Keen observers will note that I haven’t posted to this damn blog in something like 6 months. This was due to a combination of factors: social media fatigue, a lack of time & energy (having a second baby 7 months ago may have had something to do with it), and the sneaking suspicion that I’d run out of things to say.

I said to myself a while ago that it would really take something of monumental and singular significance to get me to dust off the blog again. And then one day recently that something arrived in my life, in the form of the immortal tankard of Paul Colman.

Paul’s one of the keen planning minds at W+K London, and writes a blog that somehow combines insightful social observation, sport, and socks. Three years ago, Paul was given a german beer tankard as a gift.  He wondered how far around the world it could go using only the tangled connections of the global plannersphere. And thus was born the tankard challenge.

Paul and I met once in London, although by the evidence we studiously avoided actually talking to each other (and yes, I’m carrying a baby in the picture – my daughter was 2 months old).

Now what’s incredibly odd is that Paul seems to have come up with the idea for the tankard challenge on the exact same day that I met him. How’s that for a meaningful coincidence?

Since that day, the tankard has spent the last 3 years wending its way around the globe, no doubt trying to find me, and arrived here a couple of weeks ago via Shanghai, Sydney, and New York. I received it from none other than the lovely and irrepressible Faris Yakob.

It couldn’t have picked a nicer time to visit, as the Canadian fall colours were out in full force. We went for long walks to take it all in.

A while back, one of the planners I work with – Sean – had a great idea (he does that a lot – a nice quality). 

We’d been talking about the growing demand for transparency in marketing and business, and that while many marketers today see the need for it, at the same time many companies struggle with knowing just what to do about it.

Sean thought it would be cool if a few companies picked a day, and invited their customers in to see some part of their business behind the scenes – the factory floor, the R&D lab, the headquarters. He called it “Take Your Customer To
Work Day.” Last summer he wrote a blog post about it, which proceeded to get a lot of positive response, including a nod from no less than Seth Godin.

Since then there have been a few high-profile initiatives that have done just this. The most notable was last summer’s P&G’s Mommy Blogger event, where the Pampers brand team invited 15 bloggers to tour their Cincinatti headquarters, hear about new products, talk about their needs, and weigh in on the current state of marketing. It was an exercise in transparency that had some risk to it, but by all accounts was fun for all involved, and got P&G both some great learning and some great press.

Given the positive feedback and the successful examples, we’ve decided to go ahead try to do it.

Thursday May 28 2009 will be the inaugural “Take Your Customer To Work Day.”

Full details are here.

Several brands have already jumped on board, including Zappos (of course…), SteamWhistle Beer, and Beck Tench. We’re issuing an open call for other companies to come along for the ride and bring their customers in house for the day. And we’re asking any company who participates to document it, and we’ll collect all the stories, photos, and videos and create some interesting content with it.

Huge kudos to Sean for coming up with the idea, and taking the initiative to actually get this thing going.

So talk to your clients and partners, and help spread the word. Let’s get some momentum behind this thing.

Who’s in?

The gorgeous new AGO - image via wvs

I’m very excited to share some details about an upcoming event for Toronto’s strategic planning community.

First, some background. The idea for this came out of discussions I and a few other planners and strategy types have been having over the last 6 months. We realized a few things:

1. There are thriving planning communities in other markets, such as the APG in the UK, and lots of sharing and discussion in the blogosphere, but in Canada and specifically Toronto there’s no sense of local community at all.
2. Because of this, while other marketing communities (creative, clients) have events targeted to their interests and needs, the strategic planning community doesn’t have anything of its own.
3. Most importantly, the strategy community has increasingly become a fractured field, with lots of different disciplines (account planning, communications planning, engagement planning, user experience planning, etc) across different types of companies (traditional/media/digital/design agencies, clients, market researchers, etc) – but there’s not much interaction or cross-pollination between these groups. But we’re all doing similar things, and increasingly the client challenges we all face require learning about each others’ skills and toolsets.
4. And despite our lack of community, there’s still some amazing, world-class strategic thinkers and thinking going on here, and it’s time to celebrate that fact more.

So this is an attempt to foster more of a community around marketing strategy in Toronto (and Canada). We’re starting with an event, and if it’s a success, we hope to make it a regular thing.

Details:

Thursday April 9, 2009 – 2-6pm

The Art Gallery of Ontario – Jackman Hall

The event has a pretty amazing list of speakers, including the lovely and talented Mark Earls, all the way over from London; and some of Canada’s leading lights including Sean Howard, Matt Milan, Michael Anton Dila, and Laurence Bernstein. And, to bring down the average, I’ll be chairing the afternoon’s proceedings.

In addition to the speakers, the event will include some food & drink and lots of opportunities to socialize and meet new people.

Details for the event and ticket registration information can be found by clicking the big orange button above, or here.

Hope to see you there.

(image via)

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The second campaign that we’ve just launched is for a few other Frito-Lay brands.

