Articles from: Big Ideas

The gentle art of seduction

Every day I talk to clients about how digital solutions can be particularly good for nudging and exciting their customers. It’s all a bit like dating but without the Casanova ending.

As was later the case with 20th century marketers, Casanova often repeated the same pattern in his pursuits. He would discover an attractive woman (customer) having trouble with a brutish or jealous lover (competitor brand). And then three acts would follow.

Act 1: The seducer ameliorates his lady’s difficulty. Act 2: She shows her gratitude, he seduces her, a short and exciting affair ensues. So far so good, but then comes… Act 3: The seducer gets bored and orchestrates a rapid exit. The end.

For Casanova, life was an open field of sexual opportunities without consequences. For the marketers, it was an open field of transactional opportunities without post-purchase responsibility.

Persuasion without information is as unsatisfactory as information without persuasion, but together they beget seduction.

The best thinkers in User-Centered Design have long claimed that information and persuasion are two opposite modes. Some content is labelled as persuasion or even manipulation, and is associated with advertising and marketing, while other content is understood to be information and therefore virtuous. But maybe persuasion and information are not mutually exclusive. Maybe we just need to re-write Act 3 so that persuasion + information = seductive strategies.

Here’s an example: a week before Valentine’s Day I went online to find something nice for the lady in my life. I tried my best to appear susceptive by freely giving away my personal details in the hope of attracting some targeted offers relevant to my needs. I entered competitions to romantic holiday destinations; I saved several virtual shopping baskets full of flowers and chocolate, and so on. I even returned to several websites, just to show how keen I was. But maybe I was too keen, as instead of tailored suggestions for romantic gifts all I got were the usual Viagra spams, dating and gambling adverts, and an offer to join a new gym.

Persuasion design is dead. Long live seduction design!

Seduction design is all about nudging and exciting the customer, rather than using an all-or-nothing strategy. The most elaborately designed experiences inspire people to adapt their behaviour and engage with new features and functionalities. In other words, the customers allow themselves to be seduced and buy into the proposition that the product or service is worth their time and money.

Designers, marketers, and creatives need to design for seduction as much as for aesthetic impact and usability. Methods of seduction can sell a genuine offer through the combination of motivational psychology and careful preparation. To convert this into a website, a mobile application, an email, or a banner, each element – graphic or verbal – must be given a seductive value that deepens into a suggestive relationship over time.

Had Casanova known that, I’m sure his romantici evenings would have ended happier both for him and his ladies.

Marcus Mustafa - Head of User Experience - twitter.com/dacrumb

With lots of work to show we decided to adopt a pecha kucha style presentation and crack through 7 projects in super quick time. For those that don’t know - pecha kucha format is 20 slides with 20 seconds a slide. To make sure we ran to time, all the slides were set to autoplay every 20 seconds. Bound to be fun.

We got hear to about:

• - Our work with BT, including BT Business, BT Retail and BT Tradespace.
• - The story behind our Marks in Time showcase.
• - The work on launching Electrolux in France through the Art Home project.
• - A sneak peak of an upcoming project with M&S launching 17th September (watch this space).
• - The latest on our work for Garanti - Turkey’s favourite bank.
• - A summary of the work we’ve done for UMG, including a number of artist sites and some hefty strategy.
• - A preview of the soon to be released Barratt Homes Prestige work and recent campaign activity.

The gods of Pecha Kucha did strike as one of our presentors attempted to move the slide on ahead of schedule, resulting on Powerpoint getting rather confused and moving two slides ahead completely wrong footed the flow. The rules are there to be heeded - attempts to break the 20 second rule will bite you back.

We also had three special guests in the audience from Lost Boys - our Amsterdam office. They were gracious enough to share some of their work for Vodafone with us, including a lovely story explaining how ‘Make the most of now‘ has to be meant not just said.

Pecha kucha is a registered Trademark and all rights rest with it’s creators

Inspired by In B-Flat and MJ Advertising, we wanted to think up ideas for creating a simple web page containing only 1 or more YouTube videos. A low tech video experience.

With thought starters: Music, diary films, banking tips, energy savings and holidays on the cheap, we set about thinking up some ideas. 15 minutes later we’d got suggestions of Tree of Transparent Truth, Interlinked Stories, Maxi-shape Creator, Buzz Headroom, The Flying Click-its, Replace the Dialogue, Magnetic Poetry and Don’t Go There.

