The Staufenberger Repository

Afterlife Afterthought

I'd rather only talk about work I like rather than be negative, but sometimes you just got to let it out.  I saw this on the Creative Review blog.  It's a 'viral' for the new ITV series 'Afterlife'.

I'm all for doing stuff on the street and engaging consumers but you have to do it with some sort of wit or intelligence.  For the last 20 years, the London Dungeon has had a guy dressed as monk pretend to be a statue only to then scare the hell of Italian tourists when he suddenly lunges at them.  I remember when he did to my mum when I was about 12. It was quite funny then.

No Skating in Spitalfields

Most signs are there to be followed. When I was a skater I would have ignored this sign, my mate Luke would have taken a big fat marker pen to it.  But today I admired it.

Who ever designed it obviously made the effort to have the skater actually perform a trick, a front-side grab. I imagine other skaters also thought, "Nice sign, but I'm gonna skate anyway'.  1/10 for effect, 9/10 for effort.

Do good things

At the age of fourteen I joined the communist party.  My old self would be ashamed of me 18 years on, selling stuff for the man, a foot soldier for capitalism. For years at dinner parties I'd squirm in my seat dreading the question: so what do you do? I'd be praying that in a room full of people who'd just given up two years of their lives to help some poor South American kids there'd be some city boy who'd make me look good.

In the past, I've managed to ease my conscience by reminding myself that marketing has the power to do good and doing the odd bit of COI work can help as well. In the ongoing task of conscience easing, Staufenberger have joined forces with two doctors, Dr Kanwal Kalim and Dr Geraint Lewis.  The aim is to marry specialist medical knowledge with communication understanding with the intention of working together with the public and private sector to promote public health.  Think about something like Jamie Oliver's school dinners as great example of the communication of public health.

Kanwal and Geraint are also writing a revision guide for the Faculty of Public Health exams and have asked for our help in designing a cover. Instead of using Patrick's(limited but tries his best) Mac skills we thought we'd throw it open to anyone wants to have a go. The book is being published by the Royal Society of Medicine who never has any money to invest in their covers, so there's no cash in it. Below is the current working cover:

So have you got an idea about what to do? Maybe you've got a picture lying around on flickr that would be perfect. To help a bit more, below is the commonly accepted definition of public health:

"The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through organised efforts of society" Sir Donald Acheson

Send all entries to John. If used, we promise you'll get a credit inside and the ability to sleep slightly better at night

Principals' principles

Apparently, a principle isn't truly a principle until it costs you something.

The main reason we set up Staufenberger was to have more control over how we work and what we work on. Since opening for business, we've exercised plenty of the former but not so much of the latter. And when we have said no to stuff it's been because what was needed is not really what we do. Until yesterday.

Yesterday we turned down some work. Not because the client needed something we don't do. But because we'd kind of agreed not to work on the sector in question. I say "kind of" because, coincidentally, we'd had a conversation about it the day before and, without really making a decision, had sort of agreed, for different reasons, that we wouldn't.

Before we called the client to say "thanks, but no thanks", I felt stupid. Like we were being belligerent teenagers, naively making a stand on something irrelevant.

But afterwards, it felt good. And it still does.

The cash would've been nice, though.

Sneaker Hunting

When I was a kid my dad used to travel a lot on business. He usually bought me some cheap t-shirt from the airport that wouldn't last longer than the first wash. However, whenever he came back from the US that was a different story.  He knew I loved Nike, so he'd simply walk into the nearest shop and ask for the latest Nikes. It didn't really matter what they looked like because I was safe in the knowledge that I had at least 6 months sometimes even a year of exclusivity before you could buy them in the Wood Green branch of Olympus. Even if you went 'up west' they wouldn't be available.

That was the beginning of my trainer fetish. By the early nineties I was cold calling sports shops in places like Framlingham asking if they happened to have a pair of Air Jordan II from '86 gathering dust in a store room somewhere. By the late nineties it was all over. The bottom had fallen out of trainer hunting for traditionalists. Anyone armed with a internet connection could get hold of any colour way Airmax 95's from anywhere in the world and Nike had begun re-issuing everything they could possible think of....the hard work and therefore the fun had gone.

But despite my hunting days being behind me there's a whole new bunch of kids online hunting for those sneaker exclusives and to help them they have Kicks Finder.

I was put onto this by Fatlace. It's a visual search tool that allows you to search ebay for trainers using catalogue pictures of the trainers themselves. It even has an RSS feed and handy Bape Finder for those that like that ape stuff. I'm glad this wasn't around when I was a kid, I'd never have been able to afford a decent pair of trainers...even in denim.