Both sides claim partial victory in what is now clearly a bitter dispute.

I’ve never been a fan of the NLA; it charges for something but offers nothing in return.

let’s not debate the rights and wrongs of the Tribunal itself, but instead look at whether the NLA accurately reflects the thinking of the newspaper publishers it represents.

Where I think it is short changing its members is its resolutely analogue view of the news industry.

Firstly there is the value of sharing links which it says damages its members’ interests and it seeks to control by charging for them.

While the NLA behaves as if link sharing is wrong, the Daily Mail which is arguably the most digitally savvy newspaper group, has built the financial value of sharing links into its business model.

At the conference of The Society of Editors in Glasgow in late 2010, the publisher of the Mail Online Martin Clarke revealed just how valuable link sharing is. Dominic Ponsford editor of the Press Gazette reported his speech thus:

‘Clarke: “The web is one big conversation. A free conversation. People send each other their new baby pics, the joke they heard in the pub, and, yes, a link to something they saw on a news website. On Facebook, via Twitter, or even by email.”

‘Saying that journalists should see Facebook as “a gigantic free marketing engine”, Clarke revealed that Mail Online’s five-fold traffic increase in the space of little more than three years had been achieved without spending a penny on marketing.’

I wonder what Mr Clarke thinks about the NLA pursuing actions which might potentially make anyone who shares a link a criminal?

The other way I think the NLA is out of step with its members is in the way newsrooms regard themselves as gatherers and interpreters of information.

The NLA holds that the content published by newspapers is theirs and its value derives from the investment the publishers make to produce it.

Newsrooms are expensive, no doubt about it and content has value, so it’s not an unreasonable position to hold. But the NLA ignores the way newsrooms operate in today’s world of content creation and sharing.

It used to be that newsrooms were citadels.

Information was supplied to them on a speculative basis from outside and those inside would toil to turn this into truth.

Today’s newsrooms are tearing down the walls and becoming permeable.

The Guardian leads the charge in the UK, publishing its story list each day, something that used to be jealously guarded.

Explaining the move, national news editor Dan Roberts said:

“What if readers were able to help newsdesks work out which stories were worth investing precious reporting resources in? What if all those experts who delight in telling us what’s wrong with our stories after they’ve been published could be enlisted into giving us more clues beforehand? What if the process of working out what to investigate actually becomes part of the news itself?”

I have italicised the phrase about investment because it’s crucial to an understanding of the NLA arguments.

The Guardian is acknowledging that its newsroom (like others) doesn’t have the monopoly on valid information and is embracing the idea that its content can be improved by ceasing to be gatekeepers to the truth.

The New York Times is making similar moves using social media journalism to partner with outside contributors.

For a really good presentation of how newsrooms can and should become open to outside content generation, read John Paxton’s speech “Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives” in it he describes how the co-creation of content is becoming physical, with newsrooms opening their facilities to bloggers and interest groups.

These are difficult changes to make, but let’s not forget that the content they are creating is increasingly sourced at no cost from people who have an interest in seeing it published.

This is where the NLA is behind the times. Whilst their members are already changing their business model to recognise the financial value of information they get for free, the NLA disagrees, charging the organisations that supply some or all of the raw material and offering nothing in return.

It’s a bit like charging your employees for desk space.

The questions of how you value publishers’ content are difficult and fluid but the NLA increasingly seems to be an analogue King Knut whose actions are at odds with its members.

Links and content you don’t have to pay for have immense value to publishers,  only the NLA seems not to have grasped these ideas and this is unsustainable for them.

What do you think?

What?

I spent yesterday at the excellent Search and Social School 2012 at Manchester Metropolitan University, organised with skill and elan by David Edmundson-Bird and Ben Keegan. If you don’t follow David on Twitter @groovegenerator you are missing out on a unique voice on digital marketing (and the inadequacies of the trains between Manchester and Preston), whilst Ben @bobotheeklown tweets a life of quiet desperation. He supports Arsenal you see.

Both are great assets to the Manchester digital community.

The presentations from leading players in the digital marketing field were detailed and very practically oriented and as a value for money for exercise the event was perfect. Great content, delivered for precisely £0.

One thing that inadvertently linked the presentations together was a sense that the purpose of social is to ‘game’ Google. This is not an original thought but one that began to get uncomfortable when one of the presenters described social and PR and reputation management as ‘off-line SEO’.

