So i been busy not writing anything for ages. So, to remind myself how this whole blog thing works, I've put together some ideas. Mainly the ones that I've been thinking about this year, but to be honest if you scroll down only a few posts to last year then you'd find some of the ideas behind this - like the contrast between Big Simple Single ideas and Niche, Many, Rich ideas. Or the idea that media agencies should stop worrying about the big intermediaries (broadcasters and publishers) between brands and content, and start talking to the producers of content. Or that only after designing a culturally relevant package of narrative, utility and community that meets carefully designed business objectives should you think about advertising it. And even that if you are interested in blending culture and spreadability then an editor is often a better starting point than an agency.
Media Positive Planning
View more presentations from Graeme Wood.
So I haven't written lots of notes for this deck, largely because it's compiled from several other ones and doesn't have lots of notes. It has lots of slogans instead. Whether it is better or worse for that, who knows, but the story goes like this....
Once upon a time, connectivity changed lots of things faster than ever before. Things were changing so fast that it was hard to step back and work out what had changed and what hadn't, far less what to do about it. Turned out that people and marketing objectives hadn't changed much, and it was only the bit where those two things overlapped that it got messy.
So since media are just connections between people, we really need to understand a lot more about people and why they connect with other people. Because the great thing about connectivity is that if we make things that achieve marketing objectives AND that people can mess about and have fun with, then they are far more likely to spread them. And if we can work out culturally and psychologically what value spreading things has to individuals and communities, then we can get much smarter about how to design things for them. Which naturally involves looking in some different places.
That leads (via some borrowed ideas from Mike Arauz and Gareth Kay) to thinking about what an agency should do. Particularly a media agency, as that's where I've been while i was thinking about this. So if you were going to rewrite what one does to take some of this stuff into account, what would you do and who would you do it with......
Anyway. Love to know what you think. I might even write some more inside a year.
