If you liked that, you can buy my short story here. :)

“the Marc Jacobs boutique in SoHo was hit by French graffiti artist Kidult [who] sprayed the word ART over the front of the store. Marc Jacobs [...] reps turned the stunt on its head [...] by making a T-Shirt of the entire episode. Available for $680.”

(Nice little touch with the dollar sign too)
I love it for the same reasons I love this…

“When a predominantly gay synagogue in Manhattan learned that a group of ultra-Evangelical Christians were planning a protest outside their building, the congregation decided to turn the hate rally into a fundraising event. Following the 51-minute protest, the synagogue was able to raise more than $10,000 in donations.”

All because of things I said here. Negatives into positives. Hooray!

This week, we launched an ambitious project…

“What if people could power some robotic teeth along a track, just by tweeting,” someone had suggested a few weeks prior. “To win a new phone!”
We confiscated their drugs and sent them home, but after the dust (and legal proceedings) settled, it didn’t actually sound like a bad idea. Just sounded  like a tricky one. One that required Ben at times to wear a HEAD LIGHT:

The brief to us was to generate awareness and interest in Orange’s ‘Phone Fund’, with which you can ‘chat your way to a new phone’ (the more minutes you use, the more cash Orange give you towards your next phone).

So the logic was fairly sound. There was just a little matter of making it a reality — and something people could understand and would actually do. As you can imagine, this involved things like this…

As those pictures suggest, there was some pretty serious robot action going on. Here’s a test run before the teeth were at full chatter capacity:

It’s times like this I can only stare in wonder at the talented people I work with. And at the people we partner with.

It’s risky, doing things like this. The journey from a concept that makes sense, to building it and making it work, to creating an end experience that people throw themselves into is not smooth (nor is it quite as linear as that description). But when it comes off it’s pretty satisfying.

Is it perfect? No. The perfectionists in us could pick holes all day. But it works. And more importantly, it’s ‘working’: it’s getting a hell of a lot more attention that a campaign around a phone fund should get. At the time of my writing this, people are playing the game at a rate of one person per second (which is actually low compared to times over the past few days). It’s making a fairly dry proposition extremely fun. Oh, and THERE ARE SOME ROBOTIC TEETH THAT YOU CAN MOVE AROUND A TRACK.

The interesting thing with ideas like this is that you can’t possibly guarantee to your client that it will work. Because it hasn’t been tried before (not by us, anyway). But the passion and nervous energy that flows into projects like this, I believe seeps through into the end experience. It looks and feels like it was made by people that put everything into it. Even in details that I don’t think are even visible on camera, like the Orange properties that populate the mini city-scape:

If you’re reading this before Saturday 28th April 2012, then you can have a play too. Just add #phonefundprizes to your tweet and you’re in. Enjoy!

If you want to be meaningful, you have to mean it. I believe that. Mostly. And this definition makes ‘meaningful marketing’ a potential oxymoron.

The minute a person, or group of people, make a conscious decision to alter behaviour for personal gain, something changes. Here’s a made-up anecdote to prove the point:

There is a lady called Berta, who makes jam at home and sells it in her local town hall. She does so out of passion, but one day she overhears some people talking about her jam: “I love her hand-drawn labels, so cute. Much more authentic than supermarket jam!”
Realising the effect this had, Berta decides to add some new hand-made touches, adding a ribbon, writing small messages on the jars and so on. Her sales really take off and before you know it she’s actively thinking about what new ‘authentic’ touches she can apply to build on the interest.
It’s very possible that Berta might have started to add these things anyway, but the minute her actions started being led by the desire to sell, something small, but powerful changed: her intentions.

This is marketing: when a conscious desire for gain begins to influence what you make or how you promote it. And I’m not saying it’s ‘bad’ – that would be unhelpfully simplistic. Berta is still a lovely lady, she still loves making jam, and of course she has every right to promote it. In fact, what she goes on to do may be very similar to what she would have done without overhearing her customers talk.

It’s only her intention that changed…

But when we do things or make things, our intentions bleed into the final experience and that’s where things can go wrong. Small touches, uses of language, design choices all carry the DNA of our hidden desires. At the blunter end of the spectrum, we might say our strategy is showing, but the brush strokes aren’t always that broad. In fact, as I write this, I’m reminded of a Zeus Jones blog post that talks about the subtler end of exactly this.

Author, Jennifer Egan, explores a similar concept in the characters of her book, Look at Me:

“I’m interested in that chasm between the public and the private. In Look at Me, there’s this whole idea of the “shadow self.” One character is always looking at people and trying to find what she calls their ‘shadow self,’ the true self that they’re trying to keep hidden from their more public persona.”

I’m a fan of sliding scales, so here is the one this conversation operates on:
At the far right end, you have brilliant marketeers and designers who can manufacture experiences so precisely that the customer/user perceives a rich, authentic experience, ‘believing’ and feeling the designed intentions of the brand. And of course, we’re happy to pay to be cheated - if it’s done well.
On the far left of the scale, you have people that do things entirely because they love and believe in them, and the same effect is created. But both these extremes are rare circumstances. It’s more likely you sit in the middle somewhere, like Berta. You believe it, but you also fake it a bit.

