Jamie's Fowl Dinner Gets Results

If you didn’t watch it, no doubt you would have heard about Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners. This is the show where he killed baby chickens in front of a shocked studio audience in a bid to get people to choose free range eggs and chicken over factory farmed product.
If you didn’t see, it here’s what all the fuss is about: In the opening scenes of the show, he asked members of his audience to separate the male from the female chicks on their tables. With this he put the male chicks to death by suffocation, demonstrating what happens at chicken farms to the non-egg laying member of the species.

Of course his audience members were upset, and the RSPCA condemned his slaughter of the chicks. But Jamie defended his actions, saying …”if seeing some of the practices helps to change the shopping habits of just 5 per cent of people watching, then it will be worth it.”
Jamie would have known that he was going to piss of animal rights groups and alienate some of his audience. But bravery won out in the end. After the program aired in Britain sales of factory farmed chickens dropped by 10 million units within weeks and sales of free range eggs increased by a third. Amazing results for this one off stunt and more than what he was hoping for I’m sure.

Big Thinking for Small Spaces

When Ikea arrived in New York it wanted to make a big noise in the city that never sleeps. For the opening of its first store in the city, it tapped into New Yorkers’ pride in their local landmarks, combined with its traditional focus on affordability and recognition of small space living.

Four 20’x20’ pop-up room settings were fitted and furnished with Ikea products, giving the public a taste of what they could experience in-store. These living room-sized boxes were erected in busy outside spaces: Union Square, Borough Hall Plaza, Brooklyn Public Library and Cadman Plaza.
Other media used included bus kings, pizza delivery boxes, phone kiosks, guerrilla media, direct mail and even wrapping the buses and water taxis that transport visitors to the Ikea store.

No results from this campaign yet, but a really simple and effective way to bring the staple collateral of self-assembly boxes, which Ikea is well known for as an integral part of the media mix.

Getting won over!

Following on from a couple of posts, Retailtainment & Banksy, this is a simple little story about a recent retail experience of mine.

Borders, the big book baron, has infiltrated lots of shopping strips and centres and are obviously taking sales from the somewhat little-er guys that I’ve always shopped at like Dymocks and small independent book shop, Readings. Always one to go for the underdog, I don’t tend to shop at Borders.

On this occasion, I wanted to buy my loved one a copy of a book called Wall & Piece…a book of mystery man Banksy’s graffiti art.

I find myself in a shopping strip with only Borders and Dymocks to choose from. With my head held high, I head for Dymocks first. The 80’s style peach décor and times new roman font directing me to the Art section make me feel I’m doing the right thing by shopping here; they clearly need the cash to renovate. With no luck in the art section, I ask Kaye, the mid-40’s shop assistant dressed in a striped Dymocks shirt and gold name badge, if she can help me with my request. She asks her trusty computer if the book is in the shop, tries a few different ways of spelling Banksy, but they don’t have it, never have..."Sorry, can't help you love".

I shield my identity as I walk into Borders. The shop is huge, nice fit out and lots of bookish looking people man the registers. On the lower floor I find my section and start the search. Nothing! I approach one of the female staff and search for her name badge. Nothing! I ask her if she can help me find a book about Banksy…cutting me off she says “Ah, Wall & Piece…sorry we’ve sold out, but I'm happy to order that in for you. It will take up to two weeks to get here, and we can call you when it arrives, or get it sent to another store if you like. But if you’re into Banksy, what about this….”

I could go on, but you get the picture. I’m sold. Good old fashioned service, friendly, knowlegable staff and a good range has got me going back to Borders next time I’m shopping for a book. Pretty simple stuff really!

Picture Monkey

One of the most time consuming things I find in the run up to a client presentation is gathering all the relevant images to bring the ideas to life. Often the images you use to get your thinking over the line, can have a significant influence in selling in an idea. Everyone has their share of favorite stock image sites to help crystallise their idea. Some stock imagery however, is so bland and generic that all images sourced are highly unbelievable.

Flickr's related word site is one of the best sites I've come across to source interesting imagery and make the process fun along the way. With a contemporary black portal, you type in a word and a wheel of related words appear in your screen. The good thing is the images are sourced directly from flickr, so you're sourcing real people's photographs from around the world.

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

My Psychic Experience

On Friday night in the pub we were chatting about Psychics, and two of my girl-friends said they'd been to one in Manly who was good (85% accurate they said!). In the spirit of our recent creativity training, I decided to put my long-held skepticism to the side and dive in. Why not try something new to stimulate my creative brain? So I went to the Psychic and when I showed up they said I had to make an appointment (insert your own joke here e.g. didn't they know you were coming?).

So you ask: did Melita the Psychic change my life and my opinion of the supernatural? If I tell you that half way through the session I stopped to ask Melita, "Am I giving off enough energy?" you'll quickly guess that she didn't win me over. I honestly started open-minded but she was so far off / vague that I couldn't suspend my disbelief any longer.

In the style of the 7 show The One I give you the hits and misses:-

Hits
A relative with the middle name James
A new project coming up which is going to involve a bit of Payne (then again she might have meant pain?)
I'm going to the Blue Mountains soon

Misses
I went fishing with my dad or grandad a lot when I was young
I'm frustrated in my job (although I did have a frustrating day Monday)
I go to the casino with my friend Will

Predictions
I will buy property when I'm 37 or 38
I will find everything I want in reverse order but I need to be patient
I need to focus on communication and tell the girl in my life what I want out of our relationship

What did I learn from this experience? First, it's absolutely true that the more, different things you try, the better you will be at having rounded perspective and good ideas. Second, you can make $90 an hour making stuff up (and I honestly reckon I could do her job as well as she did). Third, never trust a psychic who asks for payment in advance and who starts calling you Robert when your real name is Robin! Doh.

Give Dreams not Stuff

This is the motto of a new Canadian company called DreamBank that are gathering quite a bit of good karma / PR for themselves. It's a pretty nifty idea and as with all great ideas dead simple! It's based on the premise we all gather way to much useless stuff in our lives that we actually never use. The more useless stuff in the world, not only is this a drain on storage space but this over abundance aint really helping the heaving planet either.

So, register your dream on DreamBank e.g. penguin watching in Antartica, deposit for a house, paying off the student loan etc etc and just let all your future gifters know about your dream so that rather than getting another set of personalised hankies from your Great Aunty Dot, get her to throw a bit of dosh towards your dream.

Check it out http://www.dreambank.org/

Banksy - International Man of Mystery

Art is good and often mysterious; it brings an often indefinable joy to us all where we need not have any specific agreement on what it means or why we like it, it just is and we accept that by its very nature it is often subjective.

This brings me to Banksy a British satirical graffiti artist who has been bravely challenging the establishment for a few years now.

He has an enviable ability to subvert the belief systems that we tend to clutch onto today and I LOVE IT. His art is public and therefore democratic and its poetry is in its ability to challenge social norms and injustices with a wry grin.

Aside from his satirical wit, what makes Banksy so fascinatingly mysterious is his anonymity. No one really knows who Banksy is, his art fetches huge amounts of money (one piece sold for over $500k!) and pops up in all the ‘right’ places. In 2005 nine images appeared at the Israeli West Bank and my personal favourite was when he hung his own subverted paintings at the Tate Gallery in London. Check out the video footage on his site of him doing it http://www.banksy.co.uk/

His message has been to make his art famous and not himself yet recently there have been news reports claiming to have cracked his identity. I can’t help but wonder why we can’t live with the mystery.

What is it about outing Banksy? What is it that forces us to need to explain something which is clearly more challenging the longer it remains a mystery?