The Dayfilms Experiment – some rules and background

As part of the OSLP project ‘The Key To Leadership‘, I thought I’d see how quickly I could make films to document the process.  Can you shoot, edit, puiblish & edit in a single 24 hour period, so that it’s good enough to share online, but make it part of your work so you can get it done as you go.  Let’s call them dayfilms.

It harks back to part of the Smithery studio projects for the year, working with different kinds of media to tell stories.

I’m using my Lumix LX7 to shoot lots of high speed, informal shots, and combine that with audio captured with a Samson Meteor Mic and iPad mini.  I’m importing the film footage into the iPad on iOS7, cropping in the camera roll, stitching together with iMovie on the iPad, then adding the audio on underneath.

Here’s the first dayfilm, an interview with Thomas Forsyth, who’s working on the project with me.

Resolution Test – interview with Thomas Forsyth from Smithery on Vimeo.

Anytway, I thought it might be interesting to set myself a set of rules to work with for dayfilms.  Which might look like this (to be refined as I go):

1. It only counts if it’s from first shot to export in 24 hours.
2. It’s not the main thing you’re doing, but a recording of another part of your work
3. Distribution > Perfection

Let’s see how that pans out over the next few weeks.

Lego Batman’s take on the Future of Advertising 2020.

Last year, the Herdmeister Mark Earls and I were asked to contribute to the Wharton School of Advertising.  Given that it’s a celebration of different views from across academia, business, students and more, we thought there might be enough long reads already, so we’d do something…

…well, a little different, using Artefact Cards.  And Lego Batman.  Enjoy:

Developed for the Wharton Future of Advertising Program’s Advertising 2020 Project 2012-2013, wfoa.wharton.upenn.edu/ad2020.

If you want to sign up to get news of when all the pieces are released, then head on over here and sign up for news.

The Planner's Book Of Things To Make

The planner’s book of things to make

View more webinars from John V Willshire.

UPDATE – I felt a bit guilty about posting just the below.  So I’ve uploaded the presentation on Slideshare and done a wee voiceover.  Hoorah for the interwebs.

PREVIOUS POST…

…yes, fair enough, you might click on a post expecting something interesting, but you’re going to be disappointed, because all it actually is so far is some photoshop I’ve bodged together as an intro slide for the IPA – Level One talk I’m doing tomorrow…

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Sorry.  It’s all I have at the moment.

If you want to read stuff on what you thought the subject area implied, then you should wait until I write the bastard, and manage to record a wee narration and upload it here, or maybe read Mark Pollard’s post on Why Strategists Should Make Stuff again (a faster, better option, probably).

Or you could watch a video that We Are The Physics made:

 

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Apple, Ping, Douglas Adams… and #cheeseandpicklefail

I was asked by Campaign to write a piece on Apple’s Ping social network, which was in the magazine last week.  I thought I’d post it here too.

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So, it turns out that Apple’s Ping is rubbish.  Is it rubbish?  Well, yes, it must be rubbish.

Lots of people have been saying Ping is rubbish, and sharing their thoughts on its unequivocal rubbishness.  They’ve rubbished it on twitter, they’ve rubbished it on blogs, they’ve rubbished it in forums.  Some people have even gone to the bother to make films to upload to Youtube rubbishing Ping.

It’s like a new kid arrived at social network school, and the bigger kids nicked his lunch money, flushed his head down the loo and wrote ‘rubbish’ across his forehead in permanent marker.

OK, so perhaps it’s not surprising.  If I asked you what you’d want from a music social network in 2010, a closed network locked inside a walled garden might not have been top of your list.  To paraphrase The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s a social network hosted “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’…”

We’ll come back to Douglas Adams later though.

However, in a world that’s evolving so, so quickly (Youtube is only five years old, remember), I’m inclined to think that the one thing we mustn’t rush to do is judge.  To try and make more sense of this, it’s worth stepping back a bit to see the big picture.

The past year has seen both Apple and Google start to make plays in the social space – Apple with Ping and Game Centre, and Google with Wave and Buzz. 

Now, the social phenomenon has caught them both napping a bit, and large companies find it harder than small ones to move quickly.  But they’re trying to work out how to build it in to what they do already.  They’re preparing for the future.

The problem is the media glare (both traditional and ‘social’) they both operate under.  When you’re a start-up trying to build something new, nobody is watching.

When you’re Apple or Google and you announce you’re going to the canteen to see what’s for lunch, there’s a press conference at the till and a three day post-mortem across the world on #cheeseandpickleFAIL.

We saw it last month when Eric Schimdt announced at Zeitgeist that they’re “trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component”.  Press coverage went through the roof, and commentators across the world offer a hundred and one thousand different interpretations of what this could mean for users, competitors, regulators, advertisers and so on.  Everyone is always watching.

Which is hardly the ideal climate for innovation.  If either Apple or Google had launched the first version of Facebook, we’d have probably laughed too.  It’s easy to knock people nowadays.  They always said that ‘everyone’s a critic’.  Thanks to technology, they’re now all published critics too.

But rather than poking fun at those who’ve started down the social path and have taken a few wrong steps here and there, it’s much more important to look at who isn’t “trying to take core products and add a social component”.  And I’m not just thinking about technology companies.  I’m thinking about every sort of company.

We’re on the cusp of a world where everything is “social”, from the car you drive to the toys your kids play with.

Ready for the slightly geeky bit?  Good.

You may have heard of the ‘internet of things’.  It describes a world in which every machine, product and object is connected to the internet, and the interaction between them produces a myriad of weird and wonderful services and experiences for us.

Dave Evans, Chief Futurist at Cisco Systems, recently stated that there already 35 billion devices that through some form or other are connected to the internet, and there over a trillion ‘devices’ by his estimate that could be hooked up; cars, livestock, kitchen appliances, pets… the list is endless.

The important bit is that when they’re connected, they’ll talk to each other.

Let’s take the car example.  This year Ford announced MyFord Touch, the next generation of the Ford Sync program (powered by the Microsoft Auto platform).  Amongst many other features, it has its own cellular modem built in.  In tandem with the GPS navigation device, you’ve now got a car that knows exactly where it is… and can talk to other things around it.

Want to know where the cheapest petrol is, or which restaurants are still serving breakfast?  No problem.  Want to see what songs others listen to most along your favourite drives?  Easy peasy.

Then we’ve got toys; Disney recently proposed that all toy manufacturers set out  ‘to establish a set of industry development and technology standards for web-connected toys’.  They’re looking to prevent a format war, and through making one standard for any toy that connects to the internet, decrease the costs of implementation for everyone whilst at the same time increasingly playability for kids.

Think back to when you were a kid.  It often irritated me when playing with two different toy types they didn’t ‘work’ together; Star Wars figures, for example, couldn’t hold pieces of Lego.  Copious amounts of Blu-tack solved that problem of course, though in doing so it created another carpet cleaning based one for Mum.  Sorry Mum.

Anyway, one industry standard that means any toys can talk to each other, whether to form alliances against the Evil Emperor Grrh’AAttH’TTh or to see how often they’ve taken tea together.  No doubt it’ll connect to your Club Penguin account and earn you Coins for playing in the real world too.

All this will be natural for a generation who will grow up knowing that everyone and everything can talk to everyone and everything else; ‘playing nicely together’ takes on a whole new meaning.

It will be so natural, in fact, that they won’t have a name for it.  Which brings us round again to Douglas Adams, who in a 1999 essay despaired of the term ‘interactivity’ and its emergence as a fashionable term to use when talking about the new medium of ‘the web’.  He pointed out that back before broadcast media…

“…we didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.”

Everything was ‘interactive’.  And in much the same way, when everything has ‘social layers’ built into it, so it will be that nobody will talk about ‘social this’ and ‘social that’.  Because why would you make something that didn’t have ‘social’ embedded?

So then, back to Ping; it’s just the first attempt to build a social layer into iTunes.  It had over a million members in the first 48 hours.  Would you bet against it evolving inside iTunes until its useful and fun?  There’s not many folk have made money betting against Apple. 

But maybe by then ‘social’ will be so naturally embedded into everything we’ll forget what all the fuss was about…

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The warmongering kick-ass consumer killing GriefTank III

Neil Perkin, all round clever and lovely fella, has written this article for New Media Age on the language of marketing… well worth reading (as all of Neil’s things are, as you’ll know).

Anyway, it reminded me of my favourite slide I’ve never used. 

I can’t remember why I never used it.  But I didn’t.  I might one day.  But you might have a use for it now, having been duly inspired by Neil’s piece.

  

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(PS If you really like it, I have an animated version.  Yes, I know, someone’s got too much time on his hands…)

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The last media agency

“Because we are increasingly producing and sharing media, we have to relearn what that word can mean”

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

I talked a couple of days ago about writing this post, prompted by the PSFK badges. 

Well, on the morning we present our wares for the Media Week agency of the year awards (with some stiff competition from our fellow finalists, MEC, Zenith & Carat), it’s as good a time to get it out there…

The media agency you work for now is the last media agency you’ll ever work at.


Of course, by that I don’t mean that everyone who reads this is going to disappear off into some stellar career in some other sector of the communications landscape, or land a plum role client side, or give it all up to farm a smallholding in Norfolk.

Though some of you will.

But it’s more about the nature of what the folk in the media agency do for clients, and what that adds up to as an entity, as a community. 

And as I mentioned before, it was set off by the PSFK badges last week…

I arrived at the conference, and greeting me (along with an army of smiley helpers) was a table of badges with lots of different little badges, with words like ‘PR’, ‘communications’, ‘design’ and the like on them.  Something to help other people know what you did, spark a little conversation perhaps.

Anyway, I grabbed a media badge, as you do…

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…and then looked around the other badges. 

And noticing the one saying ‘tech’, grabbed one of those too. 

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Because what we in a media agency do nowadays is so infused with technology that each and every last one of us is a techie.  Whether we like it or not.

(Some folk, of course, like it more than others.  You can spot them by asking them how long a parsec is if the Millenium Falcon did the Kessel run in twelve of them…)

And then, I saw the ‘maker’ badge.

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Now, traditionally ‘making’ is not what the ‘media agency’ do.  We don’t do making. 

At least, so the ad agency keep telling us.  Before showing us a thirty second script that needs to be shot in Argentina ‘because of the light’.

Yet as I write this of course, I’m up to my ears in the pocketgame manufacturing process (arranging atoms is a different kettle of fish compared to arranging bits), and upstairs Drum PHD have a list of projects as long as your arm of phenomenal things they’ve made…

…including the Sage AFP of The Krypton Factor, which is still the thing I can tell my Mum & Dad about and say ‘we did that’ so that they have at least a vague idea of what I do.

We make stuff, nowadays.  Lots of wonderful, different, diverse things. 

But why? 

Firstly, all a media agency has ever done is connect people with companies.  It’s our sole, driving purpose.  It just so happened there was an established, mass media delivery system that we used to do that when there was nothing else. 

Now there’s lots and lots and lots of different options.  But our purpose remains the same. 

Secondly, we’re techies because we need to understand how you connect people with companies…

Going back to Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus, he describes media as “the middle layer in any communication, whether it is as ancient as the alphabet or as recent as mobile phones”.  We need to know that ‘middle layer’ inside out.

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, I think the making bit goes back to something Matt Jones talked about at PSFK…

He showed this picture of the Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind…

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…where his character has this vision of a mountain in his head that he becomes obsessed with.

And the only way he can get it out properly is to make it.

That’s what I think we feel when we, the meadja agency lot, are immersed in that ‘middle layer’ between people and companies… it’s perhaps too hard to explain sometimes to an ad agency exactly what the thing is, or looks like, or should be. 

The only way we can get it out is by making it. 

That’s what we are nowadays:

We are media, we are techies, we are makers.

 

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Physical stuff. It matters. In Matter.

A quick ‘un…

We love all the digital malarkey.  It’s ace, and new, and exciting, and so on and so forth.

As a result, we spend less time thinking about the physical stuff.  And as Ed points out here, physical connections for brands & companies can be phenomenally powerful.

It’s what Matter was started to do, over two years ago now. 

Here’s a photo of the first box I opened back then.  There’s a whole pictorial review on flickr here

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Anyway, Matter is coming back this November, when we put the Pocketgames in it.  Woo!

Someone’s dropped out though, so Tim asked if there was anyone else that might want to put something wonderful in Matter to send to people. 

I thought I’d post it here, in case anyone who reads it might have something.

But what to put in?

Charlie wrote a good critique of the first matterbox pointing out that…

“Most of the other bits were a bit weak… not really getting me that excited or stimulated.”

I think (and may be wrong) that the trick to getting something that works brilliantly in Matter is to create something physical inside the box that will make people want to do something social outside the box.

