But then, your options are limited with these unconnected audiences. So, hop on board the DigitalUK train, currently traversing the Central Line, and ride along the future of 1010100011110 broadcasting, which hammered its final nail in the analogue coffin at the end of last month.

However, the arrival of the train has sparked controversy. Residents  along parts of the Central Line are up in arms. From Bayswater to Shepherd’s Bush they are affronted at being targeted as switchover refuseniks.

(In Chingford, Debden, South Ruislip and Theydon Bois they are, admittedly, less concerned. Out in zone 6 they consider it to be a useful public service message, creatively delivered. They also enjoy the striking pink seat fabric).

But back to Connected West London, home of the BBC, Richard Branson and Endemol. The fact that Digital UK have also targeted this stretch of London for its switchover message is being taken by residents as a slur on their socio-demographic status. At an emergency residents meeting at The Electric on Portobello Road, Michael Winner led calls for the branded train to be “switched over”  to the Victoria Line. The committee argued that South London (Vauxhall, Stockwell, Brixton) is more culturally analogue, whilst Pimlico is well known for being the Guernsey of London -  a remote island-state, where most residents are unaware that Channel 4 has now launched.

There is talk of Holland Park staging a mass boycott of on-demand TV services until the train is removed from their line. This has caused concern amongst BBC4 controllers, who fear the negative effect on aggregated viewing figures for The Bridge.

Thus the perils of Tube Line Targeting. Anything other than the consistently urbane Circle Line is always tricky to land.

It wasn’t the burning question of, are the audience behind the Voice Judges missing the faces of the super stars now they have turned around ? protected by chair backs higher than Fergies at Man Utd, or the glorious sight of Simon trying to work out if there is money to be made in the future of the performing dog,a dog that dances but doesn’t howl a tune or even say sausage’s; hard to see a future there.

Nope it was the sight of Will i am Tweeting during the show not once but “Sixteen Times” . Why anyone is shocked is a surprise particularly if you have teenage kids who regularly Tweet in front of you during the most interesting conversations, used to be Nintendo now it’s mobile.

Will i am is not alone, sit behind any youngster in the Cinema and you’ll be very aware of the glowing grey screen as they tap out commentary on the film in hand – makes the Orange plea to turn off your mobile look so redundant – needs to say turn the sound off and the brightness down because turning off they ain’t.

So back to our Will – faced with a dull act, particularly a dull act from one of his celeb competitors what’s he supposed to do ? He’s used to turning to his phone PDQ in any situation – he rapped at a Black Eyed Peas gig I saw based on a Twitter feed projected at the concert, he has 0ve
r 2,000,000 followers who expect an update.

It was good to see Will hit back Tweeting yesterday “it may seem odd me tweeting…but trust me…this will be the normal one day & people are going to copy it” – people have’ Simon Cowell was at it on BGT later.

This is probably the end slide to end all end slides for Twitter over the next couple of weeks- golly it must be good to work there.

It began innocently enough with an advert for Santam featuring the Oscar winning actor Ben Kingsley:

The advert uses a ‘made you look’ technique that is similar to the approach taken a few years ago by Transport for London’s Moonwalking Bear.

Clearly Nando’s weren’t too impressed. As can be seen by their spoof response:

This was a cheap shot by Nando’s, which left Santam and their agency King James with a dilemma – how to respond?

As can be seen in the following ad, they decided to fight fire with fire, issuing a ‘Back at ya’ challenge to Nando’s:

To their credit, Nando’s took on the challenge and even raised the stakes of the bet:

This lighthearted exchange demonstrates that brands can often benefit by being good humoured, even when ‘attacked’ by others.

When the first ad was spoofed, instead of engaging Nando’s in a potentially costly litigation battle, Santam’s tongue-in-cheek response demonstrated a human side to the brand and generated positive buzz in the process.

Knowing when to take a joke is a skill that needs to be learned. Nobody wants to be a push over, but being too uptight doesn’t win you many friends either.

If we’re honest, each of us has probably had to struggle with this through the process of growing up. The challenge is far more difficult to navigate for brands with all the financial and legal implications that need to be considered.

But as Adre Greef, candidate attorney at law firm Adams & Adams explains: “This is an example of two corporate giants who decided to come to an amicable truce rather than fighting a public war and benefiting a very deserving group in the process.”

Thanks to Jamie Kenny, Jam’s Chief Strategy Officer, for bringing this series of ads to my attention.

