First Impressions

Day 1 – Orientation

Fridge healthily stocked with beer (stocko and premium), wine, champagne, caffeine and juice. Nice.

Kitchen stocked with said beverages in warm state. Nice, I value foresight.

Day 1 – Parma

Quality parma within 100 metres of office (what’s with establishments that don’t consider ham to be an essential ingredient for a quality parma? All too common if you ask me).

Day 1 – Office Manager

Office Manager provides detailed explanation of a friend’s plight. In short, Friend attends Derby Day, meets boy, engages in intimate contact. Friend breaks out with rash around the mouth, visits doctor. Doctor requests Friend come in regarding results of tests. Friend arrives, finds Police are present. Doctor explains rash consistent ONLY with people who sleep with the dead. Police delve deeper. Friend assists and Police discover the boy works in a morgue. Police proceed to press charges...

Day 2 – Client (s)

I meet 7 of the 35 strong Marketing team. At this stage, only two have proved to be simian in nature.

Day 2 – 4:45pm

Senior Art Director approaches fridge, and politely enquires as to anyone’s interest in a beverage. There is no immediate response, so Senior Art Director states “You know I don’t mind drinking by myself”.

First impressions? I may just fit in here...

A clean desk

My last post from my current comfy surrounds – and no, I haven’t been given the ass.

To my current Agency, I leave a clean desk, in fact the cleanest it’s been since I arrived (except for several stubborn red wine stains) and hopefully a significant debt on the boss’s credit card after this evenings farewell.

Here’s to a fresh start on Monday – closer to Warsaw than Paris though. Stay tuned…

Online Player

Many Agencies claim an ‘integrated’ service offer. Call it ‘through-the-line’, ‘360 degree’ or another equally ephemeral phrase. For the non-marketing industry types, this simply means the Agency claims competence across a range of communication, branding and marketing disciplines. While most Agencies regularly preach that their clients should not try to be everything, to everyone – it would seem the reverse for our own businesses, and a great irony. You’d be quite right to brandish any one of these agencies as ‘a jack of all trades, and master of none’.

The Agency I work for is one such example. While we do indeed show expertise across a couple of industry sectors and communication mediums, it’s fair to say our online offering isn’t the strongest. Our expertise in the field was kindly pointed out to us recently by an Online Agency. They were trawling the web and checking out their competition when they stumbled across our holding page (our site is being redeveloped). They clicked on our contact link and sent us an email pointing out that our flash animated Agency name is spelt incorrectly. Nice, and what’s better, it’s been like that for about six months. So, not only is our holding page a poor advertisement for our online capabilities, it now extends to our Quality Assaurance.

Full credit however to the cheeky Online Agency BDM who then offered to pop over and provide us with a proposal to redevelop our site!

'sample noise' - taking the piss

Of the hundred’s of meetings I’ve sat through since opting to prostitute my soul in exchange for relatively easy-money, I can count on one hand how many meetings were of a productive nature. Given this low-strike rate, in preparing for a meeting I tend not to expect any significant ground will be made, but rather much old ground will be covered with no clear outcomes from which another futile meeting will be scheduled. That’s not to say I don’t approach meetings with a clear objective in mind. Experience has simply lowered my expectation of a result.

Consequently, when I'm not required to present, I find myself nodding my head at regular intervals to hide my inattentiveness (sometimes my absolute disinterest) during the long-winded, jargon-rich discussions I’m so often subjected to – generally by a consultant (or team thereof) that shares my client.

This week (as I nodded in all the appropriate places and thought of the nearing parma and two pints) I was rudely snapped-back into a discussion upon hearing ‘sample noise’ sprout from the mouth of a very senior researcher in response to a particularly challenging question.

“What’s this?” I thought, sounds like suspect jargon for ‘a poor-result we can’t explain’.

Sure enough, the term was picked-up and repeated a few minutes later when a junior researcher had his moment in the spotlight to read aloud some figures (which we all had on a hand-out in front of us) and offer us some primal interpretations. Yet again, ‘sample noise’ was used to dismiss an unexpected research result that couldn’t easily be explained. It was used in an outrageous context that suggested the negative result should be ignored, and we should assume for arguments sake that the result was positive.

Fuck me. Nothing like adding credibility to your profession. I’ll just bet our advertising budget on your findings then shall I?

What’s even scarier is the term’s contagious, so watch out – not long had it been introduced into the discourse before both the client Marketing Director and my Agency Head were freely tossing the term around almost as liberally as they were ‘consumer insight’.

After not much thought, it struck me that ‘sample noise’ is simply researcher-speak for “I’m too lazy to dig deeper into the data to find a logical answer", or it could be “I’m too stupid to do anything beyond data entry and collation”. Whatever the definition, the joke’s on the client, and the research company’s walked away with a bag full of cash.

If my definition doesn't make sense, just accept that it does – it’s just a bit of sample noise you shouldn't worry about.

Oh, and guess what? We're meeting again next week to go back over the research results.