Matthew Batstone, The Economist Group’s marketing and strategy director, wouldn’t put it quite this way. But this was one of the takeaways from his presentation to the Red Stripe team about the group’s strategy, particularly online. Unfortunately, we cannot blog about it in detail - it’s confidential and has only just been approved. But Matthew certainly won’t kill us for writing that, in his view, the Internet is not a threat for The Economist Group, but an opportunity. While other publications are suffering from ads and readers moving online (one major US business weekly, which shall remain unnamed, has apparently lost half of its revenues in the past 5 years, pushing it deeply into red territory), the Economist’s ad revenues are up and the group has never been more profitable. Although the group’s sites (Economist.com, CFO.com, etc.) could certainly have been stronger, Matthew explains, we are in a good place - and are able to be more experimental about what we do on the Internet. Hence Project Red Stripe, among other things. “Be bold and don’t worry about the (executive) board”, were his parting words. We’ll put this in our mission statement…

Hi I’m Tom Shelley AKA The Blogman. I acquired this (un)enviable moniker by insisting on talking about new media from the moment I arrived at The Economist just eleven months ago. I must admit that at times it was frustrating, I couldn’t understand why no one else was bouncing off the walls at all the fresh possibilities out there.

Then the announcement of Project Redstripe landed in my inbox. I applied. I was accepted. Now, I find myself on an innovation team that has six months to do something amazing with any of The Economist Group brands and any of The Economist Group content - I’m so pumped about this my excitement glands must have stretchmarks.

Stay looking to this blog and my own - The Fedoral Reserve - to find out more about Tom in Wonderland, which is how I feel. I’m interested in many areas of the web with a few favourites being social networks, citizen journalism and social news. Check out - very mature, I know. I’ll try to control my wonderment and can’t wait to really get cracking into the Redstripe.

If you’ve got any questions, or suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me at tom [at] projectredstripe dot com.

To get us thinking about things from a different perspective, each of us has planned an outing for the team, with the stipulation being that that it should not be work/project related. For my outing we went on a guided walk from St Paul’s to Temple Bar taking in Blackfriars and Fleet Street on the way.

I’d given Geoff, our Blue Badge guide, a bit of a brief, but hadn’t dictated the route or what he should cover. That made some of the ideas triggered by what we heard or saw all the more striking.

Cloaking in the 18th century

Or how to launch something that’s not quite what people expected….

Sir Christopher Wren used this ploy when he found that the Church would not agree to some of the design features that he wanted to use in the cathedral. As he enjoyed the favour of King Charles II, he decided to go ahead and stray from the agreed design with the results being hidden from prying eyes by the scaffolding erected for the construction. Once the scaffolding came down, it was a fait accompli and so he had his way.

Early 20th century principles

On Monday we worked on outlining some principles for the way that we would work during the project. We struggled with finding succinct wording for some of these and we got some unexpected inspiration yesterday in the Blackfriar.

 

The Blackfriars area of London gets its name from the attire of the monks that inhabited the monastery that stood in the area until Henry VII came along. The Blackfriars pub is somewhat newer, dating from 1904 and was decorated in the Arts and Crafts style popular at the time.

 

When a snack bar was added in 1914, the decoration really went over the top with marble, copper and mosaic being used in the vaulted room. As a final flourish “feel-good” slogans adorn the walls at ceiling heighth and some of these really chimed with some of the things that we had discussed.

Among them were:

 

DON’T ADVERTISE IT. TELL A GOSSIP

 

A GOOD THING IS SOON SNAPPED UP

HASTE IS SLOW

Now you could just say that these kinds of generic slogans are an early example of corporate clap trap that often spews from multinationals in their attempts to spread their word, but I’m willing to be charitable!

18th century venture capitalism

The tribulations of Samuel Johnson raising funds for his Dictionary of the English Language aren’t dissimilar to those of a startup raising funds from a venture capitalist and the behaviour of Lord Chesterfield, who refused to cough up additional money needed by Johnson to complete the work, but then offering the money for a stake after it was complete sounded all too familiar today. Let’s hope that won’t be the case for us.

Cloaking 12th century style

We ended our walk at Temple Church which is, of course, associated with the Knights Templar. One story that I’d like to believe is about why there are two people on the horse on the emblem of the Knight Templar. The legend goes that Richard Lionheart wanted Saladin to think that he had fewer men than he actually did and so each knight carried a foot soldier on his horse to confuse Saladin. The ploy worked and Saladin was defeated (on that occasion). For our project, in the 21st century we may want to turn that trick on it’s head and make people believe that we have more people than we actually do in our team. In fact, I suppose we do – we’ve got the whole of The Economist Group behind us.

A busy first day with a packed schedule which was great. Apart from spending time getting to know each other, we tried to set out some guiding principles for the project and started to think about how we would structure the next six months. Mike mentioned that many of the experts that he and Ludwig met in San Francisco commented that the first thing they would do is ask for more time to complete the project. That won’t be happening for us!

Looking at the schedule and seeing how we will have to rely on outside developers and others made me quite anxious. I’m ready to dive in now and want to start exchanging ideas but we do need to make sure we are all on the same page and we have to set out a clear structure about how we will work on the project. We divided the task into four basic items: setting up a framework for how we develop ideas; brainstorming and choosing the best idea(s); developing the idea(s); and then writing the business plan and presenting the finished product. We figure the last part will take about two weeks and the first part will take one week. But we don’t know how long it will take to come up with a good idea and without knowing what the idea will be at this point it’s hard to gauge how long it will take to develop! What if we can’t come up with a good idea after one month?

Today was a day of building blocks; attending to a number of key components which would underline the overall project moving forward; introductions from team members, scoping some broad principals to guide the project, examining the breakdown of the available time frame, combined with the more mundane setting up of computers, phone lines, email addresses finishing with the requisite ‘get to know you dinner’. A fair question from Ludwig asking if “The Real Greek” was being re-named in our honour “The Real Geek”.

In this way from the outset it becomes abundantly clear the challenge before us; to juggle theory and cerebral activity with cold, hard reality and action.

This will be a pressure cooker situtation; six months to create something, market-tested with a defined business plan and currently no pre-conception of what the idea will be; other than web-based.

The action starts now.

Overall feeling: tentatively reaching out at this new world.

Or so said BusinessWeek about Wallstrip.

New Yorkers seem pretty non-plussed as Lindsay Campbell, the show’s host, found out (but very tongue in cheek). More an insight into New Yorkers, maybe?

Thanks to Tony for the link.

No, not that nasty browser malware, but an edgy-ish ad. agency inspired (I expect) home page takeover on Diesel.com

It certainly makes those Economist £12 for 12 issues splashes look rather tired, but would it work for any of the Group’s sites?

Well, I guess that its’s something for us to consider starting Monday, from when we’ll be updating this blog at least once a day so you can keep up to date with all that lovely Red Stripey-ness.

Rather belatedly, I’m delighted to be able to let you know that the members of the team are:

• Steven Chiu
• Stewart Robinson
• Mike Seery
• Tom Shelley
• Ludwig Siegele
• Joanna Slykerman

We start in earnest on 29th January, working from our new location at AMV