A bit more (on) interesting
Posted: June 22, 2008 Filed under: interesting2008 2 Comments »
Just a few more thoughts on yesterday’s Interesting 2008.
The more I think back to it, the more it feels as if there was a bit of a weird ‘otherness’ to the day. Almost like a kind of mass hallucination or mass hypnosis.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Russell Davies is running some sort of weird CIA sponsored Moonies alternative, or that I got home to find my pants on backwards.
It’s just that from the very offset, an audience that would – I’m sure – normally be extremely cynical, allowed the speakers to go about their sometimes weird and abstract business unimpeded (and indeed applauded).
Parts of it certainly were hypnotic, like this amazing demonstration of a zoetrope using an old technics turntable and a TV camera:
(and here).
One of the morning presenters came close to a weird sort of folklore story telling with a discussion of ancient civilization that had different laws of physics that had been infected with thinking from our world (like a weird ancient version of Snowcrash).
(An incarnation of that story can be found here: http://www.upsideclown.com/2003_12_04.shtml).
There was the bizarre mix of fact and fiction which reviewed America’s visions of the future and space travel from the 50s – complete with mind-bending music reminiscent of that weird bit in French connection. There was the actual mass meditation after lunch (with busking warm up). And then of course there was the recorder playing:
which, as I’ve said before, was made a little more bizarre by Guardian sponsorship of the recorders and the bloke from Last.fm conducting.
I guess what I’m saying is three fold.
1. There was a definite spiritual angle to the whole day – a looking for a broader meaning outside of what we do professionally. Is it right to call it spiritual if it’s not at all religious? Can we have some sort of abstract, secular, interestingness? (Given Conway Hall is a major humanist venue, that could be very appropriate).
2. Whilst most speakers were – rightly – very nervous to be speaking in front of such an audience (and often many million miles from their comfort zones), the audience themselves was more like being at a wedding than being at a normal conference (very forgiving, very positive and very engaged).
3. Like all spiritual events, I’m finding it very hard to explain it to people who weren’t there. Whilst the value of it is growing in my mind, my ability to vocalize why it was so good is deserting me.
Or perhaps it was just me!
Still a great day. And eminently… interesting throughout.
A little bit (of) interesting
Posted: June 21, 2008 Filed under: advertising, agencies, interesting2008, marketing 1 Comment »
Today was interesting. It was Interesting 2008, the Russell Davies ‘unconference’; in its second year and continuing rude health. The underlying thought appears to be the same: the first step in being interesting is being interested. Accordingly a very large bunch (maybe 400) cogniscati gathered in an incredible (and extremely well buntinged) hall – Conway Hall in Red Lion Square – to hear some of the best presenters in the UK talk about their pet subjects.
If you were being satirical, you would say it was the world’s best people on branding, advertising, etc talking about their favourite colours, shoes, fashions, music or whatever. Of course, what it was actually about was people talking about things that were close to their own hearts, they thought would be interesting for 10 minutes (i.e. not their jobs) and where they’d found some interesting material.
We had Winston Churchill, Why horses are afraid of crisp packets, the extent to which we can really understand the second world war with only 60 years’ perspective, the relative density of World of Warcraft, the rise and fall of Patagonia, and why a lego fetish is a good thing.
I honestly don’t think there was a bad presenter all day. Although, this last bit – the selection of speakers – is really where Russell Davies showed his hand (despite very amusing and scene-setting opening- and closing- remarks).
Was it middle-class -bourgeoisie guardian-reading nonsense? Absolutely. At one point half the speakers joined together for a Guardaian sponsored recorder playing session.
Was it brilliant? Absolutely. A room in London was filled with some of the cleverest and most critical people of their generation, who allowed and understood their peers to do the most difficult presentation of their lives. We were a good audience – of course – but only for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, intense acts of bravery were conducted on stage as people with a lot to lose tried to be interesting to this dragons’ den.
Hats off to Russell, hats off to the speakers, and here’s to Interesting 2009. I’ll definitely try to be there. I’ve been racking my brain all day about what I’d talk about and I’m coming up blank. The best I’ve got is:
- Untranslatable words / words that have never existed
- Object orientated programming and what it can teach you about knowledge and YOUR life
- How education works in other countries
- How the WestWing (the TV show) changed the world
- The Toyato Production Sytem, who nicked it and how it’s changed the world
Hopefully ee you there. And a pleasure to meet a whole bunch of you today, It’s been one of those days that makes it clear the new world isn’t a temporary one.
