Interface Design. A Day in 2014.

September 6th, 2010 • View Comments Tech, Tools
Tags: Case Study, Cool, Creativity, Design, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Interfaces, Media, Mobile, Prediction, Presentation, Study, Tech, Tools, Touch, Usability, UX, visual, World

We all love interface design studies, don’t we? Notorious Swedish UX company TAT.SE has conducted an experiment in open innovation of User Interfaces. And the winner is this little case study staging a possible day in 2014. Nice one. I want the mirror (via).

Problems. A Simple Flowchart to solve all of them.

September 6th, 2010 • View Comments Strategy, Tools
Tags: diagrams, flowchart, Funny, problems, Strategy, Truth, visual, World

Life can be so easy sometimes. As a quick intro to this week I would like to remind you of this simple flowchart that basically makes you get rid of all your problems at once (via Flowingdata).

Toxic Avenger. N’importe comment.

August 27th, 2010 • View Comments Allgemein
Tags: Music, Prediction, Social, Tech, Trends, visual, World

Toxic Avenger‘s new video ‘N’importe comment’ carries the social graph to the extreme. It’s an almost scary vision what you can see in the video below…but I think we are not so far away from it. Thanks to thestrategyweb for the video.

Bizarre. My Tram Station is an Outdoor Award Entry.

August 22nd, 2010 • View Comments Ads
Tags: Ads, Agencies, Amsterdam, Awards, Funny, Ideas, Media, Outdoor, Truth, Underway, visual, World

I work pretty much in the center of Amsterdam. I love the city. But to be honest, there are nicer places than Leidseplein, the square nearby which opens the gates to the touristic part of the city.

What I find really bizarre (beyond stoned German teenagers) is Leidseplein’s tram station. In fact, it’s not a tram station – it is a living Cannes Outdoor Lions Award entry for the city’s agencies. Every second week the tram station is in the center of another expensive outdoor ad idea that you cannot see anywhere else. It’s the kind of stuff that you see in award videos. The kind of idea that is getting sold to award jurys as a globally executed ad campaign, while in fact we are talking about one tram station at Leidseplein.

This week it’s 180 TBWA\BEC with adidas F50 Lightspeed.

A couple of weeks ago it was some fantasy motion picture…

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Genius. An Open Letter to All of Advertising and Marketing.

August 20th, 2010 • View Comments We like
Tags: Consumers, Cool, Funny, letter, Truth, We like, World

Ah, great!

Read the following letter. It’s a letter about cocreation and crowdsourced ad campaigns by a user who simply does not want to participate. I love the brilliant laconic truth of it. And even though I don’t know who Brian is, his words of wisdom will never be forgotten – ‘I want to eat tasty sausages. I don’t necessarily want to upload videos.’ (via PSFK and JohnnieMoore)

Survey. How much can you actually earn as a Planner?

August 18th, 2010 • View Comments Work
Tags: Agencies, Jobs, Money, Planning, Report, Salary, Strategy, Study, Survey, Truth, World

Finally! An interesting analytical paper about the status quo of planning salaries in planning. My colleague Heather LeFevre from the colleagues at Strawberry Frog here in Amsterdam has just published her Planner Survey 2010. It tries to compare salaries of strategists worldwide to bring some light into the dark. The data was collected via an online survey with 1570+ participants from all over the world.

The effort definitely was worth it. You get a pretty good understanding about what you can expect to earn in NYC in comparison to London. But as usual – salaries don’t say much as long as you don’t integrate real costs of living. Earning and spending 100$ in Frankfurt is a very different thing to earning and spending 100$ in Amsterdam or London.

Anyway, great work, Heather. Thanks a lot.

A letter to Warhol. ‘I hear you like Tomato Soup’.

August 12th, 2010 • View Comments We like
Tags: Art, Cool, Funny, history, PR, World

Lovely.

This is a letter from 1964 written by overjoyed William McFarland, at that time product marketing manager at Campbell’s Soup to the young Andy Warhol. Some complimentary cans of soup soon followed. Two years prior to the letter Warhol had staged 32 of his now world famous Campbell Soup Can pictures.

Ah…multiplier outreach. You gotta love it. And as a letter almost as good as Mick Jagger’s letter to Andy Warhol five years later.

(thanks to A letter of note)

OMFG. Brands and Social Media in China.

August 11th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Social, Underway
Tags: Brands, Business, China, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Trends, Truth, We like, World

Sometimes when you do research on tech adaption worldwide you get the impression it is completely enough to look at figures from the U.S. Take for example the excellent ‘State of the Blogosphere 2009‘ report by technorati. It presents all the charts and diagrams you need if you research statistics on blog usage….but if you dig a little bit deeper you find out that it’s actually nothing but a study about the American blogosphere.

This is particularly interesting if you take a serious look at the figures. China for example has surpassed the U.S. in social media usage last year. According to Netpop almost every Chinese online user is part of a social network. There are three times more bloggers per online user in China compared to the U.S. No major study will explain an average European or American strategist what these people do, what they talk about and how to engage them. By the way, we are talking about 1.6 billion Chinese and billions of Asians that I did not even consider in this calculation.

Check out this deck by Ogilvy One Shanghai (via Giles) about the connected Chinese digital landscape which is absolutely stunning. And afterwards do me a favor and answer one question: Is it actually possible to understand and lead the complexity of this world from a desk in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam or London and to make the right decisions? How can we build cross cultural knowledge which is so important to get away from our subjective western perspective?

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Creative Briefs. Two Decks on making them evolve.

August 11th, 2010 • View Comments Jobs, Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Cool, Creative, creative briefs, Ideas, Jobs, Prediction, Presentation, Process, Strategy, Tools, World

As a strategist it is kind of a fixation to think about creative briefs. Creative brief? Yes, a piece paper which traditionally is created by a strategist/client directore to serve as a guideline for the creative process. There are literally hundreds of these templates out there. Some are good and some are bad.

In fact, most creative briefs circulating in agencies nowadays are pretty old school. That’s not surprising. Most agencies are pretty old school in the first place, secondly all too often the briefing context is the key problem and not the template. Finally, the ownership over the document is frequently not shared among the different stakeholders. Stupid process that is.

Jasmin Cheng has pulled together quite a nice deck that collects a lot of thoughts about this problem.

google. A not so evil look back on its History.

August 9th, 2010 • View Comments Brands
Tags: Business, google, history, net neutrality, Presentation, Truth, visual, World

google sure does combine many elements of a modern tech fairy tale. It is extremely successful (please, don’t mention social networks now), it did not exist 15 years ago and started with a very philanthropic vision…at least they tried. While the company still pretends to stick to its ‘Don’t be evil‘ mantra, others call it ‘a company on steroids with fingers in every industry’. The glass is always half full or half empty, right?

Google UK has now staged a (very) quick look back at the its history over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome. Enjoy the cute little animations and in case you are keener on a more critical view of the brand, try the Beast File. (via)