The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most widely used personality profiling indicators in the world.  (I happen to be a practitioner). It examines and evalauates our preferred style of dealing with the world and the people in it, and identifies our preferences on four dimensions.  The dimension relating to how we prefer to take in information is the Sensing-lntuition dimension. Those who have a preference for sensing prefer to take in information through what we would call the normal senses, to find out what is actually happening, recognising the practical realities of situations and seeing things “as it is”. Those with a sensing preference will be more likely to tell you literally what is in the picture (a ginger cat, the number of cans of lager etc). In contrast, those who prefer intuition have a preference for taking in the big picture, focussing on the relationships and connections between facts &  information rather than the information itself, seeing new possibilities and new ways of of doing things. They are more inclined to see things in the picture that are not literally there, like how the cat got in the fridge, what he might do next, or even what the cat is thinking.

Everyday we see or experience things, often we are exposed to the same thing as others. Then we mistakenly believe we are looking at a situation (or a picture) and normally assume that you are seeing similar things to everyone else. My stimulus is not the same as your stimulus. My answer to the same question will not necessarily the same as yours. The general population is over 75 per cent sensing with a minority being intuitive. People who have a natural tendency to see the more lateral and unusual connections are harder to find.  They will also normally be in the minority in most companies, teams, meetings and discussions. Intuitive perception can often find itself having a harder job getting heard.

So here is the bad news. New insight and ideas are hard to find anyway. To make it harder, we often exhibit this default myopia that not only makes it harder to see them, but harder for them to be recognised when they appear. We  can blind side ourselves to other perspectives and new ideas. We also can, some people in particular, discount what others see. Or worse, put them down for seeing it and saying it.  Because we don’t see what they see in the information – how can it be there?  In organisations that recruit to type the difficulty is even greater. More people see the same way. The culture over time shifts to seeing what it wants to see – and what they see is the same thing.  Those who may see things differently find it hard to get heard, they get seen as the weird sheep and commonly leave. When companies get to a situation where they can’t imagine what can come around the corner – because they cannot actually see it – it is often close to the moment when they get run over.

Now the good news and there are 5 bits of it:

1. We don’t work alone or have to look at things, or generate ideas just from our own perceptions. Stimulus combined with a fresh perspective is a potent recipe. Some perspectives you may not  like.  Some you may disagree with.  Some may not work. But you now have other alternatives to build on your thoughts or to provide the stress test to them.

2. Sensing & Inuition are preferences not fixed setttings in our personality.  We can all choose to act out of preference or appreciate those who can see things differently to us. Sensing & intuition are both fantastically useful in evaluating situations & coming up with new ideas. People with an intuitive preference can still sense and people with a sensing preference still exhibit intuition. They may find it not as natural to do, but they can still do it. We all sense when we do things like taste food, notice a stoplight or memorise a speech. We all use intuition when we do things like get stuck and come up with new ways of doing things, think about future implications for a current action, perceive an underlying meaning in what people say or do, or  see a bigger picture.

3.  Sensing + Intution – when we see each others perspectives, can make for biggest or most numerous of ideas. It is a mistaken belief to see those who have an intuitive preference as the only source of new inspiration.  They may be more likely to see the bigger picture, but they are also less likely to see what is under their nose. Is the idea for Google based on sensing or intuition. Of course, its based on both.

4. Breaking the habit of seeing the world only from your perspective can be done in minutes not days. When teaching people about facilitation techniques one of my favourites is to ask a group (say 10 people) to close their eyes for 30 seconds.   I ask them to think about “what have a cat and a fridge have got in common?”. (I’m not sure where I got this question from). Having done it, I then also ask them to guess how many different answers will get from the group in total. At most people guess about 10. The reality is normally way more than 10 – frequently 20. If you also allow the suggestions made to stimuluate others “both have feet”, makes someone else think “both have a tail” (the flex on the fridge), in a few minutes you can have 30 connections. The most bizarre of which to date was “you find them abandadoned in unkempt gardens when they are dead”. That came from a Finance Director.

5. The more you or a company does it – the easier it gets to do. You may ask why  30 connections for a cat and a fridge of any use to you or your business? The cat & the fridge exercise is an illustration of what can happen if, even for short time, a situation is created where people are forced to suspend their own perceptions and use a combination of their different perceptions to look at a stimulus. This is just brilliant news. Just do the maths. If 12 of us all saw the same two things in a stimulus the total answer would be 2.  If 12 of us all saw 2 different things in stimulus the total would be 24.

Thank god I checked my quarantine box this morning. Both Jennifer Aniston and Angela Jolie had sent me emails to me. I could have missed them.

Spam is a funny thing.  Intending to destroy your computer, or hijacking your email contacts to allow someone to exploit your friends, or just to fraudulently part you with your money because deep down you’d like a better erection. Yes. It’s fake viagra. The double con of fake viagra is that they may also send it to you.  If it isn’t Viagra – what is it? Very rarely people get caught doing it.  Here is a story about a man getting a “stiff sentence”.

Fake Viagra is also big business. I just wondered….if the most innovative people on getting you to pay on the web are pornsites – then how expert are the “Fake Viagra Boys” at optimisation of email headlines.  So – I rifled and researched through 4 days of my quarantine bin to produce this analysis.  I can now reveal the 12 (inches) strategies and the headlines used to encourage you to click through for the chance of a fake stiffy. We start out classical with Urgency and Discount, but it progresses through to Stud and ends in Surreal.  Michell Obama gets a mention, Jay Leno and Cockzilla…. and some may offend…or even arouse.

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You have no doubt heard of the decline in bees.

The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honey bee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy. In the UK alone, bees contribute £200m a year to the economy through pollination.

Bees play a crucial role in pollinating some 90 commercial crops worldwide.

 It’s not just fruit and vegetables; alfalfa, a major cattle crop, is 90% reliant on pollination by bees. The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) estimates that if people were to take over the job of pollination from bees in the UK, it would require a workforce of 30 million. In Southern Sichuan, pear trees are pollinated by hand after the honey bee population was wiped out.

Bees  extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.  Is that serious enough for you.

Lots of research is going on into the decline in bees.   Colony collapse disorder is the popular described affliction.  The varroa mite, which attacks the bees a key cause.

