First of All

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A blog opens a store

Seems about right. If you know what an audience wants to read, you probably have a pretty good idea of what they want to buy, too.

Adidas opens a diner

Perhaps even cooler. As everything gets mixed and remixed, mashed and mish-mashed, why not retail environments, too?

The Not New of Old Spice

Bud points out what everyone else missed. The much praised Old Spice campaign was probably part lucky and part nurture, but anything but a big change of pace for the brand.

Less Talk More Rock

Fucking thank you. "I'm suggesting that the written word -- and to some extent the spoken word -- is speaking to your intellect. Your intellect has a relationship to the whole mind, for sure, but it's a little bit apart, it's kind of its own thing. It's a great thing, but it's kind of its own thing. Meanwhile, images, sounds, music, patterns, motion -- these things are speaking directly to your whole mind, often without troubling the intellect."

The R/GA Model

Just because it's interesting.

Humongo Nation 2010 Kicks Off

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Today, the newly named and newly acquired Humongo shoves off on yet another tour across the country, blogging, tweeting, live video-ing, foodie-ing, locationing, interviewing and daily wrap-upping along the way. Much love for their sponsors  - Ford, Wingate Hotels, Sprint and Green Mountain Coffee.  

Here's the tour kick-off video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12980591&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=dc00f0&fullscreen=1

Humongo Nation pre-tour video 2010 from Humongo Nation on Vimeo.

And here's my sweet, clean t-shirt I received in the mail, complete with an air freshener that smells like a candy I can't quite put my finger on. Have fun boys and girls.

Humongo tour
 

The Expectation Problem

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Thisisnthappiness
We have an expectation problem. This is how a car ad should look or how this beer spot should sound. And given similar kinds of people solving similar problems for similar markets with similar insights, that’s to be expected, I guess. Given a certain environment, it’s usually not all that difficult to figure out what the outputs will likely look like. It’s why every problem looks like an advertising problem. When everyone at a table hold only different sized hammers, it’s easy to find those nails.

It doesn’t help much that we’ve developed an industry built around distilling to single insights on single sheets of paper. These insights can be enough to drive a single piece of communication or maybe a campaign, but those that are sustainable enough to last are few and far between. We’re substituting this “insight” for actual understanding which only reinforces preconceived observations and makes it much more difficult to just solve problems.

“Playing the authenticity game in a sophisticated way has become a requirement for every marketer, because the opposite of real isn’t fake—it’s cynicism. When a brand asserts authenticity in a clumsy way, it quickly breeds distrust or, at the very least, disinterest.” -Bill Breen

Of course, most of us are clumsy. We are busy and pressured. We rarely get out of our own way enough to allow anything remotely organic to evolve.

But here’s the thing – authenticity isn’t something you do – it's something that happens. In the top down world we’re in now, we define as much as we can in order to minimize the gap between what we think might happen and what ultimately does. And when the practice doesn’t particularly match the assumptions, we blame the assumptions, not the fact that we assumed.

I don’t deny the need for top down some things, like leadership, organizational purpose, stuff like that. This is where long-cycle strategic planning is most needed. But from there, it’s time to get much better at understanding whole people, whole communities, in order to stop developing for the person we want rather than the one that exists. And it means we need to get much better at getting out of the way, leaving the spaces where those people can make use of us in the way that works best for them, too.

(photo via this isn't happiness)

Informationism

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"The space of play and the space of thought are the two theaters of freedom."

--Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (via)

Influencing the influential
"This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with."

Dad is as stressed as Mom
“Men are facing the same clash of social ideals that women have faced since the 1970s — how do you be a good parent and a good worker?” said Joan C. Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California. “This is a pretty sensitive indicator of the rise of the new ideal of the good father as a nurturing father, not just a provider father.”

Eggers on Saying No
"The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it's corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I'll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no's you've said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say."

Turning stuff into things
Russell shares something that will be increasingly important, making the intangible tangible and giving tangibles a touch of intangible.

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=liftconference&clip=pla_5143c297-8fe2-4a76-8ece-84da78f3e33c&autoPlay=false

Watch live streaming video from liftconference at livestream.com

Speaking of: Things we touch affect our decisions
"This idea is known as 'embodied cognition' and the metaphors and idioms in our languages provide hints about such associations. The link between weight and importance comes through in phrases such as “heavy matters” and the 'gravity of the situation'. We show the link between texture and harshness when we describe a 'rough day' or 'coarse language'. And the link between hardness and stability or rigidity becomes clear when we describe someone as 'hard-hearted' or 'being a rock'."

The Creative Brief Research Project

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The Cultural Tour Bus

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Tourbus
 We are on a cultural tour bus.

“It’s the difference between traveling where you go on the tour bus and they show you Notre Dame, it was built in whenever, or the one where you end up spending a month in Paris and you end up in one bar and then you’re off. I’ve always preferred the second kind. Get me off the tour bus.”

Love this little bit from David Simon of the Wire and Treme. He describes his hatred for writing for the “Average Reader,” referring to him as “that fucker” which is probably understandable for anyone that’s been asked to design for a target of 18+. Yeah, thanks for that.

