DON'T LET BLOGGING GET YOU DOWN

Confidence In Blog Postings Over Time

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Magic

The first Rajar results of this year have revealed, once again, that Magic 105.4 is London's number 1 commercial radio station.

This makes it a total of 8 quarters (a whole 2 years!) that Magic have been at number 1.

Well done Magic!

Mchappy Slap!

Or when corporate mascots turn bad.

HAVE YOU SEEN MY-WARDROBE.COM?

It seemed like any normal day. Equipped with brollys and bowler hats thanks to impending bad weather these city workers looked like any other.

Apart from one big difference - they were missing their clothes.

Clad in only their underwear and t-shirts bearing the strapline 'Have you seen my-wardrobe.com?', semi-naked men took to the streets this morning to promote the launch of my-wardrobe.com's new men's range.

Old ladies blushed, builders smirked and generally, most people simply stared as the men took a tour of Liverpool Street station, Bank, St Paul's and after a quick coffee break to warm up, the Millenium Bridge.

The experiential activity was the first piece of work St Luke's have done for mw whose offering includes menswear designers Paul Smith London, Vivienne Westwood and McQ.

How to win an election on the web

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7850035.stm

Can Labour replicate Obama's success online? Hmm...

PHOTO COMPETITION: FEBRUARY

We shan't mention the lack of a January photo competition so swiftly moving on.

February's theme is: CREDIT CRUNCH

We're all feeling it, so let's photograph it!

Same rules apply, you must have taken the photo and the deadline is 20th feb.
Entries will be up for a week and we'll announce the winner at friday drinks on Friday 27th feb.

Good luck

that gala ad

here it is.

"Looks like we hit that broadband again" suggests its a 'homage'

It's by an agency in Glasgow called Frame.

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2009/01/08/9288-gala-bingo-reveals-new-tv-adverts-by-frame


P

New Gala Bingo ad based on our BT ad

Have you seen the new Gala bingo ad? The story is based on the BT Broadband launch ad we did about 7 years ago. In the original the idea is there is so much content coming through BT Broadband that it bursts out the pipe scattering 3-headed dragons, gaming fighters, Aardman cartoon charaters, and so on. Its good to see that 7 years later it is still considered memorable enough to base a new ad on! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Click the picture to see the original. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qBfYOtdBmk
and this link for the Gala ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qBfYOtdBmk
Neil

M ENGAGEMENT RINGS

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid8670894001/bctid8685880001

H.Samuel have launched a engagement ring for Men. I am not married yet if any ladies are thinking about asking me....

Pen Paper (Pause)

I'm feeling particulary thoughtful this January. I'm not one for resolutions, but I am big on reflections. I like to think. And these made me think. Richard Watkins is a scribbler - quickly sketching his thoughts and broadcasting them one a week though his Facebook group. He's also scanned in a Pen Paper (Pause) book that you can create your own cover for and then give it to a friend to enjoy. There are currently copies as far away as America, Australia and Thailand. This is art meets word of mouth in a homespun, crafty, thought-provoking way - a humbler version of thedailyaphorism.com.

Veet

The Original Patriotic Rant

Best ads in the world this week: Munch Lamb

Heineken Ad

Durex Get it on

Your Patriotic Duty

The gallery in woburn walk has one of these posters in the window (although I got this on Flickr.) Says it all really. We should make up some placards and get down Oxford St.

P

Little Chef Gets A Makeover

If anyone has been watching the Channel 4's Big Chef Takes Little Chef with Heston Blumenthal the chef that brought the world Snail Porridge then you may not want to scroll down as it may reveal what may be shown on tonight's final episode...

EP1 saw Heston turn up in what can only be described as the cooking world's equivalent to Hicksville. This is an eatery/diner, but the staff use microwaves to cook scrambled eggs that look like mouldy grated cheese, there are no pots and pans, in fact the staff laugh in the face of pots and pans...they are armed with microwaves. Basically nobody knows how to cook and the very suggestion of the 'kitchen' running like a kitchen and not a production line spiting out bits of food causes mass fear and hysteria. The restaurant is run down and so are the staff, but they just keep turning up to churn out food to the regular customers and unsuspecting tourists who may be passing by looking for a quick snack and an example of great British food

Heston takes the challenge on to transform the Litte Chef meu using one Little Chef restaurant in Popham thinking he can train the restaurant's staff up...wrong!!! His menu-mashed potato soup, Earl Grey flavoured smoked salmon etc etc...which seems over the top for the brand and to far along the experimental line, but nonetheless is probably better tasting than your average grub is criticised by a bunch of blokes in suits who make such insightful comments as 'its too salty', 'it just tastes like oil' and called poncy by a visibly disgusted woman. Indeed you are trying to convince people to change who hate change- this quote sums the problem up

"What's your favourite starter?" Heston asked, doing some vox-pop research on potential customer appetites. "Chips," replied one man...not Lobster Bisque then.

Indeed, the existing customers want to pull their grease drenched Olympic breakfast (probably the worst name for a breakfast-it would make me more aware of how unfit I am and reinforces the fact I will never take part in the Olympics) off their plates they don't want a pile of dry ice tipping over their plate they don't even want ham and eggs-thats just poncy. Blumenthal, genuinely appeared to believe that sticking an oyster into a Lancashire hotpot and flavouring the smoked salmon with Earl Grey would transform the fortunes of a wilting brand? Eventually he takes a more restrained approach

The MD is a small, ball shaped man named Ian Pegler who throughout wears a bemused look on his face as if it has been stapled to him, constantly projecting the feeling that he has no idea what this crazy Willy Wonka chef man Blumenthal is doing despite his expressed babbled desire for so called 'blue skies thinking' that would not alienate existing customers. Pegler finds out that Heston isn't someone to mess with in the hope of free publicity for your relaunch. Discovering that they were rolling out a new menu (the one Heston is meant to be designing) without consulting him, Blumenthal storms a board meeting and gives him an ultimatum. Either he backs a broader experiment or he would walk. At that point things move forward and the food becomes a bit more 'normal', with everything left on a positive note set up for tonights show

See how it turns out tonight...but here is a sneek preview of the restaurants rebranding, which is actually quite cool, modern and refreshing-if a little Americana for the tastes of chip obsessed Little Britain

The year of the ox.

The 26th of January marks the beginning of the year of the ox in the Chinese calender. The calender works in 12 year cycles and so 1995 was the last year of the ox. 1995 was when we founded St Luke's. The ox is our logo (no, that is not a cow or even a buffalo)

By the way, people born in the year of the ox tend to be: kind, caring souls, logical, positive, filled with common sense and with their feet firmly planted on the ground. Security is their main preoccupation in life, and they are prepared to toil long and hard in order to provide a warm, comfortable and stable nest for themselves and their families. Strong-minded, stubborn, individualistic, the majority are highly intelligent individuals who don't take kindly to being told what to do.

Sound familiar?

P

Inherent Contradictions

The way things work becomes clear in times of crisis. Marx believed that capitalism contained inherent contradictions that would eventually be its downfall. Well, they don't come more contradictory than the current situation where the government lends public money to bankers hoping they will lend that money to borrowers. The banks prefer to use the money to clear bad debts rather than create even more bad debts by lending it to businesses in a recession. If the banks did lend all the money then we could all get out of the recession faster but the banks have to be primarily self-interested as long as they are still private institutions. Same goes for consumers: we should all spend our way out of the recession but common-sense tells us to pay off debts and save our money. Catch 22. Good article by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian.

Bruce Lee Plays Ping Pong

I have a lot of love for this nice Nokia N96 Ad

How to do a great tourism promotion

Fancy being paid £70k to live on desert island for six months? 

Living in a rent-free three-bedroomed  apartment, your duties will include feeding fish, collecting mail and writing a blog attracting tourists to visit. If that all sounds a bit of an effort, don't worry the works limited to 12 hours a month.

So far over a million people have applied for the job and Tourism Queensland have had to upgrade to ten servers to cope with the demand.

Check out the link to read the rest of the promotion which includes the public having to vote for the candidate (via the Tourism Queensland website). 

It's brilliant idea that's already generating loads of free news coverage.

Jules

facebookburgerkinggate....part II

This might re-ignite the flame(burger)...
rajeena

Street Art Does Some Retouching

Make magazine has linked to a nice piece of adbusting / street art found in Berlin. A crew of artists (Mr. Tailon, Baveux Prod., Kone & Epoxy) have done up a slick pop music advertisement with a Photoshop makeover. Typical Photoshop windows have been wheatpasted over the faces of three ubiquitous top 40 music stars, perhaps commenting on all the behind the scenes image making that goes on in that world. For more images, head over to Ekosystem. This also reminded us of another real world / digital world mashup we noticed last year.

How to build a community

Free TV Show from Ustream
Gary Vaynerchuck is an entrepreneur from the US who built a multi-million pound wine business from scratch through social media. He recently spoke at the Paris Le Web 08 conference. Everyone should watch it, if nothing else, it's entertaining if a little terrifying - he's quite intense.

