Tag: blog

Creative Similarities?

On the David Elsewhere stuff Tim just commented:

I liked spike’s version from a year or two ago.

With a link to this video:

It’s a different thing doing a different job. But I can see how one would perhaps make you think of the other. For sure.

Now I’ve no idea if Tim’s comment is a thinly veiled jibe or just a simple statement. I don’t know Tim. Or his intentions, so it’s really hard to tell.

He could be saying:

YOU ARE THIEVING FUCKTARDS WHO HAVE NICKED THE IDEA OF USING A GUY WHO MOVES FUNNY AROUND AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT FOR ADVERTISING PURPOSES

Or he could just be saying that he really quite likes this video and there’s just something about it that reminds him of the above Spike Jonez directed ad from the year 2000. But there’s something about the use of the word ‘version’ that makes me think there’s a hint of jibeyness about it. Or I could be suffering from blog-comment paranoia…

Ah well.

But it does relate to something that happened to me earlier on today. I met up with some lovely creative chaps who I’ve known for a while. They wanted to chat about an idea for a project. It just so happened that we’d already done exactly the same thing 4 years ago on the internet. Like totally exactly the same. So we laughed about it and moved on to chatting about some other ideas instead.

But if they’d talked to someone else about it there would be an identical thing being conceived and made at this exact moment in time. And at some point in a month or two people would be saying: “Oh my god, they ripped off that thing from 4 years ago”. And I’d never have known any different, apart from the fact that I really like these guys and I know that they wouldn’t intentionally have done that. But in another time-space scenario I’d have probably been dead cynical about it. For sure.

The Tea Buddy shenanigans a few months ago is yet-another example of a similarish thing being spotted and jumped on.

Even the Orange Balloon Race got accused of being un-original (see first comment here) because someone else had made a Balloon Race Game that existed on the Internet before (in spite of the fact it was just a Balloon Race game that took place inside one bit of flash on one site on the Internet – which seems hugely different to me).

I guess I’m taking a long way round to say:

  • In our line of work there’s doesn’t appear to be enough ideas to go round – have we run out?
  • During development it’s really hard to do global due-diligence on a creative idea (and certainly to check on an execution or production technique).
  • However, once something is live on the internet it’s very easy for well connected and observant individuals to spot similarities in things
  • Or are (un)happy creative coincidences just a fact of life? (I just remembered this great site that groups together ads that have almost identical ideas and art direction)

It’s tough. And it’s only going to get worse as we get more connected and more people see more stuff that they can make more connections between.

I guess the only answer is to try to have seen everything in the world ever. Or perhaps the creative industries should try to set up a global panel of idea guardians who can check all concepts at an early stage and make sure they don’t remind them of something else?

But for what it’s worth, as far as I know, no-one involved in the making of the David Elsewhere stuff has ever seen that Spike Jonez ad (at least not that they’re admitting).

EDIT: I just remembered another thing! My brain must be working OK-ish tonight. This point made by James Cooper ex-of-Dare now of Anomaly NY on Scampblog.

2. Be original. Same rules apply to when all you lot who moan about whether Bravia or Guinness or John Lewis was original or not. Poke’s nice unlimited site looks a little like a Motorola site, our nice Bravia site looks a little like a Pioneer site. The point is it’s not such a leap to imagine that creative brains come up with the same things. An amount of copying goes on, but these things right themselves in the end. No one is going to make a serious career out of being unoriginal – apart from The Chemical Brothers. There are trends in digital in the same way there are in TV. If you really want to stick out then you have to do something different and we all know how hard that is these days.

Well said that man.

The full, excellent, post on ‘how to do digital’ is right here.

David Elsewhere and Motorola

Here’s a new thing that Poke have just finished. Well it’s not completely new. It’s taken a bit of time to get out into the world for various reasons. in fact some of the very eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that I posted some of these clips once before – then they vanished ;-)

We spoke to Motorola about how they could do something that was a kind of hybrid between content and product demo (I blogged a couple of other examples that cropped up during research phase). Anyway they liked the idea and wanted us to create something a little different.

These videos are what we ended up with. In each one of them David Elsewhere ‘illustrates’ a key feature of the phone in a way that only he could…

The clips are totally new to YouTube (I just posted them right now) so don’t be surprised if they’ve had 3 views each – maybe they’ll never get more than 3 views. Who knows?

