In the money
Posted: April 29, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, engagement, viral marketing Comments Off
The Carlsberg ad campaign has always been extremely entertaining and memorable. It’s what Russell Davies describes as generous or rich, as opposed to simply being the “big” idea of which ad men are so fond. In 2004, this was successfully adapted to a very nice “french disqualified” viral email idea (if you know me you’ll know how much it hurts to say the ‘v’ word). The latest incarnation, spotted on Flickr by Leo Ryan at RMM is a sort of piece of viral activity started offline which travel online. A bit like the Microsoft Vanishing Point game but a lot more subtle and with not all the discussion activity necessarily online, Carlsberg appear to be hoping the £10 will do more than just go into someone’s pocket – it will make it into public discourse. I’d love to know what happens, and clearly it’s all inlne with the rest of the advertising.
Yet, while the advertising idea here is big, rich, deep, generous, memorable, famous and all that, does it motivate you to buy the product?
One follow up on Flickr says a great deal
If it only cost them fifty grand (which is a snip for advertising) then potentially the five thousand people who discover one of these on a friday night will tell all their mates. Still wouldn’t make me drink Carlsberg though…
Having said that. Perhaps it only cost them £10 and they got lucky!
More4(04)
Posted: April 28, 2007 Filed under: 404, interface Comments Off
More pointlessness for a Saturday morning. B3ta seem to have appointed a 404 officer with literally hundreds of variants being shown on a loop on their own error page. This does beg the slightly odd question of why I had such a hard time finding them in the first place: one broken link would have made the whole process a lot easier in hindsight.
Predictably scoring highly in politically incorrect stakes and with a large number of appearances from both Carol Vorderman and Joey Deacon, the collection also includes a suprising number of more sophisticated entries such as “ce n’est pas un 404″. Here are a few highlights.
Axes of I-ville
Posted: April 28, 2007 Filed under: Futurama, location based, twitter, web2.0 1 Comment » 
Thanks to Nicola for spotting this great new site that aims to map and count the internet’s users. The theory they’re working on is that if each person spreads the word to three friends and that the spreading process takes 1 day a time, they will have reached the internet’s entire population in under a month. They put up a brilliant bit of hokum science in their introductory video:
As they explain, the ”viral” maths is pretty straight-forward. This is a geometic series. So the user count is (3n+1-1)/2 where n is the number of days or iterations. 331/2 is more than 3.1 x 1014, that’s 310,000 billion or 3 with 14 zeros. The world’s population is estimated as under 7 billion (7 with 9 zeros). Of course the flaw in the plan is that the viral effect is not 100% efficient and not all invitee will be unique but it will be fascinating to see where they get to. 7 days in they’re at 5,000. They should be at 3,200 so they’re ahead of target.
What would be really great is if this could be combined with Twitter Vision (I know that’s already a mash up), and even better than that would be a blog sentiment overlay like www.wefeelfine.org! Presumably only a matter of time.
This must be great
Posted: April 26, 2007 Filed under: advertising, web2.0 2 Comments » 
Next time you book a holiday, you should definitely book it with Thomson. All of their user reviews are 5 stars! It must be amazing.
Pint of beer for the first person to find a non 5-star review or one not posted in January 2005 or January 2006.
Corrupt absolutely
Posted: April 25, 2007 Filed under: brains, usability Comments OffThis post’s all theft:
RMM London have a brilliant quote: “Power corrupts but powerpoint corrupts absolutely“.
Russell Davies points at this brilliant post. As if we didn’t already know this intuitively, the brain finds it harder to understand ideas if they are verbalized and written on the wall at the same time!
(Picture also stolen from the post).
Geek Olympics
Posted: April 25, 2007 Filed under: computers, web2.0 Comments Off 
Another great post from RMM. This time from Dan O’Connor about potential web 2.0 olympic sports. And fully in tune with inevitable Nonsense 2.0 we are about to receive in our crazy summer.
Not, of course the sort of computer sports that we remember from being 11 and having to hammer on the “k” and “l” keys to win the race, but some nice reality and sarcasm about just how happily we’re really co-existing with modern technology.
I particularly like the Wikipedia challenge where you have to keep reposting your Zionist conspiracy theories as many times as possible before getting officially banned.
My entrant is holding a “future of advertising” summit where the winner is the last one to say the G word.
