What The Tweet Is Going On?

Hundreds of people on Twitter are changing their profile pictures into a somewhat provoking Big Ben Hand Gesture.

Why? Because we asked them to.

Well, us and Rich Fulcher.

We can't tell you more yet, but we will soon. Stay tuned!

Brilliant PR. 37signals Now Worth $100 billion

37Signals.com sells software.

They sell software to small businesses.

This makes their global number of potential customers...eh...millions.

Their software is chepa, easy to install and use, but all that means nothing if people don't know your name and don't know where to find you.

They solved a great part of this problem with a (we estimate) 20 cents picture and a 20 cents email press release.

Their gimmick: they sold 0,000000001% of the company for $1.

Which, acoording to Silycon Vally Hysteria Standards, makes 37Signals.con worth $100 billion.

Wired magazine wrote about, thousands of blogs posted it, even more people tweeted it.

37signals.com is now a better known name and anyone searching for software on Google is much more likely to run in to them.

20 cents and a good idea.

Less budget, more effort. Just the way we like it at Lateral.

The Most Inspiring Video Ever

Yes it really is 1 hour, 16 minutes and 27 seconds long.

Watch the first 5 minutes and see if you can get yourself to stop.

Brave Brands Are Better At Social Media

At Lateral we are huge Skittle fans.

We have watched every Skittles commercial that was made for the last 3 years at least a hundred times.

We even did a post on it.

Watching the commercials, we immediately knew this is a brand (client)who is unafraid.

Turns out, Skittles is even braver than we thought.

They are showing everything that is posted about the brand (videos, pictures, comments) on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube on their own website skittles.com

And when we say that they are showing everything, we mean everything.

Last time we looked at their website one of the comments on a skittles youtube videos was "I like M&M's better".

A lot of marketers in the USA are critizing the way Skittles sort of puts their brand in the hands of consumers.

We say Skittles is very smart and we are not alone in this.

Only 2 other brands have more fans on Facebook than Skittles.

We Made This But We Can't Tell You Why (yet)

In colaboration with our Chicago sister agency The Escape Pod, we made this.

We can't say what it is for yet, but if everything goes well, you will see this image a lot pretty soon.

We Have Got To Work With These Guys

In a world where the average commercial is a boring product demonstration lacking all credibility, an almost funny joke or a bunch of famous athletes wearing shoe X or Y to make you buy the same, it is always nice to see something that is totally fresh.

This video for Universiteit Twente by Buro Knapzak makes all other commercials look like they were made 20 years ago.

When the right project comes up, we will give make sure to give these guys a call.

Universiteit Twente from Buro Knapzak on Vimeo.

Playing With Sand. Always A good Idea.

We love what Theo Watson, Thijs Bierstekers and Karian Weijers are doing (the video below is a test which took place at september 4) for the new Dutch Film Museum.

They could have played it boring and safe by doing a (media wise expensive) poster or print ad announcing the coming of the new Film Museum, but they chose to make themselves and their clients budget work harder.

On the site where the new museum will be built they use the only material there (sand) to show the world what the new Film Museum will look like.

As fellow Dutch men, we are proud. And a little bit jealous.

Before Advertising Consider Your Other Options. (And Check Your Basics)

At Lateral we have many many many many theories on advertising.

(yes theories, because advertising never was and never will become an exact science. Not only because there is creativity involved, but also because the damn world just keeps changing too fast)

One of our little theories is that advertising is often not the best way to spend a communication budget.

If possible one should try to get word of mouth, which is much more powerful because it comes from people who have their friends best interest in mind.

Zappos.com does a great job at this. Instead of spending money on advertising, they spend money on extreme service, which causes people to recommend zappos.com to their friends.

PR is also preferable to advertising because it comes from an impartial if not critical source.

Virgin does a great job at this. Not only does Virgin save millions in media spendings, we are convinced Virgin's messages are received more positive because consumers do not turn on their "Beware It's Advertising Alert".

