HolyCow

Why?

The planners question

You must keep asking why. Why? Because it's just not planning when:

1) Everyone is talking and no-one is listening

2) Intellectualism is feted more than simplicity in your dept.

3) Research is used for support not illumination

4) You talk about 'consumers' not people

5) You have information not insights

6) The boss is always right

7) All your powerpoint decks look the same

8) There are rational reasons for why people buy things on your briefs

9) You still believe in purchase funnels

10) Ideas are the job of creatives

11) Data is seen to be more important than behaviour

12) The client is always right

13) You don't know the role of communications for your brief

14) The account team thinks the client isn't 'strategic'

15) Everyone analyses rather than synthesises

16) Dialogue is more important than conversations

17) You judge creative work rather than create it

18) The 'brand' conversation is owned by another agency

19) You think there is one answer

20) People around you believe that efficiency is more important than effectiveness

21) That it is ok to think incremental improvements are a long term solution

Every Extend Extra Event

I recently had the good fortune to be asked by the lovely PR firm that looks after Buena Vista in the UK to attend an evening at The Kingly Club (formerly the infamous Pinstripe Club) with Tetsuya Mizuguchi - the former Chief Creative Officer of Sega's United Game Artists game division - who was talking about his new creation - Every Extend Extra.

Now I know very little about gaming - but I am enthusiastic about meeting creatives from parallel fields - architects, designers, musicians, filmakers etc etc. so this was a must. I was supposed to interview him earlier in the day but time pressure put paid to that. Ho hum.

Tesuya - a brief history:

Now Tetsuya is a fascinating individual - he is considered to be the Godfather of gaming and has worked on many of the most famous titles including Sega Rally Championship, Space Channel 5 and Rez and for the most successful companies - Nintendo and Sega included. He now runs his own company Q Entertainment where he gets to do the things that he likes best - overseeing and bringing his visions to life and exploring the hidden subtexts that exist in the relationship between form and sound and portability of media.

His influences and background

When he was at uni he majored in media aesthetics at Nihon University's Faculty of Arts - which is interesting - and only got into gaming through an interview at Sega - the rest is history.

Besides designing video games, Mizuguchi is incredibly interested in directing music videos - and the link between music and art - however you want to define it - is close in his world. He already works with various DJs and music producers for the soundtracks of his games - He kept repeating the link to art and cubism and music and I got the impression he was talking about synaesthesia - the strange way that some people can experience moods and sounds as colours - among other things.

Synaesthesia, hidden meanings and the future of gaming

He was clearly very tired and was having trouble with his English but I did pick up a few things to share that are worth examining such as how he sees an inherent link between art and music, shapes and forms, behaviour and music, the chain reaction between them.

So I decide to look into this and I found out he once designed a game called Rez - which was dedicated to Kandinsky so I am led to believe - and guess what - it turns out Kandinsky was a sufferer - so was Hockney, Hendrix, Syd Barrett, Sibelius - there is quite an impressive link. Now at the time I had made a note that he was referring to a sort of immersive experience where sound and music are entrained through the user experience as a sort of experiential futuristic sartori. And it turns out that is approximately right.

What a long strange trip:

My scribbles are all about sounds as movement and as as shapes - I was thinking about the Grateful Dead and how Mountain Girl would sync the light show that reflected the tonality and mood of the improvised music being played in the late 60s and early 70s - the lights being as important as the music - a totally immersive experience heavily influenced by LSD at the time of course - but totally interrelated. This is the same principle exactly that he was sharing - I think.

Inspiration:

He once said in an interview that his inspiration was imagining if those artists that only had canvass to express themselves had lived now, with all these new tools, what kind of things would they make, in entertainment or art? Good question - this is a great way to look at how one sythesises information and inflences to create new forms and ideas - perfect for plannners.

Where to now?

Well this was a great and unique glimpse into a world I had little or no idea about - other than witnessing images through Matrix - or creating worlds in my own mind through reading things like Snowcrash - essential for planners to understand the potential of a digital world IMHO and I am very grateful to have met such interesting people - I am now going to start to play Rez, Every Extend Extra and Lumines - one of his other games.

I am inherently interested in synaesthesia and wish to explore more about how it works because I think it might unlock something about the potency of moving images and emotions and how the semiotics of colours (logso packaging etc) could lead to new connections and possibilities. Now that was a worthwhile evening! Superb!

