Thanks to Heather I came across this video on twitter, and goodness does it make me happy.

I'm putting together some words at the moment, in some longer format about what TIGS is all about - how culture is inherently recombinant and iterative: it builds endlessly on and from what came before, creating novelty in new combinations. How the most awesome stuff comes from the broadest set of sources and inspiration. 

Fundamentally, I do not believe creativity can come from nothing. In fact, I don't even think 'originality' can even mean that. 

If something truly had no referent elsewhere in culture - how would we even understand it? 

Everything is inspired, everything comes from somewhere - it may not directly quote, or reference, but everything is recombinant at some level. 

And Steve agrees. 

[HT @howlvenice, and @zee] 

CATFOA 2010: Edward Boches (CCO Mullen) - 2.8.2010 from Ech03 on Vimeo.

[First few mins of audio are bad but it gets better] 

On Monday, thanks to a nice chap called Tim, I'm heading to Minneapolis to speak at series of things called Conversations About The Future of Advertising [or CATFOA].

It's lovely to be asked, especially due to the illustriousness [yep, that's a word] of the other speakers on the course: Edward Boches, Hashem Bajwa, Colleen DeCourcy are all pretty awesome thinkdoers.

And we so we should be. 

If you'll indulge me [and I know you will] let me quote at you from that thesis I wrote about the future of brands, a few years back:

Prospection: the act of looking forwards in time, is a quintessentially human endeavour. In fact, some even consider it the quintessential human endeavour:

“The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.”

Daniel Dennett has noted that “the fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future...brains are, in essence, anticipation machines.”

We spend much of our time projecting ourselves forward, and we do this to motivate ourselves to reach towards our desired future, using the lens of that future as a way to understand what we should be doing now.

As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We can motivate our- selves by imagining less pleasant to- morrows, of eroding relevance and margins, and thus engage in prudent, prophylactic behaviour.

And in fact, predicting what I'm going to say is the assignment Tim has given to his class. 

You can see one of the predictions here.

Do you think it's right? 

More confusingly, what if now, because of my reading it, I change what I was going to say? 

Find out next week - I'll probably post the video of this talk, and then start to think about the next thing I'm going to think about. 

In a former life, I worked with Google in Australia [on the local and maps launch], in London [on the search/brand story] and in New York [on the first Chrome launch]. 

Across those clients and continents, once thing remained absolutely constant in all the recommendations and discussion: Google doesn't advertise. 

OK, so even back in 06, Google had already dipped its toe with super-smart recruitment ads and was beginning to realise that it was going to have to promote some of its huge array of products somehow, especially in categories that are strategically vital, like local search and browsers, for ushering in Google's vision of a ubiquitous internet, always on and for all, that it can serve, and serve ads to.

But we always agreed, as Larry and Sergey said in the SEC filing, that Google was not a regular company, and had no intention of starting to act like one. 

So seeing the Google Superbowl spot for search, a category where 100million dollars has bought Bing about 2 point of marketshare, left me a little puzzled, charming and Googley as the treatment was. 

[Although it did remind me of the search stories that were re-constructed from the leaked AOL search data, which were a bit more ominous.] 

[One of the most important things you learn working at, or with, Google, is what is, and isn't Googley. Long term Googlers just know. It becomes instinctual, because Google is a company that understands that a brand is a behavioral template for every person that works there.] 

[A Google engineer once said to me in Australia: aren't all ads spam? - which is what led to this article - because I steal.] 

BUT then I remembered that: 

Google intends to become the trading platform for all advertising, especially television, 

bringing the granularity of direct marketing and online ad serving to broadcast, 

that the Google TV Ads product is still relatively unknown and underutilized, 

despite the incredible level of data it can provide,

that Google has been trying for years to help advertisers think about the relationship between Superbowl [or any TV spots] and search and online video, 

that the ad was conceived and launched, according to Eric Schmidt, as an online film, that became an 'ad', 

[an inversion that I think is probably the right way to think about what we do]

and that the proof of any new platform requires big brand case studies and support, and that having your own is always useful when talking to agencies....

And in fact they have already said they are running Chrome spots across their TV AD network as a LIVE CASE STUDY OF HOW THESE THINGS WORK TOGETHER...because you can use insight from online deployment to better plan the TV, as I've been saying for years, because the internet gives you real data, not nonsense from pre-testing focus groups:

Using some of the results from our placement-targeted ads on the Google Content Network, we designed a Google TV Ads campaign which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns.

and then I thought that maybe this Superbowl TV spot wasn't really advertising search at all.

Goodness me isn't the world fast now?

Gandhi once said that

"There is more to life than increasing his speed"

and he was almost certainly right but I wonder what he would have made of twitter.

[See previous riff on diminished cultural latency for more on this seemingly glib insight.] 

I've literally just left the salubrious agency environs of JWT NYC where I was chatting with some lovely people about crowdsourcing [see the post below for the illustrious people I got to sit with] for the edification of a larger group of lovely people, and the video of it is already online by the time I get back to my desk.

So, like, the event kind of gets distributed across time and space.

Well, not backwards in time, but you get what I mean.

Enjoy. 

ADDENDUM: 

[I was just watching a bit of this - because I'm really vain and that - and it reminded me that I repeatedly rail against the idea that crowds are inherently wise, and therefore crowdsourcing is awesome.

As I say up there in video form, I think the fact that Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing and James Surowieki's book The Wisdom of Crowds came out around the same time iun 2004 caused some kind of associative conflation, where by crowds are wise, so if you source crowds, that's wise.

Or something.

Despite my brilliant dismantling of this fallacious idea -

[pointing out that in the book crowds are only wise in VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES, usually guessing numeric means, when the crowd can't communicate with itself to cause information cascades, and mostly for guessing the weight of bulls.

Or something.]

- it kept coming back up, not just because no one was listening to me but because it's that kind of idea, one that is ripe for misuse.

It's not that I don't think crowdsourcing can be awesome - of course it can, whatever it actually is, - but the logic flow crowds=wise therfore crowdsourcing = awesome is nonsense. 

No one is smarter than everyone, that's definitely true.

[although we really need everyone to CATCH UP and show Steve Jobs that this is true] 

But as Agent K in Men In Black says:

A person is smart, people are stupid.

[Also see your high school essay entitled The Role of the Mob in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for more on this idea]

There isn't something intrinsically BETTER about leveraging crowds - like everything it depends on what you are trying to do and other context.

But, if being inclusive, or engagement, or advocacy or other stuff like that is part of what you are trying to achieve, then there is something intrinsically better about crowdsourcing is, because then the process is also the product. 

Research done with 1 million Facebook fans is marketing.

As you may already know, it is now officially SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK - so there are lots of interesting events to check out and parties to go to in various different cities.

I sit on the advisory board of SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK in NYC but I've been a bit useless at helping out this time around.

However, I have promised to be on a panel tomorrow morning - and it STARTS at 9am.

[Although I didn't realize that when I agreed to it.]

Regardless, I shall be there bright, early and caffeinated to discuss Crowdsourcing with some truly brilliant people who all know more about this stuff than I do.

The very awesome and lovely John Winsor [CEO of Victors&Spoils] is moderating:

Ty Montague, Co-President and Chief Creative Officer, JWT North America

Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO, Big Spaceship

Saneel Radia, SVP, Alchemist at Denuo

[and me]

I shall attempt not to embarrass myself more than necessary.

If you are there, do come say hi.

So, with a flurry of excited chirrups, pings and liveblogging, the iNet has heralded the launch of the iPad [and iBooks and everything] with equal amounts of awe, confusion and ridicule - ever the attitudinal breakdown of the geeky [especially when it comes to the name - it seems feminine hygiene products still elicit a titter on twitter].

Recently, partially due to tablets [digital not prescription] and partially due to conversations with @KathySierra over twitter and various people in the book industry IRL, I've been thinking a lot about content and media and that.

[OK, so I think about that kind of thing a lot anyway, but more so.]

For a long time now I've been talking about the medium NOT being the message. 

With all due to respect to McLuhan of course - because it's never entirely clear what he means - but he was I think suggesting that the characteristics of the medium both delineate the nature of the content [but that we tend to not see the medium's delineating effect because we focus on the content] and that the cultural effect of the medium is distinct and larger than the the effect of the content.