He’s developed these rich stories because of a total immersion in a distinct environment, his use of live muses for characters in order to write in a proper language within a realistic storyline, an awareness of the point of view and an adherence to a core purpose, a statement that he wanted to make. Probably 4 key areas for us to develop in ad-like things, as well.

But for now, I guess my point is that we’ll never get that kind of immersion with 95% of clients that are out there. Even with a Budweiser sized budget, it’s just not possible to immerse a team in someone else’s world enough. A single insight doesn’t really give us much understanding at all. And really, with the surface level nonsense most are doing, we’re usually just pecking at observational scraps rather than reaching for some perceptive nirvana.

So maybe it should be the other way around. We shouldn’t be observing them as much as they should be living with us. We just need to get better at either selecting the archetype or maybe just selecting the clients that fit the passions of our staff.

Branding by Association (part 2)

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Acculturatedcreativity
A continuation of the thoughts in branding by association, there’s a bit of magic in how we use words and pictures to reflect the experience of an audience. These references are a brand’s language, the ability to build camaraderie through commonalities.

One of my favorite examples is dog whistle politics, a term first used in the mid-nineties when Australian pols were accused of exploiting illegal immigration as a proxy for racist language.

But, of course, the master is George Bush, who dropped subtle cues that appealed to the religious right. One of the most well-known examples comes in this interview with Wolf Blitzer (about 1:20 in) when he said, “when the final history on Iraq is written, it’ll look like just a comma.”

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11793879&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=dc00f0&fullscreen=1

Most from the South would feel a not-so-faint echo of the proverb “Never put a period where God has put a comma.” (interesting discussion at the language log)

You could argue this is just a product of growing up in church rather than an underhanded attempt to influence a segment of people, but it’s hard to argue the influential part.

Another good example comes from the Burger King – Spongebob rap. I rather doubt that they necessarily thought of it this way in concept, but in this odd mashing of cultural cues, they actually seem to follow an audience lifecycle. From the spike in "Baby Got Back" as an axiom of the early 90’s while mom still found time to bump and grind, to a slightly more grown up mom watching Spongebob with her kiddos 10 years later. While I’m pretty sure I’m reading far too much into this particular video, it is an interesting way to think about crafting an appeal.

Which brings me to the (very) round-about point. We generally use all this audience stuff when crafting the concept, not necessarily the execution. We use focus groups, develop personas, etc. defining the audience as a guardrail for the creative team when the value of cultural immersion should be drawn through the execution, as well. The language, the music, the pictures, the video and the rest of it, become the environment that allows a brand speak as one of us. And the better we immerse ourselves in these collective reference points, the better we’ll be at weaving the story we’re trying to tell into the story they already know.

photo via sean lamonby

Branding by Association

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Inside-joke
In Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marsha Kinder first described her concept of Transmedia Storytelling with the phrase, “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation,” setting the tone for a conversation still ongoing nearly 20 years later.

While we’ve talked the transmedia part to death, we haven’t yet spent much time on the intertexuality bit. As in, a lot about distribution and not enough about what is distributed.

Intertexuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts. This strikes me as a much more fertile place to play when building brand meaning, particularly given the struggle to find a human brand when we adapt them to more social spaces.

Imagine if you saw a facebook page of someone you’d never met. You can know what they like and what they don’t, what’s important to them and what’s not, we can see past conversations, what people have said about them and what those people look like. More than enough information to let you take some fairly informed guesses about their worldview.

These things are within the purview of a brand in our environment. In other words, a brand can’t be your friend, but it can get an inside joke.

It’s obvious when Nike+ associates with OkGo or when the NBA co-opts the Noah Kalina video for Where Amazing Happens.

It becomes clear when remixes mash a brand and an audience, blurring the associated meanings that lie within both.

Intertextuality places a brand in the cultural zeitgeist. It’s branding by association, cultural sponsorship, and it’s in this space – trading on the language of communities, that brands find their context.

photo via yeliR<>

Even Later

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Bridging the Gap Between our Online and Offline Networks

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=iasummit2010publicpdf-100410201613-phpapp01&stripped_title=bridging-the-gap-between-our-online-and-offline-social-network

Interesting presentation from Google UX pro Paul Adams. We don't have one set of friends even though most of our online networks are designed in that fashion.

The Golden Age of Middle Eastern Westerns
The Persian Dubs of these 70's westerns were both commentary and a form of localization that often changed the story along the way.

The Moral Life of Babies
"The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature."

The Social Rationality of Footballers
A study of penalty kicks that indicated that footballers often choose a less effective strategy in order to lose more honorably.

Moo-ing in different languages

Summize and Fixing Twitter
Probably an approach we should be taking more often when solving our own problems...
"I remember asking Greg during the Summize due diligence what his plan was for stabilizing Twitter. He answered that there was no magic bullet. He said they weren't going to do one big thing, they were going to do lots of small things. The first thing they did was instrument the hell out of the system, they started measuring everything and finding the bottlenecks, and then they started knocking them down one by one."