ERROL FLANAGAN

More invention again - Six drummers, one apartment

Swedish genius.

Genius graphic design

A brilliant collection of playful and inspiring inventiveness - mostly with a client attached. A timeless and enduring truth that comes through for me here is that inspiring people is the main thing to achieve to makes something stand out.

Culture stuff - the great Gibson Les Paul

I was listening to community radio here in Sydney 2SER 107.3FM, running programmes on Les Paul, inventor of two phenomenal things that changed music forever - the Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar and also multitrack recording. All fascinating and good to hear early recordings of twiddly Bert Weedon-esque 50's twanginess by Les Paul, the talented multitracking guitarist. 

The Les Paul goldtop is a big icon in the guitar world - that and the starburst finishes are timeless standards - from Paul Kossoff in Free, to Jimmy Page and later to Thin Lizzy and Pete Townsend and many others. For me though, the quintessential Les Paul experience turns up on the genius debut album by Boston. 

'More Than A Feeling' is the complete crowd pleaser - but 'Hitch A Ride' has the brilliant soundtrack of great things to come feel. Download 06 Hitch A Ride - Fabulous how a technological revolution in instruments of human expression in one decade, can move people generations later in ways the inventor could probably never have imagined.

$8bn gets clean water millennium target for the planet now

If this is true and feasible it's fantastic. 

Surely the world's water companies would be interested in doing something about making clean water available to everyone? - What a legacy - 2009, met the millennium target and stopped half the people on the planet getting sick and dying from drinking dirty water. 

It will cost $8bn according to Michael Pritchard. 

Please pass this or the TED link on to a water company near you, maybe they'll decide to get together and do something about it, here's hoping, wouldn't it be great if they did? 

Thank you Michael Pritchard for figuring this out, and thanks to TED, and you if you send this on, for sharing it with the world.

Kesselskramer exhibition in Sydney

I saw this walking to work this morning in Bondi Junction. 

Kesselskramer are a famous dutch creative agency, often mentioned in the company of other great Amsterdam creative agencies like Strawberry Frog, Wieden + Kennedy, Droog and 180. This should be well worth checking out.

Maharishi and messages about doing the right thing

These are printed inside Maharishi clothes on the inside of pockets. A good point of view and a great way to let people know what you think and align with your views in a quiet way. 

For more great CSR see Toms Shoes in the interesting places column, check baggu bags on coolhunting.com and try this link to a howies post i did some time ago.

A bit of charm from Brazil - all you need to know about authenticity from people who care

I saw this on Coolhunting.com sometime ago and thought it was worth passing on again. In trying to understand authenticity this is a great place to start. 

The care and passion these people have for what they do is genuine, infectious and instantly recognisable as a precious thing and the stuff of true beauty - the thing that lies at the heart of all that is timelessly cool.

Beautiful interactivity - mouse lines

This link is to a bit of simple interactivity - a mouse doing nice things from Wildcard Inc.

It's something I've had for a while. I like it because it's a very simple and elegant way of making something that can become pretty workmanlike and cold, a computer, be a source of subtle delight without even trying.

There's a nice lightness of touch and humanity to it. It's interesting because it has no point really either, it's just there to be interacted with. Played with and drifted with. A welcome momentary diversion - a place to stop and reflect for a second.

Converse and (PRODUCT) RED doing good brightly

I saw these Converse shoes in a Hype shop window in Bondi Junction, in Sydney the other night. The brand is owned by Nike and it was one of the founder brands of Bono's (PRODUCT) RED initiative launched a few years ago in the US and UK.

The original brands in at the start of (PRODUCT) RED were Gap, American Express, Motorola, Armani and Converse. Gap did some t-shirts - INSPI(RED), was one design I saw pictures of David Beckham and Elle MacPherson wearing in a couple of different issues of mX the free Sydney commuter paper - American Express did a red card for use in UK and USA, Motorola did a red RAZR phone, Armani did some red sunglasses and Converse started their PRODUCT (RED) product line with some mud decorated Chuck Taylors. Apple have joined too offering (PRODUCT) RED bits of the iPod family, but Converse has, it seems, been the only brand to fairly consistently support the effort in Australia with a number of outings to market with new products.

A brand that innovates and gets to market fast and fairly easily might appear to be an ideal partner for a cause brand looking to have a lot of consistent market presence over a long time, with the message being kept relatively fresh. Though Apple may have had their (PRODUCT) RED Nano out for some time, it feels like Converse have been more active in their raising of the charity's profile.

What really caught my attention was the bright and optimistic nature of Converse's brand behaviour in this particular cause minded effort. Given the brand's stereotypical emo associations, the latest red effort could have been a whole lot heavier. It definitely isn't gloomy. It's very positive, rallying almost. It made me think about social efforts that are made, or could be made, by the commercial world again too, so thanks Converse and (PRODUCT) RED for bringing that very worthy but necessary point back into my head.

