Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Greenpeace + VW – an integrated rebellion

Posted by Roo - 28/06/11 at 10:06:03 am

A fascinating new campaign from Greenpeace launched this morning, subverting the popular (and award winning) VW The Force ad.

I first noticed it because Twitter was abuzz this morning with news of Greenpeace’s hijack of a poster at Old Street’s ‘Silicon’ roundabout.

Some people on the ground, including some friends, initially seemed to think the Stormtroopers on the ground were a stunt for a new VW poster. At least until they noticed what was really going on. (Talking to some creative friends, there’s a consensus that the line on the poster could have been a lot clearer. Confusion, where it happens, seems to me to be mainly from people who glimpsed the poster in person.)

What’s actually happening is that Greenpeace are highlighting this report (download the PDF here). But doing so in a creative, and impressively integrated way.

“Develop your skills as a Jedi to help further the rebellion.”

Even more interesting than the poster takeover is the VW Dark Side web site. An impressive and slick site which rewards people for campaigning. Users start as a ‘Youngling’, campaigners can progress to be ‘Baby Ewok’ and work their way towards Jedi hood, earning points for spreading the campaign message. There’s a FAQ in Yoda speak and lots more nice touches to discover too.

And even more interesting than that is the way Greenpeace have subverted VW’s now famous brand association with Star Wars and come up with an integrated campaign. It feels big, significant, and well orchestrated. I’m sure they get a lot of services donated, but the production values are sky high; it feels expensive.

Greenpeace are co-optings the David vs Goliath / Jedi vs Empire story (overlooked by VW in their own use of the cute Darth Vader), casting VW as the evil empire and calling for people to join a rebellion. I think it’s enormously clever and I wonder how long before VW responds.

Read more: Marketing Week, Campaign magazine, Londonist, TNT Magazine.

Interesting 2011

Posted by Roo - 19/06/11 at 12:06:08 pm

Interesting 2011 was, as promised, more about activities than talks.

After the traditional Final Countdown singalong and introductions from Russell, we were all very much in the mood for an interesting day.

Stanley James Press provided all the equipment, instructions and patient help required for us to bind our own notebooks.

Next up, Leila Johnston introduced her Hack Circus:

• MJ Hibbett performed Hey Hey 16K, Theme From Dinosaur Planet and Do The Indie Kid, all with audience participation.
• Sarah Angliss (musician, engineer and writer) played the theramin and a motorised disembodied ventriloquist doll head called Hugo ["Hugo was rescued from the attic of a dead magician."]
• Nine Owls in a Baguette performed on a massive modular snyth and a large Programmable Musical Pig.



• Meanwhile, Timmy Print Face (a Microprinter) was running all day, printing tweets about interesting including a rather lovely ASCII representation of Twitpics. (I was delighted to learn that it uses my Ruby microprinter library. Hurrah for sharing code).
• Something else happening all day, and nicely timed to finish just as the event was wrapping up, was Sandy Noble’s Polargraph printer, busily printing Russell’s face. [Watch this great video from Nick]



• And there’s more. The National Museum of Computing bought along some things from their BBC Domesday collection, plus an ASR-33 Teletype and Elite running on on a BBC Micro. What more could a geek possibly want?

After the Hack Circus, there followed a short period of making and doing, including Words and Pictures who helped us make a comic, and Oli Shaw and Lynda Lorraine who set up a plasticine creature creation workshop / stall [here are the results while Matthew Solle + friends allowed people tro try out their collection of circuit bent toys and other musical instruments.

To get us in the mood for lunch, Chris Heathcote led us in an amazing hands on session of molecular gastronomy. First, to see if we were 'supertasters' we all tried sodium benzoate (which I couldn't really taste), phenylthiocarbamide (which tasted bitter and unpleasant. I think that means I tend towards liking sweet flavours. Which is true). Next we sampled dried tomato powder, pop rocks and monosodium glutamate before making tomato caviar (spherised tomato passata) and lastly trying miracle fruit (active ingredient: miraculin!) which confuses the taste buds normally receptive to sweet flavours to also be excited by sour ones. Lemons taste amazingly sweet, but the flavours in grapefruit and lime are what it's really all about. If you've never tried it you really must. [More info and links for further reading via Chris here]

After lunch, Alby Reid (possibly the best science teacher in the world) used 1000 Mousetraps and 2000 ping pong balls to demonstrate nuclear fission. Serious fun.

[Alternatively, a much more lovely mouse-eye-view video from Paul Downey here.]

And finally, Stuart Bannocks provided some briefs to be address by putting stickers on boxes. Delightful, even having done it at Papercamp last year.

A massive, massive thank you to Russell and everyone involved in making it such a brilliant day.

Previous years: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Fortnotes 14

Posted by Roo - 17/06/11 at 11:06:00 pm

[Being the fourteenth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

A busy fortnight. As usual.

Now that the Kaiser Chiefs album has been released, I continue to be excited about the analysis the Rev Dan Catt is doing with it. Keeping half an eye on things, but the team on this one doesn’t need too much input from me.

Met with Tess from Thinkbox, who was kind enough to share their ‘Tellyporting’ research with me in person in advance of me speaking at a Thinkbox event soon.

Gave a talk to some friendly students from a University in Texas. Andy, our ICD, talked about our approach to digital and interactive work and I shared a case study. Then Jon and I get them thinking about a specific project and gave them an hour or two to work on a brief we set. Genuinely impressed at the ideas they come back with.

Presented at a conference organised by PRmoment and held at Ketchum (conveniently about 30 seconds walk from my office) for people from the PR industry. Despite possibly the only advertising person in the room, everyone was very welcoming and put up with my nonsense (at one point I actually said “and that’s why they pay us the big bucks”, which even in the context of trying to be disarming and witty should probably have been a capital offence). I shared Cravendale as an example of an integrated digital project. Lots of appreciative smiling and some good questions in the panel session. Sometimes I realise how proud I am to be working at W+K. Thanks to Ben

Sitting in on a couple of creative briefings for some work for Three. Interesting stuff.

My first ‘chemistry meeting’ with a potential new client. This gives them a chance to get to know us (and us a chance to get to know them), so we can all see if we’ll be able to work together one day. Enjoyed this very much.

Starting to hear about a pitch coming up for some new business. Reading the brief, chatting with the planner and starting to understand the background and what the client is looking for. Everyone is excited about the client and the potential for working with them if we win their business. Fingers crossed for the big pitch.

An unusual bit of in-progress work that I can talk about properly; Remember Dot, the world’s smallest stop-motion animation filmed on a Nokia N8 + Cellscope microscope we did with Aardman for Nokia? Well, it’s time for the sequel, and rather than go even smaller we’re turning the idea on its head and hoping to make the worlds largest animation, filmed on a beach in Wales over a week. Having seen the storyboards and animatics, I reckon the film is going to be brilliant. We suggested opening up the production process by sharing footage from the beach, using the Nokia Nseries blog to collect material as a sort of production blog while the film is being made. This is unusual for most projects, where secrecy until the moment of release is very much the norm. Nokia and Aardman were very happy with the idea though, and we worked with Nokia’s word of mouth agency 1000 Heads to make it happen. The shoot itself was slightly hampered by bad weather, (one day and one night of filming have been postponed), but the brave souls on the beach, including some invited guests, got some great footage of the process.

Enjoying:

• Hey You! What Song are you Listening to?
• Just Cause 2 – Player Death by impact – Point Cloud Visualisation
• Luther
• Angry Boys
• Custom YouTube progress bar for Nyan Cat video. Wonderful.

Fortnotes 13

Posted by Roo - 03/06/11 at 11:06:00 pm

[Being the lucky thirteenth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

I can finally reveal the super secret project I’ve been getting increasingly excited about in these fortnotes for the past few weeks. The Kaiser Chiefs new album The Future is Medieval is out now, and it’s a bit different. Here’s how it works:

• Preview 20 new Kaiser Chiefs tracks. Select the 10 you want, and the order in which you want them, for your own album.
• Design your album artwork (much more fun than it probably sounds).
• If you like what you’ve made, buy it for £7.50 and download your album.
• Get your own kaiserchiefs.com/{username} URL for your personal album [mine is kaiserchiefs.com/rooreynolds frinstance].
• You can sell it on through the site, making a £1 cut for each album sold.
• …
• Profit.

As an agency, we’ve been working on this for ages. Our own Oli Beale (the chap behind James Face and the complaint to Richard Branson) came up with the idea with the band. The launch was simultaneously rather tense, busy and a hell of lot of fun. Most of all, it’s an enormous relief to be finally able to talk about it.

It seems to have gone down rather well. I’ve been collecting various tweets, blog posts and press articles since well before the announcement. Some highlights:

“… my fears that this release could undermine the album format as an artform (and admittedly a physical, band selected release is planned for later this summer) seem unfounded. When I made my version of the album … I found myself getting sucked into sequencing it, trying to work out what would go well together to give the album a certain feel. So in a way it actually made me engage with the album more than the average release. So much so, I’d actually advise you to forget my version and make your own.” – Paul Stokes, NME

Most of the coverage has been about the innovative and creative approach, so it’s good to see some really in depth review of the album on the BBC Music site:

“they’ve upped their creative ante somewhat, a number of these songs … coming across as more measured and mature, and a heck of a lot gloomier, than the upbeat bounce-alongs of old. Lead single Little Shocks goes some way to showcasing this murkier atmosphere – where before there was shiny hooks, here the chorus doesn’t leap from the speakers and the whole piece swells with unexpected drama. Can’t Mind My Own Business is indie-pop trapped in a Tron cabinet, while Heard It Break is a sinister sibling of something The Human League might write. Starts With Nothing examines the transitory nature of fortune, of wealth monetary and emotional – it’s rudimentary lyrically, but nevertheless a significant tonal shift for an act predominantly associated with anthems for football terraces. Child of the Jago claims, “This is your nightmare calling” – not quite, but there’s no doubt that the Kaisers have been exploring their darker side, with some exceptional results.” – Mike Diver – BBC Music review

I really loved this post too, which nails the approach perfectly:

I would not call myself a fan of the Kaiser Chiefs. I have enjoyed some of their songs but I’ve never bought one of their albums before and probably wouldn’t have noticed this record at all if it had been released conventionally. But today I paid for their new record and now I’m writing a blog about them on this cooler-than-thou music site. And I’m enjoying the record! And I know that’s partly down to the “Wow, I made that” novelty but I’m also genuinely liking the songs, and that’s down to the fact that I was able to tailor the record to my own personal tastes. This is nothing new – people pick and choose songs to put onto their iPod and even edit down and resequence albums in their iTunes – but it’s heartening to see a mainstream act recognising this trend and tailoring their output towards it. – Jed, A Girl Called Sam

But best of all though is some amazing work from Rev. Dan Catt who has been messing around with the data and working out which are the most popular tracks, providing some impressively detailed analysis of the project, and even looking into which order people put the tracks. Dan rocks.

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Other things I’ve been working on recently include Visit Wales (developing roles and approach), Cravendale (still getting ready for the next phase), spending a bit of time helping out an a really interesting Nokia campaign and appearing in a promotional video for for walls.im’s TechCity Launchpad application.

New terminology: PPM = pre production meeting.