Digit

December is here and folks at Digit are getting into the Christmas spirit. At least some of us are.

Last week I was beyond excited; pinterest boards gathered for inspiration, recipes scoured over, Christmas party finally agreed upon and booked, presents lists written. But when I came to actually doing it all, to putting my shopping plans into action, I thought, what’s happened to all the shops?

Firstly, decorations: I’m very keen on making things physical and digital, but when it comes to getting crafts supplies, where do you go? Online, that’s where. To a million different stockists; to trying to identify something from a grainy picture which can only really be decided by looking at the real thing. Size, texture and colour can’t be replicated on a screen. And then there’s the delivery and waiting. I wanted to buy a single box of paper fastners the other day priced at 99p, but was expected to pay £2.95 for postage! Same goes for our £5-budget office Secret Santa. Marvellous.

A nice Christmas outfit was bound to cheer me up. With news that one of the Kings of the High Street is planning on closing 260 stores next year, I thought I better enjoy it while it still exists. After trying on lots of things I found the perfect dress, and it was 20% off for one day only. Worried it may be slightly too tight come Christmas day, I asked the assistant for a bigger size. Sure enough, there were none, and the line, ‘have you tried online?’ popped up. Instant let-down.

I don’t know what the solution is, with rents going up and the economic benefits to businesses going online. I suppose I can see why they do it, but they simply can’t take away all the joys of doing things in real life or people will stop bothering altogether. I love shopping. It’s a hobby of mine. I don’t want it to become over-convenient! I want to discover and to be spontaneous. I want to buy myself a frock at the drop of a hat, and I want to have fun doing it. I don’t want my shopping experience to become a confused trawl through websites only to get the wrong thing and be forced to queue at the post office to send it back (if post offices continue to exist in due time).

Luckily last night I did restore some of my Christmas spirit with a trip to Columbia Road for some festive late night shopping (every Wednesday night in the lead up until Christmas). A chance to get some lovely, really unique gifts with twinkly lights and mulled wine thrown in for good measure.

I know that this post will cause some debate in the office as there are online consumers and retailers who have taken shopping to a whole new level. But for me? I just don’t get it.

(Image courtesy of TimeOut London)

The theme for the second of the Digit breakfast series was Luxury & Digital. We’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking on this topic recently, which started with a whitepaper. To push our thinking further, we decided to talk to some luxury experts and the video gives you a glimpse into what was discussed.

Thanks very much to everyone who attended.

Credits for video images
thisisglamorous.com, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeywan/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/peregrinari/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberslayer/

Last week we were lucky to have Louis Antwi join us as part of the WPP micro-fellowship intern programme. He kindly wrote a piece on his love of words and poetry. Enjoy!

I love words.

Written down. Spoken aloud. Imagined.

They don’t have to be long words. They don’t have to be fancy words. They don’t even have to be in the right order.

You can use a handful of them to tell a complete story. Ernest Hemingway once said that one of his greatest pieces of work consisted of just 6 of the beautiful little things; “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

But I’m worried for the future. Where do words fit into the life of today’s human? Will they be bullied into working in the hazardous industries of business reports and shopping lists or worse, in Tweets telling the world of the success of said shopping lists?! Will the spoken word cease to exist forever, replaced by a series of iGestures, the physical hieroglyphics of the modern world?

Probably not. But how we interact using words is most certainly changing. Thankfully there are still pioneers, heroes amongst digital men who are two steps ahead of the game and are bringing the rest of us along with them.

These are just a few of the brilliant projects I have come across recently.

Such Tweet Sorrow: Actors play out the classic Shakespearean tale of star crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet over five weeks through the medium of Twitter. 140 words of love in its deadliest form and Montague-Capulet hatred. Twitter put to better use than the usual shouting about cats.

Poetry Mosaic: London based poet, Naomi Woodis, cuts and pastes together extracts of reactions to her stimulant questions to create a completely new poem. The results are astonishing.

Six Word Stories: And so we return to Hemingway. Since 2008 sixwordstories.net has published user submitted ultra-short stories inspired by the great man’s original. Sixwordstories can also be found on Twitter. Famous writers have also jumped on the bandwagon. Here’s a few of the best.

