fenton benton, benton & fenton

New work - Anti-binge drinking

2008-06-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

Last week saw the launch of the anti-binge drinking campaign made my VCCP (where I work) for the Home Office.

The majoy online push centres around a film we made..

You may have already seen the ads on tv

Male

Female

The campaign also features online ads (I'll try to get the links soon as I'm really pleased with them) and a shop window display down at long acre in soho where you could bluetooth the online video and watch the ads and we invited bloggers down to cover the event on the same day we launched it to the press.

Laurence Borel of blogtillyoudrop has written a really good post about it.

I'll try to post some more of the stuff as the print and online ads are great. Enjoy!

URLs are on their way to the void

2008-03-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

They'll exist, but they won't be typed by anyone.

In Firefox, you can type in a keyword to the address bar and it will take you to the first google hit (just try it....gmail, hotmail, any really common sites)

Now, in Japan, just as in the UK with stuff like 'Act on CO2', they've started introducing search terms into ads rather than URLs.

One of the best blogs I've stumbled across recently

2008-03-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

Worth noting Lee McEwan's (Planning Director at Leo Burnett) blog. I found it looking for the quote above.

Measuring cup with unusual units

2008-03-18T03:26:00.001-07:00

I thought this, courtesy of boingboing was awesome.

I am an IRL sh*tposter

2008-03-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

This is my crowning glory. I have been accused of being an IRL (In Real Life) shitposter by the anti-scientology dudes over at londonlulz and they are lulz. They're absolutely right. I can't help it. But they should know that we both have the same objective - outright undeniable lulz. Mine were had at the expense of the British Police Force, rather than Scientology but hey...what are you gonna do?

Mick Jagger's Growling Bun

2008-03-17T05:48:00.001-07:00

Mick Jagger has a bun
Which sits beside him growling
On a velvet cushion
On a gilted chair
It sits beside him and goes
'aaaaaaaach'

It's not really a growl actually
It's a whisper
But 'growling bun' sounds better
Than 'whispering bun'

This is inspired by Ellie Robins, the girl who generated the phrase as part of her neverending lulz cycle.

bounce the pope / xenu and other anti-church of scientology

2008-03-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Walking down Charing Cross Road yesterday and there's the latest from the lulzologists anonymous/xenu, outside that weird COS test shop centre thing which I've always wanted to go into to see wtf they actually do in there

Anyway, when you see a protest, you might as well join it. So I did. A phrase my friend ellie coined is 'bounce the pope' it means nothing, it's just a celebration of language and putting weird words together, but I find it hilarious. So I made a sign out of it and joined in.

Little did I know that the xenu/anonymous dudes thought I was trying to show them up as religious bigots. I wasn't, I was just doing it for teh lulz. It was lulz.

This is a converstaion I had with a police officer just before I was given an official warning - my main beef here I suppose is not with the COS, but with the absolut decay of free speech in this country.

police-cop: I'm not sure they're going to be so pleased about you doing this in their protest. What's it about anyway?

stuart: We believe the pope should be bounced

police-cop: How do you mean?

stuart (trying to keep a straight face): Like a rubber ball, officer.

police-cop: well, I find that offensive as I'm catholic, could you take your sign down and move on.

stuart: Okay officer, one question, is what I'm doing illegal?

cop: Yes, this is your first official warning.

stuart: Fine. Thanks officer.

So anyway, here are some pics of the occasion. And the thread on xenu.net where they seem to think I'm a scientologist, just to note. I'm not. The COS offends me and I'm glad people like anon are trying to turn it to dust via extended internet and IRL lulz events.

Creative limits: Music made only with sounds from Windows 98/XP

2008-02-18T05:46:00.001-08:00

I posted a few weeks ago about 'creativity with limits' and how nowadays, it's a the hook, the novelty, the talkability factor that now makes art, instead of fine craft skills. Since, well, time and opportunity and technology are unlimited, fine means nothing.

I think this is a good example. It's not that good, but 200,000 views later....

Another doppelganger

2008-02-14T03:25:00.000-08:00

I seem to attract people saying...'omg, you look exactly like this dude'

This concept extends to people sending me pictures of people who they think I look like.

I can't help but agree with this one I've just been sent.

It's a guy called Daryl Polumbo, who I think was in glassjaw and is now in another band. He looks like a wide-eyed me.

Why we can't succeed against our clients

2008-02-07T03:51:00.000-08:00

We can only succeed with them. One thing all awe-inspiring advertising has in common is that the client had faith in the agency. I think this trust has been somewhat eroded, especially in this decade.

Richard summed this idea up really nicely in a post of his.

Edit: On second glance, that probably needs a comma in it.

Like wearing a nametag to remember who you are.

2008-02-06T03:53:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Saher again

They are so in-tune with what their brand is about that the need for a formal articulation is almost the equivalent of someone writing their own name on a post it note to remember who they are.

