Word

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher was supposedly the first to coin the famous phrase about brevity - often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain - which on translation reads:

“I have made this longer than usual, because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

In advertising, brevity is encouraged. How words would work on a billboard, was usually the test to pass.

But Pascal, or Twain, would have been complete amateurs on the economy of language when compared with legendary director Tony Kaye, famous for his advertising work and then feature films.

Once, when delivering a speech at the Cannes Advertising Festival, Kaye, who was not shy of voicing an opinion, was asked to address the largely creative audience on the topic of ‘how to get the best result from a director.’

The crowd on the Croisette waited with bated breath, eager for some controversy from the man who once described himself as ‘the greatest English director since Hitchcock,’ but obviously also keen to hear his answer to the question.

They didn’t have to wait long.

Hating to disappoint, Kaye approached the microphone, surveyed the hushed throng, then delivered his thought.

“Trust.” he said clearly into the mic, letting it sink in for a beat, before turning and walking back the way he came.

Genius. On so many fronts.

Of course when you get paid by the word, for say, writing a magazine article, short is to be avoided like the plague.

Since a bow can never have too many strings, I’ve been writing and snapping pics for local magazine Bay Buzz. The latest article is on remote work. I do a bit of that myself, so the words, all two thousand of them give or take, came relatively quickly.

I just ran out of time to write fewer of them.

Belinda Williams from Bad Company

Build it and they will come.

I’ve always been good at spotting opportunities. Making something of them is way, way harder, requiring a different skillset entirely and has invariably brought mixed results. I’d like to think the odds are improving. Time will tell.

‘Made by New Zealand’ was a response to a Buy New Zealand made brief that I’d stumbled across by chance back in the day. Perhaps not so much a brief, as it was a small article in the NBR, gagging to be turned into something more.

These days global supply chains make provenance tricky. Lines are easily blurred. McDonalds and Coke can promote themselves as being made in New Zealand if they wished, while Fisher & Paykel can’t. It may well be correct, but it’s silly at the same time.

I reasoned a broader approach was needed, by demonstrating what our products and ideas are really made of. The premise, was that inside our wines - for example - there’s more than grapes and sunshine; you’ll also find tenacity, passion and courage.

Inside everything we create, everything we make, every idea we develop, is our mārohirohi - our character.

Our size and connectedness means that much of what we produce is the result of many. Made by New Zealand was a thought that demonstrated collaboration. At least that’s what it said on the box.

Ten months after the initial presentation, the nice client asked for a demo video to shore up wider support for the initiative, and to convey the feeling of what the end result might be.

Such videos tend to have a small internal audience. They’e usually cobbled together from footage often nicked from another project, sometimes accompanied by a stonking big - also ‘borrowed’ - music track that you have no hope of ever buying. But these details can be dealt with later. Goosebumps are everything. It’s emotion not practicality that gets you over the line. It still does.

In this case, it seemed far more pragmatic to ditch the demo, and just start making the real thing. Surely if the project looked underway, then those manning the handbrake might believe it probably was underway, and a green light would become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness, than it is to ask for permission.

It was time to call Mike Miz.

Mike Mizrahi is not only an extraordinarily talented artist, he is a true impresario. With partner Marie, they had just completed the millennium spectacular in the domain, and were about to create some stunning installations for Louis Vuitton in New York and Shanghai. Years later it was their giant rugby ball you saw under the Effiel Tower to promote the Rugby World Cup. Mike took the brief of ‘big’ literally.

Since the Government had just made a huge investment in their new flash silver fernmark, we started there. Besides, I reasoned, even if the client hated everything else about ‘Made by New Zealand’, they would at least end up with some half decent footage of the fern that could be used elsewhere.

The fern Mike wanted to build was the size of Eden Park and made out of sand. As I’ve yet to meet the client who asks for a smaller logo, it was perfect. Almost perfect. Auckland was in the middle of stormy season, and 72 hours before filming, high spring tides had literally wiped the beach off the map. We had no weather cover, and no second chance.

What could possibly go wrong?

