Israel / Gaza / Angry chaps etc

I’m not sure this is the forum to delve into such a complicated and emotive subject. But I liked this post so much from James Berillo at The Onion that I really had to share.

“For as long as I can remember, the Israelis and Palestinians have been in conflict. And for as long as I can remember, there have been myriad opinions about who is right and who is wrong. They are often convincing opinions—passionate, personal, and eloquent. But the violence, the bloodshed, the senseless intractable hatred, is far too complicated to be explained by one newspaper column or a single on-air commentary, no matter how well composed. The names and dates in the latest violence are new, but the scars are from wounds that reach back more than a century—countless families across many generations, each with their own deeds and stories, all with their own reason to carry on the conflict.

Opinions can be dangerous. They can provoke a people to take action, when that action might not be just. Opinions can be powerful. They can shape the way a nation sees a problem, when that one perspective might not be enough. Opinions are imperfect. They are based more in politics and preference than in facts, though facts are what matter most. And those facts remain, buried beneath the rubble in the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem. Facts and truths that only the men and women at the heart of the conflict can uncover for themselves—not professional journalists on a tight deadline or amateur bloggers with an ax to grind.

No. The skirmishes fought in the desert are as ancient as the mountains that loom above and as complex as the eddies that swirl in the rivers below. The world must address this struggle with a measured approach that takes all sides into account and acknowledges the decades of conflict.

It would be far too difficult—and far too arrogant—to attempt to sum up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in one op-ed.”

Here here. I wish I could articulate such a eloquent riposte when confronted by the types of sweeping, often mildly anti-semitic, statements I encounter most days.

In future, I’ll just show them a copy of this.

The full service media agency dream is over?

I received an email yesterday from a lovely young lady working on a global pitch asking me to delve through any previous campaigns I had been involved with for examples of where a creative message had been magnified by relevant and contextual media placement. An example provided was of a Swedish anti smoking poster placed, poetically, on top of the spluttering exhaust pipes of a decaying bus – the blue, soot ridden smog replicating a smoker’s exhalations. Clever, eh? And it got me thinking, not that this is in anyway revolutionary, that such creative and media synergy must be the default. An effective communications message must be placed in a space both relevant to the brand and audience, as well as such placement being in synch with the particular creative execution. Not one without the other, and certainly not the combination of each being such rare examples that we must rummage through our network drives in fruitless despair.

But again, this is not a revolutionary point. After all this is why all agencies, large and small, are clamouring to fill the full service ideal, as already provided by many niche digital agencies, offering brands a one stop shop for effective communications. The more interesting aspect of this shift, however, is the dynamic between media and creative agencies. A traditionally fraught and politically driven relationship, both are now eyeing up each other’s space as the solution to their ever dwindling revenues.

So, who’s going to win this battle of comms superiority? Personally, I can’t help but think that media agencies may be in for a hiding. Whatever the truth of the matter, media planning, buying and strategy with always been seen as the poor, dirtied kneed brother to the glamorous world of creative. Quite simply, would you trust a traditional media agency with creative execution? Or creative agencies with media planning and buying?

And I don’t think I’m alone. Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP head honcho, said in his address to the IPA lunch on Wednesday that he sees traditional media agencies having to adapt their business models to survive the new economic new reality. No shock there. But, he then went on to state that the future of WPP media agencies lay in consumer data, insights and analyses. Closer to Reuters and Bloomberg than BBH or Mother.

This may put the CHI’s recent partnership with WPP’s media buying arm GroupM in a slightly more interesting perspective. Is this the model Sorrell sees as the future of full service agencies across the WPP network? And if so, what does this mean for those WPP media agencies whose behind the water cooler murmurings are filled with notions of offering clients both media strategy and buying with creative execution management?

Questions, questions.

You gotta love the Chinese…

TwitterFeed, Tweet Deck etc etc

Twitter tools are plentiful. Sure, a lot of them are probably pretty useful. Aggregation time…

Fingers crossed this (useless) little update will filter itself into my Twitter Stream. In about an hour, hopefully.

Blog etiquette

I re-post a lot of other people’s work. I justify it as contributing to the distribution of what I believe are quality peices of content. It is, in truth, stealing. Recently I posted/stole Faris Yakob’s excellent little PDF on mobile futures on my work blog. Faris, kindly, left a small comment of gratitude. I, in turn, want to do likewise, something along the lines of; ‘Hi Faris, I am a huge fan of your blog and will continue to leech your content at will’.

But where do I do this?

Doing so on the original post on Faris’ blog would make no sense, being as it would, completely out of context. Similarly, I would be enormously surprised if Faris reads my work blog, so leaving any note of appreciation there would, I am almost certain, fail to be registered.