Cheers Gary, Ruben and Matt

Signs of happiness

A smiling car?

The semiotics of this are quite interesting - the car itself looks like it's wearing summer clothes and it sort of makes me think it's actually happy - daft isnt it? The car has massive personality - compare this to any of the cars that surrounds it.

Accident prevention decals?

It has an almost tangible aura that made me feel like I would really hate to run into it on the road. I think I would give it more room and let it out infront of me in traffic. The graphics are just so right - well art directed and nicely over the top without being in your face. I wonder if someone like Pampers could research this hypothesis and then create decals of flowers and non-threatening imagery that new mothers could put on their cars rather than this which is just wallpaper and has no emotional surprise anymore:

Transferable brand meanings

Everyone who passed it smiled so I took a pic. This works like an ad for the fun and sheer playfulness of the Beetle but somehow in my head I kept thinking Innocent drinks - weird! My view of a brand is that it works like a halo of associations that surround and illuminate a product or service or organisation (not overly dissimilar to John G) and in this case the green and flowers and playfulness/freshness just seem to be inherently linked with Innocent. I wonder what would happen if you played with this on other brands where you 'dress' them up in seemingly unconnected cultural iconography.

So lets try it with this face and ears and think about applying it to other innanimate objects such as kettles or toasters or lawnmovers - or a new range of sports bras for women perhaps - you get the idea - could work I think.

New Look :-)

New look for 2007 - don't know why - just felt I needed to do something to inspire me a bit more. I will be playing around with formats and stuff I reckon in the next few weeks - time to get creative on ma ass...

Couldn't resist her...

It's me old favourite...

Taken at 8am last Wednesday. Still get a sense of pride when I look up. Nice.

Irony

I was walking to a brainstorm last week and passed this place on my way to the Sanderson in Berners Street. It is of course Copyright House where the slogan says: 'creating a future for music' and I nodded thinking - thats a good thing - then I realised I was wearing my iPod which has loads of stuff on there that I have got free from a range of sources and I rather enjoyed the ironic moment.

I also realised that 'copyright' is going to be without doubt the greatest test of the established order learning to live with 3.0. They will not let go without a fight - should be fascinating!

Good Advertising (cont.)

Nuff said. You don't just need territories for ideas - you sometimes do need a clear simple proposition. And in certain categories where it is advantageous to show the product - this is how you do it. I can see how this idea could work across multiple channels (expect a Moses and Red Sea execution soon). Well done George Patterson Y&R Melbourne.

Genius cartoon

Arthur and the Square Knights of the Round Table Cartoon

OK personal scrapbook time folks... Don't know why I loved this as a kid - but I did. Was trying to remember what it was recently so I found it and decided to post it. Totally selfish. Totally useless. Totally wonderful. Here's the lyrics to the theme tune:

Arthur, the king of Camelot
He's the ringa-dinga-lingaist king

Arthur, he likes to joust alot
And he really makes the kingdom swing

Dragons, don't come out to fight
And the Black Knight hasn't a chance

If your in trouble,
Send the table
To the hero of the fable
It's the topper of Camelot

He took the sword from the stone, made a table round
Took the bravest knights, then he sat them around
Then all of Camelot knew they really had a king
Yeah, a king that would do darn near any old thing

Arthur, that's what the maidens call
Whenever they're lost or in distress
If you're locked up in a tower
He does recues on the hour
He's a ???, armor-plated, dragon-slayin' king
That's Arthur, Arthur
We know an Arthur
King of Camelot!

and of course if you click here - you can here them sing it. They dont make proper toons like this anymore - big band - big vocals - great production brilliant:

http://www2.wi.net/~rkurer/toontracker/arthur.html

Brought a tear to my eye ;-)

Good advertising

Love these:

Glassex Window Cleaner - congratulations - I think taking a relatively 'low interest' category/product and making compelling interesting ads has always been a tricky one - something that used to produce a gasp of 'god I hope I dont get THAT brief' from the creative dept. This is how you do it - clean, simple, great AD, the efficiency of the product being hero - so anyone still unclear about whether propositions are valuable for brands based on amplifying a product truth - here's the answer. Still unclear? You haven't thought about it enough then. 

