http://issuu.com/bepperiva/docs/mccann-worldgroup-truth-about-youth/8

Enjoy!

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Earlier this year, we featured a beautifully filmed, intimately narrated short documentary about Scott Schuman, better known as The Sartorialist, part of Intel’s Visual Life series. This month, the series is back with a fantastic episode about iconic designer Michael Wolff of Wolff Olins fame, whose insights on curiosity and appreciation as a central gateway to creativity resonate deeply with our own mission.

I have three muscles, without which I couldn’t do my work. The first is curiosity. (You can call it inquisitiveness, you can call it questioning.) The second muscle [is] the muscle of appreciation. It’s not questioning so much as it is noticing… how joyful things can be, how colorful things can be, what already exists as an inspiration. The muscle of curiosity and the muscle of appreciation enable the muscle of imagination.

Everybody knows that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What few people realize it is only through the parts that the whole gets delivered. I see seeing as a muscular exercise, like I see curiosity. It’s a kind of being open, really: If you walk around with a head full of preoccupation, you’re not going to notice anything in your visual life.” ~ Michael Wolff

A brand is really a way of remembering what something is like for future reference — something you value, something you feel attracted to. The job of a brand identity, how you package all of that — the purpose, the vision, what it does, what it brings — how you make that so that people can take it and receive it and value it and treasure it and choose it, that’s the whole process of branding. That’s what it is.” ~ Michael Wolff

The film comes from the fine folks at m ss ng p eces, the same team who took us behind the scenes of a TED talk in January.

There’s a certain packaging of human beings that takes place in order to reveal ourselves authentically, or in order to pretend to be something other than what we are.” ~ Michael Wolff

Wolff’s wisdom on branding and identity is encapsulated in the 1995 classic, The New Guide to Identity: How to Create and Sustain Change Through Managing Identity — a thoughtful blueprint for design-driven adaptation in a world of impermanence and inevitable change.

Another great post from Maria Popova at Brain Pickings

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By Larry Mann Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Does Super Bowl Spending Equal Super Returns?

In comparison to other American traditions like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, the Super Bowl is considerably new, yet it has already become an unofficial national holiday. Even more interesting is the advertising phenomenon during the Super Bowl, which has become an American tradition of its own.

The obvious advantage to advertising during the Super Bowl is the number of people your campaign can reach at one singular moment in time. With Pittsburgh and Green Bay in the game this year, will campaigns actually hit their target markets? Football-wise, these are two markets that boast massive fan bases, yet as far as DMA rankings are concerned, Pittsburgh is only #23 and Green Bay isn't even in the top 100.

Clearly, these commercials are expensive advertising investments for priceless exposure, but are they worth the price?

If reaching consumers is the main advantage, advertisers can rest easy knowing that the Super Bowl is one of the few events considered "TiVo proof." Viewers will be watching the commercials, instead of changing the channel or fast-forwarding through to the game. Ratings have climbed over the past four years, with last year's game surpassing the finale of "M-A-S-H" as the most viewed telecast in history at 106 million viewers. Facing these big numbers, the pressure for ads to succeed is just as big, if not bigger. And at the water cooler on Monday, everyone will be discussing not just the game, but also their favorite advertisements.

The truth is that these ads can make or break a company's entire year. Remember those dot.com ads of the '90s? A failed advertisement could end up being a waste of a company's money and time. Even worse, if the game is a blowout, what happens to ads in the fourth quarter? Commercial time was budget-priced last year at $2.5 to $2.8 million, according to CBS News -- not so this year with the price back up to $3 million. That is a big-ticket item, plus the cost of the commercial, which must produce the "wow" factor with the audience.

Super Bowl advertisers have to think in different terms. You can't just deliver a good commercial; it has to be the great and memorable part of a fully integrated campaign. Perhaps this is why companies like Papa John's opted to promote just a giveaway this year, without advertisements during the game.

Making headlines last week, Papa John's is offering free pizza for America, if the Super Bowl heads into overtime (which would be the first time in NFL history). Papa John's decided to use the giveaway strategy, especially with Pizza Hut buying a game-time slot for the first time in years. Or maybe the pressure of creating a memorable ad was too much to bear. Whatever the case, its strategy seems to be working so far, generating a lot of buzz among the media and on Twitter and Facebook.