ModeShift: feature that allows you to switch between music and phone mode in one click

Camera: it should be obvious what a camera is

HapticTouch: A thing that makes it feel like there’s buttons, but there aren’t really…

CrystalTalk: for clear voice calls

The phone can be found here: http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/rokre8/

There’s a YouTube channel that contains all the clips here: http://www.youtube.com/user/motopoke. Or the official Motorola site is here (containing higher quality versions of the videos if that’s your bag).

A Hierarchy of Blogging

As I mentioned the other day I’ve been a little slack in my blogging recently.

I started having a bit of a think about my blogging behaviour to see if I could make sense of this most recent lull. I’m sure the self-analysis was partially brought on as an aftermath of Mental Detox Week. And because I’d just come back from holiday which was another screen-free period.

When I got back from holiday I dropped into a week of extremely tough work. Probably one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in the last couple of years. Plus Balloonacy was running a the time. Which didn’t leave any free time for blogging. It didn’t even give me enough time to get properly on top of my email leftovers from holiday week. And my to-do list started to run to a seemingly unmanageable length.

So I decided to set myself into max-efficiency mode. It took all my working time (and a bit extra) to get back to zero-inbox and a to-do list full of non-overdue items. Which I did. It took me a few days of hard graft. But it was worth it.

One of these days I’ll share my productivity setup with everyone – in the last couple of months I’ve finally found my own cut-down GTD style setup that really works for me – especially if I never go on holiday ;-)

Anyway once I’d caught up with emails and to-dos I figured that I ought to keep my life in order and have some fun before I got stuck into WordPress. So I went to Glastonbury. Which resulted in more emails to deal with, more to-dos and even less blogging.

At this point I started to think about some kind of ‘life hierarchy’ that perhaps I was unwittingly starting to adhere to. And of course there’s only one place to look when you’re thinking about hierarchies and life. Good old Abe Maslow.

Here’s his pyramid (re-created from this Wikipedia entry).

Maslow's Hierarchy

When I saw it, I realised that I could kind of apply my own version of a hierarchy to it. One that distills my new-found blog-life balance. Enter Tait’s Hierarchy of Blogging…

My Hierarchy of Blogging

I realised that my previous blogging behaviour had seen me jumping around all over the pyramid. Sometimes blogging (or at least twittering) when excreting. Occasionally blogging instead of getting the things done that pay my wages. And quite often blogging as a kind of proxy for a social life. Even going as far as being involved with setting up a blog (with a team of co-editors) dedicated to sexual prowess as promised by junk-emailers – lord knows I hope that’s not some neo-Freudian replacement for the last thing on Maslow’s third layer!

Anyway I’m not promising that I won’t start jumping randomly between the layers of the stack again. But for my own mental-well-being (and I think quality of blog posting), I’m going to try and sort out my lower-order needs before I start posting drivel.

I think I might have just fallen at the first hurdle.

And besides blogging can be good for helping out with sorting out some of the lower order stuff too. I’m sure it can. Can’t it…?

Webbys 2008

Just got back from the Webbys in New York. We were over there to pick up a People’s Voice for the Orange Never Ending Web Page. There’s evidently no photo of me picking up our Webby, so here’s a picture of Richard from Moo picking up their Webby instead, well done Moo chaps.

It was all really well put together and a lot of fun. Perhaps a little too much fun and there might have been too many refreshments on offer. But anyway.

I had a much better time than I normally do at that kind of thing. I think it’s because everyone was well, webby. So being the geek that I am I could easily get to common ground with folk about stuff I found at least a tiny bit interesting.

So sorry for not blogging. Got into a bit of a spiral of working. Partying. Sleeping. Hanging Over. Eating. And back to working again. And so the circle of (the last week of) life goes.

The Orange Balloon Race – Playballoonacy.com

Here’s the start of another major thing that we’ve been working on for Orange for a while now…

Registration is now open for the first Balloon Race Across the Internet.

Visit: playballoonacy.com

Basically we’re going to set off loads of balloons across the Internet. The one that goes the furthest in 7 days wins – and the prize is a £20,000 VIP trip to Ibiza including everything that you and 7 friends could hope for, ever. That’s it in a nutshell.

Oh and there’s all kinds of stars and bonus doo-dahs along the way – collect 5 stars and win stuff. Hit rainbows and get warped into the future and all that kind of thing. You know, like they do in games and stuff.