In short, he says two things matter: 1) Word of mouth - Now instead of a maximum audience of 100 now people have audiences of thousands if not tens of thousands & customer service will prevail, if it’s good.

2) If you can build a personal/people based brand you should as it will add value to yourself and the company you are working at. A company/brand with a board of celebrities is always going to be more valued by a customer base than one which is invisible.

Heineken 'Walk In Fridge'

Kissing Point

A large floor sticker placed at the platform to trains in Germany. The "Kissing Spot" is branded by Labello, a lip balm.

Quick Response Codes

Quick Response codes are 2-D bar codes developed by Denso Wave Corp and have been around since 1994. It allows content to be easily interpreted by scanners, and decoded at high speed, holding information in vertical and horizontal directions, allowing more data to be held. Originally used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, they are now used in applications aimed at mobile phone users appearing across a variety of printed media. All people have to do is scan an image of a QR code with their mobile phone and this will launch the phone's browser to a programmed URL.

QR Codes have appeared in a recent edition of Esquire, Harrod's in the U.K are running print ads featuring the codes helping to blend online and offline-with mobile as the ideal platform. H&M is attempting to make traditional media more powerful by putting a new spin on the notion of impulse shopping. Indeed, in Japan you can shop straight from street-side billboards and there are plans to follow suit in Europe. Ralph Lauren have introduced QR codes into print ads, mailers and window displays, aimed at sending traffic to its new mobile commerce site. while Gucci, Pepsi and Puma are taking advantage of QR Codes to improve consumer engagement. Furthermore Microsoft have just announced a new iphone application which allows Bar Codes to be more easily read.

http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/37275064.html

All this has massive benefits and in theory could lead tthe purchasing of products from a magazine, newspaper etc the moment you read about it. It has the ability to make all ads instantly interactive-movie billboards could offer instant access to movie trailers and the potential to make newspaper advertising more exciting, interactive and versatile.

http://www.newmediabytes.com/2008/04/06/will-qr-codes-turn-newspapers-into-cash-cows/

In Japan, QR codes are affixed to fruits and vegetables and when scanned with a QR-enabled cell phone and the code tells you the story of where they came from and how they were grown. McDonald's is placing codes on the packaging of many foods so that customers can get nutritional information.

One stumbling block is the fact that U.S. marketers have yet to embrace them and there are barriers to overcome as many mobile phones do not have the technological means to scan the codes. However, the recently released Google/T-Mobile G1 Phone has the ability to scan barcodes

Best Uses of QR technology

http://mashable.com/2009/01/07/qr-codes/

Luxury Brands Use of QR Technology

http://www.japanmarketingnews.com/2008/08/luxury-brands-q.html

H&M Use of QR Codes

http://www.thefashionguide.co.uk/?p=1103

Original News Item

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3ice058ab1756ad165420acae99d11edbd

TrueFlirt and other ways to make real money from virtual bucks

The Next Generation of Immersive, Online Brand Building

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: online advertising)

This presentation is from Marta Z Kagan, the woman who wrote 'what the f*** is social media'

Burger V Friends

I love this! Its an application from Burger King that gives you a voucher if you delete 10 of your friends from Facebook. It then sends a notice to your ex friends informing them that they have been sacrificed for a Whopper. Genius. It was created by C P+B.

Jules

smart recession thinking

Economist Ads On Edge Recession

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: recession economist)

Neil sent this around by email - it's worth a look. (the little easel icon gives you full screen.)

St Luke's Painting

Here is a nice video of Alice Druitt illustrating the wonderful St Luke's staff- Simon made the whole process a lot quicker with his video wizardry. Below the video is a link to Alice's website where you can find a nice selection of her illustration work.



gingerpaws.co.uk

Mario World Brought To Life

Mario World brought to life, complete with question-marked boxes that ba-bing! when you bump them (or, in this case, press a little button on the underside of the box). Painted-on pipes and pixelated clouds flesh out the rest of the scene. Gavin

Music Lyrics in Chart Form

Paul Copperwaite has given one hundred of the best known, most popular, awesome and awful pop lyrics the Powerpoint treatment disseminated across a variety of presentation platforms. Each example is coupled with a presentation of staggering simplicity and bullet-point brilliance that cuts to the heart of the song. Hilarious pie charts, flow diagrams, checklists, graphs and graphics pinpoint the heart of every line. Poetic, comic, philosophical and farcical, here is an in-depth scrutiny of the most glorious, gratifying, grating and gruesome pop lyrics of the last 50 years.

