This last year, 2009 has been a blast in many ways. Almost every day I’ve received interesting news from friends, other bloggers and my RSS feeds. Even thought we’ve seen one of the most severe economical downturns this year it seems advertising, communication and technology has been the business to be in.
Brands seem to have learned from the history and brand spend has rather gone up than down for a lot of brands. We’ve also seen Twitter and Facebook continue to grown faster than anything else on the planet and social media and open technologies has prospered due to that fact. The iPhone has continued to grow and Android is picking up it’s pace. Google has released lots of new cool products even though the Wave didn’t really become the clean double over head a lot of us expected.
Most brands have been looking for one-offs and as I look back at the 2009 Cannes Lions winners it strikes me that I can’t really remember one single campaign that stood out and changed the world of advertising. We’re slowly moving away from bought space to earned space, this is most certainly the reason why my brain plays these tricks with me.
I’m not gonna spend more of this post summing up 2009. Other people, papers, bloggers and personalities has done a great job doing this already. Instead let’s move on to 2010.
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Here are the Brand and communication predictions for 2010 by Johan Ronnestam
REAL
This is more of a change in how we live, consume, work, advertise and communicate. We will of course use all technology available to become more real but we will strive to make things more realistic, true [click to continue…]
Thomas Traxler has got his shit together. Powered by nothing but sunlight and some threads, Thomas Traxler‘s “The idea of a tree project” shows us how objects can grow during the course of a day. His project more or less mimics the way a tree grows and changes shape due to weather conditions. Amazing.
Thomas got exactly the characteristic you need in order to create future communication. The competence of combining art, technology and while caring for the nature into ideas that get noticed.
The music industry have for many years kept musicians at an arms length mainly because the hard- and software has been to expensive for the everyday musician to buy. On top of that the record companies has owned distribution and marketing. This way they’ve made sure that they make the big bucks while the actual artists get screwed over and over again. Now thanks to affordable laptops with software that doesn’t cost anything compared to a traditional studio production has been democratized and the internet makes marketing easy. Today a 18 year old kid walks into a record company with a final version of his song. The power has shifted over to his side and as a result the music labels are left with their pants down.
Now it’s time for the movie industry to follow.
Good friend Caroline mailed me a link to a new surf movie that is in production on Hawaii at the moment. Being a surfer myself I was of course first stunned by Jamie O’Brien handling Pipeline as if it was nothing. However, the quality of the footage amazed me even more. My first thought was that this was a big ass Hollywood production but as I was browsing through the shots I learned that this was the brain works of the next generation studio Laforet Visuals.
Laforet Visuals is run by tech geek Vincent Laforet, recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential People in Photography” by American Photo Magazine in 2005 and among other things awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
By using a combination of the RED One, the Canon 5DMKII and radio controlled helicopters the studio shows Hollywood quality doesn’t have anything to do with big ass budgets anymore. Of course Laforet Visuals have spent more than most every day photographers, but still, the price tag in the end shows that if you have an idea you can actually pull it through. Only 2-3 years ago a production like this would cost 1000 times the money.
The Canon Mark 5 with a Redrock cinema lens – Hollywood democratized
The final results are yet to see as Vincent hasn’t published a final version of the movie. But one thing is for sure. When I see this I know that the next business that will have young creatives challenging the establishment will be the movie business.
(by the way, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those RED One cameras)
ronnestam.com was voted Sweden’s first blog on Innovation, future trends and digital communication. It’s written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication.
