Adrian - don't rap!

Remember when you were young, one thing you always hated to see was your dad dancing, dad's should never dance when their kids have to suffer the consequences!

Following on the heels of my previous post about a Synovate video, here is another showing Adrian Chedore rapping.

I think the question Adrian should ask himself is, "If a Synovate and a Kantar employee were both at a conference and somebody played this clip, who would squirm and who would be uplifted?"

And, my daughter just asked me, if they are such a big research company, did they research this, did it say it was a good idea?

Comments

[Surinder]

Hi Ray,

This is cool - the first time we've found something to disagree on - maybe that's the point of the video, to polarize people and generate an active reaction. In that case, it seems to have worked!

Life's about breaking rules. They took a risk and time will tell whether it's been worth it. But with over 9k views so far, I can imagine there's a lot of envious people out there working for competitors that wish they did this first. If this in some very small way helps to position Synovate differently from the rest of the pack, it's definitely in the long term interests of shareholders.

[Andrew Jeavons]

Well at least he has fun ! I have to say I found out about it a day after they showed it via a phone call from the SVP of a Synovate rival..

Personally I think it was a good idea. At least it is original...

[Lee McEwan]

Priceless - thanks Ray.

[Ray Poynter]

Hi Surinder. One of the first rules I taught my children is that the world is not fair. If you are the CEO of a publicly quoted compay you have a hierarchy of responsibilities. At the top is your duty to share holders, and most of us would put a duty to the employees near the top. Unfortunately for Mr Chedore this means he does not have the freedom to indulge his humour in public the way most of us do - but he is adequately rewarded for this loss.

I was not worried by the production values, indeed I would have been happier if less had been spent on making the video, and I am normally in favour of all experiments with new media.

However, in this case I felt that putting this video out on YouTube was likely to make life harder for staff, and in terms of shareholder value risked emphasising that Synovate do not 'get' user generated content and Web 2.0.

[Surinder]

Ray,

Surely it's only a bit of fun. Why is everyone taking it so seriously? And despite flaws in the execution, I wouldn't want anyone to feel discouraged from doing something similar to bring levity to the sector.