The pretence that this blog is a weekly thing really has to stop. One month since the last one, fact fans. I’ve had THINGS TO DO. Not least going to Brussels and Croatia, where I went on holiday and did NOTHING other than read and swim and be horizontal. It was awesome, and as a result I now look less like this and more like this. No really, I do.
Copy reads: “When we launched 15 years ago, those four words summed up what we believed in. And they still do.
“We don’t need to paint them on the tailfins, like some advertising slogan. That would just be wasting your money.”
Ahhhh….there’s nothing I love more than good old mile-high brand rivalry, fighting it out over the pages of our weekend papers. BBH has clearly spent many many hours, weeks and months wallowing in nostalgia, crafting the detail that went into the £20 million British Airways campaign ‘To Fly To Serve’. Thinking through all the ways to imbue their hard work into our public consciousness, right down to painting the tagline onto BA tail-fins. And then Easyjet’s agency VCCP goes and knocks up a dismissive print ad in a couple of hours. Awesome.
“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness; close bosom friend of the maturing sun…” – or that’s what Keats said. Personally speaking, I think Keats can do one, as can September and Autumn in general. Everything smells of wet dog and regret, it’s cold and miserable and it’s now just the long, slow trudge towards another season of crass mass-consumerism and endless, interminable, incomprehensible perfume adverts (NB – anyone who works in advertising who reads this, please feel free to explain to me why perfume advertising is so oblique, as I have literally no idea).
Think, then, of this edition of Web Curios as the lightbox to your SAD, the plaster to your axewound (for future reference, an unpleasant conjunction of words to Google), the United Nations to your genocide. I’m here to help. To that end, herearesomerecommendationsforawesomestuffyoucandoin Londonoverthenextfewmonths (NB – that last link is one of the best things I’ve seen in years, very much recommended. Oh, and for an interesting take on Libya, you could do worse than read this). In the real world! NOT ON THE INTERNET! Crazy but true.
But for now it’s still all about the internet. Well, on this particular blog it is, anyway. If you don’t like it, you know what you can do (though I’d prefer it if you didn’t; I’m needy, and low-to-moderate traffic figures are all that’s standing between me and a P45).
I read in Marketing this week that Moneysupermarket.com is planning to present itself as a ‘big brand’ with a new big advertising campaign, and a new spot ‘Gorilla’. I am mighty relieved that they’ve lost Omid Djalili, but am I right to be feeling just a little cynical that their agency Mother has introduced gorillas into the mix…? The ad doesn’t break until Sunday, but in case you’re dying to find out what happens, the brand character Geoff is so excited to have saved money on his insurance that he interrupts a quarrel between two gorillas and ends up chief gorilla. Can’twait.
The gorilla ad to beat of course, (and hence my cynicism), is Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’. I don’t know how Fallon sold in that ad, but it is so bonkers that it generated stacks of buzz and PR, drove sales of Dairy Milk, won multiple creative awards and even revived Phil Collins‘ career. To this day it remains beautifully watchable.
This got me thinking about gorillas in advertising, and I was struggling at bit until I remembered King Kong. The ultimate reference point for toughness, Mr Kong is mostly used to plug cars. Read the rest of this entry »
Guess who’s back? NO, IT IS NOT EMINEM! IT IS ME! (Though in fairness our level of musical / performing talent is comparable) Stop gawping at the back – I AM NOT DEAD! I wish that there was some sort of exciting reason for Web Curios’ long absence – an enthralling, Willy Fog-esque journey, an unexpected temporary career change, an unforeseen visit to chokey…but no, nothing so thrilling. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, Web Curios’ existence was momentarily uncertain – but now I am most definitely here. I think.
Frankly nothing that you’re going to read from hereon in matters one iota compared to the above, but it’s probably going to be marginally more cheering. Read on, and make your Friday afternoon of wageslavery marginally less soul-crushingly worthless than it might otherwise be.
I read yesterday that men and women respond differently to advertising: women respond more favorably to ads with product research information, more frequent brand name mentions and various types of product illustrations or demonstrations. Alternatively, men were significantly more responsive to ads containing superiority claims. Research is from Data Gem, more info here.
Don’t you just love a good men vs women piece of research? It tallies well with the vanilla advertising that litters our world – ‘oooh Bodyform’ (women), ‘the ultimate driving machine’ (men).
My view, for what it’s worth, is that women (and men) respond to shock tactics. Which may explain why London is being plastered in pants and bra ads at the moment – despite the continuing furore about the sexualisation of children. I was visually assaulted last night by this:
This week the news that the COI is to be disbanded made me reflect on public service advertising. There have been some incredible campaigns over the last 65 years which deserve a bit of a retrospective. Fortunately (or unfortunately) Marketing Week had the same idea as me and has already published an excellent review, with some of my faves including “Charley says always tell your Mummy” – an ad that inspired a certain song by The Prodigy.
So with the weekend ahead I’ve tracked down three road safety ads that have terrified me into never drink drinking, drink texting or even driving for that matter:
And this one, filmed in a real pub with a car hitting a stuntman at 20mph.
And finally this one (an RSI not COI ad) for teenage texting. Our client RAC’s report on motoring 2011 released this week highlights teenage texting is becoming a major issue.
Do share your favourite COI campaigns, and next week I’ll write a more positive and upbeat post, following a few days at Cannes Lions!
Just got out of a seminar where John Battelle was the guy on stage saying the smartest things. The rest of our team is over at the Google Sandbox or maybe looking for the Twitter Beach Lounge. Tomorrow, I scored a ticket to the Facebook reception but our client Say Media is putting on a bigger party with the hot electro dance punk band Friendly Fires.
SXSW? No. Welcome to Cannes Lions 2011 where there are as many people attending from the lands known as Silicon Valley (or Tech City) as from some actual countries.
Invasion of the Attention Snatchers
Of course, this has been going on for a while. As consumers have transformed into users, marketers must follow. As the audience’s attention has wandered far from the telly ad and deep into their iPad, agencies have added talent that know what heat mapping and usability testing mean.
Our own H&K seminar tomorrow features a creative powerhouse with an addiction factor all brands would die for. By bringing Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Rovio Mobile, to the Debussy Theatre, we hope to share a little of the pixel dust that make Angry Birds such a magically success story. Please join us on 21 Tuesday at 5:30pm in Cannes or via Twitter everywhere.
I am in the slightly surreal position of writing this Curios whilst our blog is in fact broken (a fact in no way due to incompetence on the part of anyone, no sirree), meaning that there is NO GUARANTEE that any of you will be able to read this sparkling prose. It’s strangely liberating, much like the fact that I am sitting here clad in nothing but a tshirt and a winning smile. I could say ANYTHING!
I won’t, of course; I need the money that webmonging provides. Instead, I will pause a moment to reflect upon a week in which it turns out that God’s not quite ready for us yet (unless of course the Rapture in fact happened and it simply turned out that He took a good look at us and thought “Actually, hang on, none of this shower is worth saving”. It wouldn’t be that surprising, given, you know, stufflikethis); in which Ryan Giggs realised that you can’t in fact sue the internet (an aside – does anyone else think there’s something STARTLINGLY VULGAR about the incredible speed at which the Imogen Thomas cash-in vehicle is now moving? The full-page Paddy Power ads in this morning’s Metro were a particular highlight; well done, everyone, aren’t we CLEVER!), thus hopefully putting an end to this startlingly tedious superinjunction business (or that’s what Giles Coren hopes, anyway. Out of interest, if I just write Gareth Barry’s name here does that mean that I go to jail too?); in which some of the most powerful men in the world met in London (and they let The Man play too!) to take part in what appears to have been the worst game of table tennis ever played; and in which over 13,000 people LISTENED TO MY VOICE – on that point, in the unlikely event that anyone from Radio 4 is reading this and you fancy mixing up your roster of continuity announcers a bit, I am absolutely open to offers. HIRE ME, RADIO 4.
I have no idea why, but I love this picture very much indeed.
Things About The Internet:
These aren’t new news, so I won’t dwell on them as you’ve doubtless read about them on some other SOCIAL MEDIA GURU’S blog, but Facebook has added the ability to tag Pages in photos (thus giving us all that longed-for ability to link to Coca Cola’s Facebook page from our pictures. Hear that sound? That’s the sound of thousands and thousands of souls, fizzing sadly into nothingness as we take one more step towards being nothing more than dead-eyed marketing shills!), and has also updated the manner in which its ‘Share’ functionality works, allowing users to share links with specific Groups / Friends. There’s nothing evil about that, I don’t think.
This IS New – Google Correlate – New cleverness from Google, allowing you to map search terms against each other to find patterns. It’s appallingly hard to explain, or at least it is for me; they do it rather better on the site, so I suggest that you go there.
Social Search and Filter Bubbles and Stuff: Both Google and Bing hace recently been wanging on about their increased commitment to integrating social into search; that is, factoring in data from your Facebook and Twitter profiles when compiling search results. WHY IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? Ok, so I’m possibly being a luddite about this, but my friends are not necessarily experts on stuff I am searching for. Just because 8 morons who I used to go to school with and haven’t spoken to in 16 years happen to ‘like’ a story from the Mail Online doesn’t mean I want it appearing at the top of my search rankings. Ok, so obviously it’s more sophisticated than this, but this is a prime example of the growing problem of filter bubbles, as brilliantly explained in this recent TED talk by Eli Pariser (it really is interesting, I promise) – that is, information filtering based on existing tastes / preferences, and the problem of sourcing that this can and does create; when the web can learn our tastes, can provide us with prioritised information based on what our friends – who are likely to be like us – are consuming, what are the long-term consequences? This isn’t a new concept – after all, people have been reading the newspaper that best reinforces their existing worldview for years – but one that will become increasingly relevant as automated curation becomes ’smarter’ (or, at the very least, more ubiquitous). Perhaps we should all make an effort to take our news from a different source each week? Just a thought.
