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My blog has now moved to here December
2005
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25th
May 2005 - Why emergence is good for you
The talk was by Steven Johnson, who has a new book out: Everything Bad Is Good For You.
Sadly,
he didn't actually talk about this (I was rather hoping for good arguments
in support of trashy movies and computer games where you shoot people,
as my wife doesn't really approve).
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Like Star Wars? Feel sympathy for the organic cause? Then watch this.
A bit long. Probably preaching to the converted. And rather retro in its focus on 'A New Hope'. But still funny in places. And it does show how, with the help of the internet, you can get talkability for most things if you use a little imagination
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18th May 2005 - Do the Funky Penguin Having worked for a number of years on the Penguin Books account here in the UK, I know the company has always struggled with whether they are a bit dusty and old-fashioned; a brand of the establishment (in that trustworthy BBC sense). Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it is nice to see them getting a bit funky, as they embrace the whole open source digital revolution.
With Penguin Remixed, the publisher has released thirty of their best spoken word samples from their audiobooks. They are inviting people to download and remix these into new audio tracks. The instructions: "download the samples, use one or more in a track and submit that track to the penguin remixed website to stand a chance of winning publication in a Penguin digital audiobook later this year". All of which may seem quite normal for the 21st Century...although for publishing it's pretty radical. But it is another good example of a brands allowing consumers to interact with, even change their products…increasing loyalty as a consequence.
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16th May 2005 - Blokes in dresses Was reminded at the last minute the other week that I had agreed to do the comment piece that sits alongside Marketing Magazine's weekly Adwatch survey. Which meant I had to bang this out on a train journey the morning it was required. I chose the Bounty advertising not because I think it is any good (although it does make me smile), but because large blokes crammed into floral print dresses is at least something you can build a point of view around: namely the lost art of a good gag in our world of 'cutting edge' advertising for 'media literate' consumers (a big ho ho in both cases is probably called for). (Note: given that Internet Explorer minimises images, you'll have to find that 'box with arrows' that appears in the corner and click it to make this readable) Anyway, I was quite pleased given the short notice. Although it has been outrageously subedited in places, resulting in my lyrical prose seeming rather lumpen and leaden. Also, I will leave you to guess where they rewrote the sentence: "a man with a hunting horn shoved down his trousers? It's that other perennial comedy classic: the knob gag (even Shakespeare had those)". Apparently that was just too risqué for the delicate flowers of the UK marketing community.
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More on open sourcing (see 'open source advertising' and 'open source music'). A guy in the US (Paul Rademacher) had the rather nifty idea of pairing Google Maps with classified ads, mapping by price range all properties for sale or rent in specific areas.
Very useful. And rather than taking umbrage and threatening to sue, Google has taken this quite well. Not surprisingly really given that they have just launched code.google.com, a new tool that gives access to free source code and lists of Google's API services. I've had a look, and it's all a bit techie for me. But a brilliant idea, and I'm sure there are loads of people out there who know what to do with it (thanks to Trendwatching for finding this).
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6th May 2005 - Good old fashioned entertainment I like a good bit of CGI as much as the next person (maybe more, if my DVD collection is to be believed). But it does make you a tad blasé; it seems that anything is possible, making the special seem less special. It all just lacks a bit of magic. And this becomes all the more evident when you do see something truly special…all done without the aid of a computer. The magic comes flooding back. We went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium last weekend. And the car really does fly. Yes, you know it's all done with hydraulics and stuff. But it doesn't matter. It's a magical moment of the kind missing from much of what passes for entertainment nowadays.
My 8 year old son, who now completely takes for granted the CGI effects in your typical sci fi blockbuster, couldn't stop talking about the fact that "the car really did fly off the stage". And as my wife pointed out, it really did have you clapping like a kid again. So a lesson here maybe for anyone involved in marketing and communications: don't worry about how technologically clever something is (we all have computers now). Just make sure you've got the magic.
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3rd May 2005 - Perpetual Vision The Zoom Quilt is a Flash-based variation on the old picture-within-a-picture idea…but with potentially infinite iterations. It's pretty hard to describe, and the imagery is a little odd, but the concept is one which could have a lot of uses beyond the art project shown here.
What about websites you can actually travel through, in good William Gibson cyberspace fashion (though I guess there would be a high chance of getting lost…and it does rather contravene the '2 clicks from anywhere on your site' rule). Or possibly more interesting, it might be a novel way to show the story of a brand or business; to dramatise the narrative path it's on, rather than rely on a slug of solid prose or blunt toots like Brand Pyramids.
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