Poster Boy

Posted: April 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

At some point we have to looimagesk in the mirror and see how we are “contributing” to a world we’re too often embarrassed to live in. Today is such a day for me.

We are making heroes of the very least among us, and it must stop. I am. You are. We are.

What terrorists and mass-murderers do is widely misunderstood in my view. The ‘sane’ ones, that is to say those who are not intellectually impaired but spiritually and socially fractured, use murder and mayhem as means not ends. It’s simply the surest way to be heard. And seen. They have some agenda, and since Oprah won’t invite them to her couch, Stern won’t grant them airwaves, Anderson Cooper won’t return their call, and so on, they choose the one thing American media can’t resist— the Big Bad. Then every spotlight, every microphone, every camera, every blog, every everything is obsessively focused on them.

It’s entirely wrong to condemn the media for this. It feeds us what we beg for. We devour it. We spread it. We want it. As a boy I read In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter to find out what makes a person do the unthinkable. Some people, however, take an almost prurient interest in blackest souls. Virtually all of us are on this continuum, somewhere between morbidly curious, obsessed and fawning apologists.

One such person, evidently at the very extreme end of the spectrum, is Kayvon Edson. Unlike the ’sane’ murderers I mentioned earlier, it seems Kayvon is the other kind. The clearly deranged threat.

How can I know this not twelve hours after the world knew of Kayvon? Well, I read how he was walking around the Boston Marathon memorial in a black veil. I read that in the newspaper. It was a lead story. Kayvon was trending on Twitter too!
dylan
Then, without even having to be asked to, I went to Facebook to see if Kayvon might have some words of wisdom to share there. He did.

Kayvon’s cover photo is not of his shining face; it’s of his probable idol— Tsarnaev The Younger! Clever, eh? But wait— there’s more! The picture had a caption. It reads: Had A Blast At the Marathon!!!

That’s right. Three exclamation points. Subtle.

If you’re yelling at your computer right now,”He probably didn’t even do that! Someone put the image up after the news of what he’d done”, you’re right. And you’re entirely missing the point. And you’re making mine.

That I would voluntarily investigate this person is gravely disappointing to the point of shame. That someone else would make light of both Kayvon and Tsarnaev’s crimes (against humanity)and draft off of it is vulgar on its face. And spreading.

Heroin addiction is running wild again in the streets of cities and towns. It’s scary and a blight.

I would argue that our addiction to Big Bads is more pervasive, more destructive, and more treatable. Thank God for small favors.

When drunks or loons run onto the field during a game, broadcasters turn the camera away or go to commercial so as not to encourage more attention seekers. Let’s do that for Big Bads.

Of course we have to report what happened. The public has a right to know and the press has an obligation to cover it. But let’s not mention names of perpetrators. Let’s deny them their fifteen minutes— to say nothing of their book deals, jailhouse marriage proposals, or Facebook ‘likes.’ They want an audience. Forget ‘let’s not give it to them’; let’s not be it. Let’s not spend precious hours or even days trying to unravel the yarn. It’s not that interesting.

If we had done that with (redacted), (redacted) might not have felt the urge to jog in his murderous footsteps in a thinly veiled homage. And if (redacted) didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be googling (“redacted”) to see what he looks like, what his favorite bands are, or what President he’d be according to his Facebook quiz.

I think you get my point.

I feel like there should be some cleansing platitude inserted here. “Be kind to strangers.” “Care for the mentally ill.” “Live every day to the fullest.”

I’ll settle for, “Don’t make fame of infamy.” Hey, it’s a start.

I don’t want media companies to be better than me. I want them to help me be better. I need all the help I can get. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe not.

The Wonder Years

Posted: August 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: digital media | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(Overheard by no one. Ever.)

“I wonder what happened at the Olympics.”

“I guess you’ll have to wait until you get home to find out.”

###

“What do you think she’s like? I wonder what kind of music she’s into, books she’s read, where she’s from…”

“Assuming asking her is off the table, see what you can find out from one of her friends.”

###

“I’ll bet you Michael Phelps is straight as an arrow. He’s probably in bed at eight every night so he can get up and train at five-AM or some ungodly hour. I kind of feel bad for him. He can’t kick back and just do the things dudes do.”

“Yeah. He’s probably never even been to a party. Sucks for him.”

###

“Did you know Anthony Weiner originally wanted to be a weatherman? What a tool. He’s such a mensch it’s pathetic. He’s like the central casting ‘shirt off his back’ Boy Scout.”

