With such a young target, there are very few hard numbers & facts – no coverage on TGI, not much BARB detail, etc.

But we knew that boys of this age were going to be developing really fast, ultimately meaning massive differences in capability to understand & interact with media.

So we mapped out each age in terms of their physical development, their learning & cognition abilities and their relationship with the world & other people. We gleaned info from everywhere we could – development studies, medical websites, parenting guides..

We are still building the presentation, but it’s worked so well to help us understand the audience that we’re going to use it to present with, albeit in a rather more polished format:

Let’s hope the client likes it!

Much props go to Andrew Marsh, Oliver Scargill, Wendy Jim, Emma Foord, Anna Whichello, Sarah Hewitt & Tom Kislingbury for all the ongoing work in populating this & turning it into a campaign

Three important pieces of context:
1) Over 16 years of Angry Birds playing time is clocked up every single hour; Rovio are now valued at $1bn+
2) NASA funding is under constant threat, never more so than in these straitened times
3) Samsung are desperate to confound Apple at every turn

So for the launch of Angry Birds space, they have got a NASA astronaut on the space station to demonstrate the physics principles at work in the new game – with Samsung providing the tech support in exchange for demonstrating the game on a Galaxy phone.

NASA are being paid for this by taking an undisclosed cut from sales of the new game, and keep their legitimacy intact because their role is to educate young people on physical principles.

Samsung get an association with both a powerful tech story and a powerful force in gaming (41% of Angry Birds downloads have been on the Android platform).

Angry Birds get a global launch from probably the one organisation that can talk to the whole world about space with complete authority.

Clever clever clever.

This is beautifully simple; click to get a randomly generated set of 100 characters, write the best scoring tweet you can, and the highest score each day wins a copy of the game. That’s it.

A game for people who love wordplay, made playful in a space where people craft words every day.

This might be the perfect campaign. The only downside is it is in Flemish – I can’t seem to find an English-language version anywhere (although I notice that the Flemish version of this video has had precisely zero views..).

Mercedes wanted to make very clear the fact that their F-Cell hydrogen-powered car produces absolutely no emissions (apart from, as with all fuel cell cars, a little bit of lukewarm water which is entirely drinkable. Geek over & out).

So they took this very literally and made the car invisible – covering one side of the car in LEDs, and using a Canon 5D camera on the other to constantly transmit the background. For some reason, they couldn’t do the bit around the wheels very well, but otherwise it’s quite impressive.

The reason this is particularly interesting is that fuel cell cars mean a huge sea change in car design – no more engine at the front, no more transmission in the middle, no more fuel tank. All major car brands are currently trying to decide how far from the current layout they can go and not make their customers feel too uncomfortable. We are the legacy part.

So stuff like this also presages a period of transition for all cars – how they work & how they look, but also how we come to desire them when they don’t make any sound, look like anything we’ve seen before or send out well-understood messages to our peers.

If you are this specific pair of young creatives in Melbourne, what you do is buy the URLs of the names of the major creative directors, and hold the site hostage. Anyone who doesn’t put a meeting in gets their name redirected to something ghastly…

Simple & impactful – or trite & annoying? Either way, it seems to have got them a job.

is that an idea or not ?

maybe sometimes its useful to have a conversation without knowing where it may go . . .  no idea day

anyhow, it is the day when anything goes, or certainly it is deemed socially acceptable for girls to ask their men to marry them . . . so i quite like this exhortation from my coffee friends and i dare you all, all 700 of you, go on get out and try something new today . . .

MMM is coming

as Lou Reed once sang

so, i spent an exceedingly pleasant few hours in the environs of Gillingham over the weekend . . . playing hockey on the oldest, sandiest astro i’ve seen in a long while – thats not that interesting – or maybe it is

maybe its an indication of the lack of investment that is going on in towns out there beyond W1, maybe the experience is an indication that not everyone is walking around apple maxed up and instead they are riding their 50cc motorbikes round and round our nice shiny middle class cars in a slightly threatening manner . . . maybe we should be asking ourselves this

if i went and sat in the high street of croydon, watford, wycombe, hemel or wondered down to the local playing fields what would i see . . . would i see people voraciously engaging in branded content or a load of bored youths and broke housewives who dont give a damn about most of my brands ? possibly neither, but you wont know unless you get out there . . .

MMM is coming

to start us off, the other day i was completely unable to even get started on a hairy problem . . . so i buggered off and went wondering around the west end

now whilst we wouldnt highly recommend W1 as a good source of real world inspiration, in this instance it came up trumps

below are three photos see if you can tell me for which brands . . .

thats right, only one of those is in any way distinctive

now there are a couple of interesting things in here:

1) what happens when your lovingly crafted brand gets into the hands of the retailers ? does it undermine everything you’ve done

2) the increasing prevalence of brand partnerships (on which, more later)

It’s an interesting company for a couple of reasons:

1) It’s only going to make jeans – they’re focusing on one thing, a bit like Red Bull.only

2) It’s based in Cardigan in Wales, where the founder grew up, and which happened to be the location of the biggest jeans factory in the UK until it got closed down years ago. 10% of the 4,000 population town used to make jeans. Now they will again. This is an excellent example of “sweating your assets” or making the best of what’s around you.

3) They want to make jeans that are particularly hard-wearing. And because their jeans will be built to last, they’re going to put a “history tag” in every pair of jeans. It’s not clear exactly how this will work – presumably some kind of qr code attached to the jeans – but the founder describes a number of uses: you can scan the tag to reach an online destination which tells you when your jeans were made and who by. You can upload pictures of you wearing the jeans to the online “history”. And when you find a pair in a charity shop or they’re handed down, you can check the tag to see where they’ve been. This might not always be something you’d want to see of course…

Website here…
www.hiut.co.uk