From the It's-been-sitting-open-for-a-week-just-write-about-it Department, this great short video called Making Is Connecting from David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at Westminster University. In it he argues tools that exist to facilitate expression of one's self are inherently more powerful than tools that exist only as an expression of someone else (think the rise of social platforms versus the dominance of 20th century media) as this connects us to the world around us.
Gauntlett backs up his ideas not with the latest digital media thinkers such as Charles Leadbeater or (my hero) Clay Shirky, but with quotes from Ivan Illich, a philosopher from the 1970's, and William Morris, a textile designer from the 1800's. The examples point to something I've been banging on about for quite some time: the rise of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. are an interesting development, but they are successful due to facilitating expression of self, and conenction with like-minded others.
As I wrote about Posterous last March, tools will continue to rise that make it easier and easier to express yourself, creating content for others to consume in the process. Making is connecting indeed, and as the world gets radically smaller on a daily basis, understanding this becomes ever more crucial.
The speaker in question is Professor Barry Nalebuf, author of a book called Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small. I only assume the ideas in the book are the same he expresses here, it's earned a spot on my Amazon Wish List and it's probably worth a spot on yours too.
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.917784&w=425&h=350&fv=]posted with vodpod
From the equal parts genius/niceness that is Andy Whitlock and the team at Poke.
In December, we had a hack day at Poke. In a nutshell, we had 24 hours to come up with an idea and make it an online reality...Our team’s idea was to create an egg-timer that served up a Youtube video to match the exact length your egg needed to be boiled for. No staring at the egg. No staring at a boring timer. Just watch the video and you’re done. And it dishes up different videos depending on how you like your egg. Have a look for yourself over at eggwatchers.com.
<3. Srsly. The importance of this sort of thing perhaps won't be immediately apparent to anyone who still wants to make TV commercials. For the rest of us, we can be thankful places like Poke exist.
And dream of working there.
--
P.S. I've tagged this in the "branding" category of this blog to make a point - it's activity like this that builds Poke's own brand. The same way traditional agencies built their names on their work, so too do the modern shops, the difference being only one of those groups is still willing to run with the bulls.
While looking at Katie Chatfield's blog last night and thinking about the various ways I'd like to be like her when I grow up (I'm sure she'd say she'd like to be like her when she grows up too), I stumbled back across a post she'd made in May of this year on "done". I liked it so much at the time I printed it out and stuck it on the glass door to my office, though I'm not sure anyone else got it (complete aside, taking the time to turn something in bits into atoms surely has to be the most you can like something, ever).
Re-blogged below for the sake of further cementing its awesome-ness, here it is in full:
Something I preach and rarely practice is the importance of just doing, and not waiting for perfect because perfect never happens. My musical self, all nerves and insecurity, decided to make good on threats to be less hypocritical, and found once it started it was actually fine and better than expected.
Done is the engine of more, and the important thing is to have done it, not talked about it. If Nike's slogan had been "Just practice and be ready to do it at some point", then odds are they wouldn't be the rock star brand that they are.
The point of done is not to finish, but to get other things done. Amen.
I was going to title this "Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people" but that was too obscure, even for me. 5 bonus points to the person that picks the song without using "The Google".
So my motivation has been a little lacking lately (alliteration = triple word score), and try as I might I hadn't been able to rekindle it. I chatted long into the night with your friend and mine Matt Granfield who pointed me to his recent piece on sourcing the appropriate place to express a particular thought. I read it and it rang true, though it uncovered another thought of mine, that being a general wondering how long we will maintain digital identities we segment into neat boxes as if our own lives existed in a similar fashion.
And that's when it occurred to me that something had recently clicked inside my head, and all of a sudden I realised that even using the word "digital" felt utterly redundant. When it permeates so much of what we do on a day to day basis it ceases to make sense in drawing any distinction. Having an afore-mentioned neat little box for it has worked until now, because for a long time it existed in a way we could separate and escape from. Now however we're in a place where it no longer makes sense to segment it, and to not include some sort of digital element to a campaign, a product, a service, whatever is to commit commercial suicide (extreme viewpoint I know, prove me wrong!).
While this thought was buzzing around my head I swung by TIGS, as Faris had posted plenty while I'd been sunning myself in France. He, of course, had gotten here a little bit before me but along the same line of thinking, having said
Increasingly I'm finding the work 'digital' more of a hindrance than a help. It's too broad to mean anything.
in the same post he linked a great Slideshare presentation from Helge Tennø, Strategic Director of Screenplay, an Oslo, Norway-based agency. Helge's presentation is simply titled "Post-Digital Marketing", and while I'm loathe to attach a new name to it, it seems to make sense. Have a look at the deck, it's really quite lovely.
Of course Iain Tait beat us all there, telling me early in '08 "digital is not a thing anymore". I didn't get it at the time, but I do now. My only concern is having canned UGC, social media, and now "digital" itself, I'm going to need to invent some new things just to shit on them.
And I'm quite OK with that. And I'm OK with not writing about "digital", in fact I'm excited about it.
"You're excited by a blog ostensibly about nothing?"
From the "I-have-too-had-girlfriends!" department, Japan's Information Architects released and delivered straight to my door their latest Web Trend Map, an ongoing series mapping the Internet to various public transport systems. Version 4 which has just been released is the Internet mapped onto Tokyo's Metro System. If I'm at Wired and I want to get to Digg, I have to take the News Line to The Huffington post, get on the Domain Train to Google, then switch onto the Filter Line to wind up at Digg.
One part document of how far we've come, one part time capsule for us to look back and say "Remember when...?", the poster is shipping now, and even the most laid back of hipsters in the agency have swung by my office, stood back and said "...that's actually quite cool."
At just under 3' by 4', it is a fine addition to, well, any surface you care to put it on.
Every time I play a gig, people ask me if I'm nervous, which I almost always am. And I think that is the way it is supposed to be - if I'm not nervous then nothing is at stake. If nothing is at stake then why am I here? What am I going to learn I don't already know? What will the audience experience if I'm not pushing myself to some place I haven't been before; if I know I'm not going to fall, there is simply no elation in flight.
Your friend and mine Sean Howard touches on these points in a recent post, The Scariest Thing I've ever Done. In it heleverages an eBook he published called The Passion Economy (rockstars Gavin Heaton and Katie Chatfield contribute as well). It's a candid assessment of his work, and he's honest about fis failings. More to the point though, he makes a case for purposefully putting yourself into those awkward and unknown territories. He's preaching to the choir with me, and, I hope, you as well.
Since the demise of social media (in my head) I've been struggling to get excited about something again. I was sitting thinking about opportunities for a client this morning, and I was reminded of the enthusiasm I talked about the potential of browsers with. This stems from a beautiful execution last year by Poke London on behalf of Orange called Balloonacy, which purported to be (and who is going to argue) the first Internet balloon race (I just noticed they won an award for it too, as it should be!).
The (thoroughly sexy) idea here is Balloonacy didn't quite exist anywhere, rather it played out over the pages of people who took part, and, flying left to right over the screen you would land on new web pages when you went off the right-hand side. It was an app that didn't require Facebook or an iPhone, it was a campaign that didn't require a media buy. It was in fact an execution that could only have been done online, and there is so little work out there we can really say that about.
I don't know if I'll actually be able to get something in the browser off the ground for this client, let's be honest there's a barrier to entry, not to mention compatability issues, but in the same way processing is getting faster, the walls around technology are getting lower, which means more people participate, which means we get where we're going faster than we did before.
As I said over at Socialized when the web was abuzz with Skittles nonsense, we're all leveraging each other's work, and getting there together.
Just found the below via Crackunit, which is a lot of fun. Watch.
Your friend and mine, Julian Cole, said the key to going viral is friendship. Which is nonsense. Even if Jules and I are friends (which we are).
The key to going viral is having something interesting to share, and finding it interesting or amusing regardless of whether you're somehow attached to it or not. And as we all find different stuff amusing and/or interesting, that is harder than it would seem.
For instance, if you had told me yesterday I was going to blog about sheep with LED lights strapped to their backs, I would have assured you you were quite mistaken.
If you haven't seen the incredible work of Kutiman yet, make it your bid-ness to do so today. His remix of not only music but words and vision, all taken from YouTube clips is nothing short of amazing. Faris dropped some science around this the other day, delivering the following quote which sums it up (equal parts nicely and awkwardly):
It's because media has become much easier to reproduce thanks to the radical decentralisation of the economics of cultural production [which is the phrase I'm backing as a substitute to social media - I'm not very hopeful it will catch on.]
We all know how I feel about social media. I think Faris "radical decentralisation" is more easily summed up by simply stating it is now as easy to create content as it is to consume it.
Perhaps we need to extend that to being "recreate" content?
Earlier this week I finished Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin which, while I would have appreciated more practical application of his ideas, was great none the less, and a good primer for visual thinking applied to business situations.
Marty uses the book as a platform to expound the virtues of design thinking, something that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Something I really believe but perhaps haven't articulated all that well in the past is that in order to bring new ideas to the table there's little value in mining the places everyone else is looking; subsequently I'm more likely to read Fred Wilson than Copyranter when thinking about advertising, though both are great. That's not right or wrong, it's just my take, those of you reading A Big Life In Advertising keep at it, I imagine we want different things anyway.
I'm only part way through but Marty is hitting on a number of memes that have been floating around recently, certainly touching on the territory recently mined by Seth Godin in Tribes. It isn't resonating the way Zag did yet, but it's interesting none the less - I'll let you know whether I really think it is worth the coin when I'm done. It's certainly touching on some things I've thought previously, particularly being willing to be wrong, but I cna hardly say I like the parts of the book that agree with me now can I?
While I'm here, I stumbled across Design Thinking, a blog written by IDEO's CEO Tim Brown, FYI for those interested.
I spend a lot of time with friends thinking about where tomorrow's businesses lie, and I'm on the record that great content with good intentions and an open philosophy will be at the heart of the real money-makers in the next decade.
With that in mind, I've just read a fascinating post from Mark Ury who is an Experience Architect at Blast Radius. Mark ties together a few loose strands of thinking and comes out with something entirely his own. I particularly love the below principles he borrows from Jeff Jarvis...
Can applying “link economy” strategies work for “traditional” companies? Here are Jeff Jarvis’ four principles. And below is a modified version, applied to companies in pursuit of innovation:
1. All companies must be transparent. Your talent base and IP must be exposed and connected. They’re not useable unless they’re linked.
2. The recipient of IP and talent is the party responsible for monetizing them. The more you enable the flow of IP and talent AWAY from you, the more it comes BACK—with greater value and skills to monetize. Just watch how Hollywood operates.
3. A porous organization is the key to efficiency. In other words: do what you do best and link to the rest.
4. There are opportunities to add value atop the IP and talent layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity.
...which he applies to Threadless during the course of the post...
The result: a business that manages abundance (t-shirt ideas), provides value through transparency (the audience becomes both editor and consumer), and values the flow of IP and talent through them—rather than by them. (Doc Searls calls this kind of value “a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”)
Great piece. And it contains some links to some other fascinating reads on "the linked economy". Mark also takes the time to talk about opportunities that exist around monetising the aggregation of information and content, of which Threadless is a prime example (as is Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc.).
The idea here is this: find the verticles in seemingly well-mined markets, and you will open up doors the rest of us never knew existed.