“I know. The guy’s gotta loosen up a little. He’s making the rest of us look bad.”

###

“I’m worried about her. I think she’s working herself to death. I think she wants to prove to us that she can handle the freedom of college. We trust her. I just want her to enjoy herself– when she’s done studying of course.”

“The key is make friends and not look back and say ‘I wish I lifted my head up a little and enjoyed myself some.”

If Only We Could Unknow Things

Technology has made the world incredibly small and very translucent in so many ways. The whole concept of not being able to know something or to access information about it instantly from anywhere is almost unthinkable.  This is not a diatribe on “Big Brother” and our loss of privacy. The government (or its shadowy puppet-masters if the blogosphere is to be believed) can watch me all they like. I’m not that interesting. Rather, I’m speaking about our loss of those things that were so common and so foundational for so many. The curiosity, opinion rather than ‘fact’, and the dialog that surrounded us are in short supply these days. The ubiquitous “I wonder…” most of us grew up with has gone the way of the hula-hoop. Many of life’s mysteries, writ large and small, have been ‘solved.’

In many ways this is a good thing. Finding what you’re looking for quickly and verifying it against multiple sources is nearly always a good thing.  “Why belabor through debate what you can know,” has its place. But I can’t help but wonder if this seeming God’s-eye, three-hundred-sixty-degree view of everything actually acts as blinders more often than not. I worry we take so much in we retain very little.

“Did you hear about the shooting in Aurora?”

“OMG. Will Ferrell just called Kristen Stewart a ‘trampire’!!!”

Nothing sticks for long. There’s always more right behind it. Size gets distorted as everything gets force-fed into 140 characters or a million Facebook comments.

The Ephemeral Empire.

But mostly I worry we’re greatly diminished by our growing inability to understand and go beyond what we cannot see, what isn’t captured and made data.

To market a product (or create one) people used to engage in copious amounts of people-watching. Cognitive Anthropologist Dr. Bob Deutsch once told me that successful marketers are always astute observers of “people in life”, like Diane Fossey observed and came to understand gorillas in the mist.

Now we have behavior monitoring. Someone hit your website. Drop a cookie and work backwards as to how they got there. Look for ‘likes’ and funnel them at the point of decision.

Fine. For salmon.

 

The Deeper Part of the River

 

But if that’s all you’ve got, you’re in trouble. Our obsession with action has left us with decreasing understanding of why (or why not) the things happen. We only know that they happen or are statistically probable to happen.  I’m not advocating going back to the bad old days of “birds of a feather” bucketing where nine of ten products were aimed toward “soccer moms.” We’re way past that. But I don’t want to lose sight of the things that happen that can’t be measured, captured, or categorized. What makes folks tick, not just what makes them click. Trusting your eyes and ears as much as your data. Or more.

Like the “Ghost on the Canvas” from one of my favorite Paul Westerberg songs, too often, “people don’t know when they’re looking at soul.”

Pity.

Olympic Torched

Posted: July 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: digital media, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The London Olympiad is upon us, and I for one am thrilled. In a ‘win at any cost’ sports culture that mimics our larger society whether we want to admit that or not, the Olympics somehow float high above the grit despite the sponsorships, despite the doping, and despite the professionalization that’s foundationally changed the Olympics over the past few decades.

Underpinning it all is a wonderful set of tenets we could all do worse than to strive to achieve in our everyday lives:

Not to win but to take part.

Not the triumph but the struggle.

Not to have conquered but to have fought well.

So here are a few ideas I think merit recognition for their ‘going for gold’ if not ever achieving it.

Gold: Huffington Post
HuffPo may not have vanquished traditional News formats across media, but it certainly has made its presence known– and quickly. In just seven years it’s been bought, become one of the most visited News sites, and won a Pulitzer Prize. Not bad. What I like most about it is that it’s the proverbial box of chocolates. It’s got hard news and gossip, syndication/aggregation and original reporting, national and hyper-local news, liberal and conservative points of view. There’s something for everyone without being just completely vanilla, as in the USA Today. Rather than saying nothing, HuffPo says seemingly everything. Cool.

Runner-up: Facebook

Like The Dream Team, people love to hate. But, Facebook is bringing lots of the best parts of the web together under one blue roof. Acquisition of Instagram, integration of Spotify, and many other land grabs continue to make The Facebook the shiniest site on Earth for most folks.

