The Better Mousetrap

NOW DO WEAR TO THE LEFT, 007

THE CASE FOR KISS KISS BANG BANG

 

 

 

Like an Antony Gormley figure, there is something magnificent about the solitary human form; the James Dean loner; the Jack Bauer or Nicholas Brody lone agent. Stealthy types, moving in the shadows, on the outside – it reads cool off the page and walks cool across our screens. Fleming’s Bond, Ludlum’s Bourne: tough, icy, enigmatic, alone.

Yet most typically during the course of our everyday’s, few of us do “work alone”, independent and at a remove from others. In reality more the opposite is the case.

We get things done by joining forces and working together, which is why the pragmatic innovator in me would like to take this moment to praise the collaborative spirit, because Milton was on the nose. No man really is an island. It’s invariably partnerships and pairings that can make us ‘more’. By way of evidence, I’ll start with a maybe-not-so-lone 007 in the Caribbean.

 

THE CUT OF BOND’S JIB

When Daniel Craig channelled Ursula Andress and rose from the Bahamian blue in Casino Royale, the pupil dilations were of sufficient number for the majority to concur with what producer Barbara Broccoli had always known. Craig was an inspired piece of casting. It didn’t hurt that he was also a damn-fine actor. The innovation equation was clear: Broccoli + Craig = Bond Rebooted.

When Craig later emerged from a roof-top pool in the Shanghai sequence of Skyfall, the major coup for clothing brand Orlebar Brown was that 007 was wearing a pair of their swim shorts.

I discovered Orlebar Brown in 2009 when they featured in Monocle magazine. Their limited edition ‘Monocle Bulldog’ shorts were a partnership with editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé, one of a series of limited edition pairings from O+B. A Bill Amberg retro capsule of shorts, beach towel and tote bag was another. “No, Simon. It’s possible to over-accessorize”, was my wife’s very clear instruction at the time.

While quite possibly true, I admire the way Orlebar Brown has scaled their brand and ramped their cachet through associations and partnerships. Their ‘premium brand’ accent has been with the help of some shrewdly selected style Sherpa’s.

I’m even tempted to argue that O+B are taking their lead from the Bond movie formula, because while you need to find the right guy for the tux (or swim shorts), this one ingredient alone does not ensure a 50 year franchise.

Consider the narrative Bondian ingredients: girls, gadgets, exotic locations, fast cars, megalomaniac adversaries. Beauty, danger, sex, death; in the singular, they’re all alluring elements, but paired together they become intoxicating. 

The Bond legacy is really just one long line of inspired commercial and creative pairings, the latest expression being Broccoli and half-brother Michael G. Wilson as co-producing double act.

Go wider and consider how any movie gets made. The entire movie industry is built on co-production funding. Creating a pot of cash is an exercise is forecasting likely back-end profit, with an up-front appeal to hearts and minds, inviting movie studio and private investor alike to “buy into the vision”. No one can make a movie, not a good one, singlehandedly.

Of course, I use Bond and the movie-making machine to evidence a broader point. Though to further build a line of exhibits, I may free-associate through a Fleming-esque world of fast cars and fine watches.

 

FAST CARS & FINE WATCHES

 

Bond: Where’s my Bentley?

Q: Oh, it’s had its day, I’m afraid.

Bond: But it never let me down.

Q: M’s orders, 007. You’ll be using this Aston Martin DB5… with modifications.”

Goldfinger (1964)

 

Perhaps 007’s gruff was false front. He would surely have read Fleming’s ‘Goldfinger’ in advance, would have known that his written-word self had been placed behind the wheel of a motor car branding a DB. But had Fleming and then Q not been so insistent, would the Aston Martin DB5 be quite so iconic?

 

EXHIBIT A: A thing of beauty regardless, but the DB5’s Bondian past contributes to its current £350k price tag.

Aston Martin aficionados might however incline to suggest it wasn’t partnering with Bond, but with Brown that made all the difference.

 

“The man who truly put Aston Martin on the map was David Brown, who in 1947 answered a classified advertisement in The Times seeking an owner for “a high-class motor business”. Brown acquired Aston Martin for £20,500.”

Esquire, The Big Black Book, Autumn/Winter 2013

 

EXHIBIT B: Aston Martin + David Brown = Automotive History.

 

Though what would Brown make of the announcement this July that future Aston Martin’s will be powered by Mercedes AMG engines? In this arrangement, Mercedes (more accurately Daimler) will take a 5% stake in Aston Martin, a business that is now co-owned by two Kuwaiti companies and one Italian private equity firm.

Very soon, any Aston with or without a DB will also be kitted out with German engineered electrics and command systems (simply meaning the GPS will accurately plot A to B, and you’ll be able to get there even quicker).

While a German engine in an Aston Martin might feel instinctively wrong, I suspect David Brown (and Q) would have approved. Anyone who’s driven anything propelled by an AMG engine knows Aston Martin’s will be better for it. And faster. And you only have to check to the cyber chatter to see: no one’s complaining.

 

EXHIBIT C: Aston Martin + AMG = Faster & Better.

 

An Anglo-German auto pairing is arguably no different to having a Swiss movement in an Italian watch.

 

EXHIBIT D: Officine Panerai began making over-sized watches in 1860, but only in the last few years have they started making their own movements. Prior, Panerai had always used a Rolex movement.

 

Circling back to Bond’s Bentley that never let him down. Sadly, there was a point when Bentley had become a let-down. Then, in 2003, came the Bentley Continental GT. It revived the aging Bentley marque and reversed the company’s fortunes. Behind its release was a simple fact: Bentley was a company under new ownership.

The Continental GT was a Bentley made by VW (who’d wholly bought the company in 1998), targeted not at former Bentley drivers (an atrophying breed), but at well-heeled 40-something motoring enthusiasts (and premier league footballers).

Check out Breitlingforbentley.com for another shrewd pairing. “British chic, Swiss excellence: Breitling for Bentley combines the best of both worlds” declares the homepage, accompanied by spokesperson David Beckham, kitted out in a version of Sean Connery’s Goldfinger wardrobe.

 

EXHIBIT E: (Bentley + VW + Breitling) x (Brand Beckham) = More Bondian?

 

Where Brietling bought Beckham, Omega bought Bond, writing a cheque of sufficient sway to bump Rolex from 007’s wrist. For me, the Moon is a far richer association for Omega. Their Speedmaster still (quite fairly enough) dines out on being the first watch to step, via Buzz Aldrin, on to the surface of the Moon.

 

EXHIBIT F:

“Just after landing on the Moon, the Lunar Module’s on-board electronic timer broke down. Neil Armstrong left his Speedmaster aboard as a reliable backup. As a result, the first watch worn on the Moon was on Aldrin’s wrist.”

Source: www.omegawatches.com

 

LISTEN TO WILL.I.AM

Thelma and Tom would just be names, but partner them with Louise and Jerry, and they assume famous meanings and vivid narratives. Starsky, Hansel, Fred, Morecambe - add Hutch, Gretal, Ginger and Wise and you have a fun-sounding law or ad agency, plus some serious bellbottoms and dance steps.

Staying on the theme of outrageous wardrobes and rocking backing tracks, let’s consider the music world. Elton John is Elton John… because of writer Bernie Taupin, and Will.I.Am is Will.I.Am… because of his truly open-minded approach to music-making.

 

“In collaborations and with the Black Eyed Peas, Will.I.Am has a total of 34 Top 40 entries on the UK Singles Chart since 1998, and has sold 9.4 million singles in the UK.”

Source: Wikipedia

 

EXHIBIT G: I really enjoy how Will.I.Am has built his brand through “featuring”. His creative partnerships often seem incongruous, but they create sounds that feel progressive and compel:  

• Flo Rida, featuring Wil.I.Am, gave us “In the Ayer”: a US double platinum and the Summer anthem of 2008. Everyone now: “Oh hot damn, this is my jam”.
• Post “Girls Aloud”, Cheryl Cole gave Wil.I.Am full creative control on what became her triple platinum debut, “3 Words”. He remains Cole’s co-manager.
• “O.M.G.” was written, produced and features Wil.I.Am, but lives on R&B artist Usher’s sixth studio album, Raymond vs. Raymond. It went double-platinum.
• And then there’s also Will.I.Am’s collaborations with Nicki Minaj, JayLo, Jagger, Justin Bieber, Britney, and Bazz Luhrmann, begging the question, does the guy ever sleep?

