The New Entertainment

The Secret Garden Lost Lovers Ball

 
 

The Secret Garden Party is arguably the most successful of the boutique festivals - if success is counted by expanding the numbers (increasing five-fold since I went in 2007) whilst retaining the original spirit and atmosphere. In fact by all accounts the Secret Garden party has actually got increasingly good over time - inviting more and more niche companies and groups of friends with crazy ideas for entertainment, from badger and backstreet snail racing to the Kissing Den or Asstrology tent. 

So, having missed the last three summer festivals, we were a little excited for the Lost Lovers ball - especially as it was being held in Battersea Power Station. And it did not disappoint. 

Serenaded by megaphoned moviestars from the 1950s as we walked across the barren concrete to the four-towered brick icon towering above us and the river, then assaulted as we moved through into the empty heart of the building - filled for the night with a huge conservatory style marquee and inside that a dozen different areas, tents and stages. Essentially it was a full festival crammed into a single building (albeit a rather large one) and night (ditto).

At first it felt a little empty and strange to be switching straight into the very different mindset that a festival both engenders and needs, but over the night as more people flooded in, the booze flowed and the music warmed up the switch did gradually happen. Or it might even have actually switched more instantly - we had been expecting the night to finish at 1am (which it turned out was just last entries). So we were pleasantly surprised when the rather pedestrian DJ finished and - instead of being thrown out - we were invited to the multicolour light up dance-floor boxing ring to witness a dance-off of extraordinary theatre as well as moves. We're still not sure exactly how many of the contenders were plants, but what is sure everyone of them could move. More than that - the audience was encouraged to be incredibly involved and somehow it suddenly had the abandon and flair of a genuine festival night.  

 
We moved back into the main arena and, again, felt like it might be winding down. Then a rather overdone man (in both outfit and approach) announced a final band - The Correspondents. Which seemed to be just one guy. In a cloak. Singing a rather maudlin Antony and the Johnsons style ballad. No, this isn't right, we need some umph, something extraordinary - we're ready to go - IT"S ready to go OFF we cried! (I'll admit we were a little drunk). But the singer responded - by shedding his cloak to reveal a golden jumpsuit, jumping onto a treadmill and starting the most incredibly energetic and extraordinary set I have seen in years. I couldn;t quite describe it for the days after, but now I've been to their website I can tell you they 'revamp vintage sounds for the modern ear'. Which basically means taking old dance-hall classics and putting a drum and bass and dubstep over the bottom and some kind of insane beatbox singing over the top. And everyone went nuts for them, and quite a lot for each-other too it seemed...

What it comes down to - at the end of the day - is having a great venue yes, but more than that the right performers and an the right crowd. Everything else is just dressing (up)...

Photos courtesy of Cathy Otty. Thank you...

The new entertainment is back!

Well, ok the entertainment never went away - it was just me. And then I forgot the password and even the email that I registered this on. And didn't have the bankcard it was set up with. And so on...

Before this was kind of a work, social media marketing kind of a blog and kind of for the more personal pervasive entertainment side. Now this work stuff is fully on my company Tom Sawyer Effect blog, and this will be for just the entertainment...

I continued the pervasive summaries on Tseffect for the pervasive approach in general, some of the campaigns we have been running for John Connelly, Stephen King,and with the Winterwell Festival, plus what we've learnt from them and other things going on in the space - particularly in Spring and Autumn last year.

And there is also the Hollywoodstock site where I hosted some of the content around the entertainment we have actually been running...

 

 

The new entertainment marketing

Another month, another post long overdue. Thank you to anyone still tracking this through the outer reaches of the blogger system. In some attempt at mitigation there are (slightly) more frequent posts on the (slightly more) official site for the Tom Sawyer Effect. 

I talked in a recent post about a couple of social media projects that I have been consulting on this summer, but there have of course been a huge number of other campaigns, from the itunes festival that has been driven through Facebook to Vodafone's cricket tournament Street Sixes everybody has been getting involved.

