Banks are begging, bankers are buffing their Aston’s and gardening leave is literally pottering amongst the conifers and stepping in dog poo.

But it’s not all bad. In fact digital may actually prosper as advertisers seek greater accountability and consumer data for their buck.

I can say this because this morning I showered with a birthday present.

De-Stress Shower Gel which according to the tube is To Still The Mind and To Soothe The Soul.

As those who know will testify, I have no soul and my mind is rarely still.

Late last night David and I talked balance sheets, world economics and creating an application that would make people happier.

hAPPy

The word’s all fit, though the domain name is sadly gone, sat upon by a discount drug store.

Its a great idea, an App to make you happy.

Except their is no actual idea, just a will, a way and a desire to put a smile on people’s faces without subjecting them to images of centrefolds and kittens and such like.

So here’s the deal all you sad, credit crunched readers, and there are now 22,000 of you each day, come up with an idea for the App, we build it and you get a hefty % of the happy equity. We’ll even improve on the idea at no extra cost to yourself.

But how do I ensure you don’t just steal my idea?

Well, add the idea to the comments for everyone to see and if we steal it, then we’re very bad overweight people, with the caveat that we might have already had that idea anyway. In fact if you even have the same idea as us, you win.

Equity & Happiness, surely this is the answer to our troubled times?

Add your ideas below and don’t be shy, they may put a smile on one of 22,000 hidden faces.

Posted in Appvertising | No Comments »      

When you know you’re going to be read by more people than have read you before, you feel compelled to be funnier.

You also start referring to yourself in the third person, thus casting yourself as a fictional character in your own semi-demi-fat-fiction or as my history teacher Mr Rumblelow once said, ‘Adam, you’re in danger of becoming a caricature of your own self’.

How he would chortle if he knew the new Fat Man site had made FWA Site of The Day and that I featured prominently on said site as a mad man wrenching out his own teeth with pliers.

I had a caricature done once, at the Epcot Centre - Disney World, when I was 13, by a computer. It was very ‘technically advanced’. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Appvertising, Design Porn | 1 Comment »      

I’m a Fat-Man with some high fibre pretentions. We’ve been working with a PR company, Bite PR who seem to get it. They are open to ideas, bold enough to present new social media channels to their clients and better, to come to us to help devise long term social media monitoring solutions.

The pitch being, help the client aggregate the noise about them and filter it for them so the web doesn’t seem like such a big scary untamed space anymore.

PR as PR knows it is fucked. ‘Press Release’ is just fancy wordplay for ‘Spam’. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Appvertising | No Comments »      

My subscription to AdAge is becomming addictive. I’m learning a lot about trad ad land and how Emmy nominated megahit Mad Men about Madison Avenue in the 60’s is clearly buying all the ad space in the magazine that comes with the online subscription, or is it the other way around?

In Mad Men, ad men, grope, smoke and screw their clients, but they always create great copy. The rise of social media; blogs, social networks, micro-blogs, online games and all the other things people argue make up social media when not arguing it’s a defunct term, mean the marketing world has changed. One agency can never really provide the best service. Niche, specialist, bespoke, boutique, that’s where it’s at.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Appvertising | 1 Comment »      

(via AdAge)

David Armano (Logic + Emotion) writes:

‘Once upon a time, newspapers, TV and radio entered our lives. These wonderful inventions spawned yet another one — multichannel advertising. Then along came things like DVRs and everything digital, which spawned yet another invention, the backlash of traditional advertising. For the record, traditional advertising isn’t going away anytime soon, and despite the pronouncement of its death, it will live on — albeit in an evolved format. And it actually still works. I look at billboards on highways. How can you not?

But “tradigital” could be another story. Tradigital, in my opinion, means using traditional marketing methods in Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Appvertising | 1 Comment »      

Below is a press release outlining a new venture for FMC and a synergy with my role as Head of Interactive at United Agents.