Simon Armitage’s slightly humorous (although probably not to John) offering: “Megan’s baby: John’s surname, Jim’s eyes.”
Hari Kunzru’s ominous “Stop me before I kill again.”
And of course the inspired; “Man steals some watches. Gets time.” from the sixwordstories.net contributor Bogusky.

Now you know you won’t be able to stop. Answers on a postcard.

A few weeks back, Digit hosted a very interesting breakfast discussion. The theme of the discussion was about how to measure experiences, both online and offline.

We hosted the breakfast because we had been pondering over how best to measure the success of our own work. And we were finding that many of the ‘digital’ solutions out there were very good at giving us facts and figures, but they didn’t get to the heart of why people did, or did not, enjoy the experiences we were creating.

So we decided to stop talking amongst ourselves and to invite a small group of people – who are all experts at creating experiences in their field – to help us. We asked them how they measured the success of their work; be it creating fabulous meals, hosting memorable events, organizing charity demonstrations, or political campaigning.

The discussion was wide-ranging and lively and certainly gave us some food for thought. Watch the video to find out more!

Look out for more Digit breakfasts in the near future. Next one up – luxury & digital.

Credits

We feel fine – Jonathan Harris / House of Cards – Radiohead / Service cloud – Saleforce.com / drgandy – cheering MIT alumni / xanetia – hearts on hands / Philippe Lavayer – Olympic flame protesters arguing / MOVED! – Thumbs up with smiley face / Stuart Pilbrow – Face behind numbers on a screen / Re_birf – numbers etched in marble / Untrained eye – ‘the Human zoo’, people in a gallery

So after months spent campaigning, 30 million votes cast and a LOT of money spent, the General Election is finally over. Well, sort of. There’s still days and days to come of haggling over who gets to be the winner and then, inevitably, a big rematch within a year. Nevertheless, we thought it would be a good idea to cast our eyes back over the campaign to examine the role Digital Media played in it.

This was supposed to be ‘The Digital Election’. Strategists on all sides spent months studying the grassroots social media campaigns that helped sweep Obama into office a year and a half ago. The Democrats employed the services of pioneering agencies like Droga 5 and Blue State Digital to help marshal an army of young engaged supporters who organised over 200,000 campaign events and donated more than $500 million.

The Great Schlep campaign helped bring the crucial state of Florida over to Obama and duly won a slew of awards including the Black Pencil at D&AD. The Democrats even had their own travel agency, Obamatravel, which helped volunteers club together to get themselves out to the key swing states where their services could make the most difference.

When it came to the British election, the battle was going to be waged not just between Red and Blue (and yellow, a bit) but between Old and New media; with expensive billboard campaigns and newspaper endorsements on one side and Social Networks, Youtube clips and Crowd Sourcing on the other.

In that battle at least, it seems that the forces of Good have triumphed. Despite spending millions on a billboards featuring David Cameron’s massive earnest face, the Conservatives saw their campaign backfire when these started to be ruthlessly graffittied and websites popped up enabling people to create their own spoof versions (if nothing else, Art Directors will have learned not to leave any white space in political posters in future..)

Equally, when the rightwing press launched a vicious attack on Nick Clegg after his impressive performance in the TV debates, these were quickly lampooned on Twitter via the #nickcleggsfault hashtag.

However, the key feature of these and other online highlights, is that they were all created by ordinary members of the public. Nothing digital the parties did themselves seems to have had any impact whatsoever.

One the one hand, this is incredibly refreshing showing that we’ve finally moved on from the ‘Sun wot won it’ days when powerful newspapers told us what to do and then claimed all the credit. This was the election of ‘User Generated Comment’ (tm!) with actual real-life people getting a say and setting the agenda.

On the other hand, it’s noticeable that, where-as the digital campaigns in the American election were positive, inspirational and helped bring about a change for the better, the British equivalents were mainly just about taking the piss.

Maybe this is just indicative of our national tendency towards cynicism and ironic humour – they get The West Wing, we get The Thick of It. However, the fact the results of this election haven’t ended up being as transformational as was initially predicated, suggests that a digital campaign needs to have positive and uplifting message if it’s actually going to have any electoral impact.

Then again, it obviously helps if you have inspirational candidates to vote for…