Talent imitates, genius steals

Some Slides for You

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

My mate Coop has been helping out the ANA - putting together some MARKETING RESOURCES for the good of the community, which is available right now for you to use.

You can see some of the insight slides above or on Slideshare.

I like the slides - they are an obvious successor to Lynette's digital bits, although the quotes are more classics that current hits.

I enjoy quotations. It's a fact, well known to those that know me well, that I think genius steals.

Quotes are a good example of stealing, which isn't imitation. To steal from Michel De Montaigne:

'I quote others only to better express myself.'

Well exactly, Michel - well put.

Anyway, the ANA stands for the Association of National Advertisers. I had never heard of them - but then I am still new to the USA.

Have you heard of them? Do you use them?

They seem a bit like ISBA in the UK, representing marketing clients. They are starting to develop and share some useful content - like these 101 introductions to new platforms like fBook - which is a nice way to say hello.

Selling Jesus

My mate Ahra just introduced me to the work of Jim Riswold, a former W&K creative director, who created some iconic work for Nike, who was diagnosed with leukemia and decided to start making iconic art - as in art made from icons, like Jesus and Hitler. He talks about why here.

He has a great site here, with his own jingle.

I like the strategic planner diagram of Jesus above.

I suspect there is probably scope to create hilarious planning diagrams and models, with or without religious figureheads.

O wait - there is.

Advertising Elegy

Who are your heroes?

My heroes are the people from whose thoughts and words I began to construct my own belief system, my world view.

The geniuses I stole from.

[World view is a calque [or stolen piece of linguistic genius] from German. They have this word Weltanschauung. It's a Teutonic concept that is quite useful so lots of languages, and philosophers, have stolen it. It basically means the framework of beliefs and ideas through which you perceive the world, how you parse reality.]

One of my heroes just died.

George Carlin was one of the great stand ups and thinkers of our time.

[If you haven't come across him: rejoice for there is much joy ahead of you should you seek out his work and despair that there is no more of it. However, you may remember him from such roles as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you have never come across that, there is no hope for you.]

Alongside other charming iconoclasts like Bill Hicks and Kurt Vonnegut, Carlin is one of the people who helped me understand some of the things I believe to be important, who helped me piece together my stolen Weltanschauung. 

Above is Carlin's Advertising Lullaby - one of his most famous bits.

[His most famous was probably Religion is Bullshit - check it out here.]

Those of you that know Hicks and Carlin may also be aware that they reserved a significant portion of their hilarious but heartfelt vitriol for advertising. 

[Hicks implored marketing professionals to commit suicide immediately.]

For a long time I found this difficult to resolve with what I do.

I would use F. Scott Fitzgerald as my get out clause:

The art of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time while still retaining the ability to function.

I believe this is true.

[When someone seems very certain of the veracity of one side of a complex argument, I tend to look nervously for a conversational exit.]

But perhaps more importantly, I think we should consider the extreme views of advertising contained in the words of Hicks and Carlin, the critique of intent and tonality, and allow them to drive us to make it better.

It's Better to do Nothing than Not to do Anything

[From here, because I've haven't got my camera lead]
 
I'm currently expending my cognitive surplus with the help of the critical technology of the industrial revolution.

[OK - it's not gin, it's cachaca, but you get the idea.]

In the essay, Clay Shirky talks answers a television producers challenge about active online media, like World of Warcraft, or Wikipedia:

"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

And of course, I agree. I spend a lot of time talking to people about the shift from passive to active consumers. Active consumers are different. If they aren't involved, they are interested.

[His anecdote about the 4 year old looking for the mouse for the TV captures this perfectly.]

It's the same challenge that people tend to make when thinking about immersive brand experiences, transmedia ideas or ARGs or anything complex that requires a lot from the people we hope to influence.

And that's the point - if there aren't the gaps, if there aren't things for them to do, they aren't interested. Of course there are levels of involvement, not every rabbit hole needs to go all the way to Wonderland.

But everything should have gaps for people to fit into.

[Russell used to call this leaving room for the mouse in the mousetrap - good advertising has always asked the reader to fill something in.

Actually, let's go back - all good idea transmission requires this. Duchamp and Barthes both understood this - the act of creation is only completed inside someone's head.

But now that co-creation of meaning is externalised, the tests is literally constructed collaboratively. Death of the author - long live the authors! Death of the brand - long live the brandtags!]

So I was thinking about all this, inspired by this post by Bogdana that reminded me of Shirky's principle of participation:

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

And I wondered if I was wasting my time, sitting doing nothing, staring at the sea.

