What's Hot This Week #5

555 KubiK – Ever wondered what a building would look like if it was dreaming? This latest bit of work from UrbanScreen attempts to show us with some pretty amazing visual effects.
Jaydiohead – 5 new tracks from the fantastic Radiohead/Jay-Z mashup.
TED Oxford – from @brainpicker’s tweets it looks like there were some great talks. Check out Gordon Brown's surprise appearance on day 1 HERE.
Pizza Hut – the best branded iPhone app so far? The Pizza Hut app lets you create your perfect pizza from scratch then order it instantly.
Come Into The Closet – brilliant new website for Ikea.
Fisch Franke – using live fish in their latest bus stop ads.
Hackney Wick Festival – the galleries and studios of Hackney Wick open up their doors this weekend for what NY Arts Magazine described as ‘the most vital art event of the summer’. Don’t miss out!
Skateboarding – Nike, Adidas, Axe and Converse have all released skateboard videos in the past month or so. The Nike and Adidas ones are pretty damn good.

iQ Font

Interesting new campaign for the Toyota IQ, who decided to promote the car’s agility by using the it to create its very own font. The font is actually pretty nice and is available for download HERE. It’s certainly a different way of promoting a new car. I like the idea although it does feel very similar to the BMW Z4 Expression of Joy campaign from earlier this year.

I've Seen The Future...

Two rappers have recently used content from ads in their music videos and promotional activity. First up was 50 Cent who used part of the Philips Carousel web film in his video. Then Snoop Dogg spoofed Heineken’s walk-in fridge.

Is this the future of advertising? Musicians get free content, whilst brands get product placement.

New On Slideshare

Check out SaatchiPlanning’s Slideshare this week for one of the best presentations that I’ve seen on social media.

WHAT THE F**K IS SOCIAL MEDIA one year later by Marta Kagan.

Full of great stats such as social media by numbers:

13 hours - the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
412.3 years - the length of time it would take to view every YouTube video.
100,000,000 - the number of YouTube videos viewed per day.
13,000,000 - the number of articles available on Wikipedia.
3,600,000,000 - the number of photos archived on Flickr as of June 2009. That’s roughly 1 photo per every 2 people on the planet.
1,000,000,000 - the amount of content (web links, photos, notes etc) shared on Facebook each week.

And great quotes:

“The word blog is irrelevant. What’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world.”
- Seth Godin

For a more comprehensive study on social media here are two great presentations from Universal McCann:

Power To The People Social Media Tracker
When did we start trusting strangers?

And a nice chart showing how people share content on the web HERE.

If the UK were a village of 100 people...

...and all current demographic and social proportions remained the same, what would the village look like? A great article in the Independent this week that converts useful stats about the UK into a usable form, by comparing the UK to a village of 100 people.
Some of the things I found interesting:

• Only 64% of the households would have access to the internet.
• Thirty people would have a Facebook account.
• The 80 adults in the village would share a personal debt of £2.4m (£30,480 each, on average).
• The richest 10 people in the village would earn more than the poorest 50 combined.
• 31% of households would be single person households.
• The villagers would have 118 mobile phones between them.
  

A pdf of the info is available HERE.

Convincingly Natural

There’s something really striking about this promotional piece for Red Bull Cola. It consists of a wooden box displaying real samples of the 17 natural ingredients that go into the drink.
So many brands try to communicate their ‘naturalness’ and the authenticity of their ingredients but fail to do so in a convincing way. I think this works because of its simplicity and the power that physical objects have in an increasingly digital world.
I hope this wasn’t just something they sent to the press as I think it could have a real impact in store.

Everything is Conected to Everything Else: The Sputnik Observatory

Jonathan Harris is back!

The internet artist "combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, to design systems to explore and explain the human world.”
His past projects include We Feel Fine, a database of several million human feelings aggregated from blogs, and the superb Whale Hunt, a storytelling experiment.
Harris’ latest work, called the Sputnik Observatory, is dedicated to documenting contemporary culture. The Observatory consists of interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers from all sorts of disciplines and chronicles some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades.
The thing that I love about the site is the sense of exploring it gives you through forming your own connections between seemingly disconnected ideas.
As Harris puts it:

“Everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, music… Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.”