 

Collaborations can make beautiful music - which, for want of discursive symmetry, returns me to Bond. The Bond Song has always been fundamental to the formula and has always been a hit or miss matter of partnerships. McCartney and Live & Let Die. Duran Duran and View to a Kill. Successes.

General consensus would have it that Jake Black and Alicia Keys crooned a recent dud (‘Another Way to Die’), but no question inviting Adele to the Skyfall party was a centre-of-heart winner.

Some codes can be enigmatic. Certain formulas can seem closer to alchemy. I don’t look upon The Collaboration Code, The Featuring Formula, as a thing of mystery. It’s about being open-minded and giving.

Co-creation doesn’t have to be dilutive. One plus one can equal three, the procreation equation, the genesis of something new. No one should get into bed with just anyone, but everyone should be on the lookout for the right cuddle buddy.

I once had a boss who believed the only good ideas were his. It also didn’t matter whether the idea had started as someone else’s. Ended up his. My only point is that it wasn’t the most generous or inclusive kind of perspective. ‘Not invented by Me’ dead-ends collaborative creativity. I rather prefer Will.I.Am’s way of doing things. I believe we can learn much from a world of Fleming and 007, from our luxury brands and music’s megastars.

Fleming once described his novels as "pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety".  

Writing this while listening to Will.I.Am’s latest ‘Bang Bang’, there’s 20’s Charelston, some Cher, a touch of Louis Armstrong, extra vocals from both Shelby Spalione and Nicole Scherzinger, all kinds of talent in the mash. It’s an exercise in creative polygamy.

“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”?

Join forces, snuggle up, and who knows what might happen? Something brilliant? Something explosive? Whether you preference a Walther or a Berretta, it feels like a formula that’s worth a shot.

SP.

Article as also appears in Business 2 Community.

AUDACITY, BRAVERY, COMMITMENT, AMBITION

 

 

On 9 November 9^th of 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. I was 16 at the time and I remember watching events unfold live on television. As I and the rest of the world stopped and watched, spell-bound, thousands of Germans from East and West swung sledgehammers and pick axes and clawed with their bare hands at this concrete symbol of a divided world.

I’d been on a school trip to Germany the year before, seen the border, the sentry guards in their towers with their rifles and fixed stares. I remember the tears in my school teacher’s eyes.

As footage of falling mortar spanned the globe, I recall no one being sure what was going on. Was the Cold War over? Had the Arms Race bankrupted the Soviet Union? Was Communism over?

In response, I remember thethen US President, George Bush saying, “We live in fascinating times.” And that was pretty much it, the full extent of the analysis coming publicly out of the White House.

The first affirmative comment I read about the fall of the Berlin Wall came a little time after when I opened a newspaper and saw the photo of a poster pasted to the wall. The poster: Saatchi & Saatchi, “First over the wall”, plastered on the Eastern side.  

Some said it was disrespectful to those 200 people who had lost their lives trying to escape across the wall and into the West – but being disrespectful was the very last intention.

For me, very simply, ‘First over the Wall’ was up there as being as bold and audacious as gestures get. Insanely opportunistic. A comment on the future. A comment on the inevitable march of consumerism East.

It was one poster that made me want to work in advertising, and to work for Saatchi & Saatchi, both of which I went on to do.

I use one poster from a distant past as exemplar to a much bigger and very 21^st century idea: that AUDACITY, BRAVERY, COMMITMENT and AMBITION are, I believe, essential to success, even greatness, in our digital age.

Consider Red Bull’s space jump. Being oft-cited doesn’t make it less instructive. Both Saatchi’s poster and Red Bull Stratos are acts of sheer audacity and absolute bravery.

Red Bull may be the most popular energy drink in the world. They may have sold 5.2 billion cans last year in 165 countries. But what they sell doesn’t limit them from all that they want to be. Red Bull own football teams in Germany, the US and South America. They own two formula 1 racing team. They own a record label, Red Bull Records. And of course, Red Bull’s greatest fame has come from their association with extreme sports – their most extreme gesture being to sponsor Austrian Felix Baumgartner to free-fall from the edge of space. The statistics are staggering.

Baumgartner fell from an altitude of 24 miles above the Earth. He reached a speed of 844 mph, which means he broke the speed of sound, went supersonic, broke Mach 1, reached 1.25 Mach.

He was in free-fall for 4 minutes 19 seconds, the entire jump from leaving the capsule to landing back on Earth was just under 11 minutes.

And you bet, he could have died.

I watched the jump live on YouTube thinking, we could all be watching an 8 minute-long falling corpse, which will do nothing for Red Bull’s brand affinity scores. If this all goes south, those score are going to go through the floor, right along with Felix.

But history will show that fortune favoured the brave and Felix made it down safely – and I believe the future will be defined by the brave and audacious, in all their forms.

Nike is 49 year old manufacturer of running shoes that is in rude health because it’s turned digital native, has built a series of physical and digital products that orbit consumers, allowing us all to more easily live and express a “Just Do It” lifestyle. Nike, like Red Bull, do not limit themselves by constraining definitions of what they are.

Where Jay Leno declared, "I don't know what TV is anymore," I believe it’s a very good thing if we all embrace the idea of not knowing what we are. “Not knowing” removes the straightjacket.

Blockbusters never went knocking on Kevin Spacey's door. Look how that turned out. While Netflix figured the best possible ad they could make was a brilliant TV series – maybe one of the best and longest TV "ads" of all time?

With House of Cards, Netflix made TV history, won three Emmy’s earlier this year, the first time an ‘online-only’ show has ever bagged an Emmy.

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos boldly nailed his colours to the mast in a recent interview: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” It’s my favourite quote of the year. It also parallels a similar declaration from Vice founder Shane Smith, who shared his wish to make Vice the next CNN. 

20 years ago, Vice was an underground music magazine handed out for free on the streets of Montreal. Today, Vice is a global brand with offices in 34 countries, and very soon to be a 24-hour terrestrial news channel available in 18 countries. Vice have also become documentary makers, partnering with HBO. Like Red Bull, they too have a record label, as well as an ad agency, Virtue, which numbers Nike among its clients. 

Each of us arrived screaming into the light. And no one knows exactly how long they have before the lights are switched off. The only thing that really matters is what you do with the space in-between.

I’ve always abhorred the play-it-safe Teflon wearers of the world, but my adoration is endless for ‘The Definers’ who dare to defy and refuse to self-define. Audacity, bravery, commitment and ambition: what better way to use the space in between?

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Community and EatBigFish.

"WHAT DOES GREAT WORK LOOK LIKE?"

 

For brands, "What does great work look like?". This was the theme of a 10 minute talk I gave over at BAFTA recently.

"Great work" doesn't look like advertising anymore, that was the thrust of it. And to hopefully make the point, I drew on a few nostalgic and very current examples: Saatchi & Saatchi's 'First over the Wall', the Red Bull Space Jump, Nike, Netflix, and Vice.

Here's the talk:

 

 

SP.

 

THROUGH A GLASS… CLEARLY?

   

 

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,' said Scrooge. ’But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."

 

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

 

 

I’ve just seen ‘The Future’, and I’m a little uncertain how to feel about it.

 

Of course, seeing the future is a little unnerving. Sure, it quickens the pulse and gets you giddy and speculating, but it spooks in that you're learning that your world is changing.

 

I attended a Google product demonstration the other week. I didn't have to hitch my wagon to a trail heading West. Mountain View came to me. Google's demos are on a world tour, taking up London residence in a customised town house on Fitzroy Square.

 

You receive an invite, an address, the proposal of an early evening gathering, and in failing light you duly rap on the brass G door knocker, stepping across a threshold to discover... ‘The Future’ has a W1 postcode.

 

The experience would have been rewarding for anyone merely a fan of architecture, high end interiors, or members clubs – but before we explores Google’s ‘Townhouse of Tomorrow/Today’, let’s time-rewind a little, join a few temporal data points, and consider how we reached this moment.

 

FOUR POINTS IN TIME

The Prologue, let me suggest, is set in the land of late 80’s power dressing and executive fleet cars. In 1989, when Charles Dunstone launched The Carphone Warehouse, 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.

