Search On…

Having lost out on getting tickets to see them play the Royal Albert Hall in May, I was interested to see that American godlike genius musos The National have become the subject of one of the recent Google ‘Search Stories’ – a neat little campaign to highlight the various functions of the prolific search engine. It’s a cute, flexible concept executed quite charmingly and, importantly, easy to parody and viral. The National feature in the ‘Out of Office’ execution but my favourite is ‘Cheermobile’ – a fun, festive tale. You can see the set on YouTube here.

Also, check out a very funny parody called ‘Surprise Party’. Which was probably done by the agency.

Make your case

Yes Tristan, you’ve become one of those annoying iPhone types. Quite frankly I wish I was one too. Soon, I keep promising myself. Soon. When I do get one, I’ll want to keep it in one piece and make sure it stands out from the who-knows-for-sure-just-how-many-are-out-there??? crowd. (…anyone?)

These guys offer a great solution to both needs. They’re an online ‘case customiser service’ in the US, and for $34.99 plus postage you can create your very own customised case. The (beta) site itself is great (a little slow but figures as it’s pretty rich content) – really easy to navigate with some nice curser-led animation – visually striking simplicity.

The idea involves a collaboration of international designers and illustrators (Joshua Davis, Anthony Yankovic, Ray Frenden to name a few) offering a palette of their own iconography which the user can remix to create your own unique design. Choose your colour palette, iconography and apply effects to customise further – all in all a great offering and also a powerful way to get your name out there as a designer / illustrator if featured on the site.

Time for an upgrade methinks…

Hipstamatic

Before I got an iPhone I used to get annoyed by people showing me how cool they were. Now, of course, I’m one of those annoying people. Problem is, they just are really cool and they’ve got loads of cool little Apps. Like this one: ‘Hipstamatic’ by Synthetic Infatuation. It basically mimics an old 50’s analog toy camera but allows you to interchange lenses and alter your film stocks for different effects. Charging the virtual flash blows the picture out and the App ‘processes’ the pics into great square digiprints. Granted, they’re not going to make it onto a billboard as they’re quite low res, but for web and email they’re perfect. It’s a steep £1.19 but if you’ve just won the lottery or got a major inheritance, go for it. Get it here.

Fontastic!

MyFonts has very much been MyBestFriend over the past year – it’s a great place to source and try out new and old fonts alike and has come to the rescue innumerable times across various briefs. They recently released their top 10 fonts of 2009 (based on sales). It’s interesting to note the bias towards scripty, ornate faces – a calligraphic renaissance on the rise?

My  favourite font from their top 10 is Geogrotesque (above) – a great sans-serif with a modern twist that makes it a fresh contemporary face. My personal favourites from 2009 have been Creighton and Klavika – two workhorse sans faces that are timelessly modern. Thanks MyFonts!

All I want for Christmas (2010) is one of these

While I always loved remote-control cars and helicopters, let’s be honest, they’re sometimes a little difficult to control with their up/down, left/right levers and silly aerial. Well, I’ve seen the future, baby, and it’s called the Drone. All the rage with tech-geeks and kidults at this years Consumer Electronics Show, it combines a live camera feed via wi-fi to an iPhone-based control system with a cool little sci-fi helicopter. It also overlays this feed with (buzz-term alert!) ‘augmented reality’ navigational graphics. Woo. The possibilities are endless. Think real world first-person gaming. Think privacy invasion and Street View-type headlines about burglars and peeping-toms using them. Think massive but ultimately destructive fun as you never get off the sofa again.

Have a look at the website here. No price or availability yet unfortunately.

And the winner is…

…Ben Kellerman!

The panto-tastic entry by Ben beat off stiff competition to scoop our top prize. This means that ‘Death Star Disco’ will be produced by our friends at Demon and will be ready to take the Net by storm in the next month or so. It goes without saying – you’ll be able to see it here first.

Congratulations to Ben and a massive thank you to all who entered.

customer journey

Lloyds TSB have a really good illustrative style to their TV campaign, its nice to see they have extended it to their website. The above page gives the customer a journey through all their products encompassing the Olympic theme.

The journey starts with a character in the bottom left of the screen who takes you to various buildings that scale up as you hover over them. Video footage and links take you to different parts of their site that seem boring in comparison.

Its a nice interactive part to their site that seems fresh due to the illustration approach and a good cover to the rest of their site.  Their association with the customer and the olympics has been executed well. It will be interesting to see if they do any variations to the theme.

No FT, no comment

I was happy to be asked pre-Christmas for some insightful commentary for a respected journalist at the FT. I always knew that one day my opinion would grace the pages of this hallowed publication.

Turns out he wanted to know what I thought about Cardigans.

Now I’m not sure what tortuous series of events conspired to reach the point where my name came up in conjunction with Cardigans, but true to our ethos of ‘grab every opportunity no matter how weird’,  I wrote down some thoughts on Cardigans and sent them to the FT.

I promptly forgot all about it until this weekend when there it was in black and white in a national newspaper – “Sean Kinmont, managing partner and creative director of the brand communications agency 23red, is also a fan. “The cardigan is a wardrobe essential,” he says. “I own not just one, but one for every occasion. I’m wearing a two-tone Paul Smith number now, for example, but I also have a grey Brooks Brothers version at home.”

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I was misquoted. I do not have a Cardigan ‘for every occasion’- this makes me sound like some sort of weirdo. I have one Cardigan and it was given to me as a birthday present.

Christmas cheers

This is just a quick post to thank all the entrants into this year’s 23red Panto Xmas Card competition and give you all a sneaky peek at some of our entries.

For those of you who don’t know, the 23red Christmas card this year asked recipients to put their creative hats on and put together a short pantomime story using stickers of characters and props, and a simple storyboard background.

We received a bunch of creative entries, some that used photoshop, some that kept it analogue, and others who may just have been on the eggnog a little early.

Some of you will of course be having sleepless nights this weekend, wondering just who has won the fabulous prize of seeing their story professionally animated and spread around the interweb…

…but I’m afraid you will have to wait until Monday to find out.

Twitter for small-to-medium enterprises

Yesterday I was asked about Twitter and how it could be used by small enterprises to promote and market their products and services. Here’s what I said.

Question: Should SMEs make exploiting this communications channel to potential new customers a priority in 2010?

Answer: It would be a mistake to think of Twitter as a channel that may be exploited, in much the same way as it would be to think of exploiting business development opportunities at a dinner party. It’s not a marketing or PR channel in the traditional sense. Without even joining the service Twitter can be a useful research tool though. Try searching for your company, key staff, products, services or competitors and see what people are saying about them (if anything). If it appears that there’s a genuine interest in that sort of subject matter from the Twitter members, it may be worth considering a presence on the service.

Question: How does Twitter fit into a business’s PR and branding if indeed it does?

Answer: Twitter can be a useful tool for monitoring brand health and sentiment. It is also a way of expressing the personality of your brand, letting people know your thoughts on a given issue, the things you find interesting and generally making your company communications more human. It is important to note that Twitter works best when developing relationships with people by having ongoing conversations. One way monologues from businesses, press releases or self-promotion tend to be poorly received or ignored. A good example of Twitter used well by an SME is The Shower Guys in Scotland. They differentiate themselves from their competitors by being genuinely entertaining, excited about what they do, human and happy to have conversations with people.

Question: Is Twitter just another social networking flash in the pan that businesses don’t need to invest in?

Answer: Twitter is just one (albeit much-hyped) example of the emerging “real-time web”. There are other services that operate in a similar fashion (Facebook status updates, for example). These real-time or lifestreaming services aren’t going to go away and increasingly incorporate other services such as search, location-based information and social networking. I’d advise SMEs to invest a short amount of time in seeing what people are saying about them first. It costs nothing (yet) and might be illuminating. While the Twitter membership is currently small compared to the total online population, they can be quite vocal.

Question: Twitter does seem to be founded on ‘personality’ hence people like Stephen Fry have a million plus followers. For the smaller enterprise, personality isn’t a big enough draw for twitter followers. How can SME owner/managers gain a higher profile via their tweets?

