Category Archives: Brilliance from the big wide world

A collection of thinking that’s really rather good…

Idea of the day: Countdown to MMM ii

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Satellite of love
Satellite of love

as Lou Reed once sang

so, i spent an exceedingly pleasant few hours in the environs of Gillingham over the weekend . . . playing hockey on the oldest, sandiest astro i’ve seen in a long while – thats not that interesting – or maybe it is

maybe its an indication of the lack of investment that is going on in towns out there beyond W1, maybe the experience is an indication that not everyone is walking around apple maxed up and instead they are riding their 50cc motorbikes round and round our nice shiny middle class cars in a slightly threatening manner . . . maybe we should be asking ourselves this

if i went and sat in the high street of croydon, watford, wycombe, hemel or wondered down to the local playing fields what would i see . . . would i see people voraciously engaging in branded content or a load of bored youths and broke housewives who dont give a damn about most of my brands ? possibly neither, but you wont know unless you get out there . . .

MMM is coming

idea of the day: countdown to MMM

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this week’s ideas will be all about dust (or stimulus in the olde worlde parlance) and the myriad places that can come from, this is because we’re celebrating the countdown to March Method Madness (so important its even got capital letters)

to start us off, the other day i was completely unable to even get started on a hairy problem . . . so i buggered off and went wondering around the west end

now whilst we wouldnt highly recommend W1 as a good source of real world inspiration, in this instance it came up trumps

below are three photos see if you can tell me for which brands . . .

thats right, only one of those is in any way distinctive

now there are a couple of interesting things in here:

1) what happens when your lovingly crafted brand gets into the hands of the retailers ? does it undermine everything you’ve done

2) the increasing prevalence of brand partnerships (on which, more later)

Idea Of The Day – Hiut Denim

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Hiut Denim is about to launch, from the people behind the Howies brand (before they sold it).

It’s an interesting company for a couple of reasons:

1) It’s only going to make jeans – they’re focusing on one thing, a bit like Red Bull.only

2) It’s based in Cardigan in Wales, where the founder grew up, and which happened to be the location of the biggest jeans factory in the UK until it got closed down years ago. 10% of the 4,000 population town used to make jeans. Now they will again. This is an excellent example of “sweating your assets” or making the best of what’s around you.

3) They want to make jeans that are particularly hard-wearing. And because their jeans will be built to last, they’re going to put a “history tag” in every pair of jeans. It’s not clear exactly how this will work – presumably some kind of qr code attached to the jeans – but the founder describes a number of uses: you can scan the tag to reach an online destination which tells you when your jeans were made and who by. You can upload pictures of you wearing the jeans to the online “history”. And when you find a pair in a charity shop or they’re handed down, you can check the tag to see where they’ve been. This might not always be something you’d want to see of course…

Website here…
www.hiut.co.uk

The IPO of the . . . (insert chronology based point here)

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Well well well, Facebook is cashing in . . . or is it, here are some thought starters for you given some folk client side may be asking some questions on this “news”

Why now?

Technically once you have over 500 private shareholders the financial reporting requirements in the US in SEC terms basically become the same as being a listed company, so you may as well

What for?

Clearly with $3.7bn in revenues and $1bn in profit they make a fair amount of money, why do you need to raise more? especially with $3.8bn already in the bank . . .

Buying things has to be the answer – google did it (Youtube being the most obvious one) – but buying growth and defensive opportunities has to be the reason for generating the money.

Is it worth it?

To quote @Peston “At 22 times earnings and 120 times net profit” buying facebook shares would be a “triumph of hope but . . . ” although others have different ways of viewing it

So contextually, biggest tech IPO ever, valuation makes it worth roughly what amazon, macdonalds and a number of other business that probably own some significant and valuable assets, but ho-hum

Perhaps more interestingly the IPO filings show that 15% of their revenue comes not from advertising . . . this has to be where the growth comes from in the long term surely ? In the short term, 50% of impacts are on mobile, but mobile ads havent been turned on yet (but are being tested) and there is still some growth potential in penetration terms in a handful of places . . .

What next?

Who knows – what would you buy with $8bn at your disposal ? i may start with Tumblr, or maybe Spotify . . . or maybe Zynga (currently trading at a value roughly equal to this war chest)

One thing we can be sure of – the data debate will rumble on – they have access to arguably the most interesting set of data points on the planet (if you like advertisementing that it), very powerful for advertisers, but then they ain’t doing owt with that anytime soon methinks . . . and discuss . . .

Idea of the Day: What’s your problem?

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In the spirit of Monday’s get stuck into a problem vibe, check out this Adliterate blog post about diagnosing the problem to understand where your efforts will be best spent.

A very useful exercise to use when interrogating a client brief, or helping them develop one. And a tool that you could adapt to break down into micro questions for comms to help you get to clarity on what’s really holding back sales.