(written about fashion brands)

I think it must be the planner's dream to be able to articulate a strategy that becomes not a coat of varnish on a big organisation, but something that can credibly live throughout the organisation and affects the way it talks, acts and thinks.

All the successful brands, google, apple, nike, absolut...and even the type of famous person that you'd lvoe to go down the pub with people (brands are just multifaceted personifications of companies to me)..actors like brad pitt, christopher walken, gary oldman, kevin spacey...musicians...beck, jimi hendrix, jim morrison...probably most of all, david bowie. They all stand for something. It's in their blood. It's not a layer of comms or a brand onion. It's a belief. And arguably, where there isn't a CEO like Steve Jobs, there needs to be a brand planner who understands the way in which people like that work.

Millions of pounds. Wasted

2008-02-06T03:33:00.000-08:00

Imagine if all that marketing spend was a gift from the brand.

Brands spend extraordinary amounts of money advertising themselves. Imagine if instead of plugging all this money into 'communications' they instead created, cultural products, entertainment, services, innovations, applications of their brand idea. In other words they did stuff instead of said stuff. Brands should do more and say less.

From Saher Sidhom, the very sharp head of strategy at greatworks who are doing some awesome work for absolut.

I keep talking about brands doing somethign worthwhile. In fact, I got bored of myself, until I heard Saher take the words out of my mouth. I know, I know, it's nothing new, what are the origins of the soap opera afterall...it's just. Who will be the first to switch £50m of media and agency fees a year to making something people want to engage with? Altering consumer perceptions has become harder to do with conversation (be it two way or one way). It's time for some action.

Matter matters

2008-01-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to seeing a post by Russell, I've just signed up to Matter, an initiative set-up to re-invigorate DM.

I think this is awesome. Utterly brilliant and a great move toward brands doing worthwhile stuff for their customers instead of just trying to talk at them.

I've signed up and I'll definitely be posting about the thing that I am posted. Post.

Sign up before midnight tonight!

More details here.

One of my favourite ads from last year

2008-01-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

I've just seen this ad online which reminded me of Amelia's post about her favourite ad

I guess it's easy to remember that putting people off doing things seems, to me at least, a little easier than selling them something, but the example above is a testament to well constructed visuals and copy and how impactful they can be.

I found it extremely striking and I re-appraised my consumption of crisps.

Creativity with limits

2008-01-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

I doubt this is a new idea, but I've been trying to think about how to articulate it for a few weeks now, and it hasn't come to me. So I just thought I'd try writing what came to mind. Ad-hoc like? Sweet.

I want Faris to tell me the name for this, but broadly, what I'm interested in at the moment is the subject of the post. Creativity with limits.

It follows discussion with a friend in a band about creative competition as well as with Richard about, breaking through, gaining attention and otherwise being successful in an utterly saturated world.

Maybe first we need to ask why it's saturated? I think the answer is opportunity...

Technology. The ubiquity of personal creative technology, cameras and computers etc - on top of the commercial technology that allows us all to be fed without slaving in the fields...

That means that the competitive landscape is full. People don't know where to look and people don't find new things like they used to.

Suddenly, things with seemingly no creative merit in an 'olde world' become very fashionable.

- men who make art out of carving pencils. I'm sure this was just a silly craft skill bored old men in the outback would've done. Now it's art
- Paper art
- Jack Kerouac
- abstract expressionism
- gonzo

I’ve read somewhere before that some of these things were considered to be part of the cult of the amateur. I don’t buy that. And even I used to slate art forms that didn’t look like master crafts. However it’s simply the way we are forced to express ourselves in an arena where a painting that took 11 years to complete may be worth less than some LSD inspired dots that someone who is either an artist or just a very savvy businessman (is there a difference..?) created. It’s also the way to cut through, it’s the ultimate USP.

Hey look, this is my art gallery, it’s filled with expressions of city life that all took 11 minutes to paint, or indeed here are some portraits, I painted them all on Parisian metro tickets .

So here's my thing. Fine craft still exists, and it can triumph. But for now, I believe that successful art, literature and music of today will consist of things that have been made within limits imposed by the artist. I think that what happened in film with the Dogme 95 is linked with this, but slightly different, as the limits they imposed were not media limits, or limits of form, but imposed rules of behaviour within that media - i.e twitter with film would mean making a film in 1400 pixels, or twitter in a dogme 95 form might mean only tweeting using palindromes (you get the idea).

My own personal take on this is that with James Bell of Seeing Scarlet, I'll be making some demos around concepts like 'conceived and recorded in an hour' and totally ad-libbed lyrics. I understand this is not a new thing, but I like it.

Don't mess with the talent

2008-01-24T02:36:00.000-08:00

Or they'll most definitely mess with you.

Just seen this on techcrunch, Noca, an new online payment site set up by ex-Visa employees is said to be the new PayPal.

