Meet The New Year, Same As The Old Year.

In the past year, I've not posted that often. My reasoning was that after four years of blogging, I didn't think I had that much new to write. Marketing isn't rocket-science and genuinely new things don't come along all that often, so I was convinced that everybody must have heard it all before.

Of course, if that were true, the conference business would be in a parlous state indeed but the real point is that too many marketers are seduced by the new rather than the useful.

I'm not saying ignore the new. Far from it. It's your obligation to be aware of it, to understand it and to evaluate it. But, don't obsess about it to the expense of taking your eye of the ball. Some few elements of the new may have a medium to long term impact on your business, but they will do so in the medium to long term and that's not this year.

So, in 2011, dont think about new, think about better. Better may perhaps be something new, but it's more likely to be doing the old things much better.

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The Art Of Marketing.

"Paint what you see, not what you know."

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Marketing Automation: Keys to Success

Of the 235 respondents in a November IDC survey, nearly 40% had not implemented a marketing automation solution (yet). Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today's marketers. Digital marketing has exploded in scope and complexity making it practically impossible to efficiently and effectively reach your target audience without a fully realized marketing automation infrastructure. If you haven't gotten started you are already way behind the ball.

40% have not yet implemented marketing automation

Source: Marketing Automation: the Rise of Revenue, IDC #255860, Dec 2010. n = 234

Marketing automation is a must have for today's marketing and sales organizations. There is a wide array of online sources readily available to buyers that can significantly influence purchasing behavior. As a result, marketers must maintain a pervasive and continuously refreshing digital presence. Frequency is emerging as the most critical capability for sales and marketing organizations – frequency of outreach, analysis, and reporting. The cycle time for everything in marketing is under enormous pressure and companies that deliver more often, respond faster, and sustain their digital presence more successfully will be the winners.

Keys to success:

• Standardize your customer data
• Deploy marketing automation
• Review KPIs for marketing and sales to ensure alignment, visibility, and data integrity
• Integrate data, workflows, and governance across the whole "response to revenue" cycle

Top 3 places small companies (less than $1B) start:

• Lead management
• Campaign management
• Content management

Top 3 places large enterprise ($1B or more) start:

• Campaign management
• Lead management
• Financial reporting

Marketers must solve a stack of process, operational, and technical issues. It is a very complex and large scale problem spanning not only marketing and sales, but every other piece of the "response to revenue cycle, including: configuration, pricing, order processing, accounting, as well as service and support functions as well. The full scope of the customer relationship must be visible and measurable. Point solutions focused on particular marketing processes are great catalysts, but, IDC recommends companies take a holistic approach that ensures consistent data, workflows, and governance throughout the customer lifecycle.

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A Christmas Riddle

BOM is closing down for Christmas. But before we go let's leave you with a riddle to ponder over the mince pies.

Tyler has been doing some more work on the pay gap between the public and private sectors. As everyone surely knows by now, average public sector pay is considerably higher than private sector pay. When we last blogged it, we reckoned the public sector premium stands at an astonishing 50% - once we take account of the full cost of those gold plated pensions.

How did we reach that conclusion? We based it on the following analysis from the Office for National Statistics, which compares the public and private sectors in terms of both gross pay and total reward (ie including employers' pension contributions):

The conclusion is overwhelming - for both men and women, for both high and low earners, for incomes including and excluding pensions, public sector employees do much better than private sector. The median full-time employee in the public sector gets nearly 30% more than his/her counterpart in the private sector, once we take account of the employer's pension contribution.

And in truth, the public sector does even better than the ONS numbers suggest. That's because the ONS only takes account of the employers' explicit pension contribution, a contribution that hugely understates the true cost of public sector pensions.

As we blogged here, the true cost of public sector pensions as a percentage of salary averages around 25% more than current pension contributions. Which means that we need to gross up the public sector total reward numbers even further. At the median income level that takes the public sector premium up to a staggering 50%+.

All of which is pretty shocking.

But the public sector unions and their supporters have come up with an answer. They say that the public sector premium reflects the fact that public sector employees are on average better qualified than their private sector counterparts.

Here for example is what the TUC says:

"The obvious retort to the small-state brigade when they harp on about average pay [do they mean us?] is that the private and public sector workforces are different. As the private sector employs more unskilled workers on the minimum wage than the public sector, and the public sector has a high proportion of professional workers (such as teachers and doctors) it is not surprising that average pay is higher in the public sector...

...there has been a big growth in employment of graduates in the public sector over the last ten years – much bigger than in the private sector. Even in 1998 the public sector was already employing more graduates. Given that graduates are paid more than others, this in itself would tend to make average public sector pay higher. There are quite significant decreases in the proportion of public sector staff with higher education short of a degree (which we will call diplomas for simplicity) and those with other qualifications."

And the TUC is quite right - the proportion of public sector employees who are graduates is indeed much higher than it is in the private sector. In fact, at nearly 40%, it is twice as high.

Now, the TUC reckons that explains why public sector pay is higher. They're better qualified than the dolts working in the private sector, so naturally they get paid more.

Whether qualification and other differences really do explain the earnings gap is the very thing Tyler is currently attempting to bottom out. But it raises another perhaps even more critical question - in our current parlous economic state can it possibly make sense to have so many of our expensively educated graduates working in the public sector?

Because as the TUC highlights, although the public sector "only" employs just over 20% of Britain's manpower, it employs 40% of our graduates. 40%.

Can we afford to have 40% of our best brains working in the non-wealth producing public sector? Don't we need them in the private sector creating the prosperity that will power us out of Labour's economic crater?

That's a real Christmas riddle.

What's that?

Most of those supposed public sector grads are no such thing? Their growth merely reflects the "significant decreases in the proportion of public sector staff with higher education short of a degree (which we will call diplomas for simplicity)"? Many of those new public sector grads are merely redesignated diploma holders (like nurses)?

Hmm. You've probably got a point there.

Hmmm...

The mince pies are calling. Happy Christmas everyone.

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Strategic Mismarketing.

Yahoo are pilloried for closing down a number of their acquisitions after failing to develop them. Nokia have been called the place where great ideas go to die for similar reason and Google, News International and many others have received similar appraisals.

Outside the digital world, we know that the vast majority of product launches fail and I've often repeated the dirty secret of investment banking that most mergers denude shareholder value.

It's all symptomatic of a failure to understand markets; the consequent pursuit of quantity of customers over quality of customers; and the failure to recall that realisation that having high quality (i.e. long-term) customers is dependent on exhibiting requires high quality customer-centric behaviour at all times.

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New Cake Slicer Required

That doesn't look fair somehow

When all else fails, look at the facts. Tyler has been spending so much time screaming at those free-loading students on the telly, that he temporarily forgot that vital insight.

