Adverblog reports a guerilla campaign. This time not by some new groovy agency but by the, gasp, consumer.

In the age of consumer generated content, "tagging" moves to the real world… It’s a guerrilla action with the objective of raising the level of consumers’ awareness about the quality of outdoor advertising in a city.

In Berlin and Seoul guerrilla "soldiers" have been tagging outdoor ads with personal evaluations delivering messages such as "this ad makes me sick", "I like this ad", "I find this campaign boring" etc…

I wish this took off although I am not holding my breath. If it did, I bet that the next thing we’d hear would be about ‘consumers’ being sued for ‘defacing someone else’s property’. Still, an example of the consumer reclaiming his attention, which I often describe as a positive externality that is ruthlessly traded by the media.

Tis time for another post about wine and more tales of luxury and excess. This time in New York City, another visit to the Yale Club – Château Lafite Wine Dinner:

Explore the links between Bordeaux and the new world. Discover the spirit of Château Lafite encapsulated in unique grapes. Meet Martin Sinkoff, recognized expert on the wines of Bordeaux, and learn about the Rothschild family—their history and their excellent wine. Purchased by the Rothschild family in 1868, Château Lafite was then and remains one of the greatest wine estates in the world.

The food and company were excellent. I found out that my right hand dinner companion, a NYC attorney, spent a year at my old college in his youth. It was years ago, before the college accepted women, but the continuity was there as despite the time gap we manage to share the same tutor. Small world indeed. The wines were carefully selected and paired with food to an exquisite effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since I posted to Blowing Smoke blog… one of the sexier blogging projects around. Got inspired by this.

Anyway, it is one of those posts where clicking through the links in it really pays off (tip: don’t miss the last one.)

Sent by a friend.

Dotcom was about ‘taking’. Web 2.0 is about ‘giving’.

- Hugh MacLeod

Note: Read the whole thing…

Mornin’, Noo York

Sunny Big Apple as I went for a run this Sunday morning… Starbucks coffee afterwards and then brunch and a leisurely day with Tracy of Waxxi fame. After that, it’s a tad downhill, off Noo Joisey for the week.

I’ll be editing a series of interviews with various social media creatures I did earlier in the month. So it’ll be quiet times on the blog. I’ll be getting away from the studio into the sunlight at every opportunity. But I hope that there will be moments worthy of pictorial record, which I shall post on my Flickr….

An IM conversation with Alec a few days back threw up this pearl of wisdom about the process of introducing and implementing stuff that actually works in companies.

Parallel reinvention and management argumentation:

1. we don’t need this
2. who’ll pay for it
3. here’s our solution we bought it and people will use it irrespective that it sucks
4. oh to hell with it let them do what they want
5. management adoption of the field’s preferred tool

So very very true. Sigh.

In the battle for eyeball, no front is left unmanned, no stone unturned, no washroom ignored…

Studies show that around three-quarters of diners in a restaurant will go to the toilets at some point during their meal. Clubbers go around 2.9 times during an average evening at a nightclub. Statistics from the UK suggest that the number of motorway service visits result in almost 100 million impacts for washroom ads each month.

Metrics rule:

The long dwell times—an average of 105 seconds for women and 55 seconds for men—give people plenty of time to take the information in. We have found that because of the one-to-one nature of the communication, there is high recall: up to 100% recall, and 78% prompted awareness.

The long dwell times?! Oh well, you know what they say, pecunia non olet.

I rest my case.

via Marketing blog

The Pew Internet Project tried do so with the release of a report titled Riding the Waves of Web 2.0: More than a buzzword, but still not easily defined.

Let’s get a few things clear right off the bat: 1) Web 2.0 does not have anything to do with Internet2: 2) Web 2.0 is not a new and improved internet network operating on a separate backbone: and 3) It is OK if you’ve heard the term and nodded in recognition, without having the faintest idea of what it really means.Let’s get a few things clear right off the bat: 1) Web 2.0 does not have anything to do with Internet2: 2) Web 2.0 is not a new and improved internet network operating on a separate backbone: and 3) It is OK if you’ve heard the term and nodded in recognition, without having the faintest idea of what it really means.

Disagree with 3). The number of people I have met that throw the term around without knowing about Tim O’Reilly’s article What is Web 2.0? is astounding. In a true buzzword fashion they picked up the meme (good) and attached a meaning to it from their context (good with caution) and stared to throw it around in the following fashion (not good):

The report looks at how online activity during the time known as Web 1.0 differed from that of Web 2.0, using data from market research group Hitwise to support its findings. It points out that the most common Internet activity to date is still sending and reading email, even with the popularity of IM, text, and social network site messaging.

Fully 53 percent of adult Internet users sent or read email on a typical day in December 2005—a figure virtually unchanged since 2000 when 52 percent of online adults emailed on a typical day. That’s more than instant messaging, blogging and online shopping combined. To close, the report compares Web 1.0 website community Geocities to Web 2.0 king MySpace. The Geocities model relied on “metaphors of place” while MySpace “anchors presence through metaphors of a person.”

The report states the obvious – Web 2.0, the social web, is about people. And I don’t think that’s going to change, even if the phrase itself gets tired or dies. Last Wednesday at an AOP conference about Content Evolution I saw a presentation by Tim O’Reilly talking about Web 2.0 but without mentioning the phrase much. Web 2.0 is a valid concept in as much as it’s not about the nuts and bolts of the internet but about increased understanding of what the net is capable of and how the various new behavioural patterns emerge.

These patterns can be built on to increase our options. They always enhance our understanding of the online space and occassionally fundamentally influence the way we interact, communicate, create, distribute and ultimately do business. I believe they bring back the way people communicate naturally (the markets are conversations meme). With a hindsight it’s easy to spot the trends as part of Web 1.0 but that’s because they have always been there. The fact is that very few people (notable exceptions are Tim Berners-Lee, the Cluetrain crowd and those who have been there from the start) understand what the internet, let alone the web, is about. Hence the whole dot com era and imposition of half-baked business models on it. Most people who use it don’t necessarily understand the internet. Well, most people who live on earth don’t necessarily understand it in all its aspects and the bigger picture may still elude us.. a very human condition. The internet has become an environment, pervasive and multi-faceted. And as with most environments understanding has never been a pre-condition of its use… as long as you don’t try to control it. Then it has a habit of blowing up in your face.

So, Web 2.0 still makes sense although various unsavoury marketing and media types have made it rather cheesy and ‘over-exposed’.

Ooops.