Justin.TV – Online all the time.

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Many years ago I thought how cool it would be if you were to go out with some friends each with a camera strapped to our heads, record an afternoon then to play it back on a split-screen.

You’d see what each person was focussing on at any time. Imagine a car journey for example: one person might be looking out of the window while the other three are engaged in conversation. Then suddenly that person might zone into what’s being talked about, and who’s to say, maybe their contender in the group would then zone out. Maybe the leader would be the person looked at the most: or the least. One person might be totally involved in the group. Another might be slightly distanced. Or perhaps the entire group would react the same way. It would be illuminating. It would be fascinating.

I never actually achieved this because at the time VHS cameras were the size of bricks and apart from the logistics involved – gaffer-taping bricks to our heads, incurring neck pain and instant, premature, substantial, painful hair loss – it would probably also have influenced our behaviour. But now technology is unobtrusive enough to allow such experiments to happen. And now we have broadband streaming video access, someone has taken advantage of Tuvalu’s fortuitous domain name to turn themselves into a media brand.

Justin.tv is a guy walking around with a video camera strapped to his head. All the time. Right now I’m watching him at the laundromat.

I heard about him earlier today on The Message, a Radio 4 programme covering the media from the viewpoint of journalists, producers and writers. David Quantick roundly criticised Justin’s activity, calling him a ‘dork’, his site ‘mind-numbingly dull’ and – amusingly – suggesting that it would be more interesting if he had a camera in his head and no one had told him.

David Quantick is an arse. What he doesn’t realise is that this is ultimate TV. Everyone who speaks to Justin knows what’s going on. He’s the Ultimately Famous Person. Everyone who talks to him sees their potential stake in his brand. When they nurture him, they nurture his brand, and therefore themselves. It’s exactly the same as real life except they know that they’re being watched by many people online. Person and brand – online, one-to-many brand – become indistinguishable. It’s the closest thing to really Being John Malkovich currently available.

This isn’t wrong, and it isn’t right. It just is. Justin just is, and you can see him being. I’m not suggesting for a moment that our lives are so empty that we must live them through Justin. But we know what he’s looking at and listening to and if you want to walk around in someone else’s shoes – which after all is what Harper Lee urged us to do many years ago - then you can do it, now.

OK, so he may be a moron. But we owe it to ourselves to know what it’s like to be one.

If you’re interested in Whitehouse and Wolfowitz, you’ll love this.

I don’t just receive. Actually, I don’t really receive much at all on this blog. But I do give.

Subscribe to my feeds and you get a good all-round view of what’s happening in the PR, journalism, copywriting and tech blogospheres.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how I created these feeds, but what I do know is that I’ve developed techniques to ensure wide-ranging, deep-probing and relevant hits for each category. They’ve been filtered, collated and filtered again, and I’ve tested them and they work. I use them every day in my professional life.

So:

• PR Pros Proclaim – find out what’s the haps in the PR blogosphere. This does not cover regional PR activities in Pig’s Knuckle Arkansas. It does cover the latest, most important PR news, in part voted for, digg-like, by PR professionals.
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• Geeks speak – and don’t they just. Strange, in company they’re the quiet ones but give them a screen and a keyboard and you can’t shut them up. I worked in tech for 15 years before coming to PR, so I know. Bless them. The future is in this feed.

Subscribe to all four and all you’re missing is the one feed to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

The heart of everything you do

Everything hangs on your messaging and your brand personality. This doesn’t just apply to copywriting.

When I take on a new piece of work I insist on going through the copy brief. Some people are brilliant at it, providing me with exactly the right information, mainly because I ask for exactly the right information. Others aren’t so good, but I still use it as my cue for making sure I cover everything. In PR parlance this is probably called a 360 degree view.

But what a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that the copy brief can apply pretty much everywhere else. Essentially it asks ‘what are you trying to achieve’, ‘who is it for’,'what’s the message’ and ‘what’s the brand personality’. You would ask the same questions if you were a designer. You would ask the same questions if you were creating a website.

I don’t think many people take this on board. An inexperienced client will approach an inexperienced designer saying “We want clean lines and bubbles“, so naturally the designer will produce clean lines and bubbles. Or might say “This won’t take you long to write”, so an inexperienced copywriter is annoyed when it takes three days instead of three hours.

Let’s amplify. Let’s realise that really at the heart of what we do lies exactly the same thing, whether it’s writing, design, PR or advertising. It’s clarification of those four basic principles. It’s the font from which everything flows.

I’m sure I’m over-simplifying here. If only someone would read this blog and tell me.

