lil wayne

Lil Wayne has just put out his new album - The Carter III. But in between his last album and this one, he has released hundreds of songs for free on various mix tapes out on the street, as part of what amount to a three year promotional campaign for this new album. All of this just built up the hype for the big new album with featuring lots of guests and full on productions.



The moral of the story is a) having the longer timeline paid off in the end and b) giving stuff away does not mean not lead to making a loss (for the record company or Wayne)

The Future of Planning at the AAAA

Two planning gurus - Domenico Vitale and Mark Earls are looking for input for a session they will be running at this year's AAAA Planning Conference.

They want to crowd-source what people would like to lose and keep from account planning. Go help them out and help us collectively figure out what this thing calld planning should be at this wiki.

random images

I think this could double as a good employee interview technique ...







Vegetables...be free

eunuch planning

Heather Lefevre has done the industry a big favor and completed another planning study. One stat stood for me in particular...

71% of planners have no kids

Ok, this may not be all together surprising: the are fewer senior positions in the industry and this correlates with age. And it means the industry can function with 76% of planners say they are stressed in their jobs but manage.

But the implication here is that there is an enormous talent drain - lots of people are leaving (I suspect) to find similar work with more control or even exploring different fields. This creates a to of risk, particularly for existing (mid to large size) agencies that don;t adapt to the new way of working.

(for another solution, see this )

launching to fail

There's a very interesting article published by David Vinjamuri, author of "Accidental Branding" , in AdAge the other week.

In addition to have a go at the way new products are researched and developed by many packaged good companies, he points out how entrepreneurs (the engine of the economy) actually do it - by trying lots of things and failing. this is one of my favorite quotes:

"I was sitting on the deck at Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson's Napa Valley house...I asked Erickson what was the single most valuable lesson he had learned in his 16 years at Clif Bar. He shook his head, saying: "I haven't gotten any better at knowing which new products will succeed and which will fail. The most important thing I've learned is how to launch products quickly and cheaply so I can afford to fail and still keep innovating."