Those of you that know me, are well aware of my view on the necessity for good quality data and I think this is going to be one of the big things for next year. Developing access to multiple sources of information and having analysts capable of scouring through reams of seemingly indecipherable numbers to identify traits and patterns is something that agencies and organisations alike are now recognising as a business imperative. It may not be as sexy as buying developing augmented reality applications for mobile devices, but in a post recessionary environment where many of the economic indicators are still unstable, being able to prove the merit of your work is becoming an operational mandate. For everyone.

Add to this an increasing complexity within the agency world, where agencies are diversifying both horizontally and vertically in an attempt to find new sources of income (Skive’s success at the CIPDs should be a stark warning to us all) and the changing dynamics of the HR world, where we are already starting to see a consolidation of traditionally decentralised units into single departments like ‘communication’ and ‘branding’ and the message is clear: if you are unable to prove your worth, you’ll be left behind, scrabbling for scraps of work to survive.

The positive news is that Hodes has a good reputation for delivering work that is effective. The challenge we face is how to help ourselves and our clients set up systems that allow us to monitor and respond to an increasing number of touchpoints, especially when those touchpoints may be raising questions that people are (understandably) reticent to answer.

One of those questions is often raised in Direct Sourcing workshops – in a world where it is incredibly easy to find out vast amounts of information about individuals, where should a business draw the line? Ian Ruddy, HR Director of O2, has actively stated that Facebook will not be used in any part of the recruitment process, recognising (as many do) that individuals see Social Media sites like Facebook and Bebo as tools for personal conversations, as opposed to sites like LinkedIn which are purely professional. But other HR Directors (and their agencies) have not been as forthcoming.

It is heavily apparent that candidates believe the distinction is clear. But the recruitment world has yet to make up its mind. And while this quandary is digested, discussed and debated, more data is being added to the mix. The problem is that data is fails to discriminate between information used for personal purposes and that used for professional purposes. Interpretation is a task for the analysts. Or lawyers.

There is a nice presentation I came across on Slideshow that outlines the challenges posed by the melding of all our social groups, which is definitely worth looking at. This is something I expect all our clients to be asking us about. And we need to be prepared to help them find answers.

For those of you who prefer the less verbose, then here are a couple of nice sites to look at, courtesy of Messrs Dix, Gunnell and Henchman:
•    www.thewildernessdowntown.com (ideally viewed in Google Chrome)
•    http://coolmaterial.com/roundup/if-historical-events-had-facebook-statuses/
•    http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com/#/europe/our-work/mentos-diamond-white-banner

Enjoy

Oh, and while you’re reading, you might enjoy playing this (beware, its hideously addictive)

Enjoy

The SMS slingshot
We recently got very excited about the advances in Out of Home advertising and our illustrious creative director recently wrote quite a nice Friday mail about projections. I came across this video the other day, which combines urban/Guerrilla advertising and digital projection and takes it to another level. I love the fact that viewers get to participate in the activity and thought it would be a lovely idea for Events…

Billabong  runs competition with user generated content
I’ve just picked up a canoe from Oscar, so have been looking for some new beachwear and in doing so, came across this competition from Billabong. Users submit photos or videos of themselves surfing and complete a statement starting with the catchphrase  “I surf because…” Prizes are awarded on a weekly and monthly basis.

The idea isn’t new, but as a low cost brand raising initiative it is nicely executed. All I need is the bleach blonde hair…

Collaborative playlists
At a recent session with Staples, we talked about using sites like Spotify to allow employees to create their own music playlists for internal events. It’s a simple idea and is easy to do and music has the power to cross linguistic and cultural divides in a way that not many other things can. As is the way with these things, some bright spark has already beaten us to it and songvote is the result. SongVote’s purpose is to provide a place online where users can take their varying musical tastes and collaborate with others to create a unified playlist. They call it “collaborative playlisting.” I call it a playlist.

