Thought Den have been in London, invited down to a BBC Audio and Music Interctive christmas schmooze sesh off the back of the multiplatfom event at the Arnolfini a few weeks back. Don’t worry, those license fee pennies were well spent, no swanky venue and red carpet, but a great opportunity to bend the ears of some high-flying and genuinely interested indie commissioners. We talked IA, streaming, widgets, web cams and I even name dropped Happy Packages!
Our concept and prototype for the next level in locative rating systems really caught the attention and I found myself getting excited all over again. Two buttons, one red one green. Or one smiley one sad. Or one tick, one cross. And all you do is rate how you’re feeling at that time in that place. The iPhone fairy then takes over, sends the rating and GPS data to our servers and we create a happy heat map of the world…
In other news, touchscreens have taken over the world. Every shop front worth its salt within a square mile of Oxford Circus now has some form of large, interactive touchscreen wizardry for passing pedestrians. The battle is on for the hearts and minds, fingertips and hard-earned dollar of the casual window shopper. You Tube and 4OD have also teamed up in Carnaby St for a truly widescreen touch-off.
The exciting news is that Thought Den and Joanie Lemercier have been plotting some similar schemes over the last few months and our first prototype will be demoed at the TD offices in the new year. Watch this 3D space…
Thought Den have been working hard over the last few months helping igfest get off the ground. We were bought in to help with business development and festival promotions which involved talking with international brands, national newspapers, local heros and the great and good of Bristol’s media scene. Sadly Howies fell at the final hurdle despite their enthusiasm to come on board, but thanks to some fantastic support from the Arts Council the festival is going to be a huge success. The TV crews have been mobilised and the reporters are on standby. And best of all it’s going to be sunny!!!
The festival eases into action this evening with a Moose Safari, and the headline game La Noche de Los Muertes kicks off on Friday. It is already massively over-subscribed and is shaping up to be a spectacular chase across the city.
My other two personal favourite games Rainbow Rain and Sneaks and Blaggers are also fully booked, which is a shame, but I’ll be doing my best to bagsy a spot.
And before signing off I’d like to draw attention to a special little sub-game that will be running throughout the festival. It’s a battle between Bristol’s media agencies to see who is – Bristol’s Biggest Player! The ideas is that agencies get points for playing igfest games and the more they play the more points they get. Given all the press the festival gets, it’s a nice way to shout about the great media talent we have in this city, and encourage the agencies to get out into the streets and play.
Hello Thought Den blog, I haven’t paid you enough attention lately. But here’s some good news! The Fire Kills campaign managed and seeded by Team Rubber and built by Thought Den has clocked more 800,000 plays. The COI (Central Office of Information. Sounds a bit George Orwell dunnit?) are thrilled and plan to make a case study of it, because we’re all just so good at what we do…
In other news, Thought Den have joined Simon Games in the igfest engine room, provided commercial-minded support. This basically means we’ll be pestering some bad-ass brands over the next few weeks to get them involved. It’s too good a proposition to miss. Look at the similar event-based marketing activity of brands like Red Bull (Air Race, Formula 1), Virgin (V-Feset), Orange (Glastonbury), T-Mobile (Trafalgar Singalong etc) and Jack Daniels with their music programme.
If anyone has any thoughts on how we could pimp igfest, please do get in touch. And if you want to volunteer to help run the festival, please get in touch. And if you want to play – get your arse down to Bristol town centre on 11, 12 and 13 of September for some serious frivolous mental fun-ness. Over n out Cap’n.
Thought Den have recently finished hosting a programme of workshops at the Pervasive Media Studio. With the help of Jon Dovey, UWE academic and one of the studio founders, we encouraged residents and invitees to discuss the commercial prospects for pervasive media, looking at the markets we currently exploit and areas we’d like to move into. The sessions also tied in very nicely with the studio’s latest bid for funding from the Technology and Strategy Board so fingers crossed – sustainability is the word! Download the document if you’re interested in reading what came out of the sessions…
A common problem facing many of the studio residents is how to pitch their wares to commioners who might not be as technically au fait with the sort of work coming out of the studio. The ethos in the studio is to collaborate, explore and innovate and at times we risk isolating ourselves clients who are looking for more mainstream solutions. The T-Mobile campaign is a great example – swathes of the creative community sneered at the Liverpool St Station dance-off because Flash-mobs were so 5 years ago , but the general public absolutely loved it! And T-Mobile’s Trafalgar Sqr singalong sequel is again doing well on You Tube. So we looked at ways to take a step back from the cutting edge to make our work more accessible, along with what metrics might be relevant to demonstrate the success of our work. For residents like Simon Games and AntiVJ it can be a real challenge representing the success of a project because more often than not they’re dealing with a more profound emotional engagement than a simple page impression. These issues are far from solved but the debate is beginning…
The Happy Packages team has been invited to explore the ethics surrounding our project today with some of the country’s top thinkers.
