The SPOKE Daily

A River in the Woods

Clay Rochemont — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:31:08 +0000

Come watch A River in the Woods, short film screening at TIFF September 12 at 8pm at the AGO. Features the unbelievable cinematography work of Scott McClellan. A River in the Woods, winner of Audience Choice Award and Best Cinematography at the Nickel Independent Film festival, is a story about a group of kids that befriend a monster they find in the woods. Fascinated by the strange creature, they soon adopt him as a partner in crime and accept him as one of their own. More info here.

ING Mission Kits

Clay Rochemont — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:59:10 +0000

SPOKE created Mission Kits for the ING community event teams. There are 5 kits in total, here’s an example of one design.

ING DIRECT’s Mobile Community Cafe

Clay Rochemont — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:04:47 +0000

ING DIRECT’s Mobile Community Café was at the Barrie Waterfront Festival recently to bring sun cover, complimentary beverages and orange cheer to locals. Taking inspiration from ING DIRECT’S Flagship Café in the heart of downtown Toronto, the mobile café is visiting local festivities to educate savers and extend ING DIRECT’S healthy community commitment into a real space. From ING DIRECT’S support of initiatives such as THE STOP, The Green Living show and their new Flagship Café, amazing conversations are are taking place about educating and empowering savers, inspiring new small businesses and offering shared office space for entrepreneurs through Network Orange. “SPOKE is proud to work with and support ING DIRECT’S innovative approach to banking and engagement with local communities in a sincere and authentic fashion. Giving consumer the information and power to make their own decisions and shape their own lives. Kudos ING DIRECT. Kudos.

WVRST Is De BEST

Clay Rochemont — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:06:33 +0000

Attended the opening of WVRST last night. It is a “Sausage Joint” located on King West, where Thuet used to be. Impressive menu items included Rabbit, Boar and Duck, with veggie options as well. Presentation is killer, and the fries are some of the city’s best. The decor was beautiful, a blood red TTC Subway tile wall with their WVRST branding located dead center, impressive tables, and incandescent lighting sets the mood to be just right. Check out their site here, and go in for a few bangers.

From Class to Crass; Final High/Lo lights from SXSW

Rachel Noonan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:55:56 +0000

Music is coming to SXSW. It starts slowly; the hair gets longer, the button downs are now distressed vintage t’s, and the beards multiply. Before you know it the geekfest turns into a city wide rock concert. Bands are performing in every nook and cranny throughout the city. Music is spilling into the streets from all different directions. People are jumping on trucks, sleeping on the street and looking to do two things; drink and vibe. It was kind of weird thinking of nature vs nurture paired with the juxtaposition of the Interactive, Film and Music crowds. How people communicate and why. From a hyper tuned in group of over communicators to another group who communicate through instruments and song lyrics, it made me wonder who is getting their message across in the most effective way. Then I remembered interactive is about connecting and music is about feeling. We can’t really exist without both. Well, we could, but it would be a pretty boring. I know I will be swallowed soon by the rock locks and dirty bass lines. In an attempt to create some space in my brain I took a mental look back for my final SX highlights.. What were the awesome new discoveries? The inspiring talks? The newly created connections with the international “Futures Community” (I just made that up and will now create a wiki page for it)? Perhaps the next level bionic style partying that took place? Here are the top 10, in no particular order: HIGHLIGHTS Crowdtap Party. Good product. Good people. The most amazing chocolate fountain EVER. FROG Design. AWESOME. Joseph Kahn’s new Movie Detention. He did a bunch of Britney’s vids. Detention is a real-time pop culture satire time travel horror comedy. The script was crazy tight, the story was funny and the pop culture references were plentiful. Stylistically it felt like a series of single shots. The music video DNA is embedded in Kahn. He made no apologies for it in the Q&A. He does what he does and knows his audience. Talk with Pete Cashmore and David Crowley from Four Square. Crowley did some serious tap dancing around Cashmore’s pointed questions about selling foursquare. Chevy making life a little easier with 30 cars providing complimentary rides throughout the city. They also created the best photo experience I’ve ever seen in the history of photo experiences! Check it: http://social-gen.com/sxsw11/index-v.php?u=eC6. Checked out their new electric car, VOLT. It’s nice to see a “Dinosaur” surprise the scene with a product the future gen may actually like. Feel free to judge me on this, I don’t care. Mashable events. You could tell they cared and they worked really hard to make it fun. They were missing their actual content integrated into the activities, which was a bit of a bummer. GE’s Carosolar. A beautiful use of solar energy. A white on white old era carousel outfitted with slick neon lighting sat in a large parking lot inviting people to take a ride. Powered by solar energy, the carousel moves around and around, throwing people back to a time of fun and magic. Beyond the slick activation, this new solar technology seems to have legs. I’ve been trying to decide what to invest in. Something that’s part of today while constantly evolving to reflect new technologies, the environment and our constantly decreasing shared space. GE’s new solar technology is IT. Andrew WK talked. It was inspiring. I wish he was my big brother. Check out the venue Santos he opened with some friends in Manhattan. PARTY HARD. Artists you have to hear; Sheepdogs, Cold War Kids, Dikta from Iceland, The Kills, Kawarka, Malajube, Defences, Does it offend you, Yeah?, The Naked and the Famous, Phantogram In closing; SXSW Interactive was has the largest concentration of the most amazing thought leaders, trend setters and visionaries I have ever come across. SXSW Film was good, wish I had seen more. They need to separate film from Interactive. SXSW Music is dirty, loud and one of a kind. SPOKE will be back in 2012 ready to learn, play and connect. SIDE NOTE: For the ladies who are reading: Geeks are hotter than music dudes.

