CrapHammer

Teenage affluenza is spreading fast.

I think I should just put "this blog brought to you by Get Shouty" as my new header or something.  This video gets major kudos.  Wonderful way to package and present this message in a world filled with "do something" videos.

www.30hourfamine.org

Is your information beautiful?

As the data available to us grows in complexity, it becomes a challenge to utilize this data effectively.

My friend, Katie the Shouter, once told me a story about the ability of an individual to relate to complex data, quickly and effectively. 

A famous race car drive, whose name escapes me, was coming up to a critical lap in a race.  As he approached a blind, hair-pin turn, he suddenly slammed on the breaks.  He emerged on the far side of the turn at a crawl and was able to navigate one of the worst accidents in the course's history.

Afterwards, everyone wanted to know how he knew to slam on the breaks, avoid the accident and subsequently win the race.  He replied that the color of the audience in the stands had "changed".  In mass, thousands of people all looking at him (as the leader in a race) became a color in his mind.  Suddenly as he approached the blind hair-pin turn, all these people had their heads turned.  They were not looking at him, but down the track where the accident was.

He had milliseconds to act.  And his response not only won him the race, but may have saved his life.

This got me thinking about all the charts, data models and academic research around complex relationships between data.  I've seen some pretty crazy charts in my day. 

Charts that are anything but actionable to someone not specialized in their creation and analysis.  I believe the answer is to present information that is "actionable" at a human level. And I propose that the model for doing this is to make information beautiful.

I would argue that this process of bringing beauty to information is about finding simplicity in alignment with chaos.  Both exist:  the design allows us to simplify the experience and yet the complexity of underlying data is maintained.  And this experience causes us pause.  We are struck not just by the image, but by our ability to relate to the underlying information.

Not surprisingly, Katie also found a wonderful example of beauty out of chaos.  Beauty in function and aesthetic.  The image below is from the Incom Project.  I found the reference to it on Get Shouty's secret new company blog.  The image below shows the google search terms from April to June of 2006 overlaid geographically on a world map.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Time to vote!

http://bandbattleblog.blogspot.com/

Join the Canadians in supporting the amazingly funky Bony M.

The Retail Crap-Off

Two stories.  Many votes.  One "winner."

But first, anyone interested in marketing in the retail space, I highly recommend you read the (evil) Northern Planner's diatribe on retail.  It's long but full of wonderful insight and actionable recommendations.

VW
This one comes from Matt at the Digital Perm.

Matt was in love with the VW Touareg.  He drooled on his popcorn when seeing it in the latest Bourne movie and was following every campaign, commercial and announcement about the car with bated breath.  We even have reports that he was considering making it the background image for his blog.

Guy and his dream car.  No big deal.  But get this.  He'd even managed to get his wife to love the car.  And they had just bought their last car less than a year ago.  Jealous yet?  I know I am.

I'd say VW was sitting pretty sweet. They have engaged Matt and likely many others as well.

And then Matt saw the offer.  "Sign up for a joyride in the Touareg 2 and receive two free tickets to the Bourne Ultimatum."

Dream Car.  Guy movie with a dream car in it.  Driving said dream car.  Matt didn't even blink.  He signed up.  The site let him choose the type of car to drive, when would be a good time to take a test ride and even when and how to contact him.

Within 15 minutes he had a car salesman calling him on his cell phone leaving messages.  But hadn't he just said he wanted to be contacted via email?  But hey, it's the Touareg 2.  Better listen to the man, Matt.  Turns out they have a hot offer until the end of the month and that he couldn't pass it by.  No mention of his joy ride.  Just a hard sales pitch.

But the best part is the email follow-up.

Way to blow it VW.

The hardest part of retail is that you can't sell your idea to corporate and be done with it.  You gotta take it all the way down through a channel you may or may not control.  But not fighting this fight is bad news.

P.S.  I love that the fist image on Matt's blog of the car was "vwjoy.jpg" and the last one was "vwsux.jpg".

LCBO Drops the Plan-o-bomb
Here in Ontario, we have to buy most of our alcohol from the Government (LCBO) or The Beer Store.  Likely explains why Canadians are more involved in politics.  We have to be or they may mess with our beer.

And until recently, my local LCBO (Danforth and Broadview) was a classy little place.  I'd grown accustomed to going there to get all my alcoholic needs.  Their selection of beers ran to the higher end and allowed me to get all my Montreal micro-brews, peruse some wines and even pick up some random other tidbits.  But a few weeks ago, this all changed.

I arrived to find that the beer area was a disaster.  There were now cases of cheap beer stacked everywhere.  And all the micro-brews were pretty much relegated to a single warm shelf.  All the refrigerated shelves now brimming with cases of Molson, Labatts and other domestic, mass-produced weasel-piss.

After a few visits, I came to realize this state of affairs was "planned."  I approached one of the cashiers and asked, "What happened to the beer area?"  They shared my frustration but informed me that someone in corporate had sent a new "plannergram" and they had no choice but to implement it.  They went on to say something along the lines of "You would think one of them might actually come and visit the store, before or after, eh?" 

I stopped by again just the other day and it was the same.  And this time, when I asked the cashier, they let me know that "someone at corporate is very smart and so it must be a good thing." 

And while I'm sure these changes look great on a balance sheet and on the neat little plannergram someone in corporate designed, it shows that retail is more than planning and oversight.  It requires visiting stores.  But fine.  So the store is a mess, just give me my beer.  But nope.  Turns out they haven't received a beer shipment in some time which is why all the micro-brews are depleted.

I have since had to return to the Beer Store for all my beer needs.  I am happy to report they have my micro brew in stock.  And it's almost worth having to wait in line with the wino's returning empties and breathing the fumes of many an open beer bottle.  Sigh.

Tally the votes!

So.  Send in your votes.  Who has a larger craphammer?

- LCBO - store relations gone astray, store dis-empowerment, warm beer
- VW - car-salesman-itis, bad campaign management, blowing it

Photos: LexnGer   

Guerilla marketing

Sigh. Came across this and was going to leave it alone, but it has my goat.

"Guerilla marketing is a low-budget, unconventional spin on marketing that often doesn’t feature the actual product at all."

source: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/cadbury-gorilla

At first I thought this was an attempt to be ironic.  That the author was playing with the fact that the campaign they were writing about involved a dude in a very expensive gorilla suit.  But no.  He continues:

"Also known as stealth marketing, this type of campaign tricks the consumer into thinking about a certain product, without them realizing they have been exposed to commercial advertising."

Has the world changed? Am I now out of the loop?  I had always given credit for this term to Jay Conrad Levinson.  As does wikipedia by defining Guerilla Marketing as "an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget"

I always considered it the OPPOSITE of what trendsetting is claiming.  It was all about authenticity.  About small being the new big.  Flyers under wipers.  Local events.  Etc.

But let's look at the clip that this group felt qualified as "guerilla marketing" shall we?

While they are attempting to bastardize Guerilla Marketing, they do come clean with the term "stealth marketing."  I'm looking for an even better term for the above.  No Idea Marketing?  Off Target Marketing?  No Insight Marketing?  Please.  Join in with your suggestions. 

A Better Example of Guerrilla Marketing:

Freedom and Control

There's a lot of talk about privacy afoot of late.

• Facebook opens up to search engines.  User profiles will be findable on Google, etc.
• Reports of Facebook being banned in Iran.

And just today is the launch of a bill of rights for users of the social web.

Key to this initiative are the following points:

• Ownership of their own personal information
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others;
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

In order to accomplish this, we have to be able to support rights and access to our RSS feeds.  Has your content been misused by an ad or spam link site?  What if areas of your site or service have private information in them?  Right now, RSS becomes a risk.

I've been struggling with this inability to protect my RSS feeds for a number of applications we have been working on.  It turns out there are protocols for accomplishing this.  Bloglines presented a most notable option.  The challenge?  Google (and Feedburner) don't abide by any such restrictions.

Andy Beard breaks down the details for those interested in a deeper understanding.  What's intriguing is that Facebook becomes a text book case for what this means.  In essence, if you use the RSS feeds and someone runs them through google reader, your information and all the rights you've set in facebook can be bypassed and misused.

Image Source: armcurl

The Kaiser calls...

As head of the imperial overseas Canadian unarmed forces still loyal to the Kaiser, I urge each and every reader to support the Kaiser in this critical effort to overcome the evil northern planning forces.

(embedded video above)

Join us in upholding the funky and amazing Boney M.  Or I will visit each of your offices in my traditional lack-of-garb and do what any strong Canadian force will do.  Um.  Protect you?

A week away

I'm back.  What a wonderful respite it was away from work, the city and so many pressures.

Rather than move into posting, I'd rather catch up on all the amazing writing everyone else has been up to.  So I'll just post a photo or two and some experiments around the campfire using a long exposure, iStopMotion and some flashlights.  Enjoy.

(embedded stop frame movie above)

Painting with light slideshow on (flickr)

music source: geometer