Hello, and welcome!
eskimon is Simon Kemp‘s collection of ‘things worth sharing’.
It covers two broad themes: thoughts and ideas on marketing strategy, and scrapbook cuttings of things that inspire me.
If this is your first visit, you might like to start with these posts:
8 steps to better communications
Making marketing more strategic
Improving advertising measurement
And if you liked those, you might like to have a more general look around, or subscribe to my RSS feed (my what?).
Or, if you’re looking for more inspiration, you can find a guide to my favourite sources here.
Alternatively, if you’d like to share some inspiration of your own, you’ll find me on twitter as @eskimon.
One last note: this is my personal blog, so please remember that the opinions I express here aren’t necessarily shared by my employer, or by anyone else for that matter.
Thanks very much for visiting – I look forward to seeing you again soon!
eskimon 
Hi!
I like your way of breaking down hidden truths.
Great sentence!
Best,
Al
Hello Simon
Impressed by your clear and insightful writing
And digging the mix you uploaded too… nice work.
BC
Thanks Ben! Glad you liked the mix too 🙂
Hi Simon,
I got lucky and bagged myself an interview with JWT next week so
I’m trawling your blog for some nuggets of inspiration. I’m trying to make sure that I can talk with confidence about strategy as a couple of people have mentioned that it’s likely to come up.
The future of advertising, what makes a brand work, what is being said by XXX’s campaign… these are the sorts of things I’m thinking about. I also wondered if you had any suggestions for things to think about? You being where I’m hoping to go!
Thanks,
Casey
Well done! Hope it goes well…
Most of the advice I’d offer is in here somewhere – I’m not sure whether you’ve read all of the links below already, but they’re the ones I’d recommend.
However, the most important thing is to have your own opinions.
Read up as much as you can from the internet (here’s a guide to my favourite sources of inspiration), but always do so with a critical eye: take out what you think is important, and then take that somewhere new.
Think of it like Lego: follow the instructions the first time, then think how you could make it better; argue with it, pull it apart, throw away the instructions, build something else, and then do the same all over again.
This works because there are no right or wrong answers in planning; rather, it’s about finding the most appropriate solutions to the challenges that each brand faces at a specific moment in time (which is why we need to move to a more ‘agile’ planing mindset).
As for the interview itself, a good interviewer should challenge your thinking, not your knowledge of what other people think, so take time to understand what they’re really asking with every question. What they’ll really want to know is how well you can reason and adapt, and you can’t really ‘prepare’ for that by reading. You’ve just got to be confident that you can give a sensible and constructive answer to every question, even if you don’t know enough about the topic.
As a last point, it goes without saying that honesty, humility, and enthusiasm are minimum requirements. Reference your reading wherever it’s appropriate; show how you’ve evolved someone else’s thinking, and if you simply don’t know stuff, say so, but immediately say how you’d resolve it (i.e. where you’d look for a solution).
Anyway… enough rambling. Here are the posts I’d recommend: take them all apart and build your own!
Strategy
A simple 8-step guide to addressing communications briefs.
The elements of strategy
How to make a brand more valuable
Planning
Some thoughts on a ‘new planing manifesto’: the planning for the future series
Why every advert needs a ‘message’
Making sure that all your communications connect: the communications proposition
Measurement (this is how to show you want to help clients’ brands, not just make pretty adverts)
The problem with the media / advertising model, resulting from ‘media myopia‘
How to construct a really meaningful ad measurement model
The challenges with measuring ad effectiveness
Other useful thoughts
Why being different is important
The role of innovation in marketing (and advertising)
Some thoughts on brand differentiation
Hope those help. If you’re still looking for more, browse the category cloud thing on the right hand side of any page for words or phrases that you want to know more about; clicking on any of them will show you all the posts that have been tagged with that category.
Be sure to have some real-world examples too. It’s fine to use big and famous brands (I use Nike all the time), but make sure you can justify why they’re the best examples. Big brands are usually successful because they do many things right; identifying which of those ‘bits’ made them successful in the specific context of what you’re talking about shows you understand their marketing, and have the useful skill of learning from others’ actions.
Best of luck with the interview! Let me know how it goes.
Thank you for all the info and links, it’s really really helpful. My plan is to sit down today and read all of it (and any similar stuff I have come across recently) then I’m going to prepare some responses to the more obvious questions so I can rehearse them over the next week.
Following that I’m going to fill my head with as much relevant information and as many real-world examples as possible (I already have Campaign & Marketing coming out of my ears). And learn JWT’s global output by heart… easy! I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Thanks again,
Casey
Hello,
I was wondering if you accept guest post for your blog. If you do, I would like to submit a few. I’m a recent college graduate, with an English major, looking to build out my portfolio. I can write on a wide variety of topics and am sure you would be happy with the quality. Please email me back if you are interested. Thank you for your time.
– Kathleen Hubert
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002374243662
Thanks for the offer Kathleen. This is a personal blog, so I’m not currently using guest posts, but if you have something written on social media and want to share it then I’m always happy to consider something. Cheers!
Hi Simon,
I particularly loved your #win diagram and would love to be able to use it as illustration for an article I am writing for online publication EdgeCondition about women in architecture. Can you let me know if there are any rights attached to it and/or how you would want it credited?
Great work!
Cheers,
Laura