Best of TEDXSydney 2013

Posted on May 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

I attended TEDxSydney  on Saturday which had moved to iconic Sydney Opera House as a venue. This year’s 2,200 attendees were deliciously catered for by Matt Moran and the grass roots movement ‘Grow it local’.
Telstra, Qantas, Samsung, U of Syd and NAB were some of the main sponsors, lending a more corporate component. At the same time the conference was still retaining a lot of the activism and volunteering spirit.

Best musical performer (IMHO) was Kate Miller-Heidke, best MC Jess Scully, most famous attendee Marc Newson and probably most powerful speech by Omar Musan.

TEDxSydney

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The above photos are posted under CreativeCommons from TEDxSydney’s flickr stream.

The talks themselves are still being edited so I will update this blog with another post when they are available on their YouTube channel

Here are my personal favourites from the films they played in between:

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Posted in Convergence, Video

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Weight Watcher’s Plate of our Nation for a Webby

Our campaign “Weight Watcher’s – Plate of our Nation“ is up for a Webby and we need your vote. It’s a tight race and there are only 2 days to go:

Vote  for Plate of our Nation for a Webby

So please, show this fight against obesity some love and VOTE NOW. We also appreciate your support for the campaign itself, spearheaded by ‘My Kitchen Rules’ star chef Pete Evans.

Hop on over to the website and throw your weight behind the cause. Simply by connecting your followers and friends via Twitter or Facebook you add to the total tally of Australians knowing about the facts. And hopefully we are ready for change.

Plate of our Nation

Plate of our Nation website

“Plate of our Nation” is a collaboration between Reactive and BMF, Naked, One Green Bean and OMD.

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Posted on April 26, 2013 in Advertising, design, Social Media

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The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented

Posted on April 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

This is a project we at Reactive worked extremely hard for over the last 2 months. It’s called ‘The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented” and this is its story.

The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented

The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented

Children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) suffer from progressive deterioration of their muscles. The kids lose the ability to use their arms and for example sign their name very early in their life. At the same time the Australian government does not have a policy on this disease, meaning there is no research support to help halt or cure DMD. This is why we created The Most Powerful Arm, a bionic arm with which you can help wake up the politicians. Please sign a petition to the Australian government, asking them to start supporting the important research on this crippling disease. Watch the trailer below:

The arm is publicly installed, first in Customs House Sydney, and now in Ariel Book Store. It takes your signature via your Facebook login, also accesible thorough your mobile phone if you happen to be in front of the installation. It then signs the petition for you, with a real pen on paper. It uses the original handwriting of one of the children affected, Jacob Lancaster, which we turned into a typeface. A photo camera will then take a picture of each signature and post it to the respective signee’s Facebook wall.

I really appreciate any help you can give to the cause. We have smashed the original target of 20,000 which was required to have the petition considered by parliament. But the more signatures we get, the more weight it will have. Please add your signature at TheMostPowerfulArm.com and if you want and can afford to, you can also donate to make the trials happen.

Below you find our  Making Of The Most PowerfulArm that explains the whole signing experience in detail.

Here are some photos from our launch day in Customs House.

The Most Powerful Arm is a collaboration between Reactive, Finch and Havas Worldwide / Red Agency. Special shout out goes to Emad Tahtouh who heads the creative technology at Finch and who not only had the idea but also tirelessly worked on all the robotics, video, photos and backend technology to make the arm the most powerful ever invented.

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Posted in Convergence, Experiential, interactivity, Mobile, Video

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How to win Gold Lions at Cannes

Posted on April 8, 2013 | 1 Comment

It’s awards season – a painful, exhilirating, mental and rewarding time in agencies. The biggest whopper of an award show is coming up and tons of case studies are being edited and submitted as we speak. All to win some Gold Lions at Cannes. So at Adverblog, we thought it would be helpful to take a group-wide look at the Art of the Case Study. We describe some of the obvious and some of the not-so-obvious characteristics of a true winner (in terms of case study). First, have a quick look at Lars Bastholm’s  tips from 2009:

As the case movie becomes an art form in itself, the question is: Which awards show will be the first to actually give out an award for “Best Case Study” ?

Below are my points, which I wrote after most of the other (more creative tips) had been made by the other Adverblog editors already. I decided to add three rather mundane items. They are nevertheless highly annoying if not thought about before hitting the magic ‘Submit’ button.

