Luke Sullivan

Luke Sullivan from Mediastash.tv on Vimeo.

Lasagna Ragu

So I kind of fell off the veggies only diet. But I have two very good reasons, thanks to FX Cusine. The first was Ragu Bolognese, the traditional dish that spag bol is based upon. It took over four hours to cook on Saturday, but was worth every minute. The second was the Lasagne you can then make with the ragu.

I just discovered FX Cusine, and I love it. It's clearly the blog of someone who loves eating. That he takes such lovely photos of the process makes it very easy to understand the dishes.

Inspired, I took my own photos, which pale in comparison.

Peter Kenny's Birthday

60 years of Chinese Communism

If the Olympic opening ceremonies weren't enough to convince you that China had arrived (again) on the world stage, 'ave a look at these fantastic pictures from boston.com. Who, by the way, do lovely photojournalism online in their Big Picture section.

Proof that one thing you get from communism that you don't get in a democracy is unbelievable levels of synchronisation, the 60th anniversary of communist rule celebrations were sort of like the opening ceremonies, but with guns. Which is all the proof you need that they would kick anybody's ass in a war.

Attack of the Killer Rabbit

Fisherman Little Tale

One of the guys who works here, Lucas, is probably one of the most creative people I've ever worked with, mostly because he never stops doing creative things. Like making a simple little video about a story he told in one of our Creative Department meetings. Simple as it should be.

fisherman little tale from Lucas Levitan on Vimeo.

Re: The consumer is STILL not a moron

Mr. Hunt over at I Noticed This and I regularly have conversations about the upheaval currently happening in marketing. They're fun, and a great way for us to share what each of us has recently learned. WOM. Hmmm. Sounds familiar for some reason.

Inspired by a presentation I shared (see previous post), he has weighed into the debate with a post The consumer is STILL not a moron in the way he normally reserves for our conversations. Boo hoo.

He curiously drew a connection between a Guinness ad from the 60's and how he feels about that pour of Irish pride. Basically, do intelligent advertising, and people will think you have an intelligent brand. I know; he made me realise it's so blindly obvious that it's mystifying why there aren't far more ads like it.

But that led him to touch on something that is really important to understand. That brands need to be useful. And that on the internet, that should be easier than it was pre-internet.

But once brands do something useful, it ceases to be advertising. Doing something useful is a service. To be sure, most often that service is entertainment, but the are many examples of brands at least trying to do this.

I recently saw a presentation about a brand who, in their research, realised that very few of the blogs about their area of expertise were actually connected to each other. And rather than attempt being the expert source, they're developing a hub to which all the other blogs, theirs included, will connect to. They're not forcing people to only listen to them; they're actually helping people find the information they want, at other sources.

And this is the reason I love working in digital so much. Much of what we can do, in theory, at least, is not really marketing. It's not particularly creative, but we have the opportunity to use digital tools to actually help people.

Sadly, most clients still don't understand this about digital. They're still using the old ways of doing things (talking at people), and using them on this 'new' medium (which really isn't a medium). But people on the internet aren't paying attention to them. The old ways don't work. And I'm not just talking about finding new ways to advertise. I'm talking about completely re-thinking (on the internet), what it means to advertise.

On the TV, which is a passive medium, ads tell people things (though sometimes they can entertain), in DM, you can have a one-on-one conversation, though those seem to be disappearing, with people. In digital, you can, but really shouldn't, shout at people, you can have one-on-one conversations, but you can also do something else that earns you kudos from your customers. You can help them have a conversation, not with you, but with someone else. And that's where brands should be.

In a lot of ways, the internet isn't a channel, or a medium (it's LOADS of them in itself). It can't really be defined in any of our advertising-friendly ways, as David Cushman points out for one simple reason:

The internet doesn't do anything new. It's still about human interaction. The internet just makes that cheaper and easier.

Like Word of Mouth.

Post digital marketing

Is apparently very long. Stumbled across this presentation at crackunit. It is everything you ever wanted to know about digital marketing. Or at least where it is now. Rather overwhelming, but worth the investment. Especially if you are one of my clients. Or my mum trying to figure out what I do for a living.

Post Digital Marketing 2009

View more documents from Helge Tennø.

Out of touch

So this little episode actually happened last week during the debate on the climate change bill going through Congress. Seriously. Anyone who still adheres to this view has either not picked up a book, read a newspaper or looked outside anytime within the last 20 years, or has a powerful financial incentive.

He scares me, because he gets to vote on the bill. But what is perhaps even scarier is the people like this:



Glen Beck. He's scary because people actually listen to him. The climate change bill is Communist? Is that all he has? An old Cold War accusation? This isn't politics. This isn't reasoned debate. It's theatre. It's risking the future of humanity to chase short-term viewer ratings.

