Actually the first one happend before the Old Spice culture hack.
[There's a great comment below:
I'm very amused... I believe 'em... but... the one thing that's preventing me from blogging about your incredible use of social media--- HOW are you finding where these people are located in order to accost them with the wheat thins?]
It didn't happen in near real time but it did respond to tweets and turn the response into a film, or commercial.
In fact, by that proviso, the Domino's work which re-contacted people from the focus group and tweets with the new flavor of pizza has a similar quality - responding directly to consumer needs using 'advertising' vehicles.
[Full disclosure CPB client.]
What I think I like about this is that yes it's again about reversed polarity, but it is specifically addressing customer needs or frustrations in a [metaphorical, advertising] way that had been expressed unsolicited, which is what companies should do in general because customer service is marketing.
[Why is the embed code so hard to get hold of? Had to pull it from blogger...]
Plenty has been written praising and analyzing the awesomeness that was the Old Spice Man Twitter Responses campaign.
Whilst I don't intend to add much, I did want to say that this is exactly what the kind of idea I think low latency advertising smells like, responding to the diminished cultural latency things like Twitter are triggering.
Alacrity is the key here - being able not just to move fast, but to respond fast.
Additionally, a couple of other points of note:
the fact that this campaign lasted ONE DAY [ish] suggests how diminished latency polarizes the idea of campaigns: go long [a year long platform like Pepsi Refresh] or explode and vanish like a firework.
Or, actually, some combination of both, ideally.
love that it reverses the polarity of how the industry currently operates - pulling from social into 'television commercials' - but really just using the whole mediascape as a system of inter-operating parts that do different things well, as opposed to simply different places to garner impressions.
Correction: Here is my deck, which may not make a lot of sense without me presenting it.
[Remember kids: YOU ARE THE PRESENTATION.
The slides are just visual aids. And - as Russell said recently, presentations should be PERFORMED.]
So I was going to write up each slide, but in some way I prefer not being too prescriptive and letting you make up your own mind about what they mean.
Fortunately, a nice mobile marketing reporter has done a thorough write up of the salient points which you can read here.
It begins by pointing out that Everyware is stolen from the book of that name by Adam Greenfield about the internet of things and the future of ubiquitous computing.
As Adam himself recently pointed out, he wrote it in 2006, before the iPhone changed the mobile landscape, and so it doesn't take into account how much the ubiquitous computing future would be a function of mobile phone technology.
The second quote is from Copernicus.
He was a smart dude and renaissance type polymath, who dabbled in astronomy mostly as a hobby.
[That would be cognitive surplus then.]
He began to suspect that, contrary to what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD believed, and what our senses tell us, that the sun didn't go around the Earth.
So he went back to older sources before Ptolemy to find anyone else who had suspected this, and he found some, which helped him light the way to a cogent heliocentric model of the solar system.
So my points were: sometimes we can use the past as a lens to help us look into the future, when we do look fowards we are often heavily biased by the concerns of the present, and that sometimes the thing we are focusing on gets in the way, and maybe it's the other stuff that's moving.
Then I show one of the awesome YOU WILL ads from AT&T in 1993, directed by David Fincher, featuring the voice of Tom Selleck.
There were remarkably prescient, got so much right, but little elements anchor it to its time - they foresee 3G enabled iPads, but they think we will use them to send faxes from the beach.
The ideas and examples are, of course, plundered from the hivemind, from Shirky et al and all of you, and I thank you.
This morning I gave a talk called "The Mobility of The Earth" at the IAB Mobile Event.
I thought it went well, it was fun and the tweetback was lovely.
I shall post the deck tomorrow - you can see what you think.
In the meantime, I also announced the launch of this little iPhone app we put together at Spies and Assassins
[Wondering what S&A is still? Maybe you have guessed. More will be revealed shortly, I'm sure.]
designed especially for the specific context of things like the IAB Mobile Event, or indeed anywhere you meet people and want to connect.
TwitHit is a single use technology - it does one thing.
It grew out of being at lots of events and seeing how people connect, and how that was changing.
It used to be meet, chat, exchange business cards, then, afterwards, send an awkward email saying HELLO we met earlier.
At social media events, people just wear badges of their twitter handle, and you just follow them on Twitter. That way you are already 'connected' when you leave the event.
During the relatively recent CreativityandTechnology [CaT] conference, some of the highly esteemed and very charming members of the Boulder Digital Works Board [and me] hosted a little lunchtime chat about things NOT to do when looking to move things to a digital way of thinking.
We punted in a few ideas, so did the audience, who then voted on their top ten, which we wrote up for Creativity and you can read now.
Thanks to everyone who took part.
When you read number 9 you should also watch this.
[which was awesome by the way so head down there if you get a chance before the end of the World Cup.]
It starts off by echoing some of the ennui I have been hearing about "social media" - the sudden reticence of social media experts to identify themselves as such, the semantic wear out the term is suffering from over- and misuse.
That's OK. Terms come and go. We used to have web 2.0 and user generated content.
I think I prefer "people doing stuff that creates conversations and relationships online".
BUT - I think the lesson we all learn, from the need to constantly feed social media without endlessly hawking our brands and ourselves - to constantly communicate as befits an always-on world - is that the best way to create content is to do awesome stuff in the world.
And that's a lesson I'm not bored by.
[P.S. Wondering what Spies & Assassins is? You'll see - shortly.]
A charming journalist called Jane from the Sunday Express [UK] called me up and asked about originality and Genius Steals and that, which led to some of my words being in this article in the CULTURE section.
I think it's good, but then I would, wouldn't I.
Regardless, I think it's good to remember that CULTURE IS A PROCESS, and that this comment on culture is part of that process, and that this comment on that comment is too, and that we all get to make culture now, if we so choose, to publish, to make things public, and that often the things we will talk about is other pieces of culture because, well, that's how recombinant processes works.
<Poetry Interlude>
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on. De Morgan: A Budget of Paradoxes
</Poetry Interlude>
You can, if you so choose, download a hi-res portable document of the article and enjoy it as your leisure.
That which is NEW is destined, eventually, to become old.
With the exception of the NEW category of the London International Awards, which takes as its ongoing mission the championing of those ideas that drive the industry forward, that help us expand our role as agents and the palette we use.
You can read what I wrote about the NEW category last year here - the gist of it is that it's super exciting, designed to reward systems of engagement and help us create an expanded vocabulary for the industry and that.
I'm honored that they have asked me to preside over the jury again so I can see the category into its terrible twos.
The deadline has been extended to July 9th so get your entries in and show us what NEW looks like this year.
I'm super honored and excited that these excellent NEW minds will join me on the jury:
Richard Schatzberger Director of Creative Tech BBH New York
Naveen Selvadurai Co-founder Foursquare New York
Paul Swann Executive Ideas Director Naked Sydney Sydney
Iain Tait Global ECD - Digital Wieden + Kennedy Portland
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