Talent imitates, genius steals

And The Winner of Lovely Rita Is...

Thank you all so much for your nominations for the Best Book in The World [TIGS edition].

The winner, picked mostly at random but partly because of the way the nomination was written, is Libby:

Fell in love with Donna Tartt's The Secret History early on and have yet to find a book that has so fully sucked me in to its world.

It's here http://twitpic.com/8tlau in between some of my other favorite authors like Tom Perrota & Colson Whitehead & Naomi Klein. See sad, crowded Ikea bookshelf as opposed to lovely, vibrant Allmodern version. Shameless, I know.

Very personal and evocative and that. Plus twitter integration. And brand plug. Good stuff.

Congratulations Libby!

I shall connect you to Allmodern via email.

I have also decided to award runner up prizes. 

These people shall receive a copy of my nomination for the best book in the world - Stone Junction by Jim Dodge - just send me an address to farisyakob at gmail dot com.

John V Willshire

Hugh McGrory

Thiago

Jess Greenwood

christine

Francois Grouiller

[I've signed up to Amazon Prime - postage and packing is no longer a concern for me]

Congratulations all!

And Happy Independence Day! 

[Is that what you say? Or is it Merry or something?]

[I think because I grew up in England, the first thing that comes to mind when I wrote 'Independence Day' that is the Will Smith movie.]

This Post is Not For Economist Readers

Since Scamp has retired his blog [farewell my friend the sphere shall miss you] I feel oddly obliged to post this new Economist advertisement that I just got sent.

First of all, a little history {Sorry I can't help it}.

The Economist ran, for 15 odd years I think, one of the greatest outdoor campaigns of all time. Sprung from the mind of David Abbot [the A in AMV/BBDO] it ran at a light to medium weight, for 2 2week bursts, every year.

And everyone remembers them. Because they were brilliant. Really, truly, brilliant. They were based on the insight that Economist readers tend to skew smart. So they were smart.  They targeted existing readers and were simple white out of red lines.

This is one of the most famous:

My favourite one, which I can't find, read something like

"Most people can't read more than 6 words on a poster when passing by. Fortunately, this poster is for readers of The Economist"

Anyway, it was one of the great poster campaigns - someone even wrote about a book about it [that's right - a whole book about one single medium campaign] - called Well Written and Red [a line from one of the posters].

So this is the new campaign for The Economist - but they have decided to focus on people who DON'T read it at the moment, because generally people have got smarter in the last 20 years.

The tight rope dude is cool -

{I secretly want to run away and join the circus - like John Major. My brother got me trapeze lessons for my birthday - awesomeness}

- here's what they say about him:

This ad uses the image of a wire-jumper (Florent Blondeau) walking through a city on a series of red wires and the strapline “Let your mind wander” as a metaphor for the inherent pleasure in connecting different ideas, and how this is reflected in the wide-range news and analysis available in a copy of The Economist.

As I may have pointed out before, I'm a big fan of connecting different things together.

The ad will eventually be up on the Economist Youtube channel - the link above will self destruct at midnight tonight.

Let me know what you think - it obviously has a lot to live up to - I can't wait to see the posters.

Books And Fast Company

The Best Book in the World Book Shelf competition is now closed! The winner will be announced in a following post, once I get a chance to collate the list of best books as recommended by you.

[Feel free to keep contributing suggestions in the comments - I shall include them all]

In the meantime, I'm guest blogging over on Fastcompany all this week - first piece is about how language changes can tell us about what's important and Cannes....

Lions and Language and Geeks [Oh My]

Another piece will go up today. At some point. Once I write it.

And here it is.

Cultural Latency.

RFP or Digital Scavenger Hunt?

One of the my digital brothers in the network sent this my way.

[One of the cool things about being in a huge network is that we can share and learn from each other - I'm reaching out to my digital siblings across the world to see what genius I can steal.]

McCann Istanbul is pitching Turkish Airlines, and they got on to the pitch by finding the pitch brief at the end of a social media scavenger hunt.

Let me explain.

Turkish Airlines wanted to celebrate their love of digital, put prospective partners' love to the test, and, by exposing the pitch process to the world, turn the pitch itself into a teaser campaign, that positions the brand as part of NOW.

So, instead of issuing a traditional RFP, they sent some agencies a social media treasure map: the tag 'thybrief', surrounded by various social media logos.

So across platforms like flickr, tumblr and blogger, clues as to the whereabouts of the pitch brief were hidden.

The team in Turkey followed the clues and cracked the fact that there was a password in the HTML source code of the blog, which got them into the gmail account and google docs, where the pitch brief was waiting.

Awesomeness.

Like Current.tv issuing a pitch brief via twitter, this suggests clients are looking to innovate in how they engage partners, and using social media to both facilitate and expose the process.

Lovely Rita Free To Careful Reader

A dude called Jamie from Allmodern.com got in touch recently and said he would like you give one of you, the lovely and discerning readers of TIGS, an awesome piece of free furniture.

[This is what Allmodern.com does - they sell sweet designery furniture and accessories and that - like this Knoll stuff.]

He seemed like a nice chap and I thought that seemed cool, so we're doing it. Now.

Here's the deal - I chose this bookshelf ribbon thing to give away because READING IS FOR AWESOME PEOPLE, and, you know, you are reading this right now.

In order to make this interesting / useful / fun for more than whoever wins, I thought I'd ask you guys to offer up a little something.

Don't worry it wont hurt, and I'll go first.

Since this is a bookshelf, I'd love for you to tell me, in the comments, what the best book in the world is.

This is obviously a horribly subjective question to answer, so don't think too hard about it.

I shall go first:

The best book in the world is....Stone Junction by Jim Dodge. It describes itself as an alchemical potboiler, and that works for me. If I could make everyone read one book, I'd make them read that.

You don't need a reason, and it can be any kind of book, but later I'll post the whole list of the best books in the world, and then everyone can read something that they otherwise wouldn't have known about.

It's like a TIGS version of the Amazon's recommendation engine, except someone also wins a free ribbon bookshelf. 

Cool?

Terms and conditions are the is only one winner, decisions are final unless I change my mind, Allmodern will send the bookshelf directly to you, but this is only open to people living in the USA and Canada, because they can't ship stuff any further than right now.

But just because you can't win doesn't mean you can't contribute. In fact, if you do play and can't win, say so in the comments and I will personally send you something. Maybe a book.

Let's say the winner will be chosen and posted and that by Midnight my time next Monday, 29th June.

Best of luck!

I'm sad I can't win. I need a new bookshelf.

The Content Republic

I wrote this piece for the most recent issue [number 19] of the always wonderful Contagious Magazine.

[It's good - they kindly sent me a copy - and has a scary clown on the cover.]

It kind of grew out of my annoyance of people, including myself, saying Content is King too much, as thought it explained stuff:

Since the earliest days of what we used to call the information superhighway, a refrain has echoed across industries. A mantra, a koan, an aphorism of our age, that guides development and business models, that shows us all how to proceed, chanted regularly, religiously, by traditional media companies especially, and increasingly by technology companies.

Sing it with me:

‘Content is King!’

[Alliterative aphorisms are the second best kind, after those that (almost) rhyme.]

It's mostly about the fact that there are lots of business models that can support and monetise content, not just the two obvious ones [pay for it, or get ads around it].

In fact, I think what we mostly pay for is a way to make content more useful to us, either via storage medium, or timing, or context.

You can read The Content Republic here, and do let me know what you think, but the theme runs throughout the issue so get that for the full effect.

[This has been an unsolicited endorsement.]

I actually wrote it before Murdoch came out with his recidivist statements about charging for content online:

"The inchoate days of the internet will soon be over," Murdoch pronounced, citing an "epochal" debate in the industry. Having flirted with the idea of turning the Wall Street Journal website free before realising he had bought one of the world's few newspaper sites that makes money, Murdoch has come down in favour of online charging.

Now, whilst I love the fact he uses the word inchoate, he appears to have decided that the only business models that brand new exciting world of digital content can support are ones he already understands, which seems a little, well, shortsighted.

I think there will probably be room for lots of different models [like at a catwalk show] and that we don't probably know what they all are yet, but that there is probably something in making content more useful for people.

Most people can't really be bothered to steal stuff, if it's easier not to, within certain price elasticities, I imagine. In fact, I reckon there will be room for free, ad supported and paid for versions of the same content to mutually co-exist, based on context.

Of course, for advertising, one of the things to think about is that the internet is a great disintermediator, which means if we want we can connect consumers to brands without using the aggregated attention of paid for media.

But, as the media industry will tell you, it's a petrifying business where no one knows what is going to work and you have to invest in ten things in the hope that one will work.

But then, maybe that's not a bad model for us either.

Robbing Banksy

I obviously couldn't let this go.

Banksy has created a recombinant art show by remixing the entire Bristol Art Museum with his own work.

Banksy versus Bristol Museum is, of course, a lovely example what Genius Steals is all about.

It does not mean copying is cool - this is what bad artists do.

However, all culture is, by definition, a comment on everything that came before.

[This is why artists are taught art history]

And all culture is inherently recombinant, at different levels of complexity.

We've covered this all before.

It's fundamental to the post-modern [and pseudo-modern] understanding of signs and meaning construction and that.

Anyway, Banksy gets it and he's consciously messing with idea: the name of the show is referencing the tropes of mashups and soundclashes.

And with the above, he's staking his claim to the idea, stealing it, but because the theft has been referenced, it has a different meaning than simply pretending he wrote it.

Herein lies the difference.

The difference between quoting somone and copying their line is that, with a quote you want the reader to know you are referencing something else, and using that reference for an additive effect.

Copying or cultural appropriation and commentary are divided by transparency, by intention and, ultimately, by the measure of greatness.

You can see more of the show here.

[Thanks to Joyce for sending my way]

Dreams of 2088

On Saturday I went to see The Hangover...

[I was going to go sea kayaking but hey, it rained. Whatever. It's awesome. The movie I mean. Not the rain. Although I have nothing against rain. It's awesome in its own way.]

...and I saw this trailer. It's wonderful. And then I saw that it was in fact a trailer for some web films Honda is doing, with leading thinkers from within and without, and I was blown away.

I write, and think, about the future a lot. I'm a stated meliorist, and think its incumbent on all of us to think about the future when things are changing this fast, because thinking about the present stops being relevant so very quickly.

But getting people to think about 2088 is a lovely piece of projective legerdemain. It's impossible to attempt any realist projection of course, but allows you to totally free your mind from the shackles of possibility.

It moves the conversation away from when will the recession end and towards the realm of dreams.

The responses show the various interests of the minds involved [including Mitchell Joaqium, who spoke at SpringFest] and subtly makes the point that the future is built with the power of dreams, and that Honda are working on it right now.

It's part of a series of documentary films about Honda, and things that are important to the people at Honda:

Honda is a company founded by a dreamer. And we are a company that believes in the Power of Dreams.

Honda has a rich history of making impossible dreams come to fruition....

We wanted to document our advancement as a company through film to give you a better understanding of the people behind our products. Please join us as we uncover Honda through the candid approach of the documentary film process.

The language they use is telling.

This is an accelerating world. Brands are like sharks - if they don't keep moving, they die. So a company like Honda has to communicate that it is constantly advancing.

This is a social world, and social stuff is about people, especially the people inside your company connecting to the people outside it.

This is a transparent world and the tropes of documentary are being used to create transparency in a very, very controlled way, to dispel the illusion of illusion that is created by the social construct / meaning of 'advertising'.

{Of course, this documentary film IS advertising, but that's not how it chooses to describes itself.}

Raving = Lots of People Copying Each Other

Appropriately enough, Mark, the Herdmesiter himself, turned me on to this clip last week. It's been popping up ever since.

What does it show us?

That people love to copy other people.

That one person [or thing] can change behavior, if persistent, because it doesn't happen right away, and if the actions, and the copying, are visible to enough people.

That raving, like a lot of group behavior, is lots of people copying each other according to local rules.

That we are far more likely to do something, the more people we see doing it.

[Watch as the crowd increases in size, and then imagine the curve. See?]

[9 out of 10 cats]

That we love to be social, love to be in groups, love to create groups and be involved in their creation, but need something, or someone, to hold the group together.

That's there's something euphoric, and perhaps liminal, in taking part in group behaviours like this.

That raving up hills can be brilliant.

Laughter is Behavioral Medicine

The problem with using the generic ad narrative structure 'extreme consequences' with public service ads is that, usually, it shows you the truly horrible things that could actually happen, rather than the ridiculous results of either getting or not getting a specific product.

And this tends to turn me right off.

In fact, in order to protect myself from the possible reality that my behavior may be engendering in the future, I switch over when I see most smoking cessation advertising.

They scare me, make me feel uncomfortable, and so to avoid confronting that possible truth, I cognitively disengage and make a joke about doing so.

[I've since quit smoking. It's hard. Changing behavior is really hard. Habits are incredibly powerful. The trigger > behavior mechanism are powerful. Ask P&G - they love creating habits, if they can.

A friend who is a doctor told me, very directly, TO STOP. Normally doctors advise you - my mate just TOLD ME outright. Which I seemed to take seriously - although there were loads of contextual factors, like my impending birthday.

And, in fact, I think the reason I really did is because my brain loves that story of how it happened that I just told you. We love stories, especially myths we can create about ourselves.]

Humour is a very powerful human emotion and driver of behavioral change, according to my mate Adam, who's a psychologist as well as a brand thinker.

And this makes sense to me.

As I've discussed before, humor works primarily around the idea of disrupted expectations: the deviation from the expectation is what causes our brains to find something funny, often by exploiting the ambiguities of language, and the expectancy violation makes us pay attention and disrupts our existing model of the world, which aids memory formation as the model re-writes itself, and in that moment, perhaps, allows a behavior to be modified.

