Ode to technology

Being stuck in the #ashtag wasn’t actually that bad. Yes I missed my wife. Yes I missed my kids. But really, I was connected the whole time: iPhone and Facebook made it seem like I was very near home. Crazy how the world has changed in just a year or two. Made me think of this again:

CAMPAIGNS, PROGRAMS and PLATFORMS

Love this RG/A talk. At 30 mins in there’s a nice way of splitting up what agencies do for clients into 3 groups:

I love thinking about platforms (Nike+ etc) – far more exciting for me and far more rewarding for punters too.

Very interesting take on the type of skills we need in agencies these days. A neat chart to articulate Traditional Storytellers vs Digital peeps and Thinkers vs Do-ers. Interestingly I would put my self slap bang in the middle (dunno whether thats good or bad?!)

Full vid:

Music I like, Music I used to Like, Music you like

Finally, after all the joking, we’ll get to be in Minority Report

Astounding how Sci-fi has such a high hit ratio of fiction becoming reality. And the time it takes its speeding up. This is amazing:

Molecular Gastronomy

Had the most amazing experience with Bernard Lahousse, an internationally renowned food scientist and founder of CREAX Food. He advises all the top chefs in the world on the chemistry behind food. He’s the guy behind all the weird science that Heston Blumenthal uses. So he gave us a great talk on food pairing, the essence of which is: ingredients that taste good together always have a certain molecule in common. He’s created a site that documents all the possible flavour combinations for any given ingredient. It’s a bit like the visual thesaurus but for food. Another interesting thing he mentioned was THE perfect way to cook a steak. Its a myth that you can ‘seal in the juices’ by searing the meat quickly – that hissing you hear is moisture escaping. The best way to cook a steak is… bake it on a low heat (53ºC to be precise) for an hour then whip it out and sear it for 10 secs on each side. It will be perfectly cooked and the most tender and juicy steak you ever did have – with no resting or anything.

But the great thing was after we’d talked about the theory in abstract we then got to actually taste molecular gastronomy at its best. We were incredibly privileged to wrangle a private opening of Roger Van Damme’s Lunch lounge Het Gebaar especially for us. This is like the Belgian equivalent of The Fat Duck and it was quite simply the most amazing food experience I’ve ever had. We had a live demo of some food science, liquid nitrogen etc. and then into several courses of exquisite dining and great wine. The food itself was very poncey obviously, but I guess it’s the haute couture of cooking so you can forgive its pretentiousness. Beans on toast tonight.

UrbEx

Great talk from Reginald Van de Velde about urban exploration, or Urbex as its known. These guys visit abandoned buildings and forbidden places and take the most amazing photographs documenting their adventure. It’s a very secretive and respectful scene – their aim is protect and preserve these phenomenal places they discover. Their motto: “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints…”

I.R.L.

It seems in this digital age that doing things in the real world (as opposed to online) has become such a rarity that ‘in real life’ itself has acquired its own internet abbreviation: IRL.

This got me thinking, as did Russell Davis’ post digital thought, about purely digital things being a bit boring now. How many more microsites do we need? The exciting stuff is connecting real life with digital. A couple of examples are Doritos Dodgeball by AMV where web visitors can aim dodgeball canons at human targets IRL.

And Fallon’s Blast Studio for the BBC where you can make a mess IRL with various bits of cool arty equipment that seem to be left over from Fallon’s other campaigns for Sony and the BBC.

These kind of cross-media experiences are neither cheap or easy to put together and its interesting they’ve been made by a couple of big traditional agencies making deliberate inroads into the digital world.

EVOLVE at Foot Locker with Nike Tuned 10

My D&AD talk at Digital Pecha Kucha (President’s Lectures)

If it wasn’t for those pesky kids

There’s been a lot of news stories about the Mosquito teen repellent recently. You know, the device that emits a high frequency sound that teens can hear but adults can’t – something to do with Presbycusis (the aging ear). It stops chavvy teens hanging around outside newsagents, spitting and fingering each other or whatever they do. Unfortunately the decent teens studying A-Levels and not spitting or fingering outside newsagents (much) can hear it too but that’s another story. The interesting thing is those cheeky kids have only gone and converted the ultrasonic sound into a ringtone that us meddling adults can’t hear. Useful for using your mobile in forbidden areas like school or borstal. This is genius, and has gone some way to restoring my faith in the youth of today as they say in The Telegraph or Gen Y as marketeers call them these days.