As we blogged here, Lord Browne's recommendations on higher education funding were spot on, and we strongly support their swift implementation by the government. It simply isn't fair that taxpayers should pick up the tab for uni courses, when it's the students themselves who get the lion's share of the benefits. Why should we pay for them to schlep their way into higher income jobs?

As Browne's report shows, the average male graduate can currently expect to receive a boost to his lifetime income of around $200,000. And although the boost for female grads is less, it's still well worth having.

But the question we taxpayers need answering is how much do we get? Given that we've been paying the bulk of the costs, what have we had back?

Because although we keep hearing students and academics telling us that we'll all benefit from graduates "boosting the economy", there is a distinct lack of fact to go with such assertions. How much benefit, and how does it stack up against the costs?

So here are a few facts, taken from this paper produced for the European Commission.

The critical calculation goes by the snappy title "the public rate of return to tertiary education". No, don't switch off. All it means is we're comparing the extra income generated by these higher earning grads in future (as against the income they'd have generated without a degree), to the costs of putting them through uni (including the loss of income they'd have generated had they been out working). And we express that return as an annual percentage, just like the interest rate on your building society account.

Anyway, despite the explosion of M Mouse degrees and the general dumbing down we all know about, it turns out that this return is still quite respectable. According to the OECD, the average UK graduate currently generates a public rate of return of around 6.5% pa. In other words, by investing in his university education, society gets a return of 6.5% pa over the next 40 years*.

Now that's not bad in today's circs - much better than the 0.5% pa paid on a typical bank savings account. In fact, it's much better than Tyler assumed (hence the need for facts). So we really shouldn't knock it.

But the key question is how does that 6.5% return get divvied up? Who gets it - the individual student or society as a whole (aka the taxpayer)?

It turns out that here in the UK, the graduate does very well indeed. Although the overall public return is only 6.5%, the average graduate's return (according to the OECD) is 14.4% pa - well over twice as much.

How? How can the grad get so much? Simple - he doesn't have to pay anything like the full cost of his university education.

But if the grad gets much more than 6.5%, that means the rest of us must be getting less - we know the size of the cake, and if he gets a bigger slice, we get a smaller one.

So is that fair? Is that a fair division of the spoils?

I submit to you that it isn't. And when we look at other countries, we can see that the division is much less fair here than it is elsewhere. Here are the OECD figures for a range of European countries, showing how the gap between the private return (the slice going to students) and the social return (the fixed cake) is higher here than anywhere else, except the Czech Republic, Portugal, and Switzerland.

Looked at in that light, it seems pretty clear some rebalancing is required. We need to reallocate some of the return away from the students themselves back to society in general. And higher fees are an excellent way of achieving that.

There's one other interesting factual snippet in this EC paper, on the question of whacking students from poor backgrounds.

We've been hearing a lot about how the higher debts driven by higher fees will put off poor students from going to uni. And how that isn't fair.

But it turns out that from a financial standpoint - even when they can access higher edcuation - students from poorer backgrounds don't get nearly as much out of it as richer students. It seems that the return for richer UK students is getting on for three times that for poor students.

Why?

Here's the long version:

"Overall, the expansion of tertiary education in OECD appears to have had little impact on the relative prospects of young people from less advantaged backgrounds. This is hardly a surprising finding. Parental and school influences are extremely important determinants of participation at post-compulsory level. In most countries tertiary education requires prior qualifications -- generally at upper-secondary level – so that attainment in the compulsory phase of education, as much as anything which occurs subsequently, is a key to tertiary participation. Therefore, the expansion of capacity at the tertiary level will not, in itself, have much impact on these factors. The challenge to public policy of delivering equality of opportunity in tertiary education is sizeable, and falls not only on the system for tertiary education itself, but also on support for children and their families, reaching back to pre-schooling and into compulsory and upper-secondary schooling."

The short version? The damage is done long before university level. If we really want to help kids at the bottom, we need a radical improvement in our state schools.

Sounds familiar somehow.

*Footnote. Yes you're right - the OECD numbers are based on what yesterday's graduates of different ages are earning today. And actually that may not be a good guide to what today's grads will earn over their lifetimes tomorrow. So with dumbed down degrees etc, the OECD's numbers may very well overstate the prospective return to uni education today.

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Dreamforce '10 - the don't Miss Event of the Year … for CIOs

Salesforce.com held its annual user conference December 6th to 9th in San Francisco. It was unusual in that very little of the messaging from Salesforce.com itself was aimed at sales people. The company has clearly and emphatically hammered its stake in the ground as the cloud platform provider for the enterprise. Marc Benioff and other top SFDC execs spent all of the general session keynotes on four key ideas:

• Platform
• Cloud
• Social
• Mobile

If that were a word cloud of the transcripts of the keynotes "platform" would be the biggest and boldest of the four. The company made several significant announcements about how it is enhancing and building out the enterprise cloud computing platform of the future – much of it aimed at CIOs and developers. First however, there were a couple of items that will be of interest to sales and marketing people:

Full integration of Jigsaw. Jigsaw, the "crowdsourced" contact database will now provide dynamic updates to records, greatly reducing blank or incomplete record status and making it easier for sales and marketing people to contact the right individuals within their target accounts – to the extent that Jigsaw can provide clean data.

Chatter Free. Announced earlier this year, Chatter is the SFDC collaboration app. SFDC cited user numbers in the 10,000s at NBC, Qualcomm, and Nikon, and 100,000s at Dell. With Chatter Free, limited Chatter functionality will now be available to people that don't have SFDC licenses. Users can add SFDC features for $15/user/month w/o the need for a SFDC license. Salesforce.com clearly expects Chatter to make SFDC adoption a viral phenomenon. What Chatter adds to the picture beyond being "Facebook for the enterprise" is the ability to follow not only people, but groups, accounts, and contacts – potentially any record in the SFDC.com database. Chatter will help companies share tribal knowledge as well as better coordinate the outreach multiple business units may have with key contacts and accounts – both very good things that go way beyond being Facebook Friends with all of your customers and employees. Regardless of whether it drives more licenses, it sets the stage for the platform sell that's coming next.

Platform as a Service (the CIO part)
Database.com. Significantly, SFDC claims database.com is open to any environment, any programming language, and any device. It provides relational data services, full text search, user management, row level security, triggered and stored procedures, authentication, support for APIs (db to db calls), as well as a myriad of other features such as the ability for each record to have a profile that supports followers and feeds (see http://wiki.database.com/page/FAQ for more info.) Touting the power of the cloud, SFDC presented statistics showing that in the last year the number of transactions grew 50%, the number of records doubled from 10 billion to 20 billion, and average response time decreased.

Open Apex. Salesforce.com has launched an open programming language for the cloud that supports multi-tenancy. Now developers can work in the cloud to customize and enhance Salesforce.com apps as well as develop a host of other independent enterprise applications for any function - marketing, accounting, services, provisioning, HR, etc. This should fundamentally change the perspective of the IT department about cloud computing – it's open, has its own IDE and database, supports web and mobile development. You no longer have to have code on premises to manage and customize your enterprise functionality.

