Digit

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.

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…

We’re excited to announce that we have a new white paper to share with you. It’s all about luxury brands and suggestions for how they can embrace digital media. We won’t spill all the beans in a long blog post as you can read the full version over on the main Digit site but for those of you who want a quick summary, here goes:

We think that although luxury brands have traditionally been shy to embrace digital media – partly for fear of losing their exclusivity by opening themselves up to the masses – this is no longer a sustainable way of behaving from a business and brand building perspective.

Luxury brands need to keep up with an increasingly digitally savvy audience who are not going to wait to be given permission to talk about the brands they have an opinion on. As The Independent recently noted “the fashion world might once have been elitist – but the rise and rise of the online commentator has injected a democratic and fresh perspective”.

There are multiple opportunities for luxury brands to use new media to speak to their audiences; be this through instilling brand passion with the wider halo audience or finding innovative ways to reward an elite group of high-spending customers. You can read more about what we see as the opportunities in the paper itself.

Here’s a selection of the brands we think are doing a good job of using digital at the minute:

1. Burberry – we’ve mentioned Burberry’s innovative spirit in previous posts but it’s worth mentioning again. Their ability to balance maintaining a brand based on heritage with the latest technology is admirable. Burberry’s Creative Director, Christopher Bailey obviously just gets it. as he said “Burberry is a 154-year old company but we have a very young, dynamice attitude and energy.” See their Art of the Trench site as an example of this.

2. BMW – leading the field when it comes to integrating intelligent technology into their customer’s in-car experience.

3. Louis Vuitton – again, we’ve noted our love of their Nowness site already but Louis Vuitton understands the value of producing slickly product online content to an audience that is wider than their core customers. See “A Journey Beyond” as evidence.

Let us know if you’ve come across any interesting work from luxury brands in this area!

(Image via)

Last month The Economist published a very interesting special report about the ‘Data Deluge’ and how to handle it. Interesting how? Well, first of all it’s one of a number of recent publications that focuses on the negative impacts of the information explosion, rather than the benefits. Secondly the very fact that The Economist dedicated 14 pages to information management suggests that it’s a very pertinent socio-economic issue.

Finding ways to manage and filter information effectively will become increasingly important – not only for individuals – but for businesses too. Companies like Tesco, Amazon, Google and Last FM have put information at the heart of their business, using it to create a more meaningful customer experience and ultimately drive profits. But for some businesses the increase of information creates inefficiencies that can cripple their productivity.

So how are we supposed to deal with this ever growing cornucopia of data?

At Digit, we’re interested in how people consume information passively. We do this all the time, constantly monitoring our surroundings, reading people’s moods, levels of light, the weather etc. Our passive consumption of information is quick and effortless.

Bob the Lamp is the result of our exploration into passive consumption. He’s an intelligent lamp that physically responds to the BBC news feed, changing the colour of his glow and the posture of his neck depending on how positive or negative the news is.

When we set out to create Bob, we looked at objects that surround us every day and asked ourselves how we could make them intelligent. We wanted to explore the idea of passive consumption in our own work, to find ways to remove the need for people to seek information out. Sometimes technology can be a barrier to getting what you need, we wanted to hide the technology so that the experience was both simple and human (yes, this is our mantra).

There are some great examples of pieces of technology that do this in some interesting ways. We really like the availabot from Berg, which physically represents your friends’ availability on Instant Messenger apps and The Wattson that shows you how much electricity your home is using, making energy saving easier.

There are no signs that the rapid growth of digital information is slowing down. In fact is believed that the total volume of digital data in the ether is soon to double every 11 minutes. So through our internal R&D process we’ve set ourselves a challenge, to create interfaces for people to interact with information in a more meaningful, passive, and human way. More coming soon!

London is known for its innovation and willingness to try things new when it comes to fashion, and this season’s Fashion Week in the city has been no exception. Digit has been very excited to see an explosion in the use of digital and physical interactive media forms.

