For Me And You

The Nicest Place on the Internet

2011-11-24T22:35:00.001Z

Feeling a little bit under the weather this Friday morn? Go on over to the Nicest Place on the Internet and get yourself a hug.

One Man and a Microwave

2011-11-24T22:24:00.001Z

Microwhat is a tumblr blog dedicated to putting things in a microwave and documenting the results.

You can suggest what goes next too.

QR Code Haircuts

2011-11-18T06:37:00.001Z

The strangest use of QR codes I've ever seen, but a pretty cool idea all the same by Betfair with the lads of Bromley Football Club.

The video was entertaining.

Equally entertaining was this comment on youtube:

My brother (a wacky PR type) recently had his hair shaved to form the words “I AM A PAEDOPHILE” right around his head.

The thing is, he did it in aid of a national charity, & was talked into it by the local co-ordinator employed by them, who said it would be a “cool, edgy & comic” thing to do! He’s now been attacked on the street 3 times & lost a lot of work. He is taking legal advice & says he no longer cares how much money the charity has to cough up to him, the point needs making.

3D Printed Mercedes-Benz Ad

2011-11-18T06:34:00.000Z

This "ad" by BBDO Toronto, uses 3D printing to simulate photographic motion-blur in the real world.

Very nice.

via PSFK

Mint Flavoured Parking Ticket

2011-11-13T22:34:00.001Z

I don't know if I should be impressed or kinda grossed out by this idea by BBDO Germany.

via PSFK

Daft Punk Helmet in 4 Months

2011-11-13T22:23:00.000Z

Harrison Krix, a freelance props and replica artist from Atlanta, built his own, fully-working Daft Punk helmet in 4 months.

I want one for client meetings.

Christoph Niemann, New York Marathon

2011-11-13T22:13:00.001Z

Cartoonist for the NY Times, Christoph Niemann managed to both run and live draw the entire NY marathon. He's a pretty awesome guy, and if this is the first time you've heard of him, you should check out more of his work on his site.

Cheese Pencils

2011-11-11T22:11:00.001Z

How awesome are these Parmesan Cheese pencils by Kolle Rebbe.

via theinspiration.com

The Power of Games

2011-09-21T00:49:00.000+01:00

I just finished reading Aaron Digman's Game Frame - an excellent book on how we can apply game mechanics to the real world as a strategy for success. I'd recommend anyone in advertising or any creative business to pick up a copy - it could be a glimpse at the future of our industry.

Some of the topics discussed in the book are already beginning to appear. For example he mentions how the collective power of gamers could be used as a force for good. Just as I finished the book, this article appeared in my twitter feed. As the article describes:

"For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys."

But, when the structure was put online and it's unfolding restructured as a collaborative online game: Foldit - the structure was unravelled within a mere 3 weeks! What an amazing example of the power of games.

Again, I recommend anyone in the ad business to keep a close eye on gaming and pick up a copy of Game Frame. It'll be worth it.

Image via Screwattack
Article via Cosmic Log

Empathy: Why I Learned to Code

2011-09-08T02:22:00.002+01:00

Early last year I came across an excellent post by Aza Raskin of Firefox: So You Want To Be Designer? It describes the essential traits required for designers to work alongside coders:

“2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence”, a lack of empathy is to blame…You don’t need to be a great coder, but you should at least be able to get your idea across in HTML and Javascript.”

I remember reading this passage for the first time, and being struck by its simplicity. Empathy: what a great way of describing how designers and coders should approach their relationship.

Empathy in Practice

A year ago I decided to put Aza’s empathy into practice. I committed to building my first working site within 6 months of picking up a book on HTML and CSS. My method was simple: wake up early – 6am – to allow myself to work in silence without distraction, commit to only 30 minutes coding a day – no more, no less, and to code every day, even when I was completely and utterly lost, tired, or hungover.

One month in I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was wandering aimlessly through a world of div tags, stylesheets, and pseudo classes. Then, halfway through the third month, I had my Neo moment: I could see the matrix! I can’t describe what changed, but it all began to make sense. I’ve never been so proud of a screen of colour blocks!

After 5 months, a whole month ahead of schedule, I had my first site up and running: This With This. It’s a simple voting site that attempts to answer some very important questions: should chicken go on pizza, or was John Lennon better with or without Yoko Ono. Deep, I know. I decided to use Facebooks “like” button as the voting system, and discovered a new-found respect for anyone who has to deal with Facebook’s social plug-in. (This is not the time or the post, but for anyone who has gone through any type of Facebook development: I feel your pain.)

So What Are The Benefits of Digital Empathy?

I can meet any of the coders I work with halfway: The barriers to communication have been removed by both of us possessing an understanding of the medium. It allows us to skip all of the basic “Can it be done?” questions, and move onto questions about how we can bend the rules, and create something new and groundbreaking.

Instead of feeling removed from the process, I can use every digital job I work on as a learning experience; a chance to develop and expand my own skills. Thankfully most of the coders I’ve worked with have indulged me, and put up with my annoying “noob” questions.

But, above all, the greatest benefit of empathy is independence. I’m no longer as reliant on other people to produce my digital ideas, or to explain the process behind others. When I find an interesting site or digital project online I can view and understand (most) of the code, and then analyze, manipulate, remix, and recycle it for myself. That’s a very satisfying, and powerful feeling.

More Than Code.

Learning to code is probably a bit extreme for most people. It definitely requires a nerdy inclination. But empathy for the digital world could be achieved by simply using every type of social media you can get your hands on, or writing and curating a blog.

Empathy could go beyond digital. Imagine how much you could learn by sitting at an account handlers desk for a week, swapping jobs with your CD for a day or, heaven forbid, swapping jobs with your client!

This post was originally written for The Knot Collective

Program or Be Programmed

2011-08-21T21:48:00.002+01:00

Reprogramming Digital Distraction by Joshua Kaufman, explores how in an age run by computers and programs, we must learn to program less we become programmed. This article is especially interesting to me as I just finished drafting one up on a similar subject for The Knot Collective, where I describe how learning to program has helped my everyday, and work life. I'll put the post up here as soon as it's up.

Here's a taster of Joshua's article:

In the final chapter of his book, Rushkoff says that because digital technology is programmed, it’s biased towards those with the ability to program: “in the digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software.” With this, he describes the final and most important principle: program or be programmed.

He goes on to describe the consequences for those who don’t have a basic understanding of how digital technology works:

The less involved and aware we are of the way our technologies are programmed and program themselves, the more narrow our choices will become; the less we will be able to envision alternatives to the pathways described by our programs; and the more our lives and experiences will be dictated by their biases.

Decision Fatigue

2011-08-21T21:39:00.001+01:00

Decision Fatigue by John Tierney (tierneylab@nytimes.com) of the NY Times, explores how extended willpower can cause ego depletion, therefore affecting the human decision making process. Tierney describes, amongst other things, how glucose acts as a form of brain fuel that recharges our mental energy, making it easier for us to make decisions just after lunch for example.

It's long, but well worth a read. Here's a taster. Enjoy:

People with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

Joshua Foer: Deliberate Practice

2011-08-01T21:22:00.003+01:00

In this video, Joshua Foer, author of the excellent Walking With Einstein, talks about how he used "deliberate practice" techniques to leave the OK Plateau, and become an expert.

Deliberate practice is an interesting technique studied, and discovered by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson - an expert in the field of psychology that deals with the acquisition of skill. It's a fascinating subject that I have spent a lot of time reading about. If you'd like to read more about it there's plenty of great resources and medical papers online here and here.

Up Close & Personal With Food

2011-07-21T02:39:00.002+01:00

What does food look like at 15X magnification. Check out Caren Alpert's amazing photography and have a good ol' look at what delicious items you're putting in your mouth. The pictures above are: Sun Dried Tomato; Chocolate cake (yum) and an Oreo.

Accidental Painting

2011-07-21T00:26:00.003+01:00

What happens when some renegade cyclists spill paint at a major intersection? This.

At Home With Banksy

2011-07-15T00:33:00.003+01:00

At Home With Banksy is a interesting photographic project by American photographer, Julia Kim Smith. She imagined what it would be like to spend some with the street artist, partaking in such domestic chores as: bringing out the rubbish, having breakfast, and hovering.

QR Tatoo

2011-07-14T00:12:00.002+01:00

K.A.R.L has taken "The Internet of Things" to a whole new level by tattooing a working QR code onto his chest. What's interesting about this is that it somewhat overcomes the permanency of a traditional tat. Yes, you have a QR permanently inked onto your chest, but the animation is changeable. So, if you do get a certain ex-girlfriends name animated onto your chest, you can simply switch it out for your current girlfriend.

Adam Wahl: A Manifesto for the Future of Agencies

2011-05-25T17:09:00.002+01:00

(Image taken from Adam's original post)

Adam Wahl, Group Creative Director of Mir wrote this excellent manifesto on the future of ad agencies, a subject that has been debated a lot over the last few years. Adam's article is one of the best (and most likely) predictions I've read.

Enjoy:

The following is an expurgated version of the presentation I made last Friday, April 29th, 2011, at the Brandcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University to the Brandcenter Masters students, undergraduate VCU advertising students, faculty and local professionals. While I spoke about my past and growing up in an advertising family and also explored a tangent about psychology (to be covered in a separate post), here I'll focus on my philosophies about mobile and emerging technologies, and how their importance will inform the way the most successful advertising agencies will be constructed in the future. In addition, I'll cover how I believe changes need to be made not only on a departmental level and a creative team-structure level, but also on a personnel level; from entry level to C-suite, I believe the right kind of people will increase success without excessive human resource cost increases.

First, let's talk mobile. It's the future. Period. In my lifetime, it may evolve from a smartphone to a mini tablet to a wristwatch to a solid state drive and jack implanted in the back of my head‚Äîwho knows? What I do know is that it will be as small as possible, while still providing a positive user experience.

There was a time when the revolution was to be televised. In the past six months, actual revolutions were socialized via twitter and Facebook. In the western world, we're constantly on the go. Multitasking. We value time more than ever. One device that can function as the focal point for communication as well as content delivery, whether coming in the form of education, entertainment, news or utility? Vital. In the immediate future this will remain the smartphone. And though I mention the western world, make no mistake: the mobile device is a global device:

Seventy seven percent. And nearly seventy five percent of those people have the phone within an arm's reach, 24 hours a day. How long until the majority of those phones are smart phones? Well, with AT&T selling the iPhone 3GS for $49, it won't be very long. Android will be no different. And as the hardware becomes more affordable, more end users gravitate to the platforms, which stimulates platform development. Brands respond by increasing their ad-spend exponentially. Don't think so?

Take a look at that chart. Brands spent under $800 million on mobile in 2010. That's expected to triple by 2014. And people aren't only buying mobile phones in greater quantity to place calls; twenty five percent of internet users surf the web using mobile only. A better experience? No, a convenient one. So users are out of the house, surfing the web, getting branding messages in the wild ‚Äî near places they can spend money. And soon they'll be using their phones to make payments; seventy percent of retailers are developing or exploring capabilities for mobile commerce right now. That's nearly three in four. Despite that increase, online shopping (via mobile) is going nowhere but through the roof, tripling from 2009 to 2010, from one to four billion dollars. And some purchase and fulfillment never even leaves the phone; 350,000 applications are available in Apple's app store alone. Unbelievable.

