Just seen this work for the Cannon Pixmas – Bringing colour to life. It’s absolutely stunning, epic, beautiful stuff and works so well at dramatising the vivid colours:
Also, I recently saw the following film which Dentsu, in conjunction with BERG, made to promote themselves. It’s a lovely bit of work, using iPads and Stop frame animation to extrude 3d light shapes.
There is also an interesting post on their blog where they talk about 10 spartan rules which are 10 principles written in 1951 by President Yoshida to guide behaviour at Dentsu in Japan. They seem just as relevant today. Sadly, the 10 new ones which they added beneath it are utter BS and seem totally contrived. The original 10 are below:
1. Create work for yourself; don’t wait for work to be assigned to you.
2. Take an active role in all your endeavours, not a passive one.
3. Seek out large and complex jobs. Trivial tasks debase you.
5. Once you begin a task, complete it. Never give up.
6. Lead your fellow workers. Be an example for them to follow.
7. Set goals for yourself to ensure a constant sense of purpose. This will give you perseverance and hope for the future.
8. Move with confidence. Confidence gives your work force, focus and substance.
9. Find new solutions. This is the way we ensure satisfactory service.
10. When conflict is necessary don’t shy away from it or be afraid. Conflict is the mother of progress and the source of aggressive enterprise. If you fear conflict, you will become timid and servile.
In 2004 the term “web 2.0” was coined. It has been used to describe the second generation of web services and applications which feature an increasing emphasis on human collaboration. Things like blogs, wikis, RSS and social bookmarking would be typical examples of this. Now we are in 2010 and web 3.0 is approaching fast. There are many theories about what this next generation will hold for us but most agree that the semantic web will underpin it. If web 2 was about using the internet to make connections between people, web 3 will be about using the net to make connections with information.
The semantic web is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. So, machines will not just relay the information to us, they will know what it means. If computers could understand what’s in a webpage, they could learn what we want and if they know that, they could change from passively, to actively helping us. This abundance of structured data could facilitate the much heralded “internet of things”, meaning that all the the devices in our lives would be connected and could act intelligently on the information making decisions for the benefit of us and the system as a whole.
Why is this exciting for marketers? Well, once it’s possible to discern the meaning of content, it is possible to use it more intelligently. Relevant stuff can be served and a more personal experience can be had by all. Contextual advertising and behavioral targeting both have their limitations. The former relies on the dictionary definition of a word and can often be totally irrelevant to the true context, the latter relies on cookies which means shared computers can contain spurious information. Semantic advertising knows the true meaning and context of the webpage and can therefore serve relevant ads with a much higher degree of accuracy. This means increased product visibility, more intelligent customer marketing, more accurate forecasting models and many opportunities that go beyond selling.
Meaningful relationships between products are emerging which can increase cross sell opportunities. Plus, consumers will be better informed so this means an improved sales ratio and less returns. As a marketer, the benefits of going semantic are clear. Yahoo! reported that search results which embedded snippets of structured data received 15% more click-throughs than the competition. Best Buy say their use of semantic markup has lead to improved SEO, increased traffic and enhanced customer service.
Three of the biggest players have all shown significant support for the semantic web.
- Facebook’s “Open Graph Protocol” is a neat way of connecting people through the concepts they are interested in. This will accelerate the semantic process as the scale of Facebook’s user-base means that a huge amount of data will be amassed very quickly.
- Twitter’s “Annotations” will allow tweets to hold additional meta data without affecting the strict character count.
- Google has started displaying structured data in its search results. This new feature has been silently deployed and many believe it is the precursor to truly semantic search functionality.
Does this mean that we are witnessing the advent of “Advertising 3.0”?
As the technology becomes able to truly understand our interests, it will begin to provide promotions so relevant that, if done right, will cease to be advertising any more. Indeed, they will be valued content. The entire model is evolving and as the convergence of devices increases, this messaging should become seamless.
In order to get the most out of the semantic web, successful brands put their data online. Data Marketing is the new paradigm to embrace.
It’s the video for Arcade Fire’s track, “we used to wait” and has taken things to the next level. It uses Google maps integration to pull in pictures and create video of your home town and integrate it seamlessly into the experience. It massively improves the context and effect of the song by personalising the experience and bringing the lyrics to life.
It also exclusively uses HTML5, rather than flash. This means it’s safest to view this on Chrome, as many browsers are not supporting it fully yet. However, it does mean that it should run on iPads etc – as Apple has famously snubbed flash in favour of the emerging HTML5. Certainly, it’s is very impressive indeed. However, some of the visual effects would be a lot slicker if they were done with flash. Also, ironically, the accessibility of this experience is actually less because it doesn’t use flash. Far less people have an HTML5 enabled browser than a flash plugin installed.
That said, I’m totally blown away by this and it’s good to show people the potential of HTML 5. Doing things like this speeds up the support for HTML5 which will benefit everyone.
Hats off to Google, Arcade Fire and everyone involved in the project.
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.”
I don’t entirely agree with it, mind. Maybe because I’m over 30 and am constantly being excited by things that are only just getting invented. Indeed, that’s precisely what keeps me addicted to all the “digital” stuff. Maybe that’s because I’m a so called “digital native” a term he doesn’t agree with. But, i’ve been making digital stuff since i was a teenager and as such am hard wired to constantly look for the latest innovation, explore how it works and then assimilate that into new possibilities with creative application.
Perhaps the quote would be more true if point 3 referred to things that are invented after you’re 70. I dunno. I hope that by the time I’m that age, I will still be as interested by new stuff, and I have a hunch all the people like me will be too. It’s more a case of people who are 70 now or of a previous generation where technology moved a lot slower than it does now, in our exponential times.
I love the definition / explanation of “media”. I think it helps broaden the term, as there will be more and more different types of media and, as Russell says, it’s hard to know where the edges are. You can slice it up into owned, bought and earned media. You can divide it by channel. but ultimately it’s about the application of that media by the people who are using it.
Extrinsic motivation is rewarding someone for doing something, intrinsic motivation is the thing that drives us to do things we love, like play an instrument or learn a new craft.
So, what motivates people to work harder? It’s not money. Indeed money, weirdly, can make people work less hard.
It reminded me of this
One of Saint’s creatives, James Manning, sent it round a while ago and it’s REALLY good. The content is fascinating but the way is is presenting is also excellent. I’ve embedded it below.
One of the findings was that for purely mechanical tasks, higher pay = higher performance. However, as soon as even rudimentary cognitive skills were involved, higher incentives lead to worse performance! There is loads of evidence and numerous case studies to support this finding.
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough not to have to worry about cash. Then once that has been done, it’s the higher order needs such as autonomy, mastery and purpose which play the most important role.
There’s a company (Atlassian) that, one day a month, allow the workforce to work on whatever they want, how they want and with whom they want. As long as they show what they have done to the rest of the workforce, in a fun meeting. What they have found is that they came up with a load of fixes and improvements to existing projects, plus innovations for new stuff.
At Saint we have something called “The nursery” and it is an excellent example of this. It’s run by Chris Jefford , our Innovation Director. And it exists to create a place for us to innovate, explore and create stuff that is not for any specific client brief but that interests the people involved. Ultimately it does benefit our clients too. If a new technology comes out, we will use the nursery to get to grips with it, so that we can implement it into a project when the time comes. We may also create stuff for clients that they haven’t asked for and if they buy it, great. If not, we have learnt something. typically, you will see Chris and some of the coders and creatives huddled around a pile of dismantled 80’s technology, some Arduino chips, some household devices and a loose brief involving a subject that is topical at the time.
The interesting thing about this is that one of the people involved, a freelance Flash scripter, told Chris that for every half day we pay him to work on the nursery, he will contribute at least half a day for free. It’s interesting to see people staying late and really getting passionate about the projects that come out of there. I don’t think it’s any sort of perverse desire to work on non-paying stuff. It’s just the passion that giving a bit of creative freedom generates.
What interests me most about this is that there’s no reason why the same passion, commitment and genuine excitement can’t be generated on normal paying work too. We have had projects where everyone involved have worked late into the mornings and all weekend even once the project has been well beyond the level expected by the client. But the team wanted to make it better. They wanted to make it the best it could be. If it’s an exciting project and people feel empowered and autonomous, the sky is the limit.
We are now seriously considering how to create a model that actively facilitates this sort of passion on a regular basis. How to give people the ownership and belief that they would have if it was their own side project that they did in their spare time. We all have other interests. The great thing about creative agencies, and especially Saint, is the diversity of people’s interest. There are musicians, sculptors, street artists, and much more. Pretty much everyone has a passion outside of work. However, we are in a unique position to be able to bring our passions to work.
Good advertising agencies are like a petri dish for creativity, where cross fertilisation can lead to beautiful mutations. If we were to harness the collective creativity and passion of our team to even a fraction of its potential, it would be formidable.
The challenge is how to do this. But I am committed to unlocking this potential.
To say I’m proud would be an understatement. We have had creativity and effectiveness rewarded for the same peice of work and it’s precisely the sort of work that we have been banging on about for ages. So, it’s a total vindication and hopefully will help us get more of our clients to buy into what we know is the right approach. Big up the team. You are all legends!
For a funny but sad commentary / discussion / slanging match between much of the respected digital arts community and one “douchebag” director, who didnt need to get involved, go here
It’s a real shame that advertising agencies rip off people’s work so blatantly – without so much as a credit. I’m sure, half the time, that the artist involved wouldn’t even expect money if he were given some recognition.
On Thursday night we threw a party. It was to celebrate the launch of our recent campaign for Kopparberg but it also coincided roughly with Saint’s 3rd birthday, so we combined forces and had a joint knees up!
It was a really good night with plenty of free cider, an excellent live band – Clock Opera, and some Saint DJs like Mark Sun. I was due to be spinning the last set but bowed out the day before in a vein attempt to ensure I left early. Needless to say, I didn’t !
Saint has really matured and no longer creates digital ad ons but proper fully rounded integrated campaigns. It is a serious contender and the Kopparberg work proves this beautifully.
In a nutshell the strategy was to enable the brand to grow without deserting its roots. The sort of people who helped build this brand are the trendy underground party people most likely to be found in the Hawley Arms or the Proud Galleries for example. We landed on the area of discovery and thought this would be a rich seam to explore. The idea is that where you find the sorts of cool stuff these people seek out, you will find Kopparberg.
To articulate this point we found an unsigned band – The Joy Formidable - who had a great track - The Greatest Light is The Greatest Shade. And we held a mini gig, packed it full of party people, various cameras, and shot a promo for them to use for the release. The video will be out soon.
From the same footage, we created a 60 second spot which is currently showing at art house cinemas and may be played on tv shortly. The ad is below.
We used the same assets to create the print executions, once again playing on the discovery theme but also referencing the website, blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed which we created. The blog and Twitter account help facilitate discovery by keeping the followers up to date on the up n coming gigs and parties.
You can access the website here findkopparberg.com. I really love this site. It feels fresh and modern, it is accesible, doesn’t rely on flash, plus it works well on mobile devices and totally nails the brand.
We also created something in conjunction with Vice magazine, called the Kopparberg Klash, which is a way of discovering hot new talent in the creative industries. One such person is perfectly represented in the gifted street photographer, Jonathan Winstone who was at the shoot and took some stunning photos.
The campaign was created with a pretty small budget but by reducing waste, stripping out layers of management, and staying true to the brand we have managed to create an authentic and credible body of work. A fully integrated piece which places just as much importance on the events and blog posts as it does the traditional broadcast activities.
At this year’s F8, Facebook caused quite a stir by announcing some potentially game-changing improvements to the service. But what are they and what does this mean for marketers? The big two are Open Graph and Social plugins – when you put them together, the implications are profound.
Open Graph is a way of linking up the various, disparate parts of your social graph. A social graph is a network of connections and relationships between site users. Typically, these are separate and remain under the control of the site owner but ideally, there would be a centralised social graph that noone (or everyone) owns. You may have a part of the graph pertaining to business, part that covers music, part that covers news, etc. If you could link these all up you could create a smarter, more social semantic web. For example, a news feed item about restaurant review could bring up more information about that restaurant and which of a user’s Facebook friends have been there. This will indeed benefit the users and brands alike as this information is now joined up and much more relevant. Clearly, it will also benefit FaceBook, as they become the holders of the master graph. One commentator summed it up nicely with “One graph to rule them all”
Social Plugins, Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s @anywhere, are a way of putting the Facebook functionality on any webpage. Sites can include activity feeds which show what a user’s friends have done on that site including recommendations and importantly “likes”. So, if you come across a piece of content on the web and you “like” it, all your friends in Facebook can be notified of this fact. The benefit to the website is that they can potentially gain exposure to Facebook’s 400million+ user-base. They can also display the most relevant content to any user, based on their friends and likes – all of which means more traffic and revenue for publishers. The benefit to Facebook is that they gain real estate on pages outside of their previously walled garden and can attract more new users to their database. This is a big step towards changing Facebook from a destination, to a presence on the web.
Within seven days of this announcement, 50,000 sites had implemented Facebook plugins on their sites.
Levis have created a seamless social shopping experience where you can choose to factor in the recommendations of your Facebook friends or leave your own comments by the items of clothing.
CNN allow you to see what content on the site your friends have “liked”. It also lets you know how many people have recommended a piece of news and encourages you to be the first one of your friends to do so.
The internet radio station, Pandora provides a stream on their site showing what music your friends have “liked” as well as recommending playlists based upon the bands you have liked on Facebook.
Check out Scobleizer’s blog for a really detailed post with interviews and reactions from key people.
This sort of stuff benefits brands greatly because there is a low barrier to entry for the user. Liking something takes seconds but that endorsement carries a lot of weight to the user’s network. Research shows that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and people care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them. Simply attaching a like button to a webpage can increase your brand presence, give you exposure to new prospects and produce new insights.