Summer madness
Posted: April 25, 2007 Filed under: advertising, brand, london, marketing, web2.0 Comments OffI know it’s not summer yet. But it’s going to come soon and it’s going to be full of crazy people. And the crazy people are going to work in marketing agencies and they’re going to be trying to reinvent the interweb. Here are some early starters:
Firstly some klutz at JWT clearly doesn’t know that Google Earth is a product name and not a generic. Rather more importantly is this candidate for most patronising and inelegant phrase I’ve heard for a long time: ‘read what people like you made of it’.
The site itself has some nice features and UI bits and pieces, as well as a (not bad) custom virtual earth. I can only assume they’re still working on the content. When you roll over the continental United States you get one clickable link which opens up to say: “Holidays in the USA will offer you the warmest of welcomes, the biggest of portions and lifetime of memories”.
Well I don’t know about you but I feel like I’ve been there before I even got on the plane. I might explore more with some user generated content. Although Thompson would like to make it very clear that any resemblence to trusting their customers is purely accidental:
Well they can’t be too careful what people like us might upload.
The ad was in good company. The newly updated information revolution ad was right next to it. Remember boys and girls, Google is too powerful so you should use Ask.com. That’s the same ask.com that only exists now because it ran Google ads for the last five years.
The battle for hearts and desktops
Posted: April 18, 2007 Filed under: Futurama, Futurism 1 Comment »
A lot of arguments are about complex nuance and deeply entrenched beliefs. They seem intractable because they are so closely related to ideology.
Well here’s one that isn’t. This is just the difference between X as tool and X as hobby:
Linux people can never understand why people would want to use Windows: all those fidgety user-interfaces, hand-holding wizards, automatic updates and patronizing marketing material. Windows users can never understand why people would want to use Linux for precisely the same reasons. They want a bit of packaged nanny-state to their operating systems and they don’t want to turn the page in the manual and find “to achieve this you simply need to re-compile the kernel with your favourite text editor”.
A new product from Pipex founder Peter Dawe at last brings us a Linux distribtion without too many bells and whilstles, but with all the features most users actually want. Debates about technical superiority aside, the new product Babel disc sounds like a neat solution and is also a sign of the times for operating systems in general.
In additon to taking a particularly cut-down configuration of the operating system and bundling it with a Skype, MS-compatible productivity suite (open office), browser (Firefox), email, IM, even Freeview app out of the box (actually off the disc), Babel disc depends on using a fashionable new storage device called the interweb (as well as being able to access USB memory sticks and local drives).
Vista may get bigger and the new Max OS X (puma? giraffe? lion?) will doubtless do the same and become shinier. But all the variants will have this in common - all will become essentially client terminals linked into server computing power online. And where’s the revenue coming from in all this? Mac and Windows are charging for base software (and/or fancy hardware). Babel disc are charging for the internet storage. Google has a potentially cleverer idea… making money from access to your preferences and interests.
Is Babel disc to early? Perhaps. I think there’s a bigger risk it’s already too late. In the next year, Google may be able to deliver 90% of the OS experience inside the browser. That could make any computer with an internet connection and a decent processor the terminal on your own digital virtual computer: no disc, no configuration no more re-installing.
More Google larks
Posted: April 18, 2007 Filed under: google Comments OffGo to maps.google.co.uk and click on the direction tab. Do the search from Southwark Bridge, London to New York, New York. Point 31: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3462 miles. Ho ho. But that’s not the end of the merriment. Look, they make you go to France first.
Kurt is up in heaven now
Posted: April 13, 2007 Filed under: language, literature Comments Off
There seems little doubt that Kurt Vonnegut was one of the finest American authors of the last century. In many ways, despite some very dark moments in his own life, he is simply one of the most noble Americans of all time. Always a patriot, Vonnegut despised the fake nationalism of the Bush administration, coming out of retirement to write the short story collection A Man Without a Country in 2006. He is quoted as saying that he had “drawn energy from my contempt for our president”. (Why patriotism and supporting the president aren’t the same).
As observed in this lovely tribute, it was Vonnegut’s ability to characterize and humanize the frailties that bind us which made his writing so engrossing, captivating and – so often – laugh-out-loud funny.
Although he had not written very much in recent years, his death is a monumental loss. I can think of no writer who comes close to matching his humanity, humor and pure mastery of the language.
Surely it would be fitting to have a memorial to this great man. I suggest a replacement of the Pot Noodle in Times Square, perhaps surrounded by the aliens from Tralfamadore and accompanied by some of his famous one liners:
”If you want to disappoint your parents and don’t have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.”
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal labotomy”
NB: the title of this is ironic and borrowed from Vonnegut himself. In a quote about Isaac Asimov:
“Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in Heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.”
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