thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Just before Christmas I watched a video which featured Lee Clow¹, and Alex Bogusky²,  talking about the development of brand entertainment and other interactive changes impacting the advertising businesss. It was a panel presentation as part of the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference from Sept ’08.

(¹ Global Director of Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide, ² Partner, Crispin Porter + Bogusky.)

I referred to it briefly in the previous post but it really deserves wider attention.

We get key viewpoints from Lee & Alex on the way that advertising and media intersect with current online trends and how that continues to drive other significant business changes almost everywhere.

Lee is a legendary ad guy who is perhaps best known for the Apple 1984 ad  which was directed by Ridley Scott who I like for 1982′s Blade Runner but you might know him for some other movies.

Alex Bogusky recently won the Microsoft account and I suspect this ad referred to on New Music Strategies might be the first one in a series from that new alignment.

Media markets develop according to the culture they soak in and the ultimately from the local business interests and values of each location.

In NZ where I am located, most of the time local TV is a mash-up of UK /US / Australian and  NZ originated programmes.  My personal preference is close to zero TV since I prefer a more active role in life.

And I can get almost anything I really want online which is more attractive now that bandwidth speeds are improving and data caps are less of an issue.

The Clow-Bogusky presentation has had its video embedding disabled and so I have provided a screenshot and separate link below. Lee Clow of TBWA and Alex Bogusky on Google Zeitgeist (28:16)

Here are some of my notes and comments on the themes on the content. Advertising has changed from a monologue to dialogue. Also that the dimensions of media are changing as interactivity challenges everything; especially for some (digital native) markets.

What has happened more recently is that it is now easier to validate some of the anecdotal learnings as new   media measurements become easier to assess.

There is a discussion on how gaming revenue has surpassed movie revenue a year or two back but more importantly on what this might mean for marketers and media / advertising sectors. (about 7mins in.)

Research has been telling us this for some time but the cultural changes represented by changes from narrative forms of storytelling are much more obvious now.

The impression is that ad creatives like this change but media fragmentation does make life harder for ad buyers.

Clow makes some comments along the lines of “we are  closer to the tipping point for artists rather than technologists now”.  It seems obvious but I’d agree that it is much easier for creative people to create without needing too much tech help now.

Just looking around at the Mac tribe and all the smart mobile phones now;  it is certainly easier to be connected. Software and other tools are getting better and most importantly expectations have changed.

Add to that faster,cheaper bandwidth and the “always-on” group is managing to spread much further outside the usual global hot-spots.

Lee likes to redefine his business as having changed from advertising to media arts business

They both commented that the whole idea of having brand conversations can be quite scary for marketing and ad managers. There is still scope for other campaigns like the (anti smoking)  truth campaign that Alex worked on.

Alex sees a growing part of the role for traditional media is to seed ideas into popular culture.

The most stunning aside in the panel discussion was this line on US TV numbers.

There is no such thing as broadcast (now) the Number 1 primetime show is only 2% of the(US)  population. (23:45)

I suspect its not quite that fragmented yet in NZ, AU or UK markets but would love to hear any comparative numbers if you have them in a public version.

Marketers now have to work much harder to get channel coverage and offer more choices.

One of the questions from the floor concerned the trend for what has been called “brand entertainment” and was asked by a staff member from Youtube.

Other questions were asked about how these changes might affect public policy style campaigns. Other  media planners were wondering about how to weight their budgets.

Certainly many of these trends around technology and media are not new – just more obvious and heading in exciting directions.

Over the summer break I have been catching up on the very good Media7 shows which are still available over on the TVNZ site.  There are now 43 episodes available and worth watching. Russell Brown³ is one of the presenters and the panel format seems to work well enough.

(³ Great to read about these numbers over at Public Address System (“Google Analytics presently shows 1,169,014 visits to Public Address in 2008, and 3,558,983 pages served.”)

Ironically Media 7 also beats watching actual summer TV and it is all Mac friendly. Happy New Year 2009.

TED just released news (June 2008) that there have been more than 50 million downloads of their videos.

Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions that iPlayer has now had more than 75m video downloads (as at May 2008) so clearly we are moving into a new era of accelerated video and this has major benefits right across the spectrum.

Keep reading for more about both stories.

