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...

The truth is out there?

Just watched an hour or so of Al Gore's current tv (229 on the Sky+ EPG.)

1. Video documentary of Pakistani and Indian people coming together as friends and family - pleading for their national governments to stop their nuclear ams race
2. Demonstration of ecologically-sound bicycle networks in East London
3. An project from teenagers in the UK to stamp out Marijuana growth and use amongst their peers
4. A video diary of an Iranian teenager visiting the wonders of America for the first time

Ah, the democracy of user generated content....

Are you infected?

For some reason, a big fat hardback book with a snappy pseudo-scientific title and some choice reviewer quotes seems necessarily authoritative.

Affluenza by Oliver James seems to be such a book. In this tome, Oliver (author of 'They F*** You Up') spends a year of his life interviewing people across the world - from New York to Beijing, from Moscow to Wellington. He argues that he has identified a 'contagious middle class virus causing depression, anxiety, addition and ennui'.

This virus (the Affluenza of the title) is 'obsessive, envious, keeping up with Joneses' - or in other words the human condition of seeking to better themselves by accumulating material possessions and experiences in order to feel better off than others. James argues that as we continually strive to achieve these 'virus goals' our motivations of 'being' are replaced by those of 'having'. And James links the intrinsic motivation 'being' to genuine happiness. Or rather, the motivation of 'having' to such ills as depression, anxiety and ultimately greater social problems such as drug abuse.

James proceeds to go around the world drawing on case studies of individuals to illustrate how the condition of late capitalism (post-post modernity, velocity age, anyone?) creates ever-increasing desires such as home-ownership and wider conspicuous-consumption that leads to the incubation and growth of the virus. These desires mean we are suckered in by advertising to buy more stuff so we work longer hours, relationships and communities suffer and children are uncared for properly.

Pretty bleak, isn't it? And nice to know that I'm somehow at fault due to my role in the evil advertising industry.

James goes on to suggest 'vaccines' for the virus. These start off as sensible psychologist's therapies: finding intrinsic motivations (i.e. I am a city trader because I am fascinated by numbers and the big fat bonuses are really just a bonus, honest); being beautiful rather than attractive (apparently Russian women are great at this); only consuming what you need; being authentic; enjoying motherhood (& fathers taking a greater child-caring role); educating children rather than brainwashing them. So far so Freud, Jung, etc.

But his finale is quite frankly amazing. He lays out a manifesto not dissimilar to the Socialists of the mid 20th century.

• Return all property to the state (having one estate agent, fixed prices and a lottery system if demand surpasses supply for specific property)
  
• Tax anyone earning over £100K / year at about 95% to equal out wages.
  
• Cut all defence budget and reallocate to paying one parent at national average wage to take the first couple of years off following childbirth
• Remove tests / exams from education and divorce syllabuses from the needs of industry - allowing children to discover their true talents
  
• Ban anyone attractive being in adverts. (seriously! who decides, the 'beauty police'?!)

So a lovely future where we're all doing stuff that we intrinsically love and getting paid enough for it, and living in a place that's just big enough for our needs. (worrying echoes of lebensraum?!).

What James fails to consider is the very nature of capitalism will necessarily create uneven development. Capital flows from places that don't suit the need to accumulate to places that do. Areas of growth and areas of destruction and deprivation. Even if the UK did seek to employ some of James' measures, the flow of capital (i.e money) away from the UK would be expedient and devastating. The only way in which James' measures could be employed would be on a global basis. Which is, of course, impractical.

It's a similar argument to that often postulated idea of agencies being paid for pitches - there will always be someone who waives the cost to gain an advantage...

So, in my opinion James has let himself down with the last couple of chapters. They rather smack of 'must finish book for publishers.... must have controversial conclusion'. His arguments are badly thought through compared to the elegant stories of the early part of the book. I can excuse him his methodology - qualitative stories that back up his opinion. Statistically invalid, and no doubt biased in the fieldwork, James is only using a storytelling technique that increasingly popular in authoritative, trans-disciplinary books (see Gladwell, Godin, Grant, Anderson, etc).

What is the definition of a good book?

Well, I finished it. It made me think. I'm now writing about it. I suggest these behaviours are the result of 'a good book'. A look at the reviews on Amazon shows very polarised opinions. (but then again, that is the fallacy of Amazon reviews - few people write a review or rate something if they are ambivalent about it).

I like (most of) his thinking. We are often obsessed with material stuff at the expense of genuine happiness. I've noticed that I've changed some of my behaviours in the last few weeks as a result of reading the book (that iTube is only something I want - not what I need...)

But in the meantime, I must go online to look at those ISA deals I was seeing on the TV - I must buy a new and bigger flat next year.