In a nutshell, this is why aligning the motivations of businesses and customers is one of the most important things we can do. If they are aligned, then no trick is necessary and no bleed is damaging. We can execute our intentions proudly and openly, allowing them to seep into every corner of the experiences we create. Maybe this will even lead to unexpected value, that we didn’t ‘design’ intentionally.

Unless you’re the Derren Brown of marketing, your true intentions will bleed, somewhere, possibly unexpected. So my advice is to align your motivations with your audience’s, to ensure that your intention bleed always turns into positive experiences.

It’s worth taking a look at Paul Adam’s blog post on the same subject matter, which I would have mentioned in this deck had I seen it early enough.

The images are taken out the back window of my house in Dalston, London. It’s very rough. And the photos (taken with an iPhone 3Gs) are terrible. But I think there’s a lovely quality to it anyway.

The idea was born from a practical problem: the mic on my phone is really bad, so I wanted to get sound that would be richer and louder than ambient noise. But the radio is actually a perfect soundtrack to capture moments and locations (especially so, because I genuinely listen to the radio when I get ready for work).

This belongs to a similar world to Plumpton Mornings, by John Willshire, who’s also been mucking about with Picle. I’d love to see ‘Picle fm’ stories from other people, capturing the views and radio audio from different locations. It would be lovely.

You can view my Picle stories here. Although you can’t. Because this is the first. But maybe there’ll be more.

I know, I know. You’re excited about submitting a short story to Bad Dollar. And the deadline is May 31st 2012. So you’d like to make a start this weekend.

But which day should you write? Your writers’ weather report is below:

London, UK
It’s going to rain a bit on Sunday afternoon. Maybe get a couple of hours in then.

Edinburgh, UK
Sunday looks nicer. Sat is a low of -1°c with rain, you should write on Saturday.

Manchester, UK
Rainy and colder on Saturday. Write then. Maybe go for a walk on Sunday.

New York, USA
Write on Sunday, there are thunderstorms.

Colorado, USA
Sunday looks sunny! So write on Saturday when there is some rain.

Melbourne, Australia
26° and sunny. DON’T WRITE. GO OUTSIDE.

Remember, get your submission in by May 31st 2012. Bye!

Am I considering buying Coco Pops?

I froze. I wasn’t expecting to be asked that question.

I don’t think I was considering it, but maybe I was.

Damn it! Now I was really thinking about Coco Pops — about what it might have been like had I considered it and then acted on it.

Bastards.

Let this be inspiration for you: Penguin poop that is visible from space:

Yes, the poos are tiny on their own, but together they make a mountain of poop and stain the landscape around them. So go make poop. Make poop that can be seen from space!

Update:
A better way to say it is that if you get enough people to do one small thing, the result will be unmissable. (thanks James, for cleaning up my metaphor)

Platforms with large communities, of course, come with obvious advantages. ‘Emerging’ platforms (Pinterest, anyone?) excite us but get us wondering when the tipping point will make it ‘worthwhile’.

But let’s park numbers for just a minute and look at two examples of alternative ‘platform usage’. First up is this recent promo for the movie, Prometheus:

It’s smart: a character from the movie gives a Ted talk in the year 2023. Of course, the concept of this character talking at a conference could have existed without the TED reference, but it wouldn’t have resonated so much. This TED partnership blurred the lines between the movie’s world and our own, the placement of the video within Ted’s own ecosystem completing the picture. (personally, I would have liked the production to match the feel of a real Ted talk and be less slick/acted, but still)

Next up is Umbro’s launch of the England football kit a couple of years ago:

Yes, Kasabian is a ‘platform’ of sorts too; its own ecosystem, connecting fans to Kasabian content and experiences on various platforms, including this stage. England’s football kit was seen for the first time on the torso of an Englishman (that many young football fans look up to) as he provocatively accepted the boos of a French crowd (England’s next opponents were to be France).

When you consider ‘platforms’, how often do you think about a band, or a brand like Ted? You might think of them in terms of ‘partnerships’, but that’s a subtly different thing.

They both feel closed off as platforms: ‘Ted wouldn’t let us do a fictional Ted video’; ‘Kasabian isn’t going to take our product on-stage’. But the right idea, which also benefits them (Ted cemented as thought leader; Kasabian as an English export in the limelight) opens up unlikely opportunities. And it can also generate huge amounts of noise, first via the passionate communities of those brands, and subsequently because of the novelty of the concept. No platform, of course, need be isolated from others.

Like most conversations, this is a semantic one. You’re probably rolling up your sleeves and getting your comment ready. What is a platform? What is media? Yada yada. We could argue it all day. But how we think about things affects how we consider them. And I’m saying that there are millions of opportunities out there that we won’t see unless we learn to see things differently.

I’ve always liked Made by Many’s line “We make new stuff out of the Internet”.  We make culture out of culture. Or we should. Question is, how much of it are you considering as ingredients?