This, towed behind an airplane off the coast of Cannes this week has caused a bit of a rumpus. Amusing chortling into mobile phones and posting online about what a cock-up.
Personally I think it is genius. No-one would have paid the blindest bit of attention to the banner in normal circumstances, but they have done something to make everybody take notice.
Isn't that exactly the point? Hats off to Grey who seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance.
"Photographer Brandon Voges came up with a simple and surprisingly novel idea: photograph portraits of people hanging upside down by their ankles. Then invite your closest friends to do the same. The resulting eerie series "Upside Downey Face" is a collection of unsettling, strange images of people flipped the wrong way up."
from CoolHunting via Dom O'Brien
I don't know if I mentioned it, but this summer Sarah and I cycled coast to coast across the USA. I did? Oh, sorry to be a bore, but we just received some photos in the post from Greg Siple, one of the founders of the Adventure Cycling Association in the USA.
The route passes by their offices in Missoula Montana, and the map noted that you are welcome to come in for an ice cream. Despite the fact that it was raining that day, we thought the offer was too good to turn down, so in we went. Once we got there we were introduced to a few people who were welcoming to a turn, Greg was one of them. He explained that since year dot (in this case dot being 1976) he had been photographing the people who came by and cataloguing them. There were some very cool pictures up on the wall - along with some historic bicycles.
So here we are, the 128th and 129th people to pass through their offices in 2009. I think we got there in early-mid July. The pictures are so grainy because they were scanned in from film, printed out on normal 80gsm paper, then scanned in again at our flat. I quite like the effect actually, it feels kind of historic. Like old time pioneer pictures or something.
Two things about this ad, which I saw on the tube today.
1) in the big advertising references game, I call this as wordle
2) the idea of a personal claims handler for water, while timely is a bit rubbish isn't it? It's a bit like saying if your car is hit by any kind of Peugeot the insurance company will send someone over to stroke your hair in hospital.
However, the human mind is quite bad at evaluating risks and I think there is some research to suggest that the more specific you are about a risk, the more likely people perceive it as happening. So if you ask someone what the chances are of there being a major earthquake in the world sometime this month, they will give you one estimate, but if you ask them what the chances are of a major earthquake in Los Angeles this month they will give you an estimate suggesting it is more likely - even though the set of places in Los Angeles is inside the set of places in the world. This is covered in the excellent book 'Made to Stick' by Chip and Dan Heath.
I guess since insurance companies want you to fear specific, concrete things and perceive them as likely to happen this is a good approach, given they probably assign personal claim handlers for all expensive cases like flooding - since it's probably good at keeping the costs down.
In the central market in Santiago yesterday we were wandering through the various stalls and while Sarah was taking pictures something struck me very strongly, some of the stalls seemed to be more buzzing than the others. In this mass of undifferentiated products – tens of fishmongers, tens of fruit and vegetablists – you would expect there to be a fine example of 'perfect competition' and no significant differences between the vendors, but it wasn't true.
Every stall had a guy behind the counter filleting the orders and a guy out the front trying to hook people to buy the congrio or calamares from them rather than the similar looking chap next door. It has occurred to me since that what we do, though we tie it up in tortuous words and phrases is essentially the same as these two people down at the market. Hello my friend? Where are you from? You are very beautiful (they said this to my wife, not me). Would you like to take a picture? A lot of people spend a lot of time wondering about if their ads are working hard enough, or have a good call to action, but it seems that in the fish market at least the most important thing is how charming the guy who does the hooking in is and how handy with the knife the other one is.
This is a photo we took in Sweden a couple of years back. Got runner-up in the Weekend magazine photo competition in May, theme: 'size'.
Would you believe you can look at the most popular flickr images on their website by reviewing them as they emerge from a stream of rainbow puke out of the mouth of Ling Ling the panda.
Deeply weird: http://flickr.com/explore/panda
Original photo here
Virgin Mobile in Australia have set up a site "are you with us or what" that is built almost entirely around photographs from Flickr that have a creative commons license.
