Steve Job's Speech in Stanford Ceremony

This is an amazing speech by Steve Jobs in Stanford University's graduation ceremony!

God gets a MySpace page

Cool brand study on neave.tv

Check it out here

The intersection of VIDEO, 3D and Interactive

Thanks to OF for this neat example of web tv and here is another example of 3D enviornments online. The future of the web and web design is likely to be at the intersection of VIDEO, 3D and video. Now are we thinking enough about what this means?

Planner as Politician

I reckon as well as looking for curiosity, intuition, creativity and all those things you look for in a young planner you need someone who can be a statesman/woman too.The more you go up you enter into boardroom level selling where the real selling happens as well as managing the in-evitable complex iceberg agendas floating about. Nevertheless, integrity and truth continue to be the ultimate planner weapons.

Brands & 2.0

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...

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.

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.

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?

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

Your help please

I've been asked to speak in a conference about Leveraging content to access younger audiences and early adopters on digital platforms. Any thoughts on what you think the do's and don't are welcome...and any reflections or examples on/for my 5 starters below are extremely welcome: 1. Create a culture around the brand not just a campaign or a message. 2. Give them an experience and don't chase exposure for expoure's sake, do not say. 3. Give them something that they can participate in - not treating them like a passive audience. 4. Be authentic not didactic. 5. Allow them to carry your idea forward - their way.

Life in Second Life: The Holiday Video

Trash Talk Tells it as it is HERE: Click on watch film on the left.

10. Random thoughts on Second Life

1. A place for 'forward thinking, innovative ad agencies' to show us how forward thinking & innovative ad agencies they are. (Dad in school disco) 2. Chatted to David Reuters from Reuters in SL a great deal of interest about their venture at least they have an interesting idea - the intersection between virtual and real news. 3. A place for Americans to come and make money and for others they come to find out about the rest of the world. 4. You can watch a stripper and run a spreadsheet on the same desktop neither sheet is worth getting underneath. 5. Brands are trying to exploit it while its users are trying to enjoy it. 6. There is nothing really new in Second Life pretty much everything in it is already in Real Life ... its just the way you do it is different. 7. People in Second Life have really weird alter egos (flaming wings anyone?) wonder what they look like in real life (bloke with a beard from bexley heath?). 8. SL is clunky techy geeky but when it becomes more like real life that's when it will really be an interesting proposition for example VOIP will enable you to have multiple voice conversations live. Ultimately Second Life - I humbly predict - is on a trajectory to become as close to real life as possible...but 9. Second Life is a metaphor for fantasy and that has always been with us not just now. So will it loose its fantasy? 10. It's all about people people. Technology may give us new ways to connect and make clans but it is still about people and always was always will be.

Clients of the future will look like this...

The top ten marketing innovators in Ag Age's report showed some interesting characters. Trever Edwards the VP Global Brand Management for Nike who was born in London and pretty much worked in every major city had this to say about Nike innovation:

We think a lot about the need to bring something new to the marketplace, but we don't think about it as just being new; we think about: How is this better than the last thing we brought to the marketplace?

According to Edwards it's not innovation for innovation's sake. A father of two three year old twins Edwards is inspired by how his children always see the world with a fresh pair of eyes. Another interesting US marketer is Paolo Timoni CEO Piagio US. He had a great lovely brand and cool product but the Americans didn't want it I mean its small to start with and didn't know where to park it right? Wrong. He started a campaign about

"Vespanomics" concept, which the company defines as "the ecological, economic and personal satisfaction one achieves after buying a Vespa scooter."

This is interesting but what's more interesting is what Mr. Timoni did when Bush announced a drive against American's 'addiction to oil' Timoni wrote an open letter in The New York Times, addressed to all U.S. mayors, encouraging them to find a place for scooters in their cities. The letter received an overwhelmingly positive response, not only from pro-scooter bloggers but from the mayors, who invited the company to present at a conference of mayors in May. Now could this idea have come from an ad agency who is only interested in selling 30second ads ... I doubt it but damn it gets mayors in every city consider giving your product government approved distribution not to mention putting your product on the public agenda. And of-course the latest campaign moved from "Vespanomics" to "Vespatition" to call for facilities for two-wheel vehicles. The client of the future is an opportunist, propagandist as well as innovator.

The Consumer is not an idiot it's your ...

Thoughts on Cannes

Cannes are a bit like what the car industry does in their motor shows. Full of concept cars, beautiful and shiny stuff that no one in the street would buy or ever be able to buy and somehow not many people see re-incarnations of these glimmering toys post a motor show. Cannes tend to be the industry's pat on the back by its own hands (no audience awards, critic's awards or anything that may make it the credible zenith of achievement in our business). Yet we love to see the winners out of spite or inspiration depends on who you are. I went through the winners and finalists this morning and for what's worth here is what struck me as interesting random thoughts: 1. Animation is back. don't know if this has been started by Honda GRRR... 2. Serialisation / soap opera style ads e.g. Love Story from Thailand. These were interesting because that type of campaign gets to watch the different bits of the story not just a single ad. The narrative becomes what keeps you looking forward to the next episode. You wouldn't have to fight too hard for attention when you already have an audience that is interested in the next twist in the story. Stella, VW, Smooth 3. Ads that mock ads. I thought these were really interesting Beer AU and Smooth Thailand. There is some honesty about the punter in the street's perceptions of advertising and brands poking fun at the whole thing WITH the audience instead of AT them. 4. There was an ad from Renault that I really liked about crash tests not only because it subverted the conventions of crash test advertising but of food category advertising as well in one creating 'depth' to the engagement. 5. Craft? Somehow it felt like the winners were rewarded for the craft and the new 'tricks & techniques' that were introduced in the production of the ads not the brilliance of the idea. See for your self here.

I wish I had the mind of a teenager.

Compund Security Systems have developing an alarm that can only be heard by young people under the age of 20. Capitalising on a medical phenomena where we stop hearing sounds at a certain frequency (18 to 20kHz) after the age of 20. The intended use was to push the kids out of malls and places where they may be a nuisance (a worthy cause of-course I mean kids should be treated like insects right?) So here we go the kids record the alarms turn it into ringtones to pass on to their friends so that when they call each other in class the teacher can't hear them. Brilliant. More here.

Doing the (RED) thing.

I am a cynic. I don't believe in silly ideas like every little helps ... but every time I make a call from my new Motorala RED mobile phone my phone company Orange makes a 5% donation of the cost of the call to Africans desperate for help. It makes me feel better about my 'middleclass guilt' but beyond that I also feel that at least it is something that I can participate in everyday. To do something is better than doing nothing. As well as a cynic I am also a hater, I hate indifference. Indifference is the biggest enemy that civilised societies ever had. RED allows a cynic like me to stop being indifferent. Do the RED thing even if you don't see the results immediately people will see you doing it. A colleague of mine after seeing my RED mobile decided to change his Amex from Gold to RED. As I said to do something is better than to do nothing. And if one does the RED thing maybe others will see you doing it and it might just catch on. The greatest irony would be if RED catches on like a virus and spreads across companies and consumers a bit like AIDS … but without the 's' beating a virus at its own game. One more thing, I really couldn't give a toss about Motorola as a brand felt nothing thought nothing about it, if anything my natural default choice would have been a Nokia N series - you know the one that your creatives are carrying. But somehow I feel different towards this brand now on a level that its silly ads would never get me to feel. Here is to the power of doing not saying.