The Staufenberger Repository

Zooomr through The Portal

*** Update: this might not work in IE. Time to try out Mozilla's Firefox. ***

The Flickr-alike, Zooomr, has just released a new feature called Portals. It's a way to embed one photo within another. You can either scroll around the embedded picture in the window or click to zoom through to it.

I'm not sure if it's really that revolutionary (flickr enables you to add a link to another picture on a notes tag), but the video (on TechCrunch and the Zooomr blog) makes it look pretty exciting.

Anyway, we thought the best way to judge was to have a play. So here's a set of photos of a short journey  we took earlier today across central London.  If you click the picture above it'll take you through to Zooomr where you can follow our route. And I've added some notes pointing out a few planner/bloggers too. (Anyone who wants out, just let me know).

No doubt flickr will be there very soon, which makes you wonder whether things like Zooomr really have a enough distinctiveness to make it in the long run. Or rather, there is distinctiveness in the small things (the language versions, Portals, GeoTagging) but whether that adds up to enough distinctiveness is another matter.

Time will tell.

Cream of the crop

Kendall Tarrant were very kind and invited Yusuf and me to this year's Cream showcase of new creative talent.

Staufenberger friends, Martin & Theo and Ollie & Janson, were showing alongside a bunch of other young and hungry teams.

Each team got a space to set up their book and other examples of their work. And invitees sauntered round admiring it and chatting to the hopefuls. (The picture above is of one hopeful pair's work. The tape on the wall overlooking their elaborate display says: elaborate displays mask weak books. Normally I would read this as a self-deprecating bit of irony, but during the evening they were overheard slagging off their peers. And I don't just mean criticising their haircuts. Tut tut, boys. What goes around, comes around.)

Anyway, various creative bigwigs turned up. We spotted Graham Fink, Steve Henry and Tony Davidson. Rumour has it Trevor Beattie went to the ballet instead, but I reckon he was just busy on a pitch.

And us Staufenbergers wondered around watching everything fom a distance. Here are a few of our observations.

Cream 2: who needs planners?

What's always intrigued me about student books is, who does the planning?

Having hung out with a few I now know that the aspirant creative team is expected to provide their own strategic jumping off point. Good for them. And a team's planning nouse is often covered during a book crit. With a senior-ish creative. Interesting.

Anyway, what was interesting about Cream was that some of the teams were providing themselves with some pretty sound strategic foundations. Not ones that Richard would be happy with, mind you. But no worse than the majority of ad campaigns planned by pricey planners.

The above scamps - from Aidan McClure and Laurent Simon, I think - are a good illustration of this. Three brands, three clear strategies:

Kia Cars: utilitarian doesn't have to be emotion free.
No one will buy a Kia for the status it conveys, nor its sporty performance. But they probably will because it reliably gets you from here to there. The car's not important, so the argument would go, it's what you do with it that counts. Hence, the above execution: a line from A to B that traces a seaside scene. Nice thinking, but I have a problem with the creative expression of it: the line-from A-to-B-tracing-something else feels really tired. Or is that just me?

Lotto: however slim the odds, you might win.
The ridiculously slim odds put many people off playing the lottery. Strategy: remind people that weird improbable shit happens. Execution: true stories of things happening against high odds. (This one tells the apparently true story of an old guy who lost his false teeth in the Atlantic only to find them again in a cod that he caught two years later.)

Iceland: you never know when you might need emergency rations.
A generic claim admittedly, it obviously applies to all frozen food brands and retailers, but who better to make a generic claim about frozen food than a retailer named Iceland?

We've talked before about collapsing the planning and creative functions into one. People might assume that this is a badly disguised attempt by frustrated planners to justify writing lines and drawing pictures. But given the evidence above, it is far more likely to be the creatives who add planning to their armoury than vice versa. 

Cream 3: Mystery Tattoos

Staufenberger chums, Janson and Ollie, put on a good show. Rather than having an elaborate display, they opted for a cunningly appealing sideshow to lure people to their book's stand.

Hence the Mystery Tattoo Booth: whilst flicking through their book you stuck your arm through a hole in the booth and got a random tattoo.

Of course, they didn't do the tattoos themselves. They outsourced that bit to a friend who could actually draw. Smart thinking, chaps!

So, nothing too convoluted, just a nice idea that created a talking point during the evening as people, - inevitably - compared their random tats.

(Incidentally, in addition to their blog, they've put their book(s) on flickr.)

Cream 4: the kids aren't online

Flyers Hosted on Zooomr

Whilst we were there, I conducted a bit of flaky research.

Every team, I think, had a business cardy, flyery kind of thing on with their contact details on. I collected them and took this fetching picture. (Apologies to Emma and Candi, Creamiest Cream Team, for missing them out of the picture).

Knowing that Martin & Theo and Ollie & Janson were webbed up, I was interested in seeing how many of the others had a web presence of some sort. There were too many people there to make it possible  for everyone to properly look at the work. So it made sense - even just on the basis of last night - to have somewhere that people could visit to peruse a team's work.

So looking at all these cards, how many do you think include a URL?

10?

5?

2?

Nope. None, not even M&T and O&J. And they have their own sites, the muppets.

In their defense, Cream is a bit of a beauty parade, really. By the time a team is considered for the showcase they should've already met all the people that matter. Inclusion here is a nice validation and a little extra nudge in the right direction.

But as someone who doesn't matter, I want to see a site. I want to see new ideas. And I want old ones evolve. But that's just me.

Staufenberger Rides

I could justify this picture by claiming that everyday we're bombarded with emails asking us what bikes we ride or as an explanation as to why Patrick insists on wearing twenty year old woollen tops bearing obscure Italian brands.  But I actually just like posting pictures of bikes on the internet.

The wonderful, weird web

An oft-cited reason why it makes sense for businesses to blog is that it helps optimise your search results. Here at Staufenberger Towers we've been blogging for only a few months and we're already enjoying modest results.

What we weren't expecting was that it would make finding us quite so easy.

This morning, our stats showed someone had visited The Repository via a Google search. As this is a fairly unusual occurence, I clicked the link to see what the search terms were. This is what I found:

Perhaps they really were looking for lil' old us. It clearly states our surnames on the search results and the person still clicked through. In which case, isn't it amazing that Google found us? Perhaps I'm just one of Maurice's digital immigrants, but I find that really impressive.

And yet part of me thinks I'm being hugely presumptious thinking that this person really was looking for Yusuf and me. Let's face it, there must be other Yusufs and Patricks who hang out together. You know, Google's quite a popular search tool.

In which case, I want to meet them. Or at least know of them. So if you know of a Yusuf and Patrick who aren't Yusuf and me, drop us a line.

Small things

Like a few others, we've been bleating on about the importance of the small stuff as well as the big things.

A while back I mentioned Topshop shoeboxes. Here they are:

Now, having worked for a large clothing retailer in the past, I know that even these seemingly small things can take on alpine proportions when it comes to making them happen. The point is that in the grand scheme of things these are little, relatively unimportant, details.

But aren't they great? You get a handy little handle, a slidey little compartment and - for those who like that sort of thing - an illustration by Daisy de Villeneuve.

As the kids might say, sweet.