New interesting post on MRM blog

from their guest blogger. Click here to read more

web.ro a threat to classical media?

There's a lot of talk these days about offline advertising budgets being moved to online for reasons of efficiency. It sounds like the heyday of online when all the money is being poured into display and special projects and so forth. Offline money going into online.
I did a small experiment on Twitter, asking what you could do with a typical offline budget online. Say you took the 700k / 6 weeks from offline and wanted to invest it in just online adv for the same amount of time. What could you do with 700 k (that is euro) in 6 weeks in web.ro?
Most of the replies [click on image to read some] seem to suggest that it would be an overwhelming amount for the Romanian web. Basically you'd takeover the Romanian web without any regard to targeting, be it demographic or otherwise.
I will ask my media people to help me out with this but my first instinct is also to say that a lot would be left over.
So maybe the reason people think offline money is going into online is really that the offline money is so little it can only pay for online these days [sad sad smile]

Writing frenzy

I am being asked to write a lot of stuff these days and, surprisingly enough, it is actually coming along well. One piece in particular I like is about the death of print and what we can do to prevent it. I hope I get the okay to place it here to in an English version, but until then let me brag about the last lines which go:
"In the end, when all else has failed, and the gesture of leafing through has been completely replaced by the gesture of browsing, let us hope that we will at least find it less comfortable to sleep with a laptop over our faces...."
:-)

Why I don't go out

because I spend every minute of my workdays interacting with people, from 8 am to 10 pm. and then I need time to think

Andrei Plesu explains it here

"Singurătatea e materia primă a reflexivităţii şi a construcţiei de sine. „Dumnezeu – s-a spus – e ceea ce fiecare ştie să facă cu propria sa singurătate”. Nu se poate trăi prin aglutinare, nu se poate supravieţui interior în condiţia unei sociabilităţi perpetue. Sfârşeşti, inevitabil, prin a-ţi pierde chipul, prin a deveni un ins statistic. Orice om are nevoie (chiar când nu-şi mai dă seama) de episodul nutritiv al unei confruntări solitare cu adâncul şi cu înaltul său, cu terorile sale, cu portretul său, cu unicitatea destinului său."
[solitude is the raw material of reflection and self building. God, it was sai, is what each one of us knows to do with his/her solitude. one cannot live through bonding, one cannot maintain one's inner self under in constant sociability. one eventually ends up losing one's true nature, becoming a static individual. any person needs (even when we don;t realize it anymore) a nourishing episode of confrontation with one's depths, heights, faces, unique destiny.

via Tolontan

Digital Marketing Forum

This year's DMF has a good line-up and I am going to be speaking about a campaign that my colleagues at MRM did for Microsoft. I never expected to EVER do a speech about Microsoft except maybe to say "by contrast, Microsoft...." but weirdly enough, in Romania this company is a pretty interesting case study of how a movement of projects, initiatives and courage managed to run under the all encompassing mother brand and make it glide along easier.

It's called "Repurposing the mammoth" and it will be minimally about what MRM did and a lot about how a feat of courage like accepting that campaign contributed to switching some perceptions.

Do you guys feel that in Romania Microsoft is moving along more nicely? Because maybe it's just me... and then I need to switch topics...

Great guest blogger

Not here but on MRM Worldwide's Romanian blog. His name is Martin and he is a digital planner from Spain and has some neato ideas so you should totally read his stuff here and here

Articles

The nice people at strategic.ro asked me to be their editorialist for a week or so and write about whatever I wanted.
I said, pompously, in an e-mail to them that I was going to write something quite interesting non-crisis, back to the good old times etc. Naturally what came out was AGAIN about the crisis but they were nice enough to publish it non the less.
It is a brief reflection on planning and how it may be affected by our pre-crisis frame of mind and you can read it all here (I also got permission from them to republish it in English here but it will take me some time to translate it so...bear with me)
As an aside, the website looks really cool

Awesome!

via Wired

Japanese people have a sense of humor

This is what happens in Japan when people pretend to shoot other people or slice them with samurai swords...



via (as always)

Want to work in advertising?

Be prepared for this

“Have you ever met people who work in advertising? They are mostly good people, overworked, but entirely separated from reality. If they saw the negative comments here they'd laugh at us and say that we "just don't get it". They come up with the clumsiest of ideas and shower accolades of "brilliance" upon each other when in truth most is rubbish”

from here

Crisis....again

I am part of the second group of people who think that there is a crisis and that we should do something about it (the first one, unless you already know, think the crisis is an artificial social and media construct and just ignoring it will make it go away). As such, I think, not as leisurely as I would like, about how to best coordinate the business that I run to keep it afloat and possibly profitable. Obviously having next to no managerial experience in times of crisis I might not always make the best decisions, but as it stands, I cannot afford to take on a consultant, do not have financial analysts to shower me with figures and have found no books on crises such as this one, to get inspiration from.
A while ago I met with an excellent friend of mine who works for the World Bank. I assumed he would be rather busy at this time of the year, what with the WB being asked in to advise on the crisis or provide funding or such. Well, no. he tells me there has been no attempt from the governing bodies to involve foreign institutions at all in dealing with this even though attempts have been made on the part of the WB to offer assistance. So I think of the people running this country, who are probably just like me – without experience, without the books, but who, by contrast, can benefit from the expertise of an institution who might know something more. And I ask myself why they don’t.
It is painfully obvious that this country is not going the right way for two reasons: thievery and stupidity. A lot of people do bad to get rich but more people do bad because they don’t know what to do and are afraid to ask (witness the recent Snake Island debacle – I mean, it’s crystal clear that someone was stealing but someone was really dumb). At this point it’s seriously fucked up to be stealing unless you’re starved but even more so to miss a good solution standing right in front of you.

APG initiatives

This year the APG in Romania is planning to put forward an interesting document to help the advertising industry with reviewing efficiency. This document, which is the brain child of Stefan Stroe and will be written in cooperation with a number of APG members, is a "how to" for the Effie competition happening every year in the ad industry. The work is aimed at unveiling the most common "tricks" in writing a brief and enabling both writers of briefs and judges of briefs to get a better idea of what a correct and persuasive brief is.
The first draft of the document is being finished this weekend and there will be a public workgroup in the coming two weeks to get input from any planner or person involved with brief writing interested in joining. I will come back with details about this soon.
APG is also planning to put together the first Romanian Battle of Big Thinking so anyone interested n helping with that is welcome to pitch in ideas.
Finally, we are looking for some smart and savvy student of communications to help us out with logistics and keeping on schedule. We cannot really pay anything at this point but you will get to hang out with planners, plan meetings, contribute to texts and manage a website - which all are good things to have in your resume.
For interested parties you know the e-mail ...