The Better Mousetrap

A Pop Culture where everyone’s invited

 

 

 

I came out with a line the other day which was rather lofty, but I have to admit, I like the sentiment behind it.  

“What we’re seeing is the democratisation of popular culture."

 

It just slipped out and it rightly rolled a few eyeballs in the room.

But what prompted it?

 

I was watching the new Tipp-Ex “White & Rewrite” campaign that they’re running on YouTube. “A hunter shoots a bear” lets you change the ending, by replacing “shoots” and typing your own choice of verb. Check it out below... and type what you like, but also type “tickles”.

 

“A hunter tickles a bear” is a knowing nod to “Surprised Kitty”, from October 2009.

 

 

Hence, “the democratisation of popular culture”, which put another way, is where advertising acknowledges, homage’s, plagiarises, repurposes (the word you prefer is a whole other debate) popular content that’s out there, anywhere, as made by anyone, whether they’re cute kitten-owners or not.

The Ad Industry is a wonderfully creative one, but it’s also guilty on occasions of unimaginatively jumping on and all over Pop Culture’s latest band-wagons. The popular stuff that comes out of Hollywood, makes money, has a good 15 plus minutes of fame, all too often becomes rich pickings for that new car, bank, travel operator campaign.

Sometimes this is ok, sometimes just sadly lazy, but this is not a moment to name and shame. Conversely, what I do rate is when UGC (User Generated Content) gets picked up on and re-worked. It means anyone anywhere, born of talent, imagination, or sheer dorkiness can capture the moment, gain a voice, an enthusiastic following, and contribute in some small way to the canon of popular culture.

Remember “Star Wars kid”...

 

...and its companion piece, the “Drunken Jedi”?

 

Here’s a 15 year old Canadian tenth grader who back in 2002 achieved over 1.1m downloads. You’ve gotta love “Star Wars kid”, and everyone who’s followed in his Jedi steps. (For more examples, see: Internet Video Top 100)

And with “Life’s for sharing”, T-Mobile has really embraced this User Generated theme as a strategic platform for their global advertising.

First we saw T-Mobile’s “Flash Mob” at Liverpool Street Station (January 15, 2009). I love the idea that a Flash Mob, a piece of field marketing, a media stunt no more, can be recorded and turned into a piece of content with global reach.

 

 

Then on April 30^th of the same year, T-Mobile threw a mass sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square, where they also invited Pink along to plug her new tune, “So What”. Here’s Hey Jude, a different track, but part of the same event.   

 

 

I was on the judging panel (2010) that awarded T-Mobile and Saatchi & Saatchi a Silver Effie for their “Singalong” campaign. There was so much to like about it. And I’ve just returned from a day in Brussels judging the Effie submissions for 2011. This year, as last, I delight in some of the papers I read through that underlines there are some very smart, very talented people out there who are making sure advertising pays its way.

And what I find myself equally delighting in right now is how you don’t have to be a Warhol or a Banksy or an Effie winner to make your mark. You can just document your amazing cake-making skills.

Here’s the Angry Birds cake-making upload that apparently inspired T-Mobile to go from cake-size to city-size.

 

And here’s T-Mobile taking super-sized Angry Birds to the streets of Barcelona this spring (May 11^th, 2011).

 

 

Ivan Pollard, a guy I’ve been lucky enough to see in action first-hand, writes with his usual crazy-smarts and eloquence when he says,

“A person’s feeling towards a brand is made up of the aggregation of their experiences...  The most powerful force for vicarious experiences now is the connection between ordinary people. 

This leaves us with two routes for communication – create more stand-alone experiences ourselves and work with the fluid, active, multi-dimensional mediation of the collective.

And working with the collective - really working with them - will take us to a new place in our thinking about the way big brands need to behave.”

 

The lumpenproletariat is no longer a “raggedy” crew of non-achievers. Genius Cake-Makers and Jedi-Wannabees the world over are now showing everyone else their moves. They’re firing up their Macs, sharing the life they’ve got, and leaving it in the hands of their fellow Jedi’s to decide whether it’s a thumbs up.    

It’s a thumbs-up.

SP.

Mobile: The New Dependency

 

We are a Screen-Avid Society.  

In an Analogue Age, Pre-Mobile Phone, society only gathered around 2 screens: the one in the corner of the living room, the other in the darkness of the movie theatre. Both hypnotised in their own ways. Both commanded an avid following.

The Digital Age created “Screen Competition” – a convergence of content across a divergence of screen hard-wear – and while the term, "Screen-based Society" has been doing the rounds for a while, it no longer quite cuts it.

Tempus fugit, and Society & Technology have waltzed hand-in-hand into a whole other dance craze.

Personal Screens are becoming The New Dependency. Prevalent is giving way to ubiquitous, will soon give way to universal. Just look around, and look how many are busy looking down at their screens.

 

Screens. And more screens. They're everywhere.  

A "mobile" phone, a phone you carried around with you, was initially a Novelty-of-the-Few. But it didn't take the late-majority long. We all quickly arrived at the party, quickly developed a dependency on a technology we'd never previously needed... because the benefits were so clear. It was hellishly useful to be able to get hold of someone in an instant, whatever they were up to, wherever they were.

 

All narcotics have to be benefit-based, otherwise they wouldn't be narcotic – and The Mobile Phone was all about Clear Benefit.

 

Today, the mobile phone has progressed to a Higher Purpose, has become a more ambitious kind of "Life Support" - a label I give quite literally. It genuinely supports the way people live their daily lives.

 

How well could the majority function without it? How much would people give-up in place of giving up their mobile phone? On the totem pole of daily importance, our mobile phones sit pretty close to the top, maybe even up there above caffeine and chocolate, if push came to shove and something had to go.

 

And because everyone loves a good Infograph:

 

 

Our phones are becoming "all screen", some have grown into tablets, and few remain “just phones”. They're hand-held computers that fit in our pockets, and because they connect us to the digital world, they are the world in our pocket.

 

Apple is spelling it out to us, just in case spelling out were needed...

 

 

When Charles Dunstone launched The Carphone Warehouse (1989), he was looking no further into a future than where a phone-in-your-home was naturally scale-able to a phone-in-your-car.

 

The business opportunity got kinda bigger than that.

 

3.6 billion people currently own a mobile phone. 91% of Americans use a mobile phone, 31% of whom currently own a smartphone, and by the end of 2011, more Americans will have smartphones than feature phones. It’s projected Mobile Internet Access will hit 10 billion users by 2020 (Source: Nielsen).

 

So, from a primordial analogue soup of car phones and cathode tubes, we now have a Screen-Dependent Society where everyone carries one or more Life Devices; an iPad, a Kindle, a smartphone for calling, gaming, Googling, and Facebooking, and that handily is also a camera that stores your music collection. It sometimes sounds like we're living in a time that comes after The Jetsons.

 

 

And our wireless, world-wired screens are only going to usurp other “daily dependable”, where One Device can meet a greater number of needs. Our car keys, our credit and debit cards, our boarding passes: all replaceable with a single cellular solution, a solution soon loaded with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology. Everyone's getting to feel a little more like James Bond, equipped with latest gadgets from Q-Branch. 

It used to be that our only daily Screen-Fix came from the one in the corner of our living rooms. 3.5 hours a day was the average daily Western diet of TV (a figure that’s now fluttering around 4).

 

But today, we no longer have to leave our homes and feel screen-bereft. Our screens come with us; have become our crutch, our comfort blanket, our umbilical cord and keyhole on the world.

 

And shortly, as “augmented reality” starts to find its feet and spread its wings, our screens will redefine how we interact with our physical world. Our screens will provide the looking glass for what we see, how we experience, how we behave with Our Everyday.  

 

Layer a digital graft over the physical world, and the view fundamentally changes. The Synthetic or Virtual World is starting to fold back into the real world, is going start allowing people to self-define their own "real".

 

“One of the most important technology trends over the next 3-5 years will be the effort to embed the dynamics of networked gaming into everyday life.”

Edward Castranova, Economist

 

To wonder what's next is indeed to wonder. Prospection is a tricky business... but I'd hazard a guess that The Screen Business will always be good business.

 

 SP.

Footnote:

Check out also: Are Smartphones Taking Over Our Lives?