Bond Product Placement Mayhem

Ford Ka
Coke Zero
Swatch

Is Bond going to superseed iRobot as the most product placemented movie ever?

Jack White isn't happy with Coke.

What do consumers think? We are going to find out...

Physical data

An original way of gaining information from the public through a participative, physical data visualization. a row of 5 large perspex cylinders act as a series of bar charts, each filled with a different colored badge featuring a statement about how passers-by answer a specific question, such as how they may or may not spend their time or ‘what did you do last week?’. as anonymous participants remove & keep badges the levels in the cylinders drop, producing an instant reflection of what are the most & least popular statements. in addition, alongside the tubes are postcards asking visitors to predict the levels in the tubes on a future date

Now that's an Ad

If you want people to look at your ad, make it interesting enough to share:


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

The Quantified Self

host of sites springing up to help people track the trends in their real life behaviour. click. and an article in the washington post.

track where you have been: BrightKite.com
track your driving habits: MyMileMarker.com
track your sexual habits: Bedposted.com

Is this some quest for identity creation? Self Affirmation. Whatever, there is a lot of data being captured here for free.

YouTube = Shazam + on demand Radio + MTV = better than myspace

Everyone thinks of MySpace or lastfm for music, but it looks as if YouTube is the real winner.

Was talking to a fairly mainstream couple last night about how they use YouTube. They both primarily used it to search for song lyrics of songs they heard on the radio during the day, they typed the lyrics in found the name of the artist got to watch the video of a song they really liked, and got linked to all their other songs too. Simple.

Avril Lavigne's "girlfriend" is now the most popular video on Youtube of all time racking up 100,708,906 million views to date... And of the top 20 all time videos 13 of them are music videos.

YouTube is a powerful music marketing tool and Metallica are actively embracing that - Read here with the Metallica YouTube channel. They show all the videos of kids in their bedrooms playing their songs. Very Nice.

Blurring On and Off line worlds: Part 2

More on the blurring of On and Offline worlds here.

Spot the difference?

I'm convinced that young people today have about the same level of sophistication when it comes to deconstructing advertising as they did 20 years ago. Not because they are less smart, but mainly because they watch TV with one eye and do 4 other things at the same time, and they just don't think about it that much. I want to test classic ads from the 80s and see if they engage young people as much today.

Or perhaps its already happening?

Data as art

This is nice.



more creative data here.

Youth Suicide hike linked to technology use?

American mediacal association has found alarming spikes in suicides in the under 20s. And according to this article some of the reasons are because technology is atomising the family structure:

"Kids and family members are spending more and more time apart," she said. "Apart might mean being on the computer. Kids and their families are not watching TV together, they're not eating meals together, they are not talking to each other nearly as much."

"There is a lot of data that shows when families don't eat together, kids get into trouble. And trouble means drug use, alcohol use, sex and suicide," she said. "Parents need to be more involved in the decision-making process about what their kids are doing.

Funny to think now that watching lots of TV is seen as a good old fashioned wholesome family activity.

Staying Younger for Longer

Pupils starting secondary school in Britain must legally stay in education until they are 17 according to the BBC. This decision has an impact for youth brands because it means children are dependent on their parents for longer.

Today, parents are not only paying the family mortgage and bills, increasingly they are funding youth culture; the shopping, the gaming, the technology, the communication. And if they are paying for it - they get to be involved in it. The relationship between youth and their parents is changing, and brands ignore mum and dad at their peril.

Viewzi - Visual Search Engines

www.viewzi.com

Still tiny, and I'm not sure google are worried, but I actually liked this more 'visual' way of searching for content, i'm going to use it as well as google. As we become an increasingly visually literate culture it makes sense.

There is also: searchme.com - getting slightly more traffic than Viewzi, but it has been around longer and has declined from its peak a few months back.