All of which makes sense. I think.

Think about what we call advertising.

Its primary form is essentially an historical accident - the nature of what we call advertisements was delineated by the nature and relative scarcity of the transmission vectors.

To whit: we put films on television, and airtime costs money, so we buy it in 30 seconds chunks, and call those advertisements.

[But, as Jim Carrol from BBH has endlessly pointed out, advertising comes from advetere: to draw attention to [literally to turn towards] - so advertising should really be considered to be anything which draws attention to a company. We have tended to conflate the expressions with the intention. Possibly.]

Up until recently however, what we called media were themselves assemblages of a number of different things.

[McLuhan had an extended definition of medium - he included light bulbs - but the point will hold for the primary 'media']

So 'television' isn't actually a clearly defined thing as such - it's a socio-cultural construct of at least two things: content and a distribution platform - the medium.

Books, magazines, radio all work the same way. A 'book' is a bunch of words printed on paper, with a certain set of culturally defined ideas that float around it.

Up until digitalness, you couldn't separate the content from the distribution platform. 

But digital 'content' can be unbundled from its distribution platform.

And the iPad made me realise that it's not just distribution and content - there is a third piece: the consumption platform.

When IBM started talking about the brave new 'world of platform agnostic content and the fluid mobility of media experiences' in 2006, we weren't really there yet. 

Language, as usual, helps us see where changes are occuring.

When you are watching 30Rock on Netflix via your Xbox360, or on Hulu, on a laptop, or screen, or projector, or iPad - are you watching television?

If so - why? If not - why not?

When you are reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on your Kindle [or iPad] - are you reading a book?

If so - why? If not - why not?

What about books like Pride and Prejudice? Because they are no longer under copyright, they are free on the Kindle. Previously you would pay for the consumption vehicle, now you don't need to. 

A Kindle is clearly not a book, and yet it is all books, kind of.

The words don't quite fit properly anymore - because they are bundled constructs.

You have the distribution platform - in pre-digital media these were closed networks: book distributors, magazine distributors, cables, satellites, mobile phone networks.

With digitalness you just need an IP network that you can access anywhere.

Then you have content.

Digital content can take any form: text, audio, video, experience, game and so on.

Then you have consumption platforms: screens basically. Lots of different kinds of screens, that are good in different contexts.

Previously you had 'computers' that were bundled devices for content consumption and creation [and communication and spreadsheets and stuff] - but the iPad seems like it is focused primarily on being a content consumption device for the time being.

[Although the touchscreen only iPad Keynote does sound interesting, from a very personal point of view]

And you have emerging economic ecosystems that plug these things together: things like iTunes and iBooks and app stores and that.

[And yes they are walled gardens, just like when phone networks started doing content for mobiles, because that's how you make the most money from new platforms, manufacturing scarcity and exclusivity - but they will hopefully all become more webby eventually, assuming Google gets its way.]

Returning for a second to the iPad - it's been much discussed as the saviour of PRINT [although of course that word doesn't make sense in a digital context].

But how is an enewspaper any different from a news website, on an iPad? In fact, what do these distinctions even mean in an unbundled media world?

You have text, sounds, images, moving images, interactive experiences, and blends of all these.

What constitutes an unbundled newsPAPER, magazine, tv channel?

Content> distribtution> consumption - the new 'unbundled' mediascape is emerging.

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A division was articifically introduced, because one of the inital effects of computer mediated interaction was the draw of anonymity or the appeal of being someone else, leveraging the space between who you were IRL and your forum handle.

Initially, it was assumed that anonymity was a fundamental aspect of Computer Mediated Communication:

The issue of anonymity is often privileged in CMC scholarship (e.g., Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Postmes, Spears, Sakhel, & de Groot, 2001; Turkle, 1995).

Some studies have attributed anti-social online behaviors to anonymity (Davis, 2002; Suler & Philips, 1998).

Others have shown that it may foster group norm violations (Jessup, Connolly, & Galegher, 1990; Postmes & Spears, 2000).

Communication online is also characterized as "hyperpersonal" due in part to anonymity (Nowak, Watt, & Walther, 2005; Walther, 1996). That is, the lack of visual cues allows people to selectively self-present for better impression management.

Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs

But the draw to disclose who we are, at least partially, is too strong for a social creature whose unique identity as part of a group, is core to our sense of self and self worth.

Our ability to empathize from our own experience is the emotional medium through which we can communicate with other minds.

Then the whole social thing enabled a generation to mediate itself, and identity online became more about self-restraint than self disclosure. 

Platform by platform, what used to be a profile or homepage became a footprint, a distributed identity that expressed itself in different ways in different places.

Content syndicates itself automatically, cross pollinating from the blog to twitter and facebook and back again.

Mapping out a social ecosystem for brands came naturally to those who had seen their own social ecosystem develop and grow, and so intuitively knew how to use these emerging tools and platforms.

To understand the ebbs and flows of attention one really needs to live in the stream. 

[I remember when I first put a URL on my curriculum vitae. Now if you don't have some web presence on there it suggests you have opted out, and you need to be ready to discuss why.]

New aggregation platforms like Flavors.Me use the magic of RSS to stitch your distributed digital identity back together. 

But sometimes it can seem daunting, trying to keep up with an accelerated culture, maintaining the constant stream of phatic pings [and re-pings] that constitute networked relationships.

Jake from Zoomdoggle hired help:

Seriously, I have a problem:
- I have 642 unopened messages on Facebook and haven’t posted a status update since October 1st.
- I have 3,639 followers on Twitter and, though I tweeted 4 times yesterday, each one was a struggle.
- I try to post 6-8 times per day here on Zoomdoggle, but somehow talking about fun is keeping me from having any.
- My primary email account (gmail) currently has 29,568 unread messages. Admittedly most are newsletters I’ve signed up for, or notes from my mom who’s currently bedridden with little more than a laptop to entertain her, still, it’s hard to keep up.

I need a break. Just for a week.

I need someone to take over my Facebook correspondence, picture posting, and commenting. I need someone to blog for me. I need someone to twitter, thumb things up and down on Stumbleupon, and vote things “cute” or “wtf” on Buzzfeed.

Companies are being forced to reconsider how they communicated with customers - from promotional campaigns and customer service bottlenecks, to ongoing monitoring and resolution in real time across whichever engagement space the customer wants to reach out on. 

They are also reaching out for assistance, recruiting new staff and agencies to help manage the tasks.

Whilst 'Google Xistence' is clearly not real and not really from Google, it nevertheless highlights a tension that applies to both individuals and companies.

It suggests a dichotomy, one echoed by George today on PSFK:

Isn’t there some kind of moral there? Like, if you want to get stuff done, stop arseing about with   social media, and get on with it.

But it's not as simple as either / or.

You need a social profile to engage with other people and the world - but you need to be doing other stuff, constantly, to feed it.

To be successful in social spaces, you need to be active in the world.

Or, to put it another way, if you want to have [and be the topic of] interesting conversations, do stuff worth talking about.

Grant is creating transmedia extensions of his lovely book Chief Culture Officer, as of course he should.

On Feburary 13th he is hosting a Boot Camp for aspiring CCOs.

I've seen Grant present many times and he's great - plus this time you get a whole day of Harvard approved business tools and that. [Don't forget Grant teaches at Harvard Business School].

You should go. I don't think I can make it but I shall be planting spies in the audience.

Here's how to tell you if it's for you:

Are you ready to make your way to the C-Suite? Are you already in a senior position but would like to sharpen your cultural acumen? Are you already your company's unofficial CCO?  As a marketer, planner, media specialist or manager you are uniquely positioned to bring change to the corporation as their Chief Culture Officer. 

So if that sounds like you - you can buy tickets here

http://cco.eventbrite.com/

I'm beginning to suspect that the NYTimes is reading TIGS.

Points of Evidence For Spurious Self-Aggrandizing Supposition:

1.

From TIGS [March 2009]

[Generations seems to turn over pretty fast now.

Well, no, technically I guess they don't, since you need to be born during a certain arbitrarily defined time period to be X or Y or whatever, but actually I think they do, if by generation we mean a bunch of people who are around the same age but have dramatically different habits and thoughts and behavior to people who are older or younger.

