APG BATTLE OF BIG THINKING '09
Gordon Macmillan wrote a post last week on Brand Republic in which he talked about the Battle of Big Thinking.In it he said: In what is likely to be one of the hottest sessions of the day Head of Strategy and Innovation at VCCP Amelia Torode will share what she has learnt from campaigns including comparethemarket/meerkat.com, in Big Thinking in Social Media. Having just finished working out what my big thought that I want to share on Thursday is, I just wanted to tell Gordon that I am afraid

CROWDSOURCING Advertising - can it work?
I'm a bit torn on this subject. It's something that's been troubling me for a few weeks now ever since I saw Nic Ray from crowdsourcing company  Idea Bounty present at Media140 . Unilever's decision to cheaply outsource, sorry I meant to write, "crowdsource" their latest integrated advertising campaign for Peperami rather than use an advertising agency worried me. I know that this is going to sound like sour grapes as I work in a creative agency, but I wanted to share my concerns and get your thoughts. Very open to be proved wrong on this!In princip

GUINNESS - Is there anything to talk about?
I enjoyed this BBH Labs post that Pats tweeted to me yesterday - "if you want a conversation say something interesting." Then I watched the new Guinness ad online and was struck by the fact that the only thing that I could really say about it was "I wonder how much money they spent on that?"It's beautiful, but feels very 1980s and a bit out of touch. About 30,000 views on YouTube so maybe it wasn't just me who wasn't that interested by the ad.

Going Loco with Southern Railways
This just makes me smile. When the "more bums on seats" pitch brief came into the agency, we were looking to find a different way of approaching this creatively. We didn't want to do a category job for all trains it had to be Southern specific, we also didn't want to do the job of the South Coast tourist board and simply talk about the great destinations that Southern trains go to. The insight for the brief was sparked off after reading Alain De Boton's The Art of Travel - we wanted to try and work out WHY people feel the need to travel. It's a great read BTW. Southern trips are all quiet sh

Guardian's Word of Mouth/Influencer Study
I have been meaning to blog about this event and WOM UK for a while now. I went along to their Espresso Briefing with  David Brain from Edelman, I am not sure that you could have had a better "espresso" companion than David (incidentally his blog is well worth reading) The research, although obviously wrapped into a sales tool for The Guardian, was interesting. The Guardian's Word of Mouth DatabaseView more