What does this all mean? Well, from my selfish POV, it means that if you're a company like MIR that builds mobile ads or iAds, develops mobile sites, designs mobile apps and creates quality UX mobile commerce systems, you're in pretty good shape moving forward. But before I seem like I'm all code and no theory, I'll say and underscore this:

Now I need to choose my words carefully, to avoid being misunderstood. I do believe in the big idea. Shh‚Ä¶don't tell anyone, but I still love traditional. I still love broadcast. And I still love print. And I can see by saying these things, one might imagine I'm the anti-digital, the Lex Luthor to Michael Lebowitz' Superman. But you're totally wrong. I'd imagine Michael and I agree philosophically on many things surrounding this topic (Note: Despite the laws of probability and outcome that would predict two people who interact with many of the same associates and friends would know each other, Michael and I have actually never met). And I think we're actually saying the same thing in different ways; Michael might say a mediocre idea made with great tech is better than a big idea sitting on the shelf that can't be or never is made. He'd likely also say that creativity itself often straddles both the editorial and technological ideating of what we do. He'd be right. I say no matter how advanced the technology, it will not succeed (from a branding standpoint) without a creative idea behind it. I'm right. And ultimately, I'm sure we both want the best brand storytelling married to the best technology. We're right. And though mobile, digital and emerging technology is going to become the focus moving forward, the reality is that if you've cracked the brief for an overall campaign, the creative idea should be able to live anywhere.

Still, we have a big dilemma these days:

We have very forward thinking, digitally savvy technological people, and we have seasoned, track-proven traditional creative people. It begs three very big questions:

And most importantly:

Back to question 1: Traditional agencies CANNOT survive without change. The fundamental need for change relies upon EDUCATION. More often than not, educating is the first thing I do when meeting with an agency or a brand partner, because they're not familiar with how anything other than traditional advertising works. They rarely know the difference between a wireframe and a comp. And the first time you show a wireframe to a brand CEO who's expecting to see full color comps because he or she doesn't know the difference, you're in for some shit. Agencies and brands not familiar with digital and mobile processes need to understand what we do and how we do it. It will better prepare them for what to expect at various stages of development, will provide them the ability to comment on work from a more confident position, and moving forward, it will allow them to be a contributor rather than an observer or burden.

Question 2: Can traditional and digital people co-exist in an evolving agency? Short answer? Without communication, not for very long. Traditional ad people who refuse to communicate with technologists will first find themselves at a disadvantage, and ultimately find themselves unemployed. I'm not saying the technologists shouldn't be helping, by providing somewhat remedial instruction and exercising a great deal of patience, but the burden of learning the technical side of what we do (in greater amounts each day) falls to the traditional creatives. And I'm not excluding non-creatives; strategists, account people and especially project managers must be proficient in speaking and understanding the language of tech. Still‚Ä¶

This is a creative business. The more we expand the channels in which we deliver stories and messages, the more vital it is to have a seamless communication between those who do the dreaming and those who nurture those dreams and turn them into emerging technology reality. And until those out of the loop catch up, I believe there may be a new role at traditional agencies that will be vital for the next few years:

And that's the bridge builder. A hybrid traditional/digital thinker who can educate the pure traditionals in the language of digital, and play the part of conduit between the traditionals and the digital in everyday business. Make no mistake: I'm not saying Martin Sorrell is going to shell out money for this new position. This will likely fall to creatives within the agencies who can already play this role, making them even more indispensable.

The way creative teams are constructed will change as well. They have to. I think we're already starting to see a change. Before long, I believe the main structure of a creative team will change from the left to the right diagram, below:

That brings us to Question 3: What does the agency of the future look like?

When it comes to agency departments, I think the siloed vs. integrated agency debate is over; integrated is the obvious way to go. And we just covered teams. But I believe that moving forward, agencies will survive and thrive not only based upon the structure of departments and teams, but even more upon the structure of the people themselves. Because as long as the same types of people are put together in more or less the same kinds of teams, the results will be the same.Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results? Know what that is?

Right. Einstein's definition of insanity. So who are these people I'm talking about? Who should be leading agencies moving forward? It may be a philosophy based in generalities, but it's one to which I subscribe. The great majority of people in this world can be divided into one of three groups when it comes to innate ability and the aptitude to develop specific advanced intellectual talents. The two MAIN groups are left and right brain thinkers:

Left brain thinkers are rooted in fact and process, while right brainers focus on emotion and creativity. I did say there were three groups. The third group is exactly who I believe are the prime choice to be bridge builders today and the ideal candidates to be leading agencies tomorrow. They are both left and right brained and have the capacity to not only understand exactly what the creatives and the technologists are doing, they can mediate between the two, and most importantly, they can explain all of it to a client who doesn't know what the hell any of it means. It's part teacher, part counselor, part psychologist. It's not always fun, but it is absolutely vital for agency survival.

Now, I can imagine what you're thinking. ruminating upon. It's nagging you:

Am I both left and right brained? Let's see‚Ä¶

This is not a definitive test, but let's look at a question. Think honestly about how you react to it:

If your mind's tendency is to think the above, there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. But you might not be equally left and right brained. However, it's absolutely possible for one to develop a greater understanding and mastery of what was once a deficiency. It behooves people to gain the knowledge they lack in order to make them more indispensable at the workplace. And it's essential for anyone contemplating a start-up of their own.

There's someone else who I imagine I'll be at odds with based on my opinions presented here, and that's Daniel H. Pink, author of the best-selling book "A Whole New Mind - Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future." In it, Pink discusses how the Industrial Age of the 19th century was replaced by the Information Age of the 20th, which has now given way to the Conception Age of the 21st. And though there is much in those pages that I agree with wholeheartedly, I still believe that much of its content and even the title (on its surface) seem to intimate a devaluation of left brain thinking, which I completely disagree with. Professing design visualization as a pillar of the right brain future (which Pink does) without taking into consideration the mathematics inherent in spacial analysis, angles, symmetry and balance is just wrong in my opinion.

Only time will tell if I'm even remotely prophetic and how agencies (and mobile technology) will evolve and flourish, or fail and be replaced by whatever's next. For now, survival depends upon knowing the rules and being able to play the game(s). I made that plural because we do so much more than brand building these days. The lines between what we do and what many in Silicon Valley now do have blurred tremendously. Intellectual property is more on the minds of agencies today than ever; it has to be, simply because the buying public is so accessible and there's too much money to be made via apps and platform development. And to me, it's just another piece of evidence in the argument for change on an organizational and personnel level that embraces digital and technological thinking and processes as an organic part of the creative process from the beginning rather than an appendage dialed up like a pinch hitter with two out in the bottom of the ninth.

Heineken - The Invite

2011-05-25T17:07:00.001+01:00

"The Invite" is a student project by Max Arlestig and Maximilian Gebhardt. Not only is it a brilliant idea, but it's great example of how a real world, or "offline" object, can be used to trigger on online event.

A lot of social media campaigns can feel disconnected and cold because they lack links to the real world. Creating a campaign or product that connects both worlds brings a sense of magic, a "How did they do that?" moment.

Technology should make us feel this way and give us the opportunity to create something, or be part of something we could never be part of before. When you link this feeling to a brand the effect can be very powerful.

Digital Foosball

2011-05-25T17:07:00.000+01:00

Created by German ad agency SinnerSchrader, digital Foosball uses some nifty soft and hardware to turn the analog game into a digital one. All is explained by the rather annoying voice over in the video and the software is can be downloaded for free here.

It's great to see they have respected the "rules" of open source technologies such as processing and arduino (the coding language and hardware used in the project) and made their code available to download for free. This project is about spreading a platform and an idea. The focus is not profit, it's ideas. As a promotional vehicle for an ad agency this sends out the message that ideas are more important than profit, and that they can conceive, build, and promote their own "non-traditional" product. I predict they'll get a nice chunk of new business from this project.

Thanks to Ed for the link.

The Web Allows Stories to be Spun in New Ways

2011-05-16T14:42:00.001+01:00

This article was written by Robert McCrum for The Observer magazine. In it he discusses how the web is allowing us to tell stories in a new way, allowing for deeper immersion and experiences. It touches of rather large subject of "transmedia storytelling" and is a very interesting read considering the direction in which advertising campaigns are moving:

The simple truth about the book in the 21st century is that this is a golden age of reading and writing. As Umberto Eco puts it in his latest publication, This is Not the End of the Book (Secker Harvill), "the computer returns us to Gutenberg's galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read".

The figures support this. Despite a dire economy, there's a boom in progress. In 2009, in the US, during the worst recession for 100 years, American readers bought more than 800m new books. Here in the UK, the number of published new titles per annum has risen from 65,000 in 1990 to a staggering 177,000 in 2010, far greater – pro rata – than France, or Germany.

Our literary microclimate is flourishing, too. Book festivals up and down the country are heaving with record attendances. Book clubs and reading groups have become middle England's bingo. Every publisher has a reader's group website to promote new books. Then there are the prizes: Smarties, Orange, Whitbread, Aventis, Booker, Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and this week, the Encore prize. The buzz of books and reading is so familiar that it's easy to overlook, but it reflects an astonishing surge in global literacy.

When Dante published The Divine Comedy in 1321, barely 10% of the Italian population could read, and not even Shakespeare's contemporaries could spell his name (or their own) consistently. In 2008, by contrast, 98% of American adults and 83% of adults worldwide were described as literate by Unesco, which reported that between 1995 and 2008 there had been "an overall global increase of about 6% in rates of adult literacy". In a world of 7 billion, of whom about one-third use "some kind of English", that's a huge potential audience for books.

Some examples of increased literacy are more influential than others. In India, for instance, literacy has increased at a rate of 90% per annum since independence in 1947. Part of this is the inheritance of the Raj, but the bald truth is that in 60 years the subcontinent has done with literacy what it took the US more than 200 years to achieve.

Readers worldwide are driving technological innovation, which in turn is slowly changing the book and its stories, manga novels from Japan or Bollywood fantasies from Mumbai. This is not new. In 15th-century England, Caxton and the development of movable type inspired the vernacular Bible, the rise of periodical journalism and, finally, the novel. Dickens and the Victorians were shaped by magazines such as Household Words.

The worldwide web has already begun to have an influence on imaginative expression. The internet, as Frank Rose writes in The Art of Immersion, "is the first medium that can act like all media. It can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above. It is nonlinear, thanks to its adoption of the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking." According to Rose, "a new type of narrative is emerging – one that's told through many media at once in a way that's nonlinear, that's participatory and often game-like, and that's designed above all to be immersive. This is 'deep media'."

Kate Pullinger, a Canadian writer who has spent her adult life in the UK, is fascinated by the opportunities of deep media. Pullinger has pioneered "digital fiction". She insists that "my primary concern is to tell stories", but believes that "the new technology has the potential to inject a new dimension to storytelling". She describes digital fiction as "a hybrid genre", mixing screen and text in radical ways. Pullinger thinks that "we have barely scratched the surface in the potential for storytelling".

There is a literary dividend to such initiatives, and it is beginning to shape the narrative of the book. "An artistic movement is forming," writes David Shields in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, "What are its key components?" His answer is randomness, spontaneity, reader participation, a fascination with artifice and authenticity, "a blurring to the point of invisibility of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real".

When it is a genre that evolves, as much as the formats in which it appears, you know the medium in which you work is a living thing.
A creation concocted in the Eco lab?

Mysterious Albanian exile Milo Temesvar, the acclaimed author of Let Me Say Now, was once the talk of the Frankfurt book fair, with publishers such as Feltrinelli, Gallimard and Rowohlt competing for the rights to his work. Temesvar's later books, The Patmos Sellers, for instance, were also reviewed in Europe, but his name has faded from view. He is, however, mentioned in the introduction to The Name of the Rose. Circumstantial evidence of this kind, mixed with teasing references in Umberto Eco's prodigious bibliography, suggests that he is one of Professor Eco's delightful fabrications, a spoof on the absurdities of publishing and a vehicle for occasional parodies of books such as The Da Vinci Code.
There's just no silencing some people

Towards the end of the 1950s, an infuriated Harold Macmillan was moved to exclaim, "Can nothing be done to suppress or get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher?" The answer, half a century on, appears to be no. At the age of 97, Pincher has bundled up the experience of his Daily Express scoops into a book entitled Treachery. This incorrigible witness to the misdemeanours of Britain's secret state first published his magnum opus in the US out of fear and respect for the Official Secrets Act. But the onset of his centenary has given him renewed impudence. Now the Edinburgh publisher Mainstream is bringing out a UK edition with a lot of new material, notably Pincher's unflattering verdict on Christopher Andrew's "authorised" history of MI5. I hear that he has also sold the film rights, which raises the intriguing question of who might play the quasi-fictional character of the Fleet Street legend "Chapman Pincher".

