Consumer Electronics White Paper

Over at our work blog, www.shopperculture.com, we've just put up a new white paper on a study our Dallas office undertook about shopping in the Consumer Electronics category. If that's your gig, worth a download.

More lists

Trend Candy have a bunch of top something lists on all sorts of things on their site. As a fan of a top X list, thought I would pop it up here and make up my own top 5 list of their top x lists from today's browsing. So here it is:

1) Top 30 hip hotels in 2008. Love the Istanbul underwater hotel
2) 11 kinetic energy innovations, free green energy. Go buy some.
3) Top 30 unique inventions in 2008. Some of these are great.
4) 13 innovations in Transportation and future transit - I will get my hover car that I was promised as a child one day!
5) Top 30 naughty trends, innovations and ads in 2008 - coz it's fun

Thing with this though is that I don't think a lot of their content actually constitutes a trend. It's interesting an' that, but trends?

Thinker types

As I have been lousy at writing anything of late (and 3 weeks in the UK hasn't helped that) thought I would post a link to Heather's findings of the planner study she recently undertook. I posted about it a while back.

Live ads

Thursday 29th May, 2008. Channel 4 in the UK showed what was the first ad created "live" in the ad break. The execution was a great manifestation of the "Difficult is worth doing" idea developed by W&K (although the actual executional idea was bought to the table by Starcom).



Many interesting things in this. It...

1) continues the line of innovative Honda work (Cog, Choir etc.)
2) has (and will continue) created a huge amount of column inches and PR coverage
3) was cheap to produce, as it was done in house by Channel 4 and took reletively little to create. No fancy CGI and all that.
4) was a creative executional idea bought by the media agency.

Was it effective? Given the number of people who viewed it (over 2 million) and the link above to Youtube which has over 50k views so far, it's certainly got a lot of attention. The product (the new Accord) is also likely to be top-notch and will sell well too.

Brilliant!

It's been a while

Workload. Pitches.

My car has spent more time at the airport garage than at home.

My back is fed up with hotel beds.

And somehow, I've just not had the time to post - although there are some new things over at shopperculture.com.

In the haze though, I did have this thought at the weekend. Grown men in Crocs - is that right?

Visual treats

I cannot stop myself from hanging out on this site new site for Microsoft's Zune player. I love the visual impact it delivers, the navigation, and the variety of imagery. The play list also has some great tracks on it. It's so interesting and visually pleasing it just makes me smile. This is what brands should be all about - delivering people with interesting chances to play with their brand. I've been going on about it all week. How good is that, a non-user talking about your brand to anyone that will listen for week?


And I have asked around, and no, I still don't know anyone who owns one. Do you? Why? What's cool about it? I'd love to know.

Handbags

This is great. I was at a conference today and saw a brilliant presentation of a new study that has been done about the contents of America's handbags. Called In your Purse - Archaeology of the American Handbag, it's an enlightening look (especially for blokes) at the dark recesses of the handbag. Whats fascinating is the potential for innovation that the humble handbag presents.

Great insight

This is a new Visa execution that springs from a great insight. Watch and enjoy the absence of hard sell. Wonderful stuff.