The people's reviewer from Volkswagen, which wouldn't have got ANYwhere without the massive advertising campaign they put behind it. I certainly never saw anything on it being discussed online and it feels like a traditional advertising campaign with some 'real people' bolted on. 

The same accusation of advertising driving instead of conversation could be levelled at Lucozade's Energy Challenge, particularly as they have strangely combined high octane physical sports with sponsoring Big Brother. They at least have a decent prize, although it all feels a little like load of forty year old marketing execs put their caps on backwards in a boardroom to devise it. 

It gets even worse for Peugeot's Fuel Fugitives, which has been teased with press ads in the nationals for the last month. 'Have you seen this couple?'...sounds interesting, and the core of the campaign is a laudable and even potentially entertaining prospect - a guinness world record to beat the miles per gallon record. 

However, when you get there you find out that not only is there not a single opportunity to actually engage with the campaign, it's actually already finished! And as for why they are pretending that the Taylors are breaking the law is just inconceivable. This press release sums up the awful miss of the entire campaign... 

So, finally two campaigns that have played by the rules, taken the opportunity by the horns and created something great with it... 

Smirnoff's UR the Night didn't jsut exist within Facebook's walls to attempt to market to its communities, it asked those communities to contribute. It asked them what they would like to see and then they made it happen. From DIY cocktail areas to a free bar accessed by a fortune teller to a digital graffiti wall (that was linked back to Facebook). 

Smirnoff genuinely listened to its fans, it celebrated with them rather than marketing at them, and it even got them drunk to the Pet Shop Boys. 

The only campaign that threatens to upstage it is the awesome I Spit on Your Rave  Zombie gathering planned for the big chill. This is another World Record, but one that you are invited to participate in this time, and one that should get plenty of takers - the most number of zombies to gather in one place. And they're not only going to make it happen and make some content from it, they're going to use it in a Warp Films / Film Four feature film. 

Both of these last campaigns fulfill the pre-requisite to succeeding in this space - give people something they genuinely want, and let them get involved - in a meaningful way rather than just giving them a prize. This is what I refer to as user-collaborated content, and the more control gets handed over from brands and their agencies and to (carefully chosen) advocates the better the content is going to get...

Change for good

I have had to re-apply to the chartered institute of bloggers to write this piece, it has been so long since I wrote one.My re-application is pending, but in case i dont get struck off for good...

this is a sister post to the recent virtual agency piece on the 'corporate' blog for the Tom Sawyer Effect.That was about doing things differently (in the way that you do things). This is about doing things differently (in what you are trying to do).

Everywhere I look there are people trying to do good things, most of them facilitated by online tools and social media - meet-up groups like 21st Century Network and Social Innovation Camp, campaigns like Twestival, or the Summer of Social Good from Mashable, to company's that are basing their whole approach on being more aware, like Fiat with their Ecodrive technology, to heavy-weight corporate intitiatives such as Google's charitable arm Google.org. 

CSR – doing some good with your company to make it look good – is being replaced by social good – making the very purpose of your company the benefit of the world.

And this makes sense - the CEO of one my agencies' clients stood up in a meeting recently and declared (as many of them do) – the only reason we exist is to serve our shareholders, everything that we do needs to be done with delivering value back to them in mind. Which is bullshit. The only reason your company exists is to provide a service to other people / companies. If you do this well, then the money will come (unless you are either dumb or unlucky).

It is this common mistake in the order of these two goals that has led to the current economic crisis. But it is this economic crisis that provides us with the opportunity to re-appraise. To change and move on in a healthier direction.

There are many that will dispute this statement, accuse me of idealism an accompanying lack of realism. But there are ever-growing numbers who agree, and who are doing things to put these fluffy ideals into concrete, succesful practice. I wish them all luck...

Talking Tuttle, Tweet-ups and tosh

One of the stats that we use to amaze our clients with a couple of years ago as we demonstrated the power of the internet was that three quarters of Koreans have met someone in the real world whom they had first got to know online.

At the time it wasn't just the greybeards shaking their heads but almost everyone, and invariably I would be the only in the room who had gone through the virtual looking glass (on two disastrous dates via datingdirect.com, and that was before they 'guaranteed' your success...)

This attitude already seems antiquated, at least to those in the industry, although it was only last week that I first introduced myself as my username 'benny008'. Of course I felt like a tool as I did so, but he only knew me through Twitter and a discussion on his blog, so had I said Ben Mason, he would have replied 'so what?' (lots of people do..)

Our encounter was at the Tuttle club, formerly the more self-explanatory Social Media Cafe (and which emerged out of / broke away from the London chapter of the Social Media Club which we used to house back when i was at Fleishman Hillard).

I never managed to find the time to attend the Tuttle daytime meet-ups while agency-side due to the usual pressure of clients, meetings and new business - intra-industry networking and keeping on top of breaking technology and trends was always the first thing to be dropped as the one thing that no-one was screaming at you to do.

So it wasn't until February that I managed to get myself down to the ICA of a Friday morning, ironically the same week that neuro-scientist Susan Greenfield released her findings that social media is potentially detrimental to the brain. Her report suggested that as our brain is affected by the environment that we exist in, and as we now are spending a lot of time online this is effectively 're-wiring our brains'. Of course humanity is still evolving and every parent that I have met recently admits that they are astonished at how comfortable generation y is with technology. But why does this have to be a bad thing?!

The Tuttle club is the ultimate rebuttal to her opinion that social networking online makes us less sociable in the real world: every week around fifty people come together to meet other like-minds and chat. Tuttle has just reached its first anniversary, in commemoration of which founder Lloyd Davis has published this semi-serious annual report to explain the premise behind it and what has been achieved in the first year.

But, of course, Tuttle is not the only group to meet in the real world to discuss the digital one. I thought it might be useful to gather those i know of together to help identify which may be useful...

The Shoreditch Twit is a monthly evening social event in East London, convened by Lewis Webb of Shiny Red.

The Dirty South Twit is what it says on the tin, the south London equivalent.

Aperitweat is an Italian version that apparently does actually come with free snacks

The Tuesdaytweetup - is a monthly tweet-up for the south of England

Open Soho - is a wider media and tech peeps networking monthly

Digital Lounge - started off just running free networking events on the last Wednesday of the month, but has now expanded to offer paid for courses too

Cwoffee - doesn't really admit to what it's for - the explanation on facebook says ' Russell's coffee mornings were such good fun - I miss them, and am keen to put one on myself.' In fact I don't recognise anyone who attends, so maybe I've invited myself to this

Open Coffee is a global networkof entrepreneurs , London's weekly gathering is at the UCL

Creative Coffee Club was set up as a creative networking opportunity, but seems to have fallen by the wayside, alongside the Network of Networks that was dreamt up to bring some of the above together.

The coffee club may be replaced to some extent by the forthcoming Dark Mountain Project, although it looks like that will have a slightly more ambitious scope than just networking. And to me this seems the next step that more of these communities should look to take. Not necessarily starting a new artistic / political movement like said mountain, but to create just a little more structure, to facilitate just a little more active collaboration between their like-minded membership, and to make it slightly easier for others to come in and find what they need from the community.

Of course, as with all things social media driven, the tricky bit is to create a structure without losing the fluidity and organic feel. And ultimately it is to make that structure something that can *whisper* make money. The paradox is that no-one in social media wants to feel like they are selling-out (let alone being exploited), while at the same time almost everyone you speak to feels like they could be making more money from it.

More on this soon. For now, I'm sure there are plenty more meet-ups out there, let me know and I'll add them to the list. And if you want to make your own there is always the Twtvite application or the older-skool Meetup.com or Upcoming.org...

