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US NOW SCREENING IN COPENHAGEN
29/04 2009 // aaron
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A quick heads up to say that Us Now, ‘a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet’, is being screened here in Copenhagen next month.
The screening is being organised by KaosPilot International, the International School of New Business Design and Social Innovation, and will be followed by a panel discussion with folks from Wemind and the Danish government, as well as the film’s director. Get more info and sign up for tickets here.
Here’s the trailer:
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STAND BY ME SPLICED AND DICED
29/04 2009 // aaron
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This interpretation of Ben E. King’s classic is a wonderful example of the editor’s art. The producers filmed and recorded a host of street artists performing the song around the world, and then spliced it together to create this wonderful piece:
“Stand by Me” performed by musicians around the world from SKAT on Vimeo.
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TILLYKKE TIL HEMPEL!
24/04 2009 // aaron
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A quick post to say well done to our friends at Hempel for winning this year’s prestigious ‘Produktprisen’ from Ingeniøren magazine for their X3 coating. The annual award is given to the Danish-designed product deemed to have made the most significant contribution to global industry.
The judges recognised the product’s fuel-saving capabilities and praised its environmental credentials.
Gratifyingly, the lovely people at Hempel went out of their way to thank us for our work on the X3 campaign, which they said had made the judges’ decision an easy one. Nice!
See what TV2 News had to say on the subject (in Danish).
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A LEGO A DAY..
17/04 2009 // Annette Flinck
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I fell over this cool site the other day – better late than never, right?
Well, meet Dan. 27 years old. Living with Annie, his supposedly beautiful fiancee, in northern Virgina. For the love of LEGO and for the love of photography he’s on a mission: To take a photo with a LEGO minifig every day for an entire year. Check his site out. Some of them are really cool and funny.
Take for example this one from day 318 - The LEGO ninja forgets his gloves 
And this, where it’s clear to everyone that this Gillette shaving is doomed to go wrong..
Or this one, very real-life setting, when the ship’s new first mate demonstrates his patented ’scurvy slam’ move..
At the conclusion of the 365, assuming his contact with LEGO goes well, his plan is to do prints and a coffee-table type photo book of all of the pictures for purchase. Nice.
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GETTING DIRTY WITH Q8
15/04 2009 // aaron
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We’ve just launched a fun new campaign for our friends at Q8 aimed at getting more people to use their rather fancy carwashes.
Line Maria and Line – adopting the hands-on approach – spent the day literally dishing the dirt at three different service stations:
As well as buckedloads of dirt, the cars are emblazoned with a sticker informing passing drivers that they can pay by swiping their cards inside the carwash instead of having to go into the service station to buy a token.
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THE IPHONE MEANS BUSINESS
13/04 2009 // aaron
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Apple is poised to break the one billion barrier in terms of the number of apps it has sold for its iPhone and iTouch devices. This is pretty incredible given that it’s been less than a year since the App Store actually launched.
As The Guardian indicated the other day, music is one of the industries that has been most affected, while the iPhone is also emerging as a serious gaming machine with almost a quarter of the apps sold to date games of some kind, over half of which are paid-for.
But it’s not all fun and games; Apple itself has been keen to remind us of the iPhone’s utility value.
With almost 20million iPhones sold around the globe to date, brands should probably not be ignoring the potential of a good app.
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BIKE HELMETS MUST ONLY BE GOOD, RIGHT?
06/04 2009 // aaron
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Bike blogger extraordinaire Mikael Colville-Andersen (The Guardian called him ‘The Sartorialist on wheels’) is not someone who lets ‘facts’ and ‘statistics’ get in the way of the truth.
Over the past year or so Mikael has been busy getting to grips with the science and the studies trotted out by the organisations and the individuals (read commercial interest groups) who believe bike helmets should be made compulsory.
He’s buried himself in the literature, educated himself, approached the problem with an open mind, and he’s made a few interesting discoveries.
I won’t go into too much detail but, to be brief, he’s learnt that there is precious little in the way of good science to back up the clain that helmets offer worthwhile protection in the event of a collision. And he has also learnt that cyclist numbers can drop by up to 40% in the cities and countries with compulsory helmet laws.
This argument is emphasized in Mikael’s most recent post on the subject, which features the picture above from Sweden. The image is of an advert put out by a Swedish organisation lobbying for tougher road safety laws. The headline translates as: ‘A helmet protects in more ways than one’. (Spot the birdcrap on the helmet.)
Someone has then gone to the trouble to add their own comment underneath, which translates as: ‘Fewer choose the cycle’. It looks as though Mikael’s message is spreading.
Part of the reason I post this on what is ostensibly an ad blog is because I wonder if the ad agency that produced the ad for their client took the time to really research this subject.
At first glance, it would have looked like a pretty simple brief: Client thinks more Swedes should wear bike helmets. Bike helmets are designed to protect people’s heads. Therefore they can only be a good thing. Make outdoor ad promoting this message.
But on closer investigation, this brief could have raised a few troubling questions for the agency: How good is the science here? What if we are complicit in driving people away from bikes and back into their cars? Is this scaremongering?
I guess what I am getting at (while running the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld) is that there are certain ‘truths’ that we just feel less compelled to question. Such as the ‘truth’ that bike helmets must only be a good thing. But as ad people we’ve got to examine the heck out of every problem we face, or run the risk of being complicit in something bad.
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Mikael has created a terrific resource here (Danish) for people wanting to educate themselves and learn more about the bike helmet debate.
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THE INTERNET RULES, NO WAIT IT SUCKS!
01/04 2009 // aaron
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The Ad Contrarian’s take on the ‘TV is Dead’ debate is rapidly reaching ‘seminal’ proportions in terms of web traction. I.e. it’s still being talked about and linked to a couple of days after publication.
And for good reason too. His argument that the ‘ad industry is mesmerised by the web’ and too heavily invested in the myth that it will sweep away TV and advertising as we know it is solidly backed up by viewing figues.
Maybe we’re all trying too hard to make the web fit our preconceived norms of what makes a medium successful. I’m thinking of things like ‘metrics’ and ‘click-through rates’ and lots of other things I don’t fully understand but instinctively dislike.
As this Ad Age article makes clear, people just don’t click on banner ads, but they can be influenced by a more creative rich media ad that stands out and does something different. Which sounds like Day One at Advertising School: Things Bill Bernbach said . . .
It seems to me that a lot of the hype and bombast around the web is down to us ad types being afraid of missing the gravy train. Another groundless theory I’ve been germinating is that we are all shit scared of change and one of the things the web does best is create the impression that everything is changing REALLY FAST!
In times like this, it’s important just to calm down and remember some random aphorisms:
A stumble may prevent a fall (Anonymous).
When will crowds out knowledge, we call the result obstinacy (Schopenhauer).
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes (Proust).
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