We’ll be presenting the project in all it’s detail to Pervasive Media Ethics group (http://pervasivemediaethics.blogspot.com/) who are then invited to discuss anything and everything. No holds barred!
I’ll then be blogging up the main points later, good and bad!
It’s difficult enough explaining what Pervasive Media means so how on earth do we go about persuading clients to part with their dwindling cash supplies on projects that are inherently risky? They regularly challenge traditional interaction and engagement; they can involve un-proven technologies that are still in development; they are often only delivered on a small scale, to a handful of people. It seems that, at the moment at least, a large part of what we are aiming to do is create a spectacle and generate buzz, encourage debate, mobilise the digital communities and inspire as much press coverage as possible.
Many of the clients employing Pervasive Media for promotional campaigns are dependent on its PR success. Enable Interactive’s Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for the Red Cross was hugely effective because of the extensive press coverage achieved with an almost non-existent media spend. The product engaged its audience and was genuinely interesting to the national press; innovation captures the imagination.
So are we likely to see more brands take these sorts of risks? And let’s be honest – the risk must be part of the appeal. As the arteries of the internet continue to be clogged with LOLs and ROFLs , sponsored marketing messages and sleep-walking dogs it is harder and harder to build an authentic and rewarding relationship with an audience. Pervasive Media is the new frontier for engagement – it could be online, offline, on a mobile device, in a busy metropolis or on a deserted hillside, in a dis-used prison or projected onto a building facade. What is unique about this sort of work is they create an atmosphere, they are experiences that transcend the medium and exist as part of day to day life, no longer confined to the screen.
And so how do we sell these products, services and pervasive propositions? We need to get people excited about them, we need examples, we need to develop a language that describes pervasive experiences, we need to come together as a community and keep on expanding and exploring, pushing the envelope, dancing on the cutting edge!
That’s the sound of our own trumpets screaming to the heavens as we find ourselves in the industry magazine NMA (New Media Age).
The article is all about the Happy Packages project and covers how Thought Den and Mobile Pie are working together in the Pervasive Media Studio to produce a sexy iPhone application aimed at friends leaving fun trails for each other.
If you’d like to read more about the initial Happy Packages project, take a look at some of our posts.
Small side note, it’s worth mentioning that they managed to spell our name wrong and we’re now ‘Thought Deeds’. Also while we’re at it, it’s a good time to mention the Evening Post’s misspelling of Ben’s (our creative director) surname a few weeks ago. Good morning, Mr Pembleton!
It’s been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don’t understand, it’s new NEW stuff!
Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom’s face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.
At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were: (more…)
The ideas for Happy Packages could be great or they may stink, but hell it’s a research project and that’s what ThoughtPie are meant to be finding out. Either way, no matter how good the implementation and delivery, something we’ll have to be wary of is Pervasive Fatigue.
The Situation
People who are constantly bombarded with repeated Bluetooth requests every time they walk past Co-op’s Bluetooth gopping device are slowly or possibly very quickly going to get annoyed with the vibration in the pocket requiring their attention. It’s just bad etiquette to interrupt someone with something un-expected and then probably ask them again the next day. So if during their personal time, while a client is choosing a sandwich, they’re re-asked to about downloading something, are we providing them with some very simple and mostly detrimental choices, get it, ignore it or turn their Bluetooth off. (more…)
Thought Den are still hanging from the Soco Social knees up in London last night (guests of honour, of course – here’s why) and from the dirty-early coach journey back this morning to meet our very special guest, Mr Alistair Darling! He came to open the Pervasive Media Studio and dutifully cut the digital ribbon with an HP iPaq!
Both Clare and Dick from the Watershed lay down some inspirational speeches, waxing lyrical about the fantastic creative and computing industries currently booming in the west country. Roll on world domination. View the rest of the pics here
