meish dot org: life, unfolding

22 January: Please see the update at the end of this post for what happened next.

Dear Grey London,

I’ve just been made aware of the ad you were involved with creating for Horlicks.

In the middle of the advert at 1′15″, amid the collection of shots of coffee/tea/beverage making and drinking, there’s a brief shot which is slightly different.

It’s a woman sitting on a tube train going along an above-ground track. She’s holding a book in front of her face. The book’s cover depicts a woman’s face. I’ve screengrabbed it below:

I find it very difficult to believe that this shot wasn’t styled on this image I took and posted in August 2006, which has since become well-circulated on the internet.

Your treatment is startlingly similar to my original photo, right down to the woman; the hand position; the ring; the tube above ground; the styling of the cover; the sweep of the hair; the man with his head down, reading next to her.

I’ve written before about advertising agencies using internet-popular ideas and artwork as source material for campaigns, but there’s a fine line between homage and rip-off.

Should I submit an invoice for the portion of the creative work that I unknowingly did on your behalf? Or would acknowledgement of your inspiration be out of the question?

Best regards,

Meg Pickard

PS If anyone else reading this has any ideas about what I might be able to do about this, please let me know in the comments below or via email or Twitter. Thanks.

Update, 22 January

I spoke to Hugo Feiler, MD of Grey London today, after the creative director of the ad forwarded on the email I’d sent him about the issue. Mr Feiler was very pleasant, and said (transcribed from notes taken on phone):

“On reflection, I would agree that we had been influenced by your photo … we shouldn’t have gone on to use such a similar image without speaking to you first, so I’m very sorry about that”

He offered to have the film re-edited to remove the chunk in question. I declined this, but asked him to ask the production company involved to remove the still from their site as proof of their creativity. He has done this since our call.

In addition, as a gesture of goodwill, Mr Feiler offered to make a generous donation in my name to a charity of my choice. I accepted this and am pleased that Oxfam’s Haiti emergency appeal has been able to benefit from this experience.

He went on to say that he would have said and offered exactly the same thing if I’d spoken to him privately before “going public” on my blog, but he understands why I did because of what I do for a living. (I’d actually sent email via the Grey website, to the production company and to the CD’s personal site).

I don’t think that my work was copied maliciously or through an attempt to decieve or claim credit: I’ve worked with enough creative agencies to know how easy it is for something to slip from early-stage random found object moodboard into a concept storyboard and then through to the produced object, all the while getting further and further from the original credited influence. As with most things like this, Hanlon’s razor applies (and especially the Sir Bernard Ingham variant).

In summary, I am reassured that this has been handled in a timely and considerate way by Hugo at Grey London: I’m glad that they’ve apologised and acknowledged the influence of my work, and feel sure that they will have learnt a lesson from this experience about how random internet influences are handled within their creative processes.

Not to underplay the serious inconvenience caused by inclement meteorological conditions to some parts of the UK, but I’d just like to take a moment to reflect on this typically calm and understated headline from yesterday’s London Evening Standard:

A few points.

If you’re still measuring the snow in inches rather than feet or yards, it’s not an “extreme” weather event, it’s a “bothersome” one. The words “extreme weather” should apply to total snowmageddon, not tobogganing & a bit of a whinge about slippery pavements.

“Extreme weather” seems like a rather odd overstatement by the Met Office. It brings to mind scenes from The Day After Tomorrow. Epic, unbelievable, unusual weather with catastrophic effects.

Hurricane Katrina was extreme. The 1988 ice storm in Quebec was extreme. The heatwave + drought + bushfires in SE Australia in early 2009 were extreme.

In this photo, taken during last night’s snow, you can still see the cars.

This is a good indication that it’s not an extreme weather event. Yet. Whatever the hysteria from media and transport providers may otherwise indicate.

OK, it doesn’t snow often in London, but it does snow in southern England in winter sometimes, and in northern England and Scotland more often. So it’s not that weird.

We can be forgiven for being underprepared for a long stint of cold or inclement weather (hot, cold…) because most of the time, this country is just a bit middling, weather-wise. But we have no excuse for over-reacting and creating blanket hype and pointless coverage about extreme hardship and crisis caused by some seasonally-expected wet white stuff. Breaking news: snow happens in winter.

Snowpocalypse by antimega

(My favourite example of this was yesterday, when my local train service provider, SouthWest Trains, cancelled a number of services for today in advance because of the weather, which I thought was particularly brilliant considering it hadn’t even snowed yet. It was almost like they were saying “we know that however much it snows, we’re not going to be able to cope”)

Read the rest of this entry »

At a (media) event in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago, the organisers were giving out these badges:

Tell me: is this wry self-mocking? Or cold statement of fact?

I genuinely can’t figure out which it should be.

And the temptation to sharpie in the word “only” somewhere is almost overwhelming.

As part of Quadriga’s Online Communication 2009 conference, I was invited by the organisers to present some reflections about how to communicate with people online, drawn from both personal and professional experiences, in the form of an after-dinner speech. This was a new experience for me: I’ve never done an after-dinner speech before. Lots of presentations, lectures, debates and panels, but nothing in quite this format before, with no visual aid, nestled in between main course and dessert.

Rather than just post my notes, here’s a fully-written up version of what I said, including links to sources, resources, inspirations and further reading. Forgive the slightly odd formatting, with so many paragraphs - it’s structured this way to reflect the emphasis and pauses and topic sections as I spoke.

If anyone wants it, I was thinking about making an audio version available to download, because this is fairly long (about 25 minutes) - let me know if this would be interesting to you. And if you’re interested in me giving this presentation (or one similar) at an event you’re organising, do get in touch.

When I first told my friends I was coming to Amsterdam to speak to a room full of online communication executives, they asked me why I had to fly to Amsterdam to do that. Why do we all need to get together in one room? Couldn’t I just do it by email, maybe in a newsletter or a series of tweets?

Well, maybe – but if that had been the case, I wouldn’t have got to enjoy such a delicious meal and wouldn’t have met so many of you face to face. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.

Actually, yesterday I asked my Twitter contacts whether there’s anything they’d recommend to a room full of the best and brightest communication professionals in Europe. I got a lot of interesting answers, many of which I’ll draw on later, but I particularly liked this suggestion from a contact who said:

“Just tell them they should promote the juniors for two months and let them run wild over the internet.”

Well, it’s an idea. Not sure it’s the first thing you could do, but still…

When Quadriga were putting together the conference programme, I was asked to present my perspective on online communication from “both sides of the wall” – as a keen online user both personally and professionally.

I’s just like to note that that implies the wall is somehow this insurmountable, divisive thing which is rarely scaled. In fact, the walls are coming down. I think it’s remarkably easy - and getting easier - to hop from one side to the other, and in fact the boundaries are blurring for many of us every day. I count myself as incredibly lucky that my professional life draws on my personal experiences and passions.

As part of that, I have a confession to make.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, there’s more beauty (or at least aesthetic interest) in removed or partially removed things than in what was there before.

This seems especially true with advertising.

They’re doing lots of restoration work in the bowels of King’s Cross tube station at the moment. These former advertising posters can be found in the entry/egress tunnels from the Victoria line platforms.

More after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »

Enjoy England, the domestic marketing division of Visit-Britain has got a new advertising campaign at the moment, which revolves around the idea of aerial views of landscapes, and the positioning of map pins. It’s an obvious next step for a tourism approach in these days of familiarity with Google Earth and LiveMaps, but it’s well done and there’s no denying that the photography is stunning.

Here’s the TV advert:

And on their accompanying blog, they provide details about the various filming locations used in the ad shoot.

I also spotted this poster next to the district line platform at Hammersmith tube station this morning:

(Please excuse poor image quality - iPhones have their limitations)

Which is a vast improvement from their previous rather politically-tinged ad campaign:

(Only kidding - that’s a sign around the back of their offices in W6)

But on their new poster, although there are a range of interesting suggestions about things to do - picnic, train ride, fishing, country walk - and the location itself looks beautiful, there’s no indication on the poster or on the site of where the location actually is.

