50 more of Wikipedia’s most interesting articles

The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia post on this blog has had heaps of interest. So I thought it was about time I posted another one.

This time, the list’s a lot less war-focused. I particularly like number 42, though the Wikipedia article doesn’t make it very clear that the graffiti appeared a multitude of times in different places and the writer has never been identified.

1. Anthropodermic bibliopegy
2. Elm Farm Ollie
3. EURion constellation
4. (the) Demon core
5. Pole of inaccessibility
6. Globster
7. Hoba meteorite
8. Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic
9. GRB 971214
10. “Resolute” desk
11. Candace Newmaker
12. Cryptomnesia
13. Hans Island
14. Harrowing of Hell
15. Semantic satiation
16. Dempster Highway
17. Dalton Highway
18. Paul Felix Armand-Delille
19. Herschel Island
20. Stone spheres of Costa Rica
21. Paternoster
22. Self-immolation
23. Narco submarine
24. Louis Slotin
25. Language deprivation experiments
26. London Stone
27. Cité Soleil
28. Blood chit
29. Parsley Massacre
30. Ribbon Creek Incident
31. Art intervention
32. Impostor
33. Bata LoBagola
34. Cheating at the Paralympic Games
35. David Hempleman-Adams
36. The Kafka Machine
37. Park Young Seok
38. Houston Riot (1917)
39. Albert Pierrepoint
40. Discoveries of human feet on British Columbia beaches, 2007–2008
41. Taman Shud Case
42. Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?
43. First flying machine
44. Defeat in Detail
45. Peppered moth evolution
46. Resource holding potential
47. Saint Dismas
48. Target girl
49. Longevity myths
50. SL-1

Thanks again to Ray Cadaster for all his hard work putting the lists together.

Anti-social media

What would most brands do if a Twitter user @mentioned them describing their product as a “pile of shit”?

Specifically, quite a new brand, trying to establish themselves in a crowded marketplace?

Would they ignore it?
Respond in a conciliatory tone to try and find out where the brand had gone wrong?
Or this?

Being social media, this hasn’t gone unnoticed. Outraged tweeters messaged Sunlove, asking about their negative attitude and rudeness. Sunlove responded by insulting their careers:

and education (with ironically appalling spelling):

Unsurprisingly, this is already big news in the beauty blogosphere, and a YouTube video made by one of the people they insulted has had nearly 400 views just today.

This is a classic example of a brand getting involved with social media without knowing what it entails. One bad comment can haunt a brand forever (see Habitat), and even if Sunlove now delete their offensive tweets, the conversation sparked on forums, Twitter and YouTube won’t be going anywhere. Nor will posts like this, easily found on Google. This blog had over 8,000 views yesterday. That can’t be good for business.

The funny thing is, Sunlove clearly understand the influence of beauty bloggers and YouTubers because they contacted heaps of them asking them to review the product. In at least one case, they paid a YouTube member a pretty hefty sum of money to do so [the review promptly disappeared when the furore started]. So why aren’t they smart enough to know that it goes both ways? Beauty blogger gives your product a glowing review -> more sales. Beauty blogger is publicly insulted by your representative, posts angry blog/video -> fewer sales and a bad name.

In my opinion, it’s a pretty good case study for how to ruin your image before your brand’s even got off the ground.

Disturbing things I’ve found on the internet, round 3

That right there is a t-shirt with nipple tassles on it.

Not so disturbing, you might think.

Except that it’s for kids. From 0 – 6 months up to 4 years. Yech.

According to its creator, it’s supposed to be a comment on the sexualisation of children’s clothes. Does it say “I’m rallying against sexualisation of children’s clothes” to you? Because to me, it says “Look at my nipples!”. Lovely.

[Via Sociological Images]

Little touches of brand personality

Brand Gym picked up on a sweet little touch Esquire have added to their design lately: custom barcodes themed to a story in the issue. Like these:

I’m a big fan of unexpected little things like that from brands. As you know, one of the clients I work on is a big phone network, and one of my current briefs is to create text messages to reply to people who just text “Hi” or “Thanks” (when we’ve just done something for them) to one of their shortcodes.

And I’m really enjoying it. It’s fun coming up with something that will be an unexpectedly nice thing for the customer to receive. They text “Hi” because they’re bored, not really expecting anything back, and get a prompt, friendly reply. Just like you would from a person.

It’s the little things that make a brand seem human, and seeming human is what makes a brand likeable. And being responsible for one of those little things is really satisfying, so look for the opportunities wherever you can. They might be hiding in a simple SMS brief.

Quote of the day

“An art director is a visualiser who can’t draw”

- From the brilliant Real Men Write Long Copy

Help. I am jealous.

How beautiful are these?

In a market full of bizarre names and endless disclaimers, these simple and sweet pill packages stand out a mile. The decision to focus on the problem is inspired, leading off the insight that people who need pain relief or sticking plasters are thinking about their pain, not the product. When my head’s killing me and I go to buy something to relieve it, I’m thinking “my head’s killing me” not “I’m looking for something in a caplet, ideally with caffeine and a white sugar coating”. I’ll reach for the nearest thing that says “I will take the ouch away”. These do exactly that.

So you pick up the box. You turn it over. Usually you’re rewarded with a huge list of claims, often in tickbox form, or an interrogation: “Nose running? Head exploding? Teeth slowly turning turquoise?” followed by the aforementioned huge list of claims.

