If you wanted to hear about the current state of Comms Planning, you should definitely check out the latest episode of The Planning Salon. I was lucky enough to have a chat with Joel Pearson who is currently the Innovation Director at PHD working on the global comms planning duties for Unilever where he looks after the hair care, home care and skin care brands.
The conversation started out focusing on his role in architecting the propagation plan for the successful Dove Sketches which has amassed over 165 million views. We then had a chat about Comms Planning from a creative agency vs. media agency and the trends we are likely to see. Have a watch and let me know what you think.
What is Comms Planning? is my latest presentation which goes into detail about the role of the Comms Planner at a creative agency. Hopefully you find it useful!
One of the hardest things to find online are great examples of Digital Strategy presentations. I was lucky enough to have some great students in my class who ended up spending a lot of time creating their final Digital Strategy presentations for the Skillshare course. It was great to see all the different ways that people approached the problem and presented the information. Hopefully you can pick up a few tips from their presentations.
The past month has been a whirlwind of events, I was over the moon to be a part of the team at BBH NY to win the PlayStation account for North America. Since then, I have been tasked with leading the Communication Strategy for PlayStation. For Communications Strategists - this is the dream job. Gaming and sports are the only two categories where you get that elusive continued high level of engagement in communication that is rarely seen by consumer brands.
Because of this high level of engagement there has seen a lot of the ground breaking work in the Communication Strategy world come from the gaming category in the last couple of years. From the boom of Alternate Reality Gaming, thanks to the Halo franchise, to what we now see as the best practices in Social Media Marketing which were being pioneered in gaming forums 10 years ago.
If that was not a great enough, add to that challenge that PlayStation just announced that they will be releasing the next generation of their console this year. With speculation that Xbox will announce a new console too, the communications strategy has never been more important in ensuring that PlayStation is the next generation of console that is purchased.
The scope of this job is quite large and with that I am looking for a Communication Strategist to join me at BBH to help create the most compelling work possible for PlayStation so far. I really want to meet a Strategist that is a gaming nut, not someone that plays games but the kind of person that knows the intimate nuances within the gaming community and what makes its members tick. Like all Strategists, this person needs to be fascinated by consumer behavior, have fantastic attention to detail and can multi-task like a pro. They also need to have 2 - 5 years agency experience.
If you know someone who would be perfect then get them to send through their CV and Xbox Gamertag/PlayStation ID to me at julian.cole(at)bartleboglehegarty.com
Just a little side project that I worked on over the last couple of weeks with fellow Digital Strategist Kristian Henschel 'A Digital Strategy of Lindsay Lohan' on Slideshare. We were lucky enough to get to Presentation of the Day on Slideshare and had over 40,000 views in a week.
Fridges seem like a good starting point for examples of Physical Computing. It is an object that we interact with each day, which has a number of data points that we currently work out in our heads (what food is in their, how much is there of each product and when does it go off). There have been a number of people and companies looking into this space. The following is a list of developments going on in this area.
LG Innovation arm Smart Thinq have come up with a Fridge that will help you diet. The new Health Manager will help you build a personal profile, then suggests recipes, daily and weekly meal plans, menus, and food selections based on age, gender, weight, height, and BMI.
The Digital Strategy Agency Undercurrent have also recently had a look at updating the technology in a fridge. The working prototype had scales inside to measure how much milk is left and alert you when you were running low. They also took on the dieting issue, connecting your fridge to a fitbit to measure how much you exercise and unlocking the fridge when you had reached your quota. Read the full article as it is an interesting read as they have shown how an Agency looks at the creation process of building a physical computing prototype.
Evian Water have also been getting involved in this area with the Evian Water Magnet. It lets people order Evian water from their fridges, I think this is a massive step from a high profile brand to do this. I am guessing the home delivery system in Europe is different to how it works in Australia and US, as I don't think the infrastructure would be set up to allow this to happen in these countries.
There was also a similar concept done by Dubai Pizza company 'Red Tomato Pizza'. In this video you can see how the magnet is connected via bluetooth.
Inside the fridge there has also been examples of Physical Computing Innovation. Crowd Sourced Product Innovation Company Quirky partnered with GE to create the Smart Milk Jug the 'Milkmaid'. It lets you know when your Milk is going off through measuring the PH level and temperature of the milk through sensors in the base. Read more about the technology on TechCrunch
'In MY Fridge' is a student project from the University of Applied Sciences in Schwabisch. They created a fridge with a touch screen on the front that allowed you to see what was inside the fridge and what you could make with the products. This is based on an RFID system which requires you to print off tags that you stick on the products when they go into the fridge.
Tagging items seems like the biggest barrier at the moment in the whole Physical Computing for Fridges space. However I expect that there will be some tech developments most likely around barcodes and using them as a product recognition element which should help to eliminate that issue.
With the great Twitter/Arduino/Fuelband Mash Up from Stink Digital the other day, I thought I would look at the best Digital Physical projects coming out of Advertising/Media Labs.
