welcome to optimism

tiger, tiger

Hemant, who made these tiger paintings, writes:

The story behind these paintings:

People in the office often ask me where to go in India. And I always recommend Ranthambore. It carries a powerful memory for me. And it's always good to hear back from people that they loved the place. Holly just came back and said how much she enjoyed Ranthambore.

1987
The trip to Ranthambore stays unforgettable in my memory. There was a Hotshot camera that we had. Point and click. And my sister pointed it at deer and held on like a professional photographer and when she clicked, the deer had hopped out of the frame.
Spotting bears is difficult. But we were lucky to spot two. Eating berries. I passed on the camera from behind to my Harvard returned uncle. He pointed the camera at the bears but did not click. He too was delusional about being a pro photographer and took his ambition out on that Hotshot.
I have a picture. But I can’t convince you that the two black dots you see in that are actually bears.
And then the tigers came along.
Two cubs crying for their mother. The mother hurrying to meet them.
And that is the image I carry in my mind.
And that is the image that is brutally killed every time I see the word ‘poaching’ in the newspapers.
It’s been 22 years since that day. And so many tigers have been killed mercilessly in the jungles of India.
I have read stories of how tigers are tortured before they die. I have read accounts of people who have seen poachers go about their business. I have heard of corruption and I have resigned myself to the fact that tigers will no longer roam our forests.
And slowly, painfully a memory is getting created in my mind.
The cubs calling out to their mother. And the mother being killed before she can reach the cubs.
I cannot shake off the imagined memory.

A year after we returned from the trip, there was a small clip in the newspaper. Three tigers poached in Ranthambore.

makeover

A lovely new W2O masthead (cheers, Ryan), a Twitter feed (yes, Russell, I know you suggested it about two years ago - we're part of the long tail), and in the spirit of optimism in these dark days of 'armageddon flu' and recession, with acknowledgement to the marvellous Ian Dury, some reasons to be cheerful:

Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly
Good golly Miss Molly and boats
Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet
Jump back in the alley and nanny goats

18-wheeler Scammels, Domenecker camels
All other mammals plus equal votes
Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willy
Being rather silly, and porridge oats

A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You're welcome, we can spare it - yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 - no electric shocks

The juice of the carrot, the smile of the parrot
A little drop of claret - anything that rocks
Elvis and Scotty, days when I ain't spotty,
Sitting on the potty - curing smallpox

Reasons to be cheerful part 3

blue monday

According to BBC news, today is 'blue monday'(12 inch mix), the most depressing day of the year, which makes me wonder if yesterday was 'gloomy sunday'.

Wikipedia says:

This date was published in a press release under the name of Cliff Arnall, at the time a tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, a Further Education centre attached to Cardiff University. The Guardian reported that the press release was delivered substantially pre-written to a number of academics by PR agency Porter Novelli, who offered them money to put their names to it. The Guardian later printed a statement from Cardiff University distancing themselves from Arnall, whom they described as a 'corporate whore'.

Dr Arnall says the date was calculated by using many factors, including: weather conditions, debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability to pay), time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of a need to take action. Writing about the calculation, The Guardian stated: ... the fact is that Cliff Arnall's equations ... fail even to make mathematical sense on their own terms.

So it would seem that the whole thing is a fabrication of mendacious marketing. And as such we can dismiss it and be as positive as we like here at Welcome to Optimism.

Despite this revelation, at Wieden + Kennedy's palatial East End offices, there has been concern about the whole 'blue monday' thing. David Stevens suggested that if anyone had the ‘Now That’s What I Call Music: Volume 1’ 25th anniversary album we should put it on the in-house radio now. This seemed to many like the perfect soundtrack for a miserable day. None more so, perhaps, than Kevin Chesters, who said:

From memory NTWICM 1 contained "Clouds across the moon" by the Rah Band. This was playing on the school bus at the exact when Tracy Davis dumped me aged 11.  I was pretty miserable as I recall. Crying into my Um Bongo.

Have  a nice day.

thought for the new year

Our creative director Tony D is off in Japan on sabbatical. But he's obviously been reading the excellent Let My People go Surfing over Christmas to judge from the note he dropped me. 

Tony says,

Thought I'd give you a quote / thought for the year ahead from Yvon Chouinard's book:

"The owners and managers of a business that wants to be around for the next hundred years had better love change. The most important mandate for a manager in a dynamic company is to instigate change.  In his book 'The Beak of the Finch' Jonathan Weiner talks about an insect that was found preserved in amber. The specimen, millions of years old, is identical in appearance to that species living today - with one big difference. The present-day insect had developed the ability to shed its legs and regenerate new ones after touching plants covered with pesticides.  Surprisingly, this ability has evolved just since the time of World War II, when pesticide use began.  The lesson to be learned is that evolution (change) doesn't happen without stress, and it can happen quickly."

He goes on to say:

"Just as doing risk sports will create stresses that lead to bettering of one's self, so should a company constantly stress itself in order to grow.  Our company has always done its best work whenever we've had a crisis.   I've never been so proud of our employees as in 1994, when the entire company was mobilized to change over from using traditional cotton to organically grown by 1996.  It was a crisis that led to writing down our philosophies.  When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one.  Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.
As Bob Dylan says, "He not busy being born is busy dying."
New employees coming into a company with a strong culture and values may think that they shouldn't rock the boat and shouldn't challenge the status quo.  On the contrary, while values should never change, every organization, business, government, or religion must be adaptive and resilient and constantly embrace new ideas and methods of operation."



-Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia.

This relates to the quote frequently ascribed to Charles Darwin (whose bicentennial is currently being celebrated by an exhibition at the Natural History Museum):

"It is not the strongest or most intelligent of the species that survive, but those that are most responsive to change."

Sounds like a good frame of mind in which to approach a year that will certainly be challenging and in which some species of business are already becoming extinct. The values and principles of W+K won't change but we'll certainly need to adapt to thrive in the times ahead.

a merry christmas to all our readers

 

It's about time to close down Welcome to Optimism for the year and make the customary valedictory remarks about 2008. Things are a bit frantic here as people depart for the holidays, so this will have to be brief.

2008 has not been an easy year for our industry.

 

At the start of the year no-one would have predicted that within 12 months high street banks would crash, Woolies and MFI would go bust (well, OK, you might have predicted Woolies) and General Motors would be on the brink of bankruptcy, along with the entire country of Iceland.

                       

Our clients have also faced an increasingly challenging climate and the the economic crisis has inevitably affected our business.       

                

However, despite these difficult conditions we have had a successful year in 2008.  That success is due to the talent, determination and hard work of our amazing people. Big thanks is due to all our wonderful, talented, committed and unusually attractive W+K people. 

 

What can we look forward to in the new year? Well, forecasts for 2009 suggest that the situation will become increasingly tough. The Guardian on December 4^th wrote, ‘The

UK

media sector will fare the worst of any developed country in 2009 with total advertising spend set to fall 6% year on year.’

 

We aren't at the bottom of this recession yet and we shouldn’t expect recovery within the next 12 months. Businesses will continue to go under, unemployment will rise and we can expect to see widespread redundancies and probably some closures and mergers in the advertising business. All this will mean that our hard-pressed clients will expect more from us – creatively, strategically and commercially.

 

2009 will be a hard year. But there is good news for us.                        

 

We have a robust, profitable, growing business. We have no debt and are independent - two great attributes right now

 

We are not a 'generic' agency; our strong reputation and distinctive positioning separate us from most of our competition.

                       

We have a roster of fantastic, healthy clients that other agencies would kill to get their hands on.

 

Here's to a merry christmas and, with some hard work and some luck, a prosperous new year.

 

Welcome to Optimism in 2009!

 

 

why, oh why?

Do I think I'm good enough? Well, I think my punctuation exceeds the required standard.
Is it only me who sees things like this and thinks that if this is the level of attention to detail they pay to their own publicity, then they're unlikely to be very careful with my plumbing?

philosophy

This is the wieden + kennedy philosophy (such as it is), expressed in visual terms. This poster was created by WK12 in Portland. (Click on the image to enlarge.) The guys just sent us one over, so we're going to frame it and hang it up somewhere.

still crazy after all these years?

Interview with Dan Wieden and David Kennedy, the founders of Wieden + Kennedy, recorded when they were in the UK for the 25th anniversary speech at D&AD last year. Part one of two.

merry xmas to all our readers

Revellers at last week's Client Xmas Party.

Time to close down the blog for the holidays. But before Welcome to Optimism dons its paper hat, loosens its belt and settles down in front of the TV with a few tinnies, let's look back over 2007 and revisit the objectives Wieden + Kennedy London set itself at the start of the year.

We had a bloody good 2007. But that doesn’t mean we’ve done everything we set out to do.

1. Continue to try to produce the best work of our lives, across all of our clients

This is always job number one. And we’ve done well this year at broadening the quality of what we do from a couple of clients to a broad range. We’ve launched new work for new clients of which we can be justifiably very proud. Plus we continued to pull in accolades for our work with long-standing clients. Arguably in 2007 we didn’t have a world-conquering blockbuster on the scale of ‘Cog’, but our portfolio has never been stronger across the board. This is the kind of objective where you can never really say ‘job done’, but we’ve given it a damn good try in 2007.

2. Have our best year yet for revenue.  Keep our costs in check.

We achieved the first of these and though we went WAY over budget on freelance costs, the second was otherwise under control. Even our big building project, the third floor extension, came in pretty much on target.

