I love the phrase and the sentiment of 'three dimensional consumer-brand interaction' that VandenBosch describes:

You know, the real geniuses out there are the unsung talent at a lot of digital ad agencies. They may go by a variety of titles -- interaction designers, user experience designers, information architects -- but what they really do is connect the dots, they think about how the consumer is really behaving; and if they're really big thinkers, they can extrapolate that into designing how consumers interact with brands in real life. So from a strategy standpoint, it's about being one of those people who can think and plan for a three-dimensional consumer-brand interaction. If I could start my career over again, I think I'd like to be one of those people.

Beautiful images from the Indian Portrait exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Russell Davies' brilliant quips at the Ogilvy planning conference

I'm back! And determined to use this blog to relieve the manic feed in my brain. Mostly to practice writing things in a clear and digestable way without Powerpoint.

Welcome to Experienced redux (or dux)

This week I'm in Istanbul for a worldwide Ogilvy conference and the planning community got to experience a talk on 'interesting' things that Russell Davies so well threads - giving not only a gentle Sunday morning introduction to the week, but also some immensely relevant challenges for an organisation with the size, history and ambition of Ogilvy.

Rather than transcribe the brilliant talk, I'm sharing my random notes.

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In an example of analog objects with digital identities, lamposts in Gateshead have unique numbers so that people can call up the council and report outtages...

According to Gartner (?) 1/3 of Internet traffic to belong to 'objects' -- analog objects with digital feeds.

Digital-skinned architecture is the new preoccupation of architecture graduates (and it's only a matter of time before Coca-Cola will be asking to brand it.)

Instapaper is a simple tool that will store online articles and text into a PDF so that it can be read later. And, obviously, it can be printed.

Other analog objects with digital feeds?
Botanicalls a plant sensor that texts you when it needs watering.
Watson home energy monitor which estimates the annual cost of your eletricity as you use it.
Tower Bridge Twitter feed. The bridge goes up, there's a tweet...it goes down, well. you get the idea.

In the Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur delcares that as a rule, 'what starts as a group of loosely arranged objects becomes solidified into a single thing. But that thing becomes encrusted with systems and assemblies over time meaning that if you really want to innovate with it, you need to 'redomain' -- go back to another group of loosely arranged objects.

In the Robotic theory of the uncanny valley,

'The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics.[1] The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.'

(How will we make this more friendly? Pink rounded type.)

So while we strive for ever closer targetting and personlisation, would we be better going for mass likeability?

The excitement of digital and the sentiment for analog will lessen over time. What can we do? Look for the legacy systems that the analog industry has left behind and use it to our advantage. Example: it wasn't downloads which finished off Blockbuster, it was ordering DVDs via the post (like Lovefilm or Netflix)

Analog products with digital identities also have a a built in comms channel and give relevant and action-based messaging that people can use. It gives us a not all-ways, but best-time on channel. (Think Nike Plus)

San Francisco wanted to turn the dead corner near the Tram stop at Castro and 17th Street into a pedestrian zone. Rather than wait years to file for the necessary permits, the city bought some paint and some chairs from Ikea, created the zone, and said that if anyone complained they would quickly remove it. Instead, it's become a pedestrian plaza. They call is the 'reversible pilot'. Trying something cheaply that can be easily undone if it doesn't work. This is what digital can be.


Great talk. Have been ruminating on digital's relationship with physical objects and this has fired me up... but then so has the thought of dinner....

The Berlin Wall and me.

I remember standing in the middle of the front room of our college flat watching the news that the Berlin Wall was being taken down. I remember being dumbfounded. It was inconceivable and fantastical. You see, just 11 months earlier I'd seen the wall. I had taken a long weekend off from my studies in London to visit my cousin and her husband who were stationed in the US military in Berlin. They agreed to take me into East Berlin for the day. It was December, bitterly cold, a pregnant East German woman had just escaped across the river Spree and miraculously survived. But the East German government was bruised by the news and were on alert. My cousin's husband was required to wear his US military uniform when we went into East Berlin. I was told when we crossed the border to hold my passport up to the window but keep my eyes straight ahead and not make eye contact with the East German guard - it would be seen suspiciously as a slight or an attempt to communicate and we would be questioned. Indeed, a car ahead of us was pulled over for that reason.

Crossing into East Berlin was chilling. We were on alert about what could or could not be photographed. Who we could or couldn't speak to. Where in East Berlin we dare not go. The city, stripped of the advertising, commercial signs and neon was grey and seemingly deserted. We went into stores barely stocked with decades old furniture, shabby textiles and wooden toys. This was the 80s, mind and Western shops were garishly stocked with patterns and fluorescent colours. We bought a few wooden toys, had an extravagant meal of stodgy German food in a East Berlin restaurant, visited the Tomb of the Unknown Solider and made our way back to West Berlin. I later returned to a cold but somehow more festive London and finished my exams.

11 months later I watched as it all came down. As East Germans strolled freely through Checkpoint Charlie at once exhilarated and full of sadness that such a divide had been allowed to tear a country apart. The pictures of East Berlin and the Wall, now gone, stick in my head to this day and a visit years later to a reunified Berlin made them seem even more dreamlike.

Now, we celebrate 20 years of reunification and the freedoms and challenges that brought. But we must remember that these territorial walls exist today, tearing apart families, communities and cultures with no more justice than the Berlin Wall embodied. And be hopeful that, like the Berlin Wall, oppressive regimes and the controls they institute do not have to be permanent.

Those were the years...

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Arpanet, Guardian publishes a year-by-year people's history of the Internet.

Dark

Every month, the art buyers choose photographers to exhibit in the Ogilvy bar. This month we have the beautifully rich, dark work of George Logan, up-close shots of gorillas, chimpanzees and mandrills photographed at the Limbe Wildlife Centre is Cameroon - a centre for animals rescued from the brutal poaching and bushmeat trade.

The proximity of the animal to the viewer is captivating becoming almost tactile, and one sees how this type of animal portraiture is able to capture as much character and emotion as any human portraiture.

You are encouraged to visit the Born Free Foundation and the work they are doing to stop the illegal 'bushmeat' trade.

Remember Merlin?

Merlin was a not-so-pocketable pocket video game in the early 80s that included six games (although I only remember tic tac toe and blackjack.) I loved Merlin, but it was a battery hog (much like Simon) and I soon gave it up.