Came across this wonderful quote from Eric Hoffer the other day while investigating the origins of play for a client brief:

“the pattern of unfinishedness should be the most pronounced in the authomous individual…the retention of youthful characteristics in adult life endows man with a perpetual playfulness so fruitful of insights and illuminations.” (Hoffer, 1952, p. 153)

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Brands spend thousands of pounds on projects and then don’t tell anyone about it, surely that can’t work … read full post »

Sir John Hegarty

Sir John Hegarty joins Knitware to talk about the effect of digital technology on brands, craft and design.

Brands in a digital age

I think we live in a very confusing world. Technology is exploding all around us. We don’t need to all go into it, we all understand it. The fact that I’m sitting here blogging is an amazing development in technology and, if you’re a brand, what do you do? How do you navigate through all this stuff? In a way, you can’t. There is no blueprint for saying ‘This is how you do it’ - there isn’t a kind of formula that says, ‘Well you do a TV commercial, from the TV commercial you set up a website, when you’ve set up a website, you start doing that - blogs there, you go into video games…’ It can be a multitude of options.

In the end, when you’re in a world like that all you can really do is simply say, ‘Nobody really knows, so what I’ll do is try and think of better ideas.’ That’s the only guarantee. The guarantee is to say, ‘Actually I might be wrong in choosing that medium, I might be wrong in starting there, I might be wrong in doing that. But what I can do, what I do know, is if I have a great brand idea there’s a greater and better chance that that will communicate and get through,’ - and that’s the only guarantee. read full post »

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Finally. It’s been 19 years since we last saw Indy - 19 years trying to pick the truth out of the rumours. And with only a month to go I’m pretty excited. I am not the only one. The Indiana Jones series is a silver screen legend. Rarely do film-goers talk about action films with such enthusiasm because rarely does Hollywood produce action films with such quality characters. And rarely has a film’s development had such a slow burn. Suffice to say anticipation around the Cystal Skull is rife. Hype should be easy. But it ain’t what it used to be. read full post »

(cross-posted from Made by Many)

We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

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Someone just pointed out Apple’s great new advert on the home page of non-other than The NY Times (go right now, quick while it’s still showing). It’s the second Apple ad I’ve seen that plays around with the concept of multiple ad units on a single page to create ad content which is, well, better than the content of the page it is sitting on.

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There are loads of new tools that make it easy for anyone to create really slick broadband storytelling experiences and share them online. The quality and sophistication of these was previously available only to those with expert knowledge and resources, like media owners. Now, sophisticated animation and custom video creations are within reach for non-experts. It’s the next chapter of an accelerating process of media democratisation that started with cheap digital cameras and photo-sharing, YouTube and blogging. The newer tools are significantly more impressive than RockYou-style Facebook and MySpace bling. Here are three examples:

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