Our Logbook » Thinking Archive

1. Amplify your history

Find an anniversary. 150 years. 100 years. 25 years. 3 months and 6 days since your CEO got some. Whatever. Grab hold of it. Design a commemorative logo. Revert to your old logo. Put it on a poster. Print it on some hand-screened bunting with your reissued product laid out in a wheelbarrow full of straw. Make it smell like 100 years ago. Don’t have any history? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

2. Give your customers access to the top.

Print your CEO’s direct line on your napkins. Print your CEO’s wife’s mobile number on your website. Invite criticism. Acknowledge your mistakes. PR your mistakes. Run an apology ad with a witty headline. Invite your biggest critic to an open debate. Invite them to dinner, with a film crew. Admit they might have a point. Don’t want to open yourself up? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

3. Give back to the community

Create an event. Create entertainment. People need entertainment. Make it free. No, make it cost a tenner but print a t-shirt and give the profits to charity; after you cover your costs. Make the event micro local. Have a street party. Now pump it global. Have a street party in every goddam street in every goddam neighborhood in every goddam suburb in the world! Sell street stalls to every multinational business on the planet. Too much hassle? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

3. Crowdsource your marketing

Find your fans. Give them the tools. Let them evangelise the shit out your business. 1000 monkeys, 1000 typewriters. Wait for art. Place the content in a Superbowl slot. Unbranded. With a 3 minute user generated content back-story. Don’t have fans?  Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

5. Go green

Make your packaging compostable. Make your packaging factory compostable. Go carbon neutral. No, go carbon positive. Plant 6 rainforests for every sheet of A4 you company consumes. Get your customers to do the planting in exchange for green points redeemable against 6 participating green household utility companies. Now. Design a logo for it – make it look handmade. Crochet it out of hemp. Pump it on solar powered, ethically sourced, timber billboards. Happy pillaging the planet? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

6. Create a cause and effect

Selling batteries? Give two packs of batteries to the third world for every packet you sell. Hell, give the third world a torch and some batteries for every pack you sell. No, give the third world a torch factory and two packets of batteries for every pack you sell. Don’t need another cause? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

6. Give your minnows a voice

Find your lowliest minnow. Preferably middle-aged and a single parent. Give them a blog. Give them a megaphone. Make them the voice of the company. Let them construct a stand-alone customer service sub brand that hates your business. Or just make them CEO.  Don’t want to promote a minnow? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

7. Invent a new local product line

Everyone likes local. Even if you’re a global behemoth raping the planet, you can still do local. Time to add a new product line. Find a local business that makes things by hand, preferably hand-reared on their own property. Give the local community the profits to build a new library. Everyone likes books. But most importantly be OPEN about your involvement. You want to bask in the warm glow. And the locals need your authentically locally-laundered cash. Run out of new ideas? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

8. Create an unexpected product experience

Got High Street shops? Create a pop up tent in people’s back garden. They will like you and be excited by your spontaneity. Flogging a packaged good? Create a giant community version of it and let people suck the udders of your civic spirit. Can afford to be unexpected? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

9. Fail a little

People love to see others fail. And they especially like to see companies fail. So invest in some failure. Aim for the stars but really, aim to make a giant arse of your brand. People will like you for it. And it feeds back into Number 2. There are many ways to fail, but it’s most important that you give people something to talk about. Change your service. Make it more complicated so you can say sorry and recognise that the customer was right. Invest in a new corporate identity and completely ignore your product or service. Or sell your customer data. All great ways to appear to be more human. Prefer reliable success? Get a corporate dog. Make it Twitter.

10. Get a pet

Everyone likes animals. Have you seen the hits funny cats get on YouTube? Get a corporate animal. If you get in quick you can still exploit the cute cat/dog thing. Make it real. Make it open. But most importantly, make it Tweet.

This month’s creative breakfast theme was “Stories wot could only have been told through digital”. Everyone was able to interpret theme as they wished, submitting a link (art or commerce) for discussion. Here are the highlights.

Apple’s one billionth app download is not a classic “story” but it’s certainly one that could only have happened via digital. We discussed why apps have only been popularised by Apple and not one of the other handset manufacturers years earlier. It’s a hard one: the apps work and they are useful.

Penguin’s We Tell Stories is a collection of 6 stories from 6 authors that have been written by authors to capitalise on the interactivity that only digital can bring to a reader. This one caused great debate. What was this trying to achieve for Penguin? Is it the future of publishing? The consensus was that the written linear story is a long way from dead. The hardback we are not so sure about. However the traditionalists amongst us are having nothing of the Kindle.

The Blair Witch Project is 10 years old this year. The daddy of word of mouth marketing. It’s hard to tell now if the website was deliberately crap or whether the internet was just crap in 1999. Either way we still admire how high it set the bar for story telling.

My Damn Channel is what happens when writers create stuff without the studios riding them like ponies. We love You Suck at Photoshop. This feels like the future of comedy story telling. Short form. Timely. Script over production.

The Whale Hunt has been much lauded by creative folk. It’s hard not love the beauty of the gore. Skip to the blood and guts, then wonder at the download speed for those images.

The Sopranos in chronological fuck order. Who needs the bits in between really?

Obama’s first 100 days in a Facebook stream. The media dissected this every what way. But none had the, humor, cut through and modernity of this piece.

Susan Boyle: she is the global story of the internet for the month of April 2009.

Cisco Fatty. We love it when the internet attacks. It used to be emails of sexual office liasons. Now it’s Twaux Pas.

One Red Paperclip One of first “Hey I’m doing something random, help me out” events to capture an online imagination.

The Disposable Memory Project is capturing the images from over 100 disposable cameras left around the world. Proving that sometimes people will make an effort to be involved in something that makes life more interesting. But mostly not.

AOL search results A few years back, AOL made public a stack of user search requests. Compilations were created that revealed some very interesting human stories. You can still find them floating about online if you dig.

Bryony Makes a Zombie Movie One of Teddy’s mates AKA Paperlilies. Is this the future of movie making?

Steve finished the session by writing a story completely in analogue form with nothing but a pen and paper. It’s too long to transcribe and besides, it’s already lost. But the story ended with the word “Google”.

The art walk returned after a long hiatus, with a 3-in-1 itinerary. Mike R found genuine need for the art walk walking stick having sprained his ankle playing Albion football the day before.

First stop was a new venue for the art walk: Ferreira Projects on Charlotte Street. Resident artist James R Ford presented a show titled “Only boring people get bored”. The pieces ranged from one color jigsaw puzzles to videos of guitar hero being played. In the back room was an installation “33 things to do before you are 10″. Albion left the exhibit far from bored, but the show lacked the polish of something very special and felt more like an aspiring artist’s exhibit.

Next we headed to an art walk staple; White Cube in Hoxton Square, for a show by Marcus Harvey. Harvey is best known for his portrait of portrait of Myra Hindley. His new work Maggie seeks to be no less controversial. A 3D relief of Thatcher made from 25% painted dildos, 10% painted cauliflours and 65% other painted stuff. Both simultaneously stunning and predictable. Rachel Kneebone had a piece upstairs called The Descent that nearly upstaged the main show. A circular, white porcelain form of human creation, excess, gluttony, eroticism, birth and demise.

The third leg of the art walk was going to be Andres Serrano at Yvon Lambert. Unfortunately Nick screwed up as the show had already packed up. So the art walk triumverate turned into a… thing with only two parts… bi…. dual…. Let’s call it an anticlimax.

After an excellent kick off meeting with STA Travel, the team grabbed a late lunch at Pret A Manger in Kensington tube station. It turns out that Sam, one of our planners, used to work at Pret “when he was 18 or 19″. He said it was an excellent place to work until he got fired. Apparently whilst preparing sandwiches in a hungover state, Sam would kip in a quiet corner instead. Nice work if you can get it. Sadly, Sam couldn’t, and was given his P45 to take out. He wasn’t even offered a napkin to go with it.

Our conversation then turned to why Pret gets you in the door even when right next to an (arguably better) EAT. We decided that Prets are much nicer places now the acres of stainless steel are gone, and that you just can’t out Pret, Pret. The stories are deeper, better communicated and more believable. Whereas unlike Leon, EAT is just another sandwich chain, neither the underdog or more natural. But maybe it’s just Pret’s secret ingredient: sandwich chef’s sleep dribble.