Sh*t Brand Consultants Say — The Video

This is a bit of fun: a live action reinvention of my blog post recording and celebrating some of the jargon and terminology of the branding industry.

Remember: we joke because we care.

When I mentioned the idea of a video version of this as a short parting aside in my original post, I seriously never expected anyone to volunteer to pick up that ball and run with it.

Niall and Daragh stepped up and generously contributed their most Draperian presentation techniques and all of the prerequisite faux sincerity that this project required.

Niall did all the subsequent heavy lifting in the editing suite, and provided services above and beyond the call of duty, etc.

In my own case, I think I will stick to the script writing in future.

Now all of the rest of you can get working on some companion pieces. I think a few videos such as ‘Sh*t Hipster Graphic Designers Say’ and ‘Sh*t Web Designers Say’ and even ‘Sh*t Design Lecturers Say’ would be good for starters...

ToothFairy.app 2.0

My six year-old lost his first tooth this week. While putting it under his pillow we had a conversation about “how does the Tooth Fairy actually find all of the children who have lost a tooth every night?” 

As usual, he was more than happy to answer his own question for me. While he didn’t use the exact phrase “there’s an app for that”, he did describe a pretty elaborate worldwide technological infrastructure: with red lights blinking on a huge world map at Tooth Fairy Global HQ, and individual Tooth Fairies getting fine-grained, street-level directions from some kind of ‘ToothFindr’ app on their iPhones. I am always impressed with the creativity of the six year-old mind, (and also his innate millennial’s understanding of the iPhone app ecosystem).

One broad theme that our conversation revealed was a whole under-exploited vertical of useful software products aimed at addressing the un-met needs of mythical characters and helping them to become more efficient in the 21st century. Perhaps the two of us could get VC funding this suite of app products that we came up with?



• Naughty Or Nice? — Easily classify, manage and edit huge lists of billions of people. All of your data is securely encrypted and backed up into the SantaCloudTM. Launching in December.

• StarCrossed — Move beyond clumsy physical Cupid’s arrows, and avoid potential liability from accidents and misfires. Now, using your iPhone’s camera and recognition software, you can virtually tag lonely singletons to introduce romance into their lives. Launching in February.

• Rainbow’s End — Maximise your ability to locate pots of gold efficiently and effectively using a combination of GPS, weather information, and crowd-sourced data. Launching on 17 March.

• Bunny-Plus — Quickly generate multiple, alternative, randomised schematic plans for Easter Egg placement in gardens of any size. Select your preferred amount of eggs and the simply shake your iPhone to generate new sets of egg coordinates.

What other mythical/festive characters do you think could benefit from having their own app?

Sh*t Brand Consultants Say

Every specialism has its own argot, insider jargon and stock phraseology. Whether we are bankers, bakers, bloggers, bicycle-repairmen or brand consultants, each of us is happily living within our own particular linguistic suburb. So of course many of the stock phrases and expressions that we use daily are bound to be non-obvious, enigmatic and sometimes even faintly ridiculous to others. Yet why not record those and celebrate them in a light-hearted way?

I have incorporated few, if any, viral internet memes into this blog over the years. If you are unfamiliar with the conventions of the current “Shit People Say” meme, you’ can start with watching ‘Shit Cyclists Say’ and ‘Shite Irish Girls Say’. (You should easily be able to find a similar “Shit <Foo> Say” video for whatever tribe you belong to.)

It is alway healthy to be able to laugh at oneself, and this meme inspires a light-hearted response. I am short on time – so in lieu of a creating a YouTube video – here is a draft dialogue for a script. (In-joke alert: if you are unfamiliar with the lingo of the branding game then your mileage here may vary.) 

Rebranding the Office for Social Media Effectiveness

I wrote this fake news story for April Fool’s Day 2011 and we hosted it on the BFK site for that one day. I still like it, and want to archive it here.

Social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector.

We have just completed a major rebranding programme for The Office For Social Media Effectiveness to help them deliver on their strategic objectives. Established in 2009, the role and remit of the Office has expanded alongside the adoption of social media solutions within the civil service and the broader state sector. From today it is relaunching with a new name and corporate identity as “Status:State”.