I’m completely happy with the SEO folks playing a never ending game of cat and mouse with Google but reputation and PR are different and it’s an illusion to think that you can ‘game’ your own reputation and talks to a very old-fashioned mindset in which the more data you have on your customers the better tools you have to outwit them.

Well, I guess you can fool a customer once.

One of the presentations revealed more of this attitude to customers when portraying behavioural targeting as this brilliant way to present your message to customers who have gone some way down the route of buying before leaving a site.

In that sentence you can replace the phrase ‘present your message’ with the word ‘get right up the nose of’, like a  shopkeeper chasing you down the street after you’ve picked  a shirt off the rack, thought twice, and left the shop.

Appropriate down the market perhaps, but not in the marketing department

Who thinks of customers and potential customers as the mistaken, who need to be herded back into the store? Whatever happened to the idea of marketing as working out what customers want to buy and then presenting it to them?

One of the presenters, Simon Wharton, of leading SEO and digital marketing boffins Push On Ltd had a go at PR for being behind the curve on both social and SEO and there’s a lot of truth in that criticism, but there’s a wider question than simply who has the better technical skills.

If you regard social and SEO as ‘tools to fool’, either Google or a customer (and there were some eye-opening comments about manipulating user reviews for SEO too) then you have also to be able say that you have first tried to be worth searching for in the first place.

I have mentioned before Andy Sernowiz’s great phrase: “Advertising is the Cost of Being Boring.”

In other words, your first responsibility as a marketer is to find what it is about your product or brand that is intrinsically interesting and be able to tell a compelling brand story that people think is worth sharing, rather than rely on interrupting your market in ever more elaborate and even undercover ways.

The result is word of mouth and everyone knows where that ranks in the marketing hierarchy.

I’m comfortable with SEO and digital agencies having control of the specialist skills required and PR people must improve their understanding in this area (one of the reasons I devoted a day to the event) but you can have as much data and as much technique as you like, but it’s the story that customers buy into.

What do you think?

Was it stimulating? Was it one of your top 10 travel experiences?

Or was it a mundane chore, possibly even to the extent that you can’t even recall parts of it. If you were driving, you might have experienced ‘highway hypnosis’ or ‘white line fever’, where you drive for miles without causing any harm but without really knowing what you were doing.

Over many years of working as a communications consultant I have often been asked the question at the end of a presentation, “so, what other clients do you have in our sector?”

It’s a logical question; it’s comforting to think that the person in front of you is a specialist and we equate specialism in the professions with expertise. Nobody wants to be the brain surgeon’s first patient or the barrister’s first defendant.

But communications isn’t the law, or brain surgery. There isn’t a right or wrong way to go about communicating.

There is a variant in the PR meeting, which basically asks which journalists you know in the company’s target media.

This is rooted in the belief that a little black book of contacts is the sure way to secure positive media coverage and protect the company when a cold wind blows. This is an anachronism when about 40% of journalism jobs have been lost in the past 10 years.

A contacts book will always be trumped by knowing what will make a journalist’s ears prick up; they simply don’t have the time to indulge an approach that relies on past glories.

Returning to the specialism versus perspective question, in over 20 odd years or working as a consultant I can say that the projects and clients which have produced my best work are the ones where I had no prior experience of the sector and where the outcomes of a campaign are uncertain.

These were the equivalent in my driving analogy to those memorable drives over a mountain pass or through a foreign city when your nerves jangle and you are alive to every piece of new information to make quick decisions.

I might be wired to rise to a challenge, but I am far from unique. I’d go further and suggest that the essential qualities of a good consultant are that they are intellectually curious, thrive on ambiguity and see problems as challenges.

Familiarity, predictability and the mundane are hemlock to someone who has the self-belief (some might say arrogance) to carve a career out of advising others on the way forward.

The irony of the “what experience do you have in our sector” question is that it is often posed by people who themselves who have been headhunted after achieving success in other industries.

I met a group of senior executives the other day, not one of whom had worked in their current industry before, yet were achieving great things because they were applying insights and perspectives gained in other sectors to forge something new. It didn’t stop them asking the ‘specialism’ question though….

Imagine if this question was expressed a different way: “If we give you this job, which of our competitors’ strategies will you be re-heating and serving up to us?” Or, “which ideas that you can’t sell to your other clients will you be dusting off for us?”

