dead insect

Disco Lite in Action, originally uploaded by brett burton.

I love disco, and anything pretty much with flashing lights on it. I found this light boombox while looking for images for a presentation – it’s a shame they don’t still make stuff like this today.

Instead, the market is totally dominated by identical iPods and plain white iPod speaker sets. Boring.

EDIT – my friend Nick found a video!

And there’s an ebay auction for one (look in the comments of this post). A similar model was used in Madonna’s “Hung Up” video.

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Hey guys, it’s the best planning event of the summer – Beersphere.
In the Eagle just near Old Street tube. Planners and other communications people drinking and chatting in a pub.

Full details here at Faris’s blog.

I’ll be there from 7:30 onwards. Woop!

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photo from n3wJack

After that post I wrote about transmedia, I thought I would put up my favourite example that I use to illustrate how a good, rich, idea spreads in a transmedia way. It’s a slide I knocked up ages ago when this stunt happened – feel free to use it, as long as you don’t use it for evil.

It can be used as a this-is-how-the-Internet-works kind of slide, or to show the importance of trying to make ideas richer.

It started in retail (droplifting is the posh term for what Banksy did), and all the different content – images, music, stories, product – whizzed around the Internet. Different people were interested in different aspects of the stunt, which all contributed to the story as a whole.

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There’s a lot of talk about “transmedia” right now, basically meaning

a story which unfolds across lots of different media platforms, with different media contributing distinct bits of the story to make up the whole thing.

I think the plannersphere as a whole has been guilty of perverting and dumbing down the meaning of this, using it to refer almost exclusively to treasure hunts, ARGs (alternate reality games), mysteries or teaser campaigns.

Transmedia means more than simply having your audience dig around for info!

One example of something hailed as transmedia is Golden Jigsaw – this is just a website treasure hunt where you collect pieces of a picture. It’s not transmedia storytelling, here’s why:

1. There isn’t a story.
The only story is “where’s the next clue?”. There isn’t a plot to uncover – it’s just a hunt.

2. It’s not transmedia.
It only uses one mechanic – looking for clues on websites – so where are the multiple media platforms?

In the article Transmedia 101, by the term’s founder Henry Jenkins he mentions the example of Pokemon.

A cartoon, a series of video games on every platform, a card game and a movie – all combining to create a rich universe full of life and stories that you can enter at any point – now that’s transmedia.

There can be the odd mystery here and there, but the whole thing doesn’t just rely on intrigue, like a lot of the teaser campaigns being called transmedia.

The purpose of my rant here isn’t just to try to define things for the sake of it, but because transmedia comms planning is a powerful idea, and I hate to see it trivialised by being applied to every treasure hunt out there.

Also, mechanics like intrigue and mysteries are powerful ways to engage audiences, but there’s no need to yell transmedia at them!

Children play near a giant smiling Lego man that was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort August 7, 2007. REUTERS/Marco de Swart

Anyway, a giant Lego man was washed up on a beach in Europe just yesterday. This kind of thing is what we need more of in transmedia campaigns, not just endless Internet hunts and teasers!

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goodbye, bedroom

I’m going to be working at Holler for 3 weeks, starting Monday 13th August and finishing Tuesday the 5th September.

One of the things which interested me was the fact they have an in-house marketing team – a kind of cross between a media and PR team, who can get stuck in with seeding content, setting up partnerships and doing all that kind of WoM stuff that’s becoming so fashionable lately. Plus they seem like nice, fun bunch.

Feel good to have something sorted until September, so I can relax and devote this week to my admin and other projects.

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I’ve been super busy over the last couple of days, meeting work-related people, hanging out and saving money by having lots of home-cooked food.

The other morning I went to a lovely event called Brunch Bites 1.0, organised by Mike Butcher. It’s a coffee morning in the Breakfast Club in soho, aimed at web/mobile entrepreneurs and industry people. Note my new “suitable for gainful employment” haircut.

Image from Thayer

I met a nice guy called David, who wrote a book on how music propagates through social networks, and a couple of smart guys who are launching web2.0 and widget startups.

I felt a bit dirty being the only ad-guy there – I was surrounded by really positive, do-er mentality people, who believed in providing people with great services they’d want to adopt, rather than relying on marketing. Those of the let’s just make cool stuff school of thought.

Advertising, on the other hand, has always been about making stuff cool, or desirable, without really changing the content (e.g. the ingredients of the Shreddies).

While there’s loads of talk now centered around marketing that provides value to customers, and doing genuinely interesting things, it’s important that we don’t lose the ancient skill of creating communications that incite desire, rather than just inform.

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I’m just back from Secret Garden Party 2007, a festival in the countryside.

I had a brilliant time, and the atmosphere there is pretty unique – it feels like a magical childrens party or something.

image from robjgreen

Apart from obvious factors, like the size of the event, one thing that makes it special is that loads of people there are contributing, not just consuming. There were tonnes of impromptu shows, one-off events, and people going around painting moustaches, as well as the normal big-stage festival stuff.

image from robjgreen

In other words, there’s a high ratio of creators to consumers, which gives it a fun, DIY, amateurish feel that brands like Innocent and Howies do so well.

