-
This might help the make a bit more sense out of the cognitive strategy behind the last 2 years of Old Spice ads. Narratives are much more easily recalled than facts… For example: if you wanted to remember Jeff’s last name, you could try to embed “Jeff Baker Jeff Baker Jeff Baker” in your memory— but you’ll be a lot more successful if you pictured Jeff AS a baker. That image penetrates several layers of cognitive thought, and will remain clearer over time in that it is differentiated from every day life— including every Jeff and every Baker that you ever met.
-
(Source: twitter.com, via pleatedjeans)
-
The moment we first anticipate a potential reward (hope) consistently provides a greater dopamine reaction than the moment we receive a guaranteed reward. Fascinating.
-
Meme theory: Do we come up with ideas or do they, in fact, control us?
“
One idea that I’ve spent the past three years of my life investigating is that ideas are, to a very real extent, ‘alive’ in their own right – surviving, reproducing, evolving, going extinct, just like living things.
It sounds a harmless proposition, but the implications are quite startling. If ideas are just like living things, then they are subject to Darwinian rules – inherently selfish entities, doing anything and everything they must to survive and propagate. And in this scenario, what are we? Little more than their hosts, their habitats? Vehicles to carry them from one parasitic generation to the next, coerced accomplices to their wild ambitions? If this idea has any substance at all, it will upset a lot of people.
…
Who invented the tiger? No one. The environment, by acting upon thousands of generations of proto-tigers, selecting some and not others, for whatever reasons, created the tiger we know today. That’s how meme goggles see the invention of the ___________.
“
(Source: independent.co.uk)
-
On the Origin of Theses
Jonnie Hughes presents some of his work on the memetic origins of ideas and innovations that evolve through Darwian natural selection, based on Richard Dawkins’ proposal in the Selfish Gene that ideas can evolve in this way, which he named “memes”.
As a side note, the running gags we call internet memes are a small subset of all memes but also not a very good example. You can think about internet joke memes at three levels:
- The format level describes the underlying concept of the specific meme. The format for the “Socially Awkward Penguin” meme has a picture of a penguin and some phrase describing a socially awkward situation. At this level there is no variation on which selection can work. The format for the given meme is fixed and unchanging. It does not get copied in succession with variations at each copy. New versions aren’t created from old versions. People go to the same source format using online tools on meme sites. Hence the concept of the meme doesn’t evolve itself.
- The content level describes the actual words that people put into the meme format. The content has much variation from person to person, but it does not come from successive replication and selection. Evolution by natural selection works by parents having children, who have children, who have children, and so on. Meme content is more like the original parents having more and more children and never any grandchildren.
- There is arguably a meta-concept level to internet memes which is the concept of the internet meme itself. At one point an “internet meme” referred to some new event that got copied and spread “virally” person to person. Weezer’s video for “Pork and Beans” covers a lot of them such as the dancing baby, Star Wars kid, and “Leave Britney Alone”. The concept of an internet meme has not evolved more towards the pictures with overlaid text that people produce individually at sites like memebase.
It is only the meta-concept level that seems to evolve; the idea of internet memes replicates as it spreads from person to person, it varies as individuals use it to mean slightly different things, and there is selection of meanings by those who use the term to refer to one type of variation. However, I suspect sites like memebase will keep the meaning from varying too far from its current form.
-
The full impact of Nike’s Olympic ambush has hit in the wake of the games… Through the use of a consistent visual identity (those ubiquitous neon green track & field shoes) and the subversive yet empowering “find your greatness” ad campaign, Nike effectively stole the show from Adidas… and with much more targeted ROI.
-
People are braver than you think
— Prakash Dharmarajan, Director @ Ogilvy Chennai
(Source: ilovetypography.com)
-
Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.
— Peter Sondergaard, SVP, Gartner, BusinessWire.com | 17 October 2011
-
The classic Band-aid ads did a fantastic job of not getting in the way of childhood— these weren’t made for ‘helicopter’ moms— they were meant to enable kids to go out an get hurt. brilliant.
(Source: vintascope)
-
The okCupid blog is incredible, from the perspective of interpreting the social sciences. Instead of using standard questions to find matches on the site, any user can ask their own questions— ranging from “are you a cat person or a dog person?” to “do you like to dress up as a ______.” The typical user answers around a thousand of these questions.
Now we have our own notion of what responses are important, demonstrated on the left side, but okCupid has found that when someone indicates that they’ve found a long-term partner from the site, it’s more important that they are a match for the questions on the right.
okCupid analyzes some REALLY clever data sets, with regards to human relationships, sex, love, and other related demographics. Click through to learn more.
-
2012 Olympic Games P&G ad - “Best Job.”
An excellent demonstration of marketing a suite of divergent brands effectively.
-
2010 Winter Olympics P&G ad - “Kids”
An excellent demonstration of marketing a suite of divergent brands effectively.
-
Interactive outdoor advertising, using a swing door next to a revolving door… The ad shows a man sleeping next to a revolving series of different attractive women… keeping it classy, Axe.
(Pretty clever though, I have to admit.)
Axe - Revolving Door Ad
Advertising School: Hanyang University, South Korea
Creative Director / Art Director: Dongmin Shin
Copywriter: Jinuk Seok
Art Director: Jeongin Nam
