Serendipity Book

Battle of Big Thinking: T-Shirt Suggestion

Get a psychological advantage over your opposition in the APG's Battle of Big Thinking with one of these t-shirts from Off-Normal:

Lacoste Brand Reinvention

Brand reinvention case studies are a valuable commodity in the world of planning. We are forever getting briefs from mature brands that are past their best and are looking for a fresh chance in life.

This Lacoste case study by Influx Insights is therefore most useful.

What can other brands learn from Lacoste's unlikely comeback? The topline is ...

1.    History Can Be Made Relevant to Today
2.    If You Have an Iconic Identity, Use It
3.    Seize Relevant Trends
4.    Don't Be Scared to Innovate
5.    Patience Pays
6.    Scarcity Adds Value

Jump to Influx Insights for the details.

Starcom USA research on youth trends

Another one to remember. Starcom have just published a report on youth trends entitled Brand Sirens which seeks to understand their "rich, multifaceted lives". Starcom conducted the research in partnership with CNET.

It's a mix of ethnography and online quant which, in their words, seeks "to gain a better understanding of technology use, interests and passions, as well as how they become aware of, investigate, consider, purchase, experience, and communicate with others about branded products and services".

Something for a quieter moment perhaps ;-)

Engaging Insurance Ads?

This campaign from Bangkok Insurance succeeds in making insurance interesting. No mean feat. A career as an actuary strangely never appealed to me somehow ;-)

via: Fun & Jokes with Morals

Bullmore on the accelerating pace of change in advertising

The always sagacious Jeremy Bullmore made a fantastic statement about the advertising industry in his regular Campaign agony uncle column yesterday...

"More has happened in the last 18 months than happened between 1955 and 2000."

Wow! Nobody is going to accuse Jeremy of allowing presentism to bias his judgement given that he has been an active participatant to in the advertising industry since the 1960s. Plus, unlike many at ad:tech this week he doesn't have a vested interest in using hyperbole to force change in the industry.

As a footnote, I assume Jeremy is using the date 1955 for comparison because that was the date of the birth of ITV in the UK?

While I'm on the subject of change, I love this quote from Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-born economist, "We live in a perennial gale of creative self destruction" (via Pete Sealey's 10 Trends).

That's almost as bold a statement as the way Paul Saffo talks about the present day technological changes driving a "Cambrian explosion" of creativity.

The Economist on the death of the Newspaper

This week The Economist has a special report on the the decline of the newspaper (available to non-subscribers here and here).

The article does what the Economist always does so well: concisely summarises the issues and offers a dryly observed opinion which never overpowers the narrative.

They open with a quote from Arthur Miller from 1961 which defines the nature of the problem: "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself". Of course that is no longer how many of us converse.

OMD surveys Family 2.0

Quick note to bookmark this interesting piece of research released by OMD (reported at CNET News) claiming that tech drives the family together rather than driving them apart.

Incidentally, I love the CNET news "Big Picture" which they use to show the relationships that exist between their news stories ...

Absolut doesn't get user-generated content

Another brand getting involved in user-generated content. Absolut are now asking for submissions from consumers to be included in a list of lists: The 100 Absolutes.

From AdWeek ...

"Over the next two months, "The 100 Absolutes" campaign on Absolut.com is asking users to nominate their favorites in 100 categories ranging from fashion to jokes to metal band. Their nominations can come in the form of text, photo, video or audio files."

The 100 Absolutes idea is OK (even if it is woefully unoriginal) but, as with many of these examples of brands requesting user participation, I am left wondering why I would want to bother.

On the positive side, unlike this site for the forthcoming relaunch of the Fiat 500, it doesn't ask too much of me. I only need to pop my ideas into their list of categories and maybe upload a file or two to make my point.

But where is my reward? What is my motivation for participation? The submissions of previous participants aren't really very visible so I'm not sure I will get even the tiny thrill of knowing that my post is up there (unlike here where you get more or less immediate fame for submitting your ideas for top 5 t-shirt lists).

Sure, my entry might have an outside chance of being voted as one of the Absolutes but so what, it is not as if I will have done anything remotely difficult anyway - I've merely told you what my favourite bag or bar is. There aren't many egoboos for me even if I win.

Oh and what is the link with Absolut apart from the tenuous link with the name? What has this really achieved for the brand?

Apparently this is not Absolut's first attempt at soliciting user content...

