Advertising

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Tapi Carpets Man Nick Potter turns Radio Man

Roy Stannard and Nick Potter getting ready to share some more guitar music

An unlikely musical partnership has emerged from a chance encounter between radio commercial manager and presenter Roy Stannard and carpet estimator Nick Potter who works at the Rustington branch of Tapi Carpets.

Nick Potter arrived at Roy Stannard’s house in Burgess Hill early in 2015 to measure up for a carpet fitting but the conversation quickly turned to music when he found out that in addition to being a regional manager with the More Radio Group, Roy hosts a weekly radio programme on East Sussex radio station, Seahaven FM 96.3. It turned out that Nick is a blues and rock guitar fan with a vast knowledge of the back catalogues of some of the best guitar players – and has a particular favourite in the form of Robin Trower, who hails from Southend which is Roy’s home town. When Roy mentioned that he had been to the next door school to Trower and used to travel on the same bus in Southend as Wilko Johnson, the conversation deepened and Roy invited Nick to put a list together of the all-time great guitar tracks by the best musicians to form the basis of the very first Guitar Greats Radio special on 16th April 2015.

Three years later and Nick and Roy have presented thirteen shows together with the 14th planned for the 25th October this year.

By day Nick works for Tapi Carpets, Rustington, but by night roams the land in pursuit of the wailing solo, the guitar shredding technique and the finger-picking good guitar break. A connoisseur of licks, lines and lead pyrotechnics, Nick is an expert on guitar legends live and on record in the South. He and his wife who live in Rustington spend a good deal of their spare time going to live music gigs across the South and this love has been passed on to his daughter who also likes rock music.

His manager Daryl Short is delighted to be getting lots of indirect publicity on the radio. He says “Nick is an excellent estimator. Like many others in the company he came to us after many years at Carpetright and has proven to be a great success with the customers who like his engaging manner and years of carpet expertise. He and another employee here Liam Perry are both guitar fanatics and let each other know about the latest emerging players. We love tuning in to listen to Nick and Roy on the radio as we usually get a mention!”

Tapi Carpets MD Martin Harris, son of Lord Harris who founded Carpetright is pleased that the company is forging a reputation for musical knowledge as well as floorcovering excellence. “Our Manager Daryl at Rustington thinks highly of Nick and this is a perfect example of how a chance encounter has led to great publicity for the company – simply because of the customer relationship building that we encourage amongst our staff.”

Note:

Seahaven FM is a not-for-profit Community radio station based in Seaford serving an 80,000 TSA that covers Seaford, Newhaven, Peacehaven and Lewes. Roy’s Show ‘The Whole Nine Yards’ broadcasts live every Thursday 7-9pm and can be heard on FM locally 96.3 and on the internet on www.seahavenfm.com and past shows including the thirteen Guitar Great specials with Nick Potter at http://www.mixcloud.com/roystannard

The latest show – The Nick Potter Guitar Greats Special Vol XIII was broadcast across two hours on Seahaven FM on the 31st May and can be listened to via these links:

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Google Tracking – The Adman will find you

Internet Tracking

Who is watching who?

Got a Google account? Using an activated Google Maps service on your smartphone? If the answer is yes then Google Tracking is now collating your every movement and recording it for posterity, with time stamped data about how long you were there and unerringly accurate plotlines on a map showing this activity in a kind of modern day Pepys diary.

The route to this information is simple. Go to maps.google.com/locationhistory as a logged-in Google user and your life and its journeys will open up in front of you on day views, weeks views or across a whole month. If you don’t like your privacy being invaded in this way, it is pretty simple to turn this system off. How many of us will?

As someone who makes a living from within the advertising industry, the creative left side of my brain began to generate useful by-products of this information being readily available.

Deep breath.. I currently have a clean licence, but supposing someone stole my car (but not my phone) and broke speed limits with abandon on the motorway to Manchester?  I can now prove that I wasn’t where the car was.

If I had a suspicious wife (I don’t) who wanted to know my whereabouts on a particular day I can deliver the evidence to allay those suspicions along with accurate times and durations.

If I wanted to to prove to my employers that I have done the car mileage that I have claimed in my expenses, then it is a simple matter of reproducing a map similar to that below.

Roy's Travels in August 14

Roy’s Travels in August 14

Accessing this data with the password of your child’s account on Google will enable any concerned parent to ‘watch’ the whereabouts of your offspring wherever they may wander.

Of course, the real potential for the Industry that I work in is to track the journeys and travel behaviour of people that we wish to communicate with and to interact with them on those journeys. That can be done via the smartphones that they are carrying to enable mobile wallets, QR Codes, GPS activated marketing , Bluetooth alerts when passing retail stores, or even talking poster sites that murmur persuasively to you when you walk past. Increasingly, we will be asked to join Facebook groups, Google+ consumer mobs, FourSquare review clusters, MeetUp interest collectives, Streetlife.com neighbourhood watch groups and many more.

Using Internet downstreaming to track your web life we can already follow your progress across the virtual world. With the help of Google Location History we don’t have to hover in alleyways, hunch down behind the wheel of anonymous pursuit vehicles or silently pad ten paces behind you on the mean streets of your town anymore.

You are handing it tied up in bows and ribbons to Google – and to any half-decent hacker that takes an interest in you.