Sign up for the race

Visit the site now and get a balloon. Then when the race starts in 3 weeks you’ll be right up the front. Well you’ll be in the race anyway.

My lovely camel shaped balloon can be found here…

Be part of the race course

The course is made up of sites that have agreed to be part of the racecourse, or are about to agree to be part of the racecourse. That’s right folks. If you’ve got a blog or a website you can add it to the race by simply adding a small snippet of widgety code to your site. You can visit the site to sign up, but if you’re impatient and really want to add your site you can bust straight there using this URL: http://www.playballoonacy.com/account/sites

What’s in it for sites that take part? Well in hard terms it’ll drive traffic to your site. There’s going to be people visiting your site to see their balloons pass over it. And if the race passes over an interesting page people might just stop by to have a look. In softer terms it might just be a bit of fun.

Let Balloonacy commence.

Teabuddy Scandal Alert

teabuddy

Ouch. I really want to nip this one in the bud before it gets out of hand…

George Parker (who’s work and brutal honesty I admire a great deal) has written a rather fruity post about something that I wasn’t going to comment on.

Basically I got an unsolicited blogger outreach email last week regarding a new Tea Making site for Cravendale. I decided not to write about it for a number of reasons. But mainly because it’s a very similar idea to something that we did a few years ago (Teabuddy.com).

Then ‘someone’ sent me a link to the site with an ‘aren’t you pissed off’ kind of email. And I wasn’t massively. However, it is a bit strange when you get unsolicited email about something that so closely resembles a piece of work that you worked on.

Now somehow the story has blown up into this. It should be noted that all the words in the article are George’s own – and he’s not known for holding back…

It’s amazing how word spreads (and gets mutated) around these parts. I’m sure there’s nothing suspect going on at all, as we all know everything decent has already been done somewhere else, mostly. And when something sits this close to home it’s quite uncomfortable to hear people being called names and given a hard time on your behalf.

It feels a lot like someone’s heard a rumour I was being bullied at school, then they’ve gone round and punched some kid in the face really hard for looking at me the wrong way. I’m kind of grateful. But also kind of not.

In the sake of fairness and to show there’s no hard feelings round here, here’s another link to http://www.makethetea.com/, it’s actually a nice site. And is rooted in a really good idea.

Compfight.com

compfight.com

Andy our latest new Poke chap alerted me to the awesomeness of Compfight.com. It’s a Flickr search tool that allows you to find and view lots of Flickr images quickly with some key filters (like Creative Commons licensing). It’s a top way of finding images for comps, research and inspiration. Nice one.

I recommend you subscribe to Andy’s blog, it’s really rather good.

Two Things I Thought Everyone Had Seen, But Turns Out They Haven’t, Yet

If you have seen these already, sorry. I thought that they’d done the rounds but I’ve mentioned both of them to a few people who’ve all looked at me blankly. So I thought I should share…

Facebook in real life:

And this guy who breaks out a cracking (if slightly politically incorrect) stand up routine at his high school speech thingy:

Although it doesn’t seem to have loads of views on YouTube on things like break.com it’s had well over a million views, and the scandal has been picked up in the media, Doc Searls has blogged about it and there’s a Facebook group supporting his right to free speech.

Portfolio Night

Portfolio Night 6

I was lucky enough to go to Portfolio Night 6 last night. Set up by the enterprising young dudes behind http://ihaveanidea.org/ it’s billed as a chance for young creatives to meet creative directors (for a fee of £10). I felt like it was a chance for me to meet young talented people (for a fee of nothing with a couple of beers thrown in for free).

Without giving away any personal details about people that I saw I was amazed at the disparity in skills that I saw. Some of it was obviously about talent. But there were a bunch of people who’d obviously been given a really rubbish schooling in what ‘advertising’ is all about. A shocking image with a quirky line and a logo (bottom left invariably bottom right invariably [thanks Ben for pointing out my stupid error]) can’t be the basic unit of advertising any more, can it?

I met a few youngsters that really stood out: if I thought I could hide Jai and Wal from the world and keep them as my little secret I’d be tempted. But they’re already out there, blogging with the best of them and doing placements at great places. So they’ll be fine whatever happens.

There’s another couple that I really really liked, but I’m keeping them secret for now whilst ‘discussions’ take place…

I hope my comments were useful to the people I spoke to. I’m not sure they were mostly. But I hope at least I was polite and respectful (unlike some of my contemporaries who I heard being a little bit mean if I have to be honest…).