DavidBlanar.com

Despite your mean-spirited annoyance at television adverts ceaseless braying of insurance comparison web sites, the cacophony is masking a more important commercial reality: these have been jocund days for the industry. There’s nothing like a downturn to focus consumers minds on saving money and the industry has seen big winners in terms of traffic and profit.

Blessed be UK consumers; when it comes to saving a bob on insurance we are spoiled for choice. There’s excruciating hand-drawn crazy man (Confused.com), bewildering Meerkats (CompareTheMarket.com), a grindingly-ubiquitous tenor (GoCompare.com) and, depressingly, middle class boring (MoneySupermarket.com and Tescocompare.com). That’s hardly the full list, but it’s enough. Read more…

There is but one doubtless conclusion: a single path leads us out of these moribund days, darkened and close from war, pestilence, scandal, mistrust and fear.

We are doomed to this unyielding night until Baby Boomers are no more.

It is the only explanation that makes sense: Baby Boomers, the largest living crop of humans around, must be suffering a subconscious trauma, an abstract pain of dangerous proportions. It’s for this reason our society seems in a perpetual funk, unable to escape the brooding and malevolent cloud lingering above us all.

I’m sympathetic, for sure; indeed, were I to suffer such so much repeated disappointment as this generation, I’d be feeling blue too. Read more…

Far be it for me to advise you to otherwise follow your instinct and be either disappointed, subdued or even downright antagonistic towards the Apple iPad.

It’s inevitable such hype surrounding the launch of a physical piece of kit will inspire these emotions and more. Yet when the dust settles, after all the bloggers and pundits have their say, the ultimate verdict will be inevitable: the iPad is yet another inspired offering from Apple.

Mr. Jobs – no dummy when it comes to product development – got the obvious out the way immediately during his January launch presentation: there is a gaping hole between the fixed, large investment hardware of a desktop or laptop computer and the nimble, pocket-sized mobile phone. Read more…

One of the delightful presents I received for Christmas 2009 is the Amazon Kindle (dear you-know-who: thank you very much!).

I’m not new to this kind of device: in 2006 I enjoyed putting the first generation Sony Reader through its paces. I loved the reading experience; it’s a shame everything else about the Sony Reader was poor.

From the cumbersome software to the closed technology which severely restricted the types of files it would display, the entire offering was seriously flawed. To add injury to insult, the Reader died after about 2 months of use. D-e-a-d dead.

The experience put me off purchasing another e-reader and, being a somewhat snobbish Sony fanboy, I had turned up my nose when considering the Kindle. Read more…

It feels somewhat cynical to write about a cinematic endeavour in the context of a personal fight against climate change, but these are two topics brought together by strange circumstances: my Christmas Project 2009, recently completed.

I thought I might share my reflections on my experience. Read more…

What a decade of film, particularly for the aficionado of the sci-fi and fantasy genres which got a much-needed boost of quality, thanks mostly to the vastly improved technology available all levels of film makers, but also due to the bar being set incredibly high with the arrival of the Matrix and the unbelievable Lord of the Rings trilogies.

I’ve looked back at the films I’ve seen this decade and considered them across several distinctions – quality, script, acting, score and the always-difficult-to-assess emotional impact.  Of course, my opinion is just that, but I’ll have a go anyway. Read more…

Photo by Perrimoon

A chorus of voices raised across every mix of media urges brands – large and small – to compete on innovation.

Innovation!

New products, new services, new marketing techniques. Hundreds of books, thousands of blogs and millions of tweets espouse the path to commercial nirvana is paved with magical mystery of clever new craftsmanship.

For today’s marketer the message is even more direct: use innovative channels and tactics or risk losing ground to your competitor.

But while the pursuit of the Next Big Thing has forever been a key to creating better products, companies are increasingly competing along a new dimension: marketing innovation.

It’s seen in dynamic digital promotions; clever web applications; high-profile social media campaigns; or the deployment of any number of web-based communications tools. The range of activity is wide and marketing teams need help. Read more…

Those running marketing agencies today face a crushing dilemma.  Of course there are the usual challenges: a surfeit of competitors, including large, lumbering giants and hungry startups; a shortage of creative business problem-solvers; and an unforgiving economic climate squeezing everyone, client and supplier alike.

Even considering all this, the chief problem is not one of opportunity: more brands than ever need all the help they can get when it comes to delivering on their marketing promise.

The definitive challenge for agencies today is strategic: where to compete. Read more…

Photo by petrr

Even before brands faced today’s budgetary age of austerity, a populist meme was gaining traction: that while marketing is a necessary function, perhaps we don’t need a large, dedicated team to deliver it.

Mike Hutchison, writing for the blog Unlimited, argues this very point in his post Hitting Your Mark.  Hutchison’s cites an oft-quoted piece of industry lore of motorcycle manufacturer Ducati sacking its marketing department and delegating responsibility throughout the organisation.

The super-objective Hutchison craves – where individuals up, down and across an organisation take real, tangible responsibility for marketing the brand – is the right intention but the dramatic headline is unhelpful; we might have fantasies about eliminating marketing departments, yet actually doing so creates a number of acute, real problems that cannot be so easily reduced to theory. Read more…

Photograph: Marko Djurica/Reuters

I admit it: I’ve taken the outcome of the farcical World Cup 2010 playoff between France and Ireland more seriously than I ought. My smug, albeit neutral, perch affords me the lofty position of unbiased – and therefore the harshest possible – judgement.

Thierry Henry’s shameful handling in the lead-up to the final French coup de grace, reminiscent more of a touch-down in rugby than the usually prescribed path to soccer goal scoring, leaves even the non-partizan reeling in contempt.

The incident has been described as the ultimate expression of human frailty; for the referees, whose experience and good sense abandoned their eyes at the crucial moment; for the French players, whose desire to win at all costs cruelly hijacked their common decency; and for the spectator, neutral and invested alike, who have been left roiling or rollicking to face a long, cold winter digesting the ugly and inescapable realisation that – regardless France’s performance in next year’s World Cup – the outcome is immutably corrupted. Read more…