June 29th, 2009 by kevin

Wow, a lot of big news from the celebrity death newsdesk in the past couple of weeks:

• Michael Jackson
• Ed McMahon
• Farah Fawcett
• and now, Billy Mays.

Nothing really to add to this, but it’s interesting that beyond being typical celebrity deaths, these are all people who became cultural icons of one sort or another.  Maybe they are the four horsemen of a pop-culture apocalypse?  Maybe not. I just can’t remember the last time so many icons passed in the same month.

Also, Axel Rose has moved to the top of my imaginary celebrity death pool.

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June 5th, 2009 by kevin

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April 22nd, 2009 by kevin

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April 21st, 2009 by kevin

I’ve noticed a lot of talk centered around things like social media and UGC that indicates that people in marketing have become confused as to what these tools do to people’s interaction with brands.

“People don’t want to be interrupted, they want to have a conversation.”

“People demand to participate with brands now.”

The answer to both is “no, they don’t.” They actually want to talk to their friends and watch things that they enjoy without being marketed to. While the rules of marketing have changed, the value of what a brand means to people has not. Let’s not get all caught up into thinking that people distinguish between a 30-second spot and a Facebook page and a Twitter account. It’s all marketing to them. And they have much better things to do than be friends with Frosted Flakes on FriendFeed.  The honest truth is that most people don’t want to participate with brands, or have a conversation with brands, or be interupted by brands. Let’s not get all self-important on ourselves here just because there are different tools out there.

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April 15th, 2009 by kevin

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April 10th, 2009 by kevin

via here

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April 8th, 2009 by kevin

Will Wright is one of the smartest people in the gaming business, and he’d probably be well up there in just about any business. He’s the guy that invented SimCity, The Sims, and most recently, Spore. His games are never conventional. It always seemed as though he was pushing the idea of what a game could be far beyond anyone else. Though now that I’m thinking about it, he never really built games, he built simulations.

Anyways, he’s left EA to head up the Stupid Fun Club. Wikipedia failed me when looking this thing up, but I did find a 2002 Newsweek article quoted on MTV Multiplayer that described it like this:

The two-year-old stupid Fun Club is organized around the interest in robots, shared by Thorpe and filmmaker Mike Winter, Wright’s partners in the club. Their first TV pilot, called “M.Y. Robot,” features six-inch-high puppets, a roaming robot and a 16th-century Japanese village that has been altered by alien technology. In postproduction, anime-style graphics were overlaid onto the footage to communicate with viewers in a secret script. Wright explains that he was appropriating Japanese visual styles in the same way the Japanese shows reinterpret American cultural mores. “As far as we know, nobody has done this,” he says.

And according to the EA press release:

“The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change … Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms. In my twelve years at EA, I’ve had the pleasure to work alongside some of the brightest and most talented game developers in the industry and I look forward to working with them again in the near future.”

All of which sounds incredibly awesome and weird. And awesomely weird.  I think the coolest thing about it though is a implied media neutrality to what they are doing. He could make another game if he wants, as EA owns half of the SFC and it seems gets the option on any games made there, but it leaves the door open to infinite experimentation and the option to pursue any and all ideas that come out of that.

That, my friends, is the future of the entertainment industry. Unbundle from media channels. Assemble a bunch of idea people together, regardless of their craft and create using whatever medium makes the most sense…be that video games or television shows or (hopefully) robots. Ideas come from people, not specialties.

All of which makes me wonder if advertising could be better off using a model like this. What if instead of having a bunch of siloed departments of specialists, we had idea people and production people? Let’s get rid of planning departments and creative departments and account management … those are all departments based on skills rather than ideas. They are also based on the flawed thinking that creativity is a process. Ideas aren’t bound to any sort of 10-step process or the ability to use photoshop or run a focus group. That way of thinking is antique. And each and every one of us knows it. Yet we all allow it to persist. Seems a little insane to me.

