@markcridge \ muck and brass

New New Thing

2012-10-04T08:53:31+01:00

After a 9 month break I’ve decided to leave behind my life of leisure for a new roller coaster adventure of fun, inspiration and excitement with the good folks of BERG London.

If you have been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years then you might not already know that BERG are one of the world’s hottest design and tech consultancies and I’m really excited to be joining their team at such an important juncture.

I’ll be taking on a new role of Director of Consulting and my brief is to increase the number of potential collaborations with the most interesting clients and organisations.

BERG already command a hugely influential following within the global design and tech community (you can see some of their plaudits here at bergcloud.com) and the recent launch of Little Printer has created an almighty buzz online.

(If you haven’t already placed your pre-order you can do so here as the first batch are selling out fast!)

Apart from anything else it is just incredibly exciting for me to getting my hands dirty again directly helping clients make better products and services.

So much talk in the ad agency world over the past few years has been about ‘doing’, ‘making things’ and ‘innovating’, but I’ve always been slightly worried that this often siloed approach to innovation within agencies was more of a distraction from the business of marketing and in many cases would be pursued more as a new-business-loss-leader rather than fundamentally changing the way agencies work with clients.

That’s fundamentally why BERG holds such appeal. Rather than just talk about the importance of innovation BERG are out doing it for themselves, making not just their own products but creating whole new platforms and genres of connected consumer products - so in one sense I’ve gone straight to the source.

I’m only a few days in but it is already clear that there is much excitement to come over the next few years and it is great to be back in Shoreditch where I’ve spent most of my career to date and working with such a smart and committed bunch of people - plus Matt, Jack and Matt have made me very welcome already.

I’ll continue to volunteer for the Green Party on the side and have a few other things up my sleeve but for the moment BERG is very much my main bag and I’ll try to blog a bit more often here now that I’m back in the world of paid employment.

You can keep track of all things BERG related by signing up for their week notes at berglondon.com and I look forward to hearing all your comments.

Unstuck

2012-06-29T14:58:01+01:00

In January this year as some of you may know I chose to take a little time off after a 15 year stint in the digital industry, 12 years with glue and the past 6 years helping to shape the Isobar network.

It has been a wonderful opportunity to think and reflect on all that has been achieved and also for me to take some time to think about what I want to do next.

During this time I was able to indulge myself with my passion for politics by volunteering to help run the Green Party's election campaign for Mayor of London (we came a respectable 3rd place by the way) and also to spend more time with my young family.

To be involved in the formation of such a committed and passionate team as I have been at glue is a real honour and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to play a small part in building and growing a great and influential agency along with Seb Royce, Martin Bailie and others and latterly to help carve out the direction of the wonderful new Isobar network. I leave with an abundance of good friends and many happy memories.

Isobar has made great strides in the past couple of years together around the world but there is still plenty to do and there are many smart people who will continue to build a powerful creative network within Aegis.

I’m indebted to Mark Cranmer for his support, advice, good humour and leadership, he has been a true inspiration along with Jean Lin, Pedro Cabral, Nigel Sharrocks and Nigel Morris along with so many other talented leaders and colleagues.

With the London team in safe hands and the business going from strength to strength now is the right time for me to bow out and have a proper think about what I want to do next.

I’ll be taking a proper break away over the summer and will work out what to do with myself when I get back in September. As my thoughts unfold I’ll share some of them on this blog which has been rather neglected over the past few months.

As Peter Drucker said, ‘the best way to predict the future, is to create it’ and that’s exactly what I hope all of us choose to do.

Mark Cridge

ex-Global Managing Director, Isobar

Footprint

2011-08-23T16:40:02+01:00

I love fresh Orange Juice. The fresher the better. Whilst I don’t go as far as squeezing my own oranges every morning along with a warm croissant I can easily get through a carton a day, the smooth version of course not the one with the bits in it.

It has however been playing on my mind recently that shifting all that heavy liquid around the world in planes can’t be the smartest thing to do. I wasn’t worried about it as such, more a nagging itch at the back of my brain suggesting that something wasn’t quite right.

So when I was confronted with a big black footprint on the side of my last purchase it gave me a bit of a kick up the proverbial. There in unequivocal language I learned that each glass of my lovely orange nectar was producing around 400g of carbon emissions per serving. That’s at least a whopping 1.6kg per carton, more than it’s own weight in emissions every single time.

I don’t know about you but that sounds like a shockingly large amount, especially if at my current rate of consumption I’m kicking out about a third of a tonne of carbon a year just for a sweet treat with breakfast.

Of course I have other choices. The label helpfully pointed out that by moving to the ‘from concentrate juice’ I could reduce things down to more manageable 150g per serving. Let’s be honest though, it’s just not the same, too bitter and syrupy. Instead perhaps I should consider switching to the delights of pressed English Apple juice, freely available, just as tasty and surely not as heavy an impact. Or of course if I could show a little more willpower I could just drink a little bit less.