Instead, you get this:

or this:

or this:

And all that legal stuff hidden away under the label. Because most people don’t need to know all the ins and outs – just that they have a headache and this will take it away. And a little chuckle when you’re feeling rubbish doesn’t hurt, either.

I wish everything could be so simple and focussed.

[lovelypackage]

How not to do a make-your-own-ad competition

Oh Oxo. What have you done?

There have been quite a few make-your-own-ad competitions of late, jumping on the user-generated content bandwagon. Most, like the Barclaycard one inviting you to make your own version of the “waterslide” ad, have been pretty good.

Oxo’s offering, though, is appalling.

Called “The Oxo Factor”, it asks the public to make their own TV ad for Oxo to be screened during The X Factor, for a chance to win £10,000. So far, so normal.

Except that it’s not really their own ad at all. Because Oxo have written a script, and you have to use it. Sorry, remind me what the point of user-generation is again?

It gets worse. Your ad has to feature a family. But it’s OK, Oxo proclaim, “It’s 2009. There’s no such thing as “the OXO Family” any more. We’re ALL OXO Families!”. So my single-parent, four-child family would be fine? Er, no. Despite it being 2009, your family is still required to have “a Mum, a Dad and a couple of kids”.

This is where it gets ridiculous.

“Don’t worry if there aren’t that many people in your family. Just get a friend to fill in. Put a moustache on your Nan and get her to be the Dad”

What. The. Christ.

Mum dead? Don’t worry about it! Put a wig on your uncle and all’s well.

Further stifling your creativity is this:

Anyone else feel that the “Have fun” sandwiched in-between two rather stern admonishments is a teensy bit insincere? You may have fun, but only within these strictly established guidelines.

To summarise, we have a make-your-own competition that requires you to fulfil a predefined notion of what a family is, or fake it if you don’t, follow a prewritten script to the letter (including directions about what camera shot goes where) and make sure it’s not a hair over or under the prescribed 30 seconds.

All for £10,000.

Any chance you just didn’t want to fork out for cast and crew there, Oxo?

How much copy can you fit in an MPU?

I once lost a prestigious competition to a team who’d apparently “revolutionised the medium” of MPUs with the amount of copy they put in theirs. How did they do it? A scrollbar. I kid you not.

I’m still a tad bitter about that.

Anyway, if you’d like to do long copy in an MPU well (and have something to chuck back at those pricks who insist long copy is dead, especially on the internet), take notes from this inspired Pringles ad.

(Can’t embed Flash here so click the picture to go to it. And then, er, come back. Thanks)

Did you click all the way to the end? Me too. It’s brilliant. They’ve got the tone-of-voice spot-on for their audience, including appropriate internet slang (like AFK, fail, orly, etc.). It sounds obvious, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to get a writer who actually understands these things. The other day I saw some copy for a Nintendo DS Lite competition. The headline? “Win a Nintendo”. Instantly letting the entire audience of young gamers know that the writer was old and had no idea what a DS Lite was, or indeed that there’s more than one games machine made by Nintendo. Go back to the 80s, dude.

Anyway, back to Pringles. Steve Harrison talks a lot about usefulness in his book, “How To Do Better Creative Work”, and this ad’s a great example of it. The team’s insight is that a lot of people use the internet to waste time, clicking endlessly through inane chatter between people on Facebook, Twitter, forums and suchlike. So they’ve made an ad that keeps the audience entertained and kills a bit of time in a similar way. When new-media preachers talk about brands having conversations, this is a literal but excellent example. I just had a whole five-minute chat with Pringles, and even though I didn’t say a word, I felt totally engaged throughout.

Still prefer Oreos for my round snack of choice, though.

Work experience

It hasn’t changed much.

The medium of cake

Everyone loves cake. This is incontrovertible.

So when you want to get people excited about your t-shirt website, what do you do?

Ask them to make cakes of the t-shirts, of course.

It’s one of those “I don’t think I’d ever have thought of that” ideas, and it seems to be working really well. Lots of blog coverage, because of course everyone loves talking about cake. And all the entrants want to show off their creations, so they’re all over the net. This was last year’s winner (the t-shirt design is at the bottom):

And I bet it’s even better this year. I’m even considering entering myself. Perhaps with this t-shirt:

I’m picturing separate cakes for hat, sunglasses, pipe and torso. Mmmm torsocake.

Seriously though, I think this promotion shows an unusually good understanding of internet culture. Great cakes often go viral – one particularly obscene example I once made is featured on at least fifteen blogs, just because I posted it on a forum. Even terrible cakes have a following – the exceptionally popular Cake Wrecks blog features misspelt, badly iced, grotesque or otherwise unpalatable cakes, and people flock to see them.

It’s also a pretty appealing competition to enter because even if you don’t win, you haven’t lost. With something like the Golden Hoop Awards from Hula Hoops, if you take part and don’t get chosen, all you’ve got is a Hula Hoops advert you made. If it’s really good, it might be useful for a future creative reel or just for hits on YouTube, but you’re really hoping for the grand prize when you enter.

Threadcakes, on the other hand, gives you a fun day of light-hearted baking, a cake, and internet bragging rights over your creation. The t-shirts aren’t branded, so the sheep cake looks like a sheep cake, not like an advert. You can show your friends without feeling like you’re selling your soul. The cakes stand alone as something cool you made.

And of course, every entrant gets cake. That’s my kind of competition.