Google decides to finally prove no one reads online.
For such a successful company Google does some really dumb stuff some times. FIrst came their exercise in brand experimentation as they debuted new logos through the worst vehicle possible, their 16 pixel square favicon. They seemed to think no one would really notice this until pretty much everyone noticed and blogged out it including your truly. So tonight I was updating my iPhones applications and I actually go into the updates to see what they are changing before I download them. The Google iPhone application was on the list and I went into the update to see that they had 5 changes to the application. Two of the big changes listed were "longer version number" and "ninja".
A little funny, a little stupid and probably completely missed by 99% of the people who have the application. It did however launch an interesting debate among myself and some of my more experienced design and branding minded friends about if a brand should get ever even get any of those little moments of stupidity. In this case Google spends millions of dollars in media so we think of them as a smart, cutting edge company with the best search engine and a huge collection of technology tools. Then brand perception that they have worked to create can then be undermined and effected by any and every communication at any and every level- even something as simple and inane as an iPhone application update description. So the question is should brands be able to have moments like this where they break character or is the real power in consistent one and voice? I want to hear your thoughts so if you have a thought one way or another post it in the comments.
I had been aware of TOMS Shoes for a while as I had seen them in store and magazine but never really got what they were doing until last year when I met their founder Blake Mycoskie at the AdAge IDEA Conference. Blake created TOIMS with the simple premise that for every pair you purchase TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good. Blake was nice enough to give me a pair of their shoes, which I love, and I have continued to support them since.
Today I took advantage of a hot and lazy Sunday to catch up on my bulging TiVo list and as I was buzzing through the a commercial break I saw Blake's face flash across the screen. I went back to see that he was featured in the latest AT&T wireless commercial. The commercial is simple and straight forward enough as a brief overview of what he is doing and why he needs AT&T to be able to do it. I love seeing such a huge global brand spending some of their sizable marketing dollars to do more than just get their brand message out there and support a great company and cause like TOM's. I applaud the creative team that took the advertising in this direction and the clients who signed off on it. TOM's is a great cause so head over to their site and grab a pair today.
Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami bring design to QR codes
When it comes to QR codes what you see is what you get because they all look the same and I have never seen any variation in them until today. Louis Vuitton and my favorite modern artist Takashi Murakami have created the first QR code that is actually designed in the brand's visual language and characters that Murkami created. The coolest thing is that even with all the design the code actually works and takes you to the Louis Vuitton online Japanese store. I this has to be take a long time to create but this addition of branding to the QR codes could turn them into something really cool that could be used as a design element in a lot of different places.
Zappos.com uses Google Maps to put their feet down.
Online shoe retailer Zappos.com has created one of the more interesting commercial Google Maps executions I have seen. As orders are placed on Zappos.com a thumbnail of the purchased item is plotted on a U.S. map to where it will be shipped and all done in real time.
Talking creativity with the world's greatest chef, Ferran Adria
The world at large probably first heard the name Ferran Adria in 2003 because of Anthony Bourdain's TV show No Reservation on an episode called "Decoding Ferran Adria" which was the first primetime look into Ferran restaurant and studio. I have been fan of chef Adria and the food he creates at his restaurant in Spain called el Bulli for a long time. His avante guard food is wildly creative and challenges the very conventions around what makes a meal and the role of science in cooking. For all of his work the restaurant has been named the best restaurant in the world a record four times.
I have long found a strong link between the creativity in cooking and creativity in design and advertising. I get a tremendous amount of creative inspiration from the the work of chef's like Ferran Adria, Jose Andreas, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne. I even use their work to teach how to have to break through creative ideas in my studio. I tell my designers here in New York to go to Wylie Dufresne's restaurant WD50 and have the eggs benedict to see what I mean. It is a dish we have all had before but to completely re-imagined it into some you have never seen before in a form you have never eaten before the tastes bring back strong memories. It is that play between wild creativity that is contained in something familiar that I love. I think it is what all break through interactive work does. It gives you something completely new but there is something familiar in the usability and the experience when though it is all new.
A few weeks ago some of my friends in the culinary world got me a very special invitation to spend the day with Ferran Adria at the Culinary Institute of America where he was going to give a 2 hour lecture and 3 hour cooking demonstration with Jose Andrea and the chef du cuisine from el Bulli. Between the two events I had the opportunity to talk with chef Adria for about 10 minutes about creativity and his work. The three things I walked away with I have heard in other forms but hearing it from him made me refocus on the concepts in my own work.
Moving Forward by Looking Back At the end of every season Ferran makes the entire creative team go through all the work they did over the past six months to see what was successful, what failedl and what they need to work on. His point to me what that most creative people do not like to look back like this and would rather move on to their next idea. He feels the process of reviewing your work like this is critical so you can learn from it and that it will help you grow as a creative thinker faster than just looking forward. I have to agree that i have never worked in a studio where this was done with any regularity and only seemed to happen after an assignment had gone very badly and management wanted to be sure I didn't happen on the next assignment. I know I am guilty of it because so often when I look back I at my work I only see the short coming and the mistakes and I never take a more holistic view of it.
