Hasta La Creative!

Last wish
Lamode fashion footwear

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Dubai
Copywriter: Avinash Sampath
Art Director: Avinash Sampath
Illustrator: V. R. Palani
Photographer: Tejal Patni

If the dating site ScientificMatch.com can match two people based on their DNA profiles, is it possible to find the right brand messaging for people based on their genetic information?

Fast Company runs an article in which Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, puts to test the idea that trends are sparked by a handful of highly connected individuals, or the influentials, as they have become known after the bestsellers The Tipping Point and The Influentials.

“Watts believes […] a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an ‘accidental Influential.'”

Watts has published several books on the subject, including Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

Update [Jan 27 ’08]: Mike Arauz from Deep Focus responds.

My own beef with the theory of influentials is its implicit assertion, in my understanding of The Tipping Point, that if you have influence over a certain social network, this influence will have the same weight over the entire range of topics. I don’t know if this Absolute Influence exists, and my own daily experiences offer nothing to support the idea: it is not a given that someone who is an apparel fashion trendsetter in one particular network will be have the same influence over the choice of others’ plasma TVs, for example. Likewise, one’s influence will also vary across different networks, which makes identifying and targeting The Influentials a much more complex task than it is suggested by the theory advocates.

(TrendHunter.com) If your job was to sit a dream of better things with today’s products, could you come up with a cooler phone than the P-per? The Chocolate Agency released a concept for a mobile phone that is composed of four thin layers, a circuit board, polycarbonate, titanium, and one that is a wrap-around LED to…

Image: The ActiGraph

Actigraph is a device that monitors human activity and circadian cycles. It looks and is worn like a watch. The heart of the device is a very sensitive accelerometer that captures the tiniest movements of the patient.

Unfortunately, some fairy tales never reach their happy ending.
Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood can occur after a child’s first birthday.

Advertising Agency: Della Femina, New York, USA
Creative Director: Jerry Della Femina
Art Director: Einav Jacubovich
Copywriter: Cristine Esguerra
Illustrator: Steve Mack
Published: December 2007

“In its Spring 2007 in-person, in-home survey of approximately 26,000 adults (ages 18+), MRI asked whether consumers had seen advertising delivered via various alternative media and, if they had, whether they had “considerable”, “some” or “not much” interest in those advertisements. 49.3% of consumers (who have seen at least one billboard ad) report “considerable” or “some” interest in the ads that appear in this format.”
– pdf of the press release, MRI newsroom

Even when you can’t see us, we’re there.

Advertising Agency: EURO RSCG Spain
Creative Directors: German Silva, Eva Conesa
Art Director: Paulo Cuellar
Copywriters: Andres Travi, Gustavo Leon

Connecting Cape Town. It’s all good.

Advertising Agency: BBDO Cape Town, South Africa
Creative Director: Ivan Johnson
Art Director: Marcel Witbooi
Copywriter: Oskar Petty
Illustrator: Jono Heaney
Published: January 2008

Advertising Agency: McCann Erickson, Bucharest, Romania
Creative Director: Adrian Botan
Art Director: Catalin Paduretu
Copywriter: Andrei Fodolica
Published: September 2007