The 22 Rules Of Storytelling

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Pixar's storyboard artist @lawnrocket  compiled this list of narrative wisdom she's received working for the animation studio over the years. It's an amazing list and the rules are applicable to any form of content creation from movie scripts to digital story stories. My favorites in bold.

 

1.     You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2.     You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

3.     Trying for theme is important, but you won't see what the story is actually about til you're at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4.     Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

5.     Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6.     What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7.     Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8.     Finish your story, let go even if it's not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9.     When you're stuck, make a list of what WOULDN'T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10.   Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you've got to recognize it before you can use it.

11.   Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone.

12.   Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13.   Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it's poison to the audience.

14.   Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it.

15.   If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16.   What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.

17.   No work is ever wasted. If it's not working, let go and move on - it'll come back around to be useful later.

18.   You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19.   Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20.   Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d'you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21.   You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can't just write ‘cool'. What would make YOU act that way?

22.   What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

 

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Ford Keyfree Login

A great way to demonstrate how useful your product or service is will be to show how pervasive it can be in the context of everyday life.

Leveraging on the point of view that its new keyless car entry allows for "no loss of time", Ford creates an everyday life example of how useful its keyfree technology is: In the form of  a mobile app that uses proximity sensors to automatically log in and out of all your web accounts

 

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Puma Social Dream Team

Puma has been able to put a unique point of view around sports that is intrinsically linked to the brand purpose: The After Hours Athlete. Honoring the heroes of after hour sports, these are unconventional individuals who shun calories counting, fitness training for ping pong, ten-pin blowing, foosball, darts and karaoke. Just like regular athletes, they keep their eye on the prize – the goal of scoring a phone number precedes the goal of winning a basketball game.

 

This POV is wrapped around a truly social platform aptly branded Puma Social.

 

In its current form, Puma has launched Puma Social Dream Team in Asia. User engagement comes in the form of a Facebook app which leverages on your social graph to determine your social traits within a team setting and goes on to help you put together the right group of friends (leveraging on their social graph) for every social situation possible ranging from a night out in town, a bowling match to a Karaoke session.

A retail marketing strategy is tightly weaved into the experience with the app making recommendations on customized products for you and each friend in your dream team.

One of the truly “social” aspects of this is that it allows you to discover interesting social facts like friends who have checked-in with you most often or who has “liked” your Facebook posts the most.

There’s a also a clear call to action and retail push in the form of a downloaded coupon that gives you 15% discount on Puma merchandise. Check it out here

 

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Daybreak: A Transmedia Campaign of Epic Proportions

AT&T together with Tim Kring and BBDO launched Daybreak, a transmedia campaign that marries digital content, storytelling and engagement across multiple platform and device.

Daybreak is a layered digital campaign for AT&T's "Rethink Possible" platform that highlights its 4G netwrok and product innovations. It's a transmedia campaign of epic proportions, starting on TV with Touch the Fox series created by Tim Kring and continued online across two dedicated sites and mobile apps, creating an immersive entertainment experience that gives users a new way to expereince storytelling across mutiple layers of media and devices.

Check it out here

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Coca Cola Security Cameras

I've said this many times: Coca Cola is one of the world's most well known and loved brands for a reason. One single minded brand purpose - Open Happiness. A brand platform that can be communicated in so many different ways and that resonates to consumers emotionally. 

In this series, Coke shows us how happiness can come from looking at the world a little differently.

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Tourism British Columbia: Giant Vending Machine

I really like the feel good factor and goodwill that brands generate when they do on-ground activation programs that generate surprise and delight moments for consumers. These are acts of generosity that are performed by brands that can help or cheer up an individual or groups of people.

The important thing for brands to remember is that these moments should not be frivolous and should be tightly weaved into the brand purpose or the product proposition. This giant vending machine activation by Tourism British Columbia (which is similar to Coca Cola's Happiness Machine) surprises passerbys with random surprises that tie in with their 100 "British Columbia Moments"

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Easy Way Pronunciation Game

Easy Way Language Centre used Google Chrome's Speech Recognition Technology to build a simple but really cool game that allows you to practice your pronunciation skills. A really nice way of using a piece of technolgoy to create an entertaining and enjoyable experience that is social by design and rooted intrinscially to the brand.

 

 

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The Most Amazing Wedding Proposal EVER

Done to the tune of Bruno Mar's Marry You, this live lip-dub proposal is both creative and heartwarming, with all the feel-good ingredients in the makings of a great viral video with 4.95 million views the last I checked.