Ana Somnia – I’ve never been a little girl, and it’s unlikely this state of affairs will change in this lifetime; nonetheless, had I been one this is what I like to imagine my dreams would have been like. An awesomely trippy website which is halfwaybetween storybook and art project, and which has one of the most captivatingly creepy and odd soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. Click and play – a lot of it’s procedurally generated, it would seem, which means each of you will experience it in a different manner.
Vorsong Iceberg Energy Water Feng Shui Brand! – I’m reasonably sure that this is some sort of spoof, but I’m buggered if I can work out of what / why. If it’s not, there are some very, very strange people marketing this water.
Er, Horseracing? – I don’t read Japanese, therefore my ability to understand what in the name of sweet Baby Jesus this is about is pretty much 0. It’s…just mental, really. Just click stuff until the race starts and watch, mouth agape, at the ensuing oddness.
Dumb Tweets At Brands – Sometimes the quality of ‘engagement’ brands can achieve through social media is of questionable value.
Alan Sailer takes amazing pictures. Click the image for more.
The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – This Wednesday was Towel Day, and reminded me not only of the sheer amazingness of Douglas Adams’ work but also how good the original Hitchhiker’s game was. I say ‘game’; it’s more an interactive novel, the whole thing written by Adams’ himself and containing some brilliant gags and some of the most impressive / frustrating (depending on your mood) examples of lateral thinking you will ever find. Take the afternoon off and play it. You too, The Man!
Some Wordy Stuff:
Ulysses, On Twitter – Literary experimentation in 140 characters isn’t new (I covered this in a VERY early web curios, for example), but this is a really interesting experience. The idea is to recruit a bunch of James Joyce aficionados to take sections of the legendarily ‘challenging’ novel and submit them to a central account, from which they will be tweeted on 16th June as part of Bloomsday (an annual celebration of Joyce’s life and work) – as the novel unfolded over the course of a single day, so the Tweets will reflect the narrative. Will be interesting to see how it works.
Live Writing Projection – This might be my favourite thing on here this week. As part of the promotion for New Zealand’s BNZ literary awards, the opening lines of short stories were projected onto public spaces in Aotea Square, Auckland. And then passers-by started to realise that the story being written might be about them…
Motion Poems – Poetry set to animation. Some really beautiful work on here; recommended.
Katie Alves paints scenes from films on people's eyelids. This is The Nightmare Before Christmas.
VideoStuff! Enjoy – and given the fact that it’s our last bank holiday for AGES, I ORDER you to slack off for the rest of the day and watch all of them.
1) I’m opening with what is by far and away the most rubbish song I’ve featured on Curios for AGES. It’s worth it, though, for the video is all kinds of supervideogamegeekery. See how many retrogame references you can spot – there are HUNDREDS in there. I’m thinking that the audience for this is going to be primarily male. Oh, and if you do like this song then you are a cloth-eared dunce. Sorry, but it’s true. Goldfish, with “When We Come Together”:
2) This, on the other hand, is a great song by a band called Bad Lamps. The video, made by some random off the internet, features what I think is a whole host of clips from porn movies, strung together to accompany the song. There’s no nudity whatsoever, and there’s something weirdly poignant about seeing the nonsex elements of bongo movies:
3) This song about smoking has a fair bit of Johnny Cash’s ‘Boy Named Sue’ about it, which is no bad thing, and the video is very Terry Gilliam / Monty Python-esque, which is also good. Made me really want a tab:
4) Loom is a jaw-dropping piece of animation. Probably not great if you’re an arachnophobe, mind:
5) God, OFWGKTA are SO LAST MONTH. If you never found any of their output upsetting or abrasive enough then you’ll very much like Full Moon by current internet obsession Death Grips:
6) PHEW, THAT WAS A BIT MUCH WASN’T IT? Let’s come down with this, by Black Light Dinner Party. It will make you want to be a New York hipster, just a little bit. Older Together:
7) I have no idea who this girl is, but her endearingly inept (and very, very sweary) cover of ODB’s “Got Your Money” has made her my new favourite internet person. I bet she’d be THRILLED to know that:
It’s a remote control plane, THAT LOOKS LIKE A SUPERHERO. Amazing. Want one:
9) To close, this week’s eyemeltingly strange video of the week – there’s a point in this that genuinely makes me shudder each time I watch it. ENJOY!!!!
I really shouldn’t be writing this, you know. I should, instead, be continuing to whore my brain out for The Man – but instead I defy him in order to…er…waste a couple of hours knocking this rubbish out JUST FOR YOU! I expect you all to contribute to the ‘feed and clothe Matt’ fund once the near-inevitable P45 finds its way to my desk.
It’s a remote control plane, THAT LOOKS LIKE A SUPERHERO. Amazing. Want one:
