Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Fortnotes 4 – end of January

Posted by Roo - 28/01/11 at 09:01:00 pm

Trying to begin every week by making a list of all the projects/areas I’ve got some involvement with (about a dozen of them at the moment) and writing down what I need to do next for each of them. Getting Things Done. Oh yes.

I have a PA now, to wrestle my diary into submission. Nina is great, and her help is already allowing me to spend less time worrying about finding time for doing things and more time actually, you know, doing things.

A small team of us began to get our heads around how to approach a pitch, for which I’ve been doing some research and sharing some notes. Early stages so far. Initially felt a lot like staring a huge blank sheet of paper. Paul shared some thoughts about the business challenges, which helped remind us what it’s all about. The problem felt a lot more real after that.

Thinking about Honda recently. Two big projects (plus a small one, in which I’m less involved). I’m trying to maintain balance with mostly-strategic input in one project, and mostly-creative input (working directly with the creatives) on the other.

A day trip to Geneva to speak at a marketing team away day for P&G. A long day, but worth it. I managed to say some interesting things about three different projects from the past couple of years, (since I wasn’t at W+K at the time so it was made possible by my colleagues spending some time filling me in). Focusing my mind by agreeing to speak about things has always been a great way for me to think it through in much more detail than I’d usually need to. Said yes to another speaking engagement, and hoping to do no more than one per month.

Struggling to spend time on all the projects I want to.

Some time getting the ‘Radar’ Dashboard we built into a state where we can deploy it for other clients. Worked with Dan (who is a bit of a whizz with Amazon Web Services) to create and configure a new instance (EC2, RDS and Git are a good combination).

A little bit of peripheral help on the Fairtrade campaign. Mainly making introductions and staying out of the way.

Milestone event: had my first massage in the office. A fortnightly visit from a visiting masseur, with 20 minute slots which fill up fast. Entirely wonderful. I felt taller afterwards.

Spent a bit of time coming up with ideas with Dan H in order to get a self-initiated agency project back on track creatively. That was fun (and surprisingly easy once we left the office and sat in a quiet cafe).

Another day out of the office, this time to judge the Media Guardian Innovation Awards. Really enjoyed this, especially the debate lunch about the Innovator of the Year award.

Dan H is going to Portland for a month, in preparation for moving there properly. I will miss him a lot.

Thinking about: measurement (engagement, interactions, mentions & conversations), consumer decision journey, word of mouth, things real people don’t say about advertising, pink ponies.

New terminology: FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods).

Books I should probably read: ‘Soft’ (Rupert Thomson) via Kevin C, Confessions of an Advertising Man (David Ogilvy) – via everyone.

Culture Hack Day 2011: Lightning talks

Posted by Roo - 15/01/11 at 07:01:01 pm

An exciting blend of arts, culture and tech; the lightning talks session at the Culture Hack Day mounted at W+K today were interesting and inspirational.

Tom Uglow, (Creative Director, Google and YouTube, Europe) talked about “What if the Web is a Fad?”. He’s pretty sure the internet isn’t going away, but thinks the web as we know it could be on shaky ground. He also pointed out that people don’t want to interact with cultural institutions online. They want to interact with the content.

Clare Reddington (Director, iShed and Pervasive Media Studio) asked “What if We Forget about Screens and Make Real Things?” asking what if all objects had their stories attached to it? She also showed, and sat next to, Tweeture.

Leila Johnston (author, blogger & comedy writer) asked “What if We Have Fun?”, and said ‘If you’re looking for inspiration, everything is fun; toys are all around you, even if they don’t seem like toys’. [update: more notes and links from Leila]

Tom Armitage (Creative Technologist, BERG @infovore) challenged: “Sod big data and mashups: why not hack on making art?” and referenced about several of the works of Tom Philips, plus Caleb Larsen’s ‘A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter‘ (an installation that continually tries to sell itself to the highest bidder)

Tom Dunbar (Producer, Hut V) asked “What if the audience had access to metadata embedded in visual media?”” and imagined

Matthew Somerville (developer, Theatricalia @dracos) asked “What if You Never Needed to Miss a Show?” and showed us his lovely Theatricalia project.

Nick Harkaway (author and blogger for FutureBook @harkaway) asked “What if you need IP?” – and made the point that privacy protection often goes hand-in-hand with IP protection. [Update: Nick shared his own notes here.]