Gavin

Welcome to your future

The Consumer Electronics Show, the biggest technology event of the year where historically brands showcase their innovations due to be released in the coming couple of years (the iPod was famously revealed here), kicked off with the launch of Microsoft 7.

They have announced a deal with Facebook which will stream live content from your FB account straight to your Microsoft Live software. This will ensure they have the "most social" software available in the world. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said: "I believe our digital lives will only continue to get richer. There's no turning back from the connected world."

Last year, the CES was dedicated mostly to innovations of size - the thinnest widescreen TV, the smallest mobile devices and the HD/ Blu-ray debate.

So far on day 1, we've seen 3D TV, Hi-def laser broadcasting and spock-like visors for viewing programming, but mostly it's the relationship between TV and online that's dominating the conference.

Internet portal Yahoo unveiled a list of partners which will make high definition TV's to support its new online service.

These widgets, or small internet applications, will run alongside normal broadcast TV content but not over it. The TV remotes will have a one touch button that will call up the widget dock to give users access to snippets that can be used for keeping track of news, finance, sports, buying and selling on eBay, sharing photos and keeping up with friends via MySpace.com

Rich Ezekial of Yahoo's Connected Life team said it is all about making the world of TV more personal, tailored and social. Right on.

Keep your eyes peeled.

Nothing is Original

A little known band

Although it's not 100% functional yet, I thought I'd share with you with my brief foray into web design.
www.lunariot.com
(In view of the current economical climate it may be of interest that to date I've spent £100 in total on getting it to it's current state.)
Any feedback is more than welcome, as long as it's primary function is telling us how great we are.
you may also be interested to hear that we'll be performing this Friday at 8pm at the Monto Water Rats Theatre. All welcome.

Simon

ps, many thanks to my secret Santa for the Rock Bible!

The atheists' revenge

The British Humanist Society have just launched an ad campaign to promote atheism. It's a great story The comedy writer Ariane Sherine posted in the Guardian about some Christian ads that ran last year on London buses - basically saying that non-Christians would burn in hell for all eternity. Sherine suggested that atheists should each donate £5 to pay for a counter ad. Someone read the article and set up a pledgebank, the BHA stepped in and offered to administer the donations, then Richard Dawkins pledged to match all donations up to £5,500, and the ads are now running. More advertising should be made this way.

P

this is fun

I've been looking over some of last year's digital winners and although it's quite slow loading up, this website is definitely worth a look.

Agency Republic won Best Website at the Revolution awards for their 'a-to-s' Mercedes site. Did anyone own The Jolly Postman when they were small? This feels like the digital grown-up version.

Love Your Audience Awards

At St Luke's, we believe you should Love Your Audience. We're not alone. There are other brands out there where the people behind them are thinking long and hard about what their audience needs and coming up with great ideas as a consequence.

This occasional series will celebrate those brands. Feel free to submit your own examples.


First up, an example from Trendwatching's January briefing:


- Dots Gloves are knitted gloves with special metal dots on the fingertips that won't scratch iPhones or other touch screen devices. Stay warm and keep the phone smudge free.

Mills and Boon Rugby Specials

nice piece on the front page of today's Guardian about Mills and Boon tying up with RFU to do a series of books that "do for rugby what Jilly Cooper did for polo." Smart marketing.

P

Citizen Luke!

Hey People, Delphina here. One of my favourite films is ‘Passport to Pimlico’ and I was intrigued to learn that inhabitants in a less than fabulous corner of Ladbroke Grove in the 1970’s made fiction a reality.

Essentially, a bunch of free thinking folk, inspired by Passport to Pimlico and Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, managed to legally make their area Freston Road an independent state. They renamed the area “Frestonia” and passports and stamps were issued. They even planned to issue their own currency! ‘Foreign’ visitors had to be issued with visas. Frestonian Citizens motto was

Nos Sumas Una Familia – We Are all One People.

Ahh it brings out the socialist in me!

I think this is one of the coolest things I've ever read about and I think it would be great if St Luke’s could do this too. How do you guys feel about being citizens of ‘Lukedonia’? I think it has a certain ring to it.

It's totally worth checking out the link I've provided, it tells an amazing story in words and pictures.

Flight of the Conchords

This is the funniest thing I've seen in ages - Flight of the Conchords is a series on HBO in the States, featuring Bret and Jemaine, a couple of struggling Kiwi musicians in New York.
Had to share as its fab. Loads of their stuff on You Tube, have a peek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN0oDnoc3-c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zV4pJ8MwM&feature=related

Magic more good than bad according to top blogger

Seems Russell Davies enjoys his Magic FM. That brands credibility just grows and grows. Also worth checking out Daytum, a place where you can measure your life.