 

Only Dunstone, along with pretty much everyone else, wasn’t thinking big enough. Phones in cars became phones in pockets became internet-connected smartphones – but where early iterations felt Neolithic, blunt and ineffectual compared to what we're now on the cusp of.

 

But I’ve already time-skipped ahead too soon. Another rewind. Post prologue, to Christmas Day. Tim Berners-Lee, a contracted scientist at CERN, is working on project ‘WorldWideWeb’. Berners-Lee sends the first successful HTML missive on December 25th 1990. While so many of us were tucking into our turkey, no one could have appreciated this revolutionary trigger pull... in the shape of a Return key. There was no popping sound. Certainly no grand explosion. Just an email - that started a seismic Earth shake.

 

Now adjust the time-dial. Fast forward 7 years. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are still in their Stanford days. ‘Google’ is a garage band style project, operating out of a garage. On September 15th 1997, Page and Brin register the domain name ‘Google.com’.

 

Fast forward 16 years. January 2013: Google announces earnings of $50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012.

 

1989, 1990, 1997, 2013, four points in time. Joined. You could even make it a square, imagine it as a screen.

 

From the Baby Boomers onwards, no one screaming into the light anytime from 1946 to 1996 could, hand on heart, have said, “Yeah, I'll be living through a Revolution equal to and as major as the Industrial Revolution. I reckon The Digital Revolution is going to make The Jetsons seem like The Flintstones.”

 

Time to hop out of our time machine (yes, it can be a De Lorean if you like). Parked up in ‘The Now’ of Fitzroy Square (single yellow’s are fine at this time of night), let’s return to the warmth of Google House’... where it’s clear that The Jetsons has become techno retro.

 

DEMONSTRATIONS

First rate theatre aside, Google’s ‘Townhouse Demonstrations’ really demonstrate one thing: the mobile phone has progressed to a Higher Purpose; is set to become an even more ambitious form of "Life Support". While it’s been the over-eager ‘Year of the Mobile’ every year for about the last 5 years, 2014 might just be the year the declaration becomes bona fide.

 

Smartphones are at last getting genuinely smart, and Google’s voice activated search moves the whole game on. For almost everyone, soon, talking into our phones will become talking to our phones, with the major change being that they’ll talk back to us.

 

Yes, our Sat Nav’s already talk at us, but Google’s iOS Search App is more like an oracle or intermediary or translator.

 

The App download copy runs with: “Just say “Ok Google” or touch the mic to begin. You’ll also get answers before you ask”.

 

While pre-emptive search results is impressive, it’s small fry when compared to your phone’s newly coded ability to aurally translate one language into another, within a heartbeat of utterance.

 

“Phone as instant translator” is really rather mind blowing. Though I appreciate, give it a year or so, and it’ll become part of our digital second nature. In the same way that I’d suggest email has helped improve the writing skills of an entire generation, I wonder whether Google will inadvertently turn us all into slightly better linguists?

 

But this is no time to ponder, because the ‘Future Fun’ in Fitzroy Square doesn’t stop with phones that talk back. In the attic there’s Google Glass to try out.

 

The ginger bearded Google-ite (a twenty-something West-coaster with laid-back smarts) gives the crash course and happily admits, “The experience is a little hard to explain”. He’s not wrong.

 

Specs on, and it’s like giving your waking moments a heads-up display. Combined with voice command rather than touch activation, and Glass further blurs (maybe merges?) the already fuzzy line between our physical and digital worlds.

 

This is next generation Augmented Reality. It’s way beyond “gamifying your day”. When the ‘Synthetic (or Virtual) World’ is folded back on the physical world, and put before your eyes, not only does the view fundamentally change but the question begs to be asked, what becomes of “real”?

 

Wearing Google Glass made me think of Ferris Bueller and Alfie, and how we partly feel we know them the way we do because they talked to us, broke the fourth wall and came that little bit closer. Google Glass is breaking the internet’s fourth wall, bringing it near. Technology has never felt more intimate.

 

Part of me wonders, is Google Glass an ambition too far? They’re very subtle as specs go, but a very strong technophile statement however you look at them (or through them). A colleague later asked, “Wearing them, didn’t you feel a bit of a d1ck?”

 

No comment, but I have it on reliable authority that Glass wearers are an increasingly common sight not just on the Google campus but also the streets of San Francisco. From those early days 80’s memories of city boys lifting ‘mobile’ phones the size of portable stereos to their ears, is it any more of a leap to imagine us all soon wearing Google Glass? Only time, or time travel will tell.

 

Yet what I was really thinking as I went through a range of ‘OK Glass’ commands was, how insanely cool will this be when it becomes a contact lens?

 

But the show’s not over. Take off your glasses and click on Google’s Cultural Institute, to witness an increasingly inventoried world of cultural artefacts, all at a proximity “physically being there” doesn't allow. Having quantified the planet with Google Earth, Google is now capturing the micro, the contours of a brushstroke, and “mapping the world of indoor spaces”. ‘Street views’ have moved indoors.

 

Thank-you’s and goodnight’s said, it’s time to return outside, to the Autumn cold of a London going home and out. Fitzroy Square looks timeless, the kind of place where you could exchange evening pleasantries with a passing Sherlock Holmes. What would Holmes deduce from our recent encounters? Certainly that Google in Moriarty’s hands would be a very bad thing. Might a path to world domination simply be via world documentation?

 

Perhaps Holmes would further make the kind of observation Spiderman knows only too well, that “with great power comes great responsibility”.

 

One can only hope Google is good to their word and ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra - because I think it's clear who’s gathering the power. It’s also a trend line that feels like it’s curving towards the absolute, and that kind of power requires super hero levels of restraint.

 

EPILOGUE

That was then, and this, as they say, is ‘now’ - and as you read this there is no brass G door knocker in Fitzroy Square. The door’s painted a different colour. The lights are off, and the only view through those grand sash windows is one of spectral ‘emptiness’. Was it a dream? A visitation? No, a pop-up, I’m sure. Only, why does the ‘Ghost of Christmas Future’ float to mind? Better to distract ourselves with festive thoughts and wish lists. I need to tell Santa about a new pair of specs I saw - in a future that I either did or didn’t dream.

SP.

Article as also appears in: The Huffington Post, MediaTel Newsline, Sabotage Times, Koganpage.com, Business 2 Community & Emerging Spaces.

LIST LIFE: How lists make us feel alive

 

 

"3 is shy, not like 4, who's a real show-off." 7, I learn, is invisible, while 5 is musical (but short-changed of any super power such as invisibility). 6 is mechanical, 18 is a hunter. And gender divides them all. 3, for example, is a girl, "but 13 is actually a boy". This last revelation is imparted in a tone that suggests it might come as quite the surprise.

 

My son is 7, and while he may simply be exercising his imagination (or messing with my head for mild sport), the very fact he's applying it to numbers implies he has a very different relationship with them to the one I have. 

 

I've never had an instinctive 'feel' for numbers, never engendered them with gender or a superpower. I'd always regarded numbers rather dryly, but of course, everything is a matter of perspective.

 

Recently I've been thinking about numbers, particularly the lists they build, and why we have them; the role they play, the rules they make, and why they rule our lives so much. It's a reasonable enough thing to mull during a daily commute. The 7am alarm, 8:01 train, my 43 minutes between door and desk, the number of emails, received, replied, during that time. The working hours in a 5-day week, the number of times I go to the gym, the length of time I spend there.

 

Modern life seems to very conspicuously be a thing of numeric markers and lists. Like it, list it. Loathe it, you'll still likely give me at least "3 reasons why" you feel the way you do.

 

When I arrive in work, my Inbox lists the new emails that have arrived in a twenty-one minute walk from Marylebone to Charlotte Street.

 

The subscription emails include an invitation to watch 'The 10 best dog ads' (an invitation I can comfortably resist) and read about 'The four watches... (I really must inappropriately spend my money on)"... subject to the number in my savings account. The number will never be enough.

 

Another ‘alert’ tells me about Tikker, a watch that tells the time and counts down the time you have remaining. It’s like the Timex Life Index watch (from 2008) which processed your key biometric inputs and then trended your likely end-date. That was called "the death watch", and named number 7 on PC mags list of “Technologies we can do without”. Spin "life is short so make the most of it all you want", Tikker is just a new entry in next-level creepy.

