The future's bright. The future's digital.

The Creative Britain report was about helping creative business move from the margins to the mainstream. The Digital Britain report is about establishing a proper platform for the digital economy, and will have far reaching impact across many industries, not just this one.

From a creative perspective, the Government is keen to leverage Britain’s internationally-recognised talent in online, as well as move on from a leading position in global entertainment formats, advertising, marketing services and research. There is indeed a lot to do to take the economy back from gloom to boom, but there is no doubt that a strong position in digital knowledge and understanding around content generation and ‘how to code’ is as important as the massive infrastructure issues facing the telecoms sector to deliver economically viable broadband to everyone in the nation. And what is the ‘second public service’ provider to consist of? All this and more will be debated over the coming months. I felt the Creative Britain report was about looking backwards to how great it was being a digitally illiterate creative director in the sixties. The Digital Britain report is about looking forward to how great it should be being a digitally literate creative business in the future. I, for one, welcome it.

Eye-watering chocolate costs coming. No wonder those eyebrows are dancing.

Cocoa is now at its highest price for 24 years and the premium brands, those that use the most ‘cocoa solid’ content, will inevitably have to pass those raw material costs on to the consumer first. This swings things favourably for Cadbury’s and Nestlé, as they tend to use less cocoa solid in mass-produced bars, so may be able to hold prices for longer. If you compare the cocoa solids content of Dairy Milk to say, a bar of Green and Black’s you can work out the relative strength of pure chocolate for yourself.

As belts tighten, even for the indulgent, can purity at a price overcome the celebration of a joyful moment expressed in Dairy Milk advertising? The kerfuffle over ‘shrinking’ chocolate sizes (where’s my last rolo gone?) at countline level indicates that when the British consumer thinks about chocolate a tiny bit more than the three seconds it takes to snap up a KitKat as you head out of the tube, manufacturers have to sit up and take notice.  Mind you, I liked one succinct Yahoo answer on that question “it’s not the chocolate bars getting smaller, it’s the people getting bigger.” Let’s see how consumers react as wallets get smaller.
 

Obama sees unfettered email as a human right

Does today's report that Obama will be the first US president to use email mean digital is normal now? Mind you, yesterday the FBI announced an investigation into hacks who got hold of Sarah Palin's email.

A whole new world of complication for authoritative and paranoid institutions opens up.

One wonders if Obama's Candide-like attitude to technology will shift the attention from the real reason people take up email, Facebook, Twitter and so on - they want to communicate with each other, freely and without fear, to the miserable place of recrimination and *** covering, the downside of corporate communication management.

I recently receive hundreds of messages from around the world as I left MRM Worldwide, wishing me luck with my new venture and other kindly comments.

Many of them were *not* by email on account of big brother concerns. It's a sad reflection on corporate life that individuals are subsumed to the corporate will without a second thought to the perfectly reasonable human desire to communicate with people they like.

There is of course, email etiquette and certain guides to successful email life that I have promoted. Don't send email when you're a) pissed b) angry c) very angry. Do a) spell correctly b) make the message title relevant and c) consider the recipient may have two hundred unopened in an inbox.

One excuse I've heard from corporate apparatchiks for not doing something they were supposed to was they were too busy dealing with hundreds of emails. Don't confuse activity with progress was my advice back. Let's hope Obama doesn't either.

Universal Wi-Fi should be like street lighting.

First day at the new office, pop to Starbucks to write a speech. No plugs for the laptop. Grr. That’s why Starbucks is so annoying. You think you’re going to get decent coffee, but it’s a bit random. You think you can work wirelessly, but unless you have an account with T-Mobile, it’s expensive. Roll on local authority funded wireless networks, like they have in Islington. Or free wi-fi, like they have in most of the cafés in Stoke Newington and Valparaiso. Come on Starbucks. Catch up with the modern ‘knowledge-working’ habits please, and provide more than one plug for the low battery life mac users, and free wi-fi with the skinny caps. Loved the John Coltrane backgroud music though. Credit where credit's due in educating the world that A Love Supreme is not an ice cream at McDonalds.

Yes we should

Obama's success is being celebrated as the triumph of 'digital cleverness' over the old fashioned slagging TV strategy of the Republicans. Even I got an email from Obama. In the end though, I believe he was selling hope, and a vision for the future. Much of the corporate world sells the past, and it's tiring being a change agent (I know several) in companies that don't want to change at their heart, or just will take too long. Observing trends is one thing, adapting to them is another. And there are some deep changes brought about by the internet that I think companies must adapt to.

I was interviewed by McKinsey some years ago about how the digitisation of media would affect the agency business. I was pretty clear about the opportunity and the challenge. Digitisation would eventually expose the pricing structures of media and the agency infrastructure that sat in between the advertisers and the media properties that put messages in front of consumers. Media owners seek the highest bidder for access to their distribution; brand owners seek the lowest bidder for their message distribution. Agencies are in the middle, trying to make a cut both ways. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and the creation of memorable brand imagery and content for distribution has been where agencies create value for themselves. This relied on having 'the best people' and 'top creative talent' and an industry of awards recognition emerged to build rank and competition.

The world has moved on. One of the deepest and potentially destructive trends is neatly described, again, by McKinsey. The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. High tech, consumer goods, and automotive companies have to involve customers, suppliers and small specialist businesses, in the creation of new products. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies reduce costs and get to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.

Agencies struggle with this concept. They want to control everything, and take credit for everything. The advertising agencies have long known that the ability to marshal the co-creation process has been a competitive advantage, and the role of orchestration creates value, as well as the control process. This meant that in awards ceremonies, the production companies get awards too. I've heard agencies from the direct marketing world tend to be less collaborative, as they don’t have the same self-confidence perhaps, or the associative glamour that shooting with Paul Thomas Anderson or Aki Kaurismaki brings in seductive conversations with Clients.

The d-word tends to make all this rather confusing. Developing a programme for a brand to live successfully on the internet forces a way of working that requires a strong collaborative culture at the heart. That is hard to understand without experience. It’s not clear cut who is responsible in the development process. Ideas do, literally, come from everyone. That has to be a good thing, especially as the words on every marketeer’s lips are ‘the consumer is in control’. But it is not something that the old model of agency self-aggrandisement likes very much.

PS I watched the Obama inauguration with my children, (politely encouraged to switch over from Phineas and Ferb) rather like I had been allowed by my parents to stay up for the first moon landing when I was tiny, and was delighted to hear him speak up for the workers, rather than the greedy, and for the doers, rather than the credit bandwagon. Let's hope he continues to.

Digital Britain. Don't bank on it just yet.

Lord Carter's interim report on Digital Britain is due out next week. I was at the briefing he gave to the Westminster forum, which made the front page of the FT at the weekend, along with a few TV luminaries. There are a few big unanswered questions. First, is it really 'universal' access? Second, if 'free to air' is no longer viable, how do you create a framework that allows quality public service broadcasting to continue that isn't singly funding the BBC? Third if there is no publicly supported creative industry, how will programmes that sit low down the commissioning table (investigative public interest programmes for example) ever see the light of day? As the government continues to bail out the banks with our money, government investment in the 'digital content' industry pales somewhat into a relatively small proportion of the £3.5bn BBC funding. By comparison, the Government injected £37bn into RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS in October, and pledged £450bn to guarantee banks' debt. It's now adding another tranche of money for the bankers. If we are to become a serious digital player in the world, the government needs to put its money where its mouth is.