Being Blonde

Here’s a wonderfully simple idea that I’m liking a lot. It’s called brand tags and it has already generated a fair degree of buzz. I notice, for instance, that over 1800 people have already bookmarked it on Delicious.

The project is the brainchild of Noah Brier, who is head of planning and strategy at Barbarian Group.

It describes itself as a “collective experiment in brand perception”. And the mechanic is simplicity itself. The site serves up a logo and you have to enter the single word or short phrase that pops into your head. It then serves up another. And so on. You can view collective spontaneous associations of all users in the form of a tag cloud, wherein the size of each word is in direct proportion to the frequency with which it has been associated with the brand. Well over 1 million tags have been entered thus far.

Here are a few snapshots of the tag cloud for Coca Cola, which show what a multi-faceted and mildy polarising brand it is.

There is also a UK specific version, although it’s clearly had much less traffic than the American original. Anyway I’ve asked for IRN-BRU to be added, which will be the basis of an interesting comparison with the above. Watch this space.

Moo news isn’t exactly new news, but I thought I’d mention them in despatches.

Moo’s slogan is “We love to print”. And they print some dinky things including all sorts of cool and useful cards. I just had some MiniCards made for a friend. We’ve also been using these as Blonde business cards whilst waiting to confirm our long term address.

What I really like about Moo isn’t just the nice printing ideas, it’s the nice touches that go with them.

My order is confirmed by “Little Moo” the print robot. Although Little Moo has a wonderfully personal tone of voice it reminds me that it’s “just a piece of software” and tells me how to speak to real people if I need to.

As well as the MiniCards I also ordered a little card holder to keep them neat inside a wallet or bag. Rather than just being boxed up with the cards, the holder comes with a “Yay!” sticker on it. As if Moo is sharing the little bit of excitement that greets the safe arrival of any online purchase.

Inside the card holder is a nice surprise in the guise of a “surprise!” card that tells me how glad they are that I’m taking such good care of my new cards.

And there’s more! Underneath the surprise card there’s a “hi!” card (they definitely do love to print). This one gives me, or someone I might feel inclined to introduce to Moo (which I clearly am), 20% off a first Minicard order.

There are plenty of brands in the post-Innocent era that are trying oh so very hard to capture that “there’s just the three of us having loads of fun doing business from John’s garage” feeling. Moo isn’t one of them. It has got the feeling but it doesn’t seem to be an effort.

Good luck to them.

During the Festival there was a busker whose picture I now wish I’d taken. He had taken a position at the corner of South Bridge and the High Street, and this isn’t him.

Rather than belting out the usual medley of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed greatest hits, this guy was making up songs on the spot about the people walking by. Songs with pithy titles like “The Girl In The Red Jumper (Crossing The Road With A Gap Bag In Her Hand)”.

Unfortunately I can’t remember any lyrics. But I do remember that he was enjoying  a lot of attention. Certainly from the girl in the red jumper. But also from everyone else in the vicinity, either because they were enjoying the voyeuristic experience of seeing how the girl in red responded to the attention, or because they were wondering whether they would be next. Either way this busker seemed to be doing better than most.

The episode reminded me of when a busking duo got onto a tube train at Hammersmith, heading for Heathrow.

Like our friend in Edinburgh these guys avoided the temptation to treat us to Now That’s What I call Busking 26.

Instead they performed a self-written protest song targeted at BAA, which bemoaned the difficulties faced by itinerant self-employed musicians when trying to make their ablutions in airport facilities. It was called “If You Can’t Have A Shave In A Toilet, Where Can You Have A Shave?”

By tailoring their content to their context and making it personal to the audience in the carriage, they too were doing rather better than your average busker.

In our game too, personalisation or the ability of users to personalise content themselves repeatedly delivers the goods when it comes to engagement. Witness our Coincidence campaign for Grolsch.

What is or are “Thamls”? Predictive text obviously thinks it or they are very important because it prioritises it/them over the word “Thanks”. A cursory search in the usual places didn’t shed any light on this burning issue. Meanwhile it remains a right royal pain in the “appe”. Thamls a lot predictive text.

Geeks…

Golfers…

Rockstars…

Togas…

Before the summer party posts start to go up, this is to mark the occasion of the 100th post to the Blonde blog.

There’s a new version of blonde.net on the way, which will integrate blog content into the main body of the site. Meanwhile it’s worth highlighting that 20% of our posts to date have been about T-shirts, 9% have featured Nick, 44% have officially been categorised as one form of trivia or another, whereas only 35% have been about the stuff that we do. That will change on the new site.

Here’s the first picture that’s served up (today) when you search for “100″ on Flickr.

It’s from aknacer’s photostream. I hope he doesn’t mind.

Watch this space….

Andy’s commemorating arguably the best football referee ever - Italy’s Pierluigi Collina.

He’s also noting his uncanny resemblance to our very own Gary, the man who kickstarted this blog category back in January.

The similarity is only skin-deep however. Collina is famous for never being wrong about anything to do with football.

The Edinburgh International Festival for 2008 officially closed last night with the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert.

The weather, which had been dismal and damp all day long, mercifully took a turn for the better just before the gates to Princes Street Gardens opened.

The sychronisation of music to explosions was amazing.

Apparently they expended about 100,000 fireworks in about 50 minutes. At times it was the pyrotechnic equivalent of ramming a whole 200g bar of chocolate into your mouth at once.

Only it didn’t make you feel sick afterwards.