Tom Upfold, one of our very own senior copywriters, was invited to take part in a live, online Q&A with The Guardian this month on how to start a career in zoo keeping…only joking, copywriting.

He joined a panel of enthusiastic and experienced copywriters from around the UK to give their advice and opinion on questions put to them from budding copywriters looking to break into the industry.

Questions poised included: ‘What other worlds are copywriters used in other than marketing?’, ‘What should my portfolio comprise?’, ‘Is there any specific training or qualifications I should get?’ and ‘How do I go about getting work as a freelancer?’

The full discussion can be followed here – http://careers.guardian.co.uk/copywriting-careers – but Tom is always on hand to chat with anybody looking for an insight into life as a copywriter. Just email Tupfold@themarketingpractice.com.

Ahead of our next Sales & Marketing Forum – this session will be on Supplier Marketing in Times of Transformation - we thought it would be useful to highlight a few of the pressures/opportunities driving transformation in major UK industries. From a marketing perspective, the stresses of such changes may mean that the end-user audience has less time to engage. But it’s also a golden opportunity to reach decision-makers with messages that set a brand apart from the crowd.

Retail: Pessimistic for 2012
This article in The Telegraph also highlights expected woes for the retail industry, particularly for electrical goods, furniture and fashion chains http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8961976/Retail-predictions-for-2012.html

Manufacturing: Automotive set to shine if the Eurozone holds out
Global car manufacturers have committed to significant UK activity in 2012 and the recent defence cuts could be transformed by a potential deal for BAE to build a new fighter jet for India. This article summarises what else we could be seeing on the UK production lines in 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/8969193/Manufacturing-predictions-for-2012.html

Technology/IT: It’s all about BYO in 2012
This extensive report by Gartner tells you everything you need to know about where the IT sector is headed in 2012: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/predicts/

Construction: Stuck in the mud until 2014
The private sector needs to improve before the construction industry can follow in its footsteps according to many of the UK associations. This review gives an overview of the expected changes this year and a breakdown of which sectors will see the biggest impact: http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/construction-news/5-fall-predicted-for-construction-output-this-year

As for the financial and public sector, we are sure our speakers at the The Marketing Practice S&M Forum (John Crane, acting CIO, Nationwide and John Suffolk, former CIO, UK government) will be filling us in with all of the insider tips so we’ll be back after the 24th to enlighten you all then.

We’re certainly living through interesting times. One thing that brings home the pace of change is when last year’s future-gazing becomes this year’s prototype and looks like turning into next year’s game-changing product. The example of augmented reality glasses is particularly interesting as it only promises to increase the information overload that’s another symptom of these ‘interesting times’.

A bit over a year ago, Nokia Future Technologies released this trailer video for a pair of glasses that could take information from your mobile phone and place it right infront of your eyes:

Of course, the potential for reviewing and receiving information is clear. But there’s probably even greater promise in terms of finding new ways to overlay information onto the real world (anything from directions to orcs and dragons).

Where the Nokia glasses were speculation, the real world is catching up.

On the one hand, we have these augmented reality goggles from Vuzix. With video cameras on the front of the glasses linked to a mobile phone (for processing power), they take the reality infront of you, overlay digital information, and present it back on screens inside the glasses. The glasses are available now (although not yet at a price or with the associated applications that will make them appealing to the consumer market).

On the other hand, the Vuzix glasses are ‘missing’ the transparency of the Nokia vision. But this probably won’t be long in coming to the consumer market – Samsung were demonstrating transparent laptop screens last year:

This may be something of a ‘future gazing’ post to start the year, but it’s always interesting to think about the ways that technology is changing the way we perceive the world. It’s also an example of the growing range of hardware that’s emerging to provide new ways to interact with information in the cloud.

As one of the small – but growing – number of iPad users in the office, I thought I’d canvas some opinions and share our combined views on the apps that we find most useful/interesting…

Kevin (the roaming worker): Kevin’s a fan of Splashtop, an app that mirrors your PC’s desktop on your iPad, allowing you to do anything on your iPad that you can on your PC (albeit with a couple of milliseconds delay!).

Paul (the information junkie): my most frequently used app has to be Flipboard, which creates a personal magazine from all the online content that my contacts (or people/blogs I follow) are creating or linking t. Used in the right way, it’s a great antitdote to information overload. Having said that, it raises questions for online magazines that rely on advertiser revenue. And it’s also a great example for marketers of how new platforms are making it even harder to predict the way our content is consumed or even know who’s consuming it.

