SPINNING AROUND: SEVENTY SEVEN THINKING OUT LOUD

NOKIA N9000 ... AS MAD AS IT COMES

This is proper mental. I am going to have to watch it many times before I actually have an opinion other than "that's odd, that". Which is not much of an opinion, to be honest.

LOVELY, LOVELY WORK FROM SAAB

I was reading the back pages of my brother Rob's blog (which is a rum old mash of film, music - a lot of good music - marketing and dotcommery). I came across this and liked it so much that I thought it was worth sharing here. You can pretty much tell what it's all about from the post title ...

LETTING IT ALL ADD UP

Take a look at morenewmath.com.

Some low spots it has to be said. But a lot to make you smile ...

WAITER, THERE'S ADVERTISING IN MY SOUP ...

Following on from dogvertising, cowvertising and indeed Seventy Seven PR's Lambient Media, we have Fly-vertising. A sort of marketing swat team.

ALL CHANGE IN GUINNESS' EPIC RETURN

The latest work from Guinness, which has (according to CR) dropped the "Good things ... " strapline in favour of "Bring it to life". The new work is below and aired for the first time last night.

It's an ad that you need to watch in full-screen. Seriously.

For my money, it'll be interesting to see what they do with the idea of "Bring it to life" outside of the ad - it feels like a far richer territory than Good things did (although that particular brand promise also delivered some of my favourite advertising of all time, so who's to quibble) ...

THE UK'S TOP MARKETING WEBLOGS

UPDATE:

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL THE LINKS BELOW ARE WRONG. SOMETHING ODD HAPPENING WITH EXCEL. BORING THING TO UPDATE, WHICH WILL BE DONE

THIS EVENING. THE LIST AND THE ORDER IS RIGHT, BUT CLICKING ON A BLOG WILL TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. WHICH YOU COULD TREAT AS A GAME, I SUPPOSE.

This month's tables are all below. A big welcome back to 10 Yetis (who I think I must have missed last time to be honest). Hope that this finds you well and generally having good months of it. Without further ado, those charts in full ...

For those geeks amongst you, there is a post on the Adage Blog which mentions that they have changed the way that they do their calculations with Technorati and Bloglines out.

For those who may be interested, this chart is based on the AdAge Power 150, the top UK bloggers on all things advertising and marketing on 1 August 2008. If you feel that you should be included, you can get in touch with AdAge here, who will sort you out. As soon as you're in, I'll pick you up in this filleting of the AA chart.