(The picture accompanying this post is Bill Cheswick's map of the internet, in which he traces the edges of the individual networks and then colour codes them. As Clay Shirky eloquently described it, "this thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen".)

What's Hot This Week #4

MTV refreshed – based on the idea of "pop x 1000%", MTV’s new idents are pretty awesome.
The Eternal Moonwalk – a strangely mesmerising tribute to the King of Pop. If you love MJ then show it!
Labuat – stunning interactive music video.
Hibi No Neiro (Tone of Everyday) – the Japanese group Sour let their fans create their latest music video by collaborating around the world using their webcams.
The mother of all lists – Greg Rutter has compiled a great list of “99 things you should have already experienced on the internet unless you’re a loser or old or something”.
Dark Night of The Soul – DJ Danger Mouse’s latest work in which he collaborated with director David Lynch as well as a host of guest stars, was blocked by EMI for legal reasons. Not one to shy away from controversy he subsequently released a limited run of blank CDs, asking fans to find the music “by whatever means”…

Ad of The Week

The obvious choice this week is the fantastic VB ad from Droga 5 but there’s already a great post over on Jason’s blog who says, “what really does it for me is the lack of artifice and bullshit advertising pretence”.
So I decided to pick the campaign for MasOportuniades.com by BBDO Argentina. MasOportunidades is a rival to Ebay with only a 10% market share vs. Ebay’s 90%. Their problem was that their communications benefited Ebay more than themselves. By adding an emotional element they essentially generated a new playing field. Consequently monthly visits went up from 500,000 to 2 million.

MasOportunidades.com from Digital on Vimeo.

Talking About a Revolution

(Image courtesy of Helge Tenno)

Fascinating talk by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. He examines how the top-down control of news is changing not only the nature of politics but also how brands interact with their consumers.
To whet your appetite, Shirky states that "The moment we're living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history."
Well worth investing 17 minutes to watch this!

Peacocking

In the world of dating peacocking means dressing for attention, just like peacock’s use their feathers to get a mate. It’s a simple strategy that helps you get noticed in a crowded room. Fortunately this is not a post giving you dating advice.
In the last few weeks there have been a few notable examples of peacocking in the world of outdoor advertising. With the whole world going digital crazy it’s nice to see some effective outdoor work.

Amnesty International – clever bus stop ad that changes depending whether or not someone is looking at it. Very effective way of getting across an anti-domestic abuse message.

Coca-Cola – to demonstrate the new Grip Bottle they made people experience the grip using Velcro posters, resulting in a 3.7% brand volume growth in France.

McDonald's – recently took advantage of one of London’s most photographed locations. Their interactive sign encouraged people to have their photo taken in front of the ad. I would love to know the multiplier effect of people uploading their photos to Facebook and thereby significantly increasing the number of people who saw the ad.

New On Slideshare

A lot of people have been asking me about why I use Twitter and I’m generally met with the words “But I don’t care what you’re doing!”. So I was pleased to find a fantastic presentation from Minxuan Lee called How Twitter Changed My Life. For everyone who doesn’t get Twitter this is well worth a look! I particularly like her slide on the 5 stages of Twitter Acceptance and her point that Twitter is not about “What are you doing?” but rather “What has your attention?”

In keeping with the Twitter theme here are 10 useful stats taken from the Ogilvy PR blog.

1. 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter.
4. 150 followers is the magic number
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." Where active is defined as posting a tweet in the last 7 days.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day.
   
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth. 55% of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others.
9. English still dominates Twitter.The top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter is Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks.15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers.

I'd Rather Be Watching Porn

Mike Aruz has come up with a great measure for the strength of ideas. He states that since “your competition is everything on the internet”, ideas need to pass the “I’d rather be watching porn test”. So next time you’re trying to create an online experience, Mike suggests we ask ourselves:

Does this idea pass the "I'd rather be watching porn" test? Or if you prefer the safe for work option, Does this idea pass the "I'd rather be looking at pictures of kittens" test?

There’s also some useful stuff in his post about integrating online experiences into the domains where the audience already hangs out, rather than trying to compete with them.