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Nissan LEAF: A world without petrol

The new Nissan LEAF launches in Sydney and Melbourne with an art installation showing how petrol bowsers might be used in 'a world without petrol'.

A nice point of view wrapped around the 100% Electric powered Nissan Leaf that's sure to create positive brand and product conversations

Vote for your favorite bowser at www.zeropetrol.com.au

 

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Magic Vision Band Aids

Great use of technology to reinforce a brand purpose. Band Aid uses augmented reality to create an immersive and fun experience - a digital "band aid" with The Muppets for kids and in doing so, get them to forget about the pain from their injuries.

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The Return of dictator Ben Ali

Sometimes all it takes is a simple idea based on a great Point of view: Let's reawaken people's sense of political engagement with a strong and effective reminder of the price of dictatorship

Advertising is about changing the way people behave and act through a message. Behavior Change = Motivation x Opportunity - In this case, the message provides the motivation and the medium provide the opportunity.

What they have simply done is to create conversations using a strong point of view and then propagating the content output online to amplify these conversations. The idea is social by design (surprise and delight) and this gives people a reason to care and share.

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Nike Free Face

Another great use of technology and a unique point of view to demonstrate a product attribute. Kudos to Nike

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Smart EBall

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Awesome idea by our friends at BBDO Germany - A great product proposition demonstrated creatively generates social currency that gives people a reason to share

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P&G London 2012 Olympic Games Film

P&G honors what all mums around the world do to help their children succeed 100 days before the start of the Olympics.

Nice emotional touch and a great tie in to the upcoming Mother's day.

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Push To Add More Drama

How awesome is this - Great POV by TV Channel TNT in Belgium and execute in the way that creates talk-ability and sharing

A surprise and delight moment that has generated so much social currency that it's gone viral with 25 million views in 1 week.

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Quarterly Co.

I love the idea of a store that sells stuff based on a taste level rather than a category or price point.

Enter Quarterly Co., a subscription based service that enables people to receive physical items in the mail from influential contributors of their choice. Rather than a specific type of product, you elect to receive a box, once a quarter, of surprises curated by tastemakers like the duo behind the trend-scoping blog Cool Hunting. Every mailing comes with a letter from the curator explaining why each inclusion made the cut.

As seen on Details: http://www.details.com/style-advice/rules-of-style/201204/boxed-gifts#ixzz1s7alGoMW

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Animated Twitter Commercial

Create idea of using Twitter to create an animated commercial. Truly #SmartLiving

Check it out here: https://twitter.com/#!/smartarg

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A Great Mobile Experience: Nike Jumpman 23

One of the better mobile user experiences using HTML5.

Check out the site on your mobile by scanning the QR code or use this link: http://www.nike.com/jumpman23/aj2012/mobile/

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Incredibox

Great way to create a platform where users can discover, engage and remix content

Create your own beatbox tunes here: http://www.incredibox.fr/en/#/application

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Tic-Tac Flash Mob

This is genius! An elaborate setup sparked by a nice brand proposition

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Project Glass

The future is here with Google's Project Glass

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The Trojan Shirt

This is simple but brilliant campaign. An execution tied to a nice POV and a great example of creating acts, not ads.

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KLIK by Face.com

Love this integration and a great example of Local, Social, Photo and Mobile (LOSOPHOMO).

KLIK is a iPhone camera app that uses face recognition integrated with your Facebook account to let you quickly tag your friends in real-time while taking pictures.

Get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/klik-by-face.com/id484990787

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Spotify takes Facebook Time to a whole new level

This is my most favorite brand implementation of Facebook Timeline thus far. Great idea that taps on the brand ethos - Music. And how far music has come along since the dawn of time and is offering up to 1,000-odd years of music history on its new Facebook Timeline, reaching all the way back to 1,000AD.

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Excuse Me, Monteith's, There's a Twig in My Cider

The brand problem: How do we let customers know that our Ciders are made from fresh fruit and not fruit concentrate?

The Idea: Subvert an existing conversation (foreign objects found in food products) with a unique POV (Our Ciders are made from fruits so fresh that sometimes you might find twigs from the trees we harvest our fruits from in our cider packaging)

The most brilliant solutions are the simplest ones. But you'll need some ballsy clients brave enough to try something like this.

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Mobile Marketing: Everything You Need To Know

Mobile presents a unique opportunity for marketers to reach consumers at the right place and time and add value through branded utility. There’s a huge growth potential in Mobile in Asia and this presentation provides a good framework for developing your Mobile Marketing strategy.

