In case you hadn't noticed, the world's an incredible place - and as much as I love London, it would be a shame not to go exploring once in a while.
So, for the next three weeks I'm off on a trip round Vietnam & Cambodia. I'll catch you when I get back!
"I love working with planners," an account handler friend said this week.
"Good planners can take a plate of spaghetti...
... and turn it into a tube map."
"This one planner I work with, though," she continued, "he's not so good."
"He'll take your plate of spaghetti...
and cover it in fucking bolognese."
Recently, there's been a lot of chat in UK advertising circles about behavioural economics - a field which combines psychology, philosophy and economics in order to understand how people make decisions. One of its tenets is that because value is subjective, intangible value IS real value. This means simple changes to experience can affect the way we make choices.
The important intangible value that I'm going to talk to you about today is FUN.
Designers like Philippe Starck have long known about the value of fun. After all, why would you part with £40 for an Alessi lemon juicer, unless it was shaped like a space rocket?
Now, Volkswagen have sprung up with a nice little site, espousing "the fun theory" as a way to encourage good behaviour in the world at large, from encouraging people to walk up the stairs to making a game out of doing the recycling.
As a marketing professional, I'm not quite sure how all this fits in with Volkswagen just yet (car-based fun theories seem strangly lacking at the moment). As a human being, however, seeing brands trying to make the world a better place makes me happy - and if VW are lucky, a bit of that extra, intangible happiness value might just rub off on them.
Every now and again a piece of technology comes along that just makes you go, WOW, HOW COOL IS THAT?! For me, the latest is Sketch2Photo, an uber clever bit of software developed by a group of students in China. Sketch2Photo creates Photoshop style montages based on your doodles, by scouring the internet for images tagged with your annotations, cutting them out and working out the best way to fit them together.
No word yet on when the software will be available to play with, but you can read the paper on it here and watch this video of it in action:
Whenever it comes out, one things's for certain: whether you're mocking up concepts or just pimping your Powerpoint, this is going to be one useful bit of kit.
The best presentations you can give, I always think, aren't just the ones where you teach the audience something, but where they teach you something too. So, during my recent talk to the Financial Services Forum it was with great delight that I learned of Kublax.com, thanks to the marvellous David Lundholm of BGL Group Ltd (the guys behind Compare the Market, amongst other things).
Kublax is a fantastic, free, online financial management/budgeting tool that plugs what I've long seen as a big gap in e-banking services - the ability for you to analyse the data your bank holds on your money. As I wrote in my paper:
"With consumers set to take ever greater interest in their own data, brands need to start giving them access to their information, together with the tools to explore. Why doesn’t HSBC help me carry out some simple financial analysis when I use their internet banking, so I can manage my money better? "
Thankfully, the good news is that I don't need to hang around for my bank to get its arse in gear any more - and neither do you. With its secure encryption system (it uses the same tech as the banks), its easy to pull up data from all your accounts through Kublax, so you can view all your money as one. You can then get an easy overview of not just your incomings and outgoings, but what you're spending your money on (with automatic catagorisation) and even how your expenditure compares to similar users. Here's a couple of examples from my account (with some of the exact figures removed for modesty :)
So far, Kublax has one month's worth of my data. Where it's really going to get interesting is once I've been using it for a year or so and patterns & anomolies start to emerge. I'll also begin building a picture of myself through my transaction history. In a funny way, the proportions in that pie chart up there say something about me as a person. These days, as I said in this earlier post, data doesn't just report on what you do, it tells you who you are.
Aside from awareness, and being bothered to take the simple steps to set up your account, the main problem I think Kublax has is trust. It may say SECURE in big letters and have plenty of security accreditations and plaudits from reputable sources, but it's hard not to feel a twinge of doubt as you type in your internet banking ID and that secure code that your bank have told you NEVER to give out to anyone (even them!).
The solution for me would be for Kublax to either integrate its tech into existing e-banking software ("Kublax Inside") or arrange a spot of co-marketing, in partnership with the banks. For me, that'd be a real win-win-win situation. Kublax gets credibility, the banks look like the good guys for introducing people to this handy free tool and their customers get a new way to manage their money better, at a time when cashflow is a real issue for plenty of people.
Until that day, why not get ahead of the game? Grab yourself a Kublax account and take control of your finances for yourself.
I don't know about you, but I love metaphors. In fact, someone once told me that the secret to life was finding the right metaphors to live by. And, if that's true, perhaps this one could come in handy.
Metaphor of the week comes courtesy of Richard Rawlinson, Vice President at Booz & Co and co-speaker at this week's Financial Services Forum event. Richard's take on things today was that marketing used to be a bit like ten pin bowling: you worked out of your message, lined yourself up and launched it at people down nice, straightforward channels. And, if you were lucky, you might even get a strike.
Nowadays, however, things have changed. Far from being nice and straightforward, marketing's become an increasingly complex affair where you lob your message into the chaos and it gets buffeted and passed around, with marketers giving it the occasional flick or nudge of control. Less like ten pin bowling and more like pinball.
Getting good at pinball isn't easy. It takes patience, luck and - every now and again - a touch of force. Keep practising, though, and who knows? Maybe one day you'll hit the jackpot.
In the wake of last week's news that most British babies born in the past few years will live to be 100, these charts mapping the planet's aging populace caught my eye this morning.
The charts are from a lovely interactive, animated dataset that you can play with here. In them, each circle represents a country, sized according to the number of older people in each country (so the two large blue circles are China and India). The vertical axis measures the percentage of each country’s population over 65 years, whilst the horizontal axis measures the percentage over 85 years. So countries get ‘older’ as they move upwards and across.
What we can see is that in the 1960s, even where there was a growing older population, few people were over 85. In 2040, it's set to be a very different picture. Here in the UK, one in four people will be over 65, including 8% over 80 - and in Germany and Italy those figures are even higher.
Over the last few years there's been much talk about the need for brands to address our aging population - and recently there seem to have been some great success stories, with the likes of Nintendo DS and Sky+ reaching out to untapped older audiences. Today's charts only serve to underline the question for the rest of us: could thinking old be a new source of business?