“It’ll be fine on the day,” I assured everyone over-confidently. I hadn’t a clue of course, but we boxed on.

Luck was with us. At 3am on a biting cold August morning it was a bit hard to tell, but as night turned to day and the wind dropped, Te Henga turned on a pearler. The mahi tahi was working.

A fine group of artists, entrepreneurs and business leaders, both gracious and generous, stood with us on the sand to endorse the idea, and we filmed others later as momentum grew. “A fine collection of sinners and saints,” observed broadcaster Bill Ralston, arriving on set as Graham Brazier was rehearsing a poem he’d been up all night composing especially for the occasion. Bless.

As Mike manoeuvred his 40 plus construction team, racing against the tide and a mischievous water table, four 35mm camera units captured the action on the beach. Long before drones changed aerial cinematography forever, the only real way to see if what we’d built was what we’d imagined, was to be overhead looking straight down. Two helicopters circled above, filming the finished fern before it returned to the sea.

The finished fern on Te Henga beach, August 2001

As we finished production on our wee demo, the Government’s Knowledge Wave conference was also wrapping up across town. It was a talkfest of Olympic proportion, but the speaker who held everyone’s attention was a humble young wāhine toa, Kesaia Waigth, a 17 year old high school student from Gisborne. Her words, and those of the other students received the only standing ovation at the event. With good reason.

Powerful and persuasive, Kesaia implored those with ‘the eyes in power to look into the eyes of those in need.’ Without empathy or equality she challenged, all the other words spoken at the conference were meaningless. True now as it was then.

Kesaia was kind enough to meet with Janet and I the day after, as the poignant words from her speech lay barely dry on the front page of the morning paper. We seized the chance to have Kesaia comment on our own mahi. Truthful and hopeful, she once again spoke to the moment.

The video may have been finished, but the process continued to drag. Frustrated by delay, and despite assurances that things were in fact moving with indecent haste, there was only one thing left to do.

Shoot myself in the foot.

Passion projects can easily get away on you, and this one certainly got away on me. Never mind that I got overly excited with a blur filter in the edit suite - on this project a patient bedside manner was the virtue most required, and back then it had simply escaped me.

I’d fallen well short on the tenacity and grace I was championing in others, and disappointing those that had so enthusiastically come along for the ride.

Things got passionate. Lessons were learnt; and the bridges glowed brightly in the flames.

The fern returned to the sea long ago. You’d never know it was there at all.

But build it we most surely did.

When life hands you lemons

I’m long on lemons right now, having been blessed with the most productive tree. It groans with the biggest juiciest fruit, so much so, that quite a bit of last season’s crop remains in place as the new fruit forms, which can’t be doing the tree any good.

I’ve made Ottolenghi’s lemon chicken, frozen lemon blocks, jars of preserved lemons, and on it goes. Our local food rescue people used to have a nice man that would come and help pick them for re-distribution, but sadly he’s moved on. Unlike the lemons.

Gilly has been getting some every few weeks over summer, as Mrs Gilly makes the most delicious cold pressed juices and tonics with lemon, turmeric and honey, but even after taking four bulging brown shopping bags at a time, he’s barely made a dent.

All of which got me thinking about others with bounty to spare in their gardens, and how we could cut some waste and share the love around.

It’s a simple thought, making use of paper supermarket bags to spread the word, and the food, supporting local food rescue groups in the process. A supermarket could do it on their own, or in partnership with anyone else in need of some brownie points.

Design by Georgia

Ideas are a bit like the lemons on my tree; they need to be used, allowing new ones to grow in their place.

So, if you know anyone that might need this one, pass it on. It’s free to a good home. I’ve got plenty. There’s no danger of a shortage.

Just like the lemons.

Pushing the boat out

“Inspire us.” said the client, gently laying down the challenge. “No pressure.”

“What do you think?” asked Nic after the meeting.

“I think they want us to push the boat out mate … and quite a long way.”

