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Hello all, after 29 years of oper­a­tion, the last six as part of WPP, Ban­ner has moved to become part of Medi­a­com. This move will be effec­tive as from 2nd April 2013. We will be called Medi­a­com Ban­ner and will sit as a core part of Medi­a­com Busi­ness within the inter­na­tional team. Please con­tact Rupert Denny, Direc­tor, on rupert.denny@mediacom.com or call 44 7767 776183

Recent arti­cles, news and com­men­tary got me think­ing about how the whole land­scape of social media is shift­ing and that mobile is key to how peo­ple will use and inter­act with social media which will affect every­one oper­at­ing in this space, includ­ing Facebook.

See­ing this chart from Chetan Sharma Con­sult­ing makes me think that the world has gone slightly mad if there are more mobile devices out there than peo­ple who have access to fresh water.

I’ve been read­ing all the excite­ment sur­round­ing Google’s new aug­mented real­ity project, Google Glasses.

In case you missed it, these are essen­tially Oakley-style sun­glasses with a lens-mounted HUD (the head-up dis­play fighter pilots use for alti­tude, vec­tor, tar­get­ing etc.). Wear­ing a pair, you can read and com­pose emails, view cal­en­dar events, check the weather, take phone calls and, accord­ing to the promo video accom­pa­ny­ing the launch, learn to play the ukulele.

While this all may appear like great fun, it’s being touted by some quite seri­ous tech journos as noth­ing less than the nat­ural replace­ment for the smart­phone as our pri­mary com­mu­ni­ca­tions device.

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Five words that could destroy the
adver­tis­ing industry

They’re also com­plete and utter nonsense.

When a technology/soft drink/holiday com­pany approaches an ad agency, they’re buy­ing exper­tise, expe­ri­ence and tal­ent that they don’t pos­sess them­selves. If they did, they’d have no need for exter­nal pro­fes­sion­als and I’d be play­ing piano in a bar somewhere.

Yet I’m hear­ing those words – along with the more colour­ful acronym, JFDI – much more than I used to. And that’s a shame.

It’s a shame and it’s also self-defeating. You see, “The Cus­tomer Is Always Right” ben­e­fits no one: not the agency, not the client, not the end cus­tomer.

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Lego. As a young per­son, I had it. You had it. We all had it.

But what did you ever do with it? Me? Poorly thought out space sta­tions and space­ships. In this edi­tion of the Couch we’ll be see­ing what creative-types around the world have been doing with the old plas­tic bricks.

Cool Cre­ative

From the White Stripes “Fell in love with a girl” video to the wildly suc­cess­ful “Lego <insert movie fran­chise here>” game series from Traveller’s Tales, peo­ple have been tak­ing hun­dreds of bits of plas­tic and mak­ing some pretty cool stuff with it for years.

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When you’re build­ing and test­ing sites there are a lot of things to con­sider. “God is in the details” and all that. You can save time, heartache and avoid hav­ing angry clients by set­ting up your browser with a few lit­tle tools to help you check some of the basics.

Fire­Bug

For when you absolutely, pos­i­tively have to go into the code your­self and have a dig around. Indis­pens­able lit­tle add-on when trou­bleshoot­ing sites, giv­ing you (the tech-savvy PM) the abil­ity to check the code that builds the site. Also has a handy “Net” tab telling you which files are load­ing (or ever hand­ier, not load­ing).

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I’ve been play­ing with my new DSLR this month (thank you Santa), and have been think­ing about some of the cool pho­to­graphic effects used in cam­paigns over the last cou­ple of years.

Get­ting the LED out in London

What do you get if you take a cam­era with a long expo­sure, some LED lights, some Lon­don scenery and some Kraftwerk-esque music?

This: Licht­fak­tor for Sky Movies. A bunch of guys hack­ing about with lights, cam­eras and action. Throw in some Star Trek and Star Wars noises and this is a great exam­ple of where cre­ativ­ity meets tech­nol­ogy. Waste some time this after­noon with a browse through the Licht­fak­tor Vimeo Chan­nel.

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I have pretty much estab­lished myself as an anti ‘i’-product per­son. Whilst I recog­nise they are beau­ti­ful, work straight out of the box and have brought joy (and smug­ness) to mil­lions, they are not for me. I like a prod­uct that I can tin­ker with, basi­cally an item that I can make my own.

I don’t own an iPhone (I’ve got a Motorola Flipout – Android based) or an iPod (I use my phone) or an Mac­Book (I have a HP lap­top, which has been tweaked to be super­fast for my gam­ing / retouch­ing use) or an iPad (I’ve got a Kin­dle).

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Never work with chil­dren or animals

The Dig­i­tal Couch has never been one to shy away from a chal­lenge, so this week he’s taken on kids and ani­mals in the world of tech. Sounds like a recipe for dis­as­ter you say? Only time will tell…

Baby-Facebook

A new study com­piled by Dubit has revealed that nearly 50% of the UK’s under 12s are using Face­book, despite being too young to do so. Face­book requires its mem­bers to be at least 13 yet many young­sters are log­ging on way before this. And 66% of six year-olds are also aware of Face­book, so the pres­sure to be part of it must be high – even at this young age.

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The Dig­i­tal Couch took a well-deserved rest after Christ­mas but now it’s up and rar­ing to go again – revived after its mini-break to Paris. It did find love with a sofa in the Lou­vre but alas there was no Valen­tine card in the post. Worry not; we’ve man­aged to stop him brood­ing just long enough to take a look at what’s been hap­pen­ing in the world of tech so far this year.

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