What is now being connected is that the main cause is in fact a lack of biodiversity. The simple logic is that the human use of bees for professional pollination has led to the breeding of a limited numbers of types of bees and a lack of biodiversity to allow bees to natural survive:

• Biodiversity is…the variety of life on Earth > 13m species
• This is the real world wide web, and its all connected
• Oxygen you breathe from plankton in the oceans & leafy forests
• Fruit & vegetables you eat pollinated by bees
• Water, you drink part of a huge global cycle involving clouds, rainfall, glaciers, rivers and oceans.
• Biodiversity sustains these natural living systems
• It recycles waste, controls floods, regulates climate, etc
• It provides us with food, fuel, health, well being & future

Biodiversity is a thought many businesses might think about too.The lifecycle of a business is shorter and shorter.  World’s change. Markets change.  Consumers change.

Microsoft and Nokia once the leaders in their respective computing and mobile fields have seen their share prices steadily decline. They have seen their market dominance eroded.  Just recently, they looked to merge in the mobile space to take on rivals like Apple & Google.

Google recently bought Motorola. That is a heck of a leap for a technlogy company who provides web services to move into manufacturing handsets.  Apple, in case we forget, spent years just making computers until Steve Jobs returned and they then made portable music machines, an internet friendly mobile phone and most recently the tablet.

Google and Apple are, of course, the easy much heralded examples of innovative companies who are in the tech space.  Consider instead Tesco.  Once a UK supermarket, it is now mainly international, but also a bank, petrol station, insurance company and an online retailer.  Amazon started in books. It now sells many things. It also created the Kindle.

Success is often linked to the ability to innovate.  In hindsight, innovation sounds great.  The Ipad is a great idea. Yet we forget the Apple Newton.  Apple’s previous and failed attempt at  a tablet/pda. It was manufactured for Apple by Sharp in 1993 and killed off in 1998. Android is a great idea from Google and Google+ …as a sort of social network.. is getting traction, yet we quickly forget what happened to Google Buzz – Google’s previous sort of social idea that didn’t make the cut.  Everyone now talks about geo-location and check ins.  We may forget that Google bought Dodgeball a geo-location mobile check in service in 2005 before later closing it.  (The founders went on to start up again as Foursqaure.)  Google in fact has numerous ideas,over 100 acquistions, various innovations and not all of them have worked.

Albert Einstein once said “anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried something new”.  As the executives at Nokia or Microsoft or numerous other businesses pour over how their world changed – they’ll normally say they innovated. Nokia had its own version of an Apps store before Apple. In the N95 – Nokia had a internet enabled mobile pre the launch of the i-phone that got rave reviews.  Microsoft had Windows software virtually everywhere.  Its web browser Internet Explorer was the default.  Now few phones run on Windows.  In many countries, Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox (a not for profit collective) are what people use to browse the web.

Microsoft, Nokia and so many businesses innovated.  However, they didn’t innovate enough outside their model of how the world works.  As bee hive owners look for the collapse of bees they look for a cause that isn’t them.  Be it the varroa mite or the effect of mobile phone signals or whatever.  The pattern is similar in business. Companies look for a culprit that was not down to them. When the world changes they hang on to what they have and try to re-engineer it. When the i-phone launched Nokia saw it as (a) small (b) an elite and expensive user group (c) only in the USA – a market they were not big in (d) one phone when they had many.

The truth is that breeds of creature, even species, eventually die out. The same is true of companies.  The issue for bees is not that the varroa mite or something else caused the bee population to plummet.  It is the fact that the diversity in the type of bees had been reduced from generation to generation.  We’d encouraged bees who were good at making honey or doing commercially pollination. We’d ended up with less and less types of bees. As we commercially farmed, we also wiped out the natural habitat of creatures that pollinate -i.e. help new things spread and grow. When the varroa mite hit – we had less species that could survive it – so the bee population could not fight back or adapt. We had  less places off the beaten track where new pollinisation could come from. We’d created a perfect storm for bees – with few places for the species to hide or regroup.

Biodiversity is just as important in business. Microsoft for all its focus on computers also allowed itself to diversify into games consoles with the X-Box. Originally, when it made software, it allowed itself to diversify into the internet with explorer.  As Google sees Facebook change online behaviour, it is in part protected by its other previous diversifications. It means all Google’s eggs are not in one basket called search.  It also means that the company has a mindset and attitude that hasn’t just come from building one type of bee.  The management approach that led to the success of Android is core to how Google now looks to re-energise its approach to the whole company.

Of course business bio-diversity comes with no guarantees.  It comes with deadends. It comes with what seems like unnecessary distractions on new fronts when companies are fighting battles at home. It does also come with a better chance of survival in the long term.  If you don’t diversify your business and your thinking you may survive for years. The one sure thing, however,is  if companies don’t diversify is that one day the end will come. When it does – it will come quickly and not from where you might expect. Markets, consumers and business don’t just change – they mutate.  Businesses need to allow themselves to do the same.

The other day I was in WPP global media agency Mediaedge:CIA.  Whoops – I mean MEC.  It was Campaign’s agency of the year in the UK in 2010. As they pointed out in the press release a few months back when they changed the name, that colon (between Mediaedge & MEC) has caused issues for people for ages.  Half the time they called themselves MEC anyway. Let’s be honest, its holding company WPP – started out as a shell company name bought by Martin Sorrell. As most industry old hands will know it stands for Wire & Plastic Products (shopping carts originally).

There is now some sense of poignancy to WPP’s name origins.  It reflects the pragmatic commercial nature of WPP’s founder. Regardless of whether WPP is where you would have started as a brand name – you combine it, the story, the Sorrell personna,  the PR machine – it is truly a powerful brand.

Now for the irony.   Many an agency spend their time advising major brands on how to differentiate their brand from the competition, or steer their communications so a consumer atleast understands what they do or stand for.   So why do so many agency names, agency naming, name changes and their own branding…. seem to owe less to imagination/differentiation and more to the letters left over in a hand of scrabble.  I’ve puzzled over this. I figure there is a simple answer.  There must exist a book on naming an agency.  I’ve never seen it, but clearly there are rules. Therefore, there must be a book agencies buy to help pick names. When you have your first child you get a book of names to inspire you.  When car makers name cars they use a book of animal names, or solar bodies, or just letters and numbers.  So, for the first time I reveal the 7 strategies to naming an agency. I use the word strategy loosely.

