Only Dead Fish

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© Jake Goretki
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When Is A Tribute Not A Tribute?

Regular readers of this blog will already know my views on campaigns which reproduce creative concepts from elsewhere without at least enhancing or building on the idea in some way. Creative Review have just posted about the new Fiat Grande Punto ad which unashamedly uses Roel Wouters’ brilliant Grip music video for zZz:

And here's the ad:

Thing is, it seems that the agency contacted Wouters' production company and voluntarily paid a license fee to use the idea (when in theory they didn't have to). So does that make it OK? The ad is so similar to the original film that it is almost a copy. Wouters himself is quoted by CR as saying that although the degree of similarity is a little wierd, "it gives the feeling of a sincere tribute". But then he's also quoted as saying that the treatment of the idea is not as strong, and that "the content seems to be disconnected from the form".

I'm really not sure. I applaud the fact that Wouters was paid a fee, and he will likely benefit from wider exposure of his idea, but this still leaves me feeling uncomfortable. It's just so similar, and there's little attempt at interpreting or building on the original idea here and so the creative input is limited. And most people who are exposed to this ad will likely not be familiar with the original film, so can it have real value as a tribute?

Financial Flocking

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Wonderfully Herd-like feature in this weeks New Scientist talking about the inner workings of financial markets and theorising about the inadequacies of prevalent economic theory and the potential real causes behind the current financial malaise.

Traditional economic theory posits that markets operate in 'equilibrium'. They are affected by changes in surrounding forces - good news about a company creates increased demand for its stock and the price goes up, bad news decreases demand and it goes down. Financial markets are shaped by the tendency of company stocks to find their 'proper' values, driven by the incentive of investors to identify the real value so that they don't pay too much for the stock or sell it for too little. With millions of investors acting in this way, any stock soon finds its 'true' value and any mispricing (however temporary) is corrected by market forces. In this way, drammatic swings in the market can only follow from correspondingly drammatic causes such as a significant piece of news, good or bad.

Sounds logical, right? Except that its not. Physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchand analysed over 90,000 news items over two years (relevant to hundreds of stocks) from Reuters and Dow Jones who produce real-time news feeds to investors. They were looking for the direct link between the news stories and corresponding jumps in stock price. There wasn't one. They found that "neither idiosyncratic news nor market wide news can explain the frequency and amplitude of price jumps". Instead jumps seemed to "occur for no identifiable reason". The markets seemed to have an internal dynamic all their own.

This is born out by recent experience. The 2007 global plunge in stocks seemed to be characterised by the emotive forces which drove it, with words like 'fear' being often used as a situational descriptive at the time. When, in a previous study, Bouchand looked at the accuracy of analysts market predictions he found that not only did they have a tendency to be over-optimistic but that their predictions were often similar to those already made public by other analysts even when this went against prevailing information.

And contrary to the normal distribution of random events characterised by the bell curve financial fluctuations have a tendency to have 'fat tails', meaning that large price fluctuations are more likely than expected to occur and their likelihood often underestimated by those employing equilibrium thinking. The New Scientist argues that perhaps we should have seen this coming:

"Some ecomonists have long argued that the movement of opinions and information between people tends to amplify market movements, leading inevitably to fat tails."

Paradoxically, it can be the attempt of investors to learn the relevance of new information (often by watching others) that can amplify price swings. Work done by Didier Sornette, an econophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, showed that whilst public and private information tended to keep prices around realistic values, the information which flows through social networks and gets spread by word of mouth tends to create groups of people co-ordinated in their actions "which in turn leads to bubbles - stocks that become priced too high or low". These bubbles can be triggered by random pieces of news which get amplified through the social network. In this way, rather than being precedented by a major event, market crashes can have more to do with "a progressive linking together of investors' decisions and expectations over months or years". This contributes to market instability, leading to a high likelihood of a crash occuring, which can eventually be triggered by relatively minor contributory factors.

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A new generation of financial market simulations is attempting to take account of this 'financial flocking' - including detail on what makes people trade and how the actions of one investor can influence others, and even going so far as building computer models to predict market dynamics populated by artificially intelligent 'agents' that mimick the activity of real markets. Such models have had some impressive successes at reproducing stock histories.

But it is notable that as highly leveraged trades (notably hedge funds borrowing from the banks) increase the amount of leverage in the market, the risk of a cascade of failures increases exponentially with higher levels of credit creating stronger links between players in the market which in turn heightens the avalanche effect.