I don't have any evidence that these guys/girls were messed with by Visa, but when all is said and done, they left, with a great entrepreneurial idea which is set to challenge one of the internet's most valuable brands and probably Visa itself. Maybe there's VC in there somewhere from Visa, but I doubt it, there's too little branding for that.

They even started out on facebook with an awesome 'micro-payment' thing, a great proposition of 'owe your mate a fiver for the drinks last night' - from account to account, no bullshit, no fees.

Got talent? Keep it. There are lots of ways. But try asking it what it thinks and investing in that, it's talent for a reason.

This isn't branding, it's letting personality shine through organisation

2008-01-22T10:19:00.001-08:00

Something Iain Tait has certainly been quite focused on recently is the power of copy in communicating a brand, or a person behind a website. There was a tremendous post on this (in the guise of talking about DM, although really it covered all corporate comms in my book) that really snapped my fork.

The example I cite is from digg, and it's a tremendous window into the people and personalities behind a big web 2.0 brand. Basically, they use the 404 error to give each member of the team a chance to post their favourite link (maybe this is monetised, maybe it isn't). It seems to me, that in this case it's genuine and they really are just giving you, the digg reader some stuff that might be of interest to you whilst the site is down...afterall, digg is probably still run by the people who made it (it is...) and they're going to have a shared interest with their consumers, not a constructed one, a genuine one.

It feels like my job as planner needs to be to identify what this shared interest is, and with big brands, use self selective media to communicate with different shared interest groups.

All the corporate communications and branding do in this case is make me feel like i understand company x and that company x understands me, once this exchange is complete (through witty copy or huge events), then we have a relationship...and to quote the most awesome communications writing I've read in about 5 years, then I want to be a member of their club.

I've found my doppelganger

2007-10-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I blogged about a the fact that someone should make a site where you can truly find your doppelganger, with image matching algorithms as well as entering features, details etc.

Anyway, my housemate ant and his girlfriend victoria (hungamunga) have found min

Guess which one is me.

A

B

Something I don't usually blog about...

2007-10-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

...my work, well directly at least. I find it a bit unnecessary and a lot of people only seem to do it as some sort of ego-constructing onanism.

However on this occasion, it was a piece of work I was extremely proud of and something that also serves as a case study for a brand putting its faith and trust in the agency it's employing, rather than constantly fighting for intellectual superiority (dog, bark, why, yourself etc).

Anyway, from the people who brought you the Anya Hindmarch'I am not a plastic bag' and books like 'Change the world 9 till 5' comes Small actions, big change

The client came to us with a deal with the Department for Education and Skills which required, at minimum, a book to be produced which communicates the We Are What We Do philosophy. So the brief, support the production of ~2,500 books to go to every school in the country.

What we ended up with is a testament to some good research, simple strategy, awesome production, design and project management - and on top of that, and perhaps most importantly, a group of clients who couldn't have been more open, intelligently challenging and brilliant to work with.

We produced a site which lets kids, groups of kids, schools, shoals and troops upload their representation of an action.

We wanted to give it some perspective, that things could be more than the sum of their parts, and that people working together could make something bigger and more impactful than one person working alone.

We then remembered Art Attack. And we made a google/flickr maps mashup thing linking people's uploads to their position on the map, the intent to cover england in aerial actions.

I think it's cute, simple and so far, it's proving to be really effective.

We Are What We Do is an organisation that's been set up simply to do some good in the world, it's not a charity, but as far as I've seen, the money they make simply goes into the next project.

If you like the site, then I'd love for you to help it along by putting it in the hands of some kids or schools you know.

Thank you.

Fallon bunnies are just another rip off

2007-10-05T03:26:00.000-07:00

It was pretty, nothing's original, but it still makes old Fenty sigh a little bit that it's unashamedly lifted from someone and no credit's been given.

There is no difference between digital media and old school media

2007-09-27T02:10:00.001-07:00

They both got people talking about brands, just in different ways

Digital media lets you talk with the brand directly and offers you something (usually functional or novel, but it can be emotional too) to talk about.

Old school media creates an emotional/rational (perfume vs key facts that separate BOSE sound systems from the competition [in fact, perfume ads even have a rational bend to them, oooh, have you seen kate moss in the new versace ad]) reaction which, in truly successful campaigns, is strong enough to get you talking about the ad you've just seen and the product or brand within it.

The funny thing about digital media, is that the job of the piece of work is very much interlinked with the medium, and in digital, that's absolutely boundless, so what you need to do to make good digital things is to not just understand the right way to create an emotive or rational experience that creates a reaction, but also have some AUDIENCE LED comprehension of WHAT that is and HOW it works. Effectively, that the idea and the channel are too linked not to think about them at the same time.