Silver: MobileMe
What if all your stuff was synched and stored in the Cloud? Wouldn’t that be awesome?! Yes. It is. Before iCloud and other services made that de rigueur, there was MobileMe, Apple’s Hindenburg meets Pinto blemish. A great idea that just never worked, MobileMe was tantamount to asking all of your stuff to stop working. It effectively shut down all conversation between devices like a third martini over dinner with your in-laws. Undaunted, Big Mac came back strong and MobileMe is all but forgotten. I like that Apple makes computers but isn’t a computer itself. This was the ultimate feet of clay demonstration of that. Happens.

Runner-up: RIM/Blackberry

Seeing Blackberry’s struggles is like the opening sequence of The Agony of Defeat. I’m not even sure if that epic tumble was from the Olympics, but it was Ski Jumping, so close enough. Blackberry pioneered the multi-purpose mobile space, blazed the trail, was run over by an iTank, dusted itself off only to get speed bumped by a speeding ‘droidmobile’. They brought their 400m game to the Marathon with predictable results.

Bronze: Napster
In so many ways Napster was the ‘straw that stirs the drink’ for so much of what we have today. Before getting squashed like a bug, it egged the Music Industrial Complex, ushering in the likes of Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud and others who crossed the chasm from traditional to digital delivery on a bridge fashioned from the charred bones of Napster. P2P got rolling in earnest with Napster. “Don’t own it, share it” became the mantra for a whole generation, second only to “don’t buy it when you can burn it.” While its reach did exceed its grasp legally and ethically, Napster began the process of people looking to each other and not to corporations for answers, ideas, and of course, music. Rock on.

Runner-Up: Samsung

Apple and Samsung need to get a room already. These two remind me of the Harding-Kerrigan soap opera. Engaged in an Olympic-sized pissing contest over patents, Made-in-the-USA (by way of China) Apple stares down the “menace from the East” with global Gold in the balance. Sorry, that was the made-for-TV Olympic-hype version. But don’t sleep on Samsung. They could very definitely medal in the Handset 400. My money’s on Apple to nip them at the tape.

None of these products won it all and that’s precisely the point. They strived. They tried. They pushed themselves and their competition to the limit. Isn’t that what we all should aspire to do? Not competing against anyone but competing for someone. For ourselves, our ideals, our ideas. The Olympics are about Personal Best, not destroy everyone in your path.

Prediction Time
It wouldn’t be a Sporting event if we didn’t have wages on it.

Gold
All of us. That’s right. I think over the next fortnight or so we’re going to get a glimpse into how multiple technologies, multiple screens, can be used in a complementary way for regular folks, not just the Adderall-with-a-Mountain-Dew-chaser gamers. Use the web to learn more about events, contestants, venues…while also providing your own color commentary on your social web. With the apps out there and the anticipated coverage London will receive, it will be easier and more fun than ever.

Silver
Chicago. The City of Broad Shoulders wanted the Summer Olympics. When they see what an enormous cluster it is for Londoners, they’ll thank Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow they lost the bid. It’s not like they’re not used to losing.

Bronze
Innocence. I think the Olympic flame stirs something in even the most jaded hipster among us. What it stands for deep down at its core is pretty good stuff. While the McOlympification continues to dismay and disappoint, I think there’ll be enough genuine passion, genuine appreciation, and genuine sportsmanship and camaraderie to keep the flame aflicker.

Let your Games begin.

What the Zuck?

Posted: June 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I know the stock price is way down and you just got married. Look, times are tough. I’ve been there. I was a young newlywed once too. So let me give you $10 to get you through. If things don’t pick up, no problem. Come see me next month and I’ll give you $10 more. Just ‘paying it forward’ as they say.

Let me explain a bit about myself first.

I never, ever wanted my children to be named after me. I don’t want them to go where I went to school. Most importantly, I don’t want them to follow in my professional footsteps. It’s not just that I want them to forge their own unique paths. On the professional front, I’m retracing my footsteps myself. They’ve lead to a cliff. Now I’m walking backward to try to find a way around.

The assumptions I held dear – like ‘good creativity trumps the interruption that is part and parcel of advertising’ – are becoming more and more patently false every day.

Pecked to Death by (Aflac) Ducks

Last week I was awoken by the vibration of my phone on the nightstand. It was 3:12AM. I had received a text. I had won a contest. I had never entered. “Winning.”

Charlie Ergen, former client, former professional gambler, current CEO of satellite giant Dish Network, recently launched a commercial-skipping service. Why? He had to. The jig is up.

“Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete,” he told the Wall Street Journal. The same is true for Radio. Web. Mobile. Outdoor. You name it. I’d mention newspapers but that would just be piling on.

More proof: Pandora is lapping the traditional field on a monthly basis. If it was a fight, they’d stop it. Why? Either zero or very few ads. Ahh, the sounds of silence.

At a minimum, unchecked interruptive advertising is on its last legs. Not some slow growing cancer that folks used to call “old age.” Fast-moving, get-your-affairs-in-order kind of cancer. While it took me around the world, made me life-long friends with many great people, and treated me like gold, I’ll join you in dancing on its grave. Enough is enough.

“The dream is over.” – John Lennon

I remember vividly celebrating and even parroting Alex Bogusky’s proclamation (perhaps apocryphal), “Everything is an advertising opportunity.”

I wanted to believe it because that was my business. I was an ad guy. I wanted to believe there was nothing but blue ocean ahead.

Alas, like the ocean itself, we’ve polluted it to the point where prolonged exposure is dangerous.

Everything is not an advertising opportunity. I half expect to go to Mass Sunday and find the Host has a Nike swoosh and the Consecration sponsored by Dunkin’ Donuts.

Let’s go back to Facebook for a minute. Unlike the haters, I love (the) Facebook. It serves an incredibly useful purpose. It connects. I value few things as I do connections. Sure, some are superficial at best. While I am connected to a girl I revered in the fifth grade, I’d hardly call that connection meaningful. On the other hand, I can keep apprised of the goings on of good friends near and far as we’re all running our separate courses. I can see their kids. I can share playlists like the ’80s never left. It’s useful and I’m grateful for it.

But it’s a failure, right? I mean, it sucks as an ad delivery venue. The little banner ads are lame. The “sponsored posts” by creepy anthropomorphic brands leave me either cold or enraged. (As an aside, I don’t care that “Dallas” is coming back with the remaining “living” cast. What did I do or say to lead Facebook to believe I would?)

Mobile is even worse.

So they’re failures, all those hoodied coders, because they built something that adds value to its users lives but sucks as an ad vehicle. Really? Is that where we are?

I hope not, but think so.

Ask for the (New) Order

Don’t get me wrong. If they want to collect a paycheck, they need a plan to make money. So here is my modest proposal.

Ask.

Go ahead, Zuck. Tell us what you must have known all along. People are gong to have to actually pay for a service or else live through a whoreified, horrifying user experience. We can take it. YouTube announced the other day they’re getting ready to ask for my money too. It’s OK.

Five bucks a month, no problem. Ten? Grudgingly. More than that? I’ll check out Path or any one of the raft of competitors you will be creating. You see, asking people to pay for quality goods in a free marketplace makes even Democrats and Republicans smile. It’s this faux free that is killing us.

There’s plenty of precedents. We pay for HBO. It has no commercials. We pay for apps. Same. I pay for Spotify. Ditto. I want to give you money. Please take it. Don’t compromise your vision or change my experience for Aunt Jemimah or Orville Reddenbocker.

Old Math Still Works

Here’s a little back of the napkin math: there are supposedly 835,525,280 Facebook users globally. Charge us each $10 a month and you get $8,355,252,800 per month! That’s $100,263,033,600 annually. Am I missing something? OK, there are a lot of “light” users in there. Lot’s of them just won’t pay. Period. So cut that in half and you get $50,131,516,800. I’ve never proclaimed to be a math wizard, but this seems pretty straightforward to me.

Everything Old is New Again

What would they do with all that revenue? It would be a little bit like the wayback machine. Monies now poured into catchy copy, peel-backs and jingles would actually be allocated to making products better and servicing them better. People would find out about products through friends and acquaintances, both in-person and virtual. I think Google would have a huge role, obviously, but I think peer-to-peer referrals and recommendations (Foursquare, Yelp…) would increasingly gain traction too. When people want or need something they’ll seek it out from both the ‘God’s Eye’ and peer perspectives.

Will we go through the looking glass and come to miss our ads? God no. But in the event we do, we can toggle the levers a bit. That’s the balance most of us will find. Pay less per month or per content chunk, get a few (more) ads. Poor people or tightwads? Sorry. Release the ad hounds.

