Run on Toast

Streets are watching

Came across this nice adshell by Amnesty International. I'm always excited about advertising that reacts to or is part of the environment. I think you could so some really interesting things with posters that know if you are looking at it or not.


via I Believe in Advertising

Originality is overrated

This rather lovely Jim Jarmusch quote was floating around the internet a while back, and is pretty spot on in terms of creative inspiration.

I was reminded of it when I came across the rather brilliant Copyc*nts blog. For the unitiated it basically names and shames marketers who 'borrow' their ideas by outing the sources.

If the main gist of the Jarmusch quote is that we can't help but borrow, but creativity is the progressing of these ideas, then maybe in advertising we are a little too lazy. In defence of advertising, the only people who are really indignant about this 'creative borrowing' are other advertisers, who wished they'd borrowed it first.

I suppose the question is 'do we need to be more upfront about our sources?'. It was quite interesting watching the reaction the 118 247 advert (yes, that again) which, for those that didn't know, reworked an old Weebl song called Magical Trevor. After the campaign launched the Weebl community were enraged because they felt we'd ripped off his song. As we'd actually worked with the guy behind Weebl, the community was easily placated.

We talk a lot about the importance of brands being open and honest, but do advertisers need to be too?

I love wordle.net

I am fairly obsessed with data-visualisation and telling stories. A part of the digital age is the creation, storage and analysis of different kinds of data. We need new techniques.

Excell is great for numbers and graphs but it lacks a certain creativity. 

What about analysing and visualising words?

At wordle.net you can do just that. By simply cutting and pasting in a section of text it creates graphic "clouds" of words where size is proportional to frequency. It is surprisingly effective.

One of my own favourites is below. You have a number of options for analysis when considering the question - who are the most successful international football teams in the history of the World Cup?

Looking at teams who have made the semi-final you could  - produce a table, build a complex score and graph it or simply do this...

Faster, Faster, Faster?

Yesterday the government produced its report dubbed Digital Britain. One of the key points attracting most attention was the promise to ensure that every home in the UK can get 2Mbps broadband by 2012.

In the age of 50Mbps super-fast fibre-optic broadband this doesn't seem like much of a commitment - although the graphic below shows that you can do most things with your 2Mbps.

On reflection - and whilst we all want to have fun - this seems a very trivial list of activities. In Japan which tops the high-speed list they are beginning to ask what can be done with all this bandwidth.

For me where it gets interesting is when the infrastructure starts to facilitate real social change such as workable telecommuting (with usable video-conferencing) and remote interaction with public services such as healthcare. 

The Law of Disruption curve below shows that all elements of society lag considerably behind technological advancement - with the political sphere bringing up the rear.

For me a government serious about a Digital Britain would have been more ambitious - 50Mbps fibre-optic broadband for every household by 2012 is more like it. For that it might have been worth paying a levy.

118 247, get online for UGC heaven

We'll be surprised if you've been able to escape the jingle-tastic 118 247 campaign this summer (if you've managed to avoid it, you can watch it here). It's been a really successful campaign for us, and we're proud of what it's done in terms of driving calls and raising the profile of the brand. Although its possible that all these achievements are eclipsed by the amount of UGC it's generated. It's nice when people take your work and run with it - more please!

We'd thought we'd share some of the greatest hits, but you can see them all here.

One of the comments on this Pivot TV version of the ad says that it's better than the original. You can't get higher praise than that:

We're obviously totally down with the *yoots* as they decided to put a donk on it:

And this beauty was created by the Yell call centre staff, who are apparently quite handy with a video camera: