Dining with Della: Geoffrey Bird at Stanley Park
August 29, 2016
An instructor at BCIT in the Marketing Management program for the School of Business, Geoffrey is constantly creating new ideas for his classes and getting people from industry to share real world learnings.
Geoffrey has been at BCIT for the past 12 years. We reconnected eight years ago when he added communications to his mix of classes. Every year, I speak to his students about crisis communications. You can see how well he connects to his class by their eager participation. He works hard to keep them fully engaged while learning the latest tools of the trade. Consistent with his roots of working in technology in early days, Geoffrey keeps abreast of what is happening in the marketplace.
We first connected in 1991 when he was at Cantel, a Rogers company, one of the first mobile phone suppliers and networks. I remember having one of those massive phones in my car, hooked up to a mega battery in the trunk. We thought it was so avant-garde at the time. We would never have anticipated some 26 years later we would be chatting about the Pokémon phenomenon coming and going so quickly, Snapchat numbers and the ongoing media challenges in a fast paced social world. Or, that I would be interviewing him in a park taking notes on my iPad.
We've come a long way, Geoffrey.
What one bit of communication impacted your life?
Early in his career, Geoffrey learned how to stand out and break through the clutter. Before Cantel, during his time as a copywriter for radio stations CKNW/CFMI, he had an a opportunity to win a free trip to Toronto to see The Rolling Stones. Coca-Cola was doing a national promotion with stations throughout North America for a Stones concert in NY. As an incentive for stations to be innovative in their promotional campaigns, they offered the creative teams a chance to win a trip as well. Geoffrey knew the 100 other rock stations would do the usual Stones guitar riffs and use their DJs to do the voice overs. Geoffrey's idea was to zig while everybody else zagged. He used the gospel sounding beginning of the song "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and outside talent to create a preacher's voice to promo the show. Every fibre in his body said they would win, and they did.
The big lesson here was to think about what everyone else will do and do something different. Disruptive thinking became Geoffrey's mantra. Throughout all his years in marketing and now with his students, he pushes hard for those stand out ideas.
In my previous business, we often hired BCIT students because of instructors like Geoffrey. They were given all the fundamental skills required plus the freedom to think beyond the text book.
He has an extremely cool idea for the upcoming first year students. I won't release the concept here but it is a take off on Humans of New York and will be a fabulous way for the students to connect with each other and alumni. Geoffrey, always thinking about how to make it interesting!
What did not work...
During Geoffrey's freelancing days, he had a specialty in the direct response arena. He worked for top notch companies of the day such as Go Direct Marketing. Before we could all hop online to connect with people, directly mailing information was a key way to get consumers to buy. Through an existing client, Geoffrey was referred to a blue chip company (names withheld for obvious reasons) to create a letter. This letter was key to solidifying a partnership with an even bigger blue chip brand name. It was the perfect job for Geoffrey, completely in his domain of expertise. It also could have led to more business and been quite lucrative.
He crafted the letter and was invited to a feedback session. To his surprise the session included eight people in a boardroom and two people on speaker phone. They walked through the letter word by word for no less than 90 minutes. Needless to say the end result was a dog's breakfast. He thought about leaving the meeting but did not want to impact negatively on his initial referral and felt invested in the potential of longer term business. The company that believed in this kind of collaborative effort is no longer in business. No big surprise. No matter how important a letter, 10 people to edit after hiring an expert is plain ridiculous... IMHO.
What if...
What advice would you give to your younger self to enhance your ability to communicate with others – and why?
Use a brief.
For my readers who are not in the communications biz, briefs are used to ensure the creative folks have a good understanding of what the client and they need. It is also a document to help ensure everyone heard each other, avoiding conflict later in the process. Briefs contain all the pertinent information for any job.
As Geoffrey says, good briefing documents are key to getting it right. He keeps refining the ones he used while working in the ad world. Former students often call back for the template.
Imagine if we used briefs in our personal communication. Could be quite helpful when making major life decisions. What is your objective? Who is impacted? What are the budget considerations? What are the must haves? What can you live without? What is the time frame? Hmmm, could be helpful for all sorts of decision making... and perhaps decrease family arguments.
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