Famous Creaters on the Fear of Failure

2011-05-16T14:41:00.002+01:00

Failure and the willingness to fail is an integral part of creativity and innovation. Failure is the theme of this year’s student work exhibition at Stockholm’s Berghs School of Communication and, to launch it, they brought together some great creative minds, including Milton Glazer and Stefan Sagmeister, and asked them to share their thoughts and experiences on the subject.

A great collection of videos and ideas, and well worth a watch.

Have a look here.

Thanks to Niall for the link.

Russian Roulette and Our Digital Lives

2011-05-16T14:39:00.001+01:00

Russian Facebook Roulette is a project by the students of Miami ad School, Berlin. The idea is simple: you and your friends spin the virtual pistol and shoot at your facebook profile, running the risk of deleting your entire facebook account and killing the "digital you". If you escape unscathed from the game you're entered into a draw to win a weeks vacation in Russia. Those who are unfortunate enough to lose receive a gold bullet in the post, a physical representation of the bullet that ended their digital life.

Alongside the obvious gambling thrill, the game highlights the idea of the "digital life" and how the value we place on it can be used cleverly in social media campaigns to drive engagement. Examples of other campaigns exploring this area include the famous Whopper Sacrifice campaign by CP+B which asked people to sacrifice their virtual friendships in return for a free burger, and the "digital-death" campaign for World AIDS day by TBWA\Chiat\Day, where a rake of celebrities including Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake killed their digital lives and vowed to bring them back to life when $1 million had been collectively raised for charity.

As the lines between the online and offline worlds begin to blur people are beginning to place a lot of value in their digital lives The campaigns above show how this applied value can be used effectively and creatively to drive interaction and engagement.

BBH - Stop Digging for Insights

2011-04-29T09:04:00.003+01:00

Image courtesy of backseatblogger.com

Here's a very interesting article on the excavation of consumer insights by Emma Cookson, Chairman of BBH New York. In it she argues that we need to stop digging for insights, presuming that insights are something that can be uncovered. Instead insights are in her opinion:

"...not – in my experience – discovered. They are thought of. Conceived in the mind of some smart, informed person. They are not found, they are intuited. They are not mined, they are identified and hypothesized"

She continues:

"In reality, identifying an insight is less about finding some new piece of information (who doesn’t already know that moms are proud of their sons’ and daughters’ achievements? Who needs a piece of research to point this out? ) and much more about realizing how information or knowledge can be freshly used and applied. We all already know that some people aren’t athletic, we all know we get grumpy and distracted when we’re hungry, we all know kids learn by experimental play – but we don’t all spot what to do with that knowledge. We don’t all have the INSIGHT to see how to apply it."

The rest of the article and comments below are well worth a read.

Gamification and Advertising

2011-04-28T17:32:00.002+01:00

Image courtesy of Gamingbolt.com

Gamif-what?

Gamification is the application of game dynamics to non-game scenarios. It takes advantage of people's natural instinct to take part in games, encouraging new behaviors and convincing them to invest in a product or brand. Game dynamics are things like levels, points, leaderboards, skills, and competition to name but a few. They're the arsenal of tricks game designers have been using for years to create incredibly successful computer games.

Sounds interesting, but why should I be concerned about any of that?

First some facts

The gaming industry is the largest entertainment industry in the world - eclipsing even the juggernaut that is Hollywood making a revenue of $25 billion in 2010.

FarmVille, the popular facebook game has more people playing it than there are on twitter.

Angry Birds' immense popularity has spawned the amount of merchandising you'd expect from the latest Disney movie.

Call of Duty: Black Opps generated $650 million globally on the first five days of it's release.

World of Warcraft has an online community of 12 million players.

And while you're at it, forget the stereotypes

Gamers are not young teenagers playing Call of Duty when they should be studying, the average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years. The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old.

Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 percent).

Sixty-four percent of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.

In 2010, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 play video games, an increase from nine percent in 1999.

Here's the source.

So what brands use game dynamics already?

The social media based geo-location app Foursquare, uses badges and leaderboards (Mayors) to encourage people to check-in places and "Unlock Their City".

Nike+ brings together the once diverse and largely individual pursuit of running and turns it into a community based on competition, encouragement, progress and levels.

Nike Grid encouraged people to race around the streets using pay-phones to unlock levels and claim their city. They could play by themselves or in teams.

VW's amazing Fun Theory campaign encouraged the public to develop games to encourage people to do good. It generated some brilliant ideas such as The Speed Camera Lottery and The Bottle Bank Arcade.

Heineken and AKQA have just launched StarPlayer an app that syncs to the TV and lets people play along with a game in real time, attempting to predict goals and player performance.

With numbers like this and campaigns as groundbreaking and forward thinking as the ones above, it's clear that gamification and game dynamics are becoming a integral part of modern life and advertising.

Okay, how do I find out more?

I highly recommend this book Game Frame by Aaron Dignan. In it he explores how behavioral games can be used in business and branding and goes into a great amount of detail on the componants that make up a game.

Gaming company SCVNGR have released their Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck. It's a list worth reading and saving.

Gameful is an online community built around the idea that games can make the world a better place. As a member you take part in challenges to design behavioral games and critique others.

#action

2011-04-20T21:12:00.004+01:00

This brilliant kick-in-the-arse article by Stefan Boublil encourages us to stop obsessing over inspiration and process and just get making. If you're taking your time on a side project, or haven't even started it yet bookmark this article, take note, and act.

Is it me or has the too-easily accessible internet made us creative types susceptible to what i would call, and heretofore coin, inspiration fetishism?...

Every time I open any of my socially conscious accounts these days, it is to find yet another peer fawning over the words of one Godin, Gladwell or Béhar and declaring them to be "so inspiring," "amazing" or, god-forbid, "telling the truth!" (exclamation theirs.) The truth is that too many of my confreres find some sort of solace and pride in their judicious identification of what constitutes value, especially as previously singled out by others, but fail miserably to act upon the principles therefore unearthed. It seems to me that when some professional editor, CEO or designer deigns to publicly expound on the oft-expounded virtues of leadership, excellence or the way to creation, it is neither to show off, encourage awe nor even lead by example, but rather to foster principle. They aim to advertise the source of their supposed success not merely encourage imitation of its least valuable consequence, form...

Continue reading here

Approve / Disapprove Street Art

2011-04-20T20:50:00.009+01:00

MOCA-latte, a private organsiation from Los Angeles are looking to start a debate on street art with their Red Sticker Campaign.

By providing Approved and Disapproved red stickers through their website they're encouraging people to voice their opinion on the art on the streets.

I like how the stickers themselves become a form of street art - acting as a guerilla or analogue version of the facebook like's we're so used to seeing on the web and giving a sense of interactivity to such a static medium as street art.

Then it got me thinking, what if these stickers were used on print and outdoor advertising? Consumers are used to commenting on TV ads through youtube, and interactive sites and ads through social media and likes, but print, especially outdoor has remained somewhat immune.

What if people on the street downloaded these stickers and Approved or Disapproved an outdoor campaign? And what if a brand embraced it as part of a
campaign and let people crit their work?

Image and info via PSFK

Facebook Studio

2011-04-20T20:48:00.000+01:00

Facebook Studio is an community and gallery for advertisers and marketers who use facebook as part of their advertising campaigns. Set up by facebook themselves it's a great resource and showcase for how brands are using the sites social media plugins to engage their audience.

It's well worth spending a bit of time having a look around and seeing what other people are doing with the software. Any agency can supply a case study for their work with the best work being showcased and awarded at the top of the site.

As facebook becomes more and more synonymous with advertising campaigns maybe it'll only be a few years until we see the "Facebook Advertising Awards"?

Thanks to Ed for the link.

Oblique Strategies for Creative Block

2011-04-01T11:49:00.002+01:00

Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975 and now available online, Random Oblique Strategies offers eh, Random Oblique Strategies to help you overcome creative block.

I'm about to put them to use.

Personal Data & 3D printing

2011-04-01T11:11:00.000+01:00

As 3D printing continues to penetrate the mainstream consciousness and personal data is heralded by some as Web 3.0, it'll be very interesting to watch the two converge more and more and see what that convergence produces. The vase above for example is a 3D vocal sound wave sculpture produced by the uniqueness of one persons voice. This vase and other products such as wall hangings based on your musical tastes and barcode inspired prints of your favourite movies pave the way for a not so distant future where people will come to expect all of their products and experiences to be personalised.

For the last few years we in advertising have been concentrating on personalising the brand experience online and offline by bringing a sense of uniqueness to a campaign through social media integration. Some forward thinking companies and brands such as Nike+, have realised that the product itself must also begin to offer this same sense of personalisation.

3d printing means that personal data previously restricted to digital or 2D form can now become a physical, tangible 3D object. This offers brands and advertisers an opportunity to use the consumers input allow them to form a bond with a brand right at the very beginning of the process instead of spending a lot of time, money and energy convincing them at the end. At the end of the day, you're more likely to buy or use a product you helped create.

Hackney Hear: GPS Triggered Audio Tour

2011-04-01T11:08:00.002+01:00

Hackney Hear uses the GPS on your smartphone to guide you on an audio tour of the Olympic borough of Hackney. As you walk around the area your movements trigger different audio clips relative to your location. The clips include music, poetry, and stories from famous Hackney artists and business men such as Alan Sugar and Michael Rosen, as well as interviews from the community.

It's a great example of using technology to bring culture outside the walls of museums and onto the streets. The app will be launched closer to the Olympic games when Hackney will be under the full glare of the media.

DAA Parody Pt2

2011-03-28T14:45:00.000+01:00

It seems as if our DAA ad continues to penetrate popular culture.

Paul Adams: The Foundation of (Online) Motivation

2011-03-25T10:28:00.000Z

Facebook's Global Experience Manager (what a title!) Paul Adams was interviewed recently by O'Reilly Radar on the foundation of online motivation: what motivates people to interact or "like" a brand and what brands motivations should be when creating online experiences. The full article is well worth a read, but if you're stuck for time I've taken two quotes from this great summary by Waggen Eredstrom that somewhat sums up what Mr Adams talks about:

"It’s problematic that many businesses focus on existing and emerging technology, and not on social behavior. Thinking about platform integration first, like Twitter or Facebook, or technologies first, like what could be enabled by ‘mobile location’ or ‘real-time updates,’ is the wrong place to start. Often, businesses need to step back and consider what will motivate people to use what they are developing, above and beyond what exists today. Something that I’ve been saying for a while is that human behavior changes slowly, much slower than technology. By focusing on human behavior, not only are you much more likely to create something that people value and use, but you’re more likely to protect yourself from sudden changes in technology."

"We’re still seeing the fans and followers arms race — businesses trying to gather as many fans as possible. But I think that’s fundamentally wrong. It’s more important to focus on quality, not quantity, of connections.

For example, many brands run competitions on social media platforms. You have to ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ that business to enter. So the question is whether they are making connections with advocates of their brand, or with people who simply love competitions. If it’s the latter, then they’re filling their social media interactions and data with noise.

As I mentioned earlier, people are often most influenced by their closest friends. So only make connections with true advocates of your brand, and market to the friends of those fans."

Thanks to Jane and Ed for the link.

Hashtag Battle

2011-03-25T10:16:00.001Z

Hashtag Battle pits two hashtags from Twitter against each other to see who's winning based on the amount of times they've been tweeted. It's a very simple idea well executed.

