I photographed this object attached to the wall on the Picadilly Line at Kings Cross station. I also found another almost identical unit on the Northern line platform. As you can see from the photo, this object is strongly attached to the wall. It is comprised of a tough steel box, a knob on the front with what appears to be a hex-key slot. On the side there is what looks like a spout, which is attached to a thick metal flange. At the centre of the spout is an orage section, this is actually a lens.
Because of the curvature of the wall it is not possible to look directly into the device, so I cannot tell if the orange colour comes from the lens that is inset into the flange, or something deeper within the device. It does not appear to be emiting any light, however it looks like it ought to.
Would anybody care to tell me what this device is? There is no prize, just my admiration. I shall have an answer, even if it means hassling every underground obsessive in our fair nation.
In April of 1999 (Almost exactly a year before I left Ogilvy Advertising Group), I was invited by the then chief-creative of the London office to speak at a training project organised by the South African branch of the company. My subject was one I knew almost nothing about, however that was substantially more than most people claiming expertise at the time: “Viral Marketing”
These days, almost nobody uses the term Viral Marketing, as it is the sort of trendy corporate nonsense that reminds us of how wrong we all were at the high-point of the dot-com boom. The phrase been stricken from the lexicon of credible business in favour of more sober plain language, however the central idea is a simple truth: It is better for a message to charm its way into offices and living rooms rather than to rely on the more costly, hypnotic brute force of repeated messages and big media.
I was never originally intended to be a speaker at this event; the person whose suite I ended up occupying was none other than the worldwide head of interactive. At the height of the dot-com boom his talents were judged to be more profitably used elsewhere. The opportunity fell to me because everybody else considered themselves too important or too busy and of course thanks to the generosity of the creative director who nominated me.
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