Let's Keep Things Simple

4 Fuks Saké

This blog has moved and changed names.

Please head to 4 Fuks Saké for more of the same.

Goodnight and God bless.

Sex Sells. Sex + Vanity = Millionaires

Here's a signpost as to where the digital revolution has taken us to as we move into 2008.

Stressed about the democratisation of hardcore Internet porn? Depressed at the disintegration of the concept of celebrity? Disturbed by the accelerating voyeuristic hunger of tabloid and digital media? Bored by the sapping of creativity and brain-numbingness of reality TV? All four collide in a simple, yet spectacular example of dot-joining to create a piece of business genius.

Bigsister.net (be very careful with this 'not suitable for work' link) is a free, online brothel. It's a real life brothel somewhere in Prague. You can log on for $20 a pop (sorry, monthly fee) and watch the action in its various rooms. Or you can walk in and get some action - for free.

Except it's not for free. As the T&Cs say quite clearly, "Basic requirement is, that every guest visiting BigSister has to sign a contract, where he agrees, that all his activities will be shown via internet, respectively subrogates also his rights, that relate with any kind of publication."

This much I know. The publishers will be rich. The staff won't be rich. The clients will all have middle-aged paunches, many of them German.

What next? Do we get them in every city?

A Proper Job

I don't know who you are, but you'll be like me. We don't have proper jobs. As Mrs Martin Lukes' commented, we're all "just faffing about."

Except this man. This is a real man with a real job. This is David Higgins and his job is to build an Olympic Park.

The London 2012 Olympics will cost GBP10.3bn. David's in charge of GBP9bn of that - and with it he's got to see that an 80,000 capacity Olympic stadium, an aquatic centre, a velodrome, an Olympic village and a media centre are all standing and fit for purpose in some dark hinterland of east London when the world turns up in five years time. There's no mealy-mouthiness going on when you meet David down the Rotary Club. His annual appraisal doesn't have too many grey areas.

I like David a lot, and I'd like to sit down with him in his office and get my head round how the hell he does it. If you read this very refreshing interview, and if you have ever undertaken any form of 'project' in your life, you end up doing what I've been doing today...getting distracted, your mind wandering back to David and his job, and starting hundreds of phases in your head with, "how does he know," or "what if,"   or "how on Earth...?"

LOCOG should be / will be looking to Beijing for lessons as they prepare for 2012. For once, LOCOG should accept a lesson in communication from China - because it's time to get a grip on the drip-drip of budgetary bungling and the tepid passion the UK has for the Olympics. If David was in Beijing he would be a Chinese national hero - the man who holds China's dreams in his hands. In the UK he's perceived as just one of a quagmire of bungling bureaucrats with acronyms and dodgy calculators, tucked away in a corner of east London, as remote from the citizens of Putney as they are those in Pudsey. 

GBP60bn thrown down the toilet of Northern Rock, or GBP10bn for an experience that will shape a generation financially, physically, spiritually? I know what's better value for money. It's about time we started to see, hear and feel a campaign that connects with the country - that starts building an Olympic spirit with young and the not-so-young. David Higgins doesn't need our support, but he certainly deserves it.

Television News. Nothing's More Important (Part 2)

We've discussed before that nothing is more important than television news. 'From ITN, News AT TEN...' returned to UK TV screens last night satisfying meat eaters, gun toters and Republicans with its  timpani drummed opening titles and a scene setting image of planet Earth.

Quite rightly, a female newsreader in the shape of Julie Etchingham plays the support role to 'Sir' Trevor McDonald. Girls might be trusted with the US Presidency - but they should never lead the news.

If you've got the guts, click on the above to watch it again,  or read what the critics had to say...

Andrew Billen, The Times

Andrew Pettie, Daily Telegraph

Mark Lawson, The Guardian

Ciar Byrne, The Independent (from Monday's paper)

Cramming Chickens Together Is Good For Us

John Mulholland has signed off his feisty first (or second) edition of The Observer this weekend, the UK's left-leaning quality newspaper. (It comes with an insert from the New York Times each week - they have much in common). Mulholland is the new editor, serving a readership based on people who write blogs, have Macs, buy Arcade Fire albums, work in the media and get given Gordon Ramsay cookbooks for Christmas. People like me.

It's not enough to see Nick Cohen's article on energy policy headlined with 'Blame The Greens...' but he's also given great prominence to Jay Rayner's excellent piece on intensive poultry farming. Your Observer reader generally agrees with the debate currently being put forward by media and cooking heroes Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - that intensive farming is disgusting, and we should all boycott it, along with its chief sponsors the large supermarkets. Rayner raises many valid and ignored facts about the benefits of cramming 17 birds into one square metre of space.

The UK discovered food as a pleasure in about 1990. Prior to that, Brit foodies travelled to France and Italy in large Volvos in order to bring back delicacies such as balsamic vinegar and olive tapenade. The supermarkets cottoned on, and started importing decent food on behalf of the Volvo drivers. The quality of food on shelves, and in our restaurants is frankly outstanding. Our expectations, as middle class Observer readers, are somewhat advanced.

As is often the case in the UK's insular media, the debate is being contained within an audience that likes to talk to itself and not look beyond its walls. Hugh, Jamie and Observer readers can afford $10 chickens.  Plenty can't - and that's the audience that we're trying to educate into the importance of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle. Persuading the poorer parts of society to eat healthily, and pay over the odds for it, is not going to tackle the UK's obesity crisis.