Which is how we happened to be in Times Square at Magic Hour on a Thursday, helping Chorus turn the plaza into a digital art gallery, and co-ordinating the giant billboards to display the work of 13 New Zealand design students at the same time. It was all to pitch the shiny new Ultra Fast Broadband network to New Zealand’s growing creative economy, showing what you could do with fibre if you really opened up the pipe.

We’d live stream the event, and film it doco style for a media campaign back home. Back then, the 34 screen gallery was the largest display of synchronised content in Times Square history.

Stepping into the Square the day after, most of the skyscrapers were hidden in low cloud. Then the rain arrived. Worse was coming. A few days later we raced towards Kennedy just before Hurricane Sandy rolled in, swaggering like a drunk uncle at Christmas with a belly full of piss and bad manners. Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and was heading our way. Bullet dodged. But not by much.

No pressure at all.

Grace under pressure

“Kia hora te marino,
kia whakapapa pounamu te moana,
kia tere te kārohirohi i mua i tō huarahi”

”May the calm be widespread
may the sea glisten like greenstone
may the shimmer of light dance across your pathway”

There’s nothing worse than watching your team lose the America’s Cup as it can go on for days. Longer if the weather plays up. Which it was.

Alinghi were on match point in the 31st America’s Cup and I’d asked Hone for help crafting a message in the increasing likelihood of the team not being able to claw back the points, and Hone had offered up the whakatauki composed by Rangawhenua of Ngāti Pāhere, a hapu of Ngāti Maniapoto.

There’s another version, as there so often is, of the last line; ‘may your path be straight like the flight of the dove.’ Translation is always tricky, but the spirit was captured. Hone was given it by the late Koro Wetere, also Ngāti Maniapoto so we were in a good place.

Not so much out on the Waitemata, where things were getting bitter.

New Zealand let out a collective gasp when the mast snapped, but real damage was being done elsewhere too. The blustery Blackheart campaign was only meant to poke fun at Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, who had left Team New Zealand to head the rival Alinghi syndicate. There was a whole lot of dramatic outrage and ‘how-dare-yous’ from the campaign organisers at the start, but things soon took a southerly tack, ending in death threats and intimidation.

It was all good harmless fun until it wasn’t.

Team New Zealand had been quiet throughout the whole affair, staying focussed on the water as Alinghi turned the screws.

But when given a good old fashioned slippering, it was time to gently sprinkle some sugar. Manaaki time. Win, lose or draw, shaking your opponents hand at the end of the match is good sportsmanship. We expect it. The sponsors did. The many tamariki who wrote letters proudly displayed on the walls and ceiling of the team’s base certainly did.

We needed something soothing, gracious, and heartfelt. The karakia - a blessing - was often offered to wish travellers well. It was pitch perfect. Exhausted, hurting and humbled, Team New Zealand stepped up and went high.

‘Courage,’ said Ernest Hemingway, ‘is grace under pressure.’ And he wasn’t wrong.

The message aired in a television documentary about Sir Peter Blake that same night. Hone and I watched it with the rest of New Zealand on the telly. ‘It was only a rich white man’s sport until we lost it eh?’ observed Hone with a small wry smile.

He wasn’t wrong either.

Ka kite anō au i a koe.

"The worst ever social media campaign."

After Times Square, the ‘early adopters’ had pretty much all early adopted. Chorus was already hatching plans to test ultra, ultra fast broadband in one New Zealand town, so we suggested having a competition to decide where.

We called it Gigatown.

Towns competed to win the fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere - the winner being the town who wanted it most, as measured by social media activity. And compete they did. As luck would have it, Gigatown launched at the same time many local councils - who had been developing their own digital strategies - were looking for a catalyst to engage their communities. Boom.

A user generated campaign was an obvious thing to do really. Certainly the most appealing at my end. Not that there’s any shame in laziness. I take great comfort in Bill Gates’ advice: ‘always get a lazy person to do a hard job because they’ll find the easiest way.