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April 7th, 2009 by kevin

A few months ago, after taking a bike ride across the Golden Gate to Sausalito, we came across this guy:

He stacks rocks. And it’s amazing. I don’t know how difficult it actually is … maybe it’s just a matter of being bored enough to try it. But it’s really interesting. And after watching Thru-You, and being temporarily amazed before moving onto something else, it made me start thinking about creativity and the Internet, or more specifically, what the digital world means to creativity.

I want to start off by saying that I’ve never really trusted electronic music. Maybe it’s because I’m a drummer, but I used to really dislike all of it until a band called Lake Trout opened my eyes to how good it can be. Now instead of hating all of it, I’m highly skeptical, just like I am with hip-hop. Reflecting on it, I think that I just require a lot more proof that a digital artist has something interesting to say than I do of a more traditional band. Where is the line is between artistic creation and the mastering of a technology?

While at SXSW a few weeks ago, we met up with an art director from a prominent San Fran agency who had been to some kind of demonstration of upcoming Photoshop features which we joked about being the end of art direction as a career. “I’m going to be like an IT person now, when the Photoshop acts up, that’s when they’ll call an art director, to fix it.”  Just get someone computer savvy on the payroll, and have the computer make the ads look good. Maybe it’s the new data entry?

It makes me wonder if creativity has become a commodity because of technology. Is it disposable? Can there ever be another Beatles, or Rembrandt, or Hemingway? Andy Warhol remarked that in the future, everyone would get 15 minutes of fame. But what if we’re moving to a future where no one gets fame because there is so much creativity out there that none of it gets noticed?

Creative things are no longer things to be cherished or admired, they are now something that anyone can do cheaply and simply. I worry sometimes that creativity as a job is being killed in the same way that robot arms threaten assembly line jobs. Are we making creativity so easy to do that we’re all doomed to a future where having creative skills isn’t worth a paycheck?

Maybe not. Thinking back to my last post, I think that the value of created things is not in perfection, but in their humanity, which at this point is near impossible to create digitally without enough knowledge and ability to inject your own sense of craft into it. The athleticism inherent in creation, which for some reason is usually missing in our digital pursuits, or if it’s there, we tend to iron the humanity right out of it in order to make it perfect.

Three examples:

1. Part of the difficulty I had while moving the blog to Wordpress was that the themes available were all so perfect and shiny. Finding a theme with any sort if character was hard to do. Even the themes tagged as “grunge” were still kind of perfectly imperfect, like what a mom’s scrapbook page about her teenager’s band would look like.  After sorting through so many themes that were cutesy and rounded and did unnecessary things, I finally had to pick a theme that was almost interesting, and then go into the code and ugly it up a bit.  While Web 2.0 does make it easier for people to make things on the Web, it does so by providing the user with perfected bits and atoms to assemble and write on. In that sense, while things can be customized, you lose a bit of the individual human touch that comes from building things on your own.
2. Whenever I’m flipping through an old photo album or just a shoebox full of old pictures, it’s always the unplanned shots that are the best.  But for some reason, people always end up framing and displaying the perfectly posed picture.  Everyone is smiling, looking at the camera, no one is blinking, and hopefully none of the kids are holding themselves where the bathing suite goes because they have to pee (see my wedding photos for examples of this).  It seems as though digital photography should enable more of these candid shots because of the increased number of pictures we can take without changing film, and it does, but the problem is that they are much easier to delete than film-based prints are to throw away.  There’s something about throwing away a physical print that seems more wasteful, while it is so easy to delete a picture that didn’t turn out perfectly that might actually turn out to be a favorite in a couple years.
3. There is a line from an old Ani Difranco song that I heard a million years ago and haven’t been able to find since (no matter how much I refer to it when writing this blog), that says something to the effect of “making a record used to be about recording the event of musicians making music together.” The imperfections were a part of the charm.  They showed craft, personality, and often times would inspire the evolution of an idea or of a completely new genre of music itself.  It’s what I’ve been thinking of lately as the athleticism inherent in playing music.  Digital recording seems to have all but eliminated any nuance of style or character.  As a drummer, there’s something about the chaos and nuance that can be created by striking a surface differently, or by the clashing sounds of many cymbals and drums ringing at the same time produce.  Unfortunately, it seems that more and more of the recording that I’m doing is using electronic drums that produce a midi note rather than live recordings.  This midi note can then be changed however is thought to be necessary.  You can take a drum beat that someone plays, and have the program make it perfect, taking away any sense of style and feel that makes it uniquely that drummer.  It also completely eliminates the “noisiness” that is a sizable part of playing the drums.  Everything is so precise that it loses a bit of the base level, cave-man excitement of percussion. The same can be done with melodic instruments,  and for a few hundred bucks you can buy a software program that will allow you to correct your very own vocals so that they are exactly on pitch. We can now completely scrub away any imperfections that reek of human involvement when creating music.

