A strange thing to see aspects of your back catalogue re-surfacing out of context. Metronomy’s take on The English Riviera lifts not only the collective name given to the three resorts of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham – something we helped re-introduce through an overhaul of their marketing and advertising through Travis Dale many, many years ago. But it also lifts, wholesale, the palm tree branding device used in all the award-winning advertising we produced for the resort. A sample from the series produced over many years appears below.

Richard Seymour gave a truly inspiring talk at Designer Breakfasts on the 24th June in BBH’s Kingly Street offices.

The central theme was based on the thought that a designer has a special responsibility, and ability, to reveal the truth. The clue was wrapped up in the title of the talk: ‘The Pilot’s Prayer’. The shorthand for which Richard put as “Thanks for the ability to do things other people cannot do”.

Over the course of an hour Richard revealed the truth about a host of objects, from personal vibrators to floating hotels.

In getting to the truth he proved time and again that in an increasingly technologically sophisticated world we are not limited by the technology but by our own imagination. And that even in our seemingly digital-with-everything world the truth lies more often in the analogue and is embedded in our anthropological make-up. The anthropology, he argues, never changes.

Looking for the dissonance between what people say they do and what they actually do often reveals the truth about what needs to change.
He clearly has a gift for seeing things as they are, not as we imagine them to be. And then it’s a short hop to seeing things not as they are, but as they might be.

The answers all appear blindingly obvious when the blinkers are removed. The solutions look so elegant and simple. But getting to the simple truth is anything but.

Rather dispiritingly he also explained why even the face of an obviously great idea, things sometimes don’t or won’t change. It’s not a shortage of ideas necessarily. It‘s often a lack of will to see them through to fruition. The very metabolism of an organisation can pre-dispose it to repeat its failings rather than innovate its way to a better future.

By contrast, those organisations that do rise to the challenge find that “The further they walk into the future, the less competition they have”.

It’s the first Designer Breakfast I’ve been to in a long while. But on the strength of this talk I’m determined to make it a regular event.

There was a piece on Radio 4′s Today at the start of the week stating ICANN have now approved the change making it possible for the use of brand names and other generic domain extensions.

Talking to Pauline Amphlett of Brand Guardians the week before, she raised these key points:

Although there can now be brand name extensions e.g. .cocacola, .ford, .virgin, .hsbc, .macdonalds, .apple, .microsoft, .loggica, it’s likely that in order to be granted these the applicant will have to provide evidence of trade mark ownership and use.
Where the problems are likely to arise is where there is more than one legitimate owner of a name who wants to register it. LOTUS is a good example – who should be granted it: the car brand, watch company, food brand, software company? There are likely to be auctions in these cases.

There’s also the option for descriptive names e.g. .hotel, .insurance, .bank, .holiday, .dinner. Put a simple prefix like ‘my’ or ‘your’ in front of these and you start to see the potential. There’s also an opportunity for industry sectors or businesses or brands belonging to the same group to cash in on these. Say an automotive business gets .car, it freezes out the competition from owning it but also it is able to use it for the group and the models.

Deep Pockets
The owners of these new extensions will have to have deep pockets. The application cost is $184,000, but this is the tip of the iceberg. In terms of creating infrastructure the owner will have to set-up and run a domain registry. They will have to put a structure in place that guarantees that it won’t go out of business as this would impact on the businesses of its customers. There will be a heavy commitment in terms of professional service fees to set it up too. Estimates for this are in the region at $1 million, possibly more.

It’s likely that the worlds top 250-500 companies will be applying for their extensions. Who will apply for the generic words is less clear. They will certainly have to be well resourced financially and with good professional services.

It’s clear that brand owners need to be concerned about securing names if other large international businesses in other sectors also own the name. What’s less clear is who will register the generic words – you don’t want a competitor to get them!

For more information about the issues surrounding this change take a look at Pauline’s blog post on the subject: Yet more domains.

For those of you already sold on the idea, form an orderly queue and have your cheque books at the ready.

I attended this evening’s private view of Make Believe – a pop up Xmas showcase of designer makers from Cockpit Arts. I’ve been a particular fan of Liz Emtage’s beautiful porcelain lamps ever since I first set eyes on them over a year ago. And this lamp, with it’s deep impressions of roses is a particularly fine example from a larger body of commissioned pieces based on floral and botanical themes.

Liz has a selection available for sale at Make Believe which runs until the 21st December at 42 Theobalds Road, Holborn. Open from 11am until 7pm (closed Sunday 12th and 19th December)

Other delights on show and available to buy include millinery from Judy Bentinck, Jewellery from Very Garcia, knitwear from Elisabeth Hamlyn, Woven accessories from Mica Hirosawa and papercut art and jewellery from Nahoko Kojima.

A great place to go for a truly distinctive christmas present for someone special.

Barry Cox was the Account Director at CDP when we worked on Becks for Scottish & Newcastle. He now runs The History of Advertising Trust, and it’s in desperate need of funding.

History of Advertising Trust – BigArtsGive

Recently I’ve been giving a series of two hour talks on various aspects of social media. In the last two sessions I was lucky enough to have Lin Sagovsky as one of the attendees. Amongst other things, Lin runs Play4Real – a consultancy that takes theatre techniques into the workplace as a way of building skills and confidence in all walks of working life.

Although at pains to let me know that my sessions were full of good content Lin offered to help me improve my presentation technique. I had the cake, what was missing was the icing.

What a revelation. I knew my presentation skills weren’t as good as they could be. I just didn’t know why, or where to start to improve the situation. Very quickly Lin was able to pinpoint the areas that needed working on and offer equally rapid solutions.

In less than two hours we looked at body language, breathing, timing, staging (sight lines, lighting, acoustics), managing the audience and much more besides. All of Lin’s advice and tuition addressed my specific needs.

I can’t recommend her highly enough.

I have a few weeks to practice before my next public speaking opportunity which if all goes well will be the whole cake, complete with icing. And in time I might even manage a cherry on top.

If you think you could do with some help in improving your own public speaking you could do a lot worse than signing up for Lin’s free tips newsletter. It’s a good first step in the right direction.

At this year’s BNI Big Breakfast the first speaker’s slot was given over to Richard Swan who had penned a new piece to follow up on last year’s pastiche of Don Maclean’s American Pie. This time around the musical backdrop was a composition of his own. Watch the home recorded version on YouTube here: BNI Beat Poem

It’ll be interesting to see if it can match the unexpected success of last year’s piece: BNI Song which to date has been viewed almost 33,000 times. What is certain is that Richard’s first piece influenced in part the decision to make greater use of video in marketing individual groups. Last year saw the start of a competition amongst BNI groups for best promotional video. Perversely our own group didn’t enter. Possibly because Richard is one of our members we felt there was little more to add.

I gave a talk recently to introduce a group of business owners to the world of twitter. A few were already regular twitterers but most had simply heard the growing buzz around twitter and social media in general and had yet to stick their toes in the water.

This post rounds up some of the twitter applications that we didn’t have time to cover in any great detail.

One of the first things anyone needs after opening a twitter account is something that will manage activity in a more useful way than the twitter site itself.

Two desktop applications that I have found useful are Tweetdeck and Seesmic. I have a marginal preference for the latter but have been running both on different machines for the last month.

Both will allow you to manage multiple accounts and show your tweets, replies and direct messages alongside the general stream of tweets from those you follow. They will also allow you to create groups containing the tweets of those you particularly want to keep track of. And both will allow you to hook up to your Facebook account and shorten your urls to help you keep within the 140 character limit.

They’ll do a lot more besides but these few things make either an invaluable tool. If neither take your fancy another desktop application worth looking at is Twhirl.

For tweeting away from your desk you’ll want a Mobile twitter client such as tweetie or tweetdeck for i-phone or ubertwitter for Blackberry.

A URL shortening service such as bit.ly, budurl or tinyurl will help you keep track of how popular your tweets are and keep your tweets within the 140 character limit. Most desktop clients will include URL shortener but registering directly with the service will allow you to track your shortened URLs as well as simply shortening them.

Beyond these few must-haves there are hundreds of helper applications. What follows is a listing of a few that have caught my attention:

tweetbeep and twilert – a couple of services that send alerts based on keywords that you choose to track. Great for keeping track of tweets that mention you, your product or service, or any topic you’re particularly interested in.

grouptweet – group message broadcasting for twitter. A way of using the instant messaging power of twitter within a closed group. Group tweets are broadcast privately to group members.

ping.fm – Not a twitter specific service but rather a social network broadcasting service. Ping.fm will update your status on over 40 social network sites with filters and triggers to ensure all your messages go to the right place.

nearbytweets – The Royston Vasey of the Twitterverse, a service that helps you find twitterers nearby: local tweets for local people. Key in your postcode, a keyword and a radius in miles and nearbytweets returns online twitterers tweeting on topic within your cachement area.

Another service along similar lines is
twitterfall – a ‘waterfall’ of tweets on topics you select and within geographic boundaries you set.

whofollowswhom – Pick up to five tweeters and compare what they share in common in terms of who they follow and are followed by.

friendorfollow and twitterkarma – who’s following you that you’re not following back and who are you following that isn’t following you. These two services will let you know. I have a preference for the way twitterkarma works but friendorfollow doesn’t require you to give your password – always a plus.

twittercounter – shows growth and projected growth of followers and followed based on past activity.

tweetstats – a statistical analysis of your tweeting patterns over time: tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and reply stats.

twittercal – a service that connects your twitter account to your google calendar.

SocialOomph – formerly tweetlater – a bundle of useful tools at the core of which is the possibility of forward booking your tweets – write now and send later. It will integrate with your bit.ly URL shortening account, allow you to manage multiple accounts, vet followers and automate much of the process. Personally I keep most of the settings on manual and still find plenty that’s useful.

