A worryingly easy way to spend a lot of cash!

Great example of the benefits of integration as Gucci make online shopping easy-peasy here.

Something caught your eye on that Gucci ad? Found the site but struggling to find the exact trinket you think you saw? Simply select "ad campaign" and choose the relevant ad.

Behold! A pictorial overview of the key screen shots and (rather attractive) models parading clickable objet d'art! Give one a click and up pops a brief overview and close up. Just a few more clicks and you could be £11k down!

The horizontal slider could be a bit smoother, but if you're after a horsebit ring with 5 carats worth of brown diamond it's worth a look.

When does a silence become a radio silence?

I've been feeling a bit guilty for not contributing more to my blog of late; it's been about a week since my last entry. But given my (decreasing) scepticism to blogging, I'm still not sure how frequently you're meant to blog. I'm balanced between fear of failure and self-indulgence...

Of course, different blogs are updated at different times, for different reasons, caused by differing motivations, but this Catch 22 predicament I've managed to create for myself is a bit like a contact stratgy. Am I spamming the customer? Are they feeling loved enough? Do they find what we send them interesting? (Do I have any customers!?!)

Which is why making the brand/customer relationship two-way is so important. Unless the brand (or blog) gets adequate feedback (and shows sufficient interest to encourage more) you're never really going to know. The current trend for "creating conversations" seems painfully obvious in this light.

Doesn't really help my posting deliberation much though... Luckily Uncle Seth always has an interesting answer.

Either way, I think I need some loyal readers before I need to worry about p*ssing them off!

PS The trends are quite interesting as well

I have to admit that I'm a big fan of trendwatching.com. A large part of this maybe because I'm either too lazy or too narrow minded to explore the insights that they unearth myself, but another reason is, quite simply, they link to a lot of good stuff. All those random sites that show a new type of media that's never going to take off, a product that offers you a personalised niche in an already niche industry, and so on.

Just take a look at their current offering on an 'Expectant Economy'. Awesome. Make a personalised DVD with your child buddying up with Spiderman, buy shares in a Bulgarian basketball team, create your own chocolate portfolio, or join the elite Claseo fashion club - if you're not on the guest list you're not coming in. A plethora of examples on the world of cool, random, innovation, genius and downright weird.

But just to prove that our friends at trendwatching don't have a monopoly on all that's new and cool, here's my current favourite site - Adidas Football.

Anybody with any interest in football will get this (which is why you'd be on this area of the site in the first place I'd guess). People like football. People liken themselves to favourite footballers. People try and adopt the style/qualities/attributes of said footballers. People buy the boots that will help them emulate those qulaities.

Adidas nails this and add a bit of charm as well. Put simply, the tough tackling destruction machine Gerrard takes on the stylish delicate touch of Kaka with the 'youngun' Messi flitting around with tricks galore. All brought to life through a cartoon drawn by the players themselves. Click the player that looks/plays most like you, buy his boots. Quality.

Not sure if it's part of a trend yet though...

Saw this and thought of...

...'the blog'. Nice little youtube clip of Derren Brown playing games with the ad-men.

Subliminal Messaging

Would be interesting to see if this would work on the Blackberry yielding Account-Man.

Integrating the integrators

So, a flying start to my blog then...!

In fairness I've been spending the best part of the last week on part 2 of IDM's new Integrated Marketing Diploma. As a member of the "Integrated Fanclub" and with few marketing qualifications under my belt it seemed like a good fit, and in all honesty it's been pretty good so far (and where else could you get "cognitive dissonance", "attitudinal measurement" and "hermeunetics" in one sentence?).

However, its approach does raise a few questions. If my generation of marketing is part of a new wave of "Integration", can old school silo converts teach this field effectively? Can an experienced marketeer, even with knowledge across a number of areas, ever argue from a purely integrated perspective?

We're increasingly reminded that IMC is a strategy, a concept, an approach, and not simply a combination of media, yet, realistically, our mentoring has to come from those with experience limited to how different disciplines can be brought together effectively and evolved to form synergies. Schultz would not be a happy bunny.

Don't get me wrong, the speakers on the course have been exceptional and their points well constructed and biases diluted, but you can't help feeling that there will always be issues in "How to teach IMC" until the 'true integrators' and 'fully integrated brands' come through with their completely integrated experiences. This will take time, of course, and will become easier as IMC is introduced to companies from day one (and not through step by step changes).

In the meantime a lot of 'old school' stuff remains relevant, and as long as us 'younguns' stay fresh faced, challenging, and keep aiming for consumercentricity, the future's pretty exciting.

Until then, 4 P's (plus consumer!) anyone...

Biting the bullet...

OK, to be honest I've always been a bit of resistor when it comes to blogging. I liked reading other blogs out there, but always found the concept of my own a little self-indulgent and egotistical. Maybe I was just worried that nobody would read it! But anyway, in the spirit of New Year I've decided to bite the bullet and get cracking under the guise of it being vaguely work related!

This is meant to be a bit of a self-made library in all honesty. A handy tool to save anything interesting, relevant or just, well, cool that I might want to fish out at a later date (when cool may actually become relevant!). But, to anybody that stumbles across these ramblings, a little about myself...

My name's Simon Gregory, I'm from Liverpool and I work in London. I work for an integrated direct marketing/advertising agency (depending on who's asking) as a planner and have worked, in the majority, on Mercedes-Benz and 3 mobile (mostly DM and digital). I've been in the industry for around 2 years and am still at my first agency. This is getting cringesome already...

Well good blogs are meant to be succinct and useful so I'll sign off with my current sources of blogging inspiration (in case I need them later):

Seth's blog
Amelia Torode's blog
Fallon blog
Rory Sutherland
TomPeters!