The good news for me and 46% of you readers is that APC are opening a flagship store in London's Dover St next month
The whole line is urban office appropriate classics - yeah its a little muted but that's exactly why I like it
Tuesday 30 June 2009
APC lands in London
Whenever I am in Paris I always head to APC in St Germain. APC is French utilitarian cool. Their 'New Standard' jeans are some of the best out there..(but beware the stretch)
The good news for me and 46% of you readers is that APC are opening a flagship store in London's Dover St next month
The whole line is urban office appropriate classics - yeah its a little muted but that's exactly why I like it
The good news for me and 46% of you readers is that APC are opening a flagship store in London's Dover St next month
The whole line is urban office appropriate classics - yeah its a little muted but that's exactly why I like it
Sexy Statisticians
No, really...keep reading...
I met a guy last week who told me he was going to work for google. I thought that google didn't have a handle on how analytics can improve marketing both on and offline and were hiring adsales people. Who wants to go and sell search services to media agencies? We get it.
He told me that The McKinsey Quarterly published an interview with chief economist Hal Varian. I urge you to read it after the jump
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286
What I love about it is this quote:
"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."
Looks like they do get it and we can stop pretending we are architects now?
I met a guy last week who told me he was going to work for google. I thought that google didn't have a handle on how analytics can improve marketing both on and offline and were hiring adsales people. Who wants to go and sell search services to media agencies? We get it.
He told me that The McKinsey Quarterly published an interview with chief economist Hal Varian. I urge you to read it after the jump
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286
What I love about it is this quote:
"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."
Looks like they do get it and we can stop pretending we are architects now?
Friday 26 June 2009
Just had to post this
I heard news of Michael Jackson's death brought the internet down today. Google lost $3bn in ad revenues and also go out and buy 10,000 new servers. Alright, I made that up but you know what I mean.
I really wanted to resist posting about Michael and I saw all those tweets from Miley Cyrus, Britney and Katy Perry. Let's face it - these girls grew up on 'Dangerous' who knows what they would have done if they were in a house where 'Thriller' was on heavy rotation.
Anyway, in a similar way that we love Wordle; twitscoop captures the hastags and displays them over time - I know you guys are impatient, the video warms up after about 55 seconds!
Nice video, cool technology - sad friday. RIP
I really wanted to resist posting about Michael and I saw all those tweets from Miley Cyrus, Britney and Katy Perry. Let's face it - these girls grew up on 'Dangerous' who knows what they would have done if they were in a house where 'Thriller' was on heavy rotation.
Anyway, in a similar way that we love Wordle; twitscoop captures the hastags and displays them over time - I know you guys are impatient, the video warms up after about 55 seconds!
Nice video, cool technology - sad friday. RIP
Feel The Globe
Mobile mobile mobile....this is a wonderful piece of content that has just picked up an award at Cannes for Nokia
Isn't it beautiful? Crazy thing is is that it didn't have any ad agency paws on it...this was created by Hiroki Ono a student from Japan who had never made a film before. "Feel the Globe" took 2 days to create
I see our clients tightening their belts daily....this must be the last thing advertising agencies need right now. Hiroki my friend..hold out for the big bucks!
Isn't it beautiful? Crazy thing is is that it didn't have any ad agency paws on it...this was created by Hiroki Ono a student from Japan who had never made a film before. "Feel the Globe" took 2 days to create
I see our clients tightening their belts daily....this must be the last thing advertising agencies need right now. Hiroki my friend..hold out for the big bucks!
Thursday 25 June 2009
Dancing with myself
The great thing about Nouvelle Vague is that despite everything they do are covers its done in such a quirky bossa nova style way the french do best that means it really doesn't sound derivative.
Dancing with myself is the track I listened to this morning and watching this video she must love shoes and I was really pleased I watched this.... but yes, every single one is great.
The geeky fact I want to share with you is that Nouvelle Vague means "new wave" in French, and bossa nova also means "new wave" in Portuguese...A version of Portuguese is the native language in Brazil...you see what I did there?
Dancing with myself is the track I listened to this morning and watching this video she must love shoes and I was really pleased I watched this.... but yes, every single one is great.
The geeky fact I want to share with you is that Nouvelle Vague means "new wave" in French, and bossa nova also means "new wave" in Portuguese...A version of Portuguese is the native language in Brazil...you see what I did there?
What if twitter was Vodafone?
