The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

One place though where this seems be to actually, sadly, true is in the rise of bloatware on Android phones. Having worked for a couple different Windows based computer companies, I was always amazed and dismayed at the power partner marketing groups within these companies had to force software and sometimes hardware onto machines.

It’s one of the things that turned to me to Apple.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than that, is that if Google wants to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued Microsoft as a brand, they’re going to have to do what Microsoft never did: own the hardware. Obviously the Nexus One was this, but it seems like Google didn’t, or doesn’t, have any long term vision for this product line in the way Apple has had for the iPhone. Without that, it seems like increasingly, the Android experience is going to be what carriers or handset manufacturers want it to be. At this point, I’m not even sure you can differentiate between the OS and the hardware it runs on. To have a coherent experience, I think you’d need to recognize them as intrinsically tied.

In larger sense it points out, for the millionth time, that if you want own your brand experience, you have to own it top to bottom, no matter what you do.

update
Microsoft doing what Microsoft does with these things: After spending a lot of time redesigning Windows Mobile 7 in an “authentically digital” UI, Microsoft had said they would not allow manufacturers to modify it. I thought this was a great move. While still not as good as MS creating it’s own hardware, at least they’d have some sense of what the end user experience would be. Then I read this today.

Oh well.

Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.

They’ve followed up with another one I like – Jet Lag Fighter

In both cases, I like that Virgin is looking at the totality of a customers experience with them. In the case of Flying Without Fear, they’re targeting people with a predisposition to not liking Virgins core product offering and trying to address it. The interface is dead simple and because the application is mostly audio, it means the user doesn’t have to spend their time interfacing with the app to get what they need out of it. Jet Lag Fighter is much the same. It takes a key negative experience of traveling and attempts to remedy it. Because Jet Lag Fighter is something you’d use specifically when you’re not interfacing with Virgin’s main product, makes it a great brand play too.

Overall, two great examples of a brand understanding their ecosystem, their customer, their brand, and their technology.

Media Diet
It takes me about 45 minutes after I turn my computer on in the morning to catch up with all the sites I read everyday, twitter, and a list of RSS feeds that I work diligently to keep trim. That said, I can’t help but wonder if I’m spending my time reading the best things I can.

What I Read is The Atlantic Wire’s regular series asking people of all stripes what they’re reading. While it’s not just online reading, it does slant heavily that way, so it’s pretty easy to sample the recommendations for your own use.

I love this site for two reasons: First, I like being able to see what smart people reading. From the most recent entry – Clay Shirky, to Terry Gross, to Ezra Klein it’s pretty fun to see where there is reassuring overlap and where I might be able to pick up some new stuff. (Side note: Shirly doesn’t read tech blogs, which makes me think I should’t read tech blogs, but if tech blogs are wrong…)

The site also fills a non-trivial need I have to know what famous/smart people do in their free time. Do with that what you will.

Put This On
I had a chance a few years ago to move to New York permanently. I had a great job offer with a great company in a city I’ve loved my whole life. In the end though, as much as I love NYC, I just couldn’t leave Portland. Portland is a easy city to live in, maybe that makes me soft, I don’t know, but I like it.

What I don’t like though is that it’s one of the few cities I know of where there is such a thing as “my nice running shoes.” These are the shoes people wear when they want to be “fancy.” Portland is also home of the “nice hoodie”, “nice parka”, and “nice hat with ears”. Mostly this is fine, but some times it’s nice to see people going out without looking like their camping.

Since I started Fight, I’ve to make a conscious effort to try and dress more like a grown-up, and this is why I like Put This On. Men’s style can go so wrong so easy, and more often than not these days it seems to trend between “childish” and “douche-y.” PTO is all about how to take things that used to be basics and bring them back. Pant’s that fit, a nice tie, nice shoes. Things your grandfather wore every day and looked awesome.

Meet the Facts
I love politics. I grew up in a fairly political family where debating issues remains a pretty standard way to pass time. What I don’t like anymore are political talk shows.

Meet The Press is a Sunday morning stalwart, broadcast continuously since the late 40′s. Like most political shows though, recently it’s become more a place for politicians and business leaders to get some free airtime than a place of even moderate debate.

Enter Meet the Facts. Another example of the asymmetrical nature of the web, MTF was launched after numerous pleas for the show to simply fact check its own guests. Started by a couple college students, the site has gained the attention of people like NYU professor Jay Rosen, an early critic of the state of political journalism on T.V., as well as NPR and the Huffington Post.

My favorite part of the whole program is that the creators have offered to give the entire site to Meet The Press if they will just start fact checking.

“If NBC News and the staff of Meet the Press agree to permanently institute a public fact-checking system for everything guests say on the air, we think they should absolutely name that feature “Meet the Facts” and we will gladly transfer over the domain name, Twitter username, and Facebook page username for their use, and at no cost.”

