Leiderhosen Review - indepth special

Actually, the title was total fiction: there is no leiderhosen related content here and I will not be putting any up in the future. I was inspired to write the title after having received a mail from a former colleague of mine - Jacqui. And no I won't write about Dunlop Greenflash trainers (running shoes to our non-British readers).

Back to reality, I attended a seminar by marketing group these4walls on research versus creativity. These4walls are lovely people and have some groovy video clips here. The evening went well, with the audience plied with a modicum of wine, Becks bier or mineral water (in my case). The crux of much of the discussion revolved around poor problem definition, client realpolitik and ignorance intruding on strategic thought and how innovation can be 'ironed' out through research. I decided to pose the question: how do you improve your client? Given that the underlying form of my parts of the discussion was that clients were at the root of many problems. Steps that I have taken in the past have included:
- bringing the client in to sample agency life (I had to skip my three-hour lunch at Hakkasan that day, I couldn't disappear to the gents to have a line of creative pick-me-up every 15 minutes and had to book some meetings in to pretend that I provided creative input and drove campaigns forward)
- get a feel for the realpolitik clientside and suggesting ways around it in a constructive manner whilst still delivering a programme aimed at providing business benefits (usually for Americans)
- resign the account

As the great PR maestro Larry Weber once said to me "Agency life is great, you work five years and then go in house and demand a fortune. When your in an agency to get to work on a range of clients and if one of them is an a55h01e you can tell them to go fcuk themselves". Like the magic shopkeeper in Mr Benn my governor Cathy Pittham appeared and explained that telling a client to perform a sexual act on themselves was a career limiting move. (But I can dare to dream)

In the UK we have holidays on the Friday through to the Monday, so expect little if any content to be added to this blog.