This is worth checking out - an autoplay JavaScript version of B flat

Looking back through a few articles from our old Stream blog I found one from my old creative colleague, the talented Mr Jeremy Garner, who asked the question about the first digital pieces to win a coveted D&AD Black Pencil.

Looking at Leo Burnett’s Black Pencil site (2006) and Nike+ (2007) he asked the simply question “which will be remembered in 10 years time?” surmising the one we remember will determine which principles in digital we see as most important.

“I chew the question again - which will be remembered after the years have passed by? Which will become the Benson & Hedges, the Saatchi’s Pregnant Man, the Guardian Skinhead? Which will be the true pick of the crop from 2007? Is a brilliant tech idea enough, or will a pithy creative idea with beautiful craft and a bit of wit stand the test of time?”

It’s interesting to reflect on this, just 2 years later, as it might provide an answer without the long wait. I’m pretty certain Nike+ has won many more awards than Leo Burnett’s ‘Big ideas need big pencils’ site, with Nike+ generating a lot more discussion online. Nike+ would also seem to be a key piece of work many digital agencies refer too ¹. A quick search on the leading industry publications reveals people often asking just how much Nike+ has influenced the way we think about marketing and advertising.

In my immediate digital world people still talk about Nike+ and it’s a long time since anyone has mentioned Leo Burnett’s site as an fluencer. This could be explained by of our particular focus of blending marketing and technology, or reflective of wider opinion. What is certain is that our understanding of the digital has developed in this short time and the greater transparency afforded by the connected world means brands really need to be believable with their brand promise and their service being the same. In this sense Nike+ is clearly an important example of how digital thinking can deliver on the promise ‘just do it’ and develop a new service to boot.

Looking back at the original question, it’s could be seen we could face a decision between a brilliant technical ideas or pithy creative ideas with craft and wit. Does it mean we are going down a road where technical capability overshadows pithy ideas full of craft, wit. I hope not. I fact a quick look at subsequent D&AD Black Pencil winners reveal high levels of craft (Got The Glass, 2008) and wit (The Great Schlepp, 2009) have succeeded over pure technical excellence. Interestingly enough at Cannes Lions this year, it was a technically led application, Eco:Drive (often described as Nike+ for cars) that won a Grand Prix.

Perhaps the question posed at the beginning of this post is in fact a misnomer - with both pieces of work continuing to exert influence and it is in fact either too early to judge or simply misguided to do so.

What I do know is that our own understanding and appreciation of digital work is changing on a yearly basis as we push our creativity and technical abilities. Hopefully the real winner in all this, is our audience, the ones brands reach out to impress, engage, entertain and serve. The ones that scrutinize and demand brands be loyal to them.

Now that’s a thought.

1. A few crude Google searches fail to confirm or dispute this. So I could be widely wrong.

Last week Apple released the much anticipated update to it’s iPhone operating system. Finally bringing many of the features most phone providers would have thought completely necessary in a modern smart phone: MMS, Video capture, Cut, copy, paste, Memo recorder, Background IM applications.

The Apple website lauded these new features as exciting developments, yet they can be found on most current Nokia, Sony Ericson, Samsung, LG and HTC handsets.

It’s taken two years to get these features on the iPhone - with many saying 3.0 is what it should have had when it launched. Yet everywhere I look i see iPhones, it’s easily the favoured handset amongst my friends - with the previously unconvinced now benefiting from their purchase of the new iPhone 3G S.

So did this lack of key features make a difference in the beginning, did it limit the success - no. The iPhone was so far ahead of the competition in other areas that people felt happy to live without these must-have features. This approach to not including everything people expect underlines a key principle for the internet age

Prioritise your killer features to bring instant success and don’t be afraid to add the perceived must-have basics later.

Avoiding the mythical phase 2 or phase 3

How many times have you heard - “That’s a cool idea, but lets put into phase 2″ - it’s an admission, a lack of confidence or ambition - and a fast track to mediocrity.

It happens like this, new service developments, shops & services start with hygiene factors. The team worry about doing the basics well and spend most of the budget doing these. Invariably things don’t go to plan and the pot for all the innovative extras gets smaller and smaller. The site or service launches, and it immediately fails to get traction, the audience figures grow much slower than expected, feedback isn’t a positive as expected which further pressures their development budget. This leads to a review of the project, a postponement of phase 2 - and a belief the service idea doesn’t work or the core idea was failed.

The next time your team think about delaying an exciting and innovative idea to phase 2 - ask yourself this - which of our supposed must-have features can we delay instead?

Delivering on your ambition

If your ambition is to build a better X - and let’s face it just about every project starts that way -  don’t start by copying the competition and talking about  doing the hygiene first. If you’re not innovating or doing something noticeable, why should people change their existing behaviour. Playing catch up with your competition is hard. Start from a positive position and force them to try and catch you. And remember if hygiene is easy it will be easy to add later.

If you take a look back over the myriad of web 2.0-like developments we’ve seen over the last few years. The ones that succeed are the ones that get their new ideas out there quickly, claiming their space with a bright new idea and then adding new features as their audience grows and helps them understand what makes sense.

So be brave, implement the things that differentiate first, then add the basics over time. If you talk about doing a phase 2 - make sure you’re audience is so excited they want a phase 2 and you then deliver on it.

Through the great team in EPR we launched the 2009 campaign for Red Cross in support of Refugee Week this week.
The Red Cross is asking everyone to look beyond the label of “refugee” often placed on people,a label that’s so damaging and impersonal – and to see refugees for who they really are and what they contribute to the UK.

Not content with resting on our 2008 award-winning laurels in terms of creating PR for the event, we’ve gone bigger and better this year. We’ve created a short film (in conjunction with the brilliant Agenda Collective) starring Mission Impossible 2 and Desperate Housewives star Dougray Scott, highlighting the plight of refugees in the UK and surfacing some of their stories.

Look beyond the label from British Red Cross on Vimeo.

But the real meat of the campaign we’ve created is an online movement to allow individuals to show support for the cause by participating in grass-roots action:

The idea couldn’t be simpler: we’re asking people to change their online status on the 15th June (the start of Refugee Week). To ‘look beyond the label’ by replacing their profile pictures and status, tweeting about it, blogging about it and adding the call to action to their email signatures to encourage the viral spread of the action. We’re hoping to create something a little like an Earth Hour movement here (not as big, but then Earth Hour started off small at first too).

You can check out the site and all the ways you can help here: http://www.lookbeyondthelabel.org/

The success of the campaign depends on its viral reach, so we’re asking everyone we know to please contribute where you can. Changing your email signature over the next 3 weeks to incorporate the message is a good first step (full instructions here: http://www.lookbeyondthelabel.org/email.html); but please take a minute out of your day on the 15th or before to change your Facebook/Twitter profile pics, change your status, and make a visible show of support for the Red Cross through all your social networks. The video is on vimeo which you can link and embed into your blogs etc too.

Its amazing what a little bit of seeding even just from friends will accomplish in getting it out there.

Here at LBi we’ve just launched the campaign to promote D&AD New Blood’s 10th Anniversary exhibition, at the end of June. Its been a labour of love, something that I’m really proud of for the best (in my opinion) and most important part of the charity.

This campaign is about getting industry down to New Blood to support graduating students. First off don’t let’s forget the message here - we’re trying to build our collective future. New Blood has been suffering from growing apathy amongst us agency-types for a while now. In the last downturn, internships and placements just evaporated for graduates. For a few years students stepped out into an industry that just wasn’t paying attention. These graduates went elsewhere, and as anyone trying to find mid/senior talent, particularly in digital, can attest to - the whole industry lost out, and work has suffered for it. Its our collective responsibility to grow one of the most dynamic and amazing industries out there.

Call me naive (and I’m sure you will) but we wanted to try to get us all off our arses (or out of them) and take a minute to think about what New Blood is all about, where we might have been 10 years ago, and to make a personal pledge to give these new talents the support that they deserve: there’s no denying its going to be really tough for them out there.

The hero photos represent only a small part of this campaign, but a lead that we hoped would put New Blood on the industry radar again, and cause some intense discussion about why its so important (job done there, I guess ).The images are tongue-in-cheek but the message they contain is seriously important. The point is that these people aren’t the seven most important people at the event, its the students, and its also each person that stops navel-gazing and actually contributes to its success.

These industry ‘icons’ were selected because they are actively helping New Blood already, offering their scant time (extra big thanks to Nadav) and profile to help get the conversation going, and who have committed to the New Blood event - they are the first step towards creating some solidarity with our brightest young stars by challenging you to do more yourself. And it’s working.

