Three videos – choose one (or all three, if it’s a little quiet today).
Time for words to give way to pictures this week. Moving pictures.
First up is Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy UK. If you read The Spectator, you’ll know he writes The Wiki Man, a fortnightly column on technology.
His July 2009 talk to TED in Oxford, Life Lessons Learned from an Ad Man, is fast, furious, and very, very funny. But it also has a serious side, that ties in with my last post.
With effortless ease, he moves from champagne on Eurostar to prostitutes in Turkey, from potatoes in Russia to driving in Italy, and makes his point with wit and intelligence.
And his conclusion? It’s easier to tinker with perception than to change reality.
See what you think.
(Click here if you’re reading this in email, and can’t see the embedded video.)
A tangled web
I started watching Jonathan Zittrain‘s presentation, The Web as random acts of kindness, in a dubious frame of mind.
Why? Well maybe it’s all the horror stories I’ve been reading recently about online stalking, sacking and scamming.
But Sittrain highlights the positive side of the web, and shows how it’s built on trust, altruism and selflessness.
Well, most of the time.
I particularly liked his image of beer bottles being passed from person to person as an analogy of how packet data works. And next time I’m in a Chinese restaurant, I’m definitely going to look out for stir-fried Wikipedia.
(Click here to watch Sittrain in action if you’re reading this in email and can’t see the embedded video.)
Ride the wave
Heard of the iPad? Of course you have.
What about Blendtec?
Thought not. But maybe that’s about to change.
You see, the folks at Blendtec have hit on the novel idea of surfing the wave of other, better-known companies’ brand equity.
By blending, of course. Not blending in, just blending.
Their Will it Blend? videos on Youtube are a hoot. They’ve blended glow sticks, lighters and marbles. And a Ford Fiesta.
But by far their most popular video is blending an iPad, which has gone viral. To date, it’s had over 6 million hits.
A clever idea, brilliantly done.
(Reading in an email? You know what to do.)