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Posts Tagged ‘Dublin’
To whom it may concern…
March 29, 2016
I’m busy clearing down a mountain of emails after a long weekend.
Each of these emails was sent with some purpose .. a work request, keeping me in the loop of something, providing me with valuable information or hoping that I will be prompted to do something.
Each of these emails was sent with a plan..someone decided on the content and the format and hit that ‘send’ button.
In the middle of all of this I get a “to whom it may concern” email from someone who is looking for Fuzion or one of our clients to sponsor their event in some way.
Technically they have done their job.. they compiled a list of people/companies to target, they gathered their email list, they worked on the ‘copy’ for their email and pressed ‘send‘.
When I get a ‘to whom it may concern‘ it makes it really easy to hit the ‘delete’ button.
‘Hi Greg‘ will work much better..go on… I’ve said it before, personalise – it” easy!
(the cool image I found online is by Caysi)
What do you do with Mr and Mrs Toxic?
March 25, 2016
I am working on a really interesting project at the moment and because it is quite complex there is a diverse team made up of very talented individuals from different organisations working on it.
We had a full day session, which included a meeting with the client group and instead of being the enjoyable experience I was expecting it was a horrible, draining one.
There is one characters (who happens to be really talented and super valuable) on the team who is just plain rude, arrogant, dismissive and being honest a little nasty. This has led to a testy atmosphere with team members trying to give their opinion but being dismissed in a rude manner.
Everyone witnesses the ‘put down’ and are waiting to see how the person who has just been insulted reacts …. he feels bad, he feels small and he feels weak if he keeps his mouth shut or does he decide to react and let the whole thing bubble over? To be fair to him he decided to bite his lip and eventually other people jumped in and supported him. I’m not sure if my lip would be that resilient.
At the end of the day I was totally wiped out and demotivated and a potentially great project had now disintegrated into something that was hardship. I can’t wait for it to be over is now my main thought but there is still a lot of work to be done with this crew.
I have made an effort at addressing this with this group of people who I don’t know that well .. I did it by email the following day (lets’ see if it makes any difference?)
Team spirit – At times yesterday a horrible, testy atmosphere crept into our team meeting – this makes the work very draining and we have to mind ourselves. The team leader has assembled a talented bunch together for this task – lets get the best from this collective talent and synergise. This is a team folks …lets support each other and make this job a enjoyable one.
Life is way too short!!
What do you do with Mr or Mrs Toxic?
Dreaming Big is banned in Ireland!
March 21, 2016
Our state broadcaster, RTE has just banned the Budweiser commercial featuring UFC fighter and Irish hero Conor McGregor.
The banning has already led to newspaper articles, much discussion and a huge curiosity and will inevitably have everyone googling just to see what this “offensive” advert was all about. I suspect they will be left scratching their heads wondering what the fuss was all about.
In many ways this could be deemed as a huge success for the brand because it will now achieve a level of visibility and notoriety that it previously didn’t have, without having to pay the advertising costs.
While it sends out a big message from RTE you would like to think that this is a good, sensible one because we do want there to be watchdogs to protect us from danger. It is important that ‘banning’ makes sense, that it is rational and that it is fair.
The advertising guidelines around alcohol are very strict in Ireland and all of these were followed carefully.
In the advert there isn’t a picture of a bottle of beer, there isn’t a pub in sight. There is just Conor tastefully captured in a scene walking around his home town, Crumlin in Dublin, which then transforms into a street in LA.
This 27 year old apprentice plumber has achieved huge success by dedication to his sport and the advert demonstrates this with the help of these scenes and the voice over by Conor:
Never give up on your dream
Be your own inspiration, a beacon of self belief
Keep proving others wrong
If your dream doesn’t scare you, then its not big enough
So dream, as big as you dare
Only at the very end of the advert do we see the Budweiser logo and the usual drink responsibly message at the bottom of the screen.
For me the message from the advert is a very inspirational one, delivering a powerful positive message. Yes, it does come from a beer brand, which I think is more than ok. It shows you how the guidelines are keeping alcohol brands in a very responsible place and forcing a communication about positive values.
The message coming from RTE in banning this advert?
According to the newspapers they issued a statement to the Sunday Business Post that the advert breached advertising guidelines because Conor McGregor is considered a “hero to the young“, which will in turn encourage them to drink alcohol.
I don’t get it..
In my view banning the advert will achieve the wrong thing (besides totally confusing an industry that is trying to be very responsible) – viewers will definitely seek out the inspirational advert and could instead conclude that we are living in a censorship state that in some way has an issue with people from working class backgrounds having and achieving their dreams.
Banning the advert is also bad for the RTE brand as in my view it shows them as being ultra conservative and this is not good when they are up against such stiff competition. Leaving the censorship to the advertising authorities might be a much better policy.
It’s a great thing that we are seeing extra vigilance about alcohol advertising but we need to make sure that the brands that are working really hard to get it right aren’t punished.
Are you dreaming big enough?
March 18, 2016
“If your dream doesn’t scare you then it isn’t big enough. Dream as big as you dare”
These are the words that were challenging me and the strange thing is that I heard them uttered by Conor McGregor in an advert that my son, Brendan Canty directed for Budweiser.
I then hear both Conor (the apprentice plumber from Crumlin) and Brendan (the boy from Ballincollig!), two 27 year old’s from different parts of our fine country and from different backgrounds talking about “following your dream” in a behind the scenes video about the advert.
Brendan talks about throwing everything at your dream and Conor talks about following your passion.
From the outside it probably looks easy and then I think about Malcolm Gladwell and his theory about 10,000 hours in his book Outliers and I think about what I know about these two young men.
Brendan didn’t get the grade he hoped for in CIT because his lecturer had some issue with his short film “The Kid“. Take one look at the trailer or even the full feature and make up your own mind (Brendan will kill me for drawing attention to this – this work by a student is incredible!).
He regularly pitches for videos and adverts that he doesn’t win – some of these treatments have some of his best work in them but they will never grace our screens.
He takes the kicks in the backside and drives on. Following your dream means driving on even when things happen that might leave you feeling on the floor.
Conor with all of his talent and brashness has followed his dream. I haven’t followed his story well enough to talk about his knocks but I am sure there have been many and I have no doubt that 10,000 hours of sweat, toil and disappointments are all in his ‘experience bank‘ that has him where he is today.
Okay, he took a kick in the backside in his last fight against Nate Diaz but he spoke about “celebrating defeat” ..we have to if we want to succeed!
With all this talk of dreaming I was inclined to look at my own life and what I was doing at 27 years of age and what I have done since.
The dream of a thirteen year old was to work in the music business. I flirted with managing bands for about two years, which was fun for a while and then the bands I was working with broke up!
I always wanted to start my own business and I got that chance when I started a fast food restaurant with another guy. It wasn’t my industry of choice but this ‘golden opportunity‘ to start something and make some money seemed like a good idea.
It wasn’t my dream so I talked him into opening music stores. We didn’t know the first thing about this industry but it didn’t stop us opening one in Cork, one in Limerick and one in Galway in the space of 12 months. During that time we also opened a second fast food restaurant in Cork.
We were business trailblazers but we were crazy – this rate of growth was reckless and if anything went wrong we were in huge financial trouble. Some of these ventures worked out and some of them were miserable failures.
All of this was when I was incredibly still holding down a full time job – I was working around clocks that I didn’t even have!
I was then asked if I would become the General Manager of Deasy’s, the Guinness owned subsidiary that I was the Financial Controller of. I was staggered to be asked to take on such a role and this was another dream fulfilled! After doing this for two years I was asked to join Guinness in Dublin ..wow..working in a relatively senior role for a huge international company – another dream. I was 29!
I took a job as General Manager of a subsidiary of Heineken a few years later – I quickly realised that repeating myself wasn’t part of the dream and I needed to change.
In 2001 I had a dream about creating a high end fashion and beauty event and taking it on tour around Ireland with the top Irish models. Myself and Dee created ‘Catwalks’ which was the talk of the female luxury sector in Ireland for a number of years.
Dee emigrated from Kerry to Cork and we opened a Fuzion office on the South Mall in Cork (before that we worked from home for a few years – thank you to Alison, Doreen and Barry who were happy to have enough faith in us to do that).
Soon after that we became the only agency in Ireland to have an office in both Cork and Dublin as we opened one in our capital city.
This year I was elected to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce council by the members – this sounds like a very trivial thing but it is a big deal as members from smaller firms find it impossible to get elected. This makes me very proud as it is a small tangible sign that we are succeeding in Dublin and achieving some recognition for the work we are doing there.
When I heard the words “If your dream doesn’t scare you then it’s not big enough” I had to admit to myself that I feared I had stopped dreaming big and maybe that I had stopped dreaming at all. After writing this piece I know this isn’t quite true.
This 51 year old hasn’t stopped dreaming but yes …I admit, my dreams don’t scare me.
Maybe it’s time to be scared again and not leave that to the 27 year olds!
Fancy a dance ?
March 6, 2016
I was having a chat with a buddy of mine who we do some work with from time to time.
A project with an immovable deadline had hit an impasse because someone on the client side had let one of his guys down – the task they were to do was a relatively straightforward one but they didn’t get to it due to their own work pressure.
The person on his team informed him that she could do no more because of this ‘thing‘ that wasn’t done so the project deadline would be missed.
It would probably have been a legitimate reason for missing the deadline and he could quite happily declare that “there is nothing we could do“.
He had a choice to make ..
Being in business is like being on a dance floor except you have no idea what music they are about to play or who you will have to dance with!
You turn up expecting an eighties disco and suddenly they play a waltz. You are waltzing and an Irish gig comes on. Sometimes the dance floor is packed and you are struggling to manoeuvre around the floor and suddenly you find yourself dancing by yourself and feeling very awkward as everyone is watching.
There are times when no one is dancing and its up to you to get things moving by dragging an unsuspecting dance partner out on the floor in the hope that others join in.
Sometimes you can dance all night and have the best of fun but there are times when you are just not in the mood – your feet are sore but you still have to dance.
Sometimes it’s dancing with the most perfect, incredible, stunningly beautiful woman and sometimes … Well. you can only dance with the women who are in the room!
My buddy instructed his team member to just do the task that the client was supposed to do as it wasn’t a big deal and he wanted to deliver the project on time. Nice move..
Fancy a dance ?!!
Marcus Tullius Cicero – Mistakes that mankind keeps making
March 3, 2016
I bumped into a good buddy of mine, Pat Sweeney recently and we were exchanging various nuggets of wisdom (of course!) and he started chatting about some wise fella called Cicero, that he is very interested in and studies quite a bit.
Cicero used talk about six mistakes that mankind keeps making century after century. I was quite interested in what these mistakes were and when he was alive.
It turns out Marcus Tullius Cicero was 3rd January 106 BC and died on the 7th December 43 BC. He was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul, and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and was widely considered to be one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists.
He seems to have had an interesting life – following Julius Caesar’s death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and was consequently executed by soldiers operating on their behalf in 43 BC. His severed hands and head were then, as a final revenge of Mark Antony, displayed in the Roman Forum!
The six mistakes he spoke about were:
- Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others
- Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected
- Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it
- Refusing to set aside trivial preferences
- Neglecting development and refinement of the mind
- Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do
Not a whole lot has changed since 43 BC!
Promoting female entrepreneurs in rural areas
February 24, 2016
I was checking through my emails this minute and I was looking at the e-tender notifications about new projects etc.
One particular post caught my attention, which concerns me, which annoys me, which makes we worry that we are taking certain agendas to a stupid extreme.
Development programme targeted at female entrepreneurs in Irish rural areas
“The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland, intends issuing a public tender in 2016 for the provision (by one single service provider) of a national development programme targeted at nascent female entrepreneurs in Irish rural areas”
Programmes that encourage entrepreneurship in rural areas is a fantastic idea.
Programmes that encourage entrepreneurship in any areas is a fantastic idea.
Programmes that promote female entrepreneurship specifically are wrong, silly, discriminatory and it strikes me that we are totally losing the run of ourselves with the gender equality agenda.
The fantastic women that I work with every day don’t need any special “pass”.
It’s about ‘equality’ folks, not the opposite.
Paternity leave, gender equality and the changing role of fathers
January 28, 2016
I listened with interest at the discussions about the new proposals regarding paternity leave and I fondly remembered (not!) how it was when my kids were born.
It was August, 1991 and Ellen, our second child was due. It was a busy time in work at that time of the year with my role as Financial Controller as I had to get all budgeting finalised for the following year. We were part of Guinness so it was a complex process.
