What Women Want
March 8th, 2010 Fran
International Women’s Day today.
Where to start? Anyone who’s been watching Mad Men knows women in our industry have come a long way (as Peggy Olson is learning). When I trained, the mantra of (male) creatives was ‘The consumer is not an idiot. She is your wife.” It was meant to be complimentary but seems, in retrospect, somewhat insulting.
Despite that only 1 in 4 FTSE board directors are female, which is leading the Government to talk about legislation to force big business to hire more women. But I wonder if the problem is not so much that there is still an old boy network or a glass ceiling. I wonder if it’s because a lot of women actually don’t want to work in that way at all.
According to the research published at the beginning of the decade by the IPA women in advertising were at least four times as likely to have reached a board position and five times as likely to be in an executive position when compared to the FTSE 100 companies. But despite that, the industry was losing talent.
The reason was not because there was a ceiling keeping them down but because they (and men of a certain age too) opt out once they have families. They didn’t want the pressure or lack of flexibility that comes with working in a very senior position.
So perhaps before legislating the government should find out what women really really want.
In my view it’s new, more flexible ways of working so that we can juggle work, home, family and keep doing it as we get older too. After all, despite the idea that this industry is a young person’s game, the things you get better at as you get older are exactly those which are needed as you get more senior – strategic thinking, talking to other senior people and nurturing people and talent.
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What works for the workers…
March 4th, 2010 Kayley
In the spirit of last month’s roundtable talk on social media, we held another one this month to discuss internal communications and the role digital can play in helping build staff awareness, engagement, enthusiasm and loyalty.
A handful of key (and very useful) ideas came of it but perhaps the most interesting identified the challenge of internal communications in the need to become a habit without becoming stale. Inconsistent messaging is almost as damaging as no messaging at all and battling the two-headed monster of Shrinking-Time-and-Attention-Span doesn’t help.
Internal comms teams, then, must create relevant, succinct and engaging communications for staff that are often so busy working hard they forget to eat lunch. So how do you get their attention and how do you keep it?
A few interesting case studies across a spectrum of approaches arose in our discussion. From Deloitte’s engaging Film Fest competition to a College’s mandatory internal landing page and all the intranets software and web apps in-between (Chatter, LinkedIn groups, MOSS, etc…). Some shared experiences with internal comms that didn’t work as result of information overload, irrelevance, disinterest and/or miscommunuciation (the most recent and public being Vodafone).
Looking at each case study, the good and the bad, it became clear that initiatives that are tailored to the needs of staff, management and, ultimately customer/client needs (rather than shoehorning in a fixed system) are the ones that find the most success; success measured by employee awareness, engagement and enthusiasm rather than impressions or policy memorisations.
What do you think good internal comms needs?
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Stand Up, Mrs. Gordon Brown!
March 3rd, 2010 Ben
I was lucky enough to get a ticket to last night’s debate discussing ‘2010: the first new media election?‘ (thanks again to Rosie Niven for the spare!)
At the end of the debate the audience decided eight to two that the big set piece TV debates (the first ever TV debates in 55 years of broadcasting featuring the leaders of the big three parties) will be more influential than ‘new media’ in the imminent 2010 General Election.
There were some very influential characters there – Nick Robinson (BBC Political Editor), Evan Davies (Today Programme), DJ Collins (Google), Professor Ivor Gaber, Matthew McGregor (Blue State – who ran Obama’s election IT) and new media representatives from Labour and the Conservatives – with a huge crowd enjoying the banter.
The heavy lift weapon of choice for the political parties is email. Blue State reckoned the main parties should spend 90% of their funding on email. Not Twitter (Nick Robinson described a lot of what is on Twitter as “self-important narcissistic tosh”). Email is how Obama mobilised his ‘base’. What the main broadcasters admitted was that whilst there is an obsession amongst journalists for Twitter and blogging it probably isn’t going to be so influential in the main campaign. What is vital to remember is that a general election is about 650 individual elections and new media can be a wonderful way to mobilise activists. New media – tools like Facebook and Twitter – is a brilliant way to create communities of interest.
Evan Davies elegantly summed up a widely shared view that it is incumbent on politicians to engage and entertain their audience. One of the most engaging moments in recent political memory is when Estelle Morris said she didn’t know the answer to a question on Question Time. She could not have given a more engaging answer.
Perhaps the most dangerous media in the election is the camera phone. All on the panel agreed that it is the off guard moments that politicians fear most. In today’s world a single slip can colour attitudes more than months of media artillery.
There were interesting asides. One person thought Photoshop is now very influential. How many people have seen the Conservatives campaign posters? And how many have seen the spoof, re-touched ones? Most of the of the audience had. Politicians will unsuccessfully try to use new media to bypass the broadcast media. Obama used new media to raise tens of millions of dollars. He spent nearly all of it on TV.
What resonated most was that Obama’s campaign manager called new media his ‘Field Goal’ weapon. A field goal in American Football is worth three points. Elections are won and lost on three percentage points. New media could therefore just swing the coming election. And the evidence? The most effective new media political campaigner right now is Sarah Brown. Her homespun, informal, family value led Tweets and Blogs targeting the alienated middle class are a national political phenomenon. She just might close the gap and then – who knows?
Note. Omobono is running a twitter initiative – @2010Election – to highlight what the main political parties are offering UK business and encourage discussion amongst businesses about the election.
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Communication is a service – not a cost.
March 2nd, 2010 Fran
Looking through the Marketing Society’s 50th Anniversary book ‘The Future of Marketing’, sponsored by Accenture. These words stood out particularly, from Ian Livingstone, CEO of BT: ‘From a customer point of view, irrelevant advertising is an imposition. Truly relevant advertising is a service.’ Too true Ian.
But I’d go one stage further than that. I’d actually say: Truly Relevant Service is Advertising, or at least ‘publicité’ as the French would have it. Businesses have always understood that the experience of the brand is as much to do with the people and the service as it is to do with the promotion. More so in many cases as B2B marketing budgets have always been smaller than desirable.
So, I’d like to see the Future of Marketing in B2B as one in which marketers get involved in service delivery, not just comms delivery. Oh, and I’d also like to see a major B2B brand talking about business audiences in the next edition of the Marketing Society book. But suspect I’ll have to wait 50 years for that.
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