dreams of flying: photography exhibition

Just a really beautiful set of pictures from an award winning photographer, Jan Von Holleben.


Click this picture for the whole set.

butler's furniture, shadwell, E1

This is a brilliant old furniture and household store in Shadwell, East London. They have great stuff like vintage vacuum cleaners and playboy-era ice crushers. Prices are reasonable and it's not yet raided by hipsters.



Here's a link to a map.

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

This is brilliant. The kind of thing that you talk about at 2am with friends, but someone's actually done it. This is a really tight concept around which to remix some ideas, which is, I guess what creativity is all about.

middlesex filter beds, capital ring

I thought I would take a moment to big up the Middlesex filter beds in NE London. Near Hackney Marshes/Clapton kind of way.

Because its made of regular shaped, stone walkways, with a big circle in the middle and iron pump switches at regular places on the edge of the circle, it looks like a video game level. Very mysterious and cool. The kind of game where you run around big stone levels, pressing switches to make stone blocks move and water flow. Which is in fact what those switches used to do when the filter beds were operational.



I highly recommend checking them out if you're in East London. There a big route you can follow called the Capital Ring - which is a walking/cycling route all the way around zone 3ish London - about 105 miles in all.


I find this sign really inspiring. Crystal Palace all the way to Richmond on one footpath.

Rules for marketing and advertising on Facebook

I thought I would put together a guide for advertisers and agencies looking to use Facebook. I messed around for ages then cut it down to three.

1. Be totally honest with full disclosure of what you are doing and why.
Otherwise, you will get found out. If you are going to use "influencers", or create a profile for the Honey Monster, be upfront about exactly what it is.

2. You need a great idea that is interesting, PARTICIPATIVE, and based in truth.
Otherwise, really, honestly, don't bother at all. No please, don't. It's embarrassing and a waste of everyone's time. To give you an example of how worthwhile and interesting, here are ideas which people actually care about:

London's largest Splashmob Waterfight (100k members)
The most brilliant, participative idea I have heard in a while.

Find Madeline (UK girl who was abducted on holiday, 90k members)


I <3 Spooning (35k members)
which answers such questions like is Spooning with others cheating, and other more obvious, funnier questions.

3. If it's not relevant and credible for your brand, you still can't do it.
Even if it's a really good idea.
Trying to get David Hasslehoff to #1 was a good idea. Pepsi wouldn't be be able to pull it off convincingly.
http://www.gethasselhofftonumber1.com/


Once you have got a great, participative idea, then you can go read any of the numerous other hints and tips pages on how to recruit and spread the word on Facebook. I suggest using as much different on-and-off-line media as you can, rather than relying on any one thing.

As ever, don't think about Facebook as your campaign, it's just another tool you can use if you actually have a great idea.

As a quick "what if", here is an idea that I think would make a good hook for a brand - not too complex, with fair enough pay-off:

Sponsor the Facebook city race - first city to 100K people in the group will get a massive free party with bands, etc in their city, sponsored by brand-X.

Anyone have any more suggestions?

sub-cultural themes, pet food brands

There's a site called Reddit which is a user community of real geek news and articles. The people who populate it are dead smart, program computers and hate big commercial brands apart from Apple. So I was surprised to see an article from a Purina cat foods blog on the front page of Reddit.

The article on the Purina blog is essentially about how cats have learned the importance of meowing only to communicate with humans (they never use meowing in cat-to-cat comms).

The article was then submitted to Reddit with the description that got it voted up to the front page as:

"Cats only meow because they want us to be their slaves".

Whoever spun this has done a quality bit of planning - re-framing an ordinary article to resonate with the geek culture on Reddit.

This brought me to the idea of sub-cultural themes - essentially a posh way of saying an audience insight. They're a bit like the power chords I read ages ago on Russell Davies's blog, but more about myths, beliefs and subtleties rather than the raw imagery of powerchords.

For example the powerchord here is "animals can talk!", which is pretty universal, but the geeky subcultural theme, identified by the headline, is

That an unlikely sub-species or person is actually in control.

Geeks love this theme as it's an amusing scenario which is flattering to quiet, overlooked, intelligent people.

I'd argue that identifying these cultural themes is crucial to making great ads which resonate. We're doing it already - in the audience section of creative briefs we put "these are kind of people that believe..." and such like. But I'm going to try thinking about more of these themes for different audiences and putting one in each brief.

audience insight:
I'm know I'm clever, but shy and find it hard to influence people

leads to popular sub-cultural theme:
An unlikely but secretly intelligent subspecies is actually enslaving us

hook:
Intelligent cats have us enslaved

panorama on scientology

One of the most prominent themes in our culture today is a battle raging between those who seek to control information, and those that want full and free disclosure/distribution.

The music industry, big brands, small time con-artists, the Chinese government, even restaurants that get bad online reviews and politicians are fighting a seemingly losing war against people who have very different views on how information should be controlled.

One good example of an organisation that works hard to maintain secrecy is The Church Scientology. I've been fascinated by the recent tiff between them and the BBC, following a Panorama episode which portrays them negatively:



Anyhow they've responded by creating material on youtube which questions the sensibility of the journalist, and his employers, as well as a damage limitation response here, complete with comments from sock puppets (fake Internet identities generated to look like grass roots support).

It's just drawing more fire from the Internet, and I'm sure they will get pretty tired of moderating comments soon enough.

There are a lot of issues to talk about, like censorship, who can own information, etc, will mass journalism work, etc, but for now, I just want to say that organisations that have to devote a lot of time to PR fighting will have so much work to do that it that it will be a real strain on them. The converse is true too.

great dog costume

cool product: webkinz

I really like this idea. They're like Ty Beanie Babies (limited edition collectible cute soft toys with high re-sale value), but they come alive online - each toy has a unique code which links to its online avatar version.

Like Habbo Hotel, kids can talk to other virtual pet owners, buy stuff for their pet's rooms and so forth. They're doing very well in the US with 2 million units shifted so far, of which about 1 million sign up to the Webkinz online club thing.

Computer time, originally uploaded by mia3mom.

Has implications for products with maximum idea, minimum physical stuff. You could see the virtual stuff as like Barbie's accessories - kids these days are happy to pay money to consume these virtual things (which have less environmental impact).