I dream of data dumps!

 

                                                                        Image: Ideogram

There must be an unwritten rule that, one day, you’ll look back fondly on things that annoyed you when they were ubiquitous. BoneyM, Wimpy, Pixie Boots, Poodle Perms, Malibu, Wham! 

And so it is with the world of work. I used to dread those Zip-folders containing 20 or more 100-page pdfs at the start of a strategy project. The ones that landed with a virtual thud in your in-box and a chirpy message from a junior: “you might find these interesting as background to our project.” Sub-text: I haven’t read them, neither has my boss, but we’re expecting you to read, understand, digest and come back to us asap with a brilliant inisghtful Analysis and Way Forward.

I never thought I’d say “those were the days” when it came to the delightfully-named Data Dump. But, today, the Dump is as dead as a Dodo. Because you receive the whole lot (and more) pre-chewed, semi-digested and regurgitated as Workslop. As the HBR article says, Workslop transfers the effort from creator to receiver. I can vouch for this. In the last year, it’s happened a few times. And I’ve had the rather frustrating task of swilling through the Workslop, trying to make sense of it, going back in many cases to original sources (if available), checking and reading afresh to bring my experience and perspective to the case.

It’s a waste of my time, quite frankly, and worse still, it makes me feel resentful. That my modus switches from exploratory, making connections and leaps of insight/creativity to critical and nit-picking apart, like the Head Teacher marking work. 

This website would be funny if it wasn’t so painfully close to the bone. 

The mantra today (which I’m sick of hearing as so many don’t seem to practice what they preach) is “human-first, humans empowered/turbo-charged by AI”. Substack and LinkedIn are riddled with various proclaimations in various degrees of pomposity. “The Great UnPlug!” “Being human is an act of rebellion!” General whingeing about loss of “voice.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock. As they say. Are you surprised? From politicians upwards, people are lazy and don’t want to take responsibility. Tick things off rather than do them well. Get it done not get it right. (As in “Get Brexit Done.”)

As for me, I’m not joining in. What started with models and templates and frameworks to find out what’s at the heart of a brand now continues with AI. I use it here and there, of course. But, by and large, I stick with my internot methods. The best test of any brand work I do is this: 

    - is the brand identity (in whatever format) original and unique to that brand?

    - is they way I’m expressing it to my client something only I could have created? Like this, but with         my own stamp on it?

But, in the future, will I be dreaming of Workslop? I wouldn’t count it out.    

RETROWURST: Brand consultancies March 2007

This month’s Retrowurst is less about brands and markets and more about those that earn their living through understanding what brands are, how they work and helping helping them to grow. In March 2007, I examined Germany’s brand consultancy agencies - and came to the conclusion that the choice was more limited than in the English-speaking world. 

Eighteen years is a long time in the world of brands and marketing. 2007 was pre- Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow (2010) and Les Binet and Peter Field’s The long and the short of it (2013). I also note that the only business-orientated social media network mentioned was Xing. LinkedIn was launched in 2003, but in 2007, it would only have attracted English speakers working internationally.

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My Extrawurst this month is inspired by my recent work with a UK-based International Brand Consultancy which left me wondering why this particular market is so under-developed in Germany.

 

My last month seems to have been one workshop after another and, interestingly, it has given me an opportunity to muse on the German way of doing things and on the UK (or perhaps I should say International) way. This led me to wondering why the market in Germany for Brand and Innovation Consultancy is so underdeveloped, so I have had a quick look into who is there, what they do and a few reasons for why, in my opinion, they are not doing it better.

 

The first point is that there is no lack of companies and individuals in Germany who set themselves up as some sort of Brand Consultant. I suppose that I belong to this motley bunch as well! If one starts with doing a Google search, on something like Markenberatung (Brand Consultancy), there are pages and pages of links. In addition, there are whole networking websites such as www.marketing-boerse.de or www.xing.com  where you can seek out and contact companies and experts in whatever field of marketing or branding you fancy.

