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October 24th, 2008

The fast and dirty writing academy

Every year, we run a series of inter­nal train­ing ses­sions called the Ban­ner Acad­e­mies. These are to help us share insights and infor­ma­tion across the com­pany. But, we fig­ured, why stop there?

So below is the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave yes­ter­day on writ­ing. It’s designed to be a prac­ti­cal col­lec­tion of tips and tricks – basi­cally, use­ful stuff I’ve learnt over the years from peo­ple far clev­erer than I.

The fast and dirty writ­ing academy

View more pre­sen­ta­tions from Ban­ner.

Should you wish, you can down­load a PDF of the pre­sen­ta­tion here and get the notes (which will make the most sense of it all) here.

October 14th, 2008

Content comes before communication

One of the big themes of our upcom­ing Sum­mit is going to be the impor­tance of con­tent when it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads. My favourite quote on the topic comes from the peo­ple over at the adver­tis­ing giant JWT, who pro­claimed when relaunch­ing the agency that we needed to “stop inter­rupt­ing what peo­ple are inter­ested in, and be what peo­ple are inter­ested in.” Two years on and it still rings true as a clar­ion call to our indus­try. But the fact remains that the bulk of demand gen­er­a­tion spend­ing still gets piled in to intru­sive, inter­rup­tive mar­ket­ing.

October 6th, 2008

UN Declaration of Human Rights – poetry in motion

Bit of a depar­ture. Shape + Colour has a post point­ing to a lovely bit of motion design illus­trat­ing the UN Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights.

Take a look:

October 1st, 2008

The pitfalls of realtime campaign reporting

So our eDMs and mail invites for the Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit have gone out today. All nicely per­son­alised you’ll be glad to know. I was delighted to learn that I was going to be noti­fied by email of the reg­is­tra­tions as they came in. What a time-saver — no need to keep ask­ing for reports from the web team. And now I’ve found myself sat here for the last hour obses­sively press­ing ‘send-and-receive’ on my email account, occa­sion­ally check­ing the Black­Berry just in case it’s synch­ing with the server faster than my mac. Truly sad.