Talent imitates, genius steals

Death by Review

What if an agency took the brief to create stop signs for intersections, and tried to incorporate ALL of the clients' suggestions.

[From Amber]

Feel Better or Prophylactic Advertising

[From here]

I've seen these Tylenol posters around New York for a while and they're great. I really like them - anyone know who did them? Well done.

Ads for painkillers have been stuck in a product power paradigm for as long as I can remember. They dramatise the pain, with hammers and that, and then show either blessed relief, with suitable bird tweets, or high impact demolition, hitting pain where it hurts.

Tylenol's new campaign elevates the brand's role to a higher order proposition - making you feel better. In fact, the tips contained in the ads and on the website are, more often than not, attempts at pain prophylaxis - ways to stop you getting the headache in the first place.

This no doubt seemed counter intuitive when the client first saw it - why would I prevent the pain for free, rather than treat it with my delicious analgesics?

Because it positions Tylenol as an expert on pain and as a brand that wants to help you feel better, not sell you painkillers.

Of course, for each set of tips on the site there are the relevant products to help alongside, but the point is the focus is on helping you feel better, holistically.

[They have an incredible, baffling, number of ways to package up acetaminophen [which is what they call paracetamol over here].]

The site is really simple. No bells, no whistle, just tips that are useful for chronic pain sufferers [they have no tips for hangovers].

Consumers have been adding their own tips to the ads - such as this advisory not to mix the product with wine. 

The only question I have is: why is the Tylenol website favicon the Netscape logo?

It cannot create your doppelganger

My mate Andy just sent me this, to warn me against attempting to make doppelgangers of my ninja self using a shredder.

Japanese "home electrical appliances" retailer Amadana have enlivened a dull webatalogue (and website) with some character and humour, appending these cautions to a number of their products, which is how they found their way here.

So this is a communication vehicle of some kind. And it seems have a viral coefficient sufficient to get posted and passed on.

But it describes the products in negative, highlighting silly things you can't do with each one. Nothing to do with the quality of the devices. Everything to do with being just silly enough to be worth sharing.

Bathetic tropes are very appealing since the dominant brand voice, for every big coporate brand, is po-faced, grammatically, and politically, correct seriousness.

There is something distinctly unappealing about anything that takes itself too seriously, person or brand.

They also sell their brand book on the site, which is either radical transparency or absurd hubris.

Radiohead: First Ever BitCast

I'm not going to add to the already excellent praise and discussion around the House of Cards videolisation.

Oh no wait, I am.

But only a little bit. Nothing substantial. Promise.

It just occurs to me that since RadioHEAD released the video as data, and actively encouraged people to develop other visualisations of that data, that House of Cards may be the first ever bitcast piece of content.

Bitcasting, which I've mentioned before, was Nicholas Negroponte's idea:

In Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT professor of media proposes an idea he called Bitcasting. He foresees a time when the form in which content is consumed will be decided at the point of consumption.

An example, by way of illustration. The weather is bitcast - all the core data is contained in the transmission. Then, at the point of reception, I decide if I want to consume it as printed report, as  an audio stream, as video, as interactive simulation, and my computer dynamically generates the manifestation.

To which I'd only append: my computer, and a Google visualisation API, and express my wonder at how disturbingly prescient that book was.

Ideas are New Combinations

I was recently introduced to Vosges Chocolate by my mate Jenna.

They have a little shop in Soho a block from where I work. I have walked past it innumerable times and yet I have never seen it. I had seen the Molton Brown store, which is right next door.

I wondered about that.

I have had Molton Brown stuff before and I like it. It makes the bathroom feel fancy. I had never heard of Vosges. So perhaps there's some form of confirmation bias in operation here.

"It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives." --Francis Bacon

We went inside and the people in the shop knew a lot about chocolate and were very nice. I had no intention of buying anything. It's very posh chocolate and I don't really eat chocolate much at all.

Then they gave us free samples. A bunch of them. They asked if there were any I wanted to try. I was fascinated by the bacon chocolate you see above. It sounded disgusting. My brain revolted.

[I have never understood how American cuisine blends sweet and savoury foods - bacon with syrup just seems wrong to me.]

I tried some. It was amazing. To steal from Joey from Friends [something which drags me back to an idealised verion of 90s NYC]:

What's not to like? Chocolate - good. Bacon - gooooood.