 

Most of the companies that come top of the list in the Google search are what I would call “old-school brand management consultants”. Typical of these is www.brandmeyer-markenberatung.de (which you can look at in English) which is full of process and promise to pinpoint precisely what profit each element of your marketing mix will bring. The idea of “brand core analysis- or whatever else they may be called (Sic.)” is heavily pooh-poohed as being fanciful, flakey and having no connection with commercial reality.

 

In a similar vein, but dry and intellectual rather than aggressive and dismissive is www.taikn.de . This is a website that I don’t think you can read in English but be thankful. A little better are www.esch-brand.com “The Brand Consultants” who appear to be a husband-and-wife combo with more academic qualifications than you could shake a stick at. They offer all the usual fare of Mission, Visions, Positionings and Architecture and make big of their academic connections to the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. However, despite their intellectual posturing, the site is loaded with marketing clichés of the “Win-Win” or “Whole is more than the sum of its parts” type.

 

Another category of Brand Consultancies is P.R, advertising, market research or media agencies who obviously want to add a bit of added value and substance to their offering and thus add a bit of Brand Consultancy to their menu. For example, www.k-mb.de, Kamps Markenberatung or www.brandaide.de . 

 

The Planning or Strategy part of an advertising or communications agency may also set themselves up as an independent Brand Consultancy, taking on their own clients as well as those of the main agency. A good example is Publicis-Sasserath www.markenfreunde.de who offer consultancy to clients outside the Publicis stable via their own tools and methods, such as the MarkenWesen. The question here, though, must always be: how independent are they really? There are other Brand Consultancy Agencies, who appear to be independent but on closer inspection, they are part of one of the giant communications networks. One example is www.economia.de , which offers trend-watching, innovation and new product development in addition to brand consultancy but appears to be part of BBDO. Another is www.21twentyone.com who promise to “make your brand an everyday hero” but who seem to be something to do with Carat.

 

The final category is Brand Consultancies who position themselves more on the innovation and creativity side of the spectrum but who are independent of major communications networks. These seem to be rather few and far between, but I have managed to find a couple of examples. First up is Dr Krüger & Equity, www.equity.de who formed as the first Strategic Planning Agency in Germany in 1995. They position themselves as “Creativity based on Information”. Another example is Diffferent, www.diffferent.de who also offer a combination of creative spirit and analytical expertise. Diffferent take on strategy for brands and communication, innovation and product and brand development.

 

Getting back to my differing experiences with the International and the German workshops, I suppose I can sum it up by saying that the International camp centres more around a way of thinking where a number of avenues are pursued in parallel, where we have to move out of comfort zones and where we must have faith that things will fall into place. The German experience was far more about following a linear, deductive process (“when we have got the answer to this, we can move on to the question for that”) with far more of a feeling of (false?) security that everything would be approached “step by step”. Maybe it is my UK training and upbringing, but I found the UK/International approach preferable in that it seems to lead to a number of possibilities rather than a definitive solution to one problem. 

 

While it is easy to dismiss the German way of doing Workshops as rigid and German Brand Consultancies as being inferior to ours, it did get me thinking about the why and wherefore and what we can do about it, especially if we are working with clients who are from a predominantly German culture. I think it is true to say that Germans are very reliant on structures and definitions and dislike ambiguity. This does not make their way of thinking inferior to ours, only different. After all, they have some pretty strong brands, too! I was reminded of a recent personal battle I have had here with the Finanzamt (or Tax Office) about my status. While I have argued that I am a professional freelancer, they want me registered as a “trade”. While I initially was more concerned about the tax implications, it became a matter of professional pride about what I do. My mistake was to call myself a Werbeberater (Advertising Consultant) instead of an Unternehmungsberater (Management Consultant). Now, these were the only two job descriptions in the Finanzamt’sapproved list (compiled in 1974, I have found out) that came anywhere near to Strategic Planner. Once I tried to argue that I was a Management Consultant with specialization in Brands and Marketing and not someone who advises the local nail studio on how the layout of their flyer should be, the Finanzamt demanded that I produced evidence that I had appropriate qualifications, that is, a Business Studies degree. To cut a long story short, I only achieved my desired status after much argumentation from my husband, who happens to be a German lawyer!