Which leads to two possible conclusions:

One, that it’s not a real place, but a figurative one, made from a composite of some other places, in which case they’re going to get caught out as soon as someone manages to hunt down the elements used.

Two, that it’s a real place but they’re not telling where, in which case they’ve missed a trick because people might actually want to go there.

Either way, I’d be very interested to know.

Update!

The sleuthing powers of the internet know no bounds! Crouchingbadger correctly identified the location as the Larpool Viaduct over between Ruswarp and Whitby in North Yorkshire:

View Larger Map

Good to know, but ever-so-slightly irksome that I didn’t spot it straight away since I’ve actually been there and walked over the viaduct with P (on our minimoon, I think):

I don’t often write about work here, but the news this morning is too exciting not to share.

1. The Guardian is moving to publish exclusively online after 188 years in print. This partnership between Twitter and the Guardian is called Gutter.

2. We’ve extended the Gutter partnership to work with WordPress, to build a bold new commenting platform which limits all responses to 140 characters or less. This is known as GutterPress.

I like the logos.

1. There is apparently a growing trend of people (read: overpaid footballers) hiring an owl to deliver the rings at a wedding. That’s nothing. At our friends Matt & Jane’s wedding last year on the North Yorkshire Moors, a junior barn owl showed up to the reception (uninvited) and sat on everyone, squawking loudly. For free.
   
2. Blackberries can be effective for treating diarrhoea - and other handy home remedies and natural bits and bobs. My favourite natural medicinal thing is the use of lettuce to treat insomnia. It worked for Peter Rabbit, and it works for me.
3. Bodysong is on Film4 tonight at 1.45am. Set your PVRs.
4. I really want to go to the Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture exhibition at the Barbican. I hope that by noting it down here, I might actually remember to get around to it.
5. I score a disappointing 4/10 from these “How Angry Are You?” indicators (should be a quiz really; isn’t). I thought I was way angrier than that. Must try harder.

The Kübler-Ross model famously describes the stages a person goes through when dealing with grief or tragedy, and the model has been latterly adopted by change management consultants the world over - because, after all, discovering you have a terminal illness is exactly the same as being told your department is moving to a different building. Ahem

Anyway, if that’s the case, then the hue & cry/hoo-ha/a>/furore surrounding the week’s big media story provides growing evidence of what what I’m going to call an emerging Jönäthän-Ross model, which depicts precisely how a major media organisation deals with a rather public fuck-up.

Just like the Kübler-Ross model, there are stages through which the subject must pass in order to get out the other side, and they are, at least in part, somewhat familiar:

1. Shock: Initial organisational paralysis at hearing the bad news. Shit. Hope no-one noticed.
2. Misdirection: Redirecting attention onto OH LOOK, IT’S BILL ODDIE RIDING A BADGER!/STEPHEN FRY IN A TAXI!
3. Blamestorming: Internal frenzied finger-pointing.
4. Bargaining: Public justification and debate of the merits and facts of the case on and in national news vehicles.
5. Scapegoating: Someone has to go.
6. Auto-flagellation: Saturated coverage of public contrition from all involved (and quite a few besides, who weren’t), especially on the media channels owned by the organisation.
7. Tempered Relief: Hoping everyone forgets in time for the next licence-fee hike.

We’ve seen the same pattern play out several times now at the BBC and others, in the wake of misnamedkittengate, fakecompetitionwinnergate, RichardandJudyfraudulentphonelinegate and so on.

I think it’s time the Jönäthän-Ross model of embarassing public crisis management was formally adopted by our friends in the media, in the hope that acknowledging the path they seem destined to follow every time will speed things up a bit, because it’s bloody tedious for the rest of us.

Speaking, as we were not so long ago, about unreferenced advertising homages to internet viral creative endeavours….here’s another one for the collection.

First, watch this new ad from Berocca.

People dancing on treadmills.

Strangely familiar? Indeed. OK Go did this to great viral effect not so long ago:

I know. Ad creatives in ripping off internet shocker.

<rolls eyes>