Talent imitates, genius steals

Advertising is the Medium or Distributed Broadcasting

Google just announced a deal with Family Guy [and American Dad, but that's basically the same thing] creator, Seth Mcfarlane, that will see Google be the exclusive distributor of his new animated creation.

Google will distribute the short animated clips via the Adsense network, to sites with a relevant audience - it's calling the new service the Google Content Network.

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

Not a small claim - but GCN is certain to cause concern at the A and NBCs of the world.

This mechanism turns advertising into the medium. It reaches a huge, measurable audience, by distributing the content via hundreds or thousands of sites that host Google Ads.

It turns the broadcast advertising model upside and inside out. The content doesn't create the audience to sell it to advertisers - it goes out and finds its audience, via the advertising, using other people's content, that already has an audience. 

Or something.

A while back I posited that Google would creep into owning other media to extract maximum value from its ad platform. [It has already released Google TV and Print and Radio Ad networks.]

But perhaps I was thinking about this all backwards. It creates the ad network by aggregating eyeballs from sites all over the web, and that becomes the distributed broadcast medium.

Why own the media, when you can broker all the advertising and content using other media?

Which suggests a different model, a model that America loves - a market.

Enron, the fallen poster child of 90s corporate American, was ultimately a market - an energy market. It didn't make anything - it was the transaction medium.

In fact, it was market crazy. It loved to create trading platforms. It announced a market to trade broadband.

Then it created a market to trade the weather.

[This is true. You could trade finanical instruments - derivatives in fact. Futures. So speculative contracts based the fluctuations of other variables - in this case - THE WEATHER.]

I realise that comparing Google to Enron sounds absurd, at first glance. But it's not. Honest. 

[Enron was named Most Innovative Company in America by Fortune Magazine 6 years in a row - Apple holds the title at the moment, but Google is up there, and it won Most Innovative in Fast Company.]

The principle of being the market rather than a supplier or buyer is a sound one. When Enron launched EnronOnline, a web based trading market for commodities like power and gas, it was rapidly adopted by every major energy company in the deregulated US energy market.

That's why everyone loved them so much - suddenly if you wanted to do any business at all in the energy category, you had to do it with Enron.

[Enron used a bizarre and ridiculous accounting system and were very naughty - you can read all about it here.]

[The problem arose because of the way the market was structured - Enron was financially involved in every transaction - in essence you were always buying or selling off Enron - which meant costs were rising over time, as they took on more and more risks, but their revenues looked awesome, when accounted using aforementioned absurd mark to mark accounting, which enabled you to mark future revenues as though you already had them. Anyway, this is getting way off the point. Perhaps this whole Enron analogy was misguided.]

The [rapidly vanishing] point, is that the market is the house [to use a casino analogy] and the house always wins.

[Although this analogy is also flawed - unless you are talking about poker at the casino, where you pay a proportion to play, but the house isn't actually gambling itself. Oh I give up.]

Why own some media, when you can broker the ads to all the media?

Free Rice

The Free Rice website blends two excellent things: using advertising money to donate rice via the UN World Food Program - which is a GOOD THING - and a word definition game.

As it says, for each word you get right, they donate 20 grains. They could just say "endlessly refresh the page" as each click could donate, but they make it interesting, rewarding and cumulative, which is far more effective at driving endless clicking.

Build your vocabulary and harnass the awesome power of intertising to make rice appear from nowhere now.

What does your website say about you?

Red Brick Road's new website defines the agency in contradistinction to the rest of the industry, which is fairly standard for new model agencies - the agency is called Red Brick Road because it's the path that Dorothy didn't take, the path less travelled so to speak.

But their Yellow Brick Road satirical site sends up the industry and made me laugh on a sweaty Friday afternoon.

I like the typologies of agency folk above but, to clarify, I don't DJ anymore, especially not at the Fudge Club.

Defining yourself by what you are not can be a defensive positioning, especially for a challenger brand so clearly linked to the establishment it's poking fun at, but this is pretty charming on the whole.

[Via Chroma/Gareth]

Gorilla and the Chocolate Factory

The sequel to Cadbury's Gorilla spot launched today. Trucks is another slice of surreal madness, with a truly awesome soundtrack choice, that's delightful [although it could use a better denouement] and will trigger innumerable arguments as to whether it's as good as the original.

[Sidebar - can a sequel ever be better than the original? Most film geeks would say no, with a couple of contentious exceptions, but in the context of FallonJuan's advertisements the originals set up the conceit, establish a new new thing, so can the follow up ever be as impactful? If this came before Gorilla, would it have been as discussed and popular? Is there anyway to parse this without reference to that which came before?]

The film launches alongside the launch of Glass and a Half Full Productions website and it's just grand.

The lovely people at digital shop HyperHappen have incorporated a bunch of features that capitalise on many of things TIGS is obsessed with.

