Next week, Ben, Neil, Jeffre and I are going to be in Bucharest at the invitation of Headvertising. We've no idea what we're going to do, but we're hoping that it's as unconferency as possible. We want to talk about what'll be useful to people, so we plan on starting off by finding out just what that might be. If you're going to be there next week and you want to get ahead of the game, any suggestions about stuff we should discuss very gratefully received.
Imagine being an Intellectual Property lawyer on holiday. Especially if you like fairgrounds. You'd never be able to switch off. Everywhere you turned would be somebody else (probably, presumably) infringing the copyright of someone you represent.
It must be especially tough if you work for Disney.
It's a shame, the way a generation of fairground owners have just festooned their rides with knocked-off cartoon imagery. It can be visually striking and the badness of the knock-offs is sometimes funny.
But there's something really original and thrilling about some of the original fairground graphics. This sort of stuff. But I suspect we won't see much of this preserved in real world commercial fairgrounds. It's not exciting enough for the kids. It doesn't work when the rides are all called things like Neutron and Terminator.
You get the sense though that change might be in the air, and that a number of artists who learned their trade doing graffiti are finding their way into fairground art, creating a new graphic language for a new generation of rides. That'll be an exciting combination.
There are some great round-ups of British fairground art here and here.
This is well worth a listen, a Miles Kington interview with Harry Shearer. Lots of interesting thoughts about the care and feeding of creative people.
Many people have raved about this fantastic film from Studio Smack but I first found it via City Of Sound. As Dan points out, it's hard to see it as just a critique of 'urban spam', surely no-one's saying that clocks or the keypads on cash machines are graphic pollution, they're fairly necessary in the life of a city. And the film makes all this stuff look rather beautiful. But it does serve to make us look again at the cities we walk through, which is always a good idea.
I've been thinking about urban spam. I'm supposed to be saying something clever about it on the World Service on Friday. It's clearly subjective; one person's spam is another person's useful service or entertaining promotion. Just like with email spam. It's just the balance of annoyance to usefulness is way our of wack. But I think the reason it winds so many people up is it makes us examine the deal we've done, as a society, with marketing and forces to decide if we want to do it again.
Not many people are bothered by the fact of ads on TV or in newspapers. We know why they're there. They're paying for the content and we're used to seeing them there. We don't think them. But when 'ads' turn up somewhere new, somewhere we're not used to seeing them (which increasingly they do, because of the interuptive marketing arms race) we're forced to think about them, to decide whether their presence in this new, novel place is a deal we want to do. Will we swap some attention for some entertainment, or a coupon? Maybe we will, but I think, when it's somewhere new, when we're confronted with a new invasion of our attention space then the bar gets raised. We're used to ignoring the bad ads on TV or in the papers. Our filters automatically screen out the dumb. But we're not set to do that in new places, new environments, so if brands are going to invade those spaces, they'd better be very confident they've got a deal worth doing.
Or something.
One of the points of quitting a very good job and starting OIA was to be able to have proper holidays and really make the most of the time Arthur gets off school. And I have to say that, in those terms, August was a big success. I hardly earned anything, and just before August is probably not a great time to start a new business if you're looking for lots of momentum but, holiday is the greater good. We saw lots of Britain. We all hung out a lot. And now September's rolled around and everyone's feeling 'back to school' the phone's starting to ring with work and opportunity.
The last few days of August were spent idly cruising along the Shropshire Union Canal which was rather splendid. It's like camping or caravaning, in that you've always got your kettle with you, but you don't feel the need to go and do stuff, because just drifting up the canal, at walking pace, is doing enough. And like camping it forces you to hang out together. Quite often when we're at home in the flat we'll be in separate rooms, doing our seperate things. But that's not possible on a barge. You're all together all the time. Which has it's downside and I can imagine it being difficult with teenagers. But with a 6 year-old it was good. Especially as we had both Scooby-Doo Happy Families and Star Wars Top Trumps.
Then we drove up to Blackpool for the weekend of the illuminations. It rained and blew and the hotel was a bit of a disappointment but we had a marvelous time. The illuminations were great. Strange. Pointless. But great.
They've been doing this since 1879 when 8 primitive arc lamps were billed as 'artificial sunshine'. These representations of the seasons were our favourites:
Aren't they lovely?
Anyway. Holidays are over now. Will also try to be a better blogger.
11am, Friday 8th at The Breakfast Club, D'Arblay Street. Who's in?
This was in Business Week while we were away, which was rather thrilling. Very nice of them. (Though I can't link to it because it's subscribers only.) But it reminded me that we're getting behind on homework etc. I'll get the marking of Assignment 8 from Ben and give you to the end of this week to get any more Assignment 9 entries in. Then we'll get caught up with something interesting for Assignment 10.
More ads I found in old Look And Learns. They seem so sweet and innocent now. Nothing that would cause huge melt-downs. And you realise that agencies once had to try a lot harder. How do you make an ice-cream delicious in badly reproduced black and white? 
And you just know that now you'd have some photoshopping turning milk into snake. And look at all that copy. You wouldn't get that now.
And I love this. It's a Walkman promotion. Featuring Bernard Cribbens. For the British Turkey Federation. That is very, very random.
Every now and then the memetics meme pops up in advertising. WCRS were banging on about it last year (are they still?) and Richard's dabbled with it. It's very seductive because it feels like a new and possibily effective science for understanding brands and ideas. And it promises to be an all encompassing science too, not the usual kludge of psychology, anthropology, economics etc that makes up planning. But who knows? Anyway, this talk from Susan Blackmore is a representative introduction, in that she explains it very energetically, but she doesn't quite convince you it's useful.
rain diluted tea on a shropshire canal