Answer: Breaking news alerts from the likes of the BBC and CNN are also highly subscribed so it’s not just celebrities that gain lots of followers on Twitter. Stephen Fry is probably more famous offline than most SMEs in the UK so the comparison isn’t really a fair one. It wouldn’t be appropriate to approach Twitter in the same way as a CRM programme, building a database of contacts or prospects. The emphasis should be on quality over quantity. The best way to achieve this is to be interesting, entertaining and/or responsive. JetBlue Airlines in the USA has built a massive Twitter following by using the service for fast-response customer support. Responding quickly to queries and complaints has significantly raised their profile.

Question: It is easy to become jaded about Twitter as yet another marketing and PR channel that other businesses use to try and sell your company services or goods. In the future do you believe that Twitter will have to evolve into an entirely different social network to maintain its status as the latest hot social networking site? What could that evolution look like?

Answer: Twitter isn’t a marketing and PR channel. Nor is it strictly speaking a social network. If anything, it’s a conversation network. I’d expect the future of Twitter to be in the licensed products that are built on top of it, rather than the service itself. For example, next generation digital TVs showing real-time review/commentary on events drawn from Twitter; mobile product and service locators based on your physical location and the Twitter comments of people currently nearby etc

Question: What key advice would you give to SMEs that are new to Twitter in order to gain valuable and useful followers for their businesses?

Answer: Be human first, a business second and start by seeing what people are talking about – http://search.twitter.com/

Question: Twitter of course is just one social network that an SME could use. How does Twitter fit into the wider social networking landscape that SMEs can exploit?

Answer: That’s a big question and “exploiting” is probably the wrong mindset to have when considering social technologies. As the Data Portability project gathers steam (including services like Facebook Connect) it’s likely that all social services will overlap to some extent. The similarities between social technologies are currently greater than their differences but if I’ve learned anything since the creation of the internet, it’s that everything changes.

The above are my opinions and I’m happy to debate, answer questions or be brought to the gentle realisation that I’m completely wrong. http://twitter.com/phildearson

Ping…

We all enjoy games with friends and family over the Christmas season – so if you find yourself at work at a loss, why not have a go at this neat little take on the classic – it uses browser windows as bat and ball. Minutes of fun….enjoy!

Nurturing creativity

I need to start by saying that I’d never dream of posting a 20-minute YouTube video onto this blog unless I thought it was bloody brilliant. So please grab a cuppa, get comfy and enjoy this little gem.

In short, this is quite simply the best speech about creativity I’ve ever seen. The speaker absolutely nails it. He makes a very convincing argument using the perfect blend of humour and clever insight. He really deserves a knighthood or something…

Thanks to my housemate Tom for sharing this clip and introducing me to TED.com.

Why use rollerblades when you could use Philips Sensual Massager?

I found myself in utter hysterics when i saw this classic promotion by Philips – there really arn’t many words that I can use to explain it! It’s certainly an interesting Christmas idea and I can only hope it goes someway to preventing the unfortunate accidents doctors and nurses regularly encounter from people who’ve tried experimenting with household products that weren’t designed to be used in that way!!!

Music inspiring creativity

Here at 23red we depend on our creativity to get the work done, and I certainly feel more stimulated and inspired when listening to great, different and heart stirring music. We all love Spotify in the creative department. It is a great way to listen to and try out new music and gets our creative juices flowing.

Here is my Spotify playlist to share with you some of what we’ve been listening to lately…

East London duo excite Kiwi bookworms

This lovely little stop-motion film was created by the dynamic twosome behind ‘Andersen M Studio’ in Bethnal Green, having been commissioned by Kiwi agency Colenso BBDO for the New Zealand Book Council.

The video depicts Maurice Gee’s book, Going West, brought to life in truly stunning fashion, complete with an eerie voice-over reading passages from said novel.

I just marvel at the time it must have taken…

…not to mention the paper cuts.

via the ever-inspiring folk at booooooom.

Puppet Joy

Although completely irrelevant to the world of marketing, I feel a need to share this wonderfully entertaining video with everyone. Enjoy.

N.A.S.A. music videos – out of this world

As much as I love Pixar movies (and I don’t, particularly) this is really what all computer animation should look like.

