Spinning Around

Berg and Dentsu on incidental media surfaces ...

Okay, Okay, Starbucks may be ahead of the game in mass-market marketing technology.

Berg and Dentsu are at the cutting edge of what's next. You can pretty much guarantee that what they've created in the film below through play will become the new normal over the next short while.

Love them ...

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

The latest Moshi Monsters madness

... is this ...

Moshling Lady Goo Goo makes her pop video debut ...

Bic Human Curling ... Work. Of. Mad. Genius.

I am loving this ... brave work from Bic ... Has a certain Viral Factory feel about it and is decidedly reminiscent of the old Trojan Games stuff. Lovely ...

A BIT MORE 3D PROJECTION MAPPING

This time, an interior.

This is a bit on the clever side isn't it? Take an idea and turn it inside out (or outside in, as the case may be - and indeed is, in this one) ...

Living Room from Mr.Beam on Vimeo.

ONE FOR LATER ... GROWING PAINT

Well, sort of.

Just a note to self (though the clip is worth a watch), that some clever people have created a "paint" that will later grow into a moss. There's a LOT of stuff that we can be doing with this. I've had two ideas just looking at it.

Which is nice.

LYNX EFFECT IN AR STYLE ...

Really liked this.

Simple, public, engaging, effective.

Expensive?

Probably ...

CAPTCHA C-ART-OONS HITS THE MAINSTREAM

Lovely concept, using those random words you are asked to type when verifying yourself as a human, and not a computer virus, and turning them into cartoons ... All hail Captcha Art ...

 

 

WATCH OUT MTV, HTML 5 IS ALIVE

We appreciate that this has been around for a long old while, but talk about making music personal - check out the beautiful new video from Arcade Fire, giving you a touch of nostalgia and beauty thanks to HTML 5 and Google Street View.

Gorgeous: The Wilderness Downtown

Question is of course now one of which brands will manage to get on this particular bandwagon and show what can be done ...

And a bloody clever idea from Google: create a platform that feels like it offers a way of creating content that can't be accessed on any of its competitors. The more people create for it, the fewer people will be using Firefox, IE, Safari et al ...

Interesting times, folks ...

BURNING STORIES

Honestly, I was all ready and set to absolutely hate this piece of work when I read about it.

Burn, the energy drink, has created a series of films about gritty type folk - skateboarders, snowboarders and rappers. They've been shot in an appropriately gritty sort of style. All to show what a gritty, of the street sort of brand this energy drink is.

Everything about it screamed hideousness. Advertising puffery gone mad.

Actually, the work's solid. The films in large part work.

The best of the three (in my humble) is the one that I thought that I'd like least: as it follows the story of Philly rapper Julius Wright who also does a good line in beating out breaks with a handy pen and a mail box. Gotta love the story.

The snowboard film, meantime, is similarly appealing. A bunch of girls who are figuring the whole thing out and are getting more than a little battered as they go about it. Somehow, they're likeable, amusing, sweet ... Their story works.

For my money, meantime, the one that was least interesting was the one that I had highest hopes for. The film about skateboarders in Mexico is almost narrative-less, has no characters in it, doesn't really tell a story. It's hook is tha the skaters are on fire. It doesn't really prop the whole thing up ...

So what does that tell me - apart from a bunch of stuff about my taste?

Well, the thing I got was the fact that if you're going to make this kind of work, for christ's sake embrace the role of media owners and editorial owners: tell compelling stories about real people. Ensure there's an essential conflict in the narrative. Make sure that you've got characters.

Because, as these films illustrate for me so clearly is that, while creative loveliness can get you so far, it won't always get you through 3.30 minutes. Whereas your brand ambassador's story will carry your brand forever.

ADLAND TAKES CANNES PR ... AND IT'S A GOOD THING

As most people will by now know, TBWA\Chiat Day have picked up the Cannes Lion for PR.

Let's be honest, it's a bloody good campaign. A great idea neatly executed. And it has PR written all over it.

Now, does it matter that it wasn't an idea that originated in a PR agency? Hmm ... For my money, no.

This campaign (and for that matter the Best Job in the World that picked up the Grand Prix last year) is bloody good news for PR.

Why? Because with any luck, as well as making PR agencies up their game in large style with the spectre of ad agencies jumping on "our patch," it also makes PR a bigger, more important (and therefore more valuable) piece of the marketer's armoury.

And that is the marketer's armoury. Not the Head of Communication's armoury, not the Head of Consumer PR's armoury, not the Director of Corporate Communication's armoury.

And that matters.

The Cannes jury bemoaned the numbers of entries they had from ad agencies which said "we didn't have any money to spend, so we did some PR instead".

I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

If the right people pay the right kind of attention to what is happening here, then Marketing Directors ought to be thinking "hang on just a second here, if these ad fellas can do this with PR, I wonder what my PR agency could do with a similar sum?".

And what is naff all cash to an ad agency is a bucketload of money in PR-land. Only got £100k to spend on a project. Aw, I think we could do interesting things with that. Got a mere £500k and it won't stretch to a TV campaign so it's a toss-up between a radio campaign and PR? I reckon we ought to be able to bag that cash and do something that gets a brand talked about.

So my answer to the folks whinging about the fact that an ad agency has once again waltzed off with the Cannes PR Grand Prix?

First of all, up your game. Get better. Do more interesting things. Embrace the opportunity to think bigger, think better, take a lead creatively and simply be smarter and cleverer.

Second of all, celebrate the fact that people are investing in PR in large style and beat a path to the nearest Marketing Director's door to ask them for their trifling budget.

Take out media, take out hefty production and ad agency overheads and that "budget so tough we had to turn to PR" cash looks like a healthy spend that any consumer agency should be snapping up and doing interesting things with.

This is the chance, people. Sieze it because it won't come again.

Oh, for those scratching their heads and wondering what the Gatorade replay work actually involved, there's a neat video from the second Replay game made by Contagious Magazine below.

And for the Cannes round-up, there's a summary around about here from the same source.