I’m a long time Creative Socialite but first time contributor. Just over two years ago moved from the UK to Australia. I thought it would good for the CS folks around the world to get a flavour of what’s going on from a digital perspective down under. I reckon a good place to start would be the recently completed “Australia/NZ Digital Agency Hot Index” agency charts. Compiled by Campaign Brief and Bannerblog. 70 or so Agencies initially audited. The Top 30 features on the chart. Many, if not all of the agencies charted are regulars at Creative Social.
That should give you a flavour of the landscape down under – More to follow.
Today Acne, B-Reel, North Kingdom, Perfect Fools and Unit9 together took another step towards making life easier for digital producers at agencies and production companies. How? By adding a boiler plate master service agreement to stndrd.org, the open source approach to digital creative production.
In the spirit of Swedish collectiveness we have used united experiences and best practices to put together a basic MSA – Master Service Agreement – to be used as is, or paragraph by paragraph to add to a conflicting contract. Or to be used as a boilerplate to add to.
The basic thought is, as for stndrd.org in general, to make processes between vendors and clients in the digital world easier by building de facto standards in an open source environment.
The 6 page contract and easy-reader notes are easily accessible at http://www.stndrd.org.
The Tomorrow Awards have just launched resided over by President Ignacio Oreamuno of the refreshing IHAVEANIDEA gang.
Anyway, the point: New award initiative where you can sign up, be a judge and vote. Good stuff. In a way we all vote anyway don’t we? by what we do in our everyday online lives.
What will be interesting though is the judges collectively bringing trends to life regardless of category. There are no categories in these awards, and for awards with categories (most), a key strategy is ofcourse which one you enter.
The Andys. Some interesting activity over there too we note. Not only the currently live Make It Right Auction but their Elect The Jury Initiative headed up by chairmen, Ty Montague & Michael Lebowitz.
Super effect awareness program. Amongst it myself in fact, stumbling around at the latter end of the scale I couldn’t help but think they’d be a majority of network agency jury members elected. Power through numbers and all that. I have no idea, I don’t mind, it was just a smart approach.
Nearly 3 years after the idea was first muted (That book), it finally looks like we will be finally publishing our first Creative Social Book. Why the delay? Well we did have a publisher but unfortunately once most of the hard work had been done, the publisher decided they wanted something else and we decided to part ways. Anyway twelve months on from the first set of essays being submitted, we have finally got round to wiping the dust off and moving forward with the book. It would have been a travesty to let the essays die as they make a fascinating read about the past, present and future of digital advertising. Confirmed authors include such luminaries as Alessandra Lariu, Anders Gustafsson, Andy Sandoz, Benjamin Palmer, Chris Clarke, Dave Bedwood, Fernanda Romano, Flo Heiss, Gustav Martner, John Sharpe, Iain Tait, James Cooper, Johnny Vulkan, Laura Jordan-Bambach, Matt Powell, Rafa Soto, Sam Ball and Simon Waterfall.
Why a book you might ask? Why not put the essays on the blog? Well quite simply we recognise that digital is not always the best medium and in this case we thought it would be nice to have something physical to represent a point in time – obviously we will try and make sure that there is a kindle friendly version for all those who have moved beyond print.
Anyway it looks like the we are going to self publish and the team (which also incorporates Flo H and Laura B) is no doubt going to enjoy learning the challenges of self publishing (none of us have done it before). So please feel free to share any tips you might have. However we are going to need help and are looking for volunteers based in London to help. In particular to:
Set out the book in in-design (or equivalent)
Proof read the book
We cannot pay but promise you will get the necessary credit. If you are interested, please e-mail daniele at creativesocial.com or tweet us @creativesocial. We are also looking for sponsors to help with the launch and any other incidental costs.
The 2010 International ANDY Awards has launched a 10-day eBay art auction to benefit Make It Right’s continued rebuilding efforts of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. The auction can be found on Ebay, and kicked off today. The auction includes pieces from previous Creative Socials speakers including Tristan Eaton and Shephard Fairey – sure to be a few bargains in there.
Loved this art by Liu Bolin. More of his art is featured on the Guardian website. You can also find more details on the art of Urban Camouflage here including the rather surreal anti stalking camouflage from Japan:
Completely agree with James below that most of the Superbowl ads were pants. However I have to say that i did enjoy what turned out to be the people’s favourite:
Also thought VW made a god effort to take their ad beyond the spot by creating a competition using facebook connect on VW.com albeit one which ultimately amount to social spam:
The Superbowl has historically been the place for agencies to flex their creative muscles. I’m not sure what happened this year, most of the TV spots were pants. Maybe agencies are in a funk, maybe everyone is trying to save money.
But there were a few interesting things done by agencies trying to harness the fact that this was the first superbowl where twitter was mainstream. We did something for Wheaties cereal called the Most Valuable Tweeter, a site that worked out the best tweet during the superbowl. And there was another site called Brand Bowl that worked out what people were saying about brands.
Neither of them are going to change the world but both are interesting social media experiments and show a willingness to think beyond the 30 second (and in this case $3m!) spot. The MVT site will continue for other sporting events too, so should hopefully become quite big.
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