Meme Huffer

Great Quotes for Planners #58 -on mistakes

"Always make new mistakes" - Esther Dyson

If we keep doing the same thing, we'll get the same results. We need to be unafraid to experiment, to try new approaches. And we need to be unafraid of cocking up and of failing.

And we need to be unafraid of people saying this:

image borrowed from Michael Roulier (do let me know if you object!)

Meme Huffer kicks

Oh yes.

Introducing the Nike Air Max 90 Current 'Meme Huffer'. Fresh off the boat today.

Yep, you can design your own online but if you want more selection and the chance to check out the actual materials, colours etc, then you gotta do it in person -in our case, it was the ID Studio on the top floor of NikeTown in Oxford Circus.

Very cool.

Good Ideas Salon, London

Piers and the lovely folks at PSFK are holding a "Good Ideas Salon" in London on January 30th.

If you're the sort of person who likes this blog, then this may well be the sort of event you'll like.

Sometimes you just don't need a clever strategy

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this rather genius new Durex spot was born without any plannerly midwifery:

It's pretty simple -animal balloons are funny. Animals having sex are funny. And animals enjoying spitroasting and threesomes are particularly funny.

A colleague and I were discussing this ad (having spotted it here) and were trying to figure out how a planner could have helped, or what the proposition might have been:

"Durex -good for kinky animal sex"? -nah, that would go somewhere else entirely.

It is a simple, engaging and product-centric creative idea, and perhaps the best thing a planner did was to avoid the temptation to over-intellectualise.

Agency: Fitzgerald + Co
Animation Studio: Superfad

PS Given that its all CGI, they get extra Huffer points for posting the bloopers onto YouTube. Nice.

Great Quotes for Planners #57 - Jarmusch (& Godard) on originality

Loving this, found over at ffffound but originally from Mark Malazarte

Reverse image search with TinEye

In a remarkable spot of serendipitous synchronicity, I was just alerted to the existence of TinEye, a reverse image search engine. If you've got an image and are trying to find its origin, or to find a higer res version, or an uncropped version, you can upload the image and TinEye will find other versions for you. Rather cleverly, it uses image recognition rather than just keywords or whatever. (Thank you, Dr Cook!)

Which means that I'm able to re-post the image from the previous post in higher res, which will make Mr Howard very happy indeed.

Great Quotes for Planners no. 56 - Careful with that quant study!

Regular readers will know my distrust of statistics (and I'm currently reading 'The Black Swan'', which is doing nothing to drive me towards predictive quant research). This is a lovely one to bring out when you're tow-to-toe with Millward Brown and their ilk:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." -Albert Einstein

 
(quote found over at Pop Philosophy, image from i'm-not-sure-where but bigger version found here via TinEye)

Advertising through the recession

Ah, the recession. I'm sure many of you planners, media johnnies and other adfolks are kicking off the new year creating arguments to convince your clients to keep up the spend.

Luckily, the kind folks at The Economist have prepared this rather lovely deck for us (found over at Jon Howard's 'living brands' blog):

Ads on Edge

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: branding recession)

In summary, and as Winston Churchill said, "if you're going through hell, keep going".

New Year StatShot

Here's a healthy dose of brilliantly presented brain-food for the first day back at work: