Lesson number one. Never release a “viral” close to the inauguration speech, if it’s not a spoof of it. Pretty much everything spreading fast right now is Obama in one form or another.
That said, I think that one of the fastest growing non-Obama-virals right now is quite interesting conceptually. They’ve actually created a rudimentary interactive game on YouTube on the old Street Fighter theme. Check it out here:
Rock n’ roll is dead, order and neatness is here. The economic downturn puts us all in a different spot. And what does it mean for our business? Well, reason would suggest two things – first, people will need to change their priorities. New business will be a tougher job, and there will be less cash in each gig. This will leave less time for activities like blogging. Unless of course the blog is a source of income, which is not the case for most. I can see this in my own blog. There is less luxury time to give away thoughts for free. But I promise you I will try my best. Second, more efficient activities like Twitter will grow bigger. Tweets
are shorter and take less time both to write and to read. And when looking at it, Twitter is rising very quickly in Sweden right now, pushing competition like Jaiku and Bloggy out of it’s way. (Again, it’s not efficient to have more than one microblogging platform).
For our own agency, this crisis also means two things. Our product is better positioned than before (with it’s relatively high cost efficiency), but there is a smaller total bag of gold in client budgets. This means we have to be very good at informing about what’s going on, and what we can do to boost relative ROI. This is in conflict with what I said above about less time for blogging and lecturing. So I guess this means I’ll keep putting in long days working, but also lecturing and blogging. I promise more frequent updates.
For lectures there is one at Berghs coming up, one at a major Swedish corporation and one at a conference on the west coast. Perhaps I’ll see you there!
My mind just went blank. I couldnt’ for the life of me remember wether Michael Dahlén’s new book Nextopia was in Swedish or in English. I just couldn’t.
But before I ended up in this situation, the following happened.
Last night I went down to the new magazine Distill’s launch party on Strandvägen. I flipped through the pages, realizing that this is truly a magazine of our time. It sums up the best of the fashion press and presents it in a slick format. Because, really, who has the time to plow through all the glossies anyway?
So, Distill is perfect. Or at least the idea is. Because as much as I love the concept, I do think that this issue falls a bit short on selection. It didn’t quite seem to be the best of the best. To me anyway. But that said, it’s a wonderful concept with great potential. It’s the perfect mag for me, and I hope that they will expand the concept into more fields. There should be Distills for more genres than fashion.
For anyone of you who have read Michael Dahlén’s Nextopia, you’re familiar with the concept of minisodes, where short versions of shows are distributed by Sony, because we simply don’t have time for the original intended durations. Distill is a concept along these lines, and that’s why I ended up in an animated discussion on the topic with Distill’s managing director Christopher Lockwood. I issued my warmest recommendations for him to read the book, only to realize that perhaps the book was in Swedish after all. Turns out it was. Sorry Christopher. You’ll just have to wait for the English translation. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the Nextopia blog.
I love seeing how campaigns take on their own life. How we create things where we don’t know exactly how people out there are going to transform or recreate them. Creating life.
Advertising is boring me to death, but communication is not. We are entering a new era. This time we truly are. Very few advertising agencies are staffed for this new era. They are short on psychology competence and (very large) organic systems thinking. There will still be a need for production companies, but the traditional advertising agency will be dividing up a much smaller cake.
These are so exciting times. I wish i didn’t need to sleep.
They sent out people all over the world to ask bartenders to “give me something you recommend”. If the bartender gave them Vodka Redbull, the bartender recieved an extraordinary tip, namely an Apple Ipod.
Do you think that these incognito bartender charity workers got talked about? You betcha! The rumor spread like wildfire, and pretty soon Vodka Redbull’s where handed out as the standard respons to the question in question.