Location Based Gifts

2011-03-25T09:30:00.000Z

Giftrocket is a location based gifting service that uses your phones GPS and the PayPal service to redeem rewards for a specific location. Here's how it works via mashable:

"...the giver picks a place in a specific region, as sourced from Yelp’s business listings, via the GiftRocket website. Let’s use Peet’s Coffee in Marina Del Rey as an example. The gift giver then builds the GiftRocket by filling out a few key details like amount ($20), recipient name (Scott) and email, and a personal message. Finally, the buyer pays for the gift with his credit card.

Our lucky recipient, Scott, is notified via email of his new gift. The next time he visits Peet’s, he can press “redeem” on his smartphone (no app required) to cash in his gift card. After verifying Scott’s exact whereabouts, GiftRocket will approve the request and automatically deposit $20 in Scott’s PayPal account. Scott’s next lattes are on the house, theoretically."

On a similar vein gifting giant Groupon have just announced Groupon Now a location and time based version of their coupon system. How it works:

"It's only 11 a.m. Mason clicks the "hungry" button, and his phone transmits its location to Groupon's servers and then displays a list of deals from nearby restaurants. Across a bridge spanning the Chicago River, the Asian fusion restaurant Thalia Spice is testing Groupon Now by offering $20 worth of food for $12. A block to the north, an eatery named @ Spot Café is dangling a $10 coupon for $6. Each restaurant has specified that its discount is good only during select hours on that particular day, when a few of their tables would otherwise be empty."

Both projects indicate that location based services that offer real world rewards, not virtual ones (see last weeks post on the future of Foursquare) will become the direction the technology moves in. For brands, the idea that customers will generate their own gift card for a brand (Giftrocket) or that they can instantly generate one for their own (Groupon now) is a very exciting development.

Retail stores could offer time based discounts creating a sense of urgency and introducing an element of gaming to the shopping experience.

A location based "treasure hunt" that has time built in: each "clue" has to be solved and found within a certain time.

Or simply making sure that when a user is "hungry" or "bored" that their brand is present.

Valentine's Day Twitter

2011-03-25T09:29:00.000Z

I've been keeping my eye out recently for simple projects that use the internet to effect real world items (what's being described as "The Internet of Things".) This brilliantly simple idea by Lachie made me smile. She built "a machine that dispenses chocolate according to nice or mean things that people say on twitter. It has two settings: nice mode (triggered by words like "good" and "love" and "kittens") and nasty mode (triggered by words that you are all too young to hear)"

Brilliant.

10 Great Videos on Creativity

2011-03-18T10:18:00.004Z

The 99% has put together this great collection of videos about creativity and idea generation. When there's nothing worth watching on the television (which is most of the time these days) load up some of these videosand soak up the inspiration.

The Future of Foursquare: Is There One?

2011-03-18T10:14:00.003Z

This video was shot by Mashable at this years SXSW festival. I've been skeptical for some time now about Foursquare and it's future, and I know others share my skepticism. I clicked on this link interested in seeing exactly what Foursquare had in mind for it's future, and to be honest I'm still unsure.

When Pete Cashmore of Mashable asks Crowley what the unique selling position of Foursquare is his answer is far from convincing, saying that scale is what's on his side. Considering facebook has a user base of over half a billion people and they launched their own check-in service "Places" last year it just doesn't seem that unique to me.

He mentions how Foursquare could be used to encourage people to go to the gym or visit a museum. These are interesting applications indeed, but if the only reward for checking-in at a gym is a virtual badge will people be bothered? Gaming mechanics are interesting, but when they're confined to the virtual world do they work? If a check-in at the gym was rewarded with money off membership, virtual currency for e-commerce sites, or exclusive offers it suddenly becomes a lot more appealing. If this is what Foursquare intend then great I think there is a future there for them, but as facebook begins to introduce facebook credits globally my prediction for their future is bleak.

Dynamic Logos: Branding in the Digital Age

2011-03-18T09:52:00.003Z

The brilliant MIT Media Lab have just released a new identity using an algorithm that can create 40,000 logo shapes in 12 different color combinations. Using the algorithm, the Media Lab have 25 years worth of personalised business cards.

What struck me as interesting about this logo was not it's aesthetic value or meaning, but rather it's production and application. As we accelerate towards a fully digitised culture, where media is delivered on multiple platforms and devices at multiple sizes and resolutions, the days of the static master logo may be coming to an end. Whereas before we judged an identity as a single unmovable object against a blank background, now we must consider it's application, both static and moving, across a huge variety of media.

The fact that the Media Lab logo is shown in motion as well as in stasis and is designed to allow for a huge amount of variation is an example of how it's designers are preparing for the "near total" digital future where motion and variety could be more important than the single recognisable mark.

Another brand exploring the dynamic logo is Comedy Central. This year they moved away from the traditional bubble logo towards a double "C" mark that is an obvious take on the copyright logo. When seen as a static logo on black it is admittedly a tad boring. But put it in motion and in context it comes alive, becoming something rather exciting in my opinion:

So what does this mean for ad agencies?

There is a lot in common between what is happening in visual identity and what is happening in advertising. Ad agencies can no longer rely on one TV ad to drive an entire campaign, much like a brand can no longer rely on a single mark to promote their identity. An advertising idea must have enough richness and depth to be applicable across a huge amount of media, both offline and online. Like the people who designed the logo above we as advertisers must consider our idea in motion as well as in stasis, in real life as well as virtual, as a long term solution for a digital future not a short term solution based on a fad or trend.

Info and links via Fastcode Design.

This With This: Shameless Self-Promotion Pt 1

2011-03-11T11:42:00.003Z

We learned a lot from Ed's Digital Bootcamp and many questions were raised. (We also got a lot of pizza.) During one of meetings a pizza brandishing chicken was exposed and resulted in out-cries of both joy and horror. Does chicken belong on pizza? Some people agreed, some did not. So, to settle it once and for all, we built thiswiththis.com a site that uses facebook's "like" button to allow people to vote on this very important issue.

The site proved pretty popular so we will be expanding it over the next few weeks to answer some other very important questions such as: Does Tv belong in the bedroom?

If you haven't voted please do, and you can follow us and suggest questions on Twitter.

Thanks to Niall, Adrian, Conor, Darragh, Ronan and Google.

Instagram API: What People Are Doing And What Can Be Done

2011-03-11T11:32:00.002Z

Last month the popular iPhone camera app Instagram released it's API. By opening up the code behind the product the company invited independent developers to use the API to create products and services using the technology. A couple of really interesting products have emerged recently.

First up is Instaprint by the excellent New York based agency Breakfast. The Instaprint machine searches for Instagram images tagged using a specific location i.e Ciaran's House Party, and prints out Polaroids complete with comments, of any image taken at the party.

Instawar creates a random pair of Instagram images and asks you to vote for the best. Photographers accumulate points that are redeemable for print-outs of their images from an associated product Printstagr.am.

Because the service includes location tagging and a growing community of amateur photographers it will be interesting to see how brands and advertisers will use the technology. Some thoughts on what these could be:

Brands in the social space could offer a service similar to Instaprint and provide people with print outs of photos taken from parties or special occasions.

Outdoor advertising could use the API to create print ads featuring pictures with a specific tag.

Retail screens could stream customers photos live in the shop.

Very interesting stuff. Since the release of the API is only a month old expect to see a lot more projects using Instagram.

Thanks to Ed for the links.

Personal Projects & Procrastination

2011-03-07T14:57:00.003Z

Personal projects are very important. They give us creative types the chance to create work without clients and restrictions; to explore new creative avenues and methods without fear of scrutiny or rejection; to create something that may change our lives forever. Facebook was a personal project. So was twitter. Ji Lee, creative director at Google Labs talks here about the transformative power of personal projects and how he used them to leave the world of advertising and end up where he is today.
What’s strange is that even though we are aware of their relevance and impact on our creativity, personal projects are extremely difficult to undertake and complete. Ideas remain bound to moleskin pages and online bookmarks, rarely making their way into the real world. When it comes to personal projects, for many of us, procrastination reigns supreme.

A few weeks ago I decided to explore procrastination: why we do it and how we can overcome it; and see how some of these understandings could help us complete those all important personal projects.

What is procrastination?

As I discovered, that’s quite a big question. To avoid delving too deeply into the philosophy of procrastination here, I’ll skim the surface and recommend this book: The Thief of Time. Have a look if you’re interested in reading about the subject in more depth.

Procrastination is defined as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. Knowingly delaying something because you believe it is the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count. Procrastination is about doing something against your better judgment or not doing what you think you should be doing at a given time.
This definition is important as we move further into the post. Knowingly spending time away from the office on a walk, or taking time off during the day to watch a film in a deliberate search for inspiration doesn’t count . Any activity that is knowingly undertaken and doesn’t conflict with an immediate deadline is not procrastination.

So why do we procrastinate?

I’ve always been fascinated by why we procrastinate. As a creative person I find myself doing it a lot, and judging by all the creative literature on the subject, I’m not alone. In my experience procrastinating over personal, self-initiated work is the most common. Although we technically could (and do) procrastinate in work. A project has to be completed by a certain time. There is a definite deadline. If you don’t complete a work project someone else will. The deadline for self-initiated work however is movable, and if you don’t do it, it will never get done. The goal is vague and the responsibility isn’t shared.

Here are two theories to begin to explain our tendency to procrastinate:

A Lack of Concern for Our Future Selves

In her essay Procrastination and Personal Identity from The Thief of Time, Christine Tappolet posits that procrastination displays a lack of concern for our future selves. Although we regularly display a special concern for our future being – hence regular exercise, a healthy diet, and career aspirations – when we procrastinate we willing pass the buck and burden or harm our future selves but putting off what we know we should do now for later. An example from Tappolet’s essay uses an everyday, domestic situation to explain:

“…you procrastinate about washing the dishes, though you are quite aware that the dishes have to be washed at some point – nobody will do it for you and you lack the money to buy a new set – and you are aware that by the time you do it, you will have a huge pile of dirt-encrusted dishes to wash, something you consider much worse than washing the dishes right now… we are often tempted to get someone else to do what we loathe doing… we are trying to pass the buck on to others… when you fail to wash the dishes now, though you think that washing the dishes now is clearly preferable to doing it later, it seems you end up consciously burdening your future self, the one who will have to do the chore. in such buck- passing cases, it seems particularly clear that you have a lack of concern for your future selves and that you fail to consider later selves as fully identical to your present self”

Imagine the dishes are your future novel, your screen-play, the “facebook killer” you and your friends came up with in a bar, or a side project of any kind. A lack of concern for your future selves, and the belief that they are more capable than our present selves, means the majority of us put off these projects indefinitely even though completing them now could be of huge benefit to us in the future.

Hyperbolic Discounting

As temporal beings we are prone to hyperbolic discounting:

“Given two similar rewards, humans show a preference for one that arrives sooner rather than later. Humans are said to discount the value of the later reward, by a factor that increases with the length of the delay.”

When it comes to instant v delayed gratification, instant wins. Placing this in the context of personal projects that involve vague, movable deadlines and outcomes, we can understand how completing self-initiated work is extremely difficult. It can be constantly trumped by instant rewards i.e watching the football instead of writing, drawing or reading.

What Can We Do To Overcome It?

Break a project down into small steps

If vague deadlines and outcomes are a major contributor to procrastination, we can overcome it by breaking a larger project into smaller, instantly rewarding steps. Too often personal projects have lofty, ambitious goals and the initial steps require a lot of energy. By making the first and proceeding steps small and manageable, the deadline is never that far away and the sacrifice made to achieve the goal is far less. By creating an instant reward at the end of each step, be it a definite sign of progress, or more time allowed in the pub on the weekend, we can overcome our tendency for hyperbolic discounting.
A method such as Scott Belsky’s Action Method provides a more detailed description of how to use this type of personal project management.

