Uri Overload

TV's maddest documentary-maker, Adam Curtis, aims to immerse us in the break-up of the American Dream in Manchester. Charlie Brooker tunes in

Adam Curtis has gone a bit mad. The insultingly gifted documentary maker behind The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares seemed rather quiet of late. In fact, since his 2007 BBC2 series The Trap, his only visible pieces of work were two short (and superb) mini-documentaries he created for my BBC4 series Screenwipe and Newswipe. People kept asking me what he was up to. I assumed he was chipping away at some new documentary which would be announced when he was ready.

He's ready now. He's made a new documentary called It Felt Like A Kiss. Except it isn't just a documentary. It's also a piece of interactive theatre, with music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. And it doesn't take place in a cinema or concert hall, but across five floors of a deserted office block in Manchester.

About now a sizable percentage of you will be thinking "that sounds wanky", and starting to back away. Don't. Because it's also ... well, it's also a funhouse. To be honest, no one really knows what it is. After a struggle, Curtis himself says it's "a psycho-political theme experience in which you become a central character. It's going to be frightening. A walk of enchantment and menace." On the official website, viewers are advised that it's "not suitable for those of a nervous disposition". "Please wear suitable footwear," it adds, ominously.

Curtis is collaborating with the theatre company Punchdrunk, which specialises in staging innovative, site-specific performances that defy description. They tend to leave their audiences, or rather visitors, or rather participants, babbling excitedly for days afterwards. The marriage between Punchdrunk's theatrical dreamworld and Curtis's virtuoso film-making skills might tip some completely over the edge. I haven't seen any of the live-action elements yet, but what I've seen of the film is astonishing. If you're familiar with his previous work, you'll know he specialises in creating mesmerising collages, simultaneously impish and forbidding; utterly accessible yet often giddyingly deep. Yes, they're political documentaries, but simply calling them "political documentaries" is a bit like simply calling Spike Milligan a biped. They're complex ideological arguments and emotional tone poems in one. They're frightening, fun and entirely unique.

But where his preceding works have occasionally been a touch eccentric, this one takes the piss. It is completely and utterly demented - in a positive way. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense; if anything, it forges its own new brand of coherence whether you like it or not. This is a documentary running on alien software. I'm at a loss to describe it. For starters, the trademark Curtis voiceover has gone completely, replaced instead by occasional, simple captions. Music is at the forefront. Ominous soundscapes and bubblegum pop weave their way around the images: archive news, Hollywood movies. It's hypnotic.

And the editing. One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector's wall of sound and Curtis's wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis's tape-strewn "lair" at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it'll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It'll probably kill people.

So what's it about? In a roundabout way, it's about you. But it's also about the golden age of pop, when the US rose to supreme power. It encompasses everything from Rock Hudson, Lou Reed, Saddam Hussein, a chimp and Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a heady brew.

"I think it's a fascinating period," says Curtis.

"I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time ... Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn't really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us."

It's a common theme in Curtis's work: he's not interested in conspiracy theories, but rather with the unforeseen consequences of ideas throughout history, and their impact on a deeply personal level. "The way power works in the world is: they tell you stories that make sense of the world. That's what America did after the second world war. It told you wonderful dreamlike stories about the world ... And at that same time, you were encouraged to rise up and 'become an individual', which also made the whole idea of America attractive to the rest of the world. But then this very individualism began to corrode it. The uncertainties began in people's minds. Uncertainty about 'what is the point of being an individual?'"

"The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism," he continues, "which is far wider than Westminster, consumerism or anything like that. It's how you feel. People think, 'Oh, if it's within me it must be true.' But it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not an absolute. It's a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied ... It's a political idea. That's the central dynamic of our life."

Because you're worth it? He nods. "Because you're worth it." He gestures out of the window, towards the Westfield Centre, Europe's biggest and most eerily calming shopping mall. "That's what Westfield is about. What you desire is the most important thing. But a great paradox of our time is that what you desire may not be coming from within you.

"The iPhone is a good example," he adds. "People really feel they want one - to express themselves. But they all want one, at the same time. Where does that come from? From within or without? Because we live in an age where the individual is paramount and everything is seen from the perspective of 'you', we've lost sight of the bigger forces at work. Which has limited us. Not only in our understanding of the world; it's made us very powerless. I think that's what I'm really trying to get at in this."

