Talent imitates, genius steals

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.

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. 

Magic Tubes

This is quite awesome.

Microsoft does branded content right.

Don't talk about the product, directly.

[Obliquely is fine.]

Ads that are simply product sales pitches are not content.

[Unless they are.]

Content needs to be of interest in and of itself.

[That's why we puts ads around it.]

If you aren't funny yourself, hire comedians.

[And using the word awesomer is awesome.]

The cool thing about being this huge gray corporation is that every time you don't act like it, it's awesome.

Favicads or The Disarming Nature of Novelty

I like favicons.

I like when people do clever things with them.

It always seems a waste to me when a brand website has a generic favicon.

So I liked this very very small idea that Markus sent me.

I think that novelty is a powerful thing.

When people haven't seen a brand using a space in just that way before, it disarms the standard interruption annoyance.

So this massively obstructive flash overlay becomes charming.

The problem with novelty as a strategy is that you have to keep doing different, never before done things all the time.

Maybe that isn't a problem exactly.

It's just what makes it hard.

The Natural Selection of Interesting

The Internet is like these binocular things at the top of tall buildings [the ascent of which remains the favourite tourist past time] - it brings distant point of interest within close range.

As Anthony points out in this lovely ebook, the Internet functions as a live attention market - it dynamically reallocates attention in real time, because the machine makes bringing things close easy and immediate, and finding things a function of fragments of behaviour.

Ants in colonies don't require any conscious top down organisation - local rules exist and individual behaviours leave pheremone trails that get reinforced if the behaviour is imitated, which leads to directional changes of the whole.

We leave links and tags, tweets and posts, instead of pheremones - and these guide the allocation of attention.

As Duncan Watts has pointed out, the structure of the network is as important as that which seeks attention, and the same thing that becomes an attention grabbing hit one day, may not the next.

So, rather than collapse the wave function of this dialectic on one side, let's remember rather it is the dynamic interplay of the two that makes things spread, that moves attention around the market.

And my brother, who knows about these things, has a great expression for how this happens: 

the natural selection of interesting

This is awesome because it contains both parts of the idea: natural selection of the interesting favours traits which make something interesting to the environment.

And, if you wanted, you could even think about ideas as evolving, being remixed [sexual reproduction is a recombinant process] and copied and so on, incorporating other elements, becoming more interesting, or dying out.

If you wanted.

Best not to get too wed to the mechanics of a metaphor but as the viral / spreadable discussion continues, it is important to remember that how you think about something does matter, because the metaphors we use can change how we approach things.

Words are where we live.

The Kind of Films the Internet Likes

Following on from yesterday's recombinant musings, which touched on the fact that when we make ads we rarely make the kind of films that the internet likes, we bring you the new Cadbury's spot, from Glass and a Half Full Productions [or Fallon London.]

They are getting good at making films the internet likes.

Part of the secret seems to be:

Leave out all that stuff about the product. As much as you can anyway.

Make people feel something nice, link that association to your brand. 

[Go read Feldwick again if you disagree.]

Give people things to copy, or respond to, or play with.

Don't take yourself or your brand too seriously.

Look out for the Sony zeotrope too.

Oh and have a lovely day!

[Update: Via a deal with photobox you can get a brow over picture of yourself on a mug if you want. For hot chocolate I guess.]

Twitter 150

We love scoring ourselves, ranking, competing. The more data our digital lives generate, the more like a game reality becomes [as various people have pointed out].

Or maybe it was always like a game:

Life is a game. Money is how we keep score. /Ted Turner

And we just keep finding new ways to keep score. 

There's now a twitter 150 analogue to the Adage blog 150 thing. 

I'm not sure all these lists are healthy, but I still couldn't help but be pleased I snuck in 
[at 149]. 

On the Web You Control the Relationship

The Interwebs

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: media social)

I quote others only in order the better to express myself. 

Michel de Montaigne

Spreadable Media

[The video above was made by mate Mauricio and Ricardo Justus for a panel at FOE3 - it is a mash up made from a Brazilian film called Tropa De Elite, a film which was embraced and spread by remix culture.]

One of the important things that FOE3 left me with, apart from how awesome everyone was, was the re-framing that C3 has brought to what we really shouldn't be calling viral content.

I've been getting angry about the use of the word viral for a long time. About two years ago I tried to explain why people using the word was very frustrating:

Viral is a thing that happens, not a thing that is.

If people pass your communication on, it's viral. If they don't, it's not. Sometimes I get calls saying this viral isn't performing very well - what's the problem? We've seeded it to all the right places, it's on youtube and everything - where's our traffic? The problem is usually that they've made an ad that contains nothing people consider worth showing to their friends.

Unless you would be willing to send whatever it is to your mates - it's not viral!

I remain in agreement with myself on this. 

My brother, who is an awesome epidemiological modeler [among other things] would point out to me that the 'viral' metaphor is flawed - ideas do not propagate through populations like diseases - so using the word like I do above protests against something that the signifier belies.

This metaphor is very seductive and very hard to get rid of. It lets us think we understand. And specificaly, it re-affirms the structure of control. It implies all you need to do is create something that is 'viral' enough and it spreads through populations like, well, a virus - it self-propagates.

This is simply untrue.

What we mean when something goes 'viral' is that LOTS OF PEOPLE CHOOSE TO PROPAGATE IT. It requires people to do something. Voluntarily. For their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they pull.

This is a complete inversion of the viral model.

As Watts has pointed out, the structure of the network is perhaps more important in predicting the spread of content than the nature of the content - the same thing can succeed or fail depending on network structure. 

But saying something is viral, we focus entirely on the content itself and not on the needs of the people that we are asking to spread ideas.

"People don't engage with each other to engage viruses; people
exchange viruses as an excuse to engage with each other." Douglas
Rushkoff

Shenja Van Der Graaf "The main feature of viral marketing is that it
heavily depends on interconnected peers. Viral marketing is inherently
social."

As Henry points out, people do not spread things to spread them. Like so much social communication, it has a social function, both phatic and generous. It operates within a gift economy, where value is generated in transference, not purchase.

Further, as I've endlessly pointed out, if you let people mess with your content, it gets more spreadable - because people suddenly have a personal stake in its propagation - this insight was at the heart of propagation planning, learning that we took from the Sony work and applied to the digital activation of the Cadbury's Gorilla campaign, the digital longevity of which was driven entirely by remix culture.

This ties into Mark's work on direct and indirect copying as the driving mechanism of behaviour spreading through populations.

We need to forget about trying to make things viral and begin to understand what people would like to spread and why.

You can read Henry's opening remarks here:

If it doesn't spread, it's dead.

This is What Now Looks Like

To support the immediacy of access that their new 3G dongle provides, Sprint has just launched this site which shows you what now looks like.

Pulling in feeds from innumerable places it provides a comical but very interesting snapshot of RIGHT NOW.

It's incredibly heavy flash, but the effect is impressive - turning statistics into beauty or usefulness is awesome - it feels like a dashboard for a certain view of the world.

Assume this is Goodby - but anyone know who built it?

[Via the always awesome Amber]