I find it ridiculous that I have to point out that I'm all for free speech before I say this next thing. What these guys are doing are borderline crimes against humanity. In fact, much of what the right-wing personalities currently say is either lies, distortions, or hate-mongering. They get away with it because of free speech. But someone really needs to hold them accountable for what they say.

At a time when the 'American values' party has lost a Governor and a Senator to sex scandles (Sanford, Ensign, Jon Stewart said they had conservative valuse but liberal penises. hehe), and one to vague ambition (Palin) watching clips like this makes it pretty obvious they have no moral compass, only a political one.

Which is a shame. There used to be things to admire about the Republican party. Or at least things you could understand why someone would believe in.

Now, now they're so out of touch as to be irrelevant. And that makes me proud to be a Liberal.

Thanks, Michael

So out of all the tributes being posted to Michael Jackson, I pick this one. Only he could have brought such a diverse group of American singers together to perform this song.

Thought for the day

In today's excerpt - new thoughts on the "clash of civilizations" from Robert Wright, author of the highly influential books Nonzero and The Moral Animal, in his new book The Evolution of God:

"It sounds paradoxical. On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and that the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion. On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the 'illusion,' in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusory.

"Does that make sense? Probably not. I hope it will by the end of the book. For now I should just concede that the kind of god that remains plausible, after all this streamlining, is not the kind of god that most religious believers currently have in mind.

"There are two other things that I hope will make a new kind of sense by the end of this book, and both are aspects of the current world situation. One is what some people call a clash of civilizations - the tension between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim world, as conspicuously manifested on September 11, 2001. Ever since that day, people have been wondering how, if at all, the world's Abrahamic religions can get along with one another as globalization forces them into closer and closer contact.

"Well, history is full of civilizations clashing, and for that matter, of civilizations not clashing. And the story of the role played by religious ideas - fanning the flames or dampening the flames, and often changing in the process - is instructive. I think it tells us what we can do to make the current 'clash' more likely to have a happy ending.

"The second aspect of the current world situation I'll address is another kind of clash - the much-discussed 'clash' between science and religion. Like the first kind of clash, this one has a long and instructive history. It can be traced at least as far back as ancient Babylon, where eclipses that had long been attributed to restless and malignant supernatural beings were suddenly found to occur at predictable intervals - predictable enough to make you wonder whether restless and malignant supernatural beings were really the problem.

"There have been many such unsettling (from religion's point of view) discoveries since then, but always some notion of the divine has survived the encounter with science. The notion has had to change, but that's no indictment of religion. After all, science has changed relentlessly, revising if not discarding old theories, and none of us think of that as an indictment of science. On the contrary, we think this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth.

"Maybe the same thing is happening to religion. Maybe, in the end, a mercilessly scientific account of our predicament ... is actually compatible with a truly religious worldview, and is part of the process that refines a religious worldview, moving it closer to truth. These two big 'clash' questions can be put into one sentence: Can religions in the modern world reconcile themselves to one another, and can they reconcile themselves to science? I think their history points to affirmative answers."

Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Little, Brown and Company, Copyright 2009 by Robert Wright, pp. 4-6.

Chamelon

This guy is totally freaking me out. But I post it as I think it's a great example of how Ray-Ban is using virals to connect with people. It's just a little film, after all, but it is engaging and is flying across the interwebs. It's effect is rather frightening; now I don't know how many chamelons are lurking in my new flat.

Ray-Ban: Super chameleon
Uploaded by hourigan

A blog about a blog

Another effing blog, as it were. It's where, unofficially, we, the Digitas London we, will be documenting our climb out of the Campaign School Reports basement. Among other things, natch.

http://anothereffingblog.com/

Earth Hour

Just do it. Have dinner by candle light.

Hehe

http://bacolicio.us/

Copy this link and paste it in front of the web address to your favourite site, and then click refresh.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Er, I'm weird

I think I need to build the Mellinnum Falcon.

I was afraid this was going to happen

Matt Benney says the thing about blogging is that when you have things to blog about, you're too busy to do it, and when you have time to blog, there's nothing to blog about. True, true. But I prefer to think of it more like this:

Silence

By Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a motionless player on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it.
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house-
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

Brook Green in the snow

My mate Matt made a really rather lovely little video about our neighbourhood green in the snow the other day.

A woman in Germany

Is having a bit of a rough time, and needs to know she's not alone.

What's a little snow?

So London has been smacked by a record snowfall. This is unusual. As unusual, say, as palm trees growing in Canada. It's rarity has been documents by the hundreds or even thousands of blog posts, Facebook pictures and status updates, and my favourites, Twitter posts.

Naturally, the storm has brought one of the world's great metropolis' to a standstill. At 3 pm, the Tube is still, for the most part, shut down, and virtually the entire bus network has been suspended all day. Our office closed, as did many others for want of employees who could make it into work.

It is, by any standard, a proper Minnesota snowstorm. But unlike, say, Minneapolis, London understandably just isn't equipped to handle this amount of snow. Minneapolis alone has a fleet of 400-odd snowplows, and would have had the roads plowed in time for rush hour this morning.

I personally enjoyed the snow very much. It brought back to me one of the things I miss about Minneapolis--the natural beauty of winter. And this time, I didn't have to endure two months of unbearable freezing cold to enjoy it.

Late in the afternoon, it occured to me that I would need to shovel my staircase so it wouldn't freeze (thanks Pops, for the knowledge). Like, perhaps, the rest of London, I lacked the one thing I needed to deal with the snow. So I used my dustpan:

A Queen's guardsman cracks

And puts a not inconsiderable dent in the British sense of identity. He didn't just smile. He didn't just flinch. He flipped out.

The remaking of America

Got a funny call from my mum the other day. She called to ask me if it was ok for my dad to take my letter jacket from high school to the charity shop on Martin Luther King Day. I said no, on the grounds that my childhood memories have already, save the aforementioned jacket, been resigned to just one box in the basement. And that earning that letter jacket is still one of my proudest achievements.

I didn't give much thought to the call. I was thinking about other things. Like the speech. How wonderful it felt to not feel cynicism and hatred for your government. To believe in something again.

There's an interesting take on the speech over at I Noticed This and I won't get into an analysis of Obama's speech. Mostly because it's done better at the NY Times. But also because I thought his call to remake America was a bit glib, and that it would fall on the deaf ears of a populace who had been burned too many times by politicans who said one thing, and then did another. It had obvious links to JFK's 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country', and could therefore be considered political posturing.

But I was wrong to think that the Obamas would not be able to mobilise the country. I'd asked my mum why, out of character, my dad was taking old clothes to the charity shop.

'Because he got an email from Michelle Obama asking him to celebrate MLK day by doing something for poor people.'

Spread the word

Please watch this video. Well, if you're here, you probably already have. I have posted this video for several reasons.

Ths first is that it, as a piece of art and how I learned about it, is a perfect example of what the tools and behaviours of the internet can do that no other medium (and I hesitate to use that word) can do.

It is a beautiful piece of work that only a few years ago would not have been possible without the backing of a wealthy client. It's a piece of art that did not get forced into the middle of my favourite TV show, but rather one that I have chosen to watch, because a friend of mine sent it to me.

Now I share it with you. And this is exactly what you can do in digital that you can't do anywhere else. I was the 230,109th person to watch it. And that will only grow as it goes viral. I would like to use my rather limited reach to help the makers of this film out. That's the important thing you can do with a film digitally that you can't do with a well-made commercial. You can immediately help out by sending it on. No £2 ask, no number to call.

But the main reason why I am writing to you tonight, as a member of humanity (and their much over-analisyed alter egos, consumers), is that this film, and it course through the Internet , drew a straight line between the homeless people featured and my own experience. As someone who only made it through the ass end of freelancing because of the compassion of his friends, I recognise the desolation and isolation from humanity.

And I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Ever.

Thanks to Lucas Levitan for reminding me.

Barry Gibb

This makes me giggle like a little schoolgirl.

Wind turbines

Wind turbines. Never understood what the fuss was all about. As my mate Matt says, they give him hope. They give me hope too. We think they're beautiful and graceful.

So what the hell happened to this one? The Sun claims, rather truthfully, that a UFO hit it.

The Guardian claims to have solved the mystery, or not. But the comments at the end of the Guardian article are priceless.

A London Night

Last night I was walking home from Barons Court station. Being a little late in the evening, it was dark, and the cold had broken so that it was only chilly. It was attempting to rain, which meant the air was misty.

Walking down the near-deserted street, I caught it. The unmistakable whiff of peat burning in a fireplace. It smells like wood burning, but is sweeter, like grass burning. And I knew instantly where it was coming from.

I always cut through the carpark of a church, and it was coming from the vicar's house. I knew this because his house and garden is a little oasis of country in the city. A lovely brick two-story, with an obviously lovingly-tended garden.

Having been here for so long, I often forget that I live in a foreign country. Lovely, warm reminders are always welcome.

A Minnesota Night

Something lurked in the back of my mind today as I was trolling through my recipes looking for my supper. I didn't know it at the time.

I was wearing a shirt from a Japanese store, socks and pants from English makers. A T-shirt from God knows where. Jeans were 501s.

Opted for Beer and Mushroom Mac 'n' Cheese. Didn't know why until I put the package that'd arrived on. It was the Cities 97 Sampler.

It's a compliation of artists who have come into the Minneapolis station's studio doing acoutstic sets. And for tonight, at least, I would like to be at home, listening to these people, eating this food. understanding who I am.

Today I talked to, and played with, some very serious people. Global Creative Directors, Global Marketing Directors. Global Kings and Queens. And I played, but it was a dice game.

I'm playing, and maybe by rules I can define. But I have now learned the hard way that you can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't change who you are.

A nod to Jeremy Messersmith.