talkable likeable

This collaboration between Google and Arcade Fire to show off HTML5 is amazing.

Be sure to choose your childhood postcode.

This extraordinary ad/short film from Diageo makes for compelling viewing. Aside from the green screen magic (presumably?) and great choice of actor in Robert Carlyle, it is notable for two other reasons:

• Use of story
  Appreciation of stories is hard-wired into our beings, and this is a good yarn with arcs, conflict, ambition and resolution. We’re being fed a brand story, but in such an engaging way that we accept it.
• Breaking media format
  They’ve made an ad that is six and a half minutes long. Up until recently, such a length would have been laughably prohibitive, and indeed the days of 60 or even 90 second spectaculars seemed to be on the wane. But of course nowadays, good content spreads on digital channels where media cost is free and not constrained by programming breaks or convention.

thanks to the excellent Word magazine for the spot

When it’s easy even for non-techies like me to add social plug-ins to websites, we better get ready for an explosion of ‘Like’ buttons, activity streams and friend recommendations all over the web.

Google must be thinking very hard tonight.

This is a great article on the origins of Pop Idol. It’s interesting enough given the TV format dynasty it’s spawned, but what really caught my eye was this line:

It was not the work of market research, he points out: “This was not the product of a strategy meeting, it was experience and instinct.”

While careful strategy and structured thinking is of course necessary, I believe that really good ideas spring forth unexpectedly – apparently from nowhere. The challenge in today’s left-brain, back-covering culture is getting support for ideas you know are absolutely right but can’t easily prove why.

This snippet of Apple’s Jonathan Ive talking on Stephen Fry’s recent series in the USA is short but revealing. Ive talks with touching sincerity about how fragile ideas are and how easy it is to snuff them out. Evidently Apple aren’t one of those companies.

Shameless plug alert

I’m quite proud of these two iPhone app projects that I’ve been part of. So far they appear to be doing pretty well. I genuinely recommend them (click for iTunes links)

Spotted in Soho, promoting the new Star Trek DVD – get yourself a Spock haircut