Never get out of the boat

Friday, October 26, 2007

mediacamp

It’s now Thursday so its taken me nearly a week to get it together to report on MediaCampBucks last weekend. Around 60 bods gatherered to debate Second Life, podcasting, creative commons, the future of tv and general geekery with an educational bent.

I hosted a discussion on interactive tv advertising, au naturellement. So often viewed as the poor relation of new media, I think I helped open a few eyes - to it’s possibilities as a word-of-mouth platform, conversation and permission asset tool - judging by some of the feedback I got afterwards.

Of course it was not long before the conversation turned to the possibility of ‘TV as an open content platform’. bringing more diverse programming to your tv ,with the majority not coming from the traditional broadcasters (spelling doom cable and satellite providers and paydirt for technology and telco IPTV?).

Like BT Vision (ahem).

To be fair I’m not convinced that TV is going to be dead anytime soon. What we are seeing is an increased number of options/screens where we choose to watch TV, that’s online, timeshifted regular tv, mobile devices, Xbox etc - although anyone who’s tried to use the BBCi player or Joost etc will know that’s its far from the finished article, so there’s lots of fun ahead.

The existing Cable and satellite providers have a head start as they already provide the infrastructure to get the tv and broadband into the home. Lets forget about the Long tail for a second, at the end of the day viewers will take the road that’s easiest. TV is a mass medium, for most of us dicking about with umpteen stbs and streaming in from here and there is just too much hassle for the 2 hours of tv a day we want.

If they can figure out how to get the following to the viewers, the cable and satellite providers will be laughing:

1- the content we want, when we want it (ie on demand)
2- the ability to time shift the schedule (for all) – live events, 24hr news etc
3- the ability to Search and pull content from wherever it is?
4- the ability to share and recommend?

That would do for me. Who’s going to pay? If it’s a top notch service, I will pay a subscription and advertisers will pay to get their messages into the correct living rooms based on some sort of behavioural tracking or something. And it’s all interactive.

It’s channel brands that have the most to worry about, in a time shifted, on demand environment who cares who’s bringing you ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. Is it Paramount or Channel4? Not bothered, just get me it.

Enough about tv, and like the fella once said, I never make predictions, particularly about the future.

Highlight of the day for me, and a few others I think, was Sam Ismail’s presentation on how he and fellow adlad, Anton, took liberties with Saatchi & Saatchi with a couple audacious attention grabbing scams.

I wont go into the detail, The the stories are here and here.

Suffice to say they got themselves noticed by not being afraid to ruffle the feathers of the establishment.

Sam’s presentation was themed around job hunting for grads looking to break into advertising but ended up being about using new media as a personal branding tool. He summed up by saying the ultimate goal was; when his cv landed on the desk of the hiring person in the ad agency – they would already know who he was. Word.

I don’t think he’s going to have too many problems getting hired when the time comes.

Finally, thanks to organiser and Second Life guru, Chris Hambly for pulling the day together, and some linkage for Jason Jarrett, ‘veteran’ of podcasting and the man with the golden tonsils. I often listen to his abuddhistpodcast on my way home on the train. To be fair I have no idea what he’s on about half the time but he has a fantastic calming talking voice – It was nice to meet at last. Likewise Twitter buddy and Social media guru, Lloyd Davis.

Some new connections too, Brett Porter from the musicians collaborative thingy oomix and Melinda Seckington aka miss geeky , who is reporting on various similar days across Europe.

Another interesting guy who I never got a chance to catch up with properly was Microsoft tech blogger , Steve Lamb. Maybe he’ll see this.

Thats it, I need to get off to the creative geeks meet up tonight in Soho.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

ok now i'm really confused

Thanks to talent imitates genius steals for alerting me to this one.

Jerry Seinfeld, of legendary Seinfeld fame, has a new movie coming out that he conceptualised, co-wrote and stars in. It's about a bee. It's called Bee Movie [like B movie - see what he did there?]

He has also created a number of behind the scenes comic vignettes in a neat spin on the trailer, which are being aired on NBC. According to TIME:

Though the shorts are designed to promote the film on the Internet, NBC acquired the rights to air them during commercial breaks in an effort to encourage viewers to watch the neighboring advertisements.

So, there are now content breaks in the ad breaks to get you to watch the ads, but the content is itself a commercial message, except the broadcaster paid the advertiser to run them.

Post quoted in full, heres the link to see the clip.

the car as digital distribution channel/device?

Stumbled on this article. from the brandsbandsfans site.
Nokia and Apple both moving in on the auto industry as another digital distribution channel and Nissan leading the way with experimentation.

excerpt...
“Everything is digital, so we had to find a way to reconnect to this generation,” says Mixim creator Francois Bancon. Nissan’s latest concept car, Mixim, models itself on a gamer’s experience of driving, complete with an xbox-styled steering wheel. The Nissan Pino offers buyers drag and drop pimping of the car’s interior. Choice is the new driver here.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

more rabbit than sainsbury's

Here's my tuppenceworth on the Sony rabbits.
I've only done 3 rabbits in the pic (red, green and blue), this saves time because all tv pictures are made up of those 3 colours anyway ;)

You can't argue it's not a pretty decent execution and full marks to the animators, art directors and cinematoraphy etc. The main debate Ive been reading about is around wether the idea was ripped off, but I'm not really bothered about that.

I think it was either Bob Dylan or Neil Young who nce said, something like,
'My only talent as a songwriter is the ability to open up a valve in my head to let the songs flow in from outside'. ie all the songs/ideas are out there floating about, someone just has to be a channel for them.

That's coming from a proper artist. As 'creatives' in advertising/marketing or whatever thats what we do. Hijack cultural phenomena and refashion into branded messaging etc. If we are being really clever we manage to make these communications (broadly)
a - relevant
b - authentic
c - useful
d - facilitate a dialogue

Unfortunately the rabbits thing does none of the above.
It's straight outta the old school of Pavlovian 'conditioned response' branding.
Instill an association between stimuli so that encountering one will bring the other to mind. That model is getting pretty tired now.
All that a 30: with budget of a small Hollywood movie tells me is that the product must be over-priced if they can afford to spend that much on spray and pray.

I'm not in the market for a new tv and no amount of shouting at me is going to change that. In fact, it's annoying me.
And even I were shopping, I'll get a recommendation from my geeky mate or go online and see what people who know about this stuff are saying.
That's where 'advertising' need to be too, in there - listening and contributing.

Old ad habits die hard though, a bit like trying to maintain a decent crack habit.
After one hit all you can think about is the next one. And , of course, the subsequent hits is never the same as the first so you need to up the dose each time.
Very expensive and not really sustainable (inevitably ending in death, but maybe that's too much drama)

I'm an interactive guy, what do you want me to say?

But heres something that anyone who's ever managed a team, done any teaching or been in a position where they are trying to influence behaviour will know. It's the first rule of engagement.

'Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I might remember. Involve me and I'll understand'
- Confucius

While we're on about dangerous narcotics, how much funnier would it have been if Nokia's music sponsorship participation programme thingy Rock Up and Play had featured Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse in some way?

note: can't believe i've managed to quote Chas'n'Dave and Ivan Pavlov in the same article.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Facebook group

Theres now a facebook group for this blog.
Feel free to join if you like and meet/share etc with other readers
and, of course, pimp your own stuff.
See you over there.

Close, but no cigar...

Spent a day at Ad:tech last week and had a stroll round the exhibition area. Chatted to a few of the stalls, mostly iptv/web tv people, stuff like that.
Many business cards exchanged as you would imagine. Anyway, now the follow up emails start to trickle in. Most get binned straight away as they are bog standard sales-ey type things. One caught my eye though.

Subject: Great to meet you at ad:tech last week.

Hmm, the personal touch. I'm liking it so far...

then doink!

The opening line is...

Dear Sir/Madam...

delete.

You nearly got me thinking this was a personal and relevant follow up.
You've got my business card and my email address but you can't take the extra 5 seconds to simply address me by name in the mail? So near yet so far.

I wish i could finish this post with the ultimate irony and tell you the guilty party was an email marketing firm, sadly it was not.

I'm not going to name and shame either.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Caetano Veloso

The music business is going through rapid changes as we all know.
In the past bands/artists would record an album then go on tour to promote it - sales would follow.

Of course now it's turned on its head and new records are more like the promo tools for the live experience - see the recent free Prince album ahead of his extended residency at the Millenium Dome (still can't get my head round calling it the O2) and just this week Radiohead's announcement that fans will be able to purchase their new album for whatever price they deem appropriate. Further musings on this and the trust economy by Mitch Joel over here.

With that in mind, delivering in the live setting is more important than ever. That makes it especially disappointing when things dont live up to expectations and artists lose sight of what their audience wants from them.