 

This little story sort of illustrates the problem about the fixed circle of ideas: in Germany, you can only set yourself up as a Brand Consultant if you have the relevant qualification. Although I do not have a German degree in Business Studies, I know plenty of people who have and the sort of stuff you learn there is not the stuff of creative innovation. And if you have studied something else, maybe rather more “academic”, there is a sense of “selling out” if you go into commerce. There is a distinct feeling of distaste in mixing the academic and the commercial. If you should go into qualitative research after studying Psychology, for example, you only do this on the grounds that everything is taken very earnestly and seriously. You will stress your qualifications on your business card and website and write lots of learned books about the state of the German psyche: “pop psychology” will have no place in your offer.

 

I think that there are two main points to this Extrawurst: firstly, that there is a real need for good Brand Innovation Consultancies here and secondly, that maybe we should have a good think about how we can really make use of people’s creative and thinking skills in a way that doesn’t alarm them too much when we’re working with predominantly German clients.

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There are a lot more players in the Brand Consultancy market in Germany these days. I guess that, as Account Planning in German ad agencies reached its critical mass a lot later than in the UK, it took a while for the idea and principles of Brand Strategy to take root. I came to Germany in 1996 to develop a fledgling Planning Department at Saatchi & Saatchi. At that time, people looked to marketing people in organisations such as P&G as the brand experts, rather than anyone within an ad agency. 

Many of the agencies I mentioned in 2007, particularly those that were offshoots of a communications agency network have bitten the dust. But most of the “pure” brand consultancies are still going strong. And although these have relished the rise of performance marketing with theit own Customer Journey models and growth flywheels, I’m pleased to see more acceptance of “fluffier” ideas about the nature of brands, too. In other words, that creating and growing brands is as much art as science. 

There’s a lot more choice on the market, from one-(wo)man bands to sizeable agencies, from the academic and learned to the design-thinky and innovative. And it’s good to see plenty of formal and informal networks of brand strategists as well the sharing of useful stuff on LinkedIn and beyond. 

Will the brand consultancies all have been gobbled up by AI by the end of the decade? I’m inclined to think not. In the end, you can have all the synthetic respondents and data you want, thousands of AI-generated concepts, research summaries at the touch of a button - but none of this will replace human insight.

   

LinkedOut

 A German network pal of mine recently asked what gets people’s goat about LinkedIn, for a talk he was preparing. Although he called it a rant. 

Replies (in no particular order) included: toxic positivity and enthusiasm, humblebrags, Simon Sinek, “Great Leaders do ....”, banal everyday experiences dressed up as profound insights “My cat was sick in the kitchen today. Here’s what I learned”, or once-in-a-lifetime experiences dressed down as business tricks “I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend - here’s what it taught me about B2B sales”, being scammed - yes, you ghastly creatures that want your grubby hands on my pension, woe-is-me victim stories, self-righteous virtue-signalling posturing, AI-generated and AI-stolen bullshit content, a general lack of lightness all around ...

Phew. I recognised most of it, along with the cultish nature of the site as described here by Coco Khan. She bemoans that the site now has its own language - no surprises there as it’s all prompts and AI. It takes a bit of effort, but I refuse to sound like a 5-year old at a party with a bouncy castle and a clown ("super-excited and thrilled!”), to “reach out”, to blab on about authenticity and vulnerability or read posts that hundreds or thousands have already liked.

What made me sad was Coco’s description of her friend whose experience is rich and diverse, yet doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes of LinkedIn. Know the feeling. And she puts it well when she says: “It’s shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t.” 

I am not a brand, I am a free woman. Or something. 

But, as a freelancer I’m stuck with it. Sort of at its mercy.

I’ll play the game up to a point. But I’m happy to be LinkedOut when it comes to real life.

My German pal, who’s smarter than me with this sort of stuff advised doing some proactive culling to get the algorithm working more in my direction. And it was strangely satisfying.