1 (0)	23 (4)	David Airey
2 (1)	34 (11)	NevilleHobson.com
3 (3)	36 (29)	Econsultancy's Internet Marketing Blog
4 (7)	54 (75)	How To Make My Blog
5 (2)	61 (19)	Crenk
6 (3)	63 (26)	FreshNetworks Blog
7 (-5)	90 (-47)	Blogstorm
8 (4)	109 (21)	We Are Social
9 (-5)	111 (-58)	Chris Garrett on New Media
10 (13)	116 (93)	PR Blogger
11 (30)	121 (213)	Hobo UK SEO Company Blog
12 (-7)	122 (-62)	Nick Burcher
13 (0)	135 (1)	Only Dead Fish
14 (-6)	144 (-59)	russell davies
15 (-1)	152 (-15)	This Is HERD
16 (-1)	159 (-20)	Crackunit
18 (3)	168 (30)	FeverBee
19 (3)	178 (29)	UK Affiliate Marketing Blog
20 (7)	183 (75)	Jims Marketing Blog
21 (-3)	184 (-10)	SEOptimise
22 (2)	185 (48)	SEOgadget.co.uk
23 (25)	203 (162)	livingbrands
24 (-4)	211 (-14)	PR Media Blog
25 (-6)	212 (-29)	Brand Strategy Magazine Blog
26 (-16)	232 (-117)	Welcome to Optimism
27 (-2)	240 (5)	HERD
28 (-12)	256 (-116)	adliterate
29 (-12)	257 (-87)	Collective Conversation
30 (25)	258 (148)	Connect
31 (11)	277 (58)	Event Manager Blog
32 (6)	285 (45)	Apple Pie & Custard
33 (-3)	287 (-21)	Spinning Around
34 (18)	294 (88)	UK Internet Marketing Blog
35 (-3)	295 (-11)	Faster Future
36 (-1)	302 (4)	The Engaging Brand
37 (26)	305 (170)	Technobabble 2.0
38 (2)	310 (23)	Interactive Marketing Trends
39 (-3)	320 (-11)	Wadds' PR Blog
40 (-3)	323 (-8)	Andrew R H Girdwood
41 (-13)	325 (-63)	50-Plus Marketing
42 (2)	336 (3)	Blendingthemix
43 (4)	337 (25)	Liberate Media blog
44 (12)	365 (42)	The Ad Pit
45 (-16)	369 (-105)	London Calling
46 (-1)	376 (-36)	A PR Guy's Musings
48 (1)	385 (-10)	renaissance chambara
49 (2)	389 (-11)	Make Marketing History
50 (23)	390 (231)	Fraser's Affiliate Marketing Blog
51 (7)	391 (38)	further and faster
52 (-21)	398 (-126)	The Way of the Web
53 (-7)	399 (-55)	Drew B's take on tech PR
54 (0)	400 (4)	Brendan Cooper
55 (-29)	401 (-147)	Life Moves Pretty Fast
56 (-17)	437 (-106)	Modern Marketing
57 (-4)	439 (-49)	That Canadian Girl
58 (12)	443 (143)	Digital Examples
59 (24)	445 (275)	Confessions of a Wannabe Ad Man
60 (-1)	449 (-19)	greenormal
61 (15)	451 (201)	Tamar Search Blog
62 (9)	457 (132)	PPC Blog
63 (-2)	458 (-1)	SEOCO Blog
64 (14)	476 (218)	The Renegade Agency Confessional
65 (-32)	478 (-187)	Simon Wakeman
66 (-23)	485 (-147)	Rubbishcorp
67 (NEW)	487 (NEW)	10 Yetis PR Blog
69 (-35)	501 (-200)	Social Media Trader
70 (-6)	519 (-42)	No Man's Blog
71 (-3)	532 (34)	Brandgym Blog
72 (17)	541 (195)	Nicola Davies
73 (-8)	545 (-38)	Mediaczar
74 (10)	564 (157)	Creative in London
75 (-13)	567 (-94)	Sturgeon's Law
76 (-16)	575 (-127)	never get out of the boat
77 (-5)	592 (5)	LitmanLive
78 (14)	605 (149)	[Bluurb] stuff and things
79 (-29)	645 (-268)	Simonsays
80 (-23)	650 (-240)	Feeding the Puppy
81 (-14)	656 (-117)	Funkadelic Advertising
82 (6)	666 (68)	Vincent Thome's Blog
83 (-14)	667 (-85)	The Web Pitch.com
84 (19)	687 (157)	Raw Stylus
85 (1)	712 (19)	Beyond PR
86 (-5)	724 (-23)	25 letters in the alphabet
87 (-5)	729 (-22)	Shiny Red
88 (14)	735 (106)	Measurement Matters
89 (18)	747 (140)	Curiously Persistent
90 (11)	751 (85)	Unleashed on Marketing
91 (-16)	759 (-114)	Organic Frog
92 (20)	764 (173)	Buzz Attitude
93 (-2)	767 (-21)	(Almost) Always Thinking
94 (10)	774 (78)	The Rosemont Loving
96 (-3)	786 (-18)	One Size Fits One
97 (-10)	794 (-61)	PR Voice
98 (7)	797 (59)	Rock Star PR
99 (10)	805 (112)	The Red Rocket
100 (-20)	808 (-109)	AdGrads
101 (-5)	809 (-35)	CarbonGraffiti
102 (-28)	810 (-167)	General Marketing Blog
104 (-25)	824 (-129)	Blog Till You Drop
105 (-39)	827 (-317)	Real Fresh TV
106 (10)	830 (162)	The Open Agenda
108 (-8)	834 (1)	Ginger and Proud
109 (2)	845 (79)	Norton's Notes
110 (-2)	854 (46)	Engage: the Carve Consulting blog
111 (-17)	860 (-90)	Indolent.com
112 (1)	874 (66)	A Mountain Dweller in the Thames Valley
113 (-18)	876 (-103)	middledigit
114 (-24)	882 (-145)	mediations
115 (0)	889 (98)	DaveChaffey.com
116 (-10)	892 (-9)	Living in a digital world
117 (2)	898 (135)	Holistic Search Marketing
118 (-19)	910 (-86)	Internet Marketing Made Easy
119 (-1)	916 (101)	Punch Blog
120 (-43)	917 (-245)	Freshen me up
121 (2)	926 (126)	Offer and Acceptance
122 (-5)	927 (69)	All Things PR
123 (-26)	928 (-140)	From PR to Eternity
124 (-3)	939 (105)	In the Cowshed
125 (-40)	940 (-210)	The New Marketing
126 (-4)	958 (92)	From the Cowshed
128 (-14)	1005 (-33)	noticing
129 (-31)	1029 (-213)	Digital Marketing Viewpoint
130 (-20)	1030 (-112)	Nitmesh
131 (-11)	1061 (-19)	PRwordSmith

KASABIAN CREATES FOOTBALL HERO

So Kasabian has created a large-scale hack of Guitar Hero, made as part of the rock band’s album marketing campaign.

