What do you do if you are an avant-garde, anti-capitalistic theatre and need to promote yourself to sell tickets? If your target group (and yourself) is generally suspicious of branding and advertising – an advanced, critical audience more in the habit of going to clubs and cinemas?

Germany’s leading avant-garde theatre, Die Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz in Berlin, rejected a proposal by advertising agency Springer & Jacoby and decided to do things their own way. Over the past 15 years they have created an extremely successfull anti-design superbrand, by ignoring all existing standards of advertising. Not a single thought was waisted on strategy, target groups, user panels or trend scouts.

The plays are much praised, but they are only a part of the Volksbühne show. The Volksbühne posters are in it as well. So are the Volksbühne stickers mixing with the street art, the badly assempled, rough looking Volksbühne matchboxes, the Volksbühne building, the Volksbühne flags and banners, the grumpy Volksbühne woman in the ticket booth and the lack of a decent Volksbühne website. It is a complete world: clever, ironic, fun, self assured, rebellious and spot on.

The “Volksbühne style” makes most other theatres, look like brave choire boys (which they probably are in comparison). They rely heavily on good reviews and hope to catch our attention with a nice poster. No wonder we usually forget about them and head oft to the cinema…

The consumer of tomorrow may come a lot closer to the Volksbühne Audience of today: Suspiocious, critical, fed up and difficult to seduce. Future advertising and design agencies can look to Rosa Luxembourg Platz to see what charming, intelligent anti-design branding can lead to.

www.volksbuehne-berlin.de
www.lsd-berlin.de

Cleopatra

A wanna-be princess visited Frog Design in New York as a part of the Gain Conference. Frog Design is one of the leading design companies in the world. The reason why they are top of the design business is because of their ability to perform multidisciplinary functions.

The visit contained an interesting presentation of their working methods. They are working in the field of innovation and design - and they seem to manage to work in between many fields of expertise.

Read more about their methods of working here.

By the very green Ms Rix

A few weeks ago, 1508 had sent Ms Rix to New York to join a very interesting conference “AIGA Gain Conference” about design and business.

It really was an exciting conference. It’s major theme was how design makes a difference. A differentiating factor which makes a significant difference on the bottom line. This point of view towards the design business is not common – but really relevant!

Here are some highlights from the conference:

A man called Tom
That man – Tom Kelley - really is something. Not only has he developed the well-known design company IDEO, but he has also written some really interesting books about design and innovation. The latest one is “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. You must read this one!

Sustainability
One of the main issues at the conference was sustainability. When will we Danish start thinking – seriously – about these things..? In the States, they are ahead of us in Denmark – and presumably in the rest of Europe.

Design changes business
A guy from The British Council, Harry Rich, presented a very interesting – and non-academic - report on how design makes a difference for the companies using design. The Council has through the last 5-6 years proceeded methodically with how the business use design as a strategic tool – and what the factual results are. They can document how companies who are investing in design create a better result on the bottom line – or a bigger return of investment.

Selling by Design
The last – but absolutely best – speaker was Blair Enns. An expert on how to sell design – and most interesting how you can avoid to pitch. Enns was an oracle – and his models and ways of managing the selling process will soon reflect our business!

If you work in the field of design, then you have to join the conference next year. It was really something.

By the selling Ms Rix

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about “content is king”, but things are changing. Content is just not enough. You have to offer content in a social context. That’s why Myspace and YouTube are such huge successes, because these services make you manage and exchange content. A Norwegian guy - Eirik Solheim – has some interesting thoughts about this issue.

When you compare Myspace and YouTube with a institution of culture, MTV, a trend is easy to spot. MTV is just another channel of information – while Myspace and YouTube involve and make people interact. That has an effect on how their sites expand.

So, offering information all alone is not really sufficient. If you want to have success – then you have to interact with the users.

By Ms Rix 3.0

With a little help from our friends…or we just want to pick your brains
TBWA in London has come up with an interesting concept, it’s a blog called The Lab. The idea is to let everybody with a creative mind, help TBWA solve their ad-related problems.

My question to you, dear reader - Do you think it will fly?

What’s your colour?
Adobe has made a very interesting homepage - Kuler, where you can select colours you like, share it with others, and rate it. Try it out at

Is it a magazine or a homepage?
These days you find a lot of very nice magazines, where the graphics and pictures are just beautiful. Now comes the hybrid between a homepage and a magazine. Its called Prova, and has the layout of a magazine, but the Flashy features of a homepage. 

By Rying

So here is a few links worth a visit:

Mr. Link
Just found this picture on tveskov.com. Mr Tveskov is by no comparison the #1 link Master in Denmark. If you know a little Danish, do check out his blog.

Mr. Skype
First came Skype, next big thing…Venice? One of the founders of Skype, Janus Friis is working on a new project where the idea is to combine TV and web. Not much info on his blog, but keep an eye on the project, I´m sure it will be worth waiting for.

Mr. Evangelist
Guy Kawasaki, former evangelist at Apple, now blogs about pretty much everything, and he does it very well. His blog is number 50 in the blogosphere.

By Rying

Every month a darling is selected among all the fantastic employees at 1508.

This month’s darling is our dear Klaus (B)undvig who’s working with information architecture.

Congratulation Undvig!

Today we’re featured in the Inform 09 newsletter from the national organization Danish Designers. They’re covering our processes, cases and so on… read it, if you want to learn more about us.

By Ms Rix della Rix

For a long time I’ve listened to DR’s radio magazine, Harddisken as a Podcast. It has been one of my favourite tools to keep up with the development in the digital world. However, not long ago a friend of mine introduced me to the real thing, Digital Planet by BBC. It is the equivalent to Harddisken but as in so many other ways BBC really knows how to make public service programs. Tjeck it out and see if you like it better than Harddisken.

By Rudolf