Ruby on Rails. Web development is native to the salesforce.com cloud platform. Java support is provided by vmForce and acquisition of Heroku provides both a hosting platform and an IDE for native Ruby on Rails development in the cloud. This greatly eases the process of making enterprise apps web and mobile ready.

"Now we're finally a real platform company"

SFDC now comprises: salesforce, serviceforce, chatter, jigsaw, database.com, appforce, siteforce, vmforce, Ruby, Apex, Eclipse IDE, ISV force, and more. The mantra heard repeatedly from senior SFDC execs was that Salesforce.com is now a real platfom company.

The big picture for Salesforce.com is to provide all the layers of the IT computing environment as a shared service that is managed, tuned, updated, and upgraded automatically. This greatly reduces the administrative overhead for IT while providing all the application and data control they need to rapidly respond to business requirements (and not having hundreds of rogue DIY projects all over the place.) All good things, but the risk is whether the platform can be trusted to provide all that without failure or outage or providing a conveniently centralized target for cyber attack.

While SFDC sets its sights on becoming all things to all people in the cloud, it is not intending to be the single source for automating the response to revenue process. Recent IDC research shows that 75% of SFDC customers also use up to five other sales and marketing automation solutions (see Marketing Automation: The Rise of Revenue, IDC #225860, Dec 2010.) The Expo floor featured representatives from the entire sales and marketing ecosystem – marketing automation, customer intelligence, list and database management, sales enablement, forecasting tools, proposal tools, and many others. As a result, customers will continue to be in the position of cobbling together "best of breed" solutions, and having to integrate the data, systems, and workflows required to manage and measure the performance of the customer creation process.

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Flash Helmuts.

BMW's cinema ad above is getting a lot of online attention, but to me it's all flash and no substance. The portentous nonsense at the start of the clip is the worst type of quasi justification that says everything about creative cleverness and nothing about creative relevance. It's an attention-grabbing gimmick that draws attention to the gimmick.

Until you can link the clever idea to a genuine marketing goal, the clever idea should stay in the drawer.

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Cost Of Bank Bail-Outs

A very rocky road, and still a mountain to climb

This morning's National Audit Office report on the cost of bank bail-outs is being headlined as saying taxpayers will likely escape without loss. But it actually says nothing of the kind.

True, the NAO tells us taxpayer exposure to the special guarantee and indeminity schemes (the Asset Protection Scheme, the Special Liquidity Scheme, and the Credit Guarantee Scheme) has halved to around £500bn. But:

"The Treasury retains the unquantifiable ultimate risk of supporting banks should they threaten the stability of the overall financial system. The outstanding £512 billion is only on the explicit support already provided. Further intensification of financial instability may require additional intervention."

That massive implicit guarantee is one we've blogged many times. And let's be under no illusions - at a time when there are still huge uncertainties surrounding the creditworthimess of banks right across Europe, the market reckons our two big nationalised banks remain pretty risky.

As the NAO highlights, the market price for insuring against default by RBS or Lloyds has remained right at the top of the range for similarly sized European banks (NB a 5 year Credit Default Swap cost of 200 basis points pa roughly means the market reckons there's at least a 2% chance of default within 1 year, implying at least a 1-in-10 chance of default within 5 years).

And with that level of risk, unsurprisingly our banks have underperformed other banks in the equity market:

In other words, we're still propping up two relatively high risk megabanks that the market doesn't much like the look of.

And there's another point the NAO highlights. In order to inject funds into the banks, the government has had to borrow more. And that costs. According to the NAO:

"...the Government is paying some £5 billion a year (£10 billion so far) in interest on the Government borrowing raised to finance the purchase of shares and loans to banks. This ongoing cost is material in terms of the overall public finances and deficit. This £5 billion a year was not included in the Treasury’s previous estimates of the loss to the taxpayer, because the Treasury does not consider them to be direct costs. The estimated £5 billion a year interest on this debt is 11 per cent of the total £44 billion forecast to be paid in interest on public sector debt in 2010-11."

Whatever it says in the headline, the bottom line is that we ain't out of jail yet. Not by a long chalk.

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Proverbial Hawks

No Proverbial Hawks listed

So Deputy Governor Bean says that he and his colleagues at the Bank of England are watching inflation "like proverbial hawks".

Hmm. You have to wonder whether Proverbial Hawks watch the right bit of the field.

Because today's inflation figures have yet again surprised on the upside. CPI inflation has moved back up to 3.3%, and RPI inflation is back up to 4.7%. Inflation has been above the official 2% target for 39 out of the last 48 months, and with VAT going up to 20% in January that record is set to get even worse. Some hawk.

In Tyler's experience what actually happens is this: the economics establishment lock themselves into a particular world view and find it incredibly difficult to admit they've got it wrong. Even when the numbers start telling a different story, people cling on to their world view and explain away the numbers as a temporary aberration.

OK, the facts are these.

In the two years since Lehman blew up and we were told we faced the unfathomable horrors of deflation, the overall price level has increased by 5.2% (CPI). Prices have not fallen. We have not had deflation.

The impetus - as we've blogged many times - has come from import prices. The combination of weak sterling and soaring world commodity prices has pushed up the cost of our imports by 10%.

The Bank and others have argued that we can live with that, because it hasn't fed through into wage increases. In other words, there is no 70s style wage-price spiral in the making.

But wages have certainly not been flat. Despite the rise in unemployment and widespread concern about job security, average earnings have still gone up by over 3%. And although the recovery has only just started, one-third of firms are already reporting skills shortages. As they say in labour market circles, watch this space.

Of course, there is that other explanation for the Bank's inaction - the not-so secret plan to inflate away the UK's debts.

Like we've said before - sell money.

PS A great shame that Mr Dale has pulled the plug on regular blogging. He was one of the original UK political bloggers and was always well worth worth reading. He'll be missed.

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So Who Do You Want To Carry?

I ♥ NY. Not.

Back in the 70s the Big Apple nearly went bust. After years of gross fiscal incontinence under Mayors of both parties, the City of New York was on the skids.

Naturally, they turned for help to their fellow Americans - the folk with whom they had been bonded for two whole centuries, one nation under God.

And you know what their fellow Americans said?

Drop Dead. That's what they said. You got yourselves into this mess, so you can get yourselves out of it. Besides which, we never liked you anyway.

Four decades on, and five little PIIGieS find themselves facing a very similar predicament. Because although the Greeks and the Irish have so far been bailed-out by Northern European taxpayers (including us), nobody seriously believes that's the end of the matter. The fiscal deficits and banking debts of the PIIGS are way beyond their own ability to fund, and way beyond the total European bail-out fund already established.