For those that haven’t seen the whole campaign, please check it out. For those lucky enough to be judging D&AD professional and student awards this year, there was a booth set up (using the 2 of 2006’s Best New Blood Winners - David Horwich & Paul Mansley) where everyone could pledge their support… and  of course the hub of activity is that everyone is encouraged to upload their own photos or video committing to being at the event. “I’ll be there”.

We’ll also be asking agencies to use their prime window real estate to create their own statements of support - a lot of us have the best street-level ad space in our areas.

On top of that we’re providing free space for all students to have a web presence within the same matrix, and a great digital system for tagging your favourite work at the event, so that all that fiddling about with trying to contact your favourite future teams afterwards is as painless as possible.

So please, continue with the discussion as much as you like, but know it came from the right place. Most importantly take a moment to think about what it was like when you were entering an industry with your vivid optimism and desire to do what we all do every day intact - and pledge your support.

After all, the more voices we get online, the more those you don’t agree with will be drowned out by the noise of the industry pulling together.

I’m moved to Blog about Rory Sutherland’s inaugural speech as IPA President. It’s a fine piece of oratory as you’d expect from a fellow cravat wearer (though I’ve always thought mine to be more the mod-style silk scarf).

What’s interesting in his speech is the way Rory articulates the importance of “Social Value” created by brands in the coming age of scarcity. A lot of what he says chimes closely with our own ideas about Building Believable Brands. It’s clear from his speech that the “traditional” world is waking up to the notion that ideas without media spend behind them, creativity with media thinking inherently linked, and ideas of value exchange are going to be the salvation of the communications business.

It’s also clear that Rory understands advertising to be a small component of the picture. So we can look forward to a President keen to engage with digital businesses.

The other thing I got from the speech was this brilliant articulation of what agencies are here to do:

“We create ideas that turn human understanding into business value for our clients”

This is true whether you work in digital, direct, advertising, media or in any of the other unhelpful discipline distinctions we burden ourselves with.

Creativity is often misunderstood by those who are suspicious of it’s aims, as something antithetical to business, making money, selling stuff. This is absolutely not the case and any creative who thinks it is, should go and live in a garret making art.  Creatives in commercial businesses are concerned with understanding why somebody should care about a product or service and then amplifying that feeling, if possible making them love it, and at the very least, buy it.

Yesterday I gave a short presentation to the guests of Figaro Digital at their Design & Build, UCD conference. People often use the term best practice when speaking about UXD but other people often use it to stifle creativity. I wanted to leave the delegates with a little clarification and inspiration around best practice.

The idea of the talk was inspired by two things:

1) Our own experience over the years on how are own hugely talented User Experience team have worked in conjunction with our edgy, look-to-the-stars creative department. We work in a collaborative manner and as such we’re constantly evolving our methods, techniques to creatively solve our clients’ problems.
2) This particular blog post by Chris Clarke, our CCO and his feelings for best practice

I ended up racing through the presentation at break neck speed so didn’t dwell on any particular points - although many could be expanded upon. In short, best practice is useful, but not the b-all & end-all. Use it to get started, to help out - but make sure you dream, lead with an idea and embrace failure.

The presentation can downloaded here. PDF [12MB]

A few notes when reading it:

- All the examples demonstrate great work. Some fly in the face of best practice and deliver amazing results, some extend it.
- The evolving examples are drawn from the Webby Awards - check them out and how they have assessed best practice.
- Some of the work has been removed as I’m not in a position to share it with everybody yet
- The Pattern Language is the original book (ok so it the 2nd in a series of 3 for the pedants) by Christopher Alexander. Well worth a read especially if you are interested in architecture.

This was the preamble - judge for yourselves if the presentation measures up.

Getting past best practice: being creative, staying usable

The supposed conflict between creativity and best practice still manages to influence nearly everything we do online. For many best practice is actually worst practice, being nothing more than an excuse for mediocrity. For others it’s the bible from which to preach and something not to be deviated from – at any cost.

This talk will take a refreshing look at recent web standards and provide thought provoking examples that both challenge and reinforce them. It will bust open a number of myths around best practice and show how creativity can flourish without sending usability specialists into mild cardiac arrest.

Indeed, following on from Riaz’s post I too attended the Microsoft Truman Session. Their take on the world come 2019 caught my eye.

