Month: May 2007
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I’m now on a well deserved break for a couple of weeks. ODF will be back (and bitchin’) in a fortnight. Keep on fishin’…
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Curious Psychology#5: The Colour of Letters
Imagine the letter ‘a’. Think hard about it. If ‘a’ was a colour, what would it be? Now think about the letter ‘y’. If ‘y’ was a colour what would it be? Now click here: Download synaesthetic_alphabet.jpg Get it right? If you did, likelihood is that it’s not down to chance. Synaesthesia is an involuntary…
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Useful chart
None of this is new stuff but I was scratching around yesterday for a single slide that summarised the challenges and opportunities presented by the changing media (and brand) environment. Ended up doing one myself so thought I’d pop it up here in case anyone else wants to use it. The file is available on…
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Six Billion Others
6 Billion Others is a project by Yann Arthus-Bertrand that has been going since early 2003. It has pretty big ambitions – to draw a portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values – what makes us laugh and cry, our families, what gives life meaning. Six directors set off across the globe…
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Curious Psychology #4: Lies, lies, lies
How do you tell if someone is lying? Stats tell us our chances are little more than chance but a while back, Richard Wiseman (he of all that is quirky in psychology) conducted a mass participation experiment on the BBC on this very subject. The legendary Sir Robin Day was asked to talk about his…
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The Dehumanisation of Advertising
Compare and contrast. A quote from John Maeda in this weeks Campaign defining his vision of ‘post-digital advertising’: “…approaching advertising as a more humane discipline, instead of the dry ‘monitor, measure, monetise’ paradigm of the Web 2.0 world. Choosing the right technologies, combined with a truthful message, and implemented with humour, beauty, and discipline.” …and…
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The Trouble with Mergers
What with coverage of ill-fated mergers and all the M & A activity going on in the online world right now I was reminded me of a famous Economist cover of the 90’s…
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Curious Psychology #3: Magical Contagion
One of the more curious areas of superstition is the "Law of Contagion" – the feeling people have that when an object has been in contact with someone else that it somehow acquires their "essence". An experiment done by Psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania tested how strong this was, with distinctly surprising…
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Inside view
Fascinating inside view here of last August’s US Hyundai pitch, eventually won by Goodby Silverstein & Ptnrs. Whatever you think of the winners strategy (to "create a new voice and environment of total honesty"), you have to admire the fact that they were smart enough to keep their auto team intact after the GM loss…