‘cube grenades’: using my cartoons to help your business kick ass

["Dinosaur" Cube Grenade for sale at the gapingvoid gallery.]

I’m currently accepting new commissions for “Cube Grenades”. Please read on for some Cube Grenade case studies, or for more background theory, read the Cube Grenade archives. Thanks! gapingvoid@gmail.com.

‘Cube Grenades’, I believe, is where my art works the best- small Social Objects that you “throw” in there in order to cause some damage– to start a conversation, to cause disruption, to spread an idea etc. And I want to work with clients to make more of them.

1. CASE STUDY: SHIT CREEK CONSULTING

The groovy cats over at Shit Creek Consulting commissioned me to design them their own “Cube Grenade”. After looking at the half-dozen or so ideas I presented to them, they chose the one above. I believe they’re looking to use it for their business cards, for example.

Shit Creek are a Microsoft Gold Partner. It seems a big part of their business is coming in and cleaning up the mess left behind by the large tech consultancies [I’m not naming any names]. So that’s the idea I ran with.

The name of their company implies they have a lot of attitude. They wanted a cartoon that conveyed this. Easy. It was a fantastic commission and I’m very happy with the cartoon they chose.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

2. CASE STUDY: PURINA

February, 2010 I felw to St. Louis, to give a talk at Purina, the giant pet food company that’s owned by Nestle. It was their big, annual digital summit. All their top digital marketing folk (and their top ad agency digital folk) were there.

I talked about “Social Objects”, and how I believe they are the future of marketing.

Above is the “Cube Grenade” they commissioned me to draw for them. I like how it turned out. “All products are information” refers back to something I wrote a few years ago, “The Kinetic Quality”.

How often do large, well-known companies call you up and ask you to draw a cartoon for them? Exactly. I’ve worked in the tech world for big clients before- Sun, Dell, Microsoft etc- but this is my first “Cube Grenade” with a large, FMCG brand (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods). Not to mention, I’ve always held Nestle and Purina in very high regard. So naturally, I was pretty excited. Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

3. CASE STUDY: KULA MARKETING

[The “Cube Grenade” that Kula Partners commissioned me to draw for them. You can download it here and print it out etc.]

In December, 2009 Social Marketing Whizz, Carman Pirie and his colleagues launched a new company, Kula Partners.

As the idea behind their company was partially inspired by my writings on Kula and Social Objects, they commissioned me to design a special Cube Grenade for them, which I gladly did.

I’m very happy with how the piece turned out. It illustrates nicely a point I’ve been harping on for a while now– “People Matter, Objects Don’t”- i.e. what makes a product or brand interesting is not the thing itself, but the human conversations that happen around it.

Congrats to Kula Partners on their launch, and Big Thanks for being such great clients! Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

4. CASE STUDY: THE MONSTER IN YOUR HEAD

Jerry Colonna used to be a Venture Capitalist. He was EXTREMELY successful as a partner with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners. Before that, he was an investment banker on Wall Street.

Then he decided he wanted out of the business. He had made his money, he now wanted to give back. He wanted to teach.

After teaching business classes at CUNY in New York for a little while, he set himself up as a business coach. A damn good one.

“A bit like being a shrink,” he told me, “but more business-focused.”

A big part of his modus operandi is not telling people what to do with their businesses, but trying to get them over their fears of acheiving that which they MUST do, if they want to become the people they one day hope to be.

“The issues my clients fear the most tend not to be the actual stuff out there- competition, cashflow, marketing,” he says, “but the worst-case imaginary scenarios. ‘The Monster Inside Their Heads’, as it were. So a central tenet to what I do is helping them to get over The Monster.”

So he commissioned me to draw a Monster-themed “Cube Grenade”, as a signed, fine-art print to give away as presents to his best customers and allies. Something to keep on the office wall as a constant reminder.

I was glad to do it. I’ve always got my fair share of Monsters, myself. Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

5. CASE STUDY: ROCKSTAR GROUP

Mike Walsh commissioned me to draw a “Cube Grenade” for his consultancy, Rockstar Group.

Mike’s company is basically in the business of helping small startups either make or find more money, by whatever means necessary. His website explains all…

Why do people do startups? Because they want to be “rock stars”, or something like that. They have that certain drive- or if they don’t have it, they’re in big trouble. So I tried to create something that empathized with that.

Because the world is theirs’. At least, it’s certainly more “theirs’” than for the people who just turn up every day at the office, with no other reason than the steady paycheck.

Mike was a great client, and fun to work for. He tells me his cube grenade (which he put on the back of his business cards) was a big hit at the recent TED conference. That made my day.

