Strength of feeling

I confess to reading the Metro paper on a worryingly regular basis. There's no real journalism going on there - it's a 'straight from the wires' approach at best - but just occasionally it imparts something of use.

And that thing of use, today, was a reminder that it's the time of year when The World's Strongest Man competition returns to our televisions. 

Brilliant, thought I, another opportunity (along with Eastenders, to which I'm peculiarly addicted) to stare blankly at the screen and turn my brain to standby. But, this being a more digital world than it was last year, I wondered what the website would look like. Lots of opportunity here, thought I again, to do something quite fun and creative.

I didn't get past the search results. 

Quite simply because I was intrigued that the 'world's strongest man' was eclipsed in terms of number of search results (as you'll see above) by 'world's strongest dog'. Even 'world's strongest redneck' wasn't far behind. 

Can anyone tell me why there are so many results for 'world's strongest dog'?

Shibboleths

Malcolm Gladwell's lecture on Monday night about culture - and how it can define our behaviours to the point of irrationality - has made me think about shibboleths.

Shibboleths are the practices that identify us as being of a particular background, and the word itself is a kind of discriminator between those who know what it means, and those who don't.

Walking past the golden arches on Tottenham Court Road a few moments ago, it occurred to me that I've never seen anyone in our agency eat a McDonalds for lunch. This is something that people in our profession, location and mindset just don't do.  

A shibboleth in absentia, as it were.

Just to prove a point

So this is If Wen

Digital done beautifully

Trawling through Facebook this Saturday morning (ok, not the way I expected my life to pan out) I came across a band called Revere. The keyboard player is one Nick Hirst, with whom I briefly used to work. 

Their music is stunning - and the above video truly original and beautiful. 

They have massive following on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and all the usual social networking sites. You can become fans, friends, comment on their work, link to iTunes and buy their singles, see photos, videos and reviews of their gigs ... in short, their digital presence is incredibly well thought out.

What makes it great? Well, I've spent the last hour discovering things about them in lots of different places, from lots of different points of view. I know now that they're pretty well respected by professional and amateur musos alike. I've got to know their backstory in a short space of time, I've noted the date of their next gig - and it's so far resulted in my buying their EPs and thoroughly enjoying them.

From zero to sales conversion in 60 minutes, to put it clinically.

And now I'm blogging about them - so technically I'm now an advocate, to use yet more nasty marketing terms. 

Nothing - apart from the cost of producing the music itself - would have cost them any money, I'm guessing. What they've done is reach out to people they know, make it easy for people to discover and link back to them, and - hey presto - with a good product, the network grows and facilitates its further growth.

And I have an enjoyable Saturday morning's exploration as a result. 

I know this is the sort of stuff we recommend to our clients on a regular basis, but most of them never bloody do it so it's a pleasure to see it working so well.

It's not only cream that floats to the top

If you look at the above screengrab, you'll see that there's a little green arrow next to 'Bullshit'. This is because it used to be below 'Horse Shit' when I initially searched for 'horse shit', but thanks to the good burghers of Googleville I can now promote certain items in my search engine results so that they'll always rise to the top should I wish to search for them again using that search term.

A number of people at the agency today reckon this is pretty cool, with comparisons being made to Digg and other customisable search/sort/save tools. The commentators at the BBC, on the other hand, reckon it's only going to appeal to seasoned surfers who have got more than a touch of binary OCD.

Personally, I reckon I'll use it very occasionally if something I looked for wasn't on the first page - and assuming I have sufficient forward-thoughtfulness to realise I may wish to find it again. Especially if my browser toolbar is o'erflowing with bookmarks or I can't be arsed to tag something to del.icio.us. And assuming I'm likely to remember the same search terms.

Thing is, despite working for a digital agency, I just can't get that excited about it. Sure, it's a nice extra and possibly based on a valid insight into how a very few people currently use search, but the vast majority of people really won't give a stuff. 

I doubt my sister will. I know my mother won't. Most of my old schoolfriends who gave London life the bodyswerve to have kids at an early age a few metres from where they themselves grew up - well they probably won't either. 

And there's quite a few of them. Loads, in fact.

So although it may well get a small coterie of tech-obsessed weirdy-beardies foaming at the whatnot, we'd do well to put it in perspective.

By demagoguery I mean ... Ochlocracy

The Ever-Splendid-Silvia brought this sketch to my attention a few years back and it continues to be a favourite of mine. Fry is at his very best, wielding language to devastatingly hilarious effect. 

