is a marketing strategy consultancy based in London, UK. We help companies and organisations meet fresh marketing challenges: new launches, new audiences, new directions.
This is a collection of observations, anecdotes and ideas that exercise and excite us at Studio Staufenberger.
If you want to get in touch, you can reach us at john at staufenberger dot com.
Afore the Christmas break our friends at Lean Mean Fighting Machine invited us to an evening they were putting on to publicise some work they'd done for Samsung.
The Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin is the big title of a tidy little site they'd put together to promote the Pixon camera phone. Visitors to the site clicked on the most interesting aspect of each new photo and thereby determined street photographer Turpin's next subject as he hopped around the globe.
I confess I went along for a chat and some free festive champagne expecting the photography to be, well, OK. I should stress that this is in no way a comment on Mr Turpin's abilities - I'd not heard of him before - nor on those of the Lean Mean team who, as we all know, were voted Interactive Agency of The Year at Cannes last summer.
But how often is content created on behalf of brands actually any good? Not often, and that's not because it's done by a bunch of hacks. It's because creating content that clicks with an audience is really hard. If it wasn't, every film, every novel, every pop song would be a blockbuster.
So I wasn't expecting the earth to move. But I was really pleasantly surprised at just how good much of the exhibition was. Here are a few highlights.
Some of these shots seem so right that I wonder if they weren't staged. But I don't really care. They're good, aren't they?
Despite tiring of documenting the continuing rise of the fixie (The Sunday Times, of all organs, recently moaned about the predictability of the urban hipster's most likely choice of wheels), we thought this was worth sharing.
What is it? It's the Obamabike, of course. Obviously.
Besides the fundraising aspect, what sets this apart from the many fixie collabos is the presence of Mr Funderburgh's intricate pattern design, as you can see here. It looks so good I wouldn't want to ride it.
But what tickled us most was that this could only be for Obama, couldn't it? The fixie is such a signifier of youthful, urban cool that you'd struggle to imagine a similar fundraising effort for McCain.
A while back Russell wondered why there aren't more case studies of failures. Case stumbles, perhaps. Crash studies?
So in the spirit of sharing, here's my contribution: a failure I prepared earlier. Four
years earlier, to be precise. The fact that it has taken me this
long to get round to sharing goes some way to illustrate what a
fiasco it turned out to be.
The background was this. Confident that there is strength in
numbers, I convinced a few friends that we should pool our various
creative endeavours to make a single noteworthy confection. Like when the Power Rangers come together to make...Megawhatsit. It would combine elements of drama, music and design, all
wrapped up in an online narrative extravaganza.
What we ended up with was a story wrapped round a story wrapped
round another story (that was spiked for legal reasons). All of which
were completely fictitious...but presented as fact.
The central narrative was a shaggy dog story about a (fictitious) lost Herbie Hancock score to Dog Day Afternoon. This was nixed by Hancock's lawyers, when I naively contacted them to get it cleared.
Around this was wrapped a story about J, a dealer who buys and
sells "cool shit": 20th Century furniture, vintage haute couture,
super-rare records (such as the master tapes to an unreleased Herbie Hancock soundtrack).
We billed him as an Arthur Daly for the iPod Generation.
And all this sat within a behind-the-scenes depiction of an aspiring director, William Wilson, making a documentary about J and his globetrotting
exploits buying and selling stuff. This was played out, in realtime, on the crew messageboard, which should have been password protected but - due to "technical issues" - was open for all to see.
As all these people were supposed to exist, it made sense that they had lives elsewhere on the web. So J was active on ebay, and his live auctions had links to the production company website. The production crew posted as themselves on Shooting People. And William researched the provenance of the "lost" soundtrack on the messageboards at imdb, Gilles Peterson's Worldwide/Brownswood and Straight No Chaser.
Confused? You won't be after...well, you probably will be. But here's the trailer for the documentary to get you started.
If it happened in 2008 it would probably be called an ARG (even though it's not a game), but this was 2004 and I didn't know what an ARG was;
and there was an even smaller audience of people looking to decode and unpick stories
distributed across the web. There was no
YouTube, or user-friendly flash-based video utilities in general;
everything was self-contained video files this, codecs that. Blogs and
messageboard platforms existed, of course, but for a reason that must have made sense at the time but escapes me
now, I chose to code a site to look like a messageboard. Sheesh.
So, yes, it didn't work. But in failing, I learnt. Specifically:
Lesson 1: keep it simple. The narrative I cooked up
was too convoluted (a story within a story within another story?) and
too complicated to have any hope of gaining an audience. Even our
friends, who invested more effort than they should, were a little baffled. This contradicts the current vogue for pretty dense ARG structures. But an ARG - as a promotional vehicle for a self-contained piece of entertainment, be it a movie or TV series or book - can afford to be challenging: it's for the obsessive fans. If an ARG - or something akin to one - becomes the entertainment itself, then it needs a simple core. IMHO, as they say.
Lesson 2:
DIY is great, but not if quality is compromised. Despite being a collaborative effort, I didn't
collaborate enough. I ended up doing much more than I could cope with to
the point where I was neglecting the quality, on so many levels. On any team project, half the challenge is assembling a group of talented individuals who can work together. We did get great individual talents. But I should've found another five, at least.
Lesson 3: get the seeding right. Whilst the messageboard approach was good, it wasn't enough. The whole thing was only ever going to have limited appeal, so it was important to expose it to as many eyeballs as possible in order to winnow out the few who might appreciate it. In fairness, we got a pretty global crowd from the links on J's ebay listings, but it wasn't enough by far.
Lesson 4: be honest. Today, this is online 101, but back then I was seduced by the idea that people might think these people really do exist and that their private messageboard could be accessed and read. Of course, what is important is that people are aware that they are are looking at a piece of fiction. Even if it looks very real, they need to know it's not. People don't like being hoodwinked and far prefer to feel they are in on the subterfuge.
Did we get anything right? Well, I'd like to think so. But perhaps that's for another post.
In the meantime, for those interested, the production company messageboard within which
the above, and the other video clips sat, along with the various to-ing and
fro-ing of the crew, has been dusted off and can found here.
As implied above, having taken on far too much myself, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Or, more accurately, I collapsed under the weight of what I took on, and never completed it. Hopefully, putting this here will shame me into getting it finished.
Lastly, I should credit all the fantastic individuals involved:
Seamus Hayes, frontman of the brilliant Shuffle, played J. (And Shuffle provided the music to the trailer, above.)
Monica Yam, ex-Shuffle singer and DJ (Cheeky Yam and The Hunter Gatherers), played Milla the journalist.
Ace designer Martin Kitchen created the beautiful William Wilson Productions identity.
Ben Beer, a very talented singer-songwriter, played the imaginatively named Ben.
Couldn't resist this. Simple proposition. Take high profile DJ and stick him in an incongruous situation. Hilarity ensues.
It's yet another example of the BBC getting things right. It's a small, almost throwaway thing. But it's new and surprising, it's entertaining and engaging. And people can and have been distributing it.
Well, it could be a little more distributable, if there's such a word. The only potential criticism of this is that I've had to do a cheeky grab, rather than embed a link. Sending a URL in an email is a bit 2003 when it comes to online video, isn't it?
In fairness, the iPlayer is beginning to allow embedding, like this Foals clip (via OU). But it just feels a bit wonky. Perhaps someone could put us straight: it's not about placating advertisers so is it a rights thing? In which case, why not offer embedding across the board (from the beginning) and disable it where necessary?
It's been a while since we posted about an inspirational figure outside the world of brands and planning. It's been a while since we posted anything, come to think of it.
In an effort to correct both, here's a few words about mustachioed film don, Walter Murch.
A sound designer and film editor, Murch has worked on numerous landmark movies and received three Oscars for his troubles, including two for The English Patient (for the sound mix and film editing).
The reason we like him so much is that he's a thinker and a doer. In the process of getting things done (like editing The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) he's contributed much to the process of film-making. Here are a couple of highlights.
When sound mixing THX 1138, a movie he co-wrote with George Lucas, Murch stumbled upon something he came to refer to as The Law of Two and a Half.
The future world of the film includes robot policemen, 600 pound chunks of crime-fighting metal. Obviously, the actors' footsteps didn't convey this, so Murch had to replace the sound of their footsteps with something more robot-like. Having recorded something fitting, he went about replacing each robot footstep on the soundtrack individually. Happily for Murch, he noticed that the human brain gets confused by more than a few things happening at once. Two, to be precise. He realised that he needed only to sync the footsteps if there were one or two robots in shot. But for three or more, our brains can't cope. We cannot tell whether the footsteps of three robots are in sync or not. So for scenes with three or more robots (of which there are quite a few) he simply needed to add a random number of footstep sounds. They didn't need to be synced, they just needed to seem right for the group.
He concluded that between two and three, the brain moves from perceiving individual things to perceiving a group. He points out that the chinese ideogram for forest comprises the symbols for three trees, implying that an ideogram with two trees would be just that, two trees. The addition of a third tree moves the meaning up a level from individual things to group. That's the Law of Two and a Half.
Another of our favourite Murch interventions occurred few years later, when he was working on The Godfather. During post-production, a crisis developed over Nino Rota's score. Studio boss Robert Evans had a problem with it. Not just a bit of it, all of it. He wanted to sack Rota and get Henry Mancini to pen a completely new score. Apparently, Murch discussed things with Evans and discovered that "the pea under the mattress" was the horse's head scene. Rota's music for the scene was a waltz that contrasted heavily with the horror of the action and Evan's negative reaction to this was colouring his opinion of the entire score. Murch's solution was to duplicate and layer the music - out of sync - so that it sounded more dissonant, and darker, than originally scored.
This was pretty revolutionary at the time, but it did the trick. Evans was placated and Rota kept the gig. And the film kept what was to become one of the most recognisable scores ever.
I could go on, about how Murch devised a notation system for editing movies...
...or how he re-edited Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (including the famous opening shot) based on a 58 page memo that Welles sent to Universal after he'd been kicked off the film.
But this has dragged on for long enough. For more Murch-related interestingness, you could do worse than check The Conversations, four interviews with Murch by Michael Ondaatje.
And the transcript of a Q&A with Mark Cousins in Projections 6.
...both of which provided content for this post.
I couldn't resist one last thing, though. A few years ago, the two halves - the sound and pictures - of the first known recording of film with sound, an experiment conducted by Thomas Edison and William Disckson in 1894 or 1895, were rediscoverd. At the time, the experiment failed because they didn't understand syncronisation, and the two halves were separated and presumed lost. (There's a bit more background here).
When the two pieces were retrieved, who was asked to marry them together? Yep, Walter Murch.
Any competent editor could have done it but such is Murch's standing that he was the only person for such a historically significant job.
Sitting in Kipferl the other afternoon, we were chuffed to see a Google Street View car come past. Only for it to be pulled over by the City of London police. After a brief conversation through the window, the driver got out, turned off the camera and waited while the copper took a long time to make some enquiries.
Hope that didn't scupper our chances of being immortalised online.
Last week we had an enjoyable chat with David Lubich, former editor and publisher of Soul Underground. He popped into the studio after he found us via our earlier post on the short-lived but influential magazine.
One of his stories stood out for us. It concerned he design of the first three issues. In the early days of the magazine David had a partner, Darren, who worked for London Underground. Apparently, Darren used LU's in-house design facilities to set these early issues, which explains why the Soul Underground started out in LU's own font, Johnston.
However, the powers at LU soon caught on to the moonlighting and asked him to desist. Such was Darren's dedication to the magazine that he continued to use LU's facilities. Despite two written disciplinary warnings, he still didn't stop. Then they sacked him.
David has promised to set up some sort of archive of the magazine's three and a bit years. When he does, we'll be sure to post a link.
While we were in the Netherlands, we took the train when we needed to get out of Amsterdam. Anyone who's wrestled with the touch screen ticket machines at London's Waterloo, will understand why we found the machines in Amsterdam Centraal so amazing. For those unfamiliar with Dutch Railways ticket machines, this is how they work:
Everything sorted in just one screen. How good is that?
They've kindly put the software online so that you can practise buying tickets. How thoughtful. Though I wonder if people actually use it, other than people interested in interaction design and usability issues.
The NS website is also refreshingly easy to use. When looking up a train time, it even gives you the departure (and arrival) platform. A really tiny, but hugely useful detail.
We're clearly not the only people to be impressed by these ticket machines, there have been a few comments at design and usability blogs. One of these suggested that the design was a bit boring in a good way (meaning it's simple and efficient), which is an interesting way of looking at. Although I suspect that rather than boredom, we should be designing for invisibility: the point where usability becomes transparent and draws no attention to itself, either positively or negatively.
It wasn't all work, work, work in Amsterdam. We did a bit of cruising round on the Sparta, pretending to be locals. Here are three retail establishments that we visited along the way.
1. Nijhof and Lee is a lovely bookshop that specialises in design, typography, architecture, advertising, new media, that sort of thing. They stock out of print titles as well as new.
And, for fans of graphic design from the Netherlands, they have a well stocked line of posters by dutch masters such as Wim Crouwel. Here's one of his earliest efforts for the Stedelijk Museum from 1964.
If you fancy getting your hands on one of these posters, it's well worth making a detour to their shop next time you're in Amsterdam as only a fraction of their stock is online.
2. Suit Supply have just opened in London, but we thought we'd take the opportunity to see the dutch chain in its native habitat.
It's an interesting and energetic brand: you can get an off the peg suit for £200-£250 and made to measure for a bit more, depending on fabric.
And to underline their tailoring credentials, each shop has a chap doing alterations on the spot.
If your alteration isn't completed within 30 minutes, it's free. Not bad.
3. Star Bikes is where we hired our bikes. It's where our visit began and ended. Except for the train trip to and from the airport, but that doesn't really count. It doesn't look like they sell bikes, it's just rental all the way.
They'll also do you a picnic to pack on your bike if you want to make an excursion somewhere. The staff are super nice and super chilled. Very Amsterdam.
Recent Comments