08/19/2008 05:39:49 PM
An amazing film that takes the audio of an interview with John Lennon conducted by a 14-year old in Toronto and places amazing graphics around it.




Posted by Ed Cotton
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08/19/2008 04:12:13 PM
It was staring us in the face all along, Weight Watchers is the ultimate Brand Utility. It's wonderfully functional and the whole brand is geared around helping you achieve a very specific goal. It's just not as sexy and cool as Nike Plus, that's why we don't think of the utility aspect and it's been around for years, which also doesn't help.

However, they Weight Watchers is online and the experience is very functional and  very Brand Utility.

Clive Thompson over at Wired thinks the experience is very much like an RPG..


"Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They're like a special buff or potion -- a last-ditch save when you're on the ropes.

Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind."

Clive as give us all a clue as to where the future of Brand Utility lies.

"This puts me in mind of the talk that Jane McConigal- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer -- gave at this year's South by Southwest conference. She argued that game designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by reshaping dull, everydayday activities into fun challenges."

So, it's easy to see who can move into this space.

Clorox/Unilever/P&G- Home cleaning

AAA- Car maintenance

Whole Foods/Safeway/Kroger/Kaiser- Nutritious eating

etc....


Posted by Ed Cotton

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08/19/2008 03:00:17 PM (1)
Paul Graham of early-stage VC Y Combinator has a nice list of ideas the company would like to fund. Included on his list are new ways of doing news, auctions, dating, simplified browsing, better photo and video sharing sites and advertising!

"Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales."

A nice challenge for anyone bold enough to take it on.


Posted by Ed Cotton
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08/19/2008 11:04:54 AM (1)
Peter Hall suggests that buildings and billboards are in the process of becoming a lot more interesting and will provide a whole new communication medium. Something that will need a whole new set of skills to create for.

"What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment? What if the building could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists? Digital designers and architects have begun working together to move beyond the facade and give buildings a living skin."



Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: outofhome (3) peterhall (1) signage (1) posters (1) livingskin (1) billboards (1)

08/15/2008 04:58:18 PM
VBS has built its brand reputation for pushing the envelope when it comes to extreme news story gathering. This recent venture is no exception as they dispatch one of its junior reporters to the most polluted city on the planet.


Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: vbs (1)

08/15/2008 01:34:20 PM
Somers Town is a recent UK movie release (see below).



It's by acclaimed director and Shane Meadows (This is England) and written by a couple of guys at Mother and brought to life by the agency's movie division Mother Vision.

Interestingly, the film is funded and supported by Eurostar, a client Mother pitched for and lost. However, they had an idea to make short films in the pitch and followed up with the client to eventually gain funding for this project.

Brands have played around in this area for years, but it looks like we are going to see more of this type of funding as brand owners look for interesting points of connection beyond the predictability of television.




Posted by Ed Cotton

08/14/2008 05:05:12 PM
A nice (old!!!) CNN profile on Australian bag brand Crumpler (nice new site!) and the importance of staying true to your brand self.

The CNN story mentions the brand's beer for bags promotions and the tagging of their logo, even as stickers on fruit, as some of the more unconventional approaches the brand has taken.




Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: bags (1) crumpler (1) branding (48) messangerbags (1)

08/14/2008 06:47:15 AM (2)
New Zealand is rapidly emerging as the the country that's doing most to brand itself "Green" and "Eco-Aware". The government has lots of smart policies, it promotes itself as a "pure" tourist destination, people seem to be moving there in droves to find the ecological lifestyle they desire, etc..

Then there's also the export business. Selling that New Zealand "purity" in packages to the rest of the world. I was thinking about this when our Media Director showed me a bottle of water she was drinking, Antipodes was its name. (see below).

Antipodes Water

While the design is stunning, it did raise a big question.

It struck me that New Zealand's green exporters have a massive challenge on their hands when they are trying to convince consumers that they are truly green, with the massive carbon footprints they generate with shipping and transportation.

Of course, according to its website, Antipodes appears to have anticipated the questions, but is far from transparent with its answers.

Clearly, there's a big communication challenge here and while striking design will win you lots of fans, you've got to have some decent answers to those relevant environmental questions, especially if you are using New Zealand as your "origin" to promote purity.


Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: green (11) antipodes (1) design (26) water (2) newzealand (1)

08/14/2008 06:07:24 AM (1)
Technology is about to take another leap forward and the static Powerpoint presentations of old are about to be replaced by something entirely new and a lot more dynamic. Welcome to the world of The Minority Report, where we will be able to interact directly with a presentation materials and manipulate them in real time using our hands. It will interesting to see which agencies make the technological leap forward and start using this for client and pitch presentations.




Posted by Ed Cotton
Tags: motion (1) technology (11) powerpoint (4) presentations (2)

08/13/2008 05:04:06 PM
Michael Phelps' athletic achievements are rightly being recognized around the world, but the building he is accomplishing his amazing feats in, is also incredible in its own right.

The National Aquatic Center was designed by Tristam Carfrae of Arup's Sydney office in collaboration with partners in Australia and China.




The City of Sound blog conducted an interview back in March with Carfrae where he described his approach to the building's design.

"That week of development on the Water Cube was actually based around some intensive web-based research by Carfrae, following up his own hunches on the 'soap-bubble' structure and using Google to ferret out previous research and development. A week later, most of the sources from around 200 years worth of scientific exploration were at hand, all pulled from the web, along with key contacts to talk to. An intensive process of software modelling and rapid prototyping ensued. Carfrae believes that this rich resource of the internet is something his company could tap into more, and contribute more to, as part of their business. He talks of trying to turn their intranet inside out, and sees this as another natural evolution of Arup's role.

During the '90s, that era of the architect as perceived sole author, he believes that Arup played a vital, often un-credited role in terms of cross-fertilisation - knitting together that fabric described above, by working across numerous projects, sharing best practice, and communicating technical and business breakthroughs. So it's natural that Arup would now begin to explore what it can do in terms of informational innovation, using the web internally and externally.

Issues of risk could be side-stepped to some degree, as Arup can have a certain confidence about their practise, derived from scale, reputation and ability. This approach fits in well with the current developments in 'open innovation' that are sweeping through many related business sectors.

So Arup's role as "cross-fertiliser", as Carfrae describes it, looks set to continue. Some business arrangements don't allow this, depending on the partners, but Carfrae is heartened by the agreements around the Water Cube project, where as long as each partner credits one another, they're free to say what they like about it."


I think there's a lot in this for agencies and planners to think about.

1. The idea that the internet is a powerful resource and one that can be a source of inspiration and knowledge

2. The role of agency as "cross fertilizer" bringing different parties together to yield great results for clients

3. The use of collaborative software to help make this all happen

We are at the beginning of a new era where we are going to need to re-think the way we work. Some of us could clearly learn a great deal from folks like Arup.


Posted by Ed Cotton
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