The Last Campaign

 

I’ve been reading Campaign for more years than the 30 on this anniversary issue from 1998. My  introduction to the British ad industry’s rag was in my first job, working in the market research department of Spillers Foods. 

The trade magazines were divvied up amongst the market research department to scour for articles of interest. The most senior and glamorous of us got Campaign, the middle-ranking execs got Marketing and Marketing Week, and yours truly, the trainee, got The Grocer. 

I loved Campaign - it presented a fabulous world of creativity, eccentricity, wit and wisdom that I couldn’t get enough of.

Once I started working at Saatchi, the magazine was still read avidly and woe-betide anyone that snatched the Group Account Director’s copy before they’d had a chance to look at it.

I’ve had a subscription to Campaign for the 20 years I’ve been freelancing. While it’s been useful to keep in touch with the UK ad scene, I have to say that my interest has waned. Concurrently, the price of the thing has rocketed, even though it has gone 100% digital, which should save costs, by my logic.

From 2021 to last year, the price of my subscription rocketed +172%, and a further price hike of over 50% came this year. 

Campaign still has a few good articles and thought pieces - and I tend to then look up the authors and stalk, sorry, follow them on LinkedIn. But I’m afraid much of it falls into the Reinventing the past category for me.

With those ludicrous price hikes, I’ve come to the conclusion that Campaign has lost its value in terms of being informative, useful or entertaining. Money that can be better spent.

And there seem to be one or two alternatives that won’t break the bank.

So, cheerio, Campaign. Nice knowing you.

Slave to the algorithm

 

I was a latecomer to Wordle, and snuck in just before the puzzle was taken on by The New York Times. It has kept me amused for a couple of weeks, even if I’ve been kicking myself for breaking my winning streak due to US English spelling (not-twigging-of) a little while ago.

Yesterday, though, I was completely bemused. I put in a five letter word, nothing obscure, and was told that this word was not on Wordle’s list. 

The word in question: “slave.” I genuinely wondered if this was a hiccough in the software, so tried on another device. Same result. Intrigued, I searched for an explanation and found news articles to the effect that there are various words that the new owners of Wordle don’t allow - the word for a female dog, for example, or “words associated with racism” such as “slave”. 

There were, no doubt, words for the idea of “slave” long before the English language evolved. When I think of the word, yes, the Atlantic slave trade comes to mind, but I also have associations with earlier history, Roman times, and the present day - I’ve often been asked to sign documents assuring potential project partners that my little one-woman show does not involve slavery in any part of the value chain.

Then there are the more abstract uses of the word - as in that glorious 1980s anthem by Grace Jones. Metaphorical uses, figures of speech, analogies, word-plays. It’s a word with many uses, meanings, nuanaces, contexts.

I’m a writer, and I’ve commented before about the homogenisation of language, as well as the cultural poverty (am I allowed to say poverty?) society is walking into with predictive text and suggested words and phrases. It’s bad enough when suggestions come as to which words you might like to use, but when words themselves disappear from lists and dictionaries? I know language changes all the time, but I am not talking about weird obscure historical words that have had no application for the last five hundred years here.

It’s just a game. OK, it is. But if it’s a game where I have to question every five-letter word and wonder whether it could offend someone, effectively censoring my own vocabularly, then I think I’d rather go back to the Internot and find my ancient Scrabble board game where I can use whatever words I see fit.

Ragtag, motley and wayward

 My (slightly bedraggled) career has lurched more and more in the direction of writing in the last fifteen years or so. Yes, I’m still a strategist at heart, yet words never cease to fascinate and enthrall me.  

Every is a writer collective, which bundles together the best business writing from different perspectives. In one of those open letter thingies on their website, the question is posed: Why is great business writing rare? The authors suggest three answers:

1. Great business writing requires multiple skills

2. Writers are pressurised to publish too often

3. Most writing is chasing clout, not insight

I couldn’t agree more with this, and it’s the last of these that touched my writer heart. So many guides to writing business articles talk about SEO, hashtags and key words. And so many articles I read have those clickbait headlines, but turn out to be rehashes of other articles, or yet another take on whatever “narratives” (beginning to loathe that word) are trendy or trending. Everyone seems to be writing what everyone else is writing about, from purpose to diversity.

