Track your McD or real time answers to what's in my burger, and who made it?

As if to prove just how wrong the Iceland approach is (see post below) McDonald's in Australia have launched this App that allows you to track the source of all your ingredients, including introducing you to the various growers and farmers involved. ​A simple(ish) combination of GPS, image recognition and augmented reality. I'm not a customer, but I do like this very much. Thanks to rufusleonard for the tip

McDonald's "Track My Macca's" from Stevie Laux on Vimeo.

Turn your phone into a mobile Macca’s ingredient tracker and get to know some McDonald’s favourites inside out… For the first time ever you can track ingredients in the actual food you bought. Just point your phone at the front of the specially marked boxes and let the app do the rest.

Your table-top suddenly springs into life with cutting-edge 3D augmented reality. Pick one of the featured ingredients to track, then find out its story. Using your phone's GPS, image recognition, plus the date and time, it works out where some of the ingredients came from, and what happened to them on their way to you. If you like, you can even get friendly with some of the farmers, fishermen and bakers who supply McDonald’s.

Iceland burgers, unknown place of origin

In the wake of the horse meat scandal. Iceland have been putting up these posters claiming their burgers are '100% tested' Couple of rather obvious points to this claim. One, you mean you didn't test before?​ and Two, far more important considering current* shopper treands, There is no mention of where the beef comes from. The key issue for consumer trust in grocery is being transparant about source and provenance. Putting up such a prominent poster that fails to say where the beef comes from, begs the question, what are you hiding?

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Ideals Vs Sponsors

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While it might come across as sour grapes gripping about an event you are not at. BUT i'll do it anyway. ​Looking at this weeks SXSW event I was struck by how at odds the title sponsors were to the ideals of disruption and difference that the event was founded on. Sure any live event of scale costs a bomb to put on and anything with a hint of cool will always get 'non-cool' brands throwing money after a bit of rub off.

BUT and its a big BUT.

By putting all your key sponsors on show in such a way SXSW has. Does sort of underline its got a bit 'dad-at-the-disco'

Fear of Missing Out trend begats a smart new app

If you keep getting envy from seeing what your friends are up to, when you are at home with only iPlayer and the dog for company. You need CouchCachet an app that syncs with Foursquare to depict a fantastic night on the town. Titled a bit worryingly as “Life. Without the Hassle of Living.” 

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Foursquare itself has always suffered from ​over-checkins but this takes it a step further by adding geo tagged photos and in location bonus points etc. Not sure how often you could pull the trick, but maybe worth it to spook your timeline once in a while.

Seen on http://www.fastcodesign.com/ via Brooklyn Magazine
​

Another sign the old world of Europe bumbles innovation opportunties

Ludovic Levy. VP Ad Services Orange. Feb 2013

““What is exciting is that Africa will start to close the loop before Europe because many more people pay via mobile there than in Europe – whereas it will probably take a few more years in Europe. Weve has strong opportunities in that field. As soon as we have enough NFC penetration and enough devices in-store that accept NFC payments Weve can help close the loop between mobile coupons, advertising, payments and also analytics,””

Weirdly beautiful paintings on abandoned aircraft

“The Boneyard Project: Return Trip.” Displayed at The Pima Air & Space Museum in Arizona, more than 30 artists participated including BAST, Colin Chilag, Crash, Daze, Daniel Martin Diaz, Tristan Easton, Jameson Ellis, Ron English, Erik Foss, Mark Kostabi, Lisa Lebofsky, Alex Markwith and Walter Robinson. To learn more on the Boneyard Project check out their website.

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The Sex Pistols, digital sensors and the Girl Guides of America.

Why we need to make new technology as acceptable as 1970’s Punk. Scary at first but strangely comforting when familiar.

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The current landscape;

  1. The social web has matured past the point of no return.
  2. Improvements to common tasks are regular occurrences.

The dilemma

  • Large sections of the population not on board with point one.
  • Same group therefore missing the benefits of point two
  • Complicated by current trend to avoid reasoned debate in favour of belligerent statementing

A recent incident with the Girl Guides in America highlighted the ever growing conflicts between those who get our new speed of change and those blinked to it. The worst part? we are losing the power to debate the ground in-between. A generation of reality shows appears to have tutored people in conflict arguments rather than debating skills.

