We Are Team Rubber

Paper sketch versions of web applications

I do these too. I can’t really draw, but it seems to pan out ok. Might post one here later.

What would happen if we went out to get people (customers, potential customers) to engage with ‘me’ or ‘us’, instead of ‘the brand’? Would that work better?

For those of you who are completely freaked out by the idea, what if you tried saying ‘engage with Coke / Lego / HSBC’ rather than ‘the brand’? Would that work. Name the bloody thing. Otherwise, you’re missing the whole point of ‘the brand’.

As a side-thought, if more often we all said engage with ‘me’ or ‘us’, would that make it more fun, more human to work in advertising and marketing (because despite being all about understanding people and communication, it can too often be a pretty inhuman environment to work in)?

Got thoughts on this? Why not drop me a line, or alternatively, leave us a comment.

cheers,

Andy

Bristol goes to b.tween:

Yep, we’re the kids at the back who can’t pay attention. Bristol kids always like to do our own thing, and that includes not wearing standard-issue media black. Apart from Reddington of course - some kind of convention-unconvention mind-twister she’s working there.

The bloke from Magnetic North says that “instead of the work getting in some geeky design magazine, it gets in the newspapers where real people see it, which is what it’s all about really”.

I’ve probably paraphrased that a bit. I’m sure someone has a feed of this somewhere or something if you really need accuracy in media. Either way, I like the sentiment. Although now I’ve stopped listening to the interesting man because I’m blogging him. Funny thing, internets.

My days at Team Rubber are pretty simple, and consist of saying three things in rotation:

• “Someone should blog that”
• “What are we doing about advertising today?”
• “Is anyone making tea?”

Thing is, the first one - blogging - is my job too. But great as Word Press is, it’s just a bit of a faff to create and edit posts in a web browser. So I’m trying Mars Edit, a desktop blogging app for the mac. Works well so far - but could just be ‘avoiding what needs to be done by looking for a new tool to do with it’. Time will tell.

I’ll still be looking for tea though.

(At b.tween)

Nicole Yershon talk describes moving Ogilvy from ‘analogue to digital’ as being like turning an oil tanker around. This is a candid, fun and interesting observation, but otherwise this post is just an over-extended excuse for me to mention David Ogilvy yet again - it’s fun to think that the guy really did write the book on advertising.

”

Although I’ve tried to buy every copy I see (to give to other people, not because I’m a weird book-collecting freak surrounded by piles of paperbacks), you may find Amazon has a couple new and used - if I don’t get there first.

Watch out for those nasty nasty Amazon new and used shipping charges though; £2.75 for each copy I buy, even if it’s from the same seller. That’s unfair and unjustifiable and I buy less books as a result. Amazon are you listening? - you’d make more money if you changed your shipping policy.

(Live event blogging - how shiny and digital is that?)

We’ve recently shipped possibly the first online greyhound racing/bone betting/star collecting/hydrant dodging game ever. Why not give Ultimate Dog Racer a try? You’d be barking not to.

We’ll be at b.tween in Manchester this Thursday and Friday. Looking forward to it.

There are some arguments that will never end:

• Cats Vs Dogs
• Linux vs OSX
• Emacs vs Vim vs [...]

And of course (in this office at least) OpenTTD vs Simutrans.

I come down on the  side of Simutrans, so I was shocked to realise recently that while there was an OpenTTD package in the Ubuntu universe, there wasn’t a really simple way to Simutrans (Looking at Launchpad, this serious issue may be rectified soon)

To help the growing pool of Ubuntu users who don’t want to have to compile from source, or play around in a terminal, I have created a basic .deb package for simutrans - hope others find it useful.

Today Ribena arrived in Bristol with their “har-vestival”.  Free Ribena, coconut shy, and, above all, a pie eating contest.

Naturally we took part, with Kirk finishing his pie in a mere 21 seconds with Wilkes trailing at a disappointing 37 seconds in a later round.

For your viewing pleasure, Wilkes’s moment of victory: