Simona Lody, the curator of Share Festival Torino taked about the main tech art festivals in Europe:

Linz – Ars Electronica   – a SXSW of tech art

Berlin – Transmediale    - more focused on Activism and New Government

DEAF  (Dutch Electronica Art Festival) – an open art lab

Spain – SONAR  - which started from music then expanded into other related arts.

One of the most interesting artists mentioned in the talk is Paulo Cirio  , an Italian artist who does installation art that torments Facebook, Amazon, and Google.

In Face to Facebook   Paulo stole 1 million Facebook profiles and used face recognition technology to post them on a custom made dating website.

Amazon Noir  is a media hack performance addressing the free access to education.  Here Paulo stole digital books from Amazon and displayed them in PDF formats.

Ernesto Klar, the Share Prize winner, created a light installation where people bend a curtain of light by touching it.

Kuai Auson reactive sound installation features ants as DJs 

I really liked Nova’s live comic book – The Ideogenetic Machine

The narrative of the book is based on current news and events, to which participants respond by acting and filling speech bubbles. The installation is algorithmically generated. The software keeps producing new images allowing an infinite number of unique stories to take place.

Jon Cohrs tackles social and political issues in his art. He’s interested in the relationship between culture and nature.

The Spice Trade Exhibition  investigates the disconnection between contemporary food and its origins, challenging our perception of what is “natural” and “artificial” in relation to food.

Jon travelled with a friend in a canoe and camped along the Meadowlands of Northern New Jersey, a landscape hosting the highest percentage of artificial flavouring factories in the world. They’d set up a tent between the river and the smoky factories and fall asleep with the smell of chocolate in the air.

Alviso’s Medicinal All Sault is a site-specific project that raises awareness on the pharmaceuticals in the San Francisco Bay. Jon talked about the wastewater treatment plants that filter out most toxic contaminants, but not the pharmaceuticals that many of us flush down our toilets ( anything from antibiotics to antidepressants that are not completely absorbed by our bodies). He got to harvest these substances in the Bay and created ALL SALT – a new product he then advertised and sold online and ironically at organic street fairs.

OMG  I’m on.TV challenges the content imposed by media conglomerates and refers to June 12^th 2009 when American television changed from analog to digital. OMG TV is a pirate TV station – an analog VHF transmitter that broadcasts video content pre-programmed from the web sources.

The project went live for 45 days giving the chance to anyone with limited tech experience to remix videos and broadcast them.

Just like in Nova Jiang’s live comic book, this project works like a platform where infinite random narratives can happen.

It’s interesting how this project changed the role of television as a medium by transforming it into a live screensaver that broadcasts interconnected bits of stories.

And last but not least we have Kaho Abe  who approaches art in a very playful way. She uses technology to build games that bring people together in the real world. Hit Me is a game where 2 players with cameras on their heads have to take snaps of the opponent by hitting a button on the their head. The game tests speed, agility and the ability to take good snapshots.

Every story follows a plot triangle where you have: tension and time building up the climax.  The climax in digital experiences is the buy button or the next level in the game.

The most important aspect of the story is the complication, which is generated by conflict.

How do you get teenagers in USA interested in engineering? You create conflict. Somebody had the idea to make robots fighting which changed everything. Robots were introduced in middle school, kids loved playing with them and became 4 times more likely to study engineering.

In the early ages, technology was a story in itself.

1995 – Amazon: nobody else was selling stuff online.

You would go to amazon.com to see if you wanted what they had. Now the amazing thing about Amazon is the stories around obscure products like the 45 gallons passion water based lubricant. People create whole identities around these products – loving them and hating them is better then just loving them.

“More emotions are better then less”.

Successful products add layers of complexity over and over again: Foursquare started with location sharing, then they added complexity. How do you feel about this place/ are you the one who loves this place the most, and now: what are people in different areas feeling about the elections?

Digital media transforms the observer into the author of the story. Products that build platforms for stories are the ones that will survive. Example: Jonathan Harris’ latest project  – Cow Bird – a project devoted to collecting stories, where you can search by topics, people or location and find connections between stories.

In Africa there are a lot of problems with keeping medical records, landlines don’t work but the new rise of mobile technology – 640 million phone users from a population of 1 billion. So we have a lot of new applications and services helping remote communities to stay connected. The challenge is to come up with digital solutions that don’t rely on internet connection.

ICow  in Kenia used text messages to help farmers to manage their stock.

Mpesa  is an mobile banking service that allows people to do bank transfers via text messages.

Ivan Gayton from Doctors without Borders worked with Google to map the spread of cholera in Haiti. Sharing real time data during a natural disaster is not easy. They couldn’t rely on the internet in Haiti, so they had to use old technology like GPS Garmin units from Best Buy, pool chlorine sheets and spreadsheets to source what was happening on the ground at the time.

This method allowed low skilled locals to jump on their bikes and gather the data, and then fill in the spreadsheets. This data was then combined with the health centers in Haiti and all the water systems on Google maps. Now they could monitor the spread quicker than ever.

Mapping the spread of cholera helped everyone understand how to react to the disaster: it helped the doctors to treat more than 100 thousand people, and it also helped UNICEF and the water authority to take necessary measures much quicker.

We thought we were being very original here, but it seems we’re not the first. this is an Australian life insurance ad.

This guy is called Bruce Duncan and he runs a thing called the Terasem Movement Foundation LifeNaut Project. They created the concept of “mindfiles”, files that contain data from your life gained from data. They are mentioned in the above video, but had no idea it existed.

The life insurance ad talks about Social Network data. LifeNaut uses digital data, but not social network data yet as far as I know. So it seems to still be a young enough field to make an impact, it seems likely that social network data would be a very rich seem of information if you wanted to re-create someones personality. Anyway I spoke to Bruce and he’s a really nice guy, maybe we’ll collaborate.

He bought along a robot likeness of a colleague called Bina48. Her personality was based on the Mindfile of the real Bina, whilst the conversation interface was made using separate language parser. About half the session was a question and answer session with Bina48 herself, which had varying success. It was actually pretty funny and occasionally profound.

Something interesting highlighted by an audience member was that everyone seemed to be asking really profound questions about the nature of existence, although I suppose that’s to be expected from your first conversation with a robot.

Being in a room at a big conference talking to a robot head felt really exciting, like we were witnessing the first alien contact or something.

When Julius von Bismark was a kid, he probably never “just put his fingers on his nose” but instead was creating real time sculptures using experimental materials to share with the classroom community. He probably never drew just a stick man but the human simple structure for future mapping interactions.

Julius von Bismark is an interactive Artist and this week at the age of 28 received a desk at Cern, in Geneva, Switzerland.
 Julius von Bismark is a genius but, just like every genius is paranoid: he is afraid that his inventions can end up in wrong hands. The spy? The communist? The fascists? The terrorists? The Martians? The Others? No! The Advertising. Really? Yes.
 In 2008 he won the Ars Electronica Grand Prix Award with the Image Fulgurator: a real world hack of other’s people photos. The camera is synchronized with other people’s flashes and projects an image to the pointed pictures. The other users will discover the hidden message later on their cameras.  In this video Julius shows the potentials of the Image Fulgurator projecting a white dove on Mao Zedong’s portrait. Scary, powerful.

I am sure everyone who ended up on this blog, especially these days, has a high sense of responsibility and knows the difference between creating a new concept and stealing Julius idea.

Mr Von Bismark, keep creating and inspiring all of us with this amazing stuff. And never shave your beard.

He invented OCR, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition and loads of other stuff. He popularised the notion of the “singularity”, the point in time when computers become more intelligent than humans and all bets are off. He’s probably the world’s best know futurist.

I like that he takes a systematic approach to futurism. He doesn’t seem to act on intuition like a lot of futurists do. His predictions often seem over optimistic, but end up uncannily accurate as he looks at hard numbers.

Over the years a lot of philosophers and psychologists have said we’ll never get proper “human style” artificial intelligence because there’s something “other” about it, something that is too complex for any computer to simulate. I remember when I was studying cognitive science in the early nineties that it was still thought by many that a chess computer could never beat the best in the world because there was some ill-defined humanness required. Kurzweil predicted that this would in fact happen in 1996, and it did. He knew it would because of the relentlessness of Moore’s law.

Another great example was the sampling of the human genome. Having spent something like 10 years to do 10% of it, researchers thought it would take decades to finish. Kurzweil, taking Moore’s law into account,  said it would take another year or so, and it did.

So a recurring theme was this idea that people are over pessimistic about AI and technology in general because they fail to take into account the sheer power of exponential growth. Worries about being able to create the peculiarities of intelligence get blasted away by the massive increase in things like processor speed, bandwidth, materials etc.

The recent success of IBM’s Jeopardy playing supercomputer, Watson shows just this.

It beat the World’s two best human Jeopardy players. According to Kurzweil this isn’t due to particularly new AI techniques, but more due to raw processing power. It gained it’s knowledge by reading the internet, including the whole of wikipedia. It then selected articles via a fairly simple probabilistic algorithm. It worked because it had the speed to process the data in real time. Again it’s down to Moore’s law. The interesting thing that Kurzweil highlight though was that this is pretty much how we work in our own brains anyway. We are fundamentally probabilistic machines with a lot of processing power.

If you plot our intelligence on a graph against machines, they pass us in 2045. So that’s it then, after that point we have no way of knowing what will happen next. Machines might not care to tell us what they are up to, and we may well not understand it if they did.

On the bright side, there will be no reason why we won’t be augmenting our own brains with billions of extra neurons, so we may end up having a more symbiotic relationship with machines than some people fear. And at least we’ll be able to back it up.

First Ping herself talked about how 3D scanning and printing is being used in creative and beautiful ways.

She gave the example of a beautifully crafted laser cut prosthetic leg. As she said, they usually look more like aircraft landing gear than anything you’d want to adorn yourself with. Why shouldn’t they be beautiful and custom made and custom fitted. With todays 3D scanning and printing technology its possible.

Here’s a sporty little number:

Fashion designer Iris Van Herpen uses 3D printing technology and other advanced processes to make clothes. Here’s one where she wanted the model to look like she’d been splashed with water:

Next up, Sheridan Martin. She does research for XBox. She made this, “You are what you tweet” dress. I think you can tweet from the keyboard on it, and I think you can tweet it. It was projecting words onto the inside of the dress at least.

Alison Lewis from Agent of Presence was cool. She was definitely on the pure aesthetic side of things. This technology doesn’t have to be useful, it can just be about beauty or emotion. I like that approach. She showed a pair of 3D printed Jimmy Choo shoes, which dispelled any ideas about technology and fashion necessarily being dorky.

My favorite thing of her’s though was a dress she called “Presence of Heart” that lit up in unison with the heart beat of the wearer. Dead simple and quite sweet I thought. the method used for lighting this one up was a very powerful LED and optic fibres to spread the light through the fabric.

Last was Janet Hanson from Enlighted Design. She pretty much makes all the light up clothing you ever see in pop videos and gigs.

These are all great, but they are designed for one-off or limited use. She  pre-empted people asking about whether consumer versions were possible, and she yes, but there are things to consider. The main problem with the Electro-Luminescent fibre is that it’s quite fragile and they don’t like being bent around much. So in her designs she tries to avoid bendy areas like knees and elbows. She reckons that consumer versions will be possible, but we have to really tailor them the the material. In fact she recommended wearable accessories like necklaces or bracelets etc. We’ll see.

It was funny very funny. Actual facts to take away are:

• They make lots of low budget films with small amounts of views each, as opposed to the TV model where you make very little but rely on massive viewing figures.
• They are very quick to grab talented people, without them having to go through the usual process. Billy Eichner was just making funny YouTube videos when they rang him up and said, “come to LA”. He’s now one of there regular producers.
• They are all very hands on, and have most equipment they need (gren screens lights etc) at their offices.
• This enables them to have a very quick turn around. They will have something online a day or two after having an idea.
• They do ads. Interestingly, Kia asked for the Funny or Die logo to be included in a recent ad. Pretty good cudos.

Firstly, pretty much everyone reading this is a cyborg. We rely on devices to enhance our everyday experience. We’re constantly connected to the web, we use location software to get around, we struggle when not able to connect. What I thought was funny was how she anthropomorphised the smart phone, i.e. we tend to it, feed it at night, protect it, sometimes it cries for attention. I wonder if we are pre-disposed to get addicted to caring for a thing like that. Maybe a smart phone is just and over complicated Tamagotchi.

This is Steve Mann, check him out:

This picture was taken in the early 80s. He was a pioneer of wearable computing. He’s got a wireless connection, a camera, a big metal thing. I think pretty everything in this set-up is built into a modern start phone except the metal thing. So people have been thinking about this for a long time, but it’s only now that the technology is allowing wearable computing to have it’s “Steam Engine Time”.

She then mentioned Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing. He came up with a few principles that should guide it:

• The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
• The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
• The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
• Technology should create calm.

This calm technology idea is what underpinned last years work with Queen Mary’s university. Part of our social clothing platform was a heat sensitive dye display. We wanted to avoid LEDs and create an interface that felt more natural, like blushing skin or dilated pupils.

All this leeds to moving away from the screen as our interface for everything. This Haptic Compass belt vibrates when you point to a certain bearing.

It makes the user aware of which direction they are pointing at all times, without reference to a screen, it makes total sense to not have to continually get a thing out of your pocket and look it when trying to get around. It’s been likened to the magnetic sense a bird has.

Then on to the product pitch.

Amber Case has a startup, Geoloqi.com. It looks pretty good actually. They are taking a new approach to location based apps. The focus is less on you actively having to check into places, and more on the app running in the background and doing stuff that depends on where you are. It’s a more ambient, less invasive and calm approach. Apparently they’ve overcome some of the notorious battery issues associated with GPS apps.

Here’s a game they made called Map Attack:

and here’s a thing that shows you wikipedia articles about where you are called “bringing Wikipedia to life”:

In some senses it’s nothing new. GPS games and location based social networking has been around for a long time. I think the value in this though is that they’ve managed to package the thing in an easy to use platform, that uses “always on” GPS, which all stems from the idea that interfaces should be more transparent and less about actively looking at a screen. So I guess it all makes sense.

Firstly it was about how in their culture, everyone is a maker. That is, everyone makes actual things on a regular basis, and that helps creativity, and understanding of the making process.  Everyone at Duncan/Channon makes things. One is a successful writer, one makes knives, one is a keyboard player. It’s not news that a creative agency should have people that makes things, but it’s good to hear it repeated. Interestingly, he also said they like to employ people that have never made an ad in their lives for their fresh perspective.

Secondly he talked about making products, either for the agency itself or for clients. Again, it’s not new, but something a lot of agencies are starting to do and something we talk about a lot. The main product Duncan/Channon have created is a record label, Tip records.

He said it was messy and difficult and very rewarding. I’m not sure if they make a huge amount of money from it, but that’s not the point. They’ve learnt a lot, and they can put that knowledge to good use on other, client based projects. Most of all I would think that it helps to see the clients perspective, actually making a thing and trying to sell it must focus the mind.

Then there’s approaching client work like a startup would approach making a product. It’s interesting to contrast the way the digital ad industry creates small digital products in a one-off big bang kind of way, when everyone else makes digital products iteratively. Releasing something early, listening to users, modifying goals, realeasing new features, all possible with Agile, not just in the development process, but from the ground up with the client involved. It’ an approach that’s gaining popularity at least.

Here’s some industry stuff he mentioned:

• Making Chalkbot came from Deep Local’s making culture.
• Venebles, Bell & Partners give office space to entrepreneurs for $10 per year.
• Vice Magazine now employ makers
• Matter do 50% marketing, 50% product development

They all talked a bit about how we’re about to see a lot more mental and physical enhancement. Like making ourselves more clever, or stronger etc. The main reason being that a few technologies are starting to converge to make it easier.

We’ve got improved sensors for things like pulse rate and EEG that enable us to get feedback on what we’ve done to ourselves, so we can test efficacy. We’ve got mobile apps that can follow us around all the time collecting data. We’ve got social networking that allows data from millions of people to be collated. Not to mention to actual drugs and devices that can modify us. They were all in agreement that we are all about to get a lot more control over our own brains.

It really got interesting when Dave Asprey got talking. He showed us how we went from being and awkward overweight teenager with Asbergers Syndrome to a charismatic multi-millionaire by hacking his own brain. Seriously, he matter-of-factly told us point by point how he had spent $250k on becoming his kind of ultra-cool guy. Here’s his site: http://www.bulletproofexec.com/.

Most treatments seemed to be about creating consistant alpha waves, as opposed to fluctuating activity, he showed some graphs about this, I believe him. To find out if your brain hacking is working, get a full brain scan for about $2500, or you can get a kit online for a few hundred dollars. Then start hacking.

First mentioned was a game called Dual N Back. He said it’s really annoying, but can raise your IQ by 12 points. The thing it does is called “Focused Creative Attention Training” apparently.

Here are some things he mentioned:

• Breathing. 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out 10 minutes a day.
• Use a Galvanic Skin Response meter to train yourself to relax.
• 90% of communication between brain and heart comes from heart. So train your heart. You need high HRV (heart rate variability), not constant heartbeat. He had a little machine you out your thumb on.
• EEG feedback is the number one best way to train your brain. Can get you 12 IQ points, 50% creativity increase
• Use one of these, http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/
• Electrocute your brain to change it’s behaviour. You might want to research this a bit first. He suggested this $99 kit.

So, if all this works, great, we can all do it, as long as we can afford it, and therein lies the rub. I’ve got a feeling we’re about to enter a time when the rich have yet more ability to put distance between themselves and the poor. Well we’ll see wont we.

When i first found out i was going to Austin Texas i’ll admit to being a tad ill informed about the area     (I know, Essex Boy in cultural ignorance shocker). I’d heard that Texans were all right wing, gun-toting nut jobs so It was to my surprise and delight that i was proven wrong.

Austin has some of the nicest, easy going people i’ve ever met, yeah some of them smell funny and some walk down the street wearing nothing but a Stetson and a smile, but they’re liberal, open-minded, music-loving folk.

One morning we were on the bus, all frantically checking our phones for the day’s schedule using the SXSW app (lifesaver). Suddenly a dishevelled looking man screamed at us:

“I used to have a job tellin y’all where to go!… now y’all just look at your phones.”

