On demand is moving

My friends have advised me that On Demand needs a new home so now please head to http://robnorman.wordpress.com

Shooting up at the ball game

The Mitchell report condemns the players of Major League Baseball but the shame should be shared by the administrators, owners and managers. The scale of the wrongdoing is such that most involved were cheats, fools or collaborators.

There is no way the records can be wiped and history re-written. The answer is simple. From Opening Day 2008 MLB should publish its banned substance list, introduce frequent and random testing and punish transgressors with immediate life bans for the players and an extra game in the lost column for the teams.

Why is this the answer? Simple, it costs the cheats and their employers money.

For the record Mr Bonds stood at the plate just 8 times when Mr Clemens was on the mound. In the juiciest of contests Mr Bonds struck out twice, was walked five times and hit by a pitch once. It is unlikely that this record will need revising in the future.

Well that's nice

One of our agencies was named Interactive Agency of the Year today and another as the runner-up. That's a good thing.

The question is why?

For the most part 'of the year' awards are a measure of momentum. A good run of new business and higher profile campaigns from September through Novmember helps a lot as it puts you front and center in the judging season. In fact those three months are probably worth double the identical performance in the quarter from January to March.

The most important thing to realise if you win is that expectations of your ability to deliver grow and it's really easy to slip from the top of the mountain. Also your staff become targets for your competitors so you have to do everything humanly possible to retain them.

In many ways being average is easier but if you were forced to choose.............

Britain annexes Alaska

Mike Gravel. He's our guy. An online 'match your ideas with a candidate' servive reveals the Democratic Senator for Alaska as the number 1 choice for ever Brit I know that has taken part. Broadly speaking Gravel is green, pro choice, anti death penalty and anti-war.

This much we know...........Gravel has an Alaskan snowaballs chance in hell of getting elected and that Brits (or at least my friends) are by American standards the most blood soaked of bleeding heart liberals.

Go Mike.

Tears for Sears

Before I go on I need to point out that my company used to be a supplier to Sears but was fired from its duties in the last year.

Yesterday, unconnected with the above, the company announced a 99% fall in earnings but more disturbingly an approximate fall of 5% in sales in stores that had been trading a year or more.

Sears is in an uncomfortable place. It means little to its customers, it lacks the price story of Wal Mart or the style story of Target. It means little to its staff beyond the check and appears to have lost any of the sense of pride in  its endeavors that seem to characterize good businesses.

The truth of it is that restoring a retail business to health requires the right merchandise, the right sourcing and logistics, the right environment and the right attitude among all the people the customer faces.

You save money and create efficiencies through the prism of these needs as doing it any other way is merely akin to peeling a bad onion. By and large they don't get any better the more you peel.

Sears retail estate is in pretty poor shape and there are clearly limbs that need lopping from the tree and others that  require nurturing in a somewhat intense fashion.

One problem maybe the ownership. Sears is controlled by people with heritage in hedge funds who, as a group,  prefer the notion of 'strip and spruce' to that of planting seeds and encouraging growth. Sears like many iconic businesses before it will discover it has no inalienable right to exist. It does have the 'infrastructure impact' that demands airlines are saved nor the localized and massive economic impact of the auto business. It's said that many newer mall owners don't want Sears as an anchor and if that's true the writing may be on the wall.

To survive Sears needs to spend on its estate, its merchandising and its people first. Efficiencies only benefit businesses that actually exist.