This week’s Esprit d’Escalier

Esprit d’Escalier is another new, weekly feature for this blog. The French phrase is one you wish the English language had. It means having a perfect verbal comeback – too late.  Literally translated it’s “the wit of the staircase,” meaning you couldn’t  think up a clever retort until walking down the stairs afterward.

This week, I’m dedicating my personal Esprit d’Escalier to a near-death moment.

Nipping out from the office for a bite of lunch, the lights at the crossing of Bressenden Place were changing to orange – the green man was flashing. However, was still pedestrian’s right of way. So I dashed across the two lane road.

Lane 1 car waited, but white van man in lane 2 flipped the car equivalent of ‘the bird’ and nearly ran me over. As I have discovered riding a bike,  when I feel emperiled by a lethal vehicle, I tend to react quickly and angrily.

In this case, although WVM’s window was open, I couldn’t summon any cutting missives. Pathetic shock and indignation made me too, too slow.

However I did manage to swear at the rear of the van as it disappeared in a cloud of road works dust. I was shouting at the dust. Whilst other passers-by stared at this weird, shouty man. Nice comeback, kid.

Have you had any ‘Esprit d’Escalier’ moments this week?

Poseur of the week

‘Poseur of the Week’ is a new gimmick for my blog. It’s a regular feature where I pose a question about a celeb whose PRs have been working overtime to keep them current and in the limelight this week. You can guess in the comments which celeb it is.

This PotW’s PRs went into overdrive with the following angles mentioned in a whopping 398 articles:

• The time travel story - essentially, old forces sweetheart meets saucy young babe – KEYWORDS – ‘Dame Vera Lynn’ - 180 articles (Source: Google News)
• The attack story – after Leona Lewis was cruelly punched at a book signing by a horrible, crazed fan, the media went into a fenzy for star attack stories – this celeb obliged by disclosing a terrible, personal secret – KEYWORDS – “Attack” = 124 articles (Source: Google News)
• The drug story - ah the old classics, eh? PRs arranged for this celeb to talk of historic abuse of celebrity drug, cocaine -  KEYWORDS “Drugs” – 94 articles (Source: Google News)
• The sex kitten story - PRs clad this celeb in tight fitting PVC costume, one that is most commonly associated with sexual fetishists – KEYWORDS “pvc” – 25 articles (Source: Google News)

Who could this drug-taking, PVC-wearing, Forces sweetheart-hugging,terrible atack victum be? Have a guess below.

New blog format – what to expect

I’m changing this blog to be more reader-focused with a view to providing content that’s more useful to other blogs that I read and that adds value beyond comments and links.

As such, this post is a marker in the sand. I’m not dis-owning what has gone before, but I won’t continue to post in the same style.

There will be more frequent posts, including regular, weekly blog gimmicks to hopefully keep you coming back The content will mainly have a professional bent with views on the PR industry, clients, with some tinges of personal life stuff. So as such, there won’t be much in the way of ‘both barrels’ opinion, but there should be some useful stuff for colleagues, digital specialists and others working in mainstream marketing, and perhaps people looking to get into the mad world of PR.

Hope you find it useful.

Here’s some video of an Indonesian mimic octopus adapting to better suit its environment.

 

The fashion collab

“It’s a brand new dance but I don’t know it’s name” - Fashion, David Bowie.

It’s a crisp Autumn morning today, the first Monday after London Fashion Week. We’re in the buzzing Refuel bar at the Soho Hotel, while a din of scribbles on notebooks, clinking glasses and steaming espresso machines hums in the background.

Writers discuss a film script to the left, a Quintessentially rep raps sales spiel to a prospective member to the right – both are wearing white shirts and jeans. We’re stuck in the middle sitting to attention talking fashion. Mmm bop, fashion!

A knife-thin waiter seems to slice his way through traffic to take our order. Suddenly, straight ahead, backlit by morning sunbeams, the Oki-Ni team strides coolly towards us, a blur of  style. They seem to be walking in slow motion to their own soundtrack.

As they arrive, there’s a rat-a-tat sequence of quick helloes, quicker handshakes, and sound barrier breaking coffee orders: fashion, it seems, doesn’t stand still. The waiter dissapears, as we pawkwardly pull out seemingly inadequate PowerPoint slides. Ahem, I mean ‘mood boards.’

Designer collaboration

We’re trying to strike up a collaboration between a client, Oki-Ni and a chic designer. Many have gone before us – from the long term sub-brand partnerships like Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto (Y3), to the countless one-offs designed to broaden a brand’s audience. I have worked on a couple of these myself – a laptop bag for Intel with Julien MacDonald and laptop jewellery with the lovely Roland Mouret, in order to help Celeron processors excite women as much as a killer pair of Christian Loubertins.