Everyone is still tweeting about twitter... It's user base is up by 1448% year on year to 18m people don't you know! My clients are tweeting (at dinner with us!), every conference I read about has live tweeting...haven't you guys paid for insights?
I still don't really see a use for it today. It's like Facebook updates without being able to scour through peoples drunken photos. Surely there aren't 18m sheep?
Nielsen reports that 60% of users who sign up for one month won't return for the next
In contrast, the same article cites that other sites like Facebook and MySpace have retention rates in the 50-70% range.
I wonder what the 'Active' user base is? If you were a telco and had twitter's retention problem it would all be over. It's just so expensive - a brand with strong retention spends hardly anything to replace customers and only focuses on incremental new customers. A brand with poor retention has to replace the old customers and then climb the curve again to acquire incremental new customers.
Second, in the quest to get either replacement or net new customers, the company will exhaust the available customer base very quickly and, once exhausted, will reach the limit of its growth.
So what does that mean? Well, we need to see a greater level of utility from twitter - it needs to mean something to us. We have seen mobile soar and soar with the use of smartphones and of course the twitterati will have the last laugh, but I just wish they weren't so smug and just bide their time.
Revolutions don't happen overnight
I still don't really see a use for it today. It's like Facebook updates without being able to scour through peoples drunken photos. Surely there aren't 18m sheep?
Nielsen reports that 60% of users who sign up for one month won't return for the next
In contrast, the same article cites that other sites like Facebook and MySpace have retention rates in the 50-70% range.
I wonder what the 'Active' user base is? If you were a telco and had twitter's retention problem it would all be over. It's just so expensive - a brand with strong retention spends hardly anything to replace customers and only focuses on incremental new customers. A brand with poor retention has to replace the old customers and then climb the curve again to acquire incremental new customers.
Second, in the quest to get either replacement or net new customers, the company will exhaust the available customer base very quickly and, once exhausted, will reach the limit of its growth.
So what does that mean? Well, we need to see a greater level of utility from twitter - it needs to mean something to us. We have seen mobile soar and soar with the use of smartphones and of course the twitterati will have the last laugh, but I just wish they weren't so smug and just bide their time.
Revolutions don't happen overnight
Wednesday 24 June 2009
Tuesday 23 June 2009
Sprint Network Geek Attack!
Sprint is one of our clients, and I just just had to share this. I am in no way involved with this but I think I could say that I was and no one would know any different
The pace, camera work and art direction are fantastic and the idea that world is fast really hits home ....all done with a sense of humour
This campaign builds on their wonderful 'Plug into Now' widget
http://now.sprint.com/widget/
We can argue the toss over whether their service delivers on the promise but Goodby have done a nice job here
The pace, camera work and art direction are fantastic and the idea that world is fast really hits home ....all done with a sense of humour
This campaign builds on their wonderful 'Plug into Now' widget
http://now.sprint.com/widget/
We can argue the toss over whether their service delivers on the promise but Goodby have done a nice job here
Monday 22 June 2009
Citizen Journalists
Here is the UK there is uproar as a 'serious' newspaper (The Daily Telegraph) published all of expense claims from members of parliament around a month ago. It has been hilarious as large numbers of MPs have expensed renovations of 'second homes'(including a moat) which were hundreds of miles away from their constituencies through to boxes of matches and bags of compost...all at the taxpayers expense!
The thing is, The Telegraph released 700,000 documents in 5,500 individual PDF formats covering all 650 MPs in parliament.
Rival paper, The Guardian has now uploaded all the released documents onto a microsite named 'Investigate your MP's expenses' in a more useable format than the PDFs provided by the House of Commons.
This is a fantastic take on crowdsourcing whereby The Guardian is asking readers to help its team of journalists trawl through the documents. Anybody can get involved by reading the various claim forms and receipts, and ritually humiliating them forcing them to resign or publicly apologise
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
Many MPs have been taken down and a large number have paid back monies due to 'misunderstandings' - however there's some great stuff to be found in here
"Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, appeared to have claimed for a £4.99 Toblerone bar, but later insisted the item had been a free gift from a supplier and he had not claimed for it. Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh, spent £66.66 in March last year in Tesco on a range of food stuffs from digestive biscuits, stuffed olives and HP spicy BBQ sauce. On another occasion his £111.77 supermarket receipt included expensive pate and two bags of sweets."
Now this isn't a political blog - but how much will crowdsourcing affect marketing?
So far Starbucks and Dell have experimented with great effect. It allows a brands' strongest asset (its customers) to shape the services the brand provides and that can only be a good thing
The thing is, The Telegraph released 700,000 documents in 5,500 individual PDF formats covering all 650 MPs in parliament.
Rival paper, The Guardian has now uploaded all the released documents onto a microsite named 'Investigate your MP's expenses' in a more useable format than the PDFs provided by the House of Commons.
This is a fantastic take on crowdsourcing whereby The Guardian is asking readers to help its team of journalists trawl through the documents. Anybody can get involved by reading the various claim forms and receipts, and ritually humiliating them forcing them to resign or publicly apologise
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
Many MPs have been taken down and a large number have paid back monies due to 'misunderstandings' - however there's some great stuff to be found in here
"Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, appeared to have claimed for a £4.99 Toblerone bar, but later insisted the item had been a free gift from a supplier and he had not claimed for it. Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh, spent £66.66 in March last year in Tesco on a range of food stuffs from digestive biscuits, stuffed olives and HP spicy BBQ sauce. On another occasion his £111.77 supermarket receipt included expensive pate and two bags of sweets."
Now this isn't a political blog - but how much will crowdsourcing affect marketing?
So far Starbucks and Dell have experimented with great effect. It allows a brands' strongest asset (its customers) to shape the services the brand provides and that can only be a good thing
Monday 15 June 2009
I can't believe i didn't find this first!
Straight from notanothermindshareblog.com - this is fantastic and as usual James tells it just like it is:
"This is great – colliding a sweet piece of visualisation I first came across in the NYT showing movie box office takings history, now you can look at the tweet history of any keyword: like all good infographics, you don’t need words to do much explaining"
"This is great – colliding a sweet piece of visualisation I first came across in the NYT showing movie box office takings history, now you can look at the tweet history of any keyword: like all good infographics, you don’t need words to do much explaining"
Who's Bing-ing?
Microsoft are jumping for joy, apparently bing has overtaken Yahoo! to become the second most used search engine since its launch a week and a half ago.
bing launched to a fanfare on June 3rd and promptly captured 9% of traffic that day.... See ya, Yahoo! - who killed Jeeves? And by June 6th the traffic reduced to 3% It was still at number 2
Two issues here to contemplate, I cant help but thinking it is just an initial spike as people check out the new thing. To take a chunk out of Yahoo! is creditable but I imagine a significant share of bing's gain is from Live search.
Also, these are terribly small numbers, Microsoft is a massive organization but google's brand equity is hard to knock (its a $1bn brand according to Millward Brown) - google has a 87% global share and it hardly blipped post bing's launch
Frankly I can't see panic at the googleplex just yet, sure, another player may impact google's ad revenues (where small changes impact big numbers) but it will be interesting to see if they can focus their energy (maybe customization like igoogle?) and their dollars (big big marketing push)to make a real success of bing
bing launched to a fanfare on June 3rd and promptly captured 9% of traffic that day.... See ya, Yahoo! - who killed Jeeves? And by June 6th the traffic reduced to 3% It was still at number 2
Two issues here to contemplate, I cant help but thinking it is just an initial spike as people check out the new thing. To take a chunk out of Yahoo! is creditable but I imagine a significant share of bing's gain is from Live search.
Also, these are terribly small numbers, Microsoft is a massive organization but google's brand equity is hard to knock (its a $1bn brand according to Millward Brown) - google has a 87% global share and it hardly blipped post bing's launch
Frankly I can't see panic at the googleplex just yet, sure, another player may impact google's ad revenues (where small changes impact big numbers) but it will be interesting to see if they can focus their energy (maybe customization like igoogle?) and their dollars (big big marketing push)to make a real success of bing
Tuesday 9 June 2009
Fred Perry Fading...
When you live in the UK you really don't know from one day to the next if it will be continental sun, howling wind or heavy rain. In fact you could get all seasons in a single week. That sounds good if you don't live here but the concepts of 'spring wardrobe' and the like just don't exist
Fred Perry is an iconic British brand and really has given us something to work all through the summer and into september
This may not be up the 'skins' alley but after this weeks European elections I hope these pieces get embraced by the masses
Fred Perry is an iconic British brand and really has given us something to work all through the summer and into september
This may not be up the 'skins' alley but after this weeks European elections I hope these pieces get embraced by the masses
Saturday 6 June 2009
We need more data?
