The Uniqueness of Humans
This one's a can't miss. Primatologist Robert Sapolsky examines the fascinating similarities between us and other species, but along the way exposes just how wonderfully alone we are.
The Hits Survive
In this fantastic portrait of the James Patterson blockbuster publishing machine, more evidence that the death of the hit may have been a bit overstated,
"Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies."
"The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger."
Again, it doesn't seem to be the hits that are suffering and the long tail remains rather vibrant, but it's in that murky middle where the waters seem to get choppy.
The unlikelihood of anything cool happening.
What percentage of the things we see or hear during the day are all that interesting, really?
Yes, yes, we have some sort information overload. And yes, yes our default position is skepticism and avoidance.
But no matter how busy any of us are, we like to do cool stuff. We watch things that are interesting. It’s just that usually when we’re dealing with anything to do with marketing, our inclination is to assume it’s not worth our time. We’ve been proven right so often, it’s generally a safe bet.
And then when industry types start making these advertisy things, we assume that people are these disinterested beings. We assume that we can’t expect anything. We take the default position as the only possible position.
And just like that, we’ve argued ourselves into treating the audience in a way that reinforces a posture that doesn’t help us and bores the hell out of them.
It’s a rather destructive cycle, no?
But there are so many times in my day where something cool is so unlikely to happen. Standing in line at the store, the rare television commercial I actually see, sitting in dead stop traffic. And these are extreme examples. I can go days without anything all that cool actually happening, which is either sad or normal, not sure which.
So instead of assuming that the audience is overwhelmed and unlikely to take a few steps towards you, maybe we can fill up all that monotony with a wholelotta cool. Because cool will only be unlikely as long as we let it stay that way.
photo via the fantastic yyellowbird
More Links for You
Mind Castle Holiday Card Creative Process
Yale Professor Barry Nalebuf on Creativity
[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/gtQk6M8KAg]
"Both expected and actual tastiness ratings were significantly higher for the "California" wine -- despite the fact that the wine bottles had identical, professionally-designed labels from the fictitious "Noah's Winery." What's more, the tastiness ratings for the cheese, which was the same, unlabeled mild goat cheese for everyone, matched the wine ratings. When people thought they were drinking better wine, they also liked the cheese more."
The Internet is Underrated: A note on Activism, Populism and Polarization in the Aughts
"We live in a complex world and I don't mean to oversimplify this too much. But it seems to me that, rather than a change in underlying sentiments -- that is, more prevalence of quote-unquote extreme, alienated, nonmainstream, populist, pox-on-both-their-houses viewpoints -- what has instead changed is that these viewpoints have become much more visible. And the reason has to do with technology -- to some extent cable news but to a much greater extent the Internet."
Ten Psychology Studies Worth Knowing About
Number one is my favorite, too.
"If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. One reason is adaptation: we adapt to all things material in our lives in a matter of weeks, no matter how infatuated we were with the coveted possession the day we got it. Another reason is that experience, unlike possession, generally involves other people, and fosters or strengthens relationships that are more edifying over time than owning something."
photo via yulia
On Worldbuilding (and complexity)
Advertising has been eager to ditch complexity in favor of simplicity, or at least something that feels simple. Whether this aversion to the complex is a habit of the client in buying, the agency in selling or perhaps just a general low expectation of the audience, what we most often do is sacrifice the nuance, the stuff in the middle where most things become interesting.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes an unnamed screenwriter, "When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media."
Worldbuilding is mostly used in reference to fantasy, but I think it’s an interesting way to think about brand things, too.
What worldbuilding can be is a platform for complexity. Mostly because it forces you to no longer talk only about who you are so much as creating a vision for how things could be. Not necessarily some new science fiction reality, but more like regular life, just a bit better.
So our job is less about finding the USP and more about creating environments in which our audiences thrive. Which means we should be spending more time finding what better means and the context by which that better matters.
So still good to simplify the vision. But we need to be prepared to embrace complexity in just about everything else.
Time for Search Neutrality?
I've argued in the past that Google shouldn't be penalized for creating a monopoly on search. All done through better product and consumer preference. But this editorial from Adam Raff in the times did at the very least give me pause.
"Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."
"Another way that Google exploits its control is through preferential placement. With the introduction in 2007 of what it calls “universal search,” Google began promoting its own services at or near the top of its search results, bypassing the algorithms it uses to rank the services of others. Google now favors its own price-comparison results for product queries, its own map results for geographic queries, its own news results for topical queries, and its own YouTube results for video queries. And Google’s stated plans for universal search make it clear that this is only the beginning."
