story of story

I like the concept of story telling. I've said that before. And before.

So I was quite interested to go along to a chat about story telling, and how it can give you a competitive advantage as a brand, by the people at Make Believe on Thursday. And have a back stage nose around the ENO. Very interesting stuff. Quite hard to some up so here's the notes I made instead.

Plus some pictures of Make Believe's Book, very nicely put together by designtypography.

dolphin clouds

I saw these dolphins flying over Battersea Power Station on Sunday. Animals.

water, water

Some interesting stuff to do with h2O...

Tap. Think globally, drink locally.

Another Bloody Water. Found by Dan at Dieline.

A London tap water project.

And a brass tap in howies shop on Carnaby Street.

It's everywhere.

cha cha moon

I've been frequenting Alan Yau's new place Cha Cha Moon quite a bit lately. What I like about Cha Cha Moon, other than the food, is that they are doing a good bit of falling forward fast at the minute.

For example the first few times I went they were only filling the resturant to half of it's capacity until they got the kitchen processes up to speed and service at a level they are happy with. All the dishes on the menu are priced at £3.50 each at present as well for the same reasoning (you might have a bit of delay waiting for stuff but at least they're being transparent about it and mitigating your loss with a cheap meal). They've even managed to get a fire under their belt in their fall forward fast phase.

It's probably best to get these lessons learnt and out of the way as quickly as possible though I imagine, and then move onto the business of making money.

garden and shed update

I was talking gardens and gardening with Dan at lunch today so thought I'd do a quick back garden update.

I've just mowed the lawn. There's something very satisfying about mowing your lawn on a summer evening after work. Especially in bright yellow wellington boots.

My howies trees have really started to get into that growing thing now.

As has the cherry blossom. Although there was no blossom this year. Or cherries for that matter.

The bluetits have moved out. But left things nice and tidy for next year.

The shed is now fully alarmed up.

Thanks to a solon shed alarm kindly donated by Ceri. I've found that 130+ decibels is actually really loud, so I've left the battery out of it.

Not that there's anything worth half inching.

And I'm begining to regret over seeding what is a relatively small vegatable patch.

show 2

I went along to the RCA's show 2 yesterday for a nose about. Here's my favouite bits.

A lamp that can't stand up by tiago da fonseca.

It reminds me of that dali'esque bent bicycle wheels phenomenon that I still haven't worked out yet.

A London tap water project.

And an interesting 2.0 idea about finally getting robots blogging. Like this storm twitter blogger direct from the branch of a tree (granted a tree isn't a robot but it's still a nice idea).

digital noise

Radiohead are probably one of the most interesting pioneers in digital thinking and practise at the minute in my mind. I love the way that even when they aren't intentionally looking for a digital presence they still generate it. Like the concert last night that resulted in my previous blog post and about 5 facebook updates I've seen today alone.

If you're brave enough to turn something up loud enough someone is bound to say something.

Literally.

on the breeze

I can hear Radiohead playing in Victoria Park out of my kitchen door. I don't know why I'm telling you that. Probably because I haven't got a twitter account. They just did Dollars & Cents.

new blood

I've just been to have a wander around this year's D&AD New Blood exhibition. A suprising lack of digital stuff on show, I saw about 4 websites in the whole of the 100+ stands, and even those were made as flat flash files. A bit of a shame in the year of digital for D&AD.

Anyway here's my favourite bit from the show. A series of Penguin book covers by David Jenkins from Norwich. I didn't have a camera so here's the only shot I've been able to find of them. The others in the series are even better (follow the same concept of illustrating the title with the Penguin logo), I'll try and track them down.

the local two point oh

This is quite possibly the best marketing idea I've see in a long time.

quick, quick

One of the many things I love about the world of digital is the remarkably quick evolution of ideas and stuff. As with most things it's probably easiest to illustrate this with an example...

Last week I came across this blog post about our village fete FaceBook group and use of social media.

At about the same time our Anthony, who does NPD stuff at innocent, was asking me what's hot in digital at the minute. I showed him that post and he said it was like a social media pyramid scheme. I really liked his turn of phrase so put together the below 60 second presentation for innocent's weekly monday morning meeting.

Dan liked the slide about reaching more people than there actually are in the world so said let's put it in our newsletter. Ceri did a fine job turning the concepts into words like this...