As how we are entertained and what formats entertain us, be they games, social gaming, websiodes or ripped movies, so we must engage the digital native audience and that ain’t slapping a banner ad on the side of a page and hoping they’ll click-thru. New monetisation models need to be defined and advertisers/brands are key to that development. We want our content for free.

Naked and FMC are working on some highly innovative Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Appvertising, Branding (general) | No Comments »      

‘Social media widget’, it sounds like something you might need even though you’re not sure why, ain’t words great like that.

Great to see Coke innovating in this space, appvertising writ large with a view to looking kindly upon a can of the brown fizzy treacle next time you pass the store.

Brands swift to innovate in the widget/application space display an understanding of the evolving ad markets and the needs of so called Millenials.

(via Read/Write) Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Appvertising | 1 Comment »      

We’ve been officialized by a lady called Martha at Apple. We are iPhone developers, we are prohibited from developing anything porn/iPhone related, we are excited about the 3G iPhone with true GPS, we are touting our iPhone developer credentials to any enlightened brand who wants to get with the ‘kool kidz’ and sponsor applications that enhance the content crunching mobile lives of iPhone zealots. Myself included. We are touching screens a lot and saying ‘oooh’, such is life in the fattest interactive agency.

Brands are you listenning? I got some one line pitches I want to throw your way:

Burger King/Dominos Pizza etc - App that tells you where the nearest retail outlet is and provides you with a coupon to get money off, hell it could even encourage you to jog there!

Heineken/Guiness/Bud etc - App that tells you where to get a bottle of fizzy distilled hops and meet other App users to talk sport and Britney Spears.

Match.com - App that allows you to set a colour or mood reflective of how receptive you are to approaches from App using strangers who come into your area. (except iPhone users are mostly men who play Grand Theft in suit jackets and jeans)

So fine tune your Google Alerts ask the post boy to Twitter search your brand and let’s drink green tea in nice boardrooms where I can steal stationary from.

Posted in Appvertising, Mobile, iPhone | No Comments »      

It’s been practically a whole dotcom cycle since I last talked about the term I made-up ‘appvertising‘ and remarked upon it’s gentle passage around the web.

Now at a staggering 67 entries on Google. A new entrant caught my Fat eye, Binge Eating.

I clicked on the link which took me to some generic weight loss website.

What can this mean though? That people are now actually eating advertising to such an extent as to term their sedentary munching, a binge! Zut alors!

People please eat all the banner ads and pop-ups you can see, in fact eat most of any Conde Nasty website which seems to have a plague of pop-ups.

‘ooh look I accidentally clicked on that pop-up for Louis Vuitton prosthetic travel arm… no I don’t want one, I’d seek it out and click on it if I did!’

Such ads just patronise the audience, trying to trick people into clicking on your add only serves the people selling the space on CPM’s, it’s a false economy.

But appvertising, ah sweet notion that you are. Branded applications provide the user with relevance, ie this app entertains/informs me with warm, comfy brand association, ‘thank you dear Heineken for sponsoring my iPhone bar guide to Europe, thank you from the bottom of my cold barrel of yummy Heineken and for the lady sitting opposite me who when I had not drunk any of your sparkling hops I did not find attractive, but now, post-hops intend to woo with my unique dance routine.’

Posted in Appvertising, Uncategorized | No Comments »      

‘There’s a hypothesis in robotics known as the Uncanny Valley. If you imagine a graph with the degree of realism a robot attains running across the bottom and with the amount of positive empathy it can generate climbing vertically then, generally, you see a positive correlation between the two, and an upward sloping graph. A the robot gets more human, we like it more. However, the Uncanny Valley hypothesis suggests that there’s a point where this breaks down; that there comes a moment where the increasing realism in something that’s still obviously a robot doesn’t create feelings of empathy and connection, it freaks us out. That’s one side of the valley. The hypothesis further suggests that as robots get yet more realistic then this effect diminishes, we effectively forget that it’s a robot and empathy returns. That’s the other side. Except no-one knows this because no-one’s ever built a robot that good.