This guy spends his days hiding his little car in back streets and then filming people who drive or park where they shouldn’t. Someone’s gotta do it, and he seemed pretty happy with his lot when I chatted to him. I think his favourite bit is working the camera on the roof with a joystick. I wonder whether Manchester City Council have put them in cute little Smart cars to make them seem more friendly when they fine you?

Jonathan and I were down at TBWA to have a chat about Playstation 3.    So by way of contrast to conversations about BluRay, real-time physics and HD, we popped into Pollocks Toy Museum to check out gameplay from the late 19th Century. A few years ago, Pollocks was threatened with closure, so it was good to see it thriving in its original location on Scala Street.
The least we could do was to give them a bit of a mention on the LOVE blog.

Pollocks is a rickety old rabbit warren of a museum which is bursting to the brim with toys, toy theatres, games, comics, dolls – and what the museum claims to be the oldest known teddy bear, Eric, who was born in 1906 and looks pretty well for his age.

Forget the spine-tingling intensity of Resistance Fall Of Man or the horror of Resident Evil – we haven’t seen anything quite as scary as a girls nursery full of dolls from the early 1900’s.   

Jonathan was convinced that one of them turned its head slightly, but I didn’t believe him. 

As is traditional, we brought back a momento for the office.  After much deliberation we chose Squirt Wee Boy (“pull down his shorts to make him pee!”).  Child-like, we know, but I guess that’s the point of Pollocks.

Posted by Dave Palmer

I was keen to hoover up any metrics at the Click conference, partly because I’m intrigued to see if anyone is measuring the success of digital campaigns with any accuracy and thoroughness.  It was maybe a little unfair to expect much because it was a ‘Creative’ conference, not a ‘Measurement’ conference but for all the great ideas shown, there were very few presentations that talked about results in any convincing way.  I picked up two sets of numbers that interested me. First, a few presenters banded around a broad rule of thumb saying that "5% of Youtube users are actually ‘creating’, 50% are ‘interacting’ (i.e commenting, sending stuff on etc) and 45% are ‘passivley surfing’.  Are these the generally accepted figures anyone? Second, Anson Harris from Meme shared this little chart that they’d used in a pitch for Lenovo.
  They were basically trying to put some figures on what could be deemed a successful viral campaign (by the way, the common concensus is that the term ‘viral campaign’ is misleading and ‘digital word of mouth’ campaign is preferred.)  Meme reckon that there may be only 1 campaign a year on average that will hit the ‘Outstanding 5 million+ hits’ level and a vast majority are deemed ‘ok’ at best.  Clearly more needs to be done in the area of measurement if clients are to be persuaded to put their faith and money in the hard to ‘measure and predict’ world of digital.  Until then, it’s going to be an unpredictable and experimental step into the unknown for brands.

Posted by Jonathan Rigby

Adam and I managed to get an invite to the Manchester launch of Icebreaker at Tiger Tiger.  After completing our free online registration earlier in the day (employed and stressed, straight, cuddly build, looking for a laugh and, erm, 38) we hit the bar.    Basically you send Play to 89665 and you’re in the game.  For some reason, I found myself waving my phone around the room hoping to catch the phone rays of a ‘Match’.  But before long, you get a message asking if you want to see the details of a potential ’suitor’.  "Emma, 23, single, fun-loving, likes reading books" seemed a good start (had she received word that I was married and 38?) so I started drafting my first text.  So what the hell do you say?  I’ve always been crap at chatting to strangers and I dried up, only managing a rather limp "Hi.  What books do you like?". 
Well at least it was asking for a response.  Clearly ‘Emma’ was wanting to push things forward more quickly based on her "anything that’s really saucy" response.  I gulped.  You see, it becomes a bit of a pride thing.  At any time your Match can DUMP you and move on, so true achievement involves keeping the text conversation going for a long as possible.  Emma hadn’t asked me a question, it was a closed response, so it forced me to try and keep things going.   Was "me too, the saucier the better" really that crap?  Had I closed things down?  Had I failed to move things on by simply pretending to share her taste in books?   I waited.  And waited.  I checked my signal.  I waved my phone around a little bit more.  And then it happened.  "Sorry, you’ve been DUMPED."  I have to admit, Icebreaker is strangely addictive and loads of fun.  Within seconds, "Emily, 24, bi-curious and into wet and wild" made text contact.  This time…

Posted by Jonathan Rigby