You’d have to be a strange kind of manager to aspire to repeat yourself for the rest of your career or in the motoring analogy, to be a bus driver, ploughing up and down the same route each day.

Maybe the search for the thrill, or the special moment was what led the Captain of the Costa Concordia to divert from his pre-programmed route with disastrous consequences.

What do you think?

The Guardian continues the story, although without much conviction.

I think it comes down to this. The best outcome for Salford is that MediaCity is a roaring success and achieves all it can do to be a magnet for world class companies.

That can only happen if world class talent is attracted to work there and it is obvious that the talent pool in Salford or even Greater Manchester does not possess some magical and unique qualities that have hitherto been invisible to everyone, the workforce included.

Elements of the media would love to write ‘told you so’ headlines about the failure of the BBC’s Salford experiment, based on the idea that you can only be brilliant if you live and work in London.

Those headlines are going to be a lot harder to write a) if the quality of programmes improves and b) a lot of the ones making the programmes are recognisably the ones who used to make the programmes in White City or Broadcasting House.

I have written before that the real challenge for the BBC will come about three to four years after the BBC is really up and running, when the initial wave of talent, decides to move on to new jobs.

If by then the skills pool in Greater Manchester cannot meet demand then the BBC MediaCity experiment will face some bigger headlines.

If there were 40 people in the room I’d be surprised and it’s hard to gloss over the fact that this reflects badly on the city when you consider that Julie is a genuinely significant figure in this field.

She was the founder of the hugely influential First Tuesday and a major investor in some ground-breaking businesses (Skype being one) as well as having a high profile through Dragon’s Den and appearances on Newsnight.

Why wasn’t the room packed to the rafters? Is Manchester’s start-up scene so stunted?

Much of what Julie said can be gleaned from her speech at TEDx and you can find out more from her new initiative Entrepreneur Country.

But what of Manchester’s start-up community?

I have been hovering in and around it for some months doing some research and development on business idea that hopefully will see some progress soon. If only I could find a developer to build the prototype….

My experience certainly echoes one of Julie’s themes that finance and technology have to work in harmony towards a business goal not with one being the means to get to the other.

But I worry that the two mind sets are quite far apart.

From a technology perspective developers are in short supply and highly variable in their approach to business development.  They are also very difficult to track down.

From a finance perspective I am sure that there are plenty of people drifting around with fag packet plans asking people to do development work on a purely speculative basis and there is the problem of how a non-developer adequately briefs and project manages a developer, something I admit to struggling with.

How many good ideas that might turn into real businesses go nowhere because the two can’t find a way to overcome that initial risk barrier?

There is a need for a regular forum where developers can meet entrepreneurs in an informal setting but with a commercial agenda, where the entrepreneurs have to come with a clear business plan and some money on the table but the developers have to commit to meeting deadlines and being responsive.

Maybe what we need is a new version of First Tuesday, not for entrepreneurs to meet VCs, but to get developers and entrepreneurs talking the same language.

Julie, do you fancy coming back to Manchester?

What he said was utterly simple: big stories do nothing for circulation and circulation does nothing for the bottom line.

Strip away the sound and fury of everything that has gone before, the despair of the Dowlers, the comic book Paul McMullan, the idea of Hugh Grant as moral crusader and you are left with the question: What is it all for?

The horrors of some tabloid journalism have been defended as the noble pursuit of ‘the story’ even when the contentious line between ‘public interest’ and ‘prurient interest’ is not so much crossed as being where the reporter takes his marks and waits for the starting pistol.

Even major stories like the MPs expenses scandal have only a small and temporary effect on circulations.

So if muck-raking is not making money for the publisher and it’s not in the public interest and it’s clearly not in the subject’s interest, then who benefits?

The only ones left at the table are the journalist and his or her editor.

Can it really be all about an inverted vanity to win a race to the bottom (sometimes literally so)?

If there is no relationship between the front page splash and the circulation then the newspapers’ fears over regulation are considerably less valid than some of them make out (because regulation doesn’t threaten sales) and the assymetry between a regulated press and an unregulated internet less pronounced.

Put another way, if muck-raking doesn’t prompt sales it follows that the appetite for this material, even when it’s free on Twitter, cannot be infinite and is in any case fuelled by the headline in the first case. The crystal clear example of that is Ryan Giggs.  Would his name have been tweeted a million times if the story hadn’t already been running in the papers?

Twitter breaks real news but does it break tittle tattle? No, how can it? If I see a married footballer with his arm round someone I believe to be a coked-up hooker then it’s going to take a lot of luck for that to go truly viral unless it’s picked up early on by a newspaper and then we’re back to square one.

Leveson has got a tough job on his hands because whatever form of regulation comes out of it will be howled down by a press which seems to be in that most dangerous place, of believing its own PR that this stuff (the content likely to be regulated) matters to anyone outside the newsroom and it must be protected.

Good luck to Leveson and good luck to all the journalists doing good work that is actually valued and appreciated by their readers as worth coming back for more. That is what keeps the advertisers happy and everyone in jobs.  I hope you are not drowned out by some of the prima donnas we have seen take the stand, who it is now obvious, are living in the past.

We have all experienced it. You approach a big traffic junction and the lights turn red.

You sit there for a few minutes, experiencing perhaps resignation, perhaps frustration depending on how late you are.

Or, you approach the junction and realise that the lights are out. You experience very different feelings. Your attention levels soar, you need your wits about and you feel a small feeling of triumph as you sail through, almost certainly quicker than if the lights had been working properly.

There is something less obvious at work here too.

A normally functioning junction is a colossal waste of resource. Only half the road is ever in use. Time is wasted, fuel is burnt uselessly as cars brake and sit there idling.

I began to think about this as a metaphor for marketing during a radio documentary last week on the concept of shared space in traffic management, where boundaries between vehicles and pedestrians are blurred by taking out kerbs and road markings and signs.

In one startling example in the Netherlands, the fence around a primary school had been taken down and the playground extended across the road that ran alongside it.

Imagine pitching that idea to the parents.

This is radical thinking but it works. Motorists reduce their speed because the perceived risk level goes up and they start to make eye contact with other drivers, pedestrians start to be more aware of their surroundings and both types of road user share their responsibilities.

Radical, yes but also utterly simple. It stops treating road users like imbeciles and embraces how humans respond to risk.

This kind of thinking has been around for a few years now but it is still very much a rarity because it is strongly counter-intuitive to the idea that pedestrians and motorists must be kept as separate species.

Nobody has proven that separation is the best way to do it, but it is heresy to suggest otherwise.

The analogy with marketing is obvious.

Businesses intuitively believe that inputs must have outputs, that there is a rational relationship between action and reaction, because we are conditioned to value rational behaviour in a business situation.

I have written before about the brilliant insight of Doc Searls who encapsulated decades of marketing wrong-headedness in a single tweet.

He asked: “If you ‘track’, ‘capture’ ‘drive’ and ‘lock in’ customers that you ‘own’ and ‘manage’, of what business are you speaking?”

The answer is of course, slavery and I’m sure everyone reading this has used at least one of those terms in the last month in relation to what you are trying to achieve from a campaign.

Everyone will agree that slavery is appalling but this is unconscious segregation of people into binary types – customer/non-customer behaviours and with it, an expectation that they will comply.

What the traffic engineers realised is that humans are hard-wired to embrace risk, because risk is associated with discovery and reward. Therefore humans will keep adding to risk until they are happy, in other words they will continue to drive ever more recklessly until they reach the level they are happy with. It’s why people speed up between speed bumps, even though they know it doesn’t make sense.

The response of traffic engineers is ever more control, regulation and boxing in and the response of drivers is ever more counter-productive ways of driving which actually brings with it unintended and uncontrolled risk.

For marketers, this has become the expectation that if I spend money doing something I expect a predictable, measurable reaction from customers when all the evidence is that this is exceedingly difficult to prove.

A more enlightened approach might be to ask, ‘what if we stopped trying to push people into doing something and shared the risk?’

Co-creation with customers is the ideal when you have a long term relationship with them, but what if you’re pushing frozen peas?

It can work in FMCG, just ask Coke who after some initial hesitancy about the college craze for adding Mentos to Diet Coke with explosive effects overcame what they saw as disrespect to the brand and began to embrace this.

By saying ‘OK, your game, your rules’ Coke became relevant to people in new ways as the craze grew.

It works just as well in perhaps the polar opposite to a consumer brand, nuclear waste.

Long before the advent of social media I handled the communications around the decommissioning of the Windscale nuclear reactor, possibly the most contentious nuclear site in the UK.