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Amex and the Social Media Trinity

Amex completes the Social Media trinity.

1. They started a year ago (at SXSW) with Foursquare check in deals/rewards loaded as cash back on card purchases when you check-in at Amex merchants - https://sync.americanexpress.com/foursquare/

2. Then it was Shopping rewards on Facebook based on your social graph that is loaded into your card (Link-Like-Love and Go Social): http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/amex-facebook-deals-go-social/ )

3. Now they reward you when you tweet with a specific Amex hashtag (again offers loaded back to your card):  http://www.fastcompany.com/1823041/the-social-credit-card-amex-syncs-with-twitter-to-turn-hashtags-into-savings
 
All 3 initiatives above are social by design and the customer's credit card is electronically linked to their respective Foursquare/Facebook/Twitter accounts, making it instantly socialable and allowing Amex to track if these deals eventually activate and increase card spending.

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Media Buying Epic Fail

Singapore Army Recruitment Ad turns into a joke

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Invisible Mercedes

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Guardian Open Journalism: Three Little Pigs

This is freaking brilliant. The Guardian UK advertisement for open journalism using The Three Little Pigs

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KLM Meet & Seat

KLM meet and seat allows passengers traveling on the same airline the option to share the Facebook and Linkedin details when they check-in and select a seat. This allows others who have done the same to choose who they would like to "meet" on-board (the video below shows a business meeting but in my view this might as well be a hook up) and arrange to seat next to them.

Kinda spooky but an interesting thought.

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Let's discuss this over a Tiger

Nice point of view and execution by Tiger Beer - "Here's to always working it out, here's to Tiger Time" - translated into multiple languages in this video.
 

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Intel Ultrabook™ POP-UP THEATER

This is just awesome :)

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Digital Marketing Toolkit

I've created a simple digital marketing toolkit that covers the basics of Digital Planning, Social Media, Consumer Touch-points and a guide to using basic digital/social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, Web Analytics and Social Listening.

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The Greatest Speech Ever Made

From Mr Chaplin's film - The Great Dictator. The video shows the speech overlayed with visuals from modern day. Still very relevant and very inspirational.

I particularly love this line:

"You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure."

That's what great ideas and the right use of technology have the power to do - create happiness and make life free and beautiful; to create opportunities, to solve problems and to make the world a better place than when we found it.

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TED Talk: Massive-scale online collaboration

This TED talk blew my mind on so many levels.

The evolution of Captcha to Re-Captcha and how a simple piece of technology which by itself is beneficial to the world at large (by preventing automated submissions and thus of tremendous value to CRM driven and eCommerce sites) is also used to solve a bigger challenge and digitize books. A simple idea that helps reduce wasted motion and make the world a better place.

Duolingo - The ambitious mass collaboration language translation project is a huge social win-win situation. I'm inspired by ideas and people like Luis von Ahn every day to use simple human insights and behaviors and fueling these with technology to create and manifest ideas that have the power to change the way we live.

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The Golden Voice of Love

Love (no pun intended) this idea by Kraft

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Razorbombing at work

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Touch the best of British Television

An awesome campaign with a unique point of view nicely weaved into digital. This is how brands should engage in the digital space

1. Come up with a unique brand point of view
2. Identify the consumer insight
3. Give people a reason to engage
4. Weave in the right digital medium and platform

Great example of creating acts (actions), not ads. Kudos to BBC

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Painting with a Basketball - Yao Ming Portrait

This is an interesting art project. Malaysian girl working in Shanghai paints a portrait of recently retired Chinese NBA star Yao Ming with red paint and using / bouncing a basketball.

She also did a portrait of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei using sunflower seeds - http://www.ohiseered.com/2011/11/huh-wei-wei-who.html

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Simon Sinek: If You Don't Understand People, You Don't Understand Business

I'm a huge fan of Simon Sinek and this is a very inspiring (albeit long at 30 mins) talk. The reason why I do what I do (in reference to his "Golden Circle") is that I believe that technology can help make the world a better place for everyone and advance the human race - Including the use of technology in advertising and communications to shape and change human behaviors.

In this talk, Simon talks about the need for trust in all relationships and how human bonds are formed when people find themselves within a circle of trust. This same mantra can be applied to organizations as well. It's awe-inspiring as a motivational talk but also extremely relevant and insightful to the field of communications.

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Lonely Planet Friends for Friends

Developed by the Miami Ad School and leveraging on a universal travel insight, this is a great use of the Facebook social graph to create a nice social travel utility.

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Lynx 2012 - Get It On For The End Of The World

Lynx has always had a simple but inspiring brand idea - Get sprayed to get laid (or the official version which is "Grooms men to seduce") and the brand has been masters at bringing out new ways to communicate this each year.

Their newest launch, Lynx 2012: The Final Edition is inspired by the Mayan calendar, which is set to end its final cycle on the 21st December 2012 – when Mayans believe the world will end. The TV advert for Lynx 2012: The Final Edition was seeded online to drive awareness and generate buzz among the brand’s target audience, before the TV ad campaign broke.

The TV advert sees a young male building a wooden boat in preparation for the end of the world. After all his hard work, he sits down and sprays Lynx 2012 – The Final Edition and in true Lynx style, a number of beautiful women start to descend upon the boat.

On the digital space, Lynx also created a "Last Request Generator" which users can use pre-set or random words to generate their own last requests before the world ends. Lynx doesn't guarantee anything but there's a chance that they will fulfill that last request. There's also a timer on the site that counts down to 21 December 2012

http://www.lynxeffect.com/uk/last-request-generator

I wonder what happens if doomsday doesn't come - Will there be a Lynx 2013: Survivors Edition?

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Nike + Fuel

Nike just launched the Nike + Fuelband, a wristband that measures physical activity and converts it to a universal measurement called "Nike Fuel".
This allows athletes to track their sports performance and more importantly, because it's a measurement of physical activity not just tied to one sport, it allows Nike to ladder this across all sports categories and socialize it with challenges, activities, experiences and campaigns across a gamified platform.

It's like Nike + Running but fueled by steroids. Pun intended.

The product launch is wrapped around the #makeitcount campaign. This is going to be huge for Nike.

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Flash Kick in London: Project Teamwork by Samsung Galaxy Note

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Couple Up to Buckle Up

What a unique way to use QR codes leveraging on a nice insight and a great post-scan experience

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"Where do we Land? A Converse China trip to Mongolia

Awesome video by Converse China

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Crash Corsage

This is an awesome non-branded mobile utility.

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Feel Good by Kleenex

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John Jay from W+K On Creativity

This is a really inspirational piece by John Jay from W+K and Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in the Business 2011.

It is all our job to break out of our silos and never let anyone define you by their terms. Here's to a great start to 2012.

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The Open Book Project

A great platform idea by Reach Australia.

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JWTIntelligence: 10 Trends for 2012

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Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review

 

As we close of 2011, Google Zeitgeist remembers the year through search

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Take the Ultimate Plunge

The plunging cleavage is taken literally in this Wonderbra campaign

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Introducing Google Currents

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Coca-Cola Where Will Happiness Strike Next: The OFW Project

I've said this before and I'll say it again. Coke is one of the rare brands that communicates it's brand purpose in everything it does. Open Happiness, the joy and happiness that comes with every can of Coke you open and drink. Happiness comes in many forms and means different things to different people. For some, happiness comes in the form of nice material surprises, for others, happiness comes in the form of spending time with family and loved ones.

A great brand story is one that immerses viewers completely and brings them into the story emotionally.  In this series, Coke brings the story of how it created true happiness for a few of the 11 million Filipinos working overseas and away from their family.

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Norte Photoblocker

Quite a gimmicky idea but I like the thought of leveraging on a unique brand point of view on something so relevant to the category and creating a branded utility around it.

It's a nice twist that is sure to create conversations for the brand

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Norte Photoblocker

Quite a gimmicky idea but I like the thought of leveraging on a unique brand point of view on something so relevant to the category and creating a branded utility around it.

It's a nice twist that is sure to create conversations for the brand

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPm7iWo0Tg4

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MARTINI: LUCK IS AN ATTITUDE

Great video that encapsulates the brand point of view nicely. Luck is indeed an attitude. A unique POV that helps create a great brand story

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The Last Person on Earth Who Does Not Use Online Banking

Driving online banking sign ups is something that every bank does. Transaction migration is a great way for banks to move low involvement transactions to self service channels and save costs. However, most online banking campaigns are boring and undifferentiated. This is by far the most interesting campaign done by Turkish bank Garanti to get users to start banking online.

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Russian Facebook Roulette

I don't know how I missed this from before but it's a really interesting campaign using a digital equivalent of the "Russian Roulette"

In this case, if you do lose, you virtual life (aka Facebook profile) will be lost forever.

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Seconds of Beauty

Montblanc and Leo Burnett Milan pay homage to the chronograph which records time to the accuracy of a fifth of a second with a short film challenge. People are invited to seize the moment and submit a second long tribute to this small unit of time (one second) for a chance to win a Montblanc Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph

This is an edited list based on the video submissions from the first round

Check out the campaign here: http://www.montblanconesecond.com/

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Moosejaw X-Ray App

Another AR app that is sure to appeal to men (and women too).

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Penningtons Styled To Surprise

This is an awesome AR execution at a department store. Advertising is about being able to engage consumers at the right place and right time and to shift perceptions and drive behavior or action. What digital allows is for brands to create amazing experiences along the consumer journey that will excite and delight customers and bring the brand that much closer to them.

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Life Edited

A short TED talk by Graham Hill about how to live happier with less stuff (plus reduce your carbon footprint and save more money).

I love this talk as it is very much aligned to my point of view about how we should look at living life. Too many people live their lives based on the accumulation of assets and stuff and end up being unhappy, stressed and in debt. The idea of editing your life and living in a digitized and minimalistic way is about keeping what's the best of the best and quality over quantity. It's the same principle of curation over aggregation or hoarding.

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Lays Potato Machine

Storytelling is an essential art in communications; Our minds have been primed for them since young and people love to be inspired and immersed in other's stories. Stories are a great way to change behavior and to shift perceptions. What digital provides is a way to visually and mentally immerse users into the story; in a way where they are not just consuming as viewers but engaging as participants.

This is an awesome digital activation by Lays Potato Chips. Instead of handing out regular packets of Lays for people to sample, Lays immersed consumers into the brand story - from potato to potato chips and used the platform as a way to drive trial.

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IKEA: Catch the Swedish Light

Another great idea by everyone's favorite Swedish furniture company

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Volkswagen The People's Car Project

Great platform idea playing on the brand name (Volkswagen literally means "People's Car") as well as the evolving Chinese culture where people engage socially (and vocally) online and are taking an active stance and genuine interest in wanting to be part of China's rapid development.

"The People's Car Project" campaign takes the company's name at face value and invites the people of China to design their own car by spreading and discussing their ideas on a variety of platforms.

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Augmented Reality - NatGeo and Tesco

Here are some really nice AR executions by NatGeo and Tesco of late

!

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Online Checkout in Real Life

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What Steve Taught Me About Advertising

This is my tribute to Steve Jobs and what he taught me about advertising. Steve was a visionary, a forward thinker and a great user experience and product designer.  In a very big way, Steve changed the world. He was one of the crazy ones. The way we now see, hear, touch and interact with things and technology, we all owe to him.

However, Steve also taught us what advertising and communications was truly about: Values. This was way back in 1997, during his second tenure back at Apple when they launched "Think Different"

Steve talked about how complicated and noisy the world was and how difficult it was for brands to get people to remember them. In order to do that, brands needed to be crystal clear on what they wanted consumers to remember about them.

Even great brands need constant investment and nurturing if it is going to continue it's relevance and vitality in people's lives. The way to do that is not to just talk about product features or the technology and how a brand is better than it's competitors. Steve preached  about the need for brands to talk about who they are and what they are about. Our customers want to know who we are and what we stand for; Where we fit in this world and in their lives. And to do this in a way where it resonates with consumers at a higher emotional level. To touch their souls and connect with them instantly.

A lot of things will change for a brand over time - the market, the brand's place in a market, the product, the distribution strategy
but core values should not change. It is fundamentally what the brand stands for.

Apple doesn't just build products that let people do their jobs, access music and content on the go or any of the many innovations that have changed consumer behavior. Apple believes that people with passion can change the world (in their own big and small ways ) for the better and the people who are crazy enough that think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.

Think Different is a point of view that honors people who actually do that and as a result have changed the world and moved humanity forward.

And Apple didn't just talk the talk, it walked the walk. This same point of view set the stage for what Apple would become in the years that followed (and will follow): thinking different and implementing seemingly crazy ideas that no other company aside from Apple could have pulled off. And they succeeded, time and time again. Apple didn't follow the latest trends and fads in technology but forged its own path and became the company that everybody else wanted to be.

And Steve, you are by far the craziest one of them all. Thank u for your brilliance & foresight and for making it possible for us to do what we do daily. You will be dearly remembered

Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.” - Steve Jobs

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Don Draper Presents Facebook Timeline

One of my favorite scenes in Mad Men slightly adapted for the present. Context is the same but the product shifts from the Kodak Carousel to Facebook's new Timeline.

