Infomagination

Shopping in the Name Of: X Factor Vs Rage Against the Machine

2009-12-14T17:39:25+00:00

Another year, another series of X Factor, another plucky youngster turned pop star a dead cert to be Christmas number one, right?

Well, actually, this year maybe not, as a campaign to get internet users everywhere to buy Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name Of instead gathers apace, with hundreds of thousands of supporters on Facebook.

Now, bookmakers have now slashed the odds of RATM being Xmas no. from 100-1 to 3-1 and Hitwise reports the two are neck and neck in terms of interest on the net.

Word is that Amazon reports Joe ahead in this week's sales, but there's still everything to play for. Feel free to get on there and cast your vote!

Personally, I'm hoping the Ragers nab it - but even if they don't it's definitely another nail in the coffin for any dreams marketers once had of a passive, accepting "consumer."

I mean, there's no doubt that Simon Cowell is an incredible marketer, but whether it's the double talk over Jedward, the sensationalism in the papers or just his over-polished exterior, he seems to be getting more and more complacent by the year - blythly expecting people to fall for the same old routines time and time again.

Now at least some of the public are realising they don't have to swallow the hype. In fact, thanks to the power of the internet, they can create their own - and spit it right back in his face.

Get insights on websites with Google Ad Planner

2009-12-11T12:49:05+00:00

New job + new flat = not much time to post recently, but here's a handy new tool I've been having a play with today: Google Ad Planner.

Google Ad Planner is designed to help you make ad campaigns online, as the name suggests, but it's also useful for general research into audiences and brands.

For instance, if I want to find out what aging, rich, British men look at online, I can just ask:

Or, if I want to know who visits Tesco.com, I can find that out too...

...not to mention what other sites they've visited and what keywords led them there.

It's a rich, versatile mine of information - and in typical Google style it's completely free. So what are you waiting for? Go play!

Culture clash creativity

2009-11-24T11:03:10+00:00

Travel broadens the mind, so they say, and after 3 weeks in Vietnam & Cambodia it certainly feels like my brain has been well and truly streeeeetched. If you haven't been, they're both incredible countries, full of beautiful scenery, fascinating history, friendly people, delicious food and crazy, memorable sights.

One of the big reasons they're so memorable, though, I was thinking after my jetlag woke me up at 4:30 this morning, is that the new stuff I saw/did/ate in my travels wasn't always completely unfamiliar - it was made up of new ways of mashing together things I know well. Here's just three of my discoveries, all featuring two words I wouldn't normally have put next to each other:

1. Fish Massage

Siem Reap, Cambodia, isn't just home to the incredible temples of Angkor. It's also home to tens of Fish Massage stalls - pools of water containing shoals of "kissing fish" that are more than happy to suck the dead skin off your feet if you stick them in. It's a bizarre sensation, kinda like sticking your feet in a can of coke, but when you pull your feet out they're as smooth as a babies bum.

Fish Massage: an awesome and unexpected blend of the human and animal that's got me thinking more about the increasing relevance of symbiosis (creating mutually beneficial relationships between humans, animals and the planet) as we move into an ever more environmentally conscious future.

2. Snake Wine

If people are feeling adventurous in the UK, they might make flavoured vodka, by putting some toffee, peppermint or even a chilli in a vodka bottle. In Vietnam, those people would get laughed at, by locals who regularly drink their rice wine with a pickled cobra inside. After steeping in the wine for a minimum of three years, the stuff is finally good to drink - and having tried some 9 year old vintage, I have to say I was actually pretty impressed. Kinda like sherry for hard men.

Snake Wine is supposed to have health benefits including helping rheumatism, but it's main function is basically virility - in every sense. On one side, a few shots is supposed to do wonders for your "manpower," as I heard it called (I also heard it called "Vietnamese Viagra"). On the other, one of our guides explained how rich men buy massive tanks of the stuff, filled with hundreds of snakes, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, to sit in their living room as a status symbol.

Snake Wine: a blend of the primal and sophisticated that's got me thinking about the way we take power and identity from the symbols and signs in the world around us and how we absorb and display them to others. That and what my dad will think when he opens his present this Christmas.

3. Water Puppets

Finally, a bit of fun from Hanoi, in north Vietnam, with a Water Puppet show. Slightly cruelly described as "Punch and Judy in a pond" in my guidebook, I found this 45 minute display, where puppets rise, dance and perform in a pool of water, thanks to the skillful expertise of some puppeteers lurking behind a screen at the back, thoroughly charming and strangely enthralling - in spite of, and perhaps part due to, some slightly crap puppet design.

Water Puppets: something basic elevated to something special, just by shifting the context. And that's got to be a lesson we can apply time and time again to the brands we work on. A decent production budget certainly helps too, though.

It's time to get clashing

So those were just three of the weird and wonderful new mixtures I came across whilst I've been away. Of course, creativity's always been about combining, remixing and re-making stuff that doesn't usually go together, though. That's why George Kneller, the American philosopher, said "creativity consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know" and that's why I wrote my IPA Diploma thesis - because I think there's so much to be gained by smashing information and imagination together.

So hey, get out there, mix, re-mix and mash it all up again. And next time you're out travelling, don't just bring home a T-shirt or a straw donkey, grab yourself some new ideas - and chuck it all into the melting pot together.

