Three days to go until the geek world descends on Austin for SXSW Interactive which if the ‘super grid‘ is anything to go by, will be more overwhelming than anything that has gone before. With marketeers, developers and Googler’s pouring into Texas in unprecedented numbers, we can’t hope to give more than the briefest taste of what we’re looking forward to. Our...

Author: David Bryant, Creative Strategist, Google ‘The future… doesn’t arrive all at once.’ —Sid Mead, futurist, visionary, creator of Bladerunner Booting up a PC When we first boot up a PC, we take a step back in time. The very first instructions that a PC executes when powered up are, in computing terms, ancient history. Called the Instruction Set, they...

Author: Rosie Arnold, Deputy Exec Creative Director, BBH and Deputy D&AD President On Tuesday night, D&AD launched a new initiative: The White Pencil Award. It is an ongoing award, but the first White Pencil will be awarded next year to a piece of creative thinking that best answers a brief that we’re giving to the whole creative community. The White Pencil is...

Source: Glitschka Studios Author: Greg Andersen (@gandersen), CEO, BBH New York In the last couple of weeks I’ve read two specific articles that made me really stop and think about our future as a creative industry. The first was the March 26th New York Times article “In a New Web World, No Application is an Island”. It paints a picture...

About a month ago, we posted an anti-Quora rant. It triggered quite a bit of discussion in the comments, one of which was even developed into a counter-post that argued Quora’s superiority in identifying intent over search engines. To round off the impromptu series, we’ve asked Shannon Bain to explain why it isn’t about Quora’s value or lack thereof. Below...

We recently got excited about a 15 year old chart (pictured) we were presented that effectively encapsulated participation inequality. We love the level of detail beyond the typical 1:9:90 ratio (creators:editors:audience). We can only assume “1:10:100:1000:10000 rule” is too much of a mouthful to say, thus the shorthand. It makes us stop and think about how unbelievably valuable the “catalytic...

THE START BIT I stumbled through the door of BBH London on March 29 2005. I was terrified. Despite coming from arguably the best & most famous planning agency of all time (BMP in London), I was (as we say in the UK) ‘sh*tting my pants’. Everything that felt charming yet amateur about BMP had been brutally and suddenly replaced...

Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London Jim wrote a post here a few months back which we’re happy to say Campaign magazine (campaignlive.co.uk) asked him to expand on further for today’s issue. We’re sharing the article in full here now, so anyone outside the UK can see it simultaneously. This is one of two posts – we particularly like his...

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” ~Sir Winston Churchill, November 1942 So you will have heard Ben is leaving the BBH fold after six or so years, to take up the role of Director of Strategy, Google Creative Lab. Anyone who knows Ben...