Run on Toast

Playful part deux

Following on from Jimmy's round-up of the morning session of the Playful conference, here's my notes from the second half:

Russell Davies mainly spoke about how we use pretending to make things more interesting (reminded me of a kid at school who used to go to the CIA/FBI websites and pretend that he was hacking into their mainframes). For example, the role of a watch:

And also how stuff that allows you to pretend has to be hidden in the detail (i.e. you can't pretend to be in an army vehicle driving a Hummer, because you are in an army vehicle - too bleeding obvious).
Most importantly, after his talk I desperately have to go here.

Molly Ränge talked about some really cool examples of Scandinavians playing, but crucially for me raised the question of how you 'evaluate' play, i.e. prove that it works. How do you make sure that when you put playful events into practice, that they aren't just limited to one-off events. Duncan Gough: All I can say is that he made me think about what it would be like to play Friends (yes, the TV show). Slightly disturbing. Although, he also talked about what it would be like to play the Wire or Press Gang, which sound much more interesting ;).

Rex Crowle did his presentation on OHP:

One of the interesting things he bought up the point that to help people play, we should give them the pre-defined bits to create a whole because that is less daunting. Also that a naïve animation style (like on Little Big Planet, which Rex worked on) encourages people to play.

These themes were revisited in Simon Oliver's talk: he gave the example of Spore, where the low level work of creating 'bits' is done for you, so you can get on and create a character. He also gave the example of South Park with the warning that slick visuals doesn't guarantee a good product.

The thing that made me happiest was hearing about TimWright's Kidmapper project. Basically when reading Robert Louis Stevenson's book Kidnapped (which follows the story of 'David Balfour running for his life across the Highlands, sometimes accompanied by tough and rebellious Alan, sometimes pursued by the English army'), he came across a passage which showed that the whole book happened between the dates of 30th June to 25th August. He basically decided to follow the trail, on foot, to see if the dates were right. What an awesome project!

I think he's organising a project where people meet up and follow a set trail from a book together, but I can't find anything on the interwebs (granted, I haven't looked that hard). He also wondered how nice it would be if books came with real maps of the areas covered inside, along with space for notes. The 'adventurer's version' if you like. I really like the idea of tying fiction to the real world. 

Chris O'Shea ended the day with some examples of his interactive work, including his recent project in Liverpool, 'Hand from Above', which has been doing the rounds on the interwebs recently. If you haven't seen any of his work, it is definitely worth checking out. 

Just to reiterate Jimmy's comments, it was a thoroughly awesome day and we're all looking forward to next year (although I'm sure there will be a bigger bunfight for tickets).

Playful

I, with two other colleues went to the 'Playful' 09 conference last week. I really enjoyed and it went down as one of the most interesting confererences I have been to, with exciting speakers and great themes. I am going to briefly write up the morning's talks focussing on the one i thought was most pertinent.

Playful  was a 'one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games…what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry'.Roo Reynolds got us off to a good start remarking and making observations of the gamiing world, its migration to the world of film. In summation there were no good adaptations and this set us up for the rest of the da.

I've borrowed Roo Reynolds' succinct summaries (hope you don't mind) - you can read his full post here.

• Leila Johnston talked about Enemy of Chaos (“something for the aging nerd market…”).

This was an interesting talk about Leila's novel 'Enemy of chaos', in which she read out many excerpts from her book on different gaming themes that surrealy that drew parrelells with real life in an albeit surreal fashion. ALthough broadly based on dark matters such as entropy and death her book sounds funny and uniquely plays to the ageing nerd and gaming market.

• Kareem Ettouney (Media Molecule Art Director) talked about being a servant rather than a director, and the importance of letting people pursue personal projects.

This was a fairly stark delivery with no props whatsoever. He talked about the need to follow your own instinct on projects and to go out on a limb for them taking ful responsibility and ownership. Reminded me of the director James Cameron who is ruthless in his perfectionist pursuit of the perfecet film, his last of which was Titanic and the next of which, 12 years later is Avatar, released in December this year

• Daniel Soltis talked about physical computing and games.

Really interesting talk in which the physical side of gaming was explored. He had made various hand made games that gave us a very different perspective gaming. 

• Lucy Wurstlin talked about 4iP.

Mostly talked about 4ip but told of of yet another mode of gaming that she had been working on. This was some heavily immersive text based game in which you take the protagonist role in our own very frightening world. Reminded me of a new game released on the Nintendo DS. This game works in a similar way and unravels much like those books mystery books i had as a kid that tell you to turn to pg 58 then pg 12 and you always get a different ending

• Matt Locke interviewed Robin Burkinshaw about his amazing creation Alice and Kev: the story of being homeless in The Sims 3.

