Experience Manifesto: Urban Spam

I was reading through the blogosphere tonight and came across a piece on Greg Verdano's blog about Urban Spam and that led me to several other postings, all linked here. The quoted section below is from PSFK, which has some good thoughts on the whole concept of urban spam. The second video lists the prices for a variety of OOH ad buys in NYC too.

We've explored both OOH and In-Cinema and, as much fun as we've sometime had (check out what we did for Sunsilk), but even we have to admit that some of the technologies we've worked with could be pretty annoying in the wrong hands. I mean, even we don't want laser speakers everywhere and group games everywhere. The key to making it not urban spam, is creating authentic, compelling and relevant brand experiences. Gee, where have I heard that before!

We wanted to give you some background to the little video we published yesterday on YouTube.
We first started to become aware of a concern of a growing interference by advertisers in our personal space when we watched Graham Hill of Treehugger present at the Future Marketing Summit in NYC in February. Graham talked about the 'End Of Inbetween' at the FMS as a negative trend and covered the rise of omnipresence in marketing messages.

A couple of months later, British marketing guru Russell Davies started using the term 'Urban Spam' on his blog. We haven't asked Russell where he got the term from - but we remember a specific post where he questioned why an ad had to be wrapped around his morning coffee. He has a special category now for posts on his blog about Urban Spam.