Big Ass TVs and Big Ass Computers

Last night I went to a meeting of the Creative Social, a dark, masonic,  sect where digital creative directors get together like the Witches of Eastwick. David Abraham, founder of St Lukes and now cheif exec of UKTV spoke for nearly two hours and you know what, I believe he was right about pretty much everything.  

I'll spare you the St Lukes story beacuse most adfolk know it (although if anyone has a copy of the documentary and could send it to me or knows where it exists online I would be eternally grateful) and loads of other stuff he said because that would be just giving the game away but there was one thing he said about TVs and computers that seemed very salient.

TV screens are getting bigger. Way bigger. Not smaller. TV is more like the cinema now. I've been working on Bravia and they have some whoppers with everything apart from the popcorn.

And the mobile is going to be the third screen right? If Bob Greenberg says so then you'd better believe it. So where does that leave the PC screen? Is it going to get bigger or smaller and merge with one of them? Or will people really have 3 screens in their lives?

I'm not sure but this parody of the Microsoft Surface project - touchable PC screens - is an pretty cute way of looking at it.

Bon weekends etc.

Twitter trends

I don't know how many of you use Twitter, not that many I would guess. As with all these social networking trends there seem to be peaks and troughs as people start using things get bored and then maybe come back again. This is pretty much what happened with me.

For anyone wanting to get some decent stats on twitter usage in Europe there is an excellent blog here. The only problem is that it doesn't include UK figures. It doesn't take a planner to spot the trend. Twitter accounts continue to grow and grow as people become ever so slightly addicted to telling people in 140 characters or less what they are doing.

As always clients and normal people (sometimes these two groups are even known to overlap) ask 'why would anyone do this?' Well, using twitter is technically a doddle, quick to do, needs no maintenance and is above all fun and useful. It's just another thing some people do.

So instead of asking 'why?' a legitimate response is actually, ' why not?'

If you'd like to follow me on twitter be my guest. My twitter name is Koopstakov or you can get to my page here.

Experimental movies

And I don't mean experimental as in 'Swedish Sauna' movies. A few years ago, maybe even as little as 2(?) the groovy kids who wanted to experiment with art and gadgets would make movies on their handycams and then hope they got made into the Blair Witch Project. It's all change now.

These days those same kids (I'm guessing - have you not worked out by now that this whole game is just guesswork?) experiment with computers and other bits of tech. That's where the fun is and thats where the money is. In other words it's cooler to make the next Million Dollar Homepage than the next Blair Witch Project.

In the last few weeks or so I have been sent a load of movies about people experimenting with the nintendo Wii controller. First up from Carlos who has been helping us with Sony Bravia - his wonderful papervision experiment. And then one movie with a remote controlling a PC and another controlling a MacBook.

So what you might think. Nothing really, other than for a significant amount of people this is how they get their out of hours kicks now. Whereas a few years ago it might have been doing graphic design or movies. The point for the ad insdustry is that this means there is less  experimental stuff in the traditional media for us nick (I mean pay homage too).

In other words expect to see a 30 second TV ad (or v****!) of someone controlling something with a Wii controller in the next 6 months.

This is what a digital Creative department looks like.

For all of you who work in lovely glass walled offices with towers of u-matics and bowls of green M&Ms I thought i'd give you a sneak peak at the future.

Today we say farewell to Ade and The Student. They will be sorely missed by everyone. Well, prehaps not everyone.

What makes a creative director a creative director?

I was at a panel discussion last night with the MSN team where we were talking about what worked online. Search obviously works online. And one of the most successful pieces of work we have done was our Grand Prix winning AA email campaign. The trouble is, of course, what's sexy about that?

Let's rewind for a second. Why would anyone want to be a creative director. The short answer is that you want to show off. Why do you want to show off is a more complex question. I'll spare you the amatuer Freudianisms but please feel free to comment. :)

So it's about showing off - doing work that is sexy and is going to get noticed. I often think about why there are more male painters than female painters (same across all fine arts). Over a period of time I think it's because men want to show off more than women. Why? F**k knows - maybe because we can't have kids or we are just more shallow.  

Anyway the point is there are massively more male show offs than female show offs. So what better way to promote She Says, the group trying to encourage more female creative directors - brainchild of the quite brilliant Alessandra Lariu from Agency Republic and Laura Jordan Bambach from Glue - than using the male show offs themselves.

See here Flo Heiss, my esteemed partner, Nicke Bergstrom, everyone's favourite creative dude from Far Far in sweden and Seb Royce, Andy Sandoz and Joakim Borgstrom in the Golden Stilletto campaign for She Says. And then ask yourself again why Creative Directors do what they do.

Don't worry I will inform you of the when the film of me making a complete tit of myself at the Marketing Week conference is ready for public consumption.

