Maddeningly amusing!

I love the Simpsons and I love Mad Men. Ergo….

[via Brand Flakes for Breakfast]

Brain Tap Series: Interview 16 – Asi Sharabi

Back with the Brain Tap Series! Asi Sharabi is a planner at Poke London, and an all-round great guy. I met him a few months ago, and his words of advice at the time were a godsend. Many of you will be familiar with Asi’s blog, No Mans Blog. So without further ado:

The interview:

1.  You recently wrote about location-aware applications, a concept that I’ve been interested in for a while as well. What would the best location-aware application look like to you and what comes closest to it as of date?

The best location-aware app for me should be just like a knowledgeable concierge of a boutique hotel. It never approaches you but is always there when you need it. It’s recommendations are spot on and it focuses on the hidden gems. It will tell you about places and events you’d want to blog and twitter about. It is one that I can customise (e.g I’m only interested in bookshops, independent cinemas and pet shops), and learns my taste over time. I’m thinking customizable UnchainedGuide.

The best one i’ve seen to date is urbanspoon and that’s only because of the playful interface (see my post).

 2. Do you think the current state of the economy will have a long-lasting effect on the world of advertising and marketing, and if so, what will it be?

Oooh. That’s a tough one. I hope that the short or long-lasting effect will be more budgets shifting from traditional advertising to digital so we can see more targeted, innovative, measurable and effective comms. 

3. What are your main hobbies and how do they influence your work?

Currently my main hobby is my 12-week-old baby girl…apart from sleep deprivation it puts me in perspective in general and forces me to ask time and again – ‘why would anyone give a damn about this???’  

4.  What do you like most about what you do?

Spending 12 hours a day online is a double-edged sword. I guess that what I most like about my work is the ability to be WOWed every day, sometimes more than once. I feel extremely fortunate to live the future. To experience the revolution first hand, write about it, read about it and be an active participant in this truly historic socio-technological transformation. 

5. What, in your opinion, is the most creative work/campaign ever produced and why do you like it?

The most creative works ever produced are the works by Jonathan Harris. Not a commercial as such, although his time capsule for Yahoo! can be considered as one. We Feel Fine is a mesmerising exercise in passive interactivity and human emotions. I wish I had done that. (you can read an interview i had with him few years back here)

 6.  If you could start a company of your own, what would it be like?

It will be an agency that focuses on convincing marketing directors and CEOs to dedicate 50% of their media budgets to trying to change the world. So for example, if Sony would have been my client, I’d convince them to take 50% of the media budget of ‘Bravia Paint’ …

……and spend it on painting ugly and depressing council estates all over the UK (in collaboration with the residents) to make them places you want to live in – lively, colourful and optimistic. 

7. What’s your favourite quote?

Other people matter.  (Is that a quote? More like a life philosophy I guess).

——————————

Thanks, Asi!

The world wants Obama, apparently

No huge surprises, but still an interesting exercise. The Economist gives us the results of a ‘What if’ scenario with the American elections. Obama trumps McCain with 9,111 votes in the global electoral college as against just 163 for McCain.*

* as of 9.32am UK time today. 

Harness the power of technology and community

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Harris of We Feel Fine fame gave a talk at the Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton. Many perceived it as controversial and he was deemed condescending and arrogant, because his words were thought to insinuate that most Flash work being produced today is not particularly noteworthy. 

He has sought to clarify his intentions on his blog, in a post that I think is as much worth reading as his concise and meaningful presentation. I completely identified with his main thesis, which is that we should all push ourselves to produce work that is meaningful and has a positive impact on people, and not work that is simply mechanical output. This is an idea that I am hearing more and more of, albeit in modified forms, from different corners as the days go by. 

An excerpt from Jonathan’s post:

I believe our medium – the online medium – has the potential to become the next great way of processing and expressing our world.  Some would say it has already reached this point, but I believe it still inhabits an awkward adolescence, with no real virtuosos and no real masterpieces, and that the only way for it to mature is for its leaders and practitioners to push themselves to make better work, which will, in turn, reach a larger and less insular audience.  If the work is purely technological, it will be less likely to reach this larger audience, for it won’t resonate with as many people.  If it connects on a more human level, on the level of ideas, it stands a better chance of touching people deeply and spreading widely, like a Toni Morrison novel or a Steven Spielberg movie.  My reasons for wanting all this are partly selfish – it is my medium and I want it to flourish – but also inherently communal, as rising tides raise all ships.

His entire presentation is here.

[Via Christmas Gorilla]

Spotted around London

Word puns can be fun. Board outside a Regent Street store selling Lush cosmetics.

Are you mippin’ it?