This post has turned into a doozy of a long, rambling thing, so I suppose I’d be better wrap up and try to make some sort of point. I think it’s this: Part of the value that comes from creating something is that our humanity and imperfections make it truly one of a kind. Sometimes it seems to me that the digitalization of things is commoditizing creation by making it so accessible, perfect, and disposable that what we’re making is becoming less and less valuable. And maybe the ease with which we can now create by building and combining and making things is going to give way to a creativity thats more about deconstruction than it is about creating.

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March 31st, 2009 by kevin

So after much anticipation, it turned out that I wasn’t actually able to go to SXSW. Which was a bummer, and yet another reason why I’m ready for this whole economy thing to pass. The good news though, is that we happened to be heading to Austin for some research during the last couple days of the event.  So while we didn’t get the panel goodness, we did absorb some learning from some friends who did go, and we had a great time.

After checking into our hotel, I remarked on Twitter that everyone looked like they worked with the Interwebs, but then later I realized that they looked surprisingly similar to junior and mid-level advertising people. Except of course that they were driving Porsches and talking about running companies. And that made me sad. But then it also made me think about all of the conversation I’ve heard about how advertising is having trouble attracting new talent. Which is funny when you think about the way young people are treated by this business. Understanding why there is a lack of new talent isn’t exactly rocket science.

Advertising simply isn’t the only way to make a career being creative anymore. Creative people can now just start their own business, call all of the shots, make all of the money, and have a good time building a completely original brand (yep, I said brand.) Whereas the advertising experience is typically something along the lines of paying your own way to go to New York to interview, being offered $30k to work in Manhattan, and then being reminded about how lucky you are, every day, for being allowed The Honour of working 80-hours a week for someone who got rich for knowing how to tell dick jokes in-between TV shows. I’ve been very lucky to have avoided most of that, having worked for some of the most incredible people in the business, in both talent and in graciousness, but I’ve heard some terrible stories from friends that I’ve made along the way. And it makes me think that agencies are broken in a more fundamental way than most people like to talk about.

The agency world is still operating under the assumption that they are the one place to go for creative folks. And while it still is high on the list of a lot of people, myself included, it doesn’t seem like the business is doing a very good job of bringing in the kinds of people who know how to be what marketing needs to become as we hurtle into a strange and uncertain future. Some agencies are attempting to, but often it seems like more often than not they are just bringing in weirdos for the sake and novelty of it rather than bringing in people who actually know how to do stuff. But I’m starting to get the feeling that the people who know how to do this stuff aren’t there for the easy taking, as they’ve all chosen a more appealing route.  Working for themselves. Living the life of an entrepreneur rather than an employee. Working 18-hours a day for themselves rather than someone else.

Advertising is having trouble attracting new talent because it’s not trying to attract new talent. The business is still counting on a fading mystique to lure people who love it into working in it. And while all of this might be over-generalized, I am more and more convinced that until the industry addresses this problem in a real way, it doesn’t matter how much change they talk about, agencies will continue to slide into mediocrity and lose relevance with clients.