1. The Crosby Stills Nash & Young. This is the stock route and its still the most popular.  You take the founders name and try to make them sound like a decent rock band. Occassionally, people get the order wrong and you sound like a firm of solicitors – Archibald Ingram Streatham, Bartle Bogle Hegarty etc.  Don’t you think Bartle Hegarty Bogle sounds like a better band?  Here, of course, you are trading on the fame of the founders. You are also angling for the “pay me more when you buy me out effect”… because my name is above the door. At this point, the rock band ensemble strategy meets the Dolce & Gabana premium brand price stategy. The Crosby Stills Nash & Young route does have a few key issues.  First, it relies on the founders being successful, famous and sticking together.  In the agency world that can never be relied on.  Second, sometimes you may want to add the fourth or fifth Beatle.  Hurrell Dawson – added 2 senior partners a year or so into its life in Mosely and Grimmer (one has now left). WCRS (see acronyms later) – which was founded in 1979 as Wight Collins Rutherford & Scott – added its 5th Beatle at one point.  Having got the name order right and sounding more rock band than solicitor, WCRS went public. WCRS  then had the connudrum of how to accocomodate its fifth & sixth Beatle in 1985 with  Roger Matthews & Alfredo Marcantonio. (see 7 ages of WCRS).  It plumped for…wait for it…WCRS Matthews Marcantonio.  This from the agency that did BMW’s 7 series, Orange & Carling Black Label. Oh yes – the other issue associated with option one  is ego.  This breaks down into 2 key decisions. A.  Is your name in the title.  B. Where does it come in the order. WCRS is of course now part of the Engine Group – see group names later.

2. The pragmatic acronym. Having spent years with the names above the door – even if only a few – you just get sick (or the receptionist does) of saying the whole sentence everyday and 20 times a day if you do new business.  Add to that that the original founders have retired, passed on, or most young people who work there or you sell to go “who is he?” and the pragmatism wins.  Bartle Bogle Hegarty becomes BBH, Vallance Carruthers Coleman Priest becomes VCCP, J Walter Thompson becomes JWT.  You get the idea.Further down the line there is the international merger. The powerful UK agency is bought by the big network. In the process, commonly, the genius of the founders and their history gets lost as the international name and the largest footprint from the USA holds sway.  Abott Mead Vickers becomes AMV becomes BBDO. Boase Massimi Pollitt becomes BMP becomes DDB.  In the middle are the nonsense years where you hold onto both names for “transition”.  BMP DDB, or AMV BBDO hover for a while. Imagine if brand’s adopted the same strategy.  Between Marathon & Snickers name change we’d of  had Marathon Snickers.  What we’d recommend to others isn’t what the industry does itself. By the way OMD, Omnicom’s large media network is the merger of the DDB media network Optimum Media & BBDO’s Media Direction.  See how they cleverly both had “media” in the names. Media companies tend to do that and tell you what they do in their name.

3. The better legacy scrabble answer. Occaisonally, someone never starts the dance over time from founder names above the door that drifts into meaningless acronym to anyone who doesn’t know them 20 years ago.  The best example of this is PHD.  From its outset it was an acronym of its founders names Patterson, Horswell & Durden. Cleverly they ordered them to make it mean something else that was memorable and had another “intelligent” meaning which fitted their brand persona.  Now PHD is one of Omnicom’s global media agencies.  All of the founders originally sold out and then left – yet their company idea, their legacy and their names live on. Give these guys a job at a branding agency. PHD by the way is a 3 letter no vowel and 9 point score in Scrabble.

4. A made up name that means something or not.  If you put your ego in check and forget that when it comes to sell, or negotiate your leaving package, that having your name above the door gets you more personal fame and personal cash – you might do what you advise your clients. That is invent a brand name that has some meaning and resonance for what you do or believe. Mother, Adam & Eve, The Red Brick Road, Seven Stars, are among the more recent on this route.  If you go back you’ll find previous successful agencies in their time in creative and media world with names like Yellowhammer, i-Level, or Naked. What is intersting about this route is that it also tends to come with a passion to change the way the industry works…to buck the model.  That leads to an idea as to how they believe they want to be different and a brand name sort of just follows.  Of course, no doubt at some point in the future the years of building a differentiated and successful business coincide with the desire to sell up and cash in. At which point the defending of the name coincides with commercial pragmatism.  When you are acquired or you merge with someone else the name that has the most value for international business wins. The buisiness is worth more and you get more cash. “Hey I had principles when I started – but I’ve taken the risk and worked hard to build this thing. I’ll give up on the name for more cash.”  I once knew a fairy whose name was nuff. Would you change you name for money I asked?  She said “Fair Enough”.

5.  Car branding for media networks. Then there are the international media agencies who do branding.  Firstly, it is really hard for a few people to set up a media company – especially if it buys these days.  So you have very few founders names above the door in media agenies to start with.  Often they have grown up like spin-off sitcoms from their original parent ad agency and then the knocking together of all those same entities globally. Unlike Cheers which begot Frasier – the nature of international media agency brand names has more of a Ronseal approach.  There are 3 routes.  A. Eventually end up with a merger of acronyms – see MEC and OMD earlier.  B.  They find a thesauraus and look for words that sound like they are large, powerful and intelligent: Mindshare, Zenith, Starcom, Maxus, Carat, Initiative, Universal. Coincidentally – if any of these turned up as names for models from Ford you would not be surprised. C. You take the word media and add something to it: Mediacom, Mediavest, Media Planning Group. You get the idea.

6. Bond villain holding companies. In the world where agencies are now owned by holding companies, who are listed on stockmarkets and talk more about this quarter’s growth than the work, we then have the holding company brand name.  These holding companies are run more by the money men  than the ad men.  The names are neither meaningful as words or with the exceptions of WPP – as pragmatic as to be a bought off the self  as a shell company acronym that just does. Some, like Publicis, started life as an ad agency. As for the ideas behind most of them – perhaps the key driver was global domination. I asked my children to suggest what sort of companies do you think Omnicom, Interpublic Group, Havas, Aegis,WPP, Publicis are?  One of them said “are they names of the companies owned by James Bond Villains? I’m only saying.

