It's the Links

Behind the Scenes at TED

70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet

"While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games."

Language and Tone of Voice: A look at "Oh Great"

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

"In the last decade, a quirky legion of idea peddlers has quietly invented what might be a new discipline and is certainly an expanding niche. How and why this happened is, naturally, a subject that everyone in the field theorizes about. What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking."

Dialects in Tweets

"More interestingly, however, there is a major difference in regional slang. ‘uu’, for instance, is pretty much exclusively on the Eastern seaboard, while ‘you’ is stretched across the nation (with ‘yu’ being only slightly smaller.) ‘suttin’ for something is used only in NY, as is ’deadass’ (meaning very) and, on and even smaller scale, ‘odee’, while ‘af’ is used for very in the Southwest, and ‘hella’ is used in most of the Western states."

Pick the meal for the person behind you

"It’s a creative, if strange little set-up since you still face the problem of choice overload – you have to pick something off the full menu – and the requirement to make a choice for yourself, without the benefit of getting what you ordered."

Mini Planners

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/17398038 w=400&h=225]

MINI PLANNERS from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

Everything will be reinvented

"I don’t mean to come off as some starry eyed huckster but, from my vantage point, we’re living in a very exciting time. If ever there were an opportunity to think big and attack large markets with incumbent players, its now. I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming."

Product Content and Curated Consumption

As publishers continue to seek new revenue streams, we’ve also seen a parallel trend – product companies, whether they make shoes or sell real estate, are now in dire need of content, but structurally unable to create it in any compelling, systematic way.

And with curated consumption, we have a differently influenced audience making purchase decisions based upon a series of recommendations or exposure from the right sources.

This environment will further mash media products and physical products, making them invariably connected and inter-dependent. The content surrounding the thing creating much of that thing’s value. It reeks of mutual opportunity for the content people seeking new revenue and for the product people seeking new content.

Groupon should have been made by Murdoch. Yelp could’ve have been an off-shoot of the New York Times. For some reason local expertise around restaurants or entertainment hasn’t yet made that leap. But it will.

Niche publishing brands are already using their audiences to not simply sell ad space in cubic inches or pixel widths, but by deeply integrating and expanding from a vision, a perspective or point of view. Stores like H&M and Urban Outfitters now introduce new fashions, new music, new ideas – unquestionably blending distribution, influence and bottom-up lifestyle construction.

JC Penney recently partnered with Hearst Publishing to launch new product experiences crafted more specifically for an audience with which the publisher has a deep native knowledge of and voice within. With GiftingGrace.com, editors from Redbook and Good Housekeeping will play the role of curator. With their other new venture, CLAD, the team from Esquire will take a lead role in product selection. With each, JC Penney will have a willing partner for content, community and distribution.

This will define the next era in product-related content, where publishers and product makers don’t simply trade dollars for space, but carefully partner for mutual brand and monetary benefit.

And for agencies, we can play in these arrangements, as well. We are uniquely situated to provide assistance in the formation of these partnerships, shepherding the creation of content extending through television spots, microsites, brand and product experiences. For those product brands, they will be adding their own editorial layers, carefully injecting quality control over a thousand points of communication without the staffs particularly equipped to accomplish such tasks.

But this also means that agencies that thrive here will be more integrated not just into client businesses, but into the fabric of their value systems. It will require iterative strategies, shorter routes to approval, more agile development processes, less territorial stances and constant feedback loops. This won’t only be survival of the fittest, but something much more tribal – companies seeking each other based upon similar worldviews, purposes and a fluency within the right audiences.

(photo via alnka)

Linked

Jonah Lehrer on giving

"Why do we do this? The depressing statistics leave us cold, even when they are truly terrible. That's because our emotions can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. And yet, the good news is that we're still wired to care about each other. We feel pleasure when someone else feels better."

Groupon Copywriting Guide

You might call this the engineering of quirkiness.

Free Fonts, and more Free Fonts.

Digital Changes Our Historical Narratives

"The digital age continues to refashion what we want and expect from our cultural preservationists. The vaults at places like the Library of Congress and Smithsonian have long contained far more than could be displayed or appreciated in physical space. Curators cut a narrow path through all that information; they told tell stories. That part of the job hasn't gone away, but now we also want to be able to tell our own stories."