Another thing we hold to be much more powerful than advertising is realy realy great product design.

With a design like this study from Tai Chiem, Playstation 4 sales will benefit from advertising, but definitely not depend on it.

Evian Saves Money on Paul Smith

At Lateral we have many many many wonderful books about advertising.

We only look into 3 of those books regularly.

The first 2 books are decades old: George Lois' book and Bill Bernbach's book.

We look into Bernbach's book to remind us of basic ad wisdom like "if your ad goes unnoticed everything else is academic".

We look into Lois'book to remind us to be brave and ambitious.

The third book however, was published recently.

It's called Advertising Next.

There is not a single TV or print ad in it, because the book is all about advertisers and agencies who have managed to reach a lot of consumers without a huge media budget.

Every campaign in the book is different (some are products, services, virals, events etc) but there is one common denominator:
they use a part of the huge budget they do not have to spend on media, to make sure everything looks and feels great.

In other words: less money, more effort.

One of the great examples in the book is Evian, which collaborates with a new designer every year to create a new special Evian bottle.

These bottles become collector's items instantly, turning the lucky few who own one into Evian fans forever, and the rest of us in to Evian admirers.

Evian's latest collaboration is with designer Paul Smith.

Who surely doesn't come cheap, but surely costs less than the production and media budget of the average TV commercial of the average big brand.

The moral of this story? Drink enough water, read Advertising Next and start thinking differently.

The Most Beautiful Tea Bag EVER

Big companies like Lipton never seem to come up with exciting stuff like this...

Why not? Why can't a company with tons of R&D people do what Russian designer Nathalia Ponomareva did?

Anyway, it is the most beautiful tea bag we have ever seen. (via Fubiz)

Ridding The World Of Bad Pants

We love Pants To Poverty.

Not only because they are trying to make the world a better place by making and selling totally chemical free underwear while paying cotton farmers and factory workers a fair price, but because they are so 2010 in doing it.

Their advertising is totally social using Youtube, Flickr, Wikepedia, blogs and Twitter.

And their sales channel doesn't include a single store.

Instead they succesfully promote and sell their underwear at concerts and events.

They are a sort of charity, but the coolest charity we ever came across.

Using everything that works well for them, like pretty girls in their undies at concerts and a mysterious creature called The Panteater.

Watch the Panteater Documentary here, buy some underwear at www.pantstopoverty.com

Online World Changes The Offline World

We all know the internet is changing everything.

But when we think about it we usually think of things dissapearing, like offline travel agencies, or new inventions, like a fridge that automatically orders fresh milk.

When we think about how the online world is changing the offline world, it seems we tend to think big.

At Lateral we see thinking big as a good thing, but when it comes to trends it is usually a smart thing to look at a lot of small changes to predict big ones.

Which is why we love to spot little ways the online world is changing the offline world, like this Twitter-like offline calender made by Burak Kaynak and Cem Has.

Reinventing The Wheel

We started Lateral becuase we did not want to do just advertising anymore.

We want to solve problems for clients (or create new opportunities, but that's a dfifferent blog post).

And the harder the problem, the better we like it.

How the make a folding bike as small as possible isn't exactly our field of expertise, but we like designer Victor Aleman's appraoch. His attitude: "who says you can not fold a wheel?"

Home Printed Meals, Get Your Home Printed Meals!

At Lateral we are doing some exciting 3D printing projects with our friends at Freedom Of Creation.

The stuff we come up with together with them is amazing, because 3D printing technology not only makes new things possible, but also because it changes the way we think.

And in the future it will even change the way we cook. Check out these mindblowing Philips videos and get ready for some delicious home printed meals.




Also mind blowing: The Biosphere Homefarm

The Beatles + Xbox 360 = magnificent

What are you doing reading this? Press play!

Why We Did Giveusbacknewyork.com

A couple of years ago (we were ECD’s at JWT Amsterdam at the time) we had a little free time and created a website called giveusbacknewyork.com.

The basic idea was that New York was New Amsterdam once and there for Dutch property and we created a website and fake action group claiming it back.

We made a very simple action-group like website and put one single video on YouTube.

We also wrote some emails to bloggers, and then waited what would happen.

A lot happened.

In only 2 weeks we had over 1 million unique visitors who spent between 5-10 minutes on giveusbacknewyork.com

When the number of visitors decreased we made new YouTube videos, wrote more emails to more blogs and thought of new initiatives.

Like sending T-shirts to people in New York, who we didn’t know but who did have a Dutch surname, and getting some friends of ours in New York to plant tulips in Central Park.

Each time we initiated some new thing the number of visitors rose.

And when we tried something that didn’t work, we quickly created something else.

Eventually things got so big that the off line media started to take notice.

We were interviewed by New York newspaper and made the 8 o clock Dutch national TV news (the item lasted 8 minutes, with one million people watching).

That’s when the questions came. And the questions weren’t even directed at us, it was people asking other people questions.

Well, when we say people, we have to be more precise.

It was advertising people asking other advertising people questions.

And when people who work in advertising ask questions, they usually think they already know the answer.

The question was: “Why did they (two advertising guys) create giveusbacknewyork.com?”

And the only answer they could come up with was: they want PR for the agency and themselves.

Even Dutch advertising magazines thought this was our reason.

It wasn’t.

Our reason was that we wanted to find out what it takes to create a successful on line campaign.

And because clients were not asking us to do it, we decided to create something our selves.

We wanted to learn how to do exciting things on the internet and the only way to learn that (sorry gurus) is to actually start doing things yourself.

We wanted to learn and we did.

We learned how to promote a website using YouTube.

We learned how to promote our YouTube videos using the website.

We learned how to sell stuff by opening a web shop.

We learned how printing 200 T shirts and stickers and sending them to people can get you on national TV and can get complete strangers to put stickers all over New York .

We learned how to approach bloggers.

And how not to approach bloggers.

We learned all these things and had a lot of fun, but most of our colleagues in the advertising business thought we did it only to make a name for ourselves.

They just couldn’t think of another reason.

Which to us seems pretty weird since we are all in the thinking business.

Nike History Of Flight

At Lateral we always love to find out things about companies' and brands' history.

It's always fascinating to read how a company got started, how it struggled and succeeded.

We think we are not the only ones interested in it, and we find it amazing to see how few brands actually use their history to delight current customers and attract new ones.

Fortunately some brands do understand the power of their history, like Nike.

Visit and enjoy Jordan History Of Flight: http://www.nike.com/jumpman23/historyofflight/

A Marketing Problem Every Global Brand Has To Deal With

We all know everything you put on the web has the potential to reach billions.

So when an agency in, let’s say Belgium, does an online assignment for, let’s say Heineken, they could be reaching not only the population of Belgium (11 million) but people all over the world.

There are 2 problems with this: the first is that the message Heineken is sending to the people of Belgium may not be the message they wish to send the people in the UK or the US.

The second is that if the communication becomes popular all over the world the local agency and local marketers are not really rewarded for it.

Now we understand the importance of “one clear message”, but we do not really think the first is a big problem.

People on the internet do not receive communication in the same way as they do with, for instance, TV. It’s is not forced upon them.

They either receive it from friends or they have actively looked for it themselves.

And though the Belgium message may not be 100% in line with the US message (for instance the Belgium message might be “Brussels no 1 choice!” where the US message might be “Look cool while refreshing”) chances are small they would actually contradict each other.

The second problem, local agencies and local marketers not being rewarded for global success, is much more serious.

The best way of illustrating this, is by looking at a local web initiative that has become a global success.

One of our creative teams (at the time when we were the ECD’s at JWT Amsterdam) did a thing called “KitKat Jesus”.