For those who can afford to pay, content creators will compete for dollars not unlike in a grand European market. There’s a skinned lamb, beside a rutabaga, next to fresh-roasted almonds and cured olives. I’ve got a fixed budget, so decisions have to be made. I’ll end up buying less, but more purposefully. What I pay for I’ll invariably use, unlike the free stuff that usually ends up in the compost heap. I don’t know about you, but I think we need to move back to the time when we paid for things based on our perceived value of them, not our perceived value to the merchant. What’s been sold to us as “free” isn’t free at all. It comes at an immeasurable cost in terms of time and stress as we struggle to keep our noses above the junk (mail).

That Faustian bargain was no bargain at all as it turns out.

This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/06/26/an-open-letter-to-zuck-forget-ads-make-us-pay-for-facebook/

Curly Was Wrong

Posted: March 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Curly Was Wrong

I was reading Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Companies” when it struck me: Curly was wrong.

You know– leather-faced Curly from City Slickers. Specifically when he (played by all-time badass Jack Palance) was imparting his cowboy wisdom on hapless (and now similarly leather-faced Oscar host) Billy Crystal that the key to life was ‘just one thing.’

All apologies, but wrong.

Life is about a bunch of things. Big things. Smaller things. But “things” plural. Fast Company’s top four most innovative companies—Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon—have this decidedly in common. In a seemingly ‘there’s an app for that world’ where ‘do one thing and do it better than anyone else’ is the mantra, they stand in contrast to a degree. Their utility is not one-dimensional or limited in any way. Their future seems wider, not deeper.

I won’t belabor the Applification of America. Apple is pervasive, thanks largely to ease of use and enormous utility. Apple works like you think it should and does a bunch of stuff that makes your life better or more enjoyable—even if you didn’t know it prior. What started with the iconic Mac has ballooned into something much, much more—a mix of hardware and software wrapped around an elegant experiential core. Even now, Apple seems nearer to its beginning than its end. Don’t delude yourself. We’ll all be driving Apple cars soon and asking Siri where the best place to beat the meter is.

Facebook began as a great way to keep in touch with friends new and old, to share some pictures, and blow off a little steam and time. Now it’s a way to share music, is on its way to becoming the prevalent Search venue, and will soon be all of our personal valet. It will know what we want—from turkey sandwich to Turkey vacation—before we do. Its key is that it’s so outwardly anthropomorphic. It doesn’t feel like software or layered databases. It feels like the corner pub, the high school reunion, or Aunt Gertrude’s parlor. Eight-hundred million people and counting stick with Facebook and all its foibles because we’re deeply engaged with it and have too much invested to unplug from it and move to Google+ or any of the other suitors for our social pursuits. In time, I have every reason to believe the Pinterests of the world will be bought or buried, reincarnated inside THE Facebook as it further solidifies its position as the place people digitally commune with one another for a long, long time.

Google, in contrast to Facebook’s warm and fuzzy human qualities, was the icily efficient box you typed search terms into. Remember that? Now it is email, calendars, maps, hardware, and the single best way to visualize a 3D rendering of the ulnar nerve. We all feed it more and use it more because it works—usually quickly and efficiently. Honestly, we’d all be reduced to nose-picking mouth-breathers if it went away one day. It is the undisputed champion of moving information into our heads. Think about it. Its utility and inroads into our lives (and soon our wallets) will grow unabated for the foreseeable future. Google it. You’ll see.

Amazon was a place to buy books. Now you can get Hugo Boss jeans (I’m told), organic pickles, or authentic MG (the iconic British convertible) cufflinks. Oh, and you could even get a Kindle, arguably doing more to promote reading than Harry Potter. With a significant share of hardware, software, and content sales, Amazon is not just transforming retail, but virtually all industries. It works. People like it. It’s simple. Why change?

Ultimately, I’ll give Curly this—they all began with ‘just one thing.’ From there, they consolidated their bases and built upon them vast, diverse enterprises that give us all more and more reason to use them. And use them. And use them some more. If it aint broke, don’t fix it, most of us say.

In a world increasingly thin-sliced, these four (with Foursquare hot on their heels) are becoming less specialized and more generally utilitarian. One and done competitors should take care. These all-in-one giants are not quite monopolies, but they’ve clearly got hotels on the green and yellow properties. They’re so hard to avoid because no one really wants to.

There’s a time for the new and a time for the familiar. And as these familiars are proving, there’s profit in bringing the new inside a familiar trusted source environment.

Don’t tell Curly. He’s packing.

 

 

(This post originally appeared in iMedia http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/03/26/curly-was-wrong/)