If It Was My Home
I feel weird putting this here as something I “liked”. Maybe “appreciate” is a better word? At any rate, among the many great and important projects people have done in response to the gulf oil spill, this one really drove home for me the massiveness of it geographically.

Sitting here in Northeast Portland and recognizing that there is oil coving an area that would reach well out west into the Pacific and and far enough east to pass Mt. Hood is staggering. Combining that with utterly heart wrenching photos (caution, these are disturbing) from The Big Picture of the devastated wildlife in the spill begins to make concrete to someone sitting 2,000 miles away the level of tragedy taking place. If you have the means, and you’d like – you can donate here.

Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

You can listen to part one here. And Part two here. For you convenience, I made sure to annoyingly tap on the table in both, so you don’t have to worry about missing that.

Bret has interviewed some other really interesting people (most with far more pleasant voices than mine), so while you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews out.

All that said, there is a reason I got into this. I love brands, and I love advertising. It’s this love that makes me so aware of how much more culturally important I think advertising used to be. Allowing for the possibility that I have an unhealthy relationship with this industry, I pulled some examples I love that I think demonstrate this.

First – two classics. The first one is very likely why I got into advertising in the first place.

I think this one may be one of the more perfect commercials I’ve ever seen.

But it’s not all nostalgia. Here are a couple from around 2006 and 2008 respectively.

When I was watching these again this morning, I realized a few things about them. First, each one I think uses the medium pretty much perfectly. When I was in college I took a short story writing class and the professor described the method of short story writing not as shorting a longer story, but as telling the entire story by fully rendering one single moment to become a metaphor for the entire narrative. I think each of these does that perfectly. They’re each 30 second spots, but each one is a complete story told through one single element or theme.

Second, each them is unrepentantly ernest. I was listing to the Talk of the Nation interview with Bob Garfield a couple weeks ago where he was talking about what he called “advertisings worship at the alter of comedy” and it struck me how true this is. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but I miss when an agency and brand where not afraid to say “yes, this is culturally important.”

Looking back now, it occurs to me how balls-y these ads actually where. Comparing them to something like the current Nike MVP ads, there is a safety and a distance in the humor. For me, there is something wonderful about the ads above that take the risk of saying “yes, sports matter, Nike matters.” They wore their convictions on their sleeves and in doing so took on a level of noble vulnerability.

So there you have it, proof I don’t hate advertising.

If you haven’t seen it, take a watch:

While it has all the affectations of a serious and daring spot – the formal framing, the back & white, the stern narration – I find it devoid of any seriousness at all. It is in fact, possibly the safest, and ultimately most insulting, route Nike could have taken.

What I’m presented with is this sad sack, hunched over Tiger Woods, pleading for my forgiveness like I’m his wife. Only, it’s not him asking for forgiveness, it’s HIS DAD. That’s right, you made his dad do the dirty work, all the while asking literally nothing of Tiger:

- Tiger, tell me about YOUR thoughts?
- Tiger, how are YOU feeling?

Is everything okay big guy? You doin’ alright? You need a soda?

In my mind, there are really only two legitimate tracks here:

1) What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, but Nike is all about golf, so lets get it on!
2) What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, this matters to Nike, so lets address it honestly.

Of course I apparently forgot about secret option 3

What ever Tiger did in his personal life is morally reprehensible, we know it, you know it, we know you know it, but instead of addressing it directly or saying nothing, either of which WOULD ACTUALLY BE DARING, we’re going to attempt to LOOK like we’re addressing it, all the while trying to reposition Tiger as a pitiful victim man-child being defended by his DEAD DAD. You can’t be mad at that guy. Right?

Look, I’m not naive, Nike has a golden calf that can’t keep it’s pants on. They can’t toss him overboard. But they also can’t tie themselves too close to him in case this goes further south. So they did what they had to do. I get it. But lets call a spade a spade. All moral outrage aside, looking at this from a purely strategic point of view, this wasn’t daring, edgy or powerful.

It was the safest thing they possibly could have done.

Update
Buzzfeed seems to agree
White and Wong think it’s alright
These guys liked it a lot

Note that every aspect of each device that HP pulls out is a technical specification. It’s the size of the screen, graphics cards, ports and so on. No where does HP mention the experience of using the iPad as it compares to the Slate. There is nothing about ease of use or ease of installing applications. Most striking to me: no mention of the OS.

To be fair, HP doesn’t have total control over a lot of these aspects of the device as they’re the hardware manufacturer so it may only make sense to speak to what they can own. Additionally, this may be intentionally geared to the person who would be looking at the HP in the first place.

None of this is meant to be critical of HP, I just find it interesting to see what motivates a brand, and how those motivations manifest themselves in the final product.

As you can probably guess from the title, the goal of the session was get people thinking about a different way to look at how brands relate to their audience, how agencies can more consistently deliver better experiences to that audience, and how and why we should be thinking about the business of our clients.

It is, in a lot of ways, a presentation version of this post