anything with dawkins I'm a sucker for....

Yes he is a borderline pompous prick - but he's bloody good at visualising his message - and more importantly - he's one of the few academics in the world with enough balls to go up against the US theocracy...

I'm for the robin hood....

Yes its probably hopelessly idealistic and over simplified - no its probably never going to happen - but that  isn't the point...

good news comes in 4s...

So last week - the Dig For fire inbound marketing department...

1. Completed a serious piece of listening work for Axa

2. Kicked off a soical media strategy for a new, prime time BBC 1 TV show being shown in the spring

3. Started thinking about an API (see post below)

4. Got quoted in a great article about crowdsouring...here

We rock....

API's - an engagement tool

API’s – or application programming interfaces – are a critical part of the digital world.

Without them, developers would be unable to use other people’s data in their own applications and widgets.

When you use a weather application on your iPhone – its getting its information through an API. When you see your pictures from flickr in a widget on facebook – the widget is pulling those images from your flickr account via its API. When you see a google map with information about the victims of an earthquake plotted on it – you get the idea….

From a planning and marketing perspective this technology is incredibly exciting. A brand with an API is automatically social, accessible, human. The implications of having one ripple through the business and affect all manner of systems and processes for the better. Information is set free. People inside and outside of the organisation suddenly have a reason to talk to each other. Users engage and communicate with the brand in amazing new ways. APIs are the best weapon a planner has in his / her armory to deepen engagement. And best of all, from the brands point of view. They mean everyone else does the heavy lifting of application development.

So it was with some excitement this morning that we got an email from a client to say the work we’ve been doing with them to introduce them to the delights of “pull” marketing has paid off – and they’re now thinking of building one. The client, apart from being one of our most forward thinking, is particularly interesting because the data they hold concerns stuff people really care about. On some level, everyone in the UK is interested in the data that this client holds and because of this – where its seeds will spread – is anyone’s guess.

a man after my own heart....

the frog is back...

Treehugger, New York Times, The Guardian, Wired - they all have an app - for which they charge. But having all that different information silo'ed in separate applications makes me have to work harder.

We have RSS. It works perfectly well. Why do I have to reformat my new habits?

The whole app thing smacks of the ringtone "craze" of the mid 00's - of old skool media men building artificial walls around content to try and sustain a dying business model.

A company I was running at the time spent thousands developing online audio editing software so our users could create realtones, in real time. A complete waste of time. By the time we launched everyone had figured out how to link a song in their phone library to an incoming call.

The music industry loved realtones because it represented an opportunity to turn the clock back - to charge for content because of the specific format in which it was being used - it was the virtual equivalent of the CD (if that makes any sense). Newspaper love apps for the same reason.

***Update*** interesting post here

pushing the stupid kid...

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance recently. He is a fairly senior exec at a big ad agency.

Reminded me of a piece I'd seen here

At one point in the conversation he said "I can tell the people who walk into any supermarket to buy whatever I want"

I said that didn't apply to me, and he agreed - but pointed out that there are a lot more stupid people in the world that bright ones.

On a practial level he's correct - 50% of the population have an IQ under 100. Nearly 20% of the population are classified as retarded (with an IQ under 80). The population is also probably getting more stupid, due to a dysgenic effect. See Bell Curve for a brilliant (if controversial) disection of IQ here.

If the acquaintance is right. That IQ affects an individuals susceptibility to marketing - then it all starts to feel a little uncomfortable. Does for instance, the 15% of the internet population who click on banners simply represent all the stupid people online?