Blog

James Devon

16th August 2010
Object Ideas

In my relatively recently installed, and so far remarkably effective, cross-platform way of managing my to-do list - Evernote - I have a note filled with seedling ideas for blog posts. And one of them says "connect Social Objects and Purpose Ideas".

Annoyingly, yer man Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid has just gone and written an eloquent and well thought out post doing just that. So please go take a read of Hugh's post about Object Ideas.

It's sort of my idea, but mostly not. Damn it.

Important stuff methinks. Nearly as important as there being a Calvin and Hobbes search engine.
3rd August 2010
Even More Interestingness

A few weeks ago, we launched a project to create a permanent repository of vaguely marketing related wonderfulness, designed to be a source of inspiration and a means to share thoughts and ideas.

The Interestingness blog is by MBA staff and (primarily) for MBA staff. But do feel free to take a look. You can follow the blog via Twitter (@interestingmba) which is a slave account providing a link whenever a new post is made. The RSS feed is here.

Since launch we've curated a wonderful array of content.

There's SMS Slingshot.

There's "Claire in the Community", which is a "Culture Vulture" presentation from our monthly company meeting given by our most esteemed Claire Frankling about some community initiatives that she's coming across. Includes her award winning fruit-based owl sculpture.

There's Old Spice spoofs.

And there's even Veronica pretending to be Spanish for the World Cup.

Please check it out.
8th July 2010
Simon Sinek on the Power of 'Why?'

Another fascinating TED presentation littered with great examples. Here the presenter discusses the necessity for businesses to find their core purpose - their 'Why?'. Not an entirely different train of thought from the Herdmeister's Purpose Ideas.

I'm not totally sold on the "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" shtick. Yes, being clear about why you do things has helped to develop some incredibly successful, often entrepreneurially-run, businesses (Zappos, Apple et al), but it is by no means an immutable law of business.
21st June 2010
The MBA Academy

Each year we welcome around 20 people into our agency to gain work experience over the summer months. We're about to start taking our 2010 wave of interns and we thought that this year we'd step-up the programme a little; introducing the MBA Academy.

The MBA Academy provides a way to structure our interns' time with us. There are two subtle variations: one for people who are training to be / want to be a 'creative', and then there's a broader programme suitable for everyone else. The aim is that people walk away having had a rich experience, rather than 2 weeks looking out of the window satisfying their parents demand of finding something to occupy them in the summer holidays! And there's a cash reward for the intern judged to have graduated the MBA Academy with highest honours. If you're interested, you can download a bit more info on the MBA Academy (in Word '97 format) here (for broad experience) or here (for creative experience). We have no more places for 2010, but do feel free to get in touch about 2011. Tweet @clairefrankling with why you deserve a place.
17th June 2010
Let it ring

On Tuesday night I attended the IPA Behavioural Economics presentation at the Royal Society of Medicine. The main speaker was Richard Thaler, author of 'Nudge', who spoke primarily about the content of the book, but added in some thoughts for marketing. He showed two examples of ads that didn't treat people as rational "econs". The first I have featured on this blog before here.

The second is beautiful. A smart, cross-platform campaign that gets right to the point. Cue a/v.

OVK - LET IT RING from stuffcore on Vimeo.

But do we need Behavioural Economics to produce this type of campaign? We know that we need work that produces an emotional response. We know that we need to base it on some proper human motivation insight.

What Behavioural Economics brings is a way to add some weight behind why a particular idea is robust - it provides a reason for the budget holder to invest in it. To paraphrase Rory Sutherland ever so slightly, it provides us with the vocabulary to explain what many of us knew was right anyway.
2nd June 2010
RSA Animate: Talks Visualised

This video has been doing the rounds of late... It's Dan Pink's presentation to the RSA brought to life via the medium of the white board. Aside from being a really important topic, this way of representing a lecture is just charming.

There's more! Check out the RSA's YouTube channel here for more in the RSA Animate series.

(oops, forgot to credit crackunit for first alerting me to the Dan Pink preso).