Phew!

Agency familiarisations the Kiwi way

Over the last 10 days the Albion Air New Zealand team have met people across the business from the deputy CEO to operations, PR and local marketing teams. And we have been lucky enough to have been taken on a whistle-stop tour across the country. It was a military operation prepared especially for Albion and two US agencies. At times it was hard to believe that it was work. Helicopters, bungy jumping and jet boats aren't a usual feature of a normal working day.

But by the end of our trip we really felt immersed in the Kiwi spirit and there is nothing like seeing the product you are selling with your own eyes. We'd like to thank the team at Air New Zealand for being the ultimate hosts. We really felt spoilt and privileged. We have our heads down now!

Style
Jason  8
Keith   9.5
Nick    3

Look of fear
Jason  2.5
Keith 1
Nick     10

Albion appointed to Virgin Radio rebrand

We think this is probably one of the most exciting briefs on the planet at the moment. We are already busy getting stuck in working with some real entrepreneurial thinkers.

See the story on Brand Republic.

IPA Fast Strategy conference

  Hello. Christine here. I’m a new planner at Albion.

  On Monday I went to the IPA’s Fast Strategy conference, and thought I’d share my thoughts.

  Tim Lindsay of TBWA opened the day, with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over, expecting different results’.  Slightly ironic, as he then went on to replay their standard agency creds!

  However Tim Hames (The Times), Mark Earls (‘Herd’ guru), Rob Forshaw (Grand Union) and the planning team at Leo Burnett all made the day actually very good. And a brilliant ‘live brief and 3 hr / 3-way pitch’ task did reveal who really could think fast.

  Interesting things that came up...

1. Tim Hames ‘colourful’ tie. He referred to it 3 times. Oh and talked about his advocacy of the three F’s when working fast – Flat structure, a shared Formula, and Flexibility  - adapting to change and keeping things fluid.
2. Mark Earls suggesting collaborative beginnings were crucial. By creating a Wiki and posting a link to it on the Planning for Good Facebook page, he completed the fastest ever consumer research / opinion seeking exercise I’ve ever witnessed – and from all over the world. Impressive.
3. They managed to play ‘Who let the dogs out’ 3 times at amusing moments.
4. Good fast strategy can only ever come from very well defined (or re-framed) business objectives (Cue discussion on worst ever business objectives on a client brief – ‘make our brand cool’ was probably the winner). Sainsbury’s example was interesting – ‘Grow the business by 2.5 billion over 3 years’ was reframed by the team at AMV to ‘get every customer to spend £1.14 more on every transaction’ and then ‘Try Something New’ was born in 30 minutes)
5. ‘Light lots of little fires and see which ones work’. Mark Earls turned the debate into a more interesting one - not about fast or slow strategy but about open rather than closed strategy. The idea being, you have a core thought but it should be fluid, evolving and allow you to do several things simultaneously and build on the ideas that work.
6. Finally Rob Forshaw talked about making consumers your partners, and moving from push media to pull media, and content centricity rather than channel centricity. I liked his idea that the best ‘fast strategy’ was strategy that was placed directly into the hands of consumers, and allowed them to continually evolve it (i.e. Boots 17 MySpace community set up for teenage girls to create new products, these products will be featured on their website, then produced carrying the names of their creators, then these create word of mouth, producing a viral co-creation/purchasing/web content generating circle)
7. A good fancy biscuit AND muffin selection throughout the day.

Marketing Week Brand Summit 2008

Hello to everybody who saw Glyn present at the Marketing Week Brand Summit 2008. Sorry it's taken a couple of days to get the presentation up here - I flew off to Malta straight after speaking, and the internets were too weak there to sort it.

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Sorry also that the presentation wasn't as polished as I would have liked. I only had a day's notice (I was standing in for the stand in!). I think the main casualty was that people took away the impression that eBay are reckless experimenters, just randomly trying stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth - be assured they have a strong culture of rigorous analysis. I just didn't have the time to include much data in the deck.