A man called Ed from Romania read our news, liked it, and posted these nice words to influx.

Then I put the whole concept back into a power point at the talk I gave at Fuel on Friday.

product placement, check

All within the space of about 8 days.

south of the river

I've been spending a bit of time at exhibitions South of the river lately. Here's a few good ones.

Tim Walker at the Design Museum putting the fantasy into fashion photography. Makes you want to buy a copy of Vogue. While you're there have a look at the industrial inventions bit and a nice little exhibition of creativity from Hong Kong.

Then wander down to Tate Modern to strain your neck at some very big street art outside the front door, and around the back streets.

Finally go and row a boat on top of the Hayward gallery in thier psycho buildings thing.

word of mouth

When word of mouth is good for a business:
The other day I needed to find a good plumber to sort this mess out. I don't know many plumbers so I sent an email around work to see if anyone else does.

I got a good recomendation from James for a company he'd used and 'would recommend to a friend' as they say around our way. He told me to look out for their vans when they turn up aswell (above). It turns out the company, leakbusters, are big fans of innocent and have been inspired by us in decorating thier vans and sprucing up thier website.

When word of mouth is bad for a business:
If you do a Google Search on leakbusters the very second result you get is this one, based on someones bad experience. Obviously not as good for them as a business as my own and James's recomendations and will probably be having a far greater impact on their business.

The thought being you can have a lot of very happy customers but in the age of Google searches a single one can cause a lot of bother. But what can you do? What would you do if it was your business?

going out in style

I was sorting through some stuff last night and found these photos from a specialist coffin shop I once went to in Ghana.

Even death can be fun.

desperate times call for desperate measures

I think I'm living on top of a natural spring. Unfortuanetly it doesn't look like I'll be making my fortunes opening up a Stepney Onsen or bottling artisan water though. So I've brought in the hardware courtesy of HSS Hire. It sounds like Heathow run way over here at the minute.

micro vs macro

To me my previous little big voice post kind of comes back to micro vs macro. Let's take two examples and pretend I'm a planner for a minute.

Go on, humour me.

Example one: Cadbury's Gorilla.

This is our macro. Big idea, big budget, big reach. Kind of like one of those really good fire works displays that is so big it sets off car alarms. When I think of fire works displays I think of what Nicholai once said to me on the beach of Cannes though. "Smell that? That's money burning". And fuck me can you smell the gun powder with the macro, that's what it's all about after all.

It's the big bet of marketing. Get it right and you're laughing, get it wrong and you're crying. If you were to plot it I'd imagine it would look something like this:

A: Before launch B: Big media spend C: A bit more press D: A slight renaissance.

Example two: A blog.

Any blog, let's say innocent's for the sake of argument though. Small ideas, small budgets, small reach. Kind of like a £10 back garden fire work display but without the 3rd degree burns. A blog is a series of small bets however, if you mess one up you learn your lesson and move on. You're consistently learning, that's the main thing. If you were to plot a blog it would look something like this:

A: Blog launches B: The week we tried to cross sell products too much C: The week we forgot to update the blog.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is a time and place for both. And one is going to far more significantly improve your sales than the other let's not kid ourselves.

The thought being is this though; that as time goes on one line is on the fall where as the other is on the rise.

You're wearing stuff in, not out.

little big voice

Anyone who doesn't need to click here to find out who Philip Howard is (above, centre) will know the power of a single voice, self belief and consistency. Phil was a living legend to Londoners until he got his ASBO. He even had his own tone of voice (scouse ramble via mega phone) and catch phrase "are you a sinner or are you a winner?".

The facinating thing with this is that he got a massive reach although he was just one guy with a megaphone on a well placed corner of Oxford Street. Better reach you could argue than the global mights of Nike and H&M who he stood between. If you did a straw poll of Londoners and asked them if they recognised Phil or could remember what he preached or even what his strap line was I'd imagine you'd get a much better result than if you asked what floor mens running shoes are on at Nike or who did the celebrity collection at H&M in 2006.

Here's to Phil and his megaphone.

likeminded

I went to likemind for the first time this morning. And had a nice chat with Jamie and Amanda.

Then geeKyoto tomorrow at the mighty Conway Hall. Because I can't make interesting this year. And because it looks great of course.

no song. no dance.