Creativity Isn't Copying This was a saying that Ferran got from his mentor and is the simple saying he uses as the standard he holds for all the work they do at el Bulli. We all have the tendency to want to fall back into past achievements and use things that we know work because it is safe and you don't really have to risk anything. Going away from what you know is scarier because you have to risk a lot more. I think a large part of being able to make this a successful part of your process is have the support of a studio where risk, failure and sometimes even fighting are actually encouraged. Having this type of environment where everyone is taking risks all the time makes it easier for the individual to put themselves out there and break through into something new. I think if you look behind the food at el Bulli and look at the team and the environment that Ferran has created you will see just that,
Fail Constantly This is something I have known and preached for a long time but ti was good to hear it from Ferran that it is a key part of his process as well. I know that sounds like a funny statement to teach people to fail. Most people don't want to fail, they view it as a huge negative, they don't want to admit they had an idea that didn't work but it is essential to the creative process. The key is that when you fail you have to be able to look at your process to see when you did and then be able to try and improve upon it the next time. In this way failing creates a cycle where you can constantly try and to improve your process and it makes you a lot more fearless to really try new and far reaching ideas.
BMW creates strong concept integration with their new 300 horsepower paintbrush
BWM has just release what I think is the most interesting and aggressive integrated advertising campaign I have seen in a long time. In the interest of full disclosure I will sat that it was created by two of my old creative partners in crime who also left for greener pastures at GSD&M in Austin. The campaigned started with and is centered around their latest TV commercial for the BMW Z4 where artist Robin Rhode uses the roadster as a 306hp paintbrush to create a huge work of art.
Augmented Reality They then took that TV commercial and turned it into another impressive example of augmented reality. As with other examples of the technology, you print out a marker, show it to your webcam and then you can make your own "Expression of Joy" painting. This augmented reality execution has a few more bells and whistles than what I have seen before as you can first use it to check out the car by twisting and turning the marker to get the whole picture. When you are done with that you can put it down on your desktop, size the car so it fits your desktop and then take control of the car to create your own work of art. Once you are happy with the result you can save it to YouTube or Facebook. There is one increibly big drawback here which is that the only way to make it work is to download a 20MB software install that only works on PC's. I don't know if there is a Mac version in the works but the logic in this decision eludes me as every other version of this technology I have seen works on both platforms.
iPhone Application The final part of the interactive extension of the TV commercial came with the launch of the Z4 iPhone application which is the more robust offering of the two. The application is broken into a game, photo gallery and a section where you can read about the making of the commercial The game allows you to customize your Z4 before you enter the game by choosing the type of roof, color and rims. Once you had pimped your ride to you liking you can take it for a spin in an experience similar to the one in the one in augmented reality but with the steering being done using the iPhone's accelerometer. When you are finished if you have created something you really like you can save it to the Camera Roll in the iPhone's photo albums to be viewed or sent around later. I was surprised to see that the save photos had no BMW or Z4 branding on them which I understand from a pure artist sense but it felt like a missed branding opportunity.
So while the limiting technical requirements of the augmented reality execution are very disappointing, when you look at the campaign as a whole it is an impressive display of how one idea can be brought to life through multiple channels and multiple interactive incarnations with each one staying strong enough to stand on it's own. It is this type of integrated concepting that I wish I would see a lot more and continue to wt for more agencies to wake up and start actually working this way. I continue to deeply believe that there remains vast amounts of untapped potential that could be realized by more of this type of thinking where you start with a strong media agnostic concept and then work it out from there into the various channels so each one of them can take advantage of their respective medium.
Dad always said the longer you're in advertising the farther away you will get from what you love to do. I thought this illustration was the best visual representation of that fact I had ever seen and it made me laugh.
. I got a note from a friend back in June about the thesis Martin Lihs was been working on over at Bauhaus Universit called WiiSpray. The description was about how Martin had used Wii Remote and turned into a spray can to create a communal virtual graffiti wall in which people can add their digital tags. At the time I thought it sounded like the work Blitz Interactive did for Adobe MAX 2008 when they created an interactive holographic wall experience that also used a Wii-mote to control it. But today I got a link to this video which show the WiiSpray in action and it far more impressive than I thought it would be. This video shows a very extensive color picker and interactive stencils you can spray through and around that are all controlled through the WiiSpray controller. You can read his blog and keep track of all of his progress here.
This past Thursday there was an interesting intersection happened between gaming, advertising and PR. If you have followed the launch of the Playstation 3 in any detail you will know that when they announced the console in 2005 they showed many game trailers for what would be possible on the new machine. The trailer that caused the biggest reaction was for a first person shooter called Killzone 2. After the initial announcement it was leaked that the trailer was done completely as a pre-rendered CGI movie and was not running on the PS3 hardware at all. Sony tried to position it as a 'target visual of what would be possible' but a huge uproar ensued and it took Sony 3 1/2 years to finally get the game to market. With the launch they knew it would come under instant scrutiny to see if the final product would match the first target visual movie. So with the recent release of the game also came a TV commercial called 'Bullet" that followed the path of a single bullet in slow motion through a scene in the game. Again an uproar ensued about if the commercial was real or if it had been pre-rendered agin. So this past Thursday Sony released an application through the Playstation Network called "Behind the Bullet" that lets you run the commercial, move around it in 3D and hear commentary from multiple people who were involved in it's creation thus proving that the visual were real and were really done using the PS3 hardware.
Having played the game I think the final product actually far exceeded the target rendering and is the best looking game I have ever played. Even with that end result, the whole journey of this game from concept to launch to promotion has been interesting because at every step consumers have demanded honesty from their relationship with Sony and the brand has had to go to great length to win that trust back.
I think too often branding work is approached an an intellectual exercise where you can shift your brand however you want and lead your customers around by the nose. I have participated in too many of those exercises where the trust and values that are developed between the brand and their customers isn't taken into consideration. About a month ago I wrote about how Tropicana re-branded themselves and recreated their packaging and results created a huge consumer backlash. Tropicana quickly said they were going to scrap the packaging which at the time seemed like solely a branding move but numbers released today also show they moved so quickly because the backlash was against more than the packaging. After the redesign sales of the whole Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22 which cost the brand somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 million in sales. All of this makes this branding debacle one of the worst on record and only time will tell if they are able to regain market share once they have reverted back to the old branding and packaging. So make a note than when you are doing any branding work that there is a lot at stake than wether or not you are going to have a portfolio piece at the end of the project.
Topps 3D baseball cards swing for the fences with augmented reality games
I wanted to do a quick follow up on the GE augmented reality work I wrote about a few weeks ago with another interesting execution using this medium. This time it is Topps 3D Live baseball cards that are using the technology in an even more interesting way. Like the GE execution, you go to a special web site and then hold the baseball card up in front of your web cam which will cause the player on the card come to life with an voice over announcing their arrival. Once they have been brought to life you can put the card down on a flat surface and it will trigger a simple game based on the position the chosen player plays on their team. So the pitcher has to his bulls eye targets, the outfield has to catch pop fly's and hitters get to take a few swings all controlled by the user who triggers the actions with simple key presses. I think this is the best use of this technology I have seen so far because it's use introduces a new reason to buy baseball cards which have seen their profits drop 80% in the Internet age. Collectors, most of whom are still kids, can easily find all the facts and photos they would ever want online and do it all for free. In this case being able to use the technology not only for the cool effect but to use that effect to drive sales and create brand differentiation which we all need to do now more than ever.
Fallon skims into a slick social media application
As more and more people engage with more and more social media outlets developers are creating more and more aggregators to pull all that information into one place. The latest and probably the best one I have seen in a long time has been released by the ad agency Fallon out of Minneapolis of all places. Their new desktop application is called Skimmer and aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Blogger in one very nicely designed social network dashboard. It gives you the ability to organize, search and view all the feeds the way you want to and also has nice functionality like the ability to browse your Flickr photos in a full screen mode. Publishing content is limited to Twitter and Facebook status updates and being able to respond or email your friends posts on Twitter. You can also create your own home page that aggregates all of your information that can can them embed where ever you want to.
At a time when Facebook seems to be content to continue to dilute and screw up the the interface of their site solutions like this are a nice alternative. I had tried using other solutions like the Flock social web browser but found the browser interface and performance too problematic to make a full time switch to using it. I tried other application like Nomee that aggregates over 100 services and your RSS feeds but found the interface and the time needed to get it up and running too much for me to use it every day. It is the simplicity and adaptability of Skimmer that actually has me using it every day so I don't have to switch between multiple sites to see what people are up to. I need something simple that will make it easier for me to get this information than switching between who knows how many different web pages. The fact that you can also customize the layout and the colors of Skimmer also appears to my inner design whore who needs things to be functional and look good too.
I don't know if this marks the return of what what we saw 4 or 5 years ago when every agency you can in contact with, including my former employer, all had their own custom intranets, software solutions and productivity tools they would sell to their clients to try and generate an additional revenue stream. I think in large part this practice died away because good project management software was created at an affordable price and Adobe finally got their act together to create consistently support platforms that didn't require everyone going off to invent their own worlds all the time. Both Skimmer and Nomee are developed on the Adobe Air platform which I think has a tremendous amount of potential that hasn't even begun to be realized.
I'm Stephen Gates and I’ve been in the advertising business almost my whole life. I am a designer and second generation creative director and an hour from now I will probably be locked away in my studio slowly going blind working on a new design or this blog. That has to be love or insanity – since it is advertising it is probably a bit of both.
This blog is an extension of my personal portfolio site and is a collection of rants, resources, observations and advice about Web sites, usability design, technology, the advertising industry and who knows what else that are just too well done, funny or weird not share. It takes a village so let me know what you think.
