We finally got to the point of deciding that our blog represented us much better than a static website ever could. So, here it is...enjoy.
Award submissions can be tedious affairs. The prospect of preparing all those facts and figures to prove ROI and effectiveness. The pages and pages of do’s and don’ts. The sometimes nonsensical category choices. Well here’s some good news. If you’ve longed for some straightfoward awards that exist solely to reward a bloody good idea, you’ve just found them. Here are The Chip Shop Awards!
The Chip Shops celebrate the idea, not its context. Good ideas win. Bad ideas don’t win. End of. They’re about fostering and recognising creativity with no boundaries and no rules.
Now in their seventh year, we anticipate that this year’s international Chip Shop Awards will be the best ever. Why? Well, because Swamp’s Creative Director, Andrew Brown, is judging them.
Andrew is no stranger to judging top awards, having already been on the panel for Cream, New York Festivals, FAB and the D&AD. For the Chip Shops he sits on an another esteemed panel which includes the likes of JWT, Glue and Leo Burnett. You can see them all here (cool pic Drew!).
So why not dig out that ace project you made for a client that never saw the light of day? Or resurrect that great advertising idea you had for a brand that you don’t even work for. You can enter the Chip Shops with anything. In fact, it’s only limited by your imagination. If it’s a great idea, it might win. Tell your pals (and buy Andrew lots of lager). http://www.chipshopawards.com/
Chairman's Award Winner - The Sun does The Economist by The Black Hole
Steve Jobs (apparently) doesn’t like Adobe. He called them lazy and says that Flash is buggy and causes systems to crash. Flash is notoriously slow on a Mac and in its 3 year existence the iPhone has never supported it, now it appears the iPad won’t support it either. Apple lovers better get ready to see a lot of blue Lego blocks.
Though, according to Jobs, this needn’t be a cause for concern; HTML5 is coming to the rescue. Driven by the w3 Consortium, it promises to be a worthy successor to Flash. It can handle complex screen interactions in a similar way to Flash. Have a look at these experiments for the best performance try running them in Chrome.
Which brings us to the next point, Google doesn’t have a great love for Adobe either; the nature of their products makes it more difficult for their search engine to identify content. They have certainly optimised their own browser, Chrome, to focus on JavaScript and HTML5. Strangely it appears that Apple and Google are on the same side on this one.
One place Adobe seems safe is video: Video platforms like Youtube, iPlayer and Vimeo all use Flash to deliver their videos, Adobe have practically taken over from Real, Windows Media and Quicktime. Though HTML5 has thought of this and can run video too; YouTube and Vimeo are already experimenting with new players.
And it doesn’t end there, one potential problem with HTML5 is that Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support it, so it Microsoft are drawn into it as well. Google are blaming the elderly browser for its recent security breach and are lobbying governments and large institutions to phase out the browser and let it die in peace, thus releasing the developer community from having to support it and making the world a happier and more secure place.
So what will Microsoft do?
They have said they are going to continue to support IE6 for several years yet, but will they bow to the pressure of Google and the developer community? What about their own platform, Silverlight? Does holding up HTML5 give them a chance to push that a bit more? Is this getting complicated or what? It’s like a crazy web with four spiders pulling strands in different directions and IE6 as the lynch pin.
Who knows how long it will be until something gives? Not me that’s for sure.
First image courtesy of starchild1.co.uk/shadowfax/?p=1552
Second image courtesy of http://theflashblog.com/images/ipud.jpg
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
Sigmund Freud argued that it’s our memories that make us unhappy – remove the past and we have no further reason for anxiety.
In Douglas Coupland’s new book Generation A, he describes a future where we have removed anxiety by removing the future. His new drug SOLON delivers users into a pure state of newness…no past, no future…just NOW.
In Generation A, Coupland comments on society’s move to newness – the world we are starting to inhabit - the world of always on, continuous emotional update, hyper news, where nothing exists apart from now. Global fads are invented, embraced as the answer to everything, and forgotten about in 24 hours. Really Important campaigns for Christmas Number Ones are headline news then gone in an instant. People get up earlier and earlier to make sure thay have not missed out on Facebook sensations. People get up earlier and earlier to create Facebook sensations. Email must be accessible all the time, anywhere.
Life is good in the now – you are permanently entertained, permanently emotionally fulfilled, continuously aware of everyone….you just have to react – LOLZ
Image used under Creative Commons - www.flickr.com/photos/hotpixelaction/
Many religions aim to deliver their followers to a state of perpetual bliss – a place of now forever. Borrowing from this, Utopian / Distopian sci-fi futures also remove the need for food or bodily functions – just climb in your pod, plug in and experience the now with no distractions….and when you die, just hand over to your self-learning neural networked AI, fully charged up with an eternity of ROFL’s, WTF’s, FTW’s and FAIL’s.
So…welcome to the future….the future is NOW…there is no future….and we will all be very happy.
If you went back to 1973 and brought someone into the future they wouldn’t have a frickin’ clue what everyone was talking about. I like computers and I like language. So one of the things I like when you put computers and language together is the language of computers (or digital strictly speaking).
I’m not talking about ‘incetivizing one-to-one mindshare’ or ‘productizing intuitive niches’ (thanks web economy bullshit generator http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html) or even particularly the jargon that comes with tweets and fupdates. I’m really talking about the names of things.
My son lost his dongle the other day, much to his mother’s amusement. The digital age has given us lots of fun names, from joysticks to bluetooth and hard drives to rasterisation.
One of the things that always makes me feel most future-sexy though is talking about doing things in 3D software packages. I love binding a torus knot to a space-warp or lathing a nice nurbs curve.
Neal Stephenson’s last book Anathem did a cracking job at inventing new words suitable for the alternative universe it is set in. And it’s amazing how quickly you adapt to it. For the first five chapters or so of the book it’s difficult to actually work out what the hell’s going on sometimes, but if you let the speak wash over you there seems to be a tipping point when you suddenly know what everyone’s talking about when they’re using their jeejah’s as a speelycaptor and by the time you’ve finished it seems to take some effort to stop thinking about some of the things in our universe in the language he’s invented.
One of the things I swing and roundabout around though is the modern penchant for just spelling things ow eva u lik. I quite enjoy the way that in the digital arena where people are expected to deliberately flaunt the rules of spelling and grammar it can act as a leveller, taking the high ground away from scholarly types who have bothered learning how to spell, but in the same breath I also enjoy a bit of L337 5P34k and the way it can act as a schoolyard kind of 53(r37 (0d3 parents don’t get.
I can get a bit prudish about spelling sometimes, but on the other hand I like a good living language and I’m happy to spell ‘through’ as ‘thru’ for example (thanks to Bob Dylan probably).
I wanted to wrap these observations up some witty, insightful and intelligent point, but the truth is I don’t really have one and it’s Friday so I might get away with a more flippant blog post. So I’ll just leave you with one of my favourite jokes about words paraphrased from Rob Newman when he was with the Mary Whitehouse Experience.
“Why is it that I have to buy a dictionary costing something in the region of £20 when most of the words in there are words I already know. Why do I need the print, ink and paper taken up to include words like ‘tree’, which, let’s face it might as well have the entry:Tree n 1 It’s a tree, isn’t it? It’s a f***ing tree. You know what a tree is.
What I want is a pamphlet, costing around £2.50 which just contains all the words I don’t know.”
Okay, so you’re probably wondering what on earth aliens find revolting about digital TV…?
Well, I was reading an article recently about SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and their ongoing conquest to prove that we are not alone. Fascinating in itself, but what really grabbed my attention is the fact that they blamed digital television for being the reason that aliens couldn’t find us and have a theory that, for similar reasons, we can’t find the aliens.
I thought this was quite interesting so dug a little deeper and thought I would share my findings with you all.
The problem is that digital TV is making Earth invisible.
The process for converting analogue to digital offers more stability, as it is less vulnerable to noise. This means that, whilst we’re happy because we get a nice viewing experience at home, it does make life very difficult for the aliens trying to find us.
In the world of analogue, a digital transmission looks like noise, and radio astronomers have to filter out noise to locate signals indicative of extra-terrestrial life. However, with the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) to measure or filter continuous real-world analogue signals, this noise is getting crowded and indistinguishable. So, whilst sticking astronomers on a lunar observatory on the moon may help us look for ET, the Digital Switchover could be making it harder for ET to find us.
So, if you don’t want aliens to land on Earth, keep watching digital TV!
Well, it’s Friday, the worst day of the year is behind us and the first payday of the month is just around the corner. What better time to introduce our new, (probably not) regular feature: Lookalike Fridays?
No better time.
First up, who remembers Bodger and Badger? A children’s TV show about a man and a badger who lived together and ate mashed potato a lot. Perfectly normal, everyday situation. Bodger had a funny squashy face with lovely sticky-out ears and Badger was, we can only assume, visually impaired in some way. Judge for yourselves below.
