Filed under: Comment
Obviously in the last week lots of things have been written about Apple … some good, some bad, some happy, some sad.
I’m not going to contribute any more because pretty much everything that could be said, has been said – and it’s been said much better than I could ever hope to do – however there is one thing the company does that I think rarely gets the credit it deserves, and that is their habit of launching one key new product or evolution per year.
Think about it, in a world where marketing seems to have adopted a view that capturing attention and market share can only be achieved through the continual launch or evolution of products, here is a company that shuns producing a constant stream of products in favour of focusing all their energies and attention on delivering one major product launch/evolution per year.
I’ve been trying to get definitive figures, however I heard LG launched 37 different phones in the last 18 months whereas Apple launched one.
37 to one!
Think about that for a second … it means that LG launched, on average, 2 new mobile phone products per month for the last 18 months.
PER MONTH!!!
Think about the cost to do that … it must be absolutely enormous … and that’s before you even take into account the huge marketing costs that have to go along with it. No wonder so much of LG’s advertising is just wallpaper, designed to make a lot of noise without ever saying much.
OK, so LG and Apple are very different companies focused on different audiences with very different financial requirements … however this ‘new news at all costs’ attitude seems outdated given todays ‘constantly connected’ World.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to keep in people’s consciousness and producing innovative, meaningful and valuable products/updates is a very important pillar to achieve that … however too many companies make the mistake of only focusing on what they think is innovative, meaningful and valuable rather than finding out what people really want – which will rarely ever come from a focus group – which is why so many of these companies ultimately are alienating their audience rather than attracting them.
By spending [for sake of argument] 11 months focused on producing something that is truly awesome, rather than constantly churning out average products with big marketing spend in an attempt to gain market share, Apple have been able to make things they, generally, are worthy of the [free] hype they generate and by having less inventory to promote, they make their ‘simple yet meaningful’ communication work much harder for its money than most other brands and that’s before you even get to the commercial value they achieve through their approach towards packaging and distribution.
Whatever you think of Apple … regardless of the mistakes they’ve made in their past … their lessons go well beyond just the creation of technology and if anyone wants to stand a chance of taking their place in the future, an appreciation of less is more is probably one of the best places they could start.
Filed under: Comment
So I was recently reading an obituary [I’m at that age] about a man who pioneered digital publishing when I saw a comment he is said to have made shortly before his death:
“I’m not afraid of dying, I have achieved all that I set out to do”.
Now a cynic may say that he could claim this because he either had low expectations or few goals to achieve – however I found this comment both fantastic and fearful at the same time.
I live in fear of looking back on my life and thinking about things I wish I had done or tried or experienced.
And the bugger of it all is that as I get older, I pick up more things I’d like to do or try or experience.
It’s like it’s a never-ending quest for fulfillment and so to read about someone who achieved that … who could look back on their life and feel they had done all that they wanted to do, is both brilliant and jealousy inducing.
OK, so this guy was driven by one all encompassing objective whereas I float along in life having a play with things that interest me … but still, to have lived a life of fulfillment rather than of disappointment, regret or even contentment must be amazing and that is – at least for me – more inspiring than any bollocks spouted by ad folk, ad mags, ad blogs or ad award shows.
Filed under: Comment
Sometime today, GMT time, that horribly clever bloke – Northern [or Northern Planner/Groper to his friends/enemies] – will be a Dad again for the second time.
I’ve never met him [Northerner, not his new son/daughter, though I’ve never met them either] but having followed his musings and rants for a number of years, I know that apart from the fact he genuinely thinks he was once Northern England’s version of Casanova … he is a wonderful, kind, caring and generous man and the joy he gets from being a good Dad and husband can only be matched by the happiness his kids and wife get from him being their good Dad and husband.
So even though I am jumping the gun a little, please leave a little message of congratulations to him and more importantly, his wife – who, let’s face it, did all the hard work [including sleeping with Mr Slaphead] so that if his kids come across this blog one day in the future, they will not only know their old man was quite popular with people he’s never met who live in China … but he also had his faults, of which commenting on this blog was possibly one of his worst crimes.
Best wishes to all the Hovells family today.
[PS: The header for this post was just for you Northern!]
Filed under: Comment
WARNING FOR MY MUM:
HI MUM, IF YOU COME ACROSS THIS POST, PLEASE DO NOT READ IT.
I’M SERIOUS … TURN AWAY, THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
PROMISE?
GOOD.
LOVE YOU, SPEAK VERY SOON.
_______________________________________________________________
Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls … how are you today?
I had a lovely holiday thanks for not asking.
So as we enter the final quarter of 2011, I was hoping I’d end the year on a stream of highs and then I saw this:
Now to you it might look like an innocuous headline, however to me, it brings out my immature side – a side that you’ll be shocked to learn, lies just beneath my surface.
To understand why, you have to come on a journey with me, one that starts 7 years in the past …
Jill and I had just started going out when she turned to me and said,
“Do you know what space docking is?”
I said no to which she said I should try and guess.
I asked for a clue and she said – to my delight – it was something “sexual”.
Sadly, after a number of guesses I still hadn’t got the answer so I asked her to tell me.