Add into this fact that most public service ads use guilt and shock, ones that use humor add in another layer of disruption, like these Oxfam ads from a couple of years ago.

Which is why I like this World Blood Day ad from Australia my mate Swanno just sent me.

Like any joke, it all comes together in the punchline.

Talking Bout My Generation

Panasonic has just launched it's 2009 iteration the Next Generation Talent contest - a campaign that challenges students to create a television ads [or film that will be distributed online and via television, but you get the idea] for their HD Home Hub products.

All well and good. They site has the details and a proper brief and a twitter to follow and everything.

They've announced this year's contest via the web film above. And it's pretty funny - it's just kind of depressing.

Now, don't get me wrong - I don't feel I have quite enough gray hair to be terribly concerned about my imminent obsolescence in a world and business I no longer understand.

I've been quite bullish in my support of children being the future and that - I even presented the student Clio Awards and was delighted by the ubiquity of technology in the winning ideas.

And there's some of the classic shock of recognition triggered by caricature.

[In some ways it's both flattering and low latency that the flash mob ad is now mentioned in the same breath as the gorilla.]

[And, to avoid being hoist upon my own petard, I advocate cultural recombinance, not copying ideas from other ads.]

It's just that the emotional core of this attempts to tap into advertising's seemingly endless capacity for self loathing, and I find that really depressing.

I don't think we need to be so down on ourselves. Advertising, or brand communication if even the word has become tainted for you, is one of the pillars of popular culture. It pays for events, and media, and museums, and is at the confluence of anthropology, psychology, media, technology and business.

At its best it brings people together, and gives them something to do, and finds ways to make their lives easier, and happier, which is something I can get behind.

And even at its worst, it means that you don't need to pay for basic cable.

People like buying stuff. And they like buying branded stuff more. Brands seem to create symbolic value constructs around boring everyday products, that somehow make them more than boring and everyday, in a way that seems to warrant people paying more for them, more frequently.

In fact, the brandgram seems to trigger a different physical consumption experience, an emotional or ritual aspect to the otherwise functional experience, that people seem to like enough that it sways what their tastebuds otherwise say.

And, best of all, it's a professional, proper grown-up business where the wearing of sneakers and the having of silly hair is welcomed.

So, especially now, can we all try to be a bit more upbeat about this business we call brands?

Michel Gondry Portraits and Moving Rabbit Holes

Over on the relatively recently revealed michelgondry.com, the surreal visionary director will paint your portrait for you, from a photo, for $19.95.

There is something very unlikely and awesome about this.

And yet, you can see above, the site did send me a disturbing glimpse of myself in the Gallic mirror that is the mind of Gondry.

Whether or not he actually did it, and let's hope he did, there is something strangely compelling about willing something to exist over the internets.

It's doesn't feel quite the same as buying something, as this thing only exists because I asked for it to be made.

It reminds me of the artist David Horowitz who has a website of 'Things for Sale that [he] Will Mail You" - but all of the things require him to do something - they are more souvenirs of stories than objects.

An example, by way of illustration:

If you give me $1,626 I will go to the small Okinawan island called Taketomi and send you an envelope filled with star-sand (don't worry, I've been there before, I know where to go). I will send it from there.

A while back I attended this awesome event called the Urban Rabbit Hole experience where, as part of a cool experience where I met some lovely people, I ended up buying an expensive t-shirt that I had modified, kind of as a souvenir.

Which, appropriately enough, reminds me that they just announced the next event, which is on in a couple of weeks:

060609 by the rabbit hole
On June 6, 2009,  the rabbit hole’s global madhatter collective (see full description about the rabbit hole below) will converge in New York, creating a surreal parade of wonderland, on wheels. The first event of its kind,  a double decker converted experiential time bus will journey through the city, picking up performers and creating staged invasions in 5 strategically chosen placemarks in New York that represent the performer’s creative communities. This international experiential moving art event, aims to celebrate and unite the city’s raw creative diverse communities, embracing the city as its canvas, while investigating a specific chosen theme: TIME.

Sounds like fun. Visit the site to sign up.

But you'll need a password.

Wanna know what it is?

I'll give you a clue.

The answer is revealed somewhere that sounds like Earl.

Planning A Novel

Rob&Tom - [the Idea Brothers] have 'discovered' this except of an upcoming novel written by a seemingly obsessed planning strategist type person.

