In an advert for Iceland, featuring another of the famous clan, Stacey Solomon, a voice announces the benefits of frozen food 'when people drop by unexpected.' I wouldn't have minded if it was Stacey who said that but it wasn't, it was the narrator. Ad agencies, like newspapers, used to check their copy again and again to make sure that it at least made grammatical sense. Maybe it's a sign of the times, but you can bet a tabloid sub would spot the need for an adverb in a short sentence.
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My mate was head of corporate communications of Kodak in Europe around the turn of the century. He left in 2000 and here's why.
In Rochester, New York, in 1999, as the world got ready to either celebrate or face an apocalypse caused by the millennium bug, Kodak's bigwigs got together for a conference to discuss the future.
The suits on the stage flew round the world on private jets and ran a company employing close to 50,000 people with an HQ that even had its own power plant.
They had returned from a major photo industry show in Germany where the biggest talking point was the advances made by new fangled digital technology.
So the cameras involved weighed a ton, cost a fortune and were a fraction of a pixel in resolution but the IT boffins and assorted photographic nerds were getting excited. This, they decided, was the future. And they were right of course.
Kodak had actually invented digital camera technology several years earlier but as their money came from selling film, they sat on it. The future was in yellow boxes, they thought.
Only the dimwitted couldn't see how short sighted this was. Unfortunately, the dimwitted were running Kodak. Imagine, a camera where you can see the photo you've just taken and take it again if the subject blinked without having to pay for two pictures to be developed. Nope, they couldn't imagine that.
They imagined cameras with reels of plastic where you only got to see the results if you took it into a darkroom and spent hours developing it.
So in front of a room full of PR, marketing and other important types, they went through all their visions of the future without mentioning the word 'digital' once. This puzzled my mate so he asked, out loud, in front of the audience of PRs: "What about digital?"
The senior executive consulted a colleague, turned back and replied: "We're going to drive them back into the sea."
The following year my mate left. He now does very well thank you. Something to do with change management, whatever that means, but it allows him regular trips to Ibiza with women half his age so who's complaining?
Kodak now looks like going the way of RCA, Pan Am, Betamax and the Room at the Top nightclub in Ilford, to mention a few. They could have adapted. They could have produced world beating digital cameras, gone into mobile phones with built in cameras, pocket sized video cameras, ebooks, who knows?
Instead they blamed the changing world around them for leaving behind, tried to claim they were the victims of a 'perfect storm of consumer technology advances' or that they were just unlucky.
My bet is that executive probably retired on a decent pension and is living the good life. Though he may well have gone on to captain an Italian cruise liner, who knows?
Because it is that kind of lack of vision that may well see the remaining 19,000 Kodak workers finally go under. But no doubt the bosses will do all right.
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Talking of cruise liners, I've ordered a Costa Concordia model from the local hobby shop. They've said they'll put it on one side for me. (Hat tip: Allan Hall who really should know better!)
Ahoyahoy....Solly
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