White water kayaking in Taiwan
Back in 2006, before I did what I do now, I did the odd bit of white water kayaking.
Quite a few people end up on this site as they have searched for information about white water kayaking in Taiwan, the destination of an expedition a few friends and I organised, and which I have posted some write ups relating to on here back at the time.
This is the slide deck from the lecture series I gave when we got back. If you’re thinking of going, this’ll give you a flavour of what to expect:
Gingers in Pop
Where would the pop world be without the creative genius of the red chromosone:
- Lana del Rey
- Adele
- Florence Walsh
- Carole Decker
- Mick Hucknall
- Lene Nystrøm (Barbie Girl)
- Ginger Spice
- Alison Moyet
- Ed Sheeran
- David Bowie (honorary)
Dark arts turned against News International
So, in the same week that Murdoch’s BSkyB takeover plans approach the point of no return, information relating to actions of a repulsive and unforgivable nature is leaked to a Guardian writer, Nick Davies (he of Flat Earth News).
Coincidence, of course not.
Whoever is the leaker, he has held the information relating to this disgusting activity in his back pocket, waiting to release it at the exact moment in the news cycle that will ensure public outrage will make government approval of the takeover unthinkable.
My comfort with this planned manipulation of the public response registers on a scale that includes the privacy intrusion activity itself at its top end.
Dark arts are dark arts.
Tin foil hat on.
EnjoyMaidenhead.com (19 May 2011): “Proposals for the redevelopment of a key part of Maidenhead town centre have been unveiled …will see the area… transformed into a new …high-quality shopping destination.”
The new vision for Maidenhead correctly recognises the urgent need for change, but fundamentally misunderstands what makes a town successful and is also, undoubtedly, on the wrong side of history.
The redevelopment vision’s core focus is on creating a mainstream, mass market retail experience for the town. There are some words about cafés, restaurants and ’boutiques’ in ‘public spaces’, but these are clearly subordinate to the main event: shops.
I’ve a better idea.
What makes a town succesful?
To attract visitors, successful towns do not rely on retail alone. A town centre is not just a market, it’s a catchment area’s heart: it’s the cultural centre and the best place to socialise. It should serve to enrich lives not just empty wallets. And if one does want to just shop, then Reading, Windsor and High Wycombe offer as good a retail experience as this development will offer (let’s set aside London, 25 minutes East by train).
To serve the people of Maidenhead and surrounding areas into the future, the town centre needs to be more than about retail. At the moment, Carter’s Steam Fair happens in a field somewhere beyond a comfortable walk, ditto the fun fair that appears on a field near Ray Mead, and the town’s fireworks display is on the river, a twenty minute walk from the centre. I’m not convinced that a majority of people in the town know where Norden’s Farm arts centre even is (near the A404M, in case you were wondering).
Where are Maidenhead’s versions of The Bounty’s raft race (Bourne End)? Cookham Dean’s go-cart race? Cookham’s ‘Rock the Moor?’ Nowhere, that’s where. There’s nowhere for them to go other than some far flung field that no one wants to go to. Fragmented: that’s the word for it.
Maidenhead town centre needs to invent a reason to visit other than a branch of Debenhams, and that reason needs to serve the people who live locally.
It needs a soul.
Mainstream retail, on a high street, are you sure?
You won’t get a Mothercare in our new town, will you? The nation’s leading baby-ware specialist has made it plain that town centre shopping is not where it wants to be. Arcadia group (Top Shop and Dorothy Perkins) has said the same thing: when its town centre leases expire, it is out of there. History has moved on. It’s simply easier to buy most stuff out of town or on the Internet.
And what’s the difference between your Boots and my Boots? Nothing, so I’ll go to mine, thanks. Towns that, against the odds, preserve some genuine localised retail diversity, what the word ’boutiques’ may have meant before it meant ‘expensive mass market’, preserve another reason for people to visit – think Marlow, before the mobile phone shops.
Where does that leave Maidenhead’s vision of mainstream retail as the panacea for the town centre’s undoubted ills? With yet more empty shops and an even greater aspect of emptyness than it currently has.
So here it is.
Easier on the eye
First, Maidenhead town planners, stop letting people build anything they want. I’ve never seen such a collection of different architectural style and materials. Some of the new buildings are actually quite pleasant, but they don’t match any of the old ones or, indeed, any of the new ones. What a dispiriting eye-sore. Pick a style and material and stick to it. If potential investors in the town kick up a fuss, have the conviction to say no.
Personally, given the fairly even split between modern and Victorian architectures in the town, I think there are two options: 1. Henley-world, 2. Odeon-world.
Take the Thames riverside vernacular style (Henley, Marlow, Goring and Wallingford) and shamelessly ape it. It sort of worked for Prince Charles at Poundbury in Dorset. It could work better here with a bit more long term thought. Or, use the architecture and materials of the Odeon as a style guide for anything that gets built.
Creating soul
The cultural and social centre of the town needs to be in the physical centre, which, incidentally, is 100 yards from the Crossrail terminus. All the events listed above need to have a space created for them in the centre.
San Jose in Silicon Valley is an entirely new town, but it has soul. This is largely thanks to the large (football pitch size) open space right in the centre of town. It has been designed to allow for cultural events. Rock the Moor would be perfect there, if Rick Astley were available. Carter’s Steam Fair would fit like a glove into it. All the public transport leads to it. It’s in the centre so no one is so far that they can’t walk to it (drive two minutes down the road in their case, but anyway). There are shops, cafes and cinemas surrounding it, but they complement it, rather than attempt to lead it.
