Watch this

Fans of Enid Blyton and fans of Helena Bonham Carter (I fall into both categories) and no doubt lots of fans of neither will enjoy this BBC4 drama about the writer’s somewhat surprising personal life.

The blurb goes:

It reveals how Blyton became the writer who would capture more youthful imaginations than anyone else, following her career from ambitious, driven and as yet unpublished young woman to household name and moral guardian, while glimpsing her own childhood - a dark time, far from the carefree, happy idyll portrayed in her books.
Through marriages and children, the roles of Enid the wife (to Hugh and then Kenneth) and mother are portrayed, ones she struggled to fulfil while balancing them with her extraordinary output.
The film also uncovers a strong and resourceful woman; a woman who never really grew up; a woman who rewrote the endings of many chapters of her real life, sometimes with cruel and hurtful results; and a woman whose legacy has often been criticised but whose success cannot be argued with, who gave children the stories they wanted.

I caught it last night but it’s being shown again tomorrow on BBC4 at 9pm.

If I had more time, I'd tell you how I ploughed through the entire Famous Five series as a youngster, often wondering what tinned pilchards and ginger beer actually tasted like and marvelling at the ability of the hardy five to sleep in gorse bushes. But I don't so I won't.

Good elf

As we hurtle towards December, and the inevitable deluge of bad Christmas TV ads begins in earnest, one question dear readers... Is it too early to Elf Oneself? I think not.

Yes, it’s back . With Twitter and Facebook add-ons.

M&S give the competition a helping hand

I love this. Via Campaign, Waitrose experience a sales increase of 17.1% in a week, and attribute the rise to a recent M&S ad campaign which compared the prices of its products with the Waitrose Essentials range.

Essentials range sales rose by 17% by value and 24% by volume during the 7-day period. And Waitrose promptly issue a press release to highlight this. Brilliant.

Because it's Friday

This is funny.

Via ITIABTWC.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Slightly saddened at the number of people not wearing poppies today.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfrid Owen (1917)

Bent double, like of old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind:

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

__

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

__

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in sonic smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-

My friend, you would not talk with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Image: __Olga__

Pretty pictures

Via Dave Mance, his brother Rob's sketchblog featuring some rather nice stuff he's knocked up on the iPhone Brushes app. Clever chap.

The social web

Last week, Neville Hobson posted an interesting response (well actually, I think it was a response to a response) on a Forrester report on the future of the social web.

As I haven't seen much else that comes close to being a scientific attempt to quantify how the social web is evolving, (I don't think my boss counts – "Twitter? Won't last. They were all on MSN this time last year") I thought it was worth a mention.

Forrester identify five overlapping eras over the period from 1995 – 2014 which are summarised as below.

• 2009-2011: The era of social colonization. In the next stage of social evolution, starting later in 2009, technologies like OpenID and Facebook Connect will let individuals traverse the Internet with their social connections along for the ride. The boundaries of social networks and traditional sites will blur, making every Web site into a social experience.
  
• 2010-2012: The era of social context. Next year, as sites begin to recognize people's personal identities and their social relationships, they will customize visitors' experiences based on their preferences, their behaviors, and who their friends are. In addition to enabling more intense social applications, in this stage social networks will absorb features of email and become a base of operations for everyone's online experiences.
  
• 2011-2013: The era of social commerce. Starting about two years from now, as social networks become the repository for identities and relationships, they will become more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Communities will become the driving force for innovation. As a result, brands will cater to communities, resulting in a power shift toward the connected customer.

Neville's pertinent observation on all this is as follows:

I summarize everything like this: It's about people, not technology: how people behave online and the pivotal role social networks have on catalyzing behaviour change.

And I'd just like to throw in Clay Sharky's oft-quoted:

"A revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviours."

As marketers, it seems to confirm the trend that most of us already realise we need to get to grips with pretty quickly – the transfer of ever greater levels of influence away from the seller and towards the consumer.