Scaffolding

Not so much scaffolding, actually.

What I’ve got in mind is the sort of thing that used to come up in EVERY SINGLE creative ‘brainstorm’ (why does my computer desperately want to correct that to ‘brianstorm’? Are they building these things with senses of humour these days?) that I attended in the heady days of agency and then when I scored my first in-house job.

The brief would be something along the lines of ‘no holds barred – we want a really big idea – one that’s going to translate across marketing, advertising and PR – doesn’t matter where it comes from – simply has to be big and attention-grabbing – yes, yes, if it’s good enough, we’ll find the money, never you mind about that – we don’t want anyone to be negative – no ideas are bad ideas’ etc etc. This would be followed by a sort of free-form bunfight as the various different functions, including serried ranks of consultants and agency bods, all tried to out-creative each other, the ideas getting more and more ludicrous and spiralling further and further out of control.

And, no. Before you ask, there was never any money for the big idea. A small fortune would be spent on getting everyone to the brainstorm – remember, the agency bods and consultants are charging by the hour – but when the sparkledust and dreamtinsel had settled, there was never, actually, the enormous pile of wonga we’d been promised. Maybe the ideas weren’t the right ones. Who knows?

But I digress. In every brainstorm – for a while, part of the zeitgeist I guess – the idea was put forward that we should get ‘those guys, you know, the installation artists – the ones who wrapped the Reichstag – Christo et Jeanne-Claude‘ to wrap a building in corporate colours. Overnight, obviously. To ‘surprise and delight’. (That combination of words still makes me shudder.) The choice at the time was usually either the Empire State Building or One Canada Square. (Yeah, overnight.)

So. I’m going to have a go at curating this blog. Make it easier to find stuff. Get rid of some of the self-indulgent twoddle (don’t you be telling me that I’m not self-aware) and get a focus on the stuff that might be useful in some way. Crisis Management. Media Training. Language and Writing. All that good, good stuff (as a rather strange ex-boss of mine would have had it.)

So – in the meantime – while I do a bit of bumbling workery on it – just imagine that, overnight, it’s been wrapped in thewordmonger’s corporate colours. Money no object when it comes to you, dearest blogsnorkellers.