Inspiration for budding digital creatives PART 3 : It's not all about you...
We used to tell stories.
But nowadays, it’s far more powerful to give stories.
By that, I mean doing work that puts the audience inside the idea, and gives them an incentive to interact with it, adapt it, and share it.Here’s an example we did which attempted this.
Usually a tour for emerging architects to travel Europe and see amazing places and practices should sell itself. Problem was, our client was a mainstream paint brand, talking to a niche and particular audience, which meant we had to figure out a way to get message through in a credible way.
So we found 15 influencers in the Australian architecture community, and we sent them everything they needed to tell a story.They received a parcel with a scale architects model, a mini billboard advertising the tour, and a note asking a little favour:
Take photos of the model and billboard and share them via Facebook, Twitter and email.They did, and our ad got put right in front of Australia’s best emerging architects.
And applications jumped up by 149%
All for putting the audience inside the story.
This is part of a talk I did for Award Copyschool. For my next rant follow me on twitter @warmcola .
Better design can even make potatoes taste better.
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My wife paid five bucks for a spirally fried potato on a stick yesterday at The Harvest Picnic festival.
This is an annual foodie festival with lots of tastings and stalls, and this humble variation on a bucket of chips had the longest consistent queue. It is a peeled potato, cut using one of those spiral garnish cutters, put on a skewer, deep fried, and sprinkled with your choice of "posh salts". I think this one was sea salt and rosemary.
It was so distinctive looking that it had everyone double taking as we walked past.
It was one of those ingenious products that marketed it self, practical too, the stick meant your hands didn't get greasy.
Resounding proof that better design can even make potatoes taste better.
Own a freakin' DeLorean for free.
And then to my bank manager.
Inspiration for budding digital creatives PART 2 : Be an inventor... not just a storyteller..
If you wanted to know who has held the most rattle snakes in their mouth at any give time, and I know you do, you'd go to the same place anyone in the world would; The Guinness Book of Records.
It's now so iconic it's easy to forget its connection to the black Irish stout that bears it's name. Legend has it. it was printed as a means of settling arguments in pubs after a disagreement over what is the fastest game bird erupted in 1951.
Likewise, the Michelin Guide that hands out the famed "Michelin Stars" that make or break Chef's careers started in 1900 as a means for drivers to finding lodgings, mechanics and to sell more auto parts.
Both were invented as marketing ideas, proved useful, and grew from brand utilities to world authorities.
So what do these ancient books have to do with doing digital?
Well, way back then, they had just ink and paper to build their branded utilities. You now have words, pictures, video, interactivity, proximity, time, data yanked off social media profiles, and the means to combine these elements to build yours.People like useful things a helluva lot better than they like ads, so it's not the worst place to start your thinking.So with your next creative brief, I hearby give you permission to invent something that makes peoples lives better and get your client to flip the bill. if you ensure it's relevant, they'll be happy to.Don't fret, stories are still important, but nowadays it’s more powerful to give people stories rather than tell them.I will get on to that in my next post.
This is part of a talk I did for Award Copyschool. For my next rant follow me on twitter @warmcola . Thanks to Damian Royce for the storyteller/inventor analogy.
Inspiration for budding digital creatives PART 1 : Relevance, it is your secret weapon.
If you stop and think about what the internet is, it makes it a little clearer as to how you should approach a digital advertising brief. The internet is relevance engine. To quote the granddaddy of experiential advertising, Howard Luck Gossage: The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” ~ Howard Gossage
Way back when the internet was an academic tool, the remarkable bit was its means to hyperlink words, enabling someone to click a link and dig deeper into the subjects that interested them. That hasn't fundamentally changed. So who you are talking to and how they interact with the web, their phones and their peers is where you need to start your thinking. To get genuine interest, make your idea relevant to the site they are on, the content they are reading, the location they happen to be in, or a tension that could be going on around them, In short, you need to make your idea about their all time favourite subject, themselves,
If your idea isn't relevant, theyll ignore it and revert their focus back to what does interest them.Relevance is a smart bomb that has the power draw attention away from even the funniest picture of a cat in a tuxedo.
There are many ways to wield it, I will get on to that in my next post. This is part of a talk I did for Award Copyschool. For my next rant follow me on twitter @warmcola
A little more anarchy would make us all nicer people.
A few months back, we went on a family holiday to Sri Lanka.
At first glance the streets of Columbo are crazy. There are no visible road rules, no lanes, and the few traffic lights that exist are almost universally ignored.
Growing up in a nanny state like Australia, this kind of thing makes you naturally a little uptight. More so when travelling around with our two young daughters in tow.
But after a while, you notice that this lack of rules works.
It forces everyone to be aware of each other and what they are doing.
Drivers don’t speed because they need to be able to react to what other traffic is doing at any moment - and it could do and be anything, ever been cut off by an elephant? We have. The honking is insane and constant, but it’s not aggressive, it’s drivers informing others that “I am here” rather than “get out of my way”.
There is no road rage, because there isn't a time when anyone has the right of way, it’s the group working it out together. Australian society is inundated with rules, where to stand, where not to stand, how to drive, where to park, who should go first… There is a definitive right and wrong way. Which means the most likely exchange you’ll have with a stranger on the road or on public transport is them boiling over in frustration and abusing you because they think you are "in the wrong" or "in their way".
A reckon a little more anarchy would make us all nicer people.
A desktop background for your um, desktop.
Hard to find stark desktop backgrounds, so thought i'd make one.
A desktop background for you're um, desktop.
Made this out of an iPhone pic I took of the sun setting over the indian ocean from my hotel room in the Galle Face Hotel in Columbo in Sri Lanka.
Hard to find stark desktop backgrounds, so thought i'd make and share one.
What was the Tropfest Film you never got around to making? here's mine.
I've always had good intentions to make a Tropfest film.
But alas for another year I am all pants and no trousers.
So since I’ve missed the deadline, I'll tell what I would have done.
The intention was to investigate one of the best Melbourne urban-myths I have heard in a long while. Just over a year ago my wife's cousin opened a clothing shop six floors above the Block Arcade just off Elizabeth Street. With his lease, came access to its rooftop terrace looking down on the awnings of the cafe's and restaurants in the arcade below, which also revealed that the multiple stories above these businesses have been abandoned. Story goes, someone went bankrupt in the late eighties recession and a single businessman bought all of the buildings along that side of the Block Arcade and made enough on the ground floor rents to not bother about the floors above. Which meant the three stories towering above three of these shops, now visible from this balcony housed a nightclub that closed its doors one night at the peak of its popularity in 1987 and never opened them again.So this nightclub, and all its chinsy late eighties decadence is apparently frozen in time.
The last record the DJ played that night is still sitting on the turn table, jackets are still in the cloak room and as someone who has seen this place firsthand claims, unfinished drinks are still sitting at tables and on the bar.
Caked in 25 years of dust.
The idea was document the tracking down the key (the Tropfest signature item) and investigate whether this story is true and this place actually exists. Cool if it did.