That’s fine.

But you can’t have the benefits without the responsibility.

It’s long been held that in theatre you need three things working together for the magic to come – the play, the actors, the audience.

Now it’s the same in TV.

And that’s why it’s time to begin critiquing television in the round. If the TV experience is shit, maybe it’s no longer the fault of the show. Perhaps the broadcaster, the producers and the onscreen talent have done a perfectly good job.

Maybe you’re to blame? Maybe you’re a bad audience.

Take, for instance, The Voice. Remember how you were too busy to tweet arch, wry witticisms over the May Bank Holiday broadcast? Well maybe that’s why the show’s performance dipped so dramatically. Yes, you and all the others who stopped socialising, are responsible for a 28% drop in the volume of #thevoice tweets. This in turn led to a drop in viewing performance of around 2 million. That’s how it works now. It’s a new reverse cause-and-effect. Just ask Thinkbox.

You lot, who were too busy doing non-tv-based-rainy-bank-holiday-things. What happened? Did your mini-break country cottage not have any 3G coverage? It’s like you actually acted upon the advice once given in the Why Don’t You? theme tune. You are killing this vision-impaired Dutch reality singing show.

You’re the equivalent of the comedian’s dreaded bad audience. That feared tea-total group-booking in Jongleurs, too obsessed with gathering extra mayo sachets for their chicken-in-a-basket to engage with the poor, flailing funnyman onstage.

You stopped believing. You stopped tweeting. Wil.i.am. has started to disappear. He has lost 28% of his physical presence in direct correlation with the dip in social buzz. It’s like Marty McFly looking at his fading family photograph, unable to play ironic rockabilly guitar licks because his hand isn’t there anymore. Jessie J is disappearing too. And all that’s left of Tom Jones is his hairy Cheshire cat grin.

© Universal Studios.

On the upside, the good thing about connected audiences is that you can see who they are. So thanks to various nefarious online tools, I have a list of everybody who didn’t tweet at the weekend, but had previously done so during the ratings high. I have passed this list onto the BBC and WalltoWall, the producers. It’s likely you’ll be banned from socialising with future key programming events because of your obvious lack of commitment. You’ll certainly be blocked from participating in any future episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?

Get your act together or step away from the tablet device. On current showing, you can’t be trusted with telly’s future.

On the plus side, mobile continues to grow. Ipsos MORI’s Tech Tracker tells us that 39% of UK adults access the web via mobile and Smart phone ownership is now at 42% (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/techtracker). And these figures continue to grow. What’s more our research among youth in London last year (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/youthintransition) showed us that mobile is everything and that young people expect a trade-off, such as advertising, if they get apps and other mobile-friendly things for free. If it’s all mobile with youth, the mobile is helping to future-proof. Why wait to learn your lessons?

On the negative side, 39% of UK adults access the web via mobile. Yes, this figure is up but it’s still low right now. And, if young people expect a trade-off, they still don’t like advertising very much and they expect to be entertained by advertising (as I wrote in Campaign in October 2011 http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/analysis/1100304/Entertainer-Youth-Advertising/), which might be more difficult on mobile if you don’t know how. Further, as others have mentioned before me, it’s not clear that consumers think brands have permission to be on mobile (although, given the preponderance of popular brand apps, I’m not sure this holds water).

Ultimately, it depends on what you want to do and who your target is. It’s unrealistic to think mobile is going to lead your campaign right now (although I haven’t seen evidence of anyone expecting this just yet). But it might play a role in increasing your reach or reinforcing your message.

Smart phone penetration tends to be higher among those under 35 years old. So, if your target is over 35, you’ll need to treat mobile advertising with care – certainly you’ll need to ensure that it’s not accounting for too much of your budget. If you’re targeting ‘youth’, as with any other medium, leverage it in the way that they expect – fun, cutting edge and / or giving them something back.

Mostly, no matter what the target, you need to make it simple. The fact that Apple was the first real mobile evangelist has made this par for the course on mobile. After all, mobile Internet was there before, but, like St. Paul, Apple brought it to the masses. And one of its best mechanisms for doing this was to make mobile simple and sleek, as it did with digital music.

So, if everyone else is going mobile, should you? On the whole, I fall into the yes camp, so long as it’s with sense. There are some great things you can do with mobile; so it’s totally worth a shot. Don’t be afraid to experiment, especially if this is a big medium for your target audience. And, if you’re new to it, expect some failure. Learn from that failure: you shouldn’t shy away in future if it’s not perfect the first time.

