No public Twitter messages.
The requirements of agency employment force you sometimes to just get on and do it.
Yesterday saw a classic example of this. Needing a place to mock up some audio. Guillaume decided to build a quick recording studio for some stuff he’s working on.
Apparently it works. Anyone got any egg boxes?
It would seem to me that in most other walks of life you know what you’re getting. I go to the supermarket and come out with £50 worth of food – job done. Go to the pub and get three pints for £10.40 (country prices, not London). Even pay the council tax and know that one day that hole the size of a Roman Emperors ego, outside my house, will be fixed. But why, oh why, when it comes to advertising are we so slow off the mark when it comes to testing whether what we’ve produced has worked? It’s not just down to ads but ideas. That beautiful, carefully crafted idea that we try hard to sell to clients, would surely be easier to sell if we knew that what we had previously developed had in fact worked. I find it a bizarre conflict that us, as pharma agencies, work with some of the best research specialists in the world (clients) – phase 1, 2, 3 and 4 clinical trials, the money that gets poured into it and yet there seems to be little demand to test the agency and their ‘mettle’. Come on – have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
So, my thought for the day, or should that be week, year, infinity is link communication (and ideas) to business performance. Communications are paid for out of profit (or if you get it wrong, loss), so demand to know what has worked and what hasn’t. If nothing else, in today’s lean times it may just be easier to hang onto your budget if you can prove that past activity has benefited the brand.
I have another Hive University Strategy School tomorrow morning for the suits here.
It’s finding me panicking loads, trying to figure out whether we should cover a case study or revisit some old ground with a real life business. Alongside this – I am trying to get hold of an entrepreneur to come and present their business for discussion live by the troops.
As I was sifting through a pile of interesting (but academic) notes on previous sessions and I came across this – a Powerpoint written by a Mark Sniukas a consultant I really like. It’s strategy simplified (well almost) and well worth a quick glance. Kicks off with Costas Markides, Professor London Business School and his frank views on the state of modern strategic discipline.
In the Metro today a boy of 5, sweetly outraged of face, displays the object of his indignity: a letter from the NHS.
The letter informs his parents that, at 3 st 13 lb and 4ft tall, Bailey Russell is dangerously overweight.
Bailey’s size looks ‘normal’ to me, so I went to nhschoices.com to check out the child BMI calculator. Online, the NHS places Bailey in a healthy weight category (90th centile). There is no numerical reference range given for child BMI. However, further down the page, a colour chart places an arrow for Bailey firmly in the ‘overweight’ area.
Computers and humans do get confused, but Bailey’s mum is outraged. We don’t need this kind of thing in our judicious society, she says.
Should we blame the NHS for being too bolshy in the first place? Note that in 2005, the WHO put the obese population at 1.6 billion people. In 2015 – just ten years later – this is set to top 2.3 billion.
The science of weight is very tricky. Bailey’s story reveals a problem that no government health department in the world has managed to solve. Amid all the finger pointing, there is no proper system for measuring overweight. We carry on using Body Mass Index even though we know that it often does not correlate with the amount of body fat and the risks to health.
Heart disease and diabetes are the world’s most expensive non-infectious diseases. If we are going to make a difference, it has to be in finding better ways to measure the problem – methods adapted for different populations of adults and children.
As importantly, leaders need to admit to the public that the best experts in the world have trouble assessing overweight from the outside.This needn’t give people an excuse to ignore clinical norms in weight-related health risks. Rather, it should inspire us to do some independent thinking – asking ourselves if our bodies reflect the healthiest, happiest choices we can make.
