Clare Townhill

"Can't you just put it on iTunes?"

http://twitter.com/#!/Rachel_J_Lewis/status/76543657834057729

Friendly Moose Interactive

Apparently this would be the name of my agency. Nice little name generator to add to the hoards.

http://www.breadlinedesign.com/naming_machine/index.htm

In the 'Attention Economy' I fear bankruptcy

What does it mean when most of our attention is consumed by the pursuit of attracting the attention of others?

It was back in 1971 that Herbert Simon suggested that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention“¹ and now the difficulty of capturing people’s attention (“a highly perishable commodity”)² has some theorists suggesting that the future “attention economy” will have “its own different implicit rules, roles, cycles, values, etc.“³

If everyone has everyone’s attention the value of attention is nullified. Thus to avoid mental bankruptcy, navigating an “attention economy” means saving, investing and being cunningly conscientious of your own attention. If you treated your attention as a monetary value, would you be considered broke, middle class or well-invested?

1. Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press [↩]
2. Thomas Davenport, John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001), p. 11 [↩]
3. Michael Goldhaber, The Attention Economy Hypothesis in Brief, http://goldhaber.org/?p=197 [↩]

It never ceases to amaze me how few people who work in the Communications business understand this principle or what a profound effect abundance has on people's ability and propensity to be able to make decisions. Recently I've been lucky enough to start working with Hannah Charlton and Tony Ward - two great allies in insisting on annoying people with the question 'why would someone bother?' and 'what value does it deliver?'. The Economist article on the tyranny of choice 'You Choose' is a great complement to James Shelley's piece above.

James Shelley

Economist: You Choose

"Pop Not Broth"

All hail the return of Alan Partridge. Alas I'm still no more likely to ever drink Fosters but I'm pretty interested to see if anyone else starts to.

Brand love beyond reason

Two examples of the triumph of brand over reason: Coke and Apple. Coke: despite the silliness of the over-zealous and now shamed coke-exec regarding the literal and cultural diet-coke-mentos explosion, Coke have always been honest about what they sell. They're not in the business of selling syrupy, fizzy soda; the thing they're selling is dreams. Beautifully iterated here by the latest Coke Happiness Machine on a London campus:

Apple, they may make tech (some would of course argue that they just make gorgeous remote controls for the rest of their eco-system) but what they really market is edible design.Happily reacquainted myself with just how funny and true this is:

One video from a brand: one UGC that generates a backlash of wrath from the Apple-lover. Both indicate the kind of money-can't-buy feeling that most companies would kill for yet fail to attain in their pursuit of the brand and product positioning rather than a generation of emotional feeling and brand belonging.