This time around to my modest shame after pausing for thought in the checkout queue I still went ahead and bought the fresh stuff. When faced with the same choice again in the future, I’m pretty sure I’ll select an alternative. The question is will I have the willpower to act?

Our imperative has moved from selling more stuff to more people, which was pretty much the lot of indiscriminate broadcast media, to selling more stuff to the right people through careful targeting and digital media. The challenge today is sell a lot less stuff to just the right people and that will involve a lot more than just providing a lower impact alternative further down the aisle.

I’d like nothing more than to believe that all we need to do is provide enough information to let people make the smarter choice, however from my own behaviour even when presented with the facts it is clear that consumer choice alone won’t be enough.

At some point we need to recognise that our industry does not play a passive role. At some point we need to make our own individual choices about which products we help to advertise. At some point we need to choose to sell a bit less.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

Still fun

2011-05-27T21:53:27+01:00

We’ve moved office recently. Quite a big move for us - all the way from sunny Shoreditch to a perch high above deepest adland. They say a change is as good as a rest, an opportunity to refresh and get your energy back and that has certainly been the case for us so far as we discover the strange new restaurants and cafes of ‘Upper Noho’

We moved the same week that the lovely chaps from Creative Social were hosting an evening entitled ‘The Internet Used to be Fun, What Happened?’ I had hoped to go along, unfortunately I got caught up in my usual diet of spreadsheets, strategy documents and forecasts – the irony was not lost on me.

So whilst I could not be there in person, it did at least cause me to stop and consider the proposition. This question obviously came served with a healthy dollop of sarcasm, but also a touch of melancholy, a pining for paradise lost.

As the internet has gone from the secret sauce on the side to the main course, the expectations of what it can deliver have rightfully increased and come to be respected. Those involved in producing it have adopted an air of increased professionalism and competency because frankly the stakes are undoubtedly higher than they ever have been.

More investment comes with more expectation of higher returns and more substantial impacts. Failure is less tolerated. Our desire to always be in Beta can become stifled by the need for things to work straight out of the box first time.

The search for people who can make this happen ensures that the competition for talent continues to be fiercely contested, which can put the handbrake on the pace of change as we scramble around trying to hold on to people rather than pushing forward.

A maverick attitude around digital can be harder to maintain, but whilst it may not be the Wild West anymore, there are still ample frontiers out there to be explored.

Being the centre of attention comes with disproportionate leverage, the ability to make things happen and attract investment. Rather than slow the march of digital progress this odd moment we are all in is likely to prove to have been a tipping point into a period of accelerated change, where we can actually get things done.

Ambitions are there to be achieved. Outcomes are there to be delivered.

The trick is to do all of this without losing our sense of humor along the way!

It’s incumbent on all of us now to not get bogged down in the complexities of making everything work together. Its time to get the Jesters hat back on, strike up a smile and start having fun again.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)

America twice

2011-04-09T16:20:02+01:00

I’ve been on the road a bit too much recently and my travels have taken me to America twice in the past month.

Sadly I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend the geek-fest that is SXSW, however I did manage two trips that partly made up for that missed opportunity. The first was to the West Coast to spend a few days visiting Facebook, the second to the East Coast where as part of the trip we visited the MIT Media Lab.
Both organizations use innovation to drive everything that they do. How they go about harnessing this creative spark is quite different in each case.

Facebook surprised me. It’s rare to find a company, especially one with such a high-profile that maintains such a clear and dedicated focus. What they tried to convince us was that the day Facebook starts to hire ad-agency creatives is the day they will have failed in their mission. Instead they harness the collective efforts of just over 2,000 people most of whom are engineers, in a process of iteration, experimentation and just plain trying things out. This effort is channeled towards improving and developing their platform rather than worrying about what ends up on the platform itself.

Their innovation was focused and purposeful. It has clear direction and well articulated goals.
MIT Media Lab on the other hand is much more freeform. The same level of dedication, intellectualism and culture of experimentation, but comfortable to leave the end result as a ‘what if?’ Experimentation is valued in its own right, as you might expect from an academic environment. Doing and making is valued above all else. Yet there is no embarrassment in talking about the potential for commercialisation of their ideas should that be possible.

Their process of innovation is the point of the exercise. Dispersed and open, used to find out the question rather than just provide an answer.

As agencies we often seek to place innovation on a pedestal. Innovation is the secret-sauce. Innovation is what makes the difference, what makes us stand out from the crowd. All ideas will benefit from a sprinkling of innovation pixie dust. In most cases how agencies harness innovation is in addition to what we do day-to-day.

In the case of Facebook and MIT, innovation is what they actually do. In order to maintain that focus and to ensure the innovation is actually effective they have to choose to not to do the other things. They both recognise that innovation can’t exist as a peripheral activity, its not there to make them look good or make up for banality elsewhere.

Innovation is wasted as a discrete little package, it thrives when baked-in to everything we do.

(A version of this post first appeared in Campaign Magazine.)