Noonan @ SXSW: Day 3

Rachel Noonan — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:30:34 +0000

All about engagement and Apps baby. The day started with Mashable’s Geek Games. Team #Tigerblood (me and crew) got ready to kick some smarter than thou butt in physical and metal challenges. The room was filled with fun energy of programmers, bloggers and Mashable enthusiast ready to compete for charity. Twister ended up being our maker with a 30 minute round ending with me and a girl from team #hashtag pulling some origami moves out. I broke the record setting game by setting my knee down. Hashtag FAIL. Needing a break from the twister olympics, we headed to a private taping a Comedy Death Ray. A few special guests met us on stage. Paul Rubens and Thomas Lennon for a fireside style chat. I learned Paul Rubens auditioned for SnL many moons ago, got beat out by Gilbert Godfrey, then decided he needed to get his Pee Wee character off the ground or else his career would stall. His loss on SnL was the worlds gain. How happy am I to have been raised in the Pee Wee generation. Sidenote: He is working on a movie with Judd Apatow..YES! Next we hit the Crowdtap Launch party. The promo girls almost turned us away with their Jersey Shore styling. We decided not to judge a book by it’s cover and headed in. A nice girl from their NYC agency took the time to fill us in on what Crowdtap is. Pretty awesome. They threw an amazing party with event photos being immediately twitpic’d with everyone’s @’s, a massive Chocolate Tap and mini corndogs. Before leaving they did an official presentation of their product against a massive screen. Quick, succinct and educational. Congrats Crowdtap on a killer launch. Onto the Milyoni fete. What is Milyoni you say, well (http://www.milyoni.com). Party was quiet, conservative and the same venue as Syncapse. Thanks for the taco. Onwards to the Mashable Party. #mashhouse closed the night out with shuffle board, pool and a great space for creatives to connect. I end todays words with General Electric. They have a white on white neon lit Solar Powered Carousel running during SXSW. It was a beautiful display of harnessing the suns power to make people smile late at night. Like a white horse running through a dark night, it reminded me that all the people at this festival will shape our future. The way we communicate, how efficiently we use our energy resources and how much we invest in the future. Based on who I’ve met so far, looks like the future is going to be amazing.

Noonan @ SXSW: Day 2

Rachel Noonan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:51:47 +0000

I start today’s SXSW blog with a musical reference. Day two was like the Beth Ditto song ”I wrote the Book“. Fast paced, interpretive and tons of fun. Highlights include an interactive session on Visual Storytelling for the Deaf. It was interesting to see how beautifully animated people can be with sign language and the use of visuals to tell a story. They went through some examples of deaf people jokes, the benefits of being deaf and a really cool music video. Check this out (http://d-pan.org/index.php/this-is-d-pan/who-are). Amazing content. My only challenge with the session was ALL of the stories in every form were about deaf issues. It would have been nice to see a story about families, love or teenage issues in an everyday life setting. Onto film; Pen to Paper – Creating Conceptual Marketing Campaigns . Charlie Loft from All City from the UK lead the charge. It was awesome. The whole room worked together to make two movie posters for a thriller. A conceptual poster and one for the hollywood market. We talked about Black Swan and their campaign using both conceptual (link conceptual poster to: http://www.designworklife.com/2010/12/06/black-swan-posters/ ) and mass market creative. Someone in the audience said ” we never saw the conceptual art in the US, I guess it’s because the UK is perceived as a more intelligent audience”. Wow, I wonder why that may be? Watching Loft go through his creative process was fun, unfortunately random people kept killing the flow with really junior league questions. Come on guys, ask those questions on blogs where you can be both lame and anonymous. Next: Keynote. SCVNGR inventor Seth Priebatsch (http://www.scvngr.com/about/team). He talked about how the foundations of gaming can rule the world. Think Groupon, Fab Find, Foursquare, etc. Using time mechanics, group participation. He is on point and quite entertaining with his ever present and unnecessary Oakley Glasses and cartoon like shiny face. Did I mention he is 21 and raised the first million in capital for SCVNGR on his own. Insane. Next was a little comedy repose. I”m not making this up. We saw Dave Foley, Kevin Pollack, Michael Ian Black, Howard Kramer and Brett Gelman all on one stage. INSANE and amazing. Geek jokes were flying! Ok, now party time. We hit a record number of parties, but will only mention two because they ruled. FROG DESIGN hit it out of the park…..OUT OF THE PARK and Syncapse took SXSW party sophistication to a new level with a killer photo booth, custom branded everything and an amazing drink menu. My eyes were bleeding by Syncapse, so I crawled home to grab a few hours before going back into the fray.