Does that sound right to you? Chances are it does. So go along. I'm sworn to secrecy over much of what's going to happen inside that five-storey Manchester building, but it's fair to say that the documentary gradually starts to fragment and ... well, you'll have an experience, put it that way. You'll like that, you individual. You crave experience. Curtis hopes this one will give you pause for thought.

"What I'm hoping they'll do is pull back like in a helicopter and look at themselves and think about how they're a product of history, and of power, and politics, as much as a product of their own little inner desires. We're all part of a big historical age. That's just what we are. And, sometimes, we forget."

In summary, from what I can gather, It Felt Like A Kiss is both the craziest yet crookedly rational project I've ever heard about. Hearing Curtis talk about that huge subject, that huge building, that brink-of-madness, reality-blurring feel, there are a few unmistakeable parallels with Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's recent film, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman takes control of an infinitely huge Manhattan warehouse and attempts to stage a boundary-shattering show that will sum up the entirety of human experience. He over-reaches and winds up creating a work of ever-expanding fractal madness. Curtis, I think, has gone a bit mad, too - but to precisely the right degree.

The world of tomorrow

TV industry! Here's a little bombshell for you. From now on, all of Curtis's work will be produced first and foremost for the internet. It will be hosted at bbc.co.uk/adamcurtis (coming soon). Go there to find a trailer for It Felt Like A Kiss. An hour-long cut of the whole thing will be placed on the site on the last day of the Manchester International Festival (MIF). It will also host his next two projects: "A long thing about our complicated relationship to the Congo over the last 100 years and how our idea of nature as a sacred yet terrifying realm has risen up during that same time." That will be followed by a piece about "the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet - and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web - out of which can come a new form of democracy."

• It Felt Like A Kiss is at MIF, 2-19 July, mif.co.uk

So I remember this kid I used to know, and we’re talking mid 80’s, yes?

And this kid was 7, maybe less. And he had this thing, for years, when he’d walk up to the mirror and watch himself for a while, and he’ll make faces and concentrate, and then he’d start crying. With big, round, wet tears. Often he’ll be truly bawling.

All this time he’d be staring at his own reflection in the mirror, and I seem to remember him having this intense look. Like he was amplifying and looking through it the same time.

Like he was trying to understand.
Who is this kid?
Why is he crying?
Whose body is this?
Why is it crying?
Whose kid is he?
What do those “crying” signs mean?
Who do they belong to?
And so on…

So lately I’ve been thinking this kid was a pioneer. It seems a lot of kids are doing that these days.
Or maybe he wasn’t and they always had.
Anyway, for some reason, nowadays kids are often quite happy doing it.

And in London they say: jyouknowhaamean?

Article also published on Friday 19th June 2009 in The Guardian

A little under a year ago in this very newspaper I reviewed the Apple iPhone 3G and its new firmware release: ‘Now that the Applications store is up and running,” I wrote, “you will soon find it a very common sight indeed to see people crowded around each other’s iPhones showing off the latest impossible, breathtaking and ground-breaking application. ‘Ah, but mine can do this!’ will be heard in every café and bar. Satirical sketches will be written and performed on Channel 4 mocking the trend. Once again Apple has changed the rules and nothing will be ever be quite the same again.”

It is very rare for any prophetic utterance of mine to bear fruit, but in this case it seems I was bang on the money. On July 11^th 2008 the Apple iTunes App Store Apple iTunes App Store opened its virtual doors and the world changed. The diversity, originality and imagination that has since gone into the authoring of apps has created, from the standingest of starts, a whole new business model, and one that benefits cottage industry amateurs quite as much as established software houses. With over 50,000 apps and more than a billion downloads, it is hardly surprising that Blackberry, Nokia, Microsoft and Google have all now jumped on the app emporium bandwagon. Apple has shown that a mobile phone can be a pedometer, a restaurant guide (one which can make the reservation, direct you there and let you know which kinds of sustainable seafood you can order with a clear conscience), an ensemble of musical instruments that can be blown down, tapped and strummed, a library of literature, a periodic table, a performer of magic tricks, a language translator, a  Skype phone, a Twitter client, a radio, a games platform and a device that can set your home satellite TV to record any programme you like wherever you are in the world. Not to mention a fart machine and perpetrator of other mad, pointless and preposterous one-time-use pranks, japes and wheezes. Now that the others are all playing catch-up, it is easy to forget what a risk Apple took in creating a market out of nowhere. In recent weeks the once great Palm have brought out an immensely exciting iPhone inspired touchscreen phone, the Pre (US-style CDMA only and not available in Europe for ages), Nokia have finally released their long awaited N97, which I will come to later, and the prolific HTC have introduced their Google Android phones, the Magic and Hero.

