dan burgess // all life is an experiment

human brands

shot as an internal film to motivate the staff at kodak, now rocking the web. good to see a brand that can take the piss out of itself. at some point i think a brand or an organisation needs to be able to do that, like people, brands and businesses can cock things up or lose direction. being able to laugh about it is a sign of a human brand i reckon. seems there's some nice innovation ideas in the pipeline as well.
via futurelab

being green

being green, socially responsible and ethical..all things that we collectively need to be better at and hopefully priorities for more people, brands and organisations this year. reckon it's likely to be as important as brand innovation itself as we move forward, though sadly i sense that many marketing folk still see this as grey corporate territory.
we don't buy very much from supermarkets in my house, never really have, but with some things you don't have much option or time. anyway a couple of days ago seemah noticed on this tub of 'organic' olive spread from sainsbury's that the 'packaging is non recylable and that 'we are tyring to find ways to make organic packaging more environmentally friendly'. i found that quite odd that it wasn't even partly recylable, it seemed like a weird combo of organic produce and pesty plastic and are they referring to making progress with only organic packaging?
so today in brilliant contrast i saw that the innocent posse have created a 100% biodegradable bottle which they've launched their new smashing looking thickie in.

apparently its compostable in 10 weeks which is genius. i use a wormery for recyling our kitchen waste.. i wonder if the worms can cope with the bottle?
maybe dan will know

open source brands

user generated ads are not a totally new thing but still fairly rare right now. Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser has encouraged its community of fans to make their own ads championing the browser, which indeed is a splendid application and worth downloading. Web browsers are a funny thing, you use them constantly but until you try another better version you don't really realize the limitations of your current one.
Anyway some of these ads will be running on U.S TV, this one didn't make it but has clearly been a hit on the web.
as with Faris's amateur post, clearly fantastic stuff is being made by ordinary people all over the shop and we are watching, sharing and doing in our millions. the implications for agencies and  brands is something we're all questioning, exploring and experimenting with. For me though what is really inspiring here is the relationship between the brand, the product and its users. Mozilla is about as open source as you can get. massively passionate users and advocates helping develop the product and then making and sharing adverts for the product they totally believe in. arguably a tough journey for big brands and organisations to go through, and the challenge is more about changing internal attitude, belief and approach to business than an external communications one. but a shiny example of an open source brand like this is awesome stuff and in my book sets standards to be aiming for.

brand niceness

pay and play. never seen this before. sort of odd but good and understandable but annoying at the same time. it made me think about how more and more we are being asked to pay for stuff in order to play or just get on with day to day life. like the charges on cash machines in convenience stores when there's no ATM in a local area or paying for parking inside a park. i'm sure there's more...

so in this world of marketing clutter is the cost of these things something that brands/organisations could contribute to?
- maybe a Slazenger or a Robinsons or a Lucozade could pay for the tennnis court charges at lunch time once a week or every day - you still need a ticket to play but the fee is paid, council gets cash, we get some free play time, brand gets talked about in a nice way
- or brand sponsored 'park' parking during a time of day/week perhaps
- ATM machines in local areas where the charge on a certain day/time zone is covered by a brand/organisation

part sponsorship, part media use, very local, but more about brands being nice, helping out, being useful and understanding. spending some marketing coin doing nice stuff that really helps and matters to people
Brands being nice isn't a new thing but niceness outside of the brand environment is rarer...not asking you to subscribe to them/buy something in order to get the niceness