The Grey Blog

Short version:

Demands on our attention are going up.
That might make us more shrewd with our attention in a variety of ways.
Brands should aim to give more value for attention, as people get more precious.

Long rambling version:

(This turned into a monster – no expertise here – read on for some unauthoritative ramblings.)

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I’ve been thinking that a lot of brands could be more useful. Maybe usefulness is the next dimension that brands need in order to stand out.

It’s part of what I was trying to get at with the back-end stuff below.

Instead of adding to the noise competing for our attention, or forcing into places where we’ve no need for them, can brands and marketing be useful?

I was going to expand on this before I read these creds from Zeus Jones and realised someone else had done a much better job. (Built a whole company around it.)

But it doesn’t seem to be something that many brands are actually doing yet.

Would getting more pro-active about marketing help? Instead of waiting for internal pressures to throw up a brief, could we look more to the outside world and work out what’s actually needed?

More like new product development.

I’m pretty sure these people did…

But I’m not so sure about these people…

The first of these ads looks like it was made by some mates having a pretty good time – I’d bet the same enthusiasm goes into making their products better. But the second one feels like a marketing message that I’d rather ignore.

Maybe it’s not the fairest comparison because Insight are a fashion company doing a brand ad and Rossignol are a sports company doing a product ad. Still. Somewhere along the way, Rossignol seem to have lost a bit of enthusiasm – looks like they got a bit too serious about making an ‘advert’.

I think we should be trying to surface enthusiasm – it suggests we care, we know our shit, we’re obsessive about our product, we’d be embarrassed to produce anything that wasn’t up to scratch… It’s almost more important than what we say (because most people will ignore that anyway).

Instead of buying media to get our message out, I like the idea that we should make it.

Skype – millions of callers
innocent – packaging
YouTube – everything around the clip
Flickr – everything around the photo
Dyson – hand-dryers
Google – search
Foxtons – those fucking minis

There are rumblings of a return for vinyl. There’s quite a lot I like about this…

• I like that smaller and smaller digital technologies (MP3s here) are freeing us up from form (it doesn’t have to be a CD anymore)
• I like that things (records) are becoming more than just things (records with coupons to download MP3 versions of the songs)
• I like that unlikely partnerships are forming (they call it the vinyl-MP3 tag team in the link above, which is a great image)
• And I like the thought that the old master, vinyl, is dusting itself off for a final swing at the shiny, hard-plastic upstart (it might be the tag team thing that got me thinking this – oww… down on the canvas… must… get… up… it hurts… oh shit, he’s climbing the top rope… summon… the… strength… he’s jumping… quick, leg to chin! BOOM! Right in the kisser! Take that, CD! Who’s laughing now!? Who’s Laughing Now!!??)

Anyway, I’m quite enthusiastic about this stuff, so I’m going to go on a bit.

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Still no-one reading so I don’t feel too bad about doing this…

Someone likes the website we came up with for innocent (at my last job, Albion). Thanks Media Snackers.

A lot of late nights went into making it, so it’s nice to see good things said about it. It’s annoying as hell, but that was the idea… a not-for-grown-ups site with tons of random snippets competing to keep kids interested. I’m really proud of it.

www.innocentkids.co.uk