Saw this article recently on trend-spotting site if.psfk.com:

http://if.psfk.com/when/archives/2005/07/interview_with_2.php

It’s an interview with Niku Banaie, the director of innovation at Naked Communications, about their approach to creativity. He says,

‘People still like ‘advertising’ but some of the rules have certainly changed driven by the obvious things like technology and the breadth of new and alternative media channels, but also more interestingly by what people actually perceive advertising to be.

Would an old school brand manager think Nike Run London was advertising? It certainly communicates all the right things and ticks all the marketing boxes but would not have necessarily come out of an ‘advertising’ agency.’

Well, it did! It came out of us, matey. But Nike aren’t old school and W+K is not just an ‘advertising agency’. The whole point was not just to do some running ads but to come up with something that made people actually get off their arses and run. 30,000 of them paid for the privilege to do just that last year on a cold, dark, rainy, November night.

Kim (third from left in the grey T-shirt) with various people in Singapore, including, on his immediate right, Wayne Hemingway of Hemingway Design and, in the pink shirt and tie combo, Simon Thompson, our esteemed client and marketing director of Honda UK.

I (Kim) was lucky enough recently to be invited by Honda to visit their ‘Diracc’ development in Singapore.  A unique form of car sharing.  Statistically it works out that each member of the scheme has the choice of sixty cars dotted all over town to use whenever they need. And from an environmental point of view, in a crowded city this means that thirty people are owning just one car. 

I visited what they call a ‘pod’. These are dotted all over the city in multi storey car-parks. Using text messaging you check that a car is available, you then just tip up, use your credit card style key to open the car by flashing it over the screen sensor, get in, log in your security number, state where you intend to drop the car off and away you go.  Parking is free, and then it’s $2.00 for the first 20 minutes and then $0.25 for every minute after.  A little vision of the future methinks.