Nick (the assiduous note-taker): Nick’s been experimenting with SoundNote, an app we’re finding very useful for meetings/interviews. SoundNote lets you record audio at the same time as typing notes (or even drawing). So you have an audio record of your call/meeting/interview and a written set of notes in the same place. And if you tap on one of the words when you’re looking back over your written notes, the audio playback will instantly jump to the point in the recording when you were typing that word. Which makes it a fantastic time-saver when you’re looking for more detail to add to the written notes.

A quick run down on some other apps that I am/am not using regularly:

I’m not really using any of the Word/PowerPoint/Excel apps (other than to read email attachments). It’s not that they don’t have the features, just that I’m usually multi-tasking when creating a document and (even with the OS 4.2 upgrade), the iPad isn’t the ideal way to do that. But I do find the pre-loaded Notes app really useful as a way of instantly capturing thoughts if I’m not sitting infront of my computer. The other pre-loaded apps (particularly the Safari internet browser and email client) are also good for quick access away from the PC.

There are a host of webex-style apps (from adobe, citrix, cisco), but the one I’m most keen on is Fuze meeting – which allows you to run the online meeting from your iPad and share documents on screen (as far as I can see, the others only let you see what others are sharing on their PCs).

PDF Presenter is a good little app for – as the name might suggest – presenting PDFs. If you connect an iPad to a projector/monitor (via the vga connector), you can use PDF Presenter to run through your slides.  You’ll need to convert your preesntation to a PDF first – which can be good as PowerPoints aren’t always converted perfectly by the readers on the iPad. On the subject of PDFs, iAnnotate is useful for reading and commenting on/marking up PDFs.

And some that are outside the realms of work or productivity tools:

The TED app is a great source of intelligent thought on the issues facing the world – although just flicking to it now, I’m not sure about the featured talk on ‘Why not eat insects?…

I prefer the Amazon Kindle app to the Apple iBooks one – mainly because I like the option to read white text on a black background (which I haven’t found in iBooks).

Alice in Wonderland, Wired magazine and The Times all show – in different ways – how the tablet format can bring new life to publishing.

Drums! (a touch-drumkit that you can use to play along with songs in your library) is a great demonstration of the touch-screen in action.

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter apps are pretty much as you’d expect.

Aweditorium and Photo Cooking are great ways to explore (respectively) new music and recipies – sitting back and ‘exploring’ being very much the ‘tablet’ way to interact, as opposed to sitting up and ’searching’ on a PC. It’s things like this that make me think that the tablet format is much more than just a different way to access the same information – fundamentally it could encourage a different way of thinking/interacting.

And Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds are my favourite iPad games.

The challenge that TED give their speakers (some of the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers) is to give the talk of their lives in just 18 minutes.

It’s a great model of real thought leadership (and also of intuitive,  effective website design), so if you haven’t visited it before then do take a look at www.ted.com – just be prepared to spend at least half an hour there…

One of the most popular talks on the site is Sir Ken Robinson (creativity and educational expert) on “Do schools kill creativity?” On YouTube alone it’s had almost 1.5 million views in the last 3 years, and it’s a perfect example of true thought leadership – engaging people around a big issue, tackling the subject from a fresh viewpoint, demanding that you pay attention, effortlessly showing why he has the right to talk about the issue (and leaving the viewer wanting to find out ‘how’ the answer can be delivered).

His latest talk has had over 60,000 views in just 3 months.

We normally shy away from any kind of blatant self-promotion in this blog (yes, really!). But we recently had the great news that we’ve been shortlisted as Finalists for two categories in the 2010 B2B Marketing Awards, which hopefully excuses a quick congratulatory post…

The first category is Best Lead Nurturing Initiative, for our programme with Oracle’s Supply Chain Management business unit. And the second category is Agency of the Year, so congratulations to the whole team here (and thanks especially to clients, partners and suppliers for their support). Fingers crossed for the ceremony in November…

IBM has released its 2010 Global Chief Executive Office Study into the lives and pressures of CEOs in the world’s top organisations. IBM calls 2009 the ‘wake up year’ for many CEOs and, as this survey was run in 2004, 2006 and 2008, profiles this year’s performance against past results for comparison.

You can see the full report here.

Research on this scale and into this target audience is rare for free download. In total 1,541 CEOs took place in face-to-face interviews – the research will tell you their full demographics, but suffice to say there’s a broad spectrum of public and private-sector organisations from across the world. Interestingly, 3,600 students were also interviewed (the CEO of tomorrow) and their opinions used to add another dimension to the report. [These ‘views of generation Y’ are being given increasing attention by all the decision makers we speak to – the world is changing so quickly that sometimes only the new generation seem able to keep up...]

