This is such a great idea. Brilliant. And SO lovely that it works.
Basically, a chap by the name of Matthew Knight (soon to join W+K) dropped a heap of disposable cameras in all manner of places.
He asked that people take the cameras on their travels, pass them on, take some snaps ... whatever. And then send them back to him for the images to be developed and shown on the website dedicated to the project.
What a stunning idea.
Now, the numbers might look a bit ropey. There were 93 cameras released. Five have come back and 19 have been found. A bunch of them are MIA. Which doesn't sound that great.
But these things take time - as Knight says, the project was inspired by the Slow Movement, so it seems appropriate that it takes a bunch of days to take off - we marketers too often expect immediacy, I think. And sometimes patience pays dividends..
Most people will be familiar with the T-Mobile flashmob video, right. So far, that particularly lovely piece of work has garnered around 12 million views. Which doesn't include all the teasers, user-generated bits and bobs and steals.
Good stuff.
Less well known are the celebrity films that they have created. The best of them features young Kelly Brook. There's also one with Bez in it, another with Peter Crouch.
They've done alright ... 150,000 views for the best of them, unaccountably, 220,000 for Peter Crouch.
But they've come NOWHERE near the orginal. So I started to wonder whether community might be the new celebrity.
I kind of hope so.
Celebs have their place in advertising - you can't be in an agency in the AMV Group and deny that - but community feels like it might be the natural successor. Particularly in a world where consumers are demanding more reality and less gloss from the brands that they embrace - they want more of the sausage and less of the bought sizzle.
And in a world where some brands have created this sort of community feeling (and if T-Mobile can do it, maybe anyone can - offering their fans and customers new ways of taking part in the brand itself is the natural next step.
So it was pretty lovely to see that you can take part in the next gathering ...
This is REAL behaviour for the brands of the future, if you ask me. But what do you reckon?
Okay, so we are well behind with this one ... it's now six months old.
But Izzy span around this video about Honda using strategically placed rumble strips on a road in the US to make the thing play a tune as cars drive over them.
As a brand piece, lovely. Bloody genius, in fact. Though, perhaps lacking slightly any direct connection to the car itself, in all truth.
This made me chuckle a lot ... chap who has cut together a bunch of scenes from Disney films through the ages to show where the animators may have got a bit lazy or perhaps were lacking a spot of creative spark ...
Quite fun ... Seventy Seven (us!) has taken thetrainline.com into advertising on sheep. Or Lambient Media, as we have chosen to christen it. Some piccies below of some of the finest sheep that can be bought (or found thanks to some well-placed advertising in Farmer's Guardian).
For those who want to see the "making of lambient media" film - it's true that NOTHING can be done now without a "making of ..." film - we stuck a quick report of the antics on YouTube. Rather pleasantly, the Daily Express decided that it was worthy of a place on their website, too ...
I've been meaning to write about this one for an absolute age.
Goodby's work for Sprint is genuinely lovely. First of all there, was the website that showed what was happening across the "now network" in real time. It showed who was doing what, where, across their broadband network.
The thing was that it made for a really engaging website (it still does, for that matter). Whether you got interested in the numbers of bicycles being made, the numbers of flights delayed, the buzz for MySpace vs Spotify, there are a whole bunch of toys to play with on the site.
Now, they've created some TV spots using the whole idea. Now, I fervently believed that the whole campaign was delightful, but only really digital. Having watched the TV work several times over, it's still as engaging as the web work.
Really lovely stuff. And a great example of a campaign that is "digitally native" but perfectly comfortable off the web as well. With any luck, we will see more and more of these.
Altogether now ... "I like square butts and I cannot lie ..."
I swore that I wouldn't stick ANOTHER piece of Burger King advertising up (the same with Uniqlo, the same with IKEA, the same with Cadbury ... ho hum).
But this is brilliantly ODD ... to promote the King's tie up with Sponge Bob. The BK anti-Ronald gyrates unnervingly with square-arsed eye candy.
Isn't this lovely? Architects Julian Harrap and Sandbox have worked together to create quite remarkable fisheye lens photos of the London skyline from the top of the Monument in the heart of the city. There is a daily film that shows the City in glorious panaroma from midnight to midnight. Stunning ...
The latest collection of interesting bits and bobs from around the interweb ...
TrendHunter featured our Hotels.com Picture Pillows a while back. Today, they had a piece on a hotel that has a reader-in-residence, who will come and read you a story. On a related note, there was another stunt in which those two ideas combine to create "bedtime story" sheets: stories printed on sheets.
Sweeeet ... (think that counts as two of the seven links, rather than three) ...
PSFK Good Ideas are now also available for the iPhone ... must subscribe at some point in the not-too-distant. On a related note, the TED talks are available in the same format.
Seems like ANYONE can do a city guide these days. News reaches us (via the Moment, the NYT's blog) that Heff himself has gone into the dark art, with a range of Playboy Guides to US cities, so you can live like the man himself.
Think that I will stick with Luxe (poncy, catty, fabulously written) and Le Cool (edgy, fun, cultural illuminating), thanks.
Perhaps reflecting the mood of the times, we're to have a Slow Down London event from 24th April to 4th May.
With a slow walk during rush hour across Waterloo Bridge and a read-in at Foyles amongst the events planned, this just struck us as a brilliant idea. According to them, "Slow Down London is a new project to inspire Londoners to improve their lives by slowing down to do things well".
