To understand what's good marketing and what's bad marketing watch the rent-seekers

I'm a marketer. Got all the badges. Used to have a big job telling folk how to to it. And I'm here to remind you that there's two sorts of marketing - the good sort that's about a conversation with consumers so we can meet their needs (and maybe prompt them towards something they'd not thought about) and the bad sort that's about persuading authorities to fix the market so as to allow the client a temporary monopoly or other unfair advantage.

Of course, dear reader, I did the first sort and got plenty of flak for doing so. "Where did you get my name and address", "you're manipulating people with your clever personalisation", and "these profiling systems are exploiting people's personal data". But at no point did I collect, analyse or otherwise use data for any other purpose than to make my advertising and marketing pound stretch a little further - I just wanted to sell you what we'd got in the warehouse.

The bad marketing doesn't get the same criticism, we say little or nothing when the farmers' union lobbies for protectionism or the steel companies rant about 'unfair dumping'. Yet these businesses want to fix the market so as to profit - and that profit comes at your and my expense. It's like this:

Yet lobbying requires resources: the building and office supplies used by lobbyists, the fuel used to ferry lobbyists to and fro in their privilege-seeking efforts, but mostly the time and effort of the lobbyists themselves. And the greater the expected benefit of securing a special privilege, the greater is the amount of resources those in search of such privileges will use in that search. Such resource expenditures are beneficial to the rent-seekers themselves, for these expenditures increase these rent-seekers’ prospects of actually securing the sought-after special privileges that yield rents (that is, excess profits). But from society’s perspective these expenditures are wasteful: the building used to house lawyers who seek rents for their clients is not available to be used for genuinely productive activities (such as serving as office space for tech start-ups, or for lawyers who specialize in helping commercial clients write better contracts).

For lawyers in Don Boudreaux's screed you could insert 'lobbyists', 'PR Agencies', 'Public Affairs Consultants' and a host of other titles all dedicated to the job of getting politicians and bureaucrats to fix markets to the benefit of these agents' clients or employers.

So next time someone has a go at people like me - the good marketers who just use data and information to get you better products and services - point to the lobbyists and ask when that will stop. That is corporate welfare, market fixing and it happens at our cost - Boudreaux gives one example:

I have no idea what Mr. Stohr is paid. So let’s low-ball it – I mean really low-ball it: let’s assume that he’s paid a mere $100,000 annually. If so, then at least $33,333 worth of valuable resources – Mr. Stohr’s time, effort, and creativity – are spent simply trying to maintain that which ought not be maintained, namely, subsidies – a special privilege – for American aircraft manufacturers.

Multiply this a thousand - maybe ten thousand - times just for the USA and you see the extent to which the brilliance of us marketers is turned to the dark side promoting the market-fixing interests of large corporations, labour unions and NGOs. And then the same for every country on earth, the cost of lobbying and those fixed markets to us ordinary consumers is immense. If you want a campaign that will really change the world - put an end to rent-seeking driven by the lobby and by the avarice, the ignorance of politicians.

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Why Remain lost (redux)

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Can I start firstly by saying this is a marketing view not a political one (although inevitably there'll be some politics). And secondly that Remain lost the referendum, Leave didn't win it. The campaign to stay in the European Union went from a secure opinion poll lead at the start of 2016 to losing the referendum six months later. At the outset of the campaign - which really started back in January not at the official campaign launch - Remain (or Stronger In) held all the cards. The campaign could count on the support of the three mainstream party leaders, most of the established names in politics, business, academia and science. Plus a reliable stream of celebrities happy to smile at the camera and proclaim "Stronger In".

The 'Stronger In' message - immigration aside - should also have been a winner. Thousands of foot soldiers to be recruited from the direct beneficiaries of EU members, from organisations receiving grants, from the ranks of universities. Big business, local government and the 'third sector' could be relied on to do the right thing in getting that message across.

So what went wrong? Well before some analysis from cleverer marketers than me, I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes (or qualitative analysis if you prefer).