There's one bit where Laurie questions Fry, saying: 'By demagoguery you mean...?' to which Fry replies: 'By demagoguery I mean ... demagoguery'. 

You have to see it to appreciate it.

But what a terribly splendid word it is, and it's also closely related to another Greek word 'ochlocracy' - meaning a form of ruling by the masses, the power of passion over reason, a form of mob rule.

And it just struck me that, on reading the BBC news front page today, this is what John Sergeant was trying to avoid by quitting Strictly. And these are the flames that The Sun is fanning by erecting a headstone for 'Baby P' in the crematorium. And the same reason that mothers in Portsmouth threw bricks through the windows of paediatricians thinking they were paedophiles a few years back. 

Not to mention that Diana woman.

But I suppose that because both these words come from Greek, and a long time ago at that, we're not exactly looking at a new phenomenon.

You don't write, you don't call...

See the last date of this 'Tweet'? It's the 5th of November.

That's a fortnight ago.

If you go to Obama's Twitter page you'll read that the President-Elect has decided to use Twitter to update you on news and stuff from the White House.

Only ... he's kind of forgotten to do that now he's won.

Hmm. Should we feel used? Has he stopped caring? He certainly used social media in a phenomenal way to get elected, but in my opinion, this is when things get interesting.

Which probably explains why he's stopped posting any thoughts.

Nothing to get in a flap about

According to Wired Magazine this month, blogging is dead and long live Twitter. Apparently, bloggers can no longer penetrate the armies of professional writers clogging up blogosphere to make their points heard.

Of course, this presupposes that the sole intent of bloggers is to be heard by the many rather than the select few, but - in order to work out how these two communications tools - I did a little desktop research...

What I found - using the approach I'm assuming that Wired used of seeing what floats to the top of Google - was that Twitter results have been dominated by the Obama campaign (second result - and a feat in itself).  Then, aside from the regulation Wiki entry and branded Twitter site, there was a new article about a group of mums who were ranting about a new painkiller ad on TV. 

I followed the links through to the 'tweets' and found that the majority of them posted a URL in the tweet itself. So Twitter was being used the tip of the iceberg - a way of flagging up a brief thought that links to a longer piece.

I wondered whether people did likewise for things more mundane and found that, sure enough, people were using Twitter to link to blogs and news articles about Vauxhall Astras too. 

Yikes.

Could it be that blogging is, in fact, not dead but in fact has a new form of publicity?

Opting for the backwaters

I hate these sunglasses. 

They're bling, they're brash, and they scream the brand at you. In Essex, Estonia and beyond, they are beloved of people trying to prove that they're hip or wealthy (or both), and in some onlookers' eyes I suppose they must succeed. They're a shortcut to a desired success signal - I've made it, and just in case you don't believe me I'm going to shout about it.

Many of my clients are keen on getting their logo and brand livery up front in everything they do, say or create - just in case anyone misses them and their efforts 'go to waste'.

But this is, in my opinion, wrong-headed.

There's far more merit in being in the subtle backwaters. There's nothing more flattering than when someone compliments you on an item of clothing and asks where it's from. The quality shines through, and allows you and the brand to bask in the reflected glory of a good choice.

Put your brand paraphernalia to one side, focus on doing genuinely useful stuff, and your rewards will be that much greater.

Punch in the face

I can't remember how the quotation goes exactly, but it's something like: if people spoke to each other the way that advertising speaks to them, they'd punch each other in the face.

Well, I nearly punched this VW digital offering in the virtual face: www.vwinnovatie.nl/en

The concept is simple enough - helping people to get to grips with the VW's new features by inviting them to guide a hapless video character through his various driving predicaments and apply the relevant feature. 

Initially, I quite liked it. But they ran out of juice very quickly ...

I don't really need to be congratulated for selecting 'parking assist' when he's having trouble parking, or 'satnav' when he can't find where he's going. They're pretty bloody obvious.

And then ... AND THEN ... to be told at the end that I 'truly am as clever as a Volkswagen' made me want to poke whichever bastard copywriter who wrote this right in the middle of the eye.

I own a Volkswagen - admittedly an aged one that's growing mould on the passenger footwell and has developed a mysterious dent in the tailgate - but it put me right off the brand.

For a moment.

And then I remembered that it's only advertising and so felt immediately well again.

In praise of a photo blog

Maybe it's because I like photography, maybe it's because I like talking tripe about marketing, or maybe it's because I'm a Londoner ... that I really like this piece of marketing from Samsung, thanks to it being discussed in the pub last night by Next-Door-Kate.