3. Win a big new account.  (Big revenue.  Big creative opportunity.)

We had an awesome year for new biz: Save the Children, Nokia flagship stores, Visa World Cup sponsorship, The Observer and of course the Nokia global account. In fact, we achieved our targets so resoundingly in the first half of the year that for the last few months we closed our doors to new business opportunities in order to focus on existing clients. This meant turning down some juicy opportunities but it was the right thing to do.

So, we achieved this objective and then some  - we couldn’t possibly have won bigger, or have won business with more potential to do exciting, innovative work.

4. Develop our international reach

With the wins of Visa and Nokia, both of which are global assignments that we’ll run from London, we did well on this. If you add to these our work internationally for Emeco, in Romania for Orange, and in China for Nokia flagship stores, we can reasonably claim to have become an agency of global scope based in the UK.

5. Fully embrace interactive media and turn W+K into the UK's first agency to offer genuinely integrated, creatively brilliant offline/online campaigns.

We invested in digital talent, bringing in a number of new people, and did a fair bit of digital work this year for Honda, Nike, Save the Children and Pizza Hut. We completely overhauled the Visit Wales website and created Emeco’s first e-commerce site. We built an interactive microsite for Cravendale and we created the interactive ‘Meet your City’ campaign for Nokia flagship stores. Rather than treating interactive as an add-on, we’ve approached these jobs in a completely integrated way from the outset.

Perhaps we couldn’t honestly claim that we’ve fully achieved this objective as expressed above but we’ve definitely fully embraced interactive media. And we’re making real progress on the second part of the goal. Our appointment to Nokia’s interactive work will see a continuing focus on this area next year.

6. Do more to share people with other W+K network offices

There are legal barriers to this (work permits and Visas and stuff) but we think it benefits the individuals involved and helps to improve shared culture and good working relationships round the network. So it’s a Good Thing. We managed to do this quite a lot this year, both bringing people into London for a spell from round the network, particularly on Nokia , and sending our people off to other offices. We definitely made significant progress on this objective, and W+K London felt much more connected to the wider world of Wieden as a result.

7. Do more good

Our aim is to do a bit more for our people and the community than just making adverts. This year we started working with Save the Children. We also introduced a new provision to allow staff to take time off to do charity work. And we got involved with a scheme that sponsors our people to visit charities and aid organisations in developing markets to consult on comms issues. Account Director Penny Brough spent a month in Brazil under this initiative. We connected with a local school to do creative days with the kids. We also helped our neighbours at Old Spitalfields Market to maintain business during the redevelopment of the market site, by developing a promotional campaign for Christmas shopping at the market.

And we did a lot of work on recycling and the like to reduce our environmental impact. Combined with offsetting (via a Chinese hydro power scheme,  and Indian wind power scheme and a German waste gas power project), the installation of solar panels on the roof and the change of our energy to supplies from renewable sources, we are now carbon-neutral.

8. Find ways of improving our efficiency without compromising on quality

The old question: does it always take a long time and a lot of pain to get to great work? Maybe, but we need to find ways of at least minimising the pain. To be honest, this year was probably as hard as ever in this respect, because we’ve been so busy. This is an area we need to continue to focus on, to ensure that we find ways of working that will accommodate the increased workload brought by growth, without causing log-jams / meltdown / nervous breakdowns. One key development here is our decision to merge the historically separate functions of broadcast, print and interactive production into one department responsible for the execution of all work.  We hired Rob Steiner in the new role of Director of Operations to head this up.

Rob’s appointment is a key step in our plan to deliver 360 degree integration of ATL and Interactive. But more than that, Rob will lead our search to find the people and partners who will enable W+K to execute ideas in new, diverse areas: product design, retail, content, brand creation and beyond. Our dream is to stretch the definition of what an agency can become. We want not only to create strong, provocative relationships between good companies and their customers; we want to create ideas and properties of our own that will influence culture and build our business. We want to create connections and partnerships with the most innovative and creative thinkers, doers and entrepreneurs around the world.

9. Create our own content and start to create new models for making money from our own content

Progress on this goal was disappointing as we focused on client and new biz demands for the majority of the year. We produced all sorts of new content for our clients, and for Honda in particular. But beyond some small bits and pieces we didn’t do much in the way of Wieden + Kennedy content. And we certainly didn’t make any money from it! However, we did hire Content Planner Andrew Stirk with specific responsibility to drive this area and, now that he’s on board, we expect to make bigger strides on this in 2008.