 

But our fixation with lists has much to do with our feelings towards time - and how it flees, leaving us feeling like we never have enough of it.

 

So we must learn, understand, improve, and quickly. The best tip for assailing this vanishing time: heed a wise list. The 7 best exercises to burn bottom fat; the 6 best mother-in-law put downs or ways to humanely poison your neighbour’s spaniel. And to be more effective at the aforementioned, perhaps a skim of Dr Stephen Covey's "inspirational" book list – the '7 Habits Of Highly Effective People®'?

 

It's even more fundamental than just being a sign of the times and a passing of them. Lists are what we're 'made of'.

 

The Human Genome Project is the ultimate list, a big data attempt to build the definitive biological picture of “life”. Join the right data points, get the algorithm right, and pre-empting and solving diseases might be a maths answer to a very long source code.

 

‘Life’, quite literally, is a genetic list amounting to a built-in expiration date, the stuff of BladeRunner and Gattaca and Logan’s Run. DNA lists give us the know-how to design babies, that will stay healthier and live longer. With the right list, we can push at the edges of our mortality - which returns us to the essentialness of therefore making the most of it, of every 24 hours and how we fill them, which returns us to more lists, so we may be productive, so we may accomplish, achieve all we can in the time we have.

 

The completion of each list like hitting the equals button that calculates a new state of personal order: I am now 'Informed', or 'Inspired'. 'List Completed' = I am now more complete. The 100 albums you must listen to and movies you must see before you die. In the latter case, it's unlikely that will include '10 Rules for Sleeping Around', a new "screw ball sex comedy”. Evidently, promiscuity is a thing of lists, but then, it always was.

 

The 'number of people you really must sleep with (before you die)' is a life-list that varies rather wildly by person. Mick Jagger, aged 70, is a still-rocking jitter-bag of rolling bones said to have bagged north of 4000 women. James Hunt suffered a fatal heart-attack at 45, but speculation of his 5000 sexual conquests went some way to implying that the guy had "lived".

 

Comic book writing legend Alan Moore once described life as “a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."

 

I figure Jagger and Hunt would make it onto Moore’s lucky list. And surely that’s the real skill with any list, to live it well?

 

In my 'right here and now', I'm neither in the office nor commuting in either direction relative to it. It's actually Sunday, the 13th of the 10th, 3:05pm. It's 11 degrees outside, very wet, humidity at 94%, the barometer reading 1009mb. A weather list, and a somewhat gloomy one. I take a call from Dubai, a +971 in the international directory. Their present weather list is rather different.

 

After the call, I turn on the radio. The Radio 1 DJ asks whether OneRepublic’s 'Counting Stars' will be number 1 in the top 40 for 3 weeks running, then hits play.

 

"Everything that kills me makes me feel alive."

 

Everything that kills me: that would be quite the list. I consider - 'Number 1: Tied to a tree in the Amazon to be methodically devoured by a raid of over-peckish army ants.'

 

The very fact I'm not tied to any tree or anything's lunch menu is cause to smile, to feel grateful, to feel alive.

 

Umberto Eco once said that "we like lists because we don't want to die". My feelings towards numbers, particularly towards lists, is changing. Lists make us feel alive, I think.

 

My son runs into the kitchen, breaking my reverie. "Dad! Remember when we talked about numbers? Number 7, he's also a ninja."

 

An invisible ninja? That's pretty awesome.

 

SP. 

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post and Sabotage Times.

ADVERTISING, INTERRUPTED

From Don Draper & Magic Bullets to Don Simpson & Going Native

 

 

Last week, I spent more time than absolutely necessary discussing whether a lion could beat up a tiger. It's hard to put a billable ROI against that kind of agency chat.

During the week, I also read a very good article on ‘Native Advertising’, written by Greg Grimmer, an old friend who's never short on fresh thinking.

Lions and tigers, old friends and new views, I love how certain tangents collide.

Yet in truth, these tangents aren't such tangents.

First, ‘Native Advertising’: a tag initially applied to the evolution of ‘online display advertising’, where online display comes over as too ‘advertisingy’ (hence people ignore and resent it) and so the answer becomes advertising that’s less like ‘advertising’, that’s more like the actual editorial content we all consume by choice. 

The great danger in this is how former ‘offline’ attempts at ‘advertising as editorial’ have played out. Enter: ‘The advertorial’, that most insipid kind of masquerade.

Advertising that’s faking it, trying to mirror the ‘real content’, only where the quality isn’t there, the bias is, and there’s a headline at the top underlining the insincere sham of it all: ‘This is a Promotion’ - how was that ever going to be a great idea? Or an effective one? No points for guessing, I’ve never been a fan. But like discovering a brave new universe, born from the black hole of a previously bad idea, we now have a new and potentially inspired prefix to consider.

 

INTERRUPTION… OF THE WELCOME KIND

‘Online’ is a medium troubled by the same spectral dilemma that haunts the wider advertising community. Do people like advertising, or not, and given technology is bestowing upon us a surfeit of edit buttons, what is advertising’s future?

This was the topic of a Google Squared debate I took part in last week. I didn’t talk about lions fighting tigers (though I will shortly), but my debate does represent a third converging tangent in all of this. The panel included Rob Smith, MD of Ogilvy & Mather and Mike Burgess, Digital Director at BMB. Both Rob and Mike are the kind of industry brains who are going to get as close as anyone to establishing advertising’s future, and while we didn’t collectively crack it in a 1-hour chat, I left my swivel seat with one recurring word.

‘Interruption.’

People invariably hate being interrupted, and the old model of advertising is based on this simple principle. No one welcomes that moment when the movie they’re watching on TV (live or recorded) is gate-crashed by a 3+ minute blast of snake-oil selling.

Ad agencies still sell clients TV work in darkened boardrooms full of nodding heads with the volume dialled to 11. Show that TV ad in the middle of Homeland, and I don’t feel quite the same way about it.

The Super bowl may indeed be the only TV watching exception, where the commercials co-define the pop cultural moment, but the Super bowl is that bold exception (because it’s so damn long and the structure of play so staccato) to an otherwise obvious truth.

The ‘obvious truth’ that interruption is seldom enjoyed prompts the spin-off question: Are there times when people enjoy being interrupted? Can advertising ever be a welcome interruption? Mike Burgess’s citing of style bibles like Vogue (where the advertising is intrinsic to the content, to what the magazine fundamentally is) serve as a glossy full colour affirmation that advertising can be positively received.

‘Welcome Interruption’ loops me back round to 'native', which I don’t think the online community should have all to themselves.

After all, those Prada and Jimmy Choo ads in Vogue are effectively ‘native’, given they complement, even improve, the overall media consumption moment. 

I like this word ‘Native’, and not just because it makes my Northern Hemisphere light-deprived sensibilities think of people wearing flip flops and sarongs and smelling of sun lotion.

I like the word because it posits a ‘new way of being’ for ‘advertising’, equipping brands with a new lingua franca or ‘second language’. In keeping step with these fast-moving times, advertising is being invited to shrug off its now outmoded garbs and blend in with all the indigenous stuff people naturally like and want. I wonder, is it now very possible for advertising to be "non-advertising advertising", no longer the unwelcome intruder, but rather the source of any manner of cool stuff that causes us to grin and declare feelings of awesomeness?  

 

HIGH CONCEPTS & BROWS: A NEW KIND OF MAGIC 

I’ve talked before about brands needing to be Power-Givers, to really bring it to the table, the party, to wherever and whomever. Having good chat (whether on a panel or at a party), rocking up with a metaphorically tidy ‘bottle of’, for brands, this is literally about creating very human experiences - encounters or interactions - that make life better somehow. Intrigue me. Inform me. Educate me. Entertain me. Where these experiences are brought to me BY A BRAND, is this still ‘advertising’?

Sixty years ago, ‘The Thirty Second Ad’ was a magic bullet that consistently hit its mark. Sixty years on and any suggestion that the same kind of advertising convention is going to be similarly effective is potty. Don Draper, and his output, was a product of its time. Today’s ‘Magic Bullet’ needs to look very different – and while no brand has yet landed on the absolute blend of sorcery and armoury, but some are getting closer.

