Interesting campaign from Swedish Armed Forces. The Swedish army needs to recruit people into an occupation that requires you to give up your own comfort in order to help others. To draw attention to this, they created a real event, (beamed digitally in real time) in Stockholm to see how far people are willing to go for one another. The construct was simple. A person agreed to sit inside a small box until someone replaced him (on their own volition). The question was “who cares?” Every hour a door would open, and if someone else was there to take his place, he could leave. The whole event was broadcasted around the city live on digital outdoor sites as well as Online where people could see his fate and decide whether they would help (but this could only be done by going to the box and taking the place yourself).

This is a really interesting experiment and according to their metrics it was successful but I can’t help but feel it was missing something…the sense that something real was happening for instance – this was so clearly a false construct and did not reflect the reality of war or really helping others at the expense of your own comfort.

A great example which blurs the line between reality and fiction is this public safety campaign from the Netherlands. You may have seen it before but its powerful stuff – simple but super clever. The insight was that public service employees in the Netherlands face aggression and violence on the streets more and more often. Onlookers unfortunately do not intervene often enough when they encounter a situation like this – they simpley don’t know how to react. A live interactive billboard in Amsterdam and Rotterdam was used to place people in a similar situation witch confronts them with their inactivity. Enjoy.

John

What’s happened this week:

• Facebook have begun to test a consumer pay to post scheme as another potential revenue source, if it succeeds it will be another example of the emerging ‘branded consumer’.
• Google+ for iOS re-launched with a very distinctive look and feel.
• Bing has reinvented itself around social search with a specialist set of results.  ‘What your friends may know’ is taken from our ever expanding social graph. 

 What we have learned:

• US consumers now spend more time on Facebook Mobile than on the main website, a sign of the fundamental shift to mobile happening all over the world.
• Smartphones are tracking to be the fastest adopted technology of all time.
• The Mobile industry is set to be worth USD 1.5trn this year over 2% of Global GDP.

 Cool stuff

• A sign of the emerging Internet of things, a milk jug that texts you when you are low on milk.
• Clothes Horse is a new suite of tools to link personal body data to retailer stock and style information to create a more streamlined and curated service.
• New tools to increase Facebook engagement such as the edge rank checker. Increasingly important in the ever growing eco-system of Facebook apps.

 Where to find more:

• The re-invention of TV, NDS have an interesting vision for the future of our TV sets; modular and passively obedient.
• *Angel investor Roger McNamee believes that we are on the verge of a new phase of the Internet disruption where content will be far easier to monetize (primarily due to html5 driving intelligent ad models).
• Susan Greenfield believes that mobile is changing the way that we think as it increasingly becomes the focus of our domestic lives, something akin to the piano in the Victorian era. 

 - Sam (thanks to JP and the Future group)

While Avengers Assemble continues to do well at the box office and The Dictator has been released today amid positive reviews, anyone with ANY sense this weekend will be choosing to go and see the latest Momentum release - The Raid...

Out of love for the film animator Lee Hardcastle has created an awesome Claymation version of the trailer, featuring cats.

For the uninitiated. Lee Hardcastle has his own YouTube channel which features his ‘Claymation’s that are not for children’, and famously once coupled Pingu with The Thing.

Lee’s cat based Claymation interpretation has already received over 220,000 views since it was posted on May 11^th, all with zero media budget pushing it. Instead it has been picked up with Twitter receiving positive praise from people such as Mike Shinoda (of Linkin Park fame) who is behind the films soundtrack.

Enjoy

John (thanks to Chris for sharing)

Ben and I went to a great talk last night hosted by LBi and put together by Creative Social. Excellent speakers riffing and ranting on a provocative subject…NO! Each speaker spitted and swore their way through the world of advertising, regaling tales of what really makes them think, scream or cry…..NOOOOO!