Basically there had been a couple of Jesus shaped things in the news (like Jesus’ face in a tosti that was sold on ebay) which inspired the team to photo shop a Jesus shaped face in a broken KitKat bar.

They just emailed the picture to some blogs (not mentioning that it was from an ad agency of course) and things exploded from there.

Today it has over 90.000 Google results and it was printed in newspaper articles all over the world.

It was also spot on the brand’s “Have a break..theme. In fact, almost all bloggers and journalists mentioned the brand’s theme unprovoked.

But like we said, there are problems with this.

A problem could of course be that KitKat headquarters does not consider this good PR (because of religious feelings), but like we said, we consider this a minor problem.

The big problem is that things like this don’t happen often enough and that brands are wasting massive opportunities to reach millions of people at extremely low costs (the KitKat Jesus thing did not cost more than 2 hours pay for the creative team).

And the reason that they don’t happen enough is that it is just not appreciated enough.

Most ad agency account people don’t care because they don’t get paid for any success exceeding their home market and local marketers don’t think they will get a raise or a promotion for going the few extra thousands of miles (get it?).

In fact most of the times the only reason that things like these happen is because there are some creative teams and agencies wanting to make a name for themselves.

So what should global brands do?

In the first place they should create a system which encourages and rewards local marketers and agencies to create local online campaigns (or just fun stuff) that also benefit the brand on a global scale.

Then they should allocate budgets to make campaigns that become popular globally even more successful (for instance budget to create a follow up).

They should do this, and work hard at this until it comes natural to everyone working on their brand everywhere.

When they have achieved that, it may become time to look strictly at brand guidelines again.


Update: decided to give some more supporting evidence: this Dutch Heineken commercial was also meant as a local campaign. would be nice to see this kind of work more often.

The 95-5 %, 5-95% Rule

Why are some brands so successful online (for instance Burger King) while other similar brands (McDonald’s) perform so poorly?

At Lateral Amsterdam we immodestly think we have found the answer, and we decided to call it “The 95-5%, 5-95% Rule”. (reasons being that it is pretty accurate and it sounds very Seth Godin like)

The first part of the rule, 95-5%, refers to the budget.

Successful online marketers spend at least 5% of their budget on online campaigns.

By this 5% we don’t mean online direct marketing efforts, but pure online branding budget.

We make this distinction because the first is often very predictable and always very measurable, where online branding is never predictable and hard to measure precisely.

The successful online marketer knows this, but does not shy away.

He (or she) knows the 5% of the budget might not do anything for the brand at all, but he also knows it will never be completely wasted.

Because the successful online marketer knows that his brand has to learn how to act online and that the only way of learning that is by doing stuff online.

But spending 5% of the budget without even remotely knowing the final result still isn’t enough.

The 5-95% part of the rule refers to the amount of their time successful marketers spend tracking and improving their campaigns.

Only 5% of a marketer’s time should be spent on (for instance) TV campaigns.

Marketers can spend less of their time on TV-campaigns because we already know a lot about how they work and they are therefore pretty easy to predict, measure and manage.

95% of a marketers time should be spent on online campaigns because we do not know much about how they work yet (and even the little knowledge we do have is rapidly becoming old fashioned) and they are certainly not easy to manage.

Not only does a marketer need to monitor an online campaign constantly in order to take measures in case of a slow start (find out why, make improvements, perhaps raise the budget) , he or she also has to expect the unexpected.

Consumers will do as they please with an online campaigns, which could mean they may love it, ridicule it, spread it, alter it (yes they can!) or totally ignore it.

The marketer needs to be ready to act in all of these cases and when he has acted, he has to be ready to act again, since his new actions will generate new, often unexpected responses.

The 95-5 %, 5-95% Rule means successful online marketers will have to put up with a lot of hard work and even more uncertainty .

Fortunately their chance of success is increased by the 95% of marketers that are just not willing to go there.