This site - www.thephotographicadventuresofnickturpin.com - is a collection of (ultimately) 28 photos, one per day, that street photographer Nick Turpin is taking with the Samsung Pixon camera phone. The twist is that, each day, visitors to the site can click on the bit of the photo that they'd like to be the subject of the following day's photo - and then Nick has to travel to the place in the world he reckons he'll be able to find that subject matter.

There are many reasons why I like this site, but here are my top 5:

- It stars the product itself, which is a pretty good demo;

- It's a neat idea that has a set time span and so should remain fresh;

- Nick seems genuinely interested in this project (it doesn't feel too staged);

- It taps into an emotional interest in an art form that will, in turn, genuinely appeal to the right kind of audience;

- It got Kate talking about it in the pub last night, and me blogging about it now.

To take this further, I know from my clever statistical machine that my blog gets around 20 hits a day. Sometimes even reaching the dizzy heights of 40. So there's a pretty good example of 'word of mouth' / 'word of mouse' / digital brand advocacy at work. In addition to the traffic on the site itself. And for free. 

OK, so you'd need to extrapolate these numbers to make any real difference, but it's not beyond the realms of imagination that this could be a talking point among other people. 

Nice one Samsung, and whichever agency did it. 

On puns...

As a planner, I'm well aware that 50% of my time is spent genuinely planning for the future. Coming up with a strategy that will, in some form, and with various colours and strings of words, then be implemented and hit the desired spot. 

Then there's the other 50% of the time that is spent coming up with a retrospective set of reasons that justifies an idea that's come out of the blue, but kind of feels right.

But occasionally, as the avian marketing example above shows, it's unlikely that my humble strategic endeavours - in either chronological direction - could ever help a piece of marketing 'snap to' a strategy.

But I love it nonetheless. A duck bearing a pun in a clothes shop in Chiswick, pointing you in its own inimitably beaky way towards a website.

Words from the real world

One of the words of the moment in marketing is 'engagement'. Specifically, 'consumer engagement'. What companies mean is that they want to get people to like them, to talk to them, to do things for them - oh, and to keep buying their products.

But it's a word that annoys me. For all our talk of understanding people, of one-to-one communication, too much chat is still around 'how do we engage people'. 

Sure, at a very high level, before we've worked out what people might possibly be interested in if we were to approach them in some way, I reckon you can just about get away with using it. But when you see the word in consumer-facing sites like the new Cadbury's Corporate Social Responsibility (SCR) website, pictured above, it smacks of copy that's been written by a bloke in a suit in a lofty office with no real idea of how people talk to each other.

'We've always been a company people engage with, and that engages with people.'

What the fuck?

I don't engage my friends: I talk to them, call them, listen to them, buy them drinks, laugh with them, at them, or smile grudgingly while they laugh at me.

Please, Cadbury, I can see what you're trying to do, but - for me at least - what promises so much in its name ('Dear Cadbury') and uses a host of pretty colours (despite questionable site architecture),  lets itself down in how it actually conducts itself.

The world is just a great big, er, archive

Now I don't want to sound like a designer from IKEA, but storing things in an effective manner is surely important. Google may tell us that the world is now about searching rather than sorting, but things have to sit somewhere.

Where they end up sitting can tell us something notable about who's doing the storing.

For instance, I wasn't going to write today's blog entry about this ostensibly rather tawdry subject, but I was struck when looking on Google Images for a piece of advertising by BP that at least half of the results showed images that came from people's blogs. See today's picture for a little bit of evidence.

My hypothesis is that the individuals who are now documenting the goings on around the world - verbally and visually - are collectively providing us with one of the richest archives. And doing so possibly better than any one single professional archivist.

Our blogging and search tools have turned us into a giant library. And it just might be a rather useful one.

Ideas worth naming pubs after

Back from the Sandy Country, and going to work at our new office premises today. Now we're in the same building as Saatchi and Saatchi, and there's a pub in the central quadrangle called 'The Pregnant Man' in memory of one of Saatchi's most memorable ads.

A brilliantly simple idea based on a powerful insight - and quite frankly a benchmark that so few pieces of advertising, marketing, communication - call it what you will - actually hit these days*. We're getting too obsessed with the medium, the technology and the speed of turnaround to come up with ideas that continue to resonate years down the line.

I'm hoping that the new location, the heritage, the shiny new desks and White Company liquid soap in the wash basins will spur us into coming up with ideas that, in years to come, will be worth naming pubs after.

*Thereby rendering me an old git.