Round the strange Christmas tree

I wish everyone who should cruise by this little blog a merry Christmas & happy New Year. The tree is from this years Roskilde Festival. It’s sort of like Sony Bravia “balls commercial” being the inspiration for reinventing the Christmas tree.

Contagiousness

The always inspiring magazine Contagious has its Most Contagious 2006 annual list of brilliant pieces of communication.

Here is everything from the landmark marriage of Youtube and Google to the Design Barcodes to the Second Life to the Graffiti on Air Force One to the Nokia Music Recommender to the life in Adicolors to the Lynx Jet to the Inconvenient Truth to the…

See it all here:
http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/MostContagious2006.pdf

And the person making all this contagiousness happen is no other than YOURSELF we are told from Time Magazine.

Which Cover?

Should one go with the version containing 3D glasses or the one with the eyes?

My Beck album cover

I have said before but Beck is one artist that makes it worth still buying your physical album – not only because of the brilliant DIY album cover thing but also because of the accompanying DVD with videos for all songs.

I’ve bought a couple of the songs on iTunes when it came out but since seeing thing in a record store a couple of days ago I decided that it was a must have.

My album hasn’t been individualized yet. It’s one of those really big aesthetic decisions I will have to give a little time.

There is a brilliant article in Wired featuring Beck’s outlook on the future of the album. It’s also a great read for the future of content and communication in general. Very forward looking man that Beck.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/beck.html

Three favourite questions

Brand Utility (everyone’s favourite non-internet application brand utility example – Nike Run London)
Brand Spaces (here is the cold room in the Burton Ski shop – brilliant)Sharing,connection and creating with Flickr Toys – here is Billboard creating toy (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/)

You know those kind of question that just get’s the discussion and thinking going. I have 3 current faves.

1. Question - How can the solution to this brand's problem also solve a bigger, more societal problem?"

It comes from Jack Cheng in one of the many brilliant post on psfk about Brand Utility - check out the post here:
http://www.psfk.com/2006/11/branded_utility_6.html (a Piers Fawkes presentation on the subject)
http://www.psfk.com/2006/11/branded_utility_1.html (nterview With Benjamin Palmer of Barbarian Group)
http://www.psfk.com/2006/11/branded_utility_2.html (Interview With Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly)
http://www.psfk.com/2006/11/branded_utility_5.html (Interview With Jack Cheng )

2. Question - How can we give consumers a real life experience of our brand?

There is a lot of great examples from the Trendwatching Brand Spaces study here:
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/brand-spaces.htm

I, recently saw a presentation with Communication Planning specialist Jim Taylor where he took us through all the many possibilities in retail communication today. He points out to his current counting in the area with more that 80 in-store possibilities and 20 around the store options. Which is just the known option from established retail chains not counting all the creative possibilities with pop-up shops and so on. It's still an area with a lot of creative and innovative potential.

3. Question – How can we make people share, connect and create?

I know it's the engagement strategy again again. But it's always a great question to ask every time you sit there and think you have solved the business problem with your well functioning overall brand idea and brilliant insights.

Street Poster Poetry #3

This could either describe an annual conference for ethnography/anthropology or just the top ten list on YouTube.

Copenhagen knows what’s NEXT

Last week was time for another round of future explorations in Copenhagen with the NEXT2006 exhibit and conference. It was held at new spectacular IT University and since didn’t bring my camera here is a photo taken from from the Innovation Lab photo stream at Flickr.

A day filled with interesting projects, people and thinking. It’s always an inspiration to think about tomorrow, and wonder how quickly it becomes today.

Here is the blog:
http://next.typepad.com/

Here is the website and pictures:
http://www.next2006.dk/2006/en/index.php

Execution, Compression & a Visual World

There is nothing like a trip to the museum. So full of great thinking, so much inspiration, so filled with interesting destinies, existential questions, so much breathtaking creativity.

What fascinate me about artist are the many roles they fulfil in a creative production compared to the amount persons and functions in takes in the communication business. The artist has all the hats on in the role of the researcher, the strategist, the creative, the implementer – a one man band.

Two weeks ago I was on a little romantic trip to Paris with my girlfriend among many other things we paid a visit to the always great Centre Pompidou – Modern Art Museum.

There where lot’s of great exhibitions going on but especially three of them got me thinking in the direction of some of the hot topics in the communication sphere.

Simplicity, Complexity and Compression

The on-going discussion around planning blogs have been on how to be both complex and nuanced at the same time as having a simple overall idea/essence/concept easily understandable even at a glance. Lately Russell Davies has talked about compression as the answer to something that can be both understood from a simple point of view and can be decompressed out into a much more complex understanding.

Yves Klein is simply a terrific example of this. He has his monochrome deep blue colour – which is even called international Klein Blue – and this colour goes through almost all of his work. What seems a little too easy and one-dimensional a first quickly becomes very exciting going through the exhibitions of his. The blue colour only acts as an over layer for his different experiments. It’s a complex variety of his different shapes, his paint methods like ballet choreography, his symphonic orchestra playing only one tone, him using blue painted models as brushes, his architectural projects, his “blue” sound works, his film sets and more.
More about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein
A visual world

Without downplaying the importance of the written word I’m probably not alone with the opinion that in a world of communication clutter we need more visually outstanding communication. Not just because it travels better across borders, but also because all new research point in the direction of emotions and pictures are more important than actual message understanding. Benetton’s Fabrica school is a great lab for thinking in this area. They held an exhibition to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Lot’s of interesting stuff there.

There is off-course the classical Oliviero Toscani style above (which I admire more from a visual point of view – but have certain problems with on a more ethical level)
The exhibition seen from above


Lots of great stuff thought provoking stuff like the examples above.

Most interesting is the things they do in interactive/digital fields.

The 10x10 site (www.10x10.com) was created here by the near genius Jonathan Harris. An artist & digital designer. See his other brilliant stuff here http://www.number27.org/
An interactive news channel.
A wall that appears to be displaying you live, but is actually build out of different delayed pictures.
This a moving images wall that each shows your continuous actions frame by micro frame in front of a camera.
This is the big canvas electronic Moleskine.

Off-course there is quite a lot of the usual anti capitalism/anti Americanism/anti imperialism stuff. Which seems a little easy and tired compared to the other stuff.

Overall an interesting school and probably interesting people to hire.
Execution is strategy

Finally there was the museums repeating experiment to do new thematic presentations of it’s own collection. The exhibition was called Le mouvement des images (Art & Cinema) and proposes a rereading of 20th century art through the filmmaking. It’s based around organised around the basic components of film – frame roll, projection, story and editing. It clearly shows that art have been very inspired by the cinematic world and that your theme/strategy is seldom where the magic happens. This is great exploration into the magic of execution where your experiments with different techniques are the strategy itself.

So when in Paris go see all of this.