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 

• Bill Pegram, Bill Pegram & Co, and gravitas
• Jay Wilson, Wilson Connexions and partner, Cambiar
• Philip Barnard, former chairman and CEO, Kantar Group
• Tim Bowles, former head, IRI Europe and former CEO, West Europe, Synovate
• Simon Chadwick, partner, Cambiar and gravitas (Host)

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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.

Other rules
• deadline for entries is midnight (US PST), Fri Jun 6th 2008, so don’t hang around
• OUP is giving away one copy of the book
• you must supply your accurate full name and email address with your entry (this is the way we’ll get in touch if you win)
• maximum one entry per person
• judges decision is final
• we reserve the right to cancel the giveaway at any stage, or to extend it
• E&OE

We’re new to this giveaway thing so if we’re missing any important rules then do tell

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

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…

• Something we’ve championed by strapline and example from the getgo over two years ago seems to be gaining traction, namely the need to engage and inspire clients - hooray. But while many of the speakers that referred to this seemed oblivious to the irony that their presentations were about as engaging as a bunch of grapes, a few speakers actually delivered: from the well-honed abilities of ITV’s Rupert Howell and RT friend and Publicis’s Dan O’Donoghue, to the passion and comedic charm of RI’s Tom Ewing. They all exhibited some of the qualities identified in the ‘The Big Planning Debate’ as critical to making research more potent: authority, clarity, vividness, engaging, critical thinking, analogy, simplicity, thinking about the ends and not means, building respect, inspiring.
• Keynote Allan Leighton’s no BS and highly pragmatic approach is always refreshing in a world dominated by over-hype and under-delivery, even though much of his talk was familiar to us because of the prior research we did to try and secure a chat with him
• Dan O’Donoghue’s session on Web 2.0 was electric. While some of the sessions suffered from flogging the proverbial dead horse with little to move things on, Dan’s session included a chat about in-game advertising which seems to neatly address many of the current issues around maintaining advertising’s relevance and engagement. We’ll try and bring you some of that goodness in the coming weeks
• For us the most intellectually-charged session (based on quality of ideas and debate), was ‘The Big Planning Debate’. However, as much as the pleasant Vanella Jackson (Hall & Partners) tried to convince us that they were having a conversation, they weren’t. It was still more parent-child Q&A than peer-peer chat, the latter being our definition of true, inclusive conversation. On this occasion, though, the session wasn’t the worse for being less conversational mainly because of quality of the speakers with their entertaining, useful and authoritative comments and ideas
• We intimated some format innovations that went down well. A bit of background about where we come from. Regular followers will know that we’re very keen on conversation - most bloggers, podcasters and those embedded in modern web culture think this way. We’re also uber fans of the TED conference. Among their secret sauce is that talks are strictly limited to around 15 mins. So it was refreshing to see elements of these seep into the conference. Specifically, everyone in the audience had a mobile phone type device to vote, sometimes fairly regularly depending on the session. Not all that innovative but pretty slick nonetheless (accurate results appeared magically within a millisecond of the vote closing). No. What was tres cool was the fact that you could text message stuff on a continuous basis through the session, and the moderators and panelists could see that river of questions, observations and occasional abuse in real time (think twitter stream for those into stream of consciousness). The sessions that used this well just seemed more inclusive and fluid. Not fully conversational but going in the right direction. It was funny when Rupert Howell admitted to getting confused as to what he was saying while also trying to take in the messages - the ‘older’ generation clearly have a lot to learn from gen-Y and their propensity towards continuous partial attention
• The other innovation we liked? In terms of length, many of the talks were way too long. Hence the rave reception that the Pecha Kucha session got at the end of day one (five presenters were allowed up to 20 seconds per slide and up to 20 slides to make their point, so a little over six minutes per presenter). PK is one of the innovations we’ve championed in our monthly column, and something the wonderful RLF performed at their debut event near to Research ‘07 (which may have been the inspiration for the organisers to give it a go)
• Talking of the RLF, spearheaded by Mesh’s Fiona Blades and Spring Research’s Steve Phillips, they also ran an event this year. Attendance was really good considering it was up against the official party (although a number went to both). Even better was the spirit of fun and letting your hair down - methinks they achieve far more for the industry’s profile including enticing new grads than anyone using more prim and proper methods (btw, although we’re privileged to be listed on their website as co-founders and fellow conspirators, Fiona and Steve actually do all the work)

And now a couple of low lights:

• It’s a pity but you really need to decide how much you want a conference for the quality of it’s content versus the networking opportunity. We say ‘pity’ because there shouldn’t be a need to compromise - you should be able to get both in abundance. We bumped into Inside Research’s Larry Gold who tells us that he visits at least a dozen events a year to convey the best bits to his senior executive audience. First of all, that job of curation he does so well should be done equally well by every conference organiser. But it’s not. And why? Well, when Larry produced conferences for the ARF, he worked out that the best content came from him carefully picking the speakers, and then deciding what they would talk about based on passion and authority - a level of control that mirrors TED’s approach. There was clear evidence at this conference that despite speaker rehearsals, appalling ones got through the net (the most obvious was from a consultancy that presented a completely useless and ad-filled 20min. video in place of them presenting - we’re not mentioning the name because they don’t deserve a name check). Larry also likes the notion of shorter presentations. Our view: if you can’t get it across in 15mins, you’ve failed (sic. Jeremy Bullmore’s viral piece about insights and refridgerators)
• In an age that’s increasingly embracing conversation, organic thought, it’s strange to see a few presenters tightly script their presentation and then robotically deliver that script. We won’t name names, for all we know they could have been virgin presenters and presenting isn’t at all easy, particularly when faced with up to 1,000 folks with intense stares. No, the fault’s with agency middle-management, it’s their responsibility to train to the requisite standard, they’ve failed if they’re not doing that. After all, presenting well, IOHO, is an art and science that can be perfected with practice

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.

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