Another useful twitter client, particularly if you have a number of contributors to a single profile, is HootSuite.

twitterfeed – tweets generated from an RSS feed that you nominate

twittersheep – enter your username to generate a tag cloud based on the words in the bio notes of those that follow you.

tweetake – a back up service for all your twitterings.

twibs – a business directory for twitter

twellow – a yellow pages for twitter

coupontweet – a discount coupon service via twitter

retweetist – a site that shows the most popular re-tweeted tweets. One way of discovering trends, popular topics and tweeters.

Last but not least two useful guides to twittering and twitter etiquette. The first from mashable and the second (via @subutcher) from computer-colleges.com

If anyone reading this has a favourite twitter related application or site that I have omitted, please do leave a comment.

This last week has seen the views of Matthew Robson, the 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley, causing a little concern in boardrooms across the world. The reason: a three page report he had been invited to put together detailing the media and communication habits of his peer group. In some quarters, this straw poll of one has since been elevated to the Gospel of a Generation.

The headline take-aways in the Morgan Stanley report are that teenagers:

• ignore and despise advertising
• don’t read the news
• don’t listen or watch much radio or TV
• don’t pay for anything if it can be avoided
• don’t use twitter because of the cost of texting (an investment best reserved for texting their mates)
• we should all be worried because this casts a shadow over current notions of how the world works.

So what’s new? Not much. But for twitter, a relatively new addition, it was ever thus. Teenagers have never had that much disposable income. They’ve always looked for ways of having fun without having funds. They’ve never really wanted to do much other than be with their friends, listen to music and watch movies. And it doesn’t have to be a particular movie, As Robson says in his paper,

“Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on. Usually they will target a film first, and set out to see that, but sometimes they will just go and choose when they get there. This is because going to the cinema is not usually about the film, but the experience – and getting together with friends.”

In effect, the rest of the world is inconsequential to the extent that it doesn’t impinge on their world.

As a group, their attitudes and media consumption habits will change. And some of that change will be driven by the rise in the levels of their discretionary spending.

The comment about twitter is a case in point. Robson cites that the major lack of appeal of the medium is the cost of texting and having better things to do with their ‘free’ texting allowance. This is a slightly parochial signal that only really applies in Europe – the US service having struck better deals with home turf carriers which effectively removes the cost argument – at least as far as service delivery. And anyway, modern phones have wi-fi internet access which makes tweeting free within a free access zone. It’s the availability of free access to the internet and not the service, be it twitter or anything else, that would seem to determine, for a 15 year old, whether or not it’s worth bothering with.

Hence it comes as no surprise that they’ve taken to VOIP in a big way. They’re not footing the bill that provides the core internet access on which their game console will be running. So of course they use the voice chat facility on that – it’s free.

And as for advertising, who do you know in any age group that admits to being in the slightest influenced by advertising. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. Everyone likes to think that they’ve arrived at their decisions via more ‘respectable’ routes. There’s an awful lot of advertising out there and most of it, one could be forgiven for thinking, isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. And most of the advertising that is targeted, isn’t targeted at you. For the average (there’s a weasel word) teenager, is it any wonder that most advertising is annoying or irrelevant. It’s either untargeted, poorly targeted or not targeted at them.

So should board members be concerned by this report from Morgan Stanley ? Probably not, unless the organisation is paying for a lot of poorly targeted advertising. Will 15 year-olds take their free-loading habits into their twentys and thirtys? Possibly some of them will take some of those habits. And there will certainly be a lot more free stuff available by the time they reach twenty. But most will earn enough to buy themselves better options than those that are freely available. And most of them will grow up to have a wider range of interests than music, games and movies. And advertising, in the broadest sense of the word, will be helping them make their decisions. But it probably won’t be advertising purely in the mass media forms most of us are familiar with.

If you haven’t seen it, the full text of Matthew Robson’s paper for Morgan Stanley is available online at The Guardian.co.uk It’s free. No need to buy a paper. Get stuck in.

Last month saw the publication of John Simmons book

One of the things I like most about the book is John Simmons’ belief that we are all capable of writing in a more compelling and persuasive manner. In this latest addition to the bookshelf he gives us practical tools to help unleash that potential.

Twenty-six ways of looking at a blackberry: How to let writing release the creativity of your brand

I had high hopes for the book from the outset having enjoyed many of John’s other books. A particular favourite has been ‘We, Me, Them & It’. And in ‘Twenty-six ways’ he returns to the theme of writing powerfully for business.

Taking a single base text, he returns to it twenty six times through the distorting lenses of, amongst others, Dickens, Greek myth, the graphic novel, Shakespearean sonnets, detective fiction and haiku. What he leaves the reader with is not so much a prescription for better writing, a list of do’s and don’ts, but rather a whole series of methods to subvert the commonplace, avoid the formulaic and seek out a more interesting route.