In Being Digital, Negroponte says that 'each generation will be more digital than the last'. This is worth remembering. immigrant or native: being native now isn't what will be native soon. And, if I'm right, I mean very very soon. You have to run to keep up with an accelerating culture. 

From NYTimes [Jan 2010]:

But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.

Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

2.

From TIGS [December 2009]: 

Some Next Big Things for 2010:

1. Gestures
Gestural interfaces are the future of human computer interaction, at least until we find a way to connect something straight into your brain. Despite the excitement the first multi-touchscreens triggered and the seeming ubiquity of the iPhone touchscreen paradigm it spawned, little has been made of their potential. Things like FluidTunes – an app which lets you control iTunes by waving your hand in front of the built-in webcam – and interactive installations triggered by similar motion detection both show new ways to interact with content, experiences and brands.

From NYTimes [Jan 2010]:

I'm just sayin'...

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View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Over the break I read Cory Doctorow's new novel Makers. 

Set, as his books usually are, in the almost-now-just-around-the-corner awesomeness of the near future, it charts the tale of a world where people can make stuff. 

It begins at point of inflection, the collapse of an economic system, the birth of another - NEW WORK - and its subsequent tribulations, and features exciting co-created theme park rides, an evil Empire [DisneyWorldThemeParks -the fallen star of his first book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and cute goth kids and robots and everything.

But the stars of the book are the fabbers - 3D printers. 

I've geeked out about these before - because they change everything, once they work properly, which is one of the key struggles in the book - printers that can print components of themselves, and thus create more printers. 

Or indeed, anything else. Like products and that. 

Which is very much the theme of Willsh's excellent presentation above.

See - so far the social revolution has mostly restricted itself to media because the tools of content production are easier to democratize, and because of the free distribution platform the web provides. 

The radical dentralization of the economics of cultural production have not yet really impacted industrial production much. 

Of course there are lots of steps towards co-creation of products - but in essence this is the practice of making the industrial production line flexible enough to mass personalize products and let everyone choose the colours they want - which are then sent through the industrial machine to get made - or the crowdsourcing of ideas for products, which are likewise fed into the machine.

But as Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production. 

As I said in my first post about fabbers, when you print your own products in a home nanofactory, you might still be buying branded CAD files, or something like that, which is what happens in Makers, as the IP players like Disney license their IP across yet another platform.

But anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a fabber, a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable. 

Today's selection from the Nikon Festival, also brought to my attention via some enterprising auteur's outreach. 

Here's what he said:

The video shows what can be created in one's own backyard, as opposed to needing special privileges to VIP locations and celebrities, and the video still follows the festival directions - to show what it is like to be you, with high image quality, originality, and ability to capture Nikon's theme.

Normal posting, whatever that may constitute, will probably resume soon. 

Welcome to MMX - it's gonna rock. 

Today's selection was brought to my attention by its auteur via a little blog outreach, which is good stuff since the onus is very much to spread your content as far and as wide as you can. 

This is what he says about it:

The theme of the video is about the inspiration that can be found in unlikely places and that in giving back / sharing to the world –  music is created!

A theme that is appropriate for the holiday season!

Indeed it is. Happy New Year Eve Eve. 

Today's Nikon Festival selection gets points [from me, which count for nothing] for mentioning and avoiding the more obvious tropes of 'alarm clocks snooze' and 'brushing teeth'.

And reminding me of Anchorman a bit.

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A Boxing Day selection from the Nikon Festival.

Today's celeb studded Nikon Festival selection for you.

Also a bit of a tip for those of you who are in the running. Audience voting is done by clicking the star ratings - everyone can indicate how they score each film. 

Then, from the Ts&Cs

Limit: Each rater may rate each Finalist Submission one (1) time during the Audience Award Phase. Multiple ratings received from any person or IP address after the first rating will be void and disqualified in Sponsor’s discretion. Finalists are prohibited from obtaining views or ratings by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including, without limitation, offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Finalists scores will be determined by multiplying the number of valid views the Submission received by the average rating (out of five (5) stars) it received (the score).

Being today's Nikon Festival entry that I have picked because I'm heading back to London from New York tomorrow.

[More disclosure: the winning films will be picked by judges and audience votes - nothing to do with me guv - I'm just pulling a few out here for your delectation]