Here in Cullingworth, the Village Hall decided to hold a referendum debate - they'd sounded out some folk in the village who all seemed keen and got a time and date (the venue, of course, would be the hall). A call to the local MP provided a Leave speaker pretty quickly and the Hall then contacted Stronger In - firing an email off to the address on that organisation's website. Nothing. No response at all. The good folk from the Hall chased - still nothing. I messaged the chief executive of the campaign, the Stronger In press office and another In twitter account. No response. Eventually, on the eve of the event, we got a limp phone message: "have you got a speaker?"

As it happened, other avenues had got us a speaker (thank you to Richard Corbett MEP for stepping up). But had we not used those avenues the event wouldn't have happened. The Stronger In campaign had failed at the very first hurdle of any campaign - not responding to enquiries. And, while Will Straw and the Stronger In press office were having a fun spat on Twitter with the much better organised (if smaller and poorer) Leave campaign, they also failed to respond to a request - from a non-partisan organisation - for campaign help.

The second anecdote is about public perception of what the vote was about. I'm sat in the sitting room of some local members - we were actually there to talk about the May local elections - and the referendum, perhaps inevitably, came up. Now these members are both elderly - 70s maybe even 80s - and they spoke about their doubts. Not selfishly but from the perspective of their children and grandchildren - "this is about twenty, thirty, forty years in the future - what sort of Britain we want for them" was the driver of their doubt. Now I don't know how this couple voted but I do know that the Stronger In campaign completely missed their perspective - the public campaign (where it was coherent) was entirely about the next few years.

I picked up this time perception time and time again but the Remain campaign stayed trapped in its short-termism - there was no message that answered my members' question: "what would a Stronger In Britain be like in twenty, thirty or forty years". Other than a sort of grandfatherly (at best) "it won't be good, you know - I wouldn't do it". And this short-termism continues after the Brexit vote - West Yorkshire Combined Authority in a report on 'Brexit implications' described 'long term' as 2017-2018.

I commented before on how the advertising folk - and Remain had access to all the top agencies, a deep well of marketing knowledge - saw the campaign as a shambles, without any positive message and focused more on personalities than on that message. Well here's another comment - focused more on tactical communications issues - from Mike Hind:

It was almost as if Remain actively wanted to exclude you if you read the Daily Express. Tepid offerings of business information and hesitant requests to support them if you’d “like to” hardly spoke of a passion to mobilise people who are generally more turned on by a direct call to arms. It didn’t work for me — and I was a financial contributor to the campaign. A despairing one.

Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.

As I started out saying - Stronger In, or Remain, began the campaign with all the advantages, all the expertise and the basis of an effective organisation. And blew it. On the evening of polling day - a few minutes after the polls had shut, the BBC interviewed Ed Miliband. It doesn't matter what the MP for Doncaster North said in the interview, it matters where it was conducted - from London. Miliband wasn't where he would have been most effective - in his constituency where he's known, influential and probably liked.

The problem now is that those who campaigned to remain a member of the EU are compounding their error. They're still preferring to paint Leave voters as thick, ill-educated, oafish bigots rather than begin the job of listening to those people. Analyses of voting that confirm this view are shared. Bad news of any sort is leapt on and spread around - whether its reports of xenophobic attacks (do note that West Yorkshire police say there's no post-referendum increase in such attacks) or some snippet of economic news, mostly opinion or anecdote, that confirms the Remain campaign's predictions of short-term doom and gloom.

Right now there's a peace to win. And it won't be won by portraying half the nation as stupid, bigoted, ignorant and selfish. It will be won by presenting the case most of us support - Britain as an outward-looking, co-operative, creative nation that's up for trade, intellectual exchange and, yes, sensibly managed immigration.

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Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

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Less policy, more poetry please.

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"Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street"

John Cooper Clarke is a great poet. I don't share his politics but I appreciate the poetry of his passion, an almost anger captured by the quote above. And, unlike too much modern poetry, Clarke's is accessible and appealing beyond the usual pretentious circles of the literary world. It's a reminder that, like a great song, a poem cuts right to the very core of something. It communicates.

So I was struck by Clarke's comments about today's politics:

 

I suppose if I had to I would vote Labour but only out of blind class hatred, nothing else. That's what keeps these bastards coming back. To be honest, the only one whose language I even remotely understand is Nige [Farage]. Shoot me down in flames. Everyone else: they talk about nothing that seems to matter. It's beyond satire. And even satire has become PR, you know, since someone told politicians they will get more votes if they join in with the piss-taking themselves.

This comment from Clarke isn't an endorsement of UKIP but rather a recognition that most of our political leaderships fail to break through to the audience, to get them to pay attention, to really listen. Take a few minutes and read the tweets of politicians - with just a couple of exceptions these are boring, banal and entirely forgettable. All wrapped up in caveats, conditions and the avoidance of confrontation, today's political communication mostly fails to communicate. Or rather it communicates the message that we are patronising, out-of-touch and unable to hold a conversation with a voter.

One thing Nigel Farage seems to understand is that it's perfectly fine to attack your opponents - there's no chance of getting 100% support so spending time trying not to alienate people who will never vote for you is a thoroughly stupid idea. Yet politicians do this, carefully crafting their words to be inclusive and the views to be moderate. We peer down our noses at the likes of Farage, talking of extremism and division - as if it's impossible to present a moderate view in polemic.


If the public simply don't grasp our language then all those hours of policy wonkery, the backroom chats and the market research will be wasted. We fail if we think it's enough for our political tribe to like, retweet or forward the latest banality. We don't breakthrough if our policies are presented in press releases with all the wit and charm of one explaining a vending machine. Or where those policies trickle out in speeches to selected audiences and are couched in the language of those chosen few not words a shop assistant or sales rep would use. No-one cares, no-one's listening.

Clarke's Beasley Street captures a place and the idea of a place in a few sharp words - you've an image of that Salford street instantly as he delivers the words. And politics can do this too:

It's morning again in America.

It didn't matter much about the words that came after this opener in Hal Riney's ad - he'd got your attention with that image, those few words said more than all the statistics we politicians play our games with. And it worked.

Our words are guided by audience analysis, filtered through focus groups and derived from the policy brief not the benefit on offer. We list initiatives and policies with each one design to tick a communications box. Speeches and announcements are made according to a framework rather than because we've anything to say. And we make the grand assumption that it's the detail of policy that matters rather than the positive image of the place we're in or the place we want to get to.

Here's the opening paragraph of the 1945 Labour Manifesto - this is how it's done:

Victory is assured for us and our allies in the European war. The war in the East goes the same way. The British Labour Party is firmly resolved that Japanese barbarism shall be defeated just as decisively as Nazi aggression and tyranny. The people will have won both struggles. The gallant men and women in the Fighting Services, in the Merchant Navy, Home Guard and Civil Defence, in the factories and in the bombed areas - they deserve and must be assured a happier future than faced so many of them after the last war. Labour regards their welfare as a sacred trust. 

Bang - straight to the point. We've won the war, now let's make the country a great place for the men who did the winning for us. If you read that manifesto - and for good or ill it changed the country forever - it's not filled with statistics or analysis, just a narrative describing the Britain a Labour government would create.

For balance read the 1979 Conservative Manifesto - again it makes a clear call from the start:

THIS ELECTION is about the future of Britain - a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest calibre, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? 

Today's politics with its media and message management does not allow for great narrative, let alone poetry. The popular response to most of our words is 'so what'. We don't paint pictures with words or tell stories, we relate a barrage of 'facts' and a torrent of policy hoping some of it sticks.

So let's remember that, come the day that matters, the politicians aren't in charge - we are. Election day as John Greenleaf Whittier put it is everyone's day and politicians should remember this:

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;

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What you say is more important than where you say it...

In this age of instant broadcast, of social media, blogs and Skype we've become obsessed with the place where we say things. "Are you on Facebook?", "Do you use Twitter?", "Oh you must get a blog - everyone has a blog these days."

We're urged to engage, to participate, to "get on-line". Barely a minute passes at some gathering without someone posting a snap, or pinging out some cute witticism. Torrents of quotes - all with the appropriate hashtag - are poured into Twitter for our delectation. And we rush back from wherever we've been to pen our bon mots about the experience for our readers.

It is as if we live in some place where Marshall McLuhan's words have been given speed:

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

We zoom about communicating wildly and enthusiastically - firing out semi-shaped ideas into the ether to be snaffled by a few who send them further out into the web's wilds.  We make banal - almost specious - comparisons: "Twitter is like a pub" for example. If that's so it's the weirdest pub I've ever seen - but this familiarises the medium, making it sort of homely. So we pour ourselves another glass and carry on firing out dribble into the world.

And we think this is important. Not the individual tweet or status update. Not the singular blog posting or the particular Fickr stream. No, the idea of 'social media', the concept that this little machine in our pockets makes us more engaged, reinvents our personal social capital on a bigger canvas.

But when you look at it - poke around at what we post, we see very little that is profound and almost nothing that is change making. Bloggers like Guido Fawkes crow about how they are faster to the story than the papers, how they fill the hole vacated by Private Eye. And what is that gap - it serves only our love or gossip, of tittle-tattle. For each exposure of 'wrong-doing', we get a flood of who's in and who's out, petty little bitch-fights and endless self-aggrandisement.

We love it too. We've always loved gossip - it's why we invented the newspaper, it's what journalism is really about and it's what keeps the wheels of social interaction turning. If there's no-one to talk about, no drownings or shipwrecks, no scandal, nothing to laugh at - then there's no conversation. But this gossip does not change anything any more than screaming mobs change anything - other than their poor victim's lives.

Words change things - they inspire change when they say something to our soul. Ask yourselves when you last read - or heard - something that changed what you did, that altered how you see the world, that made you do something differently? I don't mean switching coffee brand or how you wear your hair, I mean really changed how you thought about something?

So - if what we say is more important than where we say it - why do we bother more about the means of communicating than about the content of our communications? Why do we eschew poetry in preference for doggerel and prefer the rant to fine prose? As a councillor I can communicate with residents by email, by tweet, through facebook and via a blog. I can fire up Skype, create forums and even send a letter. But is this enough - should I give more attention to what I'm saying than to the media I use to say it? Do residents not deserve better than; "reported potholes in South Street, council acting on it" or a blog post explaining how many meetings I've attended and how easy it is for residents to reach me? Is it really either needed or helpful for residents to know how I'm charging about "on their behalf" all the time?


All this frantic activism rather destroys the idea that we're about more than making sure the Town Hall loo has soft paper. That we might want to consider bigger issues, to philosophise, to ask questions and to seek answers. Maybe we can do this best with our mates and a beer in our hand. Or out for a long walk with family (or even the dog). But we need to do more of it, to challenge our own beliefs, to ponder on the ideas of others and to consider what we think is the right thing to do.


Our obsession with the medium - the way we communicate - represents a sort of 'triumph of the geek', a rejection of the idea that what we say matters. It is enough to say a lot, regardless of its banality.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hand
And eternity in an hour

What we say really is more important than where we say it.

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Why our "City Region" shouldn't be called Leeds

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I like Leeds. It's a fine City with a great history. But the "City Region" in which Leeds sits shouldn't be called after that city.

1. Leeds isn't a strong enough brand when set against "Yorkshire" or "York". Most of the people we want to reach will more likely have heard of the county and its eponymous city but won't have heard of Leeds.

2. Yorkshire means something to people - both cultural identification (verging on the nationalistic at times) plus a distinct and powerful appeal

3. Using Leeds alienates and distracts from the point and purpose of the "City Region" - inevitably (and to date accurately) the accusations are made that all the attention is on the City of Leeds itself rather than on the rest of the region

4. There are five actual cities within the "city region" - why pick just one of these even if it is the biggest

It seems to me that, if we are to make the most of this opportunity, we need to get a brand that isn't divisive and that resonates for a much wider audience. "Leeds" will never do this - we have to change the 'city region's name.

