Feeding the Puppy

Life without a computer?

I had a call from Caroline Marshall at over at Haymarket earlier this week; she's asked me if I'd like to try a little experiment for writing a piece in Marketing, and live without any form of computer for 48 hours, and only work and live exclusively on a mobile device.

Being the curious sort, I immediately said 'ok', naturally.  My curiousity is being slowly replaced by a little dread...

Thing is, I am more dependent on PCs than most folk; obviously there's the one I use at work, and the one at home... and then in betwen the two, there's the lovely little Toshiba R500 I use on the train (seriousy, it's only as heavy as a bag of sugar, tis ace).

And as a result, I've not really upgraded to a full-on smartphone (I chose the LG Viewty last time out, which is now a very long 14 months ago... grrrr, eighteen month contracts).

Work did once give me a Blackberry, but I gave it back because I just couldn't work fast enough on it; for anyone who's ever received a lengthy, train of though email from me, you can see why... I'm going to have to embrace brevity as my friend, I think.

So I'm getting a loan of an iPhone from O2, and some initial tips and guidance from Ed over at Yahoo, but what I'd love is some thoughts and pointers from anyone out there who spends time working off a mobile device...

I guess I'll be noting things on my drop.io 'to-do' list, and can do that from anywhere... but I don't want to spend 48 hours just noting things that I should do after the test is over. 

The point for me is 'could I work like this forever?'...

- Can I write presentations?
- Or create something to 'replace' presentations
- Post stuff 'easily' to here on Feeding The Puppy? 
- Mess around with pictures photoshop style?
- Hook up multiple emails (work, band, personal)?
- And of course, write about the experience for the Marketing piece whilst I'm doing it

Your input and thoughts, dear friends, is going to be invaluable I think...

...what are your top tips?

Pedigree Chunks!

• Dyson flying the coop

 

This weeks installment is dedicated to the great Tom Dyson who is moving on from PHD, today being his final day. Tom joined as a Grad last year and since then has been working across Warner Home Entertainment and ING. As of a couple of weeks time he will be working in the marketing department of UBS Bank in New York City. We wish him all the best.

As a small tribute we thought it only fitting to document two of Tom's favourite past times....Classic British Comedy and University Challenge....Enjoy
 

• Something For the Weekend

This weekend see's the much anticipated theatrical release of Watchmen. Adapted from a graphic novel wrtitten by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union where freelance costumed vigilantes have been outlawed.

The story focuses upon an investigation into the murder of a government sponsored superhero, which pulls other vigilantes out of retirement and eventually leads them to confront a plot by one of their own to stave off nuclear war by killing millions of innocent people....

 

Oooo, the green eyed monster...

I try not to be jealous of things; green is such an unbecoming colour on me...

But two things on this post here on Alexander Kjerulf's blog set me off all sorts of emerald :)

Firstly, Alexander is 'Chief Happiness Officer'... as it says on his bio, he "speaks and consults in businesses all over the world, showing executives, managers and employees how to change workplaces from dreary and stressful to more fun, energized and happy. And profitable!"

Yep, he travels the world and makes work communities happier. 

Brilliant, who wouldn't love spreading joy :)

And the second thing is the thing he shared about his friend Charlotte's business cards.. she works at LEGO...

Wow, how jealous am I?!?!  (clue: the answer begins with V and rhymes with 'berry')

(hat-tip to Helen for the tweet)


Anyway, I guess we do pretty well with our Moo cards... over the last three weeks or so, I've delighted in the 'ooo, they're different' reaction from loads of different people to the ol' Moo Cards.

No-one expects something different from big companies, I've realised. 

Here's maybe why, using a stretchy little allegory...

There's a professor who when lecturing would fill a jar full of rocks, and ask his students 'how full is the jar'?  Pretty full, they conclude.

 

He then gets lots of pebbles, and poured them in.  The pebbles trickle down, and fill the gaps between the rocks.  'How full is it now'? 

Well, really full, they concluded.  Then he repeated the trick with sand.  Then again with water...

...what appeared full at first of course wasn't; there was space in between.

Now, the original story has a different moral (as I found here when googling for an image of a 'jar of rocks'), but I'm going to use it for my own purposes...

In large organisations, jobs are like rocks.  They are large, weighty things, because people write job descriptions for them to match a need at a certain time.