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Create a State of Chaos

This is how brands can use the digital space to create conversations about what it stands for and to articulate its point of view in a way where it will resonate with consumers.
State Farm's POV is that whatever unexpected happens to you, it has you covered.

What better way to demonstrate this than to unleash a robot of destruction to blow your home to smithereens. State Farm's "Create Chaos In Your Town" allows you to create a personalized rampage of destruction on your own home (or any other address) using imaging from Google's Street View.

Be prepared, Be very prepared. Unleash your own chaos at http://chaosinyourtown.com

See the full gallery on Posterous

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My Next Trip

This is an awesome Foursquare application using the API - Type in a city and get a 2 day itinerary based on user tips and recommendations on Foursquare.

Check it out on http://www.my-next-trip.com/

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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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Volkswagen BlueMotion Roulette

How do you make a technical, abstract product benefit interesting? Fuel efficiency is not something you can get people particularly excited about to find out more.
Volkswagen did it by turning the entire experience into a roulette game; getting people to guess how far the new Volkswagen Golf BlueMotion will run on one full tank of gas. The winner gets to win a car. As each person could only make one guess, participants had to find out more about the car, technology and route in the process, making it an absolutely engaging experience.

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Driving User Engagement Through Gamification

Gamification is a buzzword you might have started hearing lately. It refers to the use of game play mechanics in non-game scenarios and applications, in particular consumer web and mobile sites as a means to encourage users to engage with the site or platform in specific desired behaviours.

Gamification or game-based marketing works well in this age of information fatigue, where users are constantly bombarded with an overload of information, product pushing and marketing messages from a variety of different media sources.

Instead of purely pushing website or mobile content and expecting users to consume, engage and act in the desired outcomes, users now become players. If they perform certain tasks, such as commenting on articles, emailing links to friends, checking in to specific locations, they win points and badges and compete with others within the same ecosystem which helps extend the longevity of the engagement by making it much more addictive.

Game-based marketing allows brands the ability to build in their marketing content into the game flow and user journey and leverage on mechanisms such as leader boards, points, badges and prizes to encourage and get users to perform specific tasks such as sharing the content with friends, providing feedback (rate, like) or submitting content that would be beneficial to the brand.

Gamification in Loyalty Programs

The business of engendering online loyalty and engagement through gaming techniques is not new – rewards programs for airlines, hotels and credit cards have been using game mechanics to drive sustained engagement and loyalty with consumers for a long time. Typically airline customers enroll in programs to accumulate frequent flyer miles according to the distance flown on that airline or its partners. These days, there are so many other ways to accumulate miles such as making transactions through co-branded credit cards. When customers hit a certain level, they are rewarded with upgrades, free air travel, airport lounge access and priority bookings. Points can even been redeemed for other goods and services.

In addition, loyalty programs like Cathay Pacific’s Marco Polo Club have multiple membership tiers. Users start with the entry-level green tier and then move up the ladder once they acquire enough travel mileage to meet the next tier’s threshold. Each tier provides additional rewards to customers but more importantly, it is a status symbol or badge for users to display proudly for having achieved an exclusive level that differentiates them from the masses.

In the 2009 film “Up in the Air”, George Clooney plays a man who relishes his perpetual travels and has a personal ambition of being the 7th person in history to collect ten million frequent flyer miles with American Airlines, for which he will receive a special gold emblazoned card with life time privileges.

Most famously, Foursquare gives you badges and rewards in the form of check-in offers plus special offers for “mayors”. Other websites such as LinkedIn (progress bar that subtly urges you to add more details to your profile), GetGlue (offering badges when you review shows) and Groupon (countdown timer for buyers to nab deals before time runs out) all employ gamification to drive user interactions. The list just goes on.

Gamification in Utility

To be effective, gamified applications have to connect something already meaningful to users or wrap themselves in a story that makes it meaningful for them.

To encourage people to get fit, Nike + is a gamified utility that makes running interesting by adding scores, challenges, trophies and competition to what would otherwise just be a self-tracking running application.

Mint.com is an online service that allows users to track and manage their personal finance. It is a gamified system where the “game” is your financial health. New players walk through their financial lives on a digital quest and receive a checkmark for each completed task with the progress tracked on their financial profile. When their profile is complete, they can unlock their player dashboard to see how they are doing and create goals such as getting out of debt, saving up for a new house or vacation.