From an Engage:Sports piece by Barry Janoff, we learn there is a resurgence of car companies airing ads both during the Super Bowl game and pre-game. Companies like Mercedes and BMW aren't satisfied with just a 30-second spot, they are getting in on the social media and giveaway trend. BMW is offering a two-year lease on a new X3 model; and Mercedes has a twitter-fueled contest with a giveaway of two C-Class coupes to followers of the winning team. These auto companies seem to be reaching for a younger audience, but will their ads only result in awareness, or will this ignite a car-buying season?

No doubt the giveaways and rewards for customers are a unique aspect of this year's Super Bowl advertising, perhaps a way of rewarding customers for their perseverance through the difficult economy and hoping to catch their attention and any new-found dollars. The companies, for the most part, are classic, blue-chip American companies, which are ready to get back in the proverbial advertising ring.

So like any boxing match, expect this first round to be fairly tame, middle-of-the-road type ads, no one going for the "knockout punch," so to speak. Look for ads focused on the consumers and America, with a patriotic feel and/or "green" theme. But with a potential NFL lockout looming, maybe these companies think their Super Bowl ads are worth the price while pro football is still around.

Larry Mann is executive vice president at sports marketing and media agency rEvolution. In 2001, Mann created the rEvolution Sports Network (rSN), a media buying, selling and planning division within the agency. Prior to rEvolution, Mann was vice president of sales for ESPN, and led the development of a national network of hometown teams' sports media for Fox Sports. Reach him here.

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WESTIE GROOMING

DAY 001
Time consumed: 55 min.

If I'll ever have a dog grooming salon my logo would look like this.

MEGALOGODON

DAY 002
Time consumed: 48 min.

My project is kind of a "mega" in proportions so hence the name. Megalodon is a giant prehistoric shark.

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO SHOOT...

DAY 003
Time consumed: 63 min.

...we salute you.
This one is inspired by AC-DC album cover.

Check out more here:

http://www.behance.net/gallery/100-logos-in-100-days/807632

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Book of Tens: Campaigns Creativity Loved

A Space Chimp, a Good-Smelling Man and a World Cup Anthem Are Among 2010's Memorable Efforts

Published: December 13, 2010

PEPSI: Refresh Project
The social-media-driven campaign from TBWA/Chiat/Day, L.A., which saw the marketer divert its Super Bowl budget toward social causes, has been one of the most -- dare we say -- important brand efforts of the year. Demonstrating what a reallocation of a portion of a mega media budget could do, the campaign ended this year with nearly three billion media impressions, 51 million votes from a broad demographic sample and millions given to worthwhile grassroots causes. The campaign has been a massive success in terms of awareness and -- say Pepsi bottlers, no less -- palpable goodwill toward the brand.

ARCADE FIRE: Wilderness Downtown
Director Chris Milk, data viz artist Aaron Koblin, Google, B-Reel, @radical.media, mr. doob and others brought their combined tech wizardry and artistry to bear on this phenomenal interactive video for the Arcade Fire song, "We Used to Wait." Milk's motivation was to endow the music-video experience with the same emotional resonance as music itself. The video, which uses Google Earth to provide a powerfully personal angle on the song, succeeded as an HTML5 case study, a nifty calling card for Chrome, a giant PR boost for Arcade Fire's new album and, most importantly, a powerfully personal way to experience a great song.

DOMINO'S: Pizza Turnaround
With the help of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Domino's bared its soul and turned to focus groups and social-media channels to find out what consumers really thought about its pizzas. After discovering that eaters were likening their pies to "cardboard and ketchup," the brand went on a quest to turn opinions around with a major recipe overhaul, documenting its efforts in a series of web films and spots and on the website PizzaTurnaround.com. The experiment in transparency was a success, and according to CMO Russell Weiner, resulted in plenty of media buzz, more satisfied customers and third-quarter same-store sales increase of 11.7%.

MITSUBISHI: Virtual Test Drive
Mitsubishi, its agency 180 L.A. and digital production maestros B-Reel made test- driving a car much more accessible to potential buyers (and, doubtless, much less nerve wracking, smelly and awkward for dealers) with what the marketer called an auto industry first -- the Live Drive. Part of an integrated campaign for the Outlander, Live Drive allowed 5,000 web viewers to drive an actual vehicle on an actual course, via a remote control software system. It's perhaps not the most enduring effort, but demonstrated how a big tech-enabled idea could come to life and create energy around a brand.

