This is Violence

Louis

Louis CK: comedian AND expert brand manager.

That there is the note you find when buying Louis CK’s new comedy special and while not quite as progressive as Radioheads “pay if you want’ model, it’s another great example of how a really well managed brand doesn’t need to fear it’s customers or pirates or whatever.

The fact is: someone (probably a lot of people) will torrent this. But here’s another fact: someone (probably a lot of people) who has never seen him before will see this show because of that torrent and become a fan, and watch his show (which will add to his ratings), and will buy his next video, and will pay to see him next time his in their town, and become one of the vast majority of people who, like myself, WANT to pay for his videos.

Instead of spending his time and money finding strategies to wring every last cent out of any who ever might want to see him, Louis is spending his time and money making fans.

Yo Dawg, I heard You Like Winning Elections… or What Democrats Could Learn from Xzibit

If you read nearly any paper, or watched any sort of T.V. news, or went to pretty much any news or political website in the last 36 hours, you probably read something like this from David Brooks:

“…I doubt the health care bill will survive in anything like its current form. It was and is tremendously unpopular. The Republicans ran on repeal. They got a clear mandate to repeal the thing.”

There has been a lot of talk about this election providing a mandate to Republicans and being a referendum on everything from “Big Government” to “the Stimulus” to “Obamacare” to “Taxes” to just about everything else under the sun.

But here is the thing - I don’t think any of that is true.

“Big Government”? What does that mean? Big where? Big how? “The Stimulus”? I have to wonder what percent of Americans could explain even the basic premise of what “the Stimulus” is. The same is true of “Obamacare.” If anything was made clear during the debate on the issue over the summer it was this: no one knew what it was, but people were pissed about it. And “taxes”? No one wants to pay them, but almost no one, including the newly elected legislators, can begin to put together any type of coherent plan of services to cut to pay for those tax cuts.

Instead, the only clear mandate to me seems to be this: memes work.

By way of example, I submit this:

Let’s say you want to convey the obsurdity of combined objects? Like say a sandwich with the meat is held in place with more meat. The “Yo Dawg” meme is what you’re looking for. While early renditions assumed the basic structure

yo dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an X in your Y so you can VERB while you VERB

and looked like this:

The meme became so ubiquitous that it now can be truncated to simply “yo dawg” and still have the point understood. Example:

So then - what’s the difference between 2010 and 2008 for Democrats? And what does Xzibit have to do with any of this? While I suppose it’s possible that all of a sudden Americans have become a lot more focused on the intricacies of macro economic policy and voted Democrats based on that, I suspect is has a lot more to do with this:

In 2008 artist Shepard Fairey created this poster which instantly became an icon not just of the Obama campaign, but all of his supporters. Like “Yo Dawg”, this image, along with Obama’s twin slogans of “Change” and “Yes We Can”, became shorthand for conveying what were relatively complex and often not completely understood concepts. Against the war? “Change.” Against the war in Iraq but maybe not the war in Afghanistan? “Change.” Upset with the corrupting influence of lobbyists on the legislative process? “Yes We Can.” It doesn’t really matter that the imagery or the slogans are imperfect in conveying their meaning, in fact, that ultimately adds to their effectiveness. It does this by allowing people to agree (or disagree) with basic premise of a given point while silently, often unconsciously, adding their own specifics to it to make it perfect for them.

At my company Fight, we call this “the 80% rule.” It goes like this: If you’re trying to convey a difficult to grasp thought or concept, you’re better off having your statement be eighty percent right and simple, than one-hundred percent right and complex. Put another way, Apple includes “Multitasking” as a key feature of iOS on their website but it was only at their developers conference that Job’s explained the concept of “fast app switching” or as John Gruber put it:

“Apps don’t run in windows, they run on the full screen. So when you leave one app and switch to another in iPhone OS 4, the GUI — the visual interface — is not going to continue updating in the background. What will happen, if the app is updated to support the new OS 4 APIs (which, I expect, all actively-maintained apps will be), is that the app will stay in memory but stop processing. Switch back and it’ll start processing again, right where it left off.”

Yo dawg, we heard you like multitasking.

Which takes us to 2010. Gone were the icons. Gone we’re the slogans. In their place were nuanced explanations of how healthcare reform actually works. Tortured reflections on the size and timing of the stimulus package. And Kerry-esque stump speeches about how candidates were for either before they were against both. (a meme in its own right)

Meanwhile Republicans were running tried and true platforms of “small government” and new ones like “end Obamacare”, all under the flag of the “Tea Party”, which clearly not so much a coherent group as much as it is a catch-all concept for generalized anger at Obama and Democrats.

Putting a fine point on the role of good campaigning as opposed to good legislating is that no one really likes Republicans either:

“Democrats have a 10-point favorability gap: 43 percent of voters have a positive opinion of the party, while 53 percent aren’t thrilled. The Republican Party also gets a thumbs-down from 53 percent of the nation’s voters, with just 41 percent saying they’re happy with the GOP.”

Of course, none of this is anything new. It’s a basic tenet of advertising, which I suppose is perhaps why it’s troubling to look our political process this way. We’d like to think that the goal of any democracy is an educated voter base making rational choices based on a full set of data. But just as the idea of the “rational consumer” was thrown out the window a long time ago, so too should the “rational voter”. We’re irrational beings by nature, and the situation is compounded by an increasingly complex and global world. It would seem these days that true understanding of any issue is more often than not the purview of specialists within an administration rather than by anyone we see on T.V. Given this, how we can we expect someone with a day job to fully grasp the implications of reforming something as complex as the American health system.

Instead, if Democrats (or any party) want a chance to govern, they should learn from 2008. We call them “campaigns” for a reason, and as intellectually objectionable as it may seem, they’re about selling a concept not the intricate process. They’re about taking what are incredibly complex ideas and reducing them down to a meaning that people can “get”.

Bernbach said it like this:

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”

More on Asymmetry and the Web

If you haven’t seen it yet, Jay Rosen has an excellent run down of some of the journalistic implications of the newest Wikileaks story around the release of the Afghanistan War Logs.

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.

Things I Liked #2

Virgin Air Apps
I loved Virgins first app Flying Without Fear so much I used it as an example of a brand getting mobile app development right when I spoke at PSU’s Internet Marketing Conference back in December.

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.

The Importance of Farmville

Among Time magazine’s 50 Worst Inventions there are many that probably deserve to be there: Hair in a can, the parachute jacket, and popup advertising among them. But two that stuck out to me as being misplaced on the list though were Foursquare and Farmville.

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.

Face of Media

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Bret Bernhoft from the Face of Media podcast to talk about brands on the web, what competition means now, and a little about what Fight is up to these days.

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.

Why I Love Advertising

I spend most of time here talking about how awful things are in advertising right now, especially online. I really think the web has brought a cultural sea change that most agencies still haven’t wrapped their heads around and it’s marginalized the importance of their work. 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.

A Very Sad Tiger

A lot of people seem to think the latest Nike spot, effectively marking Wood’s return to Golf and the brand, is some kind of bold and daring piece. I have to disagree with these people. 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

Ways of Seeing the World

This sheet, comparing the upcoming HP Slate to the iPad has been making the rounds for the last couple days and I think it says a lot about the difference in how HP, or their customers, see the world in contrast to Apple.

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.