Altacircle

If you think of all of the types of civil dissent — marches, protests, sit-ins, occupies — this one is a new one for the mix.   Given the mess of a piece of legislation going through Congress, it is great to see the tech and internet industry mobilize a bit.

Self induced denial of service?

It is clearly effective since every major media outlet has picked up the story and generally put in on page 1, err, the homepage, err, the top of their feed.  Given how easy it is to contact your members of congress online, it isn’t surprising a change to Tumbler resulted in 80,000 calls to representatives.  Be interesting to see wikipedia’s response rates.

Of course as a reader of Cory Doctorow and supporter of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, it has to be said the issue is a complicated on.  Forcing DNS edits, allowing persecution of host sites and removing of links definitely seems like classic bad work in Congress.

And just at a time when the industry is making buying videos and magazines easy enough to provide real revenue and the ad industry is getting organized to turn the digital pennies everyone is complaining about into digital dollars that can support publishers as well as independent artists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/technology/web-wide-protest-over-two-antipiracy-bills.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

Lifestreams.

I’ve just been reading an article in the WSJ about David Gelernter, a professor at Yale that published a book called “Mirror Worlds” in 1991.  In it he talks about lifecasting, which is effectively what happens when a series of objects are organized according to time.  As the article points out:

A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its “wall” constantly updated with postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter’s feed is a lifestream. “Chatter,” developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by client companies, is a lifestream.

And this of course has implications for the future:

Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system.

There is no question being rid of the “file system” wouldn’t be a such a bad thing, but it will require people to give up on their property instinct. 

Think about music, although it developed through live music — ie “experiences” — it shifted to owning albums and CDs.  Music collections defined people.  Of course radio was available and what station you listened to also showed your style, the real focus was the collection.  The act of finding the music, buying it, listening to and sharing albums, and displaying it. 

With “personalized radio stations” and services like Spotify that focus shifts to curated playlists instead of collections.  Aside from the impact on music stores, it actually shifts how people think about ownership.  People are asked to revel in the demonstration of skill of putting together a great playlist of say 1920s early jazz, but there is no property there.  It is the shift from being an art collector to being an art curator.

Now of course being released of the burden of managing harddrives full of photos, documents and presentations would probably be welcome.  And if you take the concept to objects we all lease our cars, rent our houses and replace the random objects we lug around with us with temporary displays that demonstrate our personality at the moment. 

All nice but don’t we have 3,000 years of being taught the importance of property ownership?

For all of the talk of technology reducing the need for business travel, planes seem pretty full these days.

It is a true cliche to say that business is more global than ever and we’re seeing it on our dotJWT team with people working on the development that are spread from Buenos Aires to London to Dubai and Singapore.  The question I’d like to see research on is how often do you need to be physically across from each other and how much video, voice, IM and skype can work.

There is no question Kick-offs are critical.  People often don’t know each other and there is so much more communicated face to face in getting to know people.  In fact, sort of like the inane 18 hour university road trips that create life friendships, I’d say it has to be about more then dinner.  Teams that will work together have to be forced to sit in windowless office conference rooms for at least 6 hours before they can go to a fantastic trendy bar and celebrate together … for another 4 hours.

This punches through any posturing, gives time for differing agendas to make it out and allows peples real characters to come through.  And those are the characters that make or break a project.

That’s the easy part, but then comes the big question:  teams will drift apart pretty quickly if they aren’t pulled together and reminded of the common reason we’re all spending time on whatever it is we’re doing.  The Roman Army had a great way to keep people working to a common goal:  if a group broke ranks or lacked discipline, they drew lots and one tenth were then bludgened to death by their peers.  This could work for excessive use of powerpoint slides today but I don’t think it fits with modern motivation theory.

So instead we use Check Points to get teams in front of senior executives and remind everyone of progress.  Team Incentives can include business travel to nice places dolled up as “train the trainer” programs.  But at the end of the day, it is the routine communication that has to keep the team together.

So the question is:  Can technology do it?  Do extranets like Base Camp make a bid difference?  They definitely keep people informed.  Do video conferencing like our JWT Talking Heads tool do better then phone conferences?  You can’t put Skype on mute when you’re peering into the camera like LonelyGirl15 waiting for the conversation to come round.  As much as you may say “but I know what they look like” there is more bandwidth in a video call then voice alone.

And last is video conferencing rooms.  The great technology that was supposed to save us from the aluminium baloons that haul us — too slowly — across the planet.

