ThoughtSpurs

One of the production companies our company, BrandWorld use for television production has this painting in their edit suit. It has been made on the bonnet of an old car. Further evidence, as if it was required, that what separates the ordinary from the exceptional is often a matter of interestingness - and sometimes it is nothing more than a slight twist that is required.

Aside from the rather silly name I like the new search engine Cuil.com - created by some former Google people. With a dark background it is like an opposite version of the omniscient, omnipresent Google (isn't it funny we think nothing of the word 'google' now when it was strange to begin with?). Cuil claims to be the biggest search engine on the web - I did a quick search (my own name - how is that for egocentrism?) but it returned no results. I searched ThoughtSpurs (the next layer of the ego orbit ;-) and got loads of links. Bizarrely it posted random images next to text extracts. I'm not sure it is good enough to change my behaviour - what do you think? Is Cuil cool?

I just heard the news that Randy Pausch, the professor from Carnegie Mellon, famous for his inspirational 'Last Lecture' has passed away from the illness that propelled him to international fame. Obviously not unexpected, but sad all the same. His Last Lecture was intended as a legacy for his kids but I'm glad he shared it with the rest of us.

Just a footnote to my earlier post about the Vodafone (New Zealand/Australia) commercial. Thought you might like to compare and contrast the mood of the orginal with the glossed up message of the ad.

Unilever were behind the Dove campaign for real beauty ads which generated a lot of discussion on the blogosphere; some positive - but not all. The most recent twist in the tale were accusations that the 'natural' women who stripped down to their skivvies had been heavily retouched in the photos. The campaign has been a resounding success for the brand, nonetheless. Consumers are used to being duped. It is part of the transaction between us and marketers. The loss of innocence happened a long time ago. In fact, I would go as far as to say that we expect to be fooled by advertising. We want to live the lie. If I were to buy a pair of Emporio Armani I am fantasizing that there is some association between me and David Beckham. The B roll in my mind's eye shows me as irresistible to women - lean and muscular. Sadly has nothing to do with the more mundane truth that nothing could be further from any kind of hard, objective reality. It isn't even an aspirational truth - that...

Celebrity is a funny thing - funny peculiar, that is. For some reason you think someone nice looking, with a talent of some kind or other (playing games like soccer, singing, showing up at parties where free drinks flow like wine - that sort of thing). Media need nice looking people to fill pages and screens. Consumers aren't so willing to fill them with ordinary folk. Life goes easier when we see what we'd like to be like, rather than who we are. After all Hello magazine isn't a celebration of normality (that would be obscene and too uncomfortable to look at). So it is the natural and logical progression that marketers would enlist the celebrity of nice looking individuals and leverage their ubiquity in the media time and space that they, under normal circumstances, would have to pay richly for. Why not enlist Britney, George, Becks, or whoever is topping the Google search charts? Well, there are some reasons: According to Datamonitor an aging population means that audien...

To follow the dryest wit on the web. Example: How social media works. A person tells one person, who tells two people, who tells three people, one of whom is Scoble. He tells everyone. Bad Banana. Bad. In that good way.