Prepare for Olympic victory. Eat chocolate.
I’m getting quite excited about 2012, especially with our recent performance at the European Championships. As a result, I’ve been looking around to see how licensed suppliers are starting to leverage their sponsorship. One such sponsor is Cadbury (Official Treat Provider to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games). In an attempt to “rekindle the spirit of playing games”, Cadbury created a challenge to develop the next pocketgame. Lots of ideas were shortlisted and the esteemed judging panel have now selected a shortlist of 10 entries. Judge for yourself.

Crowdsourcing for social and political causes
As user interaction becomes mainstream, we are going to see a lot more crowdsourced-led initiatives. I came across one such initiative the other day: Avaaz, a global online advocacy community that “brings people-powered politics to global decision-making.”

Named for the word meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages, Avaaz has actually been working since 2007 on a simple democratic mission: organize citizens everywhere to help close the gap “between the world that exists and the world most people want.” Toward that end, it uses online and offline advocacy to empower its members to take action on pressing issues of international concern, from global poverty to the crises in the Middle East to climate change. In the past three years, Avaaz has grown to include 5.5 million members from every country on Earth, becoming what it says is the largest global web movement in history.

Achievements to date include more than 20 million actions taken online and off, including messages sent, phone calls and petition signatures, with more than 70 million friends told; raising more than USD 10 million online, including millions in funding and high-tech support for human rights and democracy advocates in Burma, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Iran and Haiti; and organizing nearly 10,000 rallies, flashmobs, vigils, marches and other online events for the climate change movement. Just recently, Avaaz used a petition with more than 2 million signatures, 500,000 online actions and tens of thousands of phone calls to score a major anti-corruption initiative in Brazil.

Enjoy

A

Where the Hell is Matt?
This hit the internet a while ago and I thought it was one of those nice stories for a Friday afternoon. Every holiday, Matt Harding used to take a photo of himself dancing badly and upload it to a blog. People started following. He changed the medium to video.  The number of followers increased. Then he managed to persuade some sponsors that what they really wanted was to pay for him to go on a round the world trip, videoing himself dancing by famous monuments and try to get people around the world to dance with him. The results, as you can see, are endearing,  have been viewed over 60 million times and has now become a full time job for him.

http://www.digdeepmoments.com/#/Explore/athletics
There was an online discussion yesterday about great emotional moments and the conversation quickly moved to sporting examples, like Derek Redmond being helped across the line by his father in the 1992 Olympics, or Kerri Strug winning the team gold in the 1996 Olympics gymnastics vault with a broken ankle. Anyway, I was trawling around and came across this site by a clothing manufacturer, DigDeep. It pulls together great sporting moments into an interactive timeline, which I thought was a nice execution of a simple idea. Makes for engaging reading, as well…

Out of a forest
A charming short animated film that focuses on isolation. Charming. And terribly sad.

Adidas Match Tracker
I’ve talked previously about my admiration for adidas and their advertising exploits. I came across this a while ago, and thought it was worth revisiting, purely because it’s a great app that gets under the skin of what drives football fans. Whilst Dixy may mock my view that modern life is all about quality data and how you respond to what it tells you, this site uses data about football matches in the 2010 Champions league to allow fans to deconstruct games in all their glorious detail. It may not appeal to you, but to football fans who live to analyse games in all their minute detail, it’s a godsend and the sort of thing I could easily see sitting on top of live TV commentary as a future application of Augmented Reality.

We are already seeing a shift in the sort of content that Recruitment Sites are offering, with added value content really helping to drive and support attraction campaigns, specifically the race to produce more and more content by the Future Talent market. I think the more intelligent recruitment models will shift to a more complex community based value-exchange model (Social Media Marketing is a step towards this) and we have already been talking about such approaches with two major Blue Chip clients. So this week’s mail is dedicated to freevertising – interesting examples of free-to-market distribution models.

Enjoy

OhMyGodWhatHappened is a book that was released last month, by a company called Innovative Thunder. The book can be purchased from Amazon, but if you want to download it for free, all you had to do was send a Tweet advertising the book. The distribution model makes sense (they are exchanging the value of their thought for the value of an individual’s network) and relies on what I often refer to in teaching courses as ‘reciprocity’ – the notion that if someone gives you something, they expect another thing back in return. It is classic human psychology. It will be interesting to see how much money they actually make, but its certainly done a lot of good for their Brand Awareness.

