With each new experiment in AI’s capability and potential I feel I am going through a grief cycle while navigating a hype cycle !!!!

As I climb the slope of enlightenment on my own journey in understanding AI I am feeling a degree of frustration, perhaps bordering on a bit of anger, that more skills that have been a hallmark of my career are potentially being marginalised or made completely redundant.

First some context.

After studying Communications, Advertising and Marketing at college my ambition was to work in an advertising agency.

Initially I worked for a printers as a paste up artist and then got a job helping organise exhibitions around the UK for a construction equipment manufacturer – a massively fun job travelling to all corners of the country, staying in hotels and having drinking competitions with Irish digger drivers.

All the time I was bombarding local marketing and advertising agencies with letters and CVs (which I still have so I can remind my daughters what job hunting used to entail).

Eventually one hit the mark and I joined what ultimately became one of the most successful marketing and advertising agencies in the region – The Lawton Communications Group – https://lawtoncommsgroup.com/

I joined as the late 80s boom turned to the early 90s bust and the agency’s house-building and tourism accounts were hit hard. However my focus was growing trade and technical accounts including the likes of Cobham, Meggitt and Racal.

One tech account really caught my eye – a company called National Transcommunications Limited – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arqiva – which had just been formed out of the privatisation of the engineering division of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, continuing the sell off of ‘the family silver’ the Government had begun during the mid 1980s.

When the time seemed right I jumped ship to this organisation with the brief of setting up and running an internal marketing and advertising agency.

It was the start of an incredible decade right in the heart of the digital revolution that stretched my skills and knowledge immensely and ultimately set me off on a completely new path.

Initially I had a frustrating time trying to transform what was essentially a civil service orientated repro-graphics department – which included a very ancient piece of technology called a ‘typesetting machine’ – into something resembling a commercial marketing agency. It helped when I successfully poached one of my former agency’s best designers to continue the journey with me. I’m sure I was never really forgiven for that but it was the best hire I ever made.

One of the emerging divisions of what became ‘NTL’ was Advanced Products. This leveraged extensive research by the former IBA and turned it into an incredibly successful commercial venture – definitely an example of unleashing pent up potential although I won’t dwell on where a lot of the profit ended up I’m pretty sure one Rupert Murdoch benefited considerably further down the line.

A project I took full responsibility for early on in my time with the company was designing and art-working ‘The NTL guide to digital compression’.

It was never going to win any design awards but given my prior knowledge of print production, page layout, typography and basic Mac skills I knew how to take a project like this from concept to reality. Ultimately it gave more knowledge than I ever imagined having of a key technology that still sits at the heart of the digital revolution – knowledge I have bored folks with ever since.

Much as I was inspired by the technology, it was visually challenging to illustrate in exciting ways as the early encoders and decoders looked like fridges and dishwashers rather than cutting edge high tech devices so my second favourite division was Satellite Broadcasting – mainly for the increasing array of sci-fi looking dishes I could get sign-written and photographed.

I still remember the night my chosen photographer captured an image of the satellite teleport that had grown rapidly outside my office window. After positioning some green lighting to highlight the backs of the dishes and echo the brand identity he had me drive my car up and down the access road so he could get the red tracks of my tail-lights that represented the other main brand colour.

The resulting images warranted creating a three page spread for the brochure we were producing and looking back on a copy I kept for future reference it makes me think of all the skills and knowledge that went into bringing that material to fruition – from the collaboration with the end client, developing the concept, writing the copy, the talents of the designer and photographer to the negotiations with the printers, the proof reading and the ultimate delivery of a tangible result.

Satellite News Gathering was another emerging service we had a lot of creative fun promoting. The digital video compression technology was incorporated into what became known as ‘flyaway’ units for rapid deployment around the world. As a gimmick at a large annual broadcasting convention we created balsa wood aeroplane kits with the wings emblazoned with the slogan ‘MPEG 2 FLYAWAY’ – a play on the second generation of compression technology. Another strapline we used to good effect was “When the World is watching, you can rely on NTL”.

One of my first projects was managing the production of a large collection of Ordnance Survey maps that covered the whole of the UK  and onto which were over-printed the details of every transmitter site the company owned. Providing co-location space on these structures became a massive recurring revenue business for NTL but the map production was extremely time consuming and had an enormous unit cost. By the time they were printed and distributed they were already out of date.

This was a project ripe for early digitisation and another I took direct responsibility for bringing to fruition. Initially we produced CD-ROM based Site Finders but later this was the first large scale application I organised to be put on the early versions of the NTL website.

Another important project I loved being part of was NTL’s efforts to launch the UK’s first Digital Terrestrial Television services.

One particular production supported the company’s first ever public demonstration of the technology broadcasted from the Croydon transmitter to the Houses of Parliament. The onward history of DTT in the UK is encapsulated on Wikipedia .

When ultimately the original NTL was acquired by the US company CableTel as the ‘cash cow’ to fund their ambitions to run the whole of the UK’s cable TV network our internal ‘agency’ moved to the forefront of turning a B2B brand into a consumer one.

It was a daunting but fascinating experience and also signalled my own personal progression into becoming pretty much 100 percent digital and online in my career.

Taking responsibility for all of the company’s public facing websites really put me on the frontline of the operation and for a time I had the main ‘contact us’ input copied into my inbox.

It was eye opening and alarming.

There was clearly a massive disconnect between the high profile marketing, advertising and sponsorship activities and the reality on the ground and also, for a cable company, in the ground.

The way the cable industry had sprung up following deregulation and licensing in the UK meant there was a mish mash of engineering standards that fell far below those the original ‘NTL’ and its high quality broadcasting and telecoms infrastructure had become renowned for.

It wasn’t surprising that headline advertising lines of “Technology Tamed” and “Easy as 1,2,3” got hammered in the emerging social chat environments like Digital Spy – which ultimately became mainstream voices.

The denial from senior management was utterly staggering and highlighted the importance for me of getting as far away from this company I once loved as quickly as possible.

So I jumped ship from broadband services to the emerging 3G based mobile internet, joining Lucent Technologies Mobility division that was headquartered in the UK.

“Out of the frying pan into the fire” is an expression that springs to mind with that career move as it turned out that some very dodgy accounting practices by Lucent senior management heralded the collapse of the overinflated telecoms industry and the Dotcom Boom in general.

I had an absolute ball while it lasted though and produced some of the most significant digital work of my career that was very much at the leading edge of what organisations were doing at that time.