Nitmesh

Will Wright talks about his new game Spore

Spores 3D Creature creator

For those outside the gaming world ‘Spore’ is the latest project from Will Wright one of the game industry's most fertile minds and the creator of the groundbreaking SimCity and The Sims, which has to date sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Wright has created the the Spore 3D creature creator with over a one million creatures being created in the space of a week.

Asked what he wanted people to get out of spore Wright said, “One of his goals for this whole thing has been to give somebody an awe-inspiring global view of reality, almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer. The kind of, "Oh, man, what if we were a molecule inside of a galaxy?" type thing. Can we transfer that experience -- that, I don't want to say drug-induced, but I guess it is, or almost theological meaning-of-life-type experience -- into an interactive computer game?

Watch the web video demo of the game below with Brian Eno below.

Youth Marketing Presentation and more lovely links

Firstly I found the slideshare presentation on Youth Marketing (at bottom of this post) from the fast forward marketing trend blog. 'Youth is no longer a demographic, it's a mindset'. It's worth a quick view as well as the summary to the  Global Habbo Youth Survey, especially on teens and their favourite mobilephones here. Quoting the summary 'Examines the interests, values, attitudes, online habits of a global audience, the survey reveals teens' current media usage, consumption behaviour and brand preferences in order to better understand what compels youth around the world'

Here's a great story about how text messaging is used for flirting in India. It's from New York Times so you might need to quickly sign up for it to access the story but NYT is always full of great stories.

Here's two great pieces on the meshing of TV and the net. First in the Atlantic Monthly and second in the Timesonline.

This is an amazing site full of futuristic skyscaper designs, fascinating what architects are wanting to build. It's a competition and you have to click on '08 Skyscaper competition'

Synchstep from Pokenyc (explanation here) - This is going to be a killer app for the iphone or itouch (and every other phone for sure) and want it now. An app that synchs your music with your walking pace. Greg Elliott, the designer of it, can safely retire.

Here's a great piece on littleminx.tv. It's a division of RSA Films (where I work). They produced five shorts films from their the directors and there's links here to watch all of them - enjoy - Exquisite Corpse

Lastly my tweetcloud - I love twitter apps. Damiano via punkplanning

 

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Burning Panda Experiential Advertising

This is from Denmark, from We Love People  Quoting the site "To prepare the Danes for the 2009 international climate conference in Copenhagen, We Love People and WWF have projected a giant panda in flames racing across the Copenhagen cityscape.”

Twitter Love

[follow me on twitter]

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void articulates the strengths of twitter against the other new communication platforms. I always thought it would be the perfect communication tool at a music festival where you could effectively mass text message all your friends at once but I have seen the light and see how it's a platform clearly populated by influencers, social media marketeers. A great platform to spread the day to day but also links of interest. Here's Shel Israel's insightful post on twitter at SXSW.

Here's Twitter in plain english from the wonderful common craft blog.

Trafalgar Square Freeze

Brits freeze in Trafalgar Square. Would have preferred to have see it happen in grand interior like Waterloo, Liverpool Street or even the new St Pancreas Station. via now in colour

UPDATE - Here's all 28 cities  in 13 countries (Rome, Stockholm, LA, Boston, Newcastle just to name a few) frozen flash mob web videos to watch.

David Armano - Experience Design and Convergence

Here's David Armano speaking below at the Interaction 08 Conference. So many great talks listed here from the conference but Armano's brings together the principles and some great examples of experience design, meshing utility, creativity and technology, explaining how interaction designers are the hub whether they are for transactional sites, branded experiences, or content that makes you laugh including breaking out onto the mobile platform. Ideas to bring sticky engagement to brand experiences. Via Brand New.

207 Frozen People in Grand Central Station

How could you use this in experiential brand engagement?

Gorilla, Convergence of Technology, Brands and Creative

In reading Scamp's piece on Gorilla and it's origins, I expanded my comment into the post below.

The photo is an example of the interactive screen in the back of all Shanghai taxis which is full of basic, but engaging content you just can't help exploring as you wizz around what is fast becoming the fastest growing and most alive city of this new century. Remember if you go, you never tip the taxi drivers. Well, not yet.

Beyond the recycling of ideas which is the debate on in the comments...isn't the point that we (and the brands) have to realize that the consumer is the power now and they/us can decide what to watch, when and where so whatever we create has to be so far beyond advertising. Our ideas have to be compulsive and engaging enough to be remarkable, so we all spread it on free through online and offline WOM, and counting it as a success when it goes beyond it's niche audience (UK market for Gorilla), and breaking out and scaling around the world primarily through online. There are over 200 mash ups of Gorilla on youtube and countless other video sites. What does that say about our new world of audience participation where brands have to relinquish control of their brand image and let the prosumer trust, enhance and ultimately spread their brand message? Even the marketing guru Tom Peters’ blog commented on Gorilla which has a huge and influential audience...irony being it cost nothing in media spend, they just found it entertaining.