This was apprently from JWT Spain. Well done Spain - in the Proximity network Spain is always really hot creatively - wish I knew why...

Musings on reality

I was thinking about reality recently based on another scribble I made in the little black book which is: 'reality is experience spontaneously reconstructed' - which I based on something RAW once said. Now I dont think this particularly profound - or perhaps it is the most profound thought about existence I am likely to ever have - anyway for me it just explains how a version of reality might work. I decided not to put it in insights from the book as it isnt really an insight (or is it?) - you tell me.

Anyway, having worked that out a while back I was thinking how most personal blogs are a series of narratives -stories we are telling each other about ourselves to be shared - not personal diaries in that intensely personal way at all. Even to the extent that we invent interesting things about ourselves that frankly aren't interesting at all - or we modify our behaviour to be more 'interesting' - not actually based on the reality of our lives. They are - well - fictions.

This is fine of course as most communities are about sharing little moments of 'stuff' - but actually I am not sure this is how this is working at all.

Hereis an example - its rather good and it made me think about the loss of spontaneity: (forgive the long winded nature of it - stay with it - I cut and pasted the commentary):

I am visiting my family in Florida for the holidays. I was chillin at my sister's house when we looked out back and noticed a swarm of honeybees congregating on their swingset. There are a lot of kids around, including my sister's 3 kids. They were inside at the time, fortunately.

Fuckin Bees!

A few minutes later they had calmed down. We were guessing they were disturbed from their hive and decided to come here, or something.

This is where the bees were coming from. A hole in the house behind my sister's place. We told the landlady about it and she didn't seem to care or want to be bothered that she was renting a house to people that had fucking BEEES living inside it.

The neighbor called a bee removal company and they said they wouldn't come out unless we paid a hefty fee, but he did recommend waiting until dark and go buy some stuff from Home Depot and squirt them with it and that should kill them off.

Well that plan was OK except for 2 things. 1 was that my sister's husband is crazy. The 2nd thing is we didn't want to wait that long nor spend any money.

So we did the next best thing. Started fucking with the bees.

My bro in law chucks a tennis ball at the clump of bees, that was the size of a basketball. He knocked off a fist sized clump of bees, which eventually just flew back up into the main clump.

That was pretty boring, so we decide to try something a little bigger....

Yeah, a 40lb trailer hitch for a Dodge Caravan.

INCOMING!

CLANG! We have bees in freefall! Did I mention he is severely allergic to bees?

 

RUN FORREST

The bees dust themselves off, and resume taking over the swingset. Every single one pretty much flew back up into a ball of bee death.
At this point it was clear these little assholes weren't getting the message. Their arrival in my sister's property was an act of agression, and we weren't going to stand for it. So it was time for some redneck engineering:

Bee incinerator contraption:
- 30 feet of rope
- 1 large fire pit
- 1 science project board
- miscellaneous rags and a bedsheet
- gas

Fill 'er up! Slide the incinerator under the bees and....

IGNITION!

The next ingredient is 1.5 quarts of PAINT THINNER

OH YES!!!!

Amazingly some bees still survived the first wave. What should we do next?

THERE WERE STILL MORE BEES ON THE SWINGSET. CALL IN REINFORCEMENTS. 2 QUARTS OF 87 OCTANE GASOLINE REPORTING FOR DUTY SIR!

OH DEAR LORD ITS SO BEAUTIFUL. I AM SO PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN RIGHT NOW.

Tonight we are having Roast Bee

The Aftermath.

Number of allied casualties (er, stings): 0
Number of bees killed: est. 10,000
Number of bee survivors: about 25 or so

FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

Sorry I know that was far too long but - the point is that we are creating 'artificial life' not reality in so many ways - it is all feeling a tad contrived - not spontaneously reconstructed at all. It reminded me of those videos sent in to those dodgy 'what happened next ?' type programmes hosted by B listers showing people falling over at weddings and dogs dancing and saying sausages and the like.

It is encouraging narcissism to the nth degree isn't it? We are gazing into our own eyes (and lives) - clones of ourselves - authors of our own selves - we are now everything we want to be - masters of our own worlds - except - its not real.

One final thought - what happens if there are powercuts in future to save resources - who will the real you be then? This is twisting nature in some way I am convinced and the fallout could be as extreme as turtles without their shells.