Then they are fixed in size and shape for a while.  They never dovetail precisely together.  There are always gaps.  In between.  But if people stick to their rock-shaped jobs, the stuff in-between never gets thought about, or done.

It's what Seth Godin referred to once in a video I watched as 'not my job' syndrome.  Something may need doing, and it could be really obvious to the outsider, but if everyone in a company is rock-like, then nothing will be sorted out.

So for instance sorting out business cards, so that they're a little moment of amazement when you connect with people on the outside... no-one would write into a job description for someone to do that.

As a consequence, people are surprised when big companies do nice small touches. 

You need people with more fluidity in their roles, so they can feel that they should fill those gaps where they see them.

Because if they're spotting the little opportunities like that, just think what will happen when they spot big opportunities...

BUD.TV R.I.P

Last week Anheuser-Busch finally pulled the plug on its ambitious and yet deeply flawed branded content venture Bud.tv. Launched after the Superbowl in January 2007, Budweiser's online comedy channel was heralded as the future of advertising, where consumers 'pull' on branded content rather than tolerate having ads 'pushed' at them. $30m is estimated to have been spent on it in its first year alone, with top writers from Letterman, Da Ali G show and the Tonight Show coming on board. The rationale for A-B was that Budweiser makes funny, popular ads, and therefore it was well placed to launch a comedy channel.

However, if content is king, then distribution is the kingmaker. Determined to go it alone and be free of 3rd party media channels in the distribution of its programmes, A-B launched Bud.tv just as the web was moving away from a collection of lots of video websites, to the YouTube model of a single system allowing fast and efficient portability. This meant that no one was able to share / spread the content via social networking sites and after a few months its traffic was so low that Comscore was unable to measure it. Combined with a cumbersome registration process, to verify the age of visitors, Bud.tv was a good example of how not to do branded content.

A-B are not the only ones to have made the mistake of thinking that pull communications is just about great content ('content is king'). In July 2006 Coke created a destination site that allowed users to upload and share their content in the same way as YouTube. It too failed to attract a following and Coke changed their strategy to one of greater integration into social networks and 3rd party content channels. And in the very same week that Bud.tv died, Adidas.TV had a soft launch:

 

In contrast to Bud.tv Adidas are fully embracing third party content and social networking services. They are not only syndicating their content, allowing users to take the content wherever they want, they are also taking feeds from some of their big NBA stars' content from YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Instead of locking their content into a single site as Bud did, Adidas has a model of circulating content.

Daniel Stein, the CEO of EVB who created Adidas.TV, sums up the strategy: "The point is less about getting people to the site. It's more about getting the content to the people." Let's hope that they have greater success with this strategy and, ahem, that branded content channels haven't been nipped in the Bud...

Taking the Red Pill

I was walking through a shopping mall in Wandsworth at the weekend... well, at least, walking through a corridor where there were a few shops left...

It really just does make you realise how much capacity for consumption we've built into the economy over the last few years... and when one section starts to go wrong, it takes a lot with it. 

The banks take the small businesses, because they cut credit.  The small businesses, because they lay people off, take all the things that those people spent their wages on (cars, consumables, larger shops...), so all the bigger businesses suffer too. 

Then of course when the bigger businesses suffer, the people who supply services to them (of which of course the advertising industry is one) find themselves suffering a shortfall too...

Sitting in a meadja agency, naturally I keep thinking about the marketing departments at companies cutting spend. 

The people there are no longer kept as busy, working overtime to manage the massive mass-media machine, occupied with the responsibility and workload that millions and millions of traditional advertising spend demands... because the budgets have dropped.

What they suddenly have is a lot of time, and very little money, to try and make a difference to how their company communicates to the customers out in the world.  The lack of funds means they can do nothing but try and be as innovative as possible in the communications landscape.

Now, two key aspects of social media and community based communications;

i) they are very time intensive compared to 'mass media', as you have to be 'present' in the conversation with people, and...

ii) they are also comparatively cheap compared to mass media, because the cost of bringing people together has sunk so low 

Marketing departments have more time, and less money.  Social media takes more time, and less money.  It's hardly rocket science to see where this is heading...

So what's our role, at agencies?  Same as it ever was, to paraphrase David Byrne & Talking Heads. 

Help them connect their companies with people (as I talked about at the APA here).  Spotting new opportunities, having the experience in those areas to make it work, and actually getting it done.  It's not going to be easy, and it'll mean change on all sides.  But it's the future, I think.

