I recently saw an exhibition with the French photographer Brassaï who is famous for his uncensored, lyrical and sometimes raw pictures of Paris by night in the 1930’s. But what really caught my attention was a brilliant quote that summed up his philosophy and actually captures the wonders of the recent empowerment in mass documentary of everyday life provide by web 2.0 tool like Flick on the picture side and YouTube on moving pictures. The quote simple says “Extract the eternal from the momentary”.
Talking about Flickr there is an interesting article here in the online edition of Wired linking to the 10 best Mashups of Flickr. It’s a clear example of how strongest marketing efforts in the technology area today is the massive creativity from consumers that use data from sites like Google, Yahoo and Flickr. The probably most famous Flickr Mashup is the “spell with flickr (http://metaatem.net/words) which even a supposedly London creative hotshop has made its website front page graphics (http://www.bmbagency.com/)
A mashup, for the unfamiliar, is a hybrid web application that uses data from an outside source to drive a web service. Mashups can be created using data culled from RSS feeds, public databases, or any open data source.
Virgin has done it again - doing a truly involving campaign for its digital music business. It’s once again Ground Zero who’s behind and this time it’s not print but a film. For me what’s better than something than combines the world of communication with almost nerdy music quizzing? It’s really difficult though, but then I guess you have to see it over and over again.
The film is at:
http://www.natl.tv/work/virgin/movie.html
Thanks for the tip to Crackunit.
The Future Marketing Summit presented by IF/PSFK is being held these days in New York. Being far away it’s great that CoBRANDIT has been out with their cameras and is video podcasting the event with interviews. Here you will find clips with Paul Woolmington from Naked NYC, Charles Rosen from Amalgamated, Alex Bogusky from CP+B and others. The link is here: http://www.obttv.com/
Co-creation and mass customization is not new to the sneaker world – most impressively demonstrated with the Nike ID feature. But now rival Adidas also wants their claim to fame in this field and it’s supposedly originates from a similar project dating back more than 20 years. Their initiative Adicolor is very non-technical but creative customization tool – that consist of acrylic paints, two paint brushes, a wooden palette and off course a pair of plain white sneaks ready to be forever individualized.
The full article is found at Sneaker Freaker here: http://sneakerfreaker.com/article.php?id=484
Always dreamt of having Albert E write your clever words on his blackboard? Here is the chance http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
We are not talking about the Isaac Hayes character from South Park, but the original inspiration for the wacky Swedish chef from Muppet Show. Allegedly the inspiration came from a guy called Lars Bäckman and a performance on American television in the Seventies. Now he is back in an IKEA campaign to promote kitchens build around an ironic website filled with different film content and stuff. It’s the second IKEA UK kitchen campaign built around an entity far away from the actual products. Last time it was about stressing less and enjoying life outside of work. Both of them work quite well in my opinion. I think it’s made in collaboration between the Danish agency Robert/Boisen & Likeminded and Naked. The link is http://www.realswedishchef.co.uk/
Thanks to all that voted for me in Adlands “battle of the ad blogs”. I ended up on an honourable third place – very surprisingly. Thanks to all the other blogs in the category which are all filled with wit and constant inspiration – they are all on my Blogline. Congrats to Russell Davies - the locomotive on planning in the blogosphere.
Verizons CMO John Stratton gave a speech at the recently held Madison & Vine conference from Ad Age. This is a great piece of insight to the growing frustrations from a billion dollar advertisers on the changing media landscape and offerings from communication companies.
The points:
"Your clients are absolutely in trouble and they are looking for you to save them."
"What you've been selling for the last 50 years no longer works."
"Major marketing money is going to be in motion in the next decade and no one really yet understands exactly where it will land, if it even will land, or if it will just disappear altogether."
"Before they figure out where to put their money, your marketer clients will hire and fire agency after agency, seeking someone, anyone, who can tell them where they might go next."
"CMO average tenure, already famously brief, will get even shorter as CEOs begin to recognize how much money they are blowing on antiquated media plans."
"Your marketer clients are really seeking one thing and one thing only: an audience for the message they are trying to convey to the market place."
