Awkward Badges. I want Foursquare to use these!

April 19th, 2012 • Fake
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Fake, Foursquare, Funny, Ideas, Location, People, Truth, We like, World

Tastefully Offensive has just posted a set of potential future Foursquare badges that might breathe in new life to the…kind of…stagnating platform. Also easier to get them.

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future.

April 19th, 2012 • Allgemein
Tags: Experimental, Facebook, Future, Ideas, People, Prediction, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Tech, Tools, Trends, Truth, World

From the great article ‘The Jig is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future‘ (The Atlantic)

‘It slipped into parody late last year with the hypothetical app, Jotly, which allowed you to “rate everything” from the ice cubes in your drink to the fire hydrant you saw on the street. The fake promo video perfectly nailed everything about the herd mentality among startups. Its creator told me to watch for “the color blue, rounded corners, SoLoMo [SocialLocalMobile], ratings, points, free iPads, ridiculous name (complete with random adverbing via ‘ly’), overpromising, private beta, giant buttons, ‘friction-less’ sign up, no clear purpose, and of course a promo video.”

And then, the hilarious parody ate itself and my tears of laughter turned to sadness when the people behind the joke actually released Jotly as a real, live app.’

Here is the original video. Isn’t it ironic? Revolutions always eat their own children. Did anyone say google Glass?

Jotly, the Ultimate App for Sharing Everything with Everyone (Psych!)

1974. The Day Mr Clarke Predicted the Internet.

April 10th, 2012 • People
Tags: 1970s, 1974, 2001, Future, Internet, People, Prediction, video, World

The following video shows British Sci-fi author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke in a 1974 TV interview in which he pretty accurately describes the future. The future in this case is 2001 and Clarke thinks that regular people will then have personal computers that communicate and retrieve information like bank statements, theatre reservations and other things.

Sounds familiar?

Thanks to Laughing Squid. If you enjoy stuff like that, go check out Retronaut.

Googopoly. The Future of Search and Social.

April 4th, 2012 • Intelligence, Knowledge, Media, Reports, Search, Strategy
Tags: Facebook, google, google plus, Insights, People, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Reports, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Study, trendstream, World

The problem with the artist formerly referred to as Social Media is – besides many other things – that it is in the agency business commonly understood as some crazy shit that you stage on Facebook to win a Cannes Lion in the end.

That of course is wrong. Specifically if you take a look at the rarely talked about opportunities of intertwining the worlds of search and social.

A while ago I had the pleasure to get to know Tom Smith, founder of Trendstream, the company behind the GlobalWebIndex and the great Wave studies conducted on behalf of McCann.

Tom’s following presentation, given at the International Search Summit in Munich, discusses the idea of what he describes as the ‘Googopoly’, where Google has risen to control most of what we see and do online.

Even though I doubt the relevance of google Plus I found Tom’s key takeaway extremely smart: It is not just about google+. It is about how google cements its position with a multitude of tools like Chrome, Android and many others in order to enforce search thinking into anything that’s social nowadays.

Great presentation. Thanks to We are Social for the link…

Read more »

Animated GIFs. The History of an Almost Art Form.

März 12th, 2012 • Experimental, Media
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Funny, Gifs, hipsters, history, Meme, People, Tech, Tools, visual

Okay, let’s just get one thing straight: Animated Gifs are the best thing since sliced bread. And if you don’t agree you are worse than Kony which is pretty bad.

Some people actually consider animated GIFs as an art form (I prefer to use things like GifShop to create stupid loops like that). And the following 6 minute documentary takes us back to a time when GIFs’ were early crude incarnations (American flags, “under construction” signs, flames) before taking us through to the more sophisticated cinemagraphs around the web today. (via Co.Design).

There is one strangely annoying thing about this film…possibly about Animated Gifs in general. To quote a Youtube comment: if feels like ‘Look at this fucking hipster: the movie. But let’s not get distracted by that. AnimatedGifs are great. And I am not a hipster.

It is Happening. Stephen Colbert on Advertising.

Februar 26th, 2012 • Ads, Strategy
Tags: Advertising, Branding, Brands, Colbert, Funny, People, Strategy, Truth, TV

Stephen Colbert on advertising strategies. Take a minute to watch this. And let me quote Fresser: ‘This is real, this is happening. It happens every day, and somewhere in a midwestern cubicle, from nice people you might be friends with, it’s happening right now.’ (via Alt nytt er farlig)

Hooked. Alex Wipf: A Strategy of Flight.

Februar 1st, 2012 • Allgemein, Hooked, Interview
Tags: Agencies, Alex Wipf, Creativity, Hooked, Ideas, Interview, Leo Burnett, People, Strategy, Truth

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?

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google Zeitgeist. What the World searched for in 2011.

