the fruits of imagination

Acts not Ads for the Environment

a weekend of email catch up (yes welcome to my life) lead me to this interesting and compelling work by Spring, an advertising & design agency in Vancouver, B.C. Canada.

this work is simple, single minded and damn clever. it shows a very clear understanding of how a highly conceptual issue - like climate warming - can be brought to life in an intriguing way through acts not ads. rather than create a common television or print campaign starring polar bears or melting glaciers, unlike most communications, this one choose to tap into two fundamental and powerful human understandings: 1) the motivating power of self interest vs self sacrifice, and 2) experiential framing...setting the issue in a personally relevant way. Lovely work and kudo's to the client for understanding a great idea when they see one.

The David Suzuki Foundation wanted to create awareness about the effects of global warming on our environment amongst Vancouverites skeptical about its authenticity. So, it enlisted Vancouver-based Spring Advertising to get them to visualize the effects on their own environment. To do that, Spring set up three-dimensional tide lines attached to city telephone poles in downtown Vancouver using a number of recycled mussel shells and fake barnacles fastened to vinyl prints. They were accompanied by street signs reading, "Global warming is closer than you think." Check out a video about the project on Spring's YouTube channel. 

Coffee Shop-Office Hybrids: The Workplace of the Future?

this is an interesting piece i stumbled upon on Fast Company - an interesting example of how a brand has tapped into a cultural fuel and behavioural understanding. read on.

“It is not a coffee shop, it is not an office. But if you are a mobile worker, it is something much better than both things together.”

More people are working remotely than ever before, which is bad news for coffee shops. Once the province of college students and stoned poets, suddenly they’re teeming with everyone from copywriters to pushy corporate types willing to raise fisticuffs over a free electrical outlet. What’s a cafe owner to do?

You could ban laptops -- the favored route of New York coffee houses nowadays -- or you could make the cafe more conducive to work. That’s the approach at Urban Station in Buenos Aires's hipsterish Palermo Soho district. With copious desks, conference rooms, and electrical outlets in spades, the place feels like a trendy workplace that happens to serve coffee and croissants. From the company press release: “It is not a coffee shop, it is not an office. But if you are a mobile worker, it is something much better than both things together.”

So how does Urban Station make money? It rents desks. We don’t know the exact pricetag but they tell us it’s “less than a promotional breakfast in any Palermo bar.” The conventional wisdom is that charging for anything in a cafe is a bad idea; that people won’t even pay for wireless, let alone a seat. Urban Station’s trick is to throw in a raft of perks: Wi-Fi channels; food and drink included in the cost of the hour; printers; fax machines; scanners; lockers; and even a couple of bikes you can bang around on when you need a break.

There’s a real and growing market for this sort of thing. Seventeen million to 26 million people work remotely at least some of the time depending on how you calculate it. And the figure will only swell as companies look to cut costs and workers increasingly eschew desktop computers for mobile technology. Freelancers and part-timers already spend hundreds of dollars a month -- or more -- on co-work spaces. Urban Station’s the same idea, but with free food.

One quibble: The design, while cheery, feels a tad unpolished. (A green futon with purple earplug tables? This is not a Deee-Lite music video, people.) Corporations are always prettying their offices, then holding them up as company billboards; if Urban Station is going to be the workplace of the future, it might wanna do the same.

a different angle on behaviour

  

The digital explosion we’ve witnessed over the last 10 years may not be the result of technology itself  - the internet and it’s many attendant mobile devices - but an unequivocal demonstration of pent up consumer demand resulting from fundamental shifts in behaviour. The internet and digital devices just happen to be the penultimate media which can, and has satisfied, peoples altered behavioural needs.

WALLED GARDEN TO FREE RANGE:

•    Where only a generation ago, our collective world view was formed within a walled garden of limited media access and selection, yet today we can globally peruse some 22,000 magazine titles across 276 verticals (specific interest areas), tune into 15,464 TV channels, and jump to any one of 5 billion websites globally.

•    For brands this is critical: centrally controlled editorial is extinct and real access to information and opinion exist at will: any time, any where and well beyond the control of the company, brand or marketing.

PASSIVE TO EXHIBITIONIST

•    Technology has given us power… and the time of the passive consumer has past. Today, right now….people are assimilating facts, fallacies and forming perspectives on brands….our brands, and significantly shaping if not controlling the brand's narrative, image and value.

•    People are actively commenting on, co-creating and -re-creating brand equity through the 200 million blogs on typepad, the 4 million entries in wikipedia and 65,000 youtube posts, rants and raves that occur each and everyday worldwide.

•    Where only 10 years ago, people we used to call show offs, grandstanders, big mouths and braggers had but a small town stage on which to play, these same people now known as bloggers perform to a hungry and attentive worldwide audience.

•    This online exhibitionism has become a behavioural condition of the digital explosion to be heard, understood and passed along.

BLIND TRUST TO ONLINE ACTIVISM

•    76% of people don’t trust advertisers to tell them the truth, 64% of people trust companies less than they did a year ago and food specifically is trusted by only 55% of people.

•    With people saying “I can no longer rely on one source of information or what I’m being told’ the masses are turning to their peers online for the real, unmitigated scoop and perceived value found in collective wisdom: 61% of people trust others like themselves…except now those ‘others’ are not local but global ,or few but many, and connected to together anywhere and at anytime placing marketing very much in the hands of others than ourselves.

TELL TO ATTRACT

•    Brands can no longer push out commoditized and functional messages to a supposedly desirous and passive audience and hope to get response.

•    “We’re a society driven by entertainment and in an entertainment culture, everything must compete with entertainment…” which demands that all content ..even brand content, be not only ever changing and but personally interesting and created with the rules of entertainment in mind.

•     And of all media, it is digital's fundamental ability to provide endless, instant and timely hyper personal entertainment - inclusive of information and education presented correctly -  that begins to explain increasing levels of internet penetration, time spent and astounding mobile adoption.

•    Digital then in essence is the one media hope that can most effectively arm current consumers with the most personally relevant tidbits to tell the best stories…. And brands whose consumers tell the best stories in the age of entertainment….win.

        This ‘new reality’ is markedly different than the fiction many brands continue to speak and live today - the way in which they market themselves to their respective consumer. The digital explosion is a result of an unexploited need and a fundamental shift in behaviour, which until digital remained dormant and inactive.