But then I remembered something that my mate Ivan once told me:

It's better to do nothing, than not to do anything.

I Eat With Fun

Spotted at a restaurant in New York's trendy SoHo.

What better way to say this is a family restaurant than to get your daughter to design the back of the menu - love it.

Counter Intuitive Arrow

Is it just me or is this arrow moving in the wrong direction?

I found it oddly jarring, so I took a long photo.

I like how flickr have taken clip culture and pulled it into their own territory: photography.

Matt has a good post about introducing a function that automatically loops the long photos, turning a micro narrative into a recursive system, which makes complete sense to me - as soon as I took the long photo I instinctively wanted to loop it - repeating patterns endlessly repeating appeals.

Coincidentally, he also links to this burgeoning collection of 11 second shots.

Content and Contact

This week I've been mostly judging the Content and Contact category for the Clios, which has been awesome.

Amelia and I are going to try something: opening up the judging process and offering up some of the thoughts of the group on some of the entries - but we can't do that until after the awards are announced. 

In the meantime: last year's winners are worth having a look at.

Polaroid Story

Doug from LVHRD was one of the lovely people on the Culture Panel at PSFK and he throws parties that get people to do stuff.

The PHTHRD event invited three artists to tell a story using Polaroid photos taken at the event itself - above is Jonathan Harris' entry: a fractal polaroid, make of polaroids, showing people in various stages of undress [sounds like a fun party] exploring the blurring of identities that comes about in liminal spaces.

The image has a fantastic zoom interface thing that allows you to control the size and magnification. 

Both the event and the pieces themselves feel like elegies to the Polaroid, doing something that can only be done with instant photographs.

I Believe I Can Fly

[From here]

Comic book superheroes may owe their origins to New York, despite Superman being invented in Ohio, since pretty much all modern comic superhero started out based in New York [or poorly disguised versions thereof, like Gotham City].

But, as photographer Jan Von Holleben captures so beautifully in his series Dreams of Flying, all children think they are superheroes [which one were you?]

[If they're boys. Girls often default to princesses or fairies. Not that they aren't super.]

This really simple photographic device expresses the artifice and the naivete of children playing and that.

I imagine it will get turned into an ad soon enough.

Up, up and away!

[Via the excellent Lost in E Minor]

[UPDATE: guscasas in the comments points out that an agency has already turned them into ads - by putting a tagline and logo at the bottom.]

IM Making a Difference

I just stumbled across this - even though its been running for about a year it doesn't seem to have generated much noise - most of the blog mentions I found about this were MS developer blogs.

Which is a shame - because it is a GOOD THING.

The I'M Initiative from Microsoft donates a percentage of the advertising revenues it brings in from Live Messenger conversations to social cause organisations.

You sign up, choose a cause, and then everytime you start an IM conversation, some money goes to your cause. Thus far the activity has raised >$850k. Change the world or go home indeed. 

One of the blogs that has picked up on this suggested this was hypocrisy - that it locks users into using bug ridden software to give pennies to charity.

And this is something I hear a lot - cynicism about brands doing socially conscious promotions to build their business on the back of 'consumer' desire to do good.

Sigh.

Of course they are. They are businesses. All they care about is money. That's the function of business - to generate profits.

The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

It doesn't matter whether or not you think Milton Friedman was right. That's the way businesses operate - their responsibility is to deliver profit for their shareholders.

The only way I've managed to engage senior clients in a corporate social responsibility discussion is by positioning it as a strategic business function that will deliver long term shareholder value.

[Typical response I've had from a CEO to a mention of CSR ideas without the value preamble: "But - we pay loads of taxes. Isn't that enough?"]

In marketing terms it was a strategic point of differentiation and added value - its increasingly becoming a competitive necessity - because we, as a consumer base, are more concerned and willing to move our money to reflect that.

To a degree. As I mentioned before, most ethical consumerism is founded on the idea of Low Impact Ethics - if we all really wanted to change everything we'd, well, change everything.

Anyway.

Some brands that have sprung up since the mass awakening of social consciousness have socially responsible profitability at their core but the mega brands are relics or a less conscious age - they are dinosaurs - perfectly evolved to extract profits from, not help, the world.

Our role is to convince these brands that the best way to make money in the world today is to cater to the growing consumer need for emotional added value in purchases - be it social or ecological - that is reflected in the the brands they buy and the premium they are willing to pay.

Companies that do good need to make more money - then more companies will do good.