Great News!
I have been invited back to The Fruits of Imagination as a regular contributor. Only problem is that now I have to half research what I’m writing about…no more firing from the hip opinion pieces.
I can’t for the life of me figure this out.
Update: Apparently this master piece won a Bronze at the Kyiv Festival (out of the Ukraine).
I first heard about Noah Brier a few months ago when he released a presentation on SEO Strategies for blogs. His latest project to garner some serious press from the likes of Seth Godin and PSFK is Brand Tags. It’s a service that displays a logo to the visitor and they have to write down the first word that comes to mind when they see it.
It’s brilliance is in its simplicity. Companies of all sizes spend large sums of money trying to influence consumers and build positive associations with their brand. Brand tags finds out whether all that effort has been work while.
Excellent work Noah. However I’m not sure if “bling” is the type of association Rolls was looking for…
Source: Seth Godin, PSFK, Noah Brier, Brand Tags
Pop-up stores are becoming more common all the time. Trendwatching calls it “Pop-Up Retail” and for companies like Target, Ebay and JC Penny it has been quite successful.
The latest pop-up store to gain some PR is method who has opened a store in downtown NYC. In 2005 in San Fran they tried a similar stunt, but this time they will include nightly entertainment with retailers, a photobooth where consumers can confess their non-environmentally friendly sins and an exchange program for old chemical-based products.
For more images of the store, check out PSFK’s coverage.
Sources: Trendwatching, PSFK, method
The results are in. Everyone knows that the iPhone is a big success. But Why?
Here are some of the key findings:
Source: Rubicon Consulting
Addict-o-matic is a great little tool that just popped up on my radar. Geeks are Sexy refers to it as a tool to help “perform ego searches online.” In reality, it searches popular services like technorati, bloglines, digg, flickr, google, delicious, twitter, wordpress and yahoo for whatever it is that you’re looking for. In essence, it gives you a snapshot of what the internet as a whole has to say about your search term.
For example: Searching Angus Gastle will net you my Youtube account, some recent posts thanks to wordpress and yahoo and my affiliations with both The Bottom Rung and the fruits of imagination. It’s great for not just aggregating text but also image and video content as well from flickr and youtube.
Helpful resource, even if you only use it to google yourself…
Source: Geeks Are Sexy
“When Life Gives you Lemons” is the latest studio album from famous beat maker, Fifth Element. Instead of doing the usual to help sell albums, Rhymesayers Entertainment decided to go interactive. PaintThatShitGold.com allows users to apply graffiti to any site on the internet. From Google to Youtube to JohnMcCain.com, no one is safe.
In a word, brilliant. From the little details like how the site continually references “the interweb” to allowing people to tag sites while listening to the new album (which is pretty hot), this site is near perfect. It’s effortlessly easy to figure out and allowing users to upload their own work leads to some interesting interpretations of the web’s most popular sites.
I can’t say enough about it really…
Source: Paintthatshitgold.com
One of the greatest pictures ever captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Called “Deep Space”, it shows the millions billions of other galaxies that populate our universe. Each one is unique, each one is special.
In total, the universe has been estimated at over 156 Billion light years across. But galaxies can be grouped into types (spirals, elliptical, etc) or regions (ie. clusters). The closest galaxy to the Milky way is Andromeda which is over 2 Million Light years away.
In advertising, we impact a huge number of people across a variety of demographics, areas and countries. The universe metaphor puts our job in perspective nicely.
Source: NASA
Great news! Today I start at Leo Burnett Toronto.
Sorry for my absence again last week. I couldn’t resist a week’s vacation.
Update: I heard a great quote today in regards to my first day at work.
“Welcome to Day 1 of pretending to be a responsible, grown adult…it’s a 20 year project.” -Kirk Brown
By the late ’90s, Enron had proved that they were the smartest guys in the room. The problem was that they were too smart for their own good and got caught.
With oil over $100 a barrel and our yearly consumption continuing to climb, the smartest guys in the room are now the OPEC member nations; mainly Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Why? Well for one, they are projected to take us for over $1 Trillion in 2008. The United States considers itself the most powerful nation in the world and yet they paying billions to the kinds of people that pay the kinds of people that fly planes into buildings.
But this post isn’t about OPEC or 9/11, it’s about planning for the future. The oil sheiks are rich, for now. But the person who figures out what comes next after oil will show them how it’s done. When the penny drops, who’s going to be the one to react?
In our business, we also have to be ahead of the curve. The internet is going in your pocket, the iPhone is allowing us to interact with one another in new, exciting ways and Facebook/Google help put it all together.
It’s a brilliant system. And I want in.
What’s next after Facebook? Google? the iPhone? the internet? How are you going to corner the market with the next big idea? What do you think is the next step?
My friend Moritz and I are hard at work on that very concept, we’ll let you know when we hit it big.
Sources: Steelguru.com, Wikipedia
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