From Lauren Laverne to One Love, via entertainment, technology and the G20

Everyone's favourite cultural presenter, intellectual crumpet, wit, mother and all round lovely Lauren Laverne ran a session on her last 6 Music show discussing entertainment franchises that have infected our thinking in the real world (ie 'I watch so much of The Wire that when I need a beer I ask my hopper for a re-up' etc)

I sympathise, in that my addiction to the incredible Fallout 3 has moved into the desperation phase and recently I keep being reminded of video game metaphors as I go about my real-world life...balancing out the usefulness of Firefox add-ons against bandwidth and speed is much like the pay-offs between the weight of your kit and your speed in Fallout 3. Trying to work remotely on your laptop you often end up in frantic searchesfor plug sockets to literally 'power-up', just as in most games.

This relationship between entertainment and our psyches has been vigorously debated at least as far back as the release of the novel Pamela in 1740, reaching its fiercest point in the late 90s with the suggested influence of Doom and Grand Theft Auto on the Columbine High School massacre and the killing of Jamie Bulger. While I believe the majority of negativity around gaming to be reactionism, I  defy anyone to play a recent GTA game for an hour and then not feel differently. However, entertainment (including video games) also has the huge potential for positive resonance too.  

In an interesting act of synchronicity this afternoon I came across two references* to the first  ever best-selling social science book Understanding Media  back in 1964. Marshall McLuhan's voice was not only popular but prescient, predicting 'broadcasting would fuse with computing and telecommunications into one demiurgic technology.'

He believed the effect technology has on society is in fact more profound than any other factor, including religion, industry, politics. McLuhan believed that the printing press was as much responsible for the nation state as it was the renaissance, and had led to what he called 'print consciousnes - the indifference of rationalism'. 

And so it followed that the 'electric global network' would lead to a new political system, one underwritten by 'electronic media consciousness - the empathy of intuition'. It's been a long time coming, but we are perhaps finally beginning to see this happening.

Barack Obama's much lauded social media campaign that helped to secure him the White House has largely been dropped now (there has been one tweet since January). However, what we are seeing right now is both a lot of positive and engaged debate around the G20, from 50 top international bloggers being given full press accreditation and access at G20 Voices to the We 20 tool facillitating people's own debates around the topic, to Audioboo facillitating mini podcasts live from the protests, to the protest itself being organised on Facebook.  

Most of the commentary is very smart, informed and engaged. At the same time occasionally some attitudes have threatened to dip into the old school of political protests - through either violence or its opposite One Love hippydom. So, it remains to be seen what the effects of both this hugely pressured summit and this 'very English protest' will be. But it could just be the start of something better...

* Richard Barbrook quotes McLuhan in his fascinating book Imaginary Futures, which examines the relationships between computers, ideology and society from World War II and through the Cold War.

As does James Harkin, discussing his new (fascinating sounding) book Cyber Realism in the Observer Film Quarterly more on which later...

From social search to social consciousness

Whether coincidence or not the new iteration of Facebook looks more than anything like its upstart microblog competitors, Twitter and Friendfeed. The emphasis is now on the status updates (which to be fair, you could say the microblogs nicked from them in the first place), with an improved ability to be able to comment on and rate the updates as they come in. While the chat has been mostly negative about the re-design this is probably just reactionism, and community engagement on the site appears to have revived as a result (having previously died so much 24 hours of updates wouldn't fill one page).

There has been a similar habit developing on Twitter, with tweeps using the prefix 'Like' to indicate their approval. This allows you to then search for the most popular discussions or items currently in circulation.

Social bookmarking sites like digg, de.icio.us, stumblupon have been popular for years, but have yet to properly cross into the mainstream. They may well make it now, following on the coat-tails of Twitter. Or they may instead be sidelined by the very same, as the search tools lining up around the microblogs become increasingly sophisticated. Depending on what you are searching for it can yield better results than Google already - of course people's recommendations are more effective than AI spider-bots as long as you have enough of them and can filter them smartly enough.

At the same time user review sites like Yelp or Qype are gathering momentum and starting to have enough content to be genuinely useful, a shift that is at least partially powered by the i-phone allowing fluid mobile access for the first time. As increasing numbers of phones connect up to these communities social search will start to overtake the traditional search engines.

It already feels like just a couple of steps away from the ultimate 'digg the world' review system, in which every time we buy a sandwich, visit a hairdresser or watch a film you immediately rate it, allowing us to build up a giant, up-to-the-minute database. And as another aspect of Web 3.0 - the semantic web comes into play and the internet develops the ability to learn from all of the different choices that we make and things that we discuss from across the web, and then cross reference these with the rest of the online population.

On holiday last week I had a weird sensation of being disconnected, not so much from Facebook and email, as these will wait for you until you get back, but from Twitter, which is all about the live discussion. I felt like I wasn't doing my part by not participating for a week, I wasn't contributing to the body of knowledge and opinion that is becoming the Hive Mind. 

If people react against the mobile web with horror ('people can find out where I am?!') then it's going to cause a few mental break-downs to ask people to tap into the collective intelligence. We have been conditioned by Hollywood (from HAL in A Space Odyssey through to the eponymous war-mongering machines in the Terminator franchise) to believe that this is a dangerous thing. But it's not about computer's becoming intelligent themselves, rather them providing this filter to allow us to share knowledge.

As Forbes recently explains 'The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe. We can leverage the ubiquity of communications to coordinate real world activity--and just about anyone can do it.'

Which is actually pretty much the same thing that they do in the Buddhist Metta meditation on expanding the circles of compassion. Which has to be a good thing, doesn't it??

Getting involved in the new entertainment...

Continuing the exploration of interactive 'new entertainment' experiences  both online and offline with a few more opportunities to try it out for yourself...

The breathing wall uses an experimental piece of software that monitors your breathing, and modifies the story as a result of it. There is a demo available here but not of the hyper trance fiction matrix element, which you have to buy a cd to experience. Surely if it was any good they'd show you up front, however the narrative is interestingly told in slick transmedia format.

The narrative uses an easy emotive hook - you are in prison for your girlfriend's murder, but you didn't do it - but brings it to life in an engaging way. Depending on how it plays out it could be worth an investment of time, but not of £15 (breaking the first rule of monetising experimental entertainment - the money has to come after you have proven the value).

Rotozaza creates audio experiences in the real world that make actors out of the viewers by feeding them lines and direction through headphones. Etiquette  is the most famous of its productions so far, now in its final week at Cafe Oto in Dalston in which two protagonists discuss the world and their take on it. But instead of it being raw and real - putting words in your mouth that you struggle to say - it goes back to the abstract, the arty, the pretentious and borrows from Ibsen and Godard, rather than Skins and Eastenders. If you took a bit of grit, made your audience enact it in front of each other and in public, then added in the opportunity to insert your own dialogue, or at the very least choose from options like in an RPG and you'd be getting somewhere pretty exciting.

To end on a more engaged high, the new interactive functionality on Youtube has finally been exploited. This Batman and the Joker game is slick, entertaining and fun. In this instance the level of interactivity and involvement is just right. All we need is to take this format into a proper story so that we care about what happens beyond just winning...

A.R.G.hhh (II) Gameshows of the future

Right, the post I meant to write last time...

As I blogged about back in April last year, all entertainment forms are moving towards deeper levels of interactivity, from choices made about how to view right the way through to taking decisions on how the story develops. As a result there is therefore an increasing prominence to the reader / viewer (who as a result increasingly becomes more of a player).

If you combine this with the move towards the mobile web, and interaction becoming contextually relevant to your time, place and status then it is hard to see how real world games, driven by the web and catalysed by mobile phones will not one day soon be huge. 

Which is exactly what I thought at the end of the incredible La Clique cabaret show on Saturday, as the performers asked everyone to stand up and clap and dance - you want to be part of this amazing performance. Social media has taught us that we dont have to be passive bystanders anymore, but this has yet to really permeate live entertainment.

There is still the occasional banter with the audience, or even bringing one of them up on stage to play a (passive) role in an act. But there is nothing that properly involves the audience and rewards them for their own contribution. What we are still waiting for is the user-generated equivalent of theatre.