Stuff journo Henry Cooke had quite a bit to say about Gigatown, claiming we’d used twitter ‘as a plaything’ and calling it the ‘worst social campaign ever’. To be fair this was long before the muskrat literally used it as a plaything, but even so I was a little confused as to what he thought twitter was actually for. By the end of his tweets Henry managed to un-convince himself, admitting that the worst thing about Gigatown was its success.

New Zealand’s hashtag of the year - and four others in the Top Ten - were all Gigatown related. Nic reminded me the other day that at one point Gigatown traffic took twitter down for three minutes, so we can actually say we broke Twitter long before Elon had the idea.

The game generated earned and social media exposure more than ten times the campaign budget. When it was all done and dusted, Gigatown won Best Community Engagement, Best Social Media campaign, and the Supreme gong at the NZ Marketing Awards.

You make the whole world smile

It’s not a cure for cancer’.

I’ve been guilty of taking myself far too seriously on many occasions, so it’s these wise words I try to remember whenever it’s time to pull my head in.

It’s always nice doing the mahi that does make a difference though.

Years ago Murray, Murray and I wrote ‘You Make the Whole World Smile’ - the Red Nose song - to help raise awareness of Cot Death Prevention; and money, to conduct ground breaking research into the causes of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The little earworm is one of the reasons you don’t hear so much about cot death anymore.

Hammond Gamble is one of the most generous, humble people you’ll meet. Getting Hammond to sing the track was a gift. Which wasn’t quite how he saw it. “I really don’t know why you asked me.” Hammond remarked as he was warming up for the session in the big room at Stebbings. “There’s plenty of good singers out there.”

Mmm not really. But how about, ‘because you’re a bloody legend?’

This was a job from way, way back in the day. My daughter was just walking when she appeared in the video. She’s celebrated 30 trips around the sun since. Cassingle anyone?

The double platinum song spent three weeks at No.1 and repeated the trick a year later. Anika Moa did a version in 2010 to raise awareness for Cure Kids.

Like every project here, if some magic happened, then it’s all down to mahi tahi.

Kia ora for that.

What I'd do about a kai

My bike got nicked a few weeks ago, which was a bit annoying. I did hope that whoever took it needed it more than I did, and I needed it quite a bit. They nicked my helmet as well, so nice to see health and safety messaging having a positive effect.

It also had a flat tyre that needed inflating every couple of rides, which might not have provided a total upper body workout, but it didn’t hurt. So when the inevitable recession was finally announced I was reminded these are desperate times.

“Thank God,” said Tina on hearing the news - about the recession, not the bike - explaining, “if it’s here, we can climb out of it.” She was right of course; her optimism was like knowing we’re heading into summer immediately after the shortest day, even though it’s still really bloody freezing for months.

Maybe times weren’t so desperate after all.

The language was a bit more colourful; she’d just lost most of her crop and fencing when Cyclone Gabrielle took them out to sea, but her farmer’s determination remained. Bruised but not broken. Climbing out of anything requires momentum. Momentum requires a catalyst and that’s what ideas are for.

Thinking our way out of things seemed like a good subject to write about and besides I had plenty of ideas lying about. Some, with good reason should probably be left lying about, but you can make your own mind up.

I liked the idea from Te Pāti Māori of removing GST from food. It’s good for everyone and because of that helps demonstrate Te Pāti Māori leadership. Their president John Tamihere had made the astute observation of how a growing tribe of largely younger voters make decisions based on conduct and character not skin colour.

Te Pāti Māori have a huge opportunity to woo voters of any ethnicity, but because their focus has been on winning Māori seats, I wondered how many pakeha knew they could give Te Pāti Māori their party vote, and so I sent John this thought, ‘anyone can vote for common sense.’

Photos by Olena Sergienko & Vicky Hladynets on Unsplash. Poster design by Georgia.

Te Pāti Māori policy must be upsetting someone’s polling data, because by the look of it, the pushback has already started.

The article did get me thinking that maybe an even bolder idea was in order. An idea to help address a whole lot of problems.

So here’s one I prepared earlier:

Let’s start with food waste.