No one to hear you scream
Posted: June 17, 2008 Filed under: advertising, Futurama, Futurism, marketing, social media, social networking, social objects, web2.0 Comments Off
An interesting comment on the last post came back to a topic which I seem to be asked, or ask myself, more and more often. If social media increasingly leads to closed groups, and tomorrow’s media consumers are increasingly avoiding the mass media, what will happen to mass-participation media events, and don’t we as a culture lose something if we lose common points of reference. What on earth will we talk about around the water cooler?
In particular, I’ve heard this as a strong initial response to Clay Shirky, who argues here that however ‘sad’ it is to play World of Warcraft, it’s a better use of the ‘cognitive surplus’ than watching a re-run of Gilligan’s Island for the 100th time. (Incidentally, what was the cognitive heatsink that we had as kids in the UK? Clearly Neighbours later on but before that? Rocketman?).
Of course, this is not a new idea. I remember years ago, a planner explained to me why you couldn’t advertise cars with direct mail – it wasn’t enough for me to know how cool my new Audi is, I need to be certain all my neighbors knew too.
Perhaps the point about ‘mass-participation media events’ isn’t that their power is diminishing (witness Apprentice this year), but rather that they are fewer and more extraordinary.
There also seems to be a point now that whole social groups can have ‘mass-participation’ events which they all know about but which are entirely closed to those outside of the group: that wierd feeling you get when everyone in a room’s been reading the same status’ and knows each others business without having ever discussed it.
It remains worth remembering a serious challenge that has been raised by commentators including Esther Dyson and Andrew Orlowski, about how these groups aren’t necessarily healthy, challenging or participatory. Often preferring to define very strict group rules and mores.
The final point, of course, is just what we mean by participation. By 2012, when the Olympic games is going on in London, what will the experience of watching it be like? If you’ve seen what NBC has planned for Beijing, the mind boggles about what it will be like in 4 1/2 years (three times the gestation period for a standard YouTube) but most certainly there will be opportunities to observe almost everything about the event, to turn the event into a private mass media event for your network, to ‘virtually’ compete and to compile, annotate and share your own coverage.
With apologies for shoplifting to Hugh MacLeod, mass participation media events have always – of course -been social objects. So in the era of mass media, it’s not a surprise the objects themselves tended to have the same traits. Whilst we may still have global events to built frameworks around, surely local (and group) interpretation and meaning can be added to createsocial object which can be more intimately shared.
The reason, it seems to me, that nobody understands microblogging unless they do it themselves, is that they don’t understand how small social objects can be.
And, to revisit the negativity of small disconnected groups (and ever-decreasing differences of opinion in those groups), technology can take these objects and make them available to huge audiences. Anyone can write a blog, anyone can produce a LOLcat (as Shirky jokes), and by 2012, everyone will be able to participate in our global media event.
It is this access to open social objects which is at the heart of participation in all cases. It’s what got all the bloggers I know addicted, it’s what makes teenagers turn the telly off and Facebook on, and it’s what makes Amelia’s wired retired fall in love with Skype, so they can share the smallest of social objects – not just their grandchildren’s first words or their first tooth, but their everyday stories about the day at school.
And do I really need to know how many people watched The Apprentice altogether if I know that my family, friends and colleagues watched it. Isn’t that enough?
The implication of advertising revolutions
Posted: June 16, 2008 Filed under: advertising, Futurism, marketing 3 Comments »
I wrote a piece a few weeks ago called ‘the structure of advertising revolutions’.
That was all about the way in which we should expect the advertising world to deal with changing paradigms, based on how the scientific community does. It was inspired by Clay Shirky’s video, blog and book, pointing out that the new media don’t have to be an additional load for customers, and that the overall effect can be to free up cognitive function, and to simplify our relationships with brands.
So. Are we there yet. Will we reach this post-marketing-apocalypse-techno-babble-euphoria? Or, is this quasi-Marxist ‘perfect distribution of information’ vision just so much more dungaree wearing nonsense?
And perhaps here we are starting to see some evidence that we’ve reached nearly the top of the hill. Whilst the advertising agencies keep trying to repurpose their wares to suit prevailing circumstances – W&K in particular making a spectacular advert which people actually tuned in to see - many firms seem to be reconsidering their position in networks, understand how influence and reputation is distributed, and at least starting to listen closely to what their customers are telling them.
If you’d told me five years ago that high-street banks would be considering allowing their staff to speak directly to customers using blogs or that Cannes Gold winners would be a website which was supported with advertising – not the other way around – I would have assumed you were still drunk on the Kool Aid of 99/2000.
