In the recent week I have been very quiet on this blog, and the main culprit is... me. Too busy to fulfil my duty to unload my brain from all these things that amaze me. But this state of intense activity is great as it has allowed me, on three continent to accumulate a nice little backlog of thoughts that I am at sharing with you in the next few months. Spain, Canaries Islands, Washington state, Tunisia, London, Munich... were indeed all on the agenda of my last trips.
One thing though that I am keen to share immidiately is how gloomy an airport can, especially when your luggage get lost, a fellow passenger has a heart attack and dies in the plane, or that you have a long transfer and not a single penny/euro/dirham/cent to offer a bit of entertainment (all true stories I am afraid).
That is only if you don't arrive in the London Heathrow Terminal 5, where T-Mobile recently performed another of their flashmobs:
I don't know you, but the warmest and most personalised welcome I have received in an airport in the recent years was closer to "Passenger Cedric, passenger Cedric, please contact security regarding your unexpectedly damaged luggage".
Flash Mob(ile phones)
Let me dwell a bit more on this marketing campaign orchestrated by T-Mobile and their agency Saatchi&Saatchi for the third time (first they danced, then they karaoke-ed, and now they mix). Flash Mobilisations consists in secretely organising a congregation of people to share a moment of pure random fun. Organisers seed the remour using the web, texts to friends, and keeping the details secrets until the very last minute... letting the word spread until it is the right time. Famous flash-mobilisations included pillow batlles in front of the Tour Eiffel, farewell posh cocktails in the London's Circle Line tube as this itinary stopped being a circle...
Of course, T-Online's are slightly less amateur and more polished than the genuine one, but heck... that is great fun to watch and eventually participate. You just have to be at the right time in the right place!
To read further:
- In this article Burger King made burger discovery an ethnologic experiment.
- In this article, Ford makes you find the hidden arts scattered around london
