Piers Fawkes Interviewed On Marketing Monger Podcast

–Tell me a little about yourself (“Who is Piers Fawkes?”)

I run a publishing start up from New York. I come from a marketing background – working at several agencies in London, starting a couple of businesses in London including Pixelpark London and then Set Loose Moves – one of the UK’s first viral marketing agencies back in 2002. I came to New York three years ago and worked as a freelance planner at agencies providing consumer insights for brands like Microsoft, W Hotel, Coke, Samsung. During that time I started PSFK.

–Describe PSFK, your inspiration for it, and success to date

PSFK was just a side project between my friend Simon and I (who I met at Pixelpark). I had come to New York and we were both keen to know what was going on in each city – so we were sharing ideas back and forth via email. I had been blogging already on a separate project, so I just thought why not put it up on the web. And so we put up things we were noticing in each city on PSFK and as we wrote people asked if they could join in – first of all Ian who was somewhere between Madrid and Sydney then some of our regular writers came like DK, JT Barnhart, Henry Lambert.

What PSFK does on all its sites is provide inspiration. That’s what we do. We want people to digest our content in whatever format and be inspired – whether for personal entertainment, for education or even for business intelligence.

One of the greatest successes is this network of contributors – we have a google group with many of the contributors and there’s 48 in there from the last count – from Istanbul to Manila, from Miami to Chenai. I’ve made some wonderful friends along the way – and I’ve even met some of them. At our heart we are a collaborative – the guys find and write about subjects that are always new to me.

I like how we’re always trying to explore the medium – we were one of the first sites to use Flickr for a cool hunt, we integrated del.icio.us into our Other News Worth Noting very early, we have done music podcasts and the odd interview, we integrate video into the site via You Tube or Google video, we do video podcasts, we sell T Shirts, we sponsored the Future Marketing Summit conference in New York.

–PSFK has started to split into multiple channels – what brought on that strategic decision?

Our business model runs across two axes – one is publishing the other is consultancy. As we grow along the publishing axis we will create new channel. We now have four channels – PSFK, eco.psfk, fashion.psfk and IF!

fashion.psfk is our latest site. It wasn;t something we really served very well but when we looked at our stats, everyone was clicking on that section. With the help of a wonderful journalist in London called Michelle Morton Banks we launched a site that is aimed to deliver inspiration around the fashion business.

eco.psfk is a smaller blog that looks at eco-consciousness from a brand point of view. We launched it because we thought it was vital to celebrate the efforts of some brands and spotlight the dire work of others.

IF! is our marketing ideas channel. We created this for three reasons: firstly, outside the individual opinion leaders – the advertising and marketing content on blogs and the web we thought was dismal – we still do (there’s no inspiration – it’s just news reporting without any quality criteria), secondly we realised we were writing about content which wasn’t necessarily trends-based on PSFK and thirdly, a guy from the West Wayne agency in Miami called me up and asked why the hell I wasn’t charging for this stuff.

So by understanding that the content we were producing was valuable we launched IF! And we decided to charge for it. The simplest reason for this is that we weren’t making any money from PSFK at the time so we didn’t want to over-stretch ourselves without any reward. We also knew that a large section of our PSFK audience were ad agencies and we thought they were used to paying for business intelligence.

–One of the channels costs money to subscribe to ($10 a month). How does it differ in terms of content from the other channels? And are you getting subscribers?

In some ways it’s very different and some ways it is similar. All of our sites have a mix of aggregation, original content such as interviews and opinion pieces. So in that way it’s the same, but the content is vastly different. IF! is about inspiring marketers and creative thinkers – we try to feed the creative mind in everyone – yes, we report some news but we also try to feature ideas that come from different sectors and we suggest that our readers go to art shows, talks, parties, exhibitions – anything to provide some fresh thought. Anything to get away from the office.

–In addition to your work with PSFK, you also do consulting with some fairly well known companies. What are you helping them with?

Inspiration – lateral thinking. Try to find themes that are considered outside their field and show them how they can use them, leverage them.

We also sell youth reports.

–As someone on the forefront of trend spotting and online media, what are the big trends of the next 12 months?

A Life Connected

* Access To Cool

* Battle For The Bulge

* Global Connectivity

* WEdia

* Web TV

* Welcome To WiLife

Baby You’re Beautiful

* Art For All

* Democratization Of Design

* Fast Fashion

* Retro Edit

* Monumentism

It’s All About Me

* Customization

* Personal & Limited Edition

* Iconic Luxury

* Tailoring

* Simplicity

It’s All About The Way I Live

* Craft

* IDividualism

* My Home My Getaway

* Slow

Shift

* Eco As Regular

* Space As Scarcity

Us, Together

* User Generated Content

* Our Terms Not Yours

* India

Also interested in the trend of ‘Products to services’.