In a poignant example of his forward-thinking and innovative spirit, the late Alexander McQueen was already using digital media to stream his show live from Paris last year, using giant robotic cameras in collaboration with Nick Knight’s Showstudio. This year, Burberry raised the bar with their decision to broadcast their show live in 3D at various locations around the world, allowing people, with the aid of those 3D glasses, to experience the show as if they are sat front row. Thumbs up for this innovative use of technology Burberry but do you really think the fashionistas are going to be happy about donning those unstylish 3-D specs?

The British Fashion Council have taken the commendable step to launch a ‘Digital Schedule’ this year, generously broadcasting all of their main on-schedule shows online. This means that it’s no longer just the fashion elite who have access to that front row feeling.

For those who lucky enough to get a real-life seat at the shows, the use of micro-blogging using sites such as Twitter has accelerated this session with second by second thoughts and twit-pics from journalists appearing as soon as the models step out onto the catwalk. Famous fashion-bloggers have been invited to sit alongside high-profile journalists, creating instant publicity about shows through their tweets. London Fashion Week are also promoting fashion tweets and pictures by providing a live stream of all relevant tweets alongside their live video-feeds.

Elsewhere, designer Cassette Playa incorporated rune-like symbols into the prints of her fabrics. Combined with streaming video, a giant screen and a bit of technical wizardry, she created the worlds very first Augmented Reality (AR) fashion show. As the models stood in front of the screen, animated 3D virtual garments and accessories were augmented onto their bodies, bringing them to life.

There is also talk of a Cassette Playa augmented-reality iPhone app later in the year, allowing phone users to create their own virtual-meets-physical experience of the collection. Henry Holland also tapped into the younger, more tech-savvy market, creating a Blackberry which allowed fans to instantly purchase limited-edition tshirts from his show direct from the side of the catwalk, ahead of the usual six months it takes them to hit the shops.

In terms of physical-interaction installations, On|Off arguably stole the show with their offerings. A huge video dance-wall outside their catwalk space was been designed to interact with two dancers who will be doing unusual art-performances between shows. They also collaborated with product designer Michael Warren to create a fitting tribute to Alexander McQueen via a huge wall of iPods individually displaying an interactive photo-reel of each of McQueen’s collections.

It seems the fashion industry is really starting to fully open up its creative hands to the possibilities of interactive media. With people such as MovingBrands, Showstudio and of course the designers themselves already aiming to push the boundaries in the way we experience fashion, we’re really excited to see what technologies will be on-trend next season…

Good evening, please sit down, tuck in your napkin, and help yourself to a healthy portion of Last week we were mostly talking about – the weekly left overs from the Digit in-boxes.

As a wiser man than I once said,  nothing lasts forever. And in the week where HTML 5 started showing poor old Flash what it could do, not to mention this very info-graphic reminder of how much market share Internet Explorer have haemorrhaged since 2002, this seems especially true.

But they’re not the only ones who’ve been crying into their cornflakes because of the big bad web. Apparently, according the report that claims the Internet causes depression, we are all feeling a bit boo hoo of late.

Ah well, although some things on the Internet may change, others will always remain the same.

Computer games will continue to be released in ever more elaborate ways (This one for Dante’s Inferno hid code all over the web).

Websites, like this one for Wrangler, will use film in increasingly seamless and interactive ways.

Giffs will get better and better.

Above-the-line creative’s will keep stealing their ideas from Youtube.

And sympathetic brands will continue to fund bizarre characters with the weapons they need for Internet dictatorship. Although in this instance we can’t complain too much, as Puma and Jagermeister’s have at least managed to tool up a South African Hip Hop trio for a rather amusing drive-by.

OK, any other business before we bid you bon voyage?

Well, we did see a beautifully simple instillation in Hermes’ shop window, a nice app that records and visualises all the movements your mouse makes in a day (see picture, and download here for PC or MAC), and a feel good idea that sees a load disposable cameras being passed around the world photo by photo. It would have been a nice web thing for a camera brand.

Right, now what’s for pudding…