Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Buy a skyscraper (get a free investment bank)
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Ouch. Bear Stearns was sold for c.$250m, whilst the building they are in is worth well over $1bn. I don’t normally write about economics, but this is starting to look enormous.
There are lots of blog comments that there’s more of this to come.
So I am invoking the sentiment of that brilliant philosopher Yogi Berra: It ain’t over ’til its over. And believe me, my friends, it ain’t nowhere near over.
Blogger Mark Anderson writes why he recently predicted just a quarter point reduction in interest rates:
Why did I make that bet? They’re running out of room, while the crisis has a way to go. They don’t dare spend all their powder on one big rate shot. Rather, Bernanke is looking for other ways (including his $200B fund of last week) to avoid deeper problems.
I told the group, in response to a question asked at the end, that, although not technically in a recession, the US was in fact in recession, and had been for awhile.
And on top of this, this is still the best primer I have seen on banking’s current woes.
Dove’s real beauty and Bill Hicks
Friday, October 26th, 2007
PSFK point to a remix of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign.
Their latest ad “Onslaught”, ends with the message “talk to your daughter…before the beauty industry does”. It’s part of a campaign that includes the Dove Self Esteem Fund, which “is designed to help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes”.
The irony here is that Unilever IS the beauty industry, as this remixed ad shows, mixing up the worthiness of the Dove campaign with the ads for Ax/Lynx - another brand owned by Unilever.
In the remix, the ad becomes slightly sinister. “Talk to your daughter - before the beauty industry does” sounds less like a concerned organisation with your best interests at heart and more like a threat - like a bully giving you a headstart.
Looking through the website of the “Campaign for Real Beauty”, there are global surveys on “beauty pressures” and “beauty ideals”, things you can do to help (including donating to Dove) but nowhere is there a mea culpa that Unilever, as a global FMCG company, might have played the tiniest role in creating this state of affairs.
If you are going to sell yourself on your values, then they had better be authentic. Otherwise, you leave yourself open to the criticism of branding and marketing that is encapsulated in following Bill Hicks segment (which is full of swearing).
“You know what Bill’s doing now - he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar - that’s a big market - Bill’s being very smart”
So is it genius campaigning? Is it an organisation at war with itself, fighting over its values? Is it the first step on a long road to a more responsible beauty industry? Or is it a cynical schtick designed to sell soap? It’s baffling.
Getting away with it
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
Man at conference from big international agency: “Facebook’s great. We use it for loads of our corporate communications. We market our events and our blogs through it. We have loads of groups on it. It’s the best way to communicate with the network around the world.”
Me: “So Facebook is almost as important as your intranet?”
MACFBIA: “Yes. Better in fact”
Me: “So how much would you pay for that? If they turned round and said they could see your firm was a massive business user of Facebook and said they were going to charge you £100k for enterprise class access.”
MACFBIA: “Oh, they could never do that. Think of the backlash. Their brand would really get trashed. It’s the sort of thing a web firm like that would get really hammered for. I can’t them getting away it.”
“Getting away with it”. This really surprised me. In what other situation would a multi-million pound business expect to get a big part of its communications infrastructure for free?
Ove Arup’s “Key Speech”
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
A recent New Yorker article profiled Ove Arup, the engineering firm. It referred to the ‘key speech’ given by Arup in 1970 that set out the values of the firm. I tracked it down and was struck by how contemporary most of it sounds nearly 40 years later.
For example, here’s a bit of the intro that suggests he was reading lots of Schumacher and Fuller when he wrote this:
There are two ways of looking at the work you do to earn a living:
One is the way propounded by the late Henry Ford: Work is a necessary evil, but modern technology will reduce it to a minimum. Your life is your leisure lived in your free time.The other is:
To make your work interesting and rewarding. You enjoy both your work and your leisure.
We opt uncompromisingly for the second way.There are also two ways of looking at the pursuit of happiness:
One is to go straight for the things you fancy without restraints, that is, without considering anybody else besides yourself.The other is:
to recognise that no man is an island, that our lives are inextricably mixed up with those of our fellow human beings, and that there can be no real happiness in isolation. Which leads to an attitude which would accord to others the rights claimed for oneself, which would accept certain moral or humanitarian restraints.
We, again, opt for the second way.
It’s worth a read, if only because forty years later Arup is a global firm that’s employee owned and working on some of the most interesting projects in the world. Download it from here.
Monocle
Friday, March 9th, 2007
The first edition of Monocle is out now - though availability seems a bit limited.
In its manifesto (can anything launch these days without one?) it promises to “focus on global affairs, business, culture, design and the best products on the market” and “be an oasis from celebrities and low production values”.
Founded by the team behind the original Wallpaper* magazine, it’s somewhere between a New Yorker for Europe and the Economist without the earnest, lecturing tone. It’s the best magazine I’ve picked up in ages.
First editions of Wallpaper now fetch over £1,000. Maybe it would be a good idea to buy a copy of Monocle to tuck away in a ziploc bag.
A happy customer
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
Good, reliable, cheap webhosting is pretty easy to find.
Good, reliable, cheap webhosting with excellent customer service is a rare thing indeed. (We had one supplier whose ‘lifetime hosting’ offer felt more like a sentence with no hope of parole). So if you’re looking for a webhost, I’d take a look at Orchard Hosting in the UK and mediatemple in the US. We’ve been moving sites and domains around over the last week or so and the service from both of these guys has been excellent.
Blogs are often quick to condemn bad service and slow to acknowledge good experiences. In a commodity market like hosting, happy customers can make all the difference.
Miswanting: Career planning with best guesses
Thursday, February 8th, 2007
Interesting article on this psychology blog about how bad people are at predicting what they want, especially when it comes to career choices:
So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we’ll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we’ll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can’t even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we’d like to be doing in twenty years?
Eames Office
Wednesday, October 19th, 2005
I’m obsessing over all the Eames stuff at the moment - more in terms of the way they ran their studio rather than the actual products, designs and events.
How would you describe them? Probably as ‘designers’, but that doesn’t really capture it.
They pursued things that interested them, pulling together ideas from lots of different disciplines. Though they worked for big firms and the government, they stayed independent. They had things they believed in that informed their work, they were playful and silly sometimes. They were good at self promotion and it sounds like the Eames Office was a great place to work.
There was a good documentary on them last night, though I think it’s the first time I’ve ever watched the Artsworld channel.
I’d love to read to a good biography of them, but can’t find one.
Walmart, Suburbia and Banks: Doomed
Monday, September 26th, 2005
A really interesting piece on industries that are doomed.
It’s not a new idea, but a nice summary of why traditional telephone companies, banks, the music industry, photography, estate agents, walmart and suburbia are will all be fundamentally changed in the next few years.
And nothing on that list - apart from photography - will have many people rushing to man the barricades in their defence.
In fact, it’s the opposite. Most people can’t wait for the market for estate agents to be fundamentally turned on its head.
Word of the day: Astroturfing
Monday, September 19th, 2005
To fake grassroots support in order to give the appearance of spontaneous public enthusiasm.
As in “They sent Jamie Cullum’s new CD to all the head girls in the country in order to astroturf his popularity among 15 year old girls” or “The crowds of happy families behind Tony Blair at the New Labour rally were astroturf provided by Millbank.”
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