NMA Top 100 2008

I know it's not everything, but the NMA Top 100 Interactive agencies 2008 just came out yesterday and iris Digital is on there for the first time, number 63 on the list which is pretty cool

;o)

The eagle has landed... At the V&A!

The mystery behind the 7th Syndikate finally unravelled this
evening and I'm glad to say I had a really good time!

I almost ran to get to the Albert Memorial on time. I put on on
my hat and sunglasses as instructed while arriving there, along
with a newspaper under my left arm. I met with a few other
strange characters similarly dressed on the steps, and they were
generally as clueless to the purpose of this whole thing
as I was...


A few minutes past 6:45pm: the man with a tan mac and a
bowler hat, our mark to tail as agents of the
7th Syndikate, finally arrived. Needless to say we got
some funny looks from people on the streets, particularly
when having a drill sergeant experience in the underground
subway by the museums... Perhaps not as fun as when I got
to walk around Birmingham with my full on Indian wedding
suit (running errands for the bride who was a friend)
but still very cool.

Turned out we were going to the V&A and it was brilliant!

I like the V&A a lot and just walking through the doors
at night while the place is closed to the general public
was excellent!

The new exhibition this was all about is opening tomorrow:
Cold War Modern, A collection of designs created between
1945 and 1970.

We had a few drinks, a few explanations about the whole
ARG (alternate reality game)
and then got to see the exhibition before everyone else. ;o)

Here is some info about it:
The decades after the Second World War saw an intense
rivalry between the world’s two superpowers: the Soviet
Union and America. In the ‘cold war’ that ensued,
the two powers engaged in aggressive contests to build
their own spheres of influence. They accelerated the
development of new technologies to produce weapons,
launched ambitious space programmes and waged
propaganda campaigns across the world.

Vying to outdo one another, each deployed displays
of modern living, signs of progress and images of
future utopias. Art, architecture and design were drawn
into this Cold War competition to demonstrate a
superior vision of modernity.
I met some cool people while over there, though unfortunately
didn't get everyone's details - just leave a comment here or
on the Facebook group if you want to be in touch!
The campaign was created by 1000 Heads, they label
themselves the Word of Mouth People. I met Seb who was
in charge of the campaign and I learned they carefully
targeted 73 London bloggers with for this campaign.
Now I don't know about you, but in my book contacting
73 people and having 30 showing up is a damn good ratio!

Congratulations to all those involved in the campaign,
it was brilliant! (I kind of suspect Lolly may have
suggested I'd be a good candidate - thanks if that's
the case ;o)

A really cool exhibition, it made me think of the
Weapons of Mass Communication last year at the
Imperial War Museum, though this one was much better.

Some architectural designs, fashion of the times
(Manhattan in a glass bubble and Pierre Cardin's 
space dress were amazing, and there are lots more!)

Really good campaign and great exhibition,
I highly recommend seeing it!

Now part of the Syndikate

Been pretty busy these few days, between a big Indian wedding (One of my best friends); talking monkeys, Bebo, milk, angels and heroes at work (Intense but lots of fun on current projects!); and my mom arriving in town I didn't take much time out for blogging... That said, I followed up with 7th Syndikate and I just received this message confirming I'm now part of the conspiracy ;o)

I'm confident I figured out who it was for/from as well!

Hi Willem

You've been activated; you will now be known as Bill WG-104.

Stand by for further instructions.

Countdown begins now.

Curtis TH-915

-----------www.7thsyndikate.org-------------

The grey jackal skips joyfully across the pond

That's the title of an email I received a couple of days ago. From TRUST.NO.ONE

New ARG..? Or just a dodgy email?

I received a second email from Curtis-TH915 today. The first one had got into my spam box a couple of days ago and I hadn't noticed yet - nor do I generally open anything titled that way.

A non sequitur but Google Curtis TH-915 and this is where you get. Not so exciting. Try "I'm feeling lucky" it's even better.

It's all from 7th Syndikate.

Pretty strange email arousing my curiosity, gaming, mystery solving, scoobidoo-esque, search skills, role player and Famous Five enthusiast instincts! Something is wrong with the grammar/syntax of that sentence, but I'm sure you get the idea.

At least a couple of other people in the London blogosphere received the same message (Check your spam boxes maybe you have one too!), Melinda aka Miss Geeky twittered that it could be an ARG... Having looked into it, I think it might be as well.

If it is, it would be my first time getting involved in one, could be fun! (Or it might jut be something dodgy, but I don't think so at this stage - and they want buzz, well I'm participating without even knowing what it's about! And I don't care, I love games, love a mystery, I'm curious and it gives me easy content for a post ;o)

I figured it out by the way (It's not that difficult). Something's going on for (or in) 3 weeks. Watch out for the people randomly placing the words "big armadillo" in their conversations!

TRUST.NO.ONE

Web and TV, a sibling rivalry

I hadn't watched a TED talk for quite a while, so I was glad to watch this one earlier and I thought it absolutely brilliant (Well sure, they all are - or close). Peter Hirshberg is a Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketer - amongst other things, he's on the board of directors for Technorati.

He delivers a really fun and insightful talk starting from the fact that TV and computing pretty much started at the same time and they evolved as rival siblings.

