The New Entertainment

There may not be trouble ahead

I was reading the International Herald Tribune today for the first time in a year (reminding me once again how startlingly crap US jouranlism is). One good thing about their reporting, however, is the prominence they give to technology, which is more likely to appear on the front page than celebrities or slander. 

Up there this morning was a report on the mobile phone congress 3GSM, happening in Barcelona this week. The story was called The Cellphone, Navigating our Lives and opened up with The cellphone is the world's most ubiquitous computer (see point 1, above). The gist of it was quite interesting however, exploring how the organisation of our communications technology has affected the way we interpret both this and the world around us. From DOS to Windows to the internet and now onto mobile phones, at each point information becoming more accessible to us (although, of course, not necessarily simpler).

However, with this current migration onto our mobiles we are in fact reverting back to a much older system for categorising all of the information we are processing - that of the MAP. Now we are able to relate the information we are searching for online to its location in the real world. The phone can tell the web where we are, and then feed us results relevant to where we are (and ultimately how and even who we are too). Now this is nothing new, not to this blog and certainly not to the wider tech space.

What I thought was worth comment though, was how the excitement at the conference has apparently ported away from the new handsets themselves and towards the software being developed for them.

The net result is that the Mobile Web is finally here (or at least the technology is finally here and working) - we just need the programmes to bring it to life before our phones become little personal Ziggy's giving us information about the world around us as we move through it (and feeding back into it as we go - learning from our experiences for the good of ourselves and others). And with the iphone and Android tech open for anyone to be able to put an application together to make this happen this shouldn't take long at all...

However, what really drove me to write this post was that (just as with every time I explain it in a training session) the overriding reaction of the IHT wasn't excitement at the benefits this technology will bring to our lives , but fear at the risks inherent to our safety and privacy.

As Facebook has demonstrated so admirably this week, we absolutely need to be aware of the processing and control of this information. But ultimately this represents an opportunity, and one that will carry us forward on its wave whether we like it or not. So we might as well get on with embracing it...

flashdance

When  T-Mobile launched their flash-mob ad in January the only thing louder than the blogosphere's ecstatic reaction was the sound of marketing consultants sucking their teeth, and thinking back to all the times they had pitched this same idea over the last three years.

My favourite pitch combined flash-mobbing with the more recent internet phenomenon of Sleeve-Face to create a massive photo composed of record covers. Dancing in train stations just felt a bit too 2007. T-Mobile may have been slow to the party, but they certainly came in with a bang. The difference between a few pranksters throwing something onto Facebook and a brand flexing their planning muscles was massive, and is a great example of what we have been calling 'user-collaborated content' TM, in which it is still the end-users fuelling the content, but backed by the resources of corporations (and with them putting their logo on the ident as pay-off).

I doubt very much though whether even the eager account manager running the project would imagine that they would inspire a much bigger (and uncontrolled) beast of a true flash-mob. It's not clear whether it's the original silent-discoers who are getting back on the case to show how it should be done or whether this is an example of 'The Hoxton Effect' and T-Mobile has just broken the phenomenon out to the mainstream. Who promptly shut down the whole of Liverpool Street.

This is the main issue with where all of this (the convergence of social media, marketing, entertainment and gaming - what i mean by the 'new entertainment') - how to allow it to be both authentic and yet slick, compelling but controlled (at least enough to get the buy-in of the authorities - in this case Liverpool Street Station, who are now never going to consent to any guerilla style events again).

The key to this is the traditional games that we play - from sport to charades - all of which derive their fun from exploring in different ways within very specific perametres (as Homer Simpson says 'rules help to control the fun'). In order to play the game you have to consent to the rule set that goes with them, and this is where the control will come from.

Another aspect of these emergent Alternate Reality Games  that has moved a little further into public consciousness this week is the fake celebrities on Twitter (my favourite is @MayorofLondoff), and more specifically the characters in Madmen, featured in the Guardian Guide on Saturday. For a while it seemed like this was part of a marketing drive to raise awareness, but it has transpired that this the contemporary equivalent of fan fiction.

This is as much a part of this user collaborated content as the flashmobs, what needs to happen next is for some framework to be put around them to allow them to engage in something with more direction, more control, and therefore more fun - some kind of game, say...

How tweet i feel about you (or how to organise your life online)

I've just updated my Twitter one line bio to 'Trying to work out how to balance the personal and the professional, the real and the virtual', and that's my reason for not to having blogged for so long.

i was discussing with my team last week whether technology will suddenly shoot ahead (catch up with itself?) and enable us to manage our communications and information processing in a way that doesn't frustrate and obstruct more than it satisfies - like Tom Cruise's magic gloves in Minority Report, or the PC table-top in the last Bond. Or whether we will always be pushing it so hard to get the most out of it that Moore's law might as well be the Circle and District Line.

