24.11.06

Parkour is soo Un-Cool

Lots of 'officially' cool brands try and copy and paste the latest cool thing in some culture or sub-culture and dress it up with their me too brands. A quick glance at a leading Parkour outfit (will remain nameless it is un-fair) in the UK revealed no less than 25 projects for BRANDS in the form of ads and events since January 2006. I swear, if I see another dumb ass sports shoes brand doing a Parkour ad again I will run away barefoot in disgust. The point is not to slap your logo on a bit of subculture but to borrow the ethos and the values of that subculture and create your own interpretation of it otherwise those who know anything about Parkour in the UK would have seen the same crew in 25 different ads this year how un-cool is that...

20.11.06

Show and Tell

Every agency I'ever worked in had some form of show and tell. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't need to do show and tells because everybody is involved somehow and already knows what is going on? For example if every person had to contribute an interpretation of or a thought on an idea that each account is working on...ah I can dream on.

14.11.06

The eleventh P

Tom at i-WISDOM posted the web paradigms below and pointed out that I could be missing two more P's: passion and porn. Agree on both of-course and actually when I do this presentation I do mention porn as the surprise surprise bit. Tom also had this great link to a video from Clo Willaerts about how porn technologies and models are in-fact the the pre-cursors to tomorrow's innovations.

6.11.06

Web (P)aradigms...

INSIDER OUTSIDER INNOVATION

Inspired by John's entry here about the Guardian's weekend piece on Web 2.0 innovators. Looking at the spectrum of innovators some of them are INSIDERS so close to the technology that they can see opportunities that no one outside the coal face could spot. A fair few are computer programmers who became entrepreneurs and some like Joshua Schachter are OUTSIDERS he built Deli.icio.us because as he put it: 'I built it because I wanted it, not because I thought it was a business or whatever'. Now this leads me to an interesting debate I had with a friend recently. To do innovation you need to be able to harness the impossible to spot insights deep into the 'thing' you are working on but you also need to have the genius of a complete outsider who spots a big whole - a painful need - in a market and do something about it. Now I wonder how many 3M's What if's, GE's HP's are staffed by a magic mix between INSIDERS and OUTSIDERS?

2.11.06

BUGA's

Ladies and gentlemen we now have an award for the top British user generated content...well will soon have champion consumers as well as creative geniuses but the question in my head is how will professional creatives justify their existence when there is ample and often better ideas made by consumers? I realise of-course that the good UGC stuff tends to be one hit wonders but sooner or later somebody is going to work out how to do it properly, here's a random selection of UGC stuff making the rounds not quite sure yet whether I've seen something that is actually amazing... Followfinger Itsyourshowtv Joga iCoke Coke Google Mentos Jones Firefox Doritos PS Freedom Flux Trouble iFilm Yourkindatv Pepsi Underground Summerbingo