As good as structure and processes can be, it is people that often make the difference, with their personalities, interests and actions.
Whether in advertising, finance, agriculture or art, personal interests and hidden talents can inspire the day job by adding the essence of individuality.
The National Portrait Gallery currently has the Take Another Look collection featuring British figures from the 16th century to current day who have talents which they might not be so well known for. Footballer Rio Ferdinand was a skillful ballet dancer in a previous life and is now an editor of a lifestyle magazine.
Peggy Olson “If we were making a movie or a play we’d be embarrassed to do this. It’s phony.”
Don Draper “You’re not an artist Peggy, you solve problems – leave some tools in your toolbox.”
Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 2: Love among the Ruins
- Sterling Cooper Portfolio
- Kodak Presentation
- The World according to Don Draper
- Don Draper’s Sterling Cooper contract [PDF]
- Mad Men Cocktail Guide
- Which Mad Man Quiz
An excellent (non-AMC) blog referencing Mad Men and culture during the times madmenfootnotes
Have you viewed the source code for digg.com recently? You might also want to check out dailymotion, kotaku, 1up, gamesradar, and wwe. Here’s why:
Get all 6 codes and enter them into the URL hidden in the ascii art (hellisnigh.com) to unlock your Earthly Rewards that includes a Concept Art Book, wallpaper, posters, ascii art and music. No doubt this ingenious hunt for Easter eggs in html code will be copied but here we see great innovation and intrigue and interest levels rise as EA connects and relates with its market.
EA Games seem to be nailing the marketing at the moment stepping away from bland franchise games, realising that storytelling is a huge part of immersing people into a video game: releasing and heavily promoting trailers of the cinematic Mass Effect 2 to build the hype even more; and now sharing the beautiful art present in Dante’s Inferno.
Watch the spot at dantesinferno.com
Other posts on video gaming:
Classic Cadbury Adverts
Transport for London nails the real reason why people use public transport with a twist of contemporary Paperchase-esq design. How complementary!
- Find more Art on the Underground
- Look for Animals on the Underground
- See how the Tube Map has evolved over 100 years
- Check the “Stars” on Simon Patterson’s Great Bear (via Brian Kerr)
Click to enlarge
To hell with the cheesey jingles and owners’ crass speeches! Here’s a behind the scenes and viewing into the making of a fun Glee advert:
And (from the same episode – don’t forget to smile 
)
(Season 1, episode 12)
Born on the 29th October 1969, the Internet is over 40 years old, but it wasn’t until 1990 that the worldwide web was founded. The Virtual Revolution (currently in production) by the BBC explores what the web has done for us in the past 20 years. Check out the microsite.
The Guardian also celebrates 40 years of the Internet and explores more such as Arpanet - the first network and the father of the modern Internet.
Some key moments:
- 1969 Arpanet – the Internet is born
- 1971 Email – is sent and received
- 1978 MUD – the pioneering online game
- 1985 Symbolics.com – the oldest URL is registered
- 1989 Archie – the first search engine
- 1990 www – the worldwide web is born
- 1991 webpage – the first one appears
- 1992 Erwise – the initial browser with a GUI
- 1994 Justin’s links – the blog that started it all
- 1995 eBay – makes its first sale (a broken printer for $14.83)
- 1995 wikiwikiweb - the first wiki entry is “hello world”
- 1995 Classmates – the original social networking site
- 1996 HoTMail – the first webmail service appears
- 2000 The dot.com bubble bursts
- 2003 4chan – the original playground for memes launches
- 2004 Facebook – pokes us for the first time
- 2005 Youtube – shares its first video (see below)
- 2006 Twitter – is created
- 2007 iPlayer – gives us TV on the net
Maybe it started with Napoleon Dynamite, probably even before that, but it certainly carried on through the 2000s with shows like Flight of the Conchords and continues with the new smash Glee. Geeks are here to stay and are gathering strength.
Perhaps it has coincided with our information and technology led age. People want to know more and now have better opportunities than ever to investigate their chosen subject with the ease of accessibilty that tools like the internet offers.
The chances of smooth talking someone into liking something is reducing heavily as people become less scared of facts, becoming increasinlgy skilled at deciphering mass information. “Don’t bullsh1t a bullsh1tter.”
Mass Effect 2 is out on 29th January in Europe and promises more improvements. Watch the documentary Mass Effect 2 Sci Vs Fi to find out:
“Can technology be used to energize the storytelling process, to make a personalised and true to life dramatic experience? How do you create the illusion of freewill with a fixed ending? How do you create a compelling storyline when the audience controls the narrative?”
Use skill and strategy to defeat aliens and make dialog decisions to evolve the plot. Players become emotionally involved, arguably more so than movies and TV shows due to the interactive nature. £40 for 30 hours (or more) of interactive fun versus £10 for sitting in a cinema for 2 hours?
With CoD Modern Warfare 2 grossing more revenue in the first five days of its release than the Avatar movie (both grossing over $1bn in total so far), video games must now be surely now be respected as serious mainstream entertainment.
The original Mass Effect was possibly the first game to execute such complete emotional involvement within video games with the stunning animated acting and storyline. A perfect mix of RPG, shooter and adventure, it immerses people into the epic sci-fi opera plot (even non-sci-fi fans). The sequel promises more improvements.
- Music is my radar, check Thinkbox’s Power of Music ad gallery.
- Watch all the original ads featured in the Thinkbox ad.
Although Avatar’s storyline may not be the best or most original, it has been sending flocks of people back to the cinema, getting them away from their laptop screens and downloaded/streaming movies. 3D geniunely made the film more beautiful and immersive.
With 3D TVs popping up a CES 2010, which industries should be the most excited about this technology soon to be widespread?
Tourism
Imagine one of those beautiful scenic ads in 3D giving you a taste of what it could be like to spend time in a beautiful paradise. If you didn’t want to take that long haul flight before, this might be just enough to tempt you.
Video Games
As if Call of Duty Modern Warefare 2 didn’t cause enough of a storm, just how excited would the kids (and older kids) be after seeing a trailer with bullets flying past? Aching to take control and be thrown into battle without any risk of so much as a paper cut.
Sex
The oldest industry and usually the first industry to take to new technologies: classifieds, telephone, satellite TV, internet. There will be queues of lonely people wanting a taste of this.
Go to the new page Collection – Great British TV Adverts to see the best from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s.
http://hooyoo.wordpress.com/collections-great-british-tv-adverts/
White stuff can be good, not the snow that has brought the UK to a standstill but spaces in design and advertising. Here’s a great example from ING Direct that even uses the white space as part of the proposition as well as directing the eyes.
Sometimes when we mess around with things too much it turns into horrible brown slush.
A night of great food TV in the UK with The Hairy Bikers’ Mums Know Best and Gordon Ramsey’s F Word.
As one of Maslow’s seven basic physiological needs, it’s beautiful to see people trying to create a better food experience - something that we humans have to have.
Brilliant to see people doing something that matters, that makes people happy and society a better place – most importantly something that they love. The results are stunning and warm the heart.
- Check Mathilde’s Cuisine blog on adventures in food.
- Watch Iron Chef for kitsch creative fun.
Voted by Adweek as the Best Promotion of the 2000s, BMW Films was a brilliant exercise in branding and promotion that started back in 2002, which was probably ahead of its time with the high quality production and cast of Hollywood A-list stars and directors. The series of short films showed that if videos were good enough, people would be captivated for more than 30 seconds. And boy did they make BMWs uber-cool with most viewers wanting to drive and experience a car like Mr Clive Owen. As well as wondering which celebrity would appear in the next film the most capitivating thing of all was the sense of story and adventure. Whilst following fairly simplistic storylines, the films created a sense of journey that viewers wanted to continue on - a journey that they also wanted to share virally, using the internet to turn something cult into something mainstream very quickly.
Branded entertainment case study: BMW movies – luxury car to movie star
- Episode 1: Ambush
- Director: John Frankenheimer
- Starring: Clive Owen and Tomas Milian
Watch all the films: Seasons 1 & 2 and behind the scenes videos at
It must be Christmas! Here’s another exclusive free eBook to download, this time by the digital master Seth Godin: What Matters Now.
Thr Archive – Seth Godin PDF collection:
- The Bootstrapper’s Bible – The selling journey
- Who’s There? – Blogs & the New Web
- How to Sell a Book – Or other new dieas
- Unleash the IdeaVirus - Create and share
- Tribes Casebook – Real Life
- Tribes (Q&A) – Leading us
- Knock Knock – Building a website
- Money for Nothing - Clicks for free
- Everyone’s an Expert – Search for meaning online
- Flipping the Funnel – Consumer voices
- 99 Cows – Great ideas
- What should Google do? – Public Brainstorming
- Small, the New Big – Short
- What Every Good Marketer Knows - Or Godin at least
- Time to get org2.0 – A cheatsheet of tips
- Building a Really Bad PPT – And how to avoid
A nicely presented and inspiring handbook helping people to understand and design modern business models. With over 400 contributers, good things have been said about it already:
“it manages to capture the complete set of the most essential elements of a business model in a simple way, express it well by means of visualizations and easy-to-understand schemes, enabling management to design a business model on one A4 page.” Ziv Baida, Senior Conultant Technology Strategy, IBM
Also check out TrendHunter’s image galleries on 2009 trends:
Red and white Santa comes to town…
See more festive TV adverts, including spots from Hellman’s, Toys R Us, Tesco, Boots, Dior, DFS, John Lewis, Guiness, Apple, Marks and Spencer, and Oxfam at
creativecommons