That’s why we were so excited to hear about the debut novel by Robin Poynglass, Director of Warm and Fuzzies at a leading London agency. ‘The Wedding Murder Code’ is so titled because according to research, books with ‘Wedding’, ‘Murder’ or ‘Code’ in the title are more likely to be bestsellers. Poynglass argues that all three words together should create a blockbuster. But can The Wedding Murder Code live up to the hype and avoid ‘plannery’ language? We think the answer is a resounding yes – but judge for yourself with our exclusive excerpt… Click the link below to read.

Click through for the whole 'excerpt'.

It's funny.

'Plannery' language aside, it does highlight the fact that personas are not very convincing as real people.

[The use of personas grew out of web development and user experience design then moved over into more traditional segmentation and targeting and that. I think.]

A long time ago I wrote a post called the paradox of planning, which basically just points out the more time you spend being a planner, the less like a real 'consumer' you become because you are cognitively engaged with brand communication all the time in a way that most people simply aren't, which makes it harder to some aspects of your job.

It may also make it harder to write novels. Although it may not. Perhaps 'plannery' language is only used because that's what we think the audience wants, that's the relevant grammar for the space.

Right, now I'm really going offline for a few days.

Low Latency Advertising

 
Mother are executing a low latency campaign in the UK for Sch....weppes that reacts rapidly to news, as in the execution above [which was pulled due to concerns about sensitivity].

See the rest of the them here.

I'm going offline for a few days - I'll catch you when I get back.

Judge the Jury

The London International Awards are a 24 year old show that honors advertising, design and digital.

This year they have introduced a new category, called the NEW category, which, like the Content and Contact category at the Clios, and the Titanium at Cannes, are designed to celebrate ideas that don''t really fit in anywhere else.

[Which is good, as I said in the link above, because mutations are the key to evolution.]

Or to put it another way:

Entries for The NEW Category are for work that merges the power of an original idea with a relevant compelling execution. Emotionally inspirational, imaginative work, effectively creating new dialogues, creating new spaces of interaction, altering perceptions, setting new benchmarks that invite and reward at every level of engagement.

Submissions can be singular or multiple, offline and/or online, multi-platform interactive experiences, and all cross media branded entertainment.

May include but not limited to; Television, Print, Outdoor, Websites, Blogs, online/offline Games, Ambient, Live Events, Email, Podcast, Social Network Communities, Mobile, Direct, Alternate Reality games (ARG) Augmented Reality (AR).

So, basically, participatory marketing or technology based coolness, or transmedia planning, or installations, ARGs, augmented reality, social media campaigns or any of the sort of stuff I think is awesome in general and tend to talk about on TIGS.

Which is why it's completely awesome that they have asked me to be President of the Jury for the New Category.

One of the cool things about this is that I get to pick the people on my jury.

So I thought I'd open this whole mysterious business of advertising awards up a little bit, and ask you who I should pick.

Now, I want to be completely transparent here: the final decision will of course be up to me and the LIA directors - I'm not turning this entirely over to the crowd.

And I have a few people in mind that I would like to ask because they are awesome. But I'm also sure there are lots of people I don't know who I should probably consider.

So - you've read the category description - who would you nominate to be on the Jury?

APG Awards Aren't Just for Advertising

The APG awards wants YOU.

Because of its heritage in, well, account planning and the fact that account planners mostly reside in larger agencies, the APG awards has tended to be dominated by larger agencies.

But this need not be the case! Anyone can enter, and from any country, so if you have some good strategic, commercially driven thinking you are proud of, it's probably worth a crack.

[A little bird told me that they'd love to see more transmedia ideas. I'm just saying.]

Here are some other things they would like you to know:

The APG awards deadline is on the 1st June. We are seeking non-traditional ad agency thinking - from anywhere! Read on for some answers to some frequently asked questions....

(1) Do the Awards reward non-advertising solutions?

 

We actively encourage papers concerning solutions that are non-traditional, and last time we saw some fantastic examples. Tate Britain won for an idea which was about the theming of tours (so more NPD than communications). Radio 1 won a special prize for a digital tool called Musicubes. Orange won for creating a piece of content with Frank Lampard that could be downloaded to your phone.

 

(2) Does my paper have to be for a big, well known campaign?

 

Not at all. Last time, although Sainsbury’s won the Grand Prix, there were awards for niche campaigns: Gold for Tate Modern and Silver for the Learning Channel. It is not to do with the size of the brand, but to do with the quality of the thinking.

 

(3) What if all the thinking did not originate in my agency?

 

Sometimes an agency inherits an idea from another agency, and needs to fit their solution around it. However, it might still be that your have made a valuable strategic contribution. It might be, for example, that you do not take credit for the macro strategy, but your contribution turned on a fascinating channel insight. Or, it might be that you team up with the other agency to create a paper that combines both of your contributions. We would really encourage partnerships, especially given the way most agencies work is increasingly collaborative. Last time, for example, Lucozade Hydroactive was written by both M&C Saatchi and Fast Track. We would love to see more of these in the future.

 

If you have not yet started on a paper, but would like to, do get going soon! Unlike some other Awards, it really shouldn't take too long to get it written, given that the thinking has already been done.

_________________

So come and have a go if you think you are strategic enough, so to speak.

As far as I'm concerned, award shows should be weighted heavily towards 'non-traditional' [if by that we mean new kinds of stuff] work, because we should be using awards to encourage commercially successful and generally ambitious experimentation that will help drive the industry forward.

More on that tomorrow.

Augmented Pencil

As part of our support for The One Show Interactive, we [we being the royal we of McCann NY i.e. not me] made this augmented reality pencil that lets you draw on the screen, to remind ourselves that no matter how in love with technology we are, ideas always start with a pencil.

If you happen to be going to the One Show Interactive awards tonight do come and say hi.

[You can print the AR symbol off the site - but here's what the prettier One Show version looks like.]

The Continuing Adventures of Be Nice

I wrote this thing, based loosely on my Be Nice or Leave talk, for the current issue of Admap (the magazine of the World Advertising Research Council).

[Since this is a re-articulation of the same thought in a different channel, I think its mostly media neutral, but may be slightly transmedia, here and there.]

I'm going to write more stuff for them as things occur to me - I like the idea of being an irregular regular contributor.

You can read the whole thing here - and check out the rest of the magazine for words from much wiser people than I, like the sage that is Paul Feldwick.

Bring People Together and Give them Something To Do

There is a line from Henry Jenkins' response to my transmedia planning post that I use in nearly all of my presentations.

[Mark uses it too, which makes sense.]

You can see it as a slide in Be Nice or Leave.

It goes like this:

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do.

I think this is probably the key to unlocking the awesome, and the biggest win for any kind of brand related action.

We are social creatures - I'm sure you all agree - but we need reasons to be social.

I suspect this is why we have sports and religions - we need to have reasons to congregate, and something to do when we all get there.

The true function of such things is almost certainly phatic and cultural and that.

This T-Mobile spot [which goes live today] from Saatchi London could have used the line as the proposition in their brief - and it seems to have turned out beautifully.

Cultural Latency & The Dawning of the Information Age

[Stolen from here]

There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes to distribute something, and the amount of time it takes for that thing to have an effect, and consequently the amount of time that thing stays relevant and interesting.

When music was distributed as sheet music - a [literally] laborious distribution mechanism - popular hits stayed at the top of the charts for years.

When gramophone reproductions were introduced and became a more popular mechanism for distributing music, the half-life of a hit decreased dramatically.

[You don't need to learn to piano to use a disc, so this removes a distribution bottleneck - piano + pianist. In fact, there was an intermediate stage, the mechanical player piano, which operated on rolls of printed music.]

It decreased again each time formats became easier to distribute, for either technological or structural reasons.

Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system - making it more efficient, economically speaking.

But this also seems to lead to far more rapid cultural decay rates - sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty - top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.

In gaming, and network based computing in general, the term that describes the lag between a cause and effect, between the moment when something is initiated and the moment one of the effects can be perceived is called latency.

The lower the latency, the faster the distant computer responds, the faster you see an effect and can respond and so on. This is a good thing - it means you don't get killed in the game because your character didn't move when you told him to.

As communication technologies get faster and more pervasive, the latency of culture is decreasing.

The speed at which people could move used to be the speed at which information traveled - hence the guy who ran the marathon.

Then people on horseback became the speed at which information traveled: the speed at which messages could traverse distances put a limit on the latency of culture, which in turn tended to mean things changed more slowly.

Email enabled messages to travel at the speed of light. This led to things moving faster, things changing faster.

But email is essentially one to one - even if you send it to many people, no one oversees the message, which puts a limit on the reduction in cultural latency - and it it used to be limited to the desktop.

Now we have millions of eyes all connected to a real time micro broadcast messaging platform via a mobile device they have with them at all times, and a social eagerness to demonstrate primacy. 

Cultural latency is dropping to [almost] zero, at least in the more connected parts of the world.

Which I suspect is going to have some interesting effects, because it creates much faster feedback loops - information, once delivered, is both a reported effect and a subsequent cause, which triggers more effects, and so on.

Things like informational cascades driving herd behavior, previously very visible in stock markets [which constantly monitors and reports on itself], and cumulative advantages, which function when behavior is visible to the decision making crowd, will inevitably become more prevalent.

Things like Swine Flu can go from something no one has heard of, to something people are searching for, to a topic of twysteria - hitting 10,000 tweets an hour.