Frito-Lay is introducing some new products and reorganizing some of their their packaging and in-store shopping experiences to appeal more to women. As you can imagine, it’s a massive project for them.

To support those initiatives, we’ve created a new web video series called “Only in a woman’s world.“

We launched it with a trailer last month that shot up to about a million views on YouTube.

On the heels of that trailer, the official launch of the series was this past weekend, with a red-carpet premiere in LA with a sprinkling of celebrities and invites to a great group of awesome female bloggers who helped us cover it. The first three episodes of the series are up today, with lots more to come.

The press is starting to roll in on this stuff, and there was a nice write up in the NY Times last week that delves into some of the upfront learning that was done to really understand women and snacking, work that took over a year and ranged from ethnography to neuroscience. Even better, it has the distinction of being the first campaign I’ve ever been involved with to be covered on entertainment news shows. The NYT is nice and all, but The Insider FTW!

One of the best things about this campaign was that the team, both client and agency, who worked on it was entirely female – and I think that played a massive role in it actually working.

Big congrats to everyone who worked on it for pulling this together, and especially to our clients who have been incredibly passionate about truly and deeply understanding the mindsets of women around snacking and media, and for being willing to step outside the confines of traditional advertising when it came time to do the communication.

UPDATE: Oh yeah – how could I forget – you can follow the series on Twitter too…

We’ve had a couple of big new campaigns launch in the US over the past few weeks. These have both been in the works for ages so it’s nice to finally see them out there and getting some positive response. And both are the kind of stuff that I’m honored to just have been in the same building with.

The first campaign is for Lay’s potato chips. This has been a great brand to work on. It’s huge (by some measures it’s the largest food brand in North America) and pretty much ubiquitous, which makes for an interesting challenge: how do you reintroduce people to something that they’re already deeply familiar with?

This is how we chose to do it:

The response has been great so far, both from industry press like Adweek (here and here) and Shoot Magazine who awarded Fireworks the ‘best music track of Winter 09′, but also from friends I have mad respect for like Charles and Paul.

And more than just these ads, I really like “Happiness is Simple” because it’s a great platform to build lots of stuff from, with a tonality that seems to fit well for today’s cultural climate.

Big props need to go to the whole team who worked on it, including some amazing clients for being brave enough to make some big changes on their biggest brand.

UPDATE – If you like the Lay’s work, the “Happy” spot is up for AdWeek’s “Freakiest ads of the month” - go vote!

Hi.

I’m back from a self-enforced six month blogging vacation.

I ran out of steam for a bunch of reasons, some too boring to talk about, some too personal to talk about, and some that I don’t even understand yet. But I realized that I needed to focus on work and other areas of my life, and to make time for that a few things had to give. This was one of them.

But I’m back. I missed it. I missed you (no, seriously). Normal service will resume shortly.

And thanks for sticking around.

Well I’m a bit embarassed that I’ve posted exactly twice in the past month. Lots of travel again, things got busy, the dog ate my homework, you know how it is. But I’ll remedy that forthwith – have a whole bunch of posts saved up.

First off, however, is a reminder that it’s time for Likemind again. It’s your chance to meet up for coffee and breakfast and conversation with other people in marketing, design, and digital stuff in Toronto.

Where: Over Easy, 208 Bloor Street West (map).

When:  Friday July 18, 8:00am.

Hope to see you there.

So the big AAAA planning conference is coming up in a month. And a couple of good things are shaping up.

The first thing is if you’re a junior or intermediate planner with under 5 years experience, Planning For Good (which you can read more about here) is conducting a workshop on the Sunday before the conference starts.

You’ll get to work on actual briefs from two amazing organizations: Kiva.org (the microlender) and Witness (the human rights organization).  You’ll be assigned into teams and competing to develop the best insights, strategies, and solutions to a challenge they set out. Each team will be mentored by a leading planning director from the industry. After a day of working, you’ll present back to a panel that includes the PFG committee and the marketing directors of these two organizations. This all happens on Sunday, so you won’t miss any of the conference. The work with be showcased and presented during the conference and at a PFG event on the Tuesday evening of the conference. 

To participate, sign up for “Real Time Crafting” workshop when you send in your conference application and fees. Also note which cause you wish to work on (Kiva or Witness).

The second thing is the Minneapolis planning crew of Paul Isakson and Kelly Thompson have created a Facebook group for people who are attending the conference so we can make plans and connect beforehand. It will also be a place to discuss the conference as it goes, recap afterwards, and most importantly gossip about who had the best ironic t-shirts, designer sneakers, and funky eyewear (aaahhhh, planner fashion).

Additionally, they’ve proposed a cocktail gathering on Tuesday night at Shore Club’s Skybar for people to hang out and unwind on the last night of the conference. This may also turn into the PFG event. The details and RSVP can be found here.

Looking forward to seeing anyone that’s attending…