7. The  legend branding route. You may end up creating an agency and making a lot of money. The truth is that some people had an idea, were always bothered about doing great work and doing the things the market wouldn’t. You may end up like David Ogilvy with your name still over the door of a global network years after you invented many of the rules on how to do better advertising.  You may end up like Bill Bernbach – the legendary creative with your name reduced to one of the Bs in global ad network DDB.  You could of course become a global network based on 2Bs and a H:  Bartle Bogle & Hegarty.  All legends, all with very different skills  and still with the power that when you say BBH it conjures up their names and what they’ve done. Of course, BBH is now part owned by Publicis – but the majority is held by BBH. So they still control their own destiny. As their strapline says. They zig whist others zag. You may end up like Patterson Horswell & Durden.  Known by those in the media industry at the time as 3 people who went against the network agency model, who built a business on better first and bigger second. No longer involved in PHD, but aware that many of the ideas behind it live on. Or you may end up like James Walter Thompson who in  1868 aged 24 completed service in the U.S. Marines Corp on the USS Saratoga.  He then moved to New York to find a job. Carlton hired Thompson as a bookkeeper. Thompson found that coming up with concepts and sales were much more profitable. He became he  a very succesful salesman for the small company. In 1877, he bought the agency for $500 and renamed it J. Walter Thompson Company. You may know where this idea ended up. It’s JWT. Of course we cannot forget Maurice & Charles Saatchi whose name lives on not as initials, but as a byword for an ad agency people know. Rather uniquely, not only is their name not reduced to an acronym, but like New York, it was so good they named it twice and twice again. First in the Saatchi & Saatchi network they founded, that they then left, but still continues as part of the Publicis Group. Second in the new global network and holding company they founded of M & C Saatchi that exists today. Global, founders names with intact initials and surnames.  These guys know a thing about branding, legend and legacy. They have a simple strapline that the company stands for “Brutal Simplicity of Thought”. I rememberwhat all these guys did and what they stand for many years on. That is powerful branding.If you want an acronym then QED,respect to you all. There is something for anyone to think about when they start up in a new agency or work in one that already exists. Good agency branding is really no more than “I wish I’d done that”.

We are now entering that moment for the 2012 Olympics where we forget what was promised. Instead, excitement kicks in that the Olympics are almost here. However, a reality check is needed. We won the Olympic Bid on a promise of leaving a legacy of more young people playing sport in the UK. We actively slagged off previous Olympics whose legacy was white elephant arenas in our bid presentaion. So pitch won – mind the gap in the strategy to deliver it. It is more distance of a javelin than height of the high jump.  Here are just 10 gaps that come to mind:

1. Where were the proper measurement objectives for the legacy? On  Insidethegames Jim Cowan points out that any obvious pre & post target for a legacy is what Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, said in the presentation. “Our vision is to see millions more young people in Britain and across the world participating in sport and improving their lives as a result of that participation.” Having hunted around I found the wooliest of Labour Government legacy targets: “Getting people more active: help at least two million more people in England be more active by 2012 & inspiring young people through sport: offer all 5-16 year olds in England 5 hours of high-quality sport a week & all 16-19 year olds 3 hours a week by 2012″. If familiar with political promises, you may notice that the 5-16 year old wish is just recasting what should happen naturally in schools as a new target. Language like “offer”  & “help” are not the same as “participate”. The 2m target is rather a small round number (including what should happen in schools anyway). As we don’t know what it was before, or how it will be measured, it doesn’t really matter. The current govt scrapped these targets. Instead, they have new participation targets linked to funds for sports bodies: for example, the ECB deliver 270,000 people playing cricket. More sensible, it would seem, but these targets are linked to funding. So if cricket misses its target it gets less government money.  If you can spot how the way the Olympics concept is being built links into participation in these sports – you are a better man than me – though Archery will be staged at Lords!
2. What if I spent money on actualy providing sport opportunities for young people vs bidding for the Olympics? The 270,000 target of increased participation in cricket for the ECB isn’t helped by the systematic removal of playing fields and time for sport in the school curriculum.  It has occurred  in the UK from government to government for numerous years. The UK is unlike many other countries. Funding and support of sport is not seen as a government responsibility. Intead, its deligated to quangos with some targets and some funding. So a few hundred £m has been siphoned off to bodies like Sport England to create an Olympics participation legacy working with local authorities. At the same time £625m is going back the other way from London Council taxes to pay for the Olympics. A current extimate is that it will cost the UK over £9bn to stage the Olympics – roughly 3 times more than the original claimed. Maybe there are alternative ways the £9bn could have been spent to achieve the legacy vision.
3. The absence of a joined up government strategy for sport. Rather bizarrely late last year the govt announced a plan to slash £162m funding for schools sports partnerships (something it has now done a u-turn on). But it isn’t the just the current government who have a lack of a coherent, consistent and joined up sports strategy. The Labour govt presided over our Olympic bid. They also interfered in an instruction that future UK Ashes games must be live on terrestrial TV. This would have effectively wiped £ms off the funds for the ECB in loss of TV rights. Given that the ECB spends most of its funds encouraging participation – particularly at youth and grass roots level (which the govt doesn’t) – many of the coaches and facilities available to kids would have gone. As the current govt put in its targets for participation among sporting bodies – it also removing the funding for Labour’s previous made up “free swimming initiative”.
4. Why is there no link or section on the 2012 website to find a local sport to join? With hopefully millions going to the official 2012 website for tickets or curiosity – surely that is a great opportunity to connect young people to play or get involved in a sport locally now? I trawled through the website and could find no mention or link that helped me do just that. There is a section called “get invoved now” – but that is about helping out for free.
5. Where is the social media strategy for 2012? OK it is still a year away, but the signs of a social media strategy or a campaign to participate in sport isn’t evident.  The official 2012 Olympics Facebook Page has 419 likes and is exceptionally uninspired. There is a thousands of  likes of the Olympics Volunteers page (we need 70,000), but if you volunteered you are not being rewarded with content, info or even good humour.  Surely if a legacy involves more young people participating in sport what you would do on social media would be of primary importance?  Even if just to do it as badly as building a massive user group so that after the Olympics you can post to their wall. “Get off Facebook and actually play some sport!”
6. Why no positive discrimination in enticing attendees? There is a kids discount for certain events – but not the big ones.  We all now know that the way the tickets were allocated did not ensure that young people were nore likely to attend.  There isn’t  a local area allocation to attend – unless you are a councillor being looked after. Whilst the issue of non-participation by youth in sport is most evident in poorer & more downmarket areas in the UK, the opportunity to provide tickets or an Olympic experience to such groups is hard to see – especially in disadvantaged areas. You can apply for a free or discounted ticket. There is a ballot where school kids can get access if their schols register, but that has been published so late (a reaction possibly to the issues over tickets) that it has come out largely in the school holidays when neither schools or kids are there to apply.  By its very nature it is more likely to be jumped on by Private schools that the state schools with less sports who most need it.
7. Global image over local substance. The normal London Marathon route that runs through more deprived areas of East London was changed for a more TV pictureque 10km loop in central London for the Olympics. Only after an extended legal and PR battle has Seb Coe promised some (quite small) investment in jobs in the area, that the Torch will run nearby and senior Olympic members will go to Brick Lane and promote local curries. Poorer locals – who have their area decimated with building works and traffic jams, their local taxes diverted, now realise their is no local preference. Residents of Lewisham won’t be getting preference for The Dressage that will take place nearby in Greenwich Park. So the legacy of inspiring future 3 day eventing champions from SE13 may be slower than was planned. Not that there will be any permanent facility left in the Park. Nope – millions of pounds will muck it up from being used to play with the kids, or to walk the dog for a year before and years after – but it will look good on the telly.
8. There is little evidence that the trickledown effect from major event to participation really exists. The 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games made no measurable impact on immediate post-Games participation rates in the area. Studies have questioned the “role model” thesis, according to which people are inspired to take up sport after watching their heroes. It has been argued, for example, that much of the thinking about the relationship between sporting role models and wider sports participation fails to understand the complexity of processes of learning and behavioural change. Of the research that does exist, an analysis of sports participation in Australia between 1985 and 2002 revealed that in the year following the Sydney Games in 2000, 7 Olympic sports experienced a small increase in participation while 9 declined. There was a similar pattern for non-Olympic sports, with the largest increase in non-competitive walking.
9. UK government doesn’t have a good record for the legacy of its big idea projects. You struggle to find a grand govt scheme or commercial idea that has worked in the UK. One possible benefit of the Olympics maybe to restore some of the rail infrastructure that has been mis-managed and not delivered by the grand pseudo privatisation plans for our railways and underground. The Millenium Dome was another failed big govt idea.  A huge white elephant created for the Millenium – nobody really attended the exhibition created. The post-exhibition plan had been to convert The Dome into a football stadium which would last for 25 years never materialised. In 2002, it went into liquidation by which time the cost was £789m and a further loss of £1m a month. Meridian Delta eventually picked it up for next to nothing and spent £600m redeveloping it and converting it into what we now knowas the O2 Arena.
10. The promise for the Olympic Legacy was made by a politician and a former Olympic Athlete. Lord Coe is of course both a great athlete and a former politician. I have no doubt that Lord Coe’s intentions and indeed desire for a legacy of greater participation in sport amongst are youth is true and well intended. However, as Larry Elder American Broadcaster once said in the 1950s when talking about govermnet policy: “A goal without a plan is just a wish”

