Everyone in Leith pays attention to tone of voice - even the gangs.
The media planning is pretty good too. The site is at 90 degrees to Leith Walk, directly facing the heavy, slow moving oncoming traffic.
Gangs are bad, obviously.
Birdbrained downstream is the title/subject of one of those random spam e-mails, of which I’ve received dozens in the last few months. According to David in IT these e-mails are filled with randomly generated text to make them look “friendly” to spam filters and firewalls, whilst hiding sure-fire share buying opportunities or cheap, “performance enhancing” drugs.
But some of this randomly generated text is really interesting, almost poetic in a surreal way. I’ve started collecting them and here is my current top ten, in no particular order.
Of wakeup my modular rude
By fly go parliamentary blubber
On shut in harpy bowling
Copulation circumference
Better life, well-horsed
No translate at surrealistic
In ask of liberate pathetic
He send at target artful
Which open so frugality swatter
Pheasant translucent
Most of these are inherently more interesting than the titles and text on 9 out of 10 Powerpoint charts. Which is a crying shame given the business we work in.
I was thinking that a good presentation training exercise would be to get people to talk about a particular subject but with slides populated only with randomly generated spam text. It would force you to be interesting. Which is kind of the whole point of presenting really.
We should at least think about injecting more quirkiness of language into our presentations. There are certain charts that really whet the appetite for what the presenter is about to say. “Copulation circumference” beats the hell out of “Key findings” any old day of the week.
“Marmite!” exclaimed my then four year old daughter when I turned to this page in the book we were reading.
“Now that’s what I call branding!” exclaimed I.
The loosely rendered drawing of the Marmite pot doesn’t have any writing on it and takes up less than 1% of the surface area of the page (I’ve measured it), and yet it was instantly recognisable and instantly more relevant to Molly than anything Postman Pat was up to.
Marmite is a product that has its branding built in.
I have a video of Matt Groenig (creator of the Simpsons) talking about similar principles. He doesn’t use the word branding but that’s what he’s talking about. He draws simple outlines of the heads of Batman and Mickey Mouse and describes how he wanted an equally instantly recognisable outline for Bart Simpson. He goes further and shows how the choice of yellow as the Simpsons’ skin colour makes the show stand out and easy to recognise even during the most rapid channel zapping.
How many products have this kind of branding hardwired into their design?
Not many.
That’s why the “Shakin’ that ass” work for the Renault Megane is so refreshing. Renault have actually produced a branded product, and the advertising simply brings it to life in an engaging way. The car’s got it and the ad flaunts it. Is it just a spooky coincidence that the Megane’s ass is shaped like half of a Marmite jar?
Too much car advertising is appallingly branded, mainly because the products themselves are appallingly branded. There’s nothing to flaunt.
The latest novel from John Irving (The World According to Garp etc.) starts in Leith.
The main character is the son of a tattoo artist who learned her trade a stone’s throw from here. Body art, “scratchers” and “ink addicts” feature heavily throughout the book and it reminded me of our Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas tattoos from three years ago.
The artwork for these was created at the Boneyard on Constitution Street who clearly enjoyed doing it judging by the letter that they sent to Rufus afterwards.
Here’s a short passage from the book.
“Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned - the song he’d first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom’s mantra, he’d thought at the time - to never be a whore.
Oh I’ll never be a kittie or a cookie or a tail.
The one place worse than Dock Place
is the Port o’ Leith jail.
No. I’ll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I’m sure -
I won’t end up on Dock Place
and I’ll never be a hure.
Jack’s Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he’d never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn’t look like such a bad place to end up - not to Jack, not anymore. (The “hures,” if they’d ever been there, had moved on.)”
The hures have moved on and us creative types have moved in, but it certainly isn’t such a bad place to end up.
