Now you may be able to help.  Because apparently the key when you’re looking for a change is to spend as much time as possible doing the things you’re good at. There’s some theory of inter-connectedness that has it that by focussing on doing specific things you create the opportunity to do more of those things (which I know sounds uncomfortably like a theory Deepak Chopra might espouse, but then someone I follow did retweet something of his the other day and that new-age stuff is virulent).

I find this all rather difficult, because to do lots of what you’re good at, you have to be comfortable claiming to be good at something. And I’m very uncomfortable claiming to be good at anything. Not just mildly uncomfortable, either. I find it properly, kidney-punchingly, uncomfortable, like the time I bumped into my client as he exited the ‘adult’ section of the video store. (True story. Hi, Hugh.)

So with a deep breath and an apology for being so hideously conceited, I am good at a couple of things and I’m hoping you might be able to help me do more of them.

I’m good at public speaking.  Apparently being called on to speak in public is most people’s greatest fear.  They fear it more than spiders, more than flying, more than heights. More than dying, even. But not me. I love public speaking. In fact I’m never happier than when speaking to a group of people, ideally in a very high place on the subject of spiders. Because I know no fear.

(That’s not true. I fear the Lace Monitor lizard, pictured below.  I once encountered one when running in Noosa National Park. I rounded a corner and it was standing in the middle of the track, languidly masticating.  Locals tried to tell me that Monitor Lizards are vegetarian.  Bollocks they are. They look vegetarian like Demi Moore looks 48.)

So, if you find yourself in need of someone to speak publicly, I’m your guy. I can talk about pretty much anything.  Marketing and advertising stuff, obviously, and spiders. But I’ll give any subject a go. (As evidence, I once gave a speech on what Carlos Spencer can teach us about effective corporate culture.)

I’m also good at writing. That said, I only have one way of writing. I always sound like me – a middle-class, slightly-pretentious, faux-intellectual, anglophile with a fondness for parentheses. That generally doesn’t work too badly for advertising and marketing stuff because, let’s be honest, a decent chunk of that audience is middle-class, slightly-pretentious, faux-intellectual anglophiles. So if you want something written in that voice, I’m your man.

On that subject, I have massive admiration for people who can write in different voices. I have a friend who used to write the letters that American Express sent to its high value customers as well as the replies to the little girls who wrote to tell Barbie that they hated their brothers and wanted to swap them for puppies. (True story. Hi, Andy.)

So there you have it. If you need something written, or you need something spoken, I’m your guy.  Just let me know.

The prevailing view is that the IRB favours the larger unions that deliver the revenue, while undermining the smaller unions that require the investment.

I’m not sure I agree that this is true, and I also think there’s a more alarming conclusion that can be drawn. Perhaps the real issue is that the IRB has more concern for the rules of the event than it does for the rules of the game.

Think about it.  Two of the IRB’s biggest calls in relation to this event have been to fine a player for wearing an incorrect mouthguard and to insist that a group of commentators be referred to by their first names, not by their nicknames. Remember that?  That was when the IRB insisted that TJ, Nisbo, Kamo and Coops must only be referred to as Tony, Grant, Ian and Matthew while commentating during the Rugby World Cup.

This is simply the IRB playing to its strengths.  Because it certainly appears from the outside that the key strength of the IRB is officious administration.

I imagine the IRB has a very large (and very happy) team of people responsible for developing and communicating guidelines to which all participating RWC teams must adhere.  (For the 2003 event this document ran to 199 pages, and it’s difficult to imagine it’s had much of an edit.)

You can bet that the detailed rules governing approved mouthguards were covered in these guidelines and that Samoa received them.  So from the IRB’s perspective the rules of the event were communicated and it’s clear a player broke them. So that’ll be $10,000.

But contrast that with the two England coaching staff who were caught illegally changing the ball prior to conversion attempts in the game against Romania.  There’s equally no question that rules were broken.  The RFU admitted this as part of their investigation of the incident that it shared with the IRB.  But England’s punishment for breaking the rules?  The two coaches were banned from the touchline for their pool match against Scotland. No fine. No points docked. No meaningful censure at all.

So the simple conclusion is that the IRB has one rule for rich, potential tournament winner England and another for struggling, probable early loser Samoa.

But I think that’s the wrong comparison. This isn’t about rich vs poor, Six Nations vs Pacific Nations, potential winner vs honest trier. All it shows is that the IRB is more concerned with the rules of its event than it is with the rules of the game.

England wasn’t fined because it didn’t break the IRB’s rules. Samoa was fined because it did. And unfortunately in the eyes of the IRB, that’s a far greater infraction.

The earthquake defined Napier – February 3rd, 1931 became its most infamous day, and the necessary rebuilding made Napier world famous for its Art Deco architecture. (It always struck me as cruelly ironic that a city that fell to the ground became famous for its buildings.)

