I do see the irony in blogging about it too…

1. Adulescent – Dresses and acts like he’s 16 although he’s now in his 30s.
2. Barbiedcutie - Would be attractive woman who has spent too long on the sunbeds.
3. Brandroid – Everything in their life has a brand on it not just their clothes.
4. Imobilised phone – In front of you at the check out with only a few items but too
   busy on their phone to pay, pack and move on. Shop assistants won’t challenge them if you do your clearly a lower form of life.
5. Robbin’ Hoodies – Hoodie wearing youths hanging round wherever there is light with no where better to go.
6. Mosher – Neo Goths in their all black uniforms hanging round where the Robbin’ Hoodies aren’t.
7. Sugar Plum Scary – Some mothers used to dress their kids to look like them and that was frightening. Now some mothers dress like their 8 year old which is far, far, far scarier.
8. Anorakxia – Thin, pale individuals who frequently lack social skills but who can bore you on a diverse range of subjects from Apples latest Operating System to a TV show that isn’t available over here yet but they’ve downloaded the first three series from the US.
9. Black Collar Worker – People who work in marketing and other creative jobs who who wear a uniform of designer jeans and polo neck shirts in ten thousand shades of black.
10. iPod Shuffler – They move in a rythmic way that suddenly jumps as their iPod randomly picks another track.
11. Sticker Stacker – You see them in the supermarket. They came in for milk and bread but the lure of Buy One Get One free was too much and now they can’t decide how many they need so they’ll have to take the lot.
12. Saga Louts – Over sixty, Over there and Over the Top. But most of the time over here wanting to be over there. You may find them, as I did tonight, hanging round bus stops. My Saga Lout told me about the football score and then told me a dozen jokes. Badly. Then he wandered off without catching a bus.
13. Google Eyed – Someone who has spent too much time on the Internet and now has a rather odd stare

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1. When they say it will only take a minute of your time it never is. I wouldn’t mind but they’ll never give me an address for me to send my bill.
2. 99% are a waste of my time and the company paying for its time. I don’t need new double-glazing tested to withstand the long artic winter.
3. When they pretend to be calling on behalf of a company you actually deal with for something important but can’t tell you which one or my name. The law has two words for that – False Pretences. I also have two words for it but I’m too polite to say them here.
4. That they call at times their statistical models say they will catch me and make a sale. Otherwise known as dinnertime and when I’m in the shower.
5. When you ask them nicely to go away they’ve been told they have to keep trying. They’ve been taught we are too polite to hang up. I’m not too polite I apologise and do it anyway then I feel bad because I’ve been rude and that makes me angry for about five minutes. Then I think why am I the one who is angry and hope their boss has an accident at a demonstration of stone cladding double glazing and ends up with an attractive new look.
6. That an over-paid marketing executive is so uncreative; so burnt out; and so lacking in ideas at their job that they think this is the best way to make me like their brand and buy their mythril framed double-glazing. If you can’t come up with a better strategy why not get work doing something you’re good at. Something honest. Like robbing banks.
7. I’m signed up to the Telephone Preference Service (UK) so the ones that call me are they’re ignoring that. Basically I only get the really unethical cold callers with the cheapest scripts, Dickensian sweatshop conditions and the staff who’ve already taken the most stick.
8. They have to have my number either from a company I’ve given it to for some important reason or be using hardware that calls banks of numbers. One is a breach of trust the other is an abuse of the phone system. At least when you get an obscene call your not the only one getting abused*
9. Friends use answer phones to screen calls for cold callers and I hate speaking to answer phones. The beep makes me a gibbering idiot. I can’t put words together in the right order. I’m more coherent speaking to an attractive woman than an answer phone. The only worse thing is an attractive woman’s answer phone.
10. Sometime I get more cold calls in a month when I’m in than I get calls from people I know. Make your own punch line up for that one.
11. When the phone rings and you’re expecting a call you get a bit excited. A bit like a small child, maybe it’s an attractive woman calling, but no it’s a cold call to sell me raspberry ripple flavoured double glazing.
12. A section of the most talented and well educated part of many developing countries population is sat around trying to sell me antique style double glazing because it’s cheaper to employ them than to come up with a smart targeted way of selling me double glazing for my car. The only experience of westerners workers in foreign call centres get is from cold calling. We hate their calls and they think we’re rude, obnoxious, angry bores who need double glazing. . That’s great form of cultural exchange.
13. That’s a great message to send when one of those workers is the leader of their nation in twenty years. One day one of them may have nuclear launch codes.

* This joke was "acquired" from Margaret Smith

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

Are they signs for aliens?

A new viral marketing campaign for the hottest computer game?

What do you think they are?

The Auteur Brand has a long tradition in our society. Far older than those names. The cult of personality around creative people goes back to the emergence of the printing press if not before. As a wider phenomena the Me Brand of leaders, performers and sports stars is a well established phenomena in our culture.

