Sometimes the insight is so great

You can't fail in creating something of genius.

I love this example of experiential and in-store for a beer brand ANDES in Argentina.

The insight is self explanatory and the idea great. via adverblog

A Great Lesson for Creative People

This chat from Derek Sivers gives a couple of great insights into cultural sensitivities and norms, and the dangers of assumption. Best of it does it all in 2 mins.



We were recently looking at a campaign for a brand across EMEA and wanted to use the wolf whistle in a bit of footage as a consumer call to action, but we learnt that in some sociaeties in EMEA the wolf whistle means nothing and instead a Hiss is used to signify male appreciation of a beautiful woman.

The other day I was in a meeting with Paul from Goodstuff and he used an example of cultural relevance about mobile phone usage and what was considered polite has social relevance.

So in Britain it is considered impolite to speak loudly using a mobile phone in public, but in Israel due to local factors on the ground it is considered very rude to talk quietly on a mobile phone in public lest you should be doing something clandestine so people tend to talk loudly to let others know they are just talking to their friends etc.

Brilliant Sketch for Bird Lovers

Don't know who this is by or what it is for but its brilliant and completely mad.

Some cool online tools and apps

I have seen some great online tools recently most of which were shown to me by the great and very knowledgeable JP at MGOMD.

1. Twinfluence - a social media indexing tool that analyses your twitter network of follower on criteria like reach, influence etc



2. MindMesiter - a collaborative, sharing tool that allows you to create mind maps for brainstorms and meetings etc.





3. Touchgraph - a data visualisation tool that draws your social networks one you open it to facebook or linked in etc




Look like they could come in handy for research, pitches and workshops.

dotcomfreude - oh how we love a disaster

First it was Gmail, then a series of etailers, then twitter, now it appears that Youtube has suffered a major outage - the site is down.

I wonder if we can come up with a new term to signal the phenomena and our collective delight as these ubiquitous sites suffer from outage - perhaps 'dotcomfreude' could sum it up?

Any other suggestions?

Bog Standard Art

This via The Design Inspiration some really innovative art created with old toilet role tubes - never ceases to amaze me how people can apply creativity to the strangest most mundane objects to such great effect.



Really cool stuff - you can see the whole collection here

Iphone apps are mobile apps

According to a new report from Gartner and courtesey of ARS Technica blog Apple iphone apps account for 99.4% of all mobile apps worldwide - that is staggering.

There are also some interesting stats on the growth and value as quoted:

"According to Gartner's numbers, Apple completely owns this market, grabbing almost every one of the 4.2 billion dollars spent on mobile apps in 2009. Based on Gartner's estimates and our own analysis, Apple could hold on to at least two-thirds of the market if current sales trends hold for 2010.

Apple first opened the App Store in July 2008, along with the launch of the iPhone 3G and the release of iPhone OS 2.0. Sales were brisk, with 300 million apps sold by December. After the holidays, that number had jumped to 500 million. Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion; that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. Gartner's figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform's recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year."

They also put this interesting graph up - again its hard to think of an industry that is this dominated by first mover advantage and it looks set to continue. I wonder how much of Apple's total income now comes from the App Store and iphone sales I'm guessing but probably approaching 50% seems a fair estimate.

Its very interesting to see how opening up a completely new market can effect a business moving forward.

3d England Rugby Coverage from O2

There has been a massive amount of noise around 3D in last few months from cinema, TV sets, online environments etc ultimately leading up to James Cameron's Avatar in 3D.

Now O2 have jumped on board and are going to bring 3D rugby to the nation by broadcasting England Rugby matches in cinemas nationwide to O2 customers in 3D - it might be the first live 3D sports sponsorship in cinemas by a mobile phone operator in history ever, ever ;-)



If nothing else its more juice to the highly succesful O2 strategy of marketing to their customers in public and utilising one of their high profile sponsorship properties.

It's all about Lego today

Two interesting videos online today both featuring Lego.

First off a new online game in a similar vein to WoW - known as an MMORPG. Looks great fun, and a great Video - courtesy of Feeding the puppy. I figure the combination of nostalgia and intrigue will see this getting quite a lot of press and coverage and probably a broad appeal outside that of the traditional online MMORPG audiences.



Secondly a completely unrelated initiative - but an equally nice and beautiful video about inspirational Eureka moments - branded 'Click Moments' by lego - courtesy of Adverblog.



No idea what it is all about but a great little video.

Paper Parkour

Nice bit of stop frame animation here. I wonder how long it took to remember which bit of paper to turn overleaf each time in the sequence. Nice style.

Wise words from a wise man

The Ad Contrarian writes a whole lot of truth when he proclaims these are the 10 commandments for advertising people:

I wonder how many of us can say we honestly do more than 5 of them regularly? You could do a lot worse than try to up your score this year.

1. Tell your clients the truth.


2. Speak in plain English.


3. Put your clients' interests ahead of your own.


4. Be guided by principles, not fads.


5. Be modest in your promises.


6. Make every client meeting as small and short as possible.


7. Never bring up an issue unless you have a recommended solution.


8. Never congratulate yourself or your agency.


9. Be more prepared than your client.


10. Always have a Plan B.

You Tube Direct

Interesting API development from You Tube aimed currently at major news organisations to plug in to their web sites to enable consumer journalism but likely to roll out further in my opinion.