Weekly Wrap - Mark Gorman, Think Hard
Mark Gorman considers all the public service roster tendering going on and has a word or two for some of The Drum's online commentators too.
In the last week alone in Scotland we have witnessed a veritable orgy of roster appointments and pitch announcements appearing in the pages of The Drum.
Leading the charge is the education sector with both Napier University and Glasgow University announcing new supplier arrangements. Napier's arrangement looks quite sensible actually; an ad agency (Clayton Graham) a design Company (Tayburn) and a DM specialist (Tangible). One can see who might be assigned to do what. Glasgow University on the other hand has opted to select seven, yes seven, design companies to its design roster.
Whoooaoahhh. Hang on a minute folks. What exactly are we designing here?
A freakin space station?
Nah, it can't be that. The TOTAL budget's only £250,000. Hmmm, correct me if I'm wrong but that's about £35 grand each if the work gets evenly split. I wonder how much was spent, in total, pitching?
And what's worse is that back in June Aberdeen University appointed six design companies to their roster in their bid for global design domination, only one of which is actually based in Aberdeen.
Leith, Tangible, Dog Digital and Hampton Associates will be rustling up rosterised comestibles for Scottish Enterprise too (again, at least you can see what each of their roles will be); and swift on the heels of The Scottish Government having just completed a mammoth 18 month procurement exercise to appoint nine ad agencies to its Marketing Framework agreement, Scotland's local authorities are setting out to find nine advertising agencies for its advertising services agreement.
Some of the names on that particular tendee list look remarkably familiar to those on the Scottish Government's list which does beg a fairly obvious question.
Doesn't it?
The message boards of the Drum are awash with outrage about this whole roster of rosters and the comments have been vitriolic in the extreme.
And that brings me to my second subject in this week's wrap.
Here am I, Mark Gorman, known to many as Bunter (and even to my face) vocalising my views for all to see; but most of the writers on the Drum's message boards choose to shriek scandalous vitriol from behind a firewall somewhere. Who are these people that hurl personal insults, snide comments and cheap jibes at those of us who are prepared to stand up and be counted?
I'll tell you who you are.
It's obvious.
Nobodies.