So it is perhaps the increasing access to easy money which is the single most destabilising factor. As the article points out, it is common for financial incentives to induce people to act for their own short-term benefit whilst saddling someone else (the client, or the company they work for) with the longer-term risks. As the sub-prime situation has shown, this thinking works fine if you believe in equilibrium economics. It's entirely another matter however, if you believe in the power of the rapid spread of ideas amongst groups of people.

Full article here

The Departures Lounge

James is running a nice little project over here to compile a collection of funny short films and virals from around the world. Their site has been resurrected after they lost a bunch of files when their hosts went bust, and they are slowly repopulating it with new content. So James is encouraging people to get involved and give them a hand "to get the site back to where it was." So if you have a favourite viral, you can submit it here. All of which gives me an excuse to post one of my favourites - an oldie but goody.

The Art Of Media

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Media - it's all about the numbers, right? Accountability, reach, frequency, coverage, weight, strike rate, ratings, spots, eyeballs, impressions, click-throughs. If you like soup, there's always a good soup of numbers surrounding media you can drown in. And digital just compounds this. Numbers are important - they show what works, they create standards, they are the basis for a whole media ecosystem. But are they everything?

As the possibilities of communication explode, the subtleties of tone and interaction explode with it. As the number of different forms of communication becomes exponential, so does the way in which they are used. So there is real skill, judgement and creativity in using the myriad communications platforms to their best advantage. Just think about the nuances of how you currently use your own various social media apps now. There's a certain type of interaction on twitter, something similar but somehow different on twitter DM, an altogether different feel to e-mail, and different again on a blog, text, IM. Flickr is different to You Tube. One community is never like the next. Mobile communication is different to web. And there's plenty of ways of getting it wrong, as Greg's presentation eloquently posits.

So suddenly media and communications becomes much less a science, and more an artform. An artform in understanding and nuance. I'm reminded of one of my favourite Rory Sutherland quotes:

"it is one thing to reach people and quite another to 'reach' people."

So will agencies of the future exist on the strength of their creativity or their technical abilities? Can the two co-exist or are we headed for one almighty collision? And which is more important, the art or the science? Discuss.

Social Graces

Great presentation from Greg Verdino, full of good advice about the power of people connecting with people, "even when one of those people represents a brand". My favourite: "Real people in real time...can really make a difference".

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Creature Discomforts

OK so this the second series of ads in the "Creature Discomforts" campaign for Leonard Cheshire but the work done by Aardman Animations, designed to "help change the way people think about, and respond to, disability", has been consistently strong and I just love the whole thing. So it's worth a post. And this is my absolute favourite of the new crop of ads:

You can see more about the making of the ads and the people behind the characters here

Big Ideas (don't get any)

Wonderfully retro remix of Radiohead's "Nude" courtesy of graphic design student James Houston and an assortment of early computing hardware. Featuring an Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer on Drums, an HP Scanjet 3c on Bass Guitar, a collection of hard drives as vocals and FX, and my own personal favourite - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum on rhythm and lead guitars. Says James:

"Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there."

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Go here for the full story

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***UPDATE: Radiohead's amazing House of Cards promo film, shot without the use of cameras and using only lasers and scanners, is getting some good coverage and is also worth a look if you haven't seen it.***

Another Great Football Giveaway

The Great Football Giveaway is a project launched by one man - Paul Clarke - and his wife to hand deliver thousands of footballs, pumps and spare valves to some of the world's most disadvantaged children. They're not a big corporate NGO, but rather a small group of volunteers wanting to spread a little happiness. And so far they've distributed thousands of footballs and netballs to children, schools and orphanages in trips to Malawi and Angola. Distributing them to schools drammatically helps increase school attendance levels.

After I wrote about them in February, they got in touch and happened to mention that there would be a third trip soon. Last week they dropped me a line to let me know that they've just got back from a trip to Uganda. And they've put a gallery of pictures of the trip up online. Amelia told me that Paul used to work in an agency but gave it all up to go and launch the project. Good for him. Just look at the happiness in these pictures. How brilliant is that?

It costs £10 to donate a football and you can do it here.

Twitter User Numbers

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Perhaps this explains why Twitter service has been so intermittent over the last few months. I was scratching around for some data on Twitter user numbers the other day and realised that there's somewhat of a paucity of information. But I did find some interesting stuff which I thought I'd stick up here.