In essence the infosphere is beginning to operate far more chaotically: a dynamic, closed, evolving system, characterized by aperiodic feedback loops, that can drive massive perturbations in the system from relatively small changes in the initial conditions.

[This is popularly known as the 'Butterfly Effect'.]

Diminished cultural latency means that the propagation of information is so fast that the spread itself becomes the defining aspect of the system: the rate-of-spread becomes as important as the information itself.

The information age is only just beginning.

[Thanks to both my brothers.]

[UPDATE: Mike Skinner/The Streets have a Swine Flu track]

SpringFest or Renaissance Planners

This video contains some highlights from the SpringFest we hosted [at McCann NY], in partnership with the research company Brainjuicer.

It was a fun day.

Mark and Grant are always awesome, and I got exposed to some people I had never heard of, like Mitchell Joaquin of Terreform1, who helped concept the future world of Minority Report, and is now trying to build softcars, where the engine is in the wheel and the body isn't made of metal, and is crafting experimental building structure made out of cloned meat on collagen scaffolds.

As I occasionally hint at on TIGS, I think making stuff from lots of different, disparate source material has a stronger likelihood to bring the awesome.

Mitchell created his own field at MIT by combining cities, ecology and mobility, which he calls ecotransology.

{recombinant academia}

We also met Simone Gostra, from SG Partners, an architecture and media practice, that built the world's largest media wall in a way that was self sustaining - absorbing solar energy during the day to power it at night -

[Wait. Hang on. Did you read that? Isn't that just completely awesome? I spoke to Simone and he envisages building covered in photovoltaic skins that trap light and energy, that not only power lighting in the building, but also act as a display wall on the outside. Like in Blade Runner.]

for the Beijing Olympics, using architectural, technological, visual and ecological understanding. 

{recombinant architecture}

The problem with the endless specialisation that Taylorism and Fordism, the division of labour and that, drive us towards is that less and less people are polymath, or glot in some senses, enough to pull different fields together and create new.

Recombinant thinking needs more than T-shaped planning - it needs renaissance planners.

Science + math + art history + literature + linguistics + economics [behavioural, of course] + psychology + technology + design + business + philosophy + media + common sense + being nice = direct route to awesomeness.

[If you'll excuse me, I have some studying to do.]

[UPDATE: This professor at Columbia agrees with me.]

Professional Hermit or Advertising to Agencies

42 Below poke fun at the London Ad industry - and me!

More of the kind of films the internet likes [if you don't know why you should check out rathergood] and made me think that perhaps, as part of the portfolio strategy of making ten films for cheap to see which one the network adopts and subjects to cumulative advantage and so on, that it would be interesting to focus communication directly at specific self delineated groups - like this film is targeted squarely back at the ad industry.

People are more likely to donate attention to things that are relevant to them, and from the forwards I've received of this film, in-jokes and references and that seem to increase the propensity to propagate, I suspect because inherent in the piece is the targeting, which tells you who you should send the piece to.

Hopefully more brands will learn not take themselves so seriously and make fun of themselves more - as Lohan ably demonstrates, it makes you more likable. 

Be Nice Or Leave (Slight Refrain)

View more presentations from farisyakob.

This is the talk I gave in Vegas a few weeks back, and again last week, on social media and that.

It's called Be Nice Or Leave.

When I made it into a slidescast [so you can hear my disembodied voice as the slides fly by] I didn't know you couldn't also embed youtube videos into a slidecast.

So here are the relevant video links, should you want the complete experience.

[Actually, I guess, if you want the complete, complete experience, you could watch the video, which will be up in a couple of weeks I think.]

Slide 13: 2010 Video

Slide 24: Ford's Approach to Social Media Part One

Slide 43: Faint Starlite - I Did It!

Slide 50: Nikon PictureTown

Slide 68: Ford's Approach to Social Media Part Two

I'd love to know what you think.

[Disclaimer: As with everything, everything is stolen, recombined, remixed, and passed along. Thank you if I stole something from you. Sorry if I didn't shout you out.]

[First Uncredited Steal Credit: The picture of me is by my lovely and very talented friend Camilla.] 

[UPDATE: Be Nice or Leave is being featured on the Slideshare homepage under 'Top Presentations of the Day' - which is nice.]

One Day Equals

My mates Jess and Joe [and someone named Scott that I don't know] have put a campaign together to support and promote a march on Albany being organized by the Empire State Pride Agenda for Equality and Justice Day.

It's not really a rally - people are going to meet their legislators and try and sort out this whole thing so everyone can marry whoever they want thing.

[Personally, I find it kind of staggering that in 2009, in the land of the free, where the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right, and when we have lots of real problems in the world, that people can't marry whoever they want to.

