Sam Michel's blog

I can already picture a new shelf being added to the awards cabinet at Wieden + Kennedy, following the Old Spice campaign. Let's take in some numbers:

In 48 hours, the team led by Brit, Iain Tait, produced 200 videos and wracked up 6,839,830 YouTube views (at time of writing ~72hrs from launch). The media coverage has been almost universally positive, even daring to engage with the notorious troublemakers at 4chan.

OK, so the title might be over-stating the case just a fraction, but the value of the good old-fashioned display advert is certainly suffering.

A recent comScore study claims that while Facebook and MySpace represent 20% of total US display advertising volume, they only represent 5% of total value. In total, the social networks are depressing average CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).

Social networks are averaging just $0.56 CPM compared to $2.43 average. Take Facebook and friends out of the equation and the CPM rises to $2.99.

The new government certainly has its work cut out for it. Save heaps of money whilst trying not to damage the economy is quite a tightrope. Increasing exports is a crucial way to help pay down the debt and the digital sector is a critical part of this.

Whilst the new administration finds its feet, any insight for business is always useful.

Mark Prisk, the newly-appointed Minister of State for Business and Enterprise joined alumni from Webmission 08, one of the first trade missions to focus on the digital sector, earlier this week.

Fortunately, Manoj Ranaweera from Techcelerate was there with his trusty camera...

Saw this handy summary of Facebook's profiles, groups, community pages and official pages and the potential opportunity for brands to take advantage.

I'd have poked, but I'm never really sure of the etiquette. Are you? Instead, here's something more useful, the presentation (re-blogged with permission) from the guys at Carve Consulting.

dConstruct, in its sixth year, is a fixture on every designer's calendar. And what better excuse to immerse yourself in design thinking by the sea-side with some of the top names in the industry?

As the dConstruct team put it,

"dConstruct 2010 brings together leading industry figures to explore the power of design thinking and show how we can all become just a little bit more creative."

We're dead chuffed to have teamed up with organisers, Clearleft, to offer a competition for two tickets to this year's event (1-3rd Sept).

Heck, you can't even but a ticket yet, but the early-bird tranche of tickets will be available from the dConstruct site from 6th July. They'll go quick, so don't hang around.

Entering couldn't be easier, just pop your details in the form below. We'll be making the draw for the lucky winners on Fri, 16th July.

Judging by the number of people coming along to the Partnering for Innovation events, there's lots of interest in collaboration to get a slice of the £18m Collaboration Across Digital Industries competition.

There are a number of challenges in entering a winning bid: meeting the scope of the competition, finding the time (you'll need ~100 hours for a mainstream application) and finding partners to collaborate with.

Are you working with Metadata? Want to get a share of £5m for research and development? Then get yourself along to one of three events covering the Technology Strategy Board's (TSB) new £5m competition, Metadata: Increasing Value in Digital Content Collaborative R&D Competition.

The competition, launched on the 1st June, provides match-funding for projects which address three opportunities to build revenue streams with more efficient and innovative use of metadata.

If you've been following my sudden increase in Tweetage (apologies for the deluge), you'll have noticed I've been zipping around the country hosting a series of events, Partnering for Innovation.

They're designed to support two collaborative R&D competitions run by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), and I'm rather chuffed to have been asked to help out by the event organisers, the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network.

It's been a particularly hectic month for zipping up and and down the country hosting the Partnering for Innovation events, promoting the £18m Collaboration Across Digital Industries competition.

If you've missed out, the good news is that there's another chance to find out about this competition, the Digital Communications KTN are running a briefing in London on 5th July (info here).

Over the course of the events, there's been dozens of presentations, heaps of official-looking information, hundreds of conversations and, for me, a lot of learning in the way that groups can collaborate.

The recipe? A large public(ish) organisation (TfL) opens its data kimono to developers. Six days later, a group of geeks gather for a hack-day and a thing of beauty is born, the live tube map.

Have a look. It's rather addictive, like watching the download bar on a browser slowly creep across the screen (just me?). Congratulations to Matthew Somerville (@dracos) for hacking this together so quickly.

London does seem to be very much on the radar of the US-based tech heavyweights, seeing visits from both Zuckerberg and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joins the line-up for The Guardian's Activate summit later this month (10% discount for Chinwaggers).

UPDATE: If you're not able to make it along, follow on Twitter #tsbcollab. Presentations will be available as videos in next couple of days.

This week we're off to The Watershed in Bristol on Wednesday (2nd June) and the Internet Advertising Bureau in London on Thursday (3rd June).

These events are part of the Partnering for Innovation tour Chinwag is helping to organise, to support the launch of the £18m Collaboration Across Digital Industries competition.

There's still a few spaces left for the Bristol event, don't forget to RSVP to secure one.

If you're after more background about this competition, don't forget to check out the videos we blogged last week with Alex Stanhope from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB).

At midday today (1st June), we're delighted to welcome Alex Stanhope and Jeremy Silver from the Technology Strategy Board to Chinwag Towers for a live webinar.

They'll join me to chat about an exciting new R&D competition that focuses on metadata and how developers or rights holders can obtain grant funding to explore new business models and ways to increase revenues from their content.

UPDATE: Win £1,500 worth of shared office space rental.

Summer's here, although saying that alone has probably jinxed the bank holiday weekend to three days of drizzle.

For budding entrepreneurs, the weekend offers some time free of distractions to focus on developing their startups, which is why the London Startup Weekend, sounds intriguing.

The team at Startup Weekend have very kindly offered Chinwag readers a chance to win two tickets to the event (enter here), and if you can't wait there's also a special 25% discount (use code chinwag00).

As anyone whose tried knows, getting grant funding from the government can be an arduous task with forms that sap your will to live.

Fortunately, the process for securing a slice of the £18m Collaboration Across Digital Industries fund recently announced by the Technology Strategy Board is much less painful.

I caught up with Alex Stanhope, who is leading this project to get the background on the TSB's work and the Digital Testbeds that led to this £18m competition.