Chris Thorpe (ArtFinder @jaggeree) asked “What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like it?” and imagined the ‘angel’ character in Disclosure walking around galleries; wants people to look at the art, not screens. ‘technology should get out of the way’.

Update: more, and better, writeups of the talks from Chris Unitt, Mia Ridge, Erin Jo Richey, Pervasive Media Studio and Simon Hopkins. Many of the talks were also recorded as videos, here.

Fortnotes 3 – early January

Posted by Roo - 14/01/11 at 10:01:15 pm

The first fortnight back at work after Christmas. The snow has given way to rain and drizzle, so London is dark and wet and I feel marginally less energetic than I did in December. Working longer hours and trying to avoid getting home after 8pm too frequently.

Finally got properly involved in some Honda work, so I’m working on two different Honda projects – plus THO, CTC and a little bit of help on two or three other campaigns too. Busy busy. Trying to spend 80% of my time on 20% of the work, but I’m not very good at saying no to things at the moment and struggling slightly to manage my calendar. Will need to learning to say ‘no’ to more things, and hopefully the right things. Generally happy to get involved in everything I physically can at the moment, because they’re usually fun and interesting.

I can now reveal that THO is actually ‘The Hungry One’ for Lurpak. It involves a gorgeous 60 second cinema + TV ad, plus print, foil lids, and some really fun, funny, entertaining online stuff too. By the time I joined, work on it was already well underway but I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the past couple of weeks helping deliver it and the things it needs to make it happen. It’s really nice being able to work closely with the creative directors and there’s a great little team all pulling together behind it. Before Christmas, we bought in Anna Pickard to join that team, specifically to run the Twitter + Facebook presences and she’s doing an amazing job of it and already (despite very small numbers of followers) lots of lovely interactions.

“Every time a microwave bell chimes to signal a ready meal’s readiness, an angel loses its wings, and The Hungry One cries hot gravy tears.“

“The fridge light is not on all the time. No, when the fridge light comes on, it is your stomach having an idea.”

Spot on for this campaign. Challenging poor food choices, encouraging the cooking and enjoying of delicious food and all without being too much about the brand. Everyone expects slow growth for the first few weeks and hopefully it’ll gather followers faster once the ad airs on TV. Already, the YouTube release got lots of positive word of mouth (not to mention a quite respectable 40k views within a week).

The Twitter dashboard I’ve been building with Dan (in order to make The Hungry One omniscient) is also going to be useful for CTC and probably lots of other projects too. Side effect: did you know that UK tweeters talk most about ‘bacon’ at 8:00am, with a big spike at 11:00am on Saturdays? I’m playing with it and improving it almost daily, often in response to an idea or suggestion from Anna who is actually using it to find tweets to which she might want to respond.

Other work…

A solid few hours with the CTC team helping them on their approach for a new campaign I’m really looking forward to.
Immersing myself in Honda history and culture, and joining the (lovely) creative team for a big project. Borrowed some really lovely books about the life of S. Honda, Thinking differently about cars. Asking questions of everyone I realistically can.

My attendance at the regular agency management meeting keeps getting postponed. Secretly relieved, as being awake and in London at 8:30 is much harder than my usual 9:30. Close to having our first full-time in-house creative community manager to work on social media projects. Actually expecting we might need more than one quite soon; there’s lots more work than we can handle at the moment, and I’m certain it’ll grow further this year.

People are still asking me how I’m finding it, and whether I’m having fun. I’m having a huge amount of fun. When trying to describe W+K London, ‘friendly’ and ‘chaos’ are always the two words that come to mind first. It seems to thrive on creative chaos actually. It’s also very flat, organisationally, and of the places I’ve worked it’s the least obsessed with process. Not that it’s easy or relaxed; just that the buzz of creative energy isn’t hampered by unnecessary paperwork. Things happen. Sometimes confusingly or overwhelmingly, sometimes after a lot of hard work and deliberation and dead ends, but things can sometimes happen quite fast and the end result is always something excellent. I’m already genuinely proud to be part of W+K.

Currently working on and thinking about: recruitment, Honda, butter and delicious cooking, word-of-mouth, conversations.
Currently trying not to think about: Dan H moving to Portland. Is that gas I can smell on the Waterloo & City line?
New terminology: LPL (large project leader, Honda terminology). CD (creative director), 60, 30, 10 (seconds of TV ad).