Stractics moved to culturalfuel.com

Hi everyone,

I started a new blog with the planners and other contributors at Leo Burnett. I will be posting there for the time being.

Please check it out at http://culturalfuel.com

million $ idea

37 signals blogs this quote:

An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.

I think this is true, not even just for business idea start-ups. It is true for the creative advertising and design set too. Don’t we wait around for too much before we do anything innovative sometimes?

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1142-advice-for-entrepreneurs-throw-out-that-five-year-plan-build-something-now-and-dont-take-any-money

Kiva.org: helping enterpreneurs

Kiva.org is a site that allows you to support entrepreneurs and their causes all around the world try to make their world a better place. Using individuals to create loans for other individuals is a neat idea, especially in a climate of institutional subprime disasters. Just last week 1,500 entrepreuneurs were funded. Oh, and, yeah, they pay you back. What a great idea!!

http://www.kiva.org/

Seen on swissmiss

Subprime Primer

I have been wondering about the Subprime Crisis in the states, and since I am no finance guy, I had been wondering about the machinations behind the credit crunch that has started affecting the whole world. Thanks to a buddy of mine, I now have been illuminated. The following presentation elucidates the issue in no uncertain terms, step by step, and utilizes expletives to make the point.

View on Slideshare and then go in full mode.

Google Street View in Germany

I was driving home from work today when I saw the google street view camera car, opened my window and waved. So looks like I will be on the street view when you look for Bockenheimer Warte.

Streetview is coming to 3 German cities: Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, and this has gotten some weird press. Germans are very privacy-sensitive, more so than other nationalities, anyway. But some of the arguments against Street View, while possible, or even true, seem petty, paranoid and irrelevant. Basically, it seems like an exercise in neo-luddite nay-saying in the name of the people.

For example, sure thieves can stake out neighborhoods and look for nice cars to steal, but you would still have to know where to look, and you would still need to go there to stake it out. Or the fact that some people don’t like other people looking at their house. Hello? What about all those people walking by your house? Wanna blind-fold them? And people who don’t like being in the pictures (even though their faces are blurred out)? Going by this standard, you couldnt send a TV camera crew to film anything in the city, either. Those arguments seem contrived and designed to make people paranoid.

In a Tagesschau Poll, people here seem pretty muchdivided on the issue and the press is trying to make it look a bit negative.

I for one think street view rocks and I am happy it is coming to my town.

Experience the Dresden Bombing through your bones

I just found this awesome public installation case study on Core77. By means of conducting the sounds of the Dresden allied bombing raid on 13th of February, 1945 through a railing, people can literally hear the sounds through their bones. Not only is this highly symbolic because hearing such noises while viewing the City of Dresden chills you to the bones, but it is also a very simple and unobtrusive city installation.

Nastiness Trending

When we started using Google Trends to glean some trend insights, it was all business at first. Then, it became a tool look at some trends no one likes to talk about. We started entering stuff like “Porn” or even worse “child porn” or anything nasty. Hence, I coigned the term “Nastiness Trending”. It’s quite a sublime thing, from which to derive a weird, negative pleasure. The pleasure part comes from knowing which countries have the nastiest google users, and being lucky if your country isn’t in the Top 10.

Obviously, we weren’t the only one with this idea, in fact a German newspaper made an article about it.

However, the whole thing is a bit tricky, because you have to choose the keywords in a certain language, so you cannot definitively say that, e.g. in the porn case, South Africans are the nastiest.

I am waiting for the day where you can do compound trending in different languages.

Wheel of Marketing Misfortune

I loved this article by David Armano and his Wheel of Marketing Misfortune. It’s a fresh way to exhort everyone in the digital marketing business to just, you know, chill out a bit.

Read the whole thing here.

When the target audience is the creatives themselves

I guess it’s viral movie day today (yeah I got work to do, so don’t ask!)

This is a pretty cool idea I thought on how to recruit creatives for charities. It’s a bit expected if you know it’s for charities, but still, what I a great idea to resurrect Bob, the painter for this. I always wondered if I could use him for a campaign one day. Well, someone else did.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/RKcMfQrqC7I&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/RKcMfQrqC7I&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Freeware.de Virals

I was in Cannes, but I somehow missed this submission.

Pretty funny and ballsy (no pun intended!) how try to communicate the product benefit. How effective this is remains to be seen. It’s a little disconnected.

Check it out.

Thanks Phillip!