The Johnny Lee short clip (at #10) is one that everyone should watch.  It highlights a surprising twist to a technology product which has much wider benefits and implications for product innovation. (5m40sec)

10. Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks – from the top 10 list from TED

This is a brilliant example of a product taking a life of its’ own when someone else sees a new market for a new product and takes it there. I’d be guessing Nintendo wish they had though of this one.

Why is this Story Important and Significant?

The Johnny Lee story  demonstrates clear examples of what Kevin Kelly (in 1999 book New Rules for the New Economy and still worth reading.) Snips and comments on 4 of these rules follow.

• 1 – “Embracing the swarm, – competitive advantage belongs to those who embrace decentralized points of control” we can be anywhere on the network and still have an impact.
• 7 – “From places to spaces, – as place is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space) the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-sized niches expand greatly.” Think of the multiplier effect that YouTube played on this research project.
• 9 – “Relationship tech, enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand and develop relationships of all types.”  With this amplification comes the opportunity for new people to tilt the paradigm of existing products and take them into new markets in new and exciting ways.I’d love to see a chart on how many controllers there were before Johnnies invention and now how many they are compared to the number of Nintendo consoles being sold.
• 10 -”Opportunities before efficiencies, – there is far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.”

Sharing new ideas and researching new product innovations in a public way kind of like “research powered by video” goes counter to most of what we have understood about value creation and intellectual property management.

The web has changed everything and that is only going to accelerate if we understand what it is that we are looking at.  Best of all, many of these change cycles happen in real time and cross- pollinate at a furious and ever increasing rate.

So What Did Mr Lee Actually Do? (If you haven’t watched the video yet.)

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks — which is almost more interesting than what he actually did – is the speed at which it has been picked up globally.

To understand Johnny Lee, just take a look at his personal Projects page. Aside from his Wii Remote hacks — voted the #1 tech demo of all time by Digg — you can see all the other places his mind has turned: typography, photography, urban renewal … to say nothing of his interesting sideline in Little Great Ideas, like the hypnotic “___ will ___ you.”

When he’s not hacking Wiimotes, Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

So the question is where else will video take us and what else is happening in the kind of television world that most people inhabit?

The Future of Online Video
A discussion panel [Ashley Highfield (first 11.5mins) , Christian Vollman (Germany), Antonio Campo, Dall'Orto] led by Matthew d’Ancona on the future of online video (35mins) Interesting that Ashley notes that BBC programmes are now available on the Nintendo Wii which is seen as a significant connected device now.

And check the numbers – BBC iPlayer has now had 75million downloads.  This really is the mainstreaming of quality video online when you factor in TED and the 4663 channels on Miro (Note: Miro includes much of the same content.)  YouTube is still a backbone but will be surpassed by other providers who have much better quality content very soon.

Now that broadband is more pervasive there is huge growth in the on-demand audience for quality video.

Ashley passes on some reports and stats that BBC can do as a public broadcaster and it is the trends that are significant on market share . This is great news for more specialist programming and offers a glimpse into the future trends that are shaping growth in other markets.

It will also ultimately have positive funding implications for programme makers looking at online broadcast platforms and potential audience numbers and revenue models.

Media7 in NZ looks to have a great future for example as it leverages outside experts and applies resources from a larger channel to get results way out of proportion to its actual current size. If you have taste-makers and media influencers in the same room anything can happen. When the audience amplifies that broadcast then you’re cooking with gas.

See also Zeitgeist Europe 08 video channel. Or here if you have a  login.

According to Youngblood the conference is now an:

“annual 2-day conference, which began in 2006, and is by invitation only for around 400 of Google’s strategic partners in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region. This year’s Zeitgeist was held at The Grove in Hertfordshire, an impressive English estate about 40 km’s North-West of Central London.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a trade conference and Google products weren’t pushed down your throat as you might’ve expected, although there was some obvious tie-ins with certain products like YouTube and of course very strong branding throughout the event. The agenda was somewhat TED-like with a diverse mix of technologists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs as speakers.

from Youngbloods blog

Seems like Coin had a great time entertainment wise but glossed over  the really significant parts but since it was a closed set and I haven’t watched all the video it’s is hard to tell.

Regardless, we are a major online video explosion with video everywhere and getting better all the time.

Enjoy. Now go ahead and get enhancing, amplifying, extending, augmenting, distilling, recalling, expanding and developing all those relationships that will help us all create new value and true 21st century wealth.

As Kevin says “A network is a possibility factory”.