Insane Beyonce painting with iPad app..

New Apple store in Covent Garden..?

There’s been building work going on on that side of Covent Garden for ages now,  so it’s  refreshing to see a teasing use of the temporary fixture. Apple Store, coming  soon I guess?

Big bang, big boom…

Oh my god this is epic.

It’s long. Sooooo long, but please find some time to watch.

Where did we come from, where have we been and where are we going….Enjoy.

From blublu.org via BBH

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Why do you do what you do..?

A fascinating and beautiful journey into the psychology behind motivation and how you can get the most out of people.

Source : HYC

Make a chart day – “Doomsday in Durban” (02/07/10)

Love them or hate them, they have surely made World Cup 2010 memorable in a very distinctive way and gifted the online world with a plethora of memes, which can only be a good thing.

My entry for #makeachartday

So why did England fail so impressively..?

One week on and its been a busy week of argumentation and exposition over England’s doomed journey in South Africa, culminating in our comprehensive spanking from Germany.  For a read, check out the Guardian‘s article on the travesty.

Of course, I’m absolutely gutted (as always). I’ve experienced England’s failure for most of my formative years but I find this year to be particularly interesting. Whilst no football statistician, I do know that on paper we have some pretty good players - but as a team something just didn’t work together. The performance as a whole didn’t tally up with the performance of the individuals and in some sadly perverse way, they played even worse. What we would have wanted was to see some teamwork, some play that was greater than the sum of its parts…in other words, some magic. But magical play isn’t something you can conjure at will unfortunately, it’s somewhat more elusive than that. But some thinking about networks might provide some insight..

Undercurrent strategist Mike Arauz discusses how the success of advertising agencies depends on both their ability to tell stories AND their ability to be create tricks, making a great analogy to magic - read here. In short, you can be an agency that does great tricks or you could be an agency that is particularly adept at story telling but those elements alone will not precipitate a good (and ultimately successful) advertising agency. I really like this idea that a central outcome can only ever be created by two seperate processes and it’s something we can use as a framework on pretty much everything.

Take music for example. I’m a music producer. I use computers and synthesisers to produce music and it is often a very technical process. But after a while of producing something happens that is kind of hard to describe. After a while I no longer hear the musical elements, I no longer hear the percussion, I no longer hear a vocal line…I hear a song. The elements combined in the right way create something that is both unexpected, quite random and entirely dependant on its component processes  - it is in essence, magical. The third element if you’d call it that. And something sadly we didn’t get to see in England’s performance.

I read a great book recently -  Connected :  Amazing power of social networks and how they shape our lives. If you find networks interesting then you should definitely have a read. It’s not entirely popular science tripe - they’ve gone in great depth to scientifically model how networks are structured, how they transfer ‘contagion’ and what the implications are for small groups and larger societies. I need to dig back into it a little more but it’s fascinating - essentially a large part of who you are is not mutually because of you and your actions, you are who you are because of everyone else in your network. Strikes a very similar chord with a campaign for Orange I worked on a few years ago - they were quite ahead of the game it seems.

Nicholas Christakis spoke earlier this year at a TED conference - he covers some of the major points in his book so if you don’t have time to read, have a listen here

Lessons learned – Anjunabeats..

Dance music marketing is a funny old thing. Some labels do it very well but the vast majority don’t. Poor creativity, inconsistent messaging, feeble social media integration and uninspiring marketing tactics create a landscape of rather monotonous looking labels.

Other than the music, what kinds of things make a great label? What kinds of ideas and strategies work best for a genre often shy of the millions that more mainstream genres can pump into their marketing … What makes a record label more than just a label?

Enter Anjunabeats, a British independent dance label that know a thing or two about how a little brand, can make a big impression..

Snog..

Snog do great frozen yoghurt, however I find their branding a touch try-hard. So what a moment of joy I had when I saw this the other day.



iAd launches in the US..

Are we entering a new era of credible and sustainable mobile monetisation or is this just a consumer-phobic strategy to make loads more money? Whilst I’m in no doubt this could have a positive effect in developing the mobile economy, Apple and its new iAd stakeholders need to be careful not to “over-commercialise” the mobile domain.

Source : WARC

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAd, has now officially launched in the US, and is expected to deliver a “powerful” impact for the brands that seek to connect with their customers in this way.

Unilever, Best Buy and Chanel are among the corporations that have committed to spending a collective $60m (€48.3m; £39.8m) on this new system, alongside Nissan, Citigroup and Sears.

The collected expenditure of these firms is expected to account for almost half of all the advertising revenues delivered by this emerging channel in America during the final six months of 2010.

Apple is also rumoured to building a unique pricing model, with the intention of charging companies a minimum of $1m apiece for employing iAd as part of their campaigns, although this strategy is not likely to be implemented until it is rolled out internationally.

The manufacturer of the iPad and iMac has argued that the specific strength of the iAd service lies in its combination of video and interactive features, which thus exploits the emotional punch of television commercials and the engagement levels of the web.

“It’s early days, but we are witnessing the birth of a market,” said Jonathan Nelson, head of Omnicom Digital.

Christophe Cauvy, digital director at the McCann Worldgroup, added: “This is very powerful. It’s a no-brainer that’s going to work.”

Babs Rangaiah, vp, global communications planning at Unilever, further predicted that the impetus generated by Apple’s entry into this category could result in the expansion of the mobile advertising sector as a whole.

“The learning we will get from this will give us a great competitive edge over time. We are going to keep using mobile in a big way,” he said.

There are currently an estimated four billion active mobile connections worldwide, vastly outnumbering the total of fixed-line broadband subscriptions – just one indication that many consumers primarily log on to the internet via this route.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consultancy, has forecast that mobile marketing budgets will more than triple from $2.2bn in 2009 to $7.7bn in 2014, when this medium will take a 7.4% share of online ad sales.

While agencies and their clients have expressed enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by iAd, which will open within a small amount of applications on the iPhone and, later, the iPad, it has proved less popular with the developers that create apps for these devices.

Apple will produce, sell and host the entire inventory available through this programme, but will keep just 40% of the returns garnered from this process, with developers pocketing the remaining 60%.

Speaking at the launch of iAd, Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said: “It’s all about helping our developers make some money with advertising. We think most mobile advertising really sucks. We thought we might be able to make some contribution.”

However, the initial emphasis on high-end brands effectively excludes a majority of applications, and developers have also raised criticisms that Apple is essentially blocking off their use of AdMob, the mobile ad network operated by Google.

Such is the level of concern that US regulators are being urged to investigate whether Apple has constructed a “walled garden” which third parties will find it difficult to access.

“Limiting our choices, especially by eliminating the largest mobile ad network out there, is definitely disconcerting,” said Justin Siegel, chief executive of Mocospace, a social network for mobile phone users with 12 million members.

Data sourced from Financial Times; additional content by Warc staff, 02 July 2010