The Lottery of Life

The Nike Music Shoe

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1exujG3cY]

The Cognitive Cost of Expertise

Always find ways to stay stupid, try new things, make ourselves uncomfortable. "The larger lesson is that the brain is a deeply constrained thinking machine, full of cognitive tradeoffs and zero-sum constraints. Those chess professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of games and places they can’t easily understand."

The Case of the Old Shirt

4 in 5 Americans feel attached to at least one old t-shirt. One of those stats that make the world seem utterly simple and disturbingly complex at the same time.

Things Left Unsaid

When asked his view of the value of University education, Jason Fried of 37 Signals finished with a description of the class he'd like to teach:

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

Editing is one of the last skills to hone. Hoarding and discovering are just more fun and much less painful. 

But the winnowing process as defined by Jason makes editing seem far less sacrificial. I've heard some of the best radio writers don't actually start with the ad, but write full stories, developing characters and scenes in order to understand motive and intent. So each next step in the process of editing isn't a step away from meaning, but towards clarity. Each unable to stand without the understanding generated by the one before.

Seems obvious maybe, but we probably don't give enough credit to all the things we've left unsaid.

(photo via this isn't happiness)

The Blog Awakening is Coming, But Links for now.

1960's Parody of 1960's Commercials

Good to know we've been mocking ourselves for at least 50 years now. Maybe some day we'll actually put away our cliches for a few years.

The Original Blogger, circa 1580

"Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. 'I cannot keep my subject still,' he said. 'It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.' His writing followed the same wayward path."

The Economics of Seinfeld

Economics theory taught through Seinfeld episodes. Lovely stuff.

The Waste of Waiting for Inspiration

"Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction."

The Facebook of Stuff

Google created the world's biggest search engine by devising the best way to chart the relationships between the billions of pages that make up the Web. Facebook became the world's most important social network by building the best system for understanding the identities and relationships of the people who use the Web. A database that allows users to identify and search every object in the world could be as elemental, and profitable.

Straight out of Comp 101

"This is why I’m so evangelically excited about The Anthology of Rap, Yale University Press’s monumental new collection of rap lyrics. It feels like it was published, exclusively for me, by the vanity press of my own subconscious. It’s an English major’s hip-hop bible, an impossible fusion of street cred and book learning. The anthology spans the entire 30-year history of the genre, from Afrika Bambaataa to Young Jeezy."

12 Timeless Rules for Making a Good Publication

A List of Diner Lingo

Single Stories Make for Single Serving Friends

It’s a fine line between insight and stereotype. The teen multi-tasks. Mom is busy. Dad just doesn’t get it. A thousand little generalizations that appear again and again in television commercials and radio spots, banner ads and microsites. The complexity of humanity ignored based upon 57% of something in an internet survey somewhere.

The way we make this advertising thing happen doesn’t work like it should. Advertising tools most often serve these generalizations and stereotypes rather than any real knowledge. The creative process is a dice roll. Most market research is CYA-driven rather than providing real understanding to those who could do the most with it.

Which brings me to novelist Chimamanda Adichie and her Ted Talk “The Danger of the Single Story,” in which she explores her misunderstandings and being misunderstood based upon the faulty stereotype, what she calls the single story.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Morgan Gerard also touches on this in his post – Idioms and Insights.

Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their business and, more importantly, their consumers.

Case in point: the consumer research game. Virtually every market research department in every major organization is founded on an idiomatic understanding of consumers. Psychographic caricatures of actual humans, like the Active Mom, have become business idioms used to simplify and, more importantly, agree on the polysemy of what are lived preferences, behaviors, opinions, attitudes and needs rather than PowerPoint descriptions such as, “Mary is a successful real estate agent who struggles to balance taking care of her three kids with her love of pilates and desire to eat healthier breakfast bars.”

We simply aren’t doing enough, usually choosing to make complexity dumb rather than finding new ways to inspire understanding.

And frankly the only way to get from where we are now to where we need to be is by shifting our mindset from observation to immersion, from research as a department to research as a duty, from creative briefs or briefings, to mixing and shuffling the creators with the audience before, during and after, not simply as a means to vet ideas but to provide better inputs, learnings, and knowledge. This is how we’ll move beyond the single stories and single servings to something a bit more meaningful.