So I bought a bar. And gave it to a friend. And showed some other people the store.

[They had already been there. I assumed since it was invisible to me, it was invisible to everyone. This is also probably a form of confirmation bias.

Actually this might be related to another cognitive bias people exhibit - what I call the I'm Special bias.

Basically, I think asking people why they do things is pointless - they don't know and, worse, everyone in the world believes they are special.

[Some study I saw showed that 90% of people think they are above average intelligence.]

That said, people are very, very good at modeling other people's behaviour. So one way to trick the I'm Special bias is projective research - what do you think your best friend would do in this situation? Why did she buy X?]

So - the shop was nice to me and I now like them and actively advocate them. 

The ethic of reciprocity is a powerful human imperative.

But that isn't really what I wanted to talk about.

Their bacon bar is a new combination, which is one way of describing all ideas.

When genius steals, it builds on and from the elements. The more polarised the elements, the more interesting the combination.

Perhaps another good way of thinking about this way of thinking is what Matt Webb calls Idea Scaffolding - ideas supported by, built out of other ideas.

Like using movement as a generative metaphor for the web, which he does in that presentation.

Or the shift from web pages to a web of data, much of which we will be creating, passively in the physical world - personal infomatics.

And, as Tom and Matt point out in that presentation, everytime you combine one set of data with another, new kinds of services emerge.

And somewhere at the intersection, or combination, of SPIME [SPaceTIME] data and social data, lies the web/world equivalent of a bacon bar.

Unofficial Olympics T-Shirt

My mate Ed has made the UNOFFICIAL OLYMPICS T-SHIRT as part of his new project SCHOOL, with his mate Hoon.

It's designed as a counterpoint to all the negative sentiment the Beijing Olympics has been stirring up, and a reminder that the Olympics is all about UNITY, which it demonstrates by featuring every single competing nation, in a beautiful word track.

There are only 888 shirts available, because the games begin on 08.08.08 - a cheeky and excellent piece of manufactured scarcity.

The Paper Part

This is the paper part of the transmedia presentation - it was published in Campaign the day of the conference.

Some people found the presentation via the piece, and vice versa. The live part was tailored for the INFLUENCE theme. I'll see if that feels like a good thing to post later.

I talk about the nature of the experiment and then finish off by pointing out that major advertisers are actively following the model Jenkins established and I stole:

When I first started talking about this, people would question whether it would work for all brands. It requires a lot from people – it attempts to distribute identity and knowledge, to drive the formation of brand communities who piece the brand back together, together. Fine if you’re Nike  - but how would this work for fast moving consumer goods?

Last month, at Media 360, Jonathon Mildenhall [Vice President Global Advertising and Creative Excellence] outlined the thinking behind Coke’s Happiness Factory as transmedia creativity.

A non-linear brand world, accessed via multiple accretive touchpoints: adverts, building towards a feature length film, an online virtual world, and from here comics, games, mobile applications and so on.

You can download the whole thing here

[Again you might need to change the file extension to .pdf]

And learn more about the Coca Cola transmedia vision here - it includes a virtual world of the Happiness Factory created by Starlight Runner.

MetaVisual

This is the visualisation article Noah and I wrote, visualised as a weighted tag cloud.

[Created with Wordle, that Beeker reminded me of.]

Push the Brief

My mate Ant and his mate Ash are doing something fun for the London ad community.

Details below - looks like fun - free booze and nice people - and the judges are all top notch minds.

[The rest of this is cross posted from Ant's blog - enjoy.]

It's FREE, there's FREE BOOZE, and we have some senior agency bods there who you can try and impress. If you're interested email themonkeypuzzler@gmail.com go to our Facebook group, and start goading the other entrants. Even if you don't want to compete, you should come down anyway to chat to people.

Here is the gist:

Brief2008 is an semi-serious ad-industry social event where teams answer and present back a brief in 2 hours, probably under the influence of alcohol.

=====Teams=====
that's you guys - made up of planners, account men, creatives, PR types, designers, strategists and whoever else. Get involved.

=====Judges=====
are senior creatives and strategists from some of the best agencies in town. Confirmed so far:

Iain Tait (Founder, Planning/Creative Partner, Poke)
Amelia Torode (Head of VCCP Digital)
Ben Milligan (Head of Planning, Holler)
Richard Knight (Creative Partner/Founder, Mission21)
Rachel Lawlan (Director of Integrated Strategy, DLKW)

=====Where and when is it=====
At the Design Council, Bow Street.
Thursday July the 17th, 6:30 pm sharp.

