Posts Tagged ‘culture’

  • A call to arms. Make way for ‘the builders’.

    Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog post at Reinventing, and his speech at the American Association of Ad Agencies Transformation conference, are both incredibly exciting.

    With both, he calls for renewal and appeals to the ad industry to save itself by hiring in top tier talent to build a new world, specifically:

    “This is the time to build. The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage.”

    And what should we be building?

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    4th March 10

    1 comment

     advertising

  • I love words: manopause, faffage, hellacious

    I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).

    reading

    Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.

    The thing that really makes my head spin is the way language evolves. Even as I type this, old words are morphing and merging to send nifty little neologisms strutting out of our cultural soup of signifiers, all a-dazzle with tasty wordiness. Perhaps my favourite of these is the portmanteau, a linguistic mashup of two words and their meanings.

    For some time, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the niftiest new (or new to me) words I come across in daily parlance. Here are three I have enjoyed this week, with more to come as I encounter them.

    Manopause

    Noun: a break from dating, flirting, and all forms of sexual interaction with men

    “He is totally giving you the eye, go for it!”
    “I can’t, I’m on a manopause. He’s fit though — get in there, Shaz.”

    Faffage

    Collective noun: timewasting, to-ing and fro-ing and general faffing

    “You’re right — there is a direct correlation between the number of children a person has and the degree of faffage involved in their getting from A to B. Thank God we chose art over ankle-biters.”

    Hellacious

    Adjective: really awful with a sort of visceral twinge; a combination of hellish and atrocious

    “During the coldest night that winter in Siberia, Ferdinand was forced to rise every hour to stoke the fire with priceless Louis XIV furniture. For an antiques dealer it was a truly hellacious experience.”

    Photo courtesy of New York Public Library, used under a Creative Commons licence

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    26th February 10

    0 comments

     content

    opinion

  • Are we just mice trapped in a digital ‘Skinner Box’?

    Yay… many thanks to Ben for mailing this awesome blog post from the O’Reilly Radar blog, by Jim Stodghill. Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year, so it’s time I finally tried to finish.

    For nigh on two weeks now Jim’s post has freaked me out. I have wondered if I am a bit like this mouse. I certainly recognised some of my own obsessive digital behaviour in his  brilliantly written and moving account of life as a “digital stimulusaholic”. He describes being engulfed in a deep personal crisis, an addiction within which he feels utterly trapped. He talks of a cognitive biological barrier to our information processing powers. And the paradox of being infinitely distracted by infinite information. It’s pretty disturbing.

    It’s even more worrying that this isn’t your average ’social-networking-and-Twitter-is-bad-for-you” rubbish. You can toss that sort of thing aside in a moment – but Jim is one of us. He a geek. He loves Twitter… a lot (actually that’s a big part of his problem). No, this is someone who’s done his time in the twenches. He’s a super-user, or more accurately a super-abuser. And yet it’s also massively entertaining – a bit like Trainspotting.

    But hold on, what the heck is a Skinner Box?

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    18th January 10

    4 comments

     Uncategorized

  • Pulling Off The Optimal Platform Job

    Another week, another blog post on the subject of “why creative advertising folk need to embrace ‘technologists and their geeky ways’” once again ignites vigorous debate.

    The post in question is by Joe Mele, VP Client Partner at Razorfish, and received a great many comments and a huge number of re-tweets of the @BBHLabs‘ tweet that contained a link to it. The citizens of Twitter seem to react with a combination of self-loathing and schadenfreudian glee to the disruption that social technologies are wreaking on advertising. It’s a little bit dull and frankly misses the point – and it wasn’t quite (I don’t think) what Joe was saying.

    Of course, how advertising responds to the digital challenge is a roasting hot topic. Joe’s blog post quotes a recent article from Ad Age provocatively titled ‘Agencies Need To Start Thinking Like Software Companies’ that talks about hybrid creative techies bringing digital know-how to Madison Avenue. If only it were that easy. It seems overly simplistic to claim that everything will be okay if they hire in some digital savvy, perhaps even ‘developers’ – let them attend client meetings and, you know, even help out with creative ideas and stuff.

    Unfortunately, I think it’s a lot more complex than that – and whilst I totally agree with everything Barbarian Group Co-founder Rick Webb, says in the Ad Age article, I’m not convinced he *totally* nails it either:

    What they should have been taking away all of this time — and have increasingly begun to — are the concepts of the constant beta and agile development. Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline.

    Rick’s completely right about needing an agile, adaptive, evolutionary approach, but I’m starting to believe that you need more than that to deliver the kind of long-term living platforms and platform-campaigns – and value – that clients need and agencies must get better at creating. I’m starting to believe you need four things, the first two of which are well-known and increasingly often quoted:

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    7th October 09

    27 comments

     agile

    innovation

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