The Art of Appropriation

Appropriation is the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work. It's a great technique for creating and developing new ideas and concept by taking a small part, from something created by someone else and using it for your own purposes without permission. It's a fancy word for stealing (on a small scale), but it's vital to any creative business. We "steal" and "borrow" all the time.

I love the word because as strategic/digital planners, we research, collect and curate ideas and content from multiple sources and then adapt them in relevant ways into what we do; whether in the form of consumer insights, data/analytics, creative stimulus or strategic frameworks.

Stealing other people's work lock, stock and barrel not only says that you're an asshole, but that you also lack the talent to come up with your own original ideas.

But appropriating ideas from another source is about being inspired and translating someone else's ideas and thinking to a new purpose. There's a lot of  skill and intuition involved in identifying relevant content and trends from different sources and weaving them together and recognizing that the same thinking or framework used there could also be applicable to what you need to craft.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

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Carlsberg stunts with bikers in cinema

Wow. This definitely calls for a beer. Never really liked Carlsberg but this is a great way to create a conversation.

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KLM Live Reply

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines have launched the "KLM Live Reply". Users who Tweet to KLM during the allotted campaign time might be lucky enough to receive a "KLM Live Reply" - Essentially, KLM will replace the normal Twitter typed responses with a living alphabet made up of 140 KLM employees. This dedicated crew responds to tweets and posts in a unique way, by running around and assembling the answer live before your very eyes, within the hour.”

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PayPal: Future of Shopping

Just a Google launches their highly anticipated Google Wallet, Paypal shows us what the future of shopping would look like

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7UP China Time Travel Commercial

Cardinal rule about creating viral videos: Humor. Understand your audience (societal issues, culture, trends, memes) well; make the commercial funny enough and people will pass it on.

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Adidas Shootter

More brands are starting to deliver engaging and immersive digital experiences using information gleaned from the consumer social graph.

This latest one by Adidas Japan comes in the form of a Japanese mini soccer game and uses Twitter integration to challenge you to score against an opposing team (i.e. Any one of your Twitter connections). The catch is that the more followers the opposing team has, the more opponents you have to shoot pass and this increases the difficulty of the game.

Check it out at http://www.shootter.jp/

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30 gifts to 30 strangers in Sydney

This is an awesome video by Lucas Jatoba. It ends with the quote: "Men's first responsibility is to be happy. The second is to make everyone else happy"

How true. Gave me goosebumps watching it.

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Jane the Concussion Slayer

I'm a huge fan of Jane McGonigal, the game designer, researcher and author from the Institute of the Future. She's been called the public face of gamification and evangelizes improving the quality of human life and social ills through game mechanics. Her TED Talk on Gaming Can Make A Better World is by far one of the best TED talks I've heard.

In 2009, she suffered a traumatic brain injury and had difficulties recovering from it. Jane decided to create a game, SuperBetter to help her recover. This has now been released as a platform SuperBetter that helps people suffering from any aliments, from obesity to a broken leg to addiction through pervasive game play.

Here's a video of her talking about Super Better:

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