Yesterday I was at my friend Tim's place where we waxed lyrical over beers on how we can make a squillion dollars - look for an announcement on retirement shortly. While there he fired up GTA 4 on his Xbox 360 as I hadn't actually seen it in action (the gamer kids are asking for my dog tags back, it's really quite tragic). I was incredibly impressed, it seems all the learnings about the balance between a sandbox and a story had been compounded into an experience equal parts open ended and focused. The biggest issue in games like GTA 4 (aside from the mammoth amount of technology they have to wrangle of course) is giving the users who want it an open ended universe to explore while at the same time delivering a taught experience for people who just want to play a game.
Tim actually took exception, saying it hinted at a completely open universe but didn't actually deliver as he couldn't run into any shop he wanted, rob them and then go next door to rinse and repeat. The pragmatist in me thinks that is unrealistic, but only because I'm coming from the perspective of a person who once had to generate content for people like Tim to run into every nook and cranny they could find; that is not a fun job to have.
I digress though. Ambiguity. Who did their homework and checked out the HBO Voyeur site? If you haven't please go look at it now.
OK, what did you think? What did you see? A series of apartments spread across New York City, all with their own narratives going on. To my mind, what the agencies involved have done is take the essence of what they were promoting and asked themselves what the best way to tell the story would be. The other day I said the best examples of narrative in games are the ones where people think first about the story they want to tell and then settle on the style of game that suits it best; marketing can learn a lot from that approach, one of being platform-neutral and making sure the main thing is the main thing. No egos, no hidden agendas, just the desire to deliver the work in a way that suits the project best.
Sure, saying no egos in advertising is like asking the Pussycat Dolls to share vocals equally, like it was a vehicle for five careers and not one. The point remains though: we overcook so much on the way to delivering creative, we lose sight of what the brief was in the first place: to get the brand, product or service talked about.
If I was a bottle of wine, how would I stand out on a bottle-shop shelf? What could I do? Varietal isn't going to cut it, people like what they like (and generally aren't adventurous). Regional? Not really.
What if I thought about the effect I have on people? What if drinking me could take you somewhere, if it was a ticket to another place, be that a great, uninhibited conversation, a new idea not previously formed...an unwanted pregnancy?
Regardless, I saw the below the other night and loved it.
[caption id="attachment_345" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Do you have your boarding pass?"][/caption]
When was the last time you saw a wine label that was unforgettable?
Content. Engaging content. Stories being told. Experiences facilitated by brands but not ABOUT brands. The logical extension of "This program was brought to you by..." in life after the 30-second spot is entertainment created solely for or by a brand. Entertainment that doesn't ram a message home, but simply offers it up on a plate and says "Hey, yeah we did this. Hope you dig it." The goal is of course still re-enforcement of whatever your brand's values are, but there are better ways to do it than to just spit out a tagline.
The below quote from Henry Jenkins sums it up for me. I'm trying to figure out where it came from, it's been sitting in my drafts folder for quite sometime...ahh here it is. I <3 Google.
The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do…I don’t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest
Autonomy (the ability to make a choice) plus Competence (a feeling like you have the necessary resources to make that choice) plus Relatedness (a sense you are working together towards a common goal) equals Happiness.
Maybe even a good deal of love for your brand.
--
First image courtesy of via, with thanks to compfight.
Being in the office on Sunday fees like I'm back in high school and am the only kid who forgot it was free-dress day, having showed up in my school uniform much like any other day.
In between the burst of work, I'm catching up on feeds. Quick off the mark this morning was Gavin Heaton's great Servant of Chaos blog, and a fun little video about growing and nurturing creatives. Ultimately pointless of course, but Sundays aren't made for productivity.
How I hate a title for a post that isn't a line from a song.
Anyway...
The below talk by Sir Ken Robinson (again at TED) is extraordinary. I wish I'd seen it when I was a kid, it would have made a whole lot of things make lots more sense. Thankfully I had parents who were already thinking along these lines, so they made everything a whole lot easier than some of my friends got from their traditionalist upbringings. Ken's talk is on creativity and the new role it has to play in today's world.
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. I only assume the ideas in the book are the same he expresses here, it's earned a spot on my Amazon Wish List and it's probably worth a spot on yours too.
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