The interface is an intuitive 3D chocolate factory that hosts the Gorilla; the studio it was filmed in; some of the top Gorilla remixes; a teaser of a build-your-own truck application; an ARG-lite that opens up a password protected vault that holds downloadable clips of Trucks for easy recombinance; and a few films that show the provence of Dairy Milk and its fairly traded supply chain.

Go have a look around.

Photoshop 2.0

Adobe has just launched Photoshop Express, a free cut-down online version of Photoshop.

Software as a service, or what we used to call application service provision, comes to the web's favourite image manipulator. 

[Thanks Fred]

We Apologise for the Inconvenience

You'd think that Facebook, of all people, oops sorry I mean brands, would get always being in beta and could add a dash of charm to their 'we're down' page.

I'm increasingly coming to feel that charm is a crucial element to communication  in today's flat world.

The internet disrupts traditional notions of authority, government and brands, because of the increased access to information and the empowerment of having our own media and voice, which means that increasingly brands need to act like real people -  by being nice, polite, charming if possible.

We apologize [with the z - grrr - they can target you for advertisers based on what you had for breakfast but can't localise the spelling for the UK?]  for the inconvenience.

or

Sorry! Something has gone wrong and we're are trying hard to fix it. Why not spend this time getting some work done or talking to someone near you? [OK so that's very Why Don't You but you get the idea].

I'm probably just cross because I can't Facebook while eating my lunch.

If you can't either go read Iain's excellent analysis of why we marketing folk are so obsessed by it.

Geo-Folksonomy

I'm 'liveblogging' from MIT's Futures of Entertainment Conference - which is very exciting.

I've promised to write it up for Contagious and so am under self-imposed embargo - but I don't think it hurts to post a few cool things that I've seen here and there. Content appetisers, as opposed to snacks.

Marc Davis - social media guru at Yahoo! and all round smart chap - showed us Tagmaps - a kind of geo-folksonomy that overlays weighted tags onto places, and then pulls pictures from Flickr with those tags up alongside the map view.

This example application displays mostly geographical tags, but you can combine geo-tags with other data sets to show, for example, the most popular movies in different regions, events that have happened there, the distribution of bird species etc etc.

The size of the tag reflects its importance as measured by a kind of pagerank - number of tags plus strength of tags.

It's like a user generated map of the world, showing what's important to people where.

Watch an Alien on your Narwahl

Slingbox is a set top box web service that allows you to watch [and control] your television at home over any internet enabled device.

This is the dude on the website that explains how it works [and the title of this post].

[Did you know the Narwahl can grow a tusk up to 3 metres long? It looks a bit like a fishy unicorn, but its name is actually derived from the old Norse word for corpse because of its necrotic hue.]

It's a great use of comedy to deliver a potentially confusing / boring technology message. A spoonful of sugar and all that.

Calling All Design Ninjas

Ninja Zoo is a new kind of t-shirt design site that I've mentioned before.

They are about to launch their public beta and are looking for a few good design ninjas to be featured artists when the site goes live.

I've seen some of the stuff they are working on - the platform looks pretty awesome. The front end has been designed by TADO.

If you're interested, send a few samples of your work to artists [at] ninjazoo [dot] com

Animated Economics

Found via House of Naked, the website Animoto creates slide show animations out of your images [which it can pull from the usual places]. Since you have very little control over how it turns out this will probably have limited presentational use except as a moving mood board, but once it lets you download the videos it'll be handy for that.

There seem to be a bunch of online animation tools launching at the moment - Iain pointed to a flash style [think singing kittens] animation tool called Fuzzwich a while back. All part of the ongoing move towards thin client wysiwyg programming that should further accelerate the democratisation of creation that we've been harping on about for ages.

The business model for software creation has been turned on its head. It no longer really makes sense to sell software to consumers - piracy is too easy in a connected broadband world.

In fact, the foundations of economics change in an information economy. Economics is based on the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity - a model that doesn't work when you can endlessly replicate product at zero cost - see software, music, information - anything digital. [You can still force corporations to buy software licenses - Microsoft send auditors round - but increasingly that model is shifting towards service contracts with the software as the bait.]

In a previous life, I used to preach this as software as a service - take the product and turn it into an on-demand service over the web, charging only for what people use, thereby lowering barriers to uptake and increasing potential customer base.

In the post Google economy, different monetisation models are springing up to compensate the creators of intellectual property without charging the end user. Currently most of them rely on a media model - use tool to build audience, sell audience to advertiers - a model which, you guessed it, is also being forced to evolve rapidly.

In our era of accelerated innovation, it makes sense for cycles of creative destruction to accelerate in step. Some old things [companies, business models] will die and from their ashes new economic powers will be born, faster than we have ever seen before.