Which brings me to ‘Lions & Tigers’. You see, if someone asks me whether a Lion can beat up a Tiger, I’m interested as hell, drawn close and want to know more. I don’t necessarily want to see 90 seconds of footage of a Tiger and a Lion going at it, but I’d very much like to see a short documentary funded by, say, Patagonia or Timberland, that explores the question (and ideally provides the answer).

If I say to you, as people have recently put to me, have you seen that mountain biker being hunted by a Peregrine Falcon, aren’t you immediately curious how that worked out for rider and bird, and to click HERE if you don’t know?

If I tell you someone, a 'Big Black Little Bit Crazy Woman' called GloZell, is willing to film herself eating a ladle of cinnamon (these kind of antics have earned her 2.25m You Tube subscribers), you might just click HERE to see the faces and noises she makes after ingesting.

While this might sound a bit inane, I’m not suggesting we only interpret ‘native’ as dumbed-down ‘High Concept’, in the Simpson-Bruckheimer ‘One Sentence Pitch’ sense.

In a separate corner of this same native universe, consider Marriot hotels interpretation of ‘Sponsored Content’; a partnership with Fast Company where they’ve created the TravelBrilliantly series, corralling some very clever people to explore and explain what travel might mean these digital days.

Sure, #TravelBrilliantly is 'branded content' because it’s content that the Mariott brand has made happen, but it’s also just plain-and-simple content that I naturally love and gravitate towards and want to talk about. It could just as easily be from WIRED or Mashable. I become grateful to Marriot for being the catalyst, and I start thinking Marriot is a brand with a much higher IQ, irrespective of whether they’re slip-steaming the smarts of others or not. (Check out what a friend of mine, Faris Yakob, has to say about Time Travel and ‘Memory Hacking” here.) 

The effect is also similar to when I recently stayed at a W Hotel and my key card – in addition to opening my door - referenced their partnership with Intel and Roman Coppola, about a short movie collection (and spin-off competition) they’ve made. I think W Hotels are pretty cool, and I actively looked into what kind of film-makers the W are. They’re this kind: CLICK.

 

“IMAGINE IF..?”: THE NEW AGE OF ADVERTISING  

I’m in the front row here-cheering where Greg’s article asserts, “distribution is as crucial, if not more so, than the curation and creation of content. Don't expect the Kevin Costner field of dreams effect”. I also however believe that in the same way that talent outs and cream rises, if you conceive the content equivalent of a Shard or a Gherkin or a Burj Khalifa, then you’re stacking the odds of making an impression on anyone’s horizon.

“Imagine what would happen if you ate a whole ladle of cinnamon… pitted a tiger against a lion… tried to free-fall from the very edge of space?”

The late Don Simpson, Hollywood Fast Lane Lunatic, is living proof that High Concept is no way to live, but it might just breathe new life into the advertising model.

Any brand that bank-rolls the creation of something ‘Very Cool’, that I’d naturally pay to see or read, is a brand I’ll happily say thank-you to, and more likely buy.

"Netflix made history tonight, winning three Emmy awards for House of Cards, becoming the first company to win the awards for online-only shows." (Sep 22^nd, 2013) 

Where Jay Leno declared, “I don’t know what TV is anymore”, it might just be a very good thing if we all embrace the idea of not knowing what 'advertising' is anymore either.

Blockbuster never went knocking on Kevin Spacey’s door, and look how that turned out. Netflix figured the best possible ad they could make was a brilliant TV series (and maybe one of the best and longest TV “ads” of all time?). "Give people what they want” said Spacey, “when they want it, in the form they want it in. It's all content."

Content that I naturally crave: this is the stuff that sells itself. And it’ll sell the brands that make it.

SP.

Article as also appears in MediaTel Newsline, KoganPage.com, Business 2 Community, and Emerging Spaces.

The Quant of One: Big Data's Next Big Thing

 

We all love a good sound bite, a snappy label, a catchy tag. Our necks snap, our attention is caught, and we fall in love. New Labour. The Third Way. A Roadmap to Peace. Yes We Can. The Fiscal Cliff. Big Data.

 

Editorial 101: give 'em the quotable and instantly re-quotable. This is how ideas spread. And there's only one thing more contagious than an idea. It's an idea that can evolve, that serves as an open mic, that everyone can riff on. Because no sooner do we ingest and espouse these headline ideas, than we desire to then spin them in fresh, ever-revolving directions.

 

The best headlines are the invitation to become evolving thoughts.

 

Take 'Big Data'. It's been the label du jour long enough for speculators to question if it's time to fire up a new dawn and invert the prefix. Maybe data is no longer big? Maybe it's small?

 

'Big' and 'Small': early learning words with all manner of delicately contrived inferences.

 

Brands like using big. Businesses like using big. At least, they like using when they are big, or want to be perceived as bigger. Big is strong, mighty, has clout and stature, implies leverage and power. People buy into big.

 

 

Barclays. 'Big', starring Anthony Hopkins. Agency: Leagas Delaney (2000)

And brands and businesses wield 'small' with equal finesse; small is nimble, agile, "boutique-like", can imply smart. People buy into small. David & Goliath was a tale conjured by those selling the virtues of 'small'.

 

But what has this got to do with data?

 

You see, data has changed, both in typology and our feelings toward it. This Digital Revolution of ours has changed our relationship with data.

 

Now I have an admission. I never really liked 'The Numbers'. They were for the numbers guys. I'd always inclined to let those Kings of Quant deal in the empirically abstract. For me, the numbers had always felt a bit too quant, too antiseptic, at a remove from scratched knee truths of the human condition. I'd never needed 'The Numbers' to tell me why people climb trees. I'd always been a qual guy; reasoned that human understanding was through interpreting the irrational, the small detail of facial tick and guilty tell; in reading between the lines of perhaps what wasn't said. Empathy and intuition had always been the reference points upon which I'd drawn my own 'best fit'.

 

Now it's not that I've flip-flopped on my view of qual. I still love qual. But I'll admit it. I'm in a quant U-turn. My feelings for quant have changed. Because data has changed.

 

Along came the digital revolution, and the data is now so much more than it once was. For starters, there's so much more of it. It's vast. Hence, 'Big Data', loads of the stuff, being produced all the time, as a consequence of a digital age where we're all connected and networking, and (almost) all carrying a phone around with us.

 

"Facebook reports that its users register 2.7 billion likes and comments per day. For many, this magnitude of data is intimidating: they can't keep up with it, much less sort it, analyze it, and extract value from it."

 Philip Lee, Trends Crux, Feb 2013

 

Of course, 'Big Data' is really just an acknowledgement of how much data is now being created, and how it's tricky processing anything north of something as big as an exabyte. Imagine a really big elephant. No, not even close.

 

But framed another way, 'Big Data' becomes a crazy-exciting idea when it becomes this vast catch-all portrait of 'life', so much multi-source data that we can encourage to join hands, like an 'arms around the world and teach it to sing' Coke ad from the 70s. Because it can join hands. New data points are being joined all the time. Multi-source can be single-stacked, becoming an oceanic trench of data inviting us to dive in, swim down, keep swimming, and start whole new depths of discovering.

 

Where indices once left me cold, because they attempted to explain the motivations and behaviours of creatures whose blood runs warm, 'data' has turned body-temperature. To be human is now to create a data trail, a 'digital exhaust', new data, different kinds of data to the stuff we made before, and we're not talking a few binary crumbs, but a forensically lit trail, criss-crossing with everyone else's, like giving Saul Bass a pen and ruler and telling him to have some fun. These trails reveal our online movements and increasingly our offline movements. The data is a converged portrait of our digital and physically collided world.

 

Returning to Lee's earlier quote, the numbers remain a portrait of hidden value. The value is generated from interpretation, as ever, a matter of applied insight and elegance and bona fide smarts. Either side of a best fit line is always a steep gradient, a surface of hidden contours cast in fading light. However big or small the data gets, the task is how you choose to traverse it, negotiating the shadows, avoiding the treachery.

 

Which swings me round to small data: in the sense that all this giant data is potentially, quite simply, exposing individual human experiences more vividly and accurately than ever before. Meaning: it's exposing each of us. This intersection of 'Big Data' and 'Human Experiences'. A 'Quant of One'.