Apple is the perfect example of this, but i dont have time to go into my feelings for my Macbook right now (it's complicated), or why i dont have an iphone (even those that love it spend an equal amount of time explaining why want to throw it out of the window).

Essentially there will (and should) always be a demand for something better, smarter, quicker. Something that helps us stay in touch with whatever and whoever we need. So we moved from My Space - which showed many of us how to show off our real world lives to our virtual friends, to Facebook - which allowed us to say how we were as well as who - and then to Twitter, which allow us to share anything we come across (in the real world or online) with a mixture of genuine friends and people we find interesting (as long as you can express it in 140 characters).This concept has now been extended to video too - on 12 Seconds TV.

I extol Del.icio.us as a way of cataloguing the web whenever i get the opportunity, but i've never found it much good for sharing - great if you know someone useful and can find them, but as a way to discover new sources of good content it takes a lot of work.

Twitter, however, is currently the glue that holds the social web together and is a provider of more interesting and useful thoughts, services and tools than anything since my Dad when i was six (can it see through walls like he could though, i wonder??)

In the last few weeks i've been shown what Stephen Fry thinks of sybaritic luxury; how to map out your arguments visually; how to coordinate diaries with people in different places, and the fact that reality might in fact be a two dimensional hologram projection onto the event horizon of a black hole.

Twitter is also to 2009 what 2008 was to Facebook, 2007 was to Second Life and 2006 to blogging. The number one request that will come from our clients on how they can exploit it (the answer - just get stuck in!). And it's the thing that we come back to again and again in our 'digital secondment' sessions at Cake. Either because they dont get it, they just have, or they can't get enough (ahem @Stickle; @LizzyP)

But i wont be satisfied until i can seamlessly map photographs, video and talk-typed thoughts straight from wherever i am onto a visual scrap-book of my life that simultaneously catalogues by location, time, theme and mood to those that may have an interest or need in what i am doing.

But then that's not too far off either, i am told, (and Friendfeed isnt far off...)

Sex, fame and the tv

The last newsprint on X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing’s sensational (in the original sense of the word) Christmas climaxes is being sent off for recycling as 2009 prepares to unleash the first of its celebrity-gawk show titillations.

With an abashed Celebrity Big Brother slinking out of its cupboard it may feel that shows based around talent and tears of opportunity and hope will be replaced by those of bullying, claustrophobia and fame-envy as another D-list of has-beens go through the Mill to come out with lucrative if brief contracts with the Daily Star.

However, hope comes from other quarters – firstly from India where the winners of the first ‘Million Dollar Arm’ competition have just landed deals with the Pittsburgh Pirates. This is no fifteen minutes of fame but a genuine life-changing opportunity, as their blog shows. It’s a brilliant read -  you almost cant believe that this isn’t a Tom Hanks rags-to-riches film, even as they talk with wonder about Hollywood special effects and how they are going to be television stars as well as sporting heroes.

Meanwhile on the other side of the entertainment fence there are plans for a reality television show hunt for the star of a new $50mn Emmanuelle  prequel. This seems a natural follow-on from the likes of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria (itself a fallout from X Factor, which in turn came out of Big Brother) cross-fertilized with the ‘real girl’ searches that FHM pioneered six years ago and every other lads mag has since followed.

High Street Honeys started off as a relatively tasteful way for the magazine to run pictures of hot girls but since has become a grottfest which is less about the looks and more about the leeriness as the entrants try to enact the fantasies of the adolescent readership.

Reality television has always encouraged salaciousness, from Big Brother’s desperate efforts to get its inmates to have broadcast sex through to tv’s fame-hungriest couple Jordan and Peter Andre. A recent episode of Jordan and Peter: The Next Chapter was somehow even more explicit than the porno they once made, as they described and even demonstrated how they give each-other head and complained about how loose they are (in both senses).

Unfortunately they are not the only ones mistaking porno for real life, and when others emulate it – most famously the Man Utd roasting party  this time last year – it can move from cringingly sordid to just plain wrong.

So Hunting for Emmanuelle seems a natural extension of a wider trend and could well be a preferable seventies soft-focused execution of it, while cutting out the pretense that we are interested in anything else…

As the Krypton Factor also makes a straight-faced return to our screens one wonders if this is the missing piece, and that reality contestants of the future will have to perform complicated sexual maneouvers while answering trivia questions. A new take on television's hardest quiz...

Corporate presents

We were in a meeting with our volunteering client Vinspired last week, talking about the campaigns that we've got going on for them for Christmas - using exercise bikes to pedal power the lights on Christmas trees in London, Manchester and virtually pedalling online to raise awareness for deeper volunteering opportunities; and then an online advent calendar featuring different opportunities every day for creating some festive goodwill...