=====What's in it for people?=====
Free booze!

Chance to show off in front of senior people from top agencies.

A chance to meet other interesting people from all different sides of the industry. Who knows? You might even get laid.

=====GET INVOVLED=====
Email themonkeypuzzler@gmail.com , go to our Facebook group, and start goading the other entrants.

Some Slides for You

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

My mate Coop has been helping out the ANA - putting together some MARKETING RESOURCES for the good of the community, which is available right now for you to use.

You can see some of the insight slides above or on Slideshare.

I like the slides - they are an obvious successor to Lynette's digital bits, although the quotes are more classics that current hits.

I enjoy quotations. It's a fact, well known to those that know me well, that I think genius steals.

Quotes are a good example of stealing, which isn't imitation. To steal from Michel De Montaigne:

'I quote others only to better express myself.'

Well exactly, Michel - well put.

Anyway, the ANA stands for the Association of National Advertisers. I had never heard of them - but then I am still new to the USA.

Have you heard of them? Do you use them?

They seem a bit like ISBA in the UK, representing marketing clients. They are starting to develop and share some useful content - like these 101 introductions to new platforms like fBook - which is a nice way to say hello.

Transmedia Presentation

| View | Upload your own

This is kind of an experiment in distributed presentations.

This deck forms one part of a transmedia presentation [which is, itself, in part, about transmedia planning] - the one I'm giving about now at the WARC Influence conference in London.

One part is the presentation I'm giving live now - it builds on the same foundations as this, but has a different ending, talking more explicitly about INFLUENCE. [I'll post about that later.]

Another part is an article that is in this week's issue of Campaign - it also comes out on Thursday, at about the same time this post will be published, while I'm presenting - which explains the idea and expands on it a bit, with reference to a more recent example.

And this deck is the backbone - it's the alternate ending to the live version.

[It mostly contains ideas that I wrote about in my thesis - so you can read the long hand version here.]

All the elements are different access points into the ideas, and they are all connected, they have different things in them, they let you come to the larger discussion in whatever you want.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm hoping it will, at least, be interesting.

Dancing Around the World

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Stride Gum paid for this guy to go and dance like this all over the world.

Hell yeah.

Smile.

[Via Em/Boing Boing]

Advertising is the Medium or Distributed Broadcasting

Google just announced a deal with Family Guy [and American Dad, but that's basically the same thing] creator, Seth Mcfarlane, that will see Google be the exclusive distributor of his new animated creation.

Google will distribute the short animated clips via the Adsense network, to sites with a relevant audience - it's calling the new service the Google Content Network.

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

Not a small claim - but GCN is certain to cause concern at the A and NBCs of the world.

This mechanism turns advertising into the medium. It reaches a huge, measurable audience, by distributing the content via hundreds or thousands of sites that host Google Ads.

It turns the broadcast advertising model upside and inside out. The content doesn't create the audience to sell it to advertisers - it goes out and finds its audience, via the advertising, using other people's content, that already has an audience. 

Or something.

A while back I posited that Google would creep into owning other media to extract maximum value from its ad platform. [It has already released Google TV and Print and Radio Ad networks.]

But perhaps I was thinking about this all backwards. It creates the ad network by aggregating eyeballs from sites all over the web, and that becomes the distributed broadcast medium.

Why own the media, when you can broker all the advertising and content using other media?

Which suggests a different model, a model that America loves - a market.

Enron, the fallen poster child of 90s corporate American, was ultimately a market - an energy market. It didn't make anything - it was the transaction medium.

In fact, it was market crazy. It loved to create trading platforms. It announced a market to trade broadband.

Then it created a market to trade the weather.

[This is true. You could trade finanical instruments - derivatives in fact. Futures. So speculative contracts based the fluctuations of other variables - in this case - THE WEATHER.]

I realise that comparing Google to Enron sounds absurd, at first glance. But it's not. Honest. 

[Enron was named Most Innovative Company in America by Fortune Magazine 6 years in a row - Apple holds the title at the moment, but Google is up there, and it won Most Innovative in Fast Company.]