Tara is a Director at Ipsos ASI. Follow her on Twitter @TaraatIpsosASI.

By contrast, agencies today have to work with fragmented audiences, digital banner ads and Facebook. Where’s the scope for doing something magical that grabs the attention of the nation?

This was the question that the Google Re-brief project set out to answer. Eighteen years after the birth of digital advertising, it took some of America’s most seminal ads for Coca-Cola, Volvo, Alka-Seltzer and Avis, re-imagining what they would have been like if they had been made today.

By working with the original creatives and matching them up with funky digital natives, each ad was given the digital treatment. You can view the results for yourself here, but the inconvenient truth is that none of them come close to matching the impact of the originals.

The problem is that as Thomas Wolfe identified, You Can’t Go Home Again. In his book of the same title, which – according to the all knowing Wikipedia - was published posthumously in 1940, the central protagonist George Webber realises:

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” 

Re-imagining Digital

Of course the solution doesn’t lie in trying to re-imagine the past. Instead, as Wieden+Kennedy famously put it for Nike, it’s about being able to ‘write the future’.

Two recent examples illustrate this point. The first is ‘The World’s Smallest IKEA Store’.

To demonstrate how IKEA provides solutions for furnishing small living spaces, Ogilvy Action in Dubai recreated an entire IKEA store in a 300 x 250 pixel web banner. It’s an original re-imagining of the banner ad format, which was cleverly targeted at people searching online for studio flats and small apartments.

Another approach, this time by Ogilvy in London, even managed to improve those repulsive Facebook ads that urge women to get rid of their tummy fat. As an extension to Dove’s celebrated ‘real beauty’ campaign, they created an ‘Ad Makeover’ app that allows Australian Facebook users to receive more positive body-image messages such as: “The perfect bum is the one you’re sitting on.” It’s another example of how even the most constrained ad formats can be transformed with some creative thinking.

But as Dan Wieden wisely points out, even in a world that is increasingly focused on digital advertising and social media marketing, television is far from dead. It too is being re-imagined:

“If you go back to that old analogy of television being the campfire at night or something that everybody gathers around. Actually what you’ve got is an interactive campfire now.

 What this business is about is not about selling stuff. This business is about creating strong provocative relationships between good companies and their customers.

People that bemoan the death of the 30 second television commercial probably need to just watch the returns.”

UPDATE: It appears Dove pulled the Facebook Ad campaign after only 3 days. As identified in this article, the reasons for this aren’t surprising. Buying all that Facebook ad space must have been expensive and as the story had already gone global, continuing the campaign would have only served to ratchet up the costs.

You can either view this as success or failure depending on your tendency to view a cup as half full or half empty. It serves to underline the impact an idea can have when it takes off across social media channels.

We can’t go home again. These are ‘the good old days’ of tomorrow. Make the most of it.

It seems real world stunts are in vogue. We’re not talking about the type of stunt the ex Concordia captain once pulled before he came a cropper. We’re talking about real world, brand PR stunts like the recent, crowd-pleasing ‘A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square’ stunt. Exciting? Yes. Creative? Maybe. Happening a bit too often? Definitely. 

You can just picture it. Client requests such a stunt from agency. Agency swiftly assembles it’s crack team of whacky, thick-rim-spectacled creatives, to dream up even whackier stunt ideas for their keen client. (erm let me think… giant, tweet-sensitive, inflatable penis, growing at the speed of Facebook Likes glides over No.10 Downing Street, finally exploding to surprise and delight it’s amazed onlookers with a shower of good will… or similar). A favourite quote of mine seems appropriate here:

“TV advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile.”

Can we add an extra bit on the end that says you’re also expected to be surprised by jaw-dropping, real-world feats, featuring explosions, gun battles, the kitchen sink and the like and be filmed for the pleasure of it, in order to show how shocked you are by the whole thing.

As good as these ‘real world’ stunts are (and this piece really isn’t intended as a slight at the very good ones which I have seen), I have a couple of issues. Firstly it all feels very faddish. I’m sure there’s a parallel here with Flash mobs. Remember those? They were most definitely done to death, and are unlikely to be pulled off with any degree of enthusiasm any time soon. It also reminds me of the notorious demand of ‘give me a viral’ that has been met with many an agency groan. Can there be too many stunts? I think so. Will there come a day when they are no longer of popular interest once the novelty has worn thin? Will brands start to appear lacking in imagination and innovation if the recent slew of stunts continues?