Using the remarkable skills of freestyle footballers from Woody & Kleiny, it features wall-mounted controls placed in front of a three-story screen. Footballs kicked at the life-size panels provide the physical interface for the game within the game.

And it's all a bit clever and actually quite watchable.

THE LATEST, GREATEST FLIPNOTE FILM

Freddy Fibs is back this week in Nintendo's latest flipnote film.

THere's more about the whole thing here.

HATS OFF ... SPAR GOES REGIONAL WITH WINE

Finally managed to track the clip down and get it up online ... Jonathan Ross, Dara O'Briain and Dominic Cooper have a crack at the SPAR regional wine labels on the show last night. Loving it. A lot ...

STUNT OR CANDID CAMERA?

My vote goes for stunt.

Could be wrong, but it feels like a neat piece of viral. In which case, I shall consider my role complete having done my bit to add to the spread.

THETRAINLINE.COM STORMS THE CHARTS

Many smiles on the faces of thetrainline.com team this week as their iPhone App stormed the App Store charts, clocking in as the second most downloaded free applications in the world.

Lovely stuff, we thought to ourselves.

So far, it's been favourably reviewed by many nice folk (thank you nice folk). And so it should have been, what with an offline timetable, as well as live and updated train times, a natty little "next train home" feature and a "last train home" thingy, too.

Well worth a look.

MORE CRACKING NINTENDO AND AARDMAN WORK

Back-story is here. Meantime, some more lovely shorts by Aardman for Nintendo.

BTW, the videos have now had over 400,000 views. Not bad, we reckon.

FURTHER CASSETTEBOY SHENANIGANS

Chris pinged this around. Liked it. Have blogged it. Toodle pip for now ...

HATS OFF TO THE PR ... DOWN IN NULLARBOR

An absolute belter as yet another Aussie tourist authority scores what will, we predict, go on to become an international sensation ... the world's longest golf course.

Hmmm ...

Ostensibly a course spread across over 800 miles of outback, the golf course is reckoned to take five to seven days to play. Funny, though, how the greens would appear to be made out of astroturf and look like someone might've popped them down overnight.

The finest quote in the whole story (and this is from that most august of media establishments, the BBC), is ...

The fourth hole at Nundroo claims to have the largest population of southern hairy-nosed wombats anywhere in Australia - surely a golfing first

After the "Greatest Job in the World" scam, this marks another feather in the Australian tourism industry's PR cap. And hence we doff our hats to them. From Blighty ... good work, chaps.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND

FAIL WEEK ... FRIDAY

The final choice of the week from the team.

Thursday's fail is here

Wednesday's fail is here

Tuesday's fail is here

Monday's fail is here

AS MAD AS YOU LIKE ... HELICOPTER BOYZ

Helicopter Boyz are a weird little Japanese pop duo who seem to do little more than dance (badly) to a pre-recorded backing track of happy electro.

But, in a remarkable moment of lateral thinking, they appear to have become the heroes of Nikon's latest Japanese stunt to promote the fact that the brand's latest cameras also have a projection facility.

It's a bloody clever way of showing how the whole thing works in an entirely watchable sort of way. Mad, but bloody clever.

via CR

FAIL WEEK ... THURSDAY

More fails ...

Wednesday's fail is here

Tuesday's fail is here

Monday's fail is here

FAIL WEEK ... WEDNESDAY

Fail the third ...

Monday's fail is here

Tuesday's fail is here

FAIL WEEK ... TUESDAY

Another day, another fail ... as pop-picked by Izzy and Sarah ...

Monday's fail is here

FAIL WEEK ... MONDAY

Certain factions in the Seventy Seven PR office have become a touch obsessed with FailBlog. Understandably, it has to be said.

So we thought that we'd declare this week FailWeek and celebrate our favourite clips from the site. First up, for you delight and delection is this gem ...

With thanks to mixmasters Sarah and Izzy for their choices ...

THE LATEST AARDMAN FILM FOR NINTENDO

There is a full back story to this piece of work.

Meantime, enjoy the latest film ...

FUN THEORY ... VW FOR THE WEEKEND

Alan came across this really cute little campaign for, of all people, VW.

