The great British comedic writer, performer and director Armando Iannucci, dropped by Mother earlier this week. Producer of 90’s comedy hit On the Hour, which gave birth to the character led spin off series – Alan Partridge; and more recently The Thick of It, a political satire-cum-farce for BBC4, Iannucci very kindly talked about his work and answered our well versed questions. When asked ‘What can the 30 second spot learn from the 30 minute TV program? he talked about the importance of improvisation in comedy. “Comedy is something that is concerned with the magic and humour”, he says. “It can’t be planned precisely which means that clients and producers alike should have the flexibility within schedules and budgets to allow for this magic to be created on a shoot if the script is comedy based”. Iannucci also evangalised about the ‘comedy maker’, where by traditional roles within comedy are changing as improvisation, working across different media and new collaborative processes are changing the traditional roles of the creator. “These days everybody is doing everything”, he says. His last inspirational words were, “Mother could be described as a ‘story maker’ in the sense that the focus is on an end product rather than individual credits”.

There has been a rising trend in both brand and cultural experiences that create an alternate reality in the real world. The famously good Secret Cinema experiences, promenade theatre like Punch Drunk and Blitz Parties are all evidence that we are enjoying wholly immersive experiences. “The way we dress, the food & drink, the venue, music and interacting with actors all blur the lines between real and fictional world to create an alternate reality”, says Mother’s Sara Tate. Secret Cinema’s recent screening of Bugsy Malone was like stepping back in time. Whilst it would be easy to say that this trend is born out of the recessionary times the trend has been growing for 4 or 5 years. “I suspect its born out of the creation of parallel realities in the digital space”, says Tate. “The freedom, sense of adventure and entertainment that people have become used to in video games & digital worlds are now spilling over into real world behaviour. Why dress your avatar when you can dress yourself up like a gangster and live life like your are in the 1920’s for an evening”.

‘The 99’ is a new comic series themed on Arabic historical characters. Growing in popularity globally, Esquire’s Middle-Eastern addition says, ‘it is based on Islamic values –the ninety-nine most beautiful names and attributes of Allah as described in the Holy Qur’an, and are personified as characters from 99 different countries, each with different powers gained from ancient stones’. The 99 came to fame three years ago thanks to a lucky break. Creator Naif Al-Mutawa launched the series when the controversial caricatures of Allah in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten blew up in the global press. As a consequence The New York’s Sunday Times gave Al-Mutawa’s new creation the global coverage he needed. It’s since grown massively, with an annual print run of over a million copies, The 99 is now translated into eight different languages. Al-Mutawa has even signed a distribution deal with DC comics and brought in the right talent from Marvel and DC to work on the series. As a result, the series gained a huge cult following with the hard to please comic book community, but more importantly it has been praised for bringing the western and middle-eastern cultures back together in these often-uncertain times. As a result, the World Economic Forum handed a Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award to Al-Mutawa earlier this year. As for next year, we can expect The 99 to hit our TV screens.

One of the simplest and most interesting pieces of branding we’ve seen this week comes in the form of a humble business card from social media specialist Mike Coulter, of DigitalAgency.com. Mike explains, “I created my new business cards based on nice and interesting tweets people had made about me and my company after meetings; I figuring that a tweet can often be a kind of 3rd party endorsement or reference”. Mike takes screen-grabs of the tweets on the followers status page as a way of crowd-sourcing people’s opinions. Mike also noted that his design work was for free and ‘serendipitous’ as the graphics he ended up having simply come from the follower’s personal choice of background on their own twitter page. He concludes, “One of the most powerful things about social media, and trusted sources of course, is when other people say nice things about you, rather than self-promoting yourself … which I do anyway of course”.

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Social Network farming games such as Happy Farm & Farmville, a craze sweeping white-collar workers in China & the US which has, according to PSFK, spawned a new occupation in the digital world – ‘the Social Network Employee’. Happy Farm, reported to be home to 30million users, 16m of which are in China alone, is a community of virtual farmers who are owners of virtual farmland to graze virtual livestock and grow crops. But the demands of being a virtual farmer can be tasking. Crops and livestock need constant attention. Recent reports found some users setting their alarms in the middle of the night so they could wake up to water their crops. The Social Network Employee is therefore a specialist in demand, who is being hired by the hour to fulfill repetitive and time consuming duties like, erm, feeding the virtual cows! Buyers and sellers of the hourly employee services in China are meeting in forums like this one.

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