They’ll be taking up residence from 1st March here at our home on Great Queen Street. The word excited doesn’t come close to our elation in anticipation of their arrival. And what a picture of them enjoying their last supper. Let’s look forward to the sound of many popping corks during 2012.

Be sure to click the image to see the team (and champagne) in their full glory.

Usually BUG veers more to the left of video production but last night’s show was slightly more commercial than normal. However this should not distract from the high standard of video pickings. M.I.A – Bad Girls by Director Romain Gavras (known for Stress by Justice & I Believe by Simian Mobile Disco) was one video of particular merit challenging viewers with a different perspective of Arab life.

High adrenaline car stunts in the Moroccan desert with various men and women, including M.I.A, hanging out the car windows skating with flip flops certainly conjures up images of a more animate lifestyle than you might expect from the Arab world.

Another must watch video that we were treated with was Rammstein’s ‘Mein Land’ which is a hilarious pastiche on the USA California 50’s surfin’ scene. If you have ever wanted to see what six metallers look like in a beach boys getup complete with traditional Rickenbacker 360 and Moog this is for you.

Finally I leave you with Rifle Burs, you won’t find this on the official blurb for BUG 29 however Adam Buxton took it upon himself to show us what can only be described as 3 and a half minutes of insanity. Genius or madness, I’ll let you decide, however one thing we can be certain of is that this video will probably change…someone’s life.

The founders and executive creative directors, Gary Robinson and Owen Lee, have joined us here at Inferno.

Campaign reports: Several Farm clients, such as Purina, Merlin Entertainments and Nestlé, will also move to Inferno with the team, who are joining the agency after talks with its managing director, Andy Cairns.

Farm’s other clients will move to Leith when it opens, while the remaining Farm staff will be absorbed into the Cello agencies Tangible, Leith and Blonde Digital.

The Edinburgh-based Leith launched a London agency in 2000 when it was independent, but it closed six years later following Cello’s decision to merge it into Farm.

At Inferno, Robinson and Lee will report to the chief creative officer, Al Young.

John Rowley, the group managing director of Cello, said: “Owen and Gary have been outstanding for us over the past couple of years and we’ll be sorry to see them go. We wish them the best of luck for the future.”

Lee commented: “We have been looking for a way to offer our clients and our people a deeper and richer level of service, and the chemistry with Inferno was irresistible. Culturally, our clients and our people are in exactly the same place as theirs.”

The panel was diverse in age, geography and background, with ‘Social’ the thread linking them together.

Chris Moss of Famoss who has spent the last 25 years working on brands like Virgin Airways, Orange and now 118 118. Alastair Duncan of Spark 44, a global brand business. Jonathan Bean of MyNewsDesk, providing brands the opportunity to become content publishers. Steve Cobelli of Jaguar/Land Rover. Tom Messett, Head of Social at Nokia.

Each of the guys had differing opinions on the state of brand communications today. “Communications have been around for a long time in a different form, technology is enabling us more each day.” Al added “My child who is 5 is already a brand in her character. Individuals are brands in their own right.” Nothing new in that insight. However it is important to note the new power possessed by socially enabled and liberated customers of brands though. Today “it’s more about customer service and how to get your ‘people’ social. Your people are your brand. Treat your employees like customers and treat your customers like employees.”

I almost whooped in agreement as they talked about entrusting our employees with social. Embrace their ambition to get involved, but at the same time make sure they know that it’s easy to damage business. Educate them in the first instance, then inspire them – it’s good to have people who are interested in all departments.”

Interestingly people in the board room “generally don’t get it”. Chris said he knows of someone in a huge company who feels “the modern, open world is just a fad”, it’s not. There are other dangers out there too. Recently Sky News decided to deny their employees the right to Retweet non-Sky sources. Really? Now that’s no fun…is it? The extent of the silly decision comes to light when Rupert Murdoch himself has the nerve to ignore these so-called ‘guidelines’. And I agree, brands like Sky who are asserting control over their employees could create unnecessary bad feeling. Who wants to walk into a sweet shop and be force-fed only the nutty ones? I’m allergic Goddamnit!

On another point (Tom agreed) “there’s nothing worse than a tweet or a piece of communication that feels staged, we have to be confident enough in our brands to empower them and trust them.” So called brand police can get in the way and try to control tone etc. Again if we believe in the personality and attitudes of the company we work for, the rest will follow.

Chris believed that the era of ‘social networking’ (for brands) has moved on and actually the term ‘social connecting’ is more relevant. This is the hardest thing to do. There was an instance a few years back during his time working with Virgin Airways. They decided to put a 24 page questionnaire on their flights to gather feedback from customers. After receiving 20 replies on week one and 55 on week two, they were quickly receiving up to 2500 per week. Each one needing a hand-written response. At the time it was a lot of work but it made the customers feel exceptionally valued. Today we have much quicker avenues to our customer base but the principles remain the same.

