Spread the Christmas Spirit

Here at Proximity Towers, we've been getting into the spirit of Christmas.

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Have fun!

Merry Christmas!

Why do I keep humming this tune?

Half rubbish, half brilliance.

It's alerted me to the idea that xmas is expensive, and if I can get some presents on the cheap, that would be nice.

Reckon I could cope with a weirdo playing guitar at me whilst I'm trying to have a drink.

Yet, somehow, over time I am imagining Nigel's world away from the pub as everything falls apart and he is soon on the streets for buying one dodgy Transformers DVD.

And as I have blogged before, there's nothing like a jingle.

TBWA diversify their services

Seen in the North Laines, Brighton, Dec 2007

Mr T's Avatar and the power of TV

Not sure if I like this or not.

World of Warcraft have made some TV ads. With Mr T, William Shatner and Willy Toledo.

You can check them out here.

So, the biggest Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gaming has decided that it needs to use 30 second TV spots to sell its wares. Having over 10M users from PR, reviews and word-of-mouth I guess isn't enough.

I applaud the agency that convinced Blizzard that they needed to advertise.

Cool to see a Mr. T Avatar though....

If only everything in life was as reliable as...

Got my new car finally. 15 week wait from our friends at Volkswagen whilst it was built and shipped over from Mexico. Almost forgot what colour I'd ordered.

Now when I first started work in this industry, there was a lot of talk about CRM and Peppers & Rogers were all the rage with their chat about putting customer needs first, etc. etc.

So why is it now, in our hyper-modern digital world that I entered into a black-hole of communications between putting the order in and finally receiving the thing?

• Confirmation of order received by the factory? Nope.
• Running specification of its build - when, how and by whom? Nope.
• Realtime 'dotted line across the ocean' as it crosses the Atlantic? Nope.

That would be have been great on my iGoogle or as a Vista widget.

No, just 15 weeks of silence. Poor show. (And that's without mentioning that they somehow lost my details on the database for the payment. Hmm - must talk to the people who run the database).

Not really a dig at Volkswagen particularly as no-one in automotive seems to have cracked the 'waiting game'. Or in any other delivery-based sector it seems. (Well, FedEx and UPS are not bad, I suppose).

When we dreamed about realtime CRM in the early 90s, it was a bit of pipe dream. At best it turned into welcome packs and quarterly newsletters & magazines, booming the direct mail and contract publishing industries for a while. But I don't understand why digital is not really being used to allow people to access the level of detailed information they want, when they want and how they want. It's not DM, but I do get welcome emails and quarterly email newsletters. Lazy.

I'm sure there are some great examples. Just none for things I'm buying at the moment....

Rant over!

Shameless Plug

Been having a lot of fun over the last few months with Harveys and itv / Coronation Street - with the big launch of the new sponsorship idents last week.

Check out the Corrie content on the website too that we've done - and play the Rovers Pub quiz that we've put together with the excellent Player Three.

It seems that every half decent TV programme has a sponsor these days, and I have to say that so many idents seem to be half baked ideas with little or no relevance to the programme they're sponsoring.

Corrie is one of the only programmes that consistently pulls a large mainstream audience, and Harveys could easily have been lazy, viewing the deal as 'cheap' airtime and settling for a cheap and nasty ad. But I think they've been brave by investing in CGI ads, online gaming, interactive and mobile internet to leverage the sponsorship with a long term strategy to help make Harveys stand out from the glut of me-too furniture retailers lurking near a out-of-town centre near you.

Harveys will have to ensure that the product and service are up to the right standards to ensure that people who try them for the first time are left satisfied. And that means in the store, waiting for delivery, the actual delivery and after-sales queries. Unfortunately, all the clever advertising in the world won't overcome negative reviews and word of mouth, which has been a problem for them in the past.

The right sponsorship deal has the power to change businesses - not just in terms of higher awareness, intrigue and google searches - but as a platform to consider and sort out every way in which the company and brand can and should add value to the customer experience.

Roll up, roll up - get your Web x.0 here

How many agency folk feel a bit like they're in the following enforced sales scenario at the moment?



Thanks to logic and emotion for that one - brilliant blog from a innovative thinker

Back to the future

Was in one of those random meetings today about 'what the next five years will hold for us, and how will digital take over the world'. And jokingly someone mentioned that we would soon see a resurgence of the 30sec spot...

And so, the conversation turned to half an hour of chatting about TV ads we currently love. And we had the usual suspects of Phil Collins / Gorilla (and whatever chocolate bar it is), bouncing balls, splashing paint and the soon to come plasticine bunnies for Sony.

And the delightful food-porn that is the Lurpack ad. (Which apparently saw an increase in sales over 20% a week after breaking - now that's an IPA award if ever I saw one!)

Ok, I know that the networks are dying and personalised and relevant 'TV ads' will soon be distributed through mobile, RFID tagging at point of sale and beamed into my head through the headphones on my next-gen ipods (maybe).

But there's nothing like some good old fashioned nostalgia. So I'm loving the new/old Aquafresh ads happily sitting in prime time. Quite refreshing in a world where most ads currently seem to include some whimsical floaty people with some whimsical floaty acoustic guitar music in the background (yeah, thanks Sony / Jose Gonzalez for starting that musical trend).

Let's bring back jingles, I say.


[And for some more predictions in Blogworld, check out this recent Holy Cow post - good stuff Mr. Hancock]

Disaster Recovery

I thought I was being clever putting all the music that I write on a dedicated hard drive. Until it went bust and I lost a year's worth of work. Silly Paul.

Anyway, just under a grand spent later, those miracle workers in data recovery have reunited me with my precious....

Go over here to hear the (old) fruits of my labour. 8 tracks for you to download to your itunes.

All comments gratefully received. Especially nice ones!

Strangely Familiar

Ok. Been away for far too long.... It's been a busy summer. After 7 and half years in the world of media, I've hot-footed it to a creative agency.

Now many people reckon that media agencies shall inherit the earth. (Certainly Jim Taylor and the folk at MEC). And perhaps they will be right.

But for me the future is in being able to create genuine value for the people that you want your brand to connect with. And creating value means doing something.

And for me that means being in a place where planners, creatives, designers, researchers (and semioticians, games designers, architects and any number of interesting people) can work together collaboratively to understand, plan and create that value. And yes, more often than not that means operating in fluid & digital world.

And unfortunately, whilst media agencies have loads of fantastic ideas - at the moment, my experience says that they still win or lose pitches based on their TV / Press / Radio / Outdoor guarantees. Not their ideas.

I think in the future, media buying will have to separated off again. Buying could do with a healthy dose of streamlining to bring it into this century. A big fat computer to automatically bid and book operated out of China I reckon. Maybe then communications planning can properly thrive and media agencies will inherit the earth.

But until then, I'm loving being able to actually make stuff happen.

Agency see agency do

Maybe I'm just more aware after my trip. Or maybe there really is something rippling through agency world. Once again, Soviet iconography has popped up - this time on Sky Sports' TV ads.

By my reckoning that's four major advertisers (Sky, Pizza Hut, Virgin and Ask) who are trying to spark off community revolutions of one sort or another.

It seems that Herd theory works for agency folk too.

Or maybe it's actually all those planners who have read the Herd book / blog and are now subliminally writing their creative briefs with collectivism in mind - sparking Soviet images in the creatives' minds?

Either way: Vivre la commune!

(Apologies & thanks for the shameless rip off of Faris' line from his recent excellent post on behavioural engineering for this blog post title)

End of an Era

Always good to achieve catharsis through artistic endeavour. Go to Latest Tunes on my other site to download some more new music. By me, my guitar and some fancy production with Cubase.

New computer coming this week, especially built for music production, so expect to hear more soon.

Privyet Comrade!

So I've been to St. Petersburg in the last week and been very impressed with how much the USSR loved the old 6 sheet and obviously had some good copywriters. Some classics:

'Vodka is your enemy. Your passbook is your friend';

or 'Let's have the proletarian parks of culture and rest';

or my personal favourite:

'Smoking is expensive and dangerous for health and work'. (Who needs Nick O Teen?)

And now I'm incredibly aware of a bit of an onslaught of Russian Iconography and sloganeering in some recent advertising ideas.

Pizza Hut came out recently with their 'Seize Your Lunchtime' campaign. (I won't call it an idea ... lazy, lazy planning with no real insight, I'm afraid)

And probably more in tune with a call for a popularist uprising is Ask with their Information Revolution / Anti Google campaign. Greg has commented on this elsewhere, and I agree with his views that the execution could have been less corporate, especially on the website.

However, (unlike Pizza Hut) this feels like an idea that might actually be connected with a genuine insight - that some people have concerns about the ubiquity of Google, have a desire to be different, and are looking for an 'underground' movement to be part of. I'm looking forward to seeing if the campaign is working and how it will develop.

The challenge for Ask is that (as I've commented before elsewhere) the Internet is as close to the proles seizing the means of production anyway, and Google are at the forefront of giving the power to the people already.

