[ paul isakson ]

Arcade Fire: Black Mirror Interactive Video

Arcade Fire has done it again. First it was with Neon Bible. Now they're letting you be the studio engineer on Black Mirror. I'm certainly a fan of their music, but am an even bigger fan of what they're doing online to let their fans play with their music videos. Well done, Arcade Fire. Well done.

Act Now, Or Forever Hold Your Peace

Just a couple of reminders for two things that have deadlines for participation at the end of this week.

1) If you want to get in on helping John Grant write his speech, get the links and details here.

2) If you haven't voted on the topic, and/or you're interested in writing a chapter for version 2.0 of The Age of Conversation, get the details here.

O.K. That's all. Carry on.

Image Credit

Havaianas Ambient Flower Beds

There's also a very interesting welcome mat idea.

All done by BBDO.

Found

The Next "Age of Conversation"

If you didn't get in on The Age of Conversation but wished you had, here's a chance to participate in its forthcoming "kissing cousin." Drew and Gavin have announced that they are ready to organize a second book only this time, they're reaching out earlier and further.

First, go vote for what you think the book's subject/theme should be by the end of this week. They've narrowed it down to three broad topics:

• Marketing Manifesto
• Why Don't People Get It?
• My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

Then, if you're interested in authoring a chapter in the new book, email Drew to let him know. All the details are available in either post from Drew and Gavin, so be sure to visit those if you need more info.

And lastly, if you haven't picked up a copy of Age of Conversation, you should. Not only is it a worthwhile read, but all the proceeds go to Variety, the children's charity (as they will for the upcoming book).

Goode Therapy / Trying Something New

If you've come by here a bit, you might notice that I don't talk much about the work my agency is doing/has done. This has very much been a conscious decision in the spirit of, "Nobody likes a bragger," something that my parents instilled in me at a very early age.

But I want to try this out. Not to show off what we're doing, as that's not me at all, but in the spirit of sharing and hopefully, to get some constructive feedback and thoughts if you feel so inclined. If you think this is a bad idea for me to start doing, feel free to let me know that as well. My mind is far from made up on if this will stick or not. For now, I'm just going to try it on and see how it feels. Anyway...

Virtual Therapy is something we just launched for Starz to help them promote Head Case, an original series of theirs. They came to us with a request for something that we could create in a short time frame which would help get the word out to more people about the show. Anyway, Let Dr. Goode analyze you and see what your diagnosis is.

Like I mentioned above, if you've got any thoughts, please feel free to share them. And thanks for humoring me on this while I work through it.

A Sign of iPhone Things to Come?

Not sure how I missed this one a couple weeks back. Good thing I dropped in at Left Pocket to see what my friends at Integer have been looking at lately.

While I find it hard to believe that Starbucks would have much interest* in this due to past experiments with mobile devices that didn't work out, it is an interesting idea and use for the iPhone.

Not only is the interface design attractive, it also seems like a more valuable use for Semacode tags than having them be used to send people to a URL on their mobile device. (Assuming the Semacode tag links to a bank account/credit card.)

What's most exciting about it to me is the potential it points to for what the iPhone can do once the SDK gets released by Apple (why are they holding this up again?) in February.

Things like this just might be what get me to stop waiting for the second generation model to come out. Then again, maybe not. What's a few more months, right?

* It might be true that a lot of iPhone users drink Starbucks, but I don't think the vast majority of Starbucks customers have iPhones. Therefore, this would be an expensive undertaking for them (consider all the back-end technology needed) with little ROI, not to mention the potential of making all of their non-iPhone customers upset for having to still wait in lines.

Adam Tensta - My Cool

Thought this was an interesting video from Swedish hip hop artist Adam Tensta.

Bad Design 911

This one seems to be making the rounds, so you may have caught it elsewhere already. If not, you can get all of the printable sticker sheets here, courtesy of Design Police.

Found via Suz.

Write John Grant's Speech

John Grant has sent out a request via the Plannersphere on Facebook and Plannersphere .ning. Here is the full text:

Planning Begins at 40: Crowd Source My Speech?

In July I am going to speak at an event hosted at JWT in London (along with Jeremy Bullmore, Jon Steel and others) celebrating 40 years of planning and looking ahead too.

I'm not sure I have anything new to say on the matter that I haven't been banging on about for some years. So... My idea is that instead of presenting my views I get 40 fellow planners from diverse backgrounds to help me put it together. I would open a blog and for the next 3 months we'd just talk about the brief (ie taking this as an opportunity just like any other for a piece of communication to have some sort of effect). We'd then write the presentation together, pick interesting visuals or creative ways to bring it to life, and finally write a speech which I would simply read out on behalf of the team.

All of which depends on if this grabs 40 of you. I'm going to crosspost this on .ning plus the facebook planning groups and give it 1 week. If 40 people say they are interested then we have a project. (If not I'll have to think of something else!) Do say if you'd like to take part (first come first served) & add comments & ideas

:J

If you're interested, you can get back to him through either post.

[ image credit ]

As A Whole, We're Not Measuring Up

WARC published an article (.pdf available below if link goes inactive) yesterday stating that marketing effectiveness has reached an all-time low. The article is based on the Global Marketing Effectiveness Report, a study conducted by the Fournaise Marketing Group with 3,000 marketing professionals from around the world.

Here are some of the key findings reported in the article:

• 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers.

• Estimated wastage rates varied from 45% for business-to-business marketers, through to 65% for business-to-consumer.

• Just one in ten of respondents have automated systems in place to track the effectiveness of their spend.

• Of the 55% of marketers who do track the results of their spending, 80% do so manually, spending hours capturing, compiling and analysing data.

• Questioned on strategy, 70% of marketers believe that short-term revenue-boosting and lead-generation campaigns are more important than long-term intangible brand building (15%). A clear indication that marketers are under pressure more than ever before to generate results.

• Tracking marketing effectiveness topped the 2008 wish lists of 35% of marketers, and made the top three for 70%.

Hmm. Do you think that maybe it's time to start changing the way we do things?

Download Article

[image credit]