These advancements are definitely a massive improvement for all concerned. It’s certainly a lot more convenient for users and it offers great benefits to brands both on and off of Facebook.com. However, it is not without its issues.
Firstly, I have a problem with the use of the term “open”. It’s not really open. It’s Facebook’s. They are building up a database of the world’s preferences and will leverage this information in the way that benefits them most. There are many blogs detailing the implications of this, a good article can be found on Mashable. The issue is that this information is not only valuable but potentially very powerful and we know from experience that Facebook doesn’t have a great deal of respect for people’s privacy. They have moved the goalposts consistantly over the years, so that information they have gleened under one premise could become subject to a different set of rules in the future. The diagram below summarises Facebook’s changes to the default privacy settings since 2005.
Many people either do not know how to change these settings or didn’t realise they have been changed from their original specification, so are unaware that their data is publicly available. To highlight this vulnerability, there is a search engine called openbook which allows you to search users’ status updates. reclaimprivacy.org is a nice site which has a tool for scanning your privacy settings and suggesting fixes – worth checking out.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg even called the users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data.Read more here – Facbook hasn’t disputed the accuracy of this manuscript – so for this organisation to be the keepers of the world’s preferences is concerning to say the least.
There are open alternatives to Facebook logins (eg. Open ID), but publishers rarely use those because they don’t drive traffic and signups like Facebook logins do. This is the reality of the situation, Facebook has reached critical mass and is in such a powerful position that the smaller organisations stand little chance of competing. It would take the might of Google to shake things up a bit here and I for one am not writing Google off. The issue is, will they be any better than Facebook? Well, it’s the age old principle of competition providing value for consumers. If we had a real choice, we may vote with our feet and these organisations would give us a little more respect. Currently Facebook is pretty much a monopoly on a path set for world domination. Google had better come up with an answer quickly or it may be knocked off its perch.
So, what are the alternatives?
OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.
OpenLike is a system which allows you to “like” stuff on the web – the same way Facebook’s social plugins do. However, this is an open source standard for recommendations – so Open Like would allow anyone who adopts the standard to make use of recommendation data. It’s still early days for this but i will be supporting it. Indeed – the below is an example of it at work. Feel free to “open like” this post!
Diaspora.com is a project being worked on by some students to provide a social network where the users own their data and privacy is taken seriously. See this video for a brief explanation.
Open Like and Diaspora are very much in their infancy but hopefully they will catch on and start to offer some sort of real choice. The problem is, they may end up being like Linux is in comparison to Windows – perfectly fine and truly open but ultimately, the preserve of a few geeks and not quite user friendly enough to crossover into the mainstream. I hope not. There is a huge opportunity for someone to come along and offer the service plus respect for privacy many people are desperate for. As I have said before, humans are inherently social animals and as the web becomes more social it improves the experience dramatically. We just need to exercise a bit of caution when entering this exciting new phase in the web’s development.
This is a fantastic achievement, whether we win it or not. Simply being nominated is a recognition of the quality of the work, and it’s thoroughly deserved. The team who worked on it all cared passionately about the project and went that extra mile at every stage to make it the best it could be. I’m tremendously proud of them all.
This accomplishment is made even more great by the fact that we had a tiny budget and managed to achieve a great deal with the pennies we had to spend. The work itself is well polished with great production values. We managed to use some new technologies such as Augmented Reality invites, which displayed an interactive 3d shape when held up to a webcam, and the results are absolutely outstanding. It was one of the most successful launches the V&A have ever done, surpassing visitor targets by 100%. The campaign reached 1.6 million people online and was featured on 1,122 social media channels.
Essentially, we were asked to promote the up coming Decode exhibition. It was a the largest installation of digital art in Britain and the theme was ‘open source’. These two concepts are an absolute dream to be working with as they provided a fertile ground for our creative concepts to explore.
The V&A had commissioned Karsten Schmidt to design a digital identity for the Decode exhibition. We asked if we could allow the users to get under the hood of this work and recode it themselves. To our surprise, the V&A and Karsten were fine with this. Happy days, this was all of a sudden a potentially very cool project indeed. So, we created a website with an interface that allowed users to control variables and affect the artwork in real time. We also made the code itself available and provided links to all the tools they would need get right down to the details and tinker away as much as they wanted. People could then submit their work to be displayed in the gallery. The best examples were then built into the digital outdoor display, such as the cross track projectors and LCD screens. The very best work was then put into the exhibition itself. This was a great example of UGC or Co-Creation actually providing something that was valuable and not just a gimmick. It was fundamentally in line with the theme of the exhibition and helped increase amplification because the sort of people who would enjoy the installation were also the sort of people who would enjoy tinkering with the code and embraced the open source philosophy.
All in all a really super piece of work and very much in line with the beliefs and values that we at Saint embrace.
