all care no responsibility
Tim Minchin - If I Didn’t Have You (via Twilight8423)
See him in England, see him in Australia. See his website for dates
I saw this guy at Google Zeitgeist and he was brilliant. But this performance is even better. Enjoy.
I had the honour of Chairing YoungGuns award judging this year. Three days in dark rooms was worth it when you look at the work that bubbled to the top of the show. Click here to view.
Every now and then there’s an example of creative craft that makes your eyes water. These 44 images are exquisite, visual storytelling in print at its best.
These three web films for Diesel come from the collaboration between Farfar and Legs as the full story explains. I think they’re brilliant and a great example of making things that people seek out, explore and share. They’re all wonderful and each one is wonderfully different from the others - I can’t wait to see ep 2 of the Dance Party. Click here to read and view.
My daughter wants to get her ears pierced. Could be the start of a life long obsession.
In this piece from today’s Guardian, Fred Pearce talks about the much publicised “water neutral” ambitions of Coke. Whether or not you believe the initiative is sincere it’s got to be a good thing that large corporations are now actively pursuing programs that have an environmental conscience. It must be progress when we don’t only get to read about companies damaging the environment in the pages of John Grisham novel.
This story is a few days old. It’s based on a presentation by the head of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer. Like so many others he’s telling us that the road we’re on, in terms of energy, takes us off a cliff. It’s one thing when you hear these views expressed by NGOs, governments and regulators, it’s quite another when it comes from big business. As he says, “we had better makes speed, or else the lights will go out”.
how’dya like these onions? the power of design.
Flight of the Conchords. We asked these guys to help us at a Cannes music seminar just after their debut at the Edinburgh Festival and i showed this video at Stream 2007. So it’s not new, but it is properly funny. You can see more on YT or on their series on HBO.
If Content is King, Community is Queen. Okay, then context and technology must be Gods!
I was sent an email recently that included, among many other quotes, the notion that, “if content is King, Community is Queen”. I like these kind of clever metaphors most of the time because they work like grabhandles on a bus helping your brain hang on and get to the next stop. But this one troubled me.
I’ve just spent a large part of the past week as Chairman of the Young Guns International Awards jury and one thing has stuck with me as a result. Everyone who has been trained in the advertising business, sub 30 or not, is fixated, no, obsessed with content. Media, goes this thinking, are just places to hang our brilliantly creative content in front of an audience so that they get the chance to appreciate all the thought and hard work that’s gone into it.
Then, as the quote suggests, there are communities that form around this content, and the stories that develop and the conversations that ensue are now right up there with the value and significance of the content itself. Well, yes, of course. In fact, I’d argue that they are often even more powerful.
For me the larger issue for agencies and advertising creative people is that we’re all wearing goggles that appreciate the content, whether created by an agency (ads) or the community (conversations) above everything else. It’s a common form of professional myopia.
It’s time to remember that we’re not in the advertising business, the communications business, or indeed the content business, but the business of problem solving for our clients. When you change the goggles, you start to see different solutions.
The founder of a major digital company recently told me how they tackled a problem for a major multinational client. They problem they had to solve was getting more people visiting the website in China. How about better Chinese content? Or a more active dialogue with those visitors already turning up so that these good conversations spread? Or some ads well placed in other media to point people in the right direction? All perfectly sound approaches.
As it turns out their solution was to move the host server from the US to China so that speed increased and there were fewer issues with content filters on the mainland. Traffic to the site went up 10 fold.
I could bang on about this with other examples. In fact I will, just not now, plane’s leaving.
This was sent to me by a Facebook friend recently. There are moments in this film, even on a pokey laptop window, that are spellbinding. For all the time and money that gets lavished on country and city tourism campaigns, this film is a reminder that it’s often enough just to capture the beauty and emotion of the destination without any other tricks. The film was viewed 327,000 times by people in 6,750 cities. Dir: Veysel Gencten. Music: Mercan Dede. See you in Istanbul.
I saw this entered in Young Guns. A lovely gift from hip hop band Atmosphere that let’s you pimp your web page of choice while you artisitc endeavours are soundtracked by the band’s latest album. Add your piece to the gallery.
