Friday, October 28, 2011

being digital (or... why digital talent doesn’t want to work at your agency)

I've said all along that 'being' digital is not about the technology or using every social networking tool or about being anti-analogue, or anything like that.

Being digital is a mindsest. A philosophy.

It involves being good a sharing, being inquisitive, poking the box, being generous, being interested and interesting,about wanting to make things and experiences that have value, that make a difference.

Likewise any agency that wants to 'be digital' should concern itself first with freeing it's mind...it's ass will follow.

Well, If i didn't fall off my chair in amazement at the simple truth of an article in Fast Company by Aaron Shapiro, CEO of Brooklyn NY based agency HUGE.

The article is titled:
Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company..

It could just as easily be:
Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Agency..

Here's an adaptation of the meat of the sandwich, I've changed a few bits to suit '...agency' purposes but the point is the same.

'The attributes of a soul-crushing, Sisyphean, anti-digital workplace run deep.

Digital talent won’t want to work at your [agency] if:

Every element of their work will be pored over by multiple layers of bureaucracy.


Even if that’s how the rest of the company operates, it can’t spill into the digital [work].
In a technology environment, new products and businesses spring up daily and a new endeavor can go from conception to launch in a matter of months.
Reining in the momentum will be read as inaction and a clear signal the company isn’t willing to grasp the new way of the world.

Mediocre is good enough.

While [clocking on and off] is attractive to some, it will discourage [those who]
want to be expected to do something great.
[They live and breathe this stuff anyway, it's embedded in their lives] They want to be pushed.
They care about their work.
Their leadership, and those they rely on to [create an environment where they can] get things done, must match their appetite for success.

Trial and error is condemned.

The freedom to try out new ideas allows employees to take initiative, make decisions, and learn from their mistakes.
It also demonstrates an attractive and inspiring entrepreneurial spirit.

Your company is structured so it takes
a lifetime to get to the top


And as such there are no digital experts in company-wide leadership positions. Digital talent--often in their 20s and 30s [and 40's, c'mon] need to see a clear path for uninhibited career development that’s based on merit, not years spent, and that’s beyond the confines of the digital department.
If they don’t, they won’t see a reason to stay with the company in the long term.'


As I said, any agency that wants to 'be digital' should concern itself first with freeing it's mind...it's ass will follow.

Your thoughts?

shhh! I gotta focus. I'm shifting into soup mode

[NEW YORK] If you thought that connect with fans + reason to buy = business model was the sole property of the music or entertainment world, check this out.

Firstly, last months launch of Get Well Soup from Heinz in the UK - as winter creeps in bringing it's inevitable sick days, Heinz Soup Facebook fans can send Heinz Cream of Chicken (soup for the soul) or Heinz Cream of Tomato 'Get Well Soup' to their sick friends featuring the friend’s name on the label.

I already stated elsewhere that, for me, this was the first bit of honest to goodness, proper use of Facebook as a marketing platform that I'd seen for a long time.

Relevance, Authenticity, Value and Easy to do.

Chuck in personalisation, community and social objects...it's damn near perfect.



Hot on the heels of that, Heinz have pulled off another Facebook masterstroke.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup Blended with Balsamic Vinegar - which uses posh balsamic instead of the basic vinegar, will first be available to buy from the middle of November, but only through the Heinz Ketchup's Facebook page.

It won't be in the 'shops' until March at the earliest.

According to the New York Times, Heinz '...has no immediate plans to advertise the product, [but] has more than 825,000 followers on Facebook, where it hopes enthusiasts will spread the word about the purchase.'



This is how we do it, people.

Connecting with fans?:
1 - FANS LOVE THEMSELVES
Try the new things out with the people who care - those who are 'in'.
If it's going to fly then they will let you know, even if they don't like it they will love you more for rolling with them.

2 - FANS LOVE ACCESS TO STUFF THE MASSES DON'T GET
Make little bets, we don't need to bet the farm on small innovations, but keep it in the family.
Don't let the great unwashed in until the fans have had access first.

Reason to buy?
- PERSONALISATION
- LIMITED EDITIONS
- SOCIAL OBJECTS
- SOUVENIRS

It's ketchup/soup equivalent of the 'tour t-shirt'.
It tells others 'I was there'.

Anyway, The Never Get out of The Boat Social marketer of the year award looks to be heading to Heinz...

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

i'll have what she's having



For those of us in the advertising business the prevailing convention is to think about about human behaviour in terms of the individual.

And the objective of advertising being to try and change that individuals behaviour.

So with that in mind this week's recommended reading is 'I'll Have What She's Having' by Mark Earls, Alex Bentley, Michael J. O'Brien.

'I'll Have..' sets out to counter that convention by demonstrating that 'consumer' behaviour is far more social; ergo influence is social (ie peer influence etc).

The book's title is a reference to the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Meg Ryan triumphantly bursts Billy Crystal's bubble - he thinks he can tell real from fake, you know the bit in the restaurant - then a startled woman at another table say's to the waiter the immortal line.
'I'll have what she's having'.

So, in summary, 'I'll have..' would argue that to improve effectiveness of marketing - which is essentially now the spreading of ideas - to focus on trying to influence the behaviour of individuals is ultimately going to be much less rewarding than looking beyond that - to our inherent social nature - and how behaviour is learned by watching, and copying, each other.

And a pretty compelling argument it is too - though not necessarily a popular idea in adland ;) - obviously if you have followed the thread from 'Herd' and 'Welcome to the Creative Age', this is essentially part 3 of the trilogy.

The behavioural science version of Bowie's Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger, if you like.

purpose idea #436

Another example of purpose-driven branded content worth checking.



'In the film, director David Altobelli tells the story of three boys exploring an empty house late one night. The boys break into a farmhouse that was clearly abandoned in a hurry some time ago. As the three explore the house - and even begin to vandalize it - one boy slowly comes to see that the family that lived there was not so different from his own. He realizes that the house they are trashing could foreshadow the future of his own family's farm and home. A frightening moment in the house sends the boys running back to the comfort of their still-functioning farms. On the soundtrack, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs covers Willie Nelson's country music classic "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys."

Get the backstory at http://www.cultivatefoundation.org/

Chipotle Mexican Grill - http://www.chipotle.com – is an American restaurant chain, they have set up The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation which works to highlight the economic hardship family farmers face in the increasingly industrialized American agriculture system.

‘Over the last several years, Chipotle Mexican Grill has contributed more than $2 million to help fund initiatives that support sustainable agriculture, family farming, culinary education, and innovation that promotes better food. This has included such beneficiaries as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, The Lunch Box, The Nature Conservancy, Niman Ranch Scholarship, Culinary Institute of America, The Land Institute, Veggie U, and FamilyFarmed.org. The Cultivate Foundation will continue with this tradition of giving started by Chipotle.’

My talk at 474Labs yesterday was about exactly this kind of thing, and why generosity, and moving from value-chain to value-cycle is a [better] business model.

VIA CONTAGIOUS

lessons in social marketing from the situationist international

In his 1967 work La Société du Spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) leading Situationist, Guy Debord documented his theory of The Spectacle.

In it, he argued, that through mass media, television, hollywood and emerging technologies, capitalism - perpetrator of The Spectacle - was controlling the conditions of human existence.

In effect, the world we see is not the real world but a world we have been conditioned to see, via an onslaught of images.

The Spectacle's audience simply observe the ‘show’ – ie life - as passive spectators, consumers if you like, without actually participating or experiencing it.

Debord saw the only outcome as Alienation.

The Spectacle made us all spectators. Manipulated into substituting material things for authentic experiences and separated from each other.
Passively consuming the image, the spectacle, together but ultimately isolated from everybody and everything.
Debord and his fellow Situationists felt that "if we can explain how the nightmare works, everyone will wake up!"

However, for the lumpen proletariat to wake up they would need to be active participants in the process.
To that end, a tactic of the Situationist International was the construction of situations.
A constructed situation being a ‘moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and game of events.

Ironically, as marketers, as ones who in the past have actively perpetrated the Spectacle, through branding and advertising, there are some learnings from the construction of situations we can apply to marketing in the age of social technologies and connectedness.

As a footnote, Debord et al would doubtless be perplexed by the voluntary reification, or self-commoditisation afforded to individuals by Facebook, but that’s another discussion…

So

A situation is designed to be lived by its participants
It’s not just ambience, it’s an integrated ensemble of behavior.

In regard to any type of community building effort it’s important to note that simply amassing vast numbers of fans or followers (ie buying likes) has little or no value.
They need to be activated in some way.