No, it really did…

[The Cube Grenade archive is here.]

6. CASE STUDY: AGENCIACLICK

In early 2009 I was hired by a Brazilian ad agency, agenciaclick to create a privately commissioned edition of the Cube Grenade above.

As with my other clients, they didn’t want these prints just for themselves; they wanted to give these out to their clients, as conversation starters.

“All brands are open brands? Huh? What does that mean? Do you agree with it? Why? What does “open” actually mean? What does “brand” actually mean…?” You get the picture. The same idea that made The Blue Monster so successful. Again, it wasn’t about the message, the object. It was all about the social.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

7. CASE STUDY: THE BLUE MONSTER

The Blue Monster was a cartoon-based “Social Object” that me and my Microsoft buddy, Steve Clayton, unleashed on the good but unsuspecting folk at Microsoft back in 2007. For those unfamiliar with it, you can find the backstory here on Google. It’s probably my best-know Cube Grenade to date.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

8. CASE STUDY: STORMHOEK

This is a design I did for Stormhoek, a small wine brand in South Africa, that I’ve been working for, off and on for five years.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

9. BANTAM LIVE

From Techcrunch, 02/03/10:

Today, Bantam Live, is launching the commercial version of its social CRM workspace and is rolling out premium features of its product. Bantam Live provides an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream.

For their lauch, they commissioned me to do this “Cube Grenade” for the front of their homepage. As they said on their blog:

The background of our relationship with Hugh goes like this… Bantam Live launched its public-beta last summer onstage at TechCrunch’s Real-time Stream Crunchup at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, Michael Arrington auctioned off copy #1 of “dream big. techcrunch 2009″ serigraph by artist Hugh MacLeod. I won the auction. I figured it was a good cause (to the Electronic Frontier Foundation), would give us a promotional bump, and would commemorate for the team an achievement of sorts to have launched in beta as a selected startup from the stage on that day. As Hugh explains, the serigraph was a “social object.” It hangs in our loft today.

Thanks to John Rourke (Founder and CEO) for being such an awesome client. Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

10. GABBA

Paul Fabretti, an old social-media PR buddy from my UK days, asked me to draw him a “cube grenade” for his Manchester-based PR 2.0 company, Gabba. Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade blog archive. Commission your own Cube Grenade.]

11. KARMAMEDIA

KarmaMedia is a communications shop in Hungary. As it was first explained to me:

Karmamedia is a communication shop with an emphasis on P.R. (whatever that is), and on doing things online (wherever that is).
We started out as a blog three years ago, working at various big agencies, and jumped ship to become independent and happy about six months ago.

Our name was selected intuitively because it sounded good and because the guy who started it all wanted to use a picture of Buddha sitting with a notebook – but since then we found a fitting explanation for it: online, what goes around comes around. We don’t believe in karma in the religious sense but we do know it exists online – Google makes sure of this. So we try to help companies do good and meaningful things and make sure these things get noticed.

To celebrate their six-month anniversary, they threw a big party. The local trade press gave it nice coverage. They commissioned me to draw something for the event. I think the motif of “Karma” pointing to itself, a play on the Eastern symbol of the eternal snake eating itself, worked out well. Straight and to the point.

Thanks to Balazs Lovenberg and his colleagues for such a great assignment. I had a lot of fun. Rock on.

[The Cube Grenade archive is here.]

12. “SCOBLEIZED”

Heh. My red “We Need To Talk” print makes a cameo appearance on the BBC, courtesy of my buddy, Robert Scoble…

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

13. “ART AND THE REAL WORLD”

[Originally posted on this blog, October, 2009]

[“Portfolio Number One”, hanging in a collector’s office in Germany.]

I’ve been playing around with this line a lot recently: “Art For The Real World”.

I’m interested in how art affects what some people call “The Real World”- the workplace, the world of work, the world of business. That’s what the Cube Grenade idea is all about.

My advertising buddy, Vinny Warren, grew up in a Roman Catholic household in Ireland. He was telling me that his parents would always have a few religious icons hanging on the wall somewhere. Pictures of Saints, Mary & Baby Jesus, that kind of thing.

Why? Says Vinny, “To remind us who we are.”

Art that reminds you who you are. Exactly. What applies in Catholic households also applies in places of business. Shared Meaning. Exactly. Social Objects. Exactly.

I don’t think any of this is rocket science…

[The Cube Grenade archive is here...]

[Update:] John left a good comment:

I think surrounding ourselves with icons, art, books and such to remind ourselves of who we are, where we have been and where we hope to go is essential to keeping our hearts alive. It is too easy to lose our way. My office is full of these things.