in mind - sparking Soviet images in the creatives' minds?

Either way: Vivre la commune!

(Apologies & thanks for the shameless rip off of Faris' line from his recent excellent post on behavioural engineering for this blog post title)

End of an Era

Always good to achieve catharsis through artistic endeavour. Go to Latest Tunes on my other site to download some more new music. By me, my guitar and some fancy production with Cubase.

New computer coming this week, especially built for music production, so expect to hear more soon.

Privyet Comrade!

So I've been to St. Petersburg in the last week and been very impressed with how much the USSR loved the old 6 sheet and obviously had some good copywriters. Some classics:

'Vodka is your enemy. Your passbook is your friend';

or 'Let's have the proletarian parks of culture and rest';

or my personal favourite:

'Smoking is expensive and dangerous for health and work'. (Who needs Nick O Teen?)

And now I'm incredibly aware of a bit of an onslaught of Russian Iconography and sloganeering in some recent advertising ideas.

Pizza Hut came out recently with their 'Seize Your Lunchtime' campaign. (I won't call it an idea ... lazy, lazy planning with no real insight, I'm afraid)

And probably more in tune with a call for a popularist uprising is Ask with their Information Revolution / Anti Google campaign. Greg has commented on this elsewhere, and I agree with his views that the execution could have been less corporate, especially on the website.

However, (unlike Pizza Hut) this feels like an idea that might actually be connected with a genuine insight - that some people have concerns about the ubiquity of Google, have a desire to be different, and are looking for an 'underground' movement to be part of. I'm looking forward to seeing if the campaign is working and how it will develop.

The challenge for Ask is that (as I've commented before elsewhere) the Internet is as close to the proles seizing the means of production anyway, and Google are at the forefront of giving the power to the people already.

My worry is that Ask will see a spike in traffic, but with a lack of genuinely different & innovative new products, those defectors will rapidly go back to the not-too-evil-ones.

If I get knocked down, I get up again

I am trying to recover from a disaster. My external hard drive has packed up, losing about a year's worth of music I've written. Yes, I know - should have done a backup.

Anyway, best thing to do is to pick yourself up and just keep going.

So I've been messing around with some guitar and synth sounds. And you can download it here if you wish. You can click on it to play in quicktime or whatever is your browser media player of choice, or you can right click and 'save target as' to get the mp3. Would welcome any comments / ideas / thoughts.

The title was inspired by a man who walks up and down the South Ealing Road punching numbers into his calculator all day.

Another fine mess

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what does an empty desk signify?

A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahmson and David H. Freedman is a fascinating, entertaining and must-read book. In this book they suggest that mess is actually a good thing. Using an informal, storytelling approach they make a convincing case for bringing mess into your life.

It seems that the investment in time for tidying is often not worth the so-called 'efficiencies' you can gain. And it also seems that too much order will restrict our abilities to make intuitive leaps, stop us connecting apparently disparate things and generally limit our creativity.

Mess gave us penicillin, The Sunflowers, and Ulysses amongst much much more. Order has given us urban planning tower block disasters and increasing levels of OCD.

I was fascinated to learn that perhaps 90% of JS Bach's work was never written down - he used to improvise all the time and make stuff up whilst playing concerts. A Jazz pioneer it seems.

Another entertaining section explored the issue of 'smell' being a generally negative, messy sensation and word with very few words in the English language knocking around to acceptably describe different smells.

A great book and highly recommended. But for some reason, I did a lot of tidying whilst reading it...