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March 30th, 2009 by kevin

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of perfection. People strive for it, beat themselves up to attain it, and then beat themselves up when they fail to get there. Luxury brands like Lexus like to use the idea of perfection as a part of their product and marketing philosophy. Kids all strive to grow up with perfect grades, have the perfect body, look perfect every day, and eventually lead the perfect life. Now more than ever, good enough isn’t actually good enough (though the collapse of the economy may fix that.)

Perfect implies a singular answer. One way of being. It speaks to cultural references of having a chosen one, and probably somewhat to the idea of monotheism. There’s one right thing to believe in, and there’s one right way to go about believing in that one right thing. The future is often thought of as a place of singularity as well.

I think what is so interesting about perfection is that our survival as a species largely has depended on our ability to be imperfect. We are problem solvers. And our brain rewards us for mastering new problems. We have been set up by evolution to be generalists who are rewarded for becoming more and more so. Imperfection is our game. And we’re really good at it.

Perfection by it’s nature is boring. It implies conforming to an already established convention. We can’t learn anything new from something that is perfect, and learning something new is what our brains thrive on and reward us for. Once we’ve memorized a pattern, our brains no longer provide that jolt of dopamine that it did the first time we learned that pattern. It’s no longer interesting or fun.

So what?

I think that a lot of the changes in media that are happening now are a result of humans being generalists and boredom with the last century of perfected mass communications…the 20th Century Anomaly. Before the Twentieth Century Anomaly, people communicated with each other around camp fires, in letters, and in other very social and very decentralized ways. As with everything else, communicating had problems of its own that had to be solved as society evolved, and sometimes it was needed to solve other problems. So people innovated to solve those problems and everything was working well, until communicating evolved into mass communications, at which point innovation was taken out of the hands of the people by both cost and required knowledge.  Once communicating was largely taken out of the hands of the great unwashed masses, things became fairly calm and predictable. In order to innovate communications, people had to become very educated and very lucky to get into the right places from where they could innovate. And frankly communicating had become a business model; there was too much money flowing to risk innovation.

Eventually technology fixed that situation by once again empowering the general public in communicating.  The old world order, which was very comfortable, was probably as close to perfect as this industry has ever been, or will ever be again. While this bored most people to tears, some people became addicted to this. They are used to having a perfected way of doing things, the lack of which has them scrambling to figure out what the new rules are. They are looking for their footing by trying to find the way to be a perfect marketer right now. This is most evident in the amount of people on Twitter who like to prescribe the “right way” to Twitter.

Unfortunately for them, I think that the democratization of communications as well as the democratization of technological creation has returned communicating to the hands of the imperfect generalist, and we’ve probably seen the last days of the perfected media landscape.  In the new world that we live in,  trying to figure out the “right way” to do things will prove to be a Sisyphean task. While people are falling all over themselves to become masters of the new way, the landscape will still be moving under them.  This is because of two things:

1. If we’re talking about social media type things, we’re talking about billions of individuals. What works for one person will not work for everyone else. What one person is interested in reading does not apply to everyone else. There’s not one right way to communicate.
2. The democratization of technological know how, combined with the ease with which people can now create their own software and hardware, combined with the democratization of distribution provided by the internet, combined with our desire to keep learning and experiencing new things, makes me think that we’re never going to see the stability of the 20th century in media ever again. We’ve now entered what I can only imagine will be a permanent state of innovation driven change.

In this new world, perfection rarely exists, and when it does, odds are that it is boring or old news. We now live in a post perfection world, which is great, because it’s what our brains were set up to deal with. I think that given this new reality, there are no shortcuts, there are no 10 commandments, and there’s certainly no proprietary model that can effectively solve marketing problems. Despite our allure to the perfect solution, anyone who claims to know the perfect way to market right now is either lying or incredible wrong. I think that the best thing that can be done from a marketing standpoint is to keep immersed in culture and consumer behavior, and use that knowledge to solve problems in the unique way with which every problem needs to be addressed. Like we’ve done for millions of years.

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