Ryan MacMillan

(Nathan has just linked to this story on my other blog. I wrote it last October, but wasn’t convinced that the tone would be right for this blog. Now popular acclaim (or, rather, Nathan) has persuaded me to open this up to the other two readers of this blog.

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I’m supposed to be working up some ideas for a column. Tim has kindly offered to help me. Leo & I went out for lunch at Canteen the other day, and came up with some titles. I’ve just been fleshing them out, but I’m not sure they’ll sell.

BEST LAID PLANS

- Some things work, some go wrong. Often the gap between the two is very, very small. Why did YouTube work, and Google Video fail to catch the public’s imagination? How come MySpace worked, and Walmart’s Hub didn’t? What exactly was it about British Gas’s “Talk Gas” teenage bulletin board that made it less successful than (to take a random example) my mother’s book club?

- Each month(?) Mat Morrison looks at two examples of the same idea: one that works and one that doesn’t, and tries to draw some lessons from each.

AD/VICE

- What can marketing professionals learn from porn, gambling, and terrorism? Surely there’s something to learn from these masters of media control and marketing?

- Having hitherto lead a blamelessly innocent life, Mat Morrison now goes in search of some answers.

CONVENIENT HALF-TRUTHS (or TRUTH/2.0)

- Content is King. The Customer is King. Web games create user engagement, and brand recall. View-through sales are a valid justification of media spend. Mobile operators can become media companies.

- Mat Morrison looks into the grey areas of online marketing. Any enjoyment the reader gets comes from watching Mat bite his tongue in an effort not to offend everyone he knows.

RESTART OR SHUTDOWN?

- Mat Morrison is working at his fourth start-up agency. He’s finally got proper equity. Only this time, he’s thirty-five, and tired…

AGONY COLUMN

- Mat answers reader questions about anything related to digital marketing. If he doesn’t know the answer, he makes up something appropriately wise. If there aren’t any questions, he makes those up, too.

STUPID AGENCY TRICKS

- Mat Morrison goes underground and persuades agencies to do things like Agency.com’s “If We Roll, We Roll Big“, or publish the long awaited “AKQA Ideas: Volume II“.

- He develops “It’s a Knockout” style tournaments for creative directors. He uses a secret camera to film business development directors carving up the User Generated Content market in hip London members clubs. He uses split-screen technology, eye-trackers, and opensource EEG kits to measure client interest during marathon pitch sessions.

HIGH 5′S ALL AROUND

- Top 5-lists of things. Celebratory tone. Mat Morrison takes the wanker’s route to profit and popularity.