Last year I started to conduct a series of interviews with some of the most interesting Marketing peeps I met so far.

I somehow wanted to take this concept one step further.My new series of interviews is called ‘Hooked’. Hooked is about leading Strategists and their hobby or a side-project. Hooked is about what people can learn for Strategy while they actually love to fly, cook, swim or whatever they do to become the interesting people that most of them are.

The first Person to be part of Hooked is Alexander Wipf – my long-time friend and all-round awesome guy. Alex is Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett, Frankfurt. And besides being one of the few truly digital Marketing Pioneers in Germany, besides being an awesome Photographer, young dad and many other things, he is in possession of a Private Pilot License. In other words: He is a passionate flier.

Irrelevant for his thinking as a Strategy Dude? I don’t think so. Get to know Mister Wipf.

You have a pilot license and you are Head of Strategy at Leo Burnett and started off as a user experience designer. I know you have an interesting theory about flying and UX. Tell me about it.

As machinery and technology get more and more complex, our susceptibility to allow technology or its interfaces to control us increases as well. As Günther Anders already noted in the 1950s (in “The Outdatedness of Human Beings 1. On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution,” 1956) at some point after WWII human technology had reached a tipping point when technologies weren’t just simple tools or extensions of ourselves, but rather complex systems that makes human capacity look outdated and miniscule. Being a thinker during the atomic age, his example for this was the invention of nuclear energy, which has a hazardous waste-product that has a half-life that will last longer than our species will be on this planet.

Trying to wrap your head around this fact is just mind-boggling. Essentially, we have created things that are simply bigger than ourselves and the consequences of which we aren’t really in control of anymore. Of course this is an extreme example, and it’s not a matter of us necessarily wanting to be controlled or hindered by the technology we create, but we implicitly accept it as necessary evil.

So, in order to cope with this, we create more technology that, in turn, controls the other technology we have. And we accept this largely because there is no way back.

As we have moved from the industrial (and atomic) age to the information age, the same forces are at play, only that the context is no longer the industrial and physical realm, but rather the informational and virtual.

Due to digital technologies, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, again, we are unable to deal with it all, so, again, after a few decades of information technologies being created to create, disseminate and store information, we are now inventing technologies to filter this information. The question is, are our interfaces designed with us in mind?

(...)
Read the rest of Hooked. Alex Wipf: A Strategy of Flight. (1,710 words)

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Post tags: Agencies, Alex Wipf, Creativity, Hooked, Ideas, Interview, Leo Burnett, People, Strategy, Truth

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FirstBank – Super Bowl Commercial from TDA_Boulder on Vimeo.

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Post tags: Advertising, Cool, Funny, Ideas, Super Bowl, Truth, TV, We like

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via Laughing Squid

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Post tags: 2011, Ads, Creativity, Fake, Funny, Ideas, Lego, Occupywallstreet, Politics, Toys, Truth

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Check out the video

Quote: “Gamers want the immersive feeling of being in a warzone. Turtle Beach takes you there.” Even if it is a hoax (it will be in the end): Putting a first person shooter into the same context as a war zone where thousands of people died and millions suffer every day makes me want to spit out.

And no, I disagree. Not any PR is good PR. This is shit. Cynical, pathetic shit. I am ashamed to work in the same industry as the guy who came up with this. (via adverblog)

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Post tags: Ads, Agencies, Brands, Creativity, droga 5, Ethics, Gaming, Ideas, Industry, Politics, World

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Post tags: Advertising, cartoon, Funny, Ideas, Truth

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(...)
Read the rest of Anrealage. An 8-Bit Showroom in Tokyo. (2 words)

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Post tags: anrealage, Cool, Creativity, Design, diesign, Experimental, Fashion, Ideas, japan, Kunihiko Morinaga, Lifestyle, People, Presentation, Retail, tokyo, visual, World

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Post tags: Ads, Agencies, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Funny, Gaming, Ideas, Lifestyle, sony, visual, We like

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This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.”

PressPausePlay is available online now. Looking forward to watching the full thing. Get it here. Thanks to Better taste than sorry for the link.

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Post tags: Creativity, download, Film, free, Ideas, People, perspectives, World

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The result: live customer service replies that are shaped by a living alaphabet made up of 140 KLM employees. Yes it is live and it reacts to customer tweets but only today (and only as as reaction to a few selected tweets).

Live Reply tweets are being uploaded to KLM’s Youtube Channel and shared on Twitter. So far they’ve sent video tweets to about ten people, but they’ve still got a lot of hours left in the campaign. The example below is one of them…

The whole campaign is funny but completely useless. Anyway, it’s again a great very short-term promotional stunt to spread the word about KLMs social platforms and to position KLM as a social-media-savvy brand. In this regard: Well done, KLM. I am looking forward to the next useless stunt.

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Post tags: Brands, Campaign, Cool, Funny, Ideas, KLM, Netherlands, Social Influence Marketing, social network, Twitter, visual

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Exit Deutschland is an organisation that tries to help members of the fascist scene to leave their (quite often very violent) peer group. In order to get their message across they just designed a very smart ‘Trojan Shirt’.

For the 9th time Germany’s right wing NPD party was allowed to stage a festival called ‘Rock fuer Deutschland’. Members of Exit Deutschland dressed up as Nazis and passed 250 of their shirts to Festival visitors. The idea: The shirt actually looks like stuff any Fascist likes (‘Hardcore Rebels. Nationalistic and free’ + skull). But once the guys came home after the Festival and washed their shirts the shirt revealed a different message: ‘What your T-shirt can do, so can you – we’ll help you break with right-wing extremism’ + a contact number for Exit Deutschland.

24 hours after the Festival NPD watchdogs sent out SMS warnings to the festival guests. 250 out of 600 guests got a T-Shirt.

Well done Exit. At last one ‘Trojan marketing concept’ with a Political attitude. Learn more on their site and like them on Facebook. (via Happyschnitzel)

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Post tags: Cool, Creativity, Exit, Experimental, Funny, Germany, Ideas, People, Politics, visual, We like

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