A major part of the programme was to move huge radioactive loads along public roads, effectively cutting off villages close to the site for long periods and in some instances having a 200 tonne piece of nuclear hardware go within a metre of your door.

We did all the usual things – ads in the local paper, press briefings, public meetings and so on. Today we’d have had a Facebook page, Twitter feed, Youtube Channel, the whole deal.

But none of it would have been any good if we hadn’t decided to share the risk with the community. The nuclear industry traditionally operates and communicates on the basis of D.A.D. – Decide, Announce, Defend.

We chose to be open, transparent and very flexible in our communications on a major engineering programme that was changing daily due to severe weather.

The most effective communication we had was to issue a daily bulletin every morning at 7.00am and put it in the shop windows of the local bakers, paper-shop and so on. In it we listed what we was happening that day and every comment we’d received on the phone the previous day and what we were going to do about it.

Mr Jones was worried about the road being closed when he needed to get to the dentist and could anyone offer him a lift and so on. Unsurprisingly someone offered to help Mr Jones and his fears were allayed.

Like the school in the Netherlands we tore down the fence and shared the space, not knowing what the reaction would be.

When we came to measure the communications campaign afterwards, approval ratings for the plant were at record highs (even though we had inconvenienced thousands of people over a long period) and the most popular form of communication was the photocopied leaflet, because the information had been shared within the community, peer to peer not via a formal medium like an ad.

The temptation when designing a communications plan is to be seduced by talk of ‘hard measures’ and ROI, when the real solution is the more subtle consideration of how can you share risk?

I have argued before that marketers need to understand and embrace the language of risk, but I didn’t expect a discussion of roundabouts and traffic lights to make the point so clearly.

The Evening Standard has just published a fascinating interview with Lord Bell who reveals a human, natural level of anger and frustration at the events which have engulfed Bell Pottinger this week.

It would be unwise of me to criticise or defend Bell Pottinger outright with the facts we have, but I have a strong feeling that the Independent is already over-egging the story, particularly in this morning’s edition.

I can’t imagine that the paper held back any comments today that would have shown Bell Pottinger in an even worse light, so we have to assume that what was quoted about child labour was as much of a ‘smoking gun’ as the Indy thought possible.

The fact is that Bell Pottinger’s advice seems to be, ‘first you need to change, then we can tell that story.’

You don’t have to be an expert to know that you can’t change a country’s laws and more importantly its customs overnight or even within a few years. Look around at your how problematic it already is for our lifestyles to adjust to the changes being imposed by austerity measures. The talk is of a lost decade, not a lost weekend.

It’s called realpolitik and as far as I know it isn’t the job of a PR/lobbying/public affairs company to hold a country to account even if they are advising them. That’s the job of NGOs, the FCO, the UN etc..

The question is how quickly change could be effected to know whether Bell Pottinger’s suggested timeframe was too easy, which might amount to simply talking a good job.

The problem is that what is ostensibly sound advice (at least in this instance, I make no comment about other campaigns) about communicating a change in behaviour rather than spinning a lie has been lost in the furore over the way in which this advice was delivered.

The claims about access and influence over ministers are at the very least unwise and possibly in breach of the PRCA’s code of conduct, something which their investigation will no doubt look at.

The problem revealed by the Bell Pottinger story affects everyone in the communication business, both buyers and sellers of services and lies with the way consultancies and clients conduct themselves during the briefing and pitching process.

The fact is that the right approach to this brief – if you change, we can tell the story to the right people – is that and no more.

It’s a simple, basic truth but how do you turn those few words into a powerful, persuasive pitch when you know that your competitors will be doing exactly the same thing and there’s a cool million on the table?

One way is to try to find ways to impress the prospect by elaborating and elevating the language for one thing. Every idea becomes a strategy (even when it’s a tactic) and every opinion former is ‘key’. Every journalist a ‘thought leader.’

And of course you suggest that you have greater insight or ability to influence than the next guy, even though there is no possible way of testing that. The only lever you can pull is not-so-subtle exaggeration.

The solution is a better, more open process of briefing a consultancy at the time of a pitch, because there is a direct correlation between the precision of a brief and the quantity of bullshit in the pitch.

In any context, the vaguer the question, the vaguer the response, the more reliant it has to be on nods, winks and personal chemistry (although that is very important) and the more tempting is the lever marked exaggeration. If nature abhors a vacuum, PR consultants really loathe one and will fill it with aspiration.

