Idea of the day: Write it all on a wall & look at it

When facing a very difficult to understand audience – in our case, 4-7 year old boys – it can be really helpful to visualise what you know early in the planning process.

With such a young target, there are very few hard numbers & facts – no coverage on TGI, not much BARB detail, etc.

But we knew that boys of this age were going to be developing really fast, ultimately meaning massive differences in capability to understand & interact with media.

So we mapped out each age in terms of their physical development, their learning & cognition abilities and their relationship with the world & other people. We gleaned info from everywhere we could – development studies, medical websites, parenting guides..

We are still building the presentation, but it’s worked so well to help us understand the audience that we’re going to use it to present with, albeit in a rather more polished format:

Let’s hope the client likes it!

Much props go to Andrew Marsh, Oliver Scargill, Wendy Jim, Emma Foord, Anna Whichello, Sarah Hewitt & Tom Kislingbury for all the ongoing work in populating this & turning it into a campaign

Point – Know – Buy

Here’s trend watching’s February report which is worth a look as it shows how POINT-KNOW-BUY will reshape consumers’ info-expectations, search behavior and purchasing patterns.

Their definition of what  POINT-KNOW-BUY:

”With textual search and information now abundantly available to most people most of the time, the race is on to make instant visual search and information ubiquitous too. Any real world object (if not person) will soon be able to be ‘known’ by on-the-go consumers equipped with smart phones, which can be pointed at anything to retrieve/find related information on a whim. And yes, some commerce may follow from that as well.”

It’s packed full of great examples, for instance, ‘find my face’, the facial recognition tool that Google launched in December 2011, and

 Skinscan, an app which allows users to scan and monitor moles over time, with the aim of preventing malignant skin cancers.

Pinterest

With all the excitement over pinterest recently I thought I’d share some interesting stats about the site which has just reached 11.7 million unique monthly users in the US, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.

In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest.

According to ComScore, the average Pinterest user spend 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. If you don’t count sites like Google+ or new Yahoo channels that have built in user bases, comScore’s data shows Pinterest would be the fastest site of any kind to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S.

Click on this to read more.

What is your planning style ? – Idea of the day

Morning

Last week in Lyme Regis the CID team (whilst generally group hugging, fire walking and naked sweat lodging), talked a lot about range when discussing facilitation styles. The point being that everyone has their own and you need to work out what you need to dial up and dial down.

I think we all need to think about our planning in the same way.

Which reminded me of this collection of genius from various advertising and planning luminaries. Take a look and have a think.

So today’s idea of the day is to think about what your planning style is?. Then start thinking about what your range is and what to dial up and what to dial down?

In case you were wondering, i would describe mine as ‘simple and sweary’

Have a great weekend

Walshy

Idea of the (yester)day: What is more valuable than gold?

The answer is branded gold.

Not a comms idea, but very interesting from a brand value perspective. The ever-surprising John-Paul Gaultier has released a limited edition of branded one ounce gold ingots, capitalising on the extremely bullish market for the precious metal as the recession continues to outstay its welcome.

The bars carry his distinctive branding, and are on the market for just over $1,800 each. The genius of this is that this price is 10% more than the market value of the metal itself.

The three things I love/hate about this are:

1) It turns investors into consumers – increasing both his target market and his brand reach
2) And the reverse: it turns a luxury item into a (vaguely) sensible investment, turning a flagging market for fripperies on its head
3) It is literally a solid-gold indication of his brand value – if people will pay $100 for a $2 t-shirt with your name on, why not see how far you can stretch?