Introducing ImpressionStream

Or “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Just Get With The Blip-Post Programme”.
As this blog has matured, I have deliberately attempted to steer it towards more considered article-type posts and analysis pieces. I have mostly avoided link-blogging because I reckoned that the shifts in tone would be just too jarring. I also want ThoughtPort to become the central resource for my thinking and my content, and not for anyone else’s.
Recently however, I have been on the lookout for somewhere to capture, store and publish material that falls outside of my self-imposed remit for ThoughtPort. Given the ways in which I use the Internet today, of necessity, a lot of the input coming down the information power-hose goes in one eye and out the other. There has to be some utility in collating at least some of the random fragments, nuggets of wisdom, one-liners and oddball WTF double-takes that cross my screen or my mind over the course of a day. The sort of mildly humorous asides or interesting factoids that previously might have warranted a ‘Seen This?’ email.
I have found a home for these blip-posts* on the recently-launched Tumblr service. (Yes, I had to work hard to get past that name too.) The, unfortunately equally ill-named, ‘Tumblelog’ format is a sub-species of blog. Basically it is a much looser, free-form assemblage of fragments and of what used to be called sound-bites (Wikipedia: tumblelog definition). In it I can capture all sorts of content without feeling the need to overlay even the slightest gloss of analysis and opinion. There is none of that over-looming sense of short-changing your readers if you don't bring added value to your posts.
Interestingly, the format also works well at a finer level of granularity than a bookmarking site, which could arguably fulfil the functional aspect of a tumblelog. I regularly tag a blog post into my Del.icio.us account when all I want to retain is just one pertinent sentence. This format is more or less optimised to address precisely that kind of quoting.
Finally, there is a certain ineffable ‘Personal Journal’ quality to the form which appeals to me. Yet, given all that, it is still a blog, it pumps out the RSS, it walks like a blog and it quacks like a blog. What I remain undecided about is whether the format can be of as much interest to readers as it will be to authors.
After all of that pre-justification and contextual back story, here is the link to ImpressionStream. In many ways it is ThoughtPort’s funky little brother, who has a shorter attention span, but who wears way cooler tee-shirts. Or something like that.

*My key recollection from watching the eighties Max Headroom movie as a teenager was the concept of ‘blip-verts’. These were super-concentrated bursts of advertising distilled down and interspersed between normal content (Television content that is, as they somehow forgot to predict the Internet). ‘Blip-posts’ is a derivation of that based on the ever-finer graduation of web content. Originally the website was the prime quantum, then it became the webpage within the site, subsequently the perma-linked post was the basic unit of the web, these micro posts supported by tumblelogs are just the next step down. I guess the ultimate logical step will be for someone to create a social networking site that just posts individual tag words on their own...

Guideline Weekly Amount

Perhaps I could improve this by including some additional categories. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Viral Bennymation

Over on KingKongsFinger, Benny has posted a quirky short animation he has created. It is based on that Garda Station prank phone call viral audio that has been doing the rounds recently, and was covered in the media over the weekend. There is an admirable flavour of Flann O’Brien to his piece. (Watch out for the bemused cow near the end.) It will be interesting to see how this animated version fares — it is definitely YouTube-friendly.

Postscript: After getting a lot of coverage, primarily in Bloggorah, but on many other blogs, the server in Galway that hosts Benny's site has more or less been slash-dotted, and the above link will return a 404. There is a lower-resolution version of the short on YouTube. There have been over 9,000 views as of 30 January 2007. Way to go Benjamin!

Beyond Parody

What with this being the week before Festivus and all, here in ThoughtPort Halls we are brimful of festive cheer and all about the making of the Yuletide Merry. The holidays are coming and nothing can burst our bubble of mid-Winter excess. Goodwill abounds. And then, a wayward link crosses my path which is just far too important not to share – even at the risk of putting a damper on people’s Holiday celebrations.

There are many strategies for promoting your brand internally: to foster buy-in; to achieve consistency of customer interface, and so forth. Some of these internal brand mechanisms are more successful than others, some fit better with the unique personality of the organisation, and others are more acceptable in different countries and cultures. But, given all that, some things are just plain unforgivable.

Allow me then to present to you – in all of its toe-curlingly cringe-inducing splendour – the Shell Corporate Anthem. (Humbug.)

Happy Holidays Everyone!

I for one welcome our new iPod Overlords...

Smirkworthy still image from the lastest stateside Simpsons episode. Future Guy: "If only we'd known that iPods would unite and overthrow the very humans they entertained..." Looking around me on the 07:15 from Maynooth it certainly feels that way sometimes.
::: Link from plasticbag.org

Odd Things People Say In Design Briefings

For designers it is always worth remembering that for a significant portion of our clients there is something about the process of purchasing design services which often challenges even the more experienced buyers. While it is our role to facilitate the process, there are still occasions when the comprehension gap is just a little too far to cross.
Whenever someone says something particularly obtuse in a meeting it tends to stick in my head. Similarly when there is stark dissonance between the service being proffered and what they wish to purchase. The following are all taken pretty much verbatim from briefing meetings. (All with people whom I did not end up working with in the end, so no conflict of interest here.)

—“We do not want a colour that will go out of date.”

—“I want a totally unique new name, such that when people hear it, they will think that it sounds like they have heard it before."


—“I definitely do not want any message, I am really looking for a style more than any substance.”

Who knows, depending on the source material, this may evolve into a series of posts. (Feel free to add more examples in the comments. Go on, you know you have some.)

The Simpsons Movie :: draft footage

This is all over the web at the moment but parts of it are pretty darn funny, particularly the baby and the monkey.

Glib Analogy

Clients can often mistakenly assume that everyone in the Creative Industries shares a common mindset, but there are many different and individual approaches to creativity.

Boy Bashes Box of Beer Bottles in Ballinasloe

Presented for my mild amusement. (Not simply because Daragh had already posted some video over on his blog.) Not sure why this is appearing sideways here in TP, it is the right way around on the home PC.

Another General Theory Of Design

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek design definition really has the ring of truth to me.
“Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.”
From the Design Matters blog, linked to by Guy Kawasaki.

Technorati Tags: design

Stupid Things People Say #168573

Overheard this evening having some ramen with Benny in Wagamama. The man sitting next to us, whether or not he was attempting to impress his female partner with his urbane wit and worldly ways it was difficult to ascertain, proclaimed at a volume somewhat above the conversational register, “and that’s just a Show-Kitchen, you know.” I only subliminally caught this comment at a tangent to the conversation I was having and the depths of its inanity only occurred to me later, after I had left the restaurant.

Work through the logic with me here, if you will. Say that I want to manage a successful Asian-Fusion restaurant. Then, obviously, the one thing that will critically aid my success would be to build an authentic-seeming, open-plan, faux kitchen within my restaurant and then pay some competent chef-actors (you know the ones: ‘resting’ between pasta commercials and those scenes in The West Wing where the President departs the building post-lecture via the kitchen, service elevator and subterranean car-park) to convincingly chop, boil and fry some noodlenium and vegatarianna. At the same time, I will also manage and staff (with what, Oompa-Loompas?) another secret ‘real kichen’ somewhere out of sight; ferrying food to my customers via concealed dumb waiters and waiting associates trained in the black arts of prestidigitation. What a brilliant business model.

Is it any wonder that these days I am rarely surprised that so many people engage their mouths without first putting their brains into gear.

Noncommercial Objectionable Online Opinion?

While I am posting links, I might as well add this one. Snapshirts will crawl your blog and extract the key words from your most recent posts, auto-generate a wordcloud and then print that onto a tee-shirt for you. I am constantly fascinated in the way companies like this are evolving to fill in some pretty obscure niches within the whole blogosphere. If I ordered a tee-shirt my personalised wordcloud would look like this. I do like the way the last line reads “web work world writes zero”. Perhaps that is my hidden uber-theme? It could even become the title for the hardcopy book version of this blog sometime down the line...

Meme O' The Day

You can file this one under meta-humour. Presented here for your amusement, the absolute best blonde joke ever. Enjoy.

Kenny’s Original Design Miscellany

In Waterstones yesterday I saw that The Economist has just published a Business Miscellany. It is obviously modelled on Ben Schott’s Meta-Miscellany, which appears to have spawned a whole publishing sub-category. While it seems that the authors at The Economist have gotten their book published well in advance of the Christmas gift book rush, it is probably now too late for me to rush out the first edition of ‘Kenny’s Original Design Miscellany’.

Given that designers will seemingly buy design books on any niche-niche topic (I am nearly sure I saw one on ‘Boring German Postcards’ recently), then there ought to be a market for something along these lines.

There could be minutely-detailed tables giving different pica, point, en, and em sizes. A list of all the various mis-quotings of that famous “Any designer who ...would steal sheep” line. Lovingly recreated faux-invoices for metal typefaces being bought by weight. A list of the most unusual typeface names. A list of typefaces named after people. A list of people named after typefaces! Arcane numerological co-incidences in the relationships between Pantone numbers, their associated process breakdowns and the Kaballah.

You know, that sort of thing.

Tribble Definition

OK, time to clarify this tribble question which has been baffling the greatest minds of our generation, or something.
It is all about twins. Val’s brother and sister are twins. My dad is an identical twin. Given all of the Irish folk wisdom that we were being helpfully informed of – advice like: “it skips a generation” and/or “it is from the mother’s side” and so forth, our own little in-joke was that we would be having twins-cubed or twins-to-the-power-of-whatever. Then, as we were obviously fated to have a litter of twelve or so, we started referring to the imminent arrivals as ‘The Tribbles’. And if you do not pick up on that particular sci-fi reference then you are not as much of a nerd as Val and I evidently are.
When – with sighs of relief all round and clink of champagne glasses – our baby-scans ultimately revealed that we are actually only expecting the arrival of ‘uno bambino’ (well 97% sure, or whatever the relevant margin of error is) the collective appellation was duly shortened to ‘The Tribble’. Which it remains to this day, as we are nowhere near any idea of what to call our little person. Only three months remain to sort that out.

Want to kill five minutes?

Then go visit the Random Buffy Quote Generator — chock full of Whedon-esque goodness!

"I'm the Slayer. Slay-er? Chosen One. She who hangs out a lot in cemeteries? You're kidding. Ask around. Look it up. Slayer comma the."