DARE LABS: Remote Palette
London agency Dare made an investment in creative technology in 2007, launching Dare Labs to foster new-product development. This year, the Labs bore fruit in the form of Remote Palette, a magical app that links iPad and iPhone, allowing users to paint on the iPad using their fingers as brushes and phone as palette. The app garnered huge online buzz, helped along by a web video featuring a man dressed as a certain artist, trying to shake ketchup onto his iPad -- a nod, of course, to the 1982 art clip, "Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger."

NIKE: Write the Future
The cornerstone of this World Cup campaign, from Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam, was a stellar anthem spot directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, starring an elite cast of athletes and celebs. Other components included a digital outdoor effort whereby users generated headlines that were projected onto a prominent Johannesburg building, and an online push that allowed visitors to see their own glorious rise from soccer unknown to all-star athlete in an interactive film and promo posters.

JAY-Z/BING: Decoded
Ubiquitous and massive -- two words that easily describe Droga5's campaign to promote Jay-Z's book, "Decoded." The multiplatform effort gave new meaning to "outdoor," and brought every page of the book to life on practically every surface imaginable -- from the rooftops of a building in New Orleans and the bottom of Miami's Delano Hotel pool, to the lining of suits -- giving fans a preview of the content at the locations that inspired them. For those who couldn't view the physical pages, a partnership with Microsoft Bing allowed Jay-Z followers around the globe to search for each page online via a scavenger hunt.

WWF: Space Chimp
The World Wildlife Fund Australia collaborated with musical artist Ben Lee and Leo Burnett, Sydney, on this gut-wrenching video. Serving as a music video for Lee's "Song for the Divine Mother of the Universe" and an environmental-awareness message, Space Chimp follows the titular astronaut returning home from a long voyage to find himself alone on a ruined planet. The visuals, orchestrated by director Steve Rogers, are superb and the effort is a great example of inter-brand collaboration.

CONAN O'BRIEN: Comeback Campaign
When it came time for Conan O'Brien to return to TV land with his new TBS talk show, he and the cable channel leveraged his legion of online supporters, aka Team Coco, and launched a slew of social media-minded pushes that included everything from a Foursquare-linked blimp, web films and a webcam showing live antics from his new office. The campaign also included hilarious TV promos, including a massive actioner starring the host in an explosive cliff dive. And, of course, there were the hilarious Twitter missives of O'Brien himself. All resulted in a successful opening night, with O'Brien surpassing both Jay Leno and David Letterman in the ratings.  

credit these guys for this:

http://adage.com/bookoftens2010/article?article_id=147584

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Honey-bee populations are mysteriously dwindling worldwide. In England, the Banrock Station winery created the "world's first ad with live bees" to call attention to the problem. They used queen-bee pheromones to attract a giant swarm of bees (as many as 100,000, according to the BBC) from a nearby honey farm to spell out an "SOS" message on a billboard. No bees were harmed and no one was stung during the stunt. The winery is also donating 5p to the honey-bee cause for every bottle sold. Clare Griffiths from Banrock Station tells the BBC: "We thought there was no better way to raise awareness of the British bee decline than get the bees to tell their story themselves. We hope the billboard has created a bit of a buzz in Devon and beyond." Via Copyranter.

Original here:

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2010/09/100000-live-bees-plead-for-help-on-billboard.html

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Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually.

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014

Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.
For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”

4. Al Gore has always been animated.

5. Los Angelinos have always been trying to get along.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation.

14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.

15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.

22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.

23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.

24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.

25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown.

30. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows.

31. The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.

33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.

34. “Assisted Living” has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always been an alternative to hospitals.

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.

36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.

37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.”

38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes.

40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.

41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.

42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.

43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.

44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.

45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents.

48. Someone has always gotten married in space.

49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States.

50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

51. Food has always been irradiated.

52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he?

54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy.

55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street.

57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife.

58. Beethoven has always been a dog.

59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone.

60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48.

61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else.

62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.

63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.

64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.

65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church.

67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

69. The Post Office has always been going broke.

70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been.

73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated.

74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi Channel.

75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis.

