Brew Dog. The World’s Strongest Beers now also served in Dead Squirrels.

Juli 26th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Business, Experimental, Social Business
Tags: Beer, Brew Dog, Cool, Creativity, ecommerce, Experimental, Funny, Ideas, Long Tail, Strategy, visual, We like, World

If there is one thing that I like about e-commerce it is the beauty of the long tail. You know what I am talking about – bizarre niche products and, sometimes, even more bizarre ways to market them.

Talking about bizarre…

Get to know Brew Dog, a brewery from North-East scotland. What the scots do is simply to c

reate some of the strongest beers on earth. Being sold under names such as ‘Tactical Nuclear Penguin‘ or ‘Sink the Bismarck‘ we are talking about beer with 32% – 50% ABV!!! That’s more than most vodkas have.

And long tail is what Brew Dog is all about

Beer was never meant to be bland, tasteless and apathetic. (…) We are proud to be an intrepid David in a desperate ocean of insipid Goliaths.

As a German I particularly like their little personal war with my Fatherland. I think not one product was named ‘Sink the Bismarck‘ since 1941. But hey, in Brew Dog’s case it’s absolutely alright. I mean they serve their beer in squirrels. That’s just genius!

Check out Brew Dog’s products, read their blog and buy their dead squirrel beer. They deserved it.

And here is the brilliant new video of the guys, announcing the strongest beer on earth, called ‘The End of history‘ which weighs about 55% ABV (OMFG)!!!

I am a fan. And here is the clip…

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google Me. Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love Privacy.

Juli 12th, 2010 • View Comments Business, Social, Strategy
Tags: Business, Facebook, google, google me, Prediction, Presentation, privacy, Reports, Social Networks, Strategy, World

Most of you may have heard about the so called Facebook killer ‘Google Me‘ that supposedly binds half of google’s resources currently. And as most of you know, google has not exactly been successful with social networking by now. Especially after google Buzz also failed as a platform that is able to compete with Facebook. google knows they need to get their hands on social. Why? Steve Rubel explains it quite well…

google will ‘continue to dominate “pull.” But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule “push.” Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it – and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over – and the system get even smarter.’ And that is exactly what google needs to do to stay alive in the long term.

No matter how successful Facebook is with its social strategy – they need to conquer Planet Push asap or become Facebook’s junior partner. In the middle of all the buzz about google Me we have to read the deck embedded below as a first rationale for google’s new platform – not as the ‘designing social networks’ deck that it wants to be. It was created by one of google’s lead User Experience architects Paul Adams and it criticizes Facebook existing social networks and the way they make people interact with a clear focus on privacy. What a surprise!

Even beyond the google Me hype – definitely a deck worth to take a look at (even though it is looooong).

Big question: Do you think google might make it this time? Do you believe privacy will be an USP strong enough to differentiate google Me from Facebook? Leave a reply.

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Social Activation. An Overview about U.S. Grocery Chains.

Juli 8th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Business, Social
Tags: Brands, Business, Diagram, Facebook, Groceries, Social Media, Twitter, US, USA, visual

First up, I hate info visual wallpapers. They just seem to pop up everywhere and there is nothing which has not yet been transferred into an info visual of some sort. But there also are the good ones.

The following diagram by Pace Communications gives a good, brief overview about fans and followers of U.S. grocery chains. No doubt, this is quite a specialized market. Nevertheless you can spot the relevance of Facebook and Twitter (in comparison to Youtube and Flickr) for these major companies – with Walmart and Wholefood being frontrunners here. At least as long as you accept fans and followers as indicators of social activation.

Eye Candy. 100 Beautiful Slides from Cannes.

Juni 29th, 2010 • View Comments Business
Tags: Agencies, Award, Awards, cannes, Cool, Creativity, Ideas, Presentation, Underway, visual

I may neither be a fan of advertising award shows nor of what is said on award shows. But if there is one thing I like about them (beyond drinks and food) it is well designed powerpoint slides. All of us have seen a couple of really ugly, undigestible slides in their lifes. So check out these PPT posers that were just presented in Cannes… (via)

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC. And both of us have a dirty secret.

Juni 28th, 2010 • View Comments Business
Tags: Business, Charity, Minerals, NGO, Politics, Supply lines, Truth, War, We like, World

There are not only Diamonds from Sierra Leone that fuel conflicts and add millions of dollars to the pockets of warlords. Crucial components of both, PCs and Macs, are made of minerals from areas that suffer from grim civil wars. Or to put it another way – with every MacBook we buy we spill money into the wallets of some of the worst war criminals of our age. Especially the horrible civil war in Congo is fueled by the profits of tech minerals such as tin, tantalum and tin – 183 million dollars last year alone.

NGO Raise hope for Congo asks tech companies, institutions and end consumers to avoid using or buying products that are built with conflict minerals. I hope they will make their voice heard and generate an impact that really makes a change.

Mobile Browsers. Worldwide Market Share.

Mai 3rd, 2010 • View Comments Business, Mobile, Trends
Tags: Browser, Business, Diagram, Mobile, Trends, World

Thank the guys from icrossing.co.uk and Visual Loop for this handy, little overview chart about the mobile browser market share. Personally I would have enjoyed more detailed information about the browser market share in North Korea right now. But you cannot get anything you want at once…

Check out the big map here.

