the F rant

I shan’t say too much about what will in the future be regarded as a famous interview, I think it’s better that you see the interview written up in graphic form and form your own judgements…

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business laurie oakes, leadership, liberal, malcolm turnbull, tv

How adland is cutting Big Media out of the future: a great piece from Wired on the Tribal DDB / Monopoly City Streets Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), and the changes for the future of brands and products.

It’s a whopper of a case study that speaks to the heart of all digital initiatives.  Ultimately, the digital industry does (should) do one or more of three things:

• Help / Augment
• Engage
• Entertain / Educate

Whatever the digital initiative, if it does only one of these things, it’s not enough.  If it does two of these things, it’s got a good chance at succeeding.  If it does three of these things, it’s likely to work very well.

How this Monopoly game ticks all three boxes?

• It helps / augments the experience of playing Monopoly by making it a global game with potentially millions of competitors.
• It engages through it being a great game, a great product and scalable across millions of peoples.
• It entertains.  It is Monopoly after all.

Disclosure: I’m the Digital Strategist at Tribal DDB Melbourne.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends game, mmog, monopoly

I read this post from my former colleague and all round good guy Steve Rubel: How to Bring Back the Old Facebook Feed – The Steve Rubel Lifestream .

I’ve added my two bob’s worth in a comment below (for those who would like to go back to the “old” Facebook news updates, it provides a how to)…

I quite like the “new” Facebook, because it allows three options.

1. News Feed
The “new” curated feed.

2. Live Feed
This option needs to be modified somewhat to get the “old functionality back. Simply click “Live Feed” and then go down to “Edit Options” down the bottom. Then change the number in the field from 50 to 5000. It will then provide a full live feed of everything your friends are doing on Facebook – from links to apps to status updates.

As a matter of interest – this is a key product offering in the battle of Facebook vs Twitter.  The new trend for search is “live discovery”, where people want to have instant results, updates and feeds.  We see it in Twitter, we’ve seen it with the new changes to Google’s realtime search results, where Google can provide searches that provide live updates to the second.

3. Status Updates
As you said in the post above, Steve…

The thing I don’t like is that Facebook hasn’t made it completely obvious how to do this, so people are confused.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends change, facebook, live discovery, old, realtime search, social networking, status updates

These kooky Germans attached banner ads to flies, and set them free in the giant Frankfurt convention centre.  It’s brilliant, and very worthy of notice and talkability.  God knows what they were advertising (If I knew, I’d buy it), but the whole idea of making something so ordinary so utterly brilliant…  It’s worthy of praise.  Check out the video:

FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment, FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends advertising, banner, flies, frankfurt, germany, video