Pete Lien used to be a planner, working in a variety of agencies including Albion (which finsihed him off!). He’s now left that all behind to become a chef. He’s documenting his journey on his blog This Edible Life, which I’m really enjoying reading – he’s got a way with words, his food looks delicious, and his affectionate bitterness about the marketing industry makes me feel suitably shallow. Add it to your feed reader today.
Normal service will be resumed in 2007.
I’m getting married in 2 weeks time, which is the second reason I’ve been too busy to blog: Literally (not in the footballer’s sense of the word – actually literally) every moment when I’ve not been working has been spent, well, working on the wedding event.
We’re getting married in church, and then the celebration is in a marquee in a field. So there is no wedding co-ordinator. They usually come with a venue, or you have to hire them independently at vast cost. So we thought we’d organise it ourselves – Jane’s a project manager after all. But what we didn’t factor in was the unprofessionalism of most of the companies you have to deal with.
The wedding service market (in the north-west of England at least) is a vivid illustration of supply and demand at work. There is far too much demand and not enough supply. Therefore many suppliers get away with offering a shoddy, overpriced service and there is often no alternative. (Unless you go seriously upmarket into the £50k price bracket, which seems an obscene amount to spend on a party.)
Thankfully along the way we’ve also found a few great people who have been very professional and helpful. I would thoroughly recommend:
I’m not going to spend any time shaming the less confidence inspiring companies… yet. Let’s see if they actually deliver on the day. I keep telling myself they will…
BTW, it’s interesting that the crap companies have crap websites, and the better ones really use the web well.
Wish me luck!
So, no posts for 4 months. Sorry.
I wonder how many lapsed (failed?) bloggers make apologetic posts like this after a lengthy period of absence? It feels a bit pathetic to be honest. I hate those ‘oh my god I’m sooo busy’ people who will never help you with anything. I try to be the kind of person who says yes to everything, but perhaps that’s why I ended up so busy. And in a battle between my blog and getting by in the real world, I’m afraid the real world had to win.
(What’s interesting is that my trickle of comments never dryed up. About three posts I’ve made here seem to persist in attracting a couple of readers. Perhaps I’ve over estimated the premium on currency with blogging?)
Anyway, so why have I been too busy?
Part 1 to the answer is that at Albion, the communications agency where I work, we are going through that victim-of-our-own-success period. We’ve quietly done some good work, which has built our reputation, and has led to us being handed lots of new business, and being asked to pitch for even more. Which is all fantastic, but it’s hard to find the time to find the good people who we need to help us do it all.
I’m sure we could have predicted this, planned for it, and found a better way through it. We’ve all been involved in growing agencies before. But we were all having too much fun actually doing the work to stop and think about it seriously enough.
As (another) aside, there doesn’t seem to be too much competition for 30-person strategic and creative agencies with serious people and good clients. We seem to keep on coming up against similar competition: Karmarama and Farm.
Anyway, here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me so busy:
So I’ve had plenty of good ideas for blog posts during the last 4 months, but really haven’t had the time to write them, because even my non-Albion time has been totally filled by another project – I’m getting married – see part 2 for details.
Hopefully in the New Year things will calm down a little, and I’ll be able to start to clear the backlog. (Hopefully I’ll get to go on some nice long train journeys too. For some reason I find trains the ideal place to write blog posts.)
Ideas Department 