31 July 2007
The media revolution
Have a look: it will remind you few things we heard in Cannes... and some others we may hear in the future!
30 July 2007
Western Union Corners - use of media!
Money Transfers are as fast - as to turn around the corner (from Publicis China)
but i would have went further! I would show different countries and
continents which are just around the corner for Western Union, what do you think?
In Vino Veritas! (a new look on packaging)
-Federico-Fellini_1.jpg)
Wine. In victory, we deserve it, in defeat, we needed it.
Napoleón
-Jean-Knessmann_1.jpg)
There's more history than geography in a bottle of wine..
Jean Knessmann
-Napoleon_1.jpg)
A good wine is like a good film: It lasts a moment and it leaves a glorious flavour in the mouth; it's new at every sip and, as it happens in films, it's born and reborn in each «taster».
Federico Fellini
24 July 2007
22 July 2007
Homer-ism, indulge me on this
Loved this from the review of the Simpsons' movie and had to share it with you guys.
Really found it quirky but telling
...... When the residents of Springfield learn they are confronting catastrophe, for instance, the panicked occupants of the bar and the next-door church pour out into the street and change places – the drinkers taking solace in religion and the religious finding comfort in drink....
sound familiar?
Really found it quirky but telling
...... When the residents of Springfield learn they are confronting catastrophe, for instance, the panicked occupants of the bar and the next-door church pour out into the street and change places – the drinkers taking solace in religion and the religious finding comfort in drink....
sound familiar?
And now financial social networking - Lax
Found this great social networking update site linked to Harvard Business Review - check it out
The Guardian reports that Reuters will soon be launching it's own financial social networking site, aimed at fund managers, traders and analysts. Reuters has some 70,000 subscribers to it's messaging service, which is the first social feature of its site. Given this large number of existing subscribers, I suspect that Reuter's forthcoming social network has strong potential to influence the financial community.
Reuter's Chief Executive, Tom Glocer says that the site will only be open to subscribers and it will enable "financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models." I'm curious about why fund managers/traders would want to
The Guardian reports that Reuters will soon be launching it's own financial social networking site, aimed at fund managers, traders and analysts. Reuters has some 70,000 subscribers to it's messaging service, which is the first social feature of its site. Given this large number of existing subscribers, I suspect that Reuter's forthcoming social network has strong potential to influence the financial community.
Reuter's Chief Executive, Tom Glocer says that the site will only be open to subscribers and it will enable "financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models." I'm curious about why fund managers/traders would want to
21 July 2007
,-)
During the Cannes Advertising Festival, SNAP FILM placed this poster at Zürich airport within the boarding areas of flights travelling to Nice.
Too far? (2)
On the same topic: an ad that created some noise here in France, for Marité et François Girbaud (clothing designers), and that was banned... To be honest, I was not shocked.
20 July 2007
Marcello!
Dear all,
I found an interesting site on "our friend" Marcello Serpa - even though it is not really updated, there is some interesting material! Above all the section "Point of view" explains the vision and approach of Marcello: creativity, good ideas, are more important than budget...above all when you don't have much!! I don't know why, but it sounded familiar!
Enjoy!
http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_02/adv382j/ortega/Serpa/Home.htm
I found an interesting site on "our friend" Marcello Serpa - even though it is not really updated, there is some interesting material! Above all the section "Point of view" explains the vision and approach of Marcello: creativity, good ideas, are more important than budget...above all when you don't have much!! I don't know why, but it sounded familiar!
Enjoy!
http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_02/adv382j/ortega/Serpa/Home.htm
TIMELESS ADVERTISING
I find this a good example of timeless advertising - it works withouth fancy trendy stuffs....
19 July 2007
What about this?
This is an OOH in Milan - just close to Duomo in the center. Enel is the national provider of Electricity, and the Ad says:
Our committment is to provide you with a "clean" energy. and these are not words blowing in the wind.
The real revolution is to avoid the World to change!
Isn't is effective???
Martini - a TVC that you love and remeber for years
rebranding of martini and their new shape of the bootle just reminded me of one TVC that I love
18 July 2007
heh! wordplay looks familiar..
a greeting card from mccann healthcare mumbai to mccann erickson india on 4 cannes lions this yearan extreme end of social marketing :)
i think some social organizations in ukraine are hardly hit by extremely hot weather in the recent weeks. biggest ukrainian cities are crowded by social campaign called "52 milion". this is a number for ukrainian population back 10 years ago, that in these years has been reduce by 5-6 million..
so the campaign says "we have to get back to 52 million! lets make love :)".. other visuals read "ukraine needs some good football players! let's make love :)", "ukraine needs cosmonauts! lets make love:)" etc. for total media value appr. $500K.
would be interesting to see its result in 9 month :)
17 July 2007
John Grant's Blog
John Grants Blog is quite nice and inspiring (well, no wonder really, is it? ;))
http://www.brandtarot.com/blog/?m=200707
Also see links under 'categories' on the right hand side.
Happy Exploring!
http://www.brandtarot.com/blog/?m=200707
Also see links under 'categories' on the right hand side.
Happy Exploring!
VIAGRA
I found this the other day next to our office. It is a bike stand, to which you can lock your bikes onto. I find the ad of Viagra on it - a bit brave but - really funny and great use of media channel: The ads says 'this stand has been brought to you by Viagra'. 'Stand' in German language also means 'erection'.
Nice play of words....
The virus is spreading!
Our creative virus is spreading real time. Here's an ad I received yesterday from Ann-Mari (BI team): really good one!
13 July 2007
Five Most Expensive Web Addresses by Forbes
Growth in online advertising and the shrinking pool of available names are pushing URL price tags to new heights. Three of the top five deals in history happened in the last two years. "You're seeing a perfect storm created by converging factors that are resulting in an increase in domain values," says Bentley. During the tech boom, top-selling domains were based on brand appeal. Now it's all about searchable keywords that are both generic and descriptive.
A big reason: With online ad spending increasing at a rate of 30% a year, owning domain names has become a business in itself. Entrepreneurs can flip them, like Miami condominiums, or they can sit on them and collect rent.
Sex.com broke the eight-figured barrier in 2005 by nabbing $12 million, according to DN Journal, which tracks the domain name industry. Porn.com came in next, at $9.5 million last month, followed by Business.com ($7.5 million in 1999), Diamond.com ($7.5 million in 2006) and Beer.com (a reported $7 million in 1999).
A big reason: With online ad spending increasing at a rate of 30% a year, owning domain names has become a business in itself. Entrepreneurs can flip them, like Miami condominiums, or they can sit on them and collect rent.
Sex.com broke the eight-figured barrier in 2005 by nabbing $12 million, according to DN Journal, which tracks the domain name industry. Porn.com came in next, at $9.5 million last month, followed by Business.com ($7.5 million in 1999), Diamond.com ($7.5 million in 2006) and Beer.com (a reported $7 million in 1999).
12 July 2007
How to make Cannes happen again
I thought of different possibilities. Some are totally silly, some are just a dream, very confused but some can be considered.
IN CANNES:
• To stay the same way and send a small group to experience the festival for a week
• To make come different small groups during the week for 2 or 3 days
• To go all of us to Cannes for a week
• To organise a week running and everybody can feel free to come at any time.
NOT IN CANNES:
• To organise our own Cannes festival in Western Union
- by inviting our own guests and intervenant
- by setting up some workshops to think about WU, how we can make it evoluted, what can be the future…
- by having our own WU jury to decided what is the best WU campain of the year
- by having our own WU jury to decided what is the best worldwide campain of the year
OTHERS:
• To see if we could show some of our advertising or campain we are very proud of, to Cannes Festival.
• We also could have a special group in Cannes who could be the correspondants. Their fonction would be to report and be in contact with the WU Cannes festival everyday or any time by videophone to bring the festival in our and in the same way to help to bring some news ideas and information to let us jump and react to the subjects. Like that, we will be directly connected with Cannes Festival to live it virtually.
IN CANNES:
• To stay the same way and send a small group to experience the festival for a week
• To make come different small groups during the week for 2 or 3 days
• To go all of us to Cannes for a week
• To organise a week running and everybody can feel free to come at any time.
NOT IN CANNES:
• To organise our own Cannes festival in Western Union
- by inviting our own guests and intervenant
- by setting up some workshops to think about WU, how we can make it evoluted, what can be the future…
- by having our own WU jury to decided what is the best WU campain of the year
- by having our own WU jury to decided what is the best worldwide campain of the year
OTHERS:
• To see if we could show some of our advertising or campain we are very proud of, to Cannes Festival.
• We also could have a special group in Cannes who could be the correspondants. Their fonction would be to report and be in contact with the WU Cannes festival everyday or any time by videophone to bring the festival in our and in the same way to help to bring some news ideas and information to let us jump and react to the subjects. Like that, we will be directly connected with Cannes Festival to live it virtually.
11 July 2007
"The Myths of Innovation"
I found the following interview on Guy Kawasaki's blog: very (VERY) interesting!
Scott Berkun worked on the Internet explorer team at Microsoft from 1994-1999. He is the author of a recently released book called The Myths of Innovation. He also wrote the 2005 bestseller, The Art of Project Management. He teaches a graduate course in creative thinking at the University of Washington, runs the sacred places architecture tour at NYC’s GEL conference, and writes about innovation, design and management.
In his most recent book he explores (or, more accurately, “explodes”) the romantic notions of how innovation occurs. Join me in this Q and A session as he explains the real world of innovation.
1.Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?
Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.
2. Question: Is progress towards innovation made in a straight line? For example, transistor to chip to personal computer to web to MySpace.
Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.
If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.
3.Question: Are innovators born or made?
Answer: Both. Take Mozart. Yes, he had an amazing capacity for musical composition, but he also was born in a country at the center of the music world, had a father who was a music teacher, and was forced to practice for hours every day before he started the equivalent of kindergarten. I researched the history of many geniuses and creators and always find a wide range of factors, some under their control and some not, that made their achievements possible.
4.Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?
Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
5.Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?
Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.
6.Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?
Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.
7.Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?
Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.
The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.
8.Question: If you were a venture capitalist, what would your investment thesis be?
Answer: Two parts: neither is original, but they borne out by history. One is portfolio. Invest knowing most ventures, even good ones, fail, and distribute risk on some spectrum (e.g. 1/3 very high risk, 1/3 high risk, 1/3 moderate risk). Sometimes seemingly small, low risk/reward innovations have big impacts and it’s a mistake to only make big bets.
The other idea is people: I’d invest in people more than ideas or business plans—though those are important of course. A great entrepreneur who won’t give up and will keep growing and learning is gold. It’s a tiny percentage of entrepreneurs who have any real success the first few times out—3M, Ford, Flickr were all second or third efforts. I’d also give millions of dollars to authors of recent books on innovation with the word Myth in the title. The future is really in their hands.
9.Question: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?
Answer: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.
10.Question: What’s more important: problem definition or problem solving?
Answer: Problem definition is definitely under-rated, but they’re both important. New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it’s easier to solve. Einstein and Edison were notorious problem definers: they defined the problem differently than everyone else and that’s what led to their success.
11.Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?
Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that they guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.
12.Question: Is innovation more likely to come from young people or old people? Or is age simply not a factor?
Answer: Innovation is difficult, risky work, and the older you are, the greater the odds you’ll realize this is the case. That explanation works best. Beethoven didn’t write his nineth symphony until late in his life, so we know many creatives stay creative no matter how old they are. But their willingness to endure all the stresses and challenges of bringing an idea to the world diminishes. They understand the costs better from the life experience. The young don’t know what their is to fear, have stronger urges to prove themselves, and have fewer commitments—for example, children and mortgages. These factors that make it easier to try crazy things.
Scott Berkun worked on the Internet explorer team at Microsoft from 1994-1999. He is the author of a recently released book called The Myths of Innovation. He also wrote the 2005 bestseller, The Art of Project Management. He teaches a graduate course in creative thinking at the University of Washington, runs the sacred places architecture tour at NYC’s GEL conference, and writes about innovation, design and management.
In his most recent book he explores (or, more accurately, “explodes”) the romantic notions of how innovation occurs. Join me in this Q and A session as he explains the real world of innovation.
1.Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?
Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.
2. Question: Is progress towards innovation made in a straight line? For example, transistor to chip to personal computer to web to MySpace.
Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.
If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.
3.Question: Are innovators born or made?
Answer: Both. Take Mozart. Yes, he had an amazing capacity for musical composition, but he also was born in a country at the center of the music world, had a father who was a music teacher, and was forced to practice for hours every day before he started the equivalent of kindergarten. I researched the history of many geniuses and creators and always find a wide range of factors, some under their control and some not, that made their achievements possible.
4.Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?
Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
5.Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?
Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.
6.Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?
Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.
7.Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?
Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.
The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.
8.Question: If you were a venture capitalist, what would your investment thesis be?
Answer: Two parts: neither is original, but they borne out by history. One is portfolio. Invest knowing most ventures, even good ones, fail, and distribute risk on some spectrum (e.g. 1/3 very high risk, 1/3 high risk, 1/3 moderate risk). Sometimes seemingly small, low risk/reward innovations have big impacts and it’s a mistake to only make big bets.
The other idea is people: I’d invest in people more than ideas or business plans—though those are important of course. A great entrepreneur who won’t give up and will keep growing and learning is gold. It’s a tiny percentage of entrepreneurs who have any real success the first few times out—3M, Ford, Flickr were all second or third efforts. I’d also give millions of dollars to authors of recent books on innovation with the word Myth in the title. The future is really in their hands.
9.Question: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?
Answer: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.
10.Question: What’s more important: problem definition or problem solving?
Answer: Problem definition is definitely under-rated, but they’re both important. New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it’s easier to solve. Einstein and Edison were notorious problem definers: they defined the problem differently than everyone else and that’s what led to their success.
11.Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?
Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that they guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.
12.Question: Is innovation more likely to come from young people or old people? Or is age simply not a factor?
Answer: Innovation is difficult, risky work, and the older you are, the greater the odds you’ll realize this is the case. That explanation works best. Beethoven didn’t write his nineth symphony until late in his life, so we know many creatives stay creative no matter how old they are. But their willingness to endure all the stresses and challenges of bringing an idea to the world diminishes. They understand the costs better from the life experience. The young don’t know what their is to fear, have stronger urges to prove themselves, and have fewer commitments—for example, children and mortgages. These factors that make it easier to try crazy things.
09 July 2007
local currency payout - help :)
dear lions, please, help!
does anyone remember seeing some good creatives for local currency payout?
i found this one from kazakhstan and briefed barbar.. but maybe you'll have any other thoughts or ideas?
08 July 2007
ecover campaign
should we check if wu has any eco technology? :)
like eco servers? or eco send-receive forms? or maybe something else we didn't know about?
like eco servers? or eco send-receive forms? or maybe something else we didn't know about?
Apple iPhone rocks!
According to reports, ATT Mobility has fulfilled over 1 million (!) iPhone activations since the device was launched in the US on June 29th. Truly impressive. Innovation pays back.
(click on the picture to better appreciate the "beast": great technology but also great design!)
06 July 2007
Welcome, Lions!
I hope this blog will allow us to stay in touch, have discussions... and have fun!
You can post your thoughts, images, videos, start votes, have podcasts and so much more!
Please, comment the layout!
This blog has quite a few other interesting page elements that can be added in the future, anything from catalogue of interesting links, music of the week to sophisticated java applications.
Any ideas for now?
You can post your thoughts, images, videos, start votes, have podcasts and so much more!
Please, comment the layout!
This blog has quite a few other interesting page elements that can be added in the future, anything from catalogue of interesting links, music of the week to sophisticated java applications.
Any ideas for now?
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