Lovely piece of brand creatvity (I sort of hesitate to call it advertising because it just doesn't feel like it). It celebrates "the fun theory" and is a handful of clever and creative ways of making stuff that we don't tend to do fun, so that we do it more.

So these two are getting people to put stuff in bins and getting people to walk up stairs.

And they are lovely things. Clever, witty, smart and, above all, engaging.

But more than that, they hit the mark so beautifully in delivering the idea that this is a brand that applies some thought-through solutions (based in science and engineering) to basic problems in the real world that are interesting. And that they might do the same to problems with their car sprockets or differentials or something that aren't interesting.

Great piece of work, if you ask me.

CANAL+ ... THE POWER OF THE STORY

Just came across this and thought that it was worth sharing. Shows that the power of a good story can still raise a smile in marketing land.

QUALITY WORK FROM A KUTIMAN

Came across this in the Google deck that I posted. It's bloody remarkable. And it kind of makes me want to stop being in marketing because there is such a lot of good stuff being done by people. I'm actually not going to do that, but instead just try harder to be better.

Anyway, Kutiman takes lots of music clips from YouTube and then grabs samples and edits them altogether to create slightly mad new tracks from them, with the videos to match. Check out the site for lots more and the backstory and these clips, which were my two favourites, as a taster ...

FLIPPING QUALITY WORK WITH NINTENDO

Brief mention for a cracking campaign that Seventy Seven has been working on with Nintendo.

Faced with the need to create an idea to promote Flipnote Studio, the new DSiWare software that enables users to create flipbook animations with their Nintendo DSi, we came up with the idea of working with some of the creatives at Aardman Animations to see what they would come up with.

In the end, they came up with gold. Mad gold. But gold nevertheless.

So we have a collection of 12 mini-films, all of which have been created with Flipnote, that we hope will show what can be done with a bit of time and effort and will inspire people to get flipping.

So far, film one (released a month or so ago) has clocked up over 225,000 views on Flipnote Hatena (the site that hosts the flip note films). The second and third films in the series are doing very nicely too thank you, numbers-wise.

And they have picked up some cracking online coverage delivered by Nintendo's network of European agencies. Which is what it was all about.

The first three films are below for your viewing pleasure. Note: someone has ripped these to YouTube, so the numbers aren't quite as high. To see them on Hatena, they're here, here and here.

THAT'S ONE WAY TO PROMOTE A SINGLE ...

Actually, rather a clever one as it turns out.

Hadouken have glued together excerpts from 100 of the most-watched (ever) YouTube clips, stuck their new single in behind it and have unleashed it on the world. Over two-and-a-half million views later, it seems to have gone down pretty well, on balance.

Thought that I would do my bit to add to the fervour. But also to add that this is just a bloody good marketing idea and that it's handy inspiration type stuff. And that I wish that I had thought of doing it. For what, I don't actually know ...

NOT SOCIAL MEDIA WANK

The lovely folks at Google popped together what is a very good presentation on the best uses of some of their tools by creative types and brands alike. And very handy brainfood it is too. Definitely NOT social media wank.

Until I've worked out how to embed it, it's here.

... cracked the whole embedding thing (problem was that it was too big for this blog frame and got the whole thing out of kilter and generally made a mess). A spot of searching (on Google) sorted the issue. Bloody baffling tho it may have been.

SOCIAL MEDIA WANK

This film sums up exactly how I feel about too much social media talk.

Working at an agency where a bunch of "social media" work is a given as part of any piece of work for any client, from doing a spot of blogger relations to managing content on behalf of clients to creating campaigns that work almost entirely online, it's just what we do.

I'm not saying it's universal, but all you social media specialists could do with watching this because, too often, it's exactly how you come across.

NB. it's a bit sweary.

TELLING THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT GAMBLING

A bit of self-congratulation if you will beg our pardon ...

News hit today that we've picked up the work for the Betfair-backed right2bet campaign.

And what a cracking campaign it is too.

We're working (alongside our European network partners in Sweden, Netherlands, Germany and Finland) on a PR and digital campaign to try and garner 1 million signatures, forcing the EU to take a more balanced and consistent approach to gambling regulations.

At the moment, gamblers in many European states can't access services from businesses based in other countries. So while you can play strip poker in public in many countries, you can't play poker in the comfort of your own home. Madness.

So we're on the case with our petition to tell the naked truth about gambling.

First up, the naked petition. Head to the right2bet website and sign our rather lovely campaign ambassador ... ANYWHERE about her body. What's more, if you do sign our friendly lovely, you'll be treated to her "bouncy video" as she celebrates your sign-up ... with a Space Hopper.

Lots more to come from this one ...