  1. Go easy on the ‘Never been done before’ – chances are I have indeed seen something similar before. Which isn’t bad at all. Only if you try to make me believe you were the first to ever think of connecting Twitter with your mum’s Facebook page.
  2. Don’t use a custom video player and don’t put it on your shitty agency video server. Use YouTube like every other dweeb in the world. If I have to suck your 60 megabyte creative bonanza through a straw from your crappy PC that runs the rest of your country’s advertising case studies – I am in a bad mood already. Nothing kills your thrilling case dead in its track like a stuttering video player.
  3. Have a compelling submission page:  good layout, title at the top (why not in the style of the campaign?), start with the case study film, bullet point the main points of the challenge, strategy, idea, execution. And follow with the long copy below. I will read it when I am intrigued but don’t make me wade through long-winded, inflated hyperbole before I get to the idea and video. And no agency branding, please. Duh!

Have a read of the full article on Adverblog and please feedback what you thought was most helpful. And if you are into (old skool term) “Cyber” like me, keep in mind some of the thoughts that Iain Tait voices here about the category.

And at the end of the day, compelling ideas present themselves.

Even the winner of Gold Lions at Cannes.

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Posted in Advertising, Video

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Facebook Home – a cross generational threat?

Posted on April 5, 2013 | 1 Comment

Just discovered the new Facebook Home concept. As my mate Ben Cooper of The Monkeys predicts, see the (Android) servers crashing on the 12th of April.

Good to see that they didn’t throw this idea into an overwrought cinematic drama and tell us that our phones are actually like chairs. Try sitting on them, you will see, they are not.

Otherwise I leave it to this (mobile!) screenshot to avoid retyping our conversation this morning.

Facebook Home

Facebook Home conversation

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Posted in Mobile, Social Media, user generated content

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Like writing? You’ll love Draft

Posted on March 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

As I like writing more and more (even though my background is more in design and UX) I love the Draft site (HT to Nic Hodges). It lets you focus on writing and nothing else. Interruptions from colleagues and clients excluded, no one can stop them.

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Draft documents can now easily be published to WordPress and Tumblr from inside Draft. Go to Settings -> Places to Publish. You’ll then get a Publish button next to your documents.

The rest below is about the new Chrome extension, actually a direct copy+paste from the creative developer Nate Kontny (his site Ninja and Robots) in Chicago, who is behind Draft:

“Bookmarklets and browser extensions like Instapaper, Evernote’s Clearly, and Readability make reading anything on the web simple, focused, and gorgeous. Why can’t writing be that way?

So here’s a Chrome extension that lets you.

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over).

When you’re done, there’s a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

All of a sudden, everything you write everywhere is focused, versioned, and able to be shared with friends for help before you publish. I hope you like it. This might be the handiest and neatest thing I’ve ever made. :)

Click here to access the Draft Chrome extension.

I’ve also open sourced the Chrome extension in case anyone wants to make it better or start similar projects for Firefox and Safari.

Finally, the past couple weeks I’ve improved a lot of other things. For example:

Google Drive syncing is a lot better.
Draft is much more usable now on narrow devices like iPads in landscape mode.
There is a CTRL+r/CMD+r shortcut to switch between edit and view modes.
It’s been a really exciting couple weeks since I launched Draft. The feedback and support have been incredible. Thank you so much for the help, the criticism, and the motivation.

Stay tuned. Draft has so much more in store to help us become better writers. I’m just getting started.

-Nate”

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Circus 2013 sees The Battle of Big Thinking

Posted on March 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

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I’ll say it upfront: The Battle of Big Thinking is my kind of stoush. A keynote can sometimes come across as a polished corporate performance, delivered in front of an audience that, while suitably impressed, is leaning back slightly.

Not so with these bouts of the brain. This time it’s personal: every contender has to weigh in, display heart and passion, come out swinging. Punchy lines have to be thrown, flying thick and fast, with the intent to floor the adversaries.

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Don’t get me wrong, a keynote can have huge impact and introduce big ideas. But how different is it when you have to convince a room full of judges that you deserve the title belt? Where every big blow reverberates through the audience (in tweets) and entices the delegates to quote you and create their own jeers from the sidelines? Have a taste of these:

  • “It’s difficult to follow a doctor of positivity when you’re pissed off.”
  • “Planners are the cake, creatives just add the icing.”
  • “Art is a reflection on humanity – it has to use the tools of today, digital.”
  • “As a woman, I am not the small, pink version of a man”

And the author of the last line, Farrah Bostic, clinched the title. She passionately appealed for more respect for women in marketing, as colleagues as well as consumers. And displayed the heart of a battle-hardened thinker. One tweeter commented: “Battle of Big Thinking – it’s like TED talks meet cage fighting.”

As I said, my kind of stoush.
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