My worry is that Ask will see a spike in traffic, but with a lack of genuinely different & innovative new products, those defectors will rapidly go back to the not-too-evil-ones.

If I get knocked down, I get up again

I am trying to recover from a disaster. My external hard drive has packed up, losing about a year's worth of music I've written. Yes, I know - should have done a backup.

Anyway, best thing to do is to pick yourself up and just keep going.

So I've been messing around with some guitar and synth sounds. And you can download it here if you wish. You can click on it to play in quicktime or whatever is your browser media player of choice, or you can right click and 'save target as' to get the mp3. Would welcome any comments / ideas / thoughts.

The title was inspired by a man who walks up and down the South Ealing Road punching numbers into his calculator all day.

Another fine mess

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what does an empty desk signify?

A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahmson and David H. Freedman is a fascinating, entertaining and must-read book. In this book they suggest that mess is actually a good thing. Using an informal, storytelling approach they make a convincing case for bringing mess into your life.

It seems that the investment in time for tidying is often not worth the so-called 'efficiencies' you can gain. And it also seems that too much order will restrict our abilities to make intuitive leaps, stop us connecting apparently disparate things and generally limit our creativity.

Mess gave us penicillin, The Sunflowers, and Ulysses amongst much much more. Order has given us urban planning tower block disasters and increasing levels of OCD.

I was fascinated to learn that perhaps 90% of JS Bach's work was never written down - he used to improvise all the time and make stuff up whilst playing concerts. A Jazz pioneer it seems.

Another entertaining section explored the issue of 'smell' being a generally negative, messy sensation and word with very few words in the English language knocking around to acceptably describe different smells.

A great book and highly recommended. But for some reason, I did a lot of tidying whilst reading it...

The truth is out there?

Just watched an hour or so of Al Gore's current tv (229 on the Sky+ EPG.)

1. Video documentary of Pakistani and Indian people coming together as friends and family - pleading for their national governments to stop their nuclear ams race
2. Demonstration of ecologically-sound bicycle networks in East London
3. An project from teenagers in the UK to stamp out Marijuana growth and use amongst their peers
4. A video diary of an Iranian teenager visiting the wonders of America for the first time

Ah, the democracy of user generated content....

Are you infected?

For some reason, a big fat hardback book with a snappy pseudo-scientific title and some choice reviewer quotes seems necessarily authoritative.

Affluenza by Oliver James seems to be such a book. In this tome, Oliver (author of 'They F*** You Up') spends a year of his life interviewing people across the world - from New York to Beijing, from Moscow to Wellington. He argues that he has identified a 'contagious middle class virus causing depression, anxiety, addition and ennui'.

This virus (the Affluenza of the title) is 'obsessive, envious, keeping up with Joneses' - or in other words the human condition of seeking to better themselves by accumulating material possessions and experiences in order to feel better off than others. James argues that as we continually strive to achieve these 'virus goals' our motivations of 'being' are replaced by those of 'having'. And James links the intrinsic motivation 'being' to genuine happiness. Or rather, the motivation of 'having' to such ills as depression, anxiety and ultimately greater social problems such as drug abuse.

James proceeds to go around the world drawing on case studies of individuals to illustrate how the condition of late capitalism (post-post modernity, velocity age, anyone?) creates ever-increasing desires such as home-ownership and wider conspicuous-consumption that leads to the incubation and growth of the virus. These desires mean we are suckered in by advertising to buy more stuff so we work longer hours, relationships and communities suffer and children are uncared for properly.

Pretty bleak, isn't it? And nice to know that I'm somehow at fault due to my role in the evil advertising industry.

James goes on to suggest 'vaccines' for the virus. These start off as sensible psychologist's therapies: finding intrinsic motivations (i.e. I am a city trader because I am fascinated by numbers and the big fat bonuses are really just a bonus, honest); being beautiful rather than attractive (apparently Russian women are great at this); only consuming what you need; being authentic; enjoying motherhood (& fathers taking a greater child-caring role); educating children rather than brainwashing them. So far so Freud, Jung, etc.

But his finale is quite frankly amazing. He lays out a manifesto not dissimilar to the Socialists of the mid 20th century.

• Return all property to the state (having one estate agent, fixed prices and a lottery system if demand surpasses supply for specific property)
  
• Tax anyone earning over £100K / year at about 95% to equal out wages.
  
