Brainstorms are good but the people in them must actually have brains

The W+K Reception - an idea for F+J.. Naked portraits of the staff?

Today I met Shingo Ohno he said that. I will be saying it again. Quite a lot. He is a Creative Director at W+K Tokyo. He does some great work for clients including Google WHO, by the way, are the SECOND most popular search engine in Japan. Yes that’s right. The Japanese prefer to “Yahoo-whack” which is surprising to say the least. I also learned that the Japanese phone systems here use a smart card system called FeliCa which means you can use your phone as, amongst other things, a subway pass and an internet credit card. This offers lots of interesting opportunities for print ads effectively driving to URLs as you can literally walk up to a poster and touch your phone on it to visit a site.

Shingo is also a bit famous for holding a world tour from his bedroom using Ustream. A problem borne out of having too many international friends and not being able to settle on a single time for them all to see him play he ran a program of events at different times for Europe, the US and Japan.. theming each gig and even selling T-shirts. What a dude.

On a culinary note (I have decided this blog will have a ‘today I have mostly been eating..’ string to it) we had a delicious lunch involving steamed, thinly sliced pieces of pork, cabbage and beansprouts with a sour dip, chives, a green paste that was made out of a special kind of lime on the side, pickled fish, an orange root vegetable that was sort of candied and rice. It was fabulous. Thank you Shingo. You rock (from your bedroom, mostly).