This is how the city of Amsterdam shows its inhabitants how abandoned bicycles form an obstacle in the city. Apparently there are tens of thousands of these bicycles in Amsterdam. By building this maze of 200 bicycles, the Amsterdammers are asked to get rid of their bikes when not used anymore. Of course this won’t help a bit, since abandoned bicycles are…um…abandoned. But it does make a nice photo opportunity for the passers by.

David Roman, CMO of Chinese computer brand Lenovo, talked about ‘Global Business Redesigned’. His most interesting insight was that the ‘net generation’ (aged 16-35, 1 billion in size), a generation that grew up with internet, has more in common around the globe, than different generations have in common within one single country. And it is because of this that the next generation enterprises will have a global mindset, will operate as a network and will be highly adaptive because of cultural diversity.

Roman’s prediction is already happening on Foursquare. Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, talked about making the city easier in use by aggregating location based tips from the community – e.g. ‘when you enter the airport, don’t go to the first Starbucks, there’s one further down with not such a long waiting line’. The badges people can earn by ‘checking in’ places regularly, give the community a game-like incentive to contribute to the community. And this is one of the key success factors of Foursquare. Is life becoming a game, we asked ourselves.

When listening to Dan Hon, you might think so. Hon, co-founder of Six To Start and since this year working for Wieden+Kennedy, talked about the first Alternate Reality Game, The Beast, created by Microsoft to promote Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence in 2001. The game was set up as a ‘rabbit hole’, which means the consumer had to discover snippets of information floating around the internet, link them with each other, and by doing so solve a big puzzle. According to Hon it was this set up, that made solving puzzles the standard for ARG’s. Almost all the big ARG’s that followed, like Dark Night, Lost Ring, and Evoke were puzzles. Hon, a great speaker, said he was bored of doing stupid puzzles; “I don’t want to need a UV torch to get to the next bit of the story”. His point was that it was time that ARG’s started to entertain the mass, rather than excite a few nerds.

Cory Doctorow, an advocate of liberalizing copyright laws, talked about free content online. Since copying will only get easier, he says, people shouldn’t fight the copy culture, but embrace it. Doctorow clearly practices what he preaches, since his science fiction e-books are freely distributed online. Doctorow believes that it only stimulates people to buy his physical books. What’s more, a physical product gets more value when its digital equivalent is free. Doctorow further substantiated his point by using a brilliant quote from Tim O’Reilly “the problem for artists is not piracy, it’s obscurity”. Since it’s easier to capitalize on being loved, than on being obscure, it’s more effective to seed your work online, than to protect it from people consuming it.

Jeff Jarvis, professor at the New York Graduate School of Journalism and famous for his book ‘What would Google do?’, talked about the future of journalism. His eloquent talk, was larded with smart one-liners. Very convincingly he illustrated a future where old school journalism will collaborate with the community (read: bloggers, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.). His motto is “Do what you do best and link to the rest”. There’s so much specialized news on the internet, that it’s the task of new school journalism to organize this. Like Doctorow Jarvis is of the opinion that old school media shouldn’t be afraid of all this news, but embrace it. He calls it ‘the power of the human link’. And since today finding news starts with search, Google is not stealing from Rupert Murdoch, but actually giving him traffic. The importance of search has created a new reality; only if you can answer a consumer’s question, you exist. So all in all, Jarvis believes in collaboration between journalists and ‘the community’. But he makes his students realize that communities cannot be built, they already exist – quoting Mark Zuckerberg.

Evan Ratliff, writer for Wired magazine, found out that online communities are very powerful. He tried to disappear for a month and Wired challenged its readers to find him. People talked about him on Twitter, created websites, maps, flow charts with credit card purchases etc. If he did anything online, people found out within no time where he was and what he was doing. Though he took thorough measures not to get discovered – from hiding a server in Las Vegas from which he could work on his computer, to shaving his head – he finally got caught because of his gluten free diet. He was found in the only gluten free pizzeria in New Orleans. It proves that the community can easily organize itself.

Tom Hulme from IDEO talked very smartly about redesigning design. He showed a letter that American Airlines customer Dustin Curtis wrote to the company to share his frustration about AA’s website. He would never fly AA again, but as a parting gift he made a new, consumer friendly design. He received an answer from the web designer who told him he had several designs ready to be implemented. But doing so was impossible, because there were many different parties within AA who all touched upon the site and had a vested interest in submitting their own specific information to the site. With this example Hulme illustrated how many companies don’t design their company as a whole. Most companies exists of different islands that don’t work very well together. Apple is the best example of a company that has designed the whole; its business model, its products, its shops, its website, and its advertising are all aligned and designed out of one single strategy. The second part of his talk was about ‘business in beta’. The business model of the future is a business that is never finished, but constant in beta.

So what have we learned? We’ve learned that the global net generation will more easily connect, because of the internet roots they share. We’ve learned that the future of journalism is about collaboration. We’ve learned that freely distributing your e-books online can be profitable. We’ve learned that hiding in the offline world is extremely difficult, if you use the online world while doing so. We’ve learned that the community can easily organize itself – though Charles Leadbeater already told us that many years ago. We’ve learned that virtual badges are a smart incentive to make people share information. We’ve learned that the word ‘beta’ will become obsolete, because everything will be constantly in beta in the future. And, finally, we’ve learned that PICNIC host Jon Rosenfeld, from Boom Chicago, is a pretty funny guy.

Here some visual impressions of PICNIC.

A new Amsterdam city guide, called Zero20 – the Amsterdam area code – was launched this week. The online platform  helps tourists and expats to spend their spare time by showing what’s on in Music, Film, Art, Food and Shop(ping). The navigation works fairly intuitive through a calendar that primarily shows big pictures of the events. It was conceived by Italian-born Stefano Xotta and created by Grey Amsterdam. Though there are already quite a few similar initiatives, this one might be more successful due to its catchy look.

While the Pletterpet has not been the most successful premium Heineken ever launched – at the supermarket you’ll still find big piles of  Pletterpet boxes – Heineken yesterday made a big come back during the national team’s canal parade. Heineken’s agency TBWA\Neboko – also responsible for the Pletterpet – came up with the idea to spoof  the well known Heineken pay-off Biertje? (Beer?) – not in use anymore, for that matter. By leaving the ‘i’ out, it spells ‘Bertje!’, referring to the Dutch football coach Bert van Marwijk. During the last days of the tournament the Amsterdam brewer spread Bertje! t-shirts and flags through supermarket Albert Heijn and its own bars. By the time the Dutch team was hounoured with a canal parade – as if they had become world champion – it was impossible to miss ‘Bertje!’ Picture: the Heineken Brewery Museum; fan waiting for the Canal Parade; newspaper ad; and Dutch top scorer Sneijder holding a Bertje! flag. Though we are very impressed by the amount of (free) publicity this must have generated, we still preferred to look at the Bavaria Dutch dress girls.

Everybody that lives in Amsterdam recognizes the human sized letters that spell ‘I Amsterdam’. So when the A and the M disappeared this week, people noticed that something was missing. Amsterdam Partners (AP) – the agency that exploits the city slogan – reported the letters as stolen. AP even stated they encountered the missing letters on Marktplaats (the Dutch eBay). But it was all a hoax. The letters were replaced by a (big) piece of origami. With this guerrilla action Sony tried to get attention for their new game ‘Heavy Rain’ – on sale as from yesterday. In this game there’s a character called the Origami Killer – hence the origami. The person selling the letters on Marktplaats was called Erik Gilliroam, an anagram for Origami Killer. Do they really expect gamers to buy this game after having seen such an incredibly far fetched example of bad guerrilla advertising?!

Romke Oortwijn (Copywriter and partner at N=5)  showed Stanislav, a short video made by N=5’s digital agency Kong. It tells the story about criminals abusing profile photos from social website Hyves (Dutch Facebook). It was spread through the members of the platform and showed every user a custom made video featuring his/her own personal data. The big idea was not making a web film about the ‘cyber mafia’ abusing a social network platform, but the big idea was smartly (and digitally) integrating social profile data in  the video.

As opposed to Oortwijn, Matthew Atkatz (ECD Riot) clearly represents the digital generation. Atkatz showed another very strong online case for Adidas featuring Dwight Howard – playing basketball in the NBA. During All Star Weekend he was documented with modern communication tools (like vodcasts, Twitter, etc.) and could thus be followed by his fans. Again, you could ask whether ‘digital’ was the big idea here. Or was it closely following Howard for three days with existing communication tools? Probably the latter, but maybe a bit of both.

Another topic of the evening was – as Raphael Mazoyer, digital communications manager at Asics, put it – the difference between seeing and doing (or as Oortwijn put it: one-way vs two-way communication, or as Atkatz put it: bottom up vs top down). Asics wants to engage its consumers by letting them do something that is useful for them. Ironically he considered Nike+ as the benchmark, while at the same time showing an Asics website that did not support his point – the website clearly conveyed a message about Asics, but it didn’t seem useful to the consumer at all. The distinction Mazoyer made between seeing and doing did make sense though. As we would put it; digital helps brands to create brand utilities; digital tools that render brand related services.

Florian Schmitt (Hi-Res) dialed in to tell us something about the alternate reality game ‘The Lost Experience’ he built for Channel 4 and the hit TV program Lost. Creatively a brilliant case, but Schmitt always advised his clients not to try to do the same thing – keep it simple. The reason might be that clients will always be clients; they want return on investment. And the question is how many new viewers this ARG generated for Channel 4/Lost. Or as the marketer in Mazoyer put it typically: the success of a campaign can only be measured by the “KPI’s” (key performance indicators).

Finally the discussion went into the direction of production value. The hypothesis was that advertisers expect online film productions to be cheap. And this surprised us a little. If you only talk about ‘virals’ it is probably true. But we’ve seen so many good examples of long form content with big production budgets recently. To name a few; Martini, Ararat and McDonald’s. Therefore we would like to state the opposite; in the future advertisers will have more budget available for big productions, because they can create their own (online) channel and don’t need big media budgets to be wasted on (traditional) TV channels.

We still don’t know when exactly digital is part of the big idea and when it merely facilitates it, but it was an inspiring night and we look forward to the next one.

First we thought about not showing this website. We think it’s corny and it embarrasses us a little. Even if you ask a cool character with smoky voice and countless tattoos to sing ‘Happy 2010′, it’s not cool. But then we realized it advertises Amsterdam – or at least, that must have been the objective. And if your blog is called Amsterdam Ad Blog, it’s not something you can ignore. It was made by Amsterdam agency Beyen Meyer. We preferred their Queen’s Day poster.