Digital doesn't push

2007-09-24T01:56:00.000-07:00

Okay

We've done a great website which says what the client wants it to say, mirrors the proposition of the ATL advertising and maybe it's got an interactive game or something else on it.

client: 'something is wrong as thousands more people than normal are not just spontaneously coming here'

stu: 'why would they? the only people who will come, unless you've let us do something really worthwhile/novel or entertaining which possibly doesn't sit within a brand pyramid, are those who would've visited your site anyway'

client: 'oh, so why are we spending all this money on digital?'

stu: 'well, I'd suggest that at the moment, you're doing it because you've heard it's the right thing to do, and well, isn't everyone devoting 20% of their budget to digital? and that nike plus thing was really great wasn't it?

then i'd suggest 3 years of cognitive behavioural therapy, breastfeeding people as children, a critical perspective, about 20-30% more cynicism, the ability to think logically and rationally about problems before acting, as well as a nature which automatically questioned what was put in front of you

to top it all off, i'd say that you should be spending money on digital to enhance and deepen your communication with people, but you must realise that only a finite amount of people will ever be interested in what you have to say unless your product is classless, sexless and alienates no one (that product doesn't exist because of the very nature of the mature consumer having to refuse as much as he accepts in order to define himself)

Digital is not a push medium, the days of 30million views of your viral are gone, the only reason people did this was because of the novelty, you have two options:

- find the next novelty, luck more than judgment, will simply make your brand look a little more forward thinking than the competition for a while, it'll be expensive, and it doesn't really fit with the temporal inertia of strategic business requirements - you can't plan for it.

- properly identify your current and realistic potential audience, don't just identify it, construct it, people's interests and activities are there for all to see, know where you want to go and adapt to that audience be focused and even more focused. there is no mass market, the thing that looks like that is just a finite collection products which appeal to lots of people, all for different reasons. you can focus on many groups if you think your product has some credibility in them....

....and please, for god's sake, stand for something. brands are just people, would you want to surround yourself with inspid, vacuous idiots, lacking an opinion but never lacking something to shout about?

Insight mining and Subway

2007-09-11T01:39:00.000-07:00

Further to my post here regarding Subway and how insights can be found in and around social communities, the same guy who drew the cartoon about Subway laying out their cheese in a manner which doesn't tessellate has now reported that someone sent him an image suggesting the do it on purpose to try to maximise revenue.

This made me feel really nasty...almost like throwing a half full can of beer at a subway window at half past twelve on a friday night. Not that Fenton would do anything like that, but the sentiment's communicated.

Stop:

Trying to cover up problems and bad things with communications

Start:

Doing things properly and then communicating them to customers

Outcome:

Everyone is doing things properly, and there's not much to talk about and everything is more efficient and life a little bit nicer.

My opinion on that?

Fine, I'll play Bossa Nova guitar on a beach instead of sitting at my desk.

Online video wall

2007-08-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

Connectedness. Lots of people online. The internet being a brilliant place to meet people and communicate.

At the moment, this interaction, meeting and communication is not at all like walking down the street. A lot of it is carried by specific searching, me clicking a band in my profile and seeing who else likes it. Searching for people in your area on myspace. Your school. Your work.

Serendipity. Meeting someone by walking into a bar isn't 'random', walking down the street and bumping into someone new isn't coincidence. It's the same as looking for them online. A series of choices have led both people to one place, the difference, is whether or not this has been a conscious process.

Serendipity online is a weird on. It used to take place in AOL chatrooms and IRC (which is actually more community and interest based). Virtual pubs. I remember rooms which used to be called "village square', 'pub' and 'TheLocal'. These existed as people were talking real world concepts online in order to understand and pass on what it was in an accessible way.

I'd like to see more serendipity in connecting with people when you're online.

I have two ideas:

1) Create a webcam videowall that when you're bored, you can switch your iSight (or lesser webcame) on, and just become part of a video wall which people could go to a URL to see (as long as they too were broadcasting). Then you could just watch people, see who you might like to chat with. communicate with them visually. I reckon it'd be really exciting. Picking people who you think you'd get on with out of a crowd. The next part of the interface would be text based, or simply feature a way to exchange details to communicate via IM, skype independantly of the site.

2) the same as this, but with avatars and text. Like second life, but less anthropomorphic. You have an icon, the virtual landscape is split into loads of areas, age, interest group, sex etc and you can skittle about throwing your avatar into a new space to see lots of people chatting to each other. Like you can hear loads of conversations in a bar. See which one you want to join. See which one you have something to add to. Read what people are saying and judge whether or not you want to take part. If not, skattle to another area of the virtual conversation space.

(note to self: post the link for that brazilian tree saving site)

It's basically a massive set of chatrooms shown in a physical space with no boundaries. They can cross, and that creates overlaps. You'll have a group of people talking about advertising, and a group talking about design and there might be an overlap group....i need a diagram to explain this. I'll get around to that.

This post is a WIP. Your thoughts and additions are welcome!

human brain cloud

2007-07-18T09:02:00.003-07:00

http://www.humanbraincloud.com/

Picture (Enhanced Metafile)
Addictive? Yep
Full of needless stats? Yep
Nice flash animation? Check
Insightful? You bet your ass…
Probably good for copywriting? Er…sure
Wish I'd made it? Fo shizzle

Common associations

* lego -> my eggo
* tiger -> tony
* have it -> your way
* snap -> crackle pop
* subway -> eat fresh
* this is -> SPARTA!

More stats here; http://2dboy.com/

Nice green site

2007-07-18T09:02:00.001-07:00

Such fun to see people working on things together

http://www.valenatureza.com.br/

Shows people collaborating at the same time no make something. Really fun when you're on there with more than one person.

Green by theme, not mechanic

________________________________________________________________________
glue London Limited is registered in England and Wales No. 4293519 Registered office: Parker Tower, 43-49 Parker Street, London WC2B 5PS

Subway insight

2007-07-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

I've started seeing that facebook groups are basically clearly articulated insights into human behaviour and opinion. When they have something to do with brands or products, they provide MASSIVE HUEG insights.

My job is to provide insights about things, most of my best ones are instinctive and based on experience (if relevant) or empathy. Some people look through data for insights, so do I sometimes. But maybe we don't even need to do this when people are TELLING us their insights.

I can't actually look for any examples now as I've just thought of something I've got to do....okay here's one http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2232168106.but they are there. The cheese example above shows a lovely insight simply demonstrated. This will be a facebook group soon.

These insights open up a whole world of microcommunication and possible starting points for new campaigns.

People have done it before, Coke brought back Coke Classic after MASSIVE media attention, nowadays it just needs to exist as a movement of a few people for you to notice it, test it and then make some ads or maybe like adapt your business/product strategy because of it.

Facebook application: Relationship Monitor

2007-07-18T06:50:00.000-07:00

We're all nosey. People's relationship statuses are always changing. They're listed and the data is accessible.

Lots of people are breaking up at the moment, it would be interesting to have a net aggregator of 'what's happening with relationships in the world?'

The data could then be looked at in terms of times, season, continent, country and we'd know when were popular break up times, if any. Whether it seemed like more men broke up with women or whatever else. What time of year and where most people got together.

This would be very interesting. Does anyone know how to make it?

MSN has no reason for being

2007-07-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

We're all on facbeook all the time

Facebook knows when you're online

We should make a facebook application that is an AJAX instant messaging client that sits within facebook (and can pop out of your browser).

This is good as:

- it needs no installation (work environments where maybe you can't install stuff)
- it uses less system resources, MSN is currently using 24mb of RAM to sit in the background (how do I even know if it's ACTUALLY still open until I look at it? Am i right? eh?)
- it's linked to facebook, where everyone is and everyone will continue to be for a while
- it will actuall extend the life of facebook and add some more inertia to social network switching, as you'll be like...hell, this thing does photos, music, appls, instant messaging...why the flenxdrax would I leave?
- it'd be sweet

There's a man with 50 nuts on his face

2007-07-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

http://positivesharing.com/2007/07/analysts-to-costco-stop-treating-your-employees-so-well/

1. Costco treats employees well, pays them 42% more than fiercest rival
2. Happier employees, less turnover & theft, people treating customers better
3. 10% increase in stock price against competitor decreases
4. Wall Street analyst suggests that 'they're being too belevolent'
5. My brain explodes as I keepy having these conversations and in relation to marketing/advertising if selling things and bottom line REALLY is you're game - you'll just treat people right and do things properly, it seems that more difference to profit and revenue is made by proper behaviour than by anything traditional 'communications' can do, alone at least.

Here's a photo of me with 50 cashew nuts on my face.

Brand comedians

2007-07-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

A lot of brilliant viral work I see simply serves to humanise a brand by letting people know it's intelligent and has a sense of humour. If a brand is seen to be observing the world like consumers do, then bingo. It's not a brand, it's just some people, but anyway.

I've thought that a good thing for a brand to have might be an in-house tream consisting of a Jack of all trades cameraman/producer/soundman as well as a couple of actor-comedians. These guys could simply talk about the world on behalf of the brand. They should be free to comment on whatever they want. There should be initial agreement on some basic groundrules of 'how does this brand actually behave?', but really, it'd be up to the people who employed the team to make sure they were the right personalities for what the internal stakeholders wanted to acheive.

It doesn't fit very well into a short termist, self destructing philosophy of most organisations, but really, people should start out doing what they do. Acting on what they believe in, if they believe in a product or service, they'll make it. They'll make it how they believe it should be made. As it grows, they'll need to hire more people who believe the same or similar things about how to make a product or service to them.

Previously, this wasn't possible, as geographical boundaries capped the amount of people with similar beliefs or value systems to the area that you were in. Not any more.

To the people that started this company which sells something they believe in, one thing they have to remember is that all through the genesis of it, they were shifting and changing what it should be, and to stop that would be sinful. New people, who are aligned at the fundamental level would bring new change and new shifts to the whole process. People shouldn't be precious, and they should appreciate the subtlety surrounding people's wants. This will help them cater for even more people, as value sets aren't separate in humans, they merge and overlap like a massive ven diagram.