The wisdom of Roy Jeans

The “wisdom of Roy Jeans” could sound like many things.  It could be a Country & Western hit. It could be a movie starring Gary Cooper. It could be a moving novel about a defence lawyer fighting for normal people’s rights against an oppressive state regieme. It may indeed still be all of these. However, for me, it is a battered piece of paper that is stuck on my wall. It’s been in every office I’ve been in since about 1996. I make sure it is in a place that I can see everyday.

Roy Jeans was a work collegue.  He has since become a good friend. At the time of writing the note, he could have been a political enemy. He worked for the same organisation, but for a different part of it. It was in his own and his business’s interest to see my part of the business fail.

Then one day I resigned. I was going to a new company.  In that company, I would be a direct competitor to the company that Roy Jeans worked for. On the day I resigned, he popped over to see me.  He wished me well.  We had a beer. Then – as a final gesture – he wrote me this note. He couldn’t rememeber where he got the ideas from. He said that he’d had it tucked away in his drawer.  He thought he’d share it.

As Roy Jean’s said: You start any new job with the best intentions.  Everything is possible. You can do everything the day you join. The thing is that at some point things don’t go your way. You can look for excuses. You can look for others to blame. Roy Jean’s advice was to just look at this note.

I still have it. I thought I’d share it.  It’s for anyone in a new job.  It’s for anyone in an old job. It is for anyone running a business.  It’s for anyone thinking of starting a business. It’s for any politician. It’s for anyone who is responsible for anything, or anyone, or even themselves.

So here it is….the wisdom of Roy Jeans

1. Deal with reality as it is, not as you would like it to be.
2. Be candid with everyone
3. Don’t manage.  Lead.
4. Change before you have to.
5. If you don’t have a competitive edge, don’t compete.
6. Control your destiny or someone else will.

I put in a bid that went into £000s for a variety of tickets – hoping to get some. I was hugely disappointed originally, as were my children (remember the legacy thing!) when we originally believed that we would not go either. Many others that disappointment is worse – they are not as lucky me. There is of course the additional wind up of the months of not knowing, keeping funds in an account just in case one day someone decides to allocate me some tickets and draw down on my request.

Disappointments happen.  More people applied that tickets were available.  That is the answer we are being told.  No lets deal with the truth.  It is yet another example of the complete lack of consistent strategy and consideration for what this Olympics is “supposedly” trying to achieve.

The  bright people at Locog  do not seem bright enough to understand that the random ballot is not the same as being fair. Random is that….random. It means that we could have had 100,000 people who bid for lots of tickets getting them all and leaving many more with nothing.  It could mean everybody gets just a few tickets. Both are random occurrances.  The second one, however, is also fairer and consistent with the supposed objectives.   How difficult would it have been to have started the ticket allocation by giving everybody who applied 2 tickets and then redrawing the remainder? How difficult would it be if in addition to selecting tickets that you had to give them a preference? If you put swimming down as 1 you would be more likely to get it.  If you put it as 10 – you were less likely etc.  How difficult would it have been to provide a geographical preference filter.  Given that I live near Greenwich Park and I’m (a) paying for the change going on for Equestrian events in local taxes, (b)having the park I walk my dog and play with my children disrupted for ages before and (c) ruined for years after with no legacy (it is £millions spent for a temporary solution)… how hard would it be to weight the event I could walk to so that I had a better chance of getting tickets?

Sir Seb Coe has got more similarly to Sept Blatter everyday.  When he faces the public at interviews you can see him get irritated by their questions – rather than actually listen to what they have said and change things. Seb is driven, but also makes up his mind about what is being done.  He listens to few people – least of all the people the games is supposedly for.  His pronunciations and public statements are things generated for the moment he is dealing with.  If you ever look at the narrative of the Sir Seb Coe story of why we are doing the games, how decisions on who will get the stadium after the event and now the manner in which tickets are allocated the story isn’t consistent.  To use a sporting analogy  – “the goal posts move”.   There was an independent body to decide on how the stadium would be used. Lord Seb had no vote on it.  However, he couldn’t help but be all over the media saying that he’d probably prefer a West Ham type bid rather than Spurs.  In any company when a decision is made on a tender you declare any interest and are not allowed to do, say or contact anyone to affect the outcome.  It seems it does not apply for the Olympics and Lord Seb Coe.