 

And this is only becoming a plausible contradiction because of how smart we're getting with the data, building machines that can learn and algorithms that adapt. A touch of Bayesian probability here, the application of NLP there, all fed into the real world versions of a HAL 9000. The 'Quant of One' becomes a very alive idea the moment trends become accurate predictions. Human actions, before the fact, revealed, through data; now there's a Minority Report kind of thought.

 

Maybe data is still big but now also small, and perhaps other prefixes are also deserving? Intimate. Knowing. Predictive. Human. The fact data is earning any prefix at all illustrates how it's changing - along with our feelings towards it... and how it's getting to know and reveal us.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post.

TRASHED IN PARADISE

WHY WE ALL NEED TO START LISTENING TO JEREMY IRONS

“I wanted to make a documentary about something that needed to be talked about. I spend much of my energies telling fictitious stories. This is a very true story. An important one.”

Jeremy Irons, interviewed at IFFP

 

When someone like Jeremy Irons speaks, you figure people will listen. Because he’s Jeremy goddamn Irons, top tier A-lister, Best Actor Oscar winner. As in Dead Ringers, The Lion King, Die Hard 3 Jeremy Irons, who can even make a papal wardrobe (The Borgias) look passable.

So you bet, if I was making a movie (or in this case a documentary), then Jeremy Irons would be up there as my first choice go-to, like he’d be for most everybody, like he was for Candida Brady.

Candida Brady is the director of last year’s eco documentary, Trashed. Brady describes herself as a mother worried “about the effect our toxic legacy is having on our children”, where researching for the project compelled her to make Trashed, “come what may.”

Which leads me to one very simple question.

Trashed, starring Jeremy Irons; this important true story that had to be made come what may; have you heard of it and seen it?

Because I hadn’t. At least, I hadn’t until recently visiting a film festival (the IFFP) on the Greek island of Patmos. And it was after the screening that I got to interview Jeremy Irons and admit that his new movie had been new news to me. Yes, a little awkward. But also telling. And rallying. So let me save you the same admission, tell you about Trashed, and compel you to see it, too.

 

A PARADISE CALLED PATMOS; A MOVIE CALLED TRASHED

Trashed screened on the third day of third annual film festival on Patmos. It was a day where a troop of SPF 50’d children had been combing the beaches for discarded water bottles and lollipop sticks, before then turning them into pieces of artwork that went under (the right kind of) hammer in the festival’s charity auction that evening.

The setting of Patmos is rather perfect for screening an eco docu like Trashed, because Patmos is an island paradise, an Aegean gem, where crystal clear waters are cut by diagonal blades of sunlight that still shimmer 20 metres down. The glancing eye of a visitor might miss the island’s landfill challenge or ongoing beach and water clear up, but it’s there and happening.

And it’s very likely because you’re so accosted by nature’s beauty, on such a beautiful island, that you feel more aware of the care we should be taking with our planet, and how we might be quite seriously trashing it.

 

Skala, from above (Patmos island)

Of course, this open-your-eyes island life vantage is rarely afforded. Too often, we’re all too busy marching through our every-days with our heads down and our thoughts everywhere else. Which is where Jeremy Irons, Candida Brady and Trashed come in.

Irons is plainly aware of how profile and celebrity can force people to slow their march, to stop, stare, and be drawn closer to the flame.

“I feel it’s incumbent on people who have a profile to raise the profile of these issues. We have no agenda. We don’t have to answer to shareholders. We artists just get to look at the world around us, free of bias, so we get to see it pretty clearly.”

And what is clear is this: Trashed is a documentary that needs to be seen, that needs to enter the mainstream. Because we’re (still) trashing the planet. We’ve heard this enough to stop thinking about the implications, to start humming to what’s become white noise - but Trashed rearticulates the message, volunteering a not just inconvenient but downright harrowing set of truths.

Our life of making and chucking away plastic anything should come with a multi-generational cancer-causing health warning. Really, truly, it should. This is why Candida felt compelled to make this movie. This is why Jeremy Irons is a UN Goodwill Ambassador (of the Food and Agriculture Organization) and served as Executive Producer on Trashed. It’s also why Irons didn’t just lend name and voice and simply commit a couple of studio days on voiceover duties.

“I wanted to be the voice of the audience, to really be there, in it, the one asking the questions the audience would like to ask.”

Consequently, Irons very deliberately puts himself in the frame, in the narrative cross hairs. He is not just our guide but our eye witness, travelling from Lebanon to San Francisco, via the UK, Iceland and Vietnam. The globe-trotting is the opposite of glossy. It demonstrates the scale of the issue and how heart-felt the matter is for Irons, Brady, and all involved. This kind of sincerity makes for what the critics like to call “brave” documentary-making.

Certainly, Trashed doesn’t hold back on the heavy punches. There are shock tactics. When Irons is feeling it, you feel it too. And that’s maybe as it should be, because to leave a lasting impression sometimes requires candour and the suspension of sugar-coating and niceties.

Trashed becomes a movie to face up to.

 

THE TRUTH IS… IT AIN’T EASY SELLING GREEN

“Money is to be made in recycling. We have too many incinerators in England and Europe - what are laughingly called waste-to-energy incinerators”, says Irons. “They are in fact waste-to-waste. But policies and new methods of recycling can be put in place. Some of this is very simple to do.”

We chuck away, and it becomes landfill, hidden away, out of sight and mind. Or we try and incinerate what we chuck, and it becomes ash, but then what do you do with the ash, which, as Irons emphasises, is simply a different kind of waste. What happens to all the smoke that hopefully just blows away? A big sky full of air. A big sea full of water. Surely our waste would dilute?

Wrong.

The long-short is the opposite. Nature doesn’t dilute pollution, but re-concentrates it.

Every plastic bag we bury or burn goes back into the environment, and back into the food chain, which goes back into our mouths. Whatever goes into the air and soil and sea goes back into us. The fish, the livestock, their diets becoming our diets, becoming carcinogenic metals (the most bad-ass kind of nasties called dioxins) that we can’t excrete and that accumulate in increments, rather like a time bomb ticking down.

So recycle or die becomes the message of Trashed, because we’re killing ourselves by not. And yet…

It ain’t easy selling green. Green still creates an audible groan. Eco messages still fall on too many deaf ears. Until the sky falls or the seas rise enough to start building Arks and grabbing our snorkels, until we have palpable and all-too-late evidence, then the great danger is that we’ll mostly continue to think and feel and behave in all ways short-termist. By consequence, governments don’t push the green agenda because they don’t have to, because green issues don’t sway voters or win elections.

Green still gets dismissed with a wafting hand, the preoccupations of tree huggers and tofu munchers.

Occasionally green cut-through. An Inconvenient Truth created global alarm about global warming, but that movie message has thinned since its 2006 moment at the podium. The truth is, with our goldfish memories and inclination to swerve inconvenience; we need to be frequently reminded of how we’re trashing the planet. It’s only through reminder and prompting that we’re likely to stop trashing and start fixing.

Trashed becomes a fresh reminder and aid memoir: we cannot keep treating our world the way we’ve been treating it. And this fresh reminder, where and when it is seen, is affecting change. Irons points out,

“Those who see Trashed, some are decision-makers, many can be influencers. Trashed screened in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg subsequently made a statement that from now on, all plastics of whatever type, would be recycled.”

Even Jeremy Irons can only open so many doors, hearts and minds to a set of ideas that needs to become a better way of life. The trick is: how do you get everyone to see it?

Until attending the Patmos film festival, I awkwardly admit, I hadn’t. “Is Trashed creating the reaction you’d hoped?”, I ask. “Is it yet being talked about the way you’d hoped?” Irons is very open in response.

“It’s always difficult to know.”

 

THE DISCOVERABILITY BOOGEYMAN

Go to IMDB and Trashed gets an 8.6 out of 10, having so far generated… one ‘user review’. It also got 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. The scores are great… but you don’t have to search deep in cyberspace to establish that Trashed hasn’t yet gone supernova.

Trashed’s one user review on IMDB is from a guy who watched it at the Cork Film Festival last Autumn, who calls it “well intentioned” but who felt at times “like standing up and going ‘OK I GET IT!! LET'S MOVE ON!!’"

It’s says everything about our Ctrl-Alt-Comment times, when a 0.20 second performing Google search for “Trashed” takes you one click away from first-stop site IMDB - where the first batch of words you read includes a guy who saw it in Cork and felt frustrated by how Trashed reinforces its message.