The human cost of tech i guess. We slowly slid our phones back in our pockets and listened to him, he turned out to be a lovely guy called Freddie who just wanted to talk. We figured out our schedule later and Freddie talked on everything from Rodeos to Racism. He spoke with passion and positivity. Maybe that day’s #Keynote was on the number 10 bus…

but i wouldn’t tweet that in front of Freddie.

Enjoy (or ignore) at your own discretion.

At first glance David looks like your standard PR Guru Douchebag, slick back hair, buzzword patter, the sort of guy you wouldn’t be too surprised to see flogging a Ponzi scheme somewhere. But in fairness to him i liked what he had to say and thought maybe it might be useful when a negligible media budget has been allocated to a project.

Main learnings

• The 2nd Paragraph (or follow up story)

Journalists have breaking stories to write all the time, the first paragraph writes itself, but they need an interesting related story to help them elaborate.

• The Newsjack

Give them an idea for their second paragraph by being creative with your product/service.

Some good examples he gave were:

The London Fire Brigade:
During a fire at Richard Branson’s holiday home Kate Winslet was said to have saved Branson’s nan from the flames: Paragraph 1. The London Fire Brigade then offered free training to Kate Winslet to make her an honourary graduate: Paragraph 2.

Presidant Obama’s Crocodile:
During a planned state visit to Australia a local insurance company, TIO, offered him free life insurance for if he got eaten by a crocodile. This quirky offer got TIO mentioned with every bit of news covering the state visit.

Its obviously easier to come up with a bespoke Newsjack than to try and find a link between your project and the story, but you may get lucky sometimes so you need to be prepared to act fast and potentially give away a free service.

Jeffery was doing an acting workshop at SXSW which basically just involved him constantly dropping the f-bomb. I’m not sure why he was dropping so many f-bombs. Maybe he wanted to stir people into a rousing performance. Or maybe he was just having a breakdown. Either way, it was fucking funny.

This guy basically smashes it constantly. When he’s not hob-nobbing with ex-presidents he’s coming up with loads of ideas to make the world a better place.

Some of his inventions: -

• The portable dialysis machine
• The insulin pump
• The Segway
• The iBot – (a gyroscopic wheelchair that can climb stairs)
• Robotic arms for war veterans.
• The Slingshot – a water purification machine for the 3rd world

Each one of these things is amazing and you could write entire books on each of them, but i’m going to focus on the water purification machine because it was the most ambitious and i liked the way he got it ‘sold in’.

Dean is obsessed with providing the 3rd world with clean drinking water and electricity. Traditional infrastructure for this is too expensive to implement on a large scale, but small, localised nodes are more feasible. Dean wanted to localise electricity and water production per village somehow. So he had the idea of providing them with “vending machines”.

After exploring this idea he then realised how difficult it will be. Generating power takes a lot of heat and energy and so does purifying water. To do it inside something the size of a small vending machine is incredibly ambitious.

Suddenly he has a breakthrough. He figures out that if he compressed the steam the whole process becomes far more efficient. So then he actually makes a working prototype called The Slingshot. Put its hose into anything wet and it will suck it up and turn it into pure drinking water.

So, how will he sell this great idea to a brand when it isn’t going to make them any money? Well, a business transaction takes place.

Dean convinces Coca-cola to invest in his project by giving them his time.

“There’s no such thing as free time. Time is the most precious commodity we have.” he says.

He uses his time to do what he’s good at, coming up with ideas. He shows them how to make their manufacturing processes more cost efficient and environmentally friendly. In exchange they then allow him to pitch to their global heads. The idea gets bought.

Coca-cola brand his vending machines and use their vast distribution network to get them to places that need them most.

I think selling ideas to any large corporate client is a very difficult task that needs both patience and tenacity. Dean showed that it is important to talk to the people that make the decisions. He got in to see them by being creative and charismatic, but ultimately he did it by being business savvy. It was, after all, a simple trade of services that got his foot in the door.

This was the most amateur talk i went to. It started with Adam giving a fairly academic presentation about messages in open space. When i say academic i mean high school.
Here’s him doing the same talk elsewhere, make your own mind up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrCpTpbWPqg
His main project was an idea that you could communicate in 3d space using lots of little LED helicopters flying in unison. But this was a shit idea imo. Think how much money would it take to develop hundreds of tiny helicopters that defy air currents to perform pre-programmed messages in unison. A lot. He showed a short video of the project going tits up and then handed over to someone that had actually made something that worked.

Albert Hwang

This guy was quite cool. Albert has a background in dance and he feels strongly that if you are going to communicate creatively in 3d space you should take influence from dancers, who do that naturally.

He created an art installation called The Lumarca.

Its great because it tricks the eye into thinking its a completely digital LED construction, when in reality it is actually made of string and gaffer tape.

It was dramatic from the start as they set up a live link with a darkened room, a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and a deep distorted voice asked if we could hear him.

The panel then discussed how this group went from creating memes such as LOLcats, Rick Rolling, Advice Animals to influencing international politics.

A guy from The Occupy movement described them as “tech support” for the activists. He told a story of them being beaten up by police and streaming the images live to the internet. They called out the officers name and number and within 24 hours Anonymous had responded by hacking the officer’s questionable police record and sharing it with the world.

In Poland, parliament members actually wore Anonymous masks in session to protest the introduction of a law that threatened free speech online.

Anonymous have been responsible for ddos attacks on the websites of those that oppose free speech and in some cases they have controversially stolen personal details and published them online. The panel was split on the morality of these actions with some saying they “fight for the user” and others saying it was the only way to get things done.

It raised an interesting point that for the many benefits of organisational anonymity (creativity, power, protection, etc) it only takes one crazy person to do something horrible in your name and drag your ‘brand’ into the mud.

A lot of core Anonymous members are geeks, but the Occupy movement has brought many other types of people into the Anonymous fold. It is really starting to take shape as a voice of the people. Amusingly one panel member said his favourite thing about the Occupy movement is that all these nerdy guys that never left their bedrooms suddenly met real people in the real world and millions of nerds got laid.

Here’s a link to a trailer for the film they were promoting We Are Legion

Firstly, this is just the title of her book. She actually only told us about 5 things, which i thought was a total rip off.

No, it was really interesting actually. She’s a Phd psychologist who has been applying psychology to business for over 30 years.

She began by talking about the unconscious mind and how it is actually responsible for most of our decision making. Her theory is that our brain makes decisions based mostly on gist’s. We get the gist of a scenario with our peripheral vision and make a quick unconscious decision.

As an example she showed us a peripheral filter experiment. They showed a bunch of rooms to people using two types of filter; one central and one peripheral. The results showed that the human brain was always quicker at identifying the room using the peripheral filter.

She then spoke about how faces were good. Our brains are designed to look for faces, etc. Ok pretty obvious.

For me, the most interesting point she made was about Mental Models
Mental Models are basically the rules you have in your subconscious that you apply to interactions. They are especially important when designing something new because you will want people to be able to apply their model to it to be able to interact with it effectively.

For example we all have a Mental Model for how you should interact with an item that looked like the above image. One that will have been created by your experience with similar looking objects.

Where it becomes interesting is when you think of how Mental Models change with generational gaps and advances in technology. For example my generation knows the Save icon is a floppy disc, but entire generations must have to ask their parents what that button does.

Susan says if you are between 25 and 35 in our industry then you are statistically the largest group responsible for designing the interfaces people use. But the largest age groups are the Baby Boomers and the Millennial’s, both of these have different Mental Models to us based on the technology they interacted with between the ages of 5 and 15.
It makes you think we should ask people more how they would use something.

The final talk.

I was told by Coxy that this would be an inspiring rant, and it was. He’s a sort of American Charlie Brooker i suppose.

He has a way of talking that sways and nudges you to his opinion. Or maybe its just that he likes to knock the guys at the top and we all like a bit of that.

He didn’t elaborate much on topics. It was more of a series of very well thought through observations and critiques. Here are some of my favourite quotes and paraphrases: -

-Student debt is like a smart tax. Its wrong.
-Geeks dress better now because design has got better.
-The future? Old people in dirty cities afraid of the sky.
-The big internet companies are like stacks of services.
-The main stacks: Google, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook.
-All Stacks will die eventually.
-Stack people are not users, they’re livestock.

He then did a cool thing where he pretended to be a kid in the future. He’s a pretty good actor with a great imagination. Good way to end the sxsw experience.

Dave and I respond poorly to familiar ideas.

An agency called Party made this, they are one of the good agencies.

http://www.theblanksheetproject.com/creative/2/sir_john_hegarty

Source D&AD

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls……………………….

Manifesto of Futurism

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

This is the funniest rant you will ever read.

Transcript below.

Hunter S. Thompson
Woody Creek

HOLLY SORENSON / Shooting Gallery / Hollywood / Jan 22 ’01

Dear Holly,

Okay, you lazy bitch, I’m getting tired of this waterhead fuckaround that you’re doing with The Rum Diary.

We are not even spinning our wheels aggresivly. It’s like the whole Project got turned over to Zombies who live in cardboard boxes under the Hollywood Freeway… I seem to be the only person who’s doing anything about getting this movie Made. I have rounded up Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Nick Nolte & a fine screenwriter from England, named Michael Thomas, who is a very smart boy & has so far been a pleasure to talk to & conspire with…

So there’s yr. fucking Script & all you have to do now is act like a Professional & Pay him. What the hell do you think Making a Movie is all about? Nobody needs to hear any more of that Gibberish about yr. New Mercedes & yr. Ski Trips & how Hopelessly Broke the Shooting Gallery is…. If you’re that fucking Poor you should get out of the Movie Business. It is no place for Amateurs & Dilletants who don’t want to do anything but “take lunch” & Waste serious people’s Time.