Now, if I argue that network neutrality is necessary to keep the infrastructure of the web ripe for innovation, and we agree that search is structural to the internet, wouldn't the same rules apply here?
photo via dunny
In the World of Interesting
The Best Documentaries of the Decade
I vote for Man on Wire. Fantastic.
Another lovely piece of Stars Wars fandom. Probably not the same cinematic experience of the Hunt for Gollum, but probably much more charming. Yes, I did just manage to use Gollum, Star Wars, Lovely and Charming in the same sentence.
Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.
Core Principles of Transmedia Storytelling
"We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness."
"As the historian Clay McShane argues, these views were intensified by a deep sense of male insecurity brought about by the mass-production system, the deskilling of manufacturing, and the shift of men into less “manly” white-collar work. Men also felt threatened by increasing education and employment for women. These factors redoubled male efforts to wall off the space outside the home as their own. Men traveled to that domain. Women did not."
The average American consumes 34GB of content and 100,000 words per day. And we wonder why most things we make are quickly forgotten.
Culture is Communication
We’re losing our lazy Sunday afternoons on the couch.
The Economist throws more cold water on the Long Tail. Or at least makes the case that a little moderation should be used when proclaiming the death of anything. The blockbuster is alive and well. The Long Tail is thriving. But it certainly sucks to be left somewhere in that hazy middle.
The absolute hits on the billboard charts? Kicking ass. But number 300-400? Yeah, don’t worry about that.
100 million dollar movies continue to carry the studios while the mid-tier flicks receive less and less support.
The biggest hits of network TV have held much of their audience, along with a varied array of niche cable networks. But that middle? Not doing so well.
So Sunday afternoons – no longer a great time to catch up on episodes of The Munsters. (Unless you’re a fanatic for 60’s pop Franken-humor. Then maybe there’s a station for that. But if that were the case, the Munsters might then actually be prime-time. But I digress.) But by now, we’re far too full of things to fill up our attention to deal with stuff we only sort of want to read, hear or watch.
As Rob Faxon, head of EMI music publishing said, “People want to share the same culture.”
It’s rather interesting, we have this odd dichotomy of searching for shared experience while satisfying our own inclinations. We often use all this content like we use the weather, filling our empty spaces with valuable communication. But while we’re seeking out shareable things, we’re more and more indulgent in our individual preferences.
And maybe that’s what our media consumption is reflecting now. We’re collectively finding the balance between what is shared and what is ours. And that renders a big swath of culture, largely found in mid-day time slots on local channels, unnecessary now. We don’t need things that merely fill up personal space, we need things that bring us together or things that precisely fulfill what we want. Anything else is just wasting our time.
An addendum to this:
This (from the same article) might get you thinking, as well
“Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
Which basically means that much of our system of targeting in the ad industry might need some rethinking. If we’re making ads for mass, but focusing towards the high purchase incident target – way may actually be designing ourselves into that unfortunate middle.
Oy.
Article via Noah. Photo via yyellowbird.
Very Large Jackets
There are rarely opportunities that come along nearly as sweet as this one. It's officially official. I'll be joining some of the smartest people I know, Leigh, Sean, and the rest of the team at Twist Image, working from the Toronto office. I'll refrain from going on too long about personal stuff, but I'll just say that I'm insanely eager to get to work with these folks and even more I can't wait to share with you the absurdly cool stuff this company is up to.
The 20th Century was Wrong
I love the obviousness of this statement from Lee Bryant. While most (probably not many around here), fight to hold on to the status quo, fight to retain the hierarchies, the efficiencies, the gray of modern business, it's probably good to remember that this is not our natural state, but just something we've grown used to over the last century or so.
"Some people see new social technology and networked culture as dangerous and 'new', and they fall back on their experience of technology and organisational culture in the late Twentieth Century as the 'established' model. Yet, in fact the reverse is true. The Twentieth century took the ideas of the industrial revolution and applied them to people. Mass production. Mass marketing. Mass slaughter.
If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life."
The Twentieth Century was Wronghttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=c20bk&stripped_title=the-twentieth-century-was-wrong
View more documents from Lee Bryant.
Sort of reminds me of the traditional marriage debate. But something tells me you'd rather avoid that rant...
photo via vw-busman