But perhaps it's too much to expect to jump straight into the best circus acts in the country. Perhaps we should start smaller, less skill-based. Jump back two weeks to the final night of Hotel Medea at the Arcola theatre in Dalston. Running from midnight until six in the morning, as you went in you were searched by Brazilian armed guards who interrogated you about your intentions regarding the Golden Fleece before letting you into a smoky, sweaty room that vibrated with drumming as a host of Inca market traders noisily plied their wares under tented canopies that sprouted cotton canopies. 

We had been given some fake coins to spend and I eagerly waded in, buying holy water and fiery homemade liquer. The traders were wary of the guards who were patrolling round still enquiring after your intentions. But when their backs were turned the locals would get out a secreted trinket and offer that instead. We understood we needed this to steal the golden fleece, which must be our mission. 

But we needed twenty coins to buy it, and we only had only been given six to start with and only had three of these left. So we either needed to club together with other visitors, or we had to make money ourselves in the market. We were just pondering which route to take and how to go about it when the ringleader blew his whistle and we were pulled into a circle.

We thought we had lost, someone had beaten us to it (presumably by researching it first online). But no, we had been wrong - there was no game. The evening slowly declined from that burst of initial energy and excitement. There were still some incredible moments - dancing and chanting around the two leads as they were stripped, washed, anointed and dressed again for their wedding (all by us); being led away by pretty nursemaids, dressed in pajamas and laid in beds facing away from the action as they fed us cocoa and stroked our hair.

So it was still an incredible experience, but they forgot the golden rule of leaving us wanting more and instead hit us with a totally unnecessary and painfully art-school pretentious final hour of shamanistic resurrections, funeral services and philosophising banquets.

I dont think you can really blame Zekura-Ura for not bringing gameplay elements into their production. Even the best in the pervasive theatre game don't make it truly interactive. Which is practically the only criticism that you can level at the incredible Punchdrunk which has put on the most original theatre of the last decade.  

They are having a break for the first time in their history, and rumour has it that they are investigating bringing in more ARG elements to their work. Fingers crossed they do, for these are the gameshows of the future...

A.R.G.hhh

Keep coming across different ideas and platforms verging on the ultimate manifestations of the new entertainment this week - ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games.

Looking back over two years of blogging I can't quite believe that I have never fully discussed the ARG genre (although two of my more abstract posts in September 2007 and April 2008 on the direction of entertainment as a whole have touched upon them).

A cross between theatre and gaming, but taking place across real-world spaces and blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, actors, gamers and oridinary people, marketeers and interactive theatre nuts have been getting excited about the phenomenon for years but they have yet to really deliver - at least beyond the niche.

The most famous have been to promote other forms of entertainment - I Love Bees for Halo 2 was a hugely complex multi-platform story starting with a hacked bee-keeping  website and ended ia stranded artificial intelligence trying to pull itself back together through email, mobiles and real-world meet-ups.

Then the Cloverfield games actually had a purpose, and integrated puzzle solving across sites as disparate as the prophetic Ethaanhaaswasright and kitch japanese drinks franchise site www.slusho.jp  into a wider teaser campaign that even held back the name from the early trailers and posters.

Other examples include  Do you Believe in Harvey Dent for Batman Begins and even the Lost Rings campaign by Mcdonalds for the Olympics (if ever there was a less convincing partnership??)

All of these campaigns to date however have either been firmly ensconsed in the hardcore online gaming, puzzle-zolving, forum-posting niche, or supported by a sizeable above-the-line campaign.

However, the bigger problem is that they apply the same rules dictated by the traditional campaign and apply it to the new medium. Namely that the trail is there only to be discovered and discussed, and not added to by the community discovering it. It is 'interactive' only in that there elements to be solved and not in the true sense that those participating can have an actual effect on the way that it turns out.

So, with all that background I havent really left enough room to talk about the intended content for the post - the new elements cropping up around ARGs on this side of the pond and taking it in a deeper more convincing direction . These will have to feature in the next post...

Image from Mscapers