According to the UN’s telecommunications agency, The ITU, the number of worldwide internet users has reached over two billion people. Just imagine how many slices of cheese on Ryvita that lot gets through.

Add the two-billion internet users statistic to a quote from science writer Matt Ridley that ‘The internet is the latest and best expression of the collective nature of human intelligence’, and it would seem to hold exciting possibilities for digital marketing that uses ‘collective brain’-based insight. Read more »

Chatting to my good friend Jo recently, who is a primary school teacher, about methods of learning, it struck me that there are some clear parallels between classroom teaching methods and digital marketing.

As I took another gazzolop of sweet tea, I considered the fact that as education continues to gravitate towards increasingly stimulatory learning techniques, so digital advertising – whether it be online ads, social media campaigns or mobile marketing – also calls for similar measures to cut through and resonate. After all, success in both professions is essentially determined by how well you have inspired your audience to engage with the points you are trying to get across. Read more »

Everyone loves a good story. Some people read them in linear form, on pages constructed of actual paper (hey! old school!), occasionally raising a mug filled with tea towards their mouths, and making deep, guttural satisfied noises in the back of their throats.

Others consume the narrative piece-by-piece, in mini-snack form, as delicious nuggets of a character-driven plot, each bite-sized chunk squirreled away somewhere inside their phone, laptop, iPad or other carriers of media, until appetite comes calling once again. Read more »

Don’t you just love mad scientists? They used to be people you only saw on the telly. You know, blokes with lots of wispy, backcombed hair and eyes that looked like they were propped open with matchsticks. They had a perpetual look of wonderment and terror as if they had accidentally attached electric wires not to a Van de Graaf generator, but to their own genitalia instead.

But now every good agency has a mad inventor. Except they’re more clever than mad. And they’re not called mad scientists any more, either, but Creative Technologists (although they’re mad scientists at heart.) Read more »

It’s 2020. You’re standing in the Design Museum, musing over a new exhibition. You’re enjoying a cup of Intracoffecino (it’s a sort of reduced sugar, increased caffeine number, available intravenously, pumped directly into the side of your neck; it’s so the thing) and you’re doing the ‘gallery walk’ (i.e. bolt upright, furrowed brow, stepping softly heels first, one hand folded behind your back), homing in on the installation called ‘Websites as They Were’.

Your brow furrows a notch tighter as you read the little placard that hangs as a wafer-thin shard of light above a MacBook Pro. ‘The late 2000s saw many websites built around concepts with the IA addressed as an afterthought’. Read more »

‘Why are your ears pointed, Mr Spock?’
‘To heat up butter popcorn, Captain.’

People will always be a bit interested when someone takes the very familiar, gives it a tweak, and makes you see it in a different way.

The appeal is probably due to the child-like excitement that comes when ‘What if…’ and ‘Why not!?’ prevail over sound reasons not to. It’s fun. It’s unexpected. It pushes the boundaries. It’s precarious, and there’s a bit of jeopardy involved. Throw some innovative technology into the mix and the result is an interesting trend for reinventing the familiar, using digital means. Read more »