‘Cross The Breeze

Keep ‘em coming Rick. Read my earlier “Listen and learn” post or this new one from Rick Segal to know what I’m on about. Here’s a teaser:

“VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

Clueless sometimes…

Brilliant. The toilet in a nightclub in Hamburg was specially prepared so that after entering the toilet, the lights would go out and the room would be bathing in blacklight… highlighting a bloody crime scene in the room. All of this to promote the exclusive thrillers on 13th Street - the action and suspense channel. I’ll say it again: brilliant.

[Via directdaily]

A bit more than 3 weeks to go to Blogger Social in NYC, a unique gathering of mainly (but not only) marketing & advertising bloggers from across the globe. With just over 80 attendees and a fun agenda of events this is really something a lot of us are looking forward to for many months.

There’s one downside to it though, and that is that it takes place the exact same weekend as the Tour of Flanders, the classic of all classics in road cycle racing if you ask me. The race, first organized in 1913, is an experience of its own and (trust me) appeals to everyone who is up for a heroic day of sports. With many steep hills, often paved with cobblestones over a distance of approx. 260 kilometers… it sure isn’t just a race like any other.

I’ve watched the race on television for as long as I can remember, most of the time with a bunch of friends, and for the last few years we’ve been going to the ‘Muur van Geraardsbergen’ (or ‘wall’ of Geraardsbergen) to watch it live, courtesy of Lotto. With several thousands of people at the key positions of the race and close to a million people over the whole length, the ambiance is incredible.

So not this year, and the Social will rock for sure, but a part in my heart will miss this raceday a lot. I’m sure Tim ‘Masiguy’ Jackson understands ;)

Here’s a great ad from Het Nieuwsblad (newspaper) for their upcoming coverage of the Tour of Flanders.

Last week I went to LIFT08 in Geneva, and although it is a conference, I think you’d better describe it as an experience. And an experience I was really much looking forward to, especially after talking to Laurent Haug and Cristiana Bolli Freitas, the creative brains and organizers of LIFT a few months earlier.

Part of what makes it a really interesting experience, is all the interaction and community involvement both before and at the conference. You have workshops & open stages that be suggested and voted on. There was a Live Magazine (”Not so empty book”), the Fontself,  the creating of the LIFT song, etc etc. All very unique and interactive.

It started on Wednesday with some workshops, one during the morning and one during the afternoon:

• Fearless City: Re-routing the digital divide with mobile: I got in a bit late as I only flew in that morning, but that didn’t make it less interesting. The presenter (Irwin Oostindie) and I had a few chats later on about The Fearless City project is about digital inclusion, but looking at this issue from a technology, culture, art and community combined view. I found it quite interesting and hope I can help Irwin out with it somehow.
• Teenagers/Generation Y and technology: The second workshop related a lot more to my day job as MSN (referring to Live Messenger) is a huge part of this. The workshop ended up in being a lengthy but interesting discussion between a few teenagers and ‘the audience’. Although the teenagers present weren’t your typical average teenagers, some learnings were still quite surprising and would most probably have applied to the average teenager anyway. I’m planning on posting a bit more in depth about this on the Live In Europe blog

Thursday and Friday were the main conference days, and while I found only few presentations on Thursday to be really good, the ones on Friday made up for that. This is a list of what I liked (links to video here):

• Rafi Haladjian on the Nabaztag, watch out for Ztamps - RFID for the masses
• Kevin Warwick on his life-project as a ‘cyborg’
• Robin Hunicke (EA) on trends in designing games
• Guy Vardi (Oberon Media) on casual gaming
• Paul Barnett (EA Mythic) on the evolution of multiplaying games
• Kevin Marks (Google) on Open Social

And the open stages from:

• Stephanie Booth on Going Solo, being a free-lancer in a connected world
• Ewan McIntosh on open education through social media and calling out to all of us
• Noel Hidalgo on the Luck of Seven and his extraordinary trip around the world

Next to all of that I obviously enjoyed meeting lots of ‘old’ and new people, seeing some back after quite a while was especially great. And last but not least, the famous Fondue on Thursday night, that was really good as well.

