I love BIG & BOLD productions and we’ve nailed one with the Microsoft Advertising Story Video featuring (the very lovely) Felicia Day.

The campaign centres around the Microsoft Advertising Story Awards which is a competition we’re running to challenge brand advertisers, marketers and agencies.

More on the competition in Richard Dunmall’s post: Challenging Global Marketers and Agencies to be Storytellers and Win a trip to Cannes! 

Check out Felicia’s teaser for the advertising awards too!

Enjoy and more coming soon!

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I love these videos the Cannes Lions chaps do. This one has Yukio Nakayama, Executive Creative Director at Dentsu giving 5 tips on winning one of the coveted awards.

Love the fact he says to keep the subtitles slow as many of the judges don’t actually have English as their first language.

Nicely edited and presented little clip too!

Now who’s going to Cannes this year?

Just goes to show how much work goes into setting up an experience like that! Bet it didn’t take so long to break down though.

The above was filmed and edited by my buddy Bryan Schaeffer, who has quite the fantastic show reel!

Links to videos here and here!

Enjoy!

My new favourite place in Seattle is just down from our office on Westlake Avenue. It’s just opened and I ate there 3 lunchtimes in a row last week. If you get there early you’ll get a seat, the service is excellent, and the food is fabulous.

What’s more fabulous are the prices! $7.95 for the above – chicken teriyaki, beef yakiniku, tofu, salad, rice and miso soup.

$7.95!

Mio Sushi does a great happy hour which I’d frequent too if I didn’t want to rush back home to tuck Maggie into bed!

Anyone for a Mount Rainier roll??

Fulfilled a career ambition this week and got 5 minutes with the charming CEO of WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell at CES 2012 in Las Vegas.

In this little shimmy, we chat about advertising spend and where marketers should be concentrating their budgets, and he talks about mobile being the big bet for the near future.

Allow me to keep beaming for a little while longer!

With a little bit of help from mummy, Maggie knocks the high bit right out of the park!

Now we couldn’t write a book called Pioneers of Digital without helping it along with a bit of digital marketing, so we’ve added a Facebook Page and Twitter account so you can keep up with all our progress.

Paul’s just got back to London from China where he’s been interviewing pioneers over there, and I’ve been rattling off chapters from interviews I’ve done with inspirational figures here in Seattle, California and New York.

As we go into 2012, we should have half the book written and have 2 months left to write 10 more profiles and a lot of analysis.

The Facebook Page and Twitter account are a good way to keep track of where we are and who we’re working on. We also want you to engage with us and give us your views on some of the people we’re writing about.

We’ll provide a bit of a list in the new year so make sure your follow and like the links below:

Pioneers of Digital Book on Twitter

Pioneers of Digital Book on Facebook

Take care and have a great Christmas!!!

Maggie’s loving her new Bouncy Bouncy toy. If she bounces high enough, the lights and sound go crazy. She loves it. So much, she giggle incessantly. 2028 Olympics?

Up until last week, I’ve been listening to music and travelling with a pair of Shure SE310’s that cost me an arm and a leg a few years ago. They had excellent sound, but were sometimes a little uncomfortable and had very thick cables that would bang on my clothes when I walked and cause a lot of periphery noise.

Last week, I pulled them too hard out of a bag and one of the earphones came off. To replace them, I’d have to go for the SE315’s for $249 from a store or send them back to Shure who’d replace them for around $90.

Just to make sure I was plumping for the best, I did some research and discovered this review by Jasmine France of the Klipsch Image S4 earphones (affiliate link). I’d never really seen such a glowing report for anything in this area so did some more research and found a pair on Amazon for about $79 (affiliate link).

They are, quite frankly awesome! They fit beautifully, the cable is light enough and doesn’t get in the way, and the sound is exceptional. I’m not a proper audiophile, but I know I like good quality and these work fantastically with all genres of music. The other thing I like about them is the price. How Klipsch did it I don’t know, but they’re giving more recognized brands a run for their money by probably shifting loads of these.

I didn’t like the tin box they came in though, so am using my old Shure case. The one I should have put my expensive ones in before I put them in my bag in the first place.

Nice to know if I’m an idiot again, it’s not going to cost me the earth any more.

Personal and career highlights collided last week as I was lucky enough to spend a whole 45 minutes with actor, writer, presenter and digital commentator, Stephen Fry.

I’ve been a monumental fan since the Fry & Laurie and Blackadder days, and have met him a couple of times (see Steve Clayton’s memories of one such occasion here) through his dapper business partner, Andrew Sampson.

We met at the Groucho Club in Soho’s Dean Street, all for the book I’m writing with Paul Springer called Pioneers of Digital.

Chatting about his first memories of the internet, Stephen shared some personal stories about the early days of the web. We learned about how his site www.StephenFry.com came about and this history of his foray into social media with his blog “blessays”, and how he got into Twitter and changed the media landscape forever in the UK with one photo from a stuck lift.

Extremely knowledgeable, frank and passionate, Stephen drove our discussion into areas perfect for profiling him in the book as a definite Pioneer of Digital.

We’ll be releasing some of the excerpts early next year.

Worth waiting for……….believe me!