There are also events at the Southbank Centre (one of the event partners), including a breakfast that we were thinking of tipping down to. There are also events on creativity and meditation.
Our prediction is that this sort of thing will only get bigger in the months to come and that we are quite likely to see this sort of thing spread - as organised "slowing down" feels like it might be more than just a reaction to the credit crunch and more like something that will stick longer-term.
As some folks may know, Seventy Seven works for Wolff Olins, the branding agency. Their irony is that they don't actually have a logo.
Odd? Mebbe ...
But also a reflection of where they think the whole idea of brands and branding is going.
So they have a totally free expression of their name ... folks are free to come up with new and interesting ways of visualising the business' identity, so that it becomes - quite literally - the property of anyone in the business to own, shape and express.
There's a flickr pool with some of the logos that they've come up with. My favourites are these ...
At some stage, I was thinking that I might ask one of the team over there to do a quick "blog interview" to explain the thinking. Might be a fun thing to do ... One for post-Easter.
The concept is shockingly straightforward: you take a photo. You then leave the memory card somewhere in a public place. Someone picks it up with the note. Reads it. Takes a photo. Then leaves it in a public place ...
Welcome, then to Photochains. A new mini-web trend that has its spritual home at Photochaining.org. A funny old thing altogether, I reckon.
It's been a long old while since I was really bowled over by a TV ad. This sorted it: Audi Q5 advertising. Just wonderful. Simple as that.
And do you know what? It's technically accomplished, but it isn't "big". It's a really simple creative idea, just beautifully executed from a technical perspective. And it's a welcome return to great ideas stunningly delivered.
It felt like - with a few notable exceptions - we were heading (across advertising, PR, digital, the works) towards a world in which we were getting over-complicated or stunningly large pretty much for the sake of it.
This feels like a rebalancing back to something like the art of making ads. Happy days. Think I shall now watch it again ... That's Scamp's test, isn't it?
Izzy is on something of a roll at the moment with this whole "pinging amusing things around the office" malarkey (after her meerkat out-take triumph). She knocked this over that I thought was worth sharing further.
Sweet campaign from Reebok for their NFL All Stars Fantasy Files stuff. A little bit of the "Rayban" school of "did they, didn't they?" mocked up footage. But nice work and eminently watchable for all of that.
The AdContrarian's eBook on advertising is a cracking polemic and I commend it as a read to all and sundry.
While I am commending good things, do take a look at Michael C Place's Build Blog ... an image for every post, most of which are links to fun stuff. But it's the illustrations that make it.
Speaking of nice places to on the web, It's Nice That is relaunching on Monday. Always worth a visit.
Ah ... the joys of the weekend and a visit to Speechification to see what has been on speech radio that has been of interest of late.
Wired's UK edition has a UK-specific website. Well worth a serious look. A story from it, OneRiot looks like it might be an interesting tool for taking the web's "pulse".
And finally ... brilliantly odd Mario Kart film ... as some crazy bugger makes the game for real on the streets of Marseille.
Part client-related, partly just plain interesting, this one.
Google, YouTube, London Business School and the Daily Telegraph have partnered together to create an interesting business channel on the video site: Survival of the Fastest.
On the one hand, it demonstrates the fact that YouTube is interesting beyond animals falling off stuff and babies eating things. Which is a good thing in itself.
It's also interesting because of some of the people who are involved - one of whom is Ije Nwokore at Wolff Olins (Seventy Seven's very own clients). He does a piece on whether brands matter in tough economic times. And we think that it's jolly interesting ...
Also of interest is the IPA and Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland talking about customer service in a downturn ...
There's a LOAD of other good stuff on the channel - it's well worth a watch. Variously, they are on the themes of Speed, Marketing and Insights.
Apologies that this is a bit late again ... it's
been another mad week. These data tables were run on the 1st April ... but it's
taken until now to pull this post together. Sorry about that ...
And secondly ... a small plea. AdAge, in their
infinite wisdom, have made it a bloody sight harder to create these
tables - you now can't pull off the whole table in one go and now have
to do things page-by-page.
SO, while we're really happy that people seem to be
interested in this table, can I just ask that people don't copy and
paste it wholesale into their own blogs, please? Okay, it may not be
terribly social network-ey, but credit where it's due (and, in this
case, a couple of hours credit are due), please link back to this page?
Thanking you kindly in advance ...
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.
More interesting things from around the place that didn't really warrant a post of their own ...
Mark Porter is an editorial designer and has a blog about designs and redesigns of the world's media: Notebook. There is an interesting aggregation of planner's tweets here.
Lovely site that enables you to find any film called ... FindAnyFilm.com ... It searches a database and tells you where you can buy any title legit.
Nokia's Music Almighty campaign has attracted some flack when one of the winners turned out to be someone who has designed for both Nokia and W+K. Read all about it at PSKF.
Trendwatching is always a good read. This month, they're talking about Sellsumers. Interesting stuff. Liked their Generation G stuff too.
Liked this image a LOT ... self-promotional piece by Alison Carmichael. And one last link ... Twitter tastings dissected by PSFK.
We've been working long and hard on the soft launch of Hotels.com's Lunar Rooms ... offering travellers the opportunity to book rooms for a mere £800 per night (though this doesn't include travel). Read all about it here.
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