There were shortcomings with 2008’s iPhone 3G and its software. “No text manipulation (not even basic cut and paste),” I moaned last July, “no Flash plug-ins for the browser, no video recording, no voice memos.” This week the This week the 3.0 firmware was released. It runs on the new 3GS iPhone, last year’s 3G, the original 2G and the iPod Touch and has addressed many user demands, although not the provision of Flash, which Apple has its own reasons for disbarring from the iPhone: Flash provides a back door through which developers could smuggle in unauthorised apps and Apple (for good reasons and bad) is allergic to the word ‘unauthorised’. An excellently intuitive cut and paste functionality is at last present (with a cute and unheralded ‘shake to undo’ feature), there are noticeably increased browser rendering speeds, global search, voice notes, better autocorrect glossary learning (non-editable however), tethering (allowing you to use your 3G or 3GS as a modem) and MMS. That’s right, MMS – Apple had never seemed very interested in Multimedia Messaging, dismissing it as a vestigial or ‘legacy’ service. “Why pay to send pictures and video,” Steve Jobs asked, “when you can send them for free by email?” Apple has relented and sweetly smooth MMS implementation is now available, though not yet in the USA, it being a carrier dependent service.

Whether current iPhone users choose to upgrade their phones or not, they should certainly upgrade their firmware – 3.0 makes a real difference in speed, function and performance. All of the above features and additions and more are possible on your original iPhone, but what about the new model – the 3GS? Well, the ‘S’ stands for speed and plenty of extra zip is delivered courtesy of the ARM Cortex A8 processor and PowerVR SGX GPU (rated seven times faster than the MBX-Lite graphics processor found in previous models) as well as 256MB of DDR. Apps open much faster, everything is smoother and sprightlier than ever before. Using a 3G and 3GS side by side the difference is very noticeable indeed. As with turning left on entering an aeroplane, the experience is spoilingly good.

Aside from the very welcome sight of ‘32GB’ printed in silver on the back, the 3GS is identical in appearance, whether in black or white, to its progenitor. A relief that we won’t be having to fork out on a whole new raft of sleeves, covers and other accessories. A 3.0 megapixel camera with well integrated focus and exposure features allows for really excellent stills and good quality video recording. An intuitive trim tool will help with the uploading of video footage directly over the air to YouTube, MobileMe, Email or MMS. The 3GS also contains a digital compass or magnetometer. Used in conjunction with GPS, wi-fi and cellular positioning your iPhone now knows exactly where it is and which way it is facing. This allows the fascinating possibility of tour guide uses (‘you are now looking at the west door of St Paul’s cathedral’) and other applications (fully featured turn-by-turn SatNav, for example) that will doubtless astonish us in the months to come.

Voice Control is as simple as can be imagined: ‘Play songs by The Incredible String Band’ you say and sure enough it does. ‘Play more like this’ you add, and an on-the-fly Genius list is assembled. ‘Call Steve Jobs, office’ you demand, and it’s done. ‘What song is this?’ you wonder and are told (in a slightly prunes and prism English accent) that it is ‘Rhinocratic Oaths by the Bonzo Dog Band’ or whatever it might be. All this can be done straight into the device or by way of the new earphones that come with it.

Look out too for future peripheral devices that can control or be controlled by the iPhone, thanks to the now addressable dock connector API. Another less trumpeted but typically thoughtful innovation is the addition of an oleophobic coating to the touchscreen that repels greasy smeary fingermarks. Nice touch, Apple. Literally.

In short, the iPhone 3GS is triumphantly the product of a company at the absolute top of their game. If it were a BMW it would badged as the ‘M’ version – the same but with added poke and better spec. Power and performance can be considered a luxury until you try them and realise how much more functionality, ease of use and productivity they can deliver. Cost is a whole other issue: if you already have an iPhone3G you may find an upgrade expensive. Could be worth waiting to see what deals emerge over the next month or so. The more people who do wait, the more pressure there will be on O2 to lower prices.