But will Northern Europe's taxpayers be prepared to shell out even more to rescue the PIIGS? Will they want to carry that weight for a bunch of spendthrift Latinos who spend half the day dossing around in the shade, and with whom historic relations are perhaps best described as troubled?

This morning Boris highlights the issue. Just like he and we Eurosceptics have always said, it turns out Northern Europe's taxpayers really don't want to pay for the profligacy of others. Your average German does not recognise a duty to support the Spaniard.

Quite rightly, Boris demands an apology from all those arrogant half-baked Europhiles who denied there was a problem and wanted us to join the Euro - the ones who wrote us all off as "xenophobic, garlic-hating defenders of the pint and the yard and the good old bread-filled British banger".

Ah yes, how right he is.

Yet there's one bit of Boris's argument that sent the Tyler eyebows twitching skywards. Contrasting the disparate tribes of Europe with the cohesive whole that is Albion, he says:

"London contributes massively in net tax revenues to the rest of the UK, and by and large Londoners accept that this is part of belonging to a single political entity."

By and large, hmmm? A nice phrase, and a nice way of reminding the rest of Britain that they'd better keep the Golden Goose of Londinium sweet. Because to our certain knowledge, there are increasing numbers of London taxpayers who most definitely do not accept that their taxes should be carted off to fund the Picts and the Celts.

We've blogged the regional unfairness of Britain's fiscal arrangements many times (eg here). But just as a reminder, here's the latest analysis from Oxford Economics. It shows that Londoners are made to contribute a net £2 grand pa per head. That is, the average Londoner pays £2 grand pa more in tax than he gets back in terms of public spending:

As we can see, the only regions that actually make a net contribution are London, the South East, and the Eastern region - together comprising the Greater South East. Every single other region takes more than they pay (and in Scotland's case, Oxford Economics have allocated to them all North Sea taxes).

It's been like this for as long as anyone can remember, and the obvious question is why do those living in the Greater South East put up with it? Without the fiscal drain to subsidise the other regions, the average family in the Greater South East would be getting on for £5000 pa better off.  That's serious money, and you'd think most families would notice.

Which brings us to today's Localism Bill.

As regular readers will know, we're great fans of localism (eg see here). We absolutely believe that local councils should have greater authority over the services they provide, so they can respond both to local priorities, and to local cost conditions. So to that extent we welcome the Bill.

Unfortunately, as far as we can see, the Bill does not address the single most important requirement for localism to work - sorting out the money. What would really concentrate minds in local councils, and would make local electors really focus on the issue, would be if councils had to raise much more of their own money for themselves (aka fiscal decentralisation).

As things stand, they get the vast bulk of their cash from Whitehall, and they get it whether or not they satisfy local electors. Indeed, we have just about the most centralised system of local council finance anywhere in the developed world (eg see this blog).

It is a recipe for continued inefficiency at the local level, and a recipe for continued fiscal transfers from the productive to the less productive.

One day in the tough years to come, the Greater South East is going to wake up. One day, its families are going to look at that £5 grand pa being carted off elsewhere and ask why? One day, its taxpayers are going to tell the rest of the country to drop dead.

PS This morning's R4 Today gave us yet another example of BBC statism. According to them, the main problem with Pickles' localism is that it might result in mad-cap councils doing mad-cap things, and surely government has a responsibility to stop that. Like Whitehall has got everything taped.

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Pursue Greatness.

A new documentary focuses on Bruce Springsteen's recording of Darkness on The Edge of town back in 1977. In an aside he recalled his musical ambitions back then.

I didn't want to be rich.
I didn't want to be famous.
I just wanted to be great.

Not a bad marketing philosophy when you think about it.

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Spotted By BOM Correspondents

BOM correspondents have spotted the following, including news of some real old favourites:

1. NHS Supercomputer still haemorrhaging cash

Were you by any chance under the impression that our new broom government had scrapped Blair's wildly expensive and wildly useless NHS Supercomputer (see many previous blogs)? Er, no. All they've actually done is attempt to renegotiate the contracts with the IT suppliers.

AMB highlights an interesting post on the latest position by Tony Collins, the former Editor of Computer Weekly and a man who did much to expose the lunacy in the first place. He tells us that the Department of Health are signing a new agreement with one of the main suppliers (CSC) to deploy a system (Lorenzo) that the hospitals themselves don't want and may never use. Collins writes:

"The deal will commit CSC to deploying the Lorenzo system to NHS trusts that have no intention of deploying it; and the deal commits the DoH to paying CSC for a minimum number of Lorenzo deployments even if NHS trusts don't actually deploy the system.

For some in the NHS, the deal will mark a new low in the history of the NHS IT programme. It may also show why central government is congenitally ill-suited to signing big IT contracts."

So WTF is Lansley's Health Department doing this?

Well, on the positive side, the new agreement will apparently save around £0.5bn compared to the previous contracts. But it will still leave this bit - that may well not ever be used - costing us £2.7bn. That aside, Collins suggests three other highly plausible explanations for the Department going ahead:

1. Pulling the plug might have led to CSC suing the Department, just as another main contractor (Fujitsu) is already doing
2. It "defers any day of reckoning within Whitehall over what many in the NHS regard as a failed programme"
3. It "relieves the health minister Simon Burns from taking any tough decisions about the future of the NPfIT, at least for the time being".

And the cost to us taxpayers? As always, it's virtually impossible to know. All we can say is that the Supercomputer has already cost us something like £6bn, for which we have got sweet FA in terms of value.

(PS This of course is not the first Labour contract our new government has tried and failed to get out of. The contract for those two new aircraft carriers had been so heavily tilted against taxpayers that it was actually cheaper to carry on rather than pull the plug. Even though we can't now afford the aircraft to go on them, and we will have the first navy ever to sail two carriers with nothing to carry. Nelson must be spinning - see this blog)


2. Student Loans Company still malfunctioning

Peter T highlights the fact that the Student Loans Company (SLC) is still not managing to pay loans on time when they are needed. In other words, despite all their promises to do better in 2010 after the shambles of 2009, the SLC still failed to pay 26% of students by the first day of term this year.

Which meant of course that many students were forced to look for emergency employment so they could eat. Bar-keeping and lap-dancing may well be good experience for later life, but that's not what we pay the SLC £94m pa in administration cost to deliver.


3. British Council still cocking-up

David Blackie reports on the latest cock-up by our old friends at the British Council.

The BC has a marketing arm for British education institutions seeking to sell courses to overseas students - Education UK. It was established a few years ago to provide a Big Government Solution in place of the private marketing operations that had existed previously. And yep, you guessed it - it's a disaster.

