Tony on Digital

When I went to my Watford interview Tony said 'most digital ideas I see are shit'.

He said that if an idea works in traditional, it will work in digital. Don't start with the medium, start with the idea. That's something Dave Trott's said before, and I fully agree.

But does that mean you shouldn't shape the idea to the kind of media that's being used?

What about CP+B's 'Sacrifice a friend', Forsman & Bodenfors 'Ikea Facebook Showroom', or even Nitro's 'Best Job in the World'? These are all campaigns where the medium was central to the idea and its success.

If want a place on the course, I suppose I'd best learn what Tony wants first and deliver that.

After all, he knows his stuff.

In passing, he mentioned the recent 'Rage against the X-Factor' campaigning.

He said 'is it going to win any awards? No. Is it going to create a lot of publicity? Yes, probably.'

I think his point was that he doesn't want to see ideas which depend on the medium doing all the hard work. Especially not in your book.

There's no idea behind the Rage campaign bar 'sticking it to the man'. Nor is it the kind of campaign you can sit down and write in a room somewhere, expecting people to get on board. When this kind of thing happens, it just happens... it's highly unpredictable.

The Power of Reddit

Call me a geek, but I love Reddit and I love internet memes.

They are fun to witness, and tell you a lot about people.

So long as you can plow through the incredibly geeky computer coding, Call of Duty, and engineering posts, Reddit is a great place to spend five minutes.

Half a million people do it every day. This vid is a must see.

Google Autocomplete Meme

If you're like me and spend way too much time on the internet, you'll probably have seen this sort of thing quite a bit:

You can get a whole bunch on AutocompleteMe.com

They COULD be a naturally occurring phenomenon... but then why put a result that has 14,000 views above one that has 1,500,000?

The answer is that everyone of these humorous little screenshots acts as an ad for Google.

Each one gets handed round virally, and people go to the site to try find their own. It's a neat idea - they probably took the whole site to pieces and looked at each bit thinking: how can we make this more interesting/attractive. Obviously with Google's simplicity there wasn't much room for innovation, but they managed it.

Subtle advertising indeed (whether intentional or not).