Stay on IMDB and you’ll discover Guggenheim and Gore’s 2006 global warming warning, An Inconvenient Truth, has 497 user reviews. It has of course had 7 years to generate those reviews, but there’s no question that at its time of release

An Inconvenient Truth gained the kind of mainstream attention that got it shown in company lunch breaks and school classrooms. And even 497 user reviews is modest the moment you step outside the docu genre.

Blockbusters like Avengers Assemble have nearly 1500 user reviews on IMDB. We live in a digital age, the ‘Age of the Share’, where a mercurially chosen few find fame and following, and where most “content” fizzles into nothing. “Discoverability” is the challenge, in this vast and misty digital sea of so much.

The movie, music and publishing industries are all kept sleepless and nocturnal by the “dicoverability” boogeyman. Because he can neither be understood nor caged. Because “The Discovered” is not necessarily based on criteria like quality or importance. The absurdly trivial catches on.

Sneezing panda’s, Clit Lit and South Korean pop videos become global idea viruses and pop cultural tent poles. ‘PSY – GANGNAM STYLE’ is closing in on 2 billion views on YouTube and nearly 8 million ‘Likes’. Considerably more effort than clicking a ‘thumbs up’ icon, over 26,000 people have felt sufficiently compelled to write a Customer review on amazon.com for Fifty Shades of Grey. Irons is entirely right when he says,

“There is a clear feeling from a growing number of people that the time has come for us all to start to try and change our ways, and to endeavour to live a more careful life."

Yet society still inclines to mobilize en masse and devote its time to the pop culturally trivial and inconsequential. The challenge with a movie like Trashed is how you get a subject of significance to not just ripple but shockwave the Zeitgeist, to get as many people to see it as have read Fifty Shades or done the Gangnam pony dance. This is where you and I come in.

To repeat Irons, “The time has come.”

 

TIME TO SUIT UP

Don’t we all want to leave this place better than we found it; the planet, an heirloom past on in reasonable shape?

A toxic legacy is no kind of legacy.

While we’re here, don’t we want to achieve something of worth, make the odd contribution that’s real, tangible, even noble? Sure, we might not be able to be noble every day.

We may have bills to pay that urge us to pursue things more mundanely every-day, but surely on some days, we can aspire to making a lasting difference. And surely every day, we can recycle, which will all add up to making a genuine difference too.

A recycling culture isn’t as difficult or as overwhelming as it might still feel. Sure, big business with deep pockets and political connections will resist society’s efforts to change. But politics and big business still has to move with the social tide.

We need to create new, stronger currents.

We’re not yet indignant enough. We haven’t yet demonized apathy toward recycling, or vilified the daily practices that don’t support it.

Recycling needs to be made simpler for people, the way smoking was suddenly made hard. “You can’t smoke in here. Get outside in the cold if you want to smoke. Oh, it’s raining? Good.”

Smoking has been socially marginalised, the act now seen as foolish, reckless, selfish, stupid. Even with a piece of dream-casting like Irons, there’s still no absolute guarantee that any movie and message is going to be seen and heard. A green message, about conservation, recycling and the consequences of not recycling: this stuff doesn’t tend to fan the flames of fanboy frenzy, get the whispering classes yabbering, or trend in Cyberspace like a new Bond or Batman movie.

Assemble the Avengers and everyone will get giddy and the Box Office tills will trill to a note in the billion dollars register. But make a documentary about trash, which makes us feel not like superheroes but planet-trashing parasites… well, it’s a tougher selling flavour of Kool Aid.

Only, Trashed is a Kool Aid we need to drink and a message we must heed. It’s action out of awareness time. Avenger-like, we need to assemble, to suit up, as individuals, and as a society. We need to watch movies like Trashed, start being smarter and behaving better - in order to save this planet and give us any shot of there being a real-life sequel. We need to listen to Jeremy Irons:

“We have to build up general public consensus. We have to change our ways. We have to build a movement about an unacceptable state of affairs.”

Before the Patmos screening, Trashed had passed me by. Only, it doesn’t have to have passed any of us by, because it only came out late last year and it isn’t even yet out on rental. So consider this a Bat sign in the night sky. Let’s get Trashed trending. Let’s ensure Jeremy Irons and Candida Brady are heard and that their movie is seen… “come what may”. Tweet @TrashedFilm and this link to the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UM73CEvwMY.

Then VOD it through Vimeo for $5.99. It’s coffee shop money, certainly worth 98 minutes of your time.

See it, tweet it, trend it. Please. And if you don’t, I might just tell Jeremy. And you can trust me, you don’t want that kind of awkward.

SP.

THE VISIBILITY OF THINGS

Why brands need to be Very Present & Very There

 

 

There’s irony in the way branding has borrowed from the language of utility companies.

Utility companies?

After the picture, that’s maybe not the opening sentence you were expecting - but I assure you, everything will link up. I am though going to have to ask that you stop thinking about that picture for a moment.

Great. Thanks. And yes, utilities, as in gas, water and electricity, the ‘Very Very Useful Stuff’ we can’t really live without.

Brand-builders would figure “utility” to be a rather useful word to borrow, given it reminds everyone that brands must make themselves useful to people - given there are few better examples of those daily essentials than the stuff the utility companies provide.

Only, I think we’ve just fished out a herring of the very red kind. (No, it wasn’t hiding in that cleavage.) Because how do you feel about your utility providers? When did you last give your electricity a moments thought? And that’s because this is the 21^st Century, where utilities are meant to work - and so, we don’t actually give two hoots (arguably not even one) about our gas, water or electricity, because it’s “always there”, almost never “suddenly turned off”. Gas, water and electricity might be essential to our daily lives, but they are givens, they are “invisible essentials”. And the moment something becomes truly assumed and taken for granted, it becomes invisible… and forgotten.

And for brands, Invisible & Forgotten is the equivalent of Arsenic & Cyanide. 

 

VERY PRESENT & VERY THERE

Decent broadband, an always-in-range wifi connection, will inevitably become another “invisible given”, once it’s become truly ubiquitous. But we’re not quite there yet. We can still lose signal a little too often. And consequently, we’re still grateful of our broadband, still offer the odd silent thanks to a Virgin or a Sky, because it can still occasionally be taken from us, a 5-bar signal or fibre optic suddenly at the whim of a capricious God or mischievous gremlin. Take something away, and its very disappearance creates fresh and potentially urgent wanting.

But I’m not right now suggesting brands be built by occasionally making themselves scarce, the figurative equivalent of turning off the tap or lights.

I am however suggesting brands can be built be being ‘Very Present’ and ‘Very There’ in the right kind of way.

Now the fact our appreciation (of a thing) is born of things making themselves present and visible – well, that’s why we have brands in the first place. Because branding makes products conspicuous. It gives them profile. Apple. Nike. These are not shrinking violets. Their advertising positions them as social peacocks; life-and-soul-and-look-at-me of the party types. Apple’s “products”, Nike’s “products”: they try and make themselves front-and-centre in our everyday. We can’t help but be aware of that which makes itself clear and highly visible to us. Apple and Nike are but two examples of brands that shoulder-barge the competition in order to get right in front of us. And it’s from that awareness that our potential understanding and consequent appreciation for them may then grow.

Now, Derida (1930-2004) would have argued that “nothing is ever present”, because everything can be so deconstructed to a point where any sense of meaning is stripped away. If you follow that line of logic too far, everything starts to unravel and the world becomes horribly confusing, awfully quickly. So let’s not. But if we play (carefully) with Derida’s proposition, we can also take it somewhere cheerful. It’s reasonable to suggest that things can be present (and understood) to varying degrees. Some a lot more so. Some a lot less.  As a brand builder, I’m interested in making things, objects, products, present in ways that people find urgent and profound. Enter, stage left or right: Branding. Branding grafts meaning on to things. It can make something present.

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) suggested companies don’t manufacture objects, but rather signs - a running shoe is not actually a running shoe, but the semiotic suggestion of a running shoe. A bra is not… you get the idea. However you want to look at things, whether as objects or signs, I say it’s a helluva lot easier to “look” on anything if it’s up close and personal and staring you in the face. Which, yes, I guess takes us back to that opening photo.