Skoda, nepotism, and cheese

From the hurly-burly of the media come three noteworthy stories.

Firstly, Skoda, purveyor of one-time jokes on four wheels. “What do you call a skip with a roof?” “A Skoda”. Over the past ten years they’ve made a remarkable three-point turn, becoming the badge of choice for cunning consumers who know they’re essentially getting a VW but for several grand less. It’s of particular interest to me because about fifteen years ago when I first wanted to be a copywriter I worked for free on an advertising brief from Saatchi and Saatchi to reposition the brand. My fumbling attempts were laughable: one involved showing a rusty bucket next to a shiny Skoda with the line “Which would you rather have?” Cue guffawing aplenty and I became a technical author instead. Ho hum. But Skoda’s success shows how canny marketing and joined-up business sense can successfully realise a strategic objective and rehabilitate a damaged brand. Very much like myself who can now look in the mirror, stand erect and say every morning “I am a copywriter.”

Which leads me nicely to writers. On the Radio 4 Today programme yesterday morning, just before I plunged into the darkness that is the Underground, I heard the preamble to the next item which was to discuss whether children of famous writers benefit from being, well, children of famous writers. And, in a wonderful möbius loop of publicity, who was going to discuss this but Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill. Apparently he’s been writing for ten years without telling anyone he’s Stephen King’s son, which is nice, but it still remains deliciously ironic that of course they benefit because they get invited to talk about it on broadcast media. A rose by any other name would have nowhere near as much PR potential. Just think, if my dad hadn’t been a logistics consultant I could have written The Great 21st Century British Novel. I’d imagine Christopher Tolkien benefitted from his father’s input to Lord of the Rings. Likewise Peter Amis probably got a lift from being his father’s son. Hmmm.

Which segues nicely to cheese. Today on Today, CheddarVision. Yes, CheddarVision. You can log on to a webcam and see cheese maturing. They’ve had half a million hits. HALF A MILLION. Let’s think about the ROI for second. Cost of buying webcam and URL, probably less than thirty quid. Cost of exposure to half a million ‘cheese geeks’ as James Naughtie termed them? Incalculable. It’s a brilliant, brilliant PR move. This isn’t just cheese, it is now Famous Cheese, and everyone will want a bite. They’ll do for West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers what Wallace and Gromit did for Wensleydale. The only off-note in this bouquet of creamy goodness is that I’ve looked good and hard and as far as I can tell it’s actually a static image, part of a Flash movie in fact. If this is so and it’s not ‘real’ then part of me thinks it’s foolish in the extreme because they could end up with, well, egg on their faces. But everyone at the agency today was looking at it to try and figure out whether or not it’s genuine and a rather tasty email thread ensued with fantastic cheese-related puns. Apparently you need to tune in at 10am every day to see it being turned. This could be Proof. So, it’s a 10am appointment on the internet for me tomorrow, hats off to Isotope Communications, and let them be edamned if it backfires. Gouda on them. They’ll brie laughing all the way to the bank.

David Cameron could be The Real Thing

This morning I was walking to work through Bayswater listening to Today on my mobile phone’s radio (a very neat little Sony Ericsson K750, well worth investigating btw). They were discussing David Cameron’s potentially risky strategy of placing himself at the forefront of the environmental issue. Suddenly, who should cycle past me but the man himself, complete with kiddy carrier on the back. I had to do a double-take but it was definitely him.

So he does cycle to work. And he isn’t noticeable. I’m sure he cycles to work with hardly anyone recognising him. I know he’s kind of famous for cycling but the point is he really does do it. It’s PR and it’s politics and it’s branding (check out the new Conservative logo) and it’s all joined up. Quite a heady mix.

To complete the circle, James Naughtie appealed for people to comment on their website which, five minutes later, I was able to do.

But the thing that impressed me the most was that I couldn’t see Cameron wearing any earphones. While the nation was debating his latest manoeuvre, and while I was tuning in via a mobile, Cameron seemed to have made the deliberate decision to enjoy getting from A to B without being connected. It gives an interesting insight into how the man works. And, grudgingly, as a lifelong Labour supporter – who may be dithering – I admire this.

The Keg.

So the world’s smallest hard disk-based MP3 player goes on sale outside Japan.

It’s called the Kenwood ‘Media Keg’. It holds 10GB (my phone can hold 8GB, possibly even 12GB in the near future). It weighs twice as much as the Nano and, at 271 squid, is nearly twice the price too.

I’d say all it has going for it is the Kenwood brand. It will be interesting to see whether this hopelessly marketed product makes it on the strength of this.