But what’s happening in every marketing department company in the world (from the guy who also does sales, to the multinational with teams in every country) is new, and exciting stuff. Of course there’s been some goofy failures. When, precisely, was marketing immune from huge, public and embarrassing mistakes. But for every bit of fake user-generated content, or every time the Playstation boys trips over their skateboarding trousers, we see an attempt to really try and do something new.
Perhaps it isn’t any more than the rephrasing of an age old phenomenon (as Leo says in West Wing, the internet turned out to be ‘no more than an efficient distribution mechanism for gossip and pornography’). Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to human nature, but we cannot deny that the world has changed recently – if only to revert to a pre-TV, pre-media monopoly time.
So, should we go a bury our TVs in the garden? Well not quite yet. Mass media events will still exist, like the Olympics or the Apprentice. We need common points of social reference. But don’t expect your kids to feel the same way. And what are you going to say to them… it would be hard to make a case for our older fashioned ways being more healthy or intelligent.
Ins and outs – a redefinition of digital marketing
Posted: June 16, 2008 Filed under: advertising, Futurama, Futurism, google, marketing, web2.0 Comments Off
Remember the first website you built. I remember doing them at university a bit but they were really awful. And then I did one for the company I worked in. And then, rather suddenly I was running a company that made them. And in the start people would argue about everything. Should there be persistent navigation? were all-flash sites bad? how about skip-intros? What about those ticker things that used to flash across the page?
And how should you do the coding? Make sure all your fonts are fixed size, and be brilliant with tables. Remember: It’s all about the home page.
And then accessibility was a thing, and then standards. And then we started sneering at people that couldn’t build a website without using tables, or who used fixed fonts. And then it was all about buttons and big fonts. And for a while there, it all seemed to be about being ugly, and then simple, and should it even have a logo any more? And wasn’t persistent navigation a bit tired, and surely users are now clever enough to navigate more complex interfaces.
Every year we think we’ve codified one more chunk, got closer to having all the design patterns sorted out. And every year we get new and – it has to be said – interesting challenges to think about. Does save make sense any more? Do we even care about the home page any more? Is Google your most important user?
Well I think the next one’s going to be bigger, more conceptually difficult, require more complex teams to figure out, and be the beginning of the end of the period where you can work out what to do by just looking at your competitors. It will also be a bitter showdown between the big web agencies (who build where the user ends up) and the digital marketing agencies (who try to get them there), finally standing squarely on each others’ turf.
Because the next phase is where we let go of the concept of domain. It’s about thinking about the users’ lifecycle as needing managing before they even get to you. It’s a question about thinking about the opportunities to capture intent in more than search engine landing pages. And it’s going to be a question of becoming a lot more sophisticated in thinking about what content you will share, how you will consume and repurpose content, and how your users will see your brand.
Possibly my favorite factoid about the internet is that 50% of all searches on Yahoo! (and they must love this) are for the word ‘Google’. In a world where the average punter doesn’t know – or doesn’t care – to this extent, but they are willing to tell Google or all of their facebook friends that they’re looking for a new car or interested in a boob job, the way in which we concieve of capturing and converting intent just became a whole lot more interesting. And so did CRM (or rather the management of a users lifetime value), and so did sales and service.
Early approaches, especially behavioral targeting of advertising have looked like privacy invasions – or as google would have it, ‘increased relevance’. Privacy will be an issue, but skills and dexterity are the main problems and it will be fascinating to see who’s got the most of those. Not advertising agencies, of course, but quite possibly the media agencies, the digital marketing agencies who are a bit more interested in the detail, and of course, the marketing teams in large corporations; not to mention digital media owners like WordPress (scroll down for relevance targeted links!).
Is it just me?
Posted: June 9, 2008 Filed under: apple, Futurama, Futurism, microsoft Comments OffAmid the phenomenal suprise of the new… 3G iphone, Jobs also slipped some other news into the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It seems Apple is re-releasing an old favourite from Microsoft:
Yes, it’s the sick older sister of Windows ’98. The ill-fated ‘millennium edition’ of Windows which barely made it into the noughties.
This new platform, (apple) mobile me is a ‘breakthrough web 2.0 app interface’ allowing the user to access their calendar and mail over the internet:
And here once again, Apple shows it’s tremendous audacity: re-inventing Outlook Web Access some five years after Microsoft built it, and declaring themselves ground breaking and market leading.
You’d be forgiven for thinking they were poking fun at their own addicted fanboys with the ridiculous ‘me’ reference.
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