I also got to meet (again) this guy called Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the magazine The Idler the author of the book How to be Idle. This book is probably the biggest reason why I’ve just quit my full-time job at glue, and it’s a great mix of observation, philosophy, how-to, and general wit.

It tied a golden thread through lots of thoughts I’ve always had, like why I think trading currency derivatives is a bit wrong, and why I hated school, but always loved learning. It’s not really about being idle in the sense that people use the word, nor about being lazy, but about taking responsibility for your life and happiness. Highly recommended.

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You can tell a lot about someone by how and what they txt. What percentage of your txts say “sorry”, “I can’t”, “oops” or “be late” ?

Do you get friends who only ever SMS you to ask for stuff? Or what about nice ones who text you out the blue to ask how you’re feeling? Or who do you always cancel on, and who you send the most X’s to?

I just had this idea for an application which scans all your text messages, and does two things:

1. By looking at how many times you use phrases and words like “I’m so”, “thanks”, “can you”, “help”, “disaster” and so on, it will give you a personality test, something like this one, (taken from a Facebook questionairre-based personality test):

It could also give you charts and graphs of how miserable or elated you’ve been over time, based on how many sad or happy faces you’ve used, or how many exclamation points you use.

2. It would also tell you loads about your relationships with your contacts – it would tell you who your emotional dumping ground is, who always says nice things to you and who texts you loads and whom you never reply to.

It could display all in this in a cool visual way, like a big graphy chart thing, or in a very cutesy neoprint way with halos, devil horns, to appeal to younger audiences.

some neoprints – those Japanese photo booths for kids that print cute stickers of you and your friends

For the technically minded amongst you, you could do in a few ways

* a Java app that you download to your mobile phone

* for mobile operators with web services that let users see their call and text data, it could sit on the web portal

* it could also work for email – be a plug in for Outlook express, or scrape of your gmail, or even be a Facebook widget, seeing who’s wall you post on, and what you say, and displaying a readout on your profile

It would get really interesting if the data was all mashed together from different users - it could tell you what the difference in texting habits across nations was, or who the most apologetic person in the UK was!

I think this is a nice idea because it appeals to both typical gender stereotypes:

* geeky boys like anything that crunches numbers and shows them as stats and graphs of things, and visual maps

* girls love doing quizzes about personalities and especially about the relationships between their friends

(I know these are awful stereotypes, but if you look at a lot of MySpace pages and blogs you find lots of evidence that these are kinds of content that are more prevalent to each gender).

If anyone wants to build it give me a shout!

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More Frenchie crowd…, originally uploaded by boutrosmeister.

I’m going away from tomorrow for a week, to the Secret Garden Party, a nice small festival about an hour out of London. We’re running the Playtent/Hungamunga area – an art and craft tent with some live music and DJs too. Everyone’s welcome – come in and say hi if you’re around!

Back on Tuesday the 31st July, but I will have some limited mobile access to Gmail and Facebook.

Hey also, I finally changed the color scheme of this blog to make articles more legible. It took ages, but gave a real sense of satisfaction, like when you fix your own car or the first time you put up some shelves.

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picture from beyondmagic

I saw this really neat post on HyperHappen’s blog. The gist of it is that whenever anything happens, before anyone has even written any news about it, Google already knows about it due to incoming searches.

“When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear [on the web] in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds”.
Google

The second point is, I guess, can this information be used as news somehow? As microblogging takes off, maybe a bunch of microblog posts put together will form a half decent news article?

Link to a global visual representation of people microblogging via Twitter.

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Kerry Katona, of Atomic Kitten and Iceland ads fame, was threatened at knifepoint whilst masked men ransacked her home.

Link to the BBC news article

This is obviously not a nice thing to happen to anyone, but I am guessing that a lot people out there will have very little sympathy, purely because she’s rich and some people find her annoying.

The BBC article is a bit loaded too –

“Police have removed a Porsche and an Aston Martin from the front of the property.

The cars are to be forensically examined to see if the robbers left any clues when they stole the BMW which was also parked at the house.”

- this isn’t necessary, and just creates vitriol – why does a family need a Porsche, Aston and BMW anyway?

Anyway, my thought was, is that say the robbers anonymously stated what they’d be using the money for a worthy cause? Like a modern day Robin Hood. I wonder what level of support they would garner from the public?

If they only targeted easily hatable celebrities – for example:

Stealing money from Pete Doherty, to give to drug abuse charities

Stealing one of Jeremy Clarkson’s large-engined cars and selling it to pay for solar water heating in developing nations?

I also wonder what the media reaction to them would be like. Since I wouldn’t advocate crime in any way, would there be any legal and less extreme ways to do this?

For example, a TV show where aggravating celebs go on trial for their excessive ways and get made to change their behaviour or face fines?

With all respect to celebs, our world is facing a basic problem of everyone in the West leading excessive, wasteful lives, that no amount of recycling plastic bags is going to solve. We need to work out a way of making irresponsible excess, and those who glamourise it, uncool.

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As most of you know by now, I’m leaving glue London after almost 2 and half years of working here as a planner.

I’ve had a lot of fun here, done some really interesting work, and to be honest I can attribute a lot of the good stuff in my life right now somehow or other to glue people.

This is my glue animated gif head, which bobs away in its hoodie. Everyone who works at glue gets an animated pixel head.

Oh well. To the future then, I’m going to be spending my time:

* freelancing in other digital and traditional agencies (if you know anyone looking let me know!)

* exploring a lot of different kinds of work and hobbies from eco-building to modding my chopper

photo from JC

* doing some marketing consulting for smaller companies.

My first job of this kind has been working for small social network called WAYN which my friend Tom works for. It’s been really enjoyable and interesting – I’ve been working on helping them define their brand a bit – i.e. “what is it exactly you do? and who for?”.

So broadly, I’m a bit nervous, but excited and looking forward to speaking to loads of different people and companies in the quest to find a few interesting things to do.

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photo from varmazis

This is the most fantastically silly thing I’ve heard about for ages. Essentially, men in Godzilla and Ultraman (70′s Japanese rubber suit monster movies) do pro wrestling, but with added props, such as cardboard cities to destroy.

Here’s a highlight reel of a Brooklyn event:

link to youtube

I’m utterly enthralled, and with my new found unemployment, I’m keen to get an event (albeit a very small one) going in the UK. It’s another great example of the mix of film, entertainment and sport that’s springing up at a grassroots level all over the world – it’s the kind of thing brands should be doing, rather than paying people to find out about and copy.

I find it a fantastic mix of cultures, from US pro wrestling, Japanese Monster movies, and I think it would fit really nicely with the whole England summer festival vibe – perhaps first demo bout at Bestival this year?

If you’d like to help organise an event, please get in touch. We need:

Atheletes - people with wrestling, MMA, martial arts or gymnastics backgrounds, but most of all with a love of pro wrestling.

Costume and prop builders – balsa wood, pvc, theatre costumes, ring builders, all sorts

Creatives - with an interest in the genre to help with character concepts, storylines and general shenanigans.

Enthusiasts - anyone from ring girls, to spectators, to just helping out.

Please get in touch if you’re interested, or pass on to people you think might dig this kind of silliness. We’ll be starting low key – think 4 atheletes and simple rope ring with mats and a cardboard London Eye and Big Ben to destroy.

Remember, Tokyo wasn’t destroyed by monsters in a day!

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I don’t know why people haven’t though of this before, but here we go. The Magic Wheel.

direct link to youtube

My guess is that it might be pretty good for getting around – combining the stability and smooth running of a bike wheel, with the carry-ability of a skateboard. And the dorkiness of a unicycle.

Having said that though, I’ve seen a group of local Hackney youths unicycling around Victoria Park, London, complete with grime music playing from their phones. If I had to take a punt at guessing a meaningless trend, it’s that unicycling might be in again.

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Web 2.0:

“you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.”

source: http://bash.org/?779320

I also heard another good, more serious one, can’t remember where this is from though.

“websites that get better with more people”

If you want to read more useful information about what web2.0 is, you could go here.

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photo from flickr

I read about this ages ago, but never thought they’d actually do it. To promote the launch of the Simpsons movie, they’ve turned some 7-11 shops into Kwik-e-Marts, complete with fake brands (re-named Slurpee as Squishee) and so on.

photo from flickr

7-11 footed the bill, which people guess is into the single millions. Hats off to them for doing something very daring and different in retail. If only Happy Shopper had had the courage to do something like this they might still be here today.

Full story on Yahoo! here
More pics from flickr here

I’ll end with a video of Bumblebee Man from YouTube. Nothing to do with the story but he is my favourite Simpsons character.

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I got a message via Flickr (a photo sharing website) asking if schamp could use one of my pictures (one I’d taken in Hackney City Farm). As far as I can work out, schmap is a city guide with a map mash-up.

The whole thing is dead smart for 3 reasons:

1. It saves them having to buy photos or pay people to take them
2. They had a very slick system where I could just click to say if I was ok with them using the picture or not
3. I am now definitely going to tell people about my picture being used on schmap, which gives them a powerful boost to their for word-of-mouth activity

Link to the schmap page here.

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Nice new BBC World ads for their US launch. They use a simple text poll mechanic to bring to life current issues.

Granted, there are about a million other campaigns that have the same idea (HSBC: Art/Rubbish, Dove: Fat or Fit), but they do the job well for now.

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A lot of the time these days, we’re talking about stuff which gives consumers real value, “enabling” them, defining our marketing through actions, and a million other things that we don’t actually end up doing.

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as in the “communications” business.

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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.

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