I remember reading the story of a survivor, recorded, as I remember it, in a newspaper supplement commemorating an anniversary of the earthquake. I was in my early teens when I read it, about the age she had been when the earthquake struck. She described the terror of seeing buildings fall, the loneliness of standing in a school field wondering, the guilt of being alive.

But what she remembered most were friends, now 50 odd years dead, but old enough then to have been looking forward. She talked about friends who wanted to be builders, to enter the church, to be married, to sail, to keep books. Friends who wanted to see Paris, see a musical, see the All Blacks play. Her sadness, she said, was that it was those plans that were lost.

Like most people I’ve spent today feeling pretty helpless. You want to help, but seriously, what can you do? I’d give blood but the Blood Service says they have enough of that. I’ve given money, and I guess there can’t ever be enough of that. But at a practical level you can’t help but feel like you’re not doing, not giving, anything of consequence.

So I’m thinking about what a Napier earthquake survivor said. So much was lost in 1931, but it was the lost opportunity that still pained her 50 years later.

And that’s what you can give. Give a commitment to doing something big, to not losing your opportunity. What’s the one thing you know you desperately want to do? If you’re honest, you know what it is. Everyone does. On a summer Sunday afternoon, just before you drift into an unplanned nap, what’s the last thing you think of? The place you want to go, the song you want to write, the job you know you should be doing, the race you should have run? You know what it is. So do that.

Please send money. Please give blood when it’s needed. Please make beds available. But please do something with your life. That’s something of consequence you can do.

It was a nice surprise to find that someone I’d never met, toiling for Wolff Olins (I think) in the UK, found a post interesting.

The internet. It’s a crazy old place.

I want one of these quite desperately.  From Dunhill, it’s a leather notebook cover in the style of a mailing envelope into which you can have your own address details pressed (image courtesy of Acquire).

These images are from a series of drawings by Ulrich Schroder for Elle Spain in which fashion designers are re-imagined as Disney characters.

In this Oooms birdhouse a solar panel in the roof charges a battery that illuminates the landing stick at the front of the house, attracting bugs. So whenever the bird hears a buzz it just leans out and dinner’s there. It’s just like Domino’s.

Yesterday Tourism Australia launched its new campaign line – ‘There’s nothing like Australia’.

Tourism New Zealand grabbed the Twitter profile @NothinglikeAus,

I wish I’d thought of that.

So if you had a subscription, would you mind please signing up again? (The button’s over there on the right.) If you’ve never had a subscription, try it now. (That’s the button, just there, on the right.)

Thanks.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

I really like this idea as a way of thinking about what we do.

I think context is interesting for us in two ways. Context should play a much more important role in how we understand consumer behaviour and the relationship people have with the things we advertise. And context should also play a much bigger role when we plan the how the work we produce is most effectively experienced.

I’ve never been able to articulate it very well, but I think everyone who works in the industry is conscious of the artificial, at-least-one-step-removed nature of what we do and how we do it. We often talk with a degree of self-awareness about the artificial nature of advertising agencies, and we know that as a sub-species we advertising people are very different (rather privileged, certainly sheltered) from the world-at-large, the audience for whom we are working.

We also often note that how we learn about the things we advertise is a bit contrived, as opposed to the way that ‘real’ people relate to them. We might use a new soap, eat a new bread or drive a new car with the genuine intention of learning about it so that we can better promote it, but by necessity we do it in a slightly artificial way, actively learning about it, rather than passively experiencing it. (I don’t say this as a criticism, because by definition our experience is different.)

I think we also see the same with research, where we conduct focus groups with the genuine goal of learning more about people, but in a very artificial way. We most often put people in a sterile, neutral environment and ask them to talk and explain, rather than observing ‘real’ behaviour in its genuine context. It’s like animals in zoos, or golfers in driving ranges – it approximates reality, but it just can never be the same and is therefore not as illuminating.

I think this is a real limitation because nothing is experienced devoid of context – the room makes a big difference to the chair, just as the road makes a big difference to the car.

Then there’s the context that media delivers to an execution that I think we need to place much more focus on. (I’ve written about this before.) And I really like the analogy with a room in a house as a way of thinking about it.

You can design a room in isolation. You can have a very specific brief for a living area – natural light, hardy surfaces for kids to crash into, muted colours for relaxation, ample wall space to display art etc. And you can do a great job of meeting this brief without giving any thought to the remainder of the house. But at some point you have to open the door and let the room function as part of a greater whole. And while the room might still function really well, it may be that when the rest of the house is considered you find it could be improved slightly to work more cohesively with the whole – more aesthetically consistent, easier flow from room to room. It might only be 10% better, but that will still be 10% improvement based on thinking about the room in its bigger context.

And that’s exactly what I think we miss when we separate creative and media thinking. We’re effectively designing rooms and then looking for houses to put them in.

This certainly doesn’t mean we get bad ads. We just get ads that potentially aren’t 10% more effective. Which when you’re dealing with the fine line that separates OK from truly effective, is actually a big margin and a huge sacrifice.