Assemble your A-Team

I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.

We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.

I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.

1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.

Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.

So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.

The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.

Friendfeed is your friend

Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).

Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.

Collaboration – Living the idea

We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.

Sketches

The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.

This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.

The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.

Magnets

Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.

This led to another study in field lines.

Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.

This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.

So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.

Set the goalposts

The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.

So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What if we can extend a realworld participation back into videogames.

The brilliant Nike78 project has a film by Nick Marsh where they have hacked a Wii controller into a pair of running shoes. By running on the spot you control the game.

This is genius but restrictive. Could you do this in the real world?

Well actually – possibly yes. Nike+ is out there. By running you accumulate points.

In Grand Theft Auto your character gets fitter and can run further by running more in the game.

Could we combine Nike+ with Grand Theft Auto so that by running in the real world makes your gaming character fitter?

If there was a clear Nike+ API and the developers of GTA chose to implement this feature then it could be possible.

What other physical or social choices could there be to create this same offline/online reward structure?

+

Can shopping create points to spend in Farmville?

Again probably yes. There is a Tesco.com API and a partnership with Farmville could be thrashed out.

So can videogames influence our behaviour? I believe we could be at the point where they actually could.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

(Image from flickr)

Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.

(Image via flickr)

So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs  and do so across all the channels they have.

A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches, the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.

So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.

The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breed of agency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.

So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The point is not whats true but what the commentary around your work will be like. If you know your treading a fineline between homage and ripoff or you’ve discovered a similar piece then you have to have a ‘reaction plan’.

In a hypothetical world, it could work like this.

Creatives to Producer -> We’ve found this great video on youtube and the style and look really works well with our script.

Producer now in a dilemma -> These guys aren’t repped by any agencies, even if I did get in touch they’ll tell me to bugger off – Then we are screwed because they know what we are upto. Double bugger.

Everyone -> We are within the law here. So Ok we’ll go it alone.

So your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Creative collaboration could be your answer. Approach the original creatives with the idea that you want THEM to work with your creatives. They’ll get paid well, they’ll get the credit they deserve, you all work together with a director in a collaborative way.

The additional benefit is that you can use the influence of the creators to help share your work. If the original creators post it to Youtube and not the client or the agency, then there is a massive audience of people ready to appreciate a new piece by the same creatives. If it’s framed in a way where everyone knows it was a collaboration then you might just have a great piece of work that is warmly received.

The recent Pepsi ‘Refresh Everything’ work highlights the needs for agencies and clients to be aware of negative word of mouth around their work. All the amazing work on the main campaign around corporate social responsibility starts to be unravelled by a highly vocal fanbase and it could have possibily been avoided by embracing collaboration and not shunning it.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

These are really big industry wide questions that are not going to be solved overnight – but I’m really interested that Dan Wieden has put the point across and also that Platform has been created by W+K London to try and find new talent from all walks of life. Starting from September, upto 12 lucky people will work across real world communication problems and solve these with a whatever approach they think can work.

Architects could be clashing with poets – electronics tinkerers forming creative partnerships with sculptors – everyone hands on – learning by doing.

All of these inventive people around an agency could give it an edge in moving into new territories – Perhaps products could be evolved and produced, buildings designed and built – Businesses changed and flipped upside down from their core.

William Bernbach whom I believe was the first to combine art directors & copywriters said this -

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.

So if we need to change the mix of the creative team so we can do things, then who needs to be in this team?

So to steal a quote from Big Spaceship -

“where putting the art director & copywriter together was the structure of the tv age, we put strategy, tech, design and production together.”

Designers, Writers, Coders, Tinkerers, Thinkers and Makers – This is the creative team of the future.

Image from TWT interactive from UVA.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So uploading your face is so 2008 and augmented reality is so 2009. Again just thinking how many great augmented reality campaigns are out there? – I’ve seen plenty of 3D cars and not much else, so the question is – are we as an industry fixated on technique and technology?

I would answer that question with a resounding ‘yes’ – A lot of agencies need to be seen as bleeding edge so they can claim the scalp that they were the first to use that tech. However, trying to retro-fit a piece of technology into a creative idea is hard – damn hard. Trying to do this and also hit the double whammy of wrapping it in a great insight or business requirement is asking the near impossible.

So whats the answer? Don’t do it?

Absolutely no – Here is the thing. Interactive advertising doesn’t build brands – It doesn’t come up with great strap lines – It doesn’t really exist (!) for long. And thats the point of it. It can just be a bit of fun – so don’t take it to seriously and enjoy it for what it is – a two minute distraction that actually involves people interacting with your brand and not – ‘the big idea’.

Related posts:

1. Why advertising agencies need to be salmon not sharks. Being a great white shark can’t be all bad can...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I arrive at what looks like a wordpress blog – with two images. Thats it. Was I expecting an all singing all dancing experience? Not really – But I was expecting to ‘see more comics’ or at least have some level of engagement.

All that media money spent on banner advertising to get me to see two press ads – Not a great user experience in my opinion. I would be really interesting to know if the digital agency (?) or the advertising agency agreed to this strategy.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What struck me though was just how the ad resembled a certain italian plumbers adventures in the utterly brilliant ‘Super Mario Galaxy’. Probably a total coincidence but it was quite interesting to think there was some influence there. Check the pics.

Flickr Pool

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.

More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.

The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.

It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.

www.kinetica-artfair.com

Related posts:

1. Kinetica Art Fair and Cybernetic Serendipity The Kinetica Art Fair was on over the weekend and...
2. London Underground Classics – Enid Marx The london underground might be derided as a creaking, rickety...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The art direction and sound direction are gorgeous and the level of detail in each screen is beautifully crafted. They did such a great job with the four screens it is a real shame the world wasn’t bigger or there was more of a level of  interaction in this world.

A few small criticisms – Some of the games are quite hard to find but I can understand they wanted people to get the enjoyment from exploring. Also there are other little avatars moving in the world and I didn’t understand if these were controlled by other visitors to the site or not – Some interaction with these other avatars would have been great.

My last comment is on the lack of a ‘take-out’ from the site. I created this gorgeous little avatar and he had no way to burst out from the site – No ability to save as a wallpaper (mobile would be been great) – No way to share to a friend  as perhaps a little widget or even an email. I hope they add these sorts of features to the site and more screens as right now I have no reason to revisit. They are missing a trick here but overall a really wonderful experience and one that is so subtle to selling product that I enjoyed the ‘product’ more.

Production – B-Reel

Agency – Fallon

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.