Noonan @ SXSW: Day 1

Rachel Noonan — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:44:13 +0000

Got my pass, ticket and party invite ducks in a row and headed to my first panel, Marketing Budgets have gone social- Is it Working? FULL. I head to the next one called Slaying the Four Horseman of the Social-Media Apocalypse. The former social guy from CITIgroup was talking about legal and how to “manage” the conversation and other social challenges. It made me realize a lot of companies are further behind than I thought. One guy asked about how are “we” going to set up ways to respond to the conversation. Really? I wanted to make reference to a client tweet issue we had that was addressed in record time, but I kept my mouth shut. Why would I give the competition intel? Or why wouldn’t I. He clearly doesn’t have a handle on the process, so my words aren’t going to magically educate him on social response process right? Dicussion done and we depart to parties, to blog to meet awesome people. After freshening up, we head into the mix for some social mingling. The Austin Museum of Digital Art threw a pretty decent fete with some homegrown Canadian talent , Alan Majer of Goodrobot showing his wares . A really cool Digital Dj battle kept people movin through the night and well into the AM. As the night was winding down, I could see the next day emerge in my mind. New panels, new people and now learnings awaited. To quote Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s,”It’s a madhouse”. Walking down 6th with a few new friends that’s all I could say over and over. From registration to sponsor activations to mardi grad style parties, there were people, tablets. phones and business cards flying everywhere. An awesome first day madhouse experience on the first day of SXSW.

Have You Done It?

Fabio Abreu — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:07:32 +0000

Oh we, we’ve done it! Tasked with the challenge of NOT creating another unimaginative, beautiful faces and places, smile-filled travel ad, SPOKE moved forward on a brilliant tagline and collaborated with director, Trevor Francis, to craft the Big Idea and further solidify the collective creative vision. Surely, the correct mixture of so many creative talents and copious beverages in the same room is sure to bear fruit, isn’t it? We’d like to think so. The result: the new Contiki Holidays Campaign that successfully captures the imagination of its target market by asking the enticing question: Have you done it? Playing with the notion of those loud and crazy nights held fondly by the target market when recounting past holiday experiences, Contiki produces an inducing video spot alongside its clever tagline, prompting peers to uncover new holiday experiences. The Call-to-Action leads to an immersive microsite experience (HaveYouDoneIt.com) to promote the sharing of stories, ideas and the Campaign message itself. To reach the target audience, the overarching strategy predicts the behavioural context of lifestyle websites, upon which various media tactics are implemented. Wild Posters Facebook CTA Presence on Lifestyle Websites

Sega Toylets

Karen Lo — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:46:14 +0000

One motion, four games. For the month of January, Sega will be test running their groundbreaking urinal console, Toylets, in four Tokyo metro locations, including Akihabara, Soga and Ikebukuro. Player aims at the pressure sensor installed in the urinal and use their maximum power to play the four available mini-games. 1. Mannekin Pis Measures how hard you can pee. 2. Graffiti Eraser Remove paint by pointing a hose in different directions. The harder you pee, the easier it is to remove the stains. 3. The Northern Wind, The Sun and Me You play as the wind trying to blow a girl’s skirt up, and the harder you pee, the harder the wind blows. 4. Battle! Milk From Nose A competitive game where you try to out-pee the person who last used the urinal. Use your maximum peeing strength to help your Sumo wrestler shoot out milk from his nose to knock the opponent out of the ring.