Peoples ingenuity with mobile

One of the many great speakers at this weeks Zeitgeist Europe was Jared Cohen from the US Secretary of State office. His panel was all about citizen politics and covered the way new media was being used by activists.
When talking about his time in Iran whilst a student he mentioned that he learnt young people used bluetooth to find others who shared their political beliefs. When asked whether they were worried about the secret police he was told no-one over 30 knows what Bluetooth is. You can read more about this here.
Whilst bluetooth isn't that fashionable any more  - and there are some issues on privacy - it's another great example of how people dictate what works and what doesn't.
Back in 2002 we wanted to use bluetooth for the COI sex lottery campaign  - tagline "Don't play the sex lottery. Use a condom." - and we came up with the idea of going to TigerTiger on Valentines Day and using bluetooth to 'drop' that line on peoples phone - emulating the alarming ease with which you can pick up something nasty. Unfortunately the client said no - but they did let us do our most successful viral ever - the 12 STIs of Christmas; over 2 million views in the days before YouTube