On Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th Bristol was graced by the great and good of advertising, marketing and creative thinking. Vision Conference delivered on all levels and the Den is bouncing with new ideas. Hopefully this summary captures some of the inspiration that was shared over the two days. Huge thankyou to Bristol Media.

Andrew Keen

Quick summary : Humanness, mystery and intimacy in a digital world

@ajkeen
You’d be fair to think this chap was just a cynical academic with voluminous hair, but for me at least, it was refreshing to hear some well-formulated and expertly communicated theories on why the perma-connected socially-extended world in which we live is not quite the digital utopia it’s cracked up to be. My summary : we need to show a little more restraint and privacy in the web 3.0 world (following the 1.0 of ‘need data, search data’ and the 2.0 of ‘you and me exploring our identities online’) Data is the new oil and we are spewing forth great quantities of the stuff into the hands of a select few. Goobook anyone? (To be deliberately oblique, this is my clever concatenation of Google and Facebook, internet superpowers)

After iTunes, iPhones and iPads the real ‘i’ word we crave is intimacy. In order to maintain our humanness we need to withdraw a little, retain what remains of our ability to be mysterious. Apparently there is a growing rejection of Facebook and Twitter among the tech-savvy teenybop-tweenagers. Let’s see how that goes.

Patrick Collister

Quick Summary : We need more right-brained visionaries

@patrickcollis

There’s no escaping it – we’re all creative, it’s a hard-wired competitive instinct. Regrettably the enduring image is of the “creative tossers” with fussball tables and minscooters in their shiny Shoreditch offices. But a world without creative right-brained thinking would be pretty shit. Maintaining the status quo is a fool’s game.

1/5 of us SEE the world. 4/5 of us READ the world. The right side of the brain (think vision, random, holistic) enables us to understand the whole. Apparently open-plan working does not do creative types any favours, but gone are the days of Don Draper and his private whiskey stocked office. Bring on the new visionaries! Top Tips:
1) At every meeting you have, make sure there is a decision-maker present

Steve Henry

Quick summary : The weird shit is the good shit

Steve’s Blog

Creativity is the only unfair legal advantage a business can use. The unspoken truth of adland us that 90% of advertising is shit and doesn’t work. If your output isn’t 9/10 there’s no point trying. But getting clients to buy big and brave ideas is tricky. Steve Henry suggests a bit of disruption – get them into the studio and fill a wall with the work of their competitors. Only then will they beg for something different.

So doing what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do, feels like magic. It’s not just advertisers who revel in breaking the rules – games provide us increasingly life-like worlds in which to make mischief. So persuade clients to buy your radical work by disrupting the traditional models they use to evaluate it. Top Tips:
1) Break the Rules
2) Do it in a way that emotionally engages the target audience

Harry Pearce

Quick Summary : Follow your dreams and desires to make stunning work

@pentagramdesign

What a bloody clever and thoroughly nice bloke. There was so much more to this talk than the sheer quality and captivating imagination of his work. Harry took us on an honest, surprising and emotionally frank journey. I was sold from the first slide and merest mention of typography. It’s hard to know in what order to arrange the superlatives. The work he showed was beautiful, intelligent and funny. Who knew type could be so fun! Check out his new book Typographic Conundrums. Top Tips:
1) Write down your dreams
2) Take photos of funny/odd things you see, like the schizophrenic road sign “Avenue Road”

Rory Sutherland

Quick Summary : Look at things the other way round.

@rorysutherland

I’m riding on his coat-tails here, but join in, it’s fun. Why spend £6bn speeding up the Eurostar by 40 minutes when you could spend 0.01% of the budget putting Wifi on the trains and serving free Dom Perignon to all passengers? Who would then, of course, beg for the train to be slowed down. Essentially, creativity is forever being policed by logic. A million great ideas have been lost to SWOT analysis. But when are creatives asked to evaluate the emotional implications of a rationalised campaign? Or to find a completely different solution for that matter? Google the ’300 million dollar button’ for an example of a creative tweak going overdrive.

Rory is a master raconteur and a clever sod; Behavioural Economics is at the heart of this man’s thinking. His dazzling array of illuminative and witty anecdotes made a compelling case for looking at things backwards. You can’t change behaviours by attempting to change attitudes first. People won’t be converted into raving environmentalists before they start composting. If we make it easy for them to change their composting behaviour their attitudes will adjust accordingly. Top Tips:
1) Behaviour not attitude
2) Look at things backwards

Bernie Hogan

Quick Summary : Help! My Mom’s on Facebook.

@blurky

Sharing some of Andrew Keen’s scepticism, Bernie riffed on the challenges faced by the users and architects of social networks. The crux of his argument is social networks do not currently understand the statuses that exist in the real world. LOLing and ROFLing to friends is one thing, but this mostly unfiltered stream of chatter probably isn’t relevant to your mum / boss / son.

Google+ makes efforts to compartmentalise your social groups but Bernie argued this was only the tip of the iceberg. Brands are finding it harder and harder to talk with niche groups online since they must forever cater for the lowest common denominator of that group. It has to do with synchronous and asynchronous relationships but I have no chance of summarising that here. Bernie might help. Top Tips:
1) Map your network at socialnetimporter.codeplex.com
2) Manage your privacy settings

Dave Trott

Quick Summary : Creatives fear the obvious, but clients love it

@davetrott

A proper cockney geezer! And an ad legend, I should add. Dave explained how to sell big ideas to difficult clients. Thankfully, he proposed a few nice little formulas and gently walked us through them with the help of a flipchart; a conspicuous and low tech approach that was very effective. It’s simple stuff! If you put shit in, you get shit out.

Every dialogue, commercial or otherwise, has a basic formula. Impact (Crying Baby / Drumming Gorilla) Communication (Why is it crying? / That Gorilla’s having fun) Persuasion (I’ll get the bottle / I want some chocolate fun as well!) So client understands need for impact. Beyond that it is about using a language-frame the client understands. Be clear about what they want out of the project. If it’s 15 separate objectives, think of these as tennis balls. Chuck ‘em at Joe Bloggs and at best he’ll catch only two.

A binary approach is quick and effective. Market Share or Market Growth? Opinion Formers or Opinion Followers? Product Focus or Brand Focus? Top Tips :
1) Understand the meaning of people, what they want, do, love, hate
2) Always be different
3) Target opinion formers over opinion leaders
4) Put clarity in, get clarity out

All images *borrowed* from Vision Bristol

Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.

Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).

In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.

The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.

Rapid prototyping is like Speed dating for business. You gotta sell a huge idea quickly, help the other party buy into it and then if you’re both aroused, hope for some hugs and sexy time afterwards.

Anyway, we were invited to UWE to take part in a Rapid Prototyping 2day workshop (much like our week long version) to help brush up on skills and solve a question plaguing the music industry. “How do we re-erect flacid music industry sales with a ubiquitous sexy product? Something physical to aid the declining CD and LP record sales.”

Not an easy question, but all the groups worked tirelessly to try and fathom a solution. The event was an ace mix of people; artists, engineers, script writers, technologists, students and research scientists.

I was lucky enough to be involved with an orgy of very clever minds from HP R&D, The Pervasive Media studio and UWE.

Our idea was to create a new market and intentionally stimulate interest in an album before it was even completed. Using some expensive Remote Studio Headphones which tune into the band’s recording studio sporadically. Super fans would to listen to new riffs, bouncing jams, banter and sparky live sets. It was called Gold Jack, see our mascot below.

Gold Jack mascot

To visualise that for a pitch, it was in all a proper dirty experience. With 3D printers burning through litres of plaster, post-its being slammed un-ceremonisasly to most surfaces and all interspersed with a lot of heated USP chats!

Post its

The workshop finished with all groups pitching to Seth from PIAS music and showcased some very beautiful ideas, like the “Music Vault”, engineered to capture memories and “dieTunes”, music only released when the artist had popped their clogs.

dieTunes

Thought Den value these training workshops very highly, it keeps the directors on their toes, tickles their digital gray cells and allows blind exploration into new business opportunities for all our clients.

Thanks UWE and Pervasive Media Studio for a very well organised 2 days.

Sex. (just felt like I needed to write the word after that post)

It’s been a challenge alright! With only a 4 week build to develop an identity, tackle 3D, print and online design, overcome technical challenges and add our usual high production standards, it was never going to be easy. The fruits of our labour can be seen on the spinARsaurus page at BBC learning development.

Identity design

Motion graphics

AR marker controlled puzzle

The output!

A little technical rundown

Good performance was at the fore of all minds on the project. How many polygons were too many? Which 3D engine would be quickest? What minimum specs were (un)reasonable? And at what point does tomorrow’s noon deadline become more attainable by going home and sleeping? By hook and crook, we struck the right balance, but not before a few bouts of panic.

In the pursuit of faster marker detection, we started with an Alchemy-compiled version of the FLARToolKit. Alchemy is an Adobe Labs technology that allows C and C++ source code to compile to ActionScript bytecode and be executed in the Flash Player. The advantage that those lower-level languages have over high-level AS3 is great scope for optimised CPU instructions and memory management. But! -using SWCs that other developers have created is akin to buying a car on eBay without seeing any pictures. This particular vehicle was as fast as promised, but leaked oil [memory] at an alarming rate, and would insta-crash on wet tarmac [Google Chrome]. We tried what we could from outside the black box of that precompiled code to resolve the problems, but it became apparent that we’d need to switch over to the more dependable, slower AS3 version, and seek our performance gains elsewhere.

Beyond the FLAR  difficulties were the need to manage dinosaur textures with some sophistication. Trying out the construction game, you’ll see that individual bone segments are alpha-ed down and up independently of the rest of the model. Papervision3D supports this sort of control while the Collada model is rendered with vector fills for textures, but setting a DisplayObject3D’s alpha property with bitmap textures present will quietly do nothing.

Our workaround involved the exposed BitmapData of each texture, and the application of ColorTransforms on a per frame basis. And since such transformations are lossy and non-reversible, a custom tweening function was needed to clone the original pixels at each time step, before reapplying the ColorTransform with an incremented alpha offset. (Intel Celerons, go home.) Where this approach made acute pain for Justin, our 3D modeller, was in the need to break apart the model’s textures into individual materials, for every segment that we wanted to fade in and out. Not knowing the final set of editable bones, we were left with over a hundred separate texture files to manage. And that’s why we’re all sleeping so well these days.

The people that made it possible

A big thanks to the team that worked so hard on this. We have:

Adam Vernon – Lead Flash Development

George Crabtree – Flash Development

Ben Webb – Lead Designer

Justin Dowling – 3D awesomeness

Antoine Kougblenou – Testing / javascripting

Dan Course – Calming words in the eye of the storm

Ben Templeton – Project lead and Creative Direction

Our client contact at the BBC, who has been fantastic, showing incredible support, patience and ambition.

We’ve landed a neat little R&D project with BBC Learning Development that aims to explore how Augmented Reality can be used in education for children. Great news for our expanding educational output, that includes live events, games, animations and bespoke online applications.

The project will launch at the Big Bang Science Fair in early March and presents users with a familiar problem – re-assemble the mixed up parts to form the whole. This time the twist is that the puzzle takes a 3D dimensional form and interaction occurs with an AR marker via the webcam. The best bit? Dinosaurs are involved. Dan is very excited.

What better way to start a research project than with a real-life puzzle and a cup of coffee. Play Nicely laid down the gauntlet by assembling their dino-kit first, though we’re not entirely sure how anatomically correct their version is. Justin, in full 3D himself, will mastermind the modeling and Mr Adam Vernon will be developing the Flash interface.

We’ll be using a mixture of the FLARToolkit and papervision, though the current debate is how to get the smoothest effect for live 3D and a model that has over 3,000 polygons. We’ve even discussed creating a series of PNGs for increased verisimilitude at the expense of full 360 interactivity. Tests will be posted for comment if anyone out there is interested in our progress.

Over at Play Nicely, the boys are making leaps and bounds with their Total Immersion AR projects, but for this brief it was essential no 3rd party software was required beyond the usual Flash Player, which currently stands at 94% penetration throughout Europe…