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The slow death of newspapers...

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This morning, stood on the platform at Green Park tube station, my wife and I happened to chat about the state of the newspaper business - like you do! I commented that it wasn't as simple as saying that the web would kill newspapers - the real killer would be the smart phone.

So no surprise the read this:

Pew research has a new survey showing that tablets and smart phones are now 27% of Americans' primary news source. The overwhelming share of this is phones, not tablets; and a reasonable view says this will rise to 50% in three years.

Why on earth should I pay over good money to buy a newspaper to read on the train when I can get up to the minute news from the BBC or whoever on my phone? Now I may have a problem with the BBC exceeded its remit by pushing aside commercial news production on-line but there's no doubt that mobile technology and TV/web convergance will completely transform the way in which we consume information, entertainment and spend our money.

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Learning from Jehovah's Witnesses...

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Sunday last I chanced across some Jehovah’s Witnesses as they plied their proselytising ways in Harecroft, a little hamlet between Cullingworth and Wilsden. I didn’t stop to chat but the occasion popped into my mind when I read David Green’s latest piece on scientology.

And the thought wasn’t the usual, ‘good grief, what are these people on’ but a question. Simply put, is there anything we can learn from Jehovah’s Witnesses – or for that matter Mormons and Scientologists?

After all, these groups are the successful end of barking pseudo-christianity – there are over seven million JWs, around 13 million Mormons and Scientology claims several million (although the true figure is perhaps below 500,000).

Set against a world population of several billions these aren’t big numbers but that isn’t the point – these are organisations with extremely heterodox beliefs (I am being kind here) and that require adherents to make significant life changes to belong. You can’t simply toddle along with the same old sinful practices, you will have to tithe, you will have to separate yourself from the corrupt world and you will have to accept the disciplines of the church.

So what can we learn?

Around a dozen men and women were out on a September morning knocking on the doors of people in Harecroft. Knowing full well that the response would be varied – from a door slammed rudely in the face to polite engagement. Every now and then someone will get a bite – rather than the slammed door, real interest and a discussion about what Jehovah offers.

Every week these people go out seeking to spread their message. Not in a cynical, worldly-wise manner but from sheer conviction and duty. We can, in our snide, knowing way, mock what these people believe but we should learn from their commitment and sense of conviction. We do not do this, we have ‘better-things-to-do’, places to go, grand jobs to undertake and much else of importance and moment.

Gordon Dickson wrote Necromancer as a prequel to his Childe Cycle (the most famous part of which is the Dorsai Trilogy) in which he set the context for man’s splintering as he expands through space – and the search for ‘responsible man’, a drawing together of three core traits: faith, courage and intellectual curiosity. Groups such as the Jehovah’s Witness are echoed in the “Friendlies” – planets populated by true believers.

The lesson we can draw from faith isn’t that it can ever take the place of enquiry – the problem with fanaticism is that is brooks no questioning, no doubt – but that we need faith to provide the motivation to go to Harecroft on a cold morning and knock on doors. Not just one morning but morning after morning – without the self-imposed discipline of duty, without true belief you will not do this, you will stay in bed and read or lounge on the sofa and watch the telly.

Without faith – however transient – we will not act to persuade others of what we believe. If there is only doubt, mere scepticism, then there can be no truth and no justice. This is the lesson I take from those dozen men and women in Harecroft that morning – a lesson to believe and to make sure others are told of that belief.

A reminder that knocking doors, making phone calls, writing letters – engaging with the world – cannot be substituted with slick PR, with shiny ads and with banks of computers. A prompt that two minutes of face-to-face conversation communicates more than the cleverest of advertisements or the most well-crafted of press releases.

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Bradford Council's budget...plus a thought about tweeting!