In 2010, for the first time, the primary challenge of CEOs was complexity. We probably all know this already – interlinking networks of suppliers and dependent third-parties – but removing or managing complexity isn’t something we see all that commonly as a message in many campaigns. Perhaps this could be a key to aligning your propositions with boardroom priorities.

As an aside, IBM has built a neat assessment tool to benchmark your attitudes against those of the CEOs in the research. In the interests of openness, take a look at the customised report we built for ourselves here!

What do bearded entrepreneur Alan Sugar and marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno have in common?

One answer suggested by last week’s episode of ‘Junior Apprentice’ is that neither would be much fun on a camping holiday. Lord Sugar set his ‘junior apprentices’ the task of creating a new camping product and pitching it to retailers. The episode is full of mentions of the lucrative size of the camping market, something that Adorno was writing about 40 years ago.

In his essay ‘Free Time‘, Adorno discussed the way that the culture industry takes our real need for ‘freedom’ and brings it back within the capitalist system (through organised hobbies and activities like camping), where money can be made and people controlled (’recharging’ before another busy week at work):

“The naturalness of the question of what hobby you have, harbours the assumption that you must have one, or better still, that you should have a range of different hobbies, in accordance with what the ‘leisure industry’ can supply [...] It is linked to the inner needs of people in the functional system. Camping – an activity so popular amongst the old youth movements – was a protest against the tedium and convention of bourgeois life. People had to ‘get out’, in both senses of the phrase. Sleeping out beneath the stars meant that one had escaped from the house and from the family. After the youth movements had died out this need was then harnessed and institutionalized by the camping industry. The industry alone could not have forced people to purchase its tents and dormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment, if there had not already been some longing in people themselves; but their own need for freedom gets functionalized, extended and reproduced by business; what they want is forced upon them once again. Hence the ease with which the free time is integrated; people are unaware of how utterly unfree they are, even where they feel most at liberty, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.”

I wonder how many of the junior apprentices were questioning their role in profiting from pseudo answers to people’s desire for freedom…

As an aside, Adorno also has interesting views on sun tans as we approach the summer holiday season. This section follows on from his analysis of the camping industry:

“Taken in its strict sense, in contradistinction to work, as it at least used to apply in what would today be considered an out-dated ideology, there is something vacuous…about the notion of free time. An archetyptal instance is the behaviour of those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan, although dozing in the sun is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and impoverishes the mind. In the sun-tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people they themselves become fetishes. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization. The sun-tan is an end in itself, of more importance then the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. If employees return from their holidays without having acquired the mandatory skin tone, they can be quite sure their colleagues will ask them the pointed question, ‘haven’t you been on holiday then?’ The fetishism which thrives in free time, is subject to further social controls.”

If there are marketing lessons to learn from Adorno (and there may well be something in his insight around how an industry can identify deep inner needs and align its products to those – even if it’s not possible to truly answer the inner need), it doesn’t really seem appropriate to think about them. And the fact that we now spend our free time letting ‘the culture industry’ (in the form of programmes like ‘The Apprentice’) train us to be better business-people… well, it’s probably better that we don’t go into that either.

If there’s a lesson to learn from last week’s episode of the ‘Young Apprentice’, it’s that no amount of salesmanship can shift a poor product – and that the difference between a poor product and a good one can be as simple as 5 minutes discussing a target audience.

We’ve shared below the slides that Colin Cram presented at the recent Sales & Marketing Forum.

A founder member of the Central Unit on Purchasing (forerunner of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC)), Colin held senior procurement positions in the public sector for over 30 years, responsible throughout for shared services, outsourcing and organisational re-engineering, and third party spends of up to £7bn a year. His presentation steps through an overview of procurement in the public sector (scale, challenges, realities for suppliers…) and highlights some potential changes that could deliver savings of £25bn and fresh opportunities for suppliers…

A write-up of our latest Sales & Marketing Forum (”A very public affair: Being an effective partner to the publc sector”) will be coming soon – but in the meantime…

We’ve had some great feedback on the latest forum (and one note to make the cocktails less strong next time – you can’t win them all…). While we wait for the ‘official’ writeup, here are a couple of related links:

The blog of one of our speakes, James Gardner from the Department for Work and Pensions: http://bankervision.typepad.com/

A link to Colin Cram’s IOD paper on potential savings in public sector procurement: http://www.iod.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/en/pdfs/policy_article_towards_tesco.pdf

And some prescient and topical views on public sector IT spend: http://thefrontline.v3.co.uk/2010/05/tory—lib-dem.html and http://www.silicon.com/management/public-sector/2010/02/22/tories-to-wield-it-budget-axe-faster-than-labour-39745504/