Serendipity Book

Cadbury's Gorilla

Loving the new Cadbury's work (via the CR blog). Watch it here. Look out for the earphone.

The Independent has an interesting article which includes an interview with Fallon's Laurence Green who comments "Advertising can be effective without a traditional 'message', 'proposition' or 'benefits'. Indeed, some of the latest advertising thinking suggests that attempts to impose them can actually reduce effectiveness. We are trading our traditional focus on proposition and persuasion in favour of deepening a relationship."

The Mirror's "business" section prefers to interview Phil Collins who says "Not only is the gorilla a better drummer than me, he also has more hair. Can he sing, too?"

It's interesting to note that this film has gone viral with ease. Front page of Metafilter and Delicious in under 24 hours. A Mefi commenter noted that Chris Cunningham used a somewhat similar concept for an Aphex Twin video:

Waster

You'll all have seen this famous 1999 image of a supermarket, '99c' by Andreas Gursky which vividly illustrates the overwhelming choice on offer in a modern grocery store:

If you like that, you may like some of the work of Chris Jordan. Some of his images featured in the pages of The Guardian today. His work is designed to draw attention to the volume of waste created by a modern consumer society. Much of it creates a similar visual impact to Gursky's '99c'.

His image 'Cans Seurat', below, depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds, to recreate the pointillist masterpiece 'The Walk' by Georges Seurat. The full size image is 60" by 92".

At partial zoom:

Close up:

10 Interesting Nuggets

An eclectic selection of 10 nuggets from my Bank Holiday reading:

1. 51% of live births in London in 2005 were to a mother who was herself born overseas (The Guardian)
2. The UK has the fourth highest population density within the OECD behind South Korea, The Netherlands, Japan and Belgium (BBC)
3. More than 70% give up watching a video within 10 seconds if presented with a pre-roll ad (YouTube)
4. Only 5 houses and 3 bungalows were demolished to build the initial 72 mile southern section of the M1Motorway in the 1950s (quoted in BBC4's Secret Life of the Motorway)
5. 80% of work conversations happen when one person simply passes another's desk. (UCL / Space Syntax)
6. Office paper consumption has increased 40% since the introduction of email (The Myth of the Paperless Office)
7. In 1949, 81% of British men and 39% of women smoked (Matthew Hilton's Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800-2000)
8. In the 5 years following the introduction of PowerPoint the time spent making speeches or presentations in British firms increased by 31.9 per cent (Exclusion, Employment and Opportunity)
9. In the four months after the introduction of the Belisha Beacon road crossing scheme, 3,000 of the 15,000 that had been installed in London had been destroyed! (Daily Telegraph, 4th Jan 1935)
10. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the amount of walking in Britain reduced by 25 per cent (The Cost of Bad Design, CABE)

Credit: Nuggets 4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10 were all found in Joe Moran's excellent book about our changing daily lives 'Queuing for Beginners'.

Note on the photo: I took the photo above with my back to Durdle Door in Dorset. I bet it will be busier today!

Moo Sticker Books

Those creative printing types at Moo have started doing these lovely vinyl sticker books. Pocket size, they hold up to 90 stickers which can be based on your own photographs or on images that they kindly provide for you.

Some people on Fickr have been sharing images of their completed sticker books here and here.

One guy has created a sticker book from photos he has taken of the upholstery of the London tube trains.

Someone else has had a go at making stickers like pin badges which contain random words with different typographic treatments.

However, as with the Moo minicards I think they are just a tad too small to display photographs well. Come on Moo, print me some bigger stickers.

You're too kind

I so wish I had one of these as a child. Along with a remote control helicopter and one of those miniature Mercedes SL roadsters and a set of x-ray specs. To be without these things as a child was to feel deprived.

As an only child I was often accused of being "spoilt". Hearing my mum say I was spoilt was as much a part of my childhood as hearing that "money doesn't grow on trees", that I was "only showing off", "shouldn't answer back" and was "just overtired". A staple of my parents' predictable repartee.

For me it's interesting to note that in our society spoiling our children is sometimes considered to be as big a faux pas as depriving them.

My dictionary defines spoiling as "harming the character of a child by being too lenient or indulgent" or "to treat with great or excessive kindness, consideration or generosity".

What I think we largely mean when we talk about spoiling our children is being too generous and giving our children whatever they want, whether that be material possessions, the ice cream they want or another go on their PS3.

As Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations, "the real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." In other words, if things come too easily to us we do not value them.

To paraphrase the title of a memorable psychology text, disappointment is important.

In our society, "spoilt brats" are the antipathy of good, well-behaved children, and yet there is still clearly significant demand for luxury goods for children. As parents we all walk a fine line between wanting to give our children the best of everything and giving them what is best for them.

But going back to that definition we clearly believe that there are limits to generosity, but is it really possible to be too kind? Can being the recipient of 'excessive kindness' as a child somehow teach us that love comes too easily?

Clearly some do believe that unconditional love is a poor foundation for life or we wouldn't talk so supportively about giving our children character-building experiences.

Are there possibly two discrete types of spoilt children then -- those that have been given too much and those that are loved too much?

A roundup of the week

A hasty roundup of some interesting things I've chanced upon in the last week...

• Management Today asks "Has the ad biz lost it's lustre?";
• The Guardian reports on a documentary maker who purposefully overdosed on the output of The Daily Mail in the interests of science and entertainment (via Ben);
• The New York Times discusses the perils of asserting idea ownership ... "a great idea is owned by whoever expresses that idea most successfully" (via Cubemate);
• Spiked analyses the contradictions inherent in what we believe and what we do in the name of saving the planet;
• Time magazine reviews some newly published research on buyer behaviour;
• The New York Times crunches the old 'ads as entertainment' chestnut; and
• A special edition of ICON magazine presents 50 manifestos by well known architects (and a contribution from London's mayor, Ken Livingstone)

Then, on a lighter note...

• This is a video news report on the annual Chav Hunt;
• It seems that we have been honoured by a visit by the Flying Spaghetti Monster;
• Here's some help if you were looking for a place to buy a chicken suit (that's a suit for a chicken btw);
• This company specialises in helping with some of the less pleasant aspects of rural life; and
• The boffins at MIT are proposing a way of harnessing the power generated by our addiction to retail.

That's not my desk

Oh, to be surrounded by furniture like this at work.

I just can't think of a chair that would do it justice.

From Conran UK or USA

Fantastic piece of '60s anti-LSD propaganda

"The hot dog told me not to eat him as he had a wife and seven kids at home to support ... I was jumping on this hot dog in the middle of market street. I realised I had murdered it".

via PRBlogNews