If food waste were a country it would be the third largest carbon emitter in the world, said a 2013 UN report. Approximately 30 - 40% of food is wasted across the supply chain. In New Zealand we threw away $2.4 billion of food in 2021. I expect we’re not throwing away as much these days, but still.

Another problem; 32% of New Zealanders are obese and another 34% overweight. The index is far greater against Maori and Pacific Islanders. In 2021 the Sapere Research Group estimated the direct cost to our health system at two billion a year.

The biggie is child poverty. It costs NZ an estimated $10b per year. - John Pearce, Analytica, 2012. Of that total $3.5 - 4b was estimated to be the cost to the health system.

It’s quite hard to get an accurate fix on this one, but in the 2020 budget the Government set aside $22.1 million just to improve the measurement of child poverty. To be fair, this was down from the 25 mil that was set aside to measure it - incorrectly it would appear - two years earlier.

Food insecurity is a result of poverty, and equality lurks not far behind. According to a recent article, living costs have risen over 18% in the last seven years for households getting some sort of benefit. But only 13% in homes that aren’t. As usual, not everyone’s taking the same hit.

Joining all of this together is food. More specifically diet. When I wrote this, a loaf of white bread was $1.19 at Pak‘n’Save. “A good diet costs a lot,” observes nutrition expert Professor Elaine Rush in the same article.

To to help fix all of these problems; food waste, obesity, and child poverty, you’d simply just have to get everyone eating exactly the same thing.

A controlled diet, to be blunt. Which is of course impossible because who would agree to it? Or follow it.

Oh wait, that’s right, we’re already doing it.

Each week tens of thousands of New Zealand families pay for fresh food in a box - a controlled diet - to be delivered from My Food Bag, Hello Fresh and others, proving it’s not only possible for people to eat the same food, done properly it’s actually highly desirable. I can’t imagine anyone’s ever been embarrassed by a Hello Fresh delivery.

The MSD have already trialled My Food Bag for Emergency Food grants, but since ‘emergency’ and ‘food’, are words that shouldn’t be used so closely together, just give a Food Box to everyone that wants one. Every week.

‘Are you mad? What about the cost?’

Glad you asked. The cost to feed 1.85 million households, five meals per week, with an average of three people per household, is $9.6 billion a year. And that’s at retail, $100 per food box, with no allowance for efficiencies of massive scale.

The challenge is how to pay for it all without any tax increase, as you can’t just find 10 billion down in between the couch cushions. Well, actually you can, as this chart from Treasury quite clearly shows. Look at the second largest item.

Source: Stuff / NZ Treasury

No functional classification, 33 billion dollars.

Huh?

That’s right, 33 billion. On something that doesn’t even have a name, and clearly serves no purpose at all. Everything else looks pretty reasonable. Health, social welfare, defence, police. It’s all there. There’s $14b set aside for ‘other economic’ activity. It’s a decent chunk of wedge which I assume includes things like tourism, but again, how would you know?

There’s enough detail to mention spending $411 million on ‘fuel and energy’, but I’m none the wiser as to ‘energy’ meaning the power bill, or a whole lot of Peanut Slabs someone’s racked up on the parliamentary Z petrol card.

There’s even a lazy $435m allocated to ‘other’. As dear Squeeze would’ve said: “Matey, you can almost do something with that.”

‘No functional classification’ is just Wellington for ‘stuff’ and at the very least it’s a line item that could stand a bit more scrutiny. To paraphrase Alexander Skarsgard’s Lukas Matsson character: “We need to get in there and cut shit close to the bone.” This is about spending less money not more.

Food waste, obesity and child poverty are problems that cost taxpayers about $14 billion a year, give or take. Which is quite a lot more than 9.6 billion. Sure, it’s not that simple, but isn’t it? Prevention is always cheaper than repair.

Once you’ve dipped into the ‘no functional classification’ fund and found the money, you’d have to market the idea quite cleverly. But hey, with ‘free food’ or ‘controlled diet’ as messages, there’s something for everyone. The good news is the Government has way, way more comms people than the country has journalists, so time for the dark artists of the Terrace to get to work.

Supermarkets will take a hit. Or they won’t, and become part of the distribution pipe instead. Or, they get out in front and lead the charge. Any loss of employment would be absorbed by the creation of s new supply chain. Insist on the idea being a sustainable, ethical way to support our local food producers. B Corp it up the wahzoo.

Maybe the Food Box won’t be revenue neutral, but it certainly won’t ‘cost’ anywhere near $9.6 billion either. Maybe we’d have less domestic violence because there’s less worry about how to feed the family. Maybe there’d be less anxiety, and increased productivity from not having to waste time working out where the next meal might be coming from.

Maybe fewer bikes will get nicked. The butterfly effect and all that.

Some people hate this, no surprises there. You can always find a reason not to do something, especially if you put some effort in. Others are more positive.

It’s all good either way. Debate is healthy and we need more of it. They’re just ideas after all, nothing to be afraid of. Sooner or later one comes along that gives us the momentum we need.

It’s how we climb out.

Forever-ish content

I’d only just posted about delving back into the past, when Geoff came through and reminded me about a post that I had written a couple of years ago - ‘Forever Content’. Geoff reckoned it had made him laugh out loud, but couldn’t find it, and he encouraged me to repost ‘for my fan club’.

I don’t know about having a fan club, but I was once chased by a man who’d caught my brother and I nicking plums from his tree, although I’m pretty sure that’s not the same thing. However given Geoff is as sharp as creases and had built a successful career on giving smart advice it was sensible to follow it.

It turned out the post was on a different site altogether and as I could barely manage one website, two seemed to be just silly. The work he liked now has a new home.

The real reason though, was that the content idea I had never really fired and I’d moved on. If I’m honest, this was down to me not trying hard enough. But I’d promised to update you either way, and I hadn’t, which was hardly in the spirit of telling the bad with the good, so here we are. On a re-read it seems I was right about one thing - nothing was going according to plan.

Funnily enough, I’d been asked to make a piece of what I’d called ‘forever content’ only a couple of months ago. My friend Meg wanted a photo of her family, and there were six of them. They’d never had one taken since the kids had grown up with kids of their own, so it was quite a big deal.

Six is quite a crowd when it comes to a photo. Like a marketing manager using Canva, and other silly things that shouldn’t be allowed, I turned to Annie Liebovitz’s Vanity Fair work for inspiration. There’s a painterly quality to her group shots and plenty of online tutorials about how to achieve the look. Well kinda.

I’d also stupidly told Meg what I was aiming for, destroying any opportunity to under promise and over deliver later on.

One of Annie’s most famous shots is a VF cover of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, of which Annie observed; “If it were a great portrait, she wouldn’t be covering her breasts. She wouldn’t necessarily be looking at the camera.” Even if there wasn’t any nudity planned for Meg’s work, I worried that I’d set the bar way way too high.

I had discovered that Annie’s even lighting effect and no lens distortion is largely what makes her photographs painterly, and is achieved by compositing. I roped my daughter Georgia into this role, grabbed a couple of lights from Gilly, and arranged to meet Meg and the whanau at Frimley Park just before magic hour.

To do the compositing requires the photographer to be technically proficient, patient and follow the rules. I’m none of these. You need a clean background plate and even lighting. Each shot needs to be taken along the same plane. No colouring outside the lines in other words.

I didn’t even come close.

Georgia saved the day, skilfully blending eight different, in some cases very different, shots together. I’d learnt a couple of valuable lessons, the most important was don’t rush things, oh and just because you can fix it in post doesn’t mean you should. While her wizardry made up for most of my technical missteps, it would have been a complete ‘mare to pull together. Graciously she’s never bought it up and we’re still on speaking terms. All is well.

Meg was happy, her Mum and Dad were chuffed and the end result was swiftly dispatched to the printer, although probably no need to bother Annie with it.

That’s the update, it took a little longer than expected, but that in itself reminded me of a letter I once received from Sue Bradford that opened with ‘I have delayed writing for as long as possible, so I could give you the most up to date information available.’ She what she did there? Genius.