I knew that when Ellen was born I wanted a little free time to enjoy the moment(s) and to be there to look after my son, Brendan who was two and a half at the time. I worked day and night and weekends leading up to that time so that when she was born there would be no issue and I could take a few days off.
Ellen was overdue and a date was set for her to be induced. I informed my boss, Charlie of the date and he wasn’t very pleased as he was planning a management meeting on that date!
What could I do?
The hospital had a gap in their scheduling and Ellen was induced a day earlier ….my beautiful daughter arrived on the 21st August!!
My childminding role kicked in for the next few days. Two days later I popped into the office to check a few things and I was stupidly expecting a round of “congratulations” from all of my workmates.
Instead I got a serious look from the Sales Manager..”You’re in trouble“. I was dumbfounded at what I heard.
“What the hell could I be in trouble for and by the way it was a girl!!” I responded.
It turns out that because Ellen was born a day earlier everyone reckoned I could and should have made the “crucial” management meeting. I grabbed Brendan and we left.
A day or two later I was back in work and was summoned to Charlie’s office ..I don’t think I even gave him a chance to open his mouth.
He got it full belt “I always put this stupid place first and this time you can well and truly f**k yourself as it is one time I am putting my family first” and stormed out. I don’t think we ever spoke about the incident again.
Two years ago in Fuzion we had our first ‘baby‘!
A few months before that one of our team announced that she was pregnant. While it was fantastic news for her and her husband, it did cause an issue for the business. She was a senior member of the team and now we had to plan about replacing her with a quality replacement.
She would be out for 6 months and she also planned on taking the extra two months. I also learnt that while she would be out she was entitled to holidays and bank holidays, so effectively she would be out for 9 months. This would be disruptive to the business as well as costing us – it was the most expensive baby I ever had!
This is life and our business had to make arrangements and cope but it did strike me that this ‘issue‘ was one that we had to solve with her. Where was the guy in this equation? Was his work disrupted or would it carry a cost for them?
Maybe she was more than happy to put her career on hold for a while and take off that precious time with her new baby but maybe she might have liked to share this gift with her husband? No one had a choice.
I imagined a different world where her husband announced to his boss that “they” were pregnant and that he was opting to take half of the parental leave. This is how it works in Denmark so it isn’t such a stretch.
I’m a dad and I’m a parent and I would have loved to have those precious days when Ellen was born back again to enjoy…maybe more than a few days?
If we are serious about the guys role as a parent and we are really serious about gender equality then us fellas need to be treated as equals.
Two weeks paternity leave..nah!
Invest in making your wheels turn
January 26, 2016
This is a really interesting client.
This company has been around for a few generations and have done absolutely everything to survive the recent tough times,
They employ nearly 100 people and insist on manufacturing their products themselves in Ireland to preserve the quality control and the ability to provide the best solutions for their customers at all times.
They have their own retail outlets and also sell through some stockists.
They purchased a similar business overseas for the sole purpose of acquiring more potential volume so that production levels are kept up and the production facility remains viable.
One of the survival tactics like so many businesses during the recession was to cut back on overheads and cut out ‘unnecessary’ costs.
Of course the first to get the chop was the Marketing budget… advertising gone, sponsorships gone, exhibitions gone, customer evenings gone and PR gone.
Despite chopping these budgets the wheels didn’t fall off the business (well not immediately) – of course it didn’t as the business had a long established reputation, good recognition in the sector and a big collection of legacy customers who knew all about them.
A few months went by and the sales dropped, a few more months passed and they dropped again and so on. While the sales did not plummet immediately the lack of promotional activity meant the business gradually disappeared from view.
An aggressive overseas competitor spotted the gap and entered the Irish market, got some fantastic deals on adverts and started to win significant business.
The client has a large business with big payroll costs, an expensive production facility and a retail network all requiring big sales volume to sustain and there is virtually nothing being spent on attracting new business.
This is the “priority trap“.
We were preparing a plan for them but we were warned in advance that the budgets for promotion were tiny – surely generating new business was essential?
If you don’t invest in ‘telling your story‘, promoting your products and getting those wheels turning you will eventually have no business.
Should the first priority for the business be promotion and not the last?
Greg Canty is a Partner of Fuzion PR, Marketing and Graphic Design, with offices in Dublin and Cork
Greg Canty Fuzion Blog 