For examples, he tells us about fundamental marketing methods

Marketing Lessons:
A. If you use our product...
You'll find true love, fulfillment, prosperity
B. If you don't...
You'll die

He also shows us the surprising first example of proprietary material locked in by the vendor, the Winky Dink crayons:



Check it out!

Wikipedia Trends

Photo by blmurch

I found out about this new project this morning, though I can't remember at all where I read about it so I can't link back to it, sorry... (Might have been an SEO blog, I was quickly browsing through a few I didn't know about this morning).

Anyhoo, check out http://stats.grok.se

It's a pretty cool idea, you can check through traffic stats for specific Wikipedia articles, month by month. Look at trends from one article to another. For example, the Barack Obama article was viewed 1,350,292 times in June, with a huge surge on the 4th June, also matched in Google Trends for June. I think it coincides with the religious stories with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, though I'm not sure that explains it. Comparatively, the thimble article was only viewed 4,424 times, probably a relief to find out people are more interested in the American presidential candidate - apart for the thimble enthusiasts, maybe.

It started to make thing about whether clients monitor the articles concerning their brands or anything related at all. I know some do for sure, but others don't. Just checking through, I noticed a couple of brands we work for at iris that don't have any presence. Even if there are probably a limited amount of people interested in finding out more about Utterly Butterly, they may be disappointed to find out there is no information available about it on Wikipedia.

Given Wikipedia is one of the main points of reference for any internet user, I think it's important for brands and products to be present, and it could also be an additional point of presence (for traffic/awareness) for digital campaigns - keeping within Wikipedia neutrality rules and guidelines, of course.

Drinking detergent..?

I was doing some research earlier and came across the Ariel website, I'm wondering if it's normal for me to think their current home page is pretty disturbing.



Let's look at this step by step:

1. Ariel is a washing liquid/powder and is classically branded in blue and green, because it's so clean, fresh and obviously feels/smells like the sea/sky/nature/apples/limes/etc.
   
2. Way too many people in the world don't have enough or any clean drinking water, which is definitely a huge issue and Ariel seems to want to get involved. I guess the relevance can be debated, but it's a noble cause, so why not.
3. However little clean drinking water you have, drinking detergent is not good for you.

So here we have a the pic of a kid in Africa basically appearing in a washing machine (animated blue bubbles going in a circle, pic shows up in the middle). Ariel branded, blue like no water has ever been before but interestingly the same colour as the Ariel liquid you can find at your local supermarket - or maybe same as a swimming pool. And the kid is drinking it.

Wrong.

No..?

The real tetris

A bit more easy blogging, I just recently saw the real Tetris video, it's absolutely awesome!

Kourtrajme - The Funk Hunt

Ben and my cousin just told me about a series of French short movies I hadn't heard about and some are really awesome, mostly visual with excellent soundtracks; They called their production house call Kourtrajme - Short Movie in French "verlan" slang, basically.

The Funk Hunt is the story of a vinyl record through time and musical styles from the 7o's to pretty much nowadays. The record itself is actually the main actor in the short and the music is brilliant!

Check it here if ever the embedded version doesn't work: Part 1 Part 2





Funky!

Talk about Social Media and influencers

Yesterday, one of my colleagues asked me what my favourite thing about digital was. It's a tough one, I actually love everything (or almost) but I still said if I had to choose it would probably be social media. You can't really take it out of digital solely, at least I think it's part of a bigger whole - and also because I don't really like the buzz word. Still, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the digital space is that people have the same opinions about brands and things they had before, but now they can address the entire world standing on their virtual cardboard box, not just a couple of passers-by a Sunday morning on Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park.

And a LOT of people have really worthwhile things to say, may it be smart, witty, insightful, funny, informative... You name it. Whatever the topic, from politics to marketing via technology, fly fishing, or thimbles (Not so sure there are that many people talking about thimbles but I just thought of Eddie Izzard). People listen, and well, if you're reading this you pretty much know the gist.

Bit of a long introduction, but I came across the Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog a couple of weeks ago. Sony Ericsson is the main client of the agency I work for, so definitely interesting from that perspective. Really good blog (Granted, you do have to be interested in mobile/technology in the first place), and this is someone with a pretty consequent voice: 478 Authority on Technorati (Whatever you think of it), and over 1000 readers at the moment.

I checked my Netvibes earlier and saw a post titled "Someone needs a wake up call...". It obviously drew my attention. Really interesting and very detailed post of all the thoughts and (pretty constructive) criticism the author currently has for Sony Ericsson. Whatever one thinks of social media, this is definitely something a brand should listen to, because this is one of their most important advocates talking. You can imagine if he takes the time out to write such a long post, how many Sony Ericsson users have already given up long ago and gone to buy an LG/iPhone/Nokia/Random other handset..?

You may be already doing this, but if you're working in digital/marketing/related perhaps the brand(s) you're working on have similar strong advocates and it might be worth making sure they're being listened to.

Research reports are interesting and useful, but mostly collating the opinions of 500 to about 2000 people, and who knows in what circumstances they were asked the questions. Here we have one person (And a few contributors), actively listened to by over a thousand people and in all likelihood a bunch of other followers. It's pretty daunting to think about. I like it!

And I know what I'll be answering if someone asks me why they should be spending money and effort into their digital communications.

PS: I checked, there are blogs about thimbles. Well, they're mostly about knitting but still. Most of them also have more authority than this blog does ;o)