10. Dial up the crazy

Wieden + Kennedy has never been a conventional agency and we have no intention of becoming one. As we get older and bigger we need to make sure that we don't lose our edge. We need to keep our thinking, our people and our environment fresh, provocative and surprising. In Kim Papworth’s words, we want to stay ‘wrong side of the tracks’. Because the craziness is what generates the big creative leap and what makes this a stimulating, challenging, fun place to work. It can be difficult to remember this when you’re working as hard as we did this year. And maybe at times we were driven to follow the most direct route rather than to try the random divergent path that may lead to somewhere more interesting. But on the other hand, we continue to make decisions that we would never consider if our primary goal was profit. We hire ‘wrong’, we resist the easy option, we encourage debate, we try to ‘walk in stupid’ every day – no assumptions that we know the answers. And we have a variety of cultural initiatives to keep everyone connected and stimulated: Sophie Dollar’s film nights, Stu’s thirsty Thursdays, and of course a number of exceptionally debauched parties.

Still crazy (after all these years)? Let’s hope so.

Looking back over the year, we’ve done well against these objectives. We haven't nailed them all, but then we deliberately aimed high. We started the year at around 75 people and we’ll finish it at nearly 130 strong. That’s some rapid growth. We’ve done some great work along the way, we’ve continued with initiatives like WK Side and WK Circle and we’ve continued to push into new areas like designing the Regents Street Christmas lights, making short films for Honda, creating exhibition stands for Emeco, working on a documentary based around the interactive football world cup for EA and redesigning the interiors at Cardiff Airport for Visit Wales. All in all, 2007 has been our most successful year yet.

Here’s to an even bigger, better, bolder 2008.

Agent Lynch in action at the party.

And how about that horoscope we looked at back in January with predictions for W+K for 2007?

Here's what they said:

'You have been going through a speedy maturing process in the past couple of years and are finally emerging from the shade. 

'Your fortunes are moving through a phase of expansion... Your spirit of adventure and enterprise will be the main driving force in the improvement of your fortunes in the coming year. Make the most of your energy and creative powers to enhance your financial situation.

'Altogether it seems that you are heading for a time of increasing success and now feel more in control of your destiny. Start the year with ambition and it'll soon pay off handsomely.'

Amazingly accurate!

Merry Christmas and Happy Hogmanay to all our readers. See you in 2008 for more fun.

vocal sexists

Stuart writes:

What's in a name? Or rather, what's in two names?

How do creative teams get to be known as what they're known as? How is the order decided? What I mean is, for instance, why is Tony & Kim, never Kim & Tony?

Is it alphabetical? Nope. Is it what scans best? Maybe. But perhaps there's another reason.

At the risk of upsetting a few people, I would like to hypothesise that it is often the slightly more vocal of the pairing whose name comes first. So I give you the WK creative teams:

Tony & Kim

Ben & Matt

Sam & Frank

Darren & Lucy

Fabian & Ida

Ian & Sophie

Mandy & Sarah

My argument would be that each of the first names here is the slightly more vocal.

Yes there are exceptions (damn you Richard & Mark and Angus & Paul) but there seems to be a strong correlation between being first in the naming, and being a bit more vocal. Are the slightly more vocal ones slightly more vocal about deciding how their team is known?

There are some undecideds, of course. Some people call our new team Matt & Matt, but then others call them Matt & Matt.

And then there are teams where it's too close to call, in terms of who is the more vocal. Like our team who are called 'Dan and Ray' (well, those are their names). But here, perhaps there is a suggestion of a more worrying sub-clause in the name order rules.

Ray, you see, is actually a girl. Dan isn't. So, if teams can't decide who is the more vocal, then does the man automatically go first? Has Germaine Greer's life been wasted?

This is backed up in wider culture. You never hear any of the following:

Ginger and Fred

Jane and Tarzan

Eve and Adam

Juliet & Romeo

Judy and Richard

Judy and Punch

Mindy and Mork

Mildred and George

June and Terry

Gretel and Hansel (yes, I checked)

It wasn't Jill and Jack who went up the hill. Why? For rhyming purposes, or blatant sexism?

Even one of history's strongest ever women - Cleopatra - didn't get nomenclature promotion over Antony. True, it isn't called the A&V Museum, but that's probably just a typo that's stuck.

Why, why, why not Delilah and Samson? OK, it's Posh and Becks, but it's Becks who wears skirts more often. And let's face it, Torvill and Dean weren't kidding anyone.

The French are rather more enlightened. In French, chalk is feminine but cheese is masculine.

But this is careering way off the main question. How do creative teams get to be known as what they're known as?

For couples, the rule is clear. Who you knew first goes first. If you knew Mick Bailey (our Head of Creative Services) first, it's Mick and Julia. If you knew Julia Methold (our Head of TV) first, it's Julia and Mick.

Mums, bless 'em, overrule this rule. Mums rule the roost in the naming-order family, versus dads. Even for posh people who have mothers and fathers.

Maybe creative teams should conflate their names into one. Like Brad and Angelina becoming Brangelina. Fabida might work. Tokim might not.

Anyway, I guess it's time for me to put the words 'up' and 'shut' the other way round too.