Thanks to the folks at Contagious for curating such a great day (big shout out to the awesome as always Nick Parish), to the Institute of Communication Agencies for inviting me and all the incredibly friendly people who were there.
I've just got back from Boulder Digital Works. I love the time there - great conversation, amazing students (every agency should have one), terrific participants in the two day session and brilliant speakers - Edward, Matt, Tim Malbon, Kim Laama, Daniel Stein and many others.
I rejigged my usual schtick on digital strategy ie it's not about strategy for digital channels but strategy in a digital world. The slides are below. I hope that this is the last time I'll rejig this - hopefully the industry is thinking more and more like this - as it's time for a new schtick. It'll be unveiled at Future Flash next week in Toronto, a collaboration between Canada's Institute of Communication Agencies and Contagious magazine. It's all about small.
One of the thoughts that really crystallized in my mind judging the Clios was that there is an increasing amount of work that sets a new role for communication - to remove, or at least reduce, the friction between brands and people. They attempt to create frictionless brands. This can be done in a number of ways - from doing something for a group of people and then using communication to amplify it (think things like H&R Block or Dulux's Let's Color project) to using media and technology to remove barriers between the product and people (think Jay-Z's Decoded campaign or Epic Mix).
It really felt the best work this year had really simple ideas that removed the barriers between people and brands; between what people do and what you want them to do. Yes, there was some amazing execution and amazing use of technology but it finally seems that we are in a world where elegant solutions trump elegant things.
Flying back from the Clios, I was reading a piece in MIT's Technology Review about Jack Dorsey. It talks about the ethos behind Square and says this: "Square is elegant. The user's flow through payment or application has been reduced to the fewest possible steps; the app has minimal features. This emphasis comes directly from Dorsey, who says, "I'm really good at simplifying things." He espouses a tremendously attractive belief that good industrial design wins customers' trust by disappearing."
Maybe advertising is finally catching up with industrial design. But if it is, we are going to need to think about our models and measurement. Intrusion and noticeability (the AIDA model we tend to default to and most research companies measure by) are rather at odds with ideas that feel a little more invisible in nature.
So it's been three months since the last post. I've been caught between not having anything interesting to say and being crazy at work. It's been a time characterized by doing more than thinking, and looking more internally than externally.
But I feel recharged, inspired and very much humbled after spending a week judging the world's best work at this year's Clio Awards. I was lucky enough to be invited by Faris to sit on the jury judging the integrated and content and contact categories. To me, these are two of the most important categories that help tell us where advertising might be headed. I can't, for obvious reasons, go in to specifics as the results need to remain secret until the award ceremony on May 19th. But I think I can talk about some general observations. In fact, here's some video:
Integrated, unsurprisingly, showed how diverse this concept is nowadays. We saw stuff that ranged from classic execute the same idea across different media to brands that did something and then used media to tell more people about it to work that was more transmedia in nature.
C&C was perhaps the most fun to judge. As one of our jurors, Rahul Sabnis, brilliant put it it's essentially the incubator category. It's the stuff that seems to be at the front of the communications train showing us a new direction for the industry and as a result was hugely diverse in nature. There was a lot of great use of technology but I think the work that stood out tended to have an incredibly simple ideas at its heart. A simple thing that elegantly removed the barriers between what people currently do and what you want them to do. I'll talk a bit more about this in a later post.
Of course, no award show roundup would be complete without the cliches you pick up after watching 400+ videos over 5 days. And, in no particular order, are this year's:
QR codes. Tattoos. Town names that are puns or that are changed. No media spend. And then make sure you take it to the streets.
Thanks to everyone who entered work - contrary to my thoughts going in to the week, there was some brilliant work produced. Thanks to Dan, Karl, Lisa and the rest of the Clio crew for making the week so easy and fun. And thanks to all the judges - Faris, Jay Benjamin, Brett Craig, Amber Finlay, Guido Heffels, Jason Oke, Rahul Sabnis and Mark Taylor - for making me so much smarter during the debates we had over the work. It's amazing how much you can learn when you are the dumbest person in the room.
Well, probably rather pointless and certainly late but here's a quick year in review (aka stuff I liked in 2010).
Campaign
It's perhaps an obvious choice but it has to be the Old Spice responses campaign.
It was a brilliantly simple way to turn an ad idea into something with far greater resonance and depth, something that became part of culture rather than an intrusion into it. But perhaps the most overlooked thing about this was the way it was executed. Rather than the usual production line process of most campaigns, this was a campaign delivered by a small, agile team for a trusting client that followed a simple set of principles and rules (you can read more about this here).
App
The quite brilliant Flipboard. Makes functionality and utility beautiful.
Website
google's Demo Slam is a lovely way to celebrate all that google's technology can do. Not only is the google Creative Lab living up to its mission of 'reminding the world what it is they love about google', it's also arguably the 'agency' that has made the most interesting stuff this year from Parisian Love on the Superbowl to the quite brilliant Arcade Fire film. It's full of amazing talent - people like Robert Wong, Aaron Koblin, Chris Wiggins and Ben Malbon - and it's a crying shame that their only client is google.
Song
I love this band. Along with the Chapel Club they make me excited about music this year.
Brilliant single. I sense their debut will be one of the albums of 2011.
Album
Easy choice - The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire. Feels epic and small all at once.
On a personal note...
I've been very lucky to have a pretty amazing 2010 personally and professionally. Thank you to all those (you know who you are) who inspired, provoked and supported me. And thank you to my wife, Clare, and Esme, my daughter, for all their support and putting up with me. I don't say that anywhere near often enough.
I hope 2011 can be an even better year. It's up to all of us to make it as good as it can be. Happy New Year.
I was an incredibly lucky person last week to be able to visit Pixar.
It's an amazing place, full of incredible stories and brilliant people.
Inspiring to learn about how this talent gets combined to make the movies, and the process they go through. Of how technology and story telling comes together to make some of the most pervasive cultural output of today,
The 'concept art' they use to shape their films
The complete color space of Toy Story
I kind of want to open an agency that is based opposite their entrance so you're permanently cajoled to try and break out of their cultural shadow.
Doing my annual 'back home for Xmas, dash in to London for a day thing' again this year. And this year it'll be on Monday 20th. Would love to see anyone who fancies a cuppa at the Breakfast Club on D'Arblay Street at 930 or so. If you're thinking of coming, maybe stick a comment below.
This morning, I got the best thing I think I have ever got in my mailbox. It's a tweet towel from the lovely, brilliant folk at we are what we do, the movement to help people change the world for better through their everyday, small actions.
One of these would make a lovely gift for the mug dryer in any home. You can buy them here.
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