This is however, finite. Value sets don't overlap infinitely. You will end up where the product or service is relevant to X people but not Y. This is okay. There is no such thing as a mass market and I think everything will begin to look even LESS like one in years to come.

I believe the way we grow up will mean that there are only a finite amount of people who deeply care about the aesthetics and ergonimics of the computer they're using, that's fine. That's why Apple might never get to everyone, and it's okay. There should just be another purely thought out solution on the other side, I suppose there is, by accident - cheaply made pcs, software that 'does the job'.

A brand should exist because the personalities and the viewpoints of the people who run the company shine through in everything about the product or service. (this screws up when things get bigger...) but really, all that happens with a successful product or brand like Apple is that the consumers are aligned with the vision of the company. A lot of people who use Apple products would probably quite like to WORK at Apple...because there are shared values.

Sade

2007-07-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

I've just had a thought whilst listening to Smooth Operator by Sade.

I'd like to do one of those animations that takes the lyrics of a song literally and then acts as the music video.

I can imagine pictures of smooth things, followed by an operator. With more thought it would hopefully become less literal.

The one I'd be most fond of is the 'Coast to coast, LA to Chicago' drawn as an animated route on google maps and then failing to actually GET to the coast, being that Chicago is nowhere near the coast. It could maybe demonstrate this with some kind of big X or a picture of an unhappy walrus

Doppelganger

2007-07-05T06:37:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this post by Iain Tait.

Seriously...is there a website for this? I can't get it out of my head - finding your doppelganger would be wicked.

You enter all physical details and several pictures and people browse through looking for people similar to them/their friends. and there's an image matching algorithm too. so it does work automatically, but the major fun is looking. and when the ideal one is found, they text/e=mail you and erm...you have a special bond with another human being - always good right?

Update:

On second thought, this should be a Facebook application which uses technology from MyHeritage (where you can find which celebrities you look like) to match you across all profile pictures.

I also actually found my own doppelganger which was quite fulfilling:

a striking example of him can be found here: http://www.lessrain.com/projects/luis/king/Main.swf.

WIP

Who do we pay to get that to run as an honest to god TV advert?

2007-06-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

It's undeniable that there's still power in a TVC, and when people see something really effective, they think that for it to escape the dark corner of the internet that they saw it on is for it to be broadcast.

That advert is by the US Drug Policy Alliance and tried to get across the utter codshite policy of focusing on the drug problem and locking up as many people as possible as a route to electoral success.

The first comment after this video inspired me somewhat

'Who do we give money to to get that run as an honest to god TV ad?'

Well, exactly, I mean in the age of mass participation, people selling houses in lotteries, buying football clubs in syndicates and of sketching in a swarm why isn't there a place where we can donate money to buy media space for a message we think people need to see. This would be the ultimate in 'power to the people' with certain issues pertinant to segments of the population perhaps being given a share of voice that they've never received before, maybe even highlighting issues in the heads of people who've never thought them before, maybe if you were a closed minded voter in the US that thought 'well, those guys seem to be doing a good job, locking up all the drug addicts, I don't know about anyone else so I'll vote for them', you'd see this ad and you might see another side to it.

So. If you're an organisation or a brand or a man or a woman or a child with a nice message or a message that you think people need to see and you think other people would agree with you, put the message out there with an easy mechanic to accept donations for delivery of that message.

You could have levels of media buy at every price point from TV, national press, local press, online or text ads sponsoring all uses of the word 'drug' in the online edition of The Times etc

Mass participation

2007-04-12T05:25:00.000-07:00

In line with http://glueblogs.glueserv.com/bumf/?p=147 from earlier. More mass participation stuff. Gets people talking, is kind of friendly and open in tone.

Users can control the paddle to go left or right. In a cinema, it's a collective thing…which gets everyone working together. Nice connecting people. Happy times. Etc. Link here; http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/interactivity-in-movie-theaters.html

Reminds me of something ant told me about ages ago - collective pong - http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html - which had 5000 people with controls saying 'left or right' and before long, the hive mind took over and 2500 people were playing against the other half just with two paddles.

Anyway, mass participation online is really sweet, but in other media it's a bit difficult technologically. People like being a part of something - even simply, with stuff like that alien vs. predator thing (which was also done on London bus shelters). People like seeing they can have an effect and make a difference. As well as being part of a bigger whole. It appeals to the basic need to belong to stuff like ego, where your opinion counts.

bono and the ethical ad-spend

2007-03-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

You've all seen it. $100m spent on Bono's hyper-ethical cockwaving, $18m raised for charity.

I've often wondered why some brands don't just throw an £8m media budget into some good causes, use PR and some clever digital stuff to get the message out there and bask in the fact that they, and indeed people like us, get to do something genuinely better than pissing insipid brand messages all over people at Old Street tube.

Do you think authenticity, a brand story, ethics and a degree of humanistaion could be achieved by activity like this? I do. Since that's what everyone wants to do, for the right brand - this could really work.

Wouldn't it be nice knowing that past the £100k creative budget you were lucky to get, that there wasn't a media agency being paid to suggest a mix of yahoo, hotmail, msn and 'key social networking sites' for the client to spunk their millions over?

White Bits

2007-03-08T08:32:00.000-08:00

So...I'm on reddit and I see this thing and I'm like 'that would totally make a nice ad for something as it looks like an insight' - the only trouble is, I'm not sure what for.

Suntan lotion is the obvious one, but it's not really right is it?

I'm hungover and I want to die a bit. I can't think. Can you? What do you think it's nice for?

click

2007-01-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

just like the ipod, i found a site where sounds are used to make me feel like it's quality...and kind of real.

http://cbeau.ca/

scroll around the pictures, it just makes it a joy to navigate. just like when you saw the ipod first and scrolled up and down for no reason.

Join the fucking army

2007-01-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

I'm well into like spoof advertisements and that, you know? Brass Eye style etc. Chris Morris yeah? Fucking genius mate. Knew how to fucking subvert culture.

I'm well into that. Culture subversion.

Please read the rest of this with a Brass Eye style accent.

You probably didn't notice, being so immersed in the cheap fat of the culture cow that advertising is part of culture. The GIF-Druids on b3ta have outdone themselves this time with a half-baked 'make a polemic animated gif banner' competition. These pixel monkeys sit there for hours chewing on the inter-cud, waiting for their chance to create something amazing. If these don't make you laugh, you're a grotesquely ugly freak.

Spoof advertising is always funny. Think of the lads in Basra. Join the fucking army.

SPAM Scare

2006-12-22T02:57:00.000-08:00

This type of SPAM makes Fenton look behind him too much on the walk home, even though Kensington is a very safe place...

On a more serious note, what is the motivation behind this sort of thing? Is there one? Is someone actually trying to kill me?

Meat Pub (tube map)

2006-12-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

I like anagram tube map from linked to me by Anthony Goh it's like, a totally cool subversion of the things in our everyday lives that we don't really notice, totally cool man. Yeah. Prussian Girdle babez.

Other tube map related stuff which I like a bit of is animals on the underground, it's amaaazing. Totally. Simeon Rose had one of these as his desktop when I first moved to London.

A geographical map from here. Probably via the guy below.

This is the best site on the internet. This dude has constructed maps indicating what's really underground, stations it's quicker to walk between, travel times, different names, toilets, the list goes on and really served to completely ZOMG me. ZOMG.

Slut Tube. That's gonna go a long way. But this fokker translated the tube map into German. Holy fuck.

Zehr gut. What you can see below from Asen T Tsvyatkov is something I thought about doing when I first saw the absolut ads as a kid (teenager?). It's obvious when you look at the map, but it's still a lovely thought. Whilst I was on the lookout for it i came across this site which is a repository for all of the ABSOLUT ads ever made. Whilst listening to an interview with Richard Huntingdon over at Russell Davies' blog, I heard them talking about 118 118, and how that's the absolute pinnacle of all our activity, from the economic side of it, investment in an agency led a totally homogenous market to have one brand with 40% market share (even though it was more expensive than the rest).

(apologies for the image size. I had to use google's cache of the image as the site I linked from is down.)

I think this campaign from ABSOLUT is on par with that creatively as they managed to take the UK flavoured vodka market (at least) by storm against much better established, cheaper brands. Especially brands like Stolichnya who have the most traditional product (they invented flavoured vodkas) but due to a lack of marketing communications they were left relatively skunnered by a mad band of drunk Svenskas.

Absolut Fenton.

Get raped

2006-12-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

Fenton's just seen something he quite likes. Not because he's a sexual deviant, just because it's something rather polemic, and he does rather like to verge on the flippant.

The latest thing for sale in Second Life is rape. There are several different types of rape to choose from and you can also select in what way you participate - "Rape victim," "Get raped," or "Hold victim". Fantastic. Have a look at the cyber-shot below.

I'll attempt to keep this apart from a diatribe about what I think of Second Life, especially what I think of the agencies/companies who are cluelessly piling onto the e-wagon. From a societal point of view, I think the people who've first linked this have put an unnecessarily negative slant on the purchase of virtual rape, or virtu-rape. It set me thinking about the purpose and possible benefits of such a thing existing.

Japan, home of certain types of animated porn which have been known to feature multiple devil docks piercing the internal organs pubescent schoolgirls* also has the lowest number of reported rape cases and the highest percentage of arrests and convictions in reported cases of any developed nation**. The obvious argument lies that the rape might be happening but not reported. Fair, but there is no evidence to support that. So I'll go with the fact that Japan is a saintly nation of non-rapists. Nice one lads.