This leads me on to my next point that agencies have to compete with everyone now in the online content space and should fast invest in all kinds of ideas (from not just creatives, but from scriptwriters, film directors, game designers, actors, musicians, TV producers) whatever the talent, the cost, the length and less in traditional ad media spend. Although it has it's merits in the live events arena and isn't going to go away soon, in reality, we all know we all ignore or skip or just don't watch it as much.

As I said the (young and increasing older) consumer (prosumer?) is in control, and you have to trust them to comment,
Seen this?  Supposedly consumer generated ad destruction of SONY PS3 (song) Wonder if it was produced by X-Box marketing team?

To spread the content, that means giving them entertainment (not advertising) that they're going to gain their attention, talk about, enjoy, embed and ultimately value. It's obvious. Whose making it obvious to the brands? Is it all the new net start ups, new tech coms, search companies meshing their tech and ideas that are eating away at the traditional ad world with no baggage or history of trad. ad models? Or is it the traditional ad agencies trying to shoehorn their old profitable ad models into this new liberating, uncontrollable, exciting online world where it's not just ideas but a future where the knitting of new tech, brands and ideas (Nike +) that matter and where now, within reason, you can quite literally try anything?

Even as your own brand, which you are, who or whatever you plagiarize, I, like everyone within and increasing out of the ad industry, will continue to follow your engaging imaginative exploits. Rock on Juan.

Making of Get the Glass campaign

Here's the 'making of' the exquisite 'Get the Glass' milk campaign from Goodby Silverstein and produced by Northern Kingdom. It's only fault being it's slow buffeting - patience is a virtue - LINK

Samsung's new wafer thin (1 centimetre thick) 40in (TV) screen coming to the shops soon. Electronic scroll paper is only around the corner to kill off newspapers. - LINK

Lucid Touch - a multi-touch screen technology where you touch the back of the screen but see your finger movements on the screen without obscuring your view of it. - web video LINK

 

Homogenisation of city boroughs - great blog piece from Zeus Jones about the troubling trend of rich white population taking over NYC neighbourhoods primarily because of rising housing costs. Look at Notting Hill in London as one example. It's becoming an exclusively enclave for young rich white Eurotrash city bankers where the original mix of rich, poor with ethnic minorities is slowly drifting away. Only the council estates are left. How soon until even their inhabitants are bought out to complete the rich enclave. - LINK

Here's Patrick Wilson's lovely song illustrated to animation found by Iain Tait on crackunit.com

Marc Ecko - Genius marketing with one baseball

This is marketing genius. Fashion designer/entrepreneur/pop culture maven Marc Ecko, the man who brought us the tagging viral of air force one, has surpassed himself with his latest marketing venture.

'He bid and won Barry Bond's 756th (it's a new record) home run baseball in an online auction costing him $752,467 and now Ecko is giving the American public the chance to decide what to do with it. He has given them three choices and is now at the centre of the biggest sports debate ever.

"I bought this baseball to democratize the debate over what to do with it," Ecko said. "The idea that some of the best athletes in the country are forced to decide between being competitive and staying natural is troubling."

Visitors to Vote756.com can choose between three options:

1. "BESTOW IT" (as is into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown)

2. "BRAND IT" (with an asterisk before delivering it to the Hall)

3. "BANISH IT" (by sending it into outer space on a rocketship, never to be seen or heard from again)

Every major sports media outlet in the States is reporting this story and will continue to do so. Whatever the public chooses, Ecko will again make news by honouring the results of the vote.

He has successfully written himself into sports history using his bank account and his brain.'

I have to admit to quoting and plagarizing much of the great Fallon Planning blog for this piece but also Joe Jaffe who makes the point that Ecko 'is democratizing the conversation'. 'He talks about the "collective consciousness" (I think I call it the connected consciousness) and the alignment between his brand and what he stands for with this pop culture moment.'

The crucial point, as Crackunit and Fallon point out, is that 750K could have been spent on a conventional marketing campaign but what Ekco has done is priceless in terms of marketing his brand. This is what we should all be doing with all these new forms of marketing. Finding opportunities to seminally reach your core demo audience in a way that they actually care, join a form of communal storytelling, causing a mass debate across all platforms, spilling out into offline (WOM), compelling the public to interact in the final outcome.

or as Ed Cotton of Influx Insights puts it another way when discussing life beyond Consumer Generated Content  'The killer application is finding a way to tap into consumer thinking and creativity through the social network, but to do it in a way that doesn't involve classical advertising.'