Anyway, here’s the original. It’s for Geoff. And the fans.

Forever Content

A couple of weeks ago I was taking some photos of a young mum and her baby boy. I’ve been getting seriouser and seriouser about photography for 7 or 8 years now, and while there’s never any shortage of things for me to learn; or indeed a shortage of photographers, a couple of hours behind the lens reminded me just how much fun it was. 

”Shit”,  I thought to myself, “I wish I could do more of this’.  

It was after this shoot that I decided to get behind the camera more often.

As it turned out, I was having a gap year, and therefore quite available, and so, here we are.   

I’ve always loved writing stories and now I’ll be telling them with pictures too. I love showing people a side of themselves they might only rarely get to see.

I’m going to focus on making what you could call ‘forever’ content. Sure, the name’s a bit shit, but the idea is solid. It’s simply pictures that because they make you feel good, you might just want to see more than once. 

Here’s some I prepared earlier.

It’s content designed to last, and be read and viewed over and over, just like in the olden days. Images and yarns that we might take a little more time crafting, because they’ll be all the better for it.

It might be a bespoke coffee table book about your business perhaps. Or your home, or farm. Maybe a short film. A celebration of an important anniversary or milestone. A gift for overseas clients. Framed portraits for Father’s Day. Or maybe a documentary film of a family gathering. 

Coffee-table books for your family. Or your brand. For a gift. To make a statement. Not only are they special, they’re great fun to do. ‘The Italian Blog’ (Blurb, hardcover, 128 pages) was for the amusement of friends. Check it out here.

You get the picture.

At least that’s the plan. Mind you I’m struggling to think of anything I’ve done that’s gone to plan, so as I watch my comfort zone disappear behind me, who knows what will happen.

But when it does, I’ll be sure to write about it here.  

And then we can all laugh about it together.

How to smarten up old chops.

I’ve always liked this phrase to describe a freshen up. I’m not sure where it really came from, but I first heard it from my friend Tina, who got it out of her mother Jo’s CWI cookbook from the chapter on ‘mutton’ in the ‘leftovers’ section.

It’s arguably more poetic than ‘new-ish website here.’ Although since ‘smartening up’ involved dousing the chops liberally in vinegar, maybe only just.

Anyhoo, prior to Covid putting the skids under so many things, I was doing a job with Greg Partington. He’d just bought the rest of his company back from Head Office and was keen to open up the throttle. Greg can be demanding and a ‘hard marker’ - but mainly on himself.

He wanted a campaign for the new company ‘Stanley St’ and we had settled on doing a series of candid interviews with his people that would run in Air New Zealand’s ‘Kia Ora’ magazine.

One thing we quickly agreed on was that ‘storyteller’ was a well overused term, ever since it had been kidnapped by people in marketing.

Stories have twists and turns, mood and details, characters you want to slap, and those you root for. The good ones have nuance and aim, vulnerability and charm. Of course so do the best ads, but contrary to what that insta tutorial has told you, writing copy doesn’t automatically mean you’ve written a story, least of all a good one.

I know this because I’m guilty too, having hastily written a shopping list more than once or twice. I’m trying harder.

View fullsize

It’s all well and good giving advice, my problem is following it. But as I rambled my way around Squarespace, I realised that behind my own work there was often an interesting backstory.

I’ve tried to tell things as they were, although I’m sure, ‘recollections may vary.’ There’s been some wins, some hard yards, and I’ve also kicked some spectacular own goals along the way. It’s all a work in progress I reminded myself.

But be honest, the fails are more interesting aren’t they? The car crashes. Even the little ones, of which there are many. Like the time I was giving a presentation - back in the day to be sure, but coincidentally also with Greg - and the client, who was staring at my feet started laughing. Looking down to see what was so funny, I discovered I’d put on two very different shoes. The shared the same colour but that was about it.

“What?” I asked, with a shameless pivot to the front foot. “You’ve never been so focussed on a job that you’ve put on different shoes?”

Who could argue with that sort of commitment. Shameless or not.

It’s not all the mahi by a long shot, just the stuff I like and the stories I remember. Well most of them. I’ll add more here. I’d like to say regularly, but I history would suggest otherwise. I’m working on that too.

One thing for sure is, I’ve been fortunate to stand on the shoulders of many, many talented people along the way who have shown not only kindness but an extraordinary amount of patience.

They know who they are, now you can too. It’s their story as much as mine.

Enjoy the chops.

Rewiring Ourselves

“I don’t really want any more work, I don’t want people ringing me up” said Meg, explaining what she didn’t want her website to do.

You’ll never die wondering what Meg Rose is thinking.

“You’ve come to the right place” I reassured her, albeit somewhat puzzled by Meg’s desire to be on the interweb at all. We first met working on Kirsten’s Mayoral campaign a couple of years ago, and I’ve offered to help Meg build a website in return for some sensible advice she’d given me. We chat as I take her photograph.

“So what do you want it for?” I asked.

“World domination” said Meg in the blink of an eye and devoid of any irony.

It turns out Meg has big plans indeed. 

Invited by Hardin Tibbs, a futurist and scenario planner from the University of Cambridge, Meg has written an article for the World Futures Review on how she uses Hardin’s strategic landscape tool in her work. The tool was originally developed for use by large scale corporates and governments, so that they could change direction by learning to rewire themselves, but it was how Meg had adapted it for local use that caught Hardin’s eye. 

“I work with CEO’s, gang members, prisoners, and small businesses” says Meg, “one client said my work … hang on … “as she reads from a testimonial “ - helped him rewire himself’”.

“But yeah, no matter who it is, the conversation starts with the same two questions: what do you need and what could we do?” 

I was momentarily distracted, wondering if the CEO, gang member, prisoner and small business owner could possibly all be the same person, meanwhile Meg is patiently explaining her dream of scaling up those individual conversations so they are held by whanau, communities and Government.

“The real big picture,” says Meg, calmly outlining her plan to rewire our most fundamental systems, “is to fuse the strategic landscape tool with the work Sir Tim Berners-Lee is doing on an alternate world wide web. The good web.”

Well, yes, of course it is I’m thinking - a little cross at myself for not having arrived at this blindingly obvious conclusion earlier. As it turns out though, I’ve heard a little bit about this ‘good web’,

”Isn’t it like the current web without the porn?” I offer. “Without the advertising actually,” Meg replies straight faced. “That’s the real problem”.

I let that one go through to the keeper, as most discussion about the relative merits of pornography vs advertising usually ends in the none too salient observation about both industries being full of wankers.

During the day Meg and her husband Andy teach life skills, a job that is intensely rewarding as it is demanding. Often their clients are dealing with a problem, but they have no idea what it is, let alone how to fix it. By a process of gentle pragmatic coaching Meg helps people identify whatever it is that’s holding them back.

“A lot of the work centres around the relationship between mind and body, when we understand how our body reacts to situations, we can learn to respond differently.” says Meg. 

They’ve set up camp in the cleaning supervisor’s office. Anyone on staff can book a session and clients get free advice on anything from budgeting, to anger management, or relationship guidance, through to how to sit a driving test.

They go into the workplace because it’s easier on the clients, this place has hundreds on staff. “Andy’s even got a set of toy cars he uses for the driving tests, because not everyone can read.” Meg adds.

For some clients Meg or Andy might be the only people they can talk to about stuff, or at least the only people that will listen. Some are really battling, others just surviving, all seem to be hurting: if Meg doesn’t want the phone to ring, it’s only because she wants to develop a set of tools that we can use to fix ourselves.

“Men really get the DIY angle” she laughs. It’s a work in progress though. “Often, they’re just looking for an acknowledgment, a validation of their journey.” Meg adds. “You can physically see a breakthrough. The exhale of breath, the body slumps forward in the relief of being heard.”

Like anyone on the frontline I’m sure Meg can tell horror stories alongside tales of triumph. 

But always with the same starting point: what do you need and what could we do?

See? World domination. But in a good way.