Being a great white shark can’t be all bad can it. Your one of the top predators in the sea, you live for a really long time and just roam the sea looking for dolphin sushi or a seal pup that just so happens to wander by – basically life is pretty good.
Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.
So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs and do so across all the channels they have.
A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.
So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.
The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breedofagency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.
So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.
The Kinetica Art Fair was on over the weekend and I wandered down to see the sights and sounds. Having been the previous year, I was well prepared for more steampunk cyber art but the talks last year were the highlight – although this year I missed the talks.
So onto the show. It was PACKED full of people which was great for everyone. I’m really hoping it was a massive success and elevated new forms of art to the masses. Here is a bref recap of caught my eye.
This was a mechanical drawing device that took plaster casts of heads and traced their contours and drew them out onto paper – A sort of 3D to 2D process. It was really interesting to watch it happen in realtime and the mechanical direct feel really made me want to watch this artwork form. The output was just as interesting – Something a bit disgusting and indefinable.
A very simple yet beautiful piece of work – If you imagine hundreds of threads of light forming ethereal bodies floating in space. I think the artist used fibre optic cables and ‘cut’ them to let the light bleed out thus creating the forms. There was no interaction or gimmickry (something common to a lot of the work) and I really liked it.
Kinetic Masters
My favourite section of the fair was the area devoted to pioneers of computer / cyber art. You can imagine at the time just how far these guys were innovating and their pieces are still of artistic value to this day. Just shows the process of creating art is irrelevant if the end result connects with you on some level.
I had heard of this ground breaking show at the I.C.A and it was brilliant to study the poster up close. A lovely piece of polish graphic design. A shame I left my camera at home as I wanted to note down all the artists present – If anyone has the poster or the programme of artists could they drop me a line. I’m sure I recalled that Xenakis was present.
So overall a very interesting experience. Some of the ‘art’ I would classify as playful interactions but then others would class it as art or even the process of creating the art. A debate I couldn’t get drawn to far into.
For another review of the fair, check Chris O’ Sheas excellent pixelsumo site.
Advertising is routinely accussed of ripping off ideas from all manner of sources with Youtube a particularly (ab)used source. The internet is so vast and easy to search that actually no such ripping off ever occured – just an unfortunate coincidence (which I’ve been on the end of). Sometimes totally true.
The point is not whats true but what the commentary around your work will be like. If you know your treading a fineline between homage and ripoff or you’ve discovered a similar piece then you have to have a ‘reaction plan’.
In a hypothetical world, it could work like this.
Creatives to Producer -> We’ve found this great video on youtube and the style and look really works well with our script.
Producer now in a dilemma -> These guys aren’t repped by any agencies, even if I did get in touch they’ll tell me to bugger off – Then we are screwed because they know what we are upto. Double bugger.
Everyone -> We are within the law here. So Ok we’ll go it alone.
So your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Creative collaboration could be your answer. Approach the original creatives with the idea that you want THEM to work with your creatives. They’ll get paid well, they’ll get the credit they deserve, you all work together with a director in a collaborative way.
The additional benefit is that you can use the influence of the creators to help share your work. If the original creators post it to Youtube and not the client or the agency, then there is a massive audience of people ready to appreciate a new piece by the same creatives. If it’s framed in a way where everyone knows it was a collaboration then you might just have a great piece of work that is warmly received.
The recent Pepsi ‘Refresh Everything’ work highlights the needs for agencies and clients to be aware of negative word of mouth around their work. All the amazing work on the main campaign around corporate social responsibility starts to be unravelled by a highly vocal fanbase and it could have possibily been avoided by embracing collaboration and not shunning it.
I was digging through an old hard drive a few weeks back and found the source code of lots of projects (from about 2000) – I had forgotten just how nice they still looked as Flash scales so well on fast computers. A lot of the animations and illustrations were down to Dylan – A genius. Hire him.
Some of these I’m really proud of. I would post up the source code but its all in Flash 5 and would be useless to anyone these days.
The london underground might be derided as a creaking, rickety antique of a public service but atleast there were some great design moments in its history – Harry Beck and his iconic map, Charles Holden and his modernist masterpiece stations and the lesser known Enid Marx who provided many moquettes (fabric designs) for the tube seats.
The TFL has decided they would like to open up the design of new moquettes to the public – There is a £5000 prize which sounds great in principle but for a professional designer this isn’t much at all – considering the usage the TFL will get from the designs.
I can understand change, progress and iterating design to make it better – I just hope they leave these designs in place somewhere as a reminder of how good design can be timeless.
I’ve been having a few chats with people recently who are starting to dabble with Twitter – They get it great but now it has come to the point where I’m wondering how do I get them to think that it is not just a way of having a conversation.