Put the two together and what do you get? That’s right folks, Jim Branning off of Eastenders (Dot’s piece, if you’re not a regular viewer).
Now, we can’t be the only ones to have noticed that Jim Branning became a regular on screens in 1996, the very same year that Bodger and Badger mysteriously disappeared from them.
Coincidence? Or irrefutable evidence that Branning is indeed the result of an ill-advised scientific splicing experiment involving the afore-mentioned mashed potato lovers?
We know which explanation we believe.
Another too-freaky-to-be-ignored lookalike situation that’s been bothering us here at Swamp is that of the much-loved Mrs Spoon, of Button Moon fame.
Anyone seen her recently? Didn’t think so.
But you know who we did see an awful lot of in the run up to Christmas don’t you? That’s right, Jamie Afro who didn’t win the X Factor.
Even their poses are the same! The sheer audacity of the man beggars belief, bearing in mind he is undoubtedly a body snatcher.
It’s the elephant in the room people; the secret so dark, so terrible, that no one dares to speak its name. Well, we dare. No longer will we stand by and let TV personalities and talent show contestants body snatch or scientifically splice our beloved children’s TV characters under this terrible shroud of secrecy. The truth will out!
So, if you have any unnerving lookalikeys, particularly if they involve kids’ TV characters, do your duty and share them with us.
Together, we’ll shatter the silence.
Remember the days when you thought Internet Explorer was the only thing you could use to get on t’internet? Mozilla’s Firefox was the 1st browser to seriously challenge the monopoly. In more recent times a browser from Google (a monopoly in its own speciality – search) has launched another worthy browser – Chrome.
Enter Chrome
It was launched in the Olympic year of 2008 and from a comic strip oddly enough. Its main selling point was both speed & simplicity. It was launched with a powerful JavaScript engine (v8) which could deal with complex websites much better (a website entitled Chrome Experiments showcases what it can do).
Integrating Search
As expected Google wanted to integrate Chrome tightly with search (as this is their primary service and is where they make their vast profits from!). The address bar acts as both an address bar and a search box which becomes second nature after a while.
Add-ons
The one thing that Firefox had above the other browsers was a huge directory of plug-ins which were easy (and addictive?) to install. These plug-ins integrated social networking, tools to help work flow, aid web development and so on. Speaking from an SEO perspective I know how useful they are in my job. In the last couple of months Chrome launched ‘extensions’ which aims to fill the plug-in void. Whilst there is some way to go to reach Firefox’s plug-in directory and community it is a good step forward.
Browsers on the Catwalk
Style is just as important as substance. One thing that I really like about Chrome is the fact you can completely redesign your browser. Bored of the same old greys? Simply apply a cool designer theme. It makes opening the same thing every single day a little more inspiring.
Brand Awareness
It’s got both style and substance… but how is Google getting it out there? You may have noticed the self promotion across Google’s own sites (including YouTube) and online display ads across other sites. You may have also seen something that Google doesn’t do too often – offline advertising. It’s been seen on billboards, newspapers and even on the tube. Has this had an effect on brand awareness? Well, yes. Internet searches for Google Chrome have almost doubled and overtook those of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
UK Internet searches for Google Chrome following advertising campaign
However they have some way to go to reach the level of brand awareness that Firefox has achieved.
UK Internet searches for web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes film over Christmas and, whilst reliving my boyhood memories, I was once again impressed with Sherlock’s extraordinary skills. He himself breaks these down into two categories: Observation and Reasoning. Whilst pondering these skills, I started to draw comparisons with marketing strategies and the strategists and agencies that develop them.
In the simplest form, Sherlock is presented with a conclusion such as a murder and then is tasked with piecing together all the events and decisions that lead up to that conclusion. He then proceeds to use observation and reasoning to deduce the preceding events working backwards from the conclusion.
Agencies effectively do the same thing except in reverse. We know the conclusion that we wish to get to, yet we start by using our ‘observation’ tools to model customer journeys from initial awareness through to the conclusion, which is often a purchase rather than a murder.
Within a marketing context, observation could be described as using the desk research tools we have available. This might include Hitwise reports, website analytics packages, TGI reports, what the colleague who sits next to you thinks, something picked up from a customer you stalked around a supermarket and the opposite of what your mum thinks. Elementary my dear reader!
However, in order to devise a campaign, the agency must use their expert powers of observation which they then combine with expert reasoning to come up with a successful strategy.
So what does ‘expert reasoning’ consist of?
The Babylonions, followed by the Greeks, were the first recorded societies to have contemplated reasoning which later lead to the development of Formal logic.
Reasoning in an argument is valid if the argument’s conclusion must be true when the premises (the reasons given to support that conclusion) are true. An example of deductive reasoning which Holmes might have employed, is as follows:
Premise 1: All criminals are very naughty boys.
Premise 2: Professor Moriarty is a criminal.
Conclusion: Professor Moriarty is a naughty boy.
The reasoning in this argument is valid, because there is no way in which the premises, 1 and 2, could be true and the conclusion, 3, be false. However the reasoning is only as good as the knowledge that was put into the premises in the first place.
Inductive reasoning is where higher order skills come into play and is where Holmes excels. An example could be:
Premise 1: In a small village there have been three house burglaries on consecutive Sundays. The victims were all attending church at the time.
Conclusion: The Burglar will probably break into another house while the occupants are at church on the next Sunday morning. We can therefore deduce that the Burglar must know who goes to church and who doesn’t. One might also deduce that in order to know such information the Burglar is watching the church – thus it should be easy to locate and apprehend the villain.
Within a marketing context, we use inductive reasoning all the time to classify people into groups and profiles which can become extremely complex and fragmented depending on the campaign. However, as demonstrated in the first example, the likelihood of success is also dependent on the level of experience and knowledge that you can bring to bear with your reasoning.
But what if you don’t have time to fully analyse the situation presented to you – do you fall back on Intuition to help you? Do you guess? Gary Klein, a leading researcher in the field, found that under time pressure, high stakes, and changing parameters, experts used their base of experience to identify similar situations and intuitively choose feasible solutions. So it can definitely be worth trusting your intuition now and again; just hope that no one asks for a rationale.
So is Mr Mallett a modern day Sherlock Holmes? Well he has a large team to provide him with expert observations and is certainly good at reasoning with the knowledge and experience to back this up. He has most definitely been known to use his intuition every now and again, providing little or no rationale to the occasionally bewildered account handler. The only aspect lacking is a deerstalker and pipe….
An elementary problem, my dear reader, when one knows a designer with Photoshop.
Our teeth are chattering and we’re using cat litter to grit our driveways. What better way to celebrate this wonderful winter weather than with a giant Swamp snowball fight?!
‘Swamp Towers’ is actually set in a beautiful old listed house with a large extention and gorgeous gardens. We thought we’d take advantage of the snow-covered lawns.
The epic fight began at 14:00, with small snowballs quickly turning to enthusiastically-thrown snow boulders. Luckily the snow was of a perfectly sticky texture, so soon we were all rolling around like slightly mental snow children, attacking unsuspecting members of the team and sheltering under ice-covered trees.
Men of the Match (or Sultans of the Snow) were George and James W. These pleasant, restrained Swamp men quickly turned into snow savages, with George sneaking up on Account Handler Chantal and gleefully dropping a large block of snow directly onto her head.
A snow-tacular time was had by all, with no serious injuries (except a little wounded pride and frostbitten fingers). Fancy taking on the Swamp snowball team? Sledge on over if you think you’re hard enough!
With Christmas and 2009 now behind us and a new year (and decade) upon us, I thought I would do what many others do at this time of year and look at booking a holiday for 2010.
Having settled on my destination and the London airport I will fly from, I started looking at options for how to actually get to the airport from the city itself.
I searched for ‘Easy Bus’ as I’ve used them before and know that they would be able to taxi me to and from the airport very early in the morning. However, when searching for ‘Easy Bus’ my eyes were drawn to the first result:
Easybus.co.uk had been hacked.
So, I paused the holiday search and looked into it further.
For a brief period last night, when Google crawled easybus.co.uk, their domain directed to a Buy Vicodin ES page. Today, the result on Google still shows the drugs page and will continue to do so until the Easy Bus site gets crawled again.
I also searched for ‘buy valium online’ and look what’s currently appearing third in the results:
The ‘Buy Vicodin’ hack of Easy Bus!
If we look then at the search volumes, in Local Search for November on Exact ‘buy valium online’ had 880 searches whereas ‘easy bus’ for November has 6,600. Less people therefore are searching for the longer tail phrase but importantly Easy Buses’ authority has propelled it up to third for ‘buy valium online’.
So how has this happened?
Google places a high ranking factor on domains that are respected and hackers target these domains to rank highly for their own money making terms.
The hack has been spotted and rectified, however, this is a damaging PR event and one that may raise questions over the security of easybus.co.uk; a site that needs to portray confidence in booking with them to their customers.
I think I’ll call a cab for this one!