In fact, it's so shambolic, and its website is so dysfunctional, that the BC has now been forced to refund subscriptions to participating institutions. David writes:

"...the organisation has used taxpayers’ money and the machinery of government to send students to a site which is so bad that everyone gets their money back. Well, actually not everybody, because there will be no refund to the taxpayer for the extraordinary waste of public money, no refund to the schools and colleges who have lost business as students, parents and agents gave up trying to use a dysfunctional site, and – interest declared – no refund to the businesses compromised by the organisation using taxpayers’ money to divert monies into its own pockets."

As we've blogged many times, the hopeless BC should be abolished. And we're seriously disappointed that Cam has not only allowed it to survive, but reportedly clasped it to his bosom on those recent trips out East.

Gah.

4. International sports bunfights still losing money

Bobby Charlton (hmm... sounds familiar somehow) emailed to point out that South Africa didn't make nearly as much out of the 2010 World Cup as had been billed:

"South Africa made a return of just £323m on the £3bn it spent on building stadiums and infrastructure for this summer's tournament, according to official figures

Mike Schussler, director of consultants Economists.co.za, said: "The country made a bit of money but less than expected. We got a small part of the ticket sales and the foreign visitors' spending, but it's not as much as we expected."

Well, who'd have possibly guessed that?

Thank God we got shafted by that nice Mr Blatter.

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Season Of Goodwill

The Major has made his view very clear:

"Why the bloody hell should we law-abiding taxpayers tolerate a bunch of freeloading welfare scroungers smashing up London? We spend God knows how much on these revolting students - and will still do so even after the fees increase. But just look how they thank us! Why should we give them anything?! If they want to spend three years dossing around and rioting, let them pay for it themselves. And I'll bet half those scum desecrating the Cenotaph yesterday aren't even students at all - they'll be anarchists. And we'll be paying them! Housing benefit, child benefit, incapacity benefit... you name it.

It's time to draw the line - anybody convicted of violent disorder should go to jail - hard labour - and then lose all their welfare benefits for ever. Period. In future, if they want to eat they have to work like everyone else. And if they think they can rob instead, we'll lock them up somewhere where they will have to work. I'll get my mate Gomulka to organise something with the Soviets out East - that'll soon wipe the smile off their faces."

Now, of course, nobody objects to peaceful protest. No, indeed.

Well, that is, nobody objects to peaceful protest as long as it doesn't inconvenience us. And as long as it doesn't require us to pick up some huge tab for police overtime. So long as it takes place on a Sunday afternoon in say, a field somewhere outside Milton Keynes, and so long as the protesters pay for the policing, like in a football match, then everything's cool. In fact, under those circs, we might even allow a little recreational effigy burning - a weekly bonfire night for young people to let off steam. Kind of idea.

But who exactly are these rioters, and who is paying to keep them alive?

According to police hunting down those involved in the previous riot - the one last month at Tory HQ in Millbank - they are mainly teenage students of one kind or another. They say:

"We are finding that many of these people are young students who do not seem to have been in any trouble before. It appears they may have been provoked by more anarchist groups.

From a parent's point of view it must be very concerning. These are young people committing really serious offences which I suspect may result in prison sentences for some." (The maximum sentence for violent disorder is 5 years)

Provoked by anarchists? Certainly when you look at the wanted poster, one or two do look older than teenage:

.
But who are these anarchists exactly?

Google's anarchist UK trail leads straight to the Anarchist Federation. But can they be in any way credible? Are real anarchists allowed to participate in such a restrictive and preposterous construct as a federation? It sounds more like the Mothers' Union. Besides, there's something seriously hollow about an organisation that wants to abolish oppressive government on the one hand, while maintaining Big Government spending on the other.

Googling Operation Malone - the police man-hunt for November's rioters - gives some far more promising leads.

Ian Bone (great name) is a veteran anarchist of 63. During the 80s he ran a newspaper called Class War, featuring pix of beaten-up policemen. And here he is addressing a Class War meeting in 1985 (parental discretion advised - some of his opinions are seriously juvenile - precisely the kind of thing which might appeal to disaffected teenagers at the University of Neverpay):



Anyway, Bone has some blogposts on the current riots that simply blew the Major away. For example, under the headline What a magnificent inspiring day - the London mob is fucking back Mr B writes:

"I salute everyone who atacked the police, the treasury, the Supreme Court, the Royal family, the tax avoiders today – a quite heroic and brave acievement. Full report tomorrow – ALL HAIL – IT’S THE POLL TAX RIOT MARK 2 – ‘we come from the slums of London……"

Now that's more like it. According to his own autobiography, Bone is the son of a butler and a housemaid (no, really) and obviously carries deep psychological scars from his parents' life below stairs:

"It is fucking phenomenol. the rich are targets whether its the Bullingdon Club, the Royals or Sir Philip Green... Yesterday was reminiscent of both the poll Tax Riot and the Gordon riots as a rich hating mob stormed through the streets... Organise and celebrate yesterday comrades…but theres more coming the way of the fucking rich…..much more.’WE COME FROM THE SLUMS OF LONDON’

All of which is absolutely fine.

Well, fine except for any incitement to riot bits obviously.

But what we need to know is how does Bone support himself?

He has published three books, including the carefully nuanced "Bash the Rich". But given that B the R is currently standing at 76,361 in the Amazon best seller list, you'd have to guess he has some other source of income. And his website gives no other clues.

One of those oldies' jobs in B&Q? At 63 it's possible.

A family inheritance? Seems a tad unlikely.

Money from Putin? In the 80s, Class War and its ilk were widely thought to have been financed by the KGB, so that has to be a runner.

But the Major reckons Bone and his like must be on some kind of welfare deal.

Unfortunately we have no way of finding out.

In this season of goodwill to all men, let's hope someone round at the DWP is looking into the entire question right now.

****

Meanwhile on an altogether more seasonal level, we've just updated the TaxPayers' Alliance Tax on Christmas paper.

We reckon that taxes on Xmas spending this year will cost the average family £283. The overall bill will be £7.2bn, an astonishing 40% increase on 2008, when we last did the calc.

Part of the increase has been driven by the growth in Xmas spending, 2008 coming immediately after the Lehman crisis. But the majority of it reflects higher tax rates - the hike in VAT from 15% back up to 17.5%, plus increases in various fuel and excise duties.

And the really bad news is that VAT increases again on 4 Jan to 20%. According to Treasury forecasts, the rise will cost the average family nearly £500 pa, taking the average family VAT bill above £4000 pa for the very first time.

Happy Xmas everyone.

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Are We Spending Too Much On Education?

How more can be less

Education, education, education.

And sure enough, during Labour's time in office, they whacked up state education spending by an astonishing 73% in real inflation adjusted terms. By 2009-10 spending had increased to £88.3bn - around £8 grand pa for every pupil and student between 5 and 21.

But what precisely have we taxpayers had in return? Where's the pay-off?

You can forget all those fiddled tractor production stats - as everybody now understands, they're not worth the dumbed down exam papers they're written on.

