Hat tip t’Internet, PR & Advertising 2.0

Thanks to shiny red for bringing this one to my attention - - Tango’s characteristically brave attempt to stop their decline. A nice summary here of what they are doing. But also an excuse to re-live a couple of those great old ads. A brand that was always so much bigger than the product really.

Patience Wheatcroft gazing into the crystal ball from Marina Mikus on Vimeo.

I sort of wish I hadn’t got out of bed this morning. I rushed into Edelman towers to hear our star studded panel of experts gaze into their crystal balls for 2009 to be told I may as well pull up the bloody draw-bridge…..but that it was good that I speak English and am in an “international value-added services industry”. Not the most substantial of straws to cling to in the storm is it?

Present were, Vince Cable, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, David Frost, Director General, British Chambers of Commerce, Jim O’Neill, Head of Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, John Waples, Business Editor, Sunday Times all of them very well chaired by the brilliant Patience Wheatcroft, former Sunday Telegraph Editor, Non-Executive Director, Barclays Group (interviewed above by Paul Afshar of Despatch Blog).

Some bullet-points from what was said (that I won’t attribute) that I found interesting but which left me glum:

* Economics is known as the ‘miserable science’ for good reason. We think the world economy will now grow at 1% but as
late as September this year we were forecasting 2.6%
* Personal consumption in the US will have a bigger drop than at any time since World War Two
* The government owns Northern Rock so why not make it a National Bank and lend as the government would want banks to
lend
* If HBoS and Lloyds can now merge, then why not next year M&S and Sainsburys?
* We are in a period of time where the public need pantomime villains and right now they are the bankers (one of the
speakers recalled recently being at a dinner event where a table of bankers had bread rolls thrown at them)
* Growth will not return to the UK until the second or third quarter of 2010
* There is going to be a lot of conflict between private and public sector workers as one set get laid off and the others
remain insulated with index linked pensions
* The politics of identity are already creeping in and they are about scapegoating people who appear to be different. It is
driven by anger and personified by the success of the BNP
* One of the speakers pointed out that presently the UK brick industry was being ‘mothballed’ because of lack of demand and
that this might mean when we did resume building again we would have to import bricks from Poland

Only one thing to say really; “Always look on the bright side of life … . . “

Nice simple demo but is this the world’s most irritating voice?

Hat tip to The Web Pitch

Edelman works for Microsoft by the way.

My colleague Adam Schokora who leads our brilliant digital team in China, just posted this interview with Ping Ke, a journalist and the voice behind the very-well-known-in-China, Antiwave.net podcast series, where he talks about, “the influence of internet memes on the general public, diversity of online expression, democratic debate, rational voices, vomit, and hope for change in the future”. It’s a really quick and interesting glimpse into one of the world’s most exciting online markets.

Hat tip Steve Clayton

Edelman works for Microsoft…oh and HP

I love all this quantifying the unquantifiable stuff. According to Twitter Grader I am a 99, which means I:

* have a higher Twitter grade than 99.1 per cent of users (see previous post about being tallest midget in circus)
* have an over-all rank of 4,172 out of 543,932
* am followed by 680, follow 355 (which probably means I am being rude)
* have 1,794 updates (which probably means I am obsessing a bit)

Hurrah.

Its seems that about the only thing that can put large numbers of the British public on their couches in front of the TV at one time are shows that we have some control over. 12.8 million (including yours truly and family) watched X Factor on Saturday night, with almost as impressive numbers watching and voting on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and of course, the brilliantly audience hi-jacked Strictly Come Dancing. Sport and News ocassionally succeed too, but generally now unless we are voting folk on or off, the TV viewing numbers continue to head south. I wonder if this is why there was such a big fuss over Britney Spears’ performance on X Factor? She broke the spell and took us back to the old command and control days because not only could we not vote her off, as we might well have done, but she was obviously miming (watch the video above and tell me that was not the Milli Vanilli performance of the year). Does she not understand that we now demand REALITY rather than slick and cynical professionalism? And unlike previous celebrity guests to the show, she did not demean herself by coaching our wannabe stars who WE have invested weeks in getting to this stage with frantic text voting. Performance may be the currency of MTV, but ‘reality’ is the only thing that counts on British TV on a cold, wet, winter, weekend night. She was badly advised.

Hat tip Stormhoek

Barry Schwartz at TED on the Paradox of Choice. Great speaker, but that is no reason to inflict those shorts on us.

A number of people in the UK PR industry will have noted with sadness the plight of Woolies. Woolworths, and its then parent company Woolworths Holdings, were the banner clients of Paragon Communications during the 80’s. Paragon came from nowhere to win award after award and grew to employ over 150 people with offices in Bristol and Leeds as well as two in London before a stockmarket flotation and eventual purchase and then neglect by Shandwick International (a very different firm then from the now very well-run Weber Shandwick). Those who worked on the Woolies business in Paragon’s heyday included Red CEO Mike Morgan (who edited the employee newsletter among other things), London 2012 communications supremo Jackie Brock-Doyle (who eventually did the comms role in-house), Reputation Inc’s Nigel Whittaker who was on Woolworth Holdings board at the time, Charlotte Blenkinsop now Director of Marketing and Communications at CNBC and Weber Shandwick’s President for Asia,Tim Sutton. Yours truly ran the Comet account (then part of the same group) for years and PR Week editor Danny Rogers who also worked at Paragon at the time may even have got involved too.

One happy footnote to this otherwise sad Woolworths tale is that the spirit and success of that once great agency that served it so well has been revived by it’s new leaders Matt Neale and Jon Hughes who run it’s latest incarnation Golin Harris. It’s a pity people of their skill and energy could not have been found to run Woolies.