Original:

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php

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Check out the interactive map here:

http://londonist.com/2010/06/londons_twitter_traffic_mapped_as_c.php

Our friends at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis never cease to amaze us. Today's dose of digital craftsmanship shows the peaks and troughs of London's Twitter traffic in the style of a contoured map.

In a cute touch, areas of the capital are renamed to fit this new topological visualisation. At London's heart is Soho Mountain, the towering peak of the local Twittersphere. We see the foothills of Peckham Crag, Gherkin Point, Battersea Hill and Hackney Downs Hill. The Lea Valley remains a valley, while the Wembley Plains look ripe for fertile growth.

This work of near-genius was crafted by CASA's Fabian Neuhaus for his Urban Tick blog. You can find high-resolution images of London and other cities treated in this way over on his Flickr pages.

The mashup comes hot on the heels of numerous other notable visualisations, including the real-time Tube map and an artful representation of where most photos in London are taken.

With thanks to Andy Hudson-Smith for the heads-up.

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Eric “The Incredimazing” Fischer used advanced geo-logic to filter tourists from locals in his Geotagger’s World Atlas.

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in places that tourists don’t visit.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken by locals.

Full set on Flickr, a few interesting ones below (click image to zoom)

NYC:

London:

Vancouver:

LA:

Rome:

Vegas:

Venice:

Detail of San Francisco:

Tourists are rare in the Mission, but they do seem to prefer the Castro, the southwest corner of Dolores Park and the murals on Balmy Alley.

I got the goods from here:

http://burritojustice.com/2010/06/05/damn-tourists/

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Now, as TechCrunch points out, the estimated 800,000 cord cutters represent less than 1 percent of the 100 million U.S. households (give or take) currently subscribing to a cable/satellite/telco TV carrier, so it's not like we're talking a mass exodus here. But by the end of 2011, the report guesstimates, the number of cord-cutting households in the U.S. will double to about 1.6 million, and if the trend continues, well...

Have you cut the cord? How much of your viewing entertainment is from the internet or via NetFlix?

While window shopping for an HD tv (yes I still have an SD tv) I have noticed that many of them come with CAT5 inputs and have these widget things and stuff - are cable and satellite providers doomed?

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SUMMARY: Consumers recognize the connection between diet and health, and for the most part, act on that knowledge. Perhaps a by-product of their quest for wellness, health-aware consumers are careful with their bodies and their budgets, making fewer impulse buys, using shopping lists, savoring the shopping outing and efficiently walking the aisles with a connoisseurs’ knowledge of merchandising and planograms.

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Todd Hale, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Shopper Insights &

Dan Brady, Director, Insights Consulting, The Nielsen Company

SUMMARY: A consistent pattern of reduced shopping trips continues to be a major element of consumer’s economic coping strategies. In the latest battle for share of wallet, those retailers who satisfy consumers through differentiation will gain more of less.

The recession continues its ravaging effect on retailers. According to Nielsen, the downward trend of consumers shopping less hit a new low in February 2010, reporting a 4% year-over-year decline in monthly all-outlet shopping trips. And while per trip shopping basket rings began to pick up during and after the holidays, February remained static with a 1% increase compared to last year. Retailers’ focus on store brands and retail price cuts helped keep spending levels in check driving more value for shoppers.

Full story here:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/recessionary-impact-fewer-shopping-trips-and-less-spending-per-trip/

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Americans increased their overall media usage and media multitasking according to The Nielsen Company’s latest Three Screen Report, which tracks consumption across TV, Internet and mobile phones.  In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a month while also watching TV.

“The rise in simultaneous use of the web and TV gives the viewer a unique on-screen and off-screen relationship with TV programming,” said Nielsen Company media product leader Matt O’Grady. “The initial fear was that Internet and mobile video and entertainment would slowly cannibalize traditional TV viewing, but the steady trend of increased TV viewership alongside expanded simultaneous usage argues something quite different.”

Full story here:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/three-screen-report-q409/

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Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

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February 16, 2010

Jason Green, The Cambridge Group

SUMMARY: The rise of new technologies and increased channel fragmentation makes reaching consumer targets more challenging than ever. More and more consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers are finding that micro-targeting strategies—traditionally employed by specialized business—are unleashing new, deeper insights into their customer targets enabling them to grow brands in creative and profitable ways.

Full Story here:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/micro-targeting-it%E2%80%99s-not-just-for-niche-brands-anymore/

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