So when is a stunt right? They should never be done just because you want a stunt, and because everyone else is doing them; they need to be on-brand and have a raison d’être. One of the criticisms leveled at the TNT stunt is that it’s far, far more dramatic and exciting than any of the programs its has to offer. So, it’s a risk if the stunt is more exciting than your brand.

Make it part of your brand story, make it intrinsically social, and make sure it’s a surprise for your audience, as well as the unsuspecting onlookers that feature in it. Above all make sure your intended message isn’t missing; Why gift people a brilliant piece of content if they remember it for exactly that, and not for the brand behind it. Finally, watch for deceit within the deceit. (huh?) It’s amazing how vexed people can become over inaccuracies when you’re just having a bit of fun.

Will Pyne is co-founder and executive creative director of Holler. He is @willy_mix on Twitter.

Maybe this is what the Mayan prediction was about – the great change is not the end of the world, but a shifting of gears in marketing and communications. (Again).

I was thinking about a relative dearth of events after 2012 when the wheels on my flight touched the tarmac post-holiday. I’ve been in the US visiting family for a couple of weeks – Olympic ads (riding the ever-patriotic storm that is America) were there, but the hype here in London has a different feel. And of course there’s none of the Jubilee business going on over there.

So, does all of this event-led marketing work? The answer is, as far as I see it, simple – good communication works regardless of what mechanism it’s using. There are examples of poor execution in event-led marketing, just as there are examples of excellence. By now, y’all probably know I love the Virgin Media / Usain Bolt campaign.

The tools need to be wielded with savvy – for the brand and the audience. As you might expect, Americans don’t need an event (Royal Wedding, Diamond Jubilee, anything Team GB) to make them feel (dare I say it?) patriotic, even if it is only a little bit. It’s a ground state of being. To make that connection in the UK requires a finer touch. But it can be done – see the T-Mobile Royal Wedding ad. (Yeah, I’m bringing that up again).

So, go wild with these events if you like – but you’ll get the most out of it if your brand is at the heart of a story driven by a strong Big Idea, rather than a one-off that advertises the event and not your brand at all.

And for, those who don’t have an association with any event specifically, try to make up your own. The one that springs to mind right this very minute is the fantabulous Tipp-Ex ad, celebrating the bear’s first birthday.

I love this! It certainly brightened my first day back from holiday. The interaction is, of course, the key element – and it encourages retransmission. But Tipp-Ex also plays a crucial role in the story here – no matter how you tell it. (Do you detect a theme emerging yet? I love a well-branded piece of communication). Who needs London 2012 when you’ve got history at your fingertips?

Tara is a Director at Ipsos ASI. Follow her on Twitter @TaraatIpsosASI.

Of course nothing’s ever perfect and the short battery life makes the need to be close to the not-quite-so-ubiquitous charger an issue. Unless, as I’ve discovered, you carry another great toy with you.

Peter Thuvander, a Swedish designer has created an induction powered ‘yo-yo charger’ for the iPhone. As you play with it a small Lo-ion battery inside it builds up a charge and then you can just plug in your iPhone to charge it.

Thuvander is bullish about it’s popularity “Since solar chargers don’t work at night or in Sweden half the year, this should be a smash hit.”

Its appeal is that it looks cool and is ‘fun’. This playfulness is also apparent in his other work. A smoke alarm he has designed for children’s bedrooms is red and circular with an outer casing – so far, so standard, except it’s styled to look like a ladybird. Rather than looking like a scary symbol of fire safety it looks fun and I guess it will be more readily accepted because of this.

Back to the iPhone and there’s a case that’s been designed for it, The ‘Intoxicase’ that doubles up as a bottle opener and its app offers a variety of useful pieces of utility including a bottle counter, Blood Alcohol Level Estimator (based on how many bottles have been opened) and a Go Home Safely feature that can either locate the user’s car or call a cab. Plus the usual Facebook/Twitter links of course so everyone knows where and with whom you are drinking.

Soon, when you can pay with your phone, all you’ll need to remember in the morning will be your keys…is there a Yale door lock app yet?

David Harris is Executive Creative Director for Wunderman UK