Ira Glass talks about the secret to long-form story telling.
If you are not an avid listener to his This American Life radio series, you should start this weekend.
If you don’t know where to start, listen to 20 acts in 60 minutes, it’s my all time favourite episode.
Pewter is a cheap metal that is used to make tin soldiers and the Goth jewelry you can buy in bong shops.
It’s not considered a precious metal, unless of course you purchase this one-off stool from artist Max Lamb.
Sugru is a silcon based putty-like substance that can applied to almost anything to either fix it, or as it’s own tag line puts it “Hack things better”.
It can fix dings in laptops, phones, be applied to cameras and fragile objects for instant child proofing, you name it.
It’s purpose built to make things last longer, and offset the design obsolescence built into everything we buy nowadays.
This was one of the most amazing things shared at the recent Future Labs presentation I attended last week.
It was apparently inspired by Irish art student and inventor Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, when she found herself playing with a ball of discarding chewing gum in one of her art school lectures.
Oh, and the name, Sugru is a play on the gaelic for play.
I’m sure this will become as commonplace as BluTac in years to come, but for now I’m in awe of its pure genius.
It’s suddenly made all of us inventors.
Nothing revolutionary in terms of interaction, but this game for Adidas Japan has the most mental animation, art direction, and sound design I have ever seen.
As my Art Director Quenton pointed out, it’s as if they have designed the sound to go with the low-fidelity output of laptop and small device speakers, and then applied the same aesthetic to the visuals.
The results are pretty amazing as you can see for yourself.
We used to tell stories.
But nowadays, it’s far more powerful to give stories.
By that, I mean doing work that puts the audience inside the idea, and gives them an incentive to interact with it, adapt it, and share it.
Here’s an example we did which attempted this.
This started out as a request to do an EDM.
Usually a tour for emerging architects to travel Europe and see amazing places and practices should sell itself. Problem was, our client was a mainstream paint brand, talking to a niche and particular audience, which meant we had to figure out a way to get message through in a credible way.
So we found 15 influencers in the Australian architecture community, and we sent them everything they needed to tell a story.
They received a parcel with a scale architects model, a mini billboard advertising the tour, and a note asking a little favour:
Take photos of the model and billboard and share them via Facebook, Twitter and email.
They did, and our ad got put right in front of Australia’s best emerging architects.
And applications jumped up by 149%
All for putting the audience inside the story.
This is part of a talk I did for Award Copyschool. For my next rant follow me on twitter @warmcola .
If you stop and think about what the internet is, it makes it a little clearer as to how you should approach a digital advertising brief.
The internet is relevance engine.
To quote the granddaddy of experiential advertising, Howard Luck Gossage:
The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” ~ Howard Gossage
Way back when the internet was an academic tool, the remarkable bit was its means to hyperlink words, enabling someone to click a link and dig deeper into the subjects that interested them.
That hasn’t fundamentally changed.
So who you are talking to and how they interact with the web, their phones and their peers is where you need to start your thinking.
To get genuine interest, make your idea relevant to the site they are on, the content they are reading, the location they happen to be in, or a tension that could be going on around them, In short, you need to make your idea about their all time favourite subject, themselves,
If your idea isn’t relevant, theyll ignore it and revert their focus back to what does interest them.
Relevance is a smart bomb that has the power draw attention away from even the funniest picture of a cat in a tuxedo.
There are many ways to wield it, I will get on to that in my next post.
This is part of a talk I did for Award Copyschool. For my next rant follow me on twitter @warmcola
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