Only Dead Fish

Same Same But Different

Image courtesy

How different are the British from the Americans? The Economist has just run a survey interviewing a thousand Brits and a thousand Americans with the same questions relating to social, economic and political matters. The differences are quite stark. Amongst the nuggets (including some paraphrased from the feature):

• 80% of Americans believe there is a God compared to less than 40% of the British
• Americans are more likely to think of globalisation's impact on the domestic economy as bad, and well over half think that free trade is often harmful (compared to 30% of Brits)
• British Tories would vote for Barack Obama; Labour supporters (narrowly) prefer Hillary Clinton
• The British would pick Bill Clinton before Tony Blair if they could choose from a list of recent Anglo-American leaders
• Americans are less keen on both the United Nations and NATO
• But they are more enthusiastic about the “special relationship” with Britain.
• Americans are more anti-big-business
• Britons are more willing to sacrifice civil liberties in pursuit of security.

For a visual summarising the key results which you can click to enlarge go here.

Earth Hour

Today is earth hour day. You can support it by turning off your lights between 8pm and 9pm local time to promote electicity conservation. The first earth hour in Sydney in 2007 engaged around 2.2 million people and cut the city's mains electricity consumption by upto 10%. This one will be much bigger. And meanwhile, as a show of support, you have to admire Google for doing this:

**UPDATE:** Having seen John's suggestion, Only Dead Fish is going to be changed to a black template for the day. Great idea John.

Age of Conversation Bum Rush

Isn't the blogosphere great? 275 (yes 275) bloggers collaborating on the second incarnation of the Age of Conversation on the subject of "Why don't people get it?". And yes, there will be an Only Dead Fish contribution. Meanwhile this weekend sees a social media bum rush to get the first book up the Amazon charts so go here to read how you can help, go here for updates, blog about it, twitter it, join the facebook group  but most of all buy the book. Hat's off to Gavin and Drew for the idea, the inspiration and the work behind this whole project.

Matthew Cerletty

Rather like these logo artworks from from Matthew Cerletty:

And also his portraits which are wholly different but have a great quality about them:

Originally via

Future Advertising (& Marketing) Trends 2

In the comments to this post on future ad trends Gavin pointed me at this presentation by the ever-insightful Paul. And I'm posting it as a follow up to the earlier post because a) it's a more rounded round up and b) I'm in violent agreement with it.

It has all the key elements:- how the essence of branding hasn't changed, but the model of how it is marketed has; how digital is playing an increasingly central role in brand storytelling; how brands can deliver value through marketing ("making people's lives better"), through product innovation, talkability (purple cows...the product is marketing); how brands can add value through content ("content is the new currency"), and the importance of observing, listening, use of rich consumer insights, and collaboration. There's probably more on the media story which could complement this (perhaps I might have a crack at it) but this is definitely worth a look. And you can read the context to the presentation here. Thanks Paul.

| View | Upload your own

How To Be Happy

Image courtesy

Lee from Serendipity Book posted a great quote from philosopher Dan Dennett - a one sentence definition of happiness:

"Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it."

This more altruistic approach to finding fulfillment may well work - at least according to this opinion piece by Michael Steger, Director of the grandly-named Laboratory for the Study of Meaning and Quality of Life at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, in this weeks New Scientist. Steger plays on the dichotomy between two very different views of how to acheive happiness:- that expressed by Aristotle of maximising ones virtue or personal excellence and applying that for the good of the community, and that championed by his predecessor Aristippus focusing on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

He's conducted simple experiments that involved students filling in daily logs showing whether they had engaged in more virtue-building or pleasure-seeking activities which were then compared to questionnaires designed to indicate how happy they felt. These illustrated that not only was there no correlation between pleasure-seeking and happiness but the more virtue-building activities the students engaged in the happier they said they were, both on the day in question and the day after.

These are just correlations, as he points out, but they may hint at the bigger picture which is that virtue-building is an important road to happiness and is exhibited in the relentless pursuit for 'growth' in abilities and understanding which people typically show. Alongside the more obviously and immediately motivational pleasure-seeking and pain avoidance, this common drive for growth may also be rooted in our evolution. So the answer perhaps is in achieving the right balance between short-term gratification and investment in longer-term satisfaction and fulfillment. God, I'm such a hippy.

Future Advertising Trends

...according to Ben Hourahine, Futures Editor at Leo Burnett (London). A surprisingly unsurprising round-up (several of these are surely existent) but interesting nonetheless.

Via

Alarmism

Set your alarms

The Death of Customer Service

The delightful Mrs Slocombe courtesy

TIME magazine is running a feature on "10 Ideas That Are Changing The World". Alongside some pretty big concepts around sustainability, "reverse radicalism", geoengineering, and the impact of ageing populations, they highlight the unstoppable rise of self-serve technology citing such joys as supermarket self-scanning and self-checkout, movie ticket kiosks, airport self-check-in and even ER check-in kiosks at hospitals (I kid you not). "Only now" they say, "are technology and public sentiment aligning to truly shift the responsibility of collecting goods and services to the consumer".

Ubiquitous self-service does two things:- it drives big savings for the companies which introduce it and it shifts the responsibility and work onto the consumer. Few initiatives deliver real macro savings in productivity. The efficency gain is far from always on the side of the consumer (how many times have you been frustrated by the inflexibility of machine-driven service?). "Business will get smarter about when to serve you" says Bill Nuti, CEO of NCR, one of the biggest providers of self-service systems. Maybe it will. It needs to. The point at which you interact with your customers and the experience they have is the most important form of marketing there is. There may well come a point at which increasing automation will invert into a corresponding increase in customer desire for the benefits of human service. Businesses which structure themselves around human interaction could find they have a real purple cow on their hands.

The Urbanista Diaries

Image courtesy

This is pretty smart. Nokia have sent four of their favourite bloggers on a trip around the world "armed with only their wits, guile and a Nokia N82 multimedia computer." Their mission "to record their journey and the people they meet along the way. To tell the stories of the places they've travelled through and capture the beauty of the world at large".

The phones are fitted with integrated GPS allowing you to follow their progress in real time as they journey to 22 cities around the world. Each of the four bloggers (Devin Balentina of The Nokia Guide, Ryan Gallagher of Camera Toss, Jenifer Hanen of Black Phoebe, and Jay Montano of My Nokia Blog) has a downloadable widget, and you can also follow their progress via a map on the site which is embedded with photos of their travels.

They've also engaged in some pretty smart partnerships. Wallpaper have armed two of their fashion journalists with the phone allowing an inside look of the coverage of the London, Paris and Milan fashion weeks (disclosure: Wallpaper is a brand owned by the company I work for). With CNN.com you can follow a CNN anchor as he reports from around the world, or be a part of the media circus following the US presidential campaign trail.  With National Geographic, you can follow an anthropolgist and a biochemist in Madagascar, or a Primatologist in Vietnam. And you can even track five Lonely Planet journalists as they discover the best places to visit from around the globe.

I love this kind of stuff. And as an exercise in illustrating the features of the phone it's pretty impressive. Done by R/GA London.