The principle of being the market rather than a supplier or buyer is a sound one. When Enron launched EnronOnline, a web based trading market for commodities like power and gas, it was rapidly adopted by every major energy company in the deregulated US energy market.

That's why everyone loved them so much - suddenly if you wanted to do any business at all in the energy category, you had to do it with Enron.

[Enron used a bizarre and ridiculous accounting system and were very naughty - you can read all about it here.]

[The problem arose because of the way the market was structured - Enron was financially involved in every transaction - in essence you were always buying or selling off Enron - which meant costs were rising over time, as they took on more and more risks, but their revenues looked awesome, when accounted using aforementioned absurd mark to mark accounting, which enabled you to mark future revenues as though you already had them. Anyway, this is getting way off the point. Perhaps this whole Enron analogy was misguided.]

The [rapidly vanishing] point, is that the market is the house [to use a casino analogy] and the house always wins.

[Although this analogy is also flawed - unless you are talking about poker at the casino, where you pay a proportion to play, but the house isn't actually gambling itself. Oh I give up.]

Why own some media, when you can broker the ads to all the media?

After the Influence

So I'm going to be at this WARC Influence Conference thing next Thursday, 3rd July.

It's right by this pub called Black Friar, which I will no doubt go to afterwards. Like around 6 or 7pm or something.

So, we could maybe have a cheeky Beersphere there, if anyone else fancies popping down for a beer.

Is it sunny in London? I'm looking forward to being able to drink outside, they won't let you do that here.

Advertising for Agencies

Campaign magazine asked me to write a couple of columns to fill in for Ian, so he could go on holiday.

In today's exciting episode, I point out that media agencies were notable by their absence from Cannes this year, even in the media category, which you'd think they would be ideally suited to enter.

[Although what constitutes a media idea, and how you separate that from a creative idea, is a whole discussion in and of itself.]

My point was though, as I realised when I was doing the Clio judging thing, that entry is almost as important as the idea itself.

Since most of the campaigns are from other countries, as a judge you may have never encountered the work, you have no idea how it resonated locally, whether people loved it and talked about, or simply ignored it.

The entry is all you have to go on - a short form video advert for an agency.

And traditional advertising agencies have quite a lot of experience making short form video adverts, whereas media agencies don't.

[I wonder if you could set up a meta agency, that just made case studies for other agencies.]

You can download the whole thing here.

[It's a pdf but you may need to rename the file and give it a .pdf file extension, as Macs seem to remove them]

In the piece I mention that media agency of the year was awarded to Forsman & Bodenfors, a creative agency. [Second and third place also went to creative agencies.]

But I said they were German, and Beata emailed me to point out that they are from Gothenburg in Sweden.

Förlåt!

Selling Jesus

My mate Ahra just introduced me to the work of Jim Riswold, a former W&K creative director, who created some iconic work for Nike, who was diagnosed with leukemia and decided to start making iconic art - as in art made from icons, like Jesus and Hitler. He talks about why here.

He has a great site here, with his own jingle.

I like the strategic planner diagram of Jesus above.

I suspect there is probably scope to create hilarious planning diagrams and models, with or without religious figureheads.

O wait - there is.

Distributed Commerce

My mate Neil has just launched Ninjazoo - a t-shirt design website that allows you to design t-shirts [and remix designs others have uploaded] and then publish your shop to social media platforms like Fbook, Mspace and Tpad.

See above for the new line of TIGS branded merchandise [and you thought I was joking] - my TIGShirt arrived today.

This is a great idea for one of the same reasons I love the Orange Balloon Race that's running at the moment-

[Feel free to boost my balloon. His name is Misfit and you can find him here.]

- it understands that the web is the platform and that from here on in, identity is distributed.

Advertising Elegy

Who are your heroes?

My heroes are the people from whose thoughts and words I began to construct my own belief system, my world view.

The geniuses I stole from.

[World view is a calque [or stolen piece of linguistic genius] from German. They have this word Weltanschauung. It's a Teutonic concept that is quite useful so lots of languages, and philosophers, have stolen it. It basically means the framework of beliefs and ideas through which you perceive the world, how you parse reality.]

One of my heroes just died.

George Carlin was one of the great stand ups and thinkers of our time.

[If you haven't come across him: rejoice for there is much joy ahead of you should you seek out his work and despair that there is no more of it. However, you may remember him from such roles as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you have never come across that, there is no hope for you.]