Dezember 15th, 2011 • 1 comment Trends
Tags: data, google, history, People, Politics, search, seo, Trends, World, Zeitgeist

As the year 2011 ends google has once again collated the world’s searches into one platform about the last 12 months. Nothing says as much about what people are really interested in than search data. And google really did a great job to stage Zeitgeist 2011 with a lot of interesting information on what this horrible great exciting year was all about for people all over the world: http://www.googlezeitgeist.com

Just a Question. Do you actually hate your Job?

Dezember 1st, 2011 • 1 comment Allgemein, People, Poll
Tags: Agencies, Business, careers, People, Truth, World

Working in an agency is a strange thing: Usually you work more hours per day than most of your friends who are employees of a Bank, an Insurance company or who may be Gardeners. Many in our industry earn less than what they could get paid if they would have gone to ‘the industry’ (a mystical word in agencies that describes an unknown Utopia, think: Xanadu). And few people really have a good plan what to do with their career once they crossed the 45 without being CCO. Long story short: Deciding to work for an agency is quite a stupid decision.

But then: You love the fact that it’s a dynamic and young environment. Sure, the typical agency has changed over time. But the places I worked at employed some of the most interesting, gentle and even some of the smartest people I ever met. It would be unfair to attach the term Playground to it – at least that’s not how I experienced it – but it was a good time wherever I worked. Agencies may be run sometimes by stressed, professional lifetime teenagers. But generally we are talking about very interesting places where people like each other and a kind of a community forms.

I guess there is not one agency person who at some point in his life raved about changing into ‘the industry’ (where everything will be good) or to be self-employed (where also everything will be good). So actually only few of the marketing peeps I got to know in my life would get up and fight to death if the concept of ad/marketing/whatever agency would be endangered. But isn’t that strange? Isn’t there a reason why we actually like to work for agencies as improvable as it is as a concept?

A couple of days ago I posted the following Dilbert cartoon on the Facebook page of this blog.

My Facebook page has about 520 members and an average post gets 5 to 10 likes. This particular one received 366 likes as it was apparently shared 280 times since I posted it (and I just stole it and re-posted it either). Oh…and that’s just my starting point. In the summer 2010 a hilarious Tumblr concept went viral: ‘Things real people don’t say in advertising‘…

The title says it all: It is a concept that makes fun of the idealistic way agencies and clients describe their clients. Because to be perfectly honest: Few of us really believe that the ordinary customer is interested in more branded messages. And yes, that is a conflict in what many of us must say professionally.

Did I mention ‘Women alone laughing with Salad?‘, another site dedicated to take the piss out of brand marketing. This time out of stock photos which pretty much look the same.

And I don’t even want to mention the brilliant video pisstakes John St did to ridicule award shows and narrow-minded agency concepts, Adverbatims – the most horrific client quotes and a lot more.

At the same time there is still this fascination for advertising, marketing and agencies. But: While digital marketing has more than obviously started (and won) the revolution against the ad agencies we seem to downgrade this in our relationship to the marketing industry.  Mad Men? This is a series about the dark ages of advertising, about BUY, BUY, BUY. And still agencies dress up as Draper’s agency Sterling & Cooper while their community manager simultaneously tweets about the dawn of a new agency era.

Seriously: Have agency peeps become a bit romantic? You know: Miserably living in the present while silently wishing back the past (when everything was clear, sexy and being an Art Director was exotic and very well paid)?

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Insights. TNS Launches Largest Global Study on Digital Behaviour.

November 30th, 2011 • Reports, Strategy
Tags: 2011, Business, Insights, Lifestyle, Media, People, Planning, Presentation, Report, Reports, Research, Social Influence Marketing, Study, target group, TNS, Trends, World

Research company TNS has launched its 2011 version of TNS Digital Life. Based on conversations with over 72,000 people in 60 countries this is the world’s largest global study into people’s attitudes and behaviours online.

I particularly like how they underline the necessity to think (before yelling Facebook or iPad or Flashmob):

‘Digital waste’ pollutes the online world as brands fail to listen to what people want.

It [the study] found that 57 per cent of people*** in developed markets* do not want to engage with brands via
social media – rising to 60 per cent in the US and 61 per cent in the UK. Instead, misguided digital
strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no
one reads. This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers – the study
shows 47 per cent of digital consumers now comment about brands online.

The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for
brands to be heard.’

Of course: This study does not at all say brands shouldn’t be digital. The opposite is true. But it repeats the one thing that I never get tired of to repeat: People are not interested in a brand’s content. And they are not interested in brand experiences. They are interested in stuff that is relevant for them – and sometimes this is a brand.

Check out TNS Digital Life here .

Thanks to Rubbish Corp for the link.