Hill+Knowlton Strategies

So, the title of Tony Blair’s autobiography has had a last-minute change from ‘The Journey’ to ‘A Journey.’ Cue debate about ego and a Messiah complex. (Personally I think there should be some debate about the photo as well but I’m sure that will come.)

Ol' blue eyes

 I’m happy there’s a national debate about the definite and indefinite article. I think the downward spiral of correct grammar is a sad reflection of today’s society. It might just have been a copyright thing… The Journey is actually a healing process that tries to free emotional and physical issues – and while I’m sure Blair’s time in No 10 had its moments, that description might be an over-stretch. Meanwhile, Journey is of course a Californian band with the top-selling catalog track in iTunes history, Don’t Stop Believin. All-time classic and another contender for that autobiography title.

Have you been thinking about buying a new pencil case lately? Or imagined tying a really fat knot in your tie? Well you’re not alone.

Today is the start of the new school term for most of the country and even if you don’t have kids the seasonal change will have a discernible effect. (I can’t be the only one.)

Just as, every Sunday, millions of people experience that ‘have I done my homework’ feeling, so the start of the autumn term prompts a mental gear change. Summer’s over (even if we hope it isn’t just yet); fun and frolics are past and the rest of the year is about serious work.

No wonder so much of art and literature depicts autumn as a melancholy season. It’s inevitable, inexorable roll towards winter makes us all feel a little low sometimes. Though perhaps not quite so low as Christmas shops opening in August!

And yet I don’t see autumn as melancholy at all (well, only if I am feeling a bit romantic or self-indulgent). That back to school feeling is actually a good thing. It makes you want to focus.

It’s an attitude seemingly at odds with the season itself which is about things coming to fruition. For me, and I suspect many others, autumn is also a time for new challenges; an upsurge in energy and ideas.

It’s a different energy to the start of the calendar year. Not quite so dynamic because we know we’ll feel like hibernating, come November. But it’s a vital energy for all of us, on a personal and professional level.

When the bees die, we all die. Well, about five years afterwards according to people who know… which is slightly worrying as it turns out the bees are dying and the decline started in 2006.

This is not a honey bee, it's an ice-cream ad

Still, setting aside the impending global disaster, I like what Haagen-Dazs are doing about it. I have fond memories of their classic ‘ice-cream = sex’ ads from the 90s but this is more of a foray into Ben & Jerry’s territory. Makes perfect sense as an issue for them and the activity from trying to come up with serious, meaningful solutions to on-pack promotion and activating consumer support is nicely done. The way forward for social marketing.

That's a honey bee

Personally I’m more of a Ben & Jerry’s girl, originally converted by Chunky Monkey. Top three flavours: Phish Food, the alltime classic of Chubby Hubby and frozen yogurt, Cherry Garcia … although Fairly Nuts is now a contender.

Fill in your own punchline.

This month, the cyberworld of interactive professionals splits into two camps. Those with a submission to SXSW, and those without. Because the good folks at SXSW know that nothing builds August buzz around a March conference more than blogger to blogger voting, they build in the need for potential speakers to promote their own panel idea. So we tweet, bleat, blog and beg.

Sure, other people are super bored with these pleas for votes. Whatevers. With 2395 panels to choose from, it is almost impossible to find a great topic without a direct link. Less than 20% will be chosen and user votes count for 30% of the decision.

Do you have a submission? Let me know. And please share any other panels you think are awesome. In my native land, committed people of all political persuasions know that a compelling platform can’t win without a huge get out the vote (GOTV) push. Annoying? Maybe. Effective? I hope so..!

Never in living memory has there been so much conversation about communication. Marketing and Technology both had plenty of industry conferences in the past. Since they’ve mashed up, it feels like we are all now in the event business. Speaking, attending, following. *Exhausting*. You can even track the trends just by watching the new titles roll out from professional event companies like Haymarket and DMG.

