Nitmesh

Booming Communication, Shrinking Entertainment

From Netpop Research - 'Stated simply, 7 million people in the U.S. are contributing content online through six or more activities (uploading photos, publishing blogs, posting ratings/reviews, etc.). These heavies are also connecting with 248 people in a typical week, on average. Needless to say, the news they choose to spread can change the marketplace overnight with such scale that companies must tune in and be in a position to react quickly and decisively'

Our attention is slowly migrating away from traditional mass media, from being the massive passive. We are all communicating, interacting much more, through blogging, facebook, twitter and through new forms and easy to use tech like the iphone.

If you don't have the engaged mass audience for TV (just one example), then how can you justify the budgets to the usually high costs of production? Especially drama production, as brands directly or more commonly indirectly finance it through TV advertising. But now with net unless your content is truly compelling and truly worth spreading, who is going to find it or even bother to watch it especially as we are now going towards a VOD model where we control what we are watching, so diminishing our engagement. We are the media now, the we-media. Click through the quick slideshare below.

Netpop | Connect: Media Shifts to Social 2009 Preview

View more presentations from Netpop.

Is genius always hidden in the obvious? Japan by Eric Testroete

This is without doubt the most engaging piece of content I have seen so far this new year. It's nothing that special yet it's so personal (just look at the amount of comments and 'likes' it's generated) yet so enlightening, giving you such a wonderful chronological visual insight to quite literally the whole of Japan and ultimately I am sold on now going there. It's by Eric Testroete.

It is so obvious and yet such a common occurrence. Anyone who travels with a camera, visual records their journey in some way, but not in such detail and such beauty. I watched it to the very end. An achievement for anyone consuming content in these fast moving, speed, feed reading times. The great soundtrack helped, the track is LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends from Sound of Silver and the photos are all here on flickr too. It has inspired me, giving me a idea which I will hopefully share at a later date. 
Hap tip to Ed Cotton at Influx Insights
This is Japan! from Eric Testroete on Vimeo.

Will Wright talks about his new game Spore

Spores 3D Creature creator

For those outside the gaming world ‘Spore’ is the latest project from Will Wright one of the game industry's most fertile minds and the creator of the groundbreaking SimCity and The Sims, which has to date sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Wright has created the the Spore 3D creature creator with over a one million creatures being created in the space of a week.

Asked what he wanted people to get out of spore Wright said, “One of his goals for this whole thing has been to give somebody an awe-inspiring global view of reality, almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer. The kind of, "Oh, man, what if we were a molecule inside of a galaxy?" type thing. Can we transfer that experience -- that, I don't want to say drug-induced, but I guess it is, or almost theological meaning-of-life-type experience -- into an interactive computer game?

Watch the web video demo of the game below with Brian Eno below.

Youth Marketing Presentation and more lovely links

Firstly I found the slideshare presentation on Youth Marketing (at bottom of this post) from the fast forward marketing trend blog. 'Youth is no longer a demographic, it's a mindset'. It's worth a quick view as well as the summary to the  Global Habbo Youth Survey, especially on teens and their favourite mobilephones here. Quoting the summary 'Examines the interests, values, attitudes, online habits of a global audience, the survey reveals teens' current media usage, consumption behaviour and brand preferences in order to better understand what compels youth around the world'

Here's a great story about how text messaging is used for flirting in India. It's from New York Times so you might need to quickly sign up for it to access the story but NYT is always full of great stories.

Here's two great pieces on the meshing of TV and the net. First in the Atlantic Monthly and second in the Timesonline.

This is an amazing site full of futuristic skyscaper designs, fascinating what architects are wanting to build. It's a competition and you have to click on '08 Skyscaper competition'

Synchstep from Pokenyc (explanation here) - This is going to be a killer app for the iphone or itouch (and every other phone for sure) and want it now. An app that synchs your music with your walking pace. Greg Elliott, the designer of it, can safely retire.