I got a bottle of Jones Soda today to add to my collection of drinks bottles at work. Mainly because of that photo thing they do. When I was nearly done drinking it I noticed the above message on the inside of the cap.

I like this. I like that they are doing something good but not making a huge song and dance about it (I imagine the vast majority of people don't even find the message). I like that they hide it away and it's something they 'just do'. It makes their intentions feel really genuine and not (as much as it could be) marketing related. And I like that only people who buy and drink the drinks will ever know about this.

That's how it made me feel anyway.

happy talk

I'm going to be giving another talk at the fuel conference for entrepreneurial type people in mid June. It will probably be something like this again, maybe with a few tweaks. Happy days.

on the cover of a magazine

Salma's already done her magazine front cover this year, so here's mine.

You can have a butchers here.

tribe wanted

I went to a chat by Ben Keene from telly's Tribe Wanted this morning. Facinating fella. Here's some of the all important transferable wisdom I picked up from him.

go with your instincts
This nearly scupered the project before it even started. It's still the number four return on a google search on 'tribe wanted'. When it first came about Ben wanted to address it with the author directly and transparently, his American PR with lots of tradional PR experience told him not to fan the fire and it would go away. It didn't and registrations for the project fell from £1,000s per day to a couple of hundred. He wished he'd gone with his own instinct now and engaged the critisism as soon as it appeared.

storytelling
Although he had a community and infastructure to build he quickly learnt that his most important task was documentation. Creating a direct line between the island and the online community. That was the whole point of the project after all. (Note more direct lining here, I'm building a theme).

being generous with your time and making a true commitment
He did the above by making a genuine commitment to making at least one update to the tribe wanted website and blog every 48 hours. Then as many other updates on top of this as humanly possible. He did this with a team of two others.

use the best of the web (for free)
Tribe Wanted is probably one of the better examples of entrepreneurial use of social media tools out there. They have a twitter feed, variety of blogs, youtube channel, flickr group, myspace page, facebook profile, and message boards. The major development cost of all of these will be the man hours to keep them up to date.

He was a very nice bloke on top of all that as well. I love that transferable wisdom stuff.

a direct line to head office

We had a bit of a think at work this week when we came across this Innocent gets Twitter wrong post. The discussion on whether or not the criticism is justified is another debate.

But what I think is interesting about this is the way in which we came across it. Basically via a google alert email. Quite a few people at innocent have these emails set up now. Add to this the increasing use of things like tweetscan and technorati and you've got quite a lot of connection between what people are saying and the people that it's being said about.

I imagine more and more brand managers, directors, CEO's and founders will start to pick on these tools in the near future creating that direct line between audience and brand.

The only thing left to consider then will be exactly how aligned with common interest the noise coming from the internet actually is.

wearing stuff in not out

I went to the D&AD digital pecha in the week. One of the many 20 second slides that stayed in my head was Nik's reference to 'wearing stuff in not out' in relation to his leather hulger phone.

I think it's an interesting analogy for websites as well. Most branded campaign sites will wear out (in audience attention as opposed to the site itself actually degenerating). Brand sites with blogs and the like wear in on the other hand. They get more interesting, more useful, more relevant and ultimately better the more they are used.

Our's did at least.

domino effect

If the web was to do something like the Honda/ Guinness/ Orange ads it would probably look like this.

talking the talk

I'm going to be giving a talk on innocent & digital at a BIMA breakfast bite in a couple of weeks.

It currently looks like this...

I need to get power pointing.

trendies and chavs

I went to a very interesting talk on Channel 4's UK Teenage Tribes research in the week. Here's how innocent did in their brand map..

We're in with the trendies and surprisingly popular with Emu's and Rude Bwoy's actually.

And here's a slide showing that teenagers media channel of choice is by far and away online these days. But then we already probably knew that didn't we.

marilyn and flowers

From a trip to Antwerp last week. Just because it's a nice picture.

we think

Makes you think.

growing on

The indoor growing didn't go to well so I've moved onto mushrooms now.

Outdoor growing in going better.

Other goings on include the roof being blown off the shed in the recent gales.

Blue tit eggs in the bird box.

The cherry blossom getting a bit closer to bloom.

And a brand new pair of bright yellow welly boots from the good Swedish folk at Tretorn.