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The deed is done - the Council has set a budget. For most folk the most important thing about it remains the answer to the question: "so how much is my Council Tax going up by?" I know, I know - the real story is about the cuts - either spiteful and targeted at vulnerable people or forced onto innocent and efficient Councils by the evil monster Pickles. But when - in about an hour - I arrive at the Club ready to win the quiz, I know it will be the Council Tax question that gets asked.

Don't get me wrong here, the 'cuts' are important - especially important if you're the poor soul who has lost a job or no longer get a particular service. But in the round taking £56m out of a £1.2bn budget isn't going to make the wheels fall off the wagon - especially if, as in Bradford's case, the Council anticipated the scale of reductions. Nevertheless the decision today included decisions to cut services - closing small libraries, removing off-highway rural bin collection and dramatically reducing the budgets for maintaining highways, parks and local facilities. These decisions - for all the talk of equity and equality from the Council's leadership - disproportionate affect people living in rural parts of the district.

So when I'm asked why I voted against the budget it isn't because I could write a better one (although I could) but because the Labour Party chose to target cuts directly and deliberately at the people I represent.

And I shall be telling those people about that decision.

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Partly related to this is a comment from that rarity - someone in the public gallery during a council meeting - who asked why I was 'playing with my phone'. In truth I was tweeting - commenting on what was being said by members during the budget debate. To do this I have to listen to what's being said!

And it means that a load of people who might not be able to or want to come to the actual meeting are able to get a flavour - albeit coloured by my bias - of what's happening. Perhaps a few hundred people knew something - certainly more than would be the case in past years - about our budget deliberations.

I don't consider that to be disrespectful but to be an enhancement - its extending our engagement and people's involvement in the processes of democracy. I was able to give response and comment on things people were concerned about - care for the elderly, children's services and support for the arts - as decisions about those very things were being discussed.

So no, I wasn't playing with my phone. I was enhancing democracy - something more Councillors should do!

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Proposals on council publicity are to protect local papers from competition not to save costs - the TPA (and Eric) are wrong

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Much though I am a fan of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and recognise that there are clear needs for restraint over public spending, the organisation is wrong about Local Council marketing – what they prefer, wrongly, to call ‘publicity’. Here’s their line:

Councils are supposed to provide services for the taxpayers who pay for them; it should go without saying that this does not include self promotion.

The TPA – like Eric Pickles, it seems – seem obsessed with the minutiae of spending rather than its purpose. And, while this isn’t the substance of my defence of local council marketing, it’s hard to find fault in the logic of Margaret Eaton’s argument:

‘If the Department for Communities and Local Government was truly committed to localism it would not be introducing draconian rules dictating to councils how often they are allow to share information with residents.’

For central government this attack on communicating with residents represents two things – an easy headline (ironic given the issue being marketing) and the chance to deliver on a stupid promise made in opposition. I wrote back then about the issue:

Now local councils have realised that communicating with the public - a duty of theirs - is not well served by relying on local papers that two-thirds or more of local residents don't read. These Councils produce their own newspapers - Bradford does this with the (multi-award winning) Community Pride.

The rules proposed by the government represent a big win for poor quality local papers and do not in any respect represent value for money to local councils. There is no doubt that producing your own information newspaper and taking advertising to ameliorate the cost is a far more cost-efficient vehicle than buying space in local newspapers. Yet that is what the government proposes:

Local authorities should not publish or incur expenditure in commissioning in hard copy or on any website, newsletters, newssheets or similar communications which seek to emulate commercial newspapers in style or content. Where local authorities do commission or publish newsletters, newssheets or similar communications, they should not issue them more frequently than quarterly, apart from parish councils which should not issue them more frequently than monthly. Such communications should not include material other than information for the public about the business, services and amenities of the council or other local service providers.

Nobody is suggesting that local councils turn themselves into newspaper publishers – and I don’t know of any council that does. The real thrust of this requirement is to protect local newspapers – many of which have come to rely on council advertising.

The revised Publicity Code contains specific guidance on the frequency, content and appearance of local authority newsletters, newssheets or similar publications. The Department considers that the Publicity Code, rather than competition legislation, is the right vehicle for imposing tougher rules to stop unfair competition by local authority newspapers because the issues involved go beyond the purely economic considerations of, for instance, council newspapers diverting revenue from paid advertising away from local newspapers.

The proposed Code of Practice demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of marketing, presents a wholly unwarranted attack on local authority communications and wholly fails to realise the limitations of local newspapers as means of communicating with all residents in a given authority area.

I find it odd that the TPA focuses on what – in most cases – is a more efficient use of limited budgets for marketing rather than on the real waste in local government communications. Councils employ armies of press officers, in house lobbyists and policy advisors whose many purpose is to ensure that the press coverage for the authority is good (and features prominently the leaders and his or her pals). Local council newspapers are an efficient, low cost and flexible means of reaching local communities – something local papers used to do but really don’t do anymore (for example the Bradford Telegraph & Argus typically reaches around 10% of the City’s population – the most recent circulation data is 28,839 in a District with an adult population of nearly 500,000).

Given this fact – even factoring in weekly papers covering Keighley & Ilkley – it seems that the need to reach the whole population is simply not going to be served by our local newspaper group (and remember it's a monopoly as all these papers are owned by newsquest). Yet – ostensibly to protect such papers – the Council is constrained in the number of occasions on which it can speak to the whole population.

In truth this code of practice is poorly structured, ill-thought out and creates a straw man by blaming local councils for the near terminal decline of daily local papers. Quite simply it is wrong, the TPA is wrong to support it and Margaret Eaton (and the LGA) is right to oppose it.

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There's a chance the revolution - or at least "the change" - will be televised!

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As you all know, I like Julian Dobson’s ‘Living with Rats’ blog – despite his tendency to get a bit too greeny-greeny for my preference. And his latest post calling for ‘smarter citizenship’ is a little gem. Not just because if contain the line; “beware the rise of the geekocracy” but because it recognises that things – that change stuff, you know – are driven by consumers. Not by Governments, not by businesses, not by “social entrepreneurs” (as an aside – definition of an anti-social entrepreneur is a bankrupt) but by us, the little old consumer doing what we want to do. Here’s Julian:

“The third approach, which most of us adopt one way or another, is as consumers. We increasingly expect high speed broadband so we can watch on-demand TV or share videos or pictures. We grumble when the service isn’t working or costs too much, but don’t spend a lot of time imagining what we could do with it. It’s just there to respond to our wants.”

What we read here is the market working its wonders. The market that will deliver the stuff that responds to peoples needs, wants, demands. And we need to look at the speed with which TV and the Internet are combining (I’ve said before that Rupert Murdoch might be rather more on the ball than you think with his Times paywall) and at what that means for communications.

The core of all this will be the television not the computer. Oh, I know you’re all watching TV shows on your lap-tops, downloading them to watch while travelling and even (for reasons entirely beyond me) loading short clips onto your mobiles. But that big square thing in your living room is the tool that matters. Why? Because everyone who wants one has one. And with digital signals, interaction via a phone line and push button response via the remote control, the television will be the weapon of choice in the future of digital communications.

True we’ll be tweeting, texting and interacting with mobile phones, we’ll be surfing the wonders of the web on lap tops and mac books but most other folk will be using the TV. As Norfolk’s Wherry Housing Association have shown this can be a pretty useful tool:

“Wherry Digital TV offers services similar to those on this website but can be accessed on Sky and Virgin TV using your remote control, on your mobile phone, on your computer and on the Nintendo Wii.”

On this you can report repairs, check details from the association, link to job centre plus, check bus and train times, make GP appointments and make a complaint. Not the most exciting telly, I know but I’m sure there’s more to come – you never know maybe you’ll be able to read The Times on your TV screen soon? And this service isn’t being funded by a generous government grant or by one or other philanthropic foundation. It isn’t being charged for – it’s just another way for the landlord to keep in touch. Plus a few other serivces. And all through the telly.

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