• Cut all defence budget and reallocate to paying one parent at national average wage to take the first couple of years off following childbirth
• Remove tests / exams from education and divorce syllabuses from the needs of industry - allowing children to discover their true talents
  
• Ban anyone attractive being in adverts. (seriously! who decides, the 'beauty police'?!)

So a lovely future where we're all doing stuff that we intrinsically love and getting paid enough for it, and living in a place that's just big enough for our needs. (worrying echoes of lebensraum?!).

What James fails to consider is the very nature of capitalism will necessarily create uneven development. Capital flows from places that don't suit the need to accumulate to places that do. Areas of growth and areas of destruction and deprivation. Even if the UK did seek to employ some of James' measures, the flow of capital (i.e money) away from the UK would be expedient and devastating. The only way in which James' measures could be employed would be on a global basis. Which is, of course, impractical.

It's a similar argument to that often postulated idea of agencies being paid for pitches - there will always be someone who waives the cost to gain an advantage...

So, in my opinion James has let himself down with the last couple of chapters. They rather smack of 'must finish book for publishers.... must have controversial conclusion'. His arguments are badly thought through compared to the elegant stories of the early part of the book. I can excuse him his methodology - qualitative stories that back up his opinion. Statistically invalid, and no doubt biased in the fieldwork, James is only using a storytelling technique that increasingly popular in authoritative, trans-disciplinary books (see Gladwell, Godin, Grant, Anderson, etc).

What is the definition of a good book?

Well, I finished it. It made me think. I'm now writing about it. I suggest these behaviours are the result of 'a good book'. A look at the reviews on Amazon shows very polarised opinions. (but then again, that is the fallacy of Amazon reviews - few people write a review or rate something if they are ambivalent about it).

I like (most of) his thinking. We are often obsessed with material stuff at the expense of genuine happiness. I've noticed that I've changed some of my behaviours in the last few weeks as a result of reading the book (that iTube is only something I want - not what I need...)

But in the meantime, I must go online to look at those ISA deals I was seeing on the TV - I must buy a new and bigger flat next year.

Rubbish designs

Rubbish. Every UK household produces over 1 tonne of it annually. And the stuff in our rubbish bins could power 5,000 hours of television every year. (does Audi TV have that much content?)

Ethical consumerism seems to be all the rage at the moment. Blogging ahoy after Channel 4's attack on Global Warming.... Gordon Brown has started getting the tube, and UK political parties square up to a 'green-off'. (I'm sure their intentions are genuine, and not a ruse to reel in the floating voter. Not that I'm cynical or anything...)

Enough about politics, let's talk design!

Enlightened sections of the design industry are considering and incorporating social and environment externalities into sustainable design solutions. They're thinking: 'What is the true 'cost' from cradle to cradle?' (In other words the energy and resources used and the social impact to make something, distribute and sell it, use it - and recycle it to make something new.)

Today I went to the [re]design exhibition at the Bluebird Cafe in London. This exhibition shows work from 17 innovative British designers who are bringing sustainability into contemporary design. Chairs made of old plastic and supermarket cardboard, a bench made from old Euro bins, trainers made from old rubber and clothes, blinds made from old signs (my favourite), lamps made from old bottles. All made using sustainable processes.

A really fascinating piece was a bench made of old supermarket cardboard packaging from a chap called Jason Ifkahar. It seems he actually has an arrangement with Sainsbury's to use their waste in his designs, and they're looking for ways in which production levels could be increased.

Now, I haven't heard Sainsbury's talking about this - but this seems to be really positive CSR from an organisation doing something proactive, innovative and actually quite cool.

(Rather than green-washing a tired loyalty scheme, like some other supermarkets we could mention)

Beautiful research

Promised myself that I wouldn't do too much signposting, but this is amazing.
It's an interactive display of research on the ideal home and housing - from Japan. It encourages feedback and comments, and has some lovely new-age music (reminiscent of Future Sound of London).

Shame the actual research isn't too interesting...

No more dull research debriefs?

Herd Abstinence

With the public smoking ban in force in July, over 2M people are going to try and give up smoking today for national no smoking day

Current stats say that about 85K people normally quit on this day each year, so this represents a massive increase in people who are going to try.

Stats for Ireland, seem to show a decrease in respiratory illness and some evidence for decreased cigarette sales.

But there is little evidence of the Government planning for a decrease in tax revenue from tobacco sales over the next few years. (but if anyone knows differently, please correct me!)

So top-down legislation is what was required all along? Or is the timing perfect that legislation has met a powerful group or herd mentality to quit? Or will people will find clever little work arounds (like your favourite pub becoming members only, or possible installing one of these)

Will we actually become a healthier nation?

