PODCASTS AND MORE TO INSPIRE FOLKS IN MARKETING, MARKET RESEARCH, PLANNING & ADVERTISING
True leaders tend to be successful at pretty much whatever’s given to them.
(Philip Barnard)
In this edition of The Leadership Show, Simon Chadwick chats with four leaders who have spent the past five decades successfully building substantial entities. Folks such as Jay Wilson who built Roper Starch (sold to NOP World), Bill Pegram who co-founded and built Pegram Walters (sold to Synovate), Philip Barnard who built Research International from its founding days as a division of Unilever (sold to WPP), and Tim Bowles who built IRI Europe. This is one of the most fun podcasts to listen to thanks to Simon and his guests.
BTW, Simon wrote and presented an excellent paper at ESOMAR ‘07 for free download entitled “Leadership - The Men and Women Who Shape Our Industry”.
Listen to other podcasts in this series
STARRING

UPDATE: This giveaway has finished
Through the fine folks at Oxford University Press, we’re giving away a free copy of their new, 800+ page tome simply called Marketing, authored by Paul Baines, Chris Fill and Kelly Page.
Aimed at marketing and business students, we think it has a much broader utility as a reference tool for agencies, e.g. when putting together those clever sounding pitches!
Having studied from marketing texts many moons ago, it seems very practical, being chock full of ‘marketing’ insights that showcase contemporary brands, scenarios and memes.
You can learn more through the excellent microsite, which includes sample chapters and video chats between the authors explaining how they developed the book.
Here’s the Amazon page so you can see how valuable this is: US, UK.
Right, now for the giveaway. This is open to every member of the ResearchTalk/ MarketingTalk/ AdTalk community (OUP confirm they’ll snail mail to anywhere in the world).
All you need to do is leave a comment in this blog post, or email us at letmetalk@gmail.com, saying why you’d benefit most from receiving the book. We’re open to giving it away to absolutely anyone in our community - agencies, students, or other - simply convince us that you’d benefit most from it, so be creative and sincere.
We’re new to this giveaway thing so if we’re missing any important rules then do tell
Series:AdTalk
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That’s what Dan Roam says. And the result is that visual stimuli are far more persuasive in business than cold verbage or text. Another good reason to up the visualization quotient.
Dan writes the visualization blog Back of the Napkin. And in this clip, he uses visualization to help explain the Icahn/Yahoo! intervention on Fox Business.
Via Stephen Phillips, someone’s just unearthed the earliest use of a focus group - from the Stone Age
“The Wheel”
“Fire”
Building on their open and friendly approach, smoothie brand Innocent has just published its first annual report. It’s not a legal or regulatory requirement, it’s done purely to engage more with its passionate users and other interested folks.
It’s a fun and informative read. Plus it balances a discussion of their successes in 2007 by giving equal prominence to, well, ‘things they learned from’ (including being called out by BBC’s Watchdog for their exploding packaging, and that polarising deal with McDonald’s).
It’s embedded below but if you want to read it and don’t have bionic eyes then you can download your very own copy here.
Coinciding with its publication, Innocent also ran the first AGM…
‘…a day when we open the doors of Fruit Towers, ask our drinkers to come and hear what we’ve been up to and let them tell us face to face what we could be doing better.”
Here’s one of the videos from the event - we can’t imagine too many AGMs being this much fun
Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk
Interview begins @ around 25:49
Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk
Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Presentation Zen, shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote.
Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making “slide presentations” in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.
Part of the Authors@Google series

Oh dear, we feel a longer-than-usual post coming. Do bear with us if this is your thing
The inevitable result of over-hyping things is that most of the time you don’t quite deliver. And that was a bit of an issue with the Research ‘08 conference, run by the UK’s Market Research Society. It was advertised as ‘the great debate’ when in fact it was a goodish debate overall. Kinda makes you feel a bit deflated.
But we’re pleased we went. Although it started off a bit lacklustre, things did pick up. And there were a couple of format innovations that really seemed to excite folks (more on these later). Plus the networking opportunities were good because of the close to 1,000 attendance (usually held in Brighton, some remarked that the London venue helped to boost attendance).
Just so you know, although we didn’t record any podcasts during the event due to time constraints, we do plan to catch up with some of the interesting speakers over the next few weeks so keep a look out for these (subscribe via the links at the top right of website). Because we weren’t allowed to film due to the number of film crews already there. we were restricted to audio which we thought was better done after the event (or so we’re trying to convince ourselves!).
Some topline thoughts, then. First, things we liked…
And now a couple of low lights:
We may seem overly critical above. So do bear in mind that despite having been to a number of events already, this is the first that we’ve actually sat in on many of the sessions and so the first event that we’ve been able to comment on through first-hand experience. So, to get a more balanced view, do pop here, here, here, here, here or here - you should get something more articulate and richer.
Before we sign-off, among the chats we had with a variety of folks between sessions, we liked a little story from semiotician Rachel Lawes of Lawes Consulting. She mentioned that a steady trickle of people have commented positively on her podcast. She started to get a bit worried in case there was something controversial in there that was generating this feedback. So she decided to listen only to discover that it was just a good ole conversation, and people were simply relaying that. Nothing more, nothing less - it’s what we like to hear, it’s why we do this
Thanks to the MRS and Sophie Russell-Ross and Camargue’s Emily Luscombe for giving us event access. Event organisation was smooth.