San Jose, could have built a massive shopping mall on the park instead, but that probably would have been a bit short sighted, don’t you think, Maidenhead town planners?
For a glimpse of an almost Henley-world version, visit Fitzroy square in London – beautiful, uplifiting and surrounded by shops.
Diversity in retail
Is it really that difficult (or illegal) to give retailers with less than five outlets a tax break? We don’t need another Starbucks. No one makes a special trip for a Tesco Express (I hope). In addition to hosting festivals and concerts, our town’s central open space could also host markets. In fact it could do whatever we wanted it to do.
Ta da!
I would welcome all comments below, unless they disagree with my vision.
My cat’s a total shit: fishing for birds
The Internet loves cute kittens. Here’s my cat, Socks, who is neither cute or a kitten, but definitely a shit, up our pear tree today.
Evil, pure evil…
Sailing at Windsor Castle
This is the view across Datchet Sailing Club’s lake towards Windsor Castle, enhanced with some innovative Photoshop button pressing.
Any art dealer wishing to buy the rights to this moving piece of neo-realism, please contact me at the usual.
Due date, +1 day: waiting
Top five reasons to detest top five lists
Ever opened a link to a top five list of something, only to feel sad, cheated, and regretful that you’ll never get that time back? They’ve taken you for a sucker, again! I’ve been there too and here’s my top five reasons why top five lists and their writers should like so totally do one.
1. Intellectual fraud
Rather than actually knowing something worth sharing, top fivers just want to mouth-off and fill a space in their, usually corporate mandated, editorial calendar. If they knew something, something really worth taking the time to understand, do you really think they would be writing top five lists? No. They’ve Googled it all or are just repeating what they’ve heard from some other pea-brained egomaniac. It’s standing on the shoulders of Lilliputians, aka, sheep learning.
2. Moral bankruptcy
Instead of attracting an audience by consistently creating engaging, thoughtful content, top five shysters want to con you into looking at their awful list of regurgitated clichés du jour, by appealing to your desire for bullet point learning.
3. Murdering the English Essay
George Orwell did not write Animal Farm as a top five list, and thank goodness for that.
4. They think they’re ‘Influencers’
They’re as influential as a carrier pigeon. Wherever the thinking came from in the first place, even if it’s only epsilon minus thinking, they’re the influential ones. The top fivers are just passing it on. It’s like thinking your better than everyone because you’ve gone out and bought a Mac book Pro. Did you design and build it, or just buy it? Idiot. What happened to Mel Gibson in Braveheart? That’s too good for you.
5. No, I don’t see any inconsistency in writing my own top five list
Say, what?
Message ends.
PR Measurement
Why do consumers buy one product over a competing similar product? They probably wouldn’t be able to tell you.
A well-priced, great product that is conveniently available will sell much better if consumers are aware of it and trust its manufacturer. Marketing, across its various discplines, helps with this. However, it’s unlikely that engagement sufficient to stimulate a purchase is created as a result of one marketing programme. Brand and product reputation is created over time and through many different channels.
In order to allocate budget to each marketing discipline or programme according to its impact, businesses require the ability to compare their effectiveness. Quite reasonably, business are especially interested in understanding marketing’s impact on sales. The trouble is that the direct and full impact of an individual marketing discipline, including PR, on purchasing behaviour is at the very least hard to calculate. Frankly, unless a business is prepared to allocate significant resource to the unpicking of the web of marketing infuence on sales behaviour it can’t, with any accuracy, be done.
To cost-effectively measure PR, or any marketing discipline, organisations should define a set of desired business outcomes that PR is clearly and in isolation able to directly influence and measure their attainment.
PR needs to be measured at the closest point to sales at which it can be clearly identified as having created the result. At the same time, the cost and effort required to calculate the metrics must not take too much resource away from the execution of the programme itself. Metrics thus defined are likely to be easier and hence cheaper to calculate, while still helping to create the outcomes the business requires.
Coverage: PR does that. And for some PR programmes the length of the monthly coverage report, alongside quality and tone metrics, is an acceptably priced proxy to PR’s influence on sales. Consumers take onboard and act on some of the messages they read.
PR may also be measured on successfully building a social media community or communicating directly with a defined list of market shapers, internal and external, encouraging them to say nice things about the brand/products to peers. It may also be measured on its consulting work, helping to re-position or transform brands over time, or how its help manage a crisis.
All of these things, PR can definitely do. Much beyond that, you’re in the realms of, ‘Not in the whit of PR’, or ‘The outcome might have been due to PR, or any number of other things’, at which point you’ll be blue sky thinking your way to writing cheques to market research agencies, or blaming PR for not doing something it can’t.
PR Measurement or My Top Five Pubs
With the whole world discussing the best way to measure PR, my mind has inevitably turned to creating a definitive list of the best pubs in the world:
1. Square and Compass, Worth Matravers, Dorset, England
2. The Boot, Boot Hill, Weymouth, Dorset, England
3. Hinds Head, Bray, Berkshire, England
4.The Bounty, Bourne End, Berkshire, England
5. Jolly Farmer, Cookham Dean, Berkshire England
That’s value you can measure.