It’s not (I repeat, NOT) a sampling exercise. 

It’s a box of actual social objects.

Email Tim, he’ll tell you more – tim@artomatic.co.uk

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Inception, MacGuffins, and ideas that spread

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea.

A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules…”

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(This is a follow up to the previous post on MacGuffins and so on.  It’s worth reading that first.)

Now, I’m very certain I won’t have been the first to seize on this quote from Inception and bend it to fit some hinky marketing theory about social sharing.

I thought the quote had a beautiful simplicity of expression about it.  We all know that, at the end of the day, powerful ideas spread.  As we navigate the layer upon layer of modern communications though, it’s the how and why we’re increasing trying to unpick.

One of the contributors to the last post, John Dodds, said…

“Think Social Idea”

…and followed up with an explanation…

“Focus on the idea, the belief behind the company – why you’re doing what you’re doing and how you’re hoping to change the world for the better – and focus your efforts on making it social ie spreadable discussable, supportable…”

Beautifully expressed.  Of course, the thing is, it all amounts to same thing; Object-Idea, Social Idea, MacGuffin.  It doesn’t really matter what you call it.

Why?

Let’s go back to the movies.

I found a post by Douglas J. Eboch, who’s a screenwriter (and a fine fellow I reckon, given he uses his middle initial… that’s always a mark of good character…).  It was on MacGuffins.

Douglas writes…

“I define the MacGuffin as the object or goal that the characters’ mission is focused on. For example, in Inception (written by Christopher Nolan) it is the idea that Cobb and his team are trying to implant in Fischer’s dreams. In Casablanca it is the letters of transit. In Sweet Home Alabama, the divorce papers. In Avatar (written by James Cameron) it’s the goofily named Unobtanium.”

The thing that gets people moving, doing things, makes you care about finding out what happens.

Douglas continues…

“Alfred Hitchcock defined the MacGuffin this way: “It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” Hitchcock believed the more generic the MacGuffin was the better since the audience didn’t really care about it.”

“Inception tells us what the idea that Cobb must implant is, but do we really care? It could be just about anything and the movie would still work as well. It’s simply a device to get Cobb and Arthur and Ariadne and the others into a dangerous dream world that will test their skills and force their characters to undergo internal change.”

It doesn’t matter what it is, or what it’s called.  It’s what it does to people.

Back to our MacGuffin.  Well, what I called a MacGuffin.  John called it a Social Idea.  Hugh called it an Object-Idea. You’re maybe thinking of calling it something different, putting your own spin on it, something that works for you to help explain to others.

It is all of these, and it is none of these.

The Macguffin here is a MacGuffin.

It doesn’t matter what it is called, or what diagrams you use to draw it.  What matters is what happens to the people who’re talking about it, debating it, remodelling it, chasing the perfect version.

It changes us. It plants an idea, a seed inside our head, which starts to grow.  And when we talk about it to others, it starts to change them too.  We can express it however we like, and it will take many forms, but that idea will continue to spread.

And that idea is that we’ve got to change the way we do things.

The idea that the future of marketing, branding, advertising, media and so on is very different from the past, and indeed from the present.

The idea that companies whose purpose isn’t an social, spreadable idea actually might not have that much of a future.

It’s an idea that can transform the world and rewrite all the rules…

 

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Social Projects – The tall and the long of it

Beth asked me if I’d like to contribute a guest post to the Social Collective 2010 blog for the event she’s co-organising on September 30th in London – there’s still tickets available here, too. 

The Social Collective conference is rooted in practice rather than theory; finding a better way to pitch social projects to clients, and then run them too.

So I said I’d like to talk about something that’s be brewing for a while, off the back of the ol’ bonfires & fireworks analogy… so here it is…

The tall and the long of it

In one of my favourite traditions of episodic storytelling, I’d like to start with something you should imagine is spoken by a gruff American man…

“PREVIOUSLY, ON FEEDING THE PUPPY…”

(You really heard him too, didn’t you..?)

Last year I was part of the wonderful IPA Social crew who created a list of principles which would help inform the approach agencies should take to ‘social’…

…rather than just imposing the ‘hey, it worked this way in advertising’ rule to everything.