Fuck this. We have a good writer, we have the main parts casted & we have a very marketable movie that will not even be hard to make….

And all you are is a goddamn Bystander, making stupid suggestions & jabbering now & then like some half-bright Kid with No Money & No Energy & no focus except on yr. own tits…. I’m sick of hearing about Cuba & Japs & yr. Yo-yo partners who want to change the story because the violence makes them Queasy.

Shit on them. I’d much rather deal with a Live asshole than a Dead worm with No Light in his Eyes…. If you people don’t want to Do Anything with this movie, just cough up the Option & I’ll talk to someone else. The only thing You’re going to get by quitting and curling up in a Fetal position is relentless Grief and Embarrassment. And the one thing you won’t have is Fun…

Okay, That’s my Outburst for today. Let’s hope that it gets Somebody off the dime. And if you don’t Do Something QUICK you’re going to Destroy a very good idea. I’m in the mood to chop yr. fucking hands off.

R.S.V.P

(Signed)

HUNTER

source-Letters of Note

Then something strange happened. While Gary Rhodes slowly fingered fish and Gordon Ramsay reduced down to an amalgamation of Rab C Nesbitt and the Grand Canyon, Jamie started doing loads of good things for society. I begrudgingly started to like him.

But now, I am in awe (it’s only his ubiquity that mars this ad. It’s a decent one). He has got four kids. How the fuck does he manage to do so much stuff?

I think we’re looking for the dark energy that powers this universe in the wrong place. It’s not in CERN. The Higgs boson is somewhere up Oliver’s jacksy.

NIKE: For 20 years, I feel like Nike hasn’t left me alone. Constantly on at me, like a positive-thinking bully. “Just do it.” “I can.” “Make it count.” It’s Anthony Robbins in good trainers.

It hasn’t worked. I’m still here struggling to do “it”. But I’m probably not its “target”, after all. Someone else told me “Impossible was nothing”, but impossible did turn out to be something: a child’s turd lodged inside one of my trainers.

However, this incessant positive bullying is done with great style – this campaign is vintage Nike. I particularly liked Mo’s poster; there’s one by Staples Corner in London. There’s something poetic about sitting in traffic, chuffing Quavers in a Prius, being told to #makeitcount. I thought about Tweeting something, but iPhones don’t like cheesy Quaver fingers.

DUREX: Bareback riding. That is stiff competition. But it looks like these sheaths do offer something a bog-standard cock can’t. I quite liked the idea. It’s tricky to come at this from a different angle. Although the endline stopped me: “LOVE SEX.” Who’s arguing?

VISION EXPRESS: Ah, the old “reverse Lassie”. I enjoyed watching this. I like dogs. Simple joke, well told. Although I would have shown the dog getting run over, leaving the horrified driver believing the dog must have been wearing the wrong glasses. Lassie should’ve gone to Specsavers.

VODAFONE: Yodafone. Now we know the true subtext of the Emperor’s hatred. He had foreseen this ad.

George Lucas – how much wonga can one man have? Yet he’s stuffing the boot of his Millennium Falcon with phones and some gadgets from Currys.

He gave us Star Wars, then shoved a lightsaber up where the Dagobah system don’t shine. I don’t know, for a late-thirties male, there are too many layers of emotion to enjoy this. That said, I did like the wasabi gag.

MCDONALDS: The strange thing with this ad is that, while it trades on its sharp observations, I’ve never observed a McDonald’s restaurant like this. A remake but with a load of pissheads and families with horrid, fat, screaming children would be really on the button.

But that’s stupid. TV isn’t about serving you the crap you have to deal with in the real world; just as the food served doesn’t have to look bugger-all like the pictures three feet above it.

And, just like the grub, I can’t help but enjoy it. I wish this parallel universe existed. But maybe it does, alongside the Higgs boson up you-know-who’s posterior.

1. McDonald’s
Project: Coffee and conversations
Client: McDonald’s
Brief: n/s
Agency: Leo Burnett
Creatives: Rob Tenconi, Mark Franklin
Director: Peter Cattaneo
Production company: Academy
Exposure: TV, outdoor, press

2. Young’s
Project: Jamie Oliver by Young’s
Client: Natasha Gladman, marketing director, Young’s Seafood
Brief: Raise awareness of the newly launched, responsibly sourced Jamie
Oliver frozen-fish range
Agency: Mother
Writer: Mother
Art director: Mother
Director: Alex Boutell
Production company: Channel 4
Exposure: TV, social media

3. Nike
Project: #makeitcount
Client: Marie Deery, brand communications manager, Nike UK
Brief: n/s
Agencies: Wieden & Kennedy, AKQA
Writers: Darren Wright, Guy Bingley
Art directors: Guy Featherstone, Carlos Matias
Photographer: Adam Hinton
Production company: ManaMedia
Exposure: Press, outdoor, online, social media

4. Vodafone
Project: Supermobile
Client: Danielle Crook, head of brand advertising, Vodafone
Brief: Demonstrate ways that Vodafone makes customers’ mobile usage
better – small things that can mean the world
Agency: Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R
Writer: Thais Delcanton
Art director: Darren Simpson
Director: Stacy Wall
Production company: Gorgeous
Exposure: TV

5. Durex
Project: How in-sync are you?
Client: Durex
Brief: n/s
Agency: Euro RSCG London
Creatives: Fabio Abram, Braulio Kuwabara
Directors: Si & Ad
Production company: Academy
Exposure: TV, social media

6. Vision Express
Project: Taken
Client: Brian Linnington, brand strategy director, Vision Express
Brief: n/s
Agency: Dare
Creatives: Nick Bird, Lee Smith
Director: James Griffiths
Production company: Moxie Pictures
Exposure: TV

As a relatively new developer, I use the internet a lot for research, reading and checking out coding tips, current affairs as well as other random things – to the point when I get home I really do want to switch off my internet – but there’s always something that bugs me at the back of my mind thinking, how do we do this? is there a better way of doing that? So surely yesterday, cracking on with a project – I found my research extremely limited, thank god for google caching. However, it struck me, that not only how much a lot of my viewing is of american origin but also the solidarity of people uniting to fight a common cause, a cause, that even the most ignorant people shouldn’t ignore. I found Wikipedia first but other sites such as wordpress have followed suit. Google blacked out their logo for viewers in America, and Wired blacked out their headlines across their sites. Michela updated her status to say “Ops! Wikipedia is like air… you don’t realize about it… till is gone…”, which I think is the best statement to describe with not just wikipedia, but what SOPA will do if it goes ahead.

So what is SOPA? SOPA , means Stop Online Piracy Act. It’s a bill that is going before the american congress pushed forward by mainly the Hollywood industry and has been voiced loudly by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. It is an act to give powers to the the attorney general to block sites and their payments if they are even remotely suspected of showing anything pirate or conterfeit goods (such a torrent links to movies, selling fake louis vittons etc). If passed, SOPA will also allow the forced removal of  listings that show any reference to them. You may think that this is good, as it will reduce the millions lost to piracy. However, little notice will be given to the accused sites, who will then be blacklisted and I can only imagine how easy it would be to appeal not to mention the costs involved. So let’s think about it, if you write a blog talking about a pirate link or anything that falls into the remit of SOPA – you will be contravening that act. The terminology used, is so loose that even if you posted a picture of something fake, it could be deemed as contravening the act. There is another bill called PIPA , and I quote, it is “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”, which is also being put forward to the congress. PIPA works on a similar way as SOPA, and I shan’t go into too much detail about it, but you can read about it here.

The thing I want go into detail about it is, these Bills represent giving power to corporate people and government entities to control what we view, what we don’t view, what we can post and write about. It effectively means, what everything the west world criticises countries like China and Iran for controlling the internet viewing in their respective countries, would happen to us. I say this very callously, but basically the freedom of speech would be abused by the likes of someone who has the money and doesn’t agree what you say and decides to shut down your content. I am not saying we need to encourage or not restrict pirate content, because at the end of day if it’s your property you’re entitled to protection and yes the industry should have this right to protect their property. What can’t I understand is why can’t they innovate to protect their content. Companies like Spotify and Grooveshark, have dramatically reduced music piracy in the uk. So why can’t we do something for the movie industry or other intellectual property? Why have they settled to just block sites? In my opinion, the two bills are a lazy option and could potentially lead to abuse of this power, and should be stopped.

Here is something about networks.

You’ve probably come across the six degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, that all actors are connected to Kevin Bacon through a maximum of six films or six degrees of separation. You might also have seen the recent study that shows people on Facebook have an average separation of 4.74 degrees. These are called small world networks, the kind that us humans live in. The kind of network that means that you and your friend in Australia might have a mutual friend in Thailand. The kind of network that makes you say, “Cor, it’s a small world isn’t it?”.

Imagine you know 100 people and the world is like this:

Everyone lives in caves, 100 people per cave. No one ever leaves their cave. Everyone is friends with people in their cave and only in their cave. You have no chance of ever meeting someone in another cave, let alone a cave on the other side of the planet.

This network is highly clustered. The average separation here, or Bacon number is very very high. You have no chance of meeting Kevin Bacon unless you live in the same cave. You can only trace a path to very few people.

