The Ice Cream Men Cometh
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I met at the bar at The Gherkin.
Like myself, he is much more Soho than City, more online than on-a-ridiculous-bonus-scheme.
And sure enough we were surrounded by a braying sea of pinstripe in the heart of Insurance-Land. My friend was wearing a light-tan jacket, white shirt, blue jeans and brown shoes. And err….so was I. Looking like a pair of ice cream salesman at a funeral, we stood at the bar marveling at the fact that each and everyone of the league of extraordinary blue-suited gentleman would pay for his drinks by card, whether it was for one pint or a round of six. Thus making the process of getting a drink as time efficient as amateur chop-stick night.
Now, here I sit on the 8.17 from Basingstoke and sitting opposite me is a chap wearing a light-tan jacket, white shirt, blue jeans and err…brown shoes. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s read The Daily Mail cover to cover I’d say media was his game. If you walk around Soho in the sun today, which I highly recommend, you will see, among many much more attractive sights, lots more middle aged media-folk in the identical get-up.
Just don’t ask to by an ice cream from them.
Note to self: stop taking pictures of strange ice-cream salesman. The wife will get concerned.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 25th, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
Where Digital Agencies May Fall Flat
A thought from 2007 from Adliterate.com, that is still just as relevant today:
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
The Network - Is Resistance Useless?
First it was Phorm and this weeks it’s Phorm by another name much more suited to a John Grisham novel – The Network. Scareeeee!
This is Logica’s new intelligence gathering platform that tracks you via your mobile. And because we take our mobiles with us everywhere as opposed to our PC’s which we leave behind when we step out, according to the Sunday Times article, The Network will “create a crucial bridge between the virtual world and the real world”.
By following our every move and developing profiles and patterns The Network, an opt-in service, will send us vouchers as we near shops we like, alert us to friends in the vicinity, inform us if we’ve left the gas on or if we’ve got loo roll stuck to our heels.
Responses to the Sunday Times article online are predictably derogatory and Orwellian in nature and on one-level I have to agree. It is scary. However, it really is too late. We are already on a thousand databases and filmed everywhere we go. There is no stopping the proliferation of computerisation of life and everything in it.
I am neither a apologist or a surrendering, but I do know for a fact that by the time my (3 year old) son is twenty in the world he will live in all the marketing he sees and media he consumes will be highly tailored to his every peculiar passion. And that we have to accept. It is however, the misuse of this information by the authorities that must be protected against and although it will be nearly impossible to decipher between the two, the first is inevitable and the second is…..oh heck, inevitable.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
Extranet = Cautious Fisherman?
Got a call from the Campaign for Real English yesterday complimenting me on my digital jargon buster. How nice!
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
When the Fat Man Sings (on the 9.36 from Basingstoke)
You know how people speaking loudly on their mobile phone on public transport is deeply annoying, especially when they are heavily name-dropping about their international status as a businessman of immense proportions?
Well, this morning on the train I was happily writing my previous blog post, sitting as it happens, opposite the journalist Tom Bradby who was nose deep in The Guardian, when a chap of immense proportions trussed in a woollen suit and surgically attached to his mobile phone, made the error of broadcasting to a sweltering coach F of the 9.36 from Basingstoke to Waterloo how he had sacrificed his weekend to making important calls to seal the big deal with the Germans.
By the time we had reached Woking and us weary travellers had listened to him constantly barking orders to his underlings and ordering the champagne to be put in the fridge via at least half a dozen phone calls, it was clear that all was not well with the deal. One of the Germans was blocking. And our man was now sweating like a man on his last trip to the casino cashiers desk.
By the time we had reached the outskirts of London the deal was off and our man was slighty less loudly re-writing history, talking of breach of NDA’s and getting so and so to write and angry letter.
As Waterloo hove into view he was sitting with his red face hidden behind a copy of The Daily Mail. And though I wish no-one anything but success in their business ventures, it just goes to show, and crikey I know this one, the fat man should never sing about success until the contract is signed and when the unwilling audience is trying to enjoy their morning papers.
Better luck next time chap.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
Blogging - The First Draft of History
Further to my post “For Whom the Digital Bells Tolls” about Andrew Sullivan and the Kindle electronic books last week, he has put his mouse-weary hand up again this weekend as a journalist of the most progressive sort. In discussing his self-appointed role as gatherer and disseminator of protest messages coming out of Tehran via Twitter he said “I felt last week more like a DJ than a journalist, compiling and sampling and remixing the sounds, sights events and words streaming out of an ever shifting drama.”
Talking of the need to sift out rumours rather than facts and disinformation tweets planted by the Iranian regime he explains that it “meant occasional corrections and revisions - but the point of blogging is a first draft of history, warts and all”
Building to a crescendo he finishes with “what I do know is that something changed last week - something we will not forget and that will transform the way we cover and consume breaking news.”
Big words. Well said.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
We’re in this week’s Media Week
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 16th, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
Off Phorm!
I’ve been thinking more about this Phorm business and the more I do, the more I think that it will splutter and die from too-long-to-get-to-market syndrome.
The internet is a fickle mistress when it comes to creating the next big thing. If something is years in development, by the time it gets to market, the technologies that allowed the idea to be conceived in the first place will have been superseded so far, that a better idea that back then couldn’t even have been imagined, is now already born and up and toddling.
And Phorm is an idea born of a previous age. Behavioural targeting is a noble and proper concept but fatally flawed. Aside of the privacy issue which is enough it seems to kill it in the womb, the question should not be what have I done historically, but what did I do with my very last click.
Its all very well that I like sailing, rugby and history books involving as much blood and guts as possible. In reality however I get to sail once a year if I’m lucky, I hung up my rugby boots years ago and I’ve already got a SkySports subscription and each of the weighty tomes I read takes me at least three months to complete. I also research a huge amount of websites for my work, buy presents for my wife, children, staff and elderly relatives online, follow hundreds of random links from Twitter and generally wander around cyberspace in search of anything that interests me or looks pretty.
In short, targeting advertising based on my historical surfing to hit me at the right point in my purchase cycle is going to be a pretty wayward affair.
Last year I set up a number of spurious profiles in the main social networks as a 16yr old boy, 16yr old girl and 35yr old man and woman - purely for research purposes you understand! Anyway, the advertising I was served was so wide of the mark and so wholly inappropriate to my apparent profile at times that it’s a wonder that the networks aren’t regularly being sued.
In short, yes of course historical trends can be very informative, but the way things are going - and this brings me back to my speed to market point - is that the way it is going to be before very long at all, is the content and advertising I am served will directly and dynamicaly relate to my very last action and will serve to continue my online journey, not interrupt it.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 16th, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
On Phorm!
Sam was quoted in the Guardian on Thursday 11th June, click here to read his comments
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 15th, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
For Whom the Digital Bell Tolls
I’m a big fan of institutions. Not the mental ones you understand. The traditional ones that serve to remind you that all is well when everything around you has gone doollaly-tap.
One of those institutions is an uninterupted reading of The Sunday Times once the children have ceased screaming for justice from their cots. As my dear friend Laurence Percival once penned, the Sunday Times is the Sunday papers and they remain so despite ludicrously becoming “for all that you are”
The other institution I hold in high-esteem is (or are) books. I cherish my book collection above most things and would probably rush to save them in a fire after the family but before the cats.
So I was surprised yesterday to read Andrew Sullivans piece in the ST Review section, which has hitherto been reserved for his always objective take on the cut and slice of American politics, opining the rise of the electronic book reader The Kindle. Here was one of my favourite insitutions being attacked in another.
I have been wary of the electronic book for some time and see it as the next bellweather in the relentless march of digital into the very fabric of our lives, so I read Sullivan with excitement and trepidation.
He comes straight out as a book-lover and as someone who would show no qualms in stepping over a choking cat to rescue his first edition of the House at Pooh Corner. He is also an Internet junkie, blogger and of course journalist. Thus his credentials are quite strong.
He articulates from long-experience the different dynamics between the instant gratification of internet use, the sound-bite and the scroll-bar, and the pleasure of curling up on the sofa with a good book. He tells us of the Kindle’s lack of glow (you can’t read it in the dark) and how it can be easily read anywhere with one hand.
Now I rarely make notes in books, but I assume due to his journalistic calling, he does. And when I think back to the slog of reading Anthony Beevor’s opus “Stalingrad” which was second only in torture as being there, and realising a few months after the battle had finally fallen silent that I couldn’t recall a single fact except that an awful lot of people died, then maybe making notes would be a good thing. The Kindle allows for highlights, notes and some level of email functionality.
And so Sullivan, a Kindle convert, concludes that books won’t dissappear but, like newspapers, will be “displaced”. He cites the huge rise of the amateur publisher and without saying it, is espousing the Internet theory of “The Long Tail” as well as the very soul of The Internet - discovery.
The ringing in my ears this morning as our train sidles into Waterloo is the sound of a tolling bellweather. I’ve long given up the dinner party pretension of “oh do just pick something from my (enormous) CD collection, they’re alphabeticised” in favour of a green Ipod nano behind the fruit bowl. Before long I shall be reading the riot act in my bare-walled study to my errant son and tanning his hide with a fully-loaded Kindle. Now that’s what I call an institution.
