Mini!

Having just got a Mini One (the car!) I was  excited to see the mini marketing team keep up the fun, exciting feel of Mini’s http://minigetawaystockholm.com/#

A great example of social media and smartphones bringing together an innovative campaign and, although would have been nice to have seen some Augmented Reality in use here, I’m  intrigued to see the take up and results of this one.

This one via the always first on the scene Steve Clayton.

HTML 5

Found this great infographic via @BrandRepublic on Twitter (click the image for the full version).

Full story here.

Windows 7 Phone

Hearing a lot of buzz regarding the new Windows 7 phone at the moment and eager to get my hands on one for a play. Being an iPhone household I’m curious to see how they compare.

Worth watching the demo as the OS is very interesting, not sure it would ‘work’ for everyone though as it seems to require some centralised thinking. Beginning to regret that long iPhone contract? We’ll see.

Blogging

…seems to get bumped and bumped down the list. Unless it is seen as an acceptable sideline to your job, which I think is something to be earned over many years, or you have very little going on in your social life (I’m getting married next week!) there is a real struggle to ensure that it doesn’t just slip off of the radar.

Hopefully in a few weeks time when I’m back from honeymoon I will be able to put more of my time into this.

In the meantime Marketing for a product that the huge majority of the world not only connects to, but embraces, really helps me to tap into and fall back in love with the creative side of my work.

Rio, Brazil, Football. If you can’t market that you should really go home.

Thanks Soccerex.

Future of Screen Technology

The future of screen technology via Steve Clayton

What the F**k is Social Media now?

One of the best Social Media presentations, via Steve Clayton earlier this week.

Click here.

Thinking

Being in new job, different ways of thinking and working are obviously at the forefront of my mind. As such a bit of classic Seth Godin:

Most of the time, we think of our job as a set of tasks that take place in a —> [box] [ box ] <–.

A doctor can consider her work in the box of the examining room. But if she figures out how to get people to quit smoking before they come in, her results are better. If she figures out how to get people to take their meds after they leave, same thing.

A designer who receives a better project brief will deliver better work. A manufacturer who figures out how to teach users to use the object properly will get better word of mouth…

Marketers, of course, can have the biggest box of all. So the stuff we think of as ‘marketing’ can be altered long before the person ever sees an ad, and have an impact long after they’ve got the product.

The challenge lies in spending a lot of time and money on the upstream and downstream parts of the work, instead of always assuming that your [box] is just what happens inside your cubicle, or as a direct result of your actions.

Adidas Star Wars

Nice video from Adidas:

iPhone 4

As with many of you today I woke up to a very eye-catching email in my Inbox this morning:

Although I can’t help but feel the usual shine given off by an apple product launch has been tarnished by the prototype leak a few months back, the rather dodgy demos at the release, and the pain in the arse operators doing everything they can to tie us in to longer and longer contracts. I fear many will be unable to get their hands on a new model for quite a while in the UK, most users being on 24 month contracts (not me though, mines ready for an upgrade!)

Can their marketing be so powerful as to get people to own two £200/£300+ phones at once? We’ll see.

Oh yeah O2 – if you could let the thousands of customers in the Surrey, South West London area know when you’re going to fix this 3G issue finally that would be great. I’m a bit sick of not being able to receive 90% of calls still after 12 months of complaining.

UPDATE: The official video from Apple is here. They keep going on about that 5 mega pixel camera…has anyone told them that’s not that great?

Holographic Pyramid

Via Leon McComish a couple of days ago. Skip forward to the one minute mark to see what it’s really all about: