A month is most definitely a long time in the world of the interwebz.  So, as we didn’t have time to run one of our meme-tastic #KittenCamp events in April, here’s a quick run down of some of the most LOL-some memes from the last month or so.

And, worry ye not.  If memes and LOLing is your thing, then come along to the May #KittenCamp event taking place in Hoxton Square on 28th May – sign up here for free LOLZ here: http://kittencampdigitalshoreditch.eventbrite.com/ Read More »

Trying to create an ad as irreverent, funny and memorable as the Old Spice “man your man could smell like” is a gargantuan task that many have tried to achieve, and almost universally failed to do.

However, DollarShaveClub.com is within a whisker of being just as good. From a migrant worker to a bear, this ad is better than good. In fact, we’d go so far as to say it’s “F***ing Great”. Read More »

Weeks after its initial release the Kony 2012 video, from the small campaigning organisation Invisible Children, which aims to bring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to justice for crimes against humanity, still tops the viral charts and has now racked up more than 86 million views, but can it happen again?

Invisible Children co-founder Bobby Bailey, who left the charity in 2009, has created another film that focuses on the mothers of the child soldiers who are often too scared to return home because of reprisal fears. Read More »

Barack Obama’s campaign team has long been praised for it’s innovative use of technology as a story telling an organising tool and developing a wide ranging social media arsenal, but with a new video it has upped the ante once again.

Obama 2012 has just released a YouTube video called “The Road We’ve Travelled” in which members of the administration past and present, including Mayor Rahm Emanual, David Axelrod, and Vice President Joseph Biden, tell the story of their first term, and the tough decisions that had to be made, and what has been achieved. Read More »

A lot of fan-fair around The Guardian’s open journalism campaign, Three Little Pigs – but did it live up to the hype? There was a comment on here last week that many of the ads we chose for January’s highlights didn’t have concept. The sort of interaction we’re looking for. However, you couldn’t accuse this of not having a concept – surely? Very interesting and right out of the BBH playbook.

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I’ve been wondering if a fixation with viral is preventing brands from getting the coverage their campaigns deserve?

There used to be something really cool, edgy and subversive about viral marketing. Like someone telling a secret online that suddenly ignited and spread like wildfire to the four corners of the Earth – boom! And there’s nothing quite like content sharing on this scale to take a brand global. Read More »

Everything is becoming more complicated.

It’s a given that consumers are spending less time on more tasks, giving everything less attention, and generally skipping around loads of subjects at any one time on Twitter, Facebook, TV, email, text and a thousand other digital touchpoints.

Now, the challenge of the digital marketer to gain entry into the consciousness of the time-and-touchpoint-squeezed consumer is greater than ever.

So it struck me as interesting when I read a quote in an essay by Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that ‘consciousness is not unlike Twitter – millions of mundane messages bouncing around, all shouting over one another, with only a few rising as trending topics’.

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First up from January is Volkswagen’s Super Bowl teaser campaign, The Dog Chorus. No wonder the Empire has gone to the dogs if this is all Darth Vader can muster to strike fear into the hearts of the rebels.

An amazing idea executed beautifully. Now don’t get me wrong, I can see in the Twittersphere that ‘Star Wars’ themed ads are hitting overload – but this a nice follow-up to VW’s excellent ‘Dark Side’ video last year. Read More »

Meme: ‘A self-propagating unit of social imitation; something that people repeat and pass along’. Or, ‘Memes replicate data. And just as genes replicate genetic data, memes replicate cultural ideas’. Or, ‘lolcats’.

However you describe them, everyone loves a good meme. And, since the term was popularised by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ‘The selfish gene’, advertising has been responsible for generating many well-known examples. (Here’s one, oops sorry…no, two examples (in one): ‘Will it blend?’ for Blendtec.) And with the connectedness and social media channels offered by the web for brands to spread and share content, you would have thought that conditions were perfect for many more… Read More »

I used to have a boss with an amazing knack for sidling up to the desk of a junior researcher late on a Friday afternoon to ask, “How are you fixed?”.

This meant one thing: a flash poll or fast-turnaround survey put into the field that day and reported back to the client as soon as it was done. A flash poll in those days, for me, was the first sign that a client was in trouble. Some crisis had hit and we needed to dive in to understand how much people knew, how much they were affected by that knowledge and how to fix any damage to the brand or bottom line. We joked that we needed a big red button to push to set off a siren so that everyone would know that it was going to be a long night or two. Read More »