Towards the end of the meeting My partner in Cake digital Mr Will Scougal, normally a very relaxed man, got a little over-excited about it all towards the end of the meeting and started waving his hands around and exclaiming 'it's a good thing we are doing here! A genuinely good thing...' Which got me thinking, is it not normally?

This Christmas it certainly feels like we do. I dont normally brag about our campaigns our in this forum, but from the Vinspired campaigns, to talking lions in Trafalgar Square for Visit London, to Ben & Jerry's Christmas Cowrol animated Christmas moosic video (sorry), raising money for the RSPCA, it seems that we are striving every day to do something a little bit special (and promote our brands at the same time, I will admit).

Actually I would argue that we do full stop - that we have now reached a position that it is necessary (or at least more effective) to be doing something that does genuine good. And recent meetings with the Good Business company, and our fellow Stephen Mews resident the Green Marine's CSR, and Project Genie   are inspiring me to believe that the world is moving that way. If slowly...

virtually a celebrity

   

three stories in the last week have highlighted the growing acceptance of deeper forms of online worlds, and the affects that they have upon the real one. Each has had its fair share of the press

firstly the biggest scoop to come out of Second Life for months, that of a real life relationship broken up by an online romance. This was interesting for more than just being scooped in the virtual world rather than in Cornwall (where South West News was able to break a story run by the rest of the (press) world), but because Ann Taylor had her own avatar (which she could make as sexy and risque as her imagination allowed) and yet this wasnt enough for her (real or virtual) man, who needed the fantasy to be as real as possible.

Will be interesting to see how David Pollard gets on with his (virtual) lover, now (real) fiance when they meet. And finally in that Ann has now got another (real and virtual) man lined up, through another online universe - World of Warcraft.

Then World of Warcraft was in the news again today, in a story on the Swedish boy that collapsed having played Wrath of the Lich King. There was a blizzard of coverage when it came out two weeks ago and 2,000 people queued to be the first to play it (just an expansion pack - it's not even a full game). This in itself is not news - this is the tenth in the series, and each of the more recent has seen the same hype. What is news is that it is news - the media now admit that this is an interesting phenomenon, and not one purely to be gawped at...

lastly the Andrew Sachs affair, which has now led to the resurgence of Andrew Sachs' career - who is reported to have been offered a part in Coronation Street - and the potential creation of self-confessed fame lusting 'Satanic Slut' Georgina Baillie's, who is allegedly going to appear in the nadir of celeb-gawping, I'm a Celebrity and is set to appear on the cover of dozens of lads mags a la Abbie Titmus...

Bonded in solace

Two films this year have been hyped more than any other in recent memory. The difference  between The Dark Knight and Quantum of Solace (other than that the first was disappointingly long, disjointed and two dimensional, and the second surprisingly tight and intensely thrilling) was that while Batman's hype centred around Heath Ledger's incredible performance, Bond's was driven by a bombardment of product advertising.

The Batman had its fair share of product placement - the MV4 Augusta superbike; a Dell laptop; a fake Nokia that looked more like an iphone - but it was relatively subtle and not much talked about. Bond, however, was more like an Argos catalogue scattered across the media. Cars, watches, phones (Sony Ericson this time), planes, vodka and beer. There's a great scene on a red-eye flight when Bond is served another remarkable vodka and orange peel cocktail, but I only remember the evil general asking for beer, shortly before he tries to rape the hostess and is then killed by the delectable Olga Kurylenko.

Regardless of the pertinence of the placements it set a new record - $50 million worth. Which would have been a bit of a turn-off, had we not met with Bebo last week. The second biggest social network in the UK, with 13 million regular users os only really known for being popular with kids and the Irish, and for its progressive webisoaps. Kate Modern was the successor to the original 'is it real, or is it the Wonder Years meets You Tube' teen angst-fest Lonely Girl. But from her product integrated, brand funded origins came a whole host of others - Sofia's Diary, The Gap Year, The Secret World of Sam King. and there are more, sat there on Bebo's servers waiting for the right brands to bring them to life. And some of them are quite good, original rather than ideas re-served from terrestial and content that feels like 'young people' would genuinely enjoy, rather than the ludicrous language of Hollyoaks.

So, in sum, as long as the content is good I am happy to have my entertainment from whoever wants to produce it, and as long as the brand isnt offensively slapped across the front or through the middle. and if it means we get more and better content through brandertainment then everybody wins, no?  

A monster crimp

Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding used to gig at our union before they became the Boosh. I never managed to see them, which I regretted hugely at the time
because everyone raved about them. Last week I managed to catch them at
Brixton Academy before they escalate to the next (final?) level of stardom
and start playing Wembley.

They are arguably the inheritors of Monty Python's crown - ridiculous, intelligent and unmistakably British humour that sets its own rules and
follows these as far as they will go. The stage-show at least goes back much
further, and has all of the elements of music-hall cabaret - with comperes,
musical interludes, slapstick, familiar characters and special guests (even
if most of these are played by the same duo, plus Bob Fossil of course - who
works much better in the larger space of theatre.