Estimates of the total number of Twitter users differ slightly but the broad consensus seems to be around the 2.1 million figure that is logged by Twitdir. Twitter growth has accelerated significantly over the past few months, as the graph above sourced from Hitwise shows, seemingly leaving all it's main competitors trailing in it's wake. And despite a degree of buzz around Plurk a couple of months back, as Mashable reports, Twitter still seems very much to be the micro-blogging service of choice. Interesting too that the patchy service has apparently failed to put people off, with Hitwise reporting return visitor numbers remaining steady. Personally, in a strange way it has for me become part of it's charm (though I could perhaps do with a few less fail-whales).

Twitdir also records a "Top 100 Followed" ranking, with the top people like Kevin Rose and Barack Obama, recording follower numbers in the region of 40-50,000.

Kinetic Sculpture At The BMW Museum

An amazing moving sculpture at the new BMW Museum featuring 714 metal balls that move apparently weightlessly through a series of abstractions and classic BMW design forms. Developed by ART+COM. Wow. Maybe one day advertising will be like this (maybe this is advertising?)

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On The Future Of The Web

The last time I saw Sir Tim Berners-Lee speak I wrote down this quote: "the web is a sub-set of humans interacting". I saw him speak again last night at a seminar on the future of the web at which he talked about his web science initiative. He was asked a question about whether, with the concurrent huge potential and challenges that the internet faces, he felt that we were expecting 'too much' of the web. His answer, as perhaps expected, was to stop thinking of the web as a 'thing' and start thinking about it as people connected. And so the question should really be about whether we were expecting too much of humanity. And then he said this:

"As humanity, I don't think we're expecting too much. Instead, we must make sure we don't expect too little."

Amen.

Goodness And Happiness

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At the recent Future of Journalism conference that the Guardian ran (an internal conference that they generously blogged about), Jeff Jarvis gave a talk on the 10 questions news organisations should be asking now. One of the questions is "Are we generous?". Generosity, says Jeff, can take many forms - sharing, supporting, enabling.  One of Jeff's most quotable quotes is "do what you do best and link to the rest" - drawing away from the control model of media 1.0 to one in which the intention and execution is altogether more altruistic.

John Naughton makes a similar point when he quotes the man that got him into blogging, Dave Winer: "The way to make money on the internet is to send them away". Why? Because "people come back to places that send them away." His point, and Jeff's point, is that the web is counter-intuitive. The more links you share, the more you send people away, the more they come back. The more open you are, the more useful you can be, the more they come back. In part, it's what Eaon has called (in the comments to this post) "creating value through content", and it expresses how the value equation is changing, something I've talked more about here.

But I think this speaks of a greater truth. An insight applicable to all brands, not just media brands. Generosity is not only a viable business model, it's the only game in town. The more generous you are, the more interesting you are (with everything you do), the more they come back.

The web is people connected and all media is becoming social. Brands are immersed in what Mark calls a "behavioural soup" where, to quote David, "small, very human, interactions make all the difference." Media becomes a mass of social interaction governed by social principles. Principles like you get back what you give. As Paul says:

"The more good things you do for people, the more of your thinking and ideas that you share, and the more you help people out, the more good things will come back to you"

Generosity is no longer a luxury in brand strategy. I'm not talking about CSR. I'm not talking about good customer service. And it's about more than just being useful. Being useful is one thing. Being generous is something else entirely. Generous thinking has to run through the organisation. Benevolence has a new power in business. It can power company morale, make your company attractive to work for, provide talkability, help people feel affinity for your business. But best of all it can provide direction and a framework for your decision making - your instinct is always to do whatever is best for your customers.

Being generous is about exceeding expectations. At every touchpoint. Making people happy. And happiness is not a bad thing to base your business on. It's the kind of thing where you end up saying "they didn't have to do that". The kind of thing we intuitively know every brand should be doing yet so rarely happens. And ironically, as we move into leaner times, there has never been a better time to be generous. It doesn't have to be expensive - Amazon's customer reviews add lots of value but cost very little. It doesn't have to be difficult - like the credit card company calling you up before they levy a late payment charge like mine did the other day. It has its own rewards - happy people talk about what makes them happy. Sounds obvious? Why aren't more companies doing it?

Perhaps I sound a touch naiive in my take on this but you know what? I don't care. I may be an old hippy but I also think this makes a whole lot of sense.

Annoyed (2)

Yes, I'm annoyed again. I drove past a poster ad yesterday and I had to double back and drive past it again to check what I was seeing. An ad for Smooth Radio that is a straight reproduction of the sleeveface idea. Another one. It's just so disappointing when there's no attempt to build on an idea or interpret it or just do something else with it apart from just rip it off. Shame.

The Girl Effect

"Because when adolescent girls in the developing world have a chance, they can be the most powerful force of change for themselves, their families, communities and nations."

More here and here.
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