The Kindle – especially the Fire – will carry an increasing amount of magazine-like content and is also perfect, of course, for ebooks. It is more as a platform that I think it holds opportunities for marketing.

Thanks for your comments.

if they make it as an e-book that's free to download, thousands of people will read it and bam thats cheap advertising to them

Don't hold you breath.

R

IMHO the whole control thing comes down to the still pervasive 'them vs us' thing between agencies and clients. I'm not sure it's really about anyone surrendering control however (or at least it shouldn't be).

There seems to be a worrying tendency to forget that ultimately we're all on the same side. I want my clients to be outrageously successful – I'm assuming they do too – the discussion then becomes how do we make them successful? The brief is a core foundation for that.

I agree with you on the "false security of a signed-off proposition or 10." In my experience, the proposition is certainly a problem. You either get the issue of it not being considered properly and signed off without really thinking through the consequences. Or the opposite where it almost presupposes what the creative will be. And that's before we even get to whether the proposition itself is springy enough to generate good ideas.

Moving to a theme approach could open this out and, potentially, create more possibilities. (Unless I'm being hopelessly naive of course.)

Thanks for your comment.

As a copy creative (mostly in B2B), I think I've always tended to look for the broad themes/organising thought behind those painfully distilled propositions, whatever the project might be. And starting with themes, not propositions, would also give us room to shape those propositions.

'Of course, this demands that everyone in the process becomes a bit more fluid, surrenders a bit more control and works a bit more collaboratively. '

And there's the toughest bit. In my experience it's the clients who won't surrender control and the false security of a signed-off proposition or 10. Any thoughts there?

I just did a blog about the iPhone - this is the first Apple product I have owned. I waited until they launched a phone with adequate features for business use and I do think they have finally arrived in this space. I guess that the real driver will be more business oriented apps. Who knows, they may eventually separate the business apps into a different section in the appstore.

Jim