Alongside other charming iconoclasts like Bill Hicks and Kurt Vonnegut, Carlin is one of the people who helped me understand some of the things I believe to be important, who helped me piece together my stolen Weltanschauung. 

Above is Carlin's Advertising Lullaby - one of his most famous bits.

[His most famous was probably Religion is Bullshit - check it out here.]

Those of you that know Hicks and Carlin may also be aware that they reserved a significant portion of their hilarious but heartfelt vitriol for advertising. 

[Hicks implored marketing professionals to commit suicide immediately.]

For a long time I found this difficult to resolve with what I do.

I would use F. Scott Fitzgerald as my get out clause:

The art of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time while still retaining the ability to function.

I believe this is true.

[When someone seems very certain of the veracity of one side of a complex argument, I tend to look nervously for a conversational exit.]

But perhaps more importantly, I think we should consider the extreme views of advertising contained in the words of Hicks and Carlin, the critique of intent and tonality, and allow them to drive us to make it better.

Collusive Influence

I'm speaking at the WARC Advertising and Consumers Conference on July 3rd in London. It's all, loosely, about INFLUENCE.

WARC says:

The programme is based on our belief that the old linear communication models have broken down – in today’s multi-media world, no brand owner can rely on winning the hearts and minds of an increasingly sophisticated and sceptical audience which continues to fragment, tag, stop, save, share and skip.

The old marketing mindset of ‘control’ has had its day. Emerging in its place is a new mindset of ‘engagement and influence’.

There are loads of great speakers, like Mark and Toby and another Toby, so it should be interesting and fun, despite my involvement. [Full list here.]

[Mind you, according to George Parker he finds inspiration on TIGS, and I wouldn't argue with him - thanks George, I shall buy you that pint as agreed - I had better think of something inspiring to say now.]

I wonder about INFLUENCE.

I imagine Toby 1 will be talking about OMD's new Influence Planning model - I'm interested to see how they conceive of it.

The thing about influence is that intuitively I feel it only works if people don't think it is working, but secretly want it to. You can't persuade someone to do something they don't really want to do, at least a bit.

Ask a used car salesman. People HATE being sold too - it smacks of coercion, which disrupts our notions of rational autonomy.

But people LOVE having external justification for their own desires.  Or a reason to focus their desires in a world of infinite choice.

When we talk about influencing consumers, it seems to suggests that we, the commercial persuaders, exert some power over our targets that make them do things they don't want to do.

But I suspect they collude. They are our partners in persuasion.

[Those of you who have seen Derren Brown influence people to spontaneously commit armed robbery may disagree.

[If you haven't seen it - go watch.]

But he repeatedly points out in his work that hypnosis is basically just getting people to play along. Persuasion requires tacit collusion. It needs to be tacit, otherwise other parts of your brain get involved and shut things down. That's why suggestion works better obliquely. Perhaps the reason that, in all surveys ever, most people think that advertising doesn't work on them is because that's a requirement for it to work.]

Once I work out what I mean by all that, I shall talk about it at the conference.

Do come and say hi.

If you want to.

Save Children with Media

Save the Children are looking for a media manager to work on a six week project.

So if you are a freelance media type and would like to help save kids

[and, if you wouldn't like to help save kids, then what kind of media monster are you?]

please get in touch with Rosie. 

Rosie Shannon (head of PR): R.shannon@savethechildren.org

Stop Frame Row Your Boat

When Famous Rob got a job I think a warm glowing warming glow spread across the Plannersphere.

He just sent me an ad his new employers have made.

[CheethamBellJWT in Manchester - they have a cute website that speaks directly to prospective marketing director clients, in the voice of Alexi Sayle, reminding them of their famously short tenure in the role and the fact that their brand doesn't exist in the INTERESTING part of the world. 

I like it. It might be a bit impractical though.

[Maybe not though. I guess if there's a phone number, and a sense of the way they think, what more do you really need? Where does it say agency sites have to do the whole people, culture, work thing? Do CMOs ever really put agencies on the pitch list due to the work on their websites? I doubt this. I retract my impracticality comment] 

[Although to get to the phone number you do have to watch the whole thing.]

[Oh but wait - their Google listing has the contact name and phone number, so you don't. Good work.]

Normally, when I get sent loosely disguised press releases concerning new TV spots, I tend to ignore them. 

