The Chip Shop Awards were held in London last week. The awards pride themselves on ‘creativity with no limits’ and this certainly rang true again this year.

From a light-hearted event set up as a humorous alternative to D&AD, the Chips have become an international event with entrants from around the world. There were Chip finalists from Australia, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, Kuwait, Amsterdam, and Poland.

The event was live online (I didn’t see it as I was watching A Single Man on DVD, definitely not as much fun.) Not only that, while Colin Firth was failing to get an Oscar, we picked up a ‘finalist nomination’ for our ‘Squeeze Bus’ ad. We did it as a piece of intro/spec work for Macari’s Musical Instruments in London.

Creative by John Peacock and Alastair Scully

You can see the rest  of the entries here. Well worth a look!

John.

Broadcaster, early adopter and leader of a 1.5million twitter entourage Stephen Fry, has been at the Hay Literacy Festival, and has been perusing through tweets entered on the festivals twitter page to find the most beautiful ever written. He found it, and it was from Marc MacKenzie from Canada, who wrote this tweet little gem.

“I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

Twitter is what you make it, some people prefer to retweet links and share information publicly, some people just prefer to watch and listen. Some people like Marc MacKenzie prefers to use the medium as a way of expressing his ‘odd thoughts’ that come to him, and amuse him, and make him want to share.

That is just one of the things I like about Twitter, it is many different things to many different people, and it has made 140 character prose writing into a modern art form.

Back in the 70’s/80’s, where I come, nobody had a vacuum cleaner. It’s not that we were scruffy, it’s just nobody ever said ‘vacuum cleaner’, we all had a Hoover instead. Regardless of what make you owned, it was still called a Hoover.

Digitally, the same thing has happened, as we no longer hear people say ‘get on the internet and search’ for something, we just hear ‘Google it’.

I believe it won’t be too long before the entire Internet will not be referred to as the Internet, but just ‘The Facebook’, because the internet will entirely fold into Facebook just about everyone, everything, and every brand, every website or microsite and even every software application, will be inside Facebook.  And as for the parts of that are not folded in? Well, they will still have a firm virtual grappling hook gripped into Facebook for safety.

Facebook have announced that as early as this month it will become a location based social experience, where people can ‘check-in’ like they can on Foursquare. This is because it is becoming more clear that people are prepared to disclose more and more about themselves, even their exact location, and this is a huge commercial property, and that is of course where brands need to be. And they will be there because there is nothing more valuable to brands than a source of real time crowd sourcing collective wisdom. Facebook, along with Twitter and other microblogs is becoming the most relevant, and valuable data available in the world.

The recent Open Graph API system has given every page on the internet the potential to have all of Facebook’s functionality built in, meaning that all activity we do on the internet could potentially be shared via Facebook. Spotify launched it’s new software version last week, allowing users to connect with Facebook and view all their friends play lists and listen to their music choices, and visa-versa.

This morning I signed up to Microsoft Docs Beta, which is giving me the whole Microsoft Office suite as an application within Facebook so I can now work within Facebook, and share my docs with my friends an colleges, via Facebook.

I am a fan of all things bright an new on the internet, but in my opinion, because of the ever advancing functionality it offers, Facebook is, again, the brightest and newest thing on the Internet.

Ron Conway, (who makes buckets loads of money cashing in on online trends) agrees with me. Well, let’s be realistic, I agree with him.

Predictably enough, we do an annual predictions presentation and blog. And it’s nice when something comes to pass.

We had a bit of an epiphany (steady!) watching Nick Griffin squirm on Question Time, and us Twittering in real time. The ‘augmented reality’ - or perhaps ‘augmented virtuality’ would be better? - of a big social event with real time online social media interaction felt like it could be huge during this year’s major events (winter Olympics, World Cup, the inferno party). We blogged about it here.

Then, just last week the BBC went and branded it Social TV. Or maybe we were a little behind the curve? I don’t know. But we do think it’ll be huge, and the race will be on now among brands eager to exploit the new platform opportunities.

But in this case Jim is you; the consumer, the user, the ideas person. Brands want our help to do better things, as evidenced by a number of high profile campaigns around the world. The list is extensive, with big-players like Nokia and their annual “Calling All Innovators”, Pepsi “Refresh Everything”, Aviva’s “Community Fund”, Starbucks and Cadbury, participating in the “Fair Trade Swap”, Timberland “Earthkeepers” and Marks & Spencer’s “Your Green Idea”…phew!

Is this type of ‘causal’ movement here to stay? Could it be just another notch in marketing’s constant state of reinvention? Or could it instead mean a longer-term change in behaviour due to social and macroeconomic drivers? To begin to answer these questions we need to think a bit about where the essential idea might have come from…

The big things first. The global economy is trying to extricate itself from the worst recession in living memory. During the downturn, global warming and sustainability might have taken a backseat, but remain omnipresent concerns. Customers are more demanding and more likely to take action about matters that are important to them.

With social media, customers have found their voice; the growing power of that voice means increasingly pervasive interaction with brands. Initially, marketing co-creation, popularised by campaigns including Dorito’s “You Make It, We Play It”, meant a winning idea got its 15 minutes of fame. Tapping into ‘Potentialism’, meaning certain people’s desire to step off the mass-market gravy-train and do more wholesome stuff, saw campaigns like “Rockcorps” from Orange, where people doing the most good got to see famous bands. As the recession bit deeper, ‘altruistic marketing’ saw brands reaching out to cash-strapped customers by offering free services and guarantees to foster loyalty.

Finally we have a chaotic proliferation of consumer technologies, platforms and apps so that it’s much harder for brands to hook into genuine customer needs and develop products or propositions that answer them in the long-term.

Taking all of these perspectives into account it’s easier to see why there has been such a flurry of activity – brands acting as ‘venture capitalists’ for new ideas that will help communities, the environment or drive new innovation. Only time will tell whether this manifests into stronger brand equity or genuine competitive advantage, but it doesn’t seem like a flash in the pan…