Planning Complexity

Ockham’s Razour states that the simplest explanation of a strategy is the best or put another way the explanation that describes a phenomenum with the least number of assumptions is the superior. Although simple solutions are usually superior it does not mean that the simplest approach to solving a problem is the best and for [...]

Fragmentation v centralisation of brands online

Often you’ll encounter the argument that online resources need to be organised over one centrally defined property like the companies website. Initially it makes sense, a brand to most people is a singular entity that is best off occupying one single space organised within one centrally controlled property but this assumption is fundementally flawed and [...]

Assumptions

Whenever I encounter the ‘because you just do” response to something I immediately think its time to challenge the underlying assumptions for acting that way because there’s a good chance the landscape has shifted significantly to require a rethink . The other day a colleague of mine was asked to come back with a list [...]

Create something worth talking about.

This is a follow on from the post “Social media as a guiding principle” which argued that if a brand wants to utilise social media properly it needs to have something worth talking about and if it doesn’t have something worth talking about it should create something.
Recently Proctor & Gamble used social media successfully to [...]

Guerilla Digital – Error 404

This campaign fuses two of my favourite things: the clever utilisation of dead space and the debunking of misinformation. This campaign for The Reality Coalition by Crispin Porter + Bogusky achieves just that – it cleverly utilises the otherwise dead space of an error 404 page with a contextually related message via an OTP style [...]

Social media as a guiding principle

Its clear to everyone now that brands can derive benefit from engaging in social media but the important thing for a marketing team to ask themselves before embarking is “have we got anything worth talking about?”
The hard thing about social media isn’t getting marketers to sit up and pay attention to it, they all want [...]

Fortune will favour the brave [and quick].

Marketing and mass media have been awash recently with reports of social media and how brands will need to engage in social media strategies in order to stay relevant. Several articles have shown survey results of marketers indicating their intention to engage in social media strategies or that they see social media platforms as a [...]

Brands, Social Media & the Illusion of Control

I think its in Buddhism that they talk about the illusion of control – that as much as you think you have control of something its just an illusion. The current sentiment from many brands in response to social media participation is that they fear losing control of their brand by letting themselves go on [...]

Vision Street Wear

I submitted an article to a company blog about this website over a year ago but it’s still one of my favorites and I wanted to have something about it on this blog.
If you look on www.thefwa.com these days the number of video background sites are too many to count but back when this site [...]

The Fantasy League Trick

Many of you would have seen the Reebok NFL Fantasy League viral video where a handful of NFL players perform super human feats of skill (see below) which has been hugely successful which I gauge through the fact that I have been sent it via about 4 different peer to peer channels which to me [...]