Three weeks off

2009-10-31T13:03:51+00:00

In case you hadn't noticed, the world's an incredible place - and as much as I love London, it would be a shame not to go exploring once in a while.

So, for the next three weeks I'm off on a trip round Vietnam & Cambodia. I'll catch you when I get back!

Good Planner, Bad Planner

2009-10-31T12:52:20+00:00

"I love working with planners," an account handler friend said this week.

"Good planners can take a plate of spaghetti...

... and turn it into a tube map."

"This one planner I work with, though," she continued, "he's not so good."

"He'll take your plate of spaghetti...

and cover it in fucking bolognese."

Ukraine's got talent

2009-10-27T12:33:22+00:00

If you haven't seen anything incredible yet today, check out this astounding video from the winner of this year's "Ukraine's got talent."

Ever the analyst, I've been trying to break down just why this is so good. For starters it's obvious that it's an original, atmospheric piece of skill performed live by a beautiful heroine. Like many great pieces of creativity, however, it also has several tensions at its heart:

- Everyday, inorganic sand becomes something magical and alive

- A serious tragedy is brought to life on throwaway reality TV

- Destruction becomes beautiful

Personally, the serious nature of the film makes me hope that she doesn't sell out to an advertiser just yet. A sand doodle iPhone app, though... Now THAT would be cool.

Ideas that are destined to get ripped off by advertising #475,642

2009-10-21T12:28:03+01:00

Matt Sadler

Why it pays to be fun

2009-10-19T17:46:58+01:00

Recently, there's been a lot of chat in UK advertising circles about behavioural economics - a field which combines psychology, philosophy and economics in order to understand how people make decisions. One of its tenets is that because value is subjective, intangible value IS real value. This means simple changes to experience can affect the way we make choices.

The important intangible value that I'm going to talk to you about today is FUN.

Designers like Philippe Starck have long known about the value of fun. After all, why would you part with £40 for an Alessi lemon juicer, unless it was shaped like a space rocket?

Now, Volkswagen have sprung up with a nice little site, espousing "the fun theory" as a way to encourage good behaviour in the world at large, from encouraging people to walk up the stairs to making a game out of doing the recycling.

As a marketing professional, I'm not quite sure how all this fits in with Volkswagen just yet (car-based fun theories seem strangly lacking at the moment). As a human being, however, seeing brands trying to make the world a better place makes me happy - and if VW are lucky, a bit of that extra, intangible happiness value might just rub off on them.

Sketch2Photo turns your doodles into art

2009-10-15T16:56:31+01:00

Every now and again a piece of technology comes along that just makes you go, WOW, HOW COOL IS THAT?! For me, the latest is Sketch2Photo, an uber clever bit of software developed by a group of students in China. Sketch2Photo creates Photoshop style montages based on your doodles, by scouring the internet for images tagged with your annotations, cutting them out and working out the best way to fit them together.

No word yet on when the software will be available to play with, but you can read the paper on it here and watch this video of it in action:

Whenever it comes out, one things's for certain: whether you're mocking up concepts or just pimping your Powerpoint, this is going to be one useful bit of kit.

Make sense of your money with Kublax.com

2009-10-15T11:02:40+01:00

The best presentations you can give, I always think, aren't just the ones where you teach the audience something, but where they teach you something too. So, during my recent talk to the Financial Services Forum it was with great delight that I learned of Kublax.com, thanks to the marvellous David Lundholm of BGL Group Ltd (the guys behind Compare the Market, amongst other things).

Kublax is a fantastic, free, online financial management/budgeting tool that plugs what I've long seen as a big gap in e-banking services - the ability for you to analyse the data your bank holds on your money. As I wrote in my paper:

"With consumers set to take ever greater interest in their own data, brands need to start giving them access to their information, together with the tools to explore. Why doesn’t HSBC help me carry out some simple financial analysis when I use their internet banking, so I can manage my money better? "

Thankfully, the good news is that I don't need to hang around for my bank to get its arse in gear any more - and neither do you. With its secure encryption system (it uses the same tech as the banks), its easy to pull up data from all your accounts through Kublax, so you can view all your money as one. You can then get an easy overview of not just your incomings and outgoings, but what you're spending your money on (with automatic catagorisation) and even how your expenditure compares to similar users. Here's a couple of examples from my account (with some of the exact figures removed for modesty :)

So far, Kublax has one month's worth of my data. Where it's really going to get interesting is once I've been using it for a year or so and patterns & anomolies start to emerge. I'll also begin building a picture of myself through my transaction history. In a funny way, the proportions in that pie chart up there say something about me as a person. These days, as I said in this earlier post, data doesn't just report on what you do, it tells you who you are.

Aside from awareness, and being bothered to take the simple steps to set up your account, the main problem I think Kublax has is trust. It may say SECURE in big letters and have plenty of security accreditations and plaudits from reputable sources, but it's hard not to feel a twinge of doubt as you type in your internet banking ID and that secure code that your bank have told you NEVER to give out to anyone (even them!).

The solution for me would be for Kublax to either integrate its tech into existing e-banking software ("Kublax Inside") or arrange a spot of co-marketing, in partnership with the banks. For me, that'd be a real win-win-win situation. Kublax gets credibility, the banks look like the good guys for introducing people to this handy free tool and their customers get a new way to manage their money better, at a time when cashflow is a real issue for plenty of people.

Until that day, why not get ahead of the game? Grab yourself a Kublax account and take control of your finances for yourself.