Winston

Good old Ray Winston! Tough, bluff, authentic and ready to kill someone at any moment. No wonder he played Henry VIII.... West Ham's marketing team did very well in signing up his services for this teaser for next seasons strip. When it comes to celebrity endorsements then this is a winner. And thank goodness Vinnie Jones never played for the Hammers....

iPhone vs Nokia N97 .......no contest.

I've read countless articles recently touting the new Nokia N97 as being a potential iPhone killer. In my opinion, what the articles fail to appreciate is that it's really nothing, or very little to do with the handsets features and useability. Rather, it’s about the total user experience. The iPhone, for all its beauty and shortcoming, is the golden key to the treasures the lie in the Apps store. This is where the real richness of customer experience lies. Together, the iPhone + the Apps store combined that delivers Apple iPhone users a superior, customisable user experience. The N97 + Ovi don't come close...but then there's Intel

I love it when you come across an article that inspires you, when you find someone who thinks the same way you do, or in this case ‘you think like they do.’ The Fast Company - Design Thinking article with David Kelley does just that.

Ideo's Design Thinking ‘is a means of problem solving that uses design methodologies to tap into a deep reservoir of opportunity.’ It’s made up of 3 Phases Inspiration, Iteration and Storytelling.
Kelley talks about the realisation that the early phases....understanding, observation, brainstorming, and prototyping is what differentiates Ideo from a bunch of management consultants …That’s what I’ve been trying to say about Mammal ! (but not well) .

Design thinking is unashamedly human-needs centric, messy and non-linear due mainly to design challenges typically being inherently complex and deserving more than a cookie cutter step-by-step approach to resolve problems.

Design thinking is about approaching the problem from a design perspective, it looks to broaden the number of possible solutions first well before drilling down to a solution, it’s about breaking a problem part before putting it back together in a totally new way.

It makes sense, total sense. And it works.

Next Stop - The house of pain (now just a nagging toothache)

This was once a winning station ..............

Life on Mars

Marketing men are quite naturally to be thanked for Easter Eggs appear in the shops the day after Boxing Day. But it seems that the commercial channels are now using the same tactic, by which I mean having a 'Lead time of at least a decade or three to plug their newest tele-visual offerings.

Forget 'Hot off the Satellite' or 'Event Bigness' (clearly that one approved by some hapless TV exec after a very long lunch...) the latest weapon to get us salivating at the prospect of yet another British actor playing an American ie 'House', 'Lie To Me', 'Life' 'Eli Stone' etc is to start showing spots what seems like MONTHS before the first actual episode has aired. I watched the plugs watching plugs for the US version of 'Life on Mars' (and no the lead actor isn't British. He's Irish) forever.

It's a blurry line to create the 'Buzz' without raising expectations too high and diminishing the impact. When is the hype over extended?

Bombs Gone

I confess I have a small addiction to old black n white British war movies. Not something I imagine Paris Hilton or Mylie Cyrus suffer from. Thus I have probably seen the classic 'The Dambusters' (a re-make by 'Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson is in the pipeline) about 98 million times. Which leads me to this wonderful spot from a good few years back from beer giants Carling for their 'Black Label'. The tagline 'I Bet He Drinks Carling Black Label' was used for years in their TV campaigns and for me (and my addiction) this one is the pick of the bunch...

No to Jako

Market research can be a tricky business. But sometimes the results speak for themselves. I did a quick survey round the Mammal office and asked each staff member whether having a picture of Glen Jakovich shoved for no apparent reason on ad's for garage doors would make them want to buy doors from that supplier. The reply was 100% no. There you go.