Glyn

Albion in Campaign's Top 100 Agencies

We were pleased with our 'school report' in Campaign's Top 100 Agencies feature last week. Click the image below to read the detail (they don't seem to have the school reports on their website to link to).

We especially liked them calling Jason a 'daredevil' (!), and that we agreed with them on our score - 7/10. We allowed ourselves to be happy about 2007 for about, ooh, 5 minutes, but we're a self-critical bunch, and are pushing ourselves even harder in 2008.

Virgin Media vs. Joost

We’re doing some guest blogging over on madcomments - the blog of mad.co.uk, which is the online home of Marketing Week, Design Week, Creative Review etc.

In our first post over there, Jason contrasts the launches of Virgin Media and Joost. It’s pokey stuff and well worth a read (but we would say that wouldn’t we!).

 

Albion develops MyDeco brand and marketing

Lots of people are quite interested in MyDeco, because it’s Brent Hoberman’s first big start-up since lastminute.com:

The Sunday Times'
'Dotcom stars have designs on your home'

Mad Comment's
'The Brent and Martha Show'

Love Creative's 'Mydeco'

TechCrunch UK's
'mydeco launches assault on the home front'

We were excited when we heard rumours about what they were planning early last year (when they got funding as a start-up called ByDesign), because we thought they had a great idea. Finding and buying home furnishings is really hard work. No shop ever has all that you need, and it’s hard to imagine how items from different shops will fit together. MyDeco brings lots of great brands together in one place, helps you put their items together in ‘looks’, and even helps you visualize what your room will look like.

So we were really chuffed when they approached us to help them develop their thing. We’ve been working with Brent and the team since early last summer to create the brand strategy and brand identity for MyDeco.

And we’ve got an online campaign breaking on the 11th Feb, with banners that aims to intrigue people with a sneak peak into the deco of some famous folks. If you click through you’ll then be able to buy that person’s look for your pad.

And Brent’s said some nice things about us: “Albion have an amazing track record in launching brands, from Skype to Innocent Kids, and they’ve done another brilliant job for us.”

Bless!

The first meeting of The Albion Society

Albion is for being entrepreneurial. That doesn't mean we only work with entrepreneurs, but it does mean that we try to be entrepreneurial in the way we work, and we like working with people who are entrepreneurial. So we wanted to do something to celebrate and further entrepreneurial 'doing'.

The Albion Society will be a regular forum for entrepreneurial people to share their vision, and debate it enthusiastically with like-minded people. Not for its own sake, but with the aim of actually doing something.

We had the inaugural meeting of The Albion Society on Tuesday evening, Gavin Neath bravely volunteered to be the first to step up and lead the debate. Gavin used to be the chairman of Unilever UK, and is now leading their global environmental strategy.

Gavin talked about whether big corporations are part of the climate-change problem or part of the solution. A lively debate then ensued, with guests like Richard Reed, Simon Darling, Harriet Brand and Scott Gallagher adding informed and passionate views.

We thought our penetrating challenges would catch Gavin off-guard and force him to ‘fess up about Unilever’s dark side.  Or at least discover some gossip about his time working with Al Gore. But it didn’t turn out quite like that.

Gavin openly admitted that no-one has all the answers for the huge challenges facing the planet, but at least Unilever is giving it a go on a number of fronts. His big news was about PG Tips is going 100% sustainable.

We ended up in broad agreement that, whatever companies do, the only real solution is to find a way to get individuals to change their unsustainable behaviour. And that consuming our way out of the problem is unlikely to work - we need to do less of things.

In the spirit of doing-not-just-talking, Richard proposed that we could all start that change by switching to the only true green energy supplier, Good Energy - which will instantly reduce our personal carbon footprints by a third.

More than that, we decided to subsidise everybody at Albion for the £50 per year this will add to their energy bill. And more than even that, we're going to get dastardly with Facebook to try and get hundreds or even thousands of people to make the switch too.

If you fancy coming along to the next meeting of The Albion Society, drop us a line.

The Albion Cooie Factory

We've cranked up the Albion Cookie Factory to celebrate Christmas with our family and friends. Check out the blog:

albionlondon.typepad.com/albioncookiefactory/