Cultural Cartography

Virtual Coke

Walking through a shopping mall in berlin yesterday, I came across a vending machine from Coke. It flashed at me, and beeped at me and basically did its best to stop me in my tracks. Of course I thought nothing more about this than normal because that's what vending machines always seem to do nowadays. Until I looked a bit closer.

The thing was I couldn't see how to get a bottle of coke out of the machine. That's because it was a digital vending machine. It sold content such as ringtones, logos, pictures etc. And also coke.

It took me a while to find the Coke button but I did. And then of course I felt like I was acting like a true dinosaur, trying to get Coke from a Coke machine.

Didn't get a picture as my new status as dinosaur prevents me from carrying a camera phone, leaving me only with a Blackberry which I can onyl just about work.

More here, but still no pictures

Clinging to the surface

I don't know about you but I often have the feeling (especially at the moment having just moved to a new country, town etc) that I am only one step away from disaster, and that it wouldn't take much for it all to come falling down on my head. But that is usually when I am obsessing too much about myself and how my life is developing. It's not really on an existential level though.

Listening to the news about the fires in California this morning on BBC World it really struck me that we are all only ever clinging to the surface of this world. Our grip is never more than tentative. It doens't take much to wipe out a town, a state and your whole life. It sounds trite but it does remind you that we are all human and that in the face of disasters that is all that really counts.

I am sure some philosopher somewhere will have talked about the importance of realising that. I know that it's a large part of the Bible: humility because none of anything that we have is owed to us. But a lot of life at the moment seems to focus on avoiding the thought.

A few good creative men

That's all we need. I am sure that this is how some of my creatives feel. Not sure I quite agree. But you've gotta love Jack Nicholson.

Cultural Shortcuts

Had a very interesting conversation today which got me thinking. I was talking to a planner in the States and was trying to describe a certain company to him. I tried words like "progressive" versus "staid", I tried "bigger on the outside" versus "small on the inside". I even tried "more like Unilever and Procter than Nike" and I still don't think it connected. And then we started talking about what sort of people it was that worked there and he said "they sound quite Middle America" and I realised that actually that was precisely what I needed as a short cut. Forget descriptive words, forget analogies, just compare things to types of people that other people know and you're away.

How to stop people meddling with our work?

A semi-serious post after a meeting where a client in all seriousness actually said "But we tested that line last year in a different campaign and the research said it worked, so why can't we use it here?"

Making advertising into a science.
I don't think the general public would tell Einstein that his formula were not quite right or Crick and Watson that maybe DNA is a different shape, so why do people who don't know anything about communication persist in telling those whose work it is to provide communication, how to do it.

I don't mind clients who spend a lot of time working on communication adding their tuppence, but I do mind people who are in production or product development or god forbid bookkeeping telling me that they don't think what we've done is right. As if they've thought about the target group and the communication objective and also about how communication works and what the best channel is to communication what.

It makes my blood boil.

So I've decided to create a new school of advertising. It's not about KISS, it's not about single mindedness, it's about something that has such a complicated formula and background that nobody will dare to challenge me on anything. I will be the queen of the world and the queen of .... OK yes, you can see that meglomania is taking over already. But it's an important point that in the world of communication we don't seem to have worked hard enough to make our work feel like something only we can do.

suggestions for a complicated formula welcome. It could look like this.

But should have the effect of a black box so that nobody suggests changing anything.

The colour of food

It's struck me recently how clever restaurants are at making sure you know what they are. And most of it is done semiotically. Italian restaurants are red, white and green and greek restaurants are blue and white and so on.

I wonder what the colour of fusion is: At the moment it often seems to be brown and orange.

I promise more posts soon, once I've got into the groove at my new job.

Insight driven advertising or the world revolves around my d..k!!!

It's long been a source of amusement to me how absolutely phallocentric the male psyche is. Here are two ads from very different cultures which demonstrate that when it comes to put downs, having a small dick is the worst thing that could happen. Worse than killing someone accidentally, worse than injuring innocent bystanders, worse than even killling yourself by driving too fast.