Your ambassador to Technology

Here at Dare towers we have the famous post-it of things creatives are only allowed to do once. Spoof campaigns nestle in there snugly beside 'No books' and 'No destroying things'. We have never actually done a spoof but if we did I'd like it to be something like the Ray Hopewood Campaign in the US of A.

Ray Hopewood is a fictional gazillionaire running for president for a US Tech company. As I say spoofs are pretty common and, for me, mostly pretty lazy thinking. But I do quite like this one. There are some nice lines, 'Your Ambassador to Technology' being one that I would imagine the geeks in Silicon Valley might like. And the art direction is so cheap it's spot on - anyone seen Hilary Clinton's site?

But probably the main resaon I like it is because you could imagine any old rich idiot running for president and getting in. Oh, yeah, Reagan and Bush already did...

When is a v**** a v****?

We have quite a few clients that ask us to do ' a viral'. I did a talk a while ago called 'the V word' where I attemped to explain the phenomenon without actually using the word.

The jist of it was that the consumer decides whether something is popular or not. They decide whether something goes v****. You are all smart people you get that.

I was always scratching around for a good example to use at the start of the presentation to show the old 'you can bring the horse to the water but you can't force it to drink' analogy and then yesterday, as it does every Thursday, Popbitch popped up in my inbox. Half way down I read this. Lovely.  

Live Earth's BBC1 audience peaked at 3.1m. This year's Eurovision got 10.9m.

 

You can't touch this

It's definitely a sign of the times when you create one of the most memorable and I would guess successful TV campaigns in recent history only to see your budget slashed in favour of Digital and Direct.

News that the 118 118 mustacheod marathoners are going to spend more time on the interweb and in promotional activities is something of a surprise to me - I didn't honestly think that UK clients were that smart. It takes some balls to try to fix something when it ain't broke.

 (At least it appears not to be broke - perhaps it's not working but my guess is that 118 118 would still be the first 118 number that most people think of when asked)

It will be interesting to see what they do next and if any other high profile TV campaigns suffer the same cuts.

Experimentation: that’s what you need.

One of the great things about the web is that you can shove stuff up there and see what happens without breaking the bank or getting fired. If it bombs no worries but if it’s a success then you can build a whole campaign around it. But far too few clients actually do this.

The famous example is of course subservient chicken. Burger King didn’t like the idea, Crispin were not that behind it but briefed Barbarian, gave them 15k and they mucked about with it and sort of, er, released it.

Obviously it took off. Crispin and Burger King were then smart enough to see how popular it was and then create TV spots and posters that made the chicken even more famous. A star of an integrated campaign is born. But nothing would have happened without the initial mucking about online.

Fear and Loathing of brands or just shopping?

On the back of an interesting report on consumers attitudes in Brown's Britain I thought I would give you a personal opinion on consumerism and what it might mean for the industry.

Right at the start of this blog I posted about not buying any clothes for a year. It was quite a popular post and many people have spoken to me about it ( i would link to it but can't seem to get to it - Ed!!??). As I said then I don't have a particulary anti consumerism bent I just thought my time and money could be spent better elsewhere. On art for example - although it's quite difficult to find art I like that I can afford. I'm still a couple of mil shy of Damien Hirst's new skull. But, you know, we'll see.

Anyways, as an update I can confirm that's it is now a full half of one year since I bought any clothes (i did buy a pair of socks from American Apparel in Berlin - it was bloody cold - but that's it).

From my personal experince this has meant less shopping in general although my book shelves continually overflow like that Big Yellow Storage ad. Can I see this catching on is, I guess, the point.  It might be my age (35 - I know, Larissa couldn't quite believe it either...) or it might be the 'green' effect or endless exposure to pony ads but whatever it is it's real for me.

I read an article in the New York Times over the weekend - it came free with The Observer (that's quite a good idea isn't it?) about Freegans. These are people who live off consumer waste, not just food, but everything, creating networks of people who swap things they don't need any more. (Anyone want a copy of Ogilvy on Advertising?)

Freegans exist in England, they are called Pikeys or Crustys depending on what paper you read but they are not mainstream enough to cause a dent in big corporations bottom line. Yet. However, the more we read about big brands like Tesco and Private Equity firms doing nasty things and how it's cooler to go to farrmers markets and buy clothes from Howies who knows profit margins are pretty tight these days so it could get worse for the big boys.

Trends are a funny old thing but you never know. Who would have ever thought that cardigans and crap white 80's plimsols would be back?

Johnny and the iPhone update

As I posted on Friday, Johnny from Anomaly queued for five days to buy the first iPhone in a great stunt for charity and one of his clients. I wonder how long Spike queued?

Watch Johnny pull of one of the marketing stunts of the century.

The auction is already up to $5,100.