I must say, their vision piece was extremely well thought out and crafted. There were of course some usual suspects: digital newspapers, an evolution of Surface and interactive mirrors (hey, we’ve already done that for Macy’s). I guess when imagining the future these technologies are de riguer.  I would have liked to see the vision piece driven by narrative however. Perhaps a storyline. How’s this: A story about a strange man that builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves?  Oh, wait.

Whilst creative judges and juries fail to admonish the jolly corruption of children in the selling chocolate to lonely women (and instead get down to late 80s freestyle electro), there are important things at hand ineligible for easy cool. 

<insert chocolate-vomit.jpg here>

Now that the Evil Eye of Mordor has temporarily passed from the energy companies to the Bankers… (and having recently worked on briefs for both) it strikes me there are some major insights relating to all forms of ‘corporate evil’: 

<insert bad-apple.swf here>

We, the consumptive populous require proof positive of corporate change in order to believe again. We want clear and easy influence… To be certain that the corporate villains are listening and repenting… And that this ‘change of spots’ is having a measurable, positive effect on our lives. 

We are conflicted, we want our guilt expunged without having to sacrifice warmth or mobility (or a million other convenient dreams)… we want CorpsUnited to change on our behalf, that’s what we’re paying for damn it!

It is said that capitalism is built upon scarcity and debt, and yet the human spirit craves the opposite… some say we are living through a 12 month window of opportunity disguised as a recession. ‘What Ever. My head hurts. I feel powerless. This is confusing. I don’t think I can make it without my two weeks in the sun’.

<insert therapist.ai here>

Here in the home of building believable brands, Marketing demands aimed at stereotyped targets seem redundant, self-indulgent and transitory. We are not immune from the dark side but we are relentless in our desire to make stuff that works and that is built on the solid foundations of listening to real people. To be part of their lives in any moment, mode or medium they feel or request. To be meaningful and sustainable. We are at Base Camp. There is a climb is ahead.

<insert corporate-optimism.mov here>

In the mean time I’d like to alert you to the genesis of a new cult: Cabralla. Sounds a bit like Kahbalah doesn’t it, well it’s pretty popular these days and not just with the creative elite. Supposedly the only effective protection is the gospel of the First Things First Manifesto, (old testament 1964, new testament 2000). As the followers of Fallon deride the disciples of IDEO (who pity them in return), some of us remember a simpler time pre-dotbomb, and imagine a future where ideas are the integrated currency - where everything else; every channel, format, media, platform and process… is open, available and perpetually intermixing. 

Some of us are nearly there now… we’re waiting for you…

<administer cold compress> 
</end waking dream>

(Playlist disguised as Post)

Jack’s back. Following on from the ‘All work, no play‘ book mentioned a few weeks ago, here’s a film trailer for the Shining recast as a romantic comedy. Love it.

If you like things a little darker, how about Mary Poppins recast as a thriller Scary Mary.

In fact YouTube is full of these recut trailers. It’s a clear example of how easy to use desktop tools like iMovie are turning many of us into amateur content creators and publishers. A quick look at the credits for these edits reveals a young digital generation, playing fast and loose with copyright, creating their own takes on popular culture.

I’m not going to provide any great new insights or revelations about this. Its just continued evidence of how our attitudes to media have changed, are changing and how technology is opening up new opportunities for individual expression. We’re living in an increasingly media savvy Internet nation, that’s continually resampling the 20th and 21st Centuries for its own entertainment. With thousands, maybe millions of versions of the same idea being found online, is new technology genuinely allowing us all to be more creative or are we simply reinforcing the old adage about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, whether we realise it or not?

There’s no escaping it, times are rough and tough.  We’ve been bracing ourselves and tightening our belts to the point where we’re running out of notches. Green shoots of recovery? Yeah, right.

Clients are shaking their heads as they ponder budgets for 2009. The IPA and other industry gurus will no doubt be knocking on their doors with some solid scientific evidence that cutting ad spend has a long-term detrimental effect. Will it be convincing enough? Partly. But accountability will be more important than ever.

We creatives can expect a rather large magnifying glass to hover above our heads, scrutinizing our work and looking to extract every last drop of value from it. Clients will be looking us straight in the eye and demanding, “hey smart Alec, stimulate me some green shoots,” as though it’s all our fault.

You can imagine agency presentations across town this year. They’ll be rather like the old Fairy Liquid TV ads. “Your previous strategy only washed this many dishes. Our fresh, new, lemon scented strategy will stretch your budget to this many dishes.”