Make it a habit

Research has proven that making relevant implementation intentions will increase the chances of you completing a project: By deciding to work on a project at a certain time, date, and place, you increase your chances of completing it.

In one very interesting experiment, the effect of using relevant implementation intentions to overcome procrastination was tested on recovering heroin addicts. At 10:00 A.M the participants were shown a model C.V and told to make plans to have one of their own created by 5:00 P.M. They were split into 2 groups. The first group made irrelevant implementation intentions: where when and how they wanted to have lunch. The second group made relevant intentions: when, where and how they were going to write their CV’s. None of the participants in the first group handed in a C.V at 5:00 P.M whereas 8 out of the 10 participants in the second group did. This result is pretty amazing: even under the cognitive strain of heroin withdrawal, making a definite plan to complete a project and overcome procrastination worked.

So next time you start, or intend to start on a personal project, figure out where, when, and how you’re going to complete it. This post for example was written between 6 – 7 A.M over the period of a week, at my desk by the front window of my house, when there was no chance of me being distracted by anything else. Stephen King committed to writing his early books by going to work at 5 A.M and writing 100 words a day before his day job began. By simply setting definite, relevant intentions to work on a project, you’re more likely to complete it.

Although I still procrastinate on personal projects (especially when rugby’s involved) I’ve found that an understanding of it and an understanding of how to combat it have helped me complete and start projects that have been notebook-bound for years.

Do you find yourself procrastinating on personal projects? Are there any other methods you’d suggest to overcome it? Did you implement any of the steps above and find that they worked / didn’t work?

This article was written for my monthly post on The Knot Collective.

This With This

2011-03-04T17:19:00.003Z

After some tricky "like" button integration and debugging my little side project This With This is live. The site seeks the answer to some simple but earth-shattering questions. First up: Does chicken belong on pizza?

Making A Magazine In 2 Minutes

2011-03-04T10:09:00.002Z

For their December issue film magazine Little White Lies documented from the start to finish, the making of the issue. It's full of grids, typography, people running around and London Hipsters - basically a real life Nathan Barley.

Thanks to John for the link.

The Internet Wishlist

2011-02-25T09:50:00.004Z

The Internet Wishlist is a site that allows people to post their wishes for technology. I like how the site acts like a form of reverse crowdsourcing:Instead of creative people asking the public to do something for them, the public tells the creatives what they'd like them to do for them.

So if you're ever stuck for a personal project, have a look at the posts and make someone's wish come through.

The Internet And Emotions

2011-02-25T09:49:00.002Z

It's an absolute fact that social media and the Internet have fundamentally changed every part of our society. We're closer to each other now than we've ever been. No longer locked down by the geographical constraints of old, groups and societies are forming globally and people are connecting in a way the world has never seen before.

As an ad creative I spend most of my time thinking about digital and social media in terms of brands: How we can use it to shift product? How we can increase loyalty and bring a consumer closer to the brand? But every now and again I step back and look at what digital media artists are doing to explore the deeper side of social media: the emotional, human side.

Below are two great, inspiring projects by some very talented artists that explore the Internet and emotions.

The first project is by Jonathon Harris entitled We Feel Fine. The site has been up for about 2 years now, but if you haven't explored in a while or ever, it's well worth spending some time with. We Feel Fine takes tweets, posts, updates from social media channels and groups them by emotion. What's particularly interesting about this project is how it taps into the guilty human pleasure of voyeurism. Peeking into someone's life on an emotional level such as this, or on a surface level such as looking through someone's facebook photo's is, as much as we mightn't like to admit it, one of the attractions of social media. As the artist himself puts it:

"It is about creating an ever-changing portrait of the emotional landscape of the human world. It is about creating a two-way mirror — where viewers simultaneously experience a God-like voyeurism (spying on the feelings of others) and a bashful vulnerability (realizing their own words and pictures are in there, too). When these two feelings mix together (voyeurism and vulnerability), the hope is that they produce a kind of humbling empathy — demonstrating that individual experiences are actually universal."

The second project by two artists Theo Watson and Kyle McDonaldand captures positive human emotions to the Internet. Happy Things is an opensource program that uses the webcam on your computer to analyze your face when you're browsing and posts your screenshot every time it detects you smiling, along with the web page that you found amusing.

This project is more about measuring the personal emotion of happiness rather than the collective emotions of We feel Fine. What it gives you is something akin to personal online happiness analytics: a way of understanding what it is about the Internet that makes you happy.

Both projects show that the new Social Internet can be used for more than advertising and can contribute to human society on a deeper, human level. Very inspiring stuff.

Info and Imagery via: PSFK and Welcome To Optimism

Using Google Trends to Predict Oscar Winners

2011-02-18T09:53:00.002Z

Google have released this nifty web app that attempts to predict who will win at the Oscars using Google trends. I'm going to try it out, put a bit of money on it and hopefully get rich!!

Google One Pass

2011-02-18T09:39:00.000Z

Google have launched One Pass, a new online payment system for publishers. One Pass will allow people to buy subscriptions to online publications across a range of platforms using the one login. The video above is rather vague and doesn't really reveal a huge amount of practical information or screenshots of the product.

What it means for publishers and brands selling published content on the web is that people may be more encouraged to spend money if it is simplified to this one universal payment system - instead of remembering a tonne of passwords they'll only have to remember the one.

Windows Phone Connects with Kinect

2011-02-18T09:37:00.003Z

Microsoft have just released this video showing their Windows 7 phone connecting and interacting with the Kinect. If you ignore the over the top, stock photography brought to life performances of the actors this is a really interesting development. Continuing on the early 2011 trend of interaction between mobile and TV, the use of the phone as an extra controller opens the door to some interesting possibilities.

Say for example microsoft developed a television with the Kinect built in - bypassing the need for advertising to be served in-game through the XBox - that allowed advertisers to develop interactive television advertising that is effected and manipulated by the windows 7 phone. Very interesting.

DAA

2011-02-11T09:29:00.004Z

I was quite proud to see our DAA ad has entered popular culture enough for someone to take the piss out of it:

Here's the original:

Facebook Places

2011-02-11T09:29:00.002Z

What is it?

Facebook Places was released in Ireland this week. Places brings location based services to the worlds largest social network, allowing people to use the GPS on their phones to "check-in" to their location and tag other facebook friends who are there with them.

Privacy

As with most facebook applications these days the feature does raise some privacy issues. Mister Zuckerberg says that the service is not about broadcasting your location to the world; it's about discovering and sharing new places with your friends. Your check-in is posted to your wall however, and you can tag any of your friends without asking their permission - not the greatest idea if you've gone for a sneaky few with work colleagues. This setting can be changed in your privacy settings under "Customise Settings" and the “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.” section.

What it means to advertisers

Places is an exciting development for us advertising folk. For the last few years Foursquare and Gowalla have been pushing location based social media services, but take-up has come mainly from early adopters and not the public at large. By introducing location to facebook's huge user base location based social media will enter the mainstream and it's popularity will explode.

Brands can begin to offer rewards for check-ins. Some possible uses:

Coffee shops could use places as a loyalty scheme and offer a free coffee to anyone who checks-in 10 times. (They'll save money and the environment by not printing loyalty cards too)

Retailers could offer discounts to customers who check-in.

Group buying schemes could be encouraged by offering group discounts for checking in to a store with your friends.

Music stores could offer iTunes previews and downloads to customers while they're in the store. If the store was big enough they could provide bespoke content based on where they check-in i.e gaming information for anyone who checks in in the games section, and music to those in the music section.

As you can see the possibilities are there, now it's time to take advantage of them.

Mercedes Race to Super Bowl Controlled by Tweets

2011-02-04T07:37:00.000Z

As we all know The Super Bowl is as famous for it's ads as it is it's football. Although not strictly a Super Bowl ad in the traditional played-at-half-time-on-a-large-screen sense, Mercedes' Twitter Race is gathering a lot of online attention and getting a lot of football fans very interested.

The race kicked off Feb 2nd with four teams leaving NY, LA, Chicago and Tampa racing towards Dallas in Mercedes' that are fueled by the power of ordinary peoples tweets and several high profile coaches with large amounts of followers. The amazing thing about this campaign in that this "fueling" isn't metaphorical, Mercedes have build cars with engines that respond to twitter commands. Amazing!

This project is yet another great example of how we can use online tools to affect offline objects to create a sense of magic around a product or campaign.

TV and the Third Screen

2011-02-04T07:22:00.002Z

2011 was predicted as the year that your old TV box in the corner would begin to catch up and join in with the social, interactive world of the modern internet. As we become more attached to our smartphones and tablets, some of us unable to put them down even as we watch our favourite shows, TV needs to figure out a way to use what is being referred to as "the third screen" to offer bespoke content that deepens the experience of television viewing.

Several high profile entertainment shows and advertisers have begun to use the third screen to offer such experiences. The technology they're using is sound recognition.

How the technology works:

An app is programmed to recognise certain sounds within a TV show or advertisement and deliver specific content based on that sound. For example, in an ad for H&M, the app could recognise a section of music from the ad that corresponds with a model wearing a summer dress. That dress would then appear on your smartphone or tablet and offer you the chance to buy it there and then, store it in a wishlist, browse your local stores to see where it is in stock, or share it with your friends. Mobile phone operators could sell phones directly, supermarkets could allow you to add items to your digital shopping list, software companies could offer instant game downloads... the possibilities are endless.

Some examples:

W+K London's brand new campaign for Honda "This Unpredictable Life" is a great example of this technology in use. By downloading an app to their iPhone, viewers can "capture" characters from ad.

ABC released an iPad app this week that synchs with Greys Anatomy. Although content wise it looks a little bit like the the extras on DVD's that no one watches, it is a sign that entertainment companies are willing to invest in creating these types of apps for very popular shows.

This is a very interesting and exciting area, and one we as marketers need to keep a very close eye on.

The Power of Prototyping

2011-02-02T06:56:00.001Z

Yesterday in the agency we had our first Hackathon. And it was great. People from all departments created and remixed for 30 minutes then presented some rather cool ideas (much of which have hence been copyrighted so they can cash in on their millions). It reminded me of this post I wrote on the Knot Collective a while ago about the power of rapid prototyping. I still believe that an agency culture that promotes rapid idea generation and iterative execution is a culture that will see it's creative output blossom. Have a read, and let me know your thoughts:

A prototype in it’s most basic form is the difference between thinking and making. In advertising terms it’s the initial scrawled drawing of a print ad, or the TV idea scribbled on the back of a napkin. It’s turning an idea from an abstract thought into a physical reality. A well executed prototype can be the difference between a great idea, campaign or product, and a bad one.

In this video, Firefox lead creative Aza Raskin discusses and demonstrates the power of prototyping for creative software development. I’ve referenced a lot of his principles in this post because they are creatively universal and very easily applied to advertising.

WHY SHOULD WE PROTOTYPE?

It’s simple really: an idea means nothing if you haven’t executed it.

This is what Scott Belsky’s excellent book Making Ideas Happen is based on. If you have an idea, that’s great, lots of people have ideas. The difference between you and everyone else is whether you execute that idea.

Prototying is the first stage of execution.

It provides you with the immediate internal and external feedback your idea needs to grow. Think about it: how many times have you woken up with THE GREATEST IDEA EVER KNOWN TO MAN!!, then attempted to explain it to your girlfriend or boyfriend only to discover they have no idea what you’re talking about and frankly neither do you? A well executed prototype allows people to see your idea the way you want them to see it.

A prototype isn’t the finished article.

If you present your client with a fait accompli at the very first meeting they’re not going to be impressed, they’re going to feel left out. By presenting a work in progress the client recognises you’ve done a lot of the initial thinking, but crucially, they feel like the idea won’t be complete without their input. If you present your idea correctly you’ll inspire people to contribute and take part in a positive way.

HOW CAN WE PROTOTYPE?

Talk about your idea.

Talking about your idea in its early stages will help you optimise it quickly and prevent you from going too far down the wrong track.

For us advertising folk it’s discussing your idea with your teammate. It’s meeting one of your colleagues from client service in the kitchen and talking to them about it. It’s sticking your sketch up on a noticeboard or in the corridor and inviting people to comment. As creatives we need to welcome and enjoy talking about the idea in its initial stages. The more opinions you get early on, the quicker your idea becomes great.

Accept that you’re always wrong the first time.

No one is good enough that they get it right the first time. Pushing ego aside and admitting that your first idea is not the absolute solution allows you to embrace other peoples opinions. If you believe that the first draft of your TV script is comparable in greatness only to the works of W. B Yeats, than you’re in for a big ego-bruising when you present it to your CD. Factor this stage into your workflow and you’ll allow other people’s opinions to positively influence your idea.

Move fast.

I saw Mike Schroepfer, the Vice President of Engineering at facebook, speak at the Science Gallery in Dublin as part of the Innovation Dublin Festival. When he discussed how they fostered innovative ideas within facebook, he described the need to prototype rapidly. One of the ways this is achieved is with the infamous facebook hackathon:

“Hackathon is a chance to work on the ideas we have been thinking about for last couple of months, to change the,’That would be hot!’ sentiment to something real and live on the site. The objective is to create something interesting by the end of the night that you can get feedback on from your peers and coworkers.”

Forcing yourself to make a prototype of your idea in a day will allow you to concentrate on the things that matter, the broad strokes, and not to get bogged down in inconsequential details.

PRACTISING WHAT I PREACH

In the spirit of what I’ve discussed above, here is an idea I had after reading and discussing with Caprice, her “The Draper Cycle” Knot Collective post:

What if we applied the idea of the hackathon to an ad agency? For 24 hours creatives, client service, production, the receptionist, everyone, came together to turn their ideas into working prototypes that could ultimately help the agency, the agency’s clients, or a not for profit organisation? A burst of collective, rapid energy could produce more in one day than countless meetings over the space of months ever could.

But, what if we made it bigger than that? What if we gathered a diverse group of people virtually, in one space for 24 hours and aimed to have an idea and a working prototype by the end of the day? As Caprice put it:

“What you’re suggesting is to allot a finite time to workaholism and turned it into a commodity and resource which can then be applied.”

Yes, that is what I’m suggesting. What do you think? Good idea or bad idea? Let’s get talking and doing.

This post is cross posted from The Knot Collective.

Designspiration

2011-01-28T09:50:00.007Z

Designspiration.net is a collection of eh.. design inspiration. It's similar in someways to bookmarking site ffffound, but has image filtering and a rather nifty "search by colour" feature. It also bans nudity, unlike our good friends at ffffound.

DonEat.at

2011-01-28T09:36:00.004Z

Don't Eat At sends you a text when you check into a restaurant in NYC that is at risk of being closed for health code violations. The app uses Foursquare's API.

Brilliant, simple idea.

Thanks to Ro for the link.

RFID in WESC Shoes

2011-01-28T09:27:00.002Z

Another great idea by those clever students at Hyper Island: RFID in shoes for WESC. By embedding chips inside pairs of WESC shoes they explore the social and advertising possibilities of this innovative but simple combination.

As advertising moves further away from the broadcast model of old, it's projects like this that show the exciting future of our industry. As the students say in their video, this is more than a campaign, it's a platform.

Rethinking An Old Business Model

2011-01-28T09:25:00.001Z

Gym Pact is a fitness concept by Harvard graduates Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer that helps people stay committed to fitness by using monetary incentives. The model is simple: the more you attend the gym the less you pay, the less you attend the more you pay.

I love this idea. It's a great example of how some clever, lateral thinking applied to an accepted business model can create a unique, game-changing idea.

Yoostar 2 and Kinect

2011-01-24T06:58:00.003Z

Yoostar 2 uses the Kinect to allow people to star in and recreate famous scenes from their favourite movies. Using the Kinect's nifty body tracking software, your face and performance are mapped over the scene of your choice in real time, allowing you to see how good of an actor you are (or aren't, as demonstrated by the rather over-enthusiastic lady in the video). It's a nod towards the video remix culture of YouTube that includes a share to facebook and twitter function.

Imagine in a few years time you could buy a TV with the Kinect software embedded in it, allowing you to act alongside actors in real time as you watch a movie or interact directly with advertising by moving your hands Minority Report style.

Very exciting.

Shazam and Syfy: The First Tagable Tv Show

2011-01-24T06:55:00.000Z

Back in December I posted about Shazam's intention to invade the living room and produce tagable TV content. In a press release posted on their site 4 days ago, Shazam announced that they have teamed up with Syfy's Being Human to produce the first tagable TV show. Tagging the show gives viewers links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to exclusive playlists from the series, downloads and the chance to enter the ‘Being Human Shazam Sweepstakes’ at Syfy.com.

This project is a very definite sign of the TV beginning to use "the second screen" i.e tablet computers and smartphones, to make the formally passive exercise of TV an interactive one. Back in November I posted about the future of TV and how 2011 will / may be the year that the TV and internet merge and it seems, for now anyway, that it may be true.

adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall

2011-01-21T09:49:00.000Z

adidas (note the lack of caps) and Intel have teamed up to create this virtual interactive footwear wall. The wall recognises if you're male or female, delivering you a selection of shoes that suit. You can then dive in and explore the shoe from every angle, and even the marketing campaign behind it, although I'm not too sure why you'd want to do that.

A very nice example of how interactivity can be used to enhance the retail experience.

Thanks Sheena for the link.

Inspiration from the Digital Arts

2011-01-21T09:43:00.000Z

In advertising we use film (or what some 10yr old kid put on YouTube) as inspiration for TV ads; graphic design and art as inspiration for print. It's at the fringes of any creative industry that we find the ground-breaking work, the stuff that's really pushing the boundries, not just re-hashing someone else's facebook campaign.

Digital art is where technology and creativity is being pushed to it's limits, and it's here that we should be looking for inspiration, collaboration and a glimpse of things to come.

Below are links to some amazing people and work in this field.

Irvine Brown has an inspiring collection of work. In one project he uses a remote control car to teach people how to breathe correctly when singing. If your breath is controlled enough the car will perform a perfect three point turn.

Tinker are a London based multi-disciplinary team of creative technologists. The indoor sundial above is one of an amazing group of projects on their site.

Niklas Roy's "My Little Bit of Privacy" above is a brilliant example of how technology can be used with everyday items to create something special. More great work on his site.

If you'd like to discover more of these digital artists and their projects you should spend some time exploring the Openprocessing site and the exhibition section of Processing site.

Quora: A New Player in the World of Social Media?

2011-01-17T10:36:00.002Z

Quora has been receiving a lot of online and offline media coverage recently. So this weekend I sat down to explore the product, read some articles and find out what the hype is all about.

What is Quora?

Quora is a question and answer service, similar in ways to yahoo answers: you post a question and it is answered by real people through a login or facebook connect.

Okay, this sounds like yahoo answers with an open graph feature, how is it different? I googled my question and found this thread on Quora: How is Quora different to X? A bit of a worrying start in my opinion. Surely the conversation around a new product such as this should revolve around how it can be used, not what it is?

As I continued to read I discovered this article by Saneel Radia over on BBH Labs. Where as I am still on the fence regarding Quora, he most definitely is not:

"To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth."

He makes a very valid point regarding the "How is Quora different to X?" conversation I mentioned earlier:

"OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people."

His article has sparked quite a heated debate in the comments section.

On the other side of the fence The Telegraph claims that Quora will be bigger than Twitter and is full of praise for the product:

"Twitter was fun for the few, but Quora will be useful to the many. It's is the place to go for on-demand answers to specific questions from people who know what they're talking about. That's something no search engine - or existing social network - comes close to. Monetisation strategies present themselves readily, where they did not - and still do not - in the microblogging platform's case."

Quora is still in it's infancy and it will be interesting see when all the hype dies down whether it will stick, or suffer a similar fate to Google Wave. For now I'm going to sit back, watch and reserve a definite personal opinion until later (it's a very comfortable fence).

Hyper Island Interactive Window

2011-01-14T09:53:00.002Z

Great Interactive Display Window Concept from Gustaf Engström of Hyper Island and the excellent North Kingdom.

Thanks to Niall for the link.

Fail Better: W+K's William Fowler on failure

2011-01-14T09:51:00.000Z

Some inspiring and insightful words from W+K London's William Fowler:

About the only role in which I can tolerate Clive Owen is as the failed assassin at the end of the Bourne Identity. He’s only on screen for five minutes, and his best line is delivered as he lies cradled in Matt Damon’s arms, his fingers paddling in the blood from the shotgun wound in his chest: ‘look…what they make you … give,’ he gasps. Then he dies. It’s a scene I often replay in my mind as I leave the office at 10pm on a Thursday night, feeling like I’ve had my brain scooped out with an ice-cream baller. Sometimes I even repeat those words to myself as the door clicks shut behind me, and I picture the sliver of evening that’s left, the rushed dinner, the hour of listless dawdling on the internet, bed. ‘Look what they make you give.’

When we go to work in advertising the companies we work for buy, not just the majority of our time, but of our creative lives. The ongoing process of self-examination, inspiration and growth that leads artists from pencil, to oils to bronzes will take us from washing machines, to jeans to carbonated, high-calorie soft drinks. And it’s sometimes hard, in long conference calls and client meetings, not to wonder whether one’s gifts, such as they are, weren’t intended for better things. Muriel Spark, writing about a group of young poets and their subsequent lives, says ‘some … took a job in advertising … and became paradoxes’, by which I’ve always assumed she meant, successes who had failed.

But the idea that talent is meant for just one thing is a strange one. Meant by whom exactly? And are they allowed to change their minds? Why should making poetry or, say, sculpture, which is accessible to so few, be inherently better than making advertising which has the potential to bring happiness not just to those that see it, but to all those people whose livelihoods depend on its effectiveness? That’s before we get to the conviviality of agency life. The sense of purpose versus the sense of self-indulgence. Participation versus separation.

Yet the fact remains that when we take a job we do make a sort of diabolical pact. We offer the agency our skills and in return we are granted the wherewithal and distribution mechanisms that mean our ideas can be produced quickly and beautifully and spread all over the world in the blink of an eye. We pay the price with the branding, the starbursts and the logos, the single-minded message, ‘buy this’, which makes advertising advertising. If it fails as art then it’s because it has a purpose, to sell product, where as the purpose of art remains part of its mystery.

So it seems to me that once we’re in an agency we have a choice, and it is one that some people never seem to get to grips with: we can either keep trying to make art which will fail as advertising. Or we can decide to make advertising that fails as art. I chose the second option, and I make it my business to fail better with every ad I make.

There are two things that advertising has to do and failure is intrinsically linked to both of them. The first is to make brands knowable, and the second is to make them memorable.

So firstly – knowability. The playwright, Alan Bennett, has said that the features that define a writer’s individual style are the things that they’ve introduced to hide what they can’t do. A perfect style would be invisible, we would see nothing of the writer, only what they wanted to say. And when you think about it, what could be more bland, more thoroughly unknowable than perfection? When we talk about personality perhaps we’re really describing the ways in which a particular person or thing is not perfect, or the ways they compensate for their flaws; there is a reason very few male models also do stand-up comedy, and it has nothing to do with needing their beauty sleep. But to bring the demonstration back to advertising, consider a brand that has to sell a shower gel for men. The discourse of masculinity is tired and clichéd, however this is precisely the field in which the brand has to participate. So the problem is, how to work around this difficulty, how to engage in the discourse whilst remaining likeable. The best answer turns out to be through self-parody, humour that mocks the idea of manliness. Yes, it is absurd that a man should be expected to smell like a man … so let’s make it absurd. We identify with the dilemma, we recognise the workaround, and through it we know a humane personality.