I know I must sometimes sound like some Apple PR spokesman or unquestioning fanboy, but please believe me when I say that I really do not want Apple to have it all their own way. When it comes to smartphones I am an out and out capitalist: competition and market biodiversity is what I crave. No one looks more keenly forward to the arrival of alternatives. I am panting to try out the Palm Pre and the HTC Magic and have been looking forward to Nokia’s new entry for months and months. It distresses me more than I can say therefore to announce that the N97 is a crushing disappointment. The candybar design is handsome enough (not dissimilar to the iPhone and also available in white or piano black) and offers the best slidey-outy keyboard I’ve yet come across. Nokia’s Ovi Marketplace (their equivalent of the iPhone App Store) allows the simple OTA downloading of apps (including live-streaming Facebook and news widgets) which is all good. But the Symbian S60 operating system that drives the device is achingly old-fashioned, sluggish and unfriendly. Setting up ‘access points’ is fiddly and horribly yesterday. I am aware that Nokia want to position this as a kind of ‘My First Smartphone’ for users who might be put off by the radical nature of the iPhone or the businesslike qualities of the BlackBerry, but a resistive touchscreen (another way of saying a touchscreen you have to keep tapping until it decides to obey you – damn it, they even include a stylus) that displays blocky icons that remind you of the ugly horror of their E63 unit is no way to inspire confidence in the Finnish giant’s commitment to modern smartphones. It really pains me that I can’t rave about this device. I love what Nokia has given to the market – I was devoted to the Communicator for years – but no one who has used an iPhone would do anything other than laugh, weep or bray with contempt at the N97. It just isn’t good enough and that is a terrible pity. It is nothing like as godawful as the BlackBerry Storm, but then nothing is. For the time being the iPhone 3GS and the superb BlackBerry Bold reign. I ache for Apple-busting newcomers.

© Stephen Fry 2009

Initials explained:

CDMA – Code Division Multiple Access (a kind of non-GSM wireless phone system used in America – properly called cdmaOne or IS-95)

GPU: Graphics Processing Unit

DDR: Double Date Rate RAM (a clever class of Random Access Memory)

API – Application Programming Interface (the guts of a device or service that can be addressed, inspected, written to and from and otherwise utilised)

OTA: Over the Air

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dirty dirty trick

The Outlook team has recently been made aware of a serious bug / flaw with the recently announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and as a result we wanted to provide the Outlook user community with additional details around this problem as well as information on how to address it.

The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data. When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.

Outlook users who are considering the Google Apps Sync plugin should become aware of this issue. If you have already installed this plugin, please take note of the steps below to address the issue.

For Outlook users who have already installed this plugin or have experienced this issue, the only remedy is to change the registry key that was modified by the plugin (click the link for more detail on the registry key):

1) Press the Windows Key + R on your keyboard, and type “REGEDIT”. This will open the Windows Registry Editor.

2) Browse to the following: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search"

3) You will manually have to reset the value of “PreventIndexingOutlook” to “0” (without the quotes). To do this, right click on the “PreventIndexingOutlook” key, select “Modify…”, then change the value data to “0”.

4) Close the registry editor.

The Outlook team has been made aware of a second issue that affects users of the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which syncs Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook. When a user has the Outlook Connector installed, then installs the Google Apps Sync plugin, the next time Outlook is started an error message comes up stating that “some functionality will be disabled”. The Google Apps Sync plugin modifies a registry key that is used by the Outlook Connector, which results in users seeing this error message. When confronted with this error message, we recommend that users click “Yes” to enable functionality. The Outlook Connector will then continue to function normally. The Outlook Connector will reset this registry key to the correct value.

Finally, we have brought these issues to Google’s attention, and have offered to work with them to find a resolution for our mutual customers. As soon as this is done, we will publish more information.

Dev Balasubramanian

Outlook Product Manager

The Fallen Princesses project imagines Disney characters if their stories didn't end happily ever after.

As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

Not so Charming. (via avenues)

The Fader has created a great 3 part video slideshow of David Byrne’s New York office. Byrne narrates the videos, which show off all of his weird and wonderful possessions. A fascinating look inside a creative mind. See part one below.

