This is a test....this is a test

Testing something out for a client and need to drop some HTML embed code somewhere.

This seemed as good a place as any.

As you were people...

Bottled magic

Happy New Year

Yes, part of the 2013 resolution guilt trip was to blog again, if only to try and match up to the prolific amount of spam being directed at this blog's comments section. I hope they're getting more out of this than I did in 2012. I did write to one of the companies being advertised and asked them if they felt good about their name being used in this way. Needless to say, the response was a profound blast of complete and utter silence. I hope they had a good boxing day sale.

First post of the year is something dear to my heart.

It's a bottle that captures any sound, remixes it, and then plays it back to you. It's kind of an aural genie thing. You open the bottle lid and it listens, you close it and it gets to work, you open it again and it plays stuff back to you.

At first I thought it was something leeching off the back of the ever excellent RJDJ, but I'm glad to say it's something very different and quite clever. 

Thumbs up to Jun Fujiwara for coming up with this.


Re: Sound Bottle from Jun Fujiwara on Vimeo.

making stuff or making people want stuff...that you've made

I haven't posted anything on here for over a year now. Mostly because a lot of things I've come across I've started posting onto our work blog / posterous, which serves multiple purposes, not least some one upmanship and the opportunity to be lambasted by Lord Clark of Brussels. I've also been writing privately on 750 words, which is excellent and warrants a post of it's own - user generated content for no one but yourself, but with some excellent analytics tools that let on much about what's going on inside your head.

All that aside, I came across a great presentation on Slide Share that tackles the conundrum of creating value vs creating desire. It usually helps to see these types of things presented by the author, but this one actually reads nicely without the theatrics.

There's a nice part of this presentation about not focusing on your target audience, but instead focusing on the space between your target audiences (or users - as the author points out). I do have a problem with the term user, myself, and a colleague has started referring to our target audiences as participants, which I think is a lot clearer and a little more respectful. (My brother is a user...it's not pleasant).

Anyway, I'm posting this because I thought it was interesting and it ties in with some thinking we've been doing at our place on targeting influencers as a route for our clients.

The Future of Marketing: Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things?

View more presentations from John V Willshire

Computer music....

Code Organ plays your website - that's right....think on that...it plays your website....like the tune you knew it always had in it...knocks BGT into a cocked hat. 


Mine sounds like this


Bought about after a productive drinking session by a chap called Andy Goodridge and some of his mates. Bought to you by the good people of DLKW 


Proof of the power of positive drinking.


Stuff like this makes this whole thing alot of fun....more like this please....much more

Life and death and everything in between......

I had to give a talk last month to some clients of our sister agency over in Brussels. The talk was one of those "how the internet works this year" type of things, but what was interesting and challenging was that the clients weren't your usual collection of brands and marketeers. This being Brussels, most of them were lobbying organisations, their jobs being solely concerned with reputation management and the spreading of ideas. So, talking to them about brands, customers and conversion rates registers a nice big blank stare. Showing them how this one idea can start "there" and then spread "to there" however gets them sat up and asking all sorts of questions.


So, was interested to catch sight of this last week, a great film about influencers and how ideas are spread. It's been blogged about loads already but, as this blog is in truth my own collection of bookmarks, then I wanted to stick it down here and share it with my future self.




INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.


The other thing that caused some nice oohs and ahhs was this great film about life and death on Facebook. It's a simple story, well told, and reflective of the fact that Facebook is beyond being a website and is now, for many, the very fabric of the web.







So, worth keeping up your sleeve when your potential client from the Federation of Chemical Farmers and Gamekeepers Association asks you why digital is worth more than taking an MEP out to lunch and slipping them an envelope full of promises.....

Free lunch.....

People like vouchers being sent to their mobile....people don't like marketing messages being sent to their mobile (unless there's a voucher / payoff involved).


This is good news if you're thinking of using Voucher Cloud or even Foursquare in any upcoming retail campaigns (I am). 


Brand Republic survey here


More mobile research from Lightspeed Research (who conducted the survey) here


By the way, there is now a healthy market in "vintage" mobile phones. A Motorola 8000x sold on eBay for $5000 last year. I feel so old....and poor. Relive the glory of vintage mobiles here

We sell or else.....

There's simply not enough talks these days that include the words "idiotic" and "lunacy"....


This is still relevant because the thrust of it is really very simple...we're here to sell, one way or another, and to pretend that doesn't matter is ignoring why clients bother to give us money and give us so much grief when what we come back with doesn't fulfil that primary criteria.


I like...a lot