One of my colleagues, Esther Duran, is an afficionado of the bossa nova and a devotee of Caetano Veloso, one of the most important figures in contemporary Brazilian music. His works are considered masterpieces. Caetano says, "I make my records as a painter would paint his canvas".
He made a rare appearance in London, at the Barbican Arts Centre, the other night. Here is Esther's review.

"I really like Caetano Veloso and his seductive voice and guitar playing. I like him so much that I bought a ticket for his Barbican concert three months ago. Last night was the final night, the count down arrived to an end, Caetano’s performance at the Barbican was already with me!

Little did I know Caetano wasn’t playing the Bossa Nova and Samba that I knew him for, instead he was performing a crap rock and roll with pseudo-ska derivations…something very unusual for Caetano.

Is he in his middle age crisis? If so, he should have bought a Porsche convertible instead of wasting my money (40 pounds per ticket) and my time (2 hours of flashing lights and non-sense electric guitar)

Caetano please, come back to your senses and play the music that everyone knows you for. Leave the rock and roll and pseudo-ska for younger people and please, Caetano don’t be six years without releasing an album and reappear to the public with that pile of shit."

It stikes me that poor Caetano has messed up with a redundant mass marketing approach.
By compromising his sound to try and appeal to a wider mass audience he's only gone and pissed-off and alienated the audience he already had. Ergo trying to appeal to everyone and you end up appealing to no-one. Not only that, a fair chunk of the audience were newbies who had been coaxed along by their friends 'in-the-know' to witness 'the master'. Now he's also made his hardcore fans look like divvies into the bargain. Theres a lesson here.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

the road to domestos

To paraphrase CJ from Reggie Perrin 'I didn't get where I am today by not writing pretentious biogs and generally blowing my own trumpet at the drop of a hat to whoever happens to be wandering by'
Heres the article about my self what I wrote for Sam and Will's adgrads blog, just giving some background as to how i got from A to B on the murky dark underbelly fringes of advertising. For some reason they reckon this might be interesting to graduates looking for their first jobs.

FLASH!

It's 1992 and I'm in the back office of the record shop in Aberdeen that I manage.

I'm clutching a brown cardboard envelope containing an Italian white label 12" record that's been mailed to me by one of the specialist importer/distributers I buy from. The note attached tells me they are hopeful of doing some business with this record and what did i think? It will be available as an import in about 3 weeks.

On the blank white label the words Glam - Hell's Party are scribbled in black marker.

I dump the record onto the turntable and drop the needle on. Its a full on Euro house/disco stomper that samples Curtis Mayfield from 'If theres a Hell Below..'

On first listen, I'm thinking that I could probably shift about 20-25 of these on import before any UK release and decide to give it a whirl at one of my dj engagements at the weekend.

Over the next few weeks I play it at every gig and everywhere it drops the roof goes off. It's a monster tune. When the labelled copies are finally available I end up selling over 250 12" on import over the following couple of months before it's picked up by Sony in the UK, remixed and released for a stab at the charts.

The Sony rep calls me to sell in his new releases and offers it as a 1 in 3 deal (ie buy 3 get one free) expecting a big order. I buy 6. Ive already sold 250 on import so I'm done with it, now it's time for HMV or whatever to takeover.

A 'Tipping Point' in action before anyone had properly coined those phrases.

Recap...

The distributer gave me one of the few white labels knowing my history of being able to sell decent numbers of Italian imports. I'm also a reasonably well-known dj in Scotland. An influencer [sic] in my niche.

I play the record at the clubs I'm booked at (the small ones that are full of the clued-up kids on the scene in their towns) - the cool kids love it and want it. When it's available they are the first to have it and play it at there own parties. The idea spreads. The specialist shops sell shed loads on import.

Sony cool detectors pick up the record for mass market - its in all the chains and hits the top 40.

It's hit the early and late majority.

It was round about this time I realised that I was destined for marketing because, without any formal training or anything, I just intuitively understood a bit of this stuff.

FLASH!

It's now 2007.

I'm working with Weapon7, a specialist digital advertising agency in London, using basically the same principles to develop digital marketing campaigns for global brands. It's come full circle again as traditional mass advertising is looking like it's not as as effective as it was in the pre-digital age, with word of mouth - this time accelerated by networked connectivity on an unprecedented scale. An evolved (fuzzy) role (geek marketer? T-shaped creative? Job 2.0? – delete as appropriate) with an evolved agency.

I quit the music industry around ’96 after helping launch a group of indie labels. We released about 15 records a month for 3 or 4 years. No big hits but being in the Long Tail kept us ticking over – we could sell about 2,000 of any release so it made sense to release loads rather than look for one big hit.