Much more important is yesterday's report from the OECD - the 2009 results from their Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). That is based on a consistent and regular set of tests sat by 15 year olds across over 60 developed countries. And what it shows is us sinking further down the international league tables with each year that passes.

The Mail has a useful summary:

What should we make of that?

Some argue that it's largely a question of race - we're simply not as bright as the superbrains out East, and we just need to accept that as they build up their education systems we will sink ever further behind.

But even if true, that doesn't explain why we're so much worse than European countries like Finland and, gulp, Estonia.

Immigrants then. Some argue that Finland and others do well because they have far fewer immigrants dragging down the overall scores.

But while with 10.6% immigrant pupils we are much higher than say Finland, other countries with high immigrant percentages also do much better than us. For example, Canada and Australia both have higher percentages, yet both beat us in the league tables.

No, the real problem seems to lie with our school system rather than the pupil mix per se. Despite a huge additional injection of cash, we still aren't getting the results we need - in fact, we seem to be going backwards.

Which raises the obvious question as to whether spending all that extra money was worth it? And whether in these straitened times we ought to cut some of it back?

Because what the OECD report also highlights is that although we are now among the world's top education spenders, others achieve similar or better results while spending much less:

"Only seven OECD countries spend more per student than the United Kingdom...

[but]... moderate spending per student cannot automatically be equated with poor performance by education systems. For example, Estonia and Poland, which spend around US$ 40 000 per student, perform at the same level as Norway and the United States, which spend over US$ 100 000 per student. Similarly, New Zealand, one of the highest performing countries in reading, spends well below the average per student. While the United Kingdom spends almost US$ 85 000, Germany or Hungary achieve a similar average performance and spend around US$ 63 000 and US$ 44 000 respectively."

So if we cut spending back to say German levels, then according to Tyler's fag packet we could save an average $22k over each pupil's 10 years of school education up to age 15. Which works out at an annual saving to taxpayers of around £10bn pa. Not bad.

And it isn't just schools. When last sighted (2006) we were spending 5.9% of our GDP on education as a whole, whereas Germany was spending only 4.8%. Which is equivalent to about £15bn pa - money British taxpayers could save if we cut back to German spending levels.

And remember this - in this post-bubble world, Germany is beating the pants off us. Jeremy Warner has the picture story here including this chart that shows how much lower is their youth unemployment:

It seems German companies actually want to employ the products of German schools.

So what does Germany do right and we do wrong?

Hmm... now, let me see... what could it be... ah yes, selection. That thing nobody is allowed to mention here any more.

It is surely time to ask ourselves a serious question - can we any longer afford an education system that is run by the social engineering commissariat? Prizes for all and A*s all round was a lovely way of spending the last days of summer, but winter's here now.

In this new and tougher world nobody owes us a living. We need an education system that prioritises academic excellence for those with the ability to generate our future wealth, and a strong grasp of basic skills for those at the bottom - it is shocking that the OECD finds that after a decade or more of schooling, 20% of our 15 year olds are functionally illiterate.

Germany shows it can be done. We can get over the fact that our school pupils are not all Chinese. We can cope with the fact that over 10% of our pupils are immigrants. And we can even save £10 - £15bn pa in the process.

We just need to grasp one nettle.

And this time, we should do it properly and fairly (see this blog).

PS And while we're on the subject, Tyler keeps swallowing his false teeth listening to those future politicos who "speak for" the revolting students. You see, English literature degrees are not essential to the future of the nation. There is no God-given right for 18 year olds to spend three years getting pissed at taxpayer expense. The Browne recommendations on university funding and student loans are fair to everyone - both taxpayers and students (see this blog). And the thought of these future Jack Straws ruling over us for the next 40 years makes Tyler gag.

PPS Talking of English Lit degrees, Mr and Mrs T saw Rory Kinnear's Hamlet last night. Stunning - possibly the best live Hamlet Tyler has ever seen. Fresh interpretation, strong performances all round. Mrs T thought they'd slightly overdone the modern instances, but Tyler was... well.. stunned. Highly recommended.

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Fiddling With Value.

A woman and a friend sit in a coffee shop at a railway station. They're engrossed in their iPhones and serving staff later report that they also kept a close eye on their computers.

So much so that they didn't notice that the other package beneath their table had gone missing. All very 21st century. A busy environment, attention in one tech-related direction, thieves in the other. Nothing to write home about, except that the package contained a bow worth £62,000.

What does that tell us about our concept of value today? The social value of the phone connection and the related value of the computer seem to take precedence over the greater financial value of the package. The social tools were more important than the tools of her trade - for yes she was a violinist.

I don't know if that's a new phenomenon, but it's a timely reminder that value is constantly shifting depending on context and mood.

And yes the violin went missing too. It's apparently worth £1.2 million, but when you get into figures like that, you perhaps lose sight of what was really going on.

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How Many Million Unemployables?

Tyler has just attended a rather depressing event hosted by a normally rather upbeat think tank. It was a seminar on a question we've mulled many times - Where will all the new jobs come from?

The correct answer of course is that nobody knows.

Nobody knows because nobody ever knows ahead of time where the new jobs will come from. And as we've blogged before, the best thing government can do to assist is to cut taxes, cut regulation, cut working age welfare and the minimum wage, break up public sector monopolies, decentralise, and cap mass immigration.

And that's pretty well all we can say. Other than reminding people that in the three decades following the invigorating pro-market reforms of St Maggs, our "Sick Man Of Europe" economy managed to throw off its bedclothes and create 6 million new jobs - and that net of 4 million fewer jobs in manufacturing (see this blog).

To be fair, none of today's panel members disagreed with the St Maggs' prescription for private sector jobs growth (well, OK, a couple of panelists weren't keen on welfare cuts). But that's mainly because her prescription wasn't really mentioned at all.

Instead, there was much talk of difficulties with people whose "labour market characteristics" make them unappealing to potential employers.

Labour market characteristics?

Yes, that's things you will know better as motivation, work ethic, and previous employment record. Labour market characteristics turns out to be a euphemism for unemployable. And according to one of the panelists, such characteristics now cripple large swathes of the working age population in the old high unemployment blackspots we've blogged so often.

So how many people are affected? Just how many million unemployables have we now got? We've taken a quick look.

Overall, Britain has 40 million people aged between 16 and 64 (the age band the ONS counts as working age adults). Of those, 11.7 million are not in employment. So that's roughly 70% of the working age population working, and 30% not working.

Fortunately, not all of those 30% are people suffering from labour market characteristics. A big chunk of the younger ones are still in full-time education, and hopefully will find employment in due course. And a big chunk of the older ones either have working partners supporting them, or they're plutocrats who don't need to work.

Stripping out those groups, the hardcore unemployables are among the 5 million people of working age who are entirely dependent on welfare handouts - about 12% of the working age population.

So how many of those 5 million are unemployable?

In truth we don't know. But up until 2008 our economy had experienced the longest period of boom since records began. Between the beginning of 1997 and mid-2008, 2.8 million new jobs were created (net). It's surely reasonable to think that anyone who really wanted a job should have been able to get one.

Indeed, so keen were UK employers to fill those jobs that they actually imported new workers from overseas. Foreign workers flooded in, and as things stand today, 86% of the new jobs created since 1997 are filled by workers born overseas. 86%!

Even at the peak of the boom, we still had 4.3 million working age people dependent on welfare - over 10% of our working age population.

4.3 million apparently unemployable people.

Depressing.

Both for us and for them.

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Who Has Our Children?

The Major's very bad dream

Following yesterday's blog on the problem of bad parents, we've taken another look at who is actually having Britain's children.

The Major is constantly telling us (eg see here) that the welfare state has produced far too many children at the bottom of the heap. He reckons that by paying the poor and feckless to have children we've given ourselves a monstrous problem. Generation upon generation of feckless no-hopers, reproducing like Fibonacci's rabbits, and threatening to undermine a billion years of Darwinian progress.

And while the Major does tend to put things somewhat bluntly, round our way that is a very widely shared view.

The trouble is - as we saw here - actual facts are very thin on the ground.

But we've now taken a closer look at the latest Office for National Statistics data on income distribution across households of different types (see here). And we've extracted the number of children in households according to their income level.

Across the whole country there are 12.9 million dependent children spread across 19.1m non-retired households, an average of 0.67 children per household. But when you look at the distribution of children across each household income level, you find that households in the bottom 20% of incomes have an average of 1.03 children, while those in the top 20% have an average of 0.34.

What that means is that the poorest 20% of (non-retired) households have over 30% of Britain's children. Whereas the richest 20% only have 10% of the children. That is a pretty striking contrast - our economically least successful households have nearly one-third of our children.

Here's the complete picture (note - 20% income bands are known as quintiles):

And to put some more flesh on this, the gross income of the bottom 20% of households before taking account of welfare benefits averages just £7600 pa. Cash welfare benefits add a further £6300 pa.

So what should we make of this? Is the Major right?

Well, it's clearly the case that the poor have considerably more children in their households than the rich. Yes, some of that is because the rich tend to be a bit older, and their kids may have flown the nest. But even if we restrict the comparison just to households with children, those at the bottom have an average of 2 children, whereas those at the top top have just 1.5.

And it's also true that welfare constitutes a big chunk of household income for the poor - getting on for half their average gross income.

But does that mean it's welfare that's delivered all those poor kids?

In an age of readily available contraception where child labour has long since been abolished, simple economics suggests that the poor should have fewer children than those with higher incomes. That's surely straightforward.

And it's also straightforward that paying welfare based on a household's number of children, must increase the attraction of having children.

But does that prove the Major's right?

What if the poor comprise a whole bunch of people who are incapable of thinking and behaving according to economic rationality? It must be said none of us are always great at doing that.

What if we cut child welfare payments only to find ourselves with just as many poor kids, only now they're starving?

Well, it could happen - we can never answer these questions ahead of time, and in the abstract anything is possible.

But Tyler has seen enough to know there's a serious problem with our current welfare system. Nobody wants children starving in gutters, but it can't make sense to subsidise the 20% of our poorest households to produce 30% of our children.

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First Choose Your Parents

As regular readers will know, BOM has always had the highest regard for Frank "think the unthinkable" Field. So we were very pleased when Cam appointed him Poverty Czar with a brief to take a good hard look at what we can actually do about it. In particular, what can be done about child poverty?

Today we got his report, and it contains a giant helping of what the Major calls good old fashion common sense.

To begin with, Field wallops Labour's obsession with its meaningless child poverty target - ie the aim to ensure by 2020 that no child lives in a household below an arbitrary line drawn at 60% of median income. Field says:

"The anti-poverty agenda is driven along a single track of hunting down families who live below this line and then marking up a success as a family is moved across the line, no matter how marginal is the advance in their income. It does little to concentrate on those children who endure persistent poverty. Worse still, this approach has prevented a much more comprehensive strategy emerging on how best, in the longer run, to counter child poverty in a way that prevents poor children from becoming poor adults."

Spot on Frank. We have long believed that dishing out yet more cash to poor families is missing the point. In general, even the lowest incomes today have moved far above what most of us mean by poverty (eg see this blog). Here's what happened to incomes on that 60% benchmark over the last half century (in real terms, adjusted for inflation):

As we can see, income on Labour's definition of the Poverty Line more than doubled from around £6k pa to nearly £13k. That is not a meaningful definition of poverty.

What's more, taxpayers can no longer afford to fund poverty relief on that scale. As Field says:

"To meet a target of cutting child poverty to 5 per cent of all children by 2020 a further £37 billion per annum in tax credit transfers is required... an unthinkable sum in current conditions. Can anyone seriously maintain that sums of these sizes will be forthcoming over the decade, to 2020?"

Much more usefully, Field focuses on the real problem - what on earth can we do to prevent poor children from becoming poor adults?

And here, he spells out something we all know, but which PC squeamishness has for too long excluded from the public debate on child poverty:

"Even if the money were available to lift all children out of income poverty in the short term, it is far from clear that this move would in itself close the achievement gap.

... there is much more beyond just improving short-term family incomes in determining the life chances of poor children. A healthy pregnancy, positive but authoritative parenting, high quality childcare, a positive approach to learning at home and an improvement in parents’ qualifications together, can transform children’s life chances, and trump class background and parental income.

A child growing up in a family with these attributes, even if the family is poor, has every chance of succeeding in life."

That resonates so strongly with Tyler. As he's blogged many times, he had the great good fortune to grow up in a family with little money but absolutely outstanding parents. And when it comes to a choice between those two, there is no choice - first, choose your parents.

Fine. Common sense.

Except unfortunately, there just aren't enough good parents to go round. And there are especially not enough to go round down in the depths of welfare dependency.

So what to do? How do we get those problem parents we've blogged so often take their responsibilities seriously? And even if we manage that, how do we get them capable of discharging those responsibilities?

Frank's solution is to expand the support services available to help. He wants organised training for parents. He wants to refocus the floundering Sure Start programme on helping the weakest parents who really need the help. He wants pre-school foundation programmes to have resource priority ahead of more spending on Child Tax Credits. He wants to get charities and voluntary groups more involved. And he wants to formalise the responsibilities of local councils and schools for lifting the attainment levels of disadvantaged kids.

Now all of that sounds quite sensible - certainly the way Frank tells it. The whole thing is geared to breaking the dire intergenerational spiral of dependency and decline visited on us by the welfare state. And it has to be better than Labour's bone-headed pursuit of arbitrary income targets.

But what we don't want is to exchange Labour's socialist poverty disaster, with a different socialist poverty disaster.