Dan and Nathan from Every call this “cotton candy” writing, in that it leaves readers unsatisfied, and doesn’t age well. They’re right. All those “likes" are something ephemeral. You only have to think about your own behaviour, liking an article because you agree with the headline, or because it’s a friend, or because everyone else seems to think it’s good. It takes a millisecond, then you move on.

Whether it’s business articles, news and opinion pieces, advertising, business books or fiction, it all starts to feel like homogenised, soulless, unoriginal pap. The output of today’s Smoothie Society  is easy to digest, with nothing to get stuck in your throat, your mind - or your heart. There’s a place for the wayward, the ragtag and motley - but it’s beyond the algorithmic boundaries, hiding somewhere on the fiftieth page of your search, out of the reach of the spotlikes. 

It’s ten years ago since I was preparing for the publication of my first novel, and I still thank my lucky stars that it was published by a small press, less motivated by clout than by insight and originality. It hasn’t sold or made me millions, but it’s still in print, which it certainly wouldn’t be if I’d been taken on by a major publisher. They would have found the sales figures somewhat pitiful and that would have been that. A couple of years after launch, I reflected on my status as a writer and concluded that I was a “happy amateur”. 

This is wot I wrote - and I think it still passes the test of time:

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HAPPY AMATEUR

 

A year ago, the launch of my first book was imminent so I thought it was high time to have a chat with my tax advisor about my status. Now, in Germany, if you’re freelance, you have to register your freelancery from a finite list of German tax-office-approved jobs or professions. It’s rather like the terribly German system of only being allowed to give your child a name from the authority-approved list.

 

My tax advisor smiled benignly as I explained all to him and told me that I needn’t do anything. The tax authorities here would classify my writing as a hobby – rather as if I’d decided to take up collecting classic cars.

 

I must admit to a certain sense of relief. I rather like thinking of my authorial efforts in this way. Financially I’m going to lose a lot more than I gain, but it’s an indulgence I can allow myself. After over twenty-five years teetering around on one career ladder, I’m quite glad I don’t have to start climbing another. 

 

But every now and then, I read an article or hear a piece of advice goading me on to take a more professional approach. This pisses me off, big time.

 

Why? Well, the best answer is in an article I read a few years back in Intelligent Life (now defunct), by Ed Smith, cricketer-turned-journalist entitled ‘Are we too professional?’.

 

The gist of the article is that the concept of professionalism has taken over in every imaginable sphere, from sports to nursing to teaching to journalism. And in the relentless pursuit of professionalism, the word amateur has come to mean second-rate, shabby and slapdash.

 

Strange for a word that has its origins in amare, to love. Why, after all, am I writing? Why are any of us writing?

 

The idea of professionalism has snuck into the world of publishing, too. And, of course, agents and publishers have to be professional. That’s how they earn their living.

 

But authors?

 

If professionalism means a certain standard of presentation and a degree of common politeness and respect to people with whom you might be entering into a business agreement, then that’s right and proper.

 

But if it means writing what the market demands, what the industry expects or what the research says – and can a market demand? Can research speak? – then, no.

 

Or if it means getting bogged down in process and management mumbo-jumbo from commercial hooks, to USPs, to author as brand, to positioning, to embracing social media, to engaging with the market…?

 

Or filing down all the rough edges, eccentricities, the bits that don’t fit to become some sort of management clone?

Or being obsessed with metrics and measures from sales to followers to Facebook ‘likes’?

 

Or being conned by the growing army of pseudo-coaches, mentors and consultants who are no more qualified to sell their advice than I am?

 

If being ‘more professional’ is any of this, then I’m happy to stay an amateur.

 

(Written in 2013)

 

The freedom of lancing

 

LinkedIn started up at almost exactly the time I started freelancing - founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003. So maybe it’s no surprise that my experiences, highs, lows and progress in my occupation have been closely linked to the way that work-related networking has changed over the years.

When I started up (and at the time I had no idea of whether I’d brave the slings and arrows, or retreat back into classic employment) it was a time pre-social media. I had no office, and was working from an Aldi computer my husband had bought in the previously century. I had a toddler and a freenet email address. I’d written a business plan for the Arbeitsamt but knew that it was as much a fiction as the retro-style adventures I was to write. An exercise in box-ticking only (more of that later).

I knew intuitively that I was likely to get business from people who already knew me and what I was capable of, and their contacts. My working title was “Ideas for Sale” before I hit on Secret Agency. I still love the irony inherent in this name - I’d be a plug-in-and-plan type of freelancer, flexible and happy to fit in to clients’ ways of working, systems and culture. I’d have ideas and experience of methods and tools, but wouldn’t force any propriety straightjackets on anyone. I’d be content working in the background, but would make no secret of who I was or where I came from. I wouldn’t hide behind some corporate-style website using the Royal We, implying I had unlimited resources at my disposal.

By and large, I’ve been happy about how this has turned out. The upside is that being low profile allows me to pursue other interests - writing those books, for example.

But the downside is that there is no safety net when you operate under the radar (I know, a particularly clumsy mixed metaphor).

Over the time I’ve been doing my freelancing, there have been vast changes in the way the freelance world works. Most of these, on the surface at least, have not really improved my lot.

First of all, there has been a huge increase in compliance-type stuff from clients of all sorts - hoops to jump through that are time-wasting and irritating for a one-woman band. Box-ticking, forms to be filled in and signed, purchasing departments’ rules and regulations, certifications here there and everywhere. In summary, a lot of things not being taken on trust, as they were in the past. I understand, to some extent. But it is wearisome.

Then there’s the growth of what used to be called the gig economy. This stretches from the democratic/exploitative (depending on your viewpoint) crowd-sourcing such as Fiverr through to what is referred to as Open Talent. This is the elite end: curated networks of specialists and experts. I’m not sure about Open Talent yet. I have joined a couple of these, and was turned down by one - I suspect due to insufficient attention to Buzzword Bingo. My main concern is that they don’t know me and what I can do, and I’m damned if I’m going to start trying to explain it all.

And the latest development is a Covid-related one as companies re-examine ways of working post-pandemic. A new employment model from Unilever is U-Work, the idea being to have a pool of staff assigned to different roles on a project-by-project basis. This gives the staff in question the benefits of freelance/contract work plus the security of fixed employment as they are paid a monthly retainer. I note the benefit to the company is that this model “avoids the costs of finding freelance workers and getting them up to speed.” I expect a lot of other companies will follow suit.

If I was starting up now, I would do things differently. I’d be all over LinkedIn using the right buzzwords and hashtags, collecting certificates, making connections, speaking the Key Word, algorithm-friendly language about great leaders, amazingly empowering inspiring blah and following the advice about asking questions and writing engaging posts. 

Or would I?

A subversive part of me shudders when LinkedIn suggests phrases I might like to use. I read somewhere, in a discussion amongst creatives about today’s award-winning ads that someone said “I don’t want to be good at doing that kind of advertising.” In the same way, I’m not sure I want to be good at raising my profile.

I still get asked through my various acquaintances in the business - could you, or do you know someone who could ...? And I still believe that companies look for an outside view on strategy - a view from someone independent, free of company culture, processes, philosophies, who is nevertheless prepared to listen and understand, and work out something tailor-made that fits and works.

LinkedIn can become ChainedUp only too easily.

  

Email Mayhem

 

The past couple of weeks have been pretty packed as far as work goes. I'm certainly not complaining, but the focus on getting stuff thought through and done made me realise just how much time I've spent in hungrier days reading other people's stuff rather than doing my own.

I started a sorting and culling action for the email newsletters that I've subscribed to over the past couple of decades and it has been liberating - like the feeling of clearing your wardrobe and realising a few weeks or months down the line that no, you don't miss any of that stuff or regret giving it away.

