Archive for posts i’ve written
i hate advertising
09 May, 2012 • posts i've written • 6 comments
I was in NY this week for Creative Week, speaking on a panel with other creatives, on the topic of the IDEA in advertising.
What began as a discussion on the primacy of ideas quickly (d)evolved into three of the four of us admitting we hate advertising.
I’ve been mulling that over ever since. Part of me feels vindicated. Part of me feels like a sad cliche.
“Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” – Robert Stephens
Full disclosure: I work for an advertising agency. Said agency has produced work that some people indeed love. We’ve shown what can be accomplished within the confines of an ad, and it’s nothing to scoff at, or belittle in any way. It’s good work that has proven to grow business.
Fuller disclosure: Words strung together that seem to suggest opinions here are my own and not those of my employer.
I grew up with a pervasive relationship with the internet and web technologies. I was hacking together digital products in my early teens and I helped build digital start-ups in my twenties. I consider myself to be a citizen of the web, above the state or country in which I was born.
And I am truly disappointed in how the advertising industry has largely approached the web. (I’m disappointed in publishers, too)
We’ve taken a technology that’s led to an explosion in participatory culture, and we’ve recreated the billboard and :30 spot.
We’ve earned consumer’s apathy. We’ve conditioned it through our own laziness and sheer lack of creativity.
Like anything, the top 1% of advertising is brilliant. It’s inspiring and effective.
Some call the other 99% landfill marketing. I consider it to be the biggest waste of money, creativity, and talent in the history of the world. Full stop.
I’m exhausted by the glut of garbage that passes as advertising. I’m frustrated by this industry and by the clients that ask for this work.
I’m also very aware that I probably sound like a pompous twit. And in the eyes of industry veterans, I probably sound like a miserable brat. I’m not sure our little bitch-fest about ads made for a compelling panel, either.
But yet. I feel a responsibility. As a member of a generation gifted with the revolution that is the web, I feel a duty to protect it. To make it better. And to stand in the way of those attempting to pollute it.
The world wasn’t born into existence with periodic pauses for commercial break. The web wasn’t either.
Part of this is personal. My father is a builder of buildings. He can point to skyscrapers that have his fingerprints.
My work is far more ephemeral. It provides no shelter for those it touches. It’s too often an empty calorie snack that isn’t even appetizing.
But I’m here in this industry because I know, with certainty, that our work can be more meaningful. It can be useful. It can impact people’s lives for the better. Brands can be more than the sum of their products. We can use the billions of dollars we wield every year with greater responsibility.
We’re at an inflection point. It’s been coming for more than a decade. It was born with the web.
Advertising, as we know it today, still has a place in the world. There are many occasions and opportunities for it to be incredibly effective. I’m just old enough to hope for a bloodless coup.
But the lion’s share of the work this industry is producing has to end.
It has to, or I fear that it will continue, that we’ll accept this great mediocrity and insult to the web (and to its citizens) as fait accompli.
emerging bets at the intersection of technology and culture
03 May, 2012 • posts i've written • 2 comments
click to embiggen
Download Deutsch LA’s Key Startups and Trends for 2012
Deutsch LA’s Invention Strategy team journeyed to South by Southwest 2012 to document the birth of over 100 new digital startups.
Following the conference, our team monitored each startups’ social mentions and press, along with cataloguing their feature set, user base, and underlying social technologies. This research has culminated in a 12-page report, free to download, that identifies the key trends and opportunities that marketers should be focused on in their work for the year ahead.
I’m incredibly proud of my team for putting this together and I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions about the report or how to put it into practice in your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
You can also browse the document below … (for those reading on the site, not via RSS)
making invention work
21 Mar, 2012 • posts i've written • 3 comments
Yesterday I spoke about making invention work at DeutschLA as part of a series of talks around invention and creativity. See more of the talks here.
As a side note, every time I do a talk, I tend to write an entirely new script and try out entirely new thoughts. I get easily bored at hearing myself speak, so I try to only say new things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I know some people who give the same talk over and over again, I just don’t have the stamina for it. I blame the internet.
Correction: I just listened to myself and I incorrectly said I helped “found” UC – that’s not right. Josh, Aaron, and Rob did that, I was merely one of the first strategists back when we shared an office with Coolhunting. My sincere bad.
collaberadication
12 Feb, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments
This is a project we’re launching at Deutsch on behalf of Twisted Metal. I think you’ll find that we’ve really taken shooting things from the comfort of your computer to the next level. Do check it out.
I had absolutely nothing to do with this, except, that I want to trademark or copyright (whatever it is that lawyers do to keep themselves busy and wealthy) the term collaberadication – the collective coming together to blow the shit out of something. It’s the Joker to Batman’s crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.
Go ahead, google it. It’s never existed before. Until now.
Happy hunting.
drawing lessons from bauhaus
12 Feb, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments
I was touring a photography exhibit at The Getty today in LA and spotted this diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum by the school’s founder, Walter Gropius. I find myself a bit jealous of the simplicity of this design and inherent teaching philosophy.