What's my point? Well, essays and studies like the one quoted above are far from uncommon, people have looked at pornography versus sex crime incidence and the overwhelming link is an inverse one. More porn, less raping. Great.

The point I am driving at, in my opinion, it's an inescapable fact that most, if not all humans harbour certain taboo desires, that's fine, it's normal. I think there should be a chance to express these desires in a cybersex-arena (like Second Life) rather than IRL as with the growth of the internet, you can't help feel that the growth of virtual environments will be primarily driven by sex and sexuality. One of the first plug-ins written and sold in Second Life allowed you to buy varying types of wang and probably tits as well, I dunno.

Second Life is mankind's first real foray into any type of mass interactive virtual world and I don't think it's very good, to be honest - I'd rather expose myself to an infinite loop of hentai. That is however, more down to technological limitation rather than it being a bad idea. The idea of a widely available interconnected virtual world is there, it will just have to become a lot more accessible and interactive on a much deeper level (possibly some type of direct brain-neurone interface whenever the guys at IBM get round to plugging in someone's head to Big Blue and flicking the switch) before it becomes universally used.

Something that writing this article sparked me to think about was an article I saw last week related to the effect of virtual reality and interactivity on memory. And how in increasingly interactive digital communications are more effective in embedding themselves in your memory than their static counterparts, your head-brain gets all confused as to whether x really happened or not. The extension of this would be to say that virtual reality implants false memories (or are they?) into your memory.

* I haven't actually seen this.
** From here.

Diagrams

2006-12-18T08:51:00.000-08:00

This is so fucking great. Why? because it demonstrates a two fairly abstract human constructs using three lines. I think communicating information succinctly and accessibly it's a greatly admirable skill.

This creative individual has the recipe for a book on their hands. A seemingly unending flow of clever ideas which have been very well represented. All of them inside a very cute, lo-fi, mechanic

I've long wished to make a website from drawing and writings, all scanned in. I think it's a nice departure from boring fonts, white space and flash. Typesetting and typography unaided by computer is an extremely attractive, ergonomic and soulful way of communicating.

I'd quite like to set up a lo-fi web dépôt as sort of an offset of modern hyper-graphics. Functionality and content could still delve into Web 2.0 and beyond, just that the interface would stray away from buttons which took 3 hours to make in Photoshop. Any lo-fi interface shrine would feature Lou Barlow , I've absolutely loved his site and it's just as effective and attractive in spite of his design method not changing since ~1999. How many 7 year old sites can you say that about?

It's kind of like this theme which I've just installed on my MacBook. Developed by Apple Japan in the 1990's and made to look like a Drawing Board. I think it's one way to make technology more friendly.

Saatchi & Saatchi - Desesperados

2006-12-11T03:58:00.000-08:00

I'm at a total loss. Standing in M&C last week was probably the most sobering experience of my life. The characters, or to be more precise, caricatures that I saw there instantly answered many questions I'd had about the fate of the dinosaurs. Clichéd I know, but they're all working in big above the line agencies.

The Client Services Director, a classically educated T-Rex, and various other types of large (supposedly) extinct reptile could be seen at this universal ego nucleus. There was a nervous energy, far darker than the ceaseless sniffing of client pockets and thinly veiled inter-agency scoffing. It was the fact that they know that there's a large body of rock, heavy metal and ice diving toward them like a Zulu on a Kamikaze mission.

It was this energy that surely led Saatchi & Saatchi to write the advert which you can see above, (apologies for bisecting it). No, this isn't a cutting from the business pages of a 1970's NY newspaper, this is from The Sunday Times business pages, dated Sunday 10th December 2006.

If you've read it, you'll be crying. At this exact moment wishing for a return to critics binding their meaningless diatribes in Kleenex so you could dry your bliddies. Unfortunately, you'll have to use the rounded aluminium corner of your MacBook Pro.

Why are you crying? You're crying because an institution which probably led you in some convoluted way to reading this blog is on it's knees and all it can do is ask an overpaid longcopy writer to bail them out.

Do you think that telling me that you've changed is good enough?

Do you not have to prove it to me?

Wouldn't the best place to prove it to me be in this very piece of communications?

Is a long copy ad in The Sunday Times the best place to prove that you're ready for the 'Paradigm shift' and that your 'new competencies' are up to scratch?

Fenton isn't so sure. Fenton would prove himself with action (or possible an aimless blogotribe). Fenton would have told Saatchi to approach their current clients and anyone else who advertises like they were an infant agency desperate for business, desperate to prove themselves. A ground up re-work of their whole strategy which mirrors the fact that advertising isn't advertising anymore. It's just a bunch of people saying stuff and that our job is to find the various ways to best influence that.

I'd be interested to hear your (plural) thoughts.

Fenton.

P.S. Any clues on what the headline means?

Credit for scanning this ad goes to Charlie Kemball who's interning at glue at the moment.