Although the session went on a little long and points seemed to resurface on a couple of occasions, there were some really inspirational nuggets. The main points to note were:

A brand is the sum of its conversations.

We (brands) can turn passion and advocacy of customers into influence.

Start internally with your Social Media strategy, once employees are engaged they will naturally push your business on to customers.

Social Networking is better described as Social Connecting. What was once monologue (brand >>> customer) is now dialogue (brand <-> customer)

More posts to follow from the inspirational Social Media Week later in the week.

The hour-long panel didn’t exactly blow the roof off, but was a nice reminder of a few basic things: don’t do social media just because your competitors do it, but only if it’s actually relevant for you. So always ask yourself why. And don’t get caught in the hype or cool or trendy stuff if that’s not what your brand is about. It makes more sense for a bank to expose their angry customer feedback (and responses to it) in social media than offer the latest trend reports (happened in real life to one of the panelists). It’s a god damn bank after all, not Italian Vogue.

Another point that got the panelists excited was how to utilize your existing communities more bravely…

Should our brand go to Twitter or Pintrest? Ask your Facebook fans directly; they are your followers and want to engage and help.  Also empowering super fans to act as customer service people was encouraged. This is often a better method of research than monitoring tools.

A key trend in 2012 according to the founder of allegedly Europe’s first social media agency is that the management of social media is increasingly done in-house. Ad agencies’ role will be more of a business consultant and trainer rather than executor. The growing importance of mobile internet requires proper mobile sites and we will see huge rise in location-based apps. No shit for Sherlock here, but it’s good to be reminded that there’s still huge, unexplored potential in that. A credit card app that recognises when you have travelled to Japan and doesn’t expect a fraud when you shop for sushi, anyone? The most praised brand of the morning was ASOS, so if you need a social media idol, look no further.

Well, it was not a bad morning, and there was still a load of pastries left!

While visiting the Electrolux team for an annual wash-up session, we were treated to a cooking workshop to give us a taste of AEG’s appliances and do a little team bonding along the way.

We were greeted by the ebullient “my-AEG-oven-is-so-great-it’s-orgasmic” Gabi, who put us to work chopping and dicing like professionals.

We chopped chives like troopers, mixing the greenery into a bowl of butter and garlic – a concoction we’d be using to stuff prawns. These would be our appetizers, which we’d be cooking ourselves using the *gestures provocatively like shopping channel assistant* AEG ProCombi oven using steam and heat.

Once in the oven, there was no time to sit back and relax – we were immediately tasked with preparing the main course: steak with turnip mash and baked apples with berry coulis, accompanied by the world’s most alien-looking vegetable that wouldn’t look out of place in a landscape panorama of Socotra. It’s official name? Romanesco cauliflower, but for the purposes of this blog post I shall proceed to call it the Spiky Green Alien.

The steak was on the griddle (that would be an AEG induction hob we’re using) and a lengthy debate ensued: exactly how long should a steak cook before you flip it? You could barely hear the steaks sizzle over the zealous voices and the cracking of MD and steak-enthusiast Andy’s knuckles as he anxiously looked on (it turned out all right, didn’t it Andy?)

Dinner was served: we could finally sit down to enjoy our steak with turnip mash, baked apple and Spiky Green Alien with a glass of wine.

But not for long – desert was up and as a self-diagnosed sugar addict, I believe it’s the most important meal of the day. But by this time we’re all a little glassy-eyed and, let’s be honest, lazy. So Gabi is left slaving over the stove (that would be the AEG ProCombi oven again) as we expectantly await our pudding: chocolate fondant with cream.

We roll back to Grand Place clutching our bellies and mentally designing our new AEG kitchens. The next day we leave Brussels narrowly escaping a blizzard (okay, a light dusting of snow, but still), better chefs than we had arrived.

Big thanks to the team at Electrolux for the workshop.

We split out into 9 teams, each with 6 people. Taking to the lanes two by two, our objective was to aim for the highest cumulative team score. Another award was to be handed out to the highest individual scorer.

The drinks were flowing and as the first two teams took to the lanes members of the remaining groups started to worry about how much the free booze was going to effect their ‘sporting prowess’. It was quite amusing watching the tactical drinking taking place as people were determined to put in a good performance. Luckily the frame length for each competitor was halved from the usual ten down to five, to save on time.

Team 1 set out the stall with a very impressive overall score of 307. None of the following six teams managed to get a score over 300 despite the efforts of Niki in Team 4 and Louise in Team 7 who both struck individual scores of 86 and 87 respectively. Here’s Emily showing everyone how it should be done as she winds one up.