Brilliant. There's an online version of the SIMs obviously. However this guy had gone on a journey with two characters he'd created and explored their relationship with each other. He published the story as he went taking virtual photography (screen shots) and gave it running commentary. It was a huge hit and he had thousands of followers on his blog catching up and reading the next installment of his story. There are now of course many people followiing in his footsteps in doing the same thing but this guy seemed to be the original

• James Bridle not only described but actually showed us a working version of MENACE, Donald Michie’s Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine, a physical computer made of 304 matchboxes. (A similar machine for ‘Go’ would be “about the size of the crab nebula”.) His excellent presentation is now online.

Brillaint. Best talk of the day. This guy explored the theroy of 'awesomeness' through the lens of play. He had hand built a computer that played o's and x's - it incorporated 304 match boxes with many more beads inside. It was fully functional. He then went on to say that if you performed the same excercise with japanese game 'Go' (the most complicated board game in the world with thousands of iterations, a game that takes many decades to become a master) it would be the same size as the Crab Nebula ( which i think is a galaxy in its own right. All the calculations were in his preseation and it was truly awesome

• Katy Lindemann showed us how fun and play drive change with some lovely examples (including Vinspired Voicebox, Chore Wars, Didget glucose monitor for DS, Fiat Eco:Drive, Thefuntheory (including the Piano Staircase, Bottle Bank Arcade Machine) and more.

Great talk in which play can drive, change human behaviour. Really basic idea but highlighted as a legitmate truism. Play has been with us from day one. it is instinct and we all love to do it even if it means expending more energy!! Just check out examples.

• Tassos Stevens talked about cricket.

Talked about cricket for half an hour and how fascinating it was.

Hope that all makes sense and speak soon. 

wear it pink 2009

We love everything pink! We rolled out a fabulous pink carpet and paped all of our 'wear it pinkers' as they strutted their favourite pink dress, pants , socks or shirt!  Our cake stall went down a treat and we raffled a lovely pink orchid and some pink bubbly too.  In total we raised £242.75 to help Breast Cancer Campaign fund vital research into the cure for Breast Cancer and had a load of fun doing it!

Addressing wrap rage

It was interesting to see this message on the front page of Amazon today:

As an agency that deals predominantly with service brands, we've been thinking a lot about service marketing recently, and the role of marketers within this area. And also, the idea of always being in beta, a principle raised as part of the recent IPA Social project (you can read the principle written up here by Jamie Coomber, strategist at Poke).

Amazon addressing wrap rage is an interesting example of addressing a customer frustration, and inviting the customers to participate in a shift that may take a while to implement. It's important to remember that our customers can be very understanding of the face that change in massive companies can take time, but at the same time need to see real change in order to believe messaging. This period of delivery will be critical for Amazon, as a customer having seen that message is going to expect some changes to their packaging.

Projections

If anyone was walking past Waterloo station last night, they would have seen this (forgive the amateur photography):


A rather spectactular example of Projection Advertising's new AdTrace technology. A digital 3-D map means that the projections can animate over the actual features of the building, rather than just project a static image a la Gail Porter/Houses of Parliament. Waterloo station is going to be a commercially available site from November 5th. It will be interesting to see which other sites get the AdTrace treatment, and how brands make use of it.

HIT or SxxT

So yesterday saw the reincarnation of the agency's infamous HIT or SxxT night, where select pieces of (other people's) creative get judged. We held our first debate for some years last night. It was really good to debate what makes good and bad work as an agency.

For a Wednesday night after work, there was quite a good turnout and below you can see our esteemed panel. From left to right we have Marius, business director on Lloyds; creative Angus; planner Melanie and Mike from studio; chaired by our *charismatic* head of planning Alex.

Was a brilliant night, I think we're all looking forward to the next one.

Service and craft

I had a rather lovely Saturday over at Lift @ living room, an informal satellite of the Lift conferences. For some bizarre reason I didn't take any photos, but here is Amanda Gore's picture of Charlie Gower giving his talk, so you can get an idea of what it was like:

As always, a couple of bits that I found interesting:

One of the themes of Charlie's talk was about how we can incorporate the charm of patina/analogue into digital services. It is starting to happen (Flickr's hello in different language, the awesome Handbrake piña colada visual, phone software which responds to the time of day), but much of service design is currently so focused on the functional that there is no room for stories.

He also talked about the shift to an intelligent networked city, which bought up some interesting ideas about privacy from the group. Namely:

• The generation behind us don't have the same privacy worries that we do
• If everyone has a certain type of information about them in the public domain, you become conspicuous because of an absence of this information
• Without privacy, will behaviour change to become more socially acceptable?

Stephen Molloy spoke about craftsmanship and how it is losing out to mass production. It's a shame that craft is a luxury proposition because of a dearth of craftsmen. Someone evoked a future scenario where outsourced production ceases to be cost-efficient meaning that furniture production, etc, would have to bought back home. The demand would result in a boom in the number of craftsmen to address the need. There were some questions raised about immediacy, and whether demanding consumers would be prepared to wait, but I think that as consumers we're very understanding of the fact that bespoke takes longer. We can see examples of people waiting to have something bespoke to them already, from Bodymetrics jeans to Tossed salads to Nike iD.

Thanks to Charlie for inviting me and to Felix for organising. Was an awesome day.

Things I wish I'd come up with #195

Just came across this great promotional idea via Michael Lebowitz:

Basically, it is a service that gives women the opportunity to have a free makeover with Estee Lauder products and then have a set of photos taken, ostensibly to use on social media - but what girl doesn't want a good photograph of herself? Simple in its genius, as good ideas often are.

At Rapier we're starting to think about creating 'marketing people want', it's our 'disruption' if you like. It's basically about creating stuff that is genuininely useful, informative and entertaining. I think this idea ticks all the right boxes by addressing a genuine need. As long as the photos aren't soft-focus 'Cover-me studios' type prints, Estee Lauder could be onto a winner.

NatMag playing cupid

Just heard that Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health magazines are teaming up to create an online dating space for their readers (read the full NMA article here). Such a great way to exploit their readership demographics!!! Their websites both have around 250,000 unique users (with the dating and relationship sections on the sites being most popular)and are encouraging them to sign up in order to be matched to a potential partner. It's such an obvious way to diversify into other areas and give the users another reason to engage in their brands, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. I wonder how long it will be before we read about a wedding story?

Social is as social does

The IPA Social discussion last night was a massive improvement on January's report launch, in which I seem to remember resorting to drawing funny faces in Jamie's Moleskine. Well done to Jamie, Katy, Mark, Neil and all the rest of the gang for starting the right kind of discussion about social media. If I came away with one thing yesterday it is that it is still uncharted territories and everyone is finding their feet, working out what works and learning from each other. Most importantly I have lots of ideas, questions and *cards* from interesting people. What follows is a collection of thoughts, in no particular order, in the spirit of being part of the conversation:

Measurement
There was a lot of talk about justifying the value of social media, defining it's ROI in order to keep clients happy and prove it's effectiveness. Amelia Torode spoke about some work they are doing to assess the importance of social activity on the Meerkat work, and I'm sure everyone is looking forward to seeing that if Amelia makes it public. On the subject of the Meerkat, Debbie and I were talking this morning about whether there is a way of measuring the impact of social media on the longevity of the campaign. You can't discount the role of TV in driving the massive numbers that they have delivered for CompareTheMarket, but if it had been only TV would it have had so much mileage?

Not getting involved
I rather foolishly nominated myself to host a conversation rather late in the day despite wanting to get involved in the conversation that  was hosting. Bless Katy for joining me and a girl from the IPA (sorry, forgotten your name) in a discussion about whether there were brands that shouldn't get involved in social media. A couple of points:

• Some brands, e.g. Apple, don't use social media to no detriment (I know they are a very peculiar case study, but I'm just saying...)
• A lot of brands want to use social media for the sake of it, jumping on the bandwagon, what Katy called the 'e.g. Facebook' brief
• If there isn't a role for social media, there's no point doing it
• You might be better off spending that money on improving customer service (lots of successful case studies of brands using social in this space)

Responsibility
We swiftly joined Nick's conversation - I think the title was about which discipline was best placed to manage social - but an interesting point was raised about whether responsibility for social should sit with the client or the agency. And actually, is the marketing department (a dept concerned with selling) the best placed to manage that relationship. Maybe customer service is a better bet?

Dirty words
Someone asked a question towards the end about whether 'campaign was such a bad thing?' (sorry I don't know who you are!). She made the point that they are involving, participatory and rewarding, and actually sometimes you don't want an ongoing conversation with a brand.

Anyway, lots to think about. Disappointed that there wasn't more participation in the mexican wave, but looking forward to the forthcoming conversation and the next meeting. There was quite a few of the Rapier gang down there, hopefully they'll add their thoughts in the coming days.