Always on hashtags
But there is a lovely twist to this all you can eat symposium smorgasbord. Several of the more grassrootsy events are true communities rather than trade shows. More Burning Man, than ad:tech.
For most events, the hashtag comes and goes. Twitter search won’t pull up tweets more than a few days old. With serial events like #media140, #140conf, and the aptly named #LikeMinds, the hashtag is always fresh. Not only are they based on a series of conferences, they have meetups, tweetups, and lots of @ing in-between. It’s lovely.

Active attendees
Private, participatory events, like WPP’s Stream, share this belief that the community makes the unconference. Mega events, like the ever more popular SXSW,  take it to the people via their Panel Picker. While SXSW is not until March, the blogosphere is alive with buzz right now as we all canvas for votes from our peers. Me too. More on that next post.

With luck I will see y’all in Texas, but it could be equally inspiring to meetup right here.

As you might expect from working in an energy and industrials team, you get to hear plenty of industry buzzwords and phrases – my particular favourite at the moment is ‘energy futures’. Like a lot of buzzwords it’s not a wholly articulate term, rather it hints at the future prognosis of the energy industry and suggests a bold new future where our energy use will change radically from present.

However, it’s important to note that our development of energy hasn’t really developed so much in the past few thousand years since the great civilisations of the world started to flourish. After all we’ve known that by burning oil, gas and coal we can keep ourselves warm. We’ve known about the sun, wind and water as energy sources too despite our lack of sophistication in developing renewables. We’ve also known about thermal power for millennia – it is with great pleasure that I read yesterday that planning permission has been given to construct the UK’s first commercial deep geothermal power plant in Cornwall. By drilling 4.5km into the ground Geothermal Engineering will be able to access rocks at temperatures of 200°C accessing enough energy to power 20,000 homes.

One aspect of our ‘energy future’ that is different is nuclear energy, specifically nuclear fusion. We know the energy is there – it’s the process at the core of the sun (hydrogen nuclei collide, fuse into heavier Helium atoms and release vast amounts of energy). We know that the energy clean and limitless. In recent weeks, a major step forward was made in our development of nuclear fusion with the announcement of funding for ITER, a large-scale scientific experiment to create nuclear fusion taking place in France. A timeline for the project anticipates that the fusion reactor will generate more power than it consumes by 2025/26. Exciting stuff indeed!

Despite ITER’s critics, nuclear fusion remains the ‘Holy Grail’ of energy production and if it isn’t produced by the ITER experiment, industry experts estimate that nuclear fusion will be commercially-viable within 30-50 years, thus representing a real ‘energy future’.

I’d like to think that nuclear fusion will be one of the major technological advancements in my lifetime so I’ll leave you with a fascinating video of the US Army’s attempts to create nuclear fusion over half a century ago. As far as energy is concerned, technological advancements are usually a slow burner…

What happens when you get a bunch of 30-somethings raging against the dieing sporting light, and a bunch of confident 20-somethings with it all to prove?

The result is a sporting contest for the ages. And so it was last Wednesday afternoon as H&K’s finest Lads, Dads and everything in-between emerged from the 4^th floor to contest a heavyweight footballing battle at London Bridge.

Or at least that’s how it should have been but for an alarming drop-out rate amongst the physically fragile Dads – the result being that we ended up with Lads vs Dads(& Lads).

But enough of that and onto the game which started at a frantic pace with the muscle-strewn Roberts snapping around the heels of the Lads in his imposing red wifebeater, and Whitlock demonstrating all his semi-pro skills with a couple of nifty turns. It was the Lads who struck first however, rifling the net with a crisp strike after only a few minutes. The Dads were undisturbed though, sticking to their tight, controlled passing game with the cat-like Sutherden barking the orders from the back like the Peter Schmeichel he clearly wished he always could have been.

Honours remained close throughout, with excellent solo efforts from Jones and Bell cancelled out by a net-ripper from chief lad Battersby and a mazy, Kaka-esque run from Woods ending with the ball in the net and the man himself seeking a high five at every turn.

With time running out, bodies shattered and sweat dripping from every limb (plus the Dads’ goalkeeper struggling to keep the score), the call went out for ‘next goal wins’. The Lads, sensing victory, launched a last bombardment but were repelled by the twin rocks of Ben ‘Edgar Davids’ Curson and the go-go gadget arms of ‘keeper Sutherden.

Renewed, the Dads assaulted the opposition goal with everything they had, forcing bodies, balls and buttocks to be thrown in the way by the exhausted Lads. And it was then, when the fire of the Dads seemed to have finally been extinguished that Pythagoras struck his cruellest blow.

Chambers, clearly desperate for a pint more than his soul was worth, allowed a harmless shot to bounce off two walls and into the path of a grateful, surprised and utterly clinical Roberts, who took revenge for all over-30s everywhere by gleefully burying the ball high into the gaping net.

7-6 to the Dads and cue the gloating. Until next time…

The fund management industry controls assets worth around $90 trillion worldwide. Deciding how to allocate this money is the task of a global industry that employs more than 50,000 people in the UK alone. Asset managers pride themselves on their ability to analyse their universe of potential investments, and for many it is this methodology or sector knowledge that separates them from the competition and secures their clients.

To communicate an investment strategy, fund managers use all manner of graphs and tables to illustrate performance and highlight the potential of their product but as Monday night’s edition of Newsnight (starting at 26 minutes) highlighted, our ability to represent complicated information is changing.

Presenter David Sillito uses examples such as the charismatic Hans Rosling’s lecture on population and life expectancy to illustrate the compelling nature of modern graphics.

The basic premise of the Newsnight feature is that as the quality and beauty of a presentation increases, so too does our likelihood to pay attention and retain the information.

There is clearly an opportunity for asset managers to use these kinds of graphics with clients and prospects, but also potentially with the media. The websites that serve the investment community have become more visually compelling, I’m thinking in particular of the Financial Times site and innovations such as Alphaville’s Tags graphic for example.

As sites like Citywire add new forms of content such as video, the media is working in partnership with fund managers to generate material. It is not hard to imagine a situation whereby fund mangers with graphics that shed new light on an investment trend could collaborate with media outlets to place their information and at the same time highlight their expertise in important media.

A few illustrations

The video graphic below shows the drop off in the number of flights during the peak of the volcanic ash chaos, but it could just as easily represent investment inflows to major financial markets.

Wheredoesmymoneygo.org looks at how the government is spending our taxes. A fixed income manager could produce something similar to highlight their beliefs about government spending policies and the outlook for the government’s bonds. An interactive version of the graphic below can be found on the website here.

For more on the potential of graphics see the wonderful – http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ – site.

HASTY EDIT – I published this and then realised that this was the 18th Web Curios. Web Curios is now of legal drinking age; should any of you fancy buying Web Curios a bottle of whisky (or meths of suitable vintage), please feel free. Thanks.

Another week down, another 7 days spent at work feeling like Sisyphus (if you’d prefer a visual representation of this, you can’t go wrong by clicking here). Yet again, it might be argued that I shouldn’t be writing this and should instead be knuckling down to some HARD GRAFT (for which phrase Google Images suggests this – proof positive that people who spend time on the internet have NO CONCEPT of what work actually means); those who hold that opinion, though, are ignoring the JOY that Web Curios brings to literally tens of webmongs across Soho. I am performing a public service, big bossman Richard Miller. Frankly I should be subsidised by the state – after all, there’s some extra cash knocking about these days.

Having said that, this is going to be the last Web Curios for a while as next Thursday I am going on HOLIDAY. Yes, I know that I have tried that before this year and failed spectacularly, but this time nothing can go wrong. I’m only going to Italy, for God’s sake *prays, fervently*. Before I embark upon my Roman holiday, though, have some things – oh, and for those of a sensitive disposition, please be assured that nothing in this week’s selection comes anywhere near to the creepiness of last week’s stuff. Which is a shame, frankly (there was a video of a Satanic mass, but I’m not quite sure how far I can test my employers’ patience at the moment). Enjoy, or don’t, but whatever you do DON’T HAVE NIGHTMARES.

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For anyone who was hanging out on the interwebs (or email) yesterday, you probably encountered at least one link to this story on TechCrunch:

One of the 33 photos used to "resign" according to a TechCrunch story yesterday

 Ah. But did she really? Read the rest of this entry »