First group ever with universal adoption of Sky+.  Really interesting in terms of ad awareness; very few TV ads mentioned, outdoor being the most mentioned.  I think once you go to Sky+ there is a drift towards other non-linear programming such as downloads and PC media centres.  We knew this would happen but amazing that a viral ad gets mentioned ahead of everything else.

We did groups on music last night, great topic with serious music fans.  We were asking them about their fave bands and favourite gig.  Nearly all of them picked gigs they went to when they were 16. We explored this in the dicussion and they have very vivid memories of this time; friends, holidays, music, experiences.  I am sure neuroscientists can tell us more.  I wonder if this is a creative / targeting insight: work out what they were into when they were 16 and trigger the memories.  Citroen Transformer ??  David Hasselhof ??  Pamela Anderson ??

The aftershave guys talked a lot about the latest Lacoste ad – a naked man running around his flat kicking a cushion – apparently he has a “really great body” and these guys didn’t feel intimidated or threatened by this at all. In fact they liked the confidence of the ad, and the fact that the male model looked friendly and fun. 

This is a Pet Media Theory (PMT) that I have been sharing at a few conferences lately.  It basically describes the different levels of commitment you can expect when using the various bits of software in the Miscrosoft Office suite. i.e if a meeting is put in your Outlook calendar, forget it, this can be changed by any PA in the world.  If you put something in Excel (like a media schedule) this can be changed almost at whim by any member of the marketing team.  Word is a pretty serious (creative briefs) but is still open to editting by anybody senior to you.  PowerPoint however is the equivalent of a tablet of stone, once something has been committed to charts it becomes precious, owned and protected.  And hence ‘all agency presentations’ become defensive and agenda ridden with nobody conceding an inch (or a bullet point).  Researchers quite rightly present in PowerPoint.

We have been doing groups with ’style leaders’, a curious bunch who are great fun to research because they love their air time and get really competitive (ie easy for us moderators).  We were discussing premium brands and high fashion and they couldn’t stop talking about Primark and Asda.  There seemed to be a real pride thing about how downmarket they could go, in fact they found it easier to boast down than up.  Egalitarian Britain?  Bling shame?  Class guilt?  It reminds me of the craze for donkey jackets and Doc Martins in the middle of the yuppy eighties.  Blair’s legacy; must-have jeans for £3.

I love watching this trend.  The latest isn’t from the world of digital media technology but from an escalator on the underground.  Catherine Zeta Jones is the new face of a beauty brand and she adorns every poster on one particular escalator.  I was there yesterday and people have stuck chewing gum onto every single one of these posters.  The vast majority have gone for the eyes, with some going for the nose, and one (or normally two) the nipples.  Bear in mind that people only chew one piece of gum at a time and this is crowd behaviour at its rawest.

I regularly hear people saying that they like programmes about dirty houses or chaotic kids becasue it makes them feel like their lives are more normal.  Yet typically these are the most normal people you could ever hope to meet.  So either they are harbouring extremely deviant lifestyles or something more curious is going on.  My pet theory (this month) is that people with boring lives need to justify normality.  Which in turn helps explain the strange appeal of the 2Cs in a K school of cosy, ‘normal’ advertising.   

Christopher Gillett, a singer from Wiltshire photograhed everything he ate in 2005.  He is displaying the five metre long collage of images at the Ale and Porter gallery.  The findings: most food is red/brown/yellow.  I particularly liked the bowl of big green olives.  What a brilliant research idea, the fact that most people now carry around a digital camera in their phone really opens up this approach.  At a recent conference we called it low involvement photo processing.  If I were a food manufacturer I’d be researching this way.

Groups last night about computers.  Not always the easiest topic because people still don’t really understand them, and if they do they quickly turn into the group-geek and get asked loads of questions !  More than ever people were talking about the PC as furniture; it lives in the front room now and it has to look good.  This is sure to be a bigger trend as TVs and PCs merge.  Yet it is still largely untapped by manufacturers who bang on about spec to consumers who have to ask a friend to translate.

Groups with small business owners last night.  Over half worked with their partners.  I haven’t checked any numbers on this but that strikes me as really high.  My hunch … small businesses are a lot like kids, and couples like nurturing things together (and maybe they think that a small business will keep them together).  Honey guess what, I’m setting up a company.