I then picked up my crayons again (I had hardly drawn anything since leaving Art School in 89 with a fine art degree) and spent a year or so learning how to work a mac on the job at the local newspaper setting ads.

Next stop was a small design and comms agency based in Aberdeen where we worked with the oil companies on everything from brochures, intranets and safety videos. The big lesson there was – never say no to a job. If we didn’t know how to do it we’d just go and figure it out. Try, fail and learn.

Decamping to London in 2000 I had the idea that interactive tv was going to be the next big thing, post dot com crash. After about 18 months at Sky I realised that probably wasn’t my smartest move (fail and learn, again) and then became Creative Director with Littlewoods Gaming, an old fashioned company looking to launch its gambling products into the 21st century and a market dominated by young pretenders like 888.com.

Around this time, I had my next epiphany when I was given a copy of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. It seemed like everything I had been thinking but unable to articulate properly was encapsulated in those pages.

‘Pouring off every page like it was written in my soul’ as Bobby D would say – that’s maybe a bit dramatic but you get where I’m coming from, however naive that sounds now.

My advice for grads making their first tentative steps into industry?

Well, if you are clever enough to be reading this blog and participating in these conversations you don’t need much from me. You already realise the power of community and dialogue in modern marketing. You are smarter than the average bear already.

Your potential employers and clients are desperate for new thinking, fresh approaches and innovation that’s going to keep their products/services and marketing relevant – beyond 30 second spots, no matter how smarty pants (I’m thinking drumming gorillas here…)

Be fuzzy, poke your nose in where its not wanted, challenge the status quo, don’t ask permission for anything and be prepared to fail and learn.

That’s about it.

Packing Up The Big Top from Modern Marketing

Another great article from James Cherkoff on his Modern Marketing page, musing on a wisdom of crowds theme.

When people want to know about something they go online and see what everyone else thinks. They don't rush to the corporate website to check out what gems the guys in marketing have come up with. Or to see if the new jingle is going to pique their aspirations. They jump in the bazaar. Trip Advisor. Amazon. Blogs....These days the problem isn't a lack of helpful opinion or market intelligence.

Read the comments as well as there's some great stuff in there.

Monday, September 24, 2007

mind the gap

A wee while back we were playing the Beatles 'Love' mash-up (sort of) album in the office. Much debate ensuing over the merits of the remix experiment, who might have done it better etc etc. One of our designers (i'll not mention her name so as not to completely destroy her credibility) pipes up...

'Who is this we are listening to?'

Hard to belive that someone can get to her mid twenties and have never come across the Beatles but there you go. It happened.

So, where are the gaps in your culturals? Which phenomenons have completely passed you by, much to the amusement and/or derision from your workmates/friends?
I've started plugging one of my gaps this weekend.

The Sopranos.

Somehow, despite devouring Goodfellas, the Godfathers, Casino etc and every thing Scorcese so much as farted I completely missed the Sopranos.

So to HMV where the boxsets are on £25 special offer, season 1 purchased and this weekend spent glued to the box catching up. Basically looking to do a season every two weeks so by about November-ish I'll be there, and can then rejoin the rest of the human race.

What's this got to do with anything? nowt really, but just to note the fatblogging has taken a knock as we felt compelled to stuff ourselves with meatballs and spaghetti all weekend for some reason. I'm 6lbs heavier now than when I started the diet.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

the revolution will be televised?

Heard Alex Cameron from Digital TX giving it the big one last night at Chinwags TV on the Web thing. I’ve been a bit of a fan since his glorious, if slightly flawed, Hendrix inspired rant at BT Vision’s iptv-lite last year.

Difficult times for network tv for a while, of course.

So heres the thing as I understand it.
Old style network tv existed mainly through advertiser funding. Digital and cable exploded as the first wave of fragmentation, advertisers don’t get the eyeballs they need for the critical mass so ad spending gets similarly fragmented. Less revenue means less new programming gets commissioned/made/bought and we get cheaply produced reality shows etc. More viewers switch off, advertisers get twitchy, programming gets worse etc etc – downward spiral.
Next wave of fragmentation, web delivered content, extends the long tail even further, mass media advertising becomes even less effective, media spending diverts even more to digital and interactive, more viewers desert tv.
In fact the tv content gets so poor that consumers end up making ther own instead.

What now?

In the Q&A Project Kangaroo was mentioned. As far as I can glean this is an idea around consolidation of all the media players and on-demand services. from the major UK broadcasters. The BBC is working with ITV, Channel 4 and the service will be built on the same P2P basis as the iPlayer, and later as a digital TV service. Can’t get my head round this working against the Long Tail distribution though? Dunno.

At the end of the day, we the viewers want great content, movies, live sport etc, same as ever, but don’t necessarily want to pay for it. Whether the broadcasters like it or not this is the model going forward so that’s what needs to be figured out.

But who is going to pay for it? The advertiser funded model is not really sustainable is it?

One heckler correctly noted that the future may be in a return to a sponsorship model from the old days of soaps (I’d forgotten that The name soap opera stems from the original serials broadcast on radio that had washing powder brands as sponsors)

Maybe, but perhaps a more evolved sponsorship model where the brand as sponsor is integral to the content. Theres a movie precedent of course with product placement – FedEx famously supplied all the transportation facilities for production of the movie Cast Away in which they were heavily featured (although no dirty cash changed hands)
I keep coming back to Where are the Jones’s partnership idea. Production co and community co-created, corporate sponsored (Ford) and Long tail distributed. (Though I’m not 100% sure the sponsor is integral to the content, keep me right here Dave!)
Brands as providers kind of thing.

As an aside, what does stuff like X Factor and those awful Lloyd-Webber find a star things mean? It's a kind of stealth product placement. The ’entertainment’ is the deconstructed production process of the one hit wonder fodder or whatever.
Although this has being around since The Monkees – but at least they had a few good tunes.

UPDATE
more perspective on the Chinwag Web TV take-over
Fiona Blamey
Rags Rupta
Broadstuff

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Electric Business

I spent Monday evening having a conversation with a group of small creative business owners - from the Surrey/Hampshire area - in Guildford.

Many thanks to Kate from the Farnham Electric Business Club for asking me to fill in.

I was asked to give a short presentation and kick off a discussion and braindump to see if we could collectively come up with some ideas and tactics around the theme of 'Know your Product'.
In retrospect I think I tried to squeeze a bit too much content into the presentation as I had to whizz through to allow enough time for the dialogue piece, and despite leaving my notes in the cab I just about managed to wing it.

My presentation was loosely themed around the value of conversation and connection strategies for small businesses with low or no budget for marketing.
I started off with a sort of case study of a piece of work we did at Weapon7 for the launch of Xbox360 which went viral via the Xbox fan forums. Using a fraction of the media budget it created a disproportionate buzz compared the more expensive media and showed how getting the early adopters and influencers talking can accelerate the spread of an idea.

I introduced gapingvoid's Stormhoek blogger outreach from 2005 and neatly segued in the launch of the Blue Monster label (how cool to be featuring it on day of launch) to demonstrate the influence of social media and show the value of unlikely partnerships, and followed that up with a look at Go Home Productions - how garden shed remixer's cgc ends up on MTV and remixes for David Bowie.

The homework for the group was to connect to me, join the conversation, start experimenting with new tools/tactics outside of traditional marketing and look into the kind of innovations that can develop the talkability of their product or service.

I also promised some recommended reading to get some thinking going, I'm going to list a couple of things here for those who have done the homework and looked me up.

BOOK - Seth Godin's Purple Cow , when I first read this about 3 years ago all sorts of lightbulbs started going off in my head.

PODCAST - to get enthused about all things new media you could do worse than Six Pixels

BLOG - Any of the links on my sidebar will lead you off to many more links.

And in the spirit of link-love heres the people who left me their cards at the end.

Claire Harrison, Fine Artist
Designer, Nick Cannons
Another designer, Andrew Cross
The Boiler Room, Guildford music and arts venue.

Whats the pic all about? On my way to work I usually buy a coffee off Mr Coffee, a van parked on the courtyard ouside new Spitalfields market. Despite having Starbucks, Costa and numerous other established coffee chains around them, Mr Coffee has a long line every morning. Instead of the usual boring loyalty stamp cards you get a free pair of pants with every 20 coffee's. Or if you just ask they will give you a pair anyway.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Look out kid, You're gonna get hit

As a Dylan freak, I'm loving this.
Send your own Subteranean Homesick Blues message.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

too much monkey business

"We've created a branded space in which Cadbury's can be generous in bringing joy,"

Yep, the Cadbury's ad with the gorilla doing Phil Collins.
You can't argue that it's a pretty funny and entertaining piece of content, decently executed. A bit of random Youtube-esque silly-ness in fact.

Yes, it's gone viral and theres a lot of debate about it

but did it need the massive tv budget to do that...?
and is it more about the clever dicks behind it than the brand...?

