Happy Raging Christmas

Over communication

Employee Generated Content

Southwest Airlines flight attendant David Holmes has become something of a minor Internet hit after passengers posted cellphone videos of his hip-hop inspired takes on the standard cabin announcements.

Brands, esepcially in the UK, are trying more and more to distinguish themselves through their staff, who are now seen as the front line of a brand. B&Q, Asda, Sainsbury's and more all want to show their authenticity and fluffy personality, which makes perfect sense.

The disturbing thing is though someone, somewhere is now probably trying to sell this clip....

Little red riding hood

Awesome video, by a Swedish University student who was given a school assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red ridning hood.

http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/

What Facebook is for...

Facebook gives you cancer (Fact?)

I read the best (ie. worst) Daily Mail article recently. They are currenlty peddaling the idea that new evil is social media. The title of this piece of wonder was 'How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer' a double whammy of Daily mail goodness.

In a nutshell the argument is that sites such as Facebook are causing us to spend less time physically with our friends and more time on the web. From a medical point of view Dr Aric Sigman (who may or may not actually be Dr Nick from the Simpsons) believes some genes, including ones involved with our immune systems, act differently according to how much social interaction a person had with others.

Clearly the headline is a red herring, and pointing the finger to a specific site is a big creative embellishment, but I love this article.

1) The article was online - ah sweet irony!
2) The thought from Robin (Rhondda Valley, Wales) on the comments page was genius (if a little disturbing):
'I think the real issue people are forgetting here is that using Facebook MUST be having some effect on house prices?'
3) Finally as a resultof reading this people took it upon themslevs to unleash an unforgiving and cutting response.

www.doessocialnetworkinggiveyoucancer.com

God bless the Internet!

The power of now

I've loved this campaign ever since I saw it last November, three months on and I've finally got hold of a widget for it. To me it is a perfect embodiment of what digital advertising is all about...

Creating pieces of accesible content that inspires users and brings a brand's DNA to life.

Does New Media need a different name?

Last night at one of the IPA’s ‘Club 44’ events, Laurence Green spoke about what ideas will thrive in the new media world we live in, what he thinks the new communications model looks like and what this means for agencies. Whilst it was reassuring to hear many of the things we already practice at glue it dawned on me that perhaps new media, just as New Labour before it, is slowly but surely losing its prefix.

Ten years on, consumers and advertisers alike now stare at a much-changed and fast-changing media landscape. We are constantly being told that our industry is slowly adjusting to new conditions: most obviously the emerging dominance of the web and reduced roles for TV and print. But have we not already reached the tipping point?

In Back to the Future 3 (admittedly the worst one) Doc and Marty make a scale model of their latest time bending escape route over Clayton Ravine. If advertising was placed on that model, surely we would now be past the rickety sign exclaiming ‘Point of no return’ and trying to drag the girl (clients?) along for the ride!?

A generation of consumers now exists with no knowledge of life without digital, where brands do rather than say, campaigns can exist and thrive without any traditional media budget and content is king. Creativity by its very nature continues to break or bend the rules that we write for it, I’m just wondering how long the name tag will be kept on its current formation.

A day in the life of glue...

Beautiful data

After recently reading through a lot of old emails in search of something else, I got really distracted by an old post in Ping Mag, which had an interview with Boris Muller. In an attempt to share some other great examples here are some edited highlights:

Based on Buckminster Fuller’s legendary Dymaxion map

Gorgeous 3D mapping
You’ll know this one...
Napoleon’s march to Moscow
History flow – visualisations of a topic’s life story on wikipedia
Feltron annual report
TED talk with some great stuff
Loads of lovely ways into Digg data
Dopplr’s raumzeitgeist map
Facebook friend wheel
Live US flight paths
The Wattson – see how much electricity your home is using
Nike Plus
Movie charts

Are great ideas dead?

The complexity of digital media often blurs the lines between "ideas" and "production," particularly as brand building moves from messages to experiences. If the experience is the fulcrum of the effort, it is hard to discount the work that goes into creating that experience as simple production. The best work often erases the distinction.

"The era of everything being based on the great idea is over," says Michael Lebowitz. "Other things have risen to a common level of importance." Without interactive experts to bring ideas to life, he adds, the big ideas are like "a fart in the wind."