It is a transport mechanism for carrying any sort of message – be that human conversation, computer messages, collating messages or sending messages.
How can I show the value of messages?
My good friend Mike Stenhouse created Out of five – a beautifully elegant way to capture reviews. You tweet in the name of the gig/film/book with a rating (out of five) and a short review.
@oo5 Coraline 4.0 simply wonderful
You have a record of what you’ve experienced with a date and a way of getting at that data later (through your own rss feed). Also a brilliant social aspect kicks in as the reviews are trasmitted through twitter so if you are following a person who reviews something – you see their review and could find a way into OO5 that way. Also all the reviews collated together and you start to see other peoples reviews of the things you like – You could follow those people as they could be your influencers if you share the same tastes.
Nathan from flowing data has been beta testing your flowing data for a little while and now it has launched. The mechanic to OO5 is very similar but it is more open in terms of what it records – In that you can record any metric – If you want to track your weight you just tweet -
d yfd weigh 160
Again all that data you send in can be extracted and the other benefit is that data visualisations can be generated straight from the site.
On the 40th Anniversary of the first moonwalk Southbank Centre and the Heritage Orchestra celebrate by bringing you an evening of the music and visuals of the Clangers alongside other lunar delights, including Russ Garcia’s classic electro-orchestral album Fantastica: Music from Outer Space.
Expect a mixture of music, narration, sound and sights commemorating the genius team of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, and Vernon Elliot’s inimitable Clangers score. A space gig like no other.
Taking white kids from middle class families and putting them on briefs – advertising to kids from the inner city is a bit absurd. Yet that is pretty much the state of the advertising industry and it needs to change. Not just changing the racial mix in agencies but changing the type of people that make up those agencies – can we blow apart the two team art director/copywriter model? Can we bring diversity of all sorts into advertising?
These are really big industry wide questions that are not going to be solved overnight – but I’m really interested that Dan Wieden has put the point across and also that Platform has been created by W+K London to try and find new talent from all walks of life. Starting from September, upto 12 lucky people will work across real world communication problems and solve these with a whatever approach they think can work.
Architects could be clashing with poets – electronics tinkerers forming creative partnerships with sculptors – everyone hands on – learning by doing.
All of these inventive people around an agency could give it an edge in moving into new territories – Perhaps products could be evolved and produced, buildings designed and built – Businesses changed and flipped upside down from their core.
William Bernbach whom I believe was the first to combine art directors & copywriters said this -
A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.
So if we need to change the mix of the creative team so we can do things, then who needs to be in this team?
A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of spending two days locked in a very dark hot room learning to program. Sounds pretty excruciating doesn’t it – But believe me it wasn’t. Just a bit of background – I used to be a jack-of-all-trades developer and hung up my coding gloves because I was bored with building the same ole websites over and over and over again. (Back then Web 1.0 was a bit dull).
So back to OpenFrameworks. I met Joel Gethin Lewis last year when we were building the Christmas Card Making Machine and he introduced me to how he was doing face tracking and all this sexy stuff. He was writing everything in OpenFrameworks and I was astounded to learn this wasn’t some fancy custom solution he had used when he was at U.V.A, but a free open source system.
To explain what OpenFrameworks is, I’m going to be a bit simplistic so bear with me – It is basically a way of wrapping up all the really really nasty bits to do with programming graphics, sound, interaction etc and opening this up so with a few lines of code you can load in images, have them move around, control them etc. It was astoundingly simple.
Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson the lead developers of the project have created community which was born out of a desire to ease new comers into the complexities of programming. The other beautiful part of this equation is that the community actively develop and put code back into the eco-system. Open source programming is not a new thing, but it is incredibly interesting to see this in more competitive artist circles (as generally OpenFrameworks is used to create installations and art projects) and along with Processing there is a whole new breed interactive artists doing great work.
The course was held at UCL and was setup by Ruairi who runs the excellent Interactive Architecture site and Joel and the multi talented Memo Atken were running the course. The ratio of architects on the course was very high and this was really interesting to find out what they are doing with code when it comes to designing buildings – They are all very keen on generating whole buildings from code. Little snippets of a process can be fed into a generative loop and out will pop a whole building – This is staggering stuff and for them incredibly liberating. Let’s just hope they don’t become too seduced by the computer as buildings need that irrevernce that lifts them.
Spotted on the Barbican website – This looks like a very interesting use of a dead space in East London -
As part of Radical Nature, the experimental and socially engaged architectural collective EXYZT has created a dynamic satellite project, The Dalston Mill.
Inspired by an overgrown wasteland, EXYZT have been working closely with various local communities to turn a disused site in Dalston into a vibrant rural retreat for the people of the area and beyond. Literally occupying an abandoned garden, the project offers an exciting programme of events, screening and summer feasts.
