Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

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).

Fortnotes 2 – end of December

Posted by Roo - 23/12/10 at 01:12:19 pm

Amazing how fast the first month has gone. Time for a second set of fortnightly weeknotes. Um… fortnotes.

I’ve mainly been sitting downstairs in the kitchen area, near the toast and tea. There’s also a pool table and a set of (never used?) drums. It’s a good spot. People mill around and it’s a great place to hang out to get to know everyone.

THM involved money negotiations, which I largely stayed out of. I did meet up with Bronwen the finance director though. She’s nice.

Spent one solid day on recruitment stuff. Getting to know someone who might apply for the creative community manager role, over Skype. Then a bunch of interviews for the THM role, complete with a writing test(!). Made a decision and let the successful candidate know. All in one day.

A few introductions to ongoing projects and new work. Meeting with Nike for the first time to discuss an interesting project. Got together with Eleanor to get an initial brain dump re Honda. Spent two hours on CTC, reviewing the campaign as a whole and giving some advice. Definitely exciting. Lots of good stuff to be done. Helped with rethinking NT along with Sid and Rob and Andy and Iain Tait (how lovely it is to have the actual Iain Tait in the office at the moment!)

Agency breakfast are on alternating Wednesday mornings. This time, the THM 60″ advert was shown and got a huge round of applause. It is really really good.

Oh, THM is now called THO. Worked with Dan on a dashboard tool for it (which will eventually integrate with the codebase for the Old Spice dashboard. Talked to Ann-Marie, Trent and John in Portland about that).

Did a ‘getting to know Roo’ session where I introduced myself and some things I’ve done. Waffled a bit but everyone was very nice and lots of people stayed to ask questions and chat afterwards. I feel like less of a new starter now. Starting to settle and find the problems where I can help.

Lots of THM THO work, moving from the dashboard back end to the twitter feed front end. The basic twitter module doesn’t do what we need, so I’m spitting out javascript to S3 to be included on the front end site.

Anna (the voice of THO) came in on Tuesday, and spent some time with me, Dan H, and Ray S. She’s funny; she’ll be great. That all kicks off early next year.

Wednesday was a quieter day, and I sat at my quiet little desk upstairs for a change and hacked together a ruby script which generates some javascript which is included on a page which shows some tweets. It was quite fun to get my hands briefly dirty with some coding, especially prototype look-this-is-what-I-mean sort of code.

Nice cup of tea and chat with Iain.

Outside of work, spent a couple of hours with Paul Carr. Paul lives entirely in hotels. I was going to interview him for Shift Run Stop but we ended up just having a nice chat. Also had lunch with a bunch of friends and did a live Shift Run Stop segment on ‘Radio Roundabout’ in which Rhodri Marsden was our very funny guest. He played christmas tunes on his musical saw.

Looking forward to a week off. The agency shuts between Christmas and new year. Very cilvilised.

Fortnotes – first fortnight

Posted by Roo - 10/12/10 at 11:12:59 pm

I’ve decided that weeknotes are too ambitious. I’m going to do fortnightly notes instead. Fortnotes. Let’s see how it goes.

A good first couple of weeks at W+K London. Getting stuck into some hard (but fun) work, plus a couple of Christmas parties.

I started on Wednesday 1st December, and my first day coincided with the fortnightly agency breakfast meeting. Bacon butty and a cup of tea (yay!) and a chance to show my face to everyone. Met a lot of friendly and welcoming people. Some time with Paul Colman (head of planning) and Andy Cameron (Interactive Creative Director) to get started. Paul and Dan H introduced me to Exciting Project #1 (I’ll call it THM for now), which is going to be brilliant. For the first few weeks, I’m aiming to dedicate most of my time that that project. I’ll also need to keep some time free for long-range stuff.

Having seen the office on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday both involved being snowed in at home, so I was staying in touch via telephone, email and Skype. (I do plan to spend some time working at home every so often, but I had not expected to be doing it quite so soon). Got a more detailed briefing about THM and wrote some social media principles and engagement guidelines to show the client how we intend to interact with people online.

Made some introductions.

Wrote a job spec for a ‘creative community manager’ role. Like a community manager, but emphasising the fact they have to be able to make great stuff as well as engage and interact with people around that stuff.

I got a quick briefing on exciting project #2, NT. Also started playing with Twitter streaming API (via tweetstream Ruby gem) to see what can be done (lots, easily). Also reviewing the dashboard they used for Old Spice with Dan H (it’s very good), working out how to go about hiring people and starting to set up a few meetings for next week.

Brainstorm for NT: Location, badges etc. Thinking about what’s possible with Facebook Places and Foursqare (et al) in a variety of countries. Hmm. Need to see some research.

Meeting (via the telephone) Renny Gleeson in Portland who heads up global interactive strategy. He’s super enthusiastic and amazing.

Lots and lots of time on exciting project #1 (THM), working with Dan H + spending some more time with Dan & Ray the creative directors on it and preparing for client briefing. My input is mainly around how we’ll find and respond to relevant things, principles, engagement guidelines and recruiting the right person. On Tuesday afternoon we showed it to Tony D, then on Wednesday a trip to Leeds to meet the client and flesh out the idea for them. (Oh, and a potential legal issue around THM, which means it might have to be renamed. Everyone struggling to think of a better name. We all like the one we’ve got).

Interviewed two people for the permanent creative community manager role.

Spent a couple of hours with the team brainstorming ideas for Nokia. Tony Davidson popped in to keep us on our toes and encouraging us to push ourselves. It worked.

Spent an hour on CTC project. Mainly finding out what the campaign will be doing and giving input to strategy for the outreach side. Already quite well developed.

Friday was a relatively quiet day, and over lunch I cobbled together a Twitter streaming API ingest script storing results in MySQL in realtime. Fiendishly simple stuff. Pairing with Dan is good too. He set up an Amazon EC2 instance and we spent a bit of the afternoon together getting a basic ingest dashboard prototype installed. A large chunk of Saturday debugging and getting it working properly, and then starting on a basic front end for it.

Agency Christmas party night and Planning team Christmas meal in the same week. and drinks. Both were amazing.

Surprised and delighted to be mentioned in Campaign magazine’s writeup of W+K being their agency of the year for 2010. Named among ‘some very astute hires’. Gosh.

The list of people I need to get to know in the next couple of weeks is quite long. Basically, everyone. I also need to prepare a short ‘meet Roo Reynolds’ session to introduce myself properly.

Being pretty good about keeping focused on THM. Maybe too good; still have not met Honda or Nike teams yet. Need to fix that.

New terminology: ‘above the line’. GAD = Group Account Director (pronounced ‘gad’).
Do say: ‘spot’.
Don’t say ‘TVC’ [television commercial] too frequently.