A Metro, Definitly Not A Subway

The city of Caracas (Venezuela) is in a valley surrounded by hills and mountains. many people live in the hills and work in the valley. Infrastructure is a major part of the problem in the barrios. A new and revolutionary approach to urban planning was developed by the founders of the urban-think tank in Caracas. A metro cable system connects the barrios in the outskirts of the city with the center's commercial area. The cable meant that a normal 2 1/2hour commute is
now only 20 minutes.

Transformer USBs

transformers are no longer just toys, they're usb's too. japanese company takara
have designed 'ravage' and 'tigatron' usb's that transform into wilcats. also included in the range are usb hubs and computer mouses.

(via designboom)

Is Posterous The Next Big Thing?

Át Lateral we think blogging isn't just a good way to get in touch with interesting people, we also think it's fun.

But it's also a bit of work. And by work we don't mean finding a topic and wrtiting about it (that's the fun part) but the uploading of videos pictures etc.

Enter Posterous.com this website does everything for you. You just send them an email with copy you have written, attach a video or photo (or powerpoint or etc etc) and they take care of everything, including linking everything to your twitter, facebook etc accounts.

Posterous might just be the next big thing.

The Power Of Free

When Amazon introduced free shipping when you spent more than 25$, sales increased immediately.

Many customers would by an extra book to avoid shippping costs. This happened in the US, the UK everywhere. Except for France.

What happened? Were the French just not so big on reading? No. It turns out that only in France, the shipping wasn't communicated as totally free but at the price of 1 cent. That's right ONE cent.

When Amazon removed the 1 cent from it's French website, sales increased in France as well.

So marketers, which would be the better proposition: "3 for 10 euros!" or "Buy 2, get 1 free!"....

Good Thinking For A Good Cause

Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz planted the tree in the center of Chile’s National Stadium where dictator Pinochet tortured political prisoners 30 years ago. For a week, the stadium was open to the public as a park, and the finale of the piece was a real soccer match played in front of 15,000 people.

Web&Design: How They Looked When They Were Launched

Fun article in The Telegraph showing how 20 popular websites looked when they were launched. We will show Google and Twitter here, the rest you can find at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-websites-looked-when-they-launched.html

via @Dailyinspired on Twitter (Follow them!)

Georges Rousse- Bending Space With Paint

At Lateral we are always looking for new ways to sell stuff to people. George Rousse just likes to make you look at a space in a new way. We love it (and can't help thinking- how can we use it?)

Samplelab: A Store Where Everything Is Free!

We read about this in Chris Anderson's book "Free".(You may know the author from is other book, "The Long Tail")

Sample Lab, is a members-only space in Tokio, Japan, that invites consumers to sample and test new products. Samplelab makes it's money by renting out shelf space to advertisers and charges members a small annual fee. It also gathers customer feedback and sells the results.

Sample Lab offers everything from BBQ sauce and exercise equipment to pantyhose and moisturiser. Besides trying everything out in the shop, members can take home up to 5 items per visit. To harvest their precious feedback, Sample Lab asks visitors to fill out surveys about the products they've tested.

Only in Japan? We think not. In fact Sample Lab is looking fro franchisers all over the world at www.samplelab-international.com

Even Harder: Rubiks 360

erno rubik, the inventor of the famous rubik’s cube game is about to release his next puzzle game, the rubik’s 360. the new puzzle is spherical as opposed to cube-shaped and also transparent instead of solid. and if you thought the cube was hard to solve, the 360 is even harder. the puzzle has three spheres, with six coloured balls that have to each nest inside there corresponding slots. the puzzle was also designed so you literally can’t put it down, otherwise your progress will be lost.
http://www.rubiks.com

Packaging: He Said, She Said Wine

‘He Said She Said’ is a fun and quirky entry level wine range for The Lake House Denmark in Western Australia. The naming and label is designed to inspire conversation and spark a healthy debate at the dinner table.

Neurosonics Audi..Something Complicated (but fun)

DJs in lab coats, robots consting only of human heads...it's weird but we like it

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.