Week Notes // 2nd October 2023
Having travelled very little for work in the wake of the pandemic, I find myself having to take two trips in two weeks. To Dublin last week and now to New York. I am writing this on the plane and will get to see the inside of a hotel room or a meeting room for the next two days before getting on a flight home on Wednesday morning.
Most of the week has been spent in preparation for the meeting I’m travelling for. So, notes on the things I’ve read, done or worked on are relatively scant. New Business pitches, of which advertising and communications agencies are especially fond, require a very specific type of commitment: they are intensive and all-encompassing. They often ask for a very collaborative type of work. Often with people you’re not used to working with every day. As a result, they are both extremely tiring and extremely rewarding. The opportunity to present your thinking to clients at the climax of the process is a strange sort of privilege.
I feel guilty that I have not been more excited about coming to New York. I am conscious that business travel is a benefit which many people may not get access to. The main gripe is that it is a long way to come not to see a country. Nor do my wife and son get to come with me. Although discussions about what New York is like and all that is interesting and important about the city with my son have prompted the resolution that we should come back soon as a family.
In spite of this, it’ll be good to meet people I’ve been talking to on the phone for weeks in person. Who will be taller, shorter… different? One of the more dislocating features of WFH during the pandemic was the reliance on Teams and Zoom for communication. People came into your home via the camera on your laptop and you into theirs, creating a special form of intimacy in the process. People spoke candidly about their challenges, their pressures, their losses. Especially during those first weeks and months when emotions were running high Sometimes with people they might have only just met. Finally meeting people in person was a strange kind of relief.
Airports remain one of my favourite places. When I was a child it was to watch the planes taking off and landing. As an adult is the variety and volume of people who go through these spaces which make them so appealing. Like Horse Racing and Hospitals, they are mostly indiscriminate; being used by a wide cross section of the population.
I see it as a sign of maturity that the airport bar does not attract my attention at 9am. I have never subscribed to the pleasures of the early morning pint. Instead, I opt for coffee, pastry and WH Smiths. As I purchase the October issue, I wonder how many copies of Monocle magazine are sold in airport departure lounges vs. ‘domestic’ retailers. The magazine is perfectly suited for that ‘liminal’ moment. The moment when you think about all the opportunity that might await you at your destination, when you think about where you might go next. When you’re thinking about the restaurants and shops you might visit. When you’re searching for interesting and intelligent perspectives to wow your colleagues at dinner with, normally on topics such as the state of architecture in school buildings across Europe or the use of Pasta in the production of super strong Concrete.
The advertising within the magazine offers some useful reminders, especially for media planners. On a call this week a colleague in the digital activation team was detailing how some of the people in his team don’t have the ability (yet) to build a story about how the media they are buying will be consumed. The formula they apply, often driven by programmatic or auction-based routes to market, is blunt. Which people, which assets and how many times. There is sometimes a problem that the advertising, the audience and the context in which they will consume the message will become untethered. Magazines are the opposite. The choice of title and the position within that title are central to the choice being made. Rolex, promoting their association with cinema, opt for a gatefold on the inside front cover of the issue. As cinematic and widescreen an experience as the channel can offer. Elsewhere, Rimowa have bought three consecutive right hand pages featuring Lewis Hamilton, Kylian Mbappé. and someone I am not familiar with. No one builds a legacy by standing still they say. What a superb marriage of brand, media, message and mindset.
In a data and technology driven world, there is a danger that we forget these skills. That we (media agencies) become obsessed more with plumbing than with architecture. By which I mean, knowing everything about how data will move from point A to point B and expert in improving those flows of information, whilst we have lose focus on the way communication will feel when it arrives in front of the audience: The materials we use to communicate, the moment that we will meet the audience and their mindset at that time, the messages that will sit around our communication.
New York. There are many more ‘temporary’ spaces than last time I was here.