Here's a great piece on littleminx.tv. It's a division of RSA Films (where I work). They produced five shorts films from their the directors and there's links here to watch all of them - enjoy - Exquisite Corpse

Lastly my tweetcloud - I love twitter apps. Damiano via punkplanning

 

| View | Upload your own

Burning Panda Experiential Advertising

This is from Denmark, from We Love People  Quoting the site "To prepare the Danes for the 2009 international climate conference in Copenhagen, We Love People and WWF have projected a giant panda in flames racing across the Copenhagen cityscape.”

Twitter Love

[follow me on twitter]

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void articulates the strengths of twitter against the other new communication platforms. I always thought it would be the perfect communication tool at a music festival where you could effectively mass text message all your friends at once but I have seen the light and see how it's a platform clearly populated by influencers, social media marketeers. A great platform to spread the day to day but also links of interest. Here's Shel Israel's insightful post on twitter at SXSW.

Here's Twitter in plain english from the wonderful common craft blog.

Trafalgar Square Freeze

Brits freeze in Trafalgar Square. Would have preferred to have see it happen in grand interior like Waterloo, Liverpool Street or even the new St Pancreas Station. via now in colour

UPDATE - Here's all 28 cities  in 13 countries (Rome, Stockholm, LA, Boston, Newcastle just to name a few) frozen flash mob web videos to watch.

David Armano - Experience Design and Convergence

Here's David Armano speaking below at the Interaction 08 Conference. So many great talks listed here from the conference but Armano's brings together the principles and some great examples of experience design, meshing utility, creativity and technology, explaining how interaction designers are the hub whether they are for transactional sites, branded experiences, or content that makes you laugh including breaking out onto the mobile platform. Ideas to bring sticky engagement to brand experiences. Via Brand New.

207 Frozen People in Grand Central Station

How could you use this in experiential brand engagement?

Gorilla, Convergence of Technology, Brands and Creative

In reading Scamp's piece on Gorilla and it's origins, I expanded my comment into the post below.

The photo is an example of the interactive screen in the back of all Shanghai taxis which is full of basic, but engaging content you just can't help exploring as you wizz around what is fast becoming the fastest growing and most alive city of this new century. Remember if you go, you never tip the taxi drivers. Well, not yet.

Beyond the recycling of ideas which is the debate on in the comments...isn't the point that we (and the brands) have to realize that the consumer is the power now and they/us can decide what to watch, when and where so whatever we create has to be so far beyond advertising. Our ideas have to be compulsive and engaging enough to be remarkable, so we all spread it on free through online and offline WOM, and counting it as a success when it goes beyond it's niche audience (UK market for Gorilla), and breaking out and scaling around the world primarily through online. There are over 200 mash ups of Gorilla on youtube and countless other video sites. What does that say about our new world of audience participation where brands have to relinquish control of their brand image and let the prosumer trust, enhance and ultimately spread their brand message? Even the marketing guru Tom Peters’ blog commented on Gorilla which has a huge and influential audience...irony being it cost nothing in media spend, they just found it entertaining.

This leads me on to my next point that agencies have to compete with everyone now in the online content space and should fast invest in all kinds of ideas (from not just creatives, but from scriptwriters, film directors, game designers, actors, musicians, TV producers) whatever the talent, the cost, the length and less in traditional ad media spend. Although it has it's merits in the live events arena and isn't going to go away soon, in reality, we all know we all ignore or skip or just don't watch it as much.

As I said the (young and increasing older) consumer (prosumer?) is in control, and you have to trust them to comment,
Seen this?  Supposedly consumer generated ad destruction of SONY PS3 (song) Wonder if it was produced by X-Box marketing team?

To spread the content, that means giving them entertainment (not advertising) that they're going to gain their attention, talk about, enjoy, embed and ultimately value. It's obvious. Whose making it obvious to the brands? Is it all the new net start ups, new tech coms, search companies meshing their tech and ideas that are eating away at the traditional ad world with no baggage or history of trad. ad models? Or is it the traditional ad agencies trying to shoehorn their old profitable ad models into this new liberating, uncontrollable, exciting online world where it's not just ideas but a future where the knitting of new tech, brands and ideas (Nike +) that matter and where now, within reason, you can quite literally try anything?

Even as your own brand, which you are, who or whatever you plagiarize, I, like everyone within and increasing out of the ad industry, will continue to follow your engaging imaginative exploits. Rock on Juan.