a hundred avatars

Singing at Sonic

I don't know or care if this is done by the brand or just the singer, but it's great. via Reddit and Stevie Dove

 

Pan Dulce

PSFK Future of Retail

Thanks, Piers!

 

PSFK Future Of Retail Report 2011 [Preview]

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100 Beautiful Slides

100+ Beautiful Slides from #CannesLions '11 from @jessedee

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Tesco South Korea: Great bridge from outdoor to digital to home

One of the most talked about ideas at Cannes 2011. Great link from outdoor to mobile to home. Whether or not it's great outdoor or digital or mobile, but it is a great stunt...

 

Packaging/Information/Content

two things in the last few days:

this packaging is cool because of what it shows:

 via PSFK

And this other stuff is interesting for how it creates community around packaging. Meta-meta tagging reality.

The line between the reality online and the reality in 3D is quickly blurring. Or maybe it's already gone. With total transparency, what's inside the packaging really has no where to hide. Packaging is a gateway to experience design, experience that differentiates far more than superficial advertising. 

Sure beats sticking a cow on the package.

This week at TEDxNY

Yesterday was the first time I attended TEDxNY, currently being hosted here at Grey Group's NY HQ.  My first time, and frankly at first I was thinking it was more TEDxBizarre, but I got the hang of it. It's hosted by Grey's own Don McKinney (attendee at several TEDs, apparently) and brings in people (from Grey too, but mostly other very interesting people who don't work for any of the Grey agencies) to hear speakers (apparently often online from TED.com) and then use the remaining 40 minutes of the hour to discuss the topic

We watched the following TED talk from last year, Dan Barber from Blue Hill talking about sustainable fishing practices and the implications for how we eat .  There's an interesting thought in there that goes beyond and implies the positive impact of sustainable practice on how we live as well.

More enjoyment, please.

Watch this space for more updates on TEDxNY.

Fun! (or, media that is really social)

I loved this video from Volkswagen, which goes to show the power of a brand going beyond its purview to bring a benefit greater than itself to people's lives. (as well as the power of what Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge calls libertarian paternalism). More brands should really think about how to help people, beyond just RTBs.

 

It also raises an interesting question with viral videos as to what credit (or blame) an agency in Sweden should get for changing brand perception of a global brand in the US. For me, this video does more to improve my opinion of VW than anything Crispin has done for them here in the US.

SPEWing good ideas

Tom O'Brien recently tweeted a link to Neal Stephenson's Spew, a piece in WIRED from what is essentially the dawn of time, 1994. What's crazy about it, given when it was published, is how prescient NS was on where we would be 15 years later.

Go ahead. Read the piece. It's really good, in the way that a cyberpunk piece called 'Spew' from 1994 is good. I know sometimes the links don't come through when these blogposts pop up on Facebook, but Google it if you don't see the link and read it.  I'll wait...

OK, it's not the Baroque Cycle or even Snow Crash, but it's sort of what we do for a living (or should be), right?

Anyway, a few things occurred to me while reading the piece:

1. Why don't people move more quickly? TV networks, publishers or advertisers don't respond to niche opportunities anywhere near as quickly as they do in the piece. I don't understand why, unless ennui, inertia or fear are fair explanations. There's no good excuse why, and we can accelerate how we move against opportunity. We just need a better infrastructure.
2. Try harder to find it: finding insights that are actionable.  Frankly in this day and age it's not hard to find information that matters, but honestly a lot of what we see in the business world is more often than not the result of outdated models that measure something that we all agree matters as opposed to the things that actually are happening. Not sure why this is the case.
3. WTF? Do you think anyone who read this piece 15 years ago really understood what NS was talking about? Did he? Did pieces like this create our reality (which is pretty spot on, at least from the perspective of what is possible) or was NS just so hyperaware that he intuited the next 15?
4. DIY: NS captures where culture really comes from perfectly.  As much as in his future there seems to be some sort of corporate-entertainment-technology complex that produces 'everything' they need to be culture vultures to find out what is really happening.  Technology that centralizes culture doesn't actually centralize culture creation but rather paradoxically just seems to help figure out what's really going on. Then the 'centralizer' can figure out how to take advantage (or not) of what's going on.
5. Intuition and in person: As much as the character in Spew has access to all the information out there, he's not purely quant driven in his approach.  He knows  "something is there" without being able to put his finger on it and really can only find out by going to where the target is and seeing it in person. Data feed doesn't replace human touch.

How creative is your work?

Everyone should have the chance to be this on message and yet on point as this guy.  If you or those you work with are not upending conventional ways of doing things to be more interesting and more human then you're not trying hard enough.