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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.

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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It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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Music in adver­tis­ing has been around for a long, long time. Long before the days of Dell singing about lol­lipops and Gwen Ste­fani sell­ing HP print­ers.

From a time when prod­ucts were pro­moted by street singers, right through to a drum-playing gorilla, music has held the impor­tant role of enter­tain­ing con­sumers in the hope that a catchy, mem­o­rable tune might lead to a sale, or at least an increase in brand awareness.

Of course there are many ways to encour­age some­one to buy a prod­uct, but his­tory has shown that incor­po­rat­ing the right song can be the dif­fer­ence between an ad’s suc­cess or fail­ure.

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