[Fader via Utne Reader]

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Architecture, Arts & Culture, Home & Garden, Music and creativity, office, Studio, Workspace

Back in April of this year we decided to have a look at running some banner ads on a number of high profile design-related sites. Over the last couple of years, advertising in our little corner of the web has come a long way. There are loads of highly trafficked design sites with excellent content and affordable ad slots. On top of this, the rise of targeted ad networks such as The Deck and Fusion Ads has made it much easier to get in front of the right crowd.

While we've dabbled in some banner advertising before, I decided to take a more thoughtful approach this time. We put together a number of banners, dedicated landing pages and put conversion tracking in place to measure the results. When looking into this process initially, I didn't come across many write-ups from advertisers on what worked, what didn't and just how effective the ads had been for them. In the interest of helping fill that void, here's the process we went through, and some of the surprising results that eventuated.

Coming up with the ad creative

As part of the merger between Campaign Monitor and MailBuild last year (more on that here), we added a stack of new features to make it easy for designers to earn passive income off their clients through email marketing. In a nutshell, you can create a sub-account for each client, set the price they should pay and earn a profit every time they send.

We figured this was something that lots of designers might find useful and it became the focus of our banner ads and associated landing pages. Here are the 3 ads we ran with initially.

For the final design of these ads we enlisted the help of the clever team at Newism, the same team that coded the current version of the Campaign Monitor site. We couldn't have been happier with the results.

The Landing Pages

As well as testing multiple ad creative, we decided to put together a number of dedicated landing pages for the campaign. We'd randomly display a different landing page for each visitor and measure which one converted best. We bought in the amazing Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain (who designed our web site) and Brad Hayes to help with the design.

Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep

This key for this page was to promote the idea of earning money in your sleep. We highlighted the 3 simple steps involved (rebrand, resell and then profit) and included an inline signup form allowing those interested to signup and start using the app on the spot.

Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?

This was definitely the most controversial landing page of the four. We took the fact that Campaign Monitor is built for designers to the extreme by including a modal window that overlays the landing page asking the person if they are a designer or not. If they clicked "You betcha", they'd be shown the page below that highlights how easy it is to resell Campaign Monitor.

If they clicked "Nope", the landing page behind the modal would fade out with a message explaining that "It's not you. It's us." We then linked to a number of other Email Service Providers that they might consider checking out that are built for a less targeted audience.

Unexpectedly, this approach stirred up a lot of conversation on Twitter. Some called us ballsy and classy for linking to our competition, others asked if we were breaking up with them. I personally received a number of emails from people complimenting us on being open and honest with people. The truth is, we've always referred potential customers to our competitors when we know they're not the right match (see this post from 2 years ago). It's how we'd want to be treated, so it's only fair that we do the same to our customers.

Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers

In the interest of testing what sort of impact the modal window might have on conversions, we also tested it against the very same landing page modal-free. The page was exactly the same otherwise, so should provide a nice comparison.

Landing page 4: Our home page

In the past we've just pointed people to our home page, which in itself is a landing page aimed at converting people to give us a try. Will it out-perform the dedicated landing pages that have a clearer connection to the ad creative?

The Results

Over April and May we booked advertising spots with The Deck and Fusion Ads along with Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Webdesigner Depot, Webresources Depot and CSS Elite.

We set up a redirect script on our servers that would choose one of the 4 landing pages above for each visitor and pass through any of the required parameters in the URL so we could track everything with Google Analytics. We have a number of goals set up so we can track important things like a customer signing up, sending a test campaign and becoming a paying customer. If you're interested, our designer Dave Martin has written about our Google Analytics setup in more detail here.

We judged the performance of each banner ad and landing page on the number of visitors that signed up to Campaign Monitor, as opposed to basing it purely on revenue. Because of the nature of our pricing, it can be weeks or even months before a customers starts paying for our software. We'll use the revenue numbers internally over the coming months to get a true idea of ROI.

The best performing banner ad

The blueprint banner ad outperformed the other two with a conversion rate of 3.5% resulting in 370 people signing up for Campaign Monitor. Here are the full results.

The best performing landing page

This one surprised everyone. Personally, I was concerned the modal window would result in a lower conversion rate because of the barrier of an additional click. I was pleasantly surprised to see this page gave us 25% more conversions than the next best performing page. Possibly the biggest surprise of all was that the "Earn money in your sleep" page with the inline signup form didn't give us one new customer. Not one! Here are the full results.

