digital art science

Hello and welcome to Issue 1 of The Good Apple.

In case you’re receiving this unsolicited (that means you, friends and clients whose emails I have to hand!), The Good Apple has been created as a reaction to the fear and cynicism surrounding digital innovation in Australia. The breadth and intensity of negative ‘commentary’ has created a situation where brands and organisations are “damned if they do, and damned if they don’t” jump in head first and try some new digital thingamagickery.

Well, no more! I shall be providing positive insights and encouragement, if for no other reason than to give people some nice quotes to cut and paste into the post analysis presentations… Let’s start with a subject close to my heart…

Hats off to the Twitter Try-ers!

Bless their cotton socks! I suspect that Twitter, while a phenomenon and increasingly popular, is being seen as a good area to attempt something new.  It’s quick, cheap, measurable and oh-so-hot-right-now. That being said, the potential for branding and marketing in Twitter is huge and getting, er, more huge. If a brand doesn’t jump in now, they risk being locked out when it really takes off, or at the very least facing a massively uphill struggle to be heard.

So a few brands tried it and copped some vitriol, but I found a couple of interesting bits and pieces that passed under the radars of the nay-sayers, or they couldn’t find anything to complain about because they were just too clever and awesome… and there’s a theme to their awesomeness – bridging the gap between online and the real-world (let’s call it meat-space).

@iSpyLevis – Awesome! Basically a dude (or dudes) runs around Australia’s capital cities, tweeting clues, pictures, or just a flat out addresses or landmarks indicating their location.  If you find the dude, and ask him if he’s wearing Levi’s, you win a pair. Several times in the last month I have been tempted to head out of the office and harass strangers about the brand of their pants. I didn’t, sadly (they were giving away skinny jeans, have you seen me in skinny jeans?), but many, many people did.  And it was fun. 1,337 followers. Not bad at all. Well done Levi’s! You opened a new channel for talking to your consumers and you built a decent base of followers for future stuff.

@LonelyPlanet ran a great Guidebook hunt a little while back. Different to Levi’s, LP already had an impressive following on Twitter and was probably wondering what to do with them all. Well, they came up with something  pretty interesting. A series of dastardly cryptic clues that were released over time and revealed the location of loads of hidden LP guidebooks in Sydney and Melbourne. Some of the books contained Jetstar travel vouchers, so it was very much worth the effort and brain-twisting (although judging by the only clue I solved, it gave a lot of people an excuse for an afternoon chocolate run to Max Brenners…).

Awesome website that brings me untold joy

I know that in the future the web will just be one big blob, with one network, one login name and password, one friends list and one doova-lacky (which is some weird application or functionality that we don’t know we need yet). And this blob will just know and do everything for you, hopefully if you ask it to, but that’s up for debate. Until then, we all have to fidget around with Facebooks, MySpaces, Flickrs, Twitters, Tumblrs, Plurks, Blogs, Wikis and widgets, but this one, when it’s complete and out of Beta-testing, should definitely be added to your list.

Jinni. Oh. My. God. The massive power and unfathomable usefulness of this application is mindflabbering, both within its current domain (movies) and without. Basically it’s a brave attempt at semantic search and recommendation for movie and television titles.  They call the community participation portion of their app “The Movie Genome Project”. What this project is hoping to achieve is detailed ‘genetic’ mapping of all films and television shows so they can be indexed, searched and recommended by everything from plot-line, themes, actors, directors, emotions and so on, and so on, and so on, and within that there’s also measurements of intensity or strength of the ‘traits’.  So a RomCom like, um, “4 Weddings and a Funeral” would sit in the romantic and comedy genres, obv, but just how funny and romantic it is would be measured as well. And Shaun of the Dead (the worlds first intentional ZomRomCom) would sit in Romantic, Comedy and Zombie genres… I think you get the picture? There’s a wonderfully cheesy video on the site which explains it better than I have here.  Go and have a squiz.  Be amazed, then hit me up, as I have 9 invites to the Beta trial remaining.  You won’t regret it.

Bullet point brilliance

• I have started spending my lunch hours with friends and clients who might be struggling with digital technologies and concepts, cracking briefs, finding insights and inspiration. We eat sandwiches, discuss challenges and new developments, have a laugh, learn something, and quite often come up with brilliant ideas. If you fancy getting on my lunch list, drop me an email.
• Why don’t TV shows like Masterchef have a Twitter feed where they talk to people WHILE they are watching the show? Tweet gossip, trivia, that kind of thing (that’s a million dollar idea I just gave you. Someone owes me a sandwich)
• What makes Twitter users more keen to meet up with each other in real life? Facebook is for people you know, Twitter is to find people you want to know, I guess.  There’s a blog post in that, keep an eye out for it.
• What is with Kinder Surprise advertising? It makes me pull my WTF face. Are the badly dubbed and frankly weird ads a subtle attempt to discourage Australians from traveling to Europe? Here’s me eating a Kinder Surprise, dropping things, looking confused and ultimately a bit disappointed. Which I think sums up the whole Kinder experience in 48 seconds.

And that’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed me giving props to some peeps.