Anyway back to Punk. The speed of musical change in the late 1970’s meant that the mainstream got a fair few years to come to terms with the Sex Pistols and The Clash and except change had indeed happened. But in terms of technology, its like Dubstep in 2004 emerging from a South London underground scene. But before the UK mainstream got it, in a few short years the Americans were exporting it back to the UK. Change just got dumped on the masses in the shape of Britney Spears remixes.

The beauty of human ingenuity paired with internet capabilities means that constant change is now our norm. Unless we embrace some bizarre Pol Pot style year zero experiment we need to communicate the benefits of rapid change to a wider group of the population. This takes me back to the Girl Guides of America. Links below for full story. But to summarise; 11 year old Girl Scout adds to her door to door selling of cookies by setting up PayPal account and selling online. great idea you’d have thought, well yes, The Girl Guides at first congratulated the girl on her resourcefulness, but then changed tack and slapped the poor girl down saying that the internet was not a place for a Girl Guide to learn life skills (!) and she would be ‘..much safer..’ selling door to door. You can imagine the scale of  the resulting social media storm. It was both loud and unfortunately generally lacking in any form of debate, just shouted statements. Maybe not quite as diametric as the American assault rifle ‘debate’ but still pretty entrenched into unstoppable force meets immovable object territory.

New opportunities driven by new technology are going to appear more often. This will benefit the parts of society attuned to accepting the positive benefits of rapid change.

Our challenge is to communicate the wider benefits of constant improvement, The web has happened, social change is exciting, scary and not a little fun. Rather than just focus on the thing that is causing the current moment of change. We have big chunks of society who still need bringing onboard to the realities of a mobile based, mature tech world. It is a responsibility of those developing new tech that what they have in their hands is not just a shiny new object, but a potential weapon of diversion. 

Compared to the 1970’s we are much more tolerant of differences in musical styles. Its no longer a subject for broadcast bans or Government intervention. But we appear to becoming more intolerant of those who are not on ‘our’ technological level. This is why I say there is a huge responsibility for those brands with the power to communicate across social demographic groups to explain a wider message. This is a narrative that development means change (and change is good).  

Any brand in any market adapts to the forces around it. The wonder of our current situation is that adaption can and will happen fantastically fast. To repeat myself, the imperative is not to leave chunks of our society behind, entrenched in a refusal to adapt, like an American style second amendment position, violently opposed to change however logical or beneficial.

Whether its a Girl Guide selling cookies or someone writing music, traditional procedures exist. But we now have increased abilities to find and implement smarter solutions to the processes at hand. What becomes dangerous for society is not a new song or type of cookie sale but the misunderstanding of why it had to be ‘new’

1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/02/06/is-the-girl-scouts-actively-discouraging-girls-from-using-technology/

2 http://cset.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/files/documents/publications/Osborne-Establishing%20the%20Norms%20of%20Scientific%20Argumentation.pdf 

& http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems121/abstract;jsessionid=14AB71E7EA088FFFFF7EDC009C579678.d03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

3 http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3262089/history-of-dubstep-beyond-lies-the-wub

4 http://yearzerodoc.com/

5 http://www.steamfeed.com/social-media-fail-girlscouts-crush-girl/

6 http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/16/gun-debate-what-makes-gun-assault-rifle/

7 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/msnbc-airs-sandy-hook-fathers-416977

8 http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13213/

9 http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-bbc-bans-the-sex-pistols-quotgod-save-the-queenquot

10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994

11 http://home.nra.org/#

Superbowl Vs The ads (in real time)

This is good, a real time look at social media chatter about the ads during the Superbowl this weekend. http://brandbowl2013.com seen via 

“Welcome to Brand Bowl 2013, the social showdown between advertisements showcased on the biggest sports stage in the world ... the almighty Super Bowl. The idea was originally conceived by Mullen in partnership with Radian6. But this year, the competition’s fifth in existence, we’re taking it over with our friends from Pointslocal. ”
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