Speakers…

Sam Ball, Creative Partner, Lean Mean Fighting Machine

Laura Jordan, Bambatch, Creative Director, Dare

Steve Price, Creative Director, Plan-B Studio

Becker Power, Executive Creative Director, Grand Union

Flo Heiss, Executive Creative Director, Dare

Andy Sandoz, Creative Partner and Innovation Director, Work Club

 Quick run-down of the eve below…

1. Sam talked bullsh*t…or to be more precise, that there’s more bull in advertising than anywhere, ever. Full of charlatans espousing nonsense. His view, think critically. So-called experts may not be. If Newtonian physics was proven to have holes in it, the stuff you hear in our world every day probably does too. Think about stuff, don’t just accept it.
2. Laura we learnt is an existentialist (dangerous position given Sam’s opening gambit). For her, and contrary to accepted wisdom, existentialists are essentially positive. So celebrate what’s possible, believe in yourself, take action, do something, don’t just sit there. Also backing tracks to presentations can be useful, especially if it’s this.
3. Steve screamed NO! to desks (a largely good idea), NO! to brainstorms, NO! to egos (employ more women), and asked everyone to love what they do; if you don’t love it, don’t do it, go do something else or rediscover why you loved it in the first place
4. Laura Power talked about how to turn NOs into YESes. Key advice, “a good idea is not enough” and “the client is (probably) not stupid”. Put as much thought in to the selling as the thinking. Never forget that your client needs to sell the idea to their boss. If they don’t get it, they can’t sell it
5. Andy implored everyone to set their NO filter. But don’t be a prat about it – its not binary – your filter should be a dial – set it to “minimal viable shizzle” just enough “shizzle” to make it fly but not too much to frighten off the money, i.e. your client. Be brave but not stupid
6. All the speakers were great but for me, Flo Heiss from CD @ Dare nailed it. He opened with this…

If you’ve ever been to Louvre you will be familiar with it. Why? He wanted to reflect on digital living, the 21^st century need to document every moment…but what on earth are we doing he asked? To prove his point he threw down his clicker, greyed out his screen and made us all sit in silence for 5 minutes…in a room with 250 other people this was horrible – weirdly painful. It was a good experiment though – with tweeting through talks, when watching shows, 2, 3, 4 screening,  massively multitasking every waking moment…when was the last time you put your phone down, sat in silence, opened your eyes, looked around, observed, thought, considered, appreciated, enjoyed, even felt bored? He’s got a point – we’re all too busy documenting to feel – we think we derive value out of sharing which we do to a point, but what about the thing itself, don’t just show people you were there, really BE there.

 Inspiring stuff…

John

John

This is a lovely idea.

Let’s face it, whether you’re a seasoned critic or a total novice, being left feeling cold by an art exhibition is not a particularly singular experience. We’ve all been there. See what Audio Tour Hack and the Guggenheim have done to democratise art. Not for everyone but its a novel idea. Begs the question, why don’t we see sound used more in art as a storytelling medium? 

John

Many people talk about how the entertainment industry is dying. The blame obviously lies with the internet and all those 'downloaders' creating a shift from broadcast networks to audience networks (as Mike Walsh frames it in Futuretainment). We are what we share, right?

But its about as true as any other endist statement (TV is dead! Radio is dead! Press is dead! etc etc). And in fact there have been some studies in the US that have shown that downloading has actually increased overall consumption. Similar to the TV PVR research in the UK which asked people who owned PVRs how much time shifted TV viewing they did. LOADS AND LOADS came the overwhelming reply but upon further investigation into their actual behaviour they simply thought they were time shifting more but their behaviour hadn't changed much. But I digress. 

Mike Masnick (Founder of Techdirt) has put together a detailed look at the entertainment industry called "The Sky Is Rising" which shows that it is quite simply in rude health. The titans may be struggling but new thinking, new technology and new ideas are contributing to the industries overall growth. You can innovate your way out of anything with a bit of imagination and grit. 

Infographic with the headlines below. 

And you can get the full 36 page pdf report here.

 
What’s happened this week:

• Google launched the brand activate initiative to measure online advertising at scale.
• With 100 days to go the official London 2012 Olympic Athletes social media hub launched.
• Intel launched the Ivy Bridge processer range. It is the first with 3D transistors which will keep Moore’s law going for at least the next few years.

What we have learned:

• 6% of 2-5 year olds have their own smartphone, one of many observations about Generation i (i.e. those born after 1994).
• The Google + button is served 5bn times a day + several hundred other recent Social Media facts.
• 62% US Tablet owners use the device daily, they spend an average of 2.4 hours a day on it (from Viacom’s recent Tabletomics Study).

Cool stuff

• Brands are increasingly looking to add something to the broadcast experience; this example from Red Bull adds a second screen point of view to what’s on TV.
• Personal is a new kind of personal data vault, owned by the consumer, to automate many online tasks. We can expect to see many more of these over coming years.
• Google’s autonomous cars are now driving every day errands for blind passengers.

Where to find more:

• Tim O’Reilly’s latest thoughts from MIT Media Lab conversations; the services that will thrive utilize new forms of shared knowledge.
• The future of in car technology; future visions from some of the world’s major automotive  brands.
• What Social Media is doing to news now that over half of us find out about major stories through it.

- Sam (thanks to JP and the Futures team)

Garrett sent us the link below today that is just awesome.  If you have not seen this yet, then watch, enjoy and learn...

- Sam

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you'll know of Joseph Kony, the tyrannical Ugandan Warlard repsonsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. His new notioriety is of cousre due to the record breaking 30 min doc produced by the charity Invisible Children to raise awareness of his atrocities and ultimately increase US involvement. To that effect it has probably worked but there is a growing fight-back from critical groups. Most visceral unsurprsingly comes from Charlie Brooker. Disturbing.

John (via Simon)