People love eating and everybody wants to discover where they can get the best food. Enter Foodspotting, the crowdsourced application that allows you to take pictures of food, say what it is, and pin it via geo-location to the restaurant. Like Foursquare, you get points for doing all this and earn badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures and participating in guides.

Even mundane activities such as doing chores and completing your to-do list can be gamified and made fun and entertaining with applications such as Epic Win and Chore Wars.

Gamification to Drive Campaigns

Game-based marketing can also be applied in short term campaigns to drive a desired user behaviour and engagement.

Two interesting and recent campaigns that incorporate gamification are Mini’s “Getaway Stockholm” and Jimmy Choo’s “To-Catch-a-Choo“.

The Mini

The former is a week long virtual-reality game that requires users to hunt for a virtual Mini with their phones and then play the classic hide and seek game to prevent other potential takers from swiping it. The person with the Virtual Mini at the end of the game wins an actual Mini Countryman.

The latter is a scavenger hunt around London that requires users to try to “catch” a pair of Jimmy Choo sneakers from clues based on where it had “checked in” on Foursquare.

Such social gaming has tremendous viral potential as well as being fun for participants. Both Mini and Jimmy Choo have been smart in creating a game that enables people to build new social circles, introduce the brand and product name into conversations and enhance the value in which the brand is known for within their respective target audience.

Blueprint for Gamification

So how does gamification apply to your brand? One way to look at it is how applying game-based marketing can help make interactions with your customers more engaging by driving participation.

A game by definition is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Players opt in to play the game because it has compelling and defined goals and rewards, an established game play (mechanics) and a dynamic feedback system (of points, levels, badges, achievements and leader boards).

As such, the four basic building blocks that create a game system involves developing goals for players, creating rules that limit players and force creativity and interaction, providing a dynamic feedback system for the progress of the players in the game and making the game voluntary.

Before jumping into gamification, brands should consider the following:

- What are the particular behaviours you are trying to reward? Is it for users to peruse, share and/or submit content?

- Understand your reward points system. Define the types of goals, how achievements are rewarded, different types of rewards and leader board mechanics to drive competition.

- Know what will make the game compelling. Just because it is a game does not mean it will be fun. Good game design, mechanics and a well thought out user journey and game flow are some principles that will help make the experience engaging and addictive.

There are many examples of companies currently using game thinking and mechanics to influence and drive behaviour. With more brands leveraging on gamification to engage users, it will not be surprising to see that within the next 5 to 10 years, almost every consumer interaction online and mobile will have some form of game mechanics built into it.

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You LOL you LOSE!

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The LivingSocial Taxi

Living Social has been the lesser known of the daily deals site (especially in Asia) as compared to Groupon.

The company started as a social discovery and cataloging network company that offers  daily deals based on handpicked experiences that can be shared with friends.

Their point of view is to surprise and delight consumers every single day and the company digs deep to deliver this by designing total experiences that delight consumers and bring an adventurous and loyal following to local businesses

This POV is manifested very nicely in the form of the Living Social Taxi where unsuspecting passengers who have hailed the cab have to make a choice—carry on to their original destination, or 'roll the die' and go for an exciting experience.

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New Balance Urban Dash

New Balance drives in-store visits in NYC with an AR app. Similar execution to the Mini Getaway in Stockholm done late last year.

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Introducing: Layar Vision

Layar's new real-world object recognition protocol will change the way we view and use Augmented Reality

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Speedo Pace Club

Speedo launches an online community and mobile app - i.e. The Nike + for Swimming.

The Speedo Pace Club provides training programs to help all levels of swimmers improve their fitness and stroke technique.Swimmers are able to find swimming pools, track their times, share them with friends, and receive support from a swimmer’s social network within Pace Club. Alongside training is content from the world’s top swimmers that includes tips on training, your diet and an insider’s perspective from the heat of competition.

The Speedo Pace Club has five components.  It lets users form a virtual swim team, via Facebook, helping them connect online for the support, recognition and motivation they need to achieve their swimming goals. It even allows them to give fellow team members a virtual high five, when appropriate. The club will also award virtual swim team members virtual badges and discounts on Speedo merchandise once they reach certain levels of achievement.

Great to see platform type ideas from classic brands.

Check out the site at: http://paceclub.speedousa.com

You can also download the mobile app at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speedo-pace-club/id448067082?mt=8

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Building Social Currency: 3 Things You Need To Know

Many agency folks would be familiar with this scenario – getting client briefs with campaign objectives to create something that will go viral or generate “buzz”. Perhaps this may have risen from the success of campaigns like the Old Spice Guy that now has every marketer pandering to leverage on earned media to help amplify marketing efforts in light of reduced budgets.

Achieving buzz and getting something to go viral is an outcome of a well-developed and -executed campaign and not the objective. Creating content that ignites conversations is the objective. Content is what starts conversations and the content must have social currency in order for people to want to share it as part of their everyday social lives.

Social currency is what helps businesses create unique brand identities and provides the accessibility and permission to continually interact with consumers and customers.

Social currency involves creating a sense of community and strong affiliation between consumers and users of a brand. It usually involves getting these participants to co-create content and is communicated by the brand through pervasive storytelling that delivers a unique point of view.

Here are three key pillars for developing social currency:

1. Value

In order for brands to achieve engagement with its audience, it needs to consider the value that the content will deliver. Looking at it from the user’s perspective – what’s in it for them to participate and be engaged?

If the content has high value, then not only will the recipients be more likely to engage with it, but they will also be more likely to engage in conversations with the brand, compelling them to pass along the content to their friends because it has social currency.

Value can come in the form of entertainment, information, or utility.

Entertainment includes things that bring users pure delight and can come in the form of music, videos, humour, and games. Most Internet memes stem from frivolous content that provides humour, silly and frivolous entertainment that users can associate and appreciate. Value could also come in the form of content that employs gaming mechanics (an actual game or game-based interactions) that requires active participation and engagement, resulting in fun and competitive entertainment. An example of this is with men vs. women in the Trivial Pursuit experiment.

Information contains things that are emotionally useful to users such as knowledge, gossip, fame, or exclusivity. An example of knowledge as valuable content is information that is developed or curated and provides thought leadership. These are usually produced in various formats such as videos, slideshare presentations, and blog posts. Opportunities to gain fame or exclusivity are also extremely compelling value-drivers if you look at the popularity of reality shows around the world.

Utility covers value that is functionally useful and includes monetary rewards such as prizes, vouchers, and free trials as well as utilitarian applications that can make life easier, help users save time, or enable them to perform certain valuable tasks. Value is also provided by connecting participants as members of a shared community in mutually beneficial ways. One great example of this is Nike +.

2. Story-ability

Ever since the dawn of time, storytelling has been one of the primary ways humans have communicated. Humans crave stories and technology constantly advances the art of story telling that helps marketers connect. Value is created through ongoing narratives that educates, inspires, informs, and connects consumers, participants, and members of the brand community.

In order to tell a compelling story, brands must have and provide a unique point of view that users can draw an affiliation with. The point of view is formed from the brand’s unique purpose within the digital landscape and how that point of view comes together to provide value and association with what consumers need and crave for.

Puma created that connection with “after hours” athletes by paying homage to the champions of late night games from foosball to beer pong, night golf, and even the highest number of karaoke hits one can belt out within an hour via its branded community Puma Social. If 5 a.m. cab rides are more your style than 5 a.m. runs, then this platform for fans of old school diversions to come together and share in social exchange and friendly competition was tailor-made for you.

Sometimes, stories can be used to build digital movements where brands come together with consumers to rally behind a cause that is fuelled and amplified by the use of technology and social media. Pepsi Refresh is one such movement where a brand and its consumers band together to try to make the world a better place.

3. Co-creation

Not all content that comes from the brand needs to be created from within the organisation. Brands need to involve consumers in the act of creating content and conversations. Value is established through the collaborative efforts of participants who share, curate, and edit each other’s (and sometimes the brand’s) efforts. Good examples are Burberry’s Art of the Trench and Vitamin Water’s Flavor Creator.

The ultimate proof of social currency is when your content is remixed and or parodied as it happened with Cadbury’s Gorilla and Old Spice Guy.

Maybe the secrets to creating something that will go viral lies in Jennifer Aniston’s viral video for Smartwater that parodies a bunch of Internet memes including dancing babies, kicking a random guy in the groin, and being aptly named the “Jen Aniston sex tape”.

For marketers who need a viral cookbook, the above three key ingredients will provide a good framework to help you create more buzz than an entire swarm of bees put together for the next campaign and beyond.

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Coke & Happiness

Why Coke is such an awesome brand. One great point of view. One single message. Happiness.

The happiness that a drink of Coke provides. Happiness that is timeless; that always resonates with people. What happiness is, means, or looks like may change, but the emotion remains relevant.

In this series, Happiness is about turning the negative into positive. Great ad.

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Twitter Job Hustle

Ingenious way to get noticed and hired via Twitter.

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The Idea

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