It was The Sun Wot Won it...again

Like it or not, you have to admire it: The Sun. Fifty-six pages of either infuriating bluster and crap or your own thoughts in black, white and smudgy colour.

It has a well documented talent for creating great front pages, the economy and simplicity of which are, in my view, a joy to behold. Funny, witty, boasting, cheeky and often on the edge of respectability. It's The Sun's primary brand asset if you like, as recognisable as the red-top masthead.

So in wondering how the national press would report yesterday's arrival, it was perhaps inevitable that they would come up with a corker. And they did.

It was The Sun Wot Won it...again.

The new Eloi

The above shows the tail-end of a Facebook conversation I had with my 10 year-old nephew, Jorge, yesterday. He's on holiday and online...non stop. I was struck by the sheer joy expressed in his post.

In the comments you can't see, I told him that both Facebook and Instagram are (in the general scheme of things) new-ish and there was a time when not only did they not exist, but the internet was a flight of fancy too. I then directed him to my last blog post, Litmus for the human condition, which is about the end of the telegram. What you see is his response.

Having posted this morning, as promised, a break-neck bullet-point list of communications milestones and links to Google+ pages of pictures of telegrams, IBM Mainframes, Morse code alphabets, the first PC's, Macs and mobile phones, I suddenly felt very old indeed.

It was my Morlock moment to his Eloi and it worried me.

It made me wonder how much of how-we-got-to-where-we are-in-this-digital-age, kids in general are being taught. It's great that they're so tech-literate but I think they also need to know where it came from, because as we know, everything is connected in some way and the future is very often found in the past.

I keep thinking about aliens, Jeff Goldblum and Morse code.

Litmus for the human condition

One informed the Bellamys that their son was missing in action, another told the world that the 'unsinkable' had sunk and an infamous murderer and his mistress were brought to book by a quick-thinking, eagle-eyed ship's captain and Mr Morse's invention.

It's responsible for some of the best and most memorable plot twists, turns and denouements and is infused with fear, loathing, hope, love, tragedy — it's Litmus for the human condition.

The telegram.
After 160 years the last telegram will be sent by someone in India by 6 PM today.

We remember the 'firsts' — the first Walkman, PC, iPod, iMac, Mobile and so on — but the 'lasts' become increasing harder to recall, the death of the once all-pervasive fax and telex machines being perhaps the nearest demises. But the telegram is in a different league because it belongs to and represents a communications world which seems unthinkable to us today.

Nowadays things dovetail or overlap. We migrate seemingly seamlessly from one medium to another, from one instrument to another. Things merge, fuse and develop.

But nothing ever really goes away.

Look no further than the parable of the CD, Mini Disc and the resurgence of Vinyl.

In Independence Day Morse code saved the world when the best and newest technology couldn't.

And only yesterday I read that in Russia manual typewriters are being snapped up as fears about hacking and cyber-espionage grow. 

For every action there's a counter-action.
Is this the end?
I wouldn't bet on it.
STOP.

Sense and Sensibilities

Without UK rapper, Sense's, new take on, Ian Dury's, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3, Vauxhall's ad for its Astra model would be meh!

It would be for the most part no more than the usual montage of people doing stuff in and outside a car, with a few kids, a dog and picnic accoutrements crammed in to illustrate its capacity. With lingering shots of the dash, shiny body work, spinning hubs and the all important golden angle.

Ian Dury and the Blockheads were and still are heroes of mine and indeed many, many others, which is why some will hate the very idea of anyone mucking around with this or any other of their tracks. I forgot to post this last week and as a result I've been able to read about the reactions to this 'sacrilege' but I think he would approve.

His life was devoted to subverting and challenging expectations and norms. A world-class wordsmith and musician who was in part defined by his refusal to be defined by his childhood Polio. So I think he would have liked this.

I think he would have liked the words.
I think he would have liked the delivery. 
I think it would appeal to his sensibilities.

I refer you to...

"Content is king." As resonant as 'Put a Tiger in Your Tank.'
'Have a break, have a Kit-Kat.' 'We're only here for the beer.' And so on. I think we've got it. Some of us got it long before others. But I refer you to the fact that a lot of people here (and elsewhere) on LinkedIn who keep telling us that this is very, very important, don't actually create any content. They just point us in the direction of content created by others and this is quite often contrary to the nature of their titles and their 'areas of expertise'.

I think that there are two kinds of contributors.

I think I would say that your ability to check databases, You Tube, and other professional sites does not make you a savant. Boys and girls. You cannot expound the importance of content if you do not create it.

So why don't they?

I wonder why that is?

I think we know.
And I am far from being the only one who has noticed.

