herebenotions

Is there a trend towards an 'urban ideal'?

"From January 2007 Sao Paulo, a modern metropolis of 11 million people, pressed the delete button and now the city has no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom, no logos on lorries."  (source)

Auckland is also debating taking this step.

New York has begun to regulate ‘advertecture’ - the practice of clothing buildings with ads

The photo below was taken in London, but it could come from anywhere.

Is this surprising when media companies sell space to companies with posters like the one below?  This one eventually got banned, but will a continual stream of posters like this gradually chip away at people's acceptance of outdoor advertising?  What collective responsibility do advertisers, media owners and ad agencies have?  I think we should have more in media like outdoor when there is no obvious benefit to the consumer, as in print or TV media where ads pay or subsidise other content.  And also because as more and more research is done on how the environment affects social behaviour, people will also start questioning the effect advertising has as part of the mix.

(Source)

We all know that the music business has a problem with illegal downloads.  For example legal downloads of In Rainbows were far exceeded by illegal torrent downloads of the album. Almost 400,000 illegal torrent downloads were made on the first day and 2.3m in the 25 days following the album’s release, compared with a full-week’s peak of just 158,000 for the next most popular album of the period (source). 

And there is a whole generation growing up without paying for music.  And not seeing anything wrong in that.

What interests me is how slow the TV industry is responding to essentially the same issue.  iplayer is all fine for the BBC which doesn't work on an advertiser funding model, but commerical media companies have a problem; people (in the UK) watching a US produced TV show often don't want to wait even a day longer than people in the USA to watch the latest episode.  And when they can jump online and download a bit-torrent or stream the latest episode through any number of sites, why would they then watch it later when it's broadcast on UK TV? 

People are often surprised when they learn that I work in advertising, but I don't own a TV.  But I don't see why I should when I can't get what I want, when I want; whereas I can get every episode of all my favourite shows instantly online, and see new epsiodes at the same time as my friends in other countries.  I would pay for them, or view them streamed with ads - except most US companies only make their shows downloadable from US itunes or from Hulu or similar which block non-USA IP addresses.  So of course, I don't end up paying, but watch ripped versions instead.  I know I'm not the only one.  US media companies are losing millions of dollars by being short-sighted and trying to protect their big deals with UK media companies.  Both are going to lose out in the long-term. 

TV production companies and media owners need to wake up fast and realise they are living in a global world that is instantly connected, and that if they want to earn their buck they need to treat everyone, everywhere the same, and serve everyone fast.  Or someone else will - for free

People are fundamnetally the same, online or offline

Who owns culture?

What the world eats

This is fascinating. From Time magazine: What the World Eats. 15 different homes around the globe show the kind and amount of food eaten.

United States: The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
Favorite foods: spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken

Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Family recipe: Okra and mutton

Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Favorite foods: soup with fresh sheep meat

Barack Obama to stand in 2008...

Been incredibly busy, but this jolted me out of the worksphere...American politics is fascinating, and the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008 looks like it will be riveting.

Food for thought

Google gets a wide range of people in to their offices to give talks - and they post videos of these talks online where anyone can watch (which is nice of them).  I just finished watching the one on human computation which relates to The ESP Game, peekaboom and verbosity (none of which you should play as they're hideously addictve).  It's a funny and thought provoking talk. 

The range of topics covered in the Google talks is really wide, they aren't all techy, and many are fascinating. Links to the Google tech talk videos here if you want to check them out.

Don't click it

An intriguing site exploring a world without the mouse click. 

It's called don't click it. 

Once you've entered, you navigate the site using a variety of click-free mouse techniques.  It's somewhat eerie and hypnotic.  It's certainly strange controling the habitual urge to click at things to get them to work.

There's lots of lovely snipets of info, like on the history of the mouse interface and visitor stats (including those that just can't control the urge to click).  There's a fascinating section where you can view recordings of the mouse movements made in the first 20 seconds of people's visits to the site. There's also a few experiments you can participate in. 

I like the design, and the soothing way you end up passing through the site; it feels a little like dancing.  It's an interesting way to reaxmine an everyday thing I for one have never really thought much about.

And I love the little mousewrap idea they've come up with to wean people off clicking!

Feeling 57 varieties

This was a consumer reaction to the Heinz Bean Amnesty campaign, quoted by Greg Nugent in his presentation at BOBT. 

His point (from my now rather hazy memory of the presentation) was that brands are fooling around with trivial ‘ideas’, like the beans amnesty, when there are real issues out there that are better, more worthwhile or would be more productive to be associated with.  Things like climate change, food miles & food labelling, waste in packaging, recycling etc.  That the future is about status of a different kind status - environmental credentials. 

I think that’s going to be tough.  For brands, trying to offer more than just a product, trying to find an idea that’s believable and ‘fits’, is not going to be easy, no matter how relevant, important or juicy the topic. 

The aol/discuss campaign would seem on the surface to be a great idea, that highlights important issues, aims to get people involved in the brand and plays to aol’s strengths in security online, especially parental concern. The campaign has been running since the start of 2006, has generated 83 ‘articles’ by 39 authors, in 14 categories on the aol/discuss site.  Yesterday I counted there were 4468 comments, total. The most in response to any one article was 740 comments (the article was “Is the internet a good or a bad thing”).  The average number of comments on an article is 54.  That doesn’t really seem a great response from a major advertising campaign. I’m sure the advertising has moved tracking measures on things like ‘aol is the leader in ensuring my children’s safety online’ and so on, but it’s hardly set the online community alight.

I was trying to work out why that was.  Maybe the site design is uninspiring, the layout is certainly clunky compared to a lot of message-boards, e.g. a similar board called willyoujoin us....

(note the reader recommend feature on the willyoutjoinus board, very web2.0)

...and I can’t help thinking that the aol/discuss format would’ve worked better as a true-blog rather than the message-board/blog hybrid that it is at the moment.  The newsnight blog just feels nicer to navigate than the aol/discuss pages.

 

So, though it's all very well saying brands should be getting on the issue bandwagon, that still leaves a mass of questions about how brands can do this in an engaging and credible way (and get results too).

Little ideas

Trevor talking at The Battle of Big Thinking about the power of Little Thinking.

Nicely illustrated.

Some of his key points (not in the order he presented them - that seems to have got lost in the note-taking blackhole):

• Worry about the little things
• Little ideas have room to grow
• Someone else will if you don't
• Don't always throw away the old
• Improve on something a little
• Changing your perspective can make something little look big (and vice versa)
• Give a shit, most people don't
• Say something nice about someone
• Fill the kettle

Perhaps because it was such a simple idea (and very amusingly presented) it's the one that's been rattling about my head since yesterday.  As it's the little things that often touch people in more direct, everday ways than big, abstract thoughts, they often end up mattering more.

There are lots of nice examples out there to illustrate how the personal touch matters:

• JC Crew impresses Church of the Consumer Blog
• Try phoning Barclays for an insurance quote and you get straight through to a person not an automated system.  Lovely. 
• Here is an interesting post about the Where the hell is Matt? video, and how Stride gum got involved in a very low key way with big results.
• Russell's written about similar things a few times; e.g. somewhere in here and here.
• Obligatory mention of Innocent, illustrated by Russell's photo from Fruitstock which I've shamelessly stolen to put up here.  All the little things they do add up to something bigger.