Canv.as - The ultimate tool for young creatives (Part 2)

Another strength of Canvas for creatives is the way that it reflects the ideas process within agencies. Ideas are usually thrown around at agencies and are built on and changed a number of times. The backbone for Canvas is that you can consistently remix ideas.

The system of contributing is very easy too, working on a very similar system to MS Paint which means that most people can get involved with the system. Here is a great speech from Moot explaining Canvas at SXSWi.



TCO's Rhys Edwards has already had success with one of his images Hipster Libyan trending on canv.as and getting over 110,000 views on Reddit in 24 hours. I have two invites for Canv.as so let me know if you are looking for one

Canv.as - The ultimate tool for young Digital Creatives (Part 1)

Canvas is the new project from 4chan founder Moot, It is a SFW version of 4Chan and heaps more. The best thing about it is that they have a reward system where people can vote for their favourite pieces of content by giving them ‘stickers’.

This feedback system presents a great opportunity for future Digital Creatives. It helps to give feedback on their ideas/remixes. I believe this will help to sharpen the brains of Creatives to be more on point. Canvas has a specific audience – a conservative 4chan audience, so it is the job of the creative to work out what is going to trigger this audience.

7 killer examples of online to offline campaings

The other week IdeaWorks launched Improve your plant/life balance, this is a great exmple of offline to online action integration. I love when there is a clear role for both online and offline within a campaign and when one area can affect the other. One of the areas of interest for me is where we can have online actions that impact offline events. The following is a list of 7 such cases;

1. Selector3000
A lot of great ideas happen on company time here is a great one from DTDigital, every present you picked up and transported into the sack, $20 was donated to charity.


2. Vodafone Pinata
People got to choose what move they used to smash the piñata, great execution that got people coming back to the Application waiting to see if the damn thing had burst.


3. Sydney Festival Your Names in Lights
People could sign in and ask for their name to be put up in lights. This seemed to have big traction with people posting photos to Facebook of their name in lights. A simple idea that worked well because the value of having your name in lights is quite high on the novelty factor.

4. Mentos Intern / Kit Kat Desk Jockey
Two very similar campaigns, where you could get a man to do anything for you, from making a restaurant booking to singing you a song.



5. David on Demand
Leo Burnetts sent Recruiter David along to Cannes. The only catch is that he would be completely controlled by the Internet. He would do absolutely anything that you wanted him to do, he even got a Fail Whale tattoo.


6. Nike Bot


7. Old Spice
Token entry

Selling clothes through Facebook

Vintage Marketplace is a Facebook Page of 24,000+ fans which is selling vintage clothes online. The admins post up photos of items they have for sale with punters being able to put a ‘sold’ in the comments under the item they want.

This is the first time I have seen this style of e-commerce through Facebook, I can imagine it probably contravenes some Facebook guidelines (probably the one about contacting people directly) however I think it is awesome what they have done here. It also makes for an interesting predicament because Facebook have been allowing Ads from Vintage Marketplace so they would probably be liable for the money they have invested.

With the idea of posting items up as photos and seeing all the items which have been commented on as ‘Sold’ it creates a feeling of scarcity with the items. Hence people feeling like they have to rush to get the purchases.

Check out Julian Lee’s succinct wrap up of the whole topic here.

Branded content without the brand

Rear View Girls is such a great idea. However what is the point of making a clip like this and getting 5 million views if you cannot even talk about the brand?

According to Colenso BBDO ‘Levi's tells us it's the fastest, most successful viral campaign Levi's has ever done, and it's only just started, so we're pretty chuffed.’

I cant see how this is the most successful campaign when there is no talk about the brand. The thing about Youtube is that no one uses the ‘subscribe’ functionality so that they will no longer come back to hear the full story when the brand is revealed.

A great way of integrating the brand into the clip is with the latest clip for Nike’s Black Mumba clip where they even suggest that product placement gives us a bigger budget. Bigger budget, bigger explosions (1:38). In the clip it seems to work with the style of narrative that they have chosen to tell the story with.



I dont think that people care if it is branded content as long as it is entertaining.

Five point Social Media idea checklist

A few questions to ask yourself before going ahead with that Digital/Social idea

1. The real pass on question
The usual question people ask themselves with online content is, will people pass this on? The question should really be what are the people going to write/say when they pass this on. What will it look like in a status update.

2. Working off schemas
Using Schema as shortcuts. Use things that people are familiar with.

3. Is it tapping into a tension points
Try to find something that will raise a debate/engage the audience. Will talk more about this in another blog post

4. 10 second rule
Everyone suffer from ADHD when it comes to online, you need to capture their attention in the first 10 seconds. If they don’t get the idea by then, you have probably lost them.

5. Insurance policy
As Social Media evolves the risk of having an idea that bombs is less and less likely or harder to detect as brands can now buy media to make sure that the idea get seen by the target audience. Make sure you have the insurance policy on the table when signing off the budget.

Cultural Touchstones and ImMrTeddy

Cultural touchstones are moments and objects that define a generation of people. Online is playing a large part in creating new cultural touchstones for Australian teens (here is a great post on memes as cultural touchstones).


The latest hype in the Australian Vlogger community is around the 17 year old boy Im Mr Teddy, he is on the observational humour train, doing rants. However what I like about his content is that he is has gone around talking about the cultural touchstones for teens in Australia e.g Facebook, Public Transport and High School. Whether he is funny or not is debatable but what he is good at is giving great insights into 13-17 year olds in Australia.