"But your clients actually need more than just an audience. One of the consequences of the evolution of our media-delivery systems over the last 10 years is that the audience you do ultimately find is much less receptive to the message you're trying to send. They are absolutely armed and ready to get to the content they want while avoiding the message you are trying to implant within it."
"They need much more than an audience. They need an audience that cares about what they have to say. They need their message to be relevant to the audience they are saying it to."
How about Rubric’s cube as your interior décor. Nice.
Electrolux wants to know how the world looks in 2020. Instead of experimenting with the questions on the internal lines they have asked leading students around the world how they see consumer needs of tomorrow. This co-creation exercise is called “The Electrolux Design Lab 2005”. The various design projects on household appliances ranges from the more serious to the more obscure.
The pictured projects “LickClean” is from the UK students Timothy Yeoh and David Wilson based around an idea of a waterless house.. The “LickClean” is a funny tongue attachment which can clean your plates without the use of water. See all the projects here.
Adland – one of the most influential ad blogs in the world, has come up with the “Battle of the Blogs” a virtual award show in different ad blog categories.
To my very big surprise I just returned to my inbox with the discovery that this little blog is nominated in the planner/theorist category.
So give me your vote here. And never mind that some of the competition in this category comes from the very best planners out there.
Ronaldinho, Messi, Puyol, Valdés, Belletti, Márquez, Larsson, Giuly, Maxi, Gio, Ezquerro, Edmílson, Sylvinho, Van Bommel, Gabri, Oleguer, Iniesta, Jorquera. Not to mention the modern day Coliseum that is Camp Nou, delicious tapas, Cerveza San Miguel, Great bars, lot’s of walking (which also included a little bit of more upstream cultural impact in the form of an exiting exhibition in the Macba – The Museum of Contemporary Art) and an overall charming city
This weekend I joined ten of my best friends for an amazing trip to Barcelona. We left the girlfriends at home so we could concentrate on nothing but pure enthusiasm for the Catalonian dream team. El Barca bested Alaves 2-0 and we saw sparks of genuine geniality from the world best player - the magical Ronaldinho. Our collective regret was that none of us made it as a sports commentator flying around the world just watching spectacular football like this.
One marketing insight occurred to me during the stay at Camp Nou and that is how strong football is in the era of battle for the best content on our multiple media platforms. Nike is present everywhere in the stadium area and they are also using Ronaldinho very cleverly in a lot of their advertising both traditionally and virally. But I think Ronaldinho and others could be used even more in the area of branded entertainment and even for more serious educational purposes. Why not have “Ronaldinhos Football School” presented by Nike and with a heavy presence online. Who knows maybe I’m not the only one wanting to learn from his tricks and tips.
I just bought this very funny cross-over between a magazine and an art project. It’s by an artist called Brendan Michael Carey. This first issue has been made in over 17.000 unique versions (over the past 30 months) of these wooden magazines (it’s just different pieces of wood) in all shapes and forms. Mine is one of the rare versions called “The Fashion Shoot Issue” where he has shot a hole through the magazine accompanied by the actual bullet. The second issue is going to bee a magazine made on different mirrors so the buyers themselves are the front cover superstars. It’s an interesting project and quite provocative in it’s questioning of our obsession with the glossy surfaces of fashion and the cutting edge media.
I visited one of the Size sneaker shops in London last week. The store has a room that’s permanently used for certain advertisers to do small installations and exhibitions – in this case the Nike Air Max 95. It’s a great example of embracing the depth, nuance and complexity of a brand. Of course it’s not all brands that have such an interesting story about how a shoe was developed through explorations of bone musculatures. But most brands have more to tell than a simple endline - especially if the audience is experiencing the brand outside of the boundaries of TV advertising.
A lot of the coolest initiatives on the web come from savvy audiences that embrace brands just as other cultural phenomena’s. The Polanoid.net site: is a great example of an audience loving this special depth and quality that a Polaroid has and has decided that the world should share their “instant moment” just as people are doing in the digital picture sphere. The results so far are more than 7.000 pictures.
