Homo Viator

I never realized it was Justin Timberlake who performs in this classic, Emmy-winning SNL digital short. After airing on NBC, the skit became an example of viral video, enjoying massive exposure on sites such as YouTube. Can you believe it, in 2007 the song won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics. Now that is show biz!

Many of you may have already heard this speech by Steve Jobs, modern day's corporate hero. He gave it to the graduating class at Stanford University and it may offer some practical reminders and motivational tips to all of us. I admire Steve Jobs for how well he transformed Apple the second time he came to run it. Let me not hide the fact that this man made me some decent money as well. ;-) Last year I convinced my dad to invest in Apple, when the stock stood at 68USD and me and him opened a special, shared account for this transaction. Apple today stands at 152.77USD (124% growth in 1.5 years) and I am convinced that Apple will hit the 200USD and go even further. With a PC market share of less than 4% and a leader such as Steve Jobs, growth to me seems to be unbound.

Looking for my Rickshaw driver in Varanasi, a holy city in the North of India, with more than 1 million inhabitants. This video depicts the wide variety of colors and people in India. What may look like a market to you is in fact typical street life in India.

I know that this is an old campaign, but I just stumbled over it again. Why cant advertising use more such digital effects? Loved it! By the way: During my internet research (at the moment, my visits to the virtual habitat are work-related ;-) I read the latest on three dimensional motion sensors that will soon replace the way we communicate with computers. What you see in the ad will one day be reality, sooner than you think. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is frequently quoted as a realistic showcase of where technology is currently heading to. I say: Niiiiiiiiiice!

HP Ad



Current two-dimensional prototypes

A little lengthy, so only tech aficionados should see the whole video.



This one always does the same, so just seeing 10 seconds would do!



Let this technology merge with 3d projection technology and you have what HP shows in the ad. Lovely!

My friend Peter played this song for me in Berlin in May and I got hooked to the beginning beat from the start. Pilooski re-mixed a relatively unknown rock & roll/funk song from 1967, originally performed by The Four Seasons. What a tune! The perfect wake up song to listen to on your i-pod, while brushing your teeth. Peter promised me that this song will accompany the opening scene of one of his to-be-made-movies.

Okey, Wiesn is what native Bavarians such as me call the Oktoberfest. The Oktoberfest is the biggest folk festival in the world. The first two days of this year saw more than 1 million visitors. For a city of 1.2 million inhabitants, this gives you a slight idea of how big of an issue this beer-drinking marathon is for us. What I like best about it is that we get visitors from around the world and on Saturday I spent a considerable amount of time trying to teach the lyrics of our beer drinking songs to Japanese, Brazilian, Italian and Australian drinking buddies. Yes, the word drinking is repetitive here. You can not imagine how drunk people get. Our beer tents take up to 12.000 people and I promise you that everyone is completely hammered. We have around 15 of such tents! I heard that the thought of lots of booze and 100.000 drunk men attracted Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan to the festival, who made it an integral part of their drinking agenda. As you can see in the video below, everyone is dancing on the benches and tables, most people (even the tourists) wearing traditional Bavarian outfits, 12.000 people, singing, hugging, falling, kissing, dancing....a phenomenal atmosphere!

The dress code:

For a hypochondriac like me, this chart is like reading Vogue for a fashionista. Strange analogy, i know! The chart gives you the odds of certain kinds of deaths. 1 in 5 people die of heart diseases, 1 in 7 die of cancer. Most of us know that already and it is little surprising. But did you know that 1 in 119 people die because of suicide? Compare that to a motorcycle related death, whose odds are 1 in 1,020 and you may relativize the risk of motorcycling. Of course this comparison has to be relativized itself, because everyone is theoretically a potential suicide candidate (in statistical terms, don't worry), while only people that jump on motorcycles are at risk of dying in a related accident. But the chart shows you nevertheless very interesting tendencies.

I have always liked watching ads; I find them to be more informative and entertaining than those dull Tv formats that dominate airwaves these days. As a teenager I always wanted to work in an advertising agency and I would deliberately zap through the channels, looking for ads. When in a country whose language I do not speak, ads are sometimes the only media formats I can understand. One should not underestimate what one can learn about a country and its culture by just looking at the billboards in the streets. Humor, for example, differs from country to country and that is always reflected in it's advertising. Indian ads make use of almost pantomimic style comedy, for example.

Even though some of my readers may not like the fact that advertising's main objective is to sell you something (which I do not mind at all), let's not forget that the tactics it uses are often very artistic, creative, innovative and social-critical. Of course many ads portray a surreal, perfect-world kind of image, but good advertising reflects societal behavior and often implicitly criticizes it.

If advertising was always as entertaining as the two ads below, would people really want to miss it? Maybe companies should tackle TiVo by simply hiring more creative agencies that produce entertaining ads? Unfortunately, a lack of creative agencies is not the problem. During my work I realized that what is lacking is creativity at the other end, the client side. Company executives and product managers often think too much with their left side of the brain. (also check out "Some people just do not like him")

Fantastic! Creativity at its best.

Pics from my recent trip to India are on facebook. If you are not on facebook, then you probably still have a life. Congratulations!