Serendipity Book

Everything is Interesting

Everything is Interesting was an exhibition of work by Canadian artist Kelly Mark at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2003.

It consisted of several events, interventions and performances through the city which Mark responded to with the proposition that ‘everything is Interesting’.

This badge, measuring 38mm in diameter, has been reprinted due to popular demand.

Get yours here for 50p. I'm off to Birmingham to get mine tomorrow.

Pre-testing reduces effectiveness

In the current issue of the Marketing Society's journal 'Market Leader', Les Binet & Peter Field make the somewhat contentious claim that, far from improving the chances of getting an effective ad out, quantitative pre-testing actually reduces your chances of success.

Their data shows that ads that have not been quantitatively pre-tested have a 71% chance of being effective whereas those that have been pre-tested have only a 44% chance of success:

Their analysis is based on the IPA dataBANK of 880 case studies. The 'Market Leader' piece is based on their recent book Marketing in the Era of Accountability which analyses the dataBANK in detail.

In the article Binet & Field provide very little to explain this poor performance by the pre-testing industry apart from deriding the overreliance by pre-testers on 'standout' as a metric.

Whilst pre-testing has it's detractors (and I must admit to being less than comfortable with the claims made about most if not all of the pre-testing methodologies that I have encountered), I'm sure that there are factors at play here apart from the use of the wrong metrics. For me the biggest factor influencing the result we see above is the difference in the cultures of the clients that pre-test and those that don't.

Open Plan Office Paranoia

I saw this fantastic mirror by Sebastian Wrong (great name) whose work is sold via Established & Sons (another great name) when I was in Liberty the other day.

Taking his inspiration from car interior rear view mirrors, Sebastian Wrong has created a wall mounted convex mirror for the home. It provides a panoramic view of the room behind you and has a steel ball joint at the back allowing movement along three axes. At just under a metre wide and available in the classic 80's colours of red, black and white this is a pretty striking object.

It reminded me of an outsized version of the desk mirrors that office workers use to see who is coming up behind them out in the wilds of the open plan. 

Most of the office staff I worked with in South Korea had one of these little mirrors (pictured above right) perched on their computers so they could see when their supervisor was approaching.

Sebastian's mirror is nearly 5 times the size of one of these so I think it would make quite a statement.

Along with good old privacy screen filters (not cheap you'll notice) rear view mirrors are considered to be the norm in open plan offices in South Korea I gather. Presumably paranoia is more socially acceptable than it is here?

With or without a mirror, nothing beats not actually being at your desk as a strategy for getting work done and avoiding interruptions as the New York Times noted recently.

London Review of Books: Cityphilia

There is a truly excellent piece by John Lanchester about the City of London in today's London Review of Books. It's the best writing about the City I've come across since reading Liar's Poker and Freud in the City.

Lanchester includes a personal reflection on the impact of the City's wealth on the rest of London, provides the best explanation of derivatives I've ever come across and gives an exemplary history of the post Big Bang era covering Leeson, LTCM, Enron, hedge funds and the recent debacle at Northern Rock.

While we watch as the impact of the CDO debt losses trickle through to the rest of the economy in 2008 we could worse than to reflect on how bad it could really get if we don't keep a closer eye on what the traders are up to: "In 2003 the total size of the world economy was $49,000,000,000,000. The total size of the derivatives being traded was $85,000,000,000,000. In other words, derivatives today are worth far, far more than the total economic activity of the planet. More than $1,000,000,000,000 of derivatives are bought and sold every day."

The Joy of Not Being Sold Anything

Banksy sells his brand by tagging an empty billboard with the anti-capitalist message "the joy of not being sold anything".

You can see a still of the finished article over at Glyn Britton's Flickr photostream (Glyn is head of planning for Albion London).