And worse that people think it's their business, who other people marry, and cause a fuss about it, and do things like write and pass Proposition 8, a sad blight on the moral conscience of the otherwise very nice California.

I  mean, really? Come on people, can we please grow up? Thank you.]

The campaign is called One Day Equals and there is a website, and a facebook page, and some nice stuff on flickr.

ONE DAY CAN CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY.
 
Join us on April 28th, Equality and Justice Day, and
march on Albany in support of the LGBT community.
One day equals us all one day becoming equals.
OneDayEquals.com

The models are all volunteers that responded to an open call and were chosen for their stories of solidarity - this is the family in the Berlin Wall ad.

Hello Scott, Joe, and Jess,

I read about your casting call for "One Day Equals”.

My wife Jen and I are a married lesbian couple and co-pastors of the Greenpoint Reformed Church. We have 8 month old son named John.  My parents, Norman and Mary Kansfield, live in Massachusetts and are strong supporters of same-sex marriage.

My father was fired from his job as President of New Brunswick Theological Seminary and suspended as a minister four years ago for officiating at our wedding in Massachusetts.

We would all be interested in participating in your project, as a family,

We know how important it is to put a face to this cause.

Thank you,
Ann (& Jennifer)

Social media seems like a good place for social causes. Feel free to spread the word.

We Live in Public or The Mediation Generation

Last night I went to see We Live In Public, a film about the 'most important internet pioneer you've never heard of'.

It was brilliant and disturbing [don't take my word for it - it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and everything.]

It's about a dude called Josh Harris [who I had never heard of, which annoyed me. As a geek I figured I would have heard of him - but I hadn't. He set up Jupiter Research, which I used to use a lot as a management consultant during dot com 1.0.] who fashioned himself as a interwebs visionary and, later, artist.

Using the money [$80 million] from Jupiter's IPO he began to champion a new kind of media culture.

Firstly he set up Pseudo - a web based television network, in the days of dial up - then later he built a bunker-like hotel commune thing called Quiet where people where filmed 24 hours day, in every room and activity, and populated it with various art installations and some very strange people [think proto Big Brother via a psychedelic lens].

After that he and his girlfriend wired their apartment with sensor enabled motorized cameras that filmed their every move and streamed it on weliveinpublic.com

What he was trying to experiment with, portray, pioneer, sell, whatever was his vision of how the web would change the world, which was that everyone would be watching everyone else, all the time. [Polypanopticon?]

And, as the film points out, then facebook and lifecasting and that came along and became ubiquitous it turned out he was pretty much right.

[It doesn't mention Big Brother, except in the older Orwelian sense, but it seems a like a direct steal from Quiet, the bunker experiment. They even have an interview room.]

Virginia Woolf once said nothing is real until it is recorded. It seems like the rest of the world has caught up with her thought. We endlessly refract ourselves, mediate our lives, to reach out and connect and then, begin to construct ourselves, in response to what seems to drive attention our way.

Online everyone is famous, but some are more famous than others - and it's really easy to tell who, because everything is enumerated. 

As people we have always thought socially - seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. Increasingly it seems that without mediation, nothing seems real.

Next time you are at a concert - look at all the people capturing the moment, to mediate and broadcast it, to remember it and share it, to continue create themselves with it - even firsthand experiences require mediation.

The MTV generation was dubbed thus because of the media it consumed. The Myspace Generation [now facebook, soon twitter, then who knows] is perhaps better understood to as The Mediation Generation because of its tendency to endlessly mediate itself, because of the media it produces.

Baudrillard suggested that endless mechanical reproductions of everything make it impossible to tell fantasy from reality - the copies become reality. He called this hyperreality - a kind of reality by proxy - and he said that we had already created a world of simulated stimuli.

Umberto Eco called the same idea 'the authentic fake'.

This is also explored [in a different way] in Charlie Kauffman's Synecdoche New York, [that I watched on Sunday] where the director creates and re-creates his own reality in an attempt to understand it and himself.

[I didn't really love the movie but that doesn't mean I can't dig on the idea.]

No doubt this is about awareness and balance - but culturally, rather than individually, we seem to be hurtling into hyper[linked]reality.

At the end of the screening Josh was there to chat and take questions, at the end of which someone claiming to be a fan attacked him on stage, claiming he had a responsibility to those that watched him and that he was a 'fucking meglomaniaic'.

This itself was probably staged [or maybe not - it's hard to tell nowadays, apparently]. 

Perhaps only in our media reflections do we get to see ourselves as we want to be, or perhaps as we want others to see us, which, as in both movies, will probably have some very odd effects on our sense of identity at some point - the attention becomes both addictive and a burden.

If you tweet without any followers - does it make a sound?