Twist Image is Growing

First, I should mention a very fond farewell to Sean Howard, my previous boss and the guy who paved the way for me to take on his old role, quite frankly. He’s moved along to other endeavors, but his contribution to the company was massive and will be felt for a long time to come.

But the real reason for this – the cat is officially out of the bag. With a very unscientific assessment, I think it’s safe to say Twist is one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies in North America. And our little strategy team is growing right along with it.

For now, we’re hiring two more – and we’ll likely be following this up with others not too long after. But one thing about being here, even with the near doubling of staff in the 10 months since I joined, we’re more likely to absorb the work than hire sub-par just for the sake of hiring. So –  we won't be settling, we're looking for the best. We don’t care where you work now, the only thing that matters is what you’re capable of accomplishing and where you want to go. We don’t need attitudes. No professional douchebags. Just passionate people with a curiosity about the way the world works and an intent to make the work better.

Check out the job descriptions below. If either sounds like it could be you, shoot me an email at paul.mcenany@twistimage.com and let’s see if there’s a fit.

Senior Strategist

Strategist, Research & Analytics

Cool things are happening

The Resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon
Somehow a not so independent brand went from a cheap Southern beer to a cheap badge of hipster-ism. Perception goes a long way.

The Object-Idea
"It’s not enough for people to like your product. For them to really LOVE it, somehow they’ve got to connect and empathize with the basic, primal human drives that compelled you create your product in the first place. The Purpose. The Idea."

Experiments in the Laboratory of Consumerism
The history of advertising never ceases to fascinate...

Westerners versus the World: We are the weird ones
"We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted."

Meaningful Objects
"Ask anybody about the most meaningful object he owns, and you’re sure to get a story — this old trunk belonged to Grandpa, we bought that tacky coffee mug on our honeymoon, and so on. The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us."

Department of Cool Music Videos

Lissie - incorporating live weather

Arcade Fire - incorporating your childhood home

Department of Cool Videos

Jeremy Rifkin - the Empathic Civilization

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g&w=520&h=317]

 Steve Jobs - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&w=520&h=415]

How New Media is Transforming Storytelling

Edward Bernays, Context and Choice Blindness

As if we needed more evidence that we don’t really know why we want what we want, Jonah Lehrer takes a look at a couple studies showing just how few people can recognize the differences between the choices they make, even immediately after they make them.

“What’s most unsettling, however, is that we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In this study, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremely easy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insisted that they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam and cinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong…We are all blind to our own choice blindness.”

Which reminded me a bit of the old Edward Bernays documentary, The Century of Self: Happiness Machines. Bernays, the nephew of Freud and so-called Father of Public Relations, helped to establish the cigarette craze among women, apparently by re-dubbing the cigarette a torch of freedom as a symbol of masculinity. (the first few minutes of this video covers it)

But I do wonder if the important bit was really all that much about the positioning and more about visibility more generally. Yes, the cigarette has the enduring sense of rebelliousness, but the degree to which the ready-made tagline mattered versus the fact that the cigarette was exposed in a different context, I don’t know. It is possible that the staged protest was only a proxy, giving the journalists fodder to chew on while the real work was done simply by other women seeing the right women lighting up.

Which is all to say that what we like isn’t just the thing, but the context of that thing, too. So if we’re talking different types of jams in some study, perhaps the confusion is simply because the methodology made these things equal. And it was that equality that made them interchangeable and easily confused. Which, as always, means we’re spending too much time finding a good one-liner and not enough time on all the associations that make that one-liner meaningful.

Understanding Customer Culture

It's shill time, peeps. If you could take a few moments to vote for our SXSW submission, Understanding Customer Culture; Caution: May Require Cajones, it would certainly be much appreciated. The panel is pretty super, I must say, including the Director of Strategy at Twist, Sean Howard, the brilliant Sam Ladner, the author of one of my favorite books of this year, Grant McCracken, and the man that pulled it all together - Huffington Post and Marketing to Culture blogger, Ujwal Arkalgud.

Vote by clicking the thumbs up here

Some other good goods you should vote for:

Community Thunderdone - Brand vs. Unbranded, You decide w/ Bud and Mike

Conquering Creativity: A Creative Method For Every Mind w/ Jason Theodor

Why PR's Future May Not Look Like PR w/ David Armano