Inspired by urban landscapes and street art – as well as music geniuses, Kool Keith and Tom Waits – this video was directed by Fluorescent Hill and forms part of the N.A.S.A. music project.

N.A.S.A have created a host of eye-bleedingly brilliant animated videos with contributions from artists like OBEY, and music by M.I.A., Santogold, RZA and Chuck D to mention but a few.

You can see all the videos from the project right here.

And frankly, if you’re not tempted to click through and watch at least one, you might as well just slap on Finding Nemo again…

a poetic partnership

I’m sure most of you have seen at least one of them, but have you really read them? I just love the Poems on the Underground series -  they’ve become ingrained in my every day commute, in my London life, and I find myself under a slightly worrying compulsion to look out for them…

I think it’s the refreshing change that they offer from my dreary journey which forces this habit. Encompassing a fantastic range of humour, poignancy, history and the down-right bizarre – you never quite know what you’re going to get! And the challenge of trying to work some of them out, is also a great way to pass the time.

 The idea behind the series also strikes a chord. In terms of a partnership the brainchild of the scheme, (American writer Judith Chernaik), couldn’t have orchestrated a better deal than with Transport for London to achieve their main aim of bringing poetry to the masses.  It’s just such a fantastic way of resurrecting old classics and immersing the millions of rat-race runners (myself included) in the intrigue of poetry that may otherwise have remained uncovered.

And although so many of the poems were written decades, indeed in some cases, centuries ago, it’s fascinating to see how many of the emotions, worries and scenarios are still relevant in some way to contemporary society.  You can’t help in many cases to draw comparisons with your own life. Reading them gives you a chance to reflect on life and all that it entails – relationships, politics, simple pleasures, poignant moments, the list is endless. 

Perhaps most refreshing of all – their presence doesn’t reek of ulterior motives.  Of course, there is a best selling book behind the series (!) and there is always profit to be made, but the underlying principles remain impressive.  A partnership simply for the sake of the arts.  You are not pushed in one way or another, or under pressure to believe anything in particular.  You can simply reflect and draw your own conclusions.

Make sure you keep an eye out.

The ‘Fun Theory’

A new theory has been developed, all around trying to instigate behaviour change. The thinking behind this is quite simple, if you make things fun for people, you are more likely to change people’s behaviour.

The first video launched to showcase this new theory demonstrates how true this can be.  A normal staircase is turned into a giant musical piano, to try and encourage people to walk on the stairs rather than the escalators. The escalators remain untouched whilst people of all ages have a little musical game on the piano stairs.

The video is a great piece of content which illustrates the theory in a simple and imaginative way. You replace the negative associations of huffing and puffing up stairs with an interactive, new and fun activity. The results therefore come as no surprise at all (66% more people tried the stairs than the escalator).

Whilst the video provides a few minutes of entertainment, I have to remain a bit of a cynic. For a few minutes I try to imagine installing the musical piano to the busy London Underground in the hope that angsty commuters can become a little more light hearted in the morning rush to work  (plus getting that extra bit of exercise we all do our best to keep up but fail miserably at – or at least I try)…And the bubble bursts…

I don’t think that Volkswagen has suddenly found the answer to all our problems. Whilst it’s created some great video content, in reality, how long will it take for people to get bored of the stairs and the annoying noise, because no-one can actually play a song on it, becomes more than some people can bear…

It will be interesting to see what other content is developed around this fun theory. I caught a glimpse of the world’s deepest bin, so have a look and judge for yourself.

Can we all adopt a bit more positive thinking and make this world a more fun place to live in…?

Power of photography

The eleventh World Sight Day took place last week and if I’m honest this was the first one I’ve been aware of. The reason… iconic photographer Rankin.

Rankin teamed up with international charity Sightsavers in order to raise awareness of the thousands of women in the world who go blind every year.

By using the power of photography coalesced with dramatic make up, the message portrayed by the pictures is extremely powerful.  

You wouldn’t think the campaign needed a photographer behind it to raise awareness as the statistics speak for themselves; two-thirds of the 45 million blind people in the world are women and 90 per cent of those live in the developing world.

 

 

 

The stunning work by Rankin will hopefully help World Sight Day become a much more prominent in years to come.