I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to the history of design, what I do know has mostly been the unintentional consequence of theft. But I’ve always been drawn to the beauty and utility of Bauhaus and, maybe ignorantly, find myself comparing their movement to the fusing of design and technology doing and thinking in our industry today. I also find it as inspiration for the sort of environment I ultimately want to foster in my own workplace: a sense of perpetual apprenticeship (to a master which is the outside world), a curiosity for holistic study, and a gathering of diverse perspectives.
“The Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories in which prototypes of products suitable for mass production and typical of our time are carefully developed and constantly improved. In these laboratories the Bauhaus wants to train a new kind of collaborator for industry and the crafts, who has an equal command of both technology and form.”
“… the culminating point of the Bauhaus teaching is a demand for a new and powerful working correlation of all the processes of creation. The gifted student must regain a feeling for the interwoven strands of practical and formal work. The joy of building, in the broadest meaning of that word, must replace the paper work of design.”
“No longer can anything exist in isolation. We perceive every form as the embodiment of an idea, every piece of work as a manifestation of our innermost selves. Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.”
Quotes by Walter Gropius.
for the maker-inclined thinkers
08 Feb, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments
Golan Levin’s AMA video, generated using experimental 3D cinema.
this video did not go viral
22 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 1 comment
Above is a video we released last week at Deutsch LA for Volkswagen.
In a matter of a few days, with only one broadcast airing, we’ve already picked up over 6 million views.
The LA Times wrote a nice complimentary article, with the headline – VW’s Super Bowl teaser video ‘The Bark Side’ goes viral.
The headline is untrue. We did not go viral.
This video is popular because people chose to spread it – not because the video shared itself.
We attempted to pack the video with cultural currency targeted at specific communities on the web that actively share content. We paid attention to the kind of content they share. And then we put the video where they would find it. But none of that guaranteed us success before hand.
You can design for popularity, but you cannot guarantee it. Popularity is a stochastic process. There is no such thing as a viral video, no matter how hard we as an industry want to believe it or try to sell it.
I’ve written on this subject before, and suggest you read this article if you want to follow me further down the rabbit hole – stop saying viral video.
the measure of our work
17 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 4 comments
Our new Like Sign – visit our livestream, click the Facebook Like at the bottom right corner, wait for 3-5 seconds, and see the sign trigger.
In addition to our shiny new dot-com, a small team here at Deutsch has just finished creating what we call our Like Sign. For every Facebook Like we receive on our new site, this sign lights up in the office.
For now, we’ve installed the sign directly in front of the office of our Chief Digital Officer, Winston Binch, where it nearly blinds him with every click.
Why we built the sign:
As advertisers, our mission is to engage networks of consumers, connected by shared interests, to accomplish a measurable business objective on behalf of our client.
Or, in other words, we try to make people do things while influencing their friends.
We do this, largely, by creating cultural currency – things that can be passed on and shared. These were once solely passive experiences, but now we build products, services, and utilities in addition to media.
The first challenge for all of our work, interactive or not, is how far our reach can extend beyond our paid placement. If we can’t create experiences that are actively passed along through networks of consumers, we likely won’t be successful in achieving business results.
We built this sign to be a reminder to ourselves that the measure of our work begins at how it’s passed along. It’s a physical manifestation of our goals. We thought it would be a nice touch to put the sign in front of our webcam for curious visitors to see, but the sign is really for ourselves. The idea is to build a sign for every client team in the building, to host in their section of the office (we sit in teams now, not by discipline) so that we’ll all think more consciously about designing things that people want to share. If the signs create a bit of internal competition, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
It even looks like our signs will travel beyond our building. The first client to get a sneak peek at the sign has already asked for their own Like Sign for their office.
Admittedly, sharing is but the first step toward achieving a business objective – but it’s a crucial one. Perhaps we need a physical manifestation of business results right next to the sign. If only sales metrics were as easily accessible as Facebook’s Open Graph … but that’s another project.
How the sign was made:
The hardware: Arduino Uno + Ethernet Shield, and a PowerSwitch Tail II.
The code: We used the Arduino development environment to create a simple web server. And then we used Javascript and Facebook to interpret the “Like” event.
The physical sign:
Frame: 3-1/2 x 3/4 pine, 1/8″ plexiglass, Wood Screws
Electrical: 18 gauge wire, 6 – plastic light socket (for standard household lamps), 6 – 25w refrigerator bulbs
Finally, a huge thank you to Mary Toves, Dan Cluff, and Bernie Santos for pulling this off so quickly.
what is beautiful design?
16 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments
Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using “hexane,” an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.
- Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour
I own an iPhone because I value design – but perhaps all of us, myself first of course, should question where beautiful design begins. In this case, it begins in the hands of children, working under conditions we would never condone in our own society. I believe in trade, and I understand that the issue is complex, but I know that holding this device in my hand, knowing what I know now, being confronted with it more than ever, that I wouldn’t feel right asking that worker to work in those conditions, for that wage.
My hope is that services like Kickstarter make us more conscious of how our products are made, that journalists keep asking difficult questions of complex systems, and competitors deliver products that don’t require such human sacrifice, near or long term.