The German poster ad says: "Raser haben so viel Grips" which basically means so much as "speeders are this clever".

I don't know, guys, does it work for you?

A little less perfection

I was walking behind a colleague on the stairs yesterday. She was perfectly dressed, very stylish, but not too styled, well made up and with a hair cut that made me want to ask her who cut her hair? Whilst I was walking behind her, I noticed that there was a sticking plaster hanging off the back of her ankle. Obviously a result of summer shoe syndrome, but also a lovely reminder that she was human, that she also got blisters and her shoes also rubbed. It reminded me of "To the Lighthouse" by Virgina Woolf, which is in some ways all about the impossibility of perfection in life and in human relationships.

"Dear, dear, Mrs Ramsay said to herself, how did they produce this
incongruous daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her stocking?
How did she exist in that portentous atmosphere where the maid was
always removing in a dust-pan the sand that the parrot had scattered,
and conversation was almost entirely reduced to the exploits--interesting
perhaps, but limited after all--of that bird?"

So what has that got to do with brands? Well, I think sometimes a little bit of imperfection is a good thing. It makes a brand more human and therefore more personable. There is of course the classic Avis Campaign "We try harder" but other examples include brands like Bradford & Bingley, who still haven't quite worked out what to do with their bowler hat, but which makes them somehow lovable, Sainsburys who messed up their distribution.

Other examples (definitely better ones) are welcome.

What are brands for?

This is a lateral link and might sound at first a bit like I'm that guy who everyone hates who goes on about when he lived in Rio. But I've established my love for certain brands again since I've moved to Germany. I've also personally experienced the truth that brands are more than just a fancy name for a product.

Since I've moved to Germany the brands that I've fallen in love with again are (in no particular order): The BBC, the Guardian (although it is scary how London centric that paper is when you are no longer living in London), NPR, Persil, Aveda, Sebamed (very German brand) and a few more. What they all have in common is their ability to give me the feeling that I know where I am, who I am and what I am doing again. I choose to listen to the BBC, because I understand their perspective on the world and why they say the things they do. I might not agree with it, but the boundaries are clear. I know who it is and I know where I stand in relation to it.

When you move to a new country on the other hand, it's all up for grabs. I don't know Germany (well OK I confess I know it a bit) and so you have to learn to orientate yourself all over again. It feels a bit like swimming in a big lake of floating bits and they are all coming towards you and there is no secure ground under your feet. And yet you have to make decisions about what to buy. I mean if you don't, you'll starve. So you buy your toiletries at Schlecker because they are eveywhere until you find out that they are reputed to treat their personnel badly, but you only find this out when someone says "oh so you shop at Schlecker do you?" It feels a bit like learning a new language and using the wrong type of words to talk to your parents-in-law because you don't know what they really mean.

Bit rambling but what I want to say is that brands help you to negotiate your way round the world. They make the decisions you have to make every day that little bit easier and they make you feel more secure about the person that you are representing to the outside world.

late night Tv: Four Eyed Monsters

It's been a while since I just surfed but today I did and I found this: Four Eyed Monsters, touching, beautiful, real and at the same time surreal and a thousand times better than anything I would have found on network TV. (Be warned, it is a feature film and lasts over an hour.) It gave a whole new feeling to what the web can do, as I could watch this at home and then go and check out the website and the comments online and the blogs and everything. Don't know quite how to explain it but it gave me an amazing sense of possibilities and freedom. That in especially because today I've been trying to work out how I can watch BBC Prime on the web. It made me feel that this is what it's really about. Me at home thinking I want to watch a film, typing in streaming video and finding a link to this film on Google. The reason I ended up watching this film is not because it was right at the top of the list but because there was something about the name and the visuals and the idea which spoke to me. I chose it but it had to be there to be chosen.

I'm excited to see where things go with this project but with this idea of just looking for things randomly, a bit like opening the bible to see which verse jumps out at you.