Insta#$%&

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For me, looking at the photos that I've liked on Instagram is like watching Baraka. Only it's better cos they're my mates and doing stuff I can relate to, not a sea of Asian-ish people waving their arms in a particular direction.

To see the creativity and adventures of my friends around the world, in real time, puts me in a really good mood.

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As an app it's perfect for now. I love it because it kind of an anti-social media, anti-rushing, anti-firsties, less is more approach to what is fundamentally another gamified experience. The content has intrinsic quality and scarcity. It allows people to consciously appreciate and share the very smallest events in their day. The one social platform that makes you slow down instead of speed up.

A picture is worth a thousand words? It sure beats twitter for information depth, if not written wit.

It also makes quite a lot of people get genuinely better at, and more interested in, taking photos. I've seen some peoples' skills increase rather dramatically over a short period of time.

Instagram provides a lot of creative practice in trying to communicate ideas visually. There is a richness and abstractness of communication that not many platforms can compete with. It's not always about pure photography, it's about making a commentary of sorts.

And really, the only thing you do is think in pictures and like in likes. It's very spaced out. Perfect, really.

What I would love to see is an export function for the photos I have liked. I want to be able to show others these photos and possibly even integrate it (in some kind on non-kitsch way) with the photography in my house. Not an LCD frame that rotates photos every few minutes but maybe some kind of electronic wallpaper that links to the feed. Come now nerds, do it.

Blue

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Mercedes-Benz has BlueTec and BlueEfficiency, and VW has BlueMotion.

I don't really care what any of these names mean, but it's sort of interesting nonetheless. Interesting as to why we need to own colours that are in no way otherwise aligned with these brands. But there you have it - it's happening.

If you have to pick a colour though, I guess blue is the best option. Blue feels maybe like a gas flame or electricity or clean energy one way or another - without fighting over green.

Get in early to own colours nearest to green on the spectrum? Is that what's happening here? Interesting to see where things go from here. Like, in general...

The Obsession with Digital

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The blindness in advertising and its surrounding rhetoric, is beginning to make me feel a bit sick. I read this article this morning on the ten best digital ad campaigns of, wait for it... the decade. One campaign that annoyed me a little was one where people tweeted messages during the Tour de France and the tweets would be painted on the road.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this idea, in fact it's kind warm and fuzzy. But there is nothing digital about it, certainly not enough to be a digital campaign of the decade. People like it is because it's tangible. And it certainly could have been done without twitter, seeing as they just picked out the cool ones to print anyway.

This is another example of a campaign that, rather than working by itself, relies almost entirely on being explained in Fast Company, not only to be understood at all but to generate the mass of publicity that is now expected from something where twitter is involved - beyond just the fans who came to watch at that exact point in the road. There is no mention of how much people liked it, or of its effectiveness in general. The story was posted because tweeting is (still) cool. Without an explanation that the messages were tweeted and that it is in fact for Livestrong, the campaign isn't much of a campaign at all. Put it this way, the only thing being retweeted (there is little original content on twitter) is the explanation of the campaign. Am I making sense? Only when people rewteet it because the content of the message moves them or such should it constitute good advertising, but the only thing being awarded here is the medium. The first half of it, in fact.

The idea that we need to separate digital advertising from any other advertising is the first mistake. Never forget that digital is a tool, not an end in itself. The paint in the road is what people want, not knowing that the paint was tweeted.

This also brings me to the idea of Digital Strategy. The way the term is currently being bandied about, people actually seem to mean channel tactics, or something similar. The actual practice of digital strategy is entirely un-strategic, it is tactical and reactive. Real brand strategy is pro-active - that is why it constitutes a strategy at all. Positioning, something which is not much affected by the latest fads and digital trends, is proactive, and what your equity is built upon.

Brand positioning IS the strategy, and "digital strategy" has nothing to do with positioning. So let's spend a little less time thinking about digital and more time thinking about the brands and what they stand for, which when done properly can be a lot more tangible and meaningful than a fleeting tweet.

The Future of Advertising

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This morning I read an article in Fast Company, which really got at why advertising is so tough now, why everyone is so lost, and why the people who were once known for building great brands are now bowing to computer geeks and search freaks. Read at least the first page to get an idea before you read on.

While I was reading, some words and phrases literally jumped right off the page at me:

"Fragmented consumer attention"

"Digital is incremental"

"Respond in real time to an unpredictable audience" [my god...]

And my personal favorite from the old guard, now so distracted by the geeks that they forgot what they came here to do:

"I'm a person petrified to fail."

These things sound to me like pretty much everything that good branding is not about. All this chasing. All these analytics. In fact, all this "essential" two-way micro-conversation with customers. Chase, test, measure, tweak, test. Who sent us barking up this tree? What a horrific concept of personality. These sound like the actions of a perfectly awful and avoidable brand.

Alan Watts said that we can peer down a microscope and say "Look! I've found something smaller than the atom, the electron!" And then someone else says that they've found something even smaller, the quark. We can keep going and going with all our new technology, but when will these particles stop getting smaller? What is it exactly that we expect to find? That we've really got them now! Found you!

What happened to building equity?

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum we have the guys who seem to have it too easy in almost every regard (haters gonna hate):

Which brand is everybody's favorite? Apple. Right.
Which brand still buys TV and billboards? Apple.
Which brand builds brick and mortar stores you actually want to visit?
Which brand DOES NOT HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT?

Just sayin.

Linear programming to save the earth

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As Stephen Hawking says, we are in fact going to have to leave the planet in order to stay alive. Assuming that this is the case – we definitely need to prepare to leave at a certain rate if we are to leave in time and stand any chance.

The time we have left will also be determined by the extra time we give ourselves by doing what we can, now, to save the environment. Of course we want to save the environment for its own sake anyway, but now we have a second reason - to win us time for the preparation to leave. The preparation itself will be determined, largely, by the amount of resources that can be allocated towards it, i.e. not toward saving the environment.

In other words, we need to put the greatest amount of effort into the environment and insodoing acquire the most time we can get, with the least expense to the preparation itself (in case we don’t make it).

If my memory serves me correctly (which it probably doesn’t), the mathematical tool needed to optimise two such grand plans is something called linear programming. But we will need an enormously complicated version of it, similar to the calculations used to determine our personal or corporate environmental footprint. Plenty of people are good at these calculations and it strikes me as something that needs to be calculated too if we are to really not waste any time and allow for the most pleasant time we have left here.