Now imagine the opposite world where you are connected to a 100 people at random, anywhere on the planet, and all of those 100 people are connected to another 100 people at random and so on. As this is the opposite end of the scale you might also expect it to give people the opposite Bacon number, but it doesn’t. Interestingly, the average Bacon number is again very high. Again you can only trace a path to a very few people. This is because out of 6 billion people, the chances of 2 people’s random 100 overlapping are pretty small. So you end up with dead end networks again.

Not until the nineties was it discovered that in reality there is a magic number somewhere in the middle, there is a very small range of randomness, somewhere between cave-world and random-world where pretty much everyone on the planet can connect to everyone else in a very few steps, any higher or lower and we’d hardly be connected to anyone. It’s weird and counter intuitive, but is highly pronounced. It crops up all over, biology, economics, physics, and luckily human society, which is why we all know each other and the average separation on Facebook is 4.74 degrees.

A bloody health and safety award. Ok I exaggerate, we also got a few bronzes, but who cares right?

When the banks go tits up nobody puts their money into bronze.  The only people happy about getting their hands on some bronze are those fuckers that steal memorial plaques from cemeteries.

Maybe that sounds ungrateful or unrealistic, but I think as a creative you have to believe only gold is good enough. Or you’ll never get one.

Sometimes this pursuit of perfection spills over, we can occasionally lose our cool, call someone a Mindless Email Drone or a Gaping Goatse of a Man. If this happens do take it with a pinch of salt. Unless of course it’s true, then take it like the Gaping Goatse you are.

Digital does seem to be a tough category now days though. A viral video that you made for 8 grand could easily find itself up against an amazing technical innovation or a primetime telly backed campaign.

We also have to accept that the internet is a very fast moving landscape. Quite often we reward the first person to exploit a new technology rather than wait for the best use of it.

Also things can seem incredible one minute and passé the very next. I, for example, don’t find videos of people having sex on bear corpses nearly as arousing as I did last week.

In this situation all we can do is keep trying. Try to make stuff we think lots of people will like. Maybe even the judges will like it too. Lest we forget, the internet is a magical place.

The Internet. by Kieron Roe

Now, I’m off to Dale Farm to see if a stray gyppo wants my Andy.

Image from phototristan

You’re 14 and getting the bus to school. Its about a half hour drive. You’ve not graduated to the back seat set, that’s two years from now. You’re solidly upper middle deck. Occasionally you get three rows from the back on a good day. The appeal of the back of the bus? That’s where the older girls are – gossiping, smoking and generally being unobtainable. You sit silently listening in, trying to glean bits from their life and stitch them together. It’s a weird sort of escapism. It’s destructive too. You should be concentrating on girls your age, but you can’t, you want for more.

All of this goes with time. Girls eventually start to talk to you. You get served for cigs. You get let into pubs. Eventually you go to univeristy, you get a job, go to dinner parties… you grow up.

The back seat of the bus feels like a long time ago.

But then you get into Twitter. You feel your way round it for a while, follow footballers until you realise they’re generally boring and indulging in “brand building” for when they retire, follow pornstars until you realise there’s no porn, follow certain comedians until you realise they’re simply emptying all their material that they didn’t get through on the last panel show.

Then you find the cliques. The small groups who all talk to each other. The journalists, the writers, the american west-coast comedians. You follow them all and you see all their conversations. You start to learn about them, what they like, who they don’t and where they stand on Libya/Amanda Knox/Frankie from X-Factor/Kim Kardashian. Part of you starts to value these opinions. Well if Caitlin Moran, Sali Hughes, India Knight and Hemmo think she was innocent maybe I need to re-evaluatte my position. If Kelly Oxford doesn’t care about the Kardashian divorce then neither do I. But wait Rob Delaney does, and Jenny Johnson also thinks that’s funny – so maybe I should too.

Eventually it becomes all too much. There are too many girls on the back of the bus now. You want to impress them all, but you’re reply rate is pitiful. Grace Dent replies once to your tweet. You consider getting all sycophantic about her column and book but think better of it. But maybe doing will get another reply…

I have a new set of girls who sit at the back of the bus, whose conversations I eavesdrop everyday.

Now they’re not just gossiping about last Friday in the pub and whose done what to whom. They’re plugging columns, books and the films they like. They’re forming your opinion on which X-Factorand Apprentice contestants to like. I don’t even watch either of these, but feel I could give a run down on who’s on them and a list of their character flaws, imagined and real.

I’m sure I’m not alone. Perhaps in how I’ve made it a bit weird by writing about it.

But between them they’ve got about 200,000 followers. So I doubt I’m the only one listening in.

If you were one of the lucky ones – you would have read about the problems Qantas were having online or in your weekend papers.  The unlucky ones lived through it on airport floors around the world.  Friday saw the entire fleet grounded globally due to ‘labour disputes’ – an action that resulted in 10,000′s of travellers being stranded  - and thoroughly pissed off with the airline.  With wait times on the Qantas customer service telephone lines reportedly running to 4 hours, a large proportion of those affected took to social media to voice their ‘displeasure’.

The complaints led to Qantas becoming a worldwide trending topic on Twitter and a flood of complaints to their Facebook page.  From a business point of view – this is bad – for community managers it means you’re officially into Crisis Management mode.

The Australian media have taken a hardline with the airline regarding their response on social media.  Complaining that their customer service through the channels became mechanical and robotic – lacking personalisation.  And stating that in the moment of crisis the airline had reverted to using Twitter and Facebook as  broadcast channel again.  This opinion doesn’t really take all factors into consideration but is an understandable reading of the situation.  It seems the airline had taken an approach that meant that anyone arriving at their Twitter or Facebook page would easily be able to find the latest information from Qantas, rather than having to search the large number of customer complaints – understandable.

Search Google and you’ll find a raft of documents offering tips on how to deal with crises on social media – the truth is that no one crisis looks exactly like another and likewise how you respond will need to change based on a number of factors.  However broadly speaking there are some do’s and don’ts for managing social accounts during times of ‘business strife’

• Have a crisis management team in place to deal with emergencies.   Usually this will be a mixture of community managers, customer service staff, brand team execs, PR, and a team leader to organise the troops.

• Be quick to mobilize them when a problem arises.  Don’t ignore the problem and hope it goes away – this generally just makes things worse when you do eventually jump in.

• Make sure there is an escalation process in place for the team, so they are empowered to fix customers issues as they arise.

• Make sure they have a constant flow of up to date information about what you’re doing to deal with the problem – they need to be able to pass this onto your customers.

• Run a social media monitor for keywords associated with your brand & the issues you’re experiencing.  The hope is that people will contact you directly on your social accounts, but the likelihood is that there’ll be conversations taking place all over the web that you should be joining or at least following.

• What you say is important – but how you say it is vital.  Don’t lose your rag, keep it personalised where possible.

• Don’t lie!  Transparency is so important.  If you don’t have the answer – find it out before responding – and let the person know thats what you’re doing.

• Go easy on the delete button.  As tempting as it is to delete the worst of the comments that you’re getting – don’t.  Stick to your community guidelines (no swearing, no bullying etc) but deleting negative comments can backfire drastically.

• Don’t panic and shut down.  As in the Qantas example its important to make relevant information easy for customers to find, however this should still function as a two-way dialogue.

• What did you learn?  After the event look for learnings, these could be related to a product, your community, your customer service, internal processes.  Make changes if you need to and communicate these to your customers where appropriate.

These incidences can tend to give brands the chills when taking their first steps into social media- I’ve heard many people use such examples as a reason not to venture into social media.  The important thing to remember is that these conversations, tweets and comments would be happening regardless of whether you have a brand presence in social or not.  At least if you’re present you are able to join and influence some of the conversations and complaints, and hopefully reach and help more of your customers.

Social media is merely another channel in which to converse with consumers, and while the public nature of it can make this feel intimidating in times of crises and high negative sentiment towards a brand – the opportunities is provides to display solid customer service and help people in real-time make it too valuable to ignore.

Over.

A very simple but yet humourous way of engaging the end user and in my case it made me want to share it with some friends, a success in my book for the campaign. Granted, this is very basic and doesn’t really do much to the video, but it involves you in the story and makes you a part of the product. There are other examples where you can use your number pad to go to certain parts of a video, click on hot spots to control the end result of the video by redirecting you to another video. This is all good and I have seen some very good examples out there.

However, claiming the fame to the world’s first interactive YouTube driving video does not make this next example anymore exciting as watching water drip from a tap. In this case, you can you use your number pad (1-9) to control the car in whatever way you want…

Judging by the comments made – I suspect this video will go viral (if it’s lucky) for all the wrong reasons. So the moral of story? Make it a bit more interesting than the world’s first interactive YouTube driving video or don’t do it at all.

http://youtu.be/NMwr6q7F-vk

But that’s my lot for the year because Halloween is about as scary as a PG-rated ‘horror’ film starring a grown up Haley-Joel Osment.

Actually, that would be pretty scary. Not only does he see dead people, he’s been eating them.

But Halloween is shit. The same, crappy costumes wheel their way onto the shelves every year and it’s down to the creative types to improvise a Zombie Bin Laden, a ghoulish Gaddafi, or maybe even a skeletal Steve Jobs.

A George Osborne mask would shit me up more though. Reality is much scarier than the rent-a-ghosts of Halloween. I even found bits of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold scary – scary because it contains real life scenes from the world of advertising.

The latest film from Morgan Spurlock rakes the muck on marketing. You’ll remember he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month, got fat and turned the colour of a Quarter Pounder. Now he’s approaching advertisers to fund his movie entirely through product placement. Become the beast to expose the beast.

I’m not one to scrutinise commercial ethics. I work in advertising, I’ve made my pact with the devil and I’ll sell guns to kids if I have to. So what could scary about a guy pitching a few ideas to make his picture?

Watch this clip

The handlebar mustache and the Bride of Frankenstein client are genuinely frightening but if you’ve worked in a creative department, it would have been how all the creative routes got blown out for a bog-standard competitor ad that would have spooked you.

You don’t need to see the film to know what ad he ends up making. You’ve seen it a million times. The graphs, stats, condescending tone of voice; it all blends into noise that we have no other choice but to ignore. Whatever you think of the concepts, if the client’s laughter was genuine then isn’t there a good chance other people will do the same? Instead, they ask for something no one will react to.

Feels like adverts have become a bit like the Halloween masks on the shelf in Tesco. We’ve seen them before and they don’t quite do the trick. What’s everyone so afraid of?

“Hi Dave

Sorry it’s taken so long to send the pebble back to you, I mislaid it on return from my holiday. Please find enclosed a second stone from my beach at home in Silecroft in Cumbria also.

Yours Faithfull

Paul”

Not only has Paul sent the original pebble back, but he’s sent a sample of a local Cumbrian pebble. It’s more speckley and more red/green than the more Grey pebble from Devon btw.

Go into Subway, get a code with your drink, use the code to get the new multiplayer feature a month early -complete with Subway branded custom game items and actions. See the TV ad.

Picture Subway employees with automatic rifles who taunt you by making the hand gesture for a Foot Long Sub right after they take you out.

Really freaking weird.

Way back in May, when we all still had hopes for the summer ahead, we entered Double Click’s HTML5 YouTube Masthead competition.

WE WON!

Now the sunshine is finally here, our winning masthead is live on YouTube for 24 hours.

Our winning idea is a Thought Visualiser that allows you to see your random thoughts come to life. And this all happens within the boundaries of a YouTube masthead and is built in that spangly new(ish) HTML5.

Try it for yourself.

Here we are picking up our award in Cannes. Don’t we look happy!

Tech City is London’s answer to Silicon Valley, an initiative to turn East London into a leading technology hub. The heart of the scheme, Old Street’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, is about to be joined by Google as they plan to open a seven-story building near the station next year. Focused on training and product demonstrations, the new space will give Google an opportunity to help technology start-ups and encourage them to adopt Google products and services.

In addition to their main London offices in Victoria, Google have also bought office space in Central Saint Giles near Shaftsbury Avenue, and made their first venture into retail with the Chrome Zone in PC World on Tottenham Court Road. There’s no doubt that Google are expanding rapidly, and London looks set to be a big part of their plans.

Sources: Cnet, MediaWeek

Ok, it’s a slightly sickly trailer, but I’d like to see the film. I think the lesson will be that doing what you enjoy can lead to great things, even if other people don’t get it at first. When this man was a kid he was considered a weirdo because he liked playing with puppets, but ended up creating a character that was globally popular. I bet a lot of people who have made money out of Elmo would have been the type to take the piss out of him, and I bet their kids love Elmo.

This September I went to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, an annual event featuring projects that mix “provocative art, technology and intellectual thinking” as they call it. At the end of 3 full days, I feel I’m sorted for the next 3 years. My journey to Linz was actually a time travel experience.

The theme this year was “ORIGIN – How It All Begins” in collaboration with the Cern Center to show the research about the origin of the world.

It explains why the moment we question ourselves where are we came from, it’s when we’re actually going forward.

An excellent example is one of the Android-Theatre project by Hiroshi Ishiguro who worked on one of the most challenging dreams of our time: the idea of recreating a robot that looks exactly like a human.

I have always been fascinated by Science Fiction movies like I, Robot and Gattacar novels like “Do robots dream electric sheep? Or music videos like “All is full of love” by Bjork with that love-sex sequence between two robots, so I was really excited entering the oldest and tallest Gothic church in Austria to attend “Sayonara”(Goodbye).

After climbing almost 200 steps in a spiral staircase, I arrived in a semi dark room where two actors were facing each other on stage seated in their chairs. I knew that one of them was a robot but I couldn’t immediately figure out who was who.

Is it the blond girl seated on the right or the Asian woman on the left?

I knew that the audience was doing the same puzzle game as me. I looked at their skins, their mouths and their hands… confronting each other and making bets in my mind. I pointed all my invisible money on the blond sleepy girl. As soon as they started to speak I realized that the Asian girl had a robotic voice, you could feel that it was not coming from “inside” her. Even

I thought my “mind game” was solved, but then a new one began when they started a conversation about dreams, feelings and future. The piece actually explores the relationship between a dying girl and her android companion.

When the piece ended the Asian Woman remained on stage and we all got closer to have a better look, like people in the 1800’s going to see a freak show at the circus. It’s just that this time we had digital cameras to immortalise the moment.

I can shyly say I felt like if I was going to visit a corpse. I have never experienced so many feeling at the same time during a play. Fascinated, attracted and repulsed at the same time. Also, I was in a church, symbol of a religious explanation to our existence and now I was brought to think in term of redefining the human existence related to a robot. What does it mean to be human? What truth is? Whow!

I left the place completely amazed and without having a lot of time to digest it all, I decided to add some more ingredients to the big information soup I was dealing with and went to have a look at one of the winners of Prix Ars “May the Horse Live in me, 2011 / Art OrientéObjet (FR) ” where a woman decided to mix her blood with the horse’s plasma… …but that’s another story.

From “I, Robot”.

Detective del Spooner to Sonny:

Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?

We could add: Can a robot act? Can a robot make you cry? What about your toaster?

Watch the video:

Go to the youtube page for more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

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Anyway, for no good reason I thought I’d write my phone number on a pebble and chuck it down the beech. Who’s going to find it? There’s millions of them, but you never know, it could be the start of an adventure!

Yesterday I got this text:

No way! Someone’s found the pebble, and not only that they’ve texted the number on it. Would I do that?

So after a couple of texts to establish neither of us are mental (sort of a shame, but we’ll see) Paul the finder is going to post it back to our office.

Never thought I’d see that again.

This is our Lean Mean Fighting Machine Blog Editor’s special mascot, or special bum-chum if you like.

This little fella was stitched together with fabric, cotton thread, slight of hand and heck of a lot of love. And was curiously assembled on Sunday’s day of rest, whilst watching the highly charged Bourne Ultimatum (which could be the reason why the ears make the Sausage Blog Dog look somewhat like Mother Teresa).

If you wish to assemble your own Sausage Blog Dog then please feel free, clone away. You might even try concocting one of these little puppies on a day of rest whilst watching Jason Bourne out of the corner of your eye to see if you too can achieve the Mother Teresa look.

While at this stage we’re still trying to get to grips with the detailed impact these changes will have, we’ve taken a bit of an educated guess as to what we think this will mean for brands on the platform:

THE BIG UPDATES

TIMELINES

This new piece of functionality replaces profiles and acts as a stream of information about you (YAY!). Starting from when you first joined Facebook – the information you’re displayed becomes more compressed the further back you go. Facebook are encouraging folks to look on it as a personal scrapbook.

FACEBOOK GESTURES

The LIKE is DEAD, Long live the GESTURE. Facebook have introduced the ability to turn any verb into a button. It’s predicted that the “LIKE” button will be looked on in years to come as a bit of relic. Now we’re moving towards “Watching” “Reading” and “Listening” – opportunities for how brands use this are huge.

APPS

Though not immediately exciting to those who don’t develop on the platform the change that Facebook have made regarding apps is significant. No longer will apps have to repeatedly ask permission. Once is quite enough. Could potentially cause some issues with the casual users of Facebook who haven’t been paying close attention.

This action is a prelude to them introducing something they are calling ‘Lifestyle Apps’ these are apps more integrated into the Facebook eco-system. They allow users to share information about their activities (such as exercising, cooking watching TV etc) and have partnered with several companies for launch such as Nike, Air BnB and Foodspotting.  The Guardian have already launched a lifestyle app which allows users to consume Guardian content without leaving Facebook.

TICKER

In order to make the ‘Timeline’ content more interesting and relevant to the user Facebook have moved some of the information and actions that appear in it to the ‘Ticker’. The Ticker is now the place where all ‘lightweight’ info will live. So while we’ll no longer be forced to enjoy endless updates from “Mafia Wars’ or ‘Sims Social’ there is now also no place in the timeline for user interactions with brand page content, it’ll all go into the ticker.

MUSIC/TV/NEWS

You can now LISTEN to music, WATCH Television Shows, and READ the News all without leaving the confines of Facebook. What this also means is a higher level of social recommendations from friends and connections that are also consuming media and content within the platform. Facebook has so far announced partnerships with Pandora, Spotify, Yahoo, Hulu and Netflix.

IMMEDIATE IMPACT TO BRANDS

LIKES

Content that people like on our brand pages no longer appears on Newsfeeds – this means less viral growth for our page. Content that people like outside of Facebook will still show up – part of Zuckerberg’s master plan to expand the Open Graph API across the interwebs? Possibly.

