the fruits of imagination

Users put Microsoft on notice, via Twitter

Whether you love it or hate it, Microsoft Outlook is the ubiquitous email client for millions of cubicled office dwellers. In a great example of the power of social networking, fans of the email client have banded together in the hope of getting the software giant to rethink it's recently announced upgrade.

A quick Whois search revealed that a David Geiner, of Email Standards Project fame, is leading the charge with the recently launched FixOutlook.org. The slick site pulls tweets from the Twittersphere (I think I just coined a new term!) and displays them alongside the person's profile picture. Any tweet with the fixoutlook.org url will be pulled in and displayed on the page in an attempt to get Microsoft's attention. Based on the amount of press the press has received in just 24 hours, I'd say they have it by now.

As of now, the site has over 17,000 tweets which is almost double what it had when I took the screen cap above this morning.

This ingenious little tie in with the well known social network makes giving your input to Microsoft as easy as sending out a tweet. And starting a conversation with their most loyal fans to help improve one of their best selling products should be should be exactly what Microsoft wants to do. For that matter, any company from Audi to Kelloggs could start promote this kind of engagement with their customers.

By launching this site, with its smart integration into a well known social platform, Mr. Geiner and the team at the Email Standards Project could very well change the course of Outlook in 2010.

Source: Fix Outlook.org

A La Cart – Designing Toronto’s newest brand

Here at Leo, we love our fair city of Toronto.  So when were asked to help out on a new project aiming to bring diversity to the street food of the city, we were more than thrilled to help out.

The Toronto A La Cart program, run by the City, is meant to bring the diverse ethnic foods of Toronto out of the restaurants and on to our streets, to offer a healthier alternative to the hot dog, for those who want it, and to show that we are a city sophisticated and multicultural enough to present its residents with a kaleidoscope of street food offerings.

 

With this opportunity in mind, we set out to come up with an identity for the project.  The resulting graphic design we developed is grounded by the number four.  Four has great significance in terms of food and diversity.  The four corners of the world (north, south, east, west), the four taste sensations (sweet, sour, salty, bitter), the four main utensils used when eating (fork, spoon, knife, chopsticks).  It uses four circles, symbolizing plates, and grounds the utensils within them to create a graphic representation of the word ‘Cart’.  The vibrant colour palette was inspired by actual vegetables and spices to reflect different cultures and ethnicity.

 

The identity can be found on the actual street carts throughout Toronto. I decided to go sample some down at

Nathan Phillips Square today…my picture doesn’t accurately reflect the crowds.  There’s nothing like some good chicken Biryani and a fresh piece of fruit to enjoy out in the sun.  I could get used to this.  Hopefully some carts will pop up near our offices mid-town!

conversations with ourselves

Alternate media. Traditional media.  That both marketers and agencies refer to any media that falls outside the realms of TV, print, and outdoor as ‘alternative’ suggests at best an inward looking and dangerous perspective.

Q: Alternative to whom?
Q: Unconventional by whose standards and whose behaviour?

The pressing reality for most brands today is that product differentiation can be erased overnight and brand messaging easily duplicated. But the creation of purpose driven acts that deliver layers of the brand experience may be a last source of differentiation. What many call ‘alternative’ media today  - and what I might call a brand act - has in been in play since 2nd century B.C. The circus maximus was buzz marketing, conversation creation and stunt writ large for brand Rome. The first known example of guerrilla marketing is to found in Ephesus (modern day turkey) in the form of graffiti advertising a brothel. Place based media in the form of architecture has at its best, implied much more than mere form as in the case of Beijing: Contemporary Superpower. Alternate media…how about a conversation about context as a media in and of itself.