The best explanation we could provide for this is that people like to check out a product more before signing up (there was no link to the product from the page, the focus was on the signup form). The other landing pages provided links back to the site where an interested customer could take a feature tour, check out the pricing, etc before signing up. On top of this, the form had a total of eight required fields. Reducing this to the bare minimum and asking for the customer data after they signed up might have helped convert more. But still, not one?

The best performing advertiser

From the day we turned these ads on, Fusion Ads has consistently been our best converter. This includes visitors who have signed up right through to total revenue to date. We've also seen good conversion rates from other advertisers, which you can see in the results below.

It's important to keep in mind that these are conversion rates only, and don't give any indication of the true return on investment. For example, while The Deck has been our second best converter, it's also more expensive than any of the other ad slots. Because of the rates we've managed to negotiate with some providers, I'm afraid I can't share the costs associated with each ad spot, but most are easily found on each respective advertiser's site.

Was it worth it?

Right now it's too early to tell just how long it will take for this campaign to pay for itself and then turn a profit (don't forget the cost of designing the banners and landing pages as well as the ongoing advertising fees). To date we've only recovered around 25% of all expenses in revenue from new customers. Having said that, a large percentage of our customers continue to use our software for an extended period of time. Looking at how revenue has been growing from these customers in the last few weeks, it certainly seems that in the longer-term this exercise will be well worth it. The nature of our business model means that it will be a few more months before we'll really know.

To me, the most important element was actually testing everything as we went. By putting in a little extra work, we could quickly gauge which ad creative, landing page and advertiser was giving us the best results and react accordingly.

Our next steps will be to continue to refine the winning landing page using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions further. On top of this we'll be trying some new ad creative and throwing a few new advertisers into the mix. I'll try and put together a follow up in a few months time with anything else we might have learned in the mean time.

uriba posted a photo:

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why did i take this picture?

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Oh, Virgin, Virgin, this is not how I’d expect a so called rebel brand to behave.

The oldest trick in the spammer’s handbook, brought up to a new level. Just how convoluted is that?

Sigh… The road’s still long.

(This was encountered on a credit card application)

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היא גדולה.
תשדיר שירות נגד הריון...

uriba posted a photo:

virgin money doing the spammer's sleight of interface thing.
post here.

I’ve been invited to lecture at the LCC, one of London’s finest creative education institutes.
Starting next Monday, I’ll be giving a series of six lectures/talks (with view to extend them if it all goes well) to postgraduate students across the different disciplines. This adventure was sparked by prof. Ian Noble while collaborating with his “Graphic Branding & Identity” students on a Brandinstinct pro-bono project.

I’ve always rejected the myth of the suits/creatives split. Have always maintained a common language between marketing, design and other media is important and empowering to everyone involved. Hopefully, I can introduce some useful concepts and break some myths.

(And in case it doesn’t come through: OMG!!!!1! I’m so bloody psyched about this!)

Brand strategy reconstructed
How marketing lost the plot and how it might find meaning again

Marketing is a discipline in crisis. For the last decades it has become evident to practitioners and scholars alike that many of the trusted old methods were just not cutting it any more. Worse, it now seems some of them weren’t valid in the first place. This series of contemplative talks brings together ideas from narrative studies, semiotics and cultural theory to drive design thinking in solving the challenges of postmodern marketing. Numerous examples will be given from actual projects, popular culture and recent marketing cases.

The first six talks:

1. Marketing, meaning & decadence: an introduction to the sophistication of marketing sign-systems and their tendency to degenerate.
2. Suspicious minds: the myth of “a consumer subject”.
3. On branding and meaning: can a simplified theoretical tool-box cut through buzzwords and hype?
4. Advanced narrative marketing: the untold story of brand stories.
5. Marketing plots: cultural pattern-recognition as a strategic tool.
6. Embracing the mess: how clients and agencies are changing their work culture and methods to encourage more sustainable marketing strategies.

Mondays@17:00, Starting May 18th, excluding 25/5 (bank holiday) and 8/6 (prior obligation).

To my non-UK readers: London College of Communication, formerly London College of Printing, is the largest constituent College of the University of the Arts London, Europe’s largest university dedicated to art, communication, design and related technologies.
Two graduates Israeli readers will know are David Tartakover & Alex Livak.