Me brands can be good and can play well until the person behind them trips over our expectations of the person. They have the advantage of the getting the early popularity hump of the brand life cycle. Ultimately most Me brands are limited to their founders working life time at most. A few will last till they die. Most Me brands tend to rely on symbiosis with older/larger distribution Brands or sponsor Brands for the oxygen of publicity and the cash feed to their bank balance.

The WWW and the Internet provides an upsurge in opportunity for Me and Auteur brands. Thanks to the cheapness of web hosting and services like Lulu, Blogger and YouTube pretty much anyone can become an Internet Auteur in their chosen creative field if they have some talent. Maybe they’ll only ever play in a little nice market in their spare time but their chances, at least for the moment, of reaching a worldwide audience are far better than ten or twenty years ago.

Most of the big broadcaster and other media distributors are well past the peak of their brand’s life cycle. They are in the slow declining tail to infinity and zero awareness. However they have advantages of familiarity and trust to being in the tail. If you can avoid restricting your brand to those who are getting old with you and thus slow the decline rate so you don’t vanish into obscurity. A good example would be Monty Python who keep talking about their retirement fund growing with each project while the musical is drawing in 20 year old men who wouldn’t go to a musical and who are too young to have seen the shows when they were first on. Walnut Whips on the other hand are watching their sales decline with their aging markets demographic decline.

Will Auteurs be able to find the revenue streams to support their work or will they mostly be stuck in back bedrooms with a PC wishing they could get the money to make more than a dodgy video to show on YouTube? I don’t know. Maybe the current broadcasters won’t survive. Maybe they’ll find a new life supporting production distributed in new ways. Brand and distribution are related but they aren’t the same thing. Just different parts of the marketing mix. Their revenue models may pull in money through new advertising models, sponsorship, product placement, merchandise sales or any number of other possibilities.

I’ve been on the professional Internet ride for ten years this month. A lots changed in those ten years. A lot of things people told me would be the next big thing haven’t happened yet or worse still bombed. A lot of things no one ever suggested would happen have come out of nowhere. I’m looking forward to the next ten years and seeing what happens.

The BBC reports Max Clifford has a 10 tips for being famous:

1. Appear on a reality series
2. Enter a talent contest
3. Be abysmal on a talent show
4. Gain fame by association
5. Date a celebrity
6. Flaunt your body
7. Date a Royal Family member
8. Make a home sex video
9. Be a success on MySpace
10. Be in the right place at the right time

I try to steer away from commenting on controversial topics or obvious marketing stunts. I’m sure Mr Clifford would claim this was just a bit of fun. Really it’s just him fishing to keep himself famous and boost his ego. Mrs Thatcher used to call it "the oxygen of publicity". Not a politician I’d normally quote and not normally a quote I’d choose to borrow,

What does the list say to people though? If you want to be a success be famous. You don’t need to do anything well. You don’t need to make an effort to improve your life. Don’t worry that we don’t tell you most of you will never be famous. Don’t say if you only shoot for fame following that list you might get 15 minutes but you won’t ever need to give up the day job.

So here are my alternative suggestion. You may not end up famous but you might end up achieving something while you try:

1. Be an astonishing performer
2. Push the boundaries of human knowledge
3. Serve others
4. Teach
5. Learn
6. Heal bodies, minds or societies
7. Create something
8. Make people laugh
9. Excel at sport
10. Perform heroic acts

One last thought. Mr Clifford appears to have missed number 11 from his list: Be a talking head pundit.

Planners have created techniques to help them to try to predict the future rather than just writing sprawling scenarios. One such technique is called STEEPV, its acronym coming from the six areas it looks at as it tries to predict the future:

• Social
• Technology
• Economics
• Ecology
• Politics
• Values

They decide how far they are going to move time forward from the present day. For each of these areas they describe changes from the present day and then describe the results of the change. They may repeat the process with further iterations, each moving the time forward and changing from the previous timeframes.

1. Writing
2. My life (sorry I’m not going to stop posting about it)
3. Computer Graphics
4. Gaming
5. Marketing
6. Random Reviews

In fact I’d need to split some of these into several sub-sub-blogs for specialist topics. This would result in me having many infrequently updated blogs which would also not be good (see point 7 of his list).

In some ways this echoes what marketing people working with brand architects call the Branded House v House of Brands debate. It comes down to is it more cost effective to group many things under one heading done well (as for example Tesco’s do) against having lots of things under different brands that all take time to develop and maintain (like Unilever) the former takes more work to start with but the later takes a lot more work down the line.

Since I’m inherently lazy I don’t intend to develop and maintain lots of different brands or blogs or web sites for my different interests. I am ultimately the brand and I’m complex

My solution is that I need to make sure I provide new content for each of my blog’s audiences regularly and make sure visitors can find the bits of interest to them easily. The second of these objectives means adding to my blog’s navigation – that’s why I’ve added the new navigation on the left that goes to navigation posts that link back to blog articles. Hopefully nice and easy to follow. I’ve set two up for now and I’ll add more as I have time