Overall, since it’s not a web only conference, some tech related presentations interested me less than let’s say at LeWeb3 although some did as you can see above. Apart from that the uniqueness, the interaction, the warmth of the event made it a fantastic experience. One I’m putting in my agenda for next year.

Ine, Clo, this is your conference - make sure you mark it in your agenda for ‘09.

In 2-3 weeks you’ll find me in Geneva for LIFT08. Check out this video if you didn’t know about LIFT yet or if you where still in doubt on going.

See you there?

Marketers have an image problem and it’s their (our) own fault. Marketers need to become more accountable for themselves and for the benefit of the business. This words come out of a presentation from Futurelab, but they’re not the only ones to realize that accountability is exactly one of the key issues marketers have to deal with.

“We can’t compete on price. We also can’t compete on quality, features or service. That leaves fraud, which I’d like you to call marketing”
- Dilbert’s boss

A couple of months ago, Gregor Harter, Eward Landry and Andrew Tipping wrote an interesting article on The New Complete Marketer, like they called it. Apart from ‘putting the consumer at the heart of marketing’ or ‘live the new agency paradigm’ (thinking also about my agency2.0 post) they focus on the ‘make marketing accountable’:

“For many enterprises, the development of accountability follows much the same path, as marketers learn to transform raw data into actionable planning. Stage one is evaluating what is being measured and how it is being measured; stage two is condensing scores of diffuse reports and metrics down to a useful few; and stage three is creating targeted analytics and a core report to gauge performance and help determine where best to focus going forward.”

Back on Futurelab Jon Miller talked about the 5 stages of marketing accountability and asks in which stage you are with your organisation. The stages are:

1. Denial: “Marketing is an art, not a science. It can’t be measured. The results will come, trust me!”
2. Anger: “You just don’t understand how marketing works. Why is marketing held to a higher standard than everyone else?”
3. Confusion: “I know I should measure marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”
4. Self-Promotion: “Hey, come look at all these charts and graphs!”
5. Accountability: “Revenue starts in marketing.”

ANA think it’s a trend to watch in 2008 though, they think this is the year marketers will get serious about marketing:

“In ANA’s 2007 marketing accountability study, it was startling to find that, despite enormous efforts, 42% of marketers were dissatisfied with ROI measurements and metrics. In about half of the companies, marketing and finance don’t speak with one voice or share common metrics. Enough! Recognizing the critical importance of accountability, companies will appoint a czar — the chief accountability officer — to lead a disciplined, internally consistent approach to marketing measurements, metrics and productivity.”

So the question is, where are you as a marketer? I believe it is indeed something we marketers need be a lot more serious about, for themselves and the business. What’s your take?

Even if you’re not a gamer, you should take a look at this. When I looked at this the first time I was wondering how they (AKQA) did this, and now I found out that it’s actually a real diorama they created for it, it’s even more impressive.

If you are into gaming then take a look at these HD videos as well.

You didn’t expect me not to talk about this one right? Enjoy the ad and given the start of a new weekend, I would say enjoy a Stella as well. Or another one of the gazillion different Belgian beers ;)

Sadly enough, the world just lost one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) beer expert this week. Read more about Michael Jackson (not that one) at the Beer Hunter or on Wikipedia.

[Ad via I believe in ADV]

This is kind of funny. Most of the time we’ll see references on how realistic games can be. Remember these screenshots of racing cars where it’s very tough to say which is actually in game footage and which isn’t.

In this case, it’s the other way around. Today I noticed this image on a blog called Asfaltkonijn (don’t ask me to translate that). West of Antwerp (linkeroever) there is an abandoned school with a (crashed?) jetfighter on the playground. In itself this is already a pretty weird thing and if you want to see what that looks like, check it out on this map.

Yesterday these guys went to check it out and Tupid made some amazing images in colour and black&white of this jet, and looking at these you can only confirm that it might just have been a scene in some type of shooter game, but I can assure you it’s very real. Really cool pics Tupid, subscribed!

(Courtesy of Tupid)

The title of this post references as both the art itself as the blog I first read about this. Andy Nulman’s Pow!Right between the eyes talked about this beatutiful piece ‘peggy’ created by Matt Bilfield. It’s a modern interpretation of ‘m-maybe’, a painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Very nice.

Technorati Tags: peggy, pow, andynulman, mattbilfield, art