"Earlier this year, Absolut started a drink-mixing site, AbsolutDrinks.com, which solicits recipes from users. Since its launch in January, its drink concoctions have been viewed 1 million times, according to Magnus Walsten, account director for GreatWorks, Absolut's interactive agency in Stockholm, Sweden."

Take a look at the site. Hardly any of the content was contributed by users. Again it fails to successfully reward submissions. This is just an Absolut online cocktail recipe book that happens to allow you to submit your own. You might call it a successful site if you judge it by the views it has got but it isn't really using user-generated content much at all.

World's Largest Artistic Collaboration

I heard about this ambitious collaborative art project called the One Million Masterpiece via deviantART.  They are aiming to collect one million online sketches which they will pull together to create one vast image to raise money for charity.

Great idea but it looks like they have quite a way to go considering that they launched the campaign to the mainstream media in July and only have 3,334 contributors so far. Now they have the support of social networking sites like deviantART, Facebook and Orkut maybe this will take off but I'm not so sure.

Let's think about what might be holding people back here....

Firstly, the organisers are not being that transparent about how they are raising the cash. After exploring the site a bit, it takes a while to realise that they are raising charitable donations by asking people to pay GBP3.50 to contribute. This is a significant barrier to participation and they might be better off removing barriers to participation to encourage collaborative creation. Once they have created something incredible then they may be able to raise donations from exhibiting it perhaps.

Secondly, I'm not sure that they are allowing people enough space for creative expression. If you want people to get an egoboo from participation (that would allow them to justify the GBP3.50 they are giving you to take part) then surely they should be allowed to upload images they have created elsewhere and not just create them using a crude online tool as happens now. Due to the limitations of the tool most contributions look like they have been made by a 5 year old child. Sure there is a risk that people will upload inappropriate material but that is happening already when people use the online painting package provided.

Thirdly, on the perhaps overly cynical view that there is no such thing as true altrusim, they need to encourage people to feel that their contribution may be noticed (egoboos again). It would sensible to assume that one contribution would be lost amongst a million others and it is therefore difficult to feel that your contribution really matters.

This project displays a worrying lack of understanding as to what motivates people to participate in social networks. It's interesting to compare it to similar initiatives on Flickr (yes, I know, I never stop). Following major tragedies like Hurricane Katrina many members of the Flickr community (mostly amateurs) spontaneously give prints of their best work for auction to raise money for charity. Typically they pay for printing and posting themselves. Take a look at the Katrina Auction here.

Anyway, it looks like they may be learning as there has been a change in their thinking over the last few weeks. From a post to their forums by one of the organisers, Paul Fisher:

We’re conducting a test with the community over at deviantArt. We’ve set up a system whereby members can join the OMM without having to make a mandatory donation up front. So why have we done this?

1) We need an injection of numbers. It is generally agreed that it would be better to reach our goal and raise less money than achieve neither.

2) We can request donations from people at a later date - giving them the whole project term to contribute. Obviously we won’t be chasing the guys who have donated already

3) Once we are at a really strong level of artists we can reinstate the minimum donation.

I hope you agree that this is a positive way forward. Of course there is a lot to consider (for example being stricter on people leaving their images blank, plus
trying to eliminate duplicate accounts by the same person), hence the test, but it seems to be working since we have doubled our numbers in 24 hours.

And as he admits further on:

£3.50 isn't much, but apparently it really puts most people off. The charities are on board though, because they will still be able to get access to loads of new people, plus we will kick the donations back in at some point.

What Flickr has taught me about digital photography

Being a member of the Flickr community for the last 18 months has introduced me to loads of new photographic techniques which I would probably never have picked up in any other way.

So far my fellow Flickrites have (passively) taught me how to:

• Trick the eye into thinking your landscape photograph is actually a photo of an architectural model (see the image on the right and there are more examples in this group)
• Achieve hyperreal high dynamic range images by pushing multiple images at different exposures (see this post where I talked about HDR a while ago
• How to create fantastic night photographs with or without a tripod using timers and remotes
• How to capture the blur of movement in action photos by moving the camera
• How to digitally fake fantastic processing effects like cross processing (take a look at this group for examples)
• How to mask images in Photoshop to create effects like cutouts (see my attempts here and here)

Most of these techniques wouldn't have become so popular without cheap digital cameras, access to increased computing power and applications like Photoshop. Digital cameras have fuelled mainstream experimentation in photography, thereby changing what we take pictures of and how we take them. Where once people would have hesitated to take a picture, now they will happily take 10 just to make sure they have got a perfect shot. It's now common to take pictures on the off-chance that they might turn out well and then share these experiments with the world.