whizdumb

Always Be Knolling

 

Lani gave me a subtle prod to write more here. I've been more of a listener than a contributor lately. But it's nice to hear that someone's reading so I'll try to write more. Thanks for the nudge, Lani.

Browsing through The Selby this morning I came across the photo essay of Tom Sachs' space... space as in his studio and living area. Space as in his interest in NASA and space travel. What a place.

Then I read a bit more about him and Knolling. It all clicks together. Angles, materials, arrangements. It is a holy mess yet fastidious and calming all at once. Quite nice.

Social experiment on Broadway

I recently went to see the Neil LaBute play Reasons to be Pretty at the Lyceum Theatre. 

As curtain time approached the usual announcements were made. "Welcome to the Lyceum," "Please take your seats, the show will begin shortly."

And "Please take a minute to turn on your mobile phones."

Instructions were read aloud and provided as an insert in our Playbill:

"At Reasons to Be Pretty we're temporarily breaking with tradition! Take your phones out. That's right, get your phones out and on. We'd like your help with a little social experiment. We want to know how attractive you think you are... and how you think your fellow theatre-goers measure up in comparison. To participate, text the word PRETTY to 42903. After you cast your vote, turn off your phones, put them away and enjoy Reasons to Be Pretty. We'll text you the results at the intermission."

I followed the instructions. Rated myself and some lady sitting a couple aisles away (6 and 5 respectively if you must know). At intermission everyone received a text with the results. On that evening the average self rating was 6.6. The average stranger rating was 5.1, a difference of 22%.

The theatre seats 922 people. Every night the results are remarkably consistent, but not terribly surprising (you've probably heard a lot of talk about the wisdom of crowds, about how on average people tend to rate themselves above average on smarts and looks).

What is different about this is how it added a bit of fun to the experience. It literally set the stage for the play to follow, which is all about judging looks of one another.

But it was also a smart marketing idea. Two weeks later I received a text telling me to visit a site for details about a buy one get one free Monday Night Date Night ticket offer. So ultimately everyone wins. I think that may be the first time I have actually welcomed a text offer to my mobile.

This kind of thing is a great example of how some have started to think about relationships: Provide an experience made better through participation.

Faris Yakob recently gave a presentation that touches on this. In it he has a quote from Henry Jenkins of MIT:

"Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices."

So to me this example is really less about a well executed mobile tactic but more about how open people are to finding new meaning (i.e. what people sitting around me think about beauty) in timeless forms (i.e. sitting in a theater and watching real actors).

Brother, can you spare a story?

Last week our planning group at R/GA hosted an AAAA event with The Moth. It featured storytellers Andy Christie (pictured) and Ed Gavagan, Andy Borowitz as host, and The Moth's executive director Lea Thau on Q&A. There were nearly 100 attendees in all. Planners mostly. AAAA executives and our group of around a dozen planners.

The way The Moth lines storytellers up is very similar to a stand up comedy routine. There is a stage, a mic, a host, and acts. Here are some examples of stories. I've listened to a few. They're compelling, human and very emotional. Not something to just listen to in the background. Oh, and they're becoming quite popular as they were the second most listened to podcast on iTunes in 2008.

To me the most valuable part of the evening was the Q&A at the end. Lea has been with the organization for years and has heard and coached probably hundreds of storytellers. She also helps The Moth in consulting gigs with corporations. One example she gave was that they helped a pharma company tell more compelling success stories of some people who used their drugs.

Here are a couple things I took away from the event.

Be present with your story

Above all else, the storyteller has to be at one with their story. In other words, comfortable in their own skin. This brings home the overriding importance of being oneself. A story well told is not recitation but sharing. It's incredibly personal and you have to leave all masks behind.

She talked about how this is challenging for some people like paid actors who think it would be cool to go on stage and tell stories for The Moth. They sometimes need a bit of coaching to leave behind their acting and simply be a regular person.

Don't confuse facts with truth

A set of facts do not make a story. In fact, a set of facts do not necessarily tell the whole truth. Great stories take a set of facts (who, what, when, where) and bring them to life, perhaps with a bit of embellishment, to reveal a bigger truth that the facts alone do not tell.

An example one of the storytellers gave was about his skydiving tale. In it, he had told what was going through his mind as he looked down at the houses and power lines below, seemingly careening toward them without a chute. He imagined the horror of being bisected by a power line. In reality, he admitted, he did not remember exactly what was going through his mind during the jump many years ago. But he did remember what he saw and how he felt. He imagined what would have been going through his mind.

So as he retold it his story took on some embellishment but ultimately a greater truth. Truth about our fears, about how we reconstruct events, about how we share life events with each other. But more importantly, it became a better story.

Stories are uniquely human

Stories are such a natural human impulse that it almost seems funny or sad to me that there is an organization in place to do what we should naturally be doing... sharing stories with each other. But these are the softer human needs that often get pushed down by more urgent deadlines and priorities in our lives. And in a place like New York they seem to need a venue of their own.

The timing of this workshop couldn't be more appropriate. We are in the midst of a great recession. Clients and agencies are laying people off like crazy. Budgets are shrinking. We are being asked to do more with less. The beauty of a good story is it's free. It stands on its own. And when times are tough, people love 'em.

