DigitalAgency

Indoors, er, at an outdoors company:

Another in the 'Reception-ist' series.

Waiting to be 'called upstairs' at my client Brasher. Down in the depths of Roy Keane country.

Reception-ist:

I spend a fair amount of time waiting for meetings and presentations in the receptions of agencies, clients, collaborators etc.

So now and again I'm going to post some shots on the blog of me, er, waiting.

My Mum always asks what the places I work at are like anyways, so here you go Mum.

caption: mightysmall. Edinburgh. February 26th 2008.

Post research post:

I like this.

A lot.

Produced to launch an ad awards show in the US, it gives us a birds eye view of a post-broadcast focus group.

The ad of course was the Macintosh launch ad; '1984' from Apple.

It aired once, during SuperBowl, in er, ...1984.

This research group was held 23 years later.

A tip o' the hat to JB at freshmonkey, Edinburgh's most jargon-free, cutty-edgy, web developers, for the heads up.

MightySmall:

mightysmall recently opened for business.

Good thing says I.

Why?

1. Scottish advertising needs a shot in the arm and a kick up the arse.

2. mightysmall is none-other than Adrian Jeffery, Brian McGregor & Tamsin Ansdell.

The brightest and the best in my book.

As well as D&AD's too, if you care to look for Brian and Adrian's names amongst the indexes. (sp? Indices? Where's the proof reader when you need one?).

A location, in addition to 21a Haddington Place, that I'm sure Tamsin will join them at before long.)

With all this in mind, I'm going to take it on myself to interview, write about them and generally cheer from the stands (aka blog),  as they grow in stature and succeed in Edinburgh over the next few years.

Why? (Again.)

1. Because this is my blog and I can do what I flippin' well please.

2. Because i) they are the best thing to happen to Scottish advertising for a very long time. ii) they might be the last thing to happen to Scottish advertising for a very long time.

Dept of: 'No surprises there then':

via: BrandRepublic.

That's a relief:

(Click article for full story.)

Bristol round-up:

Had a good mid to end of week trip to Bristol, working at Mason Zimbler a technology ad agency down here. (Client list Microsoft, Adobe, Messagelabs.)

I like Bristol a lot, a very sophisticated. buzzy city.

What's more, the council, and many individual organisations, offer wi-fi all over the place, which is great.

While down here, I tried to arrange a coffee morn on Friday, but it was pretty short notice for everyone, except the hugely well-informed and enthusiastic John Bradford from futurelab.

However the pair of us had a really good, 1:1 natter, from 8 am until 9 am at the highly recommended Boston Tea Party.

Covering everything from some exciting futurelab initiatives in education, to the complexities of funding, to the future of gaming, to why Bristol has such a great comms infrastructure.

This came on the back of meeting Tom, Mark, Simon and John at their 'BeerEvening' the night before in the trendily appointed, and yes, wi-fi enabled WaterShed.

Tom and Mark are the small but beautifully formed SimpleWeb in Bristol. Their blog is here.

While Simon is into mobile comms, (unfortunately, I mislaid my notebook travelling back home of Friday night so am having to go on memory for much of this. And can't add much detail or a url for Simon. but will rectify this when I catch up with John on Monday.)

Much of the chat was about iPhone, the problems of creating content for phones when standards and platforms can vary so much. (like 40 different versions of the same ringtone for different Nokia phone deployment?)

Most of the time I was there though I chatted to Tom who told me about a wonderful Web 2.0 idea they are developing, with some really diverse implications.

I even tried to wangle a beta-tester role out of him, but on this he remained diplomatically silent!

All I can say is that it's called pushhit, and it sounds like it's going to rock.

So, a very enjoyable trip to Bristol indeed, capped by bumping into a bloke I hadn't seen in nearly 6 years.

Kes Aleknavicius, is a world-class triathlete who lives down this way.

Our path last crossed when I went to Penticton, in British Columbia where I believed I could complete the 3.8k swim, 180k bike and 40k run of an Ironman Triathlon in 2001. (Something that increasingly looked like a massive mistake, miscalculation and supreme piece of self deception once I got there and saw the course/felt the heat.)

Anyhow, we bumped into each other, out of the blue in Bristol. I didn't know/recognise him, but it was only when I saw the ironman canada sticker on his bike and commented on it that he said, he knew me.

Blimey, talk about a small digital world.

Even the more so, not only does Kes do triathlon, he also blogs, here. (Whoops, can't find my note of url, will post later.)

So nice one Kes on both counts.

And if you're interested here are our comparative and way different times from that race years back:

Just in Time:

The Fedex Just in Time banner has been nominated for a Webby Award.

And quite right too.

Click on Launch Creative link here to see it in action.

Watching cheese mature:

Well it sure beats watching paint dry.

I was listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, when they did a feature on a Somerset Cheese maker who'd put a web cam up for a few months looking at a cheese maturing.

What I thought was brilliant was that this centuries old tradition was using present day marketing to great effect. (A 5 minute slot on the Today programme all about the brand? That'll do nicely.)

If they hadn't put a web cam up, if they didn't have a myspace page, (which I hasten to add they do, with hundreds of cheesy friends,) then this would have been a non-story.

The presenters of Today even gave out the url and invited listeners to go and look at the webcam.

As your humble reporter, I diligently did so, it was wonderfully low-fi and ever so slightly Monty Pythonish, but I noticed that 500,000 other visits to the site had already been racked up.

Yep. HALF A MILLION. To a Shepton Mallett cheese producer's web site.

My guess is that the figures will go even more stratospheric after the Today airing. (Not to mention the long tail benefits and indeed Google ranking effect, thanks to the BBC's links.)

But they might want to revisit their allocation of server capacity, in order to meet demand. After giving out the url on air today, the servers crashed.

Marvellous, name making stuff, and only possible methinks via Web 2.0 enthusiasms.

ps. On visiting the cheese site, I couldn't help but notice a striking resemblance to the TV set graphic the company my Missus works for, whitespace. I wonder if they could be related?

(Cheesecam)

(Whitespace home page.)

UPDATE: I'm told by the Whitespacers that the image was sourced from iStockPhoto, which explains the co-incidental useage.

pps. The cheesecam reminded me affectionately of the Cambridge Coffee Cam many years ago.(But you're probably to young to remember that.)

Strongbow launch new ad on YouTube. (Prior to TV.):