On 15October.net - an online resource for the #occupy situation they say:

'If we want real global change, it’s not enough for you to take to the streets.
You got to make them go out to!


From a content and platform perspective remember that the destination in Facebook, for example, is not the page itself (branded or otherwise) but the news feed. This is where content (or objects, to use Facebook parlance) is experienced.

An object is more likely to show up in your News Feed if...

You and people you know have been interacting with it or it’s creator, recently.

So social context and quality of interactions are the most important factors for Facebook engagement.

I repeat: social context and quality of interactions.

To describe our lesson in achieving this comes I’m paraphrasing notes on the construction of situations first described in issue one of Situationist International from 1958.

Situations require:

1. A temporary director or orchestrator.
The orchestrator is responsible for coordinating the basic elements necessary in the construction of the situation, and for conducting certain interventions.

In social networks, these are the account owners or page admins.

The interventions are simple. Leave no comment unanswered, leave no contribution unthanked and use every opportunity to connect the participants, or constituents with each other.

2. Direct agents
The direct agents living the situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the practical composition of the ambience.

The reason that 90% of social media marketing efforts fail is down to one simple factor.

Marketers and their agencies are married to the notion of the Spectacle.
In context of the Gutenberg Parenthesis we mentioned here last week the notion of the Spectale may in fact be pure 'Parenthesis' - part of the 'containment' blip.

[Pre-Parenthesis] Participants > [Parenthesis] Audience > [Post-Parenthesis] - Participants

To grow a community, to grow participation the community needs to be constantly fed, prodded, poked, questioned, invited to participate.
There is nothing disingenuous or inauthentic in using direct agents to agitate.

In fact it’s the opposite.
Why should your customers want to get involved and support a situation that the brand and it’s agencies can’t be bothered to live in?

3. Passive spectators
Passive spectators who have not participated in the constructive work, BUT whom can/should be forced into action.

You should be familiar with Nielsen’s Law of Participation Inequality.
Also known as the 90-9-1 rule.

In any online community:
90% of the community will be passive. They will simply watch, spectate and will not contribute.
They are also known a ‘lurkers’.
In many cases they may not even be fans, particularly if you have employed some sort of bribery tactic to attract ‘likes’.

9% will comment, share and edit/remix/modify content.
Likewise these advocates should be welcomed as direct agents (2)

1% will be the power creators (they will create original content, blog posts, videos etc) – these creators should be developed to become orchestrators (1) wherever possible.

In reference to the earlier statement that simply amassing vast numbers of fans or followers (ie buying likes) has little or no value, the objective of amassing fans is to grow the 9% and the 1%.
The bigger the pie then the bigger those slices will be.

We’re wired as humans to follow what looks like a good idea.

Good ideas are more often than not those which others like us seem to be doing.
In marketing terms this is the antithesis of Spectacle.

In fact, both the opponents and supporters of advertising have one thing in common. Both sides vastly over estimate the power of advertising in affecting behaviour change. On it's own.

But that's another post...

There is no situationist art or situationist music or situationist marketing, but only a situationist use of these mediums.
In this case, can using social technologies as a platform for connectedness and value create situations?

*yes, this is a repost of a previous article, but it fell into the ether a bit. I've reposted it as I used it in a presentation recently and it seemed to make sense...

Monday, October 24, 2011

take this lollipop

Can't help thinking that Take This Lollipop would have been more creepy with a bit of Jack The Twitter depth...

http://www.takethislollipop.com/



autonomy



Not a penguin in sight, but perhaps an unofficial anthem of #OWS and related situations?

"It's a thing that's worth having (yes i would)
Buys you your life, sir (if it could)
I...I want you. autonomy.
It leaves us all
wondering (and it should)
This awkward something (for the good)
I...I want you
autonomy


Smart observation by Nick Kaufmann in the comments on The Protests and the Metamovement by Umair Haque.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

turning rebellion into money?

[NEW YORK] Fast Company reports that a PR firm representing musician, Penguin Prison issued a press release at the end of last week to publicise his forthcoming single ‘Don’t F**k With My Money,’ which they claim'is already steadily becoming the anthem for [the Occupy Wall Street] movement!'

“CALLING ALL NEW YORKERS & PENGUIN PRISON FANS,” the announcement invited people to join Penguin Prison at the site of the OWS protests as they shot the video for said single.

Penguin Prison, aka Chris Glover ia apparently born-and-bred New Yorker, who's breeding, FC notes, apparently included attending Manhattan's Trevor Day School, which currently charges $36,000 in annual tuition.

Interestingly, none of the direct agents involved in co-ordinating, documenting and agitating around the OWS situation have seen or heard of Penguin Prison, so were unable to confirm whether the 'anthem' had indeed captured anyone's imagination.

*musical footnote: Anarchy In The UK it ain't, it's a pretty flimsy piece of 80's style syth-pop. link: http://youtu.be/Miu-XOx5Jg0

In fact Justin Hampton, blogger and music journo active in the OWS movement, noted 'f*ck Penguin Prison and f*ck them using this as a means to market their hipster bubblegum.'

It's not just the Penguin, slightly more predictably, corporate rappers Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West have also been muscle-ing in for some borrowed interest.

In advertising land, 'borrowed interest' being the flakey activity of brands of little or no substance scratching around for credibility by sponsoring or otherwise phoney-baloneying around the edges of some sort of cultural activity without providing any value or acting out of any purpose.

I couldn't help but wonder if old Joe Strummer would be turning in his grave...



'The new groups are not concerned,
With what there is to be learned,
They got Burton suits, you think it's funny,
Turning rebellion into money'


Monday, October 17, 2011

femme fatale



As it would have been Nico's birthday today, and the Velvet's first album has been on heavy rotation in Boat headquarters we'll kick off the week with this one...

'I have never desired to grow up from my world as a child, which is when things are most clear and utopian'.

Friday, October 14, 2011

pre-parenthesis post-parenthesis

Is digital/social/mobile culture - in a way - a return to an uncontained, non-linearity that was core to human societies in the ages before industrialization, mass production and, in particular, the invention, by Gutenberg, of the printing press?

The concept of a ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ – as formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark and propagated by Thomas Pettitt from the same university - is a way of identifying and understanding the roughly 500 year period we are emerging from…

‘…during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period - Shakespeare's - when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance…’

In layperson terms, the natural flow of human communication, customs, legends and storytelling was interrupted by the advent of print and ‘containment’.

Pettitt describes the “imprisonment” of words during this Parenthesis.

‘They were pressed onto pages, stitched up, bound, with stories circumscribed by beginning, middle and end -- so unlike story telling and other kinds of cultural production in previous times, when oral traditions meant dynamically changing texts and performances.’

In essence, and in post-parenthesis times, we are looking forward and seeing something that looks more like the past than the present. An uncontained, fluid, secondary orality, but digitally-powered and supported by super-literacy.

Thomas Pettitt on the Gutenberg Parenthesis from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.



So what’s this got to do with advertising?

The notion of the advertising campaign that still prevails is straight out of the Parenthesis.

The assumption that an advertising campaign will have a beginning, middle and end.

The assumption that a campaign will be a complete thing, controlled and consistent in message and appearance across every media - static and unchanging – original, individual and autonomous.

Looking at it, the advertising campaign is Parenthical and pure containment.

The reality, of course is that in the emerging post-parenthical culture is the complete antithesis, and ergo the challenge for advertising.

How does it exist in the context of sampling, remixing and re-contextualising?

How does brand planning become adaptive and agile?

In a non-linear digital culture where the past and present exist in the same plane where the even the biggest most powerful brands still have to compete with everything else on the internet for attention?

Where more content is being uploaded to the web each day in 2011 than was produced in the entire history of the internet prior to 2004?

Where access (uncontained) to media is trumping ownership (contained)?

Uncontained footnote: I gotta tell you, I’m into week four of TV detox, (ie no terrestrial or cable/sattelite TV) and have not missed it one jot. We have the BBCiplayer international on the ipad and stuff I’ve downloaded off the net but that’s it. It’s pure intention economy TV.

In post-parenthasis context, I'm joining the dots between these two statements (30 years apart but in close harmony).

Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, who declared recently:
'self-expression has become the new entertainment.'
Why spend hours every day passively consuming the creativity (or otherwise) of others?

Echoing Malcolm McLaren from much longer ago who states that:
'In a DIY Culture there are no commodities'.
The point of The Sex Pistols was not to sell records but to create 5,000 other bands.

Obviously, in it's inherent fluidity, post-parenthesis doesn't have a fixed point in time, different cultures and subcultures have moved out at different times. Advertising, as a concept, may be one of the next to pop out the other side of the blip?

Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks to Johnnie Moore who's been pointing me in this direction...

Thursday, October 13, 2011

drucker diptych



I have been saying for many years,Peter Drucker once remarked, “that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.

And my personal favourite...

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

twitter jazz slight return



'You meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions'

Absolute Beginners - Colin MacInnes pub: MacGibbon & Kee 1959

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

sam's guide to doodling

Todays note is a guest post from planner extraordinaire and demon bassist Sam Mackisack. As a keen doodler myself this resonated. Thanks Sam.

'Nick Cohen recently brought a TED video to my attention, Sunni Brown’s 6 minute talk entitled ‘Doodlers, Unite!’. Because it was emailed direct to me by a guy who’s opinion I respect, rather than posted on Twitter by one of those users who are so inane with their sharing they could be bots, I watched it.

It makes a great case for doodling; I’ve always been an inveterate doodler (even though I’m shit at drawing), so hearing some of the reasons why it can be such a powerful cognitive and behavioural tool is great.

So for a doodler, it’s a nice piece of validation. But for people who don’t doodle, and would like to, I couldn’t help thinking some guidance might be necessary. So here is my super-easy 6 point guide on how to start doodling:

#1. DON’T GET HUNG UP ON LANGUAGE

Words can make good accompaniments to help explain doodles, especially in your personal notebook. But don’t get too focussed on trying to find the exact right language – this is about vibe, not accuracy.

Today's note is a guest post from planner extraordinaire and demon bassist, Sam Mackisack on the art of doodling. As a keen doodler myself it resonated. Thanks Sam.

#2. THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF DOODLES – USE THEM BOTH

In my experience, there are two types of doodles – “directly relevant” and “seemingly pointless”. Directly relevant doodles help articulate and understand an idea that you are discussing or thinking about in the here and now. They’re often accompanied by language. Seemingly pointless doodles may have nothing to do with anything, and are just pretty much fun to do, and keep your hands and the visual part of your brain active in dialogue-heavy meetings. Both are wonderful, and don’t need to be segregated.

#3. MAKE INFORMATION MAPS INSTEAD OF LISTS

I’ve noticed a great number of people use their notebooks to write long, bullet-pointed lists. The flow of these is based entirely on the chronology of a meeting – a pretty unreliable thing at the best of times. So instead of writing lists, try jotting down points at random across your page. Then join-the-dots – soon you might find synchronicities between thoughts, ideas and reminders where you hadn’t seen them.

#4. DOODLE WHILE YOU THINK AND LISTEN

It’s not rude. Honestly. If someone’s addressing you directly, then eye contact is always nice. But the rest of the time, doodling randomly while someone speaks can actually help you process what they’re saying, and find your own way of capturing their thinking. Don’t get shitty if you see someone doing it in a meeting.

#5. DOODLE LIKE A KID

Children are much better at doodling than us. They don’t try and find a reason for doing it - they just do it. So try remembering any doodles that you did as a child or teenager, and bring them back. My first port of call when I’m doodling is usually the skateboard brands and band logos I drew when I was 14. I know them off by heart, and the process of drawing them helps me concentrate.

#6. USE YOUR DOODLING TO HELP CRAFT HOW YOU PRESENT INFORMATION

Oftentimes, your doodling isn’t just doing to make it easy for you to understand information. It could help others as well. So rather than just jammin’ on PowerPoint slides and bulletpoints, try presenting complex stuff by doodle.'

And here’s this guide in doodle form:


Friday, October 07, 2011

we are all weird part 2

Back in the early 90's I worked as a club dj, record producer and also as chief buyer in a specialist record store.

We sold mainly club music - house, techno, hip-hop, drum and bass, plus jazz and soul and the cooler end of indie rock.

Over time I got to know the taste of many of my customers, most of them were either working dj's or bedroom dj's with a finely honed discernment.

These customers quickly got to know the best times to come into the shop to catch the worms. Saturday mornings first thing there would often be a line forming before I could get to opening the shop. They knew that the boxes of American imports arrived early and they wanted the pick of the top tunes before the hoi polloi got at them.

Of course, bits and pieces of interesting stuff came into stock all through the week. The super keen would be in sniffing around most days at lunchtimes or cooking up ficticious 'work' meetings out of the office and hanging round the shop.

