The customer is always tight

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

The customer is always tight

In media, the music and porn industries have always led the way, claim Jake Pearce and Simon Young. Thankfully, they’ve chosen music for their case study on the impact of Generation C on business. Major labels, faced with the strange new world of online media, plenty of demand and a reluctance to pay, responded by turning against their customers—and we all know how that turned out. In the current Idealog, Jake and Simon take a look at arrival of co-creation, the lessons of the music industry, and what it means for the rest of us. The story’s on our website.

Super, Schweppes

We don’t want to encourage soft drink companies’ grandiose illusions (we’re all in what together? A Coke bubble?) but this moment of Schweppervescence is really quite epic. Not so much because of the script—exploding water balloons representing tastebuds leading to the Big Bang, yeah, nah—but because of the way it was made: five videos using slow motion cameras at 10,000 frames per second.

Careful Luke

“If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.”

The Hurculean Laser will also zap cancer. And generate spontaneous matter. We couldn’t say more if we wanted to.

Eyes down

Watch out ACC levvy-setters, there’s a new type of injury in town—well it’s in London city anyway, and presumably our clumsiness per capita is on par. The English city is trialing lamp post pads after a study found one in ten Londoners have hurt themselves walking while texting. However successful, the results are ultimately pointless: collision claims might halve, but those filed under ’WWF’ are definitely going to double.

Staple-free diet

Here’s something to freak out the kids: The Stapleless Stapler. Instead of metal brackets, this thing cuts a flap in the corner of your paper, and folds it in on itself, securing up to five sheets at a time. Just getting the technology out there before it gets suppressed by Big Staples.

Psychology reverse

A Canadian student has been accused of cheating after he was ‘caught’ running a computer engineering study group on Facebook. First kids get in trouble for being on Facebook when they should be doing their homework, then they get in trouble for doing their homework on Facebook. No wonder teenage confusion is rife.

Celebrate them every day

Idealog alumni and children’s media consultant, Liz Donnelly, is giving away three copies of her most excellent children’s listening improvement CD Sounds of the Home to Weekly readers, to celebrate National Children’s Day. Yes, the National Children’s Day that was on March 2. Hey, don’t make your kids suffer just because we don’t file our emails properly.

These cute New Zealand-made titles for preschoolers feature loads of everyday sounds, laid out in a way that helps develop better listening skills in under-fives. Sara Wiseman stars in Sounds of the Home as the character voice of ‘Nana’. Earlier CDs featured Sounds of the City and Sounds of the Country. They’re great gifts too … to win your copy, drop us a line with your suggestion for the next title in the series.

GOMAD

If your year’s got off to a less than creative start, inspiration is at hand in New Plymouth. Four hundred international artists will be widening local eyes at WOMAD this weekend—but don’t worry about missing kick-off, there are many more ballet, bongo and ballet-and-bongo acts to catch with a Saturday or Sunday day pass.

It happens all over the world, from Atlanta to right here, and it is one of the best business ideas ever: Dance,Dance,Party,Party. Basically you get women to pay to dance their arses off in your bar-less establishment, by reminding them they’re there to dance their arses off (and alcohol is full of calories). But yeah, if I lived in Wellington? There with whistles on. Saturdays 4-5:30pm, Webb Street Studios, Level 1, 22 Webb Street, Wellington. $5/session.

Quote of the week

“The consumer just got pissed off. The [record labels] created six years of kids who knew nothing but free music.”

—Chris Hocquard, founder of amplifier.co.nz, watches the major labels battle their customers

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, Idealog IP, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

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