Then up stepped Team 8. With a host of big-hitters they stormed past the previous leaders score and ended up with 344 points. As part of the success, Steve entered the highest individual score as he smashed into three figures with an 100 point haul. Some late excitement gripped the (now very drunken) crowd as Team 9 worked their way towards Team 1′s total of 307. Unbelievably it came down to the last ball and as Matteo stepped up he knew it would take 8 pins or more. The pressure seemed to get to him and he failed to make the shot with Team 9 ending up third with a very respectable total of 305.

As some of us peeled off to the karaoke to drown our collective sorrows and hang by the bar – Team 1 and Team 8 prepared themselves for one final showdown. The game failed to live up to the billing as Team 8 lifted off with a masterclass (with Steve again scoring high, this time with 95). Team 1 were left somewhere scrabbling in the shadows, G&T’s in hand. Team 8 victorious, it was on to prize giving.

Each winning member of Team 8 was rewarded with a tenuously-linked bowling DVD including The Big Lebowski, Grease 2, Bowling For Columbine & King Pin. Overall winner with the magic 100, Steve ‘Boon’ Clark walked away with a set of vouchers for a return to All Star Lanes one day in the near future. Big congrats.

It was a superb night that was as enjoyable as it was competitive. Oh yeah and at the death Ed decided to change into one of the All Stars’ waitress outfits. Naturally he has the skirt tucked into his boxer shorts.

We all know what happened to music industry when illegal file sharing became the national sport; it crashed. People still, obviously, wanted to listen to music, but found a way to do it for free. The only problem with free and delicious lunches and free and quality chart pop hits that they don’t exist (the latter rarely exists even at a high, high price).  Were music fans being too greedy, or was music industry being too greedy?

I believe most people realise(d) that a good music scene doesn’t come without people paying for it. Just how much was the question. I don’t believe most big music bosses realise(d) that a good music scene doesn’t survive without fans. Should the bosses have looked in the mirror when illegal music started flowing? Maybe instead they could have identified problems with their own offerings. Rather than fighting with the fans surely it would have made more sense to work with them to find solutions.

It’s all going back a little bit already: paid subscription services, rising vinyl sales and the growing popularity of merch all show that music fans are willing to pay. They just resent the idea of dancing to the sound of record bosses’ whistles. And cases like Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want album or Kaiser Chiefs’ outsourced album prove that bands are more than willing to adapt, too.

And the fact is that there will always be a music industry. No matter how much the media, labels and genres have scattered and fans can find the newest stuff online, it’s still powered by the industry. If you are an aspiring garage band – or bedroom and laptop these days – you still need labels’ validation (see article). You need pr, you need money, you need production. You won’t get that cover on NME or slot in Jools Holland without the right contacts. Arctic Monkeys were found randomly on MySpace, true, but they only got properly successful when they got a label behind them.

So, the industry may have crumbled, but it’s looking to re-shape itself. There will always be money in it, just from whom does it come from and to whom does it go to that is the question. And piracy was the wake up call to start noticing the problem. Had it been noticed and dealt differently from the very beginning, a lot of pain and tears could have been avoided.

Brands, as Mr Hed said, take notice. If you have issues with piracy and a lot of spoof around you, it’s a good thing. It means you are loved. And just like marriages, love is not always easy. You wouldn’t hit a nagging wife in the face, would you? At least talk first.

Twitter’s decision is obviously good for their business. Or is it? Their whole business is based on freedom of expression, giving voice to the people. To people whose voice would otherwise not get heard (or listened to. Hi, Peaches G.). And now this idea is being cruelly axed. What does the brand stand for now? Why does it exist? It maybe growing on the outside, but it has lost something on the inside.

This personally reminds me of a case that happened some years ago in Finland: our newly selected female president (who, admittedly, looks like Conan O’Brien; he actually dedicated whole episodes to this issue) wore a head scarf while visiting Muslim countries.  Was she being wise or a coward? Yes, to be able to promote trade and maintain diplomatic relationships and have a good old chat with men in those countries women must do that. But is it a sign of them giving up their own values? Then again, they are on another territory so should they play by the local rules, no matter how wrong they seem? Who are we, Western wasters, to tell them their beliefs (for example on the dangers of free-flowing woman hair) are wrong and our values are right? Who are we to tell them that equality and human rights and freedom of speech are quite nice things? But if we don’t, who will? The free-thinkers in China won’t be tweeting about it, that’s for sure.

Grow some balls first, Twitter, and then your business.

(Oh, one more thing. As Boing Boing points out, there was also a nice little contribution of $300m made by a Saudi prince a few months ago. Well, coincidences do happen. Don’t they?)