I won't hold my breath. I'm off to rehab, thank you very much.

Weak Links

Just picked up a(nother) new report from the US on WOM. Check it out and download here.

I picked up this comment on the report from Dani Marino, who talks about a concept called Social Persuaders and Influencers or SPIs. SPIs are people with large, active and many social networks. They have persuasive power and they love to talk about products and services. And they are 10% of the market...

As with a lot of stuff on WOM, there does seem to be an obsession with finding those important broadcasting types. Or social connectors as Gladwell calls them.

Find them, seed your message into and across their social networks and watch the dollars roll in. That'll be WOM wrapped up. Bring on the YouTube, Myspace, Tribe, MOG, Rateitall and Faceparty seeding campaigns with clever and humourous content! 7% positive buzz and 1% growth or so the LSE tell me.

But it seems to me, that people forget a few key things:

• Messages at best travel in a superficial way - instantly consumed and disposed of. ideas on the other hand have a chance of sticking - although they will probably be re-appropriated and become out of the control of the initial originator
• And as a proper reading of network theory will tell you (including the tipping point): For stuff to travel the receivers in the network / community have to be receptive. it is not enough to have loads of SPIs / broadcasters (or whatever we call them) chatting. People have to listen and want to take on or act on a dissipated idea. For an idea to travel through communities knowledge of the way in which information is exchanged within those communities is critical for success.

To have a chance of planning for an idea to spread socially requires a deeper understanding of linguistics, semiotics and ritual - within and across different communities.

It means understanding the weak links in a community and across communities as well as the so-called strong links of the SPIs / broadcasters (that everyone else is probably bombarding with rubbish viral messages anyway)

This Blog is not taking place

It seems that the spectacle of this blog is already much more important than the reality of it....

People have been talking about it for a while. I've been talking about it for, oh, nearly a year.

And now, as it goes through a difficult birth (and premature - thanks Doug), it's already undergone a few christenings, changes of clothes and is having a pre-school identity crisis - defined by the spectacle of what others think it ought to be, before it has uttered it's first few words to become a reality.

So why these mixed metaphors? Well, I read with great sadness at the passing away of one my heroes last week - Jean Baudrillard. Controversial in his writing, he is perhaps most infamously known for his writings on the first Gulf War (it won't take place, it is not taking place, it did not take place) and essays on the twin towers 9/11, where he described the horrors as 'a fusion of history, symbolism and dark fantasy - the mother of all events'.

I'm not going to deconstruct his arguments, primarily as they have been examined beforehand by excellent scholars more qualified than I. However it seems strange to me that I picked up the 'Gulf War did not take place' only a few weeks ago, and he then goes and dies.

I had decided to re-read this book, not because of a particular interest in the Gulf War, but because recent thought on brands (e.g. Grant's view on brands as molecules of real, authentic ideas) seemingly goes against Baudrillard's central thought that the spectacle (i.e. people's perceptions, influenced by media commentary) is becoming more important than the reality (i.e. what is really going on).

[Ok - Baudrillard's argument on the Gulf War, was that it was entirely constructed through the media for the purposes of both the West and Sadaam; the 'war' was won before it started and did not involve proper conflict - so how could it be called a war?; and it took place mainly on CNN rather than in the Gulf]

So, in our 21st century, Internet-dominant, convergent world, Baudrillard is surely wrong. We are no longer at the mercy of what the behemoth media companies want to tell us about the world as spectacle. We can check out real-time live feeds and blogs for the 'reality' - as we have seen in blogs from the front line for the Iraqi 'war'.

But as Henry Jenkins has succinctly argued, our culture is necessarily an interplay between the large media players and those who wish to participate. And listening to Al Gore on the radio this morning, Current TV, (for all of it's 'democratic' intentions of participatory culture and user generated content), has a 'review panel' of people who decide what is interesting / acceptable for popular consumption. Democratic??

However, surely the best measure of what is interesting / acceptable / influential / authoritative on the Internet and in the blogosphere is the number of links / downloads and views. In other words, popularity.

Does popularity mean reality and truth???!

I think it is dangerous to be swept away by the fantasy that the democratization of the Internet has opened up reality for everyone and swept spectacle under the carpet.

The spectacle has pulled off its greatest trick (again) by convincing the world that it doesn't exist.

I hope Jean is smiling.

Why the post is always late

Ok.

So holding page whilst I sort out some content. Apologies to anyone coming here from a link wondering who / what I am...