It’s true that it’s getting harder and harder to cut through with the one-offs; the short termist approach means the in-crowd may discard you faster than last season’s seconds.  It’s fairly low impact, too – you can’t build equity with a one off.  Still, there is something to be said for this approach, from a PR perspective. Liek celebrity seeding, it can give your PR to broader audiences the extra thrust it needs to get going. And  if your brand doesn’t have an existing connection to style or  fashion, then this first foray can be a fine enough PR stunt.

However, to create a bigger impact, gain more credibility, and to influence the pack leaders who exert an uneven influence on the rest of us- the fashion writers, stylists, or the style sharks who are prepared to fork out for one offs – committ more. That can mean giving your brand motifs over to be re-imagined – like Murakami for Louis Vuitton – and invest more in the link-up. You will inevitably create something utterly PR-able.

To get real traction, you have to look beyond the immediate future – think at least a year to three years worth of seasonal pieces, for instance. For maximim creativity, you have to mix your DNA strands with a designers’, so let your brand be genuinely melded up; you need contributions from both gene pools to avoid clichéd and obvious products.  And to drive adoption, you have to give fashion writers, stylists and shopppers something new and unique that they cannot get elsewhere – really wearable limited editions or one-offs.

If you’re a technology brand, some of the ideas you’ll get from a fashion designer might feel strange. Although you have design and engineering in common, you both have completely different views on for and function. However, you should try and roll with it. In the words of ridiculant Nathan Barley: “Today ridicule – tomorrow, really cool.”Mm, bop.

Oki-Ni photographer Ben Benoliel’s Cosmic Farm set

Dad I’ve been mugged

Nice , branded top tips article that taps into parental fears about their kids travelling around the world.

New ads create The Daily Profit

From Tom R:

Pretty cool new form of advertising/marketing – wafer thin video screens embedded in magazines – kind of like a pop up book (embed attached image).

Marketers are comparing it to the Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter films.

The FT cites Pepsi campaign using this technology at the moment but it’s a taste of the future, no pun intended.

Maybe it’s something your clients’ marketing teams could be looking at – could we be offering the video content to make it happen? Pretty expensive use of marketing budget, but definitely something very new, cool and different which would impress.

Dirty new addiction

I have a confession to make: I’m on my knees thanks to a filthy new addiction: growing my own grub.

Every day I end up covered in organic soil from seeding, potting, planting out, digging in, uprooting, weeding, and going toe-to-toe with zombie-like slugs and death-from-above wood pigeons. And before you think I’ve lost the plot, I’m not the only one.

Urban farming is a dirty new trend taking root in London’s zone 2 neighbourhoods and beyond, thanks to projects like Landshare, which just launched this week. Landshare matches untended (or unwanted) gardens with garden-less growers.

Swapping Starbucks for PH soil tests

As a grower – I ran my first urban farming project last year – I’m all for it, and have signed up to assist less-able folks in their growing efforts. Plenty of people in my area are taking part, as East Dulwichians swap their Nars varnish for soil-caked fingernails, their Converse sneakers for Hunter wellies, and Starbucks for soil PH tests. There are a number of drivers behind this behaviour.

Trends like the slow food movement, the food miles debate, and the economic nosedive are convincing people to think differently when it comes to their scran. London needs 125 times its own area to provide the resources it consumes,  so it’s no surprise people are taking matters into their own hands.

Mutant carrots

Some people are even calling for participatory landscaping with a greater sense of urgency than Landshare, an article on which features my highly experimental mutant carrot strain from last season.  However, if you’re not convinced about turning London’s available spaces – from decked yards to vacant lots – into urban farms, then at least sharpen your secateurs for fashion’s sake.

Gardening as vandalism

If you need any more convincing that it’s hip to grow, then look no further than achingly hip sportswear brand, Adidas, whose guerrilla gardening project last year saw the brand ‘vandalise’ public spaces with flower power. What’s next I wonder – Banksy ditching his spray paint for mushroom spores to save the world?

Timewasters need not apply

Met a girl yesterday. Australian. Just arrived, more or less, trying to find a job in PR. We’re hiring, but not at that level.Wanted to help her out, contact of a client, that kind of thing. So gave her some tips, some leads. What would you have done?