It's just not fair is it? The more marketing spend that flows to online channels the more people want to know what its doing for their business. Furthermore they aren't satisfied with clicks and conversion, they all want 'engagement'. How ungrateful can people be?!
Now we all get this; when people are truly engaged with your brand, it’s highly likely they will be loyal customers too. And to get them highly engaged, you need to create valuable content and utility that your customers need or want to interact with.
Its about at this point when you trip up. How you actually measure engagement is another entirely different matter. There’s just not a single agreed way to define, measure, and extract value from online engagement. The dichotomy is that everyone says, and by and large its true that there are more metrics and dashboards online than you can shake a stick at when it comes to the online world.
Engagement (and to be honest I hate that term...it's overdone) unlocks how people feel about brands. So as I try and grapple with these concepts for our clients I am starting with these three dimensions that I would like to pull together:
Interest: Unique visits, page views and time spent
Sharing: Reviews, pass alongs
Advocacy: Sentiment, Likelihood to recommend
Also we have to grapple with the fact that these actions take place in real and virtual worlds, and needs to be aligned with the brands business objectives
We know its not simple, but its important - so if you think you can help and are looking for collaboration opportunities you know where I am. If you think we are missing something we are also up for the education
Thanks
Now we all get this; when people are truly engaged with your brand, it’s highly likely they will be loyal customers too. And to get them highly engaged, you need to create valuable content and utility that your customers need or want to interact with.
Its about at this point when you trip up. How you actually measure engagement is another entirely different matter. There’s just not a single agreed way to define, measure, and extract value from online engagement. The dichotomy is that everyone says, and by and large its true that there are more metrics and dashboards online than you can shake a stick at when it comes to the online world.
Engagement (and to be honest I hate that term...it's overdone) unlocks how people feel about brands. So as I try and grapple with these concepts for our clients I am starting with these three dimensions that I would like to pull together:
Interest: Unique visits, page views and time spent
Sharing: Reviews, pass alongs
Advocacy: Sentiment, Likelihood to recommend
Also we have to grapple with the fact that these actions take place in real and virtual worlds, and needs to be aligned with the brands business objectives
We know its not simple, but its important - so if you think you can help and are looking for collaboration opportunities you know where I am. If you think we are missing something we are also up for the education
Thanks
Friday 5 June 2009
Pay by Bearbrick
You know there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your friends' black Amex card and raising them something so eye catching as Ping An Bank and Medicom's Toy Bearbrick credit card
Bearbrick is an icon toy, I bought a pair of jeans a few months ago and my daughter wanted a Bearbrick from the store...now she wants the whole set! Some of them are so covetable (and expensive) that part of me is proud of her (what great taste for one so young) but I just knew they would all end up with their heads pulled off and left on the stairs - some toys are too good for kids!
This one in the series is my favourite
All I need now is a Chinese bank account!
Bearbrick is an icon toy, I bought a pair of jeans a few months ago and my daughter wanted a Bearbrick from the store...now she wants the whole set! Some of them are so covetable (and expensive) that part of me is proud of her (what great taste for one so young) but I just knew they would all end up with their heads pulled off and left on the stairs - some toys are too good for kids!
This one in the series is my favourite
All I need now is a Chinese bank account!
The Greatest
There was some major action in the gaming industry this week - Microsoft showcased Project Natal the motion sensing controller (surely it cant work that well...) But while the video game industry continues to innovate and make money while everybody else struggles we should stop, pause and celebrate the 25th birthday of Tetris. Even if you’re not a big gamer you would have moved a few bricks in your time
The real Russian revolution was instigated by Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov, and is the best selling video game of all time with over 125 million copies sold since it debuted on an IBM PC in 1984....wii sports? not even close.
I would say that Tetris transcended games; its an institution.
Get it here at http://www.alzmedia.com/games/tetris.php - you get more points by building it high and using the long thin blocks to create 4 lines
Happy Birthday - you still destroy all games in this genre!
The real Russian revolution was instigated by Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerasimov, and is the best selling video game of all time with over 125 million copies sold since it debuted on an IBM PC in 1984....wii sports? not even close.
I would say that Tetris transcended games; its an institution.
Get it here at http://www.alzmedia.com/games/tetris.php - you get more points by building it high and using the long thin blocks to create 4 lines
Happy Birthday - you still destroy all games in this genre!
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