Had a great meal at The Union in soho this week. Everyone I spoke to during the evening seems to have been a member at some point. The Creative Socials were lucky enough to hear advertising guru Paul Feldwick talk about planning and poetry. I normally put poetry into the same bucket as musicals, but my attitude was transformed by his wonderful delivery and great choice of material. He is deep thinker about the mechanics of advertising. His attack on the perils of the 'big idea' seemed particularly pertinent. Not much of his thinking is online, but I did find these articles:

Interview with Paul Fenwick
Brands and Branding
He's the man

Thanks to Mark from The Garden Party who sponsored the evening.

[NOTE] Paul kindly emailed me a list of the poems, my favorite being the sock:

The Shield of Achilles WHAuden
Seasonal Fanfare Adrian Mitchell
O Strange Animals David Hart
Bean Soup John Hartley Williams
New Numbers Christopher Logue
Ode to my Socks Pablo Neruda (trans)

The nice folks from schematic.com pointed out this site yesterday. It's displays cloud tags about brands. Go across the brands and the comments seem very negative. Even darling brands like Apple get a kicking. There is something about open forums that attract 'haters'.

It's a much more intelligent version of Youtube comment speak. It's very noticeable that brands with more personality provoke more emotion. Compare BMW with Nokia. Maybe to really stand for something you have to have some people hating you. This observation was made by the developers of stack overflow. They knew they were doing something right when the spoof site crap overflow launched whilst they were still in beta. (Stackoverflow podcast)

Brandtags - nokia, bmw
www.brandtags.net