Ad of the Week

"Ad of the week"; the badly named and highly irregular feature, is back! The reason for its sudden, Lazarus-like return is the new John Lewis ad which has been endlessly blogged about, but deserves a mention. It is beautifully executed and yes it has great music, but also more interesting to me is the development of their "never knowingly undersold" strategy in a new and interesting direction. Lovely stuff.

The art of the political poster

In the year in which the election was supposed to be decided by the internet, it is telling that the most important aspects so far have been a TV microphone, and the TV debates. However it has also been a great year for posters, particularly with the added terror that the millions you spent can be instantly made worthless when someone notices you look a bit photoshopped. Here is some great new work from Team Saatchi (which is confusingly neither Saatchi and Saatchi nor M&C Saatchi). Watch the accompanying films here.

The magical world of Samsung

Though I still stubbornly refuse to leap onto the 3D bandwagon, despite coming under attack, there is some great new work for the Samsung 3D TV. The obvious problem with trying to advertise a 3D TV is that all the images you see of it will be 2D, and probably shown on an inferior quality screen. The simple solution was to show the TV as a portal into another world. First there was this interesting viral on the "old masters" of painting, exploiting the idea that 3D brings a new dimension to existing stuff. Their most recent work though is the video above, which is an ambitious attempt to bring this new dimension into the city. It effectively shows off the picture quality, and creates something genuinely magical while doing so. There is a making of video too which is worth a watch.

The Good Brand List

PSFK, in collaboration with The Purple List, have put together a list of the most innovative, imaginative and creative brands out there. All the usual suspects are there but it is good to see Jamie Oliver, MIT and Ace Hotel mixing it up a bit. Worth a read as there are some good lessons for all brands.

Spotify proved me right!

Just call me Nostradamus. My (not very controversial) prediction in the post before last about Facebook suddenly taking over and creativity flourishing, has been proven true! Spotify announce their latest changes, which includes integration with Facebook. By all accounts it looks pretty impressive.

Shakespeare- A Tweet too far

The premise behind "Such Tweet Sorrow" is to embrace the narcissism and navel-gazing which defines a lot of social media and to add a new dimension to Romeo and Juliet. 6 characters progress the plot on Twitter, while there is a spotify plalist, Facebook events for Juliet's birthday and you can catch up on it all at www.suchsweetsorrow.com. As a character driven online campaign it is interesting, and as an attempt to engage young people with the theatre it is to be praised. However a similiar attempt a year ago stripped the original play of its depth and coherence by tweeting it, and this version also seems to miss the point slightly. I can't help feeling there is a bit of bandwagon jumping going on in using Twitter, when it is almost certainly not the best medium for the project. Thoughts?

I "Like" the Internet

Over the last week there has been a lot of talk about the "Social Graph" project, recently unveiled by Facebook. It is a big step towards a more personalized and organized web (read more about the changes here, here and here). Though there are serious questions about the effect of Facebook harbouring so much information, and on whether it can be called "open" at all, what is clear is that it will bring massive changes. And already, there are things springing up which make use of it. Here are a couple we have seen- look out for an explosion of innovation in this area in the next couple of months.

- Levis Social Shop -Levis is the first major brand to integrate Facebook friends into the shopping experience, but it is hard to see how this won't become the norm.
-Likebutton.me -Now your friends can click "Like" on anything on the web, this site aggregates their choices in one place.
-IMDB- Just one of many sites to have added Facebook integration- recommend movies, comment and share.
- It's Trending - Real time feed of the most shared data on Facebook.

A Brief for a post-digital world

This presentation from Gareth Kay has some really interesting stuff to say on the future of the brief. He is quick to point out that this is not a digital brief but is a brief for a post-digital world. Everyone seems to be trying to crack the participation brief at the moment, and though this is by no means perfect, it is a good start.

You just got schooled

I found this over at the great Escape Pod blog, and thought it deserved a mention. It was for OfficeMax, and was shown on TV as a 40 minute special. Its ambitious, funny and clearly a hell of a lot more emotionally engaging than a 30 second ad. Worth a watch.

The Webbies are here. The Webbies are here!