NEWSFEED

They’ve also changed the Edgerank algorithm, previously clever community managers had been able to work the system using tricks to ensure their content turned up in more NewsFeeds. However there is now much more priority given to relationships with friends, over relationships with brands. Likely to mean lower impressions for each of our posts.

PHOTOS

The lovely new larger image display has not yet been updated to brand pages. Possible that this will follow though & excited by the creative opportunities this should open for us!

LONG TERM IMPACT FOR BRANDS

The introduction of the ticker means that the Edgerank algorithm (soon to be renamed GraphEdge) is going to behave differently. We know that 27% of engagement with brands happened via newsfeeds, with a further 21% happening through profiles. Expect that figure to drop considerably if your content is not engaging enough

For brands the platform is now less innately viral, meaning two things: 1. To get attention, and attract fans, you’ll likely have to spend more money on Facebook media 2. Once you have those fans you have to work harder to get their attention.

Content will be key in avoiding this drop off. We’ve seen many brands moving more towards the role of publishers. The work Burberry have done being a prime example. Its possible that to get the same interactions brands will need to look to post more engaging content more often.

Good page posting practice will become even more key if we are to break into the ‘top stories’ of our fans. • The introduction of lifestyle apps is likely to see a move towards brands owning actions, rather than trying to collect “Likers”. For example

“Candice is running” with running as an action being powered by Nike

The increase in functionality (and simplification for developers) of Open Graph means that Facebook is moving to own the internet, socialisation and personalisation (the semantic web) will appear everywhere, not just on Facebook pages. Its time to start thinking beyond the brand page….

We’ll be closely monitoring how the changes impact our day to running of the pages we look after and make sure to report these back to you.

SOME FURTHER READING

http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebook-changes-roundup/
http://www.allfacebook.com/do-timeline-ticker-and-graphrank-break-facebook-marketing-2011-09 http://www.allfacebook.com/highlight-of-facebooks-f8-keynotes-the-timeline-ticker-news-feed-and-apps-2011-09 http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-on-how-the-new-facebook-music-integration-will-work/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/button-down/
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/09/22/facebook-launches-a-recommendations-bar-for-news-articles-on-sites/ http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27190/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/22/facebook-changes-f8/
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/pandora-and-facebook-team-bring-you-facebook-music-stream

We lucky folk at Lean Mean Fighting Machine enjoyed a happy 2 days of summer loving in Devon last week. Cricket, country walks, blackberry picking, fish n chips, swimming in the sea at Beer beach, and one hell of a pool party (think MTV Grime, at night, with extra testosterone). Inflatable dinosaurs, fake tan, men in bikinis, teenage drinking games (waterfall – you know the one), curdled banana daiquiris, a heavy dose of Wham, a pool cleaner, Bryan Jones and a penguin.
I work with mentalists.
It’s a pleasure.

We’ve all been there, you’re on your home computer looking for information on local blue tit populations, before you know it you’re looking at a naked Smurf and a million pop-up windows spawn advertising online casinos, steamy video chats and penis enlargement.

For this reason browser popups have taken a bit of a battering, with all the major browsers including pop-up blocking functionality plus any number of pop-up blocking plugins. Us developers have been taught to avoid pop-ups like the plague.

Now everything is pop-up; shops, restaurants, cinemas, galleries, gigs, even pirates, and it seems like Google are trying to bring back the good old browser pop-up. A lot of their Chrome Experiments feature clever use of them; the brilliant interactive film The Wilderness Downtown, The Google Puzzle an online puzzle where you are tasked with finding the missing ‘o’ from their name, and most recently OK Go’s video dance messenger All Is Not Lost.

Is the pop-up back?

I’m back in love with Twitter today (we have a rocky relationship). Overwhelmingly full of positive & anti-riot messages, organising clean ups like this one in Clapham and trying to help the police catch the looters: http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice.  Social media to the rescue.

See, it’s not all bad in London Mum.

Not too long ago, I purchased an album by U2 and one by Pete Doherty. Now, I like both albums and I’ve no beef with the music, but increasingly while listening, the very thought of the singers is starting to impair the enjoyment.

It’s the musical equivalent of thinking about maggots while tucking into egg fried rice.

Doherty, whether it’s true of the man or not, comes across as a prize cock in all his manifestations in the press. And don’t get me started on that half pint of Guinness, Bono.

I just see too much of these people. In their irrepressible urge to sell more records and increase music company profits they, like any other person with too much exposure, highlight their flaws to the world and, inevitably, become fucking irritating.

The more I see the less I like and, eventually, the less I’ll buy.

Not that this is anything new in the music ‘biz’. But it does seem like the noise has been turned up to 11.

The internet and social media have allowed every artist, convinced (or told) of their inherent interest beyond just making music, that they can (and should) connect and offer their gagging audience more and more access.

I know I can switch it all off, and I know it’s my job to embrace this sort of shit. But our industry, more than most, gets a sniff of something good and unquestioningly charges ahead; like an account director with an unsigned expenses form.

All of this made me think of an old friend of my dad’s, Raymond Froggat, a country and western singer you won’t have heard of.

The reason why you’ve never heard of him? Well, he mounted a social media campaign back in the 60s which probably ruined his career (if you judge such things on fame and fortune).

His social media campaign was simple: straight after a gig he would go to the bar to chat, laugh and drink with the audience he had just played to.

This wasn’t your usual Twitter, Facebook, exclusive footage kind of social media; this was the ‘in your face, pissed’ kind of access. Unlimited. Warts and all.

He would act like one of their mates. He always did it. He was just Ray. Completely accessible, highly social.

My dad (not a marketer by trade) told him he shouldn’t have done it; he should build some mystique – you didn’t see Johnny Cash, Kenny Rogers, Elvis, etc, fraternising with the proletariat.

They created ’star’ quality. They acted like stars and let our illusions of them build and they didn’t dare drink with the crowd for fear of obliterating those illusions by becoming ‘one of us, one of the lads’.

Froggy, as he was known, worked with the best, but never made it big. You could argue his ‘content’ wasn’t as good, but with better management he could have packaged what he had into something more desirable, mysterious, long lasting and truly marketable.

Sometimes, perhaps, the best social strategy is not being social at all.

In today’s saturated market it’s difficult to imagine how you could gain any sort of notoriety, fame or success without pumping an artist down the throats of the masses via any tube available.

But maybe that’s why today’s biggest music star is Simon Cowell and not another Elvis.

The article originally appeared on Brand Republic:

brandrepublic.com/opinion/1039253/Think-BR-Anti-social-media/

“Hello, John Anderton. You could do with a Guinness right about now?” shouts the sort of annoying dickhead you’d want to drown in a bathtub of Guinness.

“Get away, John Anderton, forget your troubles.” says a beautiful air hostess-type, being as persuasive as a pot-holing holiday to a Chilean miner.

Why, in the future, is the advertising always so shit?

Has the gene pool eradicated any lasting genetic code from Abbott, Bogusky, French, et al?

Whenever a film offers a vision of the future, advertising adopts its usual role: a symbol of a morally bankrupt world. A world sick with rampant consumerism that will stop at nothing for your time and money.

In the real world, the story is pretty much the same; even when a friend regurgitates “I’m on a horse”, or pretends to drum like a gorilla, they’ll still, when asked, say that advertising is a poo that needs flushing.

For Minority Report Spielberg got together a think tank of scientists, philosophers, etc. to make detailed and considered guesses on future technologies—from cars and architecture to telecommunications and drugs.

Obviously none of them spent any time writing a decent ad (although that would be an interesting bit of business for an agency to pick up), because that’s the hard bit. No, instead, their ideas tapped into the obvious: advertising will get more invasive and more sinister.

Of course, I know, it’s a bloody film. But forgetting that detail, it is interesting how films, (actually any kind of future gazing) always have the same ideas. Try it yourself; think about advertising in the future. You’ll go down a couple of roads, and then end up with invasive media ideas and products that have become more intelligent.

Now, forget those two things, and try instead to think of a good cartoon character, a funny slogan or catchphrase, a short film that will make someone piss themselves, a storyline that will make an audience cry.

Hard. Actually, pretty impossible. It’s a tough job right now, never mind in 60 years time.

Just ask the people in 1950, who thought that by the year 2001 we’d have robot butlers and intelligent kitchens, why they couldn’t predict the obvious hilarity of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The boring fact is this: the things that made people laugh, cry, worry, envy in 1950 are in principle (though, mostly, not in execution) the same as in 2000.

The one thing that gets forgotten in all these predictions, is the one thing that doesn’t really change, people’s brains.

Technology doesn’t change us. It just allows, moulds, highlights behaviours that are hardwired into our brain’s software. As one advertising legend once said—”It took millennia for our brains to develop; it will take millennia for them to vary even a little bit.”

For example, the millions invested in social media (not to mention the millions of power-point slides), boils down to teenagers, being able to bitch with one another, whilst they watch American Idol; or friends using Facebook to upload pictures, just to rub their friends faces in their incredible social life.

In this respect, if advertising that is beamed into your retina does not appeal to you on an emotional, intellectual, gut level, it will be worthless and ignored. No different to the fate of every shit piece of junk mail today.

It will, as in the past, come down to creativity, which you just can’t predict.