I'm not sure how many marketing/brand-type newsletters I was signed up for (in addition to all those from retailers, publishing services and other hobbies-related stuff). But it's certainly multiples more than the 5 or so I had back in 2009 when records on the current laptop begin. Back then, I was getting, say, one work-related email newsletter per day of the working week, which seems quaintly handleable. 

My culling criteria were completely unscientific. I decided anything that appears on or near the weekend in my inbox is bad manners and likely written by workaholic desperados I don't want to know anyway - the sort of lost souls who haunt LinkedIn at the weekend. So sorry, any US-based companies who think they're hitting the Friday morning spot when in fact it's late afternoon here. 

Then I used gut reaction. Is this a newsletter that causes a sinking feeling when it flops into the inbox, or one I'm keen to open? 

The sinking feeling can be caused by design (difficult to read), too much content (those newsletters that link to 8 or 10 or more articles are out), clickbait headlines, or re-hashed and repetitive content (some words are simply a huge yawn).

If I had to name two favourites, they'd have to be Contagious - whose newsletter was one of the five I received in 2009 - and Good Business' Friday5. Both of these have a handleable number of items - someone has made choices over what to put in and what to leave out. The newsletters have a distinct house style and the topics covered have a clear focus. 

I'll leave you with a screen shot of the Contagious newsletter from 11 years ago - 24th November, 2009. Unfortunately the links don't link any more, but it's fascinating to see what topics marketing people were mulling over back then: reports are offered on Mobile Apps, Branded Utility, Goodvertising (which must have morphed into purpose-driven brand communications at some point), Social Media (what that?) and Branded Entertainment. 

But nothing on email newsletters - were they missing a trick?

Your business is none of my politics

When I was a bright young thing in my 20s, I joined the ad agency that had put Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives into power. I never worked on the Conservative party account personally. I wouldn't have refused (as I wouldn't have refused working on Silk Cut at that point) although I would have found it quite daunting. I don't know if everyone who worked on the account had to be staunch Tory supporters, or whether a few wild cards were brought in to challenge and play devil's advocate.

It may seem odd to younger readers, but I didn't necessarily know the politics of my colleagues. I knew what their favourite tipples were, which films they'd seen, their favourite bands and possibly who they'd slept with last Friday (if the office gossip machine was working). But politics and religion weren't discussed. Not with workmates and certainly not with clients. Salary was another thing. You didn't go blabbing about it - maybe that was a deliberate ploy from management in general to avoid transparency and fairness. Maybe it was what we thought at the time - decency and respect, and an avoidance of vulgarity. Or, I expect, a bit of both.

The world is a different place today. I've been spending more time on LinkedIn and a couple of Facebook groups for brand and communication strategists.

To be honest, these online places sometimes feel like snake pits.

Should "we" be buying so-and-so marketing guru's book, given his "uneducated" or "offensive" tweets on a completely different theme?

Pushing of pdfs, books, "voices" to follow and other assorted resources to "educate ourselves" so that "we" finally "get it."

People being sworn at, generally harangued and told they have "issues they need to work on" if they dare to say that (maybe) strategy isn't political.

Everything from hate to food has become politicised.

You could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into the desperate-to-impress anarcho-extremist- nihilist group in Fresher's week. I sometimes wonder why on earth these people are working in advertising agencies and for-profit organisations - surely it's all just a trifle hypocritical?

My politics have evolved in the last thirty years. I have achieved some reasonably dizzy heights in my career as well as fallen down in the gutter a couple of times. I've learned from that. But I still don't think I need to talk about who or what I vote for with clients, let alone complete strangers on the internet.

It's not about bravery, or speaking up. Nor do I want to avoid being uncomfortable. A certain amount of discomfort helps growth, I know that.

But it is about understanding people - whether clients, customers, people you're communicating about your brand with. You don't know what they've been through, what their views are, what their experiences are, what makes them tick. And the best place to start for understanding is common ground - something you can agree on as fellow human beings.

From there on you can agree to disagree - a phrase I hear only too seldom these days.