Via

Nooooooo!

The focus on the ‘channel’ is dafter than daft. What the old spice success has proved IMHO is entirely different:

It proved, yet again, that great ideas, well, they work! I find it a great reminder of the art and science of advertising. The success of the man your man can smell like was down to that rare stroke(s) of genius: first and foremost the quality of copywriting. Comic writing is arguably the most difficult form and the W+K team nailed it with immortal phrases (“Silver fish hand catch!”) that will forever remain in our popular culture. Then of course the combination of genius writing with the perfect casting and acting. Can’t imagine anyone could have done it better than Isaiah. That was the Art.

All the rest was ‘just’ the science, from the initial media planning and buying all the way to the ultra clever extension to real-time production as a live dialouge with loads of people from Twitter, facebook and youtube. Piggybacking or simply milking the success of the original ad was not least brilliant but something which has been achieved through great outreach strategy and admirable understanding of the culture we live by.

‘naff said.

PS: The ever too clever Graeme talked about cause and effect from a slightly different angle (read it here it’s good)

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Do yourself a favour and watch it in HD / full screen. It’s oddly mesmerising.

If I were photography geek (unfortunately I’m not) i’d have been drooling over the photography porn making-of story

Via the rockin BBH-LABS

Super lovely alphabet from Paul Thurlby

via the always awesome Charlie

Read it all over at Faris’s, I simply like the work of Ji Lee:

“In 1913, Marcel Duchamp took found objects from the streets and placed them in museums. 96 years later, if Duchamp were alive, he may want to do the very opposite”.

His google-me business card is full of awesomeness – I want one!

Tweenbots is absolutely incredible project by Kacie Kinzer, a student at ITP. You see it / read about it and it makes you want to free-hug someone.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

If you haven’t seen it yet go and take a look now (but please comeback to read the rest of the post )

It really moved me and I’ve been thinking about it the whole evening since I picked it up off twitter (thanks herdmeister). Here are my two comments:

1. Simple and genuine is much more compelling than grandiose and choreographed.

Brilliant idea is the new media budget. Here is yet another example how a personal project of anonymous individual takes off like a storm and gets everyone excited, sharing and talking. I’m not doing justice to this fantastic little experiment by comparing it to advertising but couldn’t resist thinking about all those recent ads that try to convey the feeling that people are good. Think Honda’s Let in Shine or do’er and Orange’s people are good together and more, which are all “about telling stories about the brand and making people again feel an emotional attachment to Honda”. A quick check on twitter reveals over 1500(!) tweets for tweenbots vs. just under 300 for Honda. There are various reasons why people find tweenbots ore exciting than Honda’s let it shine (apology again for comparing schnitzel and fish) but there are very obvious lessons we can learn about what makes people tick and how we should think about designing people into marketing. Tweenbots are simple and genuine and that’s 100 more compelling (personally, i should say) than grandiose and orchestrated.

2. We love stories that remind us of our humanity (even if we are humans to robots)

It’s funny how we cling to a minor anecdotal evidence to restore faith in our good nature. How genuinely excited we can get when someone demonstrates the good-will and kindness of strangers. Skim through the tweets and you’ll read assertions like “something that may make you a shed a small happiness tear”, “I know I’m having an overly emotional day when watching videos of people helping Tweenbots literally makes me cry”, ” it reinvigorates my happiness when it comes to other human beings”, “If you ever find yourself thinking that all people are bad, visit this website”. (Mind you, this is NYC, a fairly alienated city to say the list where the beggars and homeless can go unnoticed for years….)

It’s absolutely stunning.

Here is a quick one from the London from above at night series.

Remember cock-a-doodle? or this little gem? and the Pollock of course…well, Fontpark is very much the same – it let’s you play and draw and create with fonts. And all the little touches make it stunningly beautiful.

Have a go, it’s FONT-a-delic

You can never predict what kind of response n a video can ignite, but this emergence of a micro, temporary, situational community where people gather around a shared object and publicly react to and converse with it (as well as with one another) is a wonderful demonstration of our social nature.

I come from a school of thought that argues that the individual self is social in origin and dialogical in function. The dialogical self reflects and appropriates the voices of society and significant others, and video reactions are wonderful examples of communicative actions between self and other.

Ever since I wrote this post I had this dream of having a massive screen in a public space for an arthropology (art+anthropology that is) installation of video response. That is probably a little bit too ambitious so with the very kind help of the magnificent Greg & Nico(you will be missed mate), I’m happy to present Reaction Wall – a permanent exhibition of human social interaction in modern, digital culture .

It’s a 3×3 wall of youtube videos with the central one (also marked with red frame) the piece that started the ‘videosation’.

I’m hoping to change the videos every couple of weeks or so and would welcome any contributions – if you know of an interesting video that sparked interesting reactions please drop me a line.

He did a micro zoo about a year ago

Who can forget this dreamy scene…

This is something i always wanted to do!