The till person was right

By now just about everyone has read about the Sainsbury's checkout operative who refused to serve the terminally rude girl who was on her mobile. The clue to where I sand on this is evident in the earlier sentence. I have lost count of the number of times I have wanted to deck some self-important idiot who slowed things down for the rest of us in a supermarket, including parents with crying and fractious kinder, because they HAD to spout crap into their phones. 

I am in the habit of drawing things that happen around me. This was done some five years ago.
And it turns out that the person featured is the director of a very famous, flavour of the month dance troupe,
not that that makes him any less annoying or ignorant.

She and her ilk need to understand that they are in a transaction with a sentient being at the till and not an ATM. No wonder they get pissed-off. More and more one sees signs in smaller shops stating that if you talk on your mobile while you're being served you are not going to be. Good for them.

But the problem doesn't begin and end at the tills.
Dom Jolly was bang-on. It's about civility and awareness and consideration of others. It's about all those selfish idiots who devolve responsibility for themselves to us as they stand texting in shop doorways, or come to a dead halt in front of you on the street, or block stairwells, contraflows and escalators, or hold up traffic as they natter or text on the zebra crossing. Or leave their seat to bring their conversation to wherever you are because they are terminally thick, ignorant, stupid and trying so very hard to look cool and 'in the swim'.

So Sainsbury's, a cursory scan of the message boards of the national press should tell you that the overwhelming majority have sided with your checkout girl. You spend a lot of money via internal communications and recruitment materials telling prospects that you respect the individual and so on. Now's your opportunity to show it. Make it a policy. Don't berate that person, give her a year's worth of vouchers, a big pat on the back and ban the ignorant and selfish customer.

Being bad made it good

Some twenty-three years on I'll never forget the look on her face when I pulled the cover visual we had been forbidden to present out of the bag. But sometimes you just have to do what's right even if your immediate client won't. It's called doing your job.

We were presenting the concept for a brochure, which was ground-breaking in its sector (as verified by the subsequent awards, plaudits and plagiarism) for a client who could be described as the original blue-chip company. At the time it was such a departure that our immediate day-to-day client was in a permanent tizzy. Smelling Salts at the ready, we had read the brief back to her on more than one occasion with increasing emphasis on the pivotal words and we had pressed the point that you can't say you're different unless you showed it. That, at least, she understood. But when it came to the cover – the element that would signify real in-your-face change – she wanted some dreadful bodge; new and different inside and old and corporate on the outside. The fact that no one would give it time of day and thus negate all we were doing (and spending) passed her by.

She wasn't a stupid woman by any means. We liked her. She just wasn't thinking about the brief or the job. She was too busy trying to second guess what her boss would think of both it and her. So when the day of the big presentation arrived we knew that we couldn't let the bodge happen. And so the cover went into the bag and off we went.

Our ultimate client was old-school personified; no one's fool and a 'name' in his sector. Longevity, was his middle name. She was bricking-it. Her anxiousness was palpable, you could smell it. And so we started our very expensive bout of show and tell and he 'got it' straight away. From the very first board the positive affirmations and comments came thick and fast until he was almost selling it to us. We looked at each other and knowing what the other was thinking I pulled the cover visual out of the bag. Her face went on FF from disbelief, panic, horror and finally to cat-got-the-cream, as she heard him say, 'superb', many, many times over.

She got the adulation she craved.
He got the solution both he and the company needed.
We got the response and result we knew we'd get.
Everyone got what they wanted.
But it took an act of insubordination to make everyone happy.

Clients and their companies are like sandwiches.
At the base there's the support, admin and junior staff. At the top, the CEO, the board and the heads of this and that. And then there's the middle bit, middle management, and generally speaking they're the ones who don't or won't 'get it', because having got to where they are their focus is on staying there or advancement, which means that they won't rock the boat or make waves. They stifle creativity and innovation. Like a failed Vaudeville act, their days are spent trying to persuade the likes of you and me that their powers of telepathy are such that "they know what they will go for".

Not that our side gets off lightly either.
There are those who will just roll over even when they know that they'll end up with a piece of work they'll be less than proud of and a client they'll eventually lose because a competitor or someone will point out your errors and you'll be asked why you didn't 'see it'.

It's a real problem and I'm sure that you have one or two of your own at the moment, so don't roll over. 

Instead, visualise my client bounding on-stage to pick up his award with applause ringing in his ears and remember that being bad made it good.

Nice bark...

A South Korean friend once said that we get the balance of old and new right. That we know how to mix it up. That it's one of our best virtues and values. And I was reminded of this when I saw these at St. Paul's this afternoon. The old and the very different working together in a magical kind of way. It's a living instillation which is designed to make us appreciate the importance of trees, especially, I suppose, in the middle of a major city. We walk by these all the time, but probably fail to really see them, hence the blue. This small visitor from Sweden loved them. Perhaps she was thinking of that Potter chap.