   This year they have also done their own festival, had their third series air on tv and are now planning a feature film. However, such success of course comes with consequences - mostly inspiring insipid imitations of its approach. Watching a recent viral I commented that it felt like it was trying (and failing) to be the Mighty Boosh. It turned out that was exactly what they were aiming for.

 The Honey Monster 'crimping' ad was a more blatent rip-off, and resulted in
numerous gags on his behalf throughout the show, which then ended with him
coming on stage and having his head blown off by Vince's industrial
hair-drier, then booted to the top of the set and impaled on a spike,
where he is then sexually molested by a lonely eight-tentacled Tony Harrison
- a fitting warning to all marketeers to always be original...
 

Disappointed from Miracle World

 

 played Assassins Creed for the first time last week (well, two weeks ago now - see last para). i am not what you might call an early-adopter gamer. I think they would lump me into the 'occasional gamer' bracket, buying three or four games a year (which makes us of great interest to the industry, representing a huge opportunity for growth).

i first saw the game at E3 in 2006 and was blown away by what seemed to be the first demonstration of the next generation of consoles' true power - a sophisticated medieval world that you can explore in any direction, but that reacts intelligently to you as you do, so if you start clambering over buildings or knocking people over they start shouting at you and alert the guards to hunt you down. but you can use their intelligence against them, and adopt their own habits and postures to blend in.

i was delighted to discover that in fact you are exploring the assassins' creed through the mind of a subject being held in a contemporary laboratory (giving credence to the fact that you can die and come back for once). as i materialised in my own genetic memories i got rather excited (more so playing a game than since starting Rez four years ago).

But then i started actually playing the game. the world is incredibly complex and involving, unfortunately the gameplay is not. eavesdrop on the market-trader - press A; take him out - press X; climb up the clocktower - hold down Y; leap off it again - press Y. Gaming by numbers (well, letters).

This comes soon after Spore's disappointment - the game that was supposed to take the whole industry in a new direction, fill the gap between gaming and social networking, and inspire creativity rather than destruction in a game that covers off evolution, global domination and space exploration. unfortunately, after four years in the making it proved a distraction rather than an obsession (a bit like Demis Hassabis's Republic back in 2005).

but now there is a new great hope, in the form of Little Big Planet, that again promises an enthralling virtual universe of ongoing interest, sharing the creative input of all of its community and driving back to the root of why we game - to have fun. you can check it out at that celebration of all things gaming the London Games Festival, which kicks off on Friday with the mighty Video Games Live at the festival hall.

ps - as well as disappointed from Miracle World  i am now also 'frustrated from Blogland', having written this post twice already over the last week and both times lost it due to being logged out and there not being an autosave on Typepad. i wonder if Six Apart track comments made about them by their bloggers. I wonder if i will get a polite email from them saying they are aware of the problem and are looking into it. Probably not - im sure my authority ranking doesnt justify it...

mr microsoftie and the ad circus

we were asked to comment in Media Week on the Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates ads / virals. to which we said fine, as long as we were allowed to say they were the worst waste of money and effort that we had seen this year. Which we weren't, although we were far from being alone in our scepticism - around a third of the 1,000 odd comments are from Mac-fans dissing Windows, and PCs in general. Another good number were just left wanting a churro, and one or two even thought it was actually a shoe ad!

Funnily enough Microsoft announced the same day that not only was Seinfeld out with only two of three ads shown (although of course Bill gets to stick around) and Pharrel Williams and Eva Longoria in, they are going to take on the cheeky 'I'm a Mac...I'm a PC' Apple ads and open themselves up to every troll online.

Presumaby the Shoe Circus and associated pieces are supposed to demonstrate Gates and Microsoft as a bit more human and down-to-earth, but instead it feels like a massive vanity project. And, amazingly for the biggest IT company in the world, it misses every rule that has evolved out of social media - being two dimensional, linear, passive, patronising and inauthentic. less Life Without Walls, more brains on rails...

just for starters if you are going to create such an 80s 30 second spot approach, at least back it up with outtakes (they had such a riot making it!), but if they had taken just a little of the $10m fees for Seinfeld they could have created a whole ARG world around it that brought the Shoe Circus world to life.

In our nomadic online explorations we have come across a few more interesting  examples of using social media in a slightly more progressive way... a request from one of the IT Crowd creators for input into the new series, which has had 155 responses, and looks to geniunely harness creativity, while at the same time of course building buzz for the new series.

then an example piece of Choose Your Own Adventure style interactive video from the Secret Location, which, if a little dull and slow, is at least fluid and a very good demonstration of technology.

More and better to come soon on this hopefully, now that You Tube has the tech for interactivity...