Guess what? The Webby nominations have been announced and its a great list of last year's best integrated and online campaigns. There are some interesting case studies in there so have a browse of the site. Here are some of our favourites:

HBO Trueblood - Not quite The Dark Knight, but impressively engaging all the same.
Nike Chalkbot - Great example of innovative thinking
Boostup -One we hadn't seen before
Myspace Fan Video - One of many, but perhaps the best executed Facebook connect video

Awesome thing of the week

The latest bit of Nike awesomeness is Nike Grid; a sort of Foursquare/ Nike + mashup. Basically Nike have laid down the challenge to race between phone- boxes in your area, checking in by dialing a unique number. Postcodes are pitted against each other all over London, and are given points for every person completing a run.

I love it because it not only plays into an existing traditional of postcode pride and amateur athletic competition, but it does it in a completely untechnological way. They could have used Nike + but by using phone boxes it becomes universally inclusive. It also effectively lets you race other locals and track your running times- exactly what you can do if you buy Nike +.

It launches on Friday 24th April, and there is more info over at Contagious. So get your trainers ready and good luck beating Tom G and I; the lightening fast E2 team.

Creativity and the crowd

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

The Johnny Cash project has been blogged about a lot recently, not least by Melex from BBHlabs yesterday. It is a staggering project and one of the most attractive crowdsourcing projects to date. Even more ambitious is Star Wars Uncut, which released a teaser trailer this week. That project has recreated the entire Star Wars New Hope movie in 15 second chunks.

In both cases the crowd has been used to collectively create something. However it teaches us some things about when crowdsourcing works best.

1. It is something people are passionate about.

Both Johnny Cash and Star Wars have legions of devoted fans who are happy to spend time and energy devoted to honouring their heroes.

2. It is Individual

Each individual in the crowd in these projects is given a very specific task, which is relatively easy to create and becomes part of the project as a whole. Crowdsourcing in which every person is meant to offer a solution to the whole problem, and the best aspects are then picked out (such as Crowdspring logo design), tend to be less successful.

3. The project is a recreation

This is controversial, but do these work mainly because the initial creativity didn't start in the "crowd"? It was composers or artists or directors. The crowdsourcing element is secondary and just allows more people to become a part of that original piece of work, rather than creating something entirely new. Thoughts?

Everything is digital. Nothing is digital

We like Russell Davies, and we like his thinking about "Post Digital" (have a look at the Newspaper Club). It is over a year old now, but the idea that online behaviour is seeping offline, and that the two spaces are blurring, is still an interesting and provacative thought. Recently we have noticed a number of examples of this in area which are worth checking out.


KIN- Microsoft's campaign follows Rosa in her quest to meet all her Facebook friends for real
The National Day of Unplugging- The US switches off for a day
Stickybits- I keep banging on about this but it is fantastic! Tagging and commenting, but in the real world
Pixels- Amazing video of the pixelation of earth
Tweets boxset - 1000 twitter music reviews released in a box
Google Envelopes - Email meets snail mail
UPDATE: Google Maps QR Code- Had to be added really

16 minutes of satirical brilliance

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

I finally got a chance to watch the 16 (yep, SIXTEEN) minute Short; Logorama. I'm aware of the irony of publishing it on a blog linked to an ad agency but it is a stunning piece of work which deserves to be seen. Of course there are a lot of messages in it about the commercialization of US culture and the damage it is doing, but it is also a comment on the changing nature of brands. The recontextualization of so many multi-million dollar brands (in transforming them into characters in a film noir), as well being a visual feast, is an approximation of how we all consume brands now: remixing them and finding new meanings within them.
The question is how brands can embrace this new culture.

Chat Roulette gets (more) harrowing

Publicis' work for the feminist group "Neither Whores nor Submissives", uses the popular Chat Roulette format for a genuinely shocking effect. It is worth logging onto the site and sticking with it until the end to get the full experience. What I like is that, unlike the French Connection work which seemed to be jumping on the Chat Roulette bandwagon with little reason aside from being "cutting edge", the message in the Publicis version is perfect for this format. It is yet another example of creativity being unleashed once a new format becomes available. Bring on the Ipad.