We’re already seeing conventional reactions to the crunch; big football sponsorship deals being pulled, four figure global lay-offs, corporate art projects canned.

Spectacular big budget broadcast will be seen as spectacular, big budget wastage. “Open on a tropical beach? You’re having a laugh, mate. What’s wrong with Skegness?!” And that’s just in the tissue meeting. Increasingly throughout 2009 you will hear themes of empowerment, sustainability, innovation and inclusion surfacing in articles.

Industry old boys will continue distancing themselves from broadcast, “Did we say tropical beach? Noooo! Of course we meant Skeggie.” New kids will be hyping the relevance of ’social’ and ’service’ design. Digital agencies can go even further: “We open on user generated shots of Skeggie.”

Yet do we need to get all doomy and gloomy about this? Well, it’s not ideal. I’ve seen tropical beaches and I’ve seen Skegness and, with all respect to the Lincolnshire Tourist Board, I know which I prefer. Yet, the new economic climate does open up a very real creative opportunity.

The good news is that clients are on our side. They know that, as the crunch bites down hard, creativity needs to flourish.  Not just in the way it connects them with their consumers, but the way it helps run their business.  Working smarter, innovatively distributing content and creating cost-effective dialogues is now higher up the agenda than ever. CMO’s will be empowered to make the big balls decisions using “the current climate” to reinvent their approach to their budgets.

So let’s not disappoint them. We too need the balls to grasp the challenge.  Let’s reinvent the industry; move from Broadcast to Narrowcast. Embrace Branded Generosity. Be being bold enough to zig while everyone else zags. Connect with consumers by building believable brands; ones that stand up to the scrutiny of the empowered consumer.

A few of us have been playing with a Microsoft Surface today. It’s a much-hyped device, famous for it’s multi-touch interface and rather high price tag. Multi-touch is clearly becoming the brave new world for User Interface design but the revolution will probably come as an indirect consequence of it, not because of it.

You see we’ve already got multi-touch on a number of popular devices today; mobiles like the iPhone, HTC Touch, Palm and the forthcoming desktop OS’s; Windows 7 and MacOS X Snow Leopard. For these devices multi-touch simply means an interaction with more than one pointing device, usually fingers instead of a mouse or stylus. Users can pinch, scroll, flick, point and drag; which you can also do on a Surface table.

The thing you immediately notice about your interaction with Surface is that the interaction becomes social and collaborative. Using a PC or a mobile is a solitary situation - one person has the pointing device and usually the keyboard. Opportunities to use both at the same time are few and far between (why were we never allowed two mice?). Now you might see two people working together on a PC; as in the short lived eXtreme Programming methodology, or in a Kindergarten class, but one person usually makes the decisions, one at a time. With Microsoft Surface this changes - the environment becomes much more collaborative and everybody has the ability to lean in and interact.

This is certainly going to challenge User Interfaces and how we design them, but more importantly create exciting new opportunities for computing. Just think how we could work in groups all looking and interacting at the same time. Now that’s a paradigm shift, and probably a cause for a computing revolution.

I love it when people take direct inspiration from other people’s creativity and give it new life. It’s great to see people use sub-plots, objects or characters as the starting points in their own expressions. Borrowing from established cultural artefacts seems to make the idea all the more real and resonant. For example the idea behind the musical Wicked touches everyone who had seen The Wizard of Oz as a child and triggers an immediate inquisitive response, to what the story might reveal.

A recent example of this spring-boarding is a book by Jack Torrence, the main character of the Stephen King film, The Shining. It uses the story of Jack writing his book and his inability to write anything other than ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. The book uses this idea and using an increasingly varied approach to the layout reproduces that statement over 80 pages. It’s unlikely to be a best seller, but it’s a lovely example of taking a small idea and expanding it out. More details from the Guardian.

With digital work gaining in maturity (and much influenced by previous non-digital pieces) I’m wondering how long it will be before someone creates a popular new experience or narrative directly inspired by famous digital piece. Clearly there are some IP issues to resolve, but when one borrows from an established source you’ve got to come clean on your inspiration.

PS. For those with a passing interest in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, you might have been aware of HAL 9000s birthday a few weeks ago – 12^th January to be precise. I wonder if this date could become a notable day in our global culture for neural computing and artificial intelligence.

Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist the Movie has got plenty of us talking in the LBi creative studio. Is it an Anti Capitalist conspiracy theory, or a glimpse of what comes after the collapse of the monetary system in the Crunch… a geothermally powered Resourced Based Economy courtesy of the Venus Project?

A wiser film maker may have steered clear of some of the ham-fisted emotive narrative techniques (the final ‘Times Square Revelation’ scene is worst of all). It’s true Zeitgeist isn’t perfect - there are some holes, it doesn’t have all the answers. But it does do a good job of raising serious questions and prompting debate. For this alone I recommend it highly… clear an evening and go work it out for yourself. 

Part 1: Zeitgeist the Movie (2007)

Part 2: Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

(Qudos to JMT for getting there first and sharing).

It was Roosevelt whose “fireside chats” made him the first President of the broadcast age, and later Kennedy with his good looks outmaneuvered an unshaven Nixon as TV came to the fore. With his masterful grasp of the digital age Obama first changed the business model of winning the presidency; by asking for micro-donations he beat the bank and John Mcain. Today, in his inaugural address, I also can’t help feeling there was a real touch of the humility, honesty and recognition for the many who make up the whole which characterises the new forms of communication which are replacing the didactic supremacy of broadcast.

This is a most tumultuous time in history, so much is changing we hardly know where to look. But with events like this, we get a chance to measure our moment in time against the receding past. When you read the text of Obama’s speech you find a plea for a saner more connected world. For me, Obama’s words resonate with the spirit of what the internet at it’s best offer; understanding and insight through connectedness to other people.There is even a specific promise to address the infrastructure needed to make more of technology:

“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do. ”

Most exciting of all though, is the real sense that an old order finally crumbled as Dick Cheney was wheeled offstage. In our little part of the world, it is marketing which is changing irrevocably and for the better. But that change is grounded in a fundamental shift of power from the broadcast of the few to the narrowcast of the many, which has now resonated so deeply that a black man can become President. As the man says:

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

It would be trite to say the internet created Obama, but the communictions revolution we’re all a part of is certainly bound up in his phenomenon.

LBiQ4 - Death of the big idea?

In our jaunt through LBiQ 4 and it’s exploration of ideas; big and small, traditional and new, it’s clear completely new ideas are increasingly hard to find – if they ever existed in the first place. “There’s nothing new under the sun”, after all, as some crusty old fool once said. (I think we can be fairly sure he didn’t work in advertising.) As the web grows up, and is no longer the brave new world of unchartered possibilities it used to be 10 years back, we need to look back and recognise the patterns that were formed during that period of innovation, to identify the successes, and the failures, and to work with and from these in order to keep advancing.

In the thrust for The New it is important not to lose sight of a few simple facts. Check this year’s hot work: quizzes, games, viral films, soap operas, blogs and scrolling banners. Nothing new there, per se – these formats are now established, in some cases almost traditional - but all are succeeding today in 2008 by combining creative thinking with brand messages in novel and interesting ways that match and resonate with the passage of time and the changes that are happening in the world at large. 

Just as David Gunn says there are only 12 types of advertisement, a creative writing teacher might inform us of only 14 ways to start a novel, or seven types of plot; and a musician teaches us that there are only a set number of chords; we can surmise there are a limited number of interaction models in digital, a set number of viral types, and a comparable set of methods for online advertising.

So let’s stop sticking our noses up at ‘just another’ video site, or in-search-of viral film, or interactive scrolling banner, and look a bit deeper. There are ideas a plenty in the digital world - ideas that creatively stretch the main brand promise, trigger the all-important emotional hook, and ensure they are bloody well executed. Inventing new forms of communication is hard, and it’s not necessarily the job of a commercial creative. Don’t be afraid to use what you know already. It’s easier, simpler, and usually much more effective, to focus on mixing and matching known quantities in order to find creative digital ideas that work. 

Want some inspiration on finding big brand ideas? Take a read of Brand Marketing Manifesto, in which a feisty future-looking John Grant sets out a thesis for ideas and creates a framework based on eight cultural streams: innate emotional hooks that exist deep within our psyche and can be found in centuries of literature, film and music.

Me? I’m off to write a book on the 10 different types of viral. Stay tuned.

Lego master craftsmen have been putting the finishing touches to a model White House, motorcade, and even queues to the porta-loos, as excitement surrounding the upcoming 56th inauguration of a US president reaches fever pitch.