Sorry if you've sent me some, I don't mean to be rude, but they can often be as direct as:

Dear Blog, Post Our New TV Ad. This is eXclusive. To All of You. 

which doesn't tend to earn them much attention. 

[In fact it seems pretty rude to me. I retract my earlier apology.]

But this was famous Rob so I had a look. 

[Traditional PR people spend time building relationships with journalists, understanding their particular focus - should digital social hypermedia PR spambots do any less?] 

It seems like a nice enough spot. I don't think it will have the epic global viral reach of the classic Bear Fight, but that's a pretty high benchmark. 

So I asked Rob, tell me something awesome about this ad. 

It was shot entirely on Digital SLR photo cameras at 25 shots per second.

[A bit interesting.]

The boat was manually moved a few feet and the oars moved for each frame. We used three oars with various bits of blade removed so that they oars would appear to be in the ground.

[Also a bit interesting. Although I could have guessed that. ]

Once the initial idea was created, our CD remembered a video he had seen that was similar. Instead of doing what most agencies do and copy it; we found and hired the original director Gemma Burditt (just recently out of film school) for her first ever commercial shoot.

[Ah - he got me! Genius Steals but give the people credit.] 

Ways of Seeing

Noah and I wrote this piece for the new issue of Contagious about visualisations.

It's called Ways of Seeing [this is a reference to an awesome book that my mate Paul lent me that I never gave back called Ways of Seeing. It came out in 1972, was based on a BBC television series of the same name and is amazing:  a discourse about the the inherent ideologies embedded in visual imagery.]

In the piece we look at a bunch of interesting data visualisations and quote a blog post by Ed Cotton:

in a data driven world, infographics are the new art

and go on to suggest that visualisations are only going to become more prevalent and interesting as more and more data and metadata is generated by every digital interaction:

In a world increasingly saturated with data, we will all need to develop new ways of seeing.

You can download the whole thing here.

Dreaming of Android

  [from here]

So iPhone 2.0 is whizz-bang fancy and half the price of iPhone 1.0.

Why?

According to analysts:

Analyst Ken Dulaney of Gartner told us that Apple was clearly going after the cellphone industry's top dogs. "With these announcements today, [Apple is] making a statement they want to overtake Nokia," he said.

He's half right.

As my very smart brother points out - it's because Apple needs to grab market share before Android devices hit:

I'm pretty certain the timing of its release, and the farce that has surrounded it (i.e. leaving mobile shops around the world without stock for many weeks) is in some way related to the threat posed to Apple's dominance by Google's Android mobile platform. As the aware of you might know, this is due for release later this year.

He goes on to explain why it's such a threat - up to now Apple's hardware / software expertise has enabled Steve & Co. to create a device that stands head and shoulders above anything else on the market. Very few companies have deep expertise in hardware and software - technology manufacturers always fall down on the software solution, and software companies find it hard to make kit that anyone actually wants.

But that changes when Google, who are very good at software, comes out with an open source platform for devices manufacturers:

Because a large number of handset manufacturers will be producing handsets using the Google Android OS - it's just a matter of time before they figure out how to get the software/hardware combo right.

[Read the rest here]

Apple's proprietary strategy leaves it open to coopition: Google is betting on an open future.

The more people online, on whatever device, the more money Google will make.

When Timing Plans Go Bad

[Thanks to Andy Day]

Naked & Anonymous

Naked London had an anonymous art contest and exhibit last week - some lovely stuff came in from all over the agency.

[The above includes people from various creative or strategic or research backgrounds and one is from finance - can you guess which? There may, or may not, be a prize. Probably not. But maybe.]

Say it with me: Creative is not a department!

Kyle and Hass came up with the idea - here's what they said about it:

We wanted to see how well creativity would function when it has to speak for itself, stripped naked of everything but the expression – no title, no statement, no background.

So we briefed everyone who works at Naked London (the strategists, the creatives, the founding partners, even the cleaning lady) to create a piece of original art to be shown in an exclusive, one-night-only exhibition.

The twist was that every piece of art would be shown anonymously and without a title (this would all be revealed in a special online gallery the following week).

Phase two of the project has just gone live and the creators, titles, statements and inspirations have all been revealed.

You simply click on the work to discover the information.

See the work here: NAKED ANONYMOUS