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?