After all, the next pitch the client sees might have a slightly better quality of bullshit so there is value in  notching up your settings and before long you are promising the Earth and Vince Cable’s head on a plate.

If briefs specified exactly what outcomes the client desired, then the quality of response and the measurability of the campaign can only improve.

In that setting exaggeration, braggadocio or bullshit has less importance, less value.

Clients and consultancies continue to wrestle with how to measure a campaign. I suspect they are attempting what engineer’s call an end of pipe solution – fixing the problem at the outflow. More work at the briefing stage can only lead to better, agreed measures of success and almost undoubtedly a happier working relationship.

But all too often the briefing document if it exists at all is a triumph of cut and paste – different people from within the client organisation chip in their suggestions and the result is mission-creep before you’ve even started when what is need is the editor’s red pencil.

Better briefing won’t stop people believing their own PR and portraying themselves as supermen but it will make it harder for them to be tempted to do so and everyone will benefit.

The advertising industry has addressed this in the www.thegoodpitch.com initiative. The Bell Pottinger case demonstrates that there is huge potential value in PR and public affairs too.

What do you think?

Passion and Perspective Why Media City is Good For Manufacturing

If you didn’t see Paul Mason’s report on Newsnight on how we can rebalance the UK economy you missed a treat. You can read his blog about it here.

It was an eloquent examination of whether and how we can do what our Prime Minister wants, which is to rebalance the economy in favour of export, manufacturing and innovation. There isn’t huge amount I agree with David Cameron on but I support this aim wholeheartedly.

In the film, Paul Mason was filmed on the Bridgewater Canal to the west of Manchester, making the point that the canal itself was part funded by the public purse and never made a penny profit. What it did do though was stimulate the economy along its banks by enabling factories to be built which had the means to shift the goods to a waiting world.

The camera panned back to reveal once such factory, in Leigh, a huge cotton mill built in Edwardian times.

The piece then shifted to Manchester University and Graphene Industries and made the analogy between the investment in the canal and the £50m of government money that is being invested to kick start the commercialisation of graphene.

Shortly after the film aired, Paul tweeted that the mill and colliery shown was where his father and grandfather respectively had worked.

I am a big fan of Paul Mason’s plain language reporting and ability to cut through the complexity and egos of economic theory and his film was a love letter to where he grew up and its wealth creating heritage.

As we ponder whether the industrial economy can really be revived in time, one key factor is that regionally based manufacturers are not media darlings. Interviews with regional manufacturers are so often stilted down-the-lines from a local studio or contained in reports where the intro contains the phrase “I went to Manchester/Leeds/Newcastle to find out…..” indicating that this will be a subject that is a bit out of the ordinary agenda.

I doubt that many industrial managers and owners want to be media darlings for the sake of it, but you don’t have to change planes to get from popular appeal to policy focus and what Paul Mason’s proud and personal tweet suggests is that this might be a welcome effect of the BBC’s move to Media City.

My last blog post about what I see as the weaknesses of the way Manchester markets itself to the world, as the Original, Modern city caused a bit of fuss. I could have added that the irony of Marketing Manchester’s attempts to brand the city will be overshadowed by what is happening in Salford at Media City. Paul Mason’s film was an open goal opportunity to mention Original, Modern and it is telling that he didn’t refer to it.

The value of the BBC’s move to MediaCity will be measured by the number of jobs created directly and the injection of budgets into the regional economy but the subtle and more profound effect might well be that efforts to rebalance the economy will be better served by the BBC being seated inside the UK’s most manufacturing led region.

Paul Mason’s film was enriched and given more force by his personal perspective of the subject and whether Newsnight itself moves to Salford is beside the point, the region’s role in transforming the economy will be enhanced by being part of the BBC landscape in every sense of the word.

Nick was amongst a group of property developers and architects whose affront at the weakness of the previous slogan for Manchester “We’re Up and Going” was such that they became known as the ‘McEnroe Group’…You Cannot be Serious etc..

MCing the talk was Michael Taylor, the editor of Insider, who pointed out that as the head of Marketing Manchester Nick had now moved from being critic to producer and invited him to describe that journey and in particular the genesis of the “Original, Modern” line developed by the designer Peter Saville, in his role as Manchester’s creative director. Michael has blogged about this previously.

That’s when things got startling.

