HARD RAIN: December 2011

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Dial S for Shellphone

Once in a while an advertising campaign reminds you of how much fun advertising can be. Both for the people who create it and the people who consume it.A campaign promoting Royal Caribbean cruises has just opened in New York. The campaign imagines the sea calling would-be vacationers courtesy of a contraption called a 'shellphone' through which the sea speaks to you when you put your ear to it(link to television commercial) The shellphone speaks to you using a Sea G network(the rare subtle pun). Other examples of good copy: "Our Rollover Plan: Tan Front Then Back" "You Don't Recharge It. It Recharges You" The campaign's theme is "The Sea is Calling. Answer it Royally" Now while "The Sea is Calling' fits the campaign like a glove "Answer it Royally" stands out like a sore thumb. I can see the client's marketing team in a moment of near fatal weakness insisting on it. All that the "Answer it Royally" bit accomplishes is to advertise the insecurity of the brand. Wasn't the logo enough?

Monday, December 5, 2011

The Next Big Web Thing?

David Gelernter did not invent the Web. But he might be the guy who re-invents it. This professor at Yale thinks the Internet is a mess and needs some radical restructuring. In 1991 he published "Mirror Worlds" which envisaged a future where all our activities will be mirrored on the Web. Over the past ten years he has spent in to restructure the Web to mirror this emerging reality. David had nothing to do with either Facebook or Twitter. However social media did give rise to a concept central to his mission -the timeline. David however is not very complimentary about Twitter or Facebook. He believes that both while being important to the evolution of the Web are essentially inelegant and will not exist in a decade. Wall Street better rethink the $100 billion dollar valuations (the moot point, some would say, is that whether Wall Street itself may not exist in 10 years). The news is now that David is now ready to launch his product among students at Yale just as Facebook was first launched among students at Harvard. The product is, as you would expect, shrouded in mystery as of now but David does talk about the Internet of the future becoming a instead of a network of static assets and each person having a Lifestream that feeds the Worldstream and is visible to others in part based on permission settings. Imagining David's product based on the above concepts could be an interesting exercise. Who knows, you might land yourself a complementary product that positions you downstream from David's putative game changer. One more point. David was a victim of the Unabomber. A letter bomb blew up in his face, leaving him severely handicapped. Give a Genius a handicap and the odds are he will flower. Wanna bet on David's idea? You know where to find me.