Influx

Nick Carr has a great response to the buzz and attention surrounding Amazon’s new e-reader launches and points out a fact about the changed reading experience they want to bring about. “The video is something of a Rorschach test. A person of the web may see X-Ray as a glorious advance....

One thing you need if you are going to take creativity to the next level is a great client. Stella Artois has always done great creative work in the UK and won it’s fair share of awards, but rarely gets mentioned when experts talk about iconic brands that push the communications envelope. In...

One of the most appealing aspects of the proliferation of new technological channels has been the ability for content creators to allow their content to be accessed on new these new formats. The traditional hardware of old has now given way to multiple increasingly mobile forms. However, the simple...

While we are all excited about the technological additions to our lives that can help us set and try to meet goals, there’s sometimes nothing better than the real experience of human competition. With a little imagination- you can take something that might be as mundane as going for a run and...

Tom Kelley of IDEO speaking at Nielsen’s 360 Conference explained what he believes are the factors behind successful innovation. Aside from business and technology- the major influences are being able to understand people by continuous observation- everyone needs to become an anthropologist...

In a great post from The Economist about the language of air travel the author discusses how insider language creates a disconcerting experience for air travelers. For a category, where service is supposed to matter, the failure of language to bridge the gap and create more humanity and warmth is a...

Levi's new "work" campaign is being brought to life with a series of workshops around the country, the latest being a photography workshop in Wooster Street, New York. The brand has been deliberately elastic with the idea of "work" allowing it to stretch from manual graft to the more creative...

There's nothing that makes people in marketing more nervous than handing over control to the consumer. The idea is that they (consumers) are supposed to listen obediently to everything they are told and like good "puppies" act only on that information. Of course, this is complete fantasy, but the...

Dave  Pescovitz has a great piece over at GOOD on the emergence of DIY family burials. He begins his piece with this interesting taking on the desire for real experiences."As cyberspace becomes a “layer” on top of the physical world and we spend more of our lives online, a...

Easy You Tube is a nice example of playing with pre-existing experience to make it better for certain segments of society. The one size fits all approach of web design has some serious limitations, everything is optimized around a set of supposedly common needs and you end up with a number of...

R/GA's Nike+ site, although created in 2005, has been much heralded this year as the gold standard in "Brand Utility". It has been the marker to judge this new hybrid world between the banner and the website, sadly, nobody, not even R/GA has come close to the excellence of the Nike site. So, while...

It's clear that the next big change for ad agencies will be the shift to place digital at the center of the shop. Euro RSCG has already made the leap and others will doubtless follow.This move has implications for planners, as demands on them will change considerably.R/GA has been leading the...

Brands tend to play around the fringes of experience, while a trendy word in the early 90s it usually translated into a poorly executed trade show booth or something similar.The Pop-Up Store has been the most recent manifestation, the problem is that these ideas follow the rules of old school 1.0...