Far from simply spinning a good yarn, the reminder to marketers is about authenticity. People sniff out fake storytelling very quick and will know whether your brand is telegraphing some core truth, or simply a mask. It's much more about revealing truth rather than concocting a story. About peeling back the layers until you get to the soft center.

Put another way, a good brand story is a uniquely human competitive advantage.

Heard any good ones lately?

Scavengers of the digital trash heap

I recently stumbled across a video of the Payatas trash village outside Manila, Philippines.  If you haven't heard Payatas, it has a population of over 80,000 that lives on and around the monstrous trash heap.  It recycles  and resells much of what it finds there.

I thought of Payatas when I watched a video by NYT tech writer David Pogue about geotagging photos.  He talked about a memory card for your camera called Eye-Fi, which uses so-called fake GPS from Skyhook Wireless. For years the folks at Skyhook have been sending out drivers to cruise around metropolitan neighborhoods in America to detect network address of some of the 70 million Wi-Fi base stations.  Then they associate each Wi-Fi spot with its physical recorded location.  So instead of your digital camera needing a GPS, you can have a memory card that can detect and save nearby Wi-Fi signals and include them in the photo's data.  A pretty creative use of existing technologies. 

It is possibly a stretch and maybe a bit insensitive to compare these two things.  But it's not hard if you imagine the opposite of the Payatas trash heap as an invisible yet vast mass of wireless data ripe for profitmaking.  The folks over at Skyhook did and managed to find a way to resell the same data but, quite literally, through a different lens. 

(By the way, the reason your iPhone is so good at finding your location is because it uses Skyhook technology too).

I wonder what other kinds of scavenging could create value from others' digital waste. 

Rear window parking dispute

Last night we were in our living room when we heard some commotion outside.  We looked out our apartment's rear window to see quite the dramatic parking space squabble in progress.

It seems two cars happened upon the same space at roughly the same time.  Each felt a perfect claim to the spot, and each dug in their heels.

One was a silver minivan with an Asian couple.  The other a cherry red Land Rover with two African American girlfriends.  The best part was that each car's passenger walked out to stand as a human road block in front of the other car. 

A perfect stalemate. With nothing but pride and concrete hanging in the balance. Asian vs. Black,  Minivan vs. SUV. Not that their races or car types had anything to do with the fight.  But I could almost see the Daily News article unfolding before my eyes.

There was  lot of yelling and some awesome dissing body language, but it never did come to blows or anything truly newsworthy. So my dream of retiring from a photo journalistic windfall still lives on. 

One side gave up before the cops came.  Can you guess which one?

See the whole set of pics and witness the victor here.

Design and the Elastic Mind

If you haven't heard of or seen this exhibit, I'd call it a must if you find yourself in New York sometime between now and May 12 when it closes.  Loads of inspiration and mind fodder for anyone interested in the role of design in an information and technological society.

Among the many wonders on display are instant furniture, nano inventions, and a new piece by Jonathan Harris.

If you can't make it in person, the MoMA's exhibit website is a meaty proxy for it.

Music sampling in a subway tunnel

Recently in a NY subway I saw these two posters for a new live John Legend album distributed exclusively by Target.  They were side by side, to be taken together as a single bit of communication. 

But they could be seen as two approaches to advertising the same thing.  The first poster was simply a glossy announcement of the album and it's exclusive retailer.  The second invited you to sample the music right there, from a red box with a speaker jack ready for your headphones. 

Here are some samples from the album.

These two posters could serve as a kind of before-and-after exhibit for outdoor media.  Before: The basic poster bringing you in with a shot of the musician, just the facts.  And after: A more interactive sampling of the real product.  But they need to be taken together as a whole to have greatest effect. 

I don't think this is particularly remarkable communication. But it does hit on the brilliant basics of using media these days. 

And I feel it could have gone further, say, by inviting you to a free song when you visit target.com.  Or even providing a docking station for iPods to download the song then and there (not sure how technically feasible that would be).  Or a ShopText type code to buy the album instantly.  There are more and more ways outdoor media is fostering a richer interaction or sampling with products and ideas.

Three cheers to those pushing the envelope.  And to those licking it.

BBH's response to talent crisis: an idea

With all the chatter about the talent crisis in agencies these days it's nice to see at least one agency taking a novel approach to finding good people.  BBH has taken a page from Monster's lauded 1999 commercial, which was lampooned in another all-too-long advertising film (and then downhill even further to this waste of time).  Although not completely original the BBH take is executed with more craft and wit than the rest.  And though I struggled sometimes to understand what he was saying, to my American ears the accents only add to the fun.

Via Only Dead Fish

Ssllooww ddaanncciinngg

Here's a brutally simple idea.  Take something that is usually fast and frenetic. Then slow it way down to reveal its every detail.

Artist David Michalek has a traveling installation that does just that.  He takes hyper slow motion HD videos of the world's best dancers then projects them larger than life. Here's a sample, though the real videos are much slower.  They take an original 5 seconds of live action and extend it to 10 minutes.

Apple profiled the artist and gets into the technical end of the production.  More to learn is at the official Slow Dancing Films website.

Best Bio contest

I think there should be one.  I find most bios to be either totally dull or overthought nonesense.  Have you come across any weird and wonderful ones lately?  Let me know.  For the moment, this one from Demetri Martin is the reigning champ.