"Prior to the 1950s, large numbers of people died because of tuberculosis due to a simple lack of nourishment. The wide availability of cheap animal proteins, both chicken and fish, has put an end to that," says Prof Hugh Pennington - an expert on food contamination and nutritional issues. We'd do well to remember that.

Perhaps, our brains and celebrities should be better exercised working out how we get that chicken onto a plate in a council house, served with a good selection of cheap, fresh vegetables and side portion of fruit.

In at number 6...

Industry and media recognition at last from Asia-Pacific's Media. There you'll see Let's Keep Things Simple, in at number 6 in the industry's Top 10 blogs feature.

Wonderful stuff - recognition not just for me, but also my 20 regular readers.

Thanks to Tim for the image, (http://www.gotoofareast.com).

It Has Taken Me Far Too Long To Find This

The 10 Biggest Cocks In Advertising, courtesy of Charlie Brooker.

Why Viewing Loftus Road from 5,000 Feet Is So Important

I'm such a sad fuck. I can't seem to take my eyes off maps, things to do with travelling, journeys, countries and stuff.

I can gently and warmly spin a globe for ages, thinking about flights, time zones, terrains, climates and the restaurants I'll find when I get there.

I log onto Google Earth to look into sporting stadia  from the sky. 

I get mildly irritated if the Flight Tracker thing isn't working on the plane.

I'm genuinely interested when I ask people  what roads or trains they've taken on a journey, just to see if I could have done better.

That's why I love these.... With Dopplr, I can tell the world where I'm travelling to. With Plazes I can point you to a map and tell you exactly where I am and what I'm doing right now. On Facebook I blatantly show off all the countries I've visited. With OSX Planet my Mac desktop updates every 2 minutes with a live satellite shot of the whole fucking big blue planet.

No-one gives a fuck, but that doesn't matter. It just makes me feel 5% warmer inside.

Alcohol Is Dulling The Brain

Media Guardian reports this week that alcohol ads are getting more effective, because kids say so.

The report quoting Ofcom and the ASA tells us that there are now fewer alcohol ads on TV. The number of ads being seen by 10 to 24 year olds has dropped in the region of 35%. Unfortunately, the report goes on, the percentage of kids who say that advertising has encouraged them to drink has risen from 25% to 34%.

God help me if I should ever find myself working in the public sector. I swear they hand you your security pass on day one, in exchange for any element of your brain that might hint at curiosity, inquisitiveness or enterprise.

The basic assumption of the piece, and the report is straightforward. Remove ads from TV. Ergo: kids don't drink alcohol.

Has anybody considered the following?

- Kids don't watch much TV these days (see Media Guardian articles and expensive conferences passim). 
- The pressure to drink does not come from watching a 30" TV clip.
- Nor does it come from looking at a logo on the front of a football shirt.
- Kids are influenced by other kids.
- Kids are influenced by older brothers and sisters drinking.
- Kids are influenced by cool people drinking. People like celebrities, or Ian Beale's daughter in Eastenders.
- If you're a kid, and someone says to you "behave," you probably won't.
- Kids like taking the piss.
- Kids would probably give a dodgy answer to a civil servant focus group invigilator if they thought it might get a reaction.

If our society wants to tackle the binge-drinking culture - let's actually start engaging some brains that want to think. Blindly commissioning research and hiding behind the results is not good enough. It doesn't take a rocket scientists towork out that none of us rush home to watch the TV ads to get informed. The kids don't even switch it on.

Can Ofcom and the ASA use my taxes to think as well as fill in forms please?

Influence Via A Long Good Read And A Think

So if I believe everything I read in the trade mags and blogs we are going to end up in a communications world where we digest our news via 50 x 5 syllable RSS headlines, updated every 0.1 seconds. We'll never have to see our friends. We can just type things on keyboards and our lives will flash in front of us via Facebook or whatever replaces it in a couple of years time.

The next thing for us to think abut in public relations, is at what pace will people we want to influence be reading our materials?

Right now, our emphasis is on pace and personalisation. Our default setting is consuming information as fast as possible to feed some insecurity that we're either going to be left behind or left out. Via the principles of tagging we are delivering ideas to people who want to hear those ideas, and giving them something to get involved with. It's happening immediately, and instant communities are formed. My client Nokia's 'You Make It Reel' video production campaign would be a great example of that.

I've posted before though on the 'Joy Of Immersion.' DVD box sets sales are higher than ever. People immerse themselves joyfully into Lost, 24, Prison Break etc. Movie channels are running back-to-back movie franchise days. There is money to be made out of people who actually want to turn off all their devices and switch off.

It is at these times that the brain is so receptive. If I read a book on holiday, it may take me 6 months to get to the beach, but when I read it, I absorb it, it stays with me, it may influence me for a whole year after.

Bill Gates who makes software, recognises the power of immersion. The man books himself a reading week once a year when he disappears off somewhere, shuts the doors and does his big thinking. If you can get something into his big pile of reading I think it's fair to say you could look on that as a decent PR result. You may not get your instant hit, but that could well be one of the longest, deepest, richest, most influential pieces of work you will ever carry out.

How our consumption patterns continue to develop is one to watch. There will still be time and space for a good long powerful read and a think. And the more we speed up, the more we'll crave it.