There's no point hanging around for the time after this recession when everything goes back to the way it was... we can't, won't and in all honesty don't want to return to that world, knowing what we know now.

It's time to take the red pill, folks, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes...

Pedigree Chunks!

 Welcome to Pedigree Chunks! The Friday afternoon update feeding you with fresh meaty morsels from the world of media, created and collated by the litter of new grads here at PHD. Every Friday we will be bringing you innovative, entertaining and pioneering creative work we have encountered during the week.

The Grads! X

• Making the Internet more Mobile

The new generation of High Speed Mobile Internet to replace 3G is being tested on the streets of Barcelona during this years Mobile World Congress. This will allow moblie devices to be used in an increasingly interactive and multi media platform, as the quality of content increases......<Tom Parry>

Arguably prioritizing form over function, the new LG Touch Watch combines a phone with, err, a watch. Clearly the main selling point is “you can wear it on your wrist”, but is that where the appeal ends? Well, in fact, it’s not. Replete with bluetooth wizardry, HSDPA connectivity, media player, and water resistance to 50 metres, this could very well be the future of mobile telephony. I particularly like it in white....<Tom Dyson>
 

• Atheist Generator

Unless you have had your head firmly stuck in the stand it was pretty hard not to catch the Atheist Bus Campaign that drummed up a lot of PR attention in the papers over the last few months. Off the back of this campaign has come a Bus Slogan Generator, which whilst also good for expressing your inner atheist is also an incredible opportunity for creating some annoying slogans about your workmates....<Max Colson>
 

• Heineken Perkonomics

Following on from last week's Perkonomics article, here is a recent example of how Heineken are impacting consumers in a new and mutually beneficial way....<Tom Parry>

  
 

• Oscars Weekend....

This weekend brings the highly anticipated 81st Academy Awards ceremony from the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. There are 21 nominations in total for Warner Brothers films The Dark Knight and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, some good British representation from Kate Winslet and Mike Leigh, and of course the cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire which is nominated for 10 awards. Tune in to Sky 1 on Monday night at 10 for highlights....<Victoria Hine>

The Future of Advertising - Slidecast

A few days ago, I spoke at the APA's 'Future of Advertising in One Afternoon' conference down at BAFTA... and thanks to the APA & BAFTA, I got my hands on the audio too...

...so, as promised before, here's a slidecast of the presentation; press play, and you'll here some dulcet Scottish tones after Steve Davies' intro... enjoy :)

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John v Willshire. (tags: communities social)

Spring is coming @ the APA...

Spring is coming; look, it's just over the hill, just over there...

...and, in addition, Hel & I saw the first flowers poking out the ground this morning walking to the train.  Hoorah for Spring :)

Which reminds me of Will Hutton's talk yesterday @ the APA 'Future of Advertising...' conference. 

He reckons the 'green shoots of recovery' will start to emerge, banking sector allowing, in autumn 2010.  It's going to be a hardish winter for the advertising winter until then.

It's kinda of too late to think how we should best prepare for the recession, we're already in it, and it's caught a lot of folk unawares.

So screw preparing for the recession; let's spend 18 months preparing for the recovery instead...

PS  I spoke later on yesterday, and I'm informed that we have the recordings of the presentations, so when I get the mp3 through, I'll upload it with the slides and do a lovely slidecast. 

Until then, here's a picture of the audience gathering while I was waiting to speak after the coffee break: 

I can see why at public executions in ye olden days they would let the crowd assemble before bringing out the condemned man...

Web visualisation

Anyone with the (mis)fortune of having to decipher my notes will know that they tend to look like a big spider diagram (on a good day), or a scrawl (on a bad day). In a very simple process of paying attention to things that look similar I came across this tool...

(Not to big it up, but it is Brilliant)

This tool from Touchgraph provides a visualisation (using Google) of a website and the connections it enjoys in the online space. You can type in anything you would in google to see the various online platforms which are connected and associated with that word / brand.

Talking about it won't really bring it life - have a play.

In looking at "Obama" you get the visualisation below.

High Five Escalator...

I love high fives.  And escalators.  So what in the world could be better* than the high five escalator...

Thanks to Simon for the heads up.

*yes, you're right, it might be the fist bump escalaor... but in the meantime, this piece of genius will certainly suffice :)