"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris
Derren Brown is a well known British illusionist, who often specialises in ‘tricks’ where he influences his randomly chosen helpers to do exactly what he wants them to do. In the video below Derren influences some advertising folks, as well as showing us how he did it – it’s fascinating watching and makes you realise quite how much we are programmed ourselves.
Glasgow has decided to take on illegal fly-posting in a new way. Instead of scrapping off the posters from every inch of space they take up, a time consuming and messy process, they are simply sticking ‘cancelled’ notices of their own over gig posters! Then the venue owners have to deal with hordes of irate fans calling up to demand refunds. Clever indeed, so it will be interesting to see if more cities follow their lead. Or if venues start offering confirmation/cancellation info over text message instead – a new business venture for someone? [From BoingBoing].
This morning’s Globe and Mail had an article about how Toronto police are using bright spotlights on rowdy club goers to help encourage them to go home, in much the same way as clubs themselves at the end of the night. The lights have been placed to cover key corners at which crowds normally gather, in their sunlight strong glare everyone tends to disperse and head home. Clever.
In related news back across the pond, Brighton police have found that incidents of violence increase around each full moon. This has led them to wonder whether werewolf myths are more linked to fact than at first thought, though only in people’s behaviour not their appearance.
Well the London Olympic games may still be a few years away, but there’s plenty of controversy to keep everyone entertained in the meantime. Recently the British Olympic committee unveiled the new logo design to immediate, countrywide disdain. The logo cost £400,000 (~ US$800,000) and it’s amazing to see what you get for that money – I’m sure it paid for a lot of focus groups & surveys.
So now the BBC is asking people to send in their version of a logo – most of which are, frankly, awful – but some of which show promise and are more in keeping with common London design styles (translation: lots of Gill Sans). What amazes me is that, as a country, we didn’t take this change to have an open public competition to create a logo and vote for it. Think of the money you could raise for the Olympic fund running a premium text message vote for ‘Britain’s Next Top Logo’? Unknown British designers could submit their designs and win a top prize plus a place on the design team. It would have been perfect, but old school ‘money for the boys’ thinking reigned supreme – no wonder the Olympic budget keeps getting increased.
Now there’s another uproar; the presentation video developed, I can only assume for even more money, includes a section of flashing lights that has triggered epileptic fits in susceptible people. So our beloved Ken, the Mayor of London, has waded into the fray and demanded that the company responsible not be paid for this “catastrophic mistake”. My feeling on this is that it is a more honest mistake, and I’m sure that plenty of government people reviewed the video first so is it really the fault of the company developing it? Britain has pretty strict rules about limited sighted people being supported on websites, but I’ve never heard of anything regarding epilepsy.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I’m sure we’ll hear of more ‘mistakes’ such as these. I can only hope that as a country we don’t mess up by spending so much energy complaining about mistakes that we don’t have any left to make the games the success they should be.
Seth Godin has always been a fascinating guru in the realm of modern marketing and his presentation at TED is no exception to this rule. It is, Godin expounds his basic view of modern marketing: you have to be remarkable to succeed these days, not average – and being remarkable makes the right people notice you, who then tell their friends, who tell their friends and so on.
Godin expounds that you focus your new idea towards the early adopters, the innovators – because they are the only people interested in truly new ideas – the average person is only excited by this week’s latest DVD on a normal day. In Japan they have the concept of an ‘otaku’, someone who would travel all the way across Japan purely to try out a new sushi restaurant. These are the people who should be your crusaders, telling all their friends about your new product because it is just the coolest thing.
There are many supporting examples in his talk; how sliced bread wasn’t popular until 15 years after it was launched, how key influencers watch Steve Jobs’ Apple infomercial for two hours and how Seth himself only scores 3.7 on Hot or Not. All of them are compelling and demonstrate how right he is. For those of you who are too lazy to watch this presentation (and hence keep your business going) his summary points are:
So follow those rules and buy Seth a pint when your next business makes a gazillion dollars.