I started making up bags for a few of the best customers as things appeared, then they could come in on a Friday night when we weren't so busy and listen to stuff and buy in a more relaxed way.

Pretty soon I was making up bags for upwards of 25 customers every week.

Because they trusted my choices (I was a dj of repute and credible trainspotter) 9 times out of 10 they took whatever I recommended.

From time to time I'd slip them a freebie or two, white-label promos or limited editions. As I was the buyer, record companies and distributors gave me a lot of promo stuff. To be fair I'd snaffle a few for myself (of course, I had my own dj cred to protect, but one couldn't play everything and I had chiseled out my own particular style and groove - Chicago-style house, DJ Pierre Wild Pitch that kinda thing - so not everything was appropriate).

I hazard a guess that around 20%-30% of the sales of 12" club tunes came from this 'on-approval' process.

Plus I had a number of mail order customers from remote areas of Scotland who I posted out a box of tunes to every week, and they simply sent me back by return anything they didn't want.

Again, 90% of the time nothing came back.

Over time, they trusted my choices because I never stitched anyone up, I gave them fair share of the rare and sought-after imports and pre-releases and gave them a bit extra for free from time to time.

This is a long winded explanation of how I discovered the notion of 'permission marketing'.

I earned the privilege of making purchases on behalf of my customers - or on approval - by being useful, credible and trustworthy, by being interested enough in them to know pretty much exactly what they would want.

In this way I was able to push the volume of sales by finding more product for my customers rather than having to chase customers for the product. (Though, of course, this happened by default as word got round that there was a record shop that didn't sell any shit, and where the staff took the time to offer a proper personal service for the discerning spotter).

So that's my little vinyl segue into this next bit.

I reviewed Seth Godin's latest book We Are All Weird the other week, and Seth sent me in the post the 12" coloured vinyl limited edition edition audio version. I guess it kinda completes the circle. Back in the record shop I never knew what Permission Marketing was, it just seemed like good practice. Years later, reading Seth's stuff, it all fell into place.

Here's the package...



The commemorative stamp...



And the coloured vinyl..



Thank you Seth, this takes pride of place alongside my complete set of Felix Da Housecat's Radikal Fear label from the mid 90's.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

deep fried mars bars



As a Scot abroad a myth that follows one everywhere is around the dietary foibles attributed to the Scottish nation.

Yes, I'm talking about the deep-fried Mars bar.

In the 30 or so years I lived and ate in Scotland I never once encountered this phenomenon.

In fact, the closest thing I've seen was from the quintessentially English Nigella Lawson, who battered and fried a Bounty bar in her TV show.

Imagine my surprise (perhaps not delight, however) at discovering the above pictured culinary offering in my local Fish and Chip emporium in leafy suburban Melbourne...

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

the technology always comes first



In the film PressPausePlay, Bill Drummond makes this point.

Electric guitars were invented because the guitar in 30's Big Band's stuggled to be heard above the brass.

Then along came Hendrix et al, abusing the technology and inventing a genre.

Artists never invented oil paint, or the movie camera but they saw the opportunity the technology gave for creativity.

Here's a couple more for you.

The story goes that the distorted 'metal' guitar sound was invented by Dave Davies of the Kinks who slashed the speaker on his Vox AC30, then launched into the riff of You Really Got Me.

The Roland TB-303 Bass Line synth was originally made as a cheap tool for guitarists who wanted bass accompaniment while honing their licks. Only about 10,000 units were produced between 1981-84 and on the surface it looked like a flop product.

Then in the later end of the 1980s bootstrapped DJs and producers in Chicago found that by overdriving and cranking the box you could achieve the squelchy acid bass sound, and a new genre was born.

Again, all examples of the technology coming first, then artists messing with it - in ways the engineers never imagined - and new artforms coming out the other end.

The lesson here for our advertising creatives is clear. To always be embracing new technologies for their possibilities for creativity.

In particular, the possibilities afforded by mobile, are almost infinite.

For a simple start, mobile can replicate all previous mass media, and then some, particularly with the emergence of Augmented Reality platforms like Layar .

If I was a young creative type out to make my mark today, this is where I would be looking to demonstrate my creativity.

This is the technology I would be abusing, f*cking with, overdriving, cranking and generally poking the box. The tech comes along first then the artist messes with it and creates something new and unexpected.

That's my tip for the day, kids.