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

View Larger Map

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