Agencies. The Industry’s Family Tree 2010 is out.

April 26th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Business, Strategy
Tags: 2010, Agencies, Brands, Business, Diagram, List, Strategy, Trends, visual, visualization, World

You are working for a network agency? You were part of one or the other merger? Time to zoom out and locate you on ad age’s annual agency family tree. The statistical compendium lists the big players, specialized agencies, compares winners and losers. And just like last year it offers a perfect overview about the state of the marketing industry worldwide. To help you locate your agency you can download the whole tree as pdf or get into it as navigatable map. The 2010 issue was just published. So go check it out.

By the way. Congratulations to my employer. Razorfish has just become the largest digital agency in the U.S. by revenues.

World Domination. We like.

April 24th, 2010 • View Comments Business, Social, Tech, Tools, Trends
Tags: Business, Facebook, Future, I like, Open Graph, Philosophy, Social Graph, Social Networks, Strategy, Tech, Tools, Trends, World

With about 420 million active users (more than 50% of them logging in every day) Facebook really is a James Bond villain’s dream come true. And no, it is not just successful. Facebook is killing it’s competitors. It has simply buried Myspace, Orkut and others and won’t stop growing. I don’t know what is going to be the No 1 social network 2020. But currently I bet it still might be Facebook.

What was once google, is – in parts – about to become our favourite Evil Empire. google may still rule everything Pull but Zuckerberg works hard to turn its business into a Push Superpower. If you search for the Large Hadron Collider you choose google. But Facebook is your choice for the restaurant around the corner and your fave sneaker brand. And since wednesday things are on the move again…

One Graph to Rule them all

In case you haven’t heard the term Social Graph before – it will either become important or obsolete in the future – simply because Facebook wants to own or dominate it. In his 2007 article ‘Thoughts on the Social Graph‘ Brad Fitzpatrick talked about the Social Graph as ‘the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related‘. Basically it is the people you know, the stuff you listen to, read, tweet, and tag, and what you put on maps – and the question how you access and distribute the information to your friends. By now there wasn’t one but many disperse social graphs. But the more we are intertwined on Facebook as the one connector, the better the platform’s chances to become the knot of earth’s social graph. Now, after some technical adjustments last week Facebook is de facto trying to nothing less than that.

Well, world domination looks a little bit different, I have to admit. Mark Zuckerberg’s tools for world domination are so unobrusive that nobody understand them who is not part of the industry. What Facebook delivered on its F8 conference looked…well…small…but may have more than significant outcomes.

• Cornerstone of Facebook’s conquest is the Open Graph Protocol -  basically a techn0logical extension of the social network that treats the free web (the artist formerly known as Not Facebook) as Facebook entities.
• This can be studied through Facebook’s well known ‘I like’ button (plus many more new social plugins) which is now available for every web page (look up). Facebook will treat blog posts (which are part of the system) just like Facebook posts – and of course draws data from them.
• Facebook Fanpages and ‘Fans’ do not exist anymore, get replaced by ‘I like’
• Facebook Connect as a quasi-brand will be dumped
• And a couple of other revisions. Facebook did not go too much into details but it will soon finish off all other competitors in the economy by offering its own currency and geo-location solutions.

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Dear Forrester. No, We Are Not Going to Die.

März 29th, 2010 • View Comments Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Agencies, Brands, Business, Diagram, Forrester, Future, Ideas, Industry, Reports, Social Business Design, Strategy, Trends, Truth, World

Since Digital has initiated the revolution in Marketing the question for the ‘Agency of the Future’ has almost become an Internet Meme. Pretty much every agency around claims to have found the recipe. That’s in fact no very surprising. Over the time the already-complex agency-marketer relationship has been significantly altered by factors such as the recession and the rise of social media. With brands and agencies stumbling into the real time web and over interacting customers (OMFG!) the key question is obvious: Whose agency future is it anyway?

The challenge

In their late Forrester report about ‘The Future of Agency Relationships‘ Dave Frankland, Sean Corcoran, and Vidya Drego have tried to define a CMO’s challenges and their criteria catalogue when it comes to choosing an Agency of Record – a highly complex task. Agencies have always managed to adopt to changes. There were many paradigm shifts from the ad sales era of the early 19th century to our wired reality. Nevertheless agencies (or similar institutions) managed to offer services which were relevant enough. Today, once more, agencies are faced with new requirements in what they are supposed to deliver:

That may not exactly sound completely new. But it is quite interesting to ask which agency model might be able to accept these challenges.

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Agencies. Thank God It’s Doomsday.

März 23rd, 2010 • View Comments Business, Trends
Tags: Ads, Agencies, Business, Funny, Future, Ideas, Philosophy, Prediction, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Trends, World

Nowaday’s challenges for ad agencies worldwide are closely connected with a grown up customer. Personally I am not a fan of agency bashing. I am convinced most agencies are not well prepared for today’s world. But I think most of them will reinvent themselves.

Nevertheless I found this little clip remarkable. It tells a good story as starting point to stress today’s Ad Agency’s Public Enemy #1 – substantial Change. It was produced for FITC, Toronto, a digital tech & storytelling conference. I want to go there – unfortunately I won’t be able to .

>Via Fischmarkt