So you bet, a brand needs to be useful, and better still essential, like the water and the gas, but never invisibly so. “Out of sight” is not only out of mind, but also out of heart, and too quickly an after-thought. Absence doesn’t equate to increasing fondness. Successful brands make themselves frequent and “Visibly Essential”. There are times when “in your face” can be a very good thing.

SP.

Article as also appears in: The Huffington Post and Emerging Spaces.

Savouring the Metaphorical Sunsets (an interview with Riffle)

 

Have you checked out Riffle Books (www.rifflebooks.com) yet? Their site's great and I'm a big fan of what Riffle are up to. And they kindly wanted to ask me a few questions. The interview is below, and also lives here on their blog.

 

1. How did 'Digital State' start? Why did you take on this particular book project?

 

The book started as a conversation with my publisher, Matthew Smith, at Kogan Page. We were talking around how the digital age is reshaping society, how we all have a data trail, how it’s a fine line, razor sharp in fact, between a transparent world and one that invades privacy and civil liberty.

 

There was then another conversation over supper with Helen Kogan, about how different (or not) Facebook is to being a teenager hanging out at night by the bus stop. It’s a long story, from a very social night. But long-short, these two conversations sowed seeds and triggered questions like:

 

How is society evolving, as a consequence of technological change? How has this invisible technology, “digital”, become this cultural contagion that we’ve all bought into but also can’t escape? How has the very idea of the Nation State changed, been usurped even by this “Digital State” we’re in?

 

Once these questions started fizzing around, there was no real turning back. You have to look for answers, otherwise it becomes a set of whispers that can send you crazy.

 

2. What did the experience of writing this book teach you about your writing/writing process?

 

Before ‘Digital State’, I’d written one novel and one other non-fiction title.

 

My novel, ‘Remember to Breathe’, is 90’s set, in a time “Before Facebook”. It’s part rom-com, part rites of passage, part gender satire - which sort of nets out at genre-bending. My previous non-fiction title, ‘The Better Mousetrap’, is all about how brands must keep re-inventing if they are to retain fame and consumer following.

 

This new book, ‘Digital State’, was a very different experience to the other two. Where my first two books were personal journeys - though the content of each coming from very different places - Digital State is an anthology. 16 chapters, 14 contributors. My role was as writer and editor. It was a shared journey; an ever-so precarious adventure more akin to forming a garage band.

 

3. So, the idea of ‘Digital State’ following an anthology-album felt important?

 

Yes, very much so. Tim Berners-Lee described the internet as a “collaborative play-space”. Very simply, I wanted the format to reflect the theme, to be a collaborative discourse. And so I sourced my own crowd; loved the idea of inviting people I know (friends and experts in their respective fields) to form our own band and see what kind of album we could make.

 

I figured there was one future where we might go multi-Platinum, and another where there’d be blood on the garage floor - y'know, mixing in with the puddles of engine oil. 

 

4. Which writers or books have had a significant impact on you and how?

 

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘1984’: for me, two novels that example fiction at its most profound and fundamental. They’re almost a kind of companion-set and commentary on human nature and our potential for good and otherwise. I first read both in my teens, in the same year, and they were massively influential and informing, part of my reading rites of passage.

 

Stephen King and Carl Hiassen were also serial contributors to my rites of passage. No one builds suspense like King. No one does Florida odd-ball better than Hiassen.

 

Luke Rhinehart (for The Dice Man), Stephen Fry, and Iain Banks: all essential mentions for the impact they’ve had on me. And I’d add into the mix two debuts: J. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero.

 

For pure escapism, that doesn’t get more rich, vivid or downright stylish: anything and everything by Philip Pullman and Ian Fleming.

 

And I always feel a little smarter and a lot humbled reading Norman Mailer. ‘The Fight’ is as good as (sports) writing gets.

 

5. Are there any talents or skills you are currently cultivating?

 

This is where I’d like to say something that sounds cool and snappy, like, I’m learning sax, or, I’m teaching myself Mandarin. Only, I’m not learning sax. I’m borderline tone deaf, was told to mime playing the recorder as a kid, and the closest I’ve got to mandarin is eating one.

 

I think being the better version of yourself is a fairly planet-sized challenge that’s healthy to look straight in the eye once in a while. Being a parent, and trying to do a good job at it, is a lifelong challenge. Trying to strike the right kind of work-life balance can be damned hard too, because it’s too easy to get sucked into projects where it’s hard to step back.

 

The French poet Anatole France once said, “Our passions are ourselves.” I’ve always loved that line. Our passions define us. By extension, I think ‘Our obsessions are ourselves.” They not only explain us but help explain what we accomplish. I think any success comes in part from being obsessive - but the trick is to not sacrifice all else when you’re in that obsessive place.

 

Perspective, balance, priority; I’m trying to cultivate abilities in all three. I figure I’m a permanent work-in-progress.    

 

6. Is there any technology to which you find you are particularly addicted?

 

This question is, of course, very pertinent to some of the themes in Digital State.

 

It’s fascinating to me that technology has even become a thing of potential addiction, a 21^st century narcotic for most of us. We’ve suddenly all become technophiles.

 

This sensation of not feeling connected, of not being with our mobile phone or an internet connection, is creating a very new sense of estrangement and alienation. At the same time, having that connection is potentially disconnecting us from the physical and emotional moment. With social media, we run the risk of developing a ‘curators conceit’ and turning ourselves into the biographers and chroniclers of our own digitally abridged and polished life-narratives.

 

I’m coaching myself to try and feel good about being out of wi-fi area once in a while.

 

7. If you could instantly change one thing about the internet, what would it be?

 

The internet is changing all the time – so we really have that very opportunity. The important message is: whatever the internet is today, we can change it, can improve it. The internet is a reflection of who we are, good and bad. We’re really holding a mirror up to ourselves. So the challenge and invitation is that the internet reflects us at our best; that we ensure it brings out the best in us.

 

Open-source isn’t the same as laissez-faire and I don’t think the internet should be all laissez-faire and self-regulation. There have to be some checks and measures in place, some stewardship and good governance. Ensuring the global digital super-brands like Google don’t become global monopolies but remain answerable and accountable would be one “instant change” that’s easier said than implemented. Ensuring young people have more anonymity and greater protection when online also requires swift and decisive attention and action.

 

The internet is still in its Wild West years, with some panhandling and others trying to sell us snake oil. It’s all very exciting, but not all gunslingers are good guys. We need to have a much clearer sense of who’s wearing the white hats and who’s dressed in black.

 

8. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

 

My children. No question. Easy answer. I know almost anyone can do it, become a parent; that almost all of us are made biologically capable… but I still find the concept of having children remarkable. You become a parent, and your only point of former reference is when you were a child yourself. No one - outside of the caring professions - is equipped with any previous experience. So from day one, it’s a crash course… in what can feel like free falling.

 

Getting to witness and be part of my children’s lives is amazing, the greatest privilege... and yes, a fairly frequent test of patience.   

 

9. Finish this sentence: When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be. . .

 

Y’know, this question always worried me when I was a kid. Because I had no idea. At least, no realistic idea. James Bond looked like he was having a pretty good time, but beyond a life of romantic espionage, exotic travel and alluring femme fatales, I had no clear back-up plan. So if you’d asked my 12 year old self to finish the sentence, I’d have drawn a troubled blank. By the time I hit my late teens, I knew what I really wanted to be was a writer, but I’ve always looked upon writing as more of a passion and vocation, rather than any sure-fire way of paying the mortgage.

 

Stephen King’s line in ‘On Writing’ is genius, where he says, “Writers write.” In other words, doing is being. I love that, because it kills any doubts, cuts through the crap and tells you to get on with it, or get on with something else. Advice rarely gets more sage.   

 

10. If you could give your past self one piece of advice, what would it be?

 

Savour the moments, as they happen, when they happen. Truly, feel them. ‘The Present’ is a tense I think many of us could live in more. It’s so easy and tempting to be looking forward or reflecting back. We live in ‘The Past’, nostalgically, regretfully, re-running, even re-writing. We live in ‘The Future’, planning, worrying about the ‘what if?’ and aspiring to the ‘what might be?’

 

A little clichéd as motifs go, but I find sunrises and sunsets provide jarringly poignant moments of ‘Right Now’. I still need to heed my own advice much more – because I can get carried away thinking forward – but I’m trying to savour the metaphorical sunsets.

SP.