Because although this report points in the right general direction - ie less reliance on ever-expanding welfare payments and more reliance on the poor taking back responsibility for their own lives - Frank is still a socialist. Deep down he may still believe that government can find technical solutions - ways of applying the very best brains to crack even the toughest problems.

And Tyler found himself shifting uncomfortably as he read the following (quoted approvingly by Frank from a couple of eminent education Profs):

"We seem to know as much in principle about how parental involvement and its impact on pupil achievement as Newton knew about the physics of motion in the seventeenth century. What we seem to lack is the ‘engineering science’ that helps us put our knowledge into practice. By 1650 Newton knew in theory how to put a missile on the moon. It took more than 300 years to learn how to do this in practice. The scientists who did this used Newton’s physics with modern engineering knowledge. We must not wait three hundred years to promote stellar advances in pupils’ achievement. We need urgently to learn how to apply the knowledge we already have in the field."

No, no, no.

You see, the problem with that is that physics is physics. Whereas pupil achievement is all about horribly messy human beings. Human beings who can't even manage their own behaviour, let alone manage the behaviour of other human beings.

Let's hope Frank doesn't really believe we can somehow engineer our way out of this.

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Who's To Blame?

You filthy English - we have brought you here to humiliate you

Here's the list of suspects identified by callers so far:

The BBC
Sepp Blatter
Deceitful FIFA bureaucrats on the take
Russian gangsters
Birmingham and Villa supporters
Foreigners

Tyler has already made his views clear, so he ought to be rejoicing.

Yet somehow he's not. It's one thing to believe we should never offer to host any of these tax-funded jamborees, but it's quite another to accept national humiliation at the hands of a bunch of jumped up council officials from countries that had never even heard of football until 30 years ago.

Why did it happen? Nobody seems to know, but the Major has come up with the following interesting fact. Of the 24 members of FIFA's Executive Committee - the guys who actually made the decision - no fewer than 15 represent countries which are either ex-colonies, or with which we have had at least one war in the last 200 years.

Hmm.

Everybody hates us and it turns out we do care.


Update - Some FIFA financials

I couldn't resist looking at FIFA's finances. In 2009 they had revenue of about $1bn. Of that, the vast bulk - $0.9bn - came from the World Cup (which only happens once every four years but the revenues are spread out across all years).

FIFA's world Cup revenues come from broadcast rights and marketing (mainly corporate sponsorship). World Cup ticket revenues go to the host organiser (which would be the FA here).

The biggest chunk is broadcasting rights which seem to have totalled well over $2bn for the last WC in South Africa. But the interesting thing is that the sources of this broadcasting revenue are highly concentrated. Well over 50% comes from Europe. Adding in Asia takes the total up to 80%. Yet despite this, Europe and Asia combined only get 50% of votes on the FIFA Executive Committee. And my bet is that if we could see a revenue breakdown within Europe and Asia, we'd find some even more startling concentrations.

The obvious question is why don't the footballing authorities in the major revenue generating countries get together and do a complete Premier League style breakaway from the sleazy dysfunctional FIFA? Organise their own World Cup, to be rotated between them. Of course, we'd expect the big Latin American countries to be included as well, but on my count, there'd be no more than ten in the core group. Which would give each of them the tournament once every 40 years.

Naturally every country in the world would be invited to compete, just as now. But the competition would always be held in one of the big footballing nations.

Oh, and the tournament would need to be entirely self-financing - no more taxpayer subs.

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Taxpayer Funded Environmentalism

The TPA has a new report out today on taxpayer funded environmentalism. That's the outrageous arrangement whereby we pay the hippies to campaign for more restrictions on our freedom to live in the 21st century. The TPA's Emma Boon explains it all in the vid.

Key points:

•A total of £10.1 million was given to a range of environmental groups by the UK Government and the European Union in 2009-10.

•The total includes £2.5 million from various UK local councils, departments and quangos.

•It also includes £7.6 million in European Commission grants to environmental NGOs.

•The Foreign and Commonwealth Office made the largest UK payment in 2009-10 of £342,929 to WWF UK.

•Hackney council made the largest payment in 2009-10 from a UK council at £141,246 to Global Action Plan.

Of course, nobody can object to the hippies' right to run their bonkers campaigns (well, nobody except the Major, that is). But we should all object to being forced to pay £10m pa of our friggin' money to fund those campaigns.
 
PS Humble apologies for getting the dates wrong yesterday on Pitt the younger. I reported that the Bank Governor had made highly disparaging Mervyn King style remarks about Pitt in 1780. However, as was pointed out by the inestimable William Norton in comments, Pitt "wasn't elected to the Commons until January 1781, and didn't become Chancellor until July 1782." Quite right Mr N - a correction has been made. It just goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you read in Google. Or in leaked US ambassadors' emails come to that.

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The Future Of The Marketing Director

Everyone’s writing self-serving pieces about the future of advertising, yet few of them seem to realise that the true subject is the future of marketing. Central to that is the future of the marketing director, an important role that has, all too often, relegated itself to some kind of administrator of outsourcing.

The reversal of that trend starts with knowing what marketing really is: acknowledging that it’s not just promotion, that it involves every touch-point with customers (how ever tangential) and knowing therefore that it includes the work of a lot of departments outside one’s own.

This means that the classic role of evangelist must be for much more than simply the product/service, it must also evangelise on behalf of marketing itself as well as its specific aims within the company. The future of the marketing director will therefore involve:

The marketing of marketing.

Firstly, the Board and senior management have to be convinced of the value of marketing as an integral part of the product/service (in accounting terms, an element of cost of goods sold rather than an expense). Until this is achieved, marketing will be under-valued.

Relating marketing to corporate strategy.

By relating it directly to corporate strategy, the business credibility of marketing is enhanced. It also serves to ties in all stakeholders, most notably customer-facing staff. Moreover, it encourages longevity of vision and consistency of voice and thereby reduces short-term gimmickry.

Marketing to third parties.

The outsourcing of the creation of certain marketing elements may be inevitable, but your partners will serve you better if they are convinced of your mission. Faking such conviction is part of their job spec, but it’s better if they can truly be persuaded.

Becoming the account manager.

Being the manager not the outsourcer (internally with other departments and externally with third-parties) ensures a flattening of hierarchy, a continuous exchange of ideas and information and an increased ability to oversee processes so that there’s no need for sudden deadlines and rushed creativity.

Realism regarding your customers.

Acknowledging that you’re not marketing to your colleagues, your agencies or your imagined self is key. Spend lots of time with them - not in focus groups but in the real world – and know everything they do in relation to your product/service and to the rest of their lives.

Shaping the culture.

Marketing by creating the culture is more effective than marketing by interrupting the culture. The goal is to shape the ecosystem around and within your business through your interactions as described above and by all your promotional activities.

The result can be a unified marketing effort and that, after all, is what a marketing director should be ensuring.

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