This brilliant content marketing presentation explains why tone is everything

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Content makers and brand owners! Do yourself a big one and view this presentation on content marketing delivered by Furthr’s Andy Cowles at last Thursday’s PPA Live! event Re-Invented in London.

In just 15 minutes you will discover:

  1. What a hidden hook is
  2. How the Content Tree can help you build customer trust
  3. Why pictures are where content really starts
  4. How to perfect tone
  5. Why story telling is now vital in creating commercial impregnability

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Congratulations! You are exactly like every other agency in the universe

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I love this post from the Ad Contrarian.

“I’ve been reading all about your ad agency:

  • You are nimble and agile…
  • You believe a good idea can come from anywhere…
  • You are collaborative…
  • You believe the consumer has greater control than ever… 
  • You are tech savvy and media neutral…
  • You have a proprietary method for gaining consumer insights… 
  • You believe the biggest asset any brand can have is a team of creative, passionate thinkers devoted to its success…

Congratulations! You are exactly like every other agency in the fucking universe. 

At Furthr we meet businesses every day – and yes, a lot do sound the same. That is what Furthr tries to help them get over.

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Slavery is STILL big business

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Slavery is still big business. Forced labour produces profits of about $150 billion annually, according to a report published today by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).  In Asia, for example, he average annual profits per victim of sexual exploitation are $22,000—more than four times those gained from non-domestic labour and almost ten times the profits from domestic work. Read more at The Economist. 

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The latest craze in Japan? Photos of hamsters bums

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Two books devoted to images of hamsters’ posteriors have already sold nearly 40,000 copies combined in Japan, according to the publishers, with a third book set for release later this month. Fans of the craze have coined the term “hamuketsu,” which combines “hamster” and “ketsu,” or buttocks in Japanese. “The photos in the book are all shots of hamuketsu,” Yukako Minami, a spokeswoman at Sekai Bunka Publishing Inc., said. The company released “Kawaisa-ni Monzetsu Hamuketsu,” or “Hamuketsu–So Cute You Could Faint,” on April 19, with an initial print run of 7,000 copies. “We’ve had multiple reprints and already shipped 30,000 copies total” since then, Ms. Minami said.

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Content marketing tip #3: if your headline has a question mark in it, the answer is “no”

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This is a great editorial idea from my good friends over at Esquire. But having rolled the ball to the top of the creative hill, they stop before they get to the top.

“Is this the most influential haircut in Britain?” asks the headline. Obviously Esquire think so, else they would not have gone to this trouble to commission a photo and come up with a great headline. So why not say so? The question mark at the end makes Esquire look uncertain, equivocal and weak.

Golden rule: if you have to put a question mark at the end of your headline, then the answer is “no.” Queen to retire? No, because if she was, the headline would read Queen to retire. Next!

 

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Content marketing tip #2: the human face is our favorite destination spot

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Whilst reading The New York Times recently I was struck by a passage from a film review  by Manohla Dargis of new movie Locke, which I think also sums up Furthr’s approach to content and its presentation online:

“A truism about cinema and television, two tributaries that increasingly flow into one image stream, is that together they have turned the human face into our favorite destination spot. The ubiquity of close-ups, particularly in broadcast television, with its parade of bobbling heads and babbling mouths, could have drained movie faces of their power. Yet we can’t seem to get enough of other people’s faces, whether they’re as frozen as masks or changeable as churning water. We trace stories across these familiar landscapes, becoming geographers of emotion.”

In a medium as intimate and yet as potentially impersonal as digital, the human face becomes even more important. Don’t design without it.

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Shock! The UK is not the most alcoholic country in the world. Russia is

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The figures, compiled by the World Health Organisation, place Britain 13th in a table of 194 member states – with the top ten spots with the highest consumption of alcohol per person made up exclusively by European countries.

Further stats reveal 28 per cent of Britons were classed as having participated in binge drinking in the previous month – compared to an average of 16 per cent globally.

For overall alcohol consumption, Britain was the 25th highest – topping the global average and above Bulgaria and Kazakstan.

 

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