Swiftly following the release of OhMyGodWhatHappened was What Matters Now, a collection of thoughtpieces from recognised thinkers throughout the world, which was released by Seth Godin, a globally respected planner. The only difference here is that Seth doesn’t ask for money, only your network. For those who want to read it, it makes an interesting read.

On a slightly different tack, my sister-in-law recently attended the Social Media Measurement Camp. I had never heard of it, but looking into it, the camp is a global open-source movement to encourage knowledge sharing and industry collaboration towards answering ‘how do we measure engagement in social media?’. It has hubs in the UK, USA (Bay Area) and Ireland. Attendance costs nothing and the sessions are well attended. The content is managed and distributed via a wiki, so the entire business model is based on freevertising.

Particularly useful is the list of measurement tools. I receive about a zillion requests for these types of tools and this site has collated them into a useful, constantly updated source.

Finally, not necessarily free, but something that uses free content in an intelligent manner, Lab42 is a survey platform with the ability to dig through social networks to find your target consumers and enable them to give your company feedback. Low cost, broad in reach and highly customisable, it is a fantastic idea that makes market research much more accessible at significantly reduced costs in quick turnarounds. As with all these things, it will be interesting to see how long the business model remains viable, but I love the concept.

And building projection has taken the advances in animation a step further. It wasn’t that long ago that BBH were getting into trouble for projecting an image of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament. But as I reminded the creative team last week, technology has moved on, and as Aerosmith have discovered, you can do this sort of thing on the outside of Rochester Castle.  (Fast forward to the end – 3 minutes plus – for the jaw-dropping stuff.)

For the technically minded, the way it works is that real buildings are mapped and modelled in 3D and then animations are created from them and projected back on to the building. Clever stuff, not least because as well as being incredibly lifelike, the animations incorporate the quirks and characteristics of the buildings that are their backdrop. So now it seems almost anything is possible, from this interactive building-size pinball game to this  wonderful examples of a 3D building projection for Samsung.

Now projection is a fairly under-used technique in our industry. PwC picked up a RAD award a few years ago for projecting their campaign logo on a student union, but after that the channel seemed to stop developing. All of which suggests the time might be ripe for introducing a little BMW-type projection  magic to people comms.

And if you’re interested in the area, then you’re be able to learn more about Seeper the people who developed the BMW and other animated extravaganzas at their site.  Or, alternatively, you can listen to them in person, as they’ll be coming in to chat to the agency in late  August. More details to follow.

A happy weekend to one and all – I just hope your break isn’t as full on as mine. The evidence suggests those Latvian stag dos can be quite eventful (scroll down the page for the full Lederhosen mankini horror.)

In a week that saw both the CIPDs and the AGR being announced, I thought we’d take a break from our part of the world and look over the fence into consumer. Tom started the discussion last week with his links to some nice work to be recognised by D&AD, the Designers and Art Directors Association.  A D&AD pencil is the award most consumer creatives in this country aspire to, but it’s a different story outside the UK. In the US, The One Show rules the roost and opinions are divided whether the UK or the US produce and feature the best work.

Take a peek at some of the work below and see which you prefer? English Mustard or New York’s Finest?

First up is We Choose The Moon,  a site that Russ pointed out a few months’ ago. This has recently won a Gold Award at the One Show Interactive and apparently the little Lynchs have been unable to tear themselves away from this for many weeks now.

Closer to home, D&AD were awarding a Black Pencil, their highest award, to the Apple website, which has baffled many but you may see the method in their madness. (Easy on the eye and simple to navigate, but is this really the best the web has to offer?)

Meanwhile, over in New Yoick the recently awarded One Show was attracting a lot of great work, including one of my favourites – a site for HBO,  the American TV channel. If like me you’re a Robert Altman fan and like your stories told from many angles, this is a thing of beauty.

Finally, I’m going to point you in the direction of GoodBy, Silverstein and Partners and a campaign for Crest.  Goodby are a San Francisco-based agency who consistently top the Gunn Report, a ranking of the world’s most creative agencies. Their site, which interestingly focuses entirely on their clients and says very little about themselves, is packed full of well-observed, funny, engaging and brand building work – which are exactly the qualities displayed in the very lovely Crest campaign.

All of which suggests the Americans are going to edge it on humour – or does it? Oh no, the angst….

Last month saw the annual D&AD Awards take place, where the very best in design and advertising is celebrated and showcased. Their focus is commercial creativity, wherever and however it is produced, so categories are wide and numerous, awarding little yellow pencils to the best work and little black ones to the ones that are that little bit better than best. The awarded work is all featured on their website and I always take time to browse the winners, with something for everyone to appreciate, some of the stuff you will be familiar with but a surprising number of campaigns you won’t be. This stuff is obviously not directly related to recruitment marketing but it does show us what we can achieve with a little creative thinking, and can inform and inspire our work over the next year until the 2011 awards come rolling along. Here are two bits I found particularly interesting but do have a look through yourself, the work is all sectioned up so you can just browse by which medium you are interested in, and its all awesome.

The Main award winners are here

Digital Advertising/Integrated Campaigns
Title: The Best Job in the World
Agency: SapientNitro

Watch the video of the campaign here:
“the campaign that began with a classified ad and ended with an Oprah Winfrey interview”

An amazing way to use recruitment as a creative solution to a brief, the objective was to raise international awareness of the great barrier reef islands and they succeeded with their task in such spectacular style, the numbers shown at the end of the video show how powerful PR and a creative idea can be. This won the coveted black pencil and really makes you think about not always approaching a brief in the traditional sense, doing things within tried and tested frameworks, taking a moment to think about weather there could be a more innovative and interesting way to do something. Won the coveted Black Pencil for truly groundbreaking work. In case your interested the guy who won (an English bloke called Ben) is still there and you can find out all about him on the campaigns site which shows you what he’s been getting up to.

TV & Cinema Advertising
Title: Tips
Agency: wieden+kennedy
Client: CareerBuilder.com

Watch the Ad here:

Wonderfully simple and silly ad for US based recruitment site CareerBuilder.com. The ad is original and funny and will get people laughing about it at work and probably viraling it about to their friends too. The use of repetition and comedy make it memorable as well as keeping you watching to find out where its going with all the sillyness. Wieden+Kennedy as you may or may not know are one of the top ad agencies in the world and all their work is amazing, their site is worth checking out too if you are stuck for inspiration or just want to see some wonderful work.

I hope you enjoyed my email as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it, please reply if you have any comments or thoughts about any of the D&AD work, or if you have any other issues of an unrelated nature!

Enjoy. Oh yes, and good luck to England for Sunday.

Google has been pretty active of late. First came the announcement that Google Voice has shifted from Beta to freely available. Then came the news that the Google Street View team are now sending photographers out to capture the inside of business premises for Google Places. With the ever increasing mix of acquisitions, this means that on pretty much a live basis, Google now has the to identify who you are (from a combination of search and facial recognition), where you are (from Google Maps, Street View, geo-tagging) and intelligently guestimate what you are doing (looking at status updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and sites like foursquare). That a hell of a lot of information for one company to hold… (and powerful for our clients if they know how to use it).

I came across this site a couple of weeks ago: Mixergy is a social networking site for Entrepreneurs. It seems to be a philanthropic counterweight to Venture Capitalism, which is an interesting notion. I have nothing against the notion of VC-funded firms, simply that the goals of a VC firm and those of entrepreneurial management tend to be very different. I’ve worked with some entrepreneurs before and they can be a tough bunch to work with – passionate (zealous even), determined and in many cases highly destructive. Most entrepreneurs will have gone bankrupt more than once in their life… and they tend to drag other people with them . However, their zeal can be incredibly infectious and I think that people like to work somewhere where the owner is truly passionate about the ideal. And as they quite poetically state, the world isn’t changed by people who have an eye on the exit.

A few years ago, I left my bag on a tube train. It was one of those dozy daydreaming moments when you walk out of the carriage, realise you’ve left your bag inside, sprint back only for the doors to glide firmly shut in your face. Anyway, I was concerned about the tube network being shut down (it was pretty soon after the July bombings and it WAS a dubious-looking rucksack) and dutifully reported my error to the tube station manager. Unconcerned, he simply accessed a section on the TFL Intranet which showed exactly where my train was and then called the driver in the relevant train to let him know what had happened. I pointed out that having such information (specifically live data of exactly where tube trains were at any point in time) readily available would be fantastic. We then had a chat about terrorism and why the management at TFL were worried about releasing such information. Anyway, I digress. Some smart Alec has now done exactly what I suggested back then – provided a live map of all tube trains running in London. OK. The interface is quite ugly but as tends to be the case with such things, the creators have provided the source code for all to see, so expect to see modifications on the horizon.

Finally, you can’t move anywhere without someone asking you about social media these days. Given the breadth of applications out there and the pace of both adoption and cast-off, it can be pretty tough keeping up with the game. Anyway, I came across this blog that is pretty useful, outlining what you need to know in easily digestible chunks.

Anyway, given yesterday’s Boo! session, I thought that I’d use this as an opportunity to comment on the themes that continuously cropped up. I’ve chosen four, but if anyone has any thoughts around this (or disagrees) please respond. I’d love to know your thoughts. Oh, and as the World Cup starts today, I’ve attached a link to a lovely wall chart discovered by one of our digital team. Great stuff.

Enjoy

1. Our clients are disconnected. By connecting the dots, we can deliver a much more compelling proposition.
One of the things that surprised me was how many of the agencies were already working with our clients in some way shape or form: Mars, KPMG, Royal Mail, Novartis, the Ministry of Justice, ABB and GSK were mentioned amongst others. We saw from Martin at the Edge some great examples of work that was delivered for an internal audience, at not insignificant sums, which could so easily be re-used for RecAd. And we saw from Louis and Shaun at Skive how an open and intelligent sense of collaboration amongst agencies led to a much more engaging and long lasting campaign.

As the business environment is forcing firms to become more intelligent in the way they structure and manage themselves, we will see a much greater degree of intra-department collaboration (or even mergers) and I think it is incumbent on us, as a client’s agency, to look at the work that is being done by other divisions within our clients and to try to bring them together. Not only will it lead to a better proposition, but it will also help us get access to larger budgets, whilst reducing the overall cost to the client’s business. A win-win all round…

2. Storytelling is the new black
All the examples of great, award-winning work told a story, reflecting truisms in a way that was realistic, unpatronising and unashamedly emotive. I know that we won’t always have the budget that the agencies who talked to us managed to procure, but in each case the client bought into an ideal that they absolutely believed in and because of that, worked hard to find the additional budget. It was a shared journey and the most rewarding journeys are always difficult (ask Helen to talk to you about Ernest Shackleton…)

For those of you who tell me that “simply isn’t possible in RecAd” I’ll push back with Herts Police. Or STA. Or BNY Mellon. Or KPMG. Yes, it puts a lot of pressure on the creative teams to inspire, but got me to thinking that sometimes we should unleash our creatives a little bit more. For example, when answering a brief, why not have a couple of routes that sit within the brand guidelines and then one that is pure creative vision? OK, sometimes it can come unstuck, or be a bit weird, but I’ve sat in meetings where the agency has had to present some very  off the wall concepts – try thinking about Rigden explaining to Barclays how the Futtockmeister would help them procure more candidates, or an incredibly senior suit in advertising trying to explain how urinating rock star puppets would increase the sales of Opel Corsas throughout Europe. Clients buy creativity and when you get it right, they have come away enthused and inspired about what we are trying to do.

3. There is no compromise for craftsmanship
There is a lot of talk about UGC (user-generated content) and the impact it is having on design agencies and we are already seeing the advent of user-generated advertising (think of the Doritos King of Ads, for example). However, one of the things that came across yesterday was the chasm of difference between work done by individuals and work done by skilled agencies. In some cases the nuances were subtle, in other cases they were extraordinary. In all cases you could tell the difference.

And I think that in this world of constant cost reduction, clients often opt for the easy option and try to short-cut  or compromise the craftsmanship for short term gain. And agencies often compromise. How often have you sent out a document which contains typos, looks like it was rushed, is unclear or messy?  We’ve all done it. (yes, Mr Burton, that’s an absolute admission that I’m not perfect…) But I think that we should be more critical about the work we give to clients – whether it be an email, a scope of work, a creative rationale or a website. It’s strange how doing the right thing is often the harder sell and I just think we ought to push back more. To ourselves as well as clients.

4. There is no substitute for experimentation
One of the things I try to do with Friday mails is to get you to try different things. We talked this morning about Yammer. We talked yesterday about Augmented Reality. Some of these are fads. Some won’t go anywhere. And some will be used in ways that are completely different from the way they were intended. But until you try them properly, and think about them for yourself, rather than subscribing to populist opinion, you’ll never know.

One of the most interesting examples of this recently was someone I talk to on the train. We were arguing about Twitter – his view was that it was “utter cr@p.” Despite this, he was signed up and used it every day. Why? He found the Twitter sites and of the clients he was working for and used them to get a deeper insight into the client’s psyche – what they liked and disliked, how they were feeling on a particular day and so on. A little bit subversive, but an intelligent use of freely available information. In these uber competitive time, every little helps…

Oh yes, and to congratulate the England Cricket team on their historic pummelling of Australia in today’s 20/20 World Cup final, I thought you’d like to see the trending in people talking about cricket on Twitter in the run up to victory…

Augmented reality – the next step
I’m not a sneaker man, but Adidas is one of my favourite brands: their ‘impossible is nothing’ campaign has been to sport what ‘priceless’ is to credit cards, capturing the essence of  triumph over adversity that permeates sporting challenges from playground to grave. Now usually, Adidas tends to lag Nike in the innovation stakes but I recently came across this extension of Augmented Reality and thought it was a great concept. Of course, Hodes got there first with the ABB T-Shirts, but how long will it be before we see clothing that can be used as part of the controlling mechanisms in gaming?

Ashton goes off
Those of you who keep referring to Twitter as a ‘worthless fad’ might do well to read the article in the business section of the Sunday Telegraph… For those of you who are still trying to get to grips with the why’s and where’s of Twitter, it’s worthwhile knowing that in the Twitterati Golden Leagues, Ashton Kutcher features pretty highly. Mind you, his position is under threat from Britney, but who really cares? Anyway, some bright sparks are creating artwork from the profile photos of Twitter users.  The whole ‘Don’t Tell Ashton’ thing is a bit of an inside joke (OK, it’s not brilliantly funny) but I like the idea of user-participated art.

Short-cutting the supply chain (part 1)
One of the brilliant things about the digitisation of information is how it can completely level the playing field. In this example, Alibaba is a site that connects consumers direct to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like much until you consider the impact this could have on SMEs: stripping out the (often exorbitant) mark-up charges that are applied by middlemen whose sole reason for existence is simply to put one person in touch with another, could have a marked impact on the bottom line. Or in simple terms, when you’re looking for cost reducing measures, this option makes a lot more sense than making people redundant.

Fashion made easy
Continuing on the supply chain theme,  Etsy is a marketplace for handmade goods. Interestingly enough, the site had record sales on Sept. 29th, the day the stock market plunged sharply, and it continued to break records as conditions deteriorated during last year’s holiday season. The post-crash consumer seems to want to feel a direct personal connection with the designer or craftsman, just as she does when she buys carrots or milk at a farmer’s market. It’s been talked about in countless fashion circles, as well as being featured in Fast Company and Marketing magazine. Ladies beware, it is (apparently) hideously addictive, but then some things never change…

One for the Barclays team
This infographic started out as a visualisation of the Forbes 2,000, which lists the 2,000 largest companies in the world: it’s pretty intriguing. It’s also worth noting just how large the banking sector is. Hmmm… might want to rethink my share portfolio. Or revisit our New Business target list?