Mippin were sponsoring this morning’s Tuttle Club meeting. It’s a site that basically converts any website to a mobile-compatible form for easy browsing on the move. I don’t personally browse on my mobile, but I’m sure for anyone who has a BlackBerry or an iPhone, Mippin will be rather useful, because not all sites are mobile compatible currently – or at least they don’t all make for easy reading on a phone. Richard Hyndman, Mippin’s Head of Development, even converted my blog into a mobile-compatible version right on the spot as he was talking to me, with HIS phone. You can do it over here. It’s free. I think it’s a quite a useful service in general!

Ad blasts from the past

Ralph Lauren’s new ‘film’ for the launch of their perfume Notorious, featuring Laetitia Casta, is out in the UK today. It’s directed by the award-winning Wong Kar-Wai, so I thought it would be something interesting. In line with his expertise, it’s a very visually appealing, sexy video, but not ground-breaking. I was expecting something more. 

Film is a serious interest of mine, so I did a bit of a search for the best commercials directed by film directors. Not all of them are great – recently, Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Come Walkabout’ ad for Tourism Australia got quite a bit of flak from the advertising community. This list, though, seemed the most comprehensive:

10. Sony, The Third Place (2001) – David Lynch

9. Guinness, Surfer (1998) – Jonathan Glazer

8. Amex, My Life My Card (2006) – Wes Anderson

7. Adidas, Mechanical Legs (2002) – David Fincher

6. Apple, 1984 (1984) – Ridley Scott (this is a classic, of course)

5. Nike, The Secret Tournament (2002) – Terry Gilliam

4. Mercedes Benz, Lucky Star (2002) – Michael Mann

3. Smirnoff, Smarienberg (1998) – Michel Gondry

2. BMW, Beat the Devil (2002) – Tony Scott

1. Gap, Pardon Our Dust (2005) – Spike Jonze

Always good to refresh the memory. My favourites are the Apple and Smirnoff ads, which came out in 1984 and 1998 respectively, which, if you think about it, was a time when the internet wasn’t so big (it didn’t even exist in ’84), and consumers didn’t have this huge bridge across which they could communicate globally. Does that say anything about the increasing influence of the interactive form of communication over the traditional, and the consequent need to move with the times? Your guess is as good as mine.  

Play Partner Tracker, anyone?

This is one of the weirdest mobile games I’ve heard of yet. Take a look at Partner Tracker. It’s completely pointless, though.  

Ruminating on Facebook

Facebook has officially crossed the point of being just a social network. It is now a topic of research and debate. Yesterday, I came across two articles that spoke about Facebook’s effect on different demographic groups: one spoke about Facebook creating a ‘friendship addiction’ in women – essentially because women get their self-worth from ‘adding’ friends. The other spoke about Facebook ‘destroying the nuclear family’, but in a good sense, because we are witnessing more and more people over the age of 30 joining Facebook with the sole aim of keeping in touch with their family. This is true – I’ve noticed a lot of parents, even grandparents, of some of my friends joining Facebook and commenting on their status messages and photos. Mine are not on it so far, thank goodness!

I was also thinking of how I am not in touch with ALL of my friends from university, but my cousins who are currently studying have ‘friends’ in the high hundreds, most of them being people who go to school with them. When they finish studying and move into the working world, they will have that many more people to tap for jobs, hobbies and the like. I envisage a world where Facebook will ping you to tell you if any of your friends are in a five-mile radius, so you can meet them in person (apparently there is some similar application not related to Facebook that already exists – can’t remember what it’s called). Our next generation will not even know what a non-Facebook world looked like. I like to think of that as a good thing, unless of course you and your family choose to live on a remote island cut off from society (good luck to you). There will be problems of course, psychological and non-psychological, like stalkers, but there are ways to control the negatives – it’s why every network has privacy options you can control. There’s more to be done on that front yet. Women who have self-worth issues will need to find other ways of validating their existence, that’s all. 

Hope and a little sugar

When I was at the Southbank Centre a couple of weeks ago on the eve of the announcement of the Booker prize, at an event where all the nominated authors were reading from their books, I overheard someone asking Steve Toltz, author of A Fraction of the Whole, asking him how many time he’d been rejected by publishers. 

He said, ’11’. 

She said, ‘I’m sure they must be kicking themselves now. 11 idiots’. 

He said, ‘No. I like to think of them as 11 angels. Also to be honest, the the first time I submitted the book to publishers, it was over a thousand pages long.’ (It’s down to 720 now).

I like to take heart from that story. The more I look for a job, the more I find my thoughts and opinions becoming clearer, better-informed and focussed. I guess there’s a reason.