Forget stealing your pocket money, I’ll fight you for your crumbs

Some people, some agencies are doing opposite. No tips, no leads, no hires. Indeed, they’re laying off, scrambling for crumbs. Old school stuntster, Mark Borkowski, Tweeted yesterday that he’d seen 18 agencies fight over a  £20k project brief. 18 agencies, for a £20k brief. Why did people agree to take part? Must have been an amazing brand for creds/door opening, or they’re desperate. Maybe both. But how  does this happen?

Let down by “the best”

The benchmark agencies like Lexis, Cohn & Wolfe, are laying off. Clients are walking away. I’ve seen how those places run so frankly, it doesn’t surprise me. Burned by shitty service, poor results, lame ideas, clients won’t have it any more. That the benchmark agencies have been tarred and feathered by client walkouts is important – clients can’t get no satisfaction. So it affects other agencies. It affects pitch processs. How did it come to this? Either way, like Eddie the Eagle, my newly arrived Aussie aquaintance couldn’t have timed her landing worse.

A tooth and claw fight (well, at least some hair pulling)

Still, at least she’s geting to see London. And the travel bug may supercede the urge to advance her career in the world’s premier global PR hub. Until then, our Brisbabe babe will have to slug it out with a growing list of growling PR job seekers. What about the rest of us? Agencies have to bear their teeth and duke it out more than ever before. Fight to keep clients – who are being wooed seduced by a slick of great pretenders on a daily basis – and fight to win more.

Punch it Chewie, (the new business hyper drive button, that is)

Another reason for the funky pitch prosess is that everyone is accelerating their new business drive. Like bad sell-ins to long-suffering journalists, these agencies are bombarding clients with tricks and promises straight out of Glengarry, Glen Ross. Large growth agencies like the one I’m in keep on keepin on, but the start-ups that emerged from the boom are fighting for their lives and the mature businesses that are too old and fat are haemorrhaging clients. Competition has simply increased, and with it choice of agencies.

Procurement’s cloaked masters emerge from the dark

Another reason for extra long pitch lists is the re-emergence of procurement teams. These penny pinchers are the masters of the recession universes and – as much as I respect what they do – they’re somewhat enthusiastically turning pitch processes into real pains in the dick. Lets face it, competing with ten agencies instead of four, going through four rounds instead of two, and submitting two proposals instead of one run your emotions harder and explode your free time. Still, we fight and love it – what, apart from the love of a client, can beat the thrill of the chase?

Survival skills

But how do the best agencies keep clients, how do they win them and what can tanned Australians who have just landed in our frozen country looking for PR streets paved with gold rather than grey-shit slush do to sell-themselves? Four key things:

1. Service – you have to offer better service than anyone
2. Value – to hold your price, the best value is crucial – that means achieving consistently better results than any other agency
3. Hustle – that means hustling media, hustling new ideas, hustling new business, hustling your teams
4. Interactive – if you haven’t upskilled yet, do it now. The media isn’t waiting to integrate interactive into their offer, why should PROs?

The end of time wasting?

This advice seems lost on some. An example is this video from a B2B agency. Why would you do this? It is lame. L-A-M-E. Why would you put  your agency’s name on this? It says: we can make, unfunny, topical videos badly. If I was a client, I wouldn’t want to buy the quality, the script, the branding on it. It’s an anti-advert in a time when most agencies can least afford it. Another example is the rise of interactive specialists. In most cases, these people could equally be called timewasting specialists. Yes, we know you have to blog, use Twitter etc. But some of you seem to be blogging so often and spending so much time on Twitter – at least an hour per day. That’s an hour you could be servicing clients, developing ideas for your agency or hustling new business. You could be teaching staff how to do things better. You could be creating, but instead, you’re sending links we’ve all already seen, telling us about how much snow is on the pavement, and generally trying to boost your personal online visibility under the guise that you’re doing it for your agency.

How long before HRs use tools like Tweet Wasters to analyse how much time staff ‘waste’ on sites like Twitter?  Either way, whether you’re scratching out new work leads or clinging onto your job, using every minute to deliver service, show value, hustle and demonstrate innovation has become mission critical.

Ayr Sky 9 to 5

From 9 to 5 I’m usually at work. However, one day I wasn’t. I drummed my fingers as no phone rang, and no meeting alert flashed onto my screen; no screen was in front of me for anything to blink on.

So I pointed my camera at the sky periodically and collected the pictures here. From 9am to 5pm on 27-12-08, I pointed my camera at the sky over Ayr, where I grew up and where I was that day visiting my parents, and snapped periodically.

The shots are here in various blue hues. Now it’s up to you what you do with them.

Streets ahead

We should definitely import these awards to London.