Tuesday, July 21, 2009

If you print this email, I'll chop off your arm.



I love this. It's a USB-powered chainsaw that sits on your desk. Why?

You know those little messages that exhort you to consider the environment before printing an email? And how you ignore that message?

Well, every time you hit CTRL - P, the chainsaw goes off. Can't ignore that!

You can order one here.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Someone you love would love this new work.




QV is one of Australia's largest range of in-pharmacy skincare products.

Its (hitherto) unspoken brand truth is the way we first encountered it; more often than not QV was recommended to us by a nurse, by a parent, by a relative, by a friend.
Then, once we tried QV, we recommended it to others we cared about.

QV has that most precious and uncommon of things; a community of brand advocates.

With our friends at Admark Communications, we came up with a positioning line; Someone You Love Would Love QV.

To bring this thought to life, there's this commercial, a print campaign, some radio, a new website (coming soon), Twitter and Facebook pages.

Other credits go to Stephanie at QV, Clare and Stu at Admark, Chris Sferazza (director), Simone Adamson (producer) and the digitally strategic ladies at codenamemax.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Friday, July 3, 2009

Making the intangible physical

Just Landed - 61 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.



From the creator, Jer Thorp

I was discussing H1N1 (swine flu) with a bioinformatics friend of mine last weekend, and we ended up talking about ways that epidemiologists model transmission of disease. I wondered how some of the information that is shared voluntarily on social networks might be used to build useful models of various kinds.

I'm also interested in visualizing information that isn't implicitly shared - but instead is inferred or suggested.

This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...'. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta's Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Faster, faster, faster...


Swine flu goes from nothing to everything to almost nothing again in two weeks.

Millions of people who didn't even know there was an election in Iraq, turn their Twitter avatars green to protest the result a few days later.

Jeff Goldblum is reported dead in the morning, confirmed dead at morning tea then goes on national TV in the evening to prove the contrary.

And Michael Jackson goes from object of ridicule to the King of Pop again in 24 hours. Flashmobs erupt, Presidents eulogise, people weep.

Culture is moving at light speed. This is the reality in which the brands we advertise now live. To simply keep up, and avoid becoming your category's Susan Boyle, we need more messages more often.

Classic 'Economist' ad featuring Henry Kissinger.

I remember a while back presenting an idea for Maggi to a suit, featuring featuring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (when they were together)living as a normal couple in suburban Kogarah. The suit loved the campaign, loved the scripts than asked 'Hey, can we do this with normal people instead of Tom and Nicole?"

I wonder if the suit said, when presented this script, 'Hey, can we do this with a normal business guy instead of Kissinger?'

It would be much easier.