It's here

Quechup spam

sorry if i've spammed you with that Quechup thing. I got an invite from a trusted source and signed up to see what it was, then the b'stards hi-jacked my address book and spammed everyone. apologies again.

Go Home Productions retrospective

Arguably one of the finest exponents of the art of mash-up/bootleg/bastard pop - Go Home Productions - has released a 20 track retrospective 'cd' compiliation this week. "This Was Pop (2002-2007)" A 5 year bootleg retrospective.
GHP has delivered some of the most celebrated examples of the mash-up genre over the last few years including the Madonna/SexPistols fusion 'Ray of Gob' and 'Rapture Riders', the Blondie/Doors hybrid.

The mash-up phenomenon exploded around 2001/2 as bedroom mixers, enabled by the democratisation of music production allowed by software such as Acid, Ableton and later garageband fused acapella tracks with the instrumental tracks of other records to create new 'remixes’. 'Stroke of Genius' was probably the biggest of the time and that spawned an MTV slot with the video mash-ups to compliment the tracks and Mash-up club nights like ‘Bastard’.

GHP’s retrospective is a pretty decent introduction if anyone’s missed out.

GHP is also a pretty interesting case study in a couple of the basic ideas of the new marketing.

I'm thinking about, the power of free, permission and the product is the marketing.
By giving away the tracks for free via his website and mash-up community blogs like GYBO and Boomselection (early example of the long tail of distribution..?) GHP has build a fanbase and mailing list, with permission to contact the list when there’s new tracks uploaded.
With this comes reputation and with that comes dj bookings, ‘legit’ remix work etc.
From fiddling in the shed to official remixes for Bob Dylan and David Bowie is quite a ride.

Of course, it helps that his work is shit-hot. As an art form that is by nature ‘user-generated’ there are thousands of wannabe mash-up artists making pretty average at best, shoddy at worst mixes, but GHP’s ‘Purple Cow’ is the vast musical knowledge from years of fandom which allows him to introduce the little extra elements into his tracks that the less detail focussed would miss. In ‘Rock in Black’ - the Queen and AC-DC blend – the little addition of Freddie’s ‘..get on your bikes and ride’ line is that knowing final piece of polishing that gives it the extra 5% .

Anyway, the tracks are here.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Chromeo

A couple of the guys that have done some work with us recently have also made this promo clip for the new Chromeo album.
Pretty cool i think you'll agree.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

fatblogging wk#5 28_08_07

bit of a breakthrough this week. now 16st 6lb. 4 pounds off.
now its coming off i'm setting inital target of 14 stone by December.
Ive no idea if that's realistic?

Friday, August 24, 2007

Flogging a dead horse.

Campaign magazine run a feature this week, maybe influenced by the 7 deadly sins of digital - they home in on the 7 deadly sins of advertising, as illustrated by the most commonly used stereotypes and cliches.
Ranging from buffoon dads to single women with cats and 'crowds united for a cause'.
What's more remarkable is - how they narrowed the list down to seven.

The article is not online as I write but heres a couple of snippets to give you a flavour.

'Using stereotypes allows advertisers to communicate layers of meaning built up across centuries to a mass audience very quickly'

hmm, perhaps the only mass audience is the one that is fast forwarding past these ads with their Sky+.

'Great advertising shouldn't resemble the act of looking through a window at the world...in a world where we're given so much in the way of horror stories, greyness and hardship, the last thing we need is to see more of that in our ad break'

Er no, we use stuff like Art, Music, Movies to escape, not ads.

'Society still looks to advertising to entertain, promise and show world truths without it's gritty traumas' - the editorial.
Well, you wouldn't expect the industry rag to turn on it's own community but...

Maybe this stuff was true 20/30 years ago but the world has changed, consumers have changed and the rules of engagement are different. We are just not paying attention any more.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

MediaCamp BUCKS 07

Got my felt pens out and designed this nifty web 2.0 friendly ;) logo for MediaCamp BUCKS. I'm also pleased to add that I hooked up with Chris Hambly, the founder, to add my (considerable - see fatblogging) weight to any organisational areas where I can be of use.

For anyone reading this who would like to get involved, whether to present, sponsor or to participate in any way - the usual un-conference rules apply (ie there are no rules) - visit the wiki here for more info.

MediaCamp BUCKS is an UnConference with a strong educational flavour for bloggers, podcasters, and new media professionals & amateurs for one day to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media.

When? Friday 19 October - Saturday 20 October 07
Where? Buckinghamshire Chilterns University, England, UK about half an hour from London - website