Failure is also intrinsically linked to memorability. Let’s try a quiz: what was the name of the boy who flew too close to the sun? What about his father, whose flight was successful? Name the two sister ships of the Titanic (both of which were larger than her). Name one perfectly upright tower in northern Italy. You get the point. If stories ever had a purpose apart from to entertain, it was to instruct. To give the listener the opportunity to learn from the failures of others. Our jobs have a great deal to do with story-telling, so we should at least remember that failure is an option. Consider a recent meerkat-based TV campaign, website and now bestselling pseudo-celebrity biography built on a baroque exploration of a typo.

The gruelling process of getting a job in the creative industries is the ideal preparation for all this. The crits, the placements, the long hours and low pay of our early careers. Advising anyone to try to get a job in advertising is like telling them to become a cage fighter – even if they turn out to be good at it, they’re bound to have the shit kicked out of them a few times along the way. I have reason to be incredibly grateful to Paul Arden for writing that ‘if you’ve never been sacked, it’s probably because you’re not very good.’ In six years I’ve been sacked twice and made redundant once. It’s not like I haven’t been offered the opportunity to leave the industry and yet I have kept coming back. There’s no shortage of grads either, thousands of bright young things who cast themselves onto the rocks with their eyes open. Advertising may be a strange vocation, but it is a vocation nonetheless, something you want to do for reasons that you may never quite understand.

A few days ago I went to see a friend. She is at that stage in life where you live in a shared flat, in a drizzly portion of north London and work double shifts in a pub whilst you try to work out, once and for all, what to do. I sat drinking tea in her too-low Ikea armchair, nodding, but feeling like Ben Stiller in Reality Bites, a film which, being 24, she had never heard of. I have a job at an agency I like, doing work for clients that I like. I have a bit of money and column in a magazine. Verily, it seems, I have arrived on advertising’s sunny uplands. And yet, in a sense, I have failed; failed catastrophically to achieve the things that I wanted for myself when I was 24. How does that make me feel? Well, you know, all right actually.

What I seem to have discovered is that you can fail and still be happy. In fact, you have to. And the good news is that once you realise this, there is nothing left to fear.

‘Have you considered advertising?’ I asked her. ‘It’s not as bad you might think.’

William Fowler

Google Maps: Send a Gift to a Stranger

2011-01-14T09:46:00.002Z

This beautifully simple idea: Gift a Stranger from Happiness Brussels is another great example of the digital world effecting physical. When we think of social networking it's almost exclusively considered as an online / virtual activity, but projects such as this show how the web can be used to create social networks with people in the real world.

It's also heartening to see that, when given the chance, we all quite like each other.

Try it out here

Thanks Ro for the link.

PSFK presents Future Of Mobile Tagging Report

2011-01-14T09:38:00.002Z

PSFK have produced this excellent indepth report on the future of mobile tagging. As mobile internet usage rises rapidly around the globe, we as advertisers need to consider how mobile tagging can add depth and experience to otherwise static media formats, such as press and outdoor.

It's long, but a must read in my opinion.

PSFK presents Future Of Mobile Tagging Report

View more presentations from PSFK.

Physical Email

2011-01-10T09:41:00.002Z

I meant to post about John Kestner's Tableau: physical email a while back, but unfortunately forgot. When Andy Kinsella posted it on his blog last Friday I was reminded of how brilliantly simple an idea it is.

There is a certain magic around digital becoming physical, the online world affecting the offline world. As we move further into what people are calling the "post-digital" age, and augmented reality enters the main stream it's a trend that will become more and more prominent in everyday life and therefore advertising.

Two Great Videos for a Friday

2011-01-07T09:44:00.000Z

Two great videos for you to enjoy:

First up the amazing "Marcel The Shell" by Dean Fleischer-Camp.

Second up, Intel's video for their new chip using the web as the landscape for a chase. Thanks to Briain for the link.

A Temporary Restaurant

2011-01-07T09:43:00.001Z

What Happens Next is the name of quite a special restaurant opening soon in New York. Described as a "Temporary Restaurant" the entire look and feel of the space will be transformed every month for nine months based on feedback from patrons and the surrounding community. In an article on PSFK, the team behind the restaurant describe the kind of sensory experience patrons can expect:

"Your inspiration can be anything–from a short story you wrote to a song you sang last week–but it should be based off of a meaningful personal food memory.
For example, your favorite meal could have taken place in your grandmothers kitchen. It might have been in Fall, with meatloaf and mashed potatoes. With the sound of leaves crackling outside. And a teapot boiling. It might have been the only time she told you about her dream of being a piano player."

The idea of what could be described as a reactive space based on community input is very interesting, and part of a trend that's beginning to emerge worldwide, especially in retail. As more of our experiences move online and become virtual, the physical experience of shopping and eating need to change and adapt to keep us interested.

A great idea and they're taking bookings now.

Schweppes Facebook Profile App

2011-01-07T09:32:00.002Z

In this post a few weeks ago I posted a video showing some creative uses of the new facebook profile page. A few days ago Schweppes released this facebook app that helps you construct quite the artistic profile pic for yourself.

The app is a bit high involvement for quite an insipid reward, and the link to Schweppes is tenuous to say the least, but it is a good example of how a quick reaction to a trend online can be effective even if the idea isn't that strong.

Google NGram

2011-01-04T09:37:00.001Z

Launched a few days ago by Google, Google NGram Viewer lets you trace the usage of a word during the last 5 centuries by searching how many times it has appeared in books written over that time span. The data comes from Google's extensive and growing Google Books store.

The graph above shows the use of for our very own company name: Publicis. 1811 - 1812 seems to have been it's peek.

The project is a brilliant example of how data can be used creatively to return interesting, useful, and relevant information in an entertaining and strangely addictive way.

Try it out here.

The 7 Big Technologies of 2011

2011-01-04T09:29:00.000Z

As 2010 ended with lists of what has past, 2011 begins with lists of what is to come. Techcrunch's list goes through the 7 technologies set to shake up the first year of the new decade. All of them will have an impact on shaping the future of advertising, especially, in my opinion, web video on the TV.

The list is below with more details here on techcrunch's site.

1. Web Video On Your TV

2. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment

3. Mobile Social Photo Apps

4. Mobile Wallets

5. Context-Aware Apps

6. Open Places Database

7. The Streaming Cloud

Google Says "Thank You"

2010-12-23T11:21:00.002Z

AKQA, PostPanic and Rehabstudio have created this thank you from Google to all of it's 1 million AdWords clients worldwide. Each film is customised to display the viewers company name, making 1 million unique films.

As Creative Review describes it:

"Rehabstudio created a system that personalised each film, inserting the individual name of each advertiser into the action. AdWords then sent an email to all its customers globally, inviting them to view their bespoke film via a YouTube channel."

It's an interesting to see how digital can be used to turn the "traditional" medium of the mass-market TV ad into something unique and personal.

A Jolly Old Round-Up of Christmas Campaigns

2010-12-22T15:50:00.001Z

Christmas is the time of year where ad agencies can flex their creative muscles and show their clients, and prospective clients, just how creative they are. So here is a round-up of all of the Christmas work that has come to my attention this year.

Mother London : Lappi Leaks

Mother London have released some shocking revelations from Santa's grotto on their twitter page under the #LappiLeaks hash tag. Highlight's include Donor's ongoing fight with Ketamine addiction, Tiger Wood's expulsion from Santa's Good List until he starts banging chicks and winning cups again, and that the 2009 Santa's Apprentice winner lost his job after the exposure of his reindeer porn ring. Follow LappiLeaks here.

Saint@RKCR/Y&R (that's a mouthful): Twitter Knitter

Continuing the Twitter theme, Saint have produced the Twitter Knitter, a machine that produces scarfs bearing the wittiest Christmas tweets featuring the hash tag: #WarmUpCamden. The scarfs where gifted to the cold and needy of the Camden area where the agency is based. You can have a look at the results here.

The Monster Holiday Harmonizer : BBDO New York

Created for their client Monster, BBDO New York's Holiday Harmonizer let's you send Christmas greetings in an odd, auto-tuned, harmonized computer voice. You can write a simple email, type a message and make the Harmonizer sing, or go all out and record your very own song / message and listen to it back in all it's harmonized glory. Try it out here.

BBH : Holiday Alibis

BBH have produced this nifty little site that provides useful excuses, complete with evidence, to help you get some "you time" this Christmas and avoid awkward parties. Excuses include being trapped in a dream within a dream, alien abduction, and some rather dodgy Chinese food. Try it out here.

There's even more Christmassy-addy-joy here on Creative Review.

Interesting Use of the New Facebook Profile

2010-12-20T10:06:00.002Z

Continuing this mornings facebook theme, the video above shows a very creative use of facebook's new profile page. Very nice.

Via Hello Kinsella

Facebook Facial Recognition Tagging

2010-12-20T09:57:00.004Z

Facebooks new "tag suggestions" technology uses facial recognition technology to guess which friends appear in your photos. This will be especially handy when you upload large albums of photos and don't want to go through the tedium of tagging every single one.

The technology could have some interesting applications for branding and advertising if it's made available through the API. Getting yourself "tagged" in as many peoples photos as possible for example or using it as proof that you turned up at an event.

Info and Image via PSFK

Nike Plus - The Creative Edition

2010-12-17T17:05:00.000Z

Myself and two of my fellow Knot Collectivers Caprice and Leon, have been getting together through the horribly awkward iChat over the last few weeks to develop a product that for now is named Creative+. The idea is simple: recreate the energy and creative collaboration of an ad agency, or any creative workplace online. We're very excited about the possibilities of what the product could bring to creative folk and we're looking for your input.

There is a more detailed post here on The Knot Collective written by Leon. If you like / dislike the product, have suggestions for what we could add or take away, or a name please let us now in the comment section below the post.

Thanks.

2010 Psychology Round-Up

2010-12-17T10:41:00.000Z

This time of year produces a lot of "best of" lists, this has been my favourite so far. David DiSalvo has compiled the "10 Psychology Studies from 2010 Worth Knowing About". They include:

1. Most of Us are Space Cadets Nearly Half the Time

2. Excuse Me, Your Sweat is Making Me Feel....Risky

3. You're Not Imagining It, the Rich Really are Different

4. The Power of Posing, it's a Biochemical Thing

5. If You Want to Stop Procrastinating, Give Yourself a Break

Enjoy.

Most Contagious 2010

2010-12-17T10:39:00.003Z

Contagious Magazine have put together this site showing and discussing the top global trends, technologies, and campaigns of 2010. Loads of great stuff here to keep you amused on a Friday.

Foursquare Door Opening Hack

2010-12-15T18:57:00.000Z

Developers Erin Sparling and Nicholas Hall have hacked foursquare's API to use a check-in as a way to open their apartment door. A very clever idea and a nice real-world use of the check-in.

There is a nice video here that I can't embed for some reason. Grrr Flickr / Yahoo!

via the ever excellent PSFK

Google Nexus and NFC

2010-12-13T09:57:00.001Z

The "recommended by Google" sticker uses NFC (Near Field Communications) technology on google's Nexus phone to interact directly with a google image with a NFC chip inserted. The technology allows anyone with the Nexus phone to touch their phone against any image that's NFC enabled, and download or view interactive content.

Between this technology and google goggles, interaction between the online and offline worlds through mobile phones are strengthening rapidly, and in very interesting ways.

More info here on Hotpot blog.

A Christmas Theme

2010-12-13T09:46:00.002Z

We start this Monday morning with a Christmas theme. Here are 2 nice ideas using good old social media to spread a bit of Christmas cheer.