Lars Berge writes about this and other Red Bull campaigns in his column in SvD, and makes a good analysis on the concept of branding as opposed to advertising. When someone says that youngsters are getting immune to advertising messages, Lars argues that we are instead more motivated than ever to involve ourselves with different brands, just not in the traditional forced way. He’s backing up his argument by referring to Rob Walker’s book “Buying In”, where the phenomenon is called “murketing”.
Personally I think that this is a very bad term. It’s not about murketing or being sneaky, it’s about getting people to identify. Let’s call it something else. How about… alignvertising. In alignvertising we do cool/loveable/responsible/outrageous/funny stuff that people want to be a part of and have their personalities align with.
Still, this might be a book worth reading. I’ll look into it and get back to you.
I know you’ve heard this before, but most communications people still seem incredibly campaign-focused. What about the continuous work? I believe we have to start seeing ourselves less as print-factories and more like managers, doing continuous work to keep our clients in the spotlight. It’s just like managing a celebrity. Think Samantha Jones.
For one client I talked to recently, one single post by Sweden’s top blogger had more effect on sales (25% increase) than any campaign they have ever done. Ever. At any budget.
Think about that for a while.
Sure, this MIGHT have been a short term increase (I don’t have long term numbers for this case), but still. Marketing executives will not keep pouring money into low-idea high production value print and television advertising for long when they realize these things.
The other day I visited computer game giant EA’s Swedish branch DICE. From their fantastic and huge offices, sprinkled with amazing Phillippe Starck designed lamps and furniture, I overlooked Stockholm from 100 meter+ panorama windows, while sipping away on a latte. Am I in the wrong business I wondered?
This two floor mega office houses everything from musicians and artists, to state of the art physicists, and computer graphics engineers, and I had the privilege to get the private guided tour across the entire thing, checking out all the magical departments and playing awesome unreleased games. It was like being a child in a candy store. And I can tell you this: Get their new game Mirror’s Edge when it’s released this christmas. It’s absolutely groundbreaking. And it’s got the coolest girl in the world as the main hero. I think I’m in love with her.
I was told how they go to gunranges to test fire and capture sound and motion of every concievable weapon, how they invite the worlds top martial artists for motion capture sessions and how the reasoning goes when making sure a game is FUN to play (real war is no fun, war movies with heroes are).
It became very clear to me that this will be one of our more important arenas as advertisers in a not so distant future. DICE’s test with the free game Battlefield Heroes is one of the most interesting experiments in a long time, up there with top experiments like Spotify.
Turns out Tove and Olle Langseth, who left Lowe Brindfors earlier this month, are going to heavyweight trad-ad agency DDB Stockholm. Not entirely surprising, and a move that strengthens DDB’s position as the main traditional advertising agency in Stockholm.
Humanity has been pretty good at graphic design for quite some time now (though we may have called it something else early on). The same goes for packaging design. Sure there have been plenty of innovations along the way such as the printing press, photography and modern day packaging technology, but still.
I guess you could say that interaction design was born at the same time as the first stick n’ stone tools, but more systematic and advanced interaction design can perhaps be considered approximately as old as the industrial revolution.
Digital interaction design, meaning design for interacting with computers, is young. DID aimed at the general public, is really young. Born by Xerox Parc and Apple (and copied by Microsoft), the window-based interaction model still prevails.
But being this young, I think we’ve only seen the first beginnings of a huge market for digital design (including DID). The move towards digital media is natural and inevitable, and we’re still stuck i a design world that is very static. We’re moving towards a “one machine”-world, where we’ll interact with data in different ways, not neccessarily web pages. RSS-readers is an early example of this.
The more basic question of how to interact with data through a “browser” is one that many are trying to answer. Not least the people of Mozilla labs. They have suggested a model for a future browser that looks like this (corny film, but you’ll get the point):
Can you imagine your grandmother trying to work this interface? Neither can I. I think that they have made the classic mistake of being too complicated and too techy. But that might just be me.
But if you spot a good digital design agency with razor sharp DID-skills, give me a call. I want to buy some stock and get rich.
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