“Well …” she said, “… it’s where a man shits into a condom [don’t ask], puts it in the freezer and then anally penetrates their lover with it once it’s frozen”.
Now I’m no prude, however I went as white as a sheet and nearly ran to the nearest police station to declare I was in the presence of a fucking sicko … however when she saw my reaction, she burst out laughing [LAUGHING!!!!] and told me not to worry because it was simply what her ultra-gay friend, Glen, had told her he did.
I’ve had many conversations in my time … I’ve talked about things that few may ever get round to discussing … however I’ve never, ever, ever discussed freezing my shit and doing someone up the arse with it. Ever.
Not with my straight, gay, twisted or just plain deviant [that’s you Jimbo!] friends.
NEVER.
EVER.
And yet I was kind of fascinated about ‘space docking’ … not from a practical sense, but in more of a where the hell does someone think of something like that?
It’s a bit like when I was a kid and people said if you had mag wheels on your BMX and they got buckled, if you put them in the freezer, they’d sort themselves out.
Or if you spill red wine on your parents carpet, you should shove a fuckload of salt on it and the stain will come out.
How the hell does someone discover that?
I mean, who was the first BMX rider to go …
“Oh fuck, I’ve buckled my wheel. I wonder what would happen if I put it in Mum and Dad’s deep freeze? Bugger me, it’s fixed it!”
OK, so Glen was an ‘interesting character’.
Jill told me one story about him that basically put me off ice cubes for about 3 years … but still, the practicalities of space docking are hardly the sort of thing you’d come up with over a cup of tea with your parents.
And that’s the thing about the mind, it’s bloody mental and can come up with an astounding array of ideas, suggestions and solutions … so why 95% of ad agencies always come up with a 30″ TVC or some derivative of that is beyond me.
Hmmmmn, that’s quite a link isn’t it … probing someone’s anus with a condom of frozen poo to the state of adland, I’ve even impressed myself … so with that I think it’s best I go and leave you with these two snippets:
1. It would appear the last quarter of blog posts might not be very sophisticated.
2. You now know the reason why the headline in that paper made me laugh.
Filed under: Comment
I am the antithesis of cool, calm and collected.
Despite being a pensioner by adland standards, I can sometimes appear to be very immature. Not by a 41 year olds standards, but by a 14 year olds.
One example was last week when I was skyping with my best friend Paul.
As many of you know, this man is like a brother to me.
We’ve known eachother since we were born, we have gone on all sorts of stupid adventures together and I’ve written lots of posts about how much I love him – of which a positive example is here and a slightly [read: very] dodgy example is here.
Anyway last week we were catching up on Skype.
It had been a while since we spoke so we had a lot to catch up on – however within 12 seconds, I knew he was the one with all the news and I was the person who was going to listen, and do my absolute level-best not to piss myself.
His first bit of ‘news’ was he was bitten.
Not by a dog.
Or a cat.
Or any animal for that matter … but by a human, if that’s what you can call an Iron Maiden fan.
On top of being a printer, Paul – all 6ft 5″ of him – is a bouncer.
Despite his imposing size, he’s softer than a labrador puppy … so I can just imagine his surprise when throwing out some old Iron Maiden fan from one of their gigs for being a nuisance, the guy turned around and bit deeply on Paul’s hand.
As he was telling me he has had to get tetanus jabs and AIDS tests, I am ashamed to say I was laughing aloud … but that was nothing compared to the next story he told me.
To cut a long story short, he was dropping off some garden waste at his local refuge centre.
To cut a short story even shorter, he somehow managed to lose his step while chucking his rubbish in and fell 16 feet into an empty skip … breaking 3 ribs and writhing in agony.
I know … I know … when a 6ft 5″ big bastard falls into a skip and breaks his ribs, I should be deeply concerned – and I was – but that didn’t stop me howling as I imagined him doing the most ungraceful flop [into a skip] in history!
But it gets better … or worse, depending on how you look at it.
You see the skip was so deep – and so empty – that Paul couldn’t pull himself out of it and to make matters worse, the refuge centre didn’t have a ladder to get him out.
So what did they do?
They called the fire brigade.
THE FIRE BRIGADE.
The best bit is that the man that called the emergency service was told that if all the engines were out on jobs, they’d have to call a Seaking air & sea rescue helicopter [like the one in the photo above] to winch him out.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
I would literally have given anything to have some mammoth flying machine – usually used to pull people out from capsized boats in treacherous and freezing seas – fly over a rubbish dump and winch some tall bloke out of a skip, but alas, the fire brigade were available and with sirens blazing, they “rescued” the extremely embarrassed hard man bouncer from the skip dustbin.
Yes he was injured … yes he could have been seriously hurt … but that doesn’t stop the fact that I basically was 2 seconds away from becoming a baby again and wetting myself with laughter.
Don’t feel too sorry for him, he is a bit accident prone … don’t forget this is the man who chopped the end of his finger off with his lawn mower, broke his ankle TWICE trying to hurdle over some street railings, went on an Olympic toboggan run and almost fell off and recently stubbed his toe and fell so awkwardly on his sofa, he smashed his ribs in.
So to my beloved Paul, thank you for doing the stuff that makes me laugh like I’m a kid again, because given the age of the people I work with, most of the time I feel I should in an old folks home.