Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) from Stewdio on Vimeo.

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

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.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

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:

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.

“The Lowdown: Semantic web” – Adam Graham – AdMap September Issue

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.

I’ve ordered a copy and look forward to reading it.

i like the quote he references from Douglas Adams

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.

But the bit that interested my most is the reference to the work by Deci and the Soma experiment  that deals with Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation.

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.

Watch this space…

Loving this

not only because it’s a great showcase of the Google suite of products but because it uses the native support for Flash that comes with Chrome. See this article for a full explanation

The possibilities are quite profound

Plus the NMA effectiveness award!

Plus, finalist and “in book” for the D&AD awards!

All for our work on: V&A Recode | Decode

Vid hereMy earlier post on it is here here and David Gamble’s interview with the D&AD here

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!

It’s VERY similar to this by Chris O’Shea

Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

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.

Augmented Shadow_document from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo.