In the weeds
My garden is full of weeds. Big, thorny plants as tall as my chest sprouting out of the soil. It's hard to grow much in the partial shade, under Scottish rain, I suppose.
Getting into the weeds is usually thought of as a bad thing. Details bog you down. The same goes for both advertising and journalistic copy - too many facts will overburden a piece, so focus on the big picture stuff.
This week, I've been ignoring that advice. I've been working on three new series on The Drum . Each zooms in a little closer than we usually do, but for good reason.
Much of the AI debate within marketing has focused on the scary stuff and the hopeful stuff. Productivity swings; cost savings; job losses. Less on the actual work already being done.
So, I've kicked off a string of articles that hope to fix that, tool by tool, agency by agency. Last week I spoke to Uncommon Creative Studio about Midjourney. This week, VCCP 's Morten Legarth and Peter Gasston talked me through how they're using Stable Diffusion. Hopefully, I've explained it well enough to be a useful account.
It's not all about machines. Our next series takes a look at some of the unsung, but vital roles powering agencies today. The kind of jobs that few of us actually understand, but depend on. First up was Barnaby Kelly of St Luke's London , who kindly explained to me what, exactly, a business director does for a living.
Finally, I've been talking to agency execs about a major pain point in today's industry - pitching. We've covered the pain elsewhere on The Drum before - and efforts to salve it by the IPA and ISBA, who spoke to me recently about the impact of the Pitch Positive Pledge - but this time I wanted to get into the practical details of contemporary pitching: how agencies are succeeding against the odds, how they're reinventing each element to be less costly in time and human effort, and how they make it worth their while. I started with Modern Citizens 's Dan Cullen-Shute and got into the weeds with him about how best to respond to an initial creds request/RFI.
Which brings me back to the garden. I've cleared some of the worst offenders out, planted oxeye daisies or wildflowers. And when I got closer, I found some of them weren't weeds at all - they were strawberry bushes.
Something for the weekend
- I spoke to the new boss of Dentsu Americas, Michael Komasinski about growth, AI and the impact of the tech slowdown.
- I don't know if I can picture Lionel Messi eating crisps, but here's an ad from Lays welcoming him to America.
- The debate over Ogilvy's 'Maaate' campaign has made it to The Guardian.