Blue

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...

Ideas That Changed the World

I was given this book many years back. The author, Felipe Fernandez Armesto, portrays human history in terms of a series of intellectual and conceptual discoveries, adopted and understood by civilizations over time. I think it almost works better than a regular history book in the sense that history as a discipline is too much of a backward narrative for me. One tends to think of history as

event-facts

. But events are almost entirely the result of ideas, or sub-ideas (like the idea that say, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand needs to die).

When I see the world in terms of ideas and ages, and ages made from ideas, then everything makes so much more sense. Something like the whole of religion looks like just another man made idea, like cooking one's food, or democratic rule.

As the book begins from prehistoric time, one already is given a sense of the

whole

of humanity and what it means to be a race that grows off/with/out of planet earth.

By understanding, in this way, the ages and every smaller increment of time possible, I believe one is in a far better position to make educated predictions about the cycles or ages of at least the relatively near future. At least that's how I see it.

Check it out on

Goodreads

What's up with rugby fashion?

As a former/part-time colony dweller, I've never been that impressed by the British. Except that one time when my mate Paul did a stand-up comedy set back in the Obz days and cracked some wicked-funny AIDS jokes. But that was then. So I'm a little curious as to the British shop aura about the intersection of Bleecker and Charles Streets in NYC. An intersection-aura, if you will.

Within about a 25m radius of one another there is a Ralph Lauren Rugby store, a Gant Rugger store (amusing) and a Burberry Brit store (in case Burberry wasn't British enough for you already it's now more British) . These are not seasonal clothing collections, they are fully fledged sub-brands. Actually Gant Rugger looks more like American-preppy-plaid-tending-toward-baseball but I nevertheless sense that there is some unspoken and rather permanent equity to being British right now, at least in the US.

I won't say it's a trend because I haven't really seen people adopting the look quite as much as I have seen stores popping up, so I can only describe this as a rather insistent aesthetic.


Try not to laugh... I mean, cool logo bro.


Nobody's laughing now


"Mine's just a few blocks from here - what do you say? Did I mention I'm British?"

Meh

Actually kinda depressed for not having claimed the name way back - could have made a fortune. How obvious was that... Jeez.

Absolut bottle tops and Illy tin lids. Wait, what?

Go find an Absolut bottle and twist the lid on and off a few times. Now go and do the same with a tin of Illy coffee. Sick!

Is this a kinetic aesthetic? Whatever it is, more of this vibe is needed everywah.

The Obsession with Digital

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

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.

Taglines

Imagine a world without taglines.

How would you judge brands?

Firstly, you would be forced to judge them by their names. A great brand name is a gateway to all manner of brand success (and I will definitely be sharing more of my thoughts on that). Secondly, you would be forced to feel brands - feel the unique composite of their vibe, and not be limited by only verbal communication.

So often a perfectly reasonable 30 sec TV spot has whatever decent message it just tried so hard to get across replaced by a perfectly rubbish few words flashed across the screen right at the end. A picture is worth a thousand words? Well the word equivalent of 7500 frames of genius cinematic production has just been replaced in the viewer's mind by, wait for it...

Ford. Drive One.

Why not just shut up?

Taglines are one of those things that people feel forced to create and compete on because the next guy just did it. And now we have a whole new sub-medium where the primary call to action is a fear that a competitor might occupy the same territory if one doesn't grab it first.

Anyhow, in terms of brand personality, judging a person by their actions and not their words is regarded to be better, and one would normally avoid making judgements of a person by what or who they say they are. Especially if they babble the same sweet nothings at you every time.

Really?

HP – Expanding possibilities
AMD – The smarter choice

Way decent:

Virginia is for lovers
Alaska - B4UDIE
Scotland the brand
South Africa - Alive with possibility
Nike - Just do it
The Independent - It is, are you?