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…