Ten of us wrote a principle each, and my contribution ran as follows:

 

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In the sense that…

i) Firework = Big, explosive, attracts a crowd immediately, expensive, dies quickly

ii) Bonfire = Small at first, collaborative, draws in a crowd slowly, gains momentum

It helps imagining it using a simple diagram like this…

   

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I’ve found it particularly helpful in giving folk an easy-to-get image of why social projects are different than things like advertising.

(“Social Projects”?  Yes, I’ve been trying to stop saying ‘social media’, because sometimes there isn’t really any ‘media’ involved, especially in a media agency sense).

But still all a bit theoretical, which is not what Social Collective is about.

What ‘Bonfires & Fireworks’ has made me realise is this:

Selling in tall potential is easy.  We need to get better at selling in long potential.

Think about the firework (advertising, PR etc).  The way we (always have) sell in fireworks is talking about the total audience of a television channel, the readership of a newspaper, the unique users of a website.

All of these large numbers are stuffed full of tall potential; no-one expects that nearly everyone in those figures will be affected by what we place there (or even see it, necessarily). 

But the comfort of potential makes everyone happier at buying a firework, despite knowing that the ‘actual’ delivery will be considerably less.

 

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Social projects, on the other hand, don’t have that ‘tall potential’.  What they have instead is ‘long potential’.

Long potential in social projects is the moment when something big and amazing happens.  The world rejoices at the wonderful thing you’re done, all your employees sign new lifetime contracts because the company rocks so much, your customers dance in the streets and set up religions dedicated to you.

Or, more realistically, it’s the bit where the project is successful enough for everyone involved to be really glad they did it, and want to keep doing it.

The problem is, unlike fireworks, it’s really hard to get a handle on when or if the ‘actual’ might tip into  ‘potential’, how big that potential might be, or how much it might cost; three questions clients are understandably pretty keen on asking when starting projects.

 

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So how do we need to get better at responding to the ‘when, how big, how much’?  Using that wonderful gift of hindsight, here’s three things I’ve found help make everyone, both client and agency, happier and more effective on social projects.

1. Keeping it real

It’s very tempting to use the ‘social media rock star’ examples when selling in social projects… “yeah, Dell made $267 billion using twitter, and they installed the moon on a USB stick as a result…”

However, just using these examples at best sets wildly unrealistic expectations for the client, and at worst you’ll be dismissed as a fantasist and show the door.  Scour the web for examples that are a) a lot more like what you’re proposing and b) show results that sound realistic and achievable for what you are proposing to the client.  Those examples are out there, just not as hyped, so you’ll have to dig a bit harder.

Then when you’re selling in your project, you’ve got a range from the ‘realistic’ to the ‘fantastic’, which starts to resemble the actual/potential dynamic seen in the firework model.

2. Living one day at a time

I’ll be honest, I’ve nicked this from Omar Little.  The only way to be as active and reactive as you need to be when building social bonfires is too fix as few constraining frameworks around yourselves as possible.

Because, unlike fireworks, we don’t know when bonfires start and stop, it’s very hard to phase them into the traditional ‘campaign’ expectations… it makes everything clients might expect really difficult, from estimating how many people will see it, to carrying out research to see how it affected those people.

What’s been more effective for us is creating a loose framework of the stages you think the project will go through, roughly estimating how long each might take, and then setting off.  You travel through the project grabbing insights & statistics en route, spotting opportunities and closing down redundant sections, which you present to the client at pitch stage; it overtly becomes part live-project, part experimental research piece.
 

3. It’s always worth doing

Finally, we get to the ‘money’ question… how much will this cost?  With all the preparation you’ve done above, you’ll have an idea of all the elements needed to make a brilliantly successful project… and that’s your job, to think of every angle, and propose it.

Your client will, invariably and reasonably, ask ‘do we really need section x/y/z?’.  Things will start dropping off the plan, the project will become leaner and tighter as a result… but there isn’t really a stage where I think you should turn around and say ‘I don’t think this is worth doing with that much money’. 

Firstly, no-one’s really qualified to say what will & won’t work with social projects. 

Secondly, remember it’s a part-research piece, and if the finding you reach is that social projects don’t work for your client at that price, you’ve all learned something.

And thirdly, and most importantly, this brave new world isn’t going away.  So the sooner you get some social projects up and running, the better it’ll be for your client and for you…

John V Willshire is Chief Innovation Officer at PHD Media in London

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