Nice behind the scenes video from The Mill NY. Mill Touch shows the creation of their interactive multi-touch, smart glass display showcasing The Mill’s body of work. Located in The Mill’s NY office it’s sure to impress clients.

I found this really nice blog post on fastcodesign exploring and explaining the creative process behind the ‘face’ of IBM’s supercomputer Watson.

Watson recently featured on US quiz show Jeopardy, in one of the latest installments of the Human v Computer battles. IBM hired renowned digital artist/designer/technologist Joshua Davis to create a visual avatar for Watson.

The video in the blog is a great insight to the creative process and final visual execution.

To some of us oldies that remember back to the Betamax v VHS war and the beginnings of DVD the recent sad news of the demise of old faithful Blockbuster came as a bit of a shock, I guess it was inevitable in this digital age.

It was mortally wounded in it’s last few years with tough competition from Netflix, Redbox, LOVEFiLM and the like, and the killer blow will have come from the phenomenal rise in web video, and people downloading from p2p networks.

The rise and rise of web video continues unabated. A few facts:
24 hours of web content uploaded to You Tube every minute
One third of all web traffic is video, by 2013 it is predicted to be 90%!

Alongside this rise of power come technical innovations that enable brands and agencies to be creative with video like never before. A great examples is the recent Tippex – NSFW A hunter shoots a bear! video that went viral.

The TED talk above is pretty inspirational, Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. Crikey!

Tomorrow I am off to Click London, hosted by Creative Review at LBi’s London Headquarters.

Tomorrow’s theme is – Advertising born again


Advertising is not dead, it’s just being born again by merging with the world of gaming, computing, movies, and social media – in short, advertising is getting closer to, and more integrated, with all the things that people are already using and appreciating in their daily lives. Nowhere is this more evident than in the digital advertising world. In order to become relevant in the everyday lives of regular people, brands need to enter the web that people actually use. With this in mind, we set out to explore how all the external influences will impact the creativity of digital advertising.

A full day’s activity and lectures given by some of the industries big hitters including James Hilton, Chief Creative Officer, AKQA, Johan Tesch, Creative Director, BBH, Nicolas Roope, Founder/Creative Director, Poke London, Matt Ross, Creative Director, Tribal DDB London.

Expect updates on how the day progressed and what were the main topics of conversation.

I don’t normally watch much tv these days as I can’t stand any of the reality tv nonsense which seems to be the lazy option of filling broadcast hours. But this new advert for McDonalds really made me sit up and pay attention. I wasn’t really going to blog about it but it seems I am not alone in thinking that it’s a great campaign. A very well observed script, beautifully voiced accompanied by good direction. Are we really at the point where a fast food chain is producing the best ads on telly?