Manchester City Council, to its credit, realising the awfulness of the slogan it had just launched responded to the McEnroe Group by deciding to hire a creative director to shape the image of the city to its citizens and the outside world.

A line up of candidates from New York, Barcelona and other cities was interviewed amongst whom was Peter Saville, most famous then and now for his work for Factory Records in the late 70s and early 80s.

Why was he hired? What were his outstanding virtues?

On this, Nick was unambiguous. It was because he was the cheapest and he was the cheapest because he was desperate for the work.

In any normal setting, that would be a deafening klaxon to thank the candidate for his trouble and show him the door, but this is the Looking Glass world of local government mixing with a persuasive group with a common interest in getting planning permissions for their property interests.

Nick talked for a bit about branding cities and Michael brought up the recent I Love Mcr campaign from Marketing Manchester and suggested that by being a direct copy of I Love NY it was the very antithesis of original or modern.

This was clearly discomforting to Nick who then said another extraordinary thing.

Clearly he thinks the I Love Mcr campaign is beyond poor, but his diplomatic instincts led him to defend it on three fronts. It was simple, people ‘got it’ and they could if they wished, do something about it.

He contrasted this with ‘Original Modern’ which he admitted was more of an intellectual ‘construct’ and said that people ‘didn’t really understand the strategy behind it’.

I took the opportunity in the Q&A to ask him to articulate this strategy because whilst I can understand Original, Modern conceptually, I don’t understand what I am supposed to do with it or about it.

Nick replied that it isn’t actually a strategy as such so I asked him why he said it was.

His reply was, to be charitable, vague and referred to an architect sketching out a broad plan for a property development and that this was what a strategy really is.

It isn’t and this confusion of an overarching idea or a vision with a strategy makes “Original, Modern” as useless as “We’re Up and Going” and actually inferior to “I love MCR”.  Which is saying something.

Nick gave the example of the Manchester International Festival as what Original, Modern is all about because it commissions new work.

Again, this is confused thinking. The MIF is bold and to be celebrated, but fundamentally, sponsoring original work by others isn’t the same as being original, modern. Get those two ideas mixed up and you’re in trouble.

Creating the Festival would be a strategically sound marketing move for a city which aspired to be original and modern, but it is flawed thinking for one that claims to embody these words.

Contrast the MIF with the International Violin Competition run by the RNCM. This may be smaller than MIF but IS an example of original, modern in that it attracts the world’s best violinists because the some of the world’s best teaching is taking place at the RNCM under the guidance of its head of strings Malcolm Layfield who combines this role with being professor at the Beijing Conservatoire.

I will cheerfully disclose that Malcolm is my brother-in-law but this does not diminish the point that what the violin competition represents is Manchester projecting itself on the world stage through world class work and skills being attracted to Manchester not because someone has written a big cheque but because of a world class asset already in the city that is plugged in at a profound level to the dominant culture of our time.

The crucial point is that the RNCM doesn’t need the permission of anyone to be original and modern, any more than Saville himself needed permission to change the way the world looked at a record label or a band. In this sense Original, Modern is just a slogan trying to connect things that have no connection, an irrelevance.

Nick said he thought Original Modern was more an economic development idea than anything else but how? Stick it on an inward investment brochure and businesses will ask, what does this mean in terms of supporting R&D, or skills development or evidence that Manchester knocks spots off other cities in terms of the vibrancy of its informal cultural and intellectual exchanges?

That was true once in the city in the Reform Club, the Liberal Club, the Portico but Nick is right in pointing out that these forums no longer exist.

Manchester has universities to spare but I have never heard of the city being defined by them. Hopefully that may change with the commercialisation of Graphene but this will happen with money from central Government rather than the city itself being bold.

It is troubling that the chairman of the body built around the phrase was unable to say how Original Modern translates into actions rather than words.

Ultimately Original Modern is an idea in search of substance. It is a hollow slogan and the truth of its weakness is that it was overshadowed overnight in August by a thousand flyers in shop windows, reproducing a logo copied from New York circa 1975.

The beauty of I Love NY was that it was a provocative, democratic, enabling idea. Original Modern is a subtle, intellectual wordplay that requires an understanding of 200 years of history and leads nowhere.

If you’ve got nothing better to do, watch Peter Saville spend 10 minutes failing to explain it.

It’s shame that no-one in the room back in 2004 had the balls to say “You Cannot be Serious”.