First up is Honda's "Naughty or Nice" app. An idea I'm sure a lot of people had, but this one is quite clever and well executed in my opinion. Instead of a test of some sort the app analysis' your status updates for the year recognising positive and negative words and delivering you with a naughty or nice result. The design of the machine is very nice and in reminiscent of famous Grrr campaign.

Next up is this great idea by Regan Meador using twitter to play secret santa. By filling out a simple form the program picks a suitable recipient from your twitter network. It's an interesting use of social connections that are mostly anonymous. Very simple, very nice.

Both projects via mashable.

BBBRRRRRRUUUUUUMMMMMM!!!

2010-12-10T09:10:00.000Z

Just when you thought Inception could get any cooler, Christopher Nolan, composer Hans Zimmer, and RJDJ CEO Michael Breidenbrücker have collaborated to create: The Inception App! (told you it was cool)

Here is how it's described on PSFK:

"The app warns the user to not play the app with the touchscreen, noting that it’s an experience played with their life instead – using the RJDJ engine the app draws in and remixes sounds from the world around the listener. Building upon the RJDJ concept, the app features a handful of game-like elements, triggering and unlocking various dreams states based not only on types of sounds and audio input, but accelerometer speed and rate of change, ambient light levels, and geolocation as well – encouraging exploration of different environments to unlock different dream stages."

You can download it here.

I'm very excited.

Slow Down App

2010-12-10T09:00:00.001Z

The Slow Down App from OVK uses the GPS on your smartphone to recognise whether you're driving above or below the speed limit: if you drive below the music slows down; if you drive above the music stops altogether until you return to the current speed limit.

A pretty clever use of GPS technology in my opinion: using the senses to indicate a violation of the speed limit, and receiving a reward (the return of your kickin' tunes) as an incentive to drive correctly.

Maybe there are more applications for GPS controlling functions on your phone? One idea might be to not allow any incoming or outgoing calls when the GPS registers the car as moving, but once the car comes to a stop all calls are allowed.

Or a site seeing app, where you program your route into the GPS, indicate the places you'd like the phone to take photos of, say a mountain range, and then set off on your journey safe in the knowledge that you don't have to stop to take photos. You could of course just set it up to document a journey if you wanted to be arty.

Thoughts?

P.S Is it me or is that Mr. Wogan narrating the video?

Shazam On Your TV

2010-12-10T08:48:00.002Z

The popular smartphone app Shazam has targeted the living room as the next line of attack for their music recognition software. If you haven't heard, used or cared about Shazam, it's an amazing piece of technology that can recognise pretty much any song from a 30 second clip, find that song for you on iTunes and social media sites, and let you purchase or listen to it right there.

With 100m users it seems only natural that the technology should integrate into your TV allowing advertisers to use sound recognition to send you info on a product, extend the narrative of the advertising, or download a coupon. Shazam will be launching the service in the US of A in February with TV networks and advertisers that include HBO and LYNX.

Very interesting stuff and another piece of technology that will further strengthen the link between the internet and your TV.

The Best New blogs Of 2010

2010-12-06T09:08:00.001Z

I know most, if not all of you, believe that this in fact is the greatest blog in existence. (Look at that opening sentence structure for God's sake!). But, in case you want to check out the competition, The Bygone Bureau has put up this list of The Best New Blogs of 2010. There are some amazing blogs up there, all worth adding to your reading list.

They asked me to be on it but I was washing my hair at the time. Pity.

The New Facebook Profiles Page

2010-12-06T09:02:00.001Z

Last night facebook released the new facebook profile page. The video above gives a vague overview of what exactly has changed, but good old mashable have gone through it all here in more detail.

I can't find any information yet whether fan pages will be effected by the new profile design, but for now I'll just presume they will.

From a brand point of view it will be interesting to see the effects of moving the tabs from the top of the page to the left. Promotional tabs may become less visible and brands may have to work harder to highlight new tabs and apps.

If the image slideshow at the top of the page is applied to brand pages there might be some interesting opportunities for showcasing events or fans.

If you'd like to try it out here's the link.

3D Models Constructed From Flickr Images

2010-12-06T08:48:00.003Z

Via BoingBoing:

"A UNC team has written an engine that scours Flickr for photos of a city, figures out which ones are images of the same place, analyzes them, and uses the results to build amazingly detailed 3D models -- all in less than a day, using a single PC."

Imagine the possibilities of this technology coupled with the right brand: Daft could use multiple shots of a house's exterior and interior to construct an online 3D walkthroughs of properties; tourism companies could offer 3D recreations of your holiday snaps; coupled with the 3D printing technology mentioned in an earlier post the right brand could offer 3D prints of whatever you shot in camera.

Anti-Social: Social Network Blocker

2010-12-03T10:13:00.001Z

Anti-Social is a handy program for mac that shuts down all of the major social networking sites for an alloted time, giving you the time to focus and actually do some work for a change. You can add sites to your blocks if they're not included. Distraction is annoying, and between email and social media it's harder than ever to focus when the world is a click away. !!SHAMELESS SELF PROMO ALERT!! I wrote about distraction here on The Knot Collective, and this nifty piece of software definitely helps in the fight against anti-focus.

Thanks to Ro for the link.

Facebook App for Xmas Presents

2010-12-03T10:07:00.000Z

Here's a handy facebook app by Etsy that suggests gifts for your facebook friends based on their "likes". Very handy if you haven't paid attention to their not so subtle hints, if you're just not bothered to go shopping in the snow, or if you're a bloke. (Don't tell Eve I said that)

Irelands Good Side

2010-12-02T17:24:00.000Z

Conceived, built and live within 2 days, Ireland's Good Side was an idea a bunch of us in the agency had on the Friday the IMF landed in Ireland. It's a simple idea: bring all of the positive conversations about Ireland on twitter together in one place to promote a positive outlook on a somewhat negative Irish future.

We've had a great response and received loads of hits so far. The positive conversations continue and the twitter feed is as relentless as the Irish rain. The site got a mention today on the excellent PSFK blog alongside Fergus O'Neill's excellent poster below:

Fergus plans on selling exactly 42BN posters worldwide to pay-off the Irish debt.

Come on Ireland!!

3D Printing: Closer Than You Think

2010-11-29T10:00:00.002Z

The costs of 3D printing are dropping rapidly, making the idea of bespoke 3D objects more possible by the day. Companies such as Freedom of Creation are leading the way in producing 3D objects for industry. One area they're particularly excited about is the fashion industry:

"[Imagine] I can measure your body, in 3D, and I can make you perfectly fitting garments in the future without any sewing and stitching, making the needle and the thread obsolete."

3D printers are cheaper and more available than most people think. This RepRap machine costs £300, quite a contrast from earlier machines that cost in the region of £20, 000.

There is huge potential here for the rapid prototyping of products and objects and it can only fuel the fire of agencies exploring the development of in-house products.

Thanks to Ed for the links.

More info here on BBC News.

The Power of Prototyping

2010-11-26T15:36:00.000Z

My second post is up on The Knot Collective. It's rather catchy title is "The Power of Prototyping" and it's all about the power of iterative creation.

BOLD MARIO!

2010-11-26T08:49:00.000Z

Thanks Jamie for the link.

Cal Newport: Getting Creative Things Done

2010-11-26T08:44:00.001Z

Cal Newport has written this very interesting post on The 99% Percent about getting creative things done amidst a busy schedule of meetings and distraction. I've only included a snippet here because it's quite long, but it's well worth a read and may be an interesting solution to ensuring we get more good quality creative time outside of meetings, emails, and phonecalls.

" This situation is common for to-do list creatives – workers who have the juggle creative work – like writing or devising strategy – with logistical work – like prompt email replies and meetings. I'm a to-do list creative: as a theoretical computer scientist, I must switch between solving mathematical proofs – one of the most purely creative endeavors – and the logistics of reviewing papers and meeting with grant managers. To keep things interesting, I also sometimes write.

Here's our quandary: To-do list creatives advance in their careers based on the quality of their creative output. Our logistical responsibilities, however, fight against this goal. Most to-do list creatives cannot drop everything to spend days lost in monk-like focus. But the result of instead squeezing creative work into distracted bursts, driven by deadline pressure, is mediocrity. (Exhibit A: the first draft of my research statement).

Fortunately, however, there is hope..."

Continue reading here.

Traffic Lights Re-Invented

2010-11-26T08:36:00.001Z

It always amazes me how we can take something for granted for so long until someone comes along, changes it, and makes us see it completely differently. Thanva Tivawong's traffic lights are an example of this. Brilliantly simple and borrowing somewhat from the psychology behind the progress bar: that people will wait patiently if the length of the wait is indicated; her redesign, if implemented, could have a huge effect on decreasing the amount of road rage and traffic accidents. An interesting solution for a road safety client, or a city council.

IDEO: The Future of Books

2010-11-24T16:40:00.000Z

This amazing video from IDEO explores the future of books. Demonstrating three different types of interactive book models, Alice, the third and final app is probably the most relevant to us in the advertising world. It explores how an interactive experience could lead to immersive, non-linear stories involving everything from hidden features, geo-location, and video. Imagine the creative opportunities for brands!

Track Your Flush

2010-11-22T09:59:00.001Z

There's a lot of interesting work cropping up using geolocation. This interesting piece of work for Domestos by Lean Mean Fighting Machine takes a different spin on location tracking by letting you track your flush. Using google maps, Flushtracker tracks your poo's progress through your local sewage system and, as it takes several hours to reach it's destination, it sends you regular email updates as it goes.

As much fun as it is to track your poo, it is for a serious cause. World Toilet Day aims to bring awareness to the fact that many people in the developing world have no access to toilets and correct sewage systems.

No One Wants to Steal Your Ideas

2010-11-22T09:48:00.000Z

In this short and insightful post, Pek Pongpaet argues that there's no need to go around worrying if people are going to steal your idea, because your idea is worthless. Ideas are nothing without execution. Everyone has ideas. Not everyone actually executes them.

I completely agree.

Here is the post if you don't want to read it on his site:

"Occasionally my friends and I run into people who have ideas about businesses and are either feeling things out or trying to find people to execute their idea. It usually goes something like this:

I have this idea, but I can’t really tell you until you sign this NDA. Or I have this idea but we really can’t tell you anything other than it’s a Facebook killing social network. The reason we can’t tell is because you might steal our idea.

Unless your idea is geolocation and checkins and you already have millions of users and you are sitting in Yelp or Facebook’s office, I think most people are not going to care.

From my personal standpoint I rarely care about other people’s ideas. It’s not that they are bad ideas, although some are. It’s just that I am way too busy with my own ideas. Ideas are just that – ideas. Without someone to breath life into them day after day, it’s really not worth much.

Think about it. If ideas are worth that much, there would be a marketplace where people sell and buy ideas. I am not talking about patents since those are more than ideas but are blueprints. But people don’t do that. People buy companies and own stocks in companies because companies execute and produce profits.

It’s really the execution of the idea that matters. I may have the idea of creating a social network or a geolocation based checkin, but there are tons of other companies with the same idea. What differs is the execution of the idea, and the victor more often than not, out executes and out maneuvers the competition.

Do you think Groupon cares that much about someone like you or me “stealing” their idea of group deals? Unless I have 600 sales people pounding the pavement, an email list of millions of people, and the manpower to create a platform like they have, they are not too worried about me.

Here’s what Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com has to say about ideas and execution:

I went around and talked to as many people as I could about this idea. A lot of people, when they come up with a business idea, they keep it inside. They don’t want anybody to “steal” their idea. I think that’s a horrible idea. I think you should tell everyone and anyone your idea, without fear that they’re going to steal it. It’s all in the execution. A good idea is really a dime a dozen.

I think the most radical world changing ideas are so out there that the average person cannot see the possibilities of it. I still meet people who don’t get Twitter.

I think Howard Aiken, the original conceptual designer of the IBM Harvard Mark I computer, said it best:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats."