Right-Half Chow

Information does not equal insight (repeat ad nauseam)

Adding fuel to the fire, Logic+Emotion reports on a research project from Bain:

• Nearly 6 in 10 executives are concerned that their products and services are viewed as commodities, i.e., that their value is easily replaceable by cheaper competitors
• Just over half of executives believe that insufficient consumer insight is hindering their performance

As Gareth Kay points out:

This, frankly, scares me.  It scares me because the word insight here is almost guaranteed to mean information.  And when you walk into any company the last thing any of them really needs is more information.  They've got literally tons of it locked up in cabinets and boxes in corridors, basements and storage facilities.  And for the most part, it's the same raw information and observation masquerading as consumer insight that sits somewhere in their competitors.

I've said it before: 'consumer insight' is probably the most frequently abused notion in the whole of our profession. In a range from simple observations or common knowledge to  excuse of why a certain execution does not work, it can mean everything and nothing at the same time. As was pointed out in earlier discussions: if it doesn't put people in motion, it's not an insight...

It might be a fair stretch but Richard's 'generosity' concept probably works along the same lines.

Presentations don't kill people

Bullet points do...

Information Aesthetics have just provided me with one more argument against this terrible disease, something everybody succumbs to once in a while but should be fought with every ounce of will we can muster.

A lot of people seem to think that your message will be remembered more easily if you double code it (ie visual and audible), but they just start jostling for attention and disturb the interpretation of either source. The source here is more academic/scientific though. And even though I doubt it will be the instant cure for some people, at least I get to drone on about crap presentations again...

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

Via Plannerliness.

Shift Happens

Impressive, more info here.

Mojiti

Nothing to do with the cocktail (even though temperatures are starting to lend us the occasion) but a pretty interesting tool which let's you interact with and annotate online videos. Looks like a pretty interesting way to discuss creative material over the web as well.

Second Life Flooded

Someone finally showed up with an interesting campaign idea in Second Life: Ogilvy is flooding parts of the world to highlight the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming.

And even though it seems as if most of the inhabitants just saw it as a great opportunity to have one big water party, a lot of the discussions centered around the subject of global warming.

Beats the crap out of empty concept stores and imported real world brands...

Client: Adventure Ecology.

Office Drama

Mc Cann Erickson have developed an interesting campaign for Microsoft Office 2007. Even though the stories are pretty trivial in their own right, the way they are told and the time (media take note) they take to tell them turn them into mini episodes which are actually quite enjoyable to view. They're all labelled as 'web-films' so my guess is that they won't make it into classic commercial blocks (save one or two times, just to be able to enter it in competitions) which is a bit of a shame.

Three of my favourites below:

Dirt is good

to draw stuff in. The 'wash me' joke with a more intensive twist: just buy another one. Scott Wade is responsible for this campaign by MSTF Partners in Lisbon.

Via The Hidden Persuader.

Seven Eleven goes Springfield?

7-Eleven is in talks to turn some of their stores into Kwik-E-Marts, to promote the new Simpsons movie.

The album: endangered species?

Plannerliness poins out this article in the New York Times on the future of the album which is well worth the read. And to be fair, I find it a bit scary... Sure, I can see the merit of a good single as much as the next person, I still buy 12" maxis on a regular basis after all. But what happened to a lot of electronic genres is not something that you'd wish upon the complete music market.

The 'single' model, coupled with the birth of 'bedroom studios' through affordable exuipment, stimulated an enormous group of artists who started producting stuff. Which was a good thing because, as we experience everyday: you need to have a huge pile of ideas to be able to identify and feed the great ones. However, for individual consumers, it became very difficult to find your way in this evergrowing mass of singles and new releases. Which is one of the reasons why the early nineties saw a huge revival of the record store: curated consumption avant la lettre.

At the time, I spent about 4 hours a week in record stores (university is great isn't it?) sifting through huge selections of new releases and old stuff I had yet to discover. This went on for about 7 years and at the end of that period I truly considered myself as something of an expert. Only to have a period of a few months (the end of my studies) were I decided to take a break (from playing out and shopping) break it all down. In the space of 5 months I lost track of a lot of artists, labels, new releases, individual singles,...only to find myself completely lost upon my return to the store.

I can only imagine what would happen if this kind of development would continue throughout the whole market... On the other hand: we do have a lot more automated services available and user recommendations and other 2.0 services might someday replace the advise of a store owner who knows what you're into. But, as it often goes with internet related services, the voice of the masses is not always fit to replace the opinion and knowledge of the individual expert.

Plus, albums gave artists a bigger goal than scoring the next crowd-pleaser, forcing them to think through their own strengths and weaknesses, the way they want people to be touched by their music, the structure within an album and the order of songs,... And I'm kind of hoping that won't go away, or as Steven Johnson puts it at the end of this Wired article on bitesized culture:

"Yes, it sometimes seems as if we're living off a cultural diet of blog posts and instant messages - until we find ourselves losing an entire weekend watching season three of The Wire. The truth is, we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer."

Youtube on YouTube

Via Beet.tv