I have written another blog about the fallacy, inconsistency, lack of evidence and lack of executional ideas to deliver the “legacy strategy”.  Lest we forget, the £3bn that we originally bid for The Olympics (that has now grown to £9bn spend) was all about getting more young people to play sport.  They would – the unproven argument goes – be inspired by watching and being part of the Olympics in London and take up more sport.

Silly me, but I would have thought that to deliver on that strategy then the more people – especially young people – who got to attend the games the better.  Had people not got their tickets, but all young people had they would get it.  Had they charged even more for the tickets – but used the money so that more young people could have subsidised tickets they would have got it too.  people might be frustrated at not going, but they’d get behind the idea.  Perhaps lots of young people have got tickets – but it certainly was not a big part of the policy (more of a PR nod) and it isn’t announced. If it was catered for ….then only at minor events.  We certainly are not going to be told what the real numbers are for who applied for what tickets and how it broke down by age or effort.  Nope, facts and figures are carefully chosen and spun to suit in Locog.  We hear that 10,000 troops and their families will get tickets. Good idea – but why find out only after the ticket anger breaks?  Simple, it is positive spin timing to deflect the cock up on the people’s tickets.

The ideal of a London Olympics to inspire young people and the nation has long ago become a subset of justifying the PR spin about it. Having spent the money, the primary objective in the decisions is not getting young people playing sport.  It is to get the money back and have the event fully attended. The reason so many applied is we were spun on the demand to get us to oversubscribe. The money has been sucked out of us – but with no idea or control over what we may get.

When so many people are disappointed against what they expected, at this point, the claimed objective is then revealed as no more than words.  Politicians conceived the idea for the Olympics bid, the manifesto promise has somehow got forgotten when he came to office. Politicians notoriously only listen to the electorate in the run up to elections and then only use it to say what they want to hear. No doubt the games will be ready on time, the seats sold etc.  Getting it done is not the same as getting it right.  The ticket allocation fiasco is the latest example.  Clearly it is a cock up – but I don’t hear anyone admitting it at Locog.

The claimed objective and legacy of the London 2012 Olympics calls for a ticket strategy that has more people attend not less and especially more young people. It clearly doesn’t do it.  So it is incompetent, unfair and further evidence that what was said to win the Olympics bid were words only.  After all, if we were really bothered about more young people playing sport, would you really spend £9bn on the Olympics?

In 1967 a graduate intern from Cambridge working towards her PHD helped discover one of the major break throughs in our understanding of science and the universe. Her name was Jocelyn Bell and what she helped discover was something we now call Pulsars.  Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. Neutron stars are very dense objects – collapsed stars infact. They emit radiation that can be observed when they point to earth as a beam of emissions.  Pulsars act like lighthouses.  The faster they spin the greater the frequency or the pulse radiation we receive.

I wont go into the scientific details of why this was so significant.  Instead, I will give you three things that happened as aresult of this discovery:

1. It helped legitimise the ideas of a weird young scientist called Stephen Hawking.  Hawking is now among the most famous living scientists. Among Hawking’s key theories was the concept of black holes.  A simplistic description of a black hole being a star that has collapsed to such an extent and is so dense even light cannot escape. The findings on Pulsars legitimised the idea of Neutron stars.  A black hole is one step away from a Neutron star. Hawking became believable by many who previously saw him as a nut.
2. It legitimised some of Einstein’s theories.  It is difficult to explain quite how much of a genius Einstein was – given that he operated at a time without the level of computing or technical equipment that now exists. Many of Einstein’s theories could not be researched when he was alive. Pulsar’s allowed some of Einstein’s theories to be put to the test.
3. It got scientists to think differently about space and the universe.  The universe worked fine at the time and the knowledgethat existed all worked to the theory that we had for space and the universe. Scientists had therefore got themselves quite blocked because they thought they knew how the universe worked. The discovery of Pulsars confounded popular theory.  If you accept Pulsars you have to think differently about the universe.

Eventually, there was a Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of Pulsars. Jocelyn Bell did not get it.  It went to her boss when she was an intern – Prof Antony Hewish.  The logic being that he had started the experiment that led to the discovery of Pulsars.  As he described it. He was the captain of the ship.  Why should the person who spys land from the crows nest be recognised?

The presumption Hewlish would propogate is that his experiment – which was not actually looking for Pulsars – would have eventually revealed Pulsars.  If not Jocelyn Bell – then somone else would have spotted them.

Its a simple argument.  It seems true. Yet it plays down the belief and ability to have the courage and tenacity to see that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes against the prevailing pressure that to disagree is showing your stupidity or naievity. You will no doubt remember the Hans Christian Andersen story about an emperor who was duped by 2 tailors that they had a cloth so fine that it invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. In fact what they sold him was a lie that wasn’t there, but everybody went along with it not wishing to appear stupid.  The conspiracy of stupid silence is broken by a child who cries out “But he isn’t wearing any clothes”.  It is at this point, everybody including the Emperor realises how stupid they have been.

There had been many similar experiments had been carried out before and nobody had spotted Pulsars.  They liked the way the universe was dressed and couldn’t see they the truth when it appeared.  Consider also what happened when Jocelyn Bell first pointed out the weird findings to Hewlish. Hewlish had an established view of what the universe was about.  So when Bell showed her findings he rejected them several times.  Perhaps it was interference from a radio station, perhaps the reader was not working, perhaps …perhaps…perhaps.  Bell had to push back several times.  She did that by seeking new data and new perspectives to get better understanding. The experiment left to run its course would never have revealed her findings. Eventually, Hewlish and Bell went to another radio telescope to seek a second point of proof.  If the same findings appeared for the same piece of space it meant that it wasn’t a fault in the equipment.  It meant what Bell saw in the data was true.  It was the case. Hewlish accepted that there was a regular signal coming to earth from deep in the universe.

Hewlish then took responsibility for the discovery and cut Bell out of his conversations.  He sought other senior scientist views on what it might mean. One advised him to check whether the signal was on many frequencies or on just one.  If on just one the logic was that it was deliberate and controlled – manufactured in fact.  They checked. It was on one frequency. At this point panic arose.  The conclusion they reached was a manufactured signal from space meant aliens were making it.  There was pressure on Hewlish not to publish, but to burn the findings. Somebody from Earth would ultimately send  a signal back.  Perhaps an alien race was waiting for just such a thing to find a planet worth invading.

Bell eventually discovered this aliens thesis.  Again she set out to disprove it by finding other Pulsars.  The issue before wasn’t that Pulsars were not there – it was that people and their view of the universe had trained their eyes not to see them. Bell relooked through lots of previous data and she found more Pulsars.   At which point the little green men theory disappears in a puff of logic.  The odds on two sets of alien races sending out signals from completely different parts of the universe was highly unlikely.

The results were published.  The perspective of space and the universe changed.  So who should be credited with the discovery of Pulsars – the person who sails the ship or the person who can see the islands that everybody else tells you are not there?

There are several reasons why Jocelyn Bell was not recognised for the Nobel Prize and most of them are not scientific. Consider these:

• She was young and not yet a professor.  Senior people made breakthroughs not juniors in people’s minds.
• She was a woman.  More than that she was a woman physicist. Women weren’t regarded as proper scientists and certainly not proper physicists.
• She was just lucky.  It was not an original piece or research or theory she had set out to test.

There is a prevailing thought in all of this that also assumes norms and rules of how things happen.  Science is seen as  a process of experimentation to a purpose – rather than a voyage of discovery. The truth of innovation in Science and busines is the opposite.  It is riddled with serendiptous discoveries or applications. They just tend to be written up afterwards as taking a deep insight, turning it into a  eureka moment and a planned path to innovation.

Penecillin is among one of the most famous – coming from a bit of mould in a petris dish. Attributed to Alexander Fleming in 1928 – who won the Nobel Prize – it is another instance where reputation gets recognition. A published reference to what is now known as the concept of penecillin was documented by Ernest Duchesnet in an 1897 paper. It was was not accepted because of his youth. In March 2000, doctors in San José, Costa Rica, published the manuscripts of a Costa Rican scientist and medical doctor Clodomiro (Clorito) Picado Twight (1887–1944). Picado’s observations on actions of fungi of the genus Penicillium occurred between 1915 and 1927. Picado reported his discovery to the Paris Academy of Sciences, but did not patent it.  Joseph Lister was experimenting with penicillum in 1871. He found that it weakened the microbes. He, however, dismissed the fungi and looked to see it as an anomoly.

It is too easy to dismiss Jocelyn Bell’s role as one of luck – rather that the skill to see differently through the blanket of believing you know how things work.  The ability to remain open minded in seeing the insight for what it might be is the most remarkable of gifts – and rare too. It requires vision – but also passion and courage to get heard. The ability to resist the wisdom of her elders and wisers who sort to dismiss what she found, especially in the late 1960s, because it contradicted known rules.

When interviewed about what she saw the purpose of science to be, Jocelyn Bell, revealed her true wisdom. She said that she saw the purpose of science and a good scientist was to seek to gain greater understanding and not the truth. As she went on to say. If you seek to find truth, you believe that there is an ultimate answer.  Once you have that perspective your mind is closed to seeing new possibilities.

In the lyrics of Johnny Nash.  “There are more questions than answers.  And the more I find out the less I know”.  I share Jocelyn Bell’s perspective on this. Discovery is what makes the universe so exciting. Many never explore.  Of those who explore many cannot see what is there.  Of those who can see what is there many do not have the courage to remain a child inside and say what they see “But, he’s not wearing any clothes“.

When it comes to a project are you:  A.  An early starter or B. Pressure prompted.  Go on tell the truth. If you are not sure, go outside and look at the boot (trunk for my USA friends) of you car.  Is it tidy and organised, or are there things left in it from the last journey, last month, last Christmas? Or when you turn on your laptop is the desktop fairly clean of icons, or are there quite a few scattered about, including links to presentations from months ago. Do you meticulously plan journeys, check out the train times, allow for traffic jams or hold ups (just in case) and still arrive early. Or do you want to be early, but some how never always make it.  Does it fill you with dread to be late and not organised – after all why would you live that way! Alternatively, do you like to not to have too much planned and go with the flow of what the day throws up.

“Early starting” & “Pressure prompted” are two common facets of the main Myers Briggs personality profile preferences called Judging & Perceiving. The implication being that we all have inate preferences to be  either Judging (which is a preference for living in an ordered or planned way) or Perceiving (which is a preference for living in a spontaneous way).

Those with a Judging preference like being organised and like organising. They may be envious of the spontanaiety of the Perceivers they know, even dreaming that they themselves (as one told me) wished that they could wake up at the weekend, just get on a Harley and ride with no destination in mind. If he did that, the reality of neither not knowing where he was going, when he may get there, or at what time, might make him a bit uncomfortable. In general, when it comes to a project J’s have a preference for starting it early and having all the stages of development planned. See diagram left. They will probably have dates, completion points by date and also a contingency early completion date.  This date will be in advance of the actual completion date.  This is just in case something goes wrong.  I’ve gone shopping with a J with an excel spreadsheet for their shopping annotated in order of aisle.  I’ve met a J who had the recipe for Christmas dinner built into a small computer programme, complete with alarm for when to baste the turkey.

Perceivers on the other hand have a preference for spontanaiety. They also have a preference for keeping possibilities, options and projects open.  To a P’s mind, why finish something early?  You may find something better later. P’s may often have several things on the go at once, with seemingly no regard for whether they are all doable. P’s may search around all sorts of stuff and have lots of alternative solutions. I’ve been with a P the morning before a big presentation. He was still completing his charts (which were 5 times as many as was possible to present) and still couldn’t decide what to leave out. P’s, to the frustrations of J’s, are often pressure prompted. They often do their best thinking and their best work only at the last minute. When a P gets a project they’ll often complete it, but their process of working is in bursts of activity.  There will be large spaces where nothing is seemingly done and then frequently a big rush of activity just as the deadline looms. See chart left.

Some of the most eccentric genius in the world are P’s. However, on a day to day basis and working in a team, especially with J’s, the frustrations and conflict are evident.  Oven fresh is not how J’s prefer things to be.  In their mind they often cannot understand why a P “just cannot do stuff earlier and be more organised”.  The fact that the spontanaiety and desire to keep options open can reveal new ideas or new alternatives, is hard to swallow when it happens all the time.

Now, it may not surprise you to know that lots of Chief Execs, Management Consultant Types, Finance Directors, Generals, and Bankers are more likely to be J’s. Business has to be driven forward, delivered, measured and counted quarterly. The preference for planned process and structure in their minds is just common sense. Their ability to deal with issues in a more spontaneous or open manner when it is required (witness the Toyota recall or BP oil disaster) is often far from natural.

The desire to have a plan for “when things do not go to plan” is a wish rather than a reality. Many of the best ideas, business innovations or creative leaps occur when things do not go to plan or when being open & spontaneous reveals new things.  Inventors are known for building prototypes to form their ideas.  Now these are in fact unfinished products, often knocked up out of odds & ends, or scribbled on a bit of paper. The image at the top of this blog is Frank Gehry’s original sketch for the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It’s hardly a finished building, or even an archtitect’s drawing.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, commented on this very dilemma.  How does a business keep itself open to new ideas, but at the same time get things done. Schmidt neatly described the dilemma. Google needs to maintain a culture of open-minded thinking, but it cannot allow itself to became a university. In a university, all the issues and possiblities are discussed endlessy for their own end. In business, they have to become a reality at some point, or the business dies. Schmidt’s answer was the role he describes for the senior management at Google.  The job of the senior management of Google is therefore to allow a culture of innovation, but enforce the deadline.  The key to realising innovation and resolution for both J’s & Ps is the deadline.

As a facilitator by profession, the deadline is a hidden secret to innovation. You have an hour to do this and present it back in 5 charts is a common faciliatator request in a brainstorm. I sometimes book a pod in the London Eye and put groups in it, telling them they have until the pod goes 360 to answer a brief. One of easiest way to facilitate  a project being completed in an organisation is to just book in the date with the Chief Exec for the final presentation from the project team.  This is the 3rd way.  It accepts that there needs to be structure and progression, but it rejects that it has to be step by step.  It embraces the idea that some people do their best thinking when they are time pressured.  It creates an environment that allows this, without the negative energy of J’s tapping their watches. For Chief Execs, who were J’s, who I’ve worked with on a project it feels both nerve racking and rewarding. The team promises a resolution by a deadline and then the team has 3 or 4 deadline meetings along the way where activity is condensed.  You then have to let go and believe it, but you get them to report where they at a few key moments along the way.  If you dig inside many of the most innovative companies you’ll often find a version of the 3rd way. If you want to see my rough sketch…it looks a bit like the drawing on the right. I only decided what it looked like a minute ago.

Lots of our media models were wrong and fat just nobody noticed. Mags exist, TV exists, web exists. The issues with problems like AOL/Time Warner deal was the model, The issue in Newspapers is the model. Cover price + ads + cost of production and all those journos does not add up.  Only reason Observer keeps running at a loss for years is Guardian’s charity. Yet publications like The Week (98% subs) booms. It provides an editorial version of the news to a new model. New digital media companies run on handfuls of people. Models will change and with it how media is created & funded.

2. We will stop driving forward whilst looking in the rear view mirror.

Too much of our judgement of what will happen is coloured by what has happened. We like boxes for things to go in and ways of looking at business that are coloured in the past by what we experienced. Look at music. We all bang on about loss of CDs, move to downloads and then streaming. We see music as one dimensional. It changes…now music is 3rd biggest genre in games. Guitar hero made $2bn. Massive rise in live music. Huge money in X factor. More money in music than ever. Consider Nokia…thought about phones….then Apple make it a PC….Apple & Google make mobile open platform. The nature for how brands, media and agencies think and is still based on an old model of

• a. (what a brand is)
• b. (what marketing communication is about) and
• c. what you measure…clicks…awareness….engagement etc.

If you lose these blinkers you see new brands…new types of media deals and new types of content & partnerships.

3. Change the language and you change the world.

Shift from advertisers to brand owners. Shift from media sales to co-publishing concepts. Shift from buying and selling media to trading share of risk in co-creation.

4. Brands stop targeting opinion formers and start targeting foundation forming.

Banks used to target students to get customers for their whole life…but that was retention not loyalty. We assume looking backwards in the mirror that so much of what the next generation do will be based on similar brand perceptions from the past. If you want to know how old you are…how do you press a door bell….many young people will use their thumbs (texting legacy). They have new ways of assessing brands – making decisions – but also very different perspectives for their future. The legacy for Apple is different than for Nokia.

5. The next generation of Global Chief Marketing Officer will come from media.

Todayand future marketing is less and less about ads to push known products to an ordered marketing plan. It is more and more about a dynamic understanding of the brand and its relation with consumers and media…paid for…PR generated….socially augmented and responsive . That skill set is rarely there in marketing…or agencies…….the place where it does exist is in the best media thinkers in agencies. If I was a top brand…`I’d hire one of them as my next CMO.

6. Social Media means the Chief Exec cannot delegate the brand.

The days of the business and the brand decision being apart are gone. The Social media genie will never go back in the bottle. You may make a considered decision as a brand not to use social media – but you cannot as a brand do nothing. The conversation goes on whether the brand is there or not. A brand may take 20 years to build – but it can be destroyed in 140 characters.

7. The rise of marketing as a behavioural discipline.

The siloes of where marketing, product development and media start or end will go in the most successful brands. Customer relationship management will cease to be a department. It will boom as a mainstream and brand orientated marketing discipline. The value of customer retention will shift to the value of enhancing sentiment for a brand…especially with more associates and groups influencing views and opinions….be it friends….expert groups….social groups….or aggregated sentiment analysis. Check out www.plebble.com ….a site where you publically rate your customer experience of a company and they publish it for the world to see.

8. Media spikes rather than media bursts.

More and more the issue is about trying to get spikes and then hanging on to the wave. Look at how successful brands increasingly look at media….and how media….digital + traditional media work together….it is spikes. Search spikes, tweet spikes, news coverage spikes, web buying spikes, talking at the water cooler spikes. MW2 a worldwide game launch that hit 4.7m copies and $310m in first 24 hours. Think how phones launch or how brands stories break & grow….less and less a series of campaigns and more and more an arrangement and connection of generating spikes. This changes how you look to spend money, evaluate media….co-create ideas.

9. Pro-am media.

We have a world of two extremes – expert media with paid for journalists/quality production and amateur media fueled by the openess and speed of the web. You are already seeing mainstream professional media use the nature of the shareable & open access of the web to open their contact – but what we are seeing is high cost media disseminated in other ways. It does not add up. The more print & TV & radio go online. the harder it is to hold with the old model of costs. It is wrong to assume that amateur media that is cheap to do will gain a large audience. What I see is the rise of the Pro-am. Access to good amateurs at a lower cost who create great media, but combined with fewer but better experts and services that make it shine.

10. Stop using military analogies for media planning /buying and start using farming.

Thinking burst, campaign, competitor, etc frame how we see marketing and media planning to sell brands. What if we used farming phraseology….grow….fertilise….water…..harvest.