"You need an army," says Michael Ferdman, managing director of Firstborn, a New York digital agency. "The idea is going to be spurred by two people, but they need to embrace all kinds of tentacles. It's like a starfish."

blog bites

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote a piece for The Times titled "Google is giving us pond-skater minds". In which he argues that if a typewriter took part in the forming of the thoughts of a mind as profound and powerful as Nietzsche’s, what on earth is Google now doing to us? Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously?

Certainly the experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. But is this necessarily a bad thing. More information is available to more people then ever before, take Wikipedia for example, a phenomenal global project. Internet increased the sale of books, now look at Kindle.

Interestingly though, here I am giving my opinion in a short 200 word blog article, and already thinkning about my next post...more please!

Time is clicking

According to the BBC, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen's latest report finds web users less tolerant and patient when it comes to web sites. Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so..

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience...I do not think sites appreciate that yet, they still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

It's a big challenge for brands to get their emotions, richness and feelings across, when all a user wants to do is find out the price of a product. Increasingly I think businesses investing in the web need to create time rather than buy time. I guess this is all about options and navigation, allowing the user to get to a place fast if they need to, but according to Dr Nielsen, most want brands to get on with it.

Godcast

Ever keen to spread the bible according to glue, Mark and Seb were this months guests on Inside-online

Listen to there podcast on how to be a perfect client, being more experimental and the need for speed of ideas in current brand advertising.

http://www.redskyvision.com/inside-online/

Viral Trends

Duncan Watts recently wrote “If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can”. 

Essentially his theory is, that to succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. There will always be a first mover in a trend, but since they generally stumble into that role by chance, they are basically an “accidental Influential.”

The difficulty in viral trends is that the online world can be incredibly volatile. Brands are desperately seeking to find a comfortable transparency with which to embrace their customers and yet retain some control of the message. Online PR groups try to start trends or opinion by involving key influencers to kick start further discussion, but this can't work every time.

So perhaps the disease metaphor is misleading. 

Trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. 

Digital Darwin

Darwin can be used as an illustration for pretty much anything...

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change" - Charles Darwin.

However "responsive to change" as a piece of marketing advice is probably a little thin.

In a fragmented media landscape companies must battle issues of cost, complex messaging requirements and consumers being able to edit or evade adverts. Change for change's sake or change with out direction won't get you very far, a marketers response (no matter what the media) should really be "will it cut through? Is it interesting or amusing? Will people talk about it?"

Constantly interrupting people with adverts just won't work. Whilst there can't ever be a truly perfect new media cocktail, I recently came across an interesting paper by BBH's Jim Carroll who set out "10 principles for marketing in the age of engagement".

1) The first priority is engagement
2) Fame is a legitimate objective
3) Recognise the critical role of the aesthetic
4) Embrace speed and intimacy
5) Explore beyond narrative
6) Extend across platforms
7) Treat brand messaging as content
8) A big idea holds it all together
9) Take risks
10) No sector is exempted from the principles

Wake up world

I was reading Russell Davies' post about William Gibson's line about the future and it got me thinking...

Digital is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

There is no doubt that Media Consumption has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, with the Web now a close second behind TV in terms of daily media consumption.

Yet overall, marketers invest only 7.5% of their advertising / marketing budget to online initiatives. If consumers spend 30% of their media time online, why has allocation of media budget not caught up?

McKinsey recently published a study of 410 marketing executives in retail, telecomm, technology, business services and energy. McKinsey reported that the primary barriers to online investment were:

52% insufficient metrics to measure impact,
41% Insufficient in-house capabilities,
33% Difficulty of convincing upper management,
24% Limited reach of digital tools, and
18% insufficient capabilities at agency

The leading deterrent to investing online is not a surprise as online marketing is still a relatively new, somewhat complex, and rapidly changing entity. But wake up people, Digital will continue to take share from traditional media, and marketers must adapt to the changing times. Savvy marketers will take advantage of the opportunities in online and mobile marketing; those who drag their feet are in for an uphill struggle.

The picture was taken from the excellent http://thepostitproject.blogspot.com/