Howies doing great corporate social responsibility and innovative marketing at the same time

I've a lot of time for the Howies brand. They do interesting and sound things, which is a good thing to have around in a 'buy-me' world saturated with self-interested sales messages. It's also good to have in a society that increasingly looks to brands to signpost, and hold our hopes for, a better world - a world with better corporate social responsibility.

Howies is an active life clothing brand from Wales (skate and bikes with lots of mud, concrete and the great outdoors), that is arguably fast becoming an icon of world class corporate social responsibility. They have grown from tiny to highly influential amongst a growing and committed group of consumers, to become an exemplar of innovative behaviour and ideas.

It feels like momentum on green issues is about to go through an inertia barrier. In Australia, Earth Hour is getting lots of media attention and intentions to do good by a big idea from the media industry itself. In Monterey, California this talk by John Doerr (filmed in March 07 and posted in May 07) on TED.com, is powerfully cogent and emotional. He talks about how companies are making money from greentech, and it is one of the most moving talks I have seen on this issue.

Meanwhile on the more populist end of the scale, videos like this one I got sent the other day are getting passed around on facebook funwalls, simplistically putting the case for doing something about global warming.

Howies may already be a world class case study of 'innovation and creativity, meets sustainable and substantial revenue generation, from networked communities with a conscience'. They have recently opened their first shop in London's Carnaby Street and they are making corporate social responsibility work for their business.

This brand is about as integrity as integrity gets. A visit to their site is a breath of corporate social responsibility freshness that is modern, entirely optimistic and extremely authentic. I think if there was an epitome of 'Slow branding', like the slow food movement, this brand would be pretty much the standard. Howies has over a number of years been a patient and great grower of a brand. An ideas company that says it's a clothing company.

From a marketer's point of view, they are interesting too. The founders, Clare and David, are both from the creative industries in London, Clare was a writer at brand experience company, Imagination, and David was a creative at the ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and the people that work for them are classic Pro-ams, as Charles Leadbeater would describe them (amateur enthusiasts who are serious about a pursuit like the enthusiastic consumer groups that made 'clunkers' the forerunners to mountain bikes of California).

An activity they did recently involving a blackboard paint covered van is a typically engaging and inspiring Howies piece of brand behaviour that combines corporate social responsibility with marketing ingenuity. They asked for ten cheap ideas to promote the brand and this was one. A skate tour in a white van, painted grey with blackboard paint (cost 120 pounds), with a question on the front about Nuclear Power. One side of the bus was the 'Is it green?' side, and on the other, 'Is it dumb?' and they toured the bus around skate parks where people wrote their views on the bus .

From a marketing point of view again, this is high brand engagement, non-traditional, brilliant blog fodder, no media budget, highly imaginative, hopeful and fresh - completely 'let's do something interesting and positive' thinking. It was a good idea, from an idea led challenger brand, a cause brand, not consumer insight driven, but high ideal driven. Not done before, not part of a campaign with a strapline, no key visual, no functional rtb emphasis, but a definite signature tone of the Howies brand throughout, a rapid low-cost prototype activity that wonderfully exemplifies a 'try stuff often, and always be true to ourselves' culture that has faith in the idea that good business comes from positive and ambitious thinking and doing.

In more product oriented behaviour they are equally as innovative. Good examples being a collaboration with Honda to use metal from old Honda cars to make rivets in Howies jeans. Also Howies sells certain items of clothing where they keep separate bits of the clothing items in stock, so that consumers can replace the bits that wear out as and when they need to, without having to buy a whole new garment. If your jacket has a hole in its elbow, you send it back and get the arm replaced.

In his moving talk, John Doerr talks about his fifteen year old daughter turning to him and blaming his generation for the mess we are in on global warming. Howies embodies a sense of hope that consumers of the solution seeking generation, like John's daughter, might relate to> I think corporations interested in making money whilst doing the right things might learn a lot from this small brand with a big, and very timely, point of view.

If there is a core trait that enables it to trailblaze a fresh way of doing things, I think its their appetite for doing something special and being very open to ambitious and big thinking collaborations with like minded partners. Other brands that have created cultural phenomena and step changes in their competitive sets have also been compulsive big thinking collaborators. Nike+ is a good example of collaboration raising the game.

Like the blackboard paint van with Tom Seymour, and the rivets with Honda UK, other brands that do CSR and social comment well are often at their best when they are in coalitions of high principles and like-mindedness. I think the power of good collaboration is underated by most brands - the constructing a partnerships of rapid prototyping, to coin Michael Schrage, is highly risky, difficult to measure and so it gets the too hard to do tag in more traditional marketer and agency company cultures.

Successful collaborators like Howies though, show that having an appetite for chancing frequent connections with people, who are in sync with your point of view, in the spirit of doing something special, can be inspiring, good for society, and good for business. They embrace the open-endedness of things because it is their very nature to pioneer and explore, which is perhaps why the brand works well in the CSR context as a great brand people can believe in for the long haul, and when times get tough or uncertain.