Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category

  • The Kingdom of Awesome

    We were milling about at @LenKendall’s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.

    The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.

    The idea of a Kingdom, Republic or Nation of Awesomeness – depending on your political persuasion – is funny (especially after quantities of booze on a warm evening), but it reminded me of a tweet I’d seen earlier in the day from Jeff Jarvis:

    I don’t want to get carried with all this but I think The Kingdom of Awesome is real – real in an allegorical, Utopia sense: a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind.

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    5 Comments

    5
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    14th March 10

    5 comments

     advertising

    innovation

  • A call to arms. Make way for ‘the builders’.

    Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog post at Reinventing, and his speech at the American Association of Ad Agencies Transformation conference, are both incredibly exciting.

    With both, he calls for renewal and appeals to the ad industry to save itself by hiring in top tier talent to build a new world, specifically:

    “This is the time to build. The talent we most need are builders, sculptors, painters. Folks who create and not just manage.”

    And what should we be building?

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    1 Comment

    1
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    4th March 10

    1 comment

     advertising

  • How Facebook is digging a grave for online marketing

    This morning, as you do when you quietly settle in at your desk and get prepared for a long day at work, I logged in to Facebook to check what my social circle around the world is up to. For whatever reason, my eyes fell on the forbidden spot, the advertising in the right hand corner. Oh wait, I know why. It was ’speaking’ to me:

    Facebook avertising

    Look at that! Not only does it know I am 39 (nearly as old as Tim) but it also knows that I am female, and although I can’t say this for sure, this little ad also seems to have figured out that one of my favourite colours is … pink (No, I haven’t revealed the colour of my bra in my status line).

    As it happens, super agency Made by Many is already supplying me with an awesome phone, but I got interested in this deal nevertheless. Not because the offer was appealing, but seemingly offered exclusively to me, I could not resist clicking on the ad to find out more. I wanted to know why this offer was made to 39 year old women… is this for real…? So I clicked the ad…. and… Read full post

    19 Comments

    19
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    14th January 10

    19 comments

     Social Web

    advertising

  • Car ad agency brilliance

    Ad agency Nova Vista in Norway has found an innovative way of keeping cars clean. Buckle in tight, here it comes……Female drivers.

    The agency is now on the lookout for 70 (tidy) women to drive their ad decorated cars around town. (sorry, link in Norwegian)

    “Seeking clean women is a visual way of communicating that we’re looking for people who will keep the cars neat and tidy. Great ambassadors, it’s that simple,” said Nova Vista’s MD.

    Speaking to the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, he also tells us that the added bonus by using women is that we also don’t drive like pigs.

    Finally time to do away with that old silly expression that either starts or end with “women behind the wheel”, is it then…?

    To bad that the chief editor of the feminist magazine Fett (Fat, directly translated to English – meaning awesome if used as slang) kind of steps in the salad when she comments that this is really a very old fashioned view. Men are just as good as taking care of their car as women, “…if not better” she claims.

    She’s got one point, though. “It might be 70 very tidy women driving around in these cars, but they might not be very smart” she adds. Each woman must pay NOK 1790 a month to drive the car. That’s nearly £180.

    Well, it made me laugh this morning:)

    2 Comments

    2
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    13th August 09

    2 comments

     advertising

    opinion

  • Looking swell online: How avatars suit you

    My avatar has changed.

    Uh oh. Big deal, you might think – some people change their avatars as often as they change shoes. And so do I – but not here at my work blog.

    For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face – a “spare” avatar bestowed upon me by Isaac until yesterday.

    At first, I found it awkward to write and felt slightly irritated by being represented by a stranger. Whenever I published a post, this mean, hungry little lady with black hair and a sour pout would pop out like a Jack in the Box from somewhere deep inside Wordpress, ready to devour my every character. I’d look at the site and feel disconnected from my words. Now the blog post was hers… she even wore my name!

    My old avatar

    At Made by Many, we have a love/hate relationship with our work avatars. Drawn by an artist who’s been given quite a lot of artistic license, we’re not always in agreement weather a whiff of green to our skin tone or a splash of purple hair really help bring out our best features…. Some of us have now and then been known to refuse to blog under these “dreadful caricatures”, but the truth is that they do make us feel like a team and we all wear them like a badge of honor.  “At least we don’t take ourselves too seriously!” says William.

    But self-representation and avatar usage can be a serious matter online. The avatars we chose to represent ourselves have an impact on how we behave and also on how we’re perceived online.

    That’s why sites that easily allow you to change your avatar often are more engaging and interactive. People change their avatar to reflect their mood, send secret messages to other friends, display self- attributes, social role, a fantasy representation of who they want to be or they might just want to provoke. Just look at this collection of people from the Metrotwin homepage:

    Metrotwin people

    Metrotwin people

    If you look closer at the Metrotwin people, you’ll find a lot of stereotypical usage: The football enthusiast, the pet lovers, the travelers, the proud parent, the beauty, the humorist, the hobbyist, the eye, the cartoonist, the standard portrait and so on. And if you hit refresh when you’re on the site – you’ll see these types repeat again and again. I find this incredibly fascinating – seeing people’s creative use of avatars make me much more interested in finding out what’s going on at a site and communicate with the people who use it.

    But not all of us are fans of creative self representations online… In a talk on Facebook given by Blake Chandlee last year, he mentioned his dislike of people who aren’t using their real photo to represent themselves, especially those touting a pet pic on their profile.

    I first thought he was just being funny… but then I came across this thread on a FB discussion group where people complain that their profiles are deleted when they use “fluffy” avatars and “kittens” as profile pics. Says Pamela Noordman:

    picture-70

    Facebook is one of the better examples there is of a site that makes it easy and fun for people to maintain multiple avatars. So why they give their user this functionality just to tell them later they don’t like the way they use it is beyond me…

    Although I’d always be supporting the user’s right to wear the hat they want and my Facebook avatar seldom stays the same for more than a few days – I’m not entirely disagreeing with Chandlee. The amount of complaints I’ve gotten from twitter followers who’re confused when they come from twitter to this blog proves the importance of a consistent, recognizable avatar.

    I’m very happy to finally blog under an avatar that look and feel more like myself, although the first comment I got on my new, real avatar was someone questioning weather or not I was wearing a fox on my head…now that was a bit rude, don’t you think?

    10 Comments

    10
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    10th March 09

    10 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

    advertising

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