Articles from: News

Just launched by us here at LBi: a new site to support one of our biggest clients for their birthday. Marks and Spencer’s 125th Anniversary is not only an in-store celebration, but a fabulous exhibition called “Marks in Time” in Leeds which will show off their continued history of innovation and ethical production. Our task has been to support that exhibition, and to add conversation and continued development to the show over its 3 year exhibition period.

Growing from a penny stall so many years ago, did you know that M&S was the first supermarket to sell fresh chicken? The first to produce a mass-market melt-in-the-middle chocolate pud? And through Plan A, the first to go hydrogenated trans-fat free, and to only use free-range eggs, even in cooked produce? Well, neither did we, but surfacing these fascinating facts, and others, is one of the reasons that we’ve just loved this project so much. Focussing on 7 product innovation stories through time, the site both gives a taste of the show itself and an opportunity for people to add their thoughts and memories about M&S though writing online ‘postcards”.

Utilising large areas of Flash video (filmed in our basement in conjunction with Agenda Collective) and subtle sounds to bring the historical tableaux to life, it brings a little bit of the contemporary M&S sexiness to their wonderful history.

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.

According to this article, Warner Bros. have financially backed a realtime streaming video console called OnLive.  Which is quite an interesting development.  I for one wasn’t expecting anything like this until we all moved on to super-broadband.  It seems they can avoid b-b-b-buffing by leveraging clouds.  Insert your own joke.

Yesterday evening at the Truman, we had the wonderful pleasure of Microsoft giving us the lowdown on the latest and greatest in the world of creative products and services coming out of Redmond. The audience, mostly from user experience, creative and client services, were treated to demo’s of Silverlight, WPF, DeepZoom, Surface, Live Mesh, Azure, Secondlight, Windows 7 and so much more. With so many creative technology engagements at LBi, the fit of these technologies alongside some of our .NET, SharePoint, Endeca and EPiServer builds makes a lot of sense for our customers.

It was a great insight into the ‘New’ Microsoft and where it’s heading, I’m very excited that LBi are part of this venture and look forward to seeing our UX/Creative teams blend with Microsoft to develop some very cool, exciting and cutting edge creative digital solutions.

A big thanks to the Microsoft folks who spent the evening with us. James, you blew us away with Azure, ‘gen 4’ data centers and Windows 7. Michael, thanks for showcasing the likes of Surface, DeepZoom and Secondlight – very cool stuff indeed! And off course Matt, our account manager, for organising things on the Microsoft end.

Right, where did I put that copy of Expression Blend…

Another week and there is another furor building for Google.  This time it surrounds their latest product launch, Google Latitude, which enables users to connect to each other and track each other’s movements.

Innocent enough, you might think… Sure, people being able to tell where you are at any given time may not be everyone’s cup of tea but hey, it’s a free country, right?  Well according to some it shouldn’t be - the trade-press never could resist a scandal and before most people had even heard of the service it had already been denounced again and again and again.

Following some rather silly criticisms - the fact that your employer could track your movement for example, only actually true if you chose to give them access (and even if you for some reason did, you can still lie about your location by setting it manually) - The Guardian’s Paul Lewis managed to note one legitimate concern: that your phone could be setup without your knowledge if someone ‘borrowed it’. 

As valid as this concern might be it still seems to miss the point - if my partner is borrowing my mobile phone to track my movements then we clearly have bigger problems anyway. And in any case, you cannot apply pressure to have a product withdrawn simply because it could be misused by a small minority.  Huge numbers of normal high street products - glue, deodorant, cars - could be misused yet we still have the freedom to use them.  It is the act of misuse itself that needs to be controlled, not the product.

Even if you have concerns over Google’s ability to keep private data private (they seem to be better at it than the government anyway) then it should be the user’s choice whether they entrust a third party with personal information.  Let the journalists carry on with their paranoid concerns about privacy, I’ll do the sensible thing and just make sure my phone has a PIN.  After all, if someone has taken my phone they already have access to a huge amount of personal information.

Google suffers a 'minor' bug

As far as some of the more digitally inclined amongst us are concerned – i.e. those that see the world as a string of zeros and ones – the world ended (albeit temporarily) on Saturday as Google stopped working properly.  Technically it still worked, search results were delivered, it’s just that those results were all (yes, ALL) flagged as potentially dangerous.

That’s right – on Saturday Google reported that every site in existence could be potentially harmful.  Perhaps more interesting than the blip itself was the Internet’s reaction to it.  It’s probably not advisable to rely heavily on Google’s ability to detect ‘nasty’ sites but if the reactions from much of the Internet were anything to go by panic broke out and we were suddenly blind and alone in the world – as a look at our current online social barometer would shows: Twitter was overrun with comments.

After Google naughtily laid the initial blame at the door of StopBadware.org, a not for profit third party watchdog, it turns out that the problem was really just human error.  Someone accidently checked in a forward slash as a value to a file to be avoided and, as you probably know, the forward slash is used in all URLs.

Forty minutes later and the rest, as they say, was history…

Image courtesy of mitjamavsar.

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.

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.

A dramatic picture of the US Airways aircraft that crashed in the Hudson River appeared around the world within minutes after a bystander uploaded a photograph taken with his mobile telephone on to the website Twitter.