Nitmesh

Would you like a Meshfriend? Avatar Meshlining Relationships are real and here now

This is from Microsoft and is remarkable but caused me to imagine some scarily ominous ideas.
This opens up so many possibilities to the meshing of the online and offline experience. I call it meshlining, the blurring of the realities. Can you imagine a child being woken up every morning by their favourite Avatar friend? Wouldn't it become their most trusted friend maybe even with a memory too?  A memory of all our past. A memory that could be instantly recalled and played back as video. It would be a descendent of seesmic, ustream or justin.tv knitted with a virtual world but showing our development from a very young age.

Imagine as that child grows up it would hark back to it's Avatar friend, but then again that friend might age with them, always be there for them, the virtual piece of their lives. On call at a moment's notice, from any screen, whether mobile or static. Be there as a virtual psychotherapist? The virtual search engine friend that's always (supposedly) right, with that one verbal answer, demographic and contextual bullseye as opposed to the choice of millions of webpages? It would always have an answer, the right answer or would it be used as a form of control?  Steering you in a particular brand or product's direction, It's meshlining word of mouth, it's the perfect contextual avatar advertising!

Then there's steering you in a particular path in life?  Could your parents control you, feel safe in the knowledge of what their child was thinking and doing? Be alerted when key words were discussed or searched. Keeping their child's thoughts and actions on the straight and narrow. You could be constantly being mentally assessed from the analytics from your vitual 'meshfriend' then you, or your parents could nudged you towards a particular profession or form of training from it or I mean him or her and I guess primarily through games, making education a fun and informative time.  What kind of generation would our society produce? Would the youth rebel and subvert it or would we have a generation of the supertrained and supertalented who wouldn't have to remember anything at all?

 Could even our mental health be monitored by the meshlining company? This leads on to you having to have a different virtual colleague at your workplace to work in concert with you in the digital workspace or would your original meshfriend play this role in your life too? Be your mirror image? So our employers could also monitor our productivity, our mood, our state of health too.  We've seen this meshfriend already appear in films but this webvideo is a telling clue of a fast approaching, mindblowing (mesh)reality. What do you think and what ideas have I missed?  via wonderland

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.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks from Logic+Emotion by David Armano

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

View more presentations from David Armano. (tags: behavior human)

T-Mobile Liverpool Street Flashmob Commercial

Does this illustrate the effective and spreading creative power of Improv everywhere or should I say, us, the consumer who are willing to join in with all our various forms of mobile tech (see any o2 iphones in there?), for us to be creative and spread the ad brand message for free?  It is brand advertising content generating user generated content equalling lovely free media.

I love the concept, but when it's the spreading seminal, original compelling content. More the merrier, as we-(media), all separate the wheat from the vast torrent of trash. Hopefully we will rapidly diminish the vicegrip power of more traditional forms of (mass) media and the vast monies that are usually funnelled to them from brands will be invested directly into more compelling content from the truly talented. The trusted bankable filmmakers, the designers, the artists, the storytellers as opposed to going to all the few safe, stockholder or government controlled middle men in our mass media. I'm not ruling out ad or strategic agencies, they have a vital role to play in future brand/content models. It's those few that control and decide for us all what we supposedly want to watch. How many people do you meet these days that don't watch TV?

It's fair enough for Adliterate to say 'we're back' about Saatchi & Saatchi and I'm not doubting it's watchable, fun and engaging but it's not exactly original, is it? There again I'm blogging it, so Richard's strategy's worked, hasn't it?

Clay Shirky 'Cognitive Surplus' Speech Web2.0 Conference

Don't know how to put this in context but Clay Shirky, professor at NYU's interactive telecommunications program, has written this insightful book called Here comes Everybody. Shirky goal 'is to describe the intersection of social tools and social life, helping people to understand both what's happening around them and how tools could be designed that better support social activity' but just watch the web video of his 'Cognitive Surplus' speech at Web 2.0 conference where he compares television viewing attention hours with wikipedias. Twice in the last couple of weeks I have had people say to me, 'Where do you find the time to do all this?' I tell them that I don't watch TV and if I do have it on it's usually live TV and on in the background. UPDATE - Good post from Neil McIntosh here

Trucks - Sequel to Cadbury's Gorilla Film from Fallon London

It's here, after the huge viral success of 'Gorilla', Glass And A Half Full Productions launches its second major production and this time it’s the turn of ‘Trucks’.

Click here to watch the film, again directed by the Fallon's Creative Director, Juan Cabral.

Great Queen song...anyone care to comment?

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.

Ford Balloons Viral from New Zealand

Here's an example of a piece of traditional TV advertising working in conjunction with a web video viral. Ogilvy London and Ford produced a traditional TV ad where cars floated away in the sky. I never quite understood it but JWT Auckland, which has the Ford account in NZ took the release of the original ad one step further by producing this obvious idea for a viral which then went onto become a traditional worldwide new story driving viewers back to the net and breaking records on youtube especially in the comments. via JWT 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.

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.