Don’t Mention The World Cup

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In 2006 Mr John Otto Cleese delivered a wonderful football song. We wrote the song and made this video to coincide with the World Cup. You know – THE World Cup – the FIFA World Cup. Football. The game played with the feet. By the whole world. Didn’t do too badly.

The song was conceived and written by Dean Whitbread and Ashley Slater, with John nabbing himself a song credit as the creative inspiration he is.

This rousing tune re-introduced John to his many of his forgotten UK fans, as well as many younger football fans. It also gained him a lot of support from thousands of the UK Military and their radio station based in Germany. Remember, in 2006 Germany was hosting the World Cup. So while it didn’t super fly high, Don’t Mention The World Cup did very respectably indeed.

Aside from the music and the famous Mr Cleese’s presence, what also made this song work was the superb campaign run by Paul Carey.

Read about it here: https://smallpictures.co.uk/press.html

No News is Good News

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For many companies, a silent blog means either that they don’t really understand online media, or that they are just focused on the core business which is mostly offline, or that they are about to go bust.

None of those things are true for Small Pictures. Most of our business *is online and what is more, it’s thriving. Considering that writing about things, aka blogging in olden parlance, is one of the things we do best, this company blog has been shamefully neglected.  It’s just we’ve all been terribly busy, so bear with us while we play catch up.

We devised and launched quite a few successful additions for our illustrious client John Cleese, as he attempted to rake in as much money as possible to assist with his alimony payments. Here’s what we did, in brief.

World of Cheese – John Cleese Merchandise. We designed a lot of nice new t-shirts and other apparel, including custom tour shirts. Some designs are based on the old man’s Twitterings.

For example, this tweet: http://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/5387626328 gave rise to this shirt within minutes:

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The shirt promptly started to sell and has continued to sell ever since. This is real time web meets real time retail – you read it here first.

We’re so contemporary it hurts.*

John Cleese’s Nigerian Lottery – aka the email newsletter – was a great success. We took over the old list, cleaned it up, gained 5,000 new addresses from the 270,000+ Twitter followers and continued banging out fun monthly missives.

It was a blatant, opt-in third party marketing ploy, and though we’ve been gentle so far and sold official t-shirts and advertised John’s tour dates, obviously we included ads for other people for a reasonably high price, as long as they were sufficiently amusing.

So, contact us by leaving a comment here if you have a product or service you’d like us to shill to John Cleese’s most fawning fans, or anyone’s fans who we like, we’ll consider anything legal.

Facebook finally changed its Terms and Conditions so that they didn’t lay claim to your first born child and your pension, which meant we could begin to use that sprawling social network. We picked up the unofficial fan page from a kind and generous fan, authenticated it, and we added 20,000 new members in a little over a month and it now runs with 1.8M users. We also run a private Facebook JC fan group of many thousands.

We’ve always had cunning plans in the pipeline, including mobile activity (iPhone, Android) which is now called TikTok. If you really want to keep up to date with our Cleese and other superb activities, you’re better off following John’s Substack, even though given the huge investment of time and energy we put into our day to day work will only occasionally get a look in. The only reason I’m writing this now is because the weather is so dreadful, and I’m stuck in on a Saturday night.

TTFN.

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* these asterisks donate the existence of Mark Crook who with Dean Whitbread was very effectively running Small Pictures. His musicality, gift for animation and quirky appeal gave our punchy two-person business a lot of success right up to and even beyond the great crash of 2008.

** This double asterisk explains what the The Great Crash of 2008 was for those who don’t know what happened when and how. It refers to the global financial crisis that erupted following the collapse of the U.S. housing market bubble, marked by the Lehman Brothers failure on September 15, 2008.

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John Cleese’s New Headcast Video Downloads

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We were very busy working on producing John Cleese’s new videos, to be released via his Headcast website on June 7th 2009, and also the internet campaign which surrounds the launch.

As well as video production which includes animation, music composition, sound and graphic design, our work also includes a new shop featuring authorised merchandise, World of Cheese, and a revamped email list, dubbed the John Cleese Nigerian Lottery which as John points out on Twitter, you don’t have to be Nigerian to enter.

LeWeb 08: Mexican Cheese Frenzy

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LeWeb 08, Paris – the major annual international internet conference on European soil, attempting to be a beacon of hope in the wreckage of a stalled economy, costing 1m euro to stage, presenting a host of international names, A-list sponsors, a start up competition, demo rooms, after-show parties and visits from a famous author and a French government minister.

Day one was a struggle in many respects. The assembled had no internet, no WiFi, and the strain was palpable, as online presentations ground to a rusty halt.

There were glazed expressions on many faces at the end of the first morning, the geeks clinging tightly to their mobile devices, retaining their precious, flickering connections to the promised land. To make matters worse, the heating failed and people shivered in the vast conference hall.

Still, there was coffee, breakfast pastries, and lunch, although the portions were small, as were the tables. The desperate throng had literally to be held back from the food by presence of sharp-eyed caterers and the looming glare of security guards until the allotted time of 1.30pm.

Accompanied by a Franco-Mexican trio, it was a truly surreal feeding frenzy. Blood was in the water, and those higher thinking functions – internet, code, commerce – counted for nothing in the lust for nutrition.

This for me was the most riveting spectacle – geek sharks battling for sustenance.

Day one, I ate, and day two, I shot video.

Good Times

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Nice coverage of our recent online video work with John Cleese and Seesmic from Nigel Kendall at the Times – does coverage from the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Times constitute a full house?

This piece includes a comment on the timing of John’s recent ads for some banks which have fallen foul of the great financial tsunami:

One of the great comedy clichés is that the secret is in the timing, and Cleese is a master. Ponder, for instance, his timing of a recent series of commercials for Kaupthing (tinyurl.com/6fecxu). It’s the biggest company in Iceland, he tells us. Not any more it isn’t. Kaupthing was one of the biggest casualties of the recent global banking collapse. We can only hope that Cleese’s similar commercial for the Polish bank BZ WBK Commercial, at tinyurl.com/5khe4h, was more successful. As he heads into his eighth decade, he’s clearly planning for the medical attention he may need by his ninth. Happy birthday, Mr Cheese. He’s from Santa Barbara via Weston-super-Mare, you know.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin

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This short trailer for the Seesmic John Cleese interview did spectacularly well, reaching over half a million views in under a week, and achieving the notable status of the most viewed video in the world on October 14th. As of today, it’s been viewed 931,950 times.

We were number one on Digg (see below), featured in various newspapers in the UK and elsewhere, and Seesmic trebled their traffic. The Palin/Parrot connection has also inspired a cartoon by some opportunist comedians.

John Cleese does terribly well

Executive production by Dean Whitbread and Garry Scott-Irvine of Small Pictures, videography by Whit Scott who writes a nice post about the mission here and edited by Jeremey Lavoi, who writes another nice post here.