NASA has released its first iPhone game in which you can drive a Lunar Electric Rover through space. Whilst steering your fictional vehicle over the sea of tranquility, you’ll be able to see images from proposed lunar outposts and learn more about what life on the moon might be like. NASA has obviously, been quite up to speed with new media, such as when @Astro_Mike tweeted from space. In a time where Americans are losing their enthusiasm for the space race, this was a very strategic move. However, with this new initiative, it was apparently simply a case of wanting to make “a cool game”, according to NASA’s Chris Giersch. The game is free and available through the iTunes store from Monday.


Thanks to Rob Hughes for this story. Don’t talk to Rob about feminism.


References:
Wired


Image Credit

On Wednesday night, Mother gathered a group of interesting experts from the worlds of sport, teens, and culture, together with an intimate audience, to discuss the issue of how to create a teen legacy from the 2012 Olympics for our client Coca-Cola (the main Olymic sponsor). Chantelle Fiddy, editor of CTRL.ALT.SHIFT, set the tone for the evening, astutely stating that teens feel more like “observers, than participants” in the Games. Mat Locke of C4, said lots of clever things too, including something worth sticking in your next Keynote on ‘participation’. If you want to create participation, he says, you should never see your audience as less than 2 people. It is not about the brand and the consumer, but rather about the consumer and their friends. Teens are driven by self-interest, immediacy, and doing stuff with their mates, as we all know. The conclusion of the evening is that brands don’t need to invent participation, but simply bring their marketing muscle to stuff already out there that needs a leg up. The highlight, however, was definitely the hilariously misjudged monologue from a particular audience member : )


Thanks to sarah and Gavin Cumine for this story.

Instead of the usual big-bucks 30” Superbowl spot this year, Pepsi have decided to give $1.3m to good causes. The recent Refresh Everything campaign allowed consumers to vote on who should get what, with the results to be announced on March 1st. Pepsi follows the example of TripAdvisor, who in 2008, had more than a million people vote on how they should give away $1m in their More Than Footprints campaign.


This is a major move for a brand like Pepsi and very different from the usual big budget Britney ad and could be a sign of a shift in society’s attitudes towards advertising. The think-tank Compass published a report this week called The Advertising Effect, which argues that advertising fuels our voracious consumerism, which doesn’t really make us happy. It’s the old AdBuster’s thought, but it’s gaining academic weight: the report pulls together Dr. David Myer’s studies on happiness, as well as work by Prof. Richard Layard and of course Oliver James. There’s also interesting input from organizations such as The Children’s Society.


A factor leading to rising mental health problems is the increased degree to which children and young people are preoccupied with possessions; the latest in fashionable clothes and electronic equipment etc. Evidence both from the United States and the UK suggests that those most influenced by commercial pressures also show higher rates of mental health problems.


Against this background, Pepsi’s decision to ditch their usual Superbowl as looks a progressive move – but will the new approach delivers sales. Such a move challenges all of us to find positive ways to drive sales for our clients. Interesting that all this coincides with some very encouraging comments by PepsiCo’s Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi talking to the FT about the company’s “license from society”:

‘We’re constantly watching the changing societal trends and looking at the interplay between corporations and societies… [In] Davos, both this year and last, everybody is talking about the new rules of capitalism, [which] are, don’t just think about the company within the four walls of the company, think about your obligations to society.’

The Compass report starts from a marketing-is-evil presumption. They want to ban lots of advertising. That’s just a lack of imagination. The answer isn’t no advertising, but good advertising. The real challenge is to find positive ways to engage consumers, which enhances their lives and builds business for clients.


Thanks to Jon Miller for this story. Jon is visiting a job centre next week.

New York street artists Faile and Bast have a new hyperactive exhibition at London’s Lazarides gallery: Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. The space will be transformed into an interactive arcade game installation, with the games themselves bespoke to the show and covered in the artists’ signature pop-comic-advertising style of murals, collage, and urban interventions. The attention to detail the artists have paid to the exhibit is revealed in the arcade game tokens, which are specially minted for the occasion with Bast rocking a Darth Vader mask whilst carrying a baby on one side of the coin marked Lon 2010 and Faile’s side marked ‘86.


Watch a video from the show here.


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References:
Arrested Motion
PSFK

Jean brands love a good manifesto and Diesel’s latest is Be Stupid. The manifesto sees ’stupid’ pitted against ’smart’, with smart referring to the conformist and prudent, and ’stupid’ to the bold, audacious, and creative. There’s an unarguable logic to this campaign for embracing one’s stupidity. Stupid is watching apples (Newton + gravity); flying kites in a thunderstorm (Franklin + electricity). The campaign is backed by a series of posters each showing examples of people ‘acting stupid’, though they don’t really show the depth of thought. In addition, Diesel is trying to recruit ’stupid people’ to be part of a forthcoming music video that will feature the new collection. In a time when recession’s hitting Diesel’s audience and making us all more serious and cautious, this is a great cultural antidote.


Created by Anomaly, the campaign continues Diesel’s noisy and controversy-seeking advertising, which we’re big fans of. It’s another perspective, another way of thinking – a stupid way of thinking that highlights the notion that people don’t have to conform to other people’s so called ‘smart thinking’. That it’s good to break rules, be idle, go mental.


Thanks to Gavin and sarah for this story.


References:
Creative Review

The great Trans-Siberian Railway trip from Moscow to Vladivostok is 9,000km long, crosses two continents, 12 regions, 87 cities, and lasts an incredible 150 hours. Not all of us have the holiday time or the desire to sit on a train for 150 hours. So, a joint project by Google and Russian Railways now allows people to experience this epic journey from the comfort of their armchair. The route has been geotagged and embedded with YouTube footage in Google Maps. This allows users to move the train’s position along the route or simply click on a starred location to access the most picturesque moments from the journey. You can also select a soundtrack such as the ‘rumble of wheels’ or an audio book of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, all of which accompany the immersive imagery and fascinating stories along the route. In our Plane Stupid era, we wonder whether virtual travel will become an accepted mode of travel.


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References:
Creative Review
PSFK

From Jackie O to Sam Cam, fashion has proven itself to be a useful tool for making governments popular. The Chechnyan government seems to have adopted this strategy in hiring a catwalk model to help promote a more light-hearted image of the war-torn country, better known for controlling its subjects through murder and torture. Canadian model Chrystal Callahan writes a state blog called Grozny Gossip and hosts her own chat show Highlights of the Week with Chrystal Callahan, on state-controlled television. Features on fashion, beauty and frothy topics are mixed in with tributes to Chechnya’s president Kadyrov. Callahan’s latest blogpost advises citizens in a typically airhead way, to stop being nasty to each other and listen to Rhianna instead.


Thanks to Paula Bjork for this story.


References:
Radio Free Europe

The BBC’s R&DTV is a pilot show built for the Internet era and designed to be shareable, remix-able and redistributed. The latest episode from the online video series features interviews with speakers at TEDx Manchester (a local version of the famous TED conferences). What’s really interesting is how the BBC is using the show itself as a platform to explore and experiment with different ways of creating and distributing content. It intends to demonstrate that you can create content inexpensively with an off the shelf kit, and by making it shareable and remixable, it encourages viewers to behave more like active participants – to edit, customise and improve upon the content. Each episode will be available in 3 formats: a brief 5-minute video, a deeper 30-minute video, and the Asset Bundle, containing all the footage that didn’t make the final edit.


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.

Most of us spend most of our time dealing with (relatively) big budgets and big organisations. So it’s great to work with people running small businesses, it’s a different perspective, and hopefully valuable for them. Which is why we really like the idea of Ogilvy’s “pop-up agency” (though we’re really bored of the word pop-up). The Idea Shop as its called, enables staff to work for free for local businesses and projects that might not otherwise be able to afford the agency’s fees. Volunteers from Ogilvy Group UK can advise on advertising, marketing, PR, digital, social media, strategy, direct marketing, branding, design and copywriting.’


At Mother, we run quarterly “Brand Clinics” with UnLtd, a kind of venture capital fund working with social entrepreneurs. We also ran advice sessions at last year’s SHINE conference for social entrepreneurs, and we’ve been invited back this year. We’ve met some great people doing this, and everyone enjoys working on it.


The Idea Shop is only open for a few days (being a pop-up agency). It would be nice to see more of this kind of thing – agencies reaching out into the community and finding new outlets for creative thinking.


Thanks to Jon Miller for this story.

Business guru and Al Gore speechwriter Daniel H. Pink, started his RSA talk the other week by giving things away. A ham and cheese sandwich to the man in the second row. £10 to a man whom he asks to stand up and plug his book to the webcam live streaming the event. These are both demonstrations of motivation or drive. Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money. Pink’s premise is that such 20th century carrot-and-stick incentive systems do not work for 21st century knowledge work. Infact, such incentive systems actually make knowledge workers perform worse when tasks require cognitive skills. He argues that the secret to high performance and satisfaction can be found in the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things and do better by ourselves.


Pink demonstated his theory with the following examples:


Zappos.com

Read more »