Anti-proposition propositions?

Robert Heath's digest of his new research indicates that emotion and creativity are way more important than message. Ivan Pollard spoke at the Battle of Big Thinking about how the message is just 7% of the received communication - which would seem to mean the planners role is now about planning the context for delivery, rather than the channel or proposition. And I wonder what the creative brief would look like, in a world where the proposition is an afterthought, or a secondary consideration?

Spam

I used to work in an agency called Still Price Court Twivy D'Souza. At one point we could have had a spin off called Cronk D'Aguillar Guz Jaffray Squibb.

Pretty wild but nothing to the sheer wonder of spam email names. They should all have their names on the door. Careful P Mutton, Goalie H Pinter, Helmine Knaack. They're genius advertising names. Update 5/1/07: Seems like I'm not alone.

On a serious note, Richard mentioned a report recently that 91% of all email traffic is spam. Is it time to stop corporate email? A controversial view, I expect, but 91%?

Info-pR0n

Nathan put me onto swivel. Like 'You Tube' for data. It's a bit early days to be truly useful yet - 580 users - but good nontheless.

One of the things about being in an independent agency, and a smallish one, is that you become incredibly hungry for data - it's just not as pervasive as in larger networks or client organisations. There are a few good sources dotted across the web - like Flickr's camera finder - but few give you the ability to upload and interact with the information.

An idea?

I guess this is a follow up to a slightly earlier post about whether there's anything more physical we could do with the shots and commentaries on Planning Eye.

It might be fun to try and create a knowledge exchange / book club / photo sharing / research learning / idea site for planners around the world.

What would that look like? What should it be about - if anything specific? Is there a technology platform for it we should use (Flickr is good but limited)?

Since I put a job ad on this blog and Russell's, I've been inundated by CV's. I've been blown away by how interesting and inventive everybody is. I've had podcasts, business plans, dedicated websites, and brilliantly written emails. We have hired one planner already and may hire another. But you should all be in the creative department as far as I'm concerned.

One really interesting thing is that the non-UK planners - and there have been many - are typically a notch ahead in terms of web competancy - or confidence. There's a freshness and originality in a lot of your contacts that's been just brilliant.

As an aside, I hope I've written back to everybody and final decisions are yet to be taken, so bear with me; I've just been a bit busy. Thanks.

Blogging about Blogging about, well, you get the picture

Went to a debate this afternoon about whether corporate blogs are vanity or a useful marketing tool. Richard won - props. First off, I clearly think they're vanity projects, which is why I have an independent blog from the corporate website.

But I couldn't help thinking that most of the people in the room were talking about threaded discussions, message boards, forums, or whatever. Basically a corporately enabled digital interaction site to make up for corporate screw ups or somesuch.

I think that the notion of a corporate blog assumes either one person blogging on behalf of the company, everybody blogging individually (so the whole represents some sort of corporate view) , or - and I don't know what this would look like - some sort of hive-mind collective viewpoint blog. Given all the fuss a couple of years back about the wisdom of crowds, I wonder how you could build a hive-mind blog for a major corporation?