So I’m stuck. It is a far too minor issue to warrant a direct message, or general blog comment? Yet I feel, for the sake of my moral compass and genuine goodwill, that I must make a small gesture of appreciation.

Any ideas?

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I like this..

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Not to be horribly corporate – but it would be an awesome partner for a brand. Coffee? Possibly. Any ideas?

I love these both..

But maybe, I love this more (For full effect, add sound)

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Twitter + Social Media experts

So, I’m a twitterer. Granted, 12 months too late – but early adopting is not a term I’m overtly familiar with. Some initial thoughts? Ok, sure. Firstly, a couple of healthy caveats. A: I’m a month old twitterer, so maybe I just don’t get it yet. B: I’m not very bright, so maybe I just don’t get it.

But, and there is a but, something bothers me. Three days after joining I found myself with five new followers. All but one of these followers’ bios stated themselves to be ’social media experts’. (I wonder what percentage of Twitter users are ’social media experts’?)

Why was I being followed? There is no information in my profile, I am not a minor celebrity and I had, up to that point, two very non-descript updates. The only reason I could find is that I had chosen to follow Chris Brogan and that this validated me as Social Media fodder.

Not that this hugely bothered me. Follow me if you feel, and I in turn will follow you. (Does Twitter etiquette exist?)

But then I looked upon my twitter feed. ‘Off for a shower’, ‘Seven hours until the plane’, ‘OJ for breakfast’ etc. Not only do I not know these people, but I’m having minute by minute updates of their hugely inane lives. Sure, before you shout ‘duurrr – that’s the point of twitter’, I appreciate that fully. But why did these ’social media experts’ follow me in the first place? To hear about my life, or to possibly penetrate my network in the hope of building business connections. Supposedly, in doing this, they want to impress me, or my network with their social media expertise – or ‘hey, look at me, I totally get Twitter – let’s connect’.

Well no, you’re now blocked. Your crap choked my twitter feed so anything interesting from either yourselves or others was lost among your twoddle. It smacks very much to me of the ‘add as many friends on MySpace as you can’ school of online marketing. Just because the technology is different, it doesn’t mean that the lessons we have learned over and over again from other social media platforms don’t exist. Don’t add everyone and anyone, don’t shout at me all day, don’t assume that I’m interested in anything you have to say. Because I’m not, and actually, I find you marauding into my social circle like a bull in a china shop massively insulting.

Ironically, those people who I have chosen to follow, the likes of ViralBlog, whose updates are relevant, regular and insightful are the ones who do not have ‘Social media expert’ in their bios. Continue to wear your sandwich boards, I just hope people don’t fall for it. Alas, as brands clamour onto Twitter and the undoubted benefits that can derive from a well co-ordinated campaign (see Eureka, the US sci fi series) I think, sadly, that they will.

Ho hum

Radiohead + Jay Z = Happy New Year

Kinda like the Grey Album – possibly better.

Investment Bank Converters

So, the banking crisis and the internet. If there is anything to be learnt from this sorry mess, it is that when it comes to financial nouse, skill and knowledge, the banking sector knows as much, or as little, as we do. Paying a hedge fund manager or investment banker to blindly stumble from disaster to disaster would make me somewhat peeved. No doubt, those with substantial pensions or other investment funds may be feeling this way already.

So why not make these mistakes ourselves? If anything, failure would be easier to swallow…

And as such, the beauty of online commerce rises once again with a solution. Disintermediation – the idea that two parties can engage directly in profitable exchange without needlessly lining the pockets of incompetent third parties – manifests itself within such excellent sites as ebay and betfair. And for those looking to invest, Zopa may provide the answer. Well, according to Rory Sutherland anyway. And he’s right about quite a lot really

Zopa allows you to lend money to people at a rate and level of risk you chose. You can spread your investment across a wide range of borrowers, with healthy returns reported. More interestingly, and in the spirirt of Dragon’s Den, you can also invest in individual projects and borrowers, whose loan requests come complete with photographs and short biographies. Far from being just a good potential investment vehicle, I also looks great fun.

I wonder if Zopa could do for Morgan Stanley what Ebay did for Cash Converters. I do hope so

My favourite in this new p2p investment world comes in the form of Kiva. Kiva is a charitable organisation which allows you to make interest free loans to 100’s of small businesses all over the world. Rather ironically, accoridng to the site, defaults are genuinely rare.

Can’t help but think that if the internet is all about cutting out incompetent, annoying, self important middle men, then I can think of few more worthy of the chopping block than charities and bankers.