the above lovely quote is reported in Contagious Magazine by computer scientist Bill Joy in conversation with Peter Gabriel.  the artist is launching The Filter – an entertainment portal that aggregates content around your preferences.

users set up a basic profile by rating a selection of genres
and artists in music and film – the Filter then
provides a range of relevant recommendations, and uses any further
selections you make to refine its service further.

add to this the obligatory social networking element that allows you keep tabs of what the coolest of your friends are up to and we have a great example of Andersen's third long tail behaviour.

in a world of plenty, the man who knows whats most relevant for you is king…  The Filter represents the latest with their eyes on the throne.

so I couldn’t end the week without making reference to the media buying event of the last week…  first some stats (courtesy of Contagious Magazine) – Super Bowl XLII was tuned into by a total
of 148.3 million viewers world-wide.  Commercial time for the intervals
was valued at approximately $86,000 per second, or $2.7 million for
half a minute.  Oh, and just for reference, the total amount of popcorn
consumed during the behemothic game was enough to stretch around the
world nearly five and a half times.

all very impressive.  indeed you’d hope that upon media real estate of that value, some fairly magnificent structures would be built…  and some were.  you can catch all the ads courtesy of Adage here.  highlights include Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons fighting over an equally large bottle of Coca-Cola above New York, Will Ferrell suggesting we all grab a Bud Light and ‘Suck One’, which interestingly is exactly what happened to a game Justin Timberlake who spends much of a promo spot for Pepsi being invisibly dragged along on his arse.

but for all their grandeur and flawless execution, all the ads were outdone by the above little bit of work from Fox, promoting the Superbowl itself.  the piece could have been a catastrophe, and indeed has caused not a small amount of discussion (of which a little can be read here).  however it seems to have genuinely captivated not just the audience but the very spirit of the occasion.  writing in Campaign this week Mark Wnek writes:

"This had disaster written all over it and yet…  and yet, turned out to be so utterly mesmerizing a delivery that it completely poured cold water over everything that commercially followed"

a view echoed by one Ed who posted (see the above debate link):

"Such a B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. commercial.  BEST one in decades c/o
Superbowl.  All the rest, including half time, sucked so bad.
Advertisers & Investors alike, need to rechannel their creative
minds, and stop using ’stupidity’ (like Will Ferrell & witty ad
campaigns) to win their audiences’ attention.  It’s boring.  Super 3D CGI
can only complete so much, but in the end, it’s about the quality, the
words, and the product.  So please, to all you advertisers out there,
STOP BEING SO DAMN CHEAP & Selfish. Come up with a solid &
meaningful pitch, please."

there may be a lesson here… that the very nature of the advertiser / viewer contract gets reversed on an occasion like this.  perhaps the Superbowl does require more than beer and car ads.  perhaps the point of advertising in the superbowl is not to capitalise on the scale of the audience, but to acknowledge and augment it.  what the above Fox spot did was to add a sense of grandeur and occasion to the Superbowl.  it was and is ‘event-making’ in the best possible way.

the UK lacks an equivalent to the Superbowl (I don’t think the X-Factor final really counts), but there are surely occasions even in the UK when advertisers need to back away from just capitalising on a big audience and reverse the logic of their buying the space…  brands should revel in the grandeur of an event, and in doing so help to make that event and it’s aggregation of audience more meaningful as a result of their being there.

Innocent has come a long way since I first encountered it on sticker posted over an underground LEP back someime around 2002, and not all of the brand’s journey has been smooth.  despite endearing initiatives such as the granny-knit bobble hats for charity (which I blogged about here back in November), there have been wobbles – the tie up with McDonald’s being perhaps the most notable (great debate from back in May here).

Innocent is a brand which – ironically – is most open to John Grant’s second principle of green branding, which I blogged about here.  Grant’s principle states that in marketing a brand you have to "be certain that your business and the green marketing itself will live up to  the standards which you set for yourself".  the reason that Innocent attracted so much criticism was that the McDonald’s move was in direct conflict with the brand engram the company has so carefully built.

Innocent more than most brands has to be whiter than white, so I’m always more than a little interested when I encounter a new green-orientated initiative from the brand.  I noticed one such initiative – ‘Buy One Get One Tree’ – on my kitchen bench last week.  a fellow Burgoyner had purchased a big carton of Innocent.  an act which had entitled him to plant a tree.

it’s a great initiative.  everything from the pun (BOGOT) to the virtual forest online which allows to to plant a tree on someone’s behalf.  and they’re clearly conscious of their transparency issues; the website contains a plethora of background information on how it works to who it benefits via which credible organisations they’re tied up with to make it happen.

it’s a great example of what Jim Taylor (he of the Space Race book) calls instore-out planning (as opposed to outstore-in).

the principle suggests that rather than creating advertising designed to drive people to a generic product on shelf, by reversing the model and using unique, differentiated, and changing products on shelf as the starting point for communications, you not only get more interesting end-point advertising (for example an ad that in this case says "thanks for helping us plant 100,000 trees") but arguably links much more strongly back to the product…  it shouldn’t have missed anyone’s attention that you can only plant a tree on the Innocent website once per purchase, via a unique code that’s written on the carton.

this is an initiative which has sales-generation and increased frequency of purchase at its heart.  but there’s nothing wrong with that.  they’re a commercial organisation in a capitalist economy, and if increased frequency of sales allow them to get 100,000 trees planted sooner rather than later, then all the better for it.