It’s not exciting, but it is the future, and if you don’t agree? Well, when the time comes, you can just talk to my Apple Data-RaX Hand because my cryogenically thawed face ain’t listenin’.

creativity-online.com/news/the-digital-shoehorn-the-future-is-wrong/146611

Which does beg the question “Why haven’t they downloaded an app to find the nearest job center and ‘checked-out’?”

So my intention is to tiptoe through this and hopefully shine a light on one of the many helpful things the Mad Men can still teach us, beyond alcoholism.

It’s actually not that long ago when traditional advertising didn’t exist. Circa 1998, I recall it was just called advertising; there was nothing to be ‘traditional’ against. Then brands thought they’d found the holy grail of advertising, the ‘click-through rate’. And the tsunami began.

In 1999, me and my creative partner, Sam, had just begun our first job in a digital ad agency. However, what we failed to mention at the time, was that neither of us had actually been on the Internet. So we had to take a train to Sam’s cousins house to go and see it.

We’d learned our trade as a ‘traditional’ creative team; our heroes were Hegarty, Flintham, McCabe, Trott, Henry, Steel and the mighty Bernbach. Media was simple; a variety of square shapes, you ’simply’ had to fill them with something good.

In 1999, our ignorance of the internet was actually a benefit; had we known our ‘big’ ideas couldn’t be made in 12K we’d have buggered off sooner. Thankfully we met Dave Cox, a rare kind of programmer who used his knowledge to find a Yes rather than say No. I suppose a new kind of creative team had evolved. Unfortunately we didn’t have Twitter to tell everyone.

I was very fortunate to have straddled both worlds, so to speak. At that time, and still today, most people in digital have never actually worked in a traditional agency. The old art of copywriting is either not known or seen as irrelevant, especially if we can get the public to write our ideas.

Exposure to traditional agencies comes from all agency meetings where the digital lot are told what big idea they have to translate. This inevitably leads to a lot of demonizing and a reactionary party line that “they’re dinosaurs” and “just don’t get it.”

On the other side of the table, we have some traditional agencies who treat the digital lot as a bunch of geeks that wouldn’t know a brand strategy if it was loaded on a USB and shoved up their external drive.

As usual it’s mostly bollocks.

There are great people and stuff to learn from both sides.

One of the ‘traditional’ legacies that has stayed with me, is a love of posters. When we were an upcoming creative team the poster was the toughest thing to write.

Using an image and (as a general rule) 8 words, you must communicate a brand strategy, insight and on top of that, do it in a way that is memorable and stands out.

This takes some sterling penmanship. Neil French does a wonderful piece on omitting elements, the fewer elements you have the more powerful the poster.

And for us, this oldest of media is a splendid way to approach an all-singing multi-platform digital campaign.

With all of the variables, platforms, possibilities and different people poking their noses in, it doesn’t take much for the whole thing to become more complicated than waking someone out of a deep sleep and shouting the plot of Inception at them.

So a great way of keeping it all on track is to write a poster for the idea. It doesn’t have to be the next ‘Economist Management Trainee’, (just give that a go to test your mettle) just simply sum up the idea and strategy. The rule is this: if you can’t distill it into a poster it’s too complicated.

Just like the 30 second film pitch, this becomes the backbone and blueprint that allows everyone to riff off and expand upon without losing site of what we’re trying to communicate.

And even more importantly bringing it down to that simple level really shows you whether you have something worth saying; there can be no hiding behind technology, just like a shit film can’t hide behind special effects.

Even today when we see a team’s portfolio it’s great to see the hardest of writing tests. The poster. It proves they can write and proves they have the skills to make things simple. A skill in short supply.

creativity-online.com/news/the-digital-shoehorn-love-thy-poster/146195

It’s likely you would start with people and what makes them tick, observations on human behaviour, greed, love, relationships, jealousy, power, funny things that have happened to you in the past, characters you’ve met, oddities and inanities of modern life, things happening in the news and stuff that just tickles you but you just can’t explain or analyze why.

The last thing you would do is worry about where the venue is, what media the jokes will be told through, the navigation of your forthcoming iPad joke app, or whether the people in the audience are checked in to Foursquare or Facebook Places (although you might write a joke at their expense).

The professional comics, well the ones I have read about all mutter the same sort of advice. Richard Pryor says, “Tell the truth and funny will come.” Others talk mainly of keeping an ear out for funny characters and incidents you see or read about. Everyone agrees that it is mainly down to hard graft—”It took me ten years to become an overnight success,” said Jerry Seinfeld.

Considering who these people are, this is pretty boring, obvious stuff. But they don’t fill venues talking about the process of writing great material; they fill venues with great material.

Much unlike our own industry, we fill venues and conferences by mostly talking about the process and technologies involved, innovations, new buzzwords and platforms. Which, don’t get me wrong, are of huge importance and considerable interest.

But it’s far easier and far more interesting to talk about innovation and technology than about someone who sat down trying to write something funny, or moving or persuasive.

And so, the blend of ingredients required for great work has been skewed. Technology and innovation have become, dangerously, the main criteria for success. The less interesting writing process is seen as a less important skill. Or worse, a skill that anyone can do if they decide to turn their mind to it.

To simplify this and redress the balance, we often use a “joke” analogy with our clients. It serves primarily to get beyond all the buzzwords, hoopla and complications. It helps us remember what our goal is, which in this case, is to make people laugh.

We ask them to imagine that instead of writing adverts, we write jokes instead. (An invitation for them, and you, to politely inform us that they already knew that).

A joke, as we all know, can appear on TV, a poster, mailer, banner, blog, twitter, AR, app or whatever platform we’ll be evangelizing tomorrow. The most important thing is how funny that joke is. If it doesn’t make the person who sees it, in whatever guise, laugh, then they won’t remember it and won’t retell it down the pub/school gates/office.

It’s the writing of the joke and all its nuances that is clearly the vital ingredient. And just as not everyone is a comedian not everyone is automatically a good advertising writer.

Granted in the real world our job isn’t to just make people laugh, it’s to sell and persuade. These days we use an ever expanding array of tools to reach our audience, engage with them and be of some use to them.

No crappy analogy can address every variable this beautifully complicated industry throws up, but for us it serves to make it less complex to our clients and also gives balance and respect to all the different types of skills needed to make great work.

I know. I should have really ended with a joke.

creativity-online.com/news/the-digital-shoehorn-advertising-is-a-joke/146052

Whilst for my own sake I’d take issue with the first part (after all, once he’d cracked the first wrapping idea the rest sort of wrote themselves…) you can’t argue with the second.

This quote reminded me of one of my Dad’s old friends, “Bunter” as he was known. Not quite as high brow as an artist, a steel trader from Birmingham (UK) but nevertheless a very successful and wealthy one.

My Dad was always amazed by Bunter because he had a certain naive childlike aspect to how he approached business. His intellect didn’t get in the way of his believing it was worth having a pop.

I remember years ago he bought a golf course. My Dad and I were keen golfers whereas Bunter would have used a tee peg to pick his teeth. Regardless, he proclaimed he’d create the world’s longest snake bunker and have greens that had slopes with a 1/10 gradient.

Away from his company, we pissed ourselves laughing at his lunacy. We’d enough knowledge to know the huge amount of expertise that went into course design. In fact we new just enough to be certain that we’d never attempt such a thing.

Bunter never batted an eyelid. Never rationalized his gut feelings into submission. He went and built his golf course and his momentum of belief made it a great success.

Which brings me to my digital shoehorn. I’d gamble that loads of digital agencies have powerful, memorable, effective ideas stuck in their bottom drawer. I’d also gamble that just as many actually get to make these ideas, so why in the wider world is the shit work winning?

For me visualizing the whole process from the moment an idea is bought by the client to when it hits the public’s screens helps make sense of it all.

Take this picture of KISS in their prime, as a visual metaphor for the great idea that the client has just signed off:

The agency team working on the project has one goal; KEEP KISS LOOKING LIKE THIS.

However KISS are now off on an assault course like no other, traversing research groups, internal squabbles, late nights, late client feedback, change of goal posts, sphincter quivers, panic buttons, server crashes, boredom, hatred and finally antipathy.

So when KISS plops out the other end and onto the publics screens it more often or not looks like this:

It’s sort of the same idea just not quite as potent or powerful as it once was.

The real killer though is that normal people, or, as our industry calls them, consumers, only ever see the final picture.

They’ll never know about how great you were in those client meetings, all the battles you won, the heroic late nights, early mornings or the dazzling copy change that got the nod from the client right at the last minute.

No, they just see a shite ad, and that’s if you’re lucky enough for them to acknowledge its existence at all.

The answer is clear. To do great advertising of any kind a Christo/Bunter approach is the way forward.

Both Christo and Bunter had ideas that are crammed full of risk, excitement, impossibility, absurdity, passion.

This has to be our starting point, otherwise there won’t be enough in the tank to get the team through the assault course or keep their rational minds from kicking in and derailing the whole thing.

All very difficult in this often risk-averse process-heavy world of advertising. Especially when so much money is made by charging for the very process of risk aversion.

But if we can follow Christo and Bunter to the promised land, our ideas will flourish and we’ll walk hand in hand with the client down the fairway where golf bunkers stretch to the stars and the club house is wrapped in cloth.

http://creativity-online.com/news/the-digital-shoehorn-great-work-needs-a-kiss-by-dave-bedwood/145856