I suppose the answer is all of the above.  Looking forward to reading more of the science and checking it against the ever so particular environment that is JWT, and then publishing what really works.

So on Friday night, after 3 weeks+ of trial and error, research and failed attempts I finally was able to hack my Nook Color and turn it into a full Android tablet.  Thank you Barnes & Noble for making a beautifully designed piece of hardware and making your Nook Color software available as an Android app which is what makes it possible to go for a full overwrite of the tablet software rather than the alternatives.
What did I learn?

• The android development community is amazing.  There is a ton of threads, instruction and patches to work with.  In fact it was actually too much for mere mortals like myself with limited time.
• There is definitely room for a 7″ tablet in our lives.  Riding the train with all of the ipadders it is easy to see the popularity but if you are carrying a laptop, and a phone, an 11″ tablet is overkill.
• RSS feeds matter.  Barnes & Noble and Amazon have to understand there is SO much content out there they can’t expect to fully control the publishing process.

How did I make it work and be stable?
The answer wasn’t putting Android or CM7 on a bootable SD card, couldn’t get that stable and realized I wouldn’t want to boot into the Nook OS once I could get to my books and magazines.  It also wasn’t wasn’t doing a “Auto-Nooter” upgrade adding Android Market to the BN Nook Color OS since the Nook is being updated regularity.
The answer was to use the Cynogenmod 7 Build 177 version of Android and it is a reasonably recent build but not the latest nightly upload.  Then the last “signed” version of Google Apps (8/28).  Big thanks to XDADevelopers and this guide in particular.

So here another brand gets into trouble trying to generate content from bloggers.  In this case a set of food and mommy bloggers were asked to attend an underground restaurant run by George Duran, the celebrity chef but for the last course, a Marie Callender’s frozen food was served, and the bloggers reactions filmed by hidden cameras.

Not a new technique, but a classic mistake given the bloggers cardinal rule against shilling.

So the question is it subtle?  Not really.  “Brands need to start behaving like human beings” is the phrase we are hearing more and more.  And that is simple enough.

But just as brands should put the customer first and every company knows it has to take care of its people as its most important asset, doing is much harder then saying.

And there is no question that social media is unforgiving, as the NY Times so well point out in their article.

Remember the AT&T “You Will” campaign from the 90s? 

It is the one that everyone got upset about because AT&T expected us to send faxes from the beach.

The ads also promised such radical things as getting directions from an in-car GPS, buying concert tickets from a cash machine, and tucking your baby in via video call.  Perhaps we need to recognize near future fiction can come true.  Whether or not AT&T is the company bringing it us is another question.  And then there is Tom Selleck.

AT&T 1993 “You Will” AdsTechnorati Tags: AT&T, Near Future Fiction, Advertising

Coming back to the US one of the biggest advertising things you notice is healthcare advertising — whether it is on TV, in print or online.

At JWT we have a big Healthcare practice and have just launched a first release set of websites for a new pharmaceutical for our Johnson & Johnson client.   It has been amazing seeing the work it takes to get basic product information online in this sector — managing regulatory and legal definitely add a level of complexity to the usual job!

At anyrate congratulations to the team — great to see the initial communications coming out after having worked on the pitch and strategy. 

For those member of my family that are still wrestling with what exactly digital advertising is, this is a good dose of our current thinking.  The panel session focused on measurement and the audience was mostly publishers so I talked to that, but also managed to bring in some of the Brand Journalism case studies and Nightlife Exchange.

Thank you Vizu and Scribemedia for the invite to the panel.

http://www.scribemedia.org/2011/07/12/creative-agency-as-business-consultant/

This is a must read for MBA and VCs everywhere. Smart, humorous and insightful.  The cynical entrepreneurs take on the effects of VC funding — particularly the big money all entrepreneurs are supposed to dream of, is great.

And the fact that it takes place in parking lot of dead WalMart is even funnier.

Cory Doctorow
Other People’s Money
Cory Doctorow 10.15.07, 6:00 PM ET

Gretl’s stall in the dead WalMart off the I-5 in Pico Rivera was not the busiest spot in the place, but that was how she liked it. Time to think was critical to her brand of functional sculpture, and reflection was the scarcest commodity of all in 2027.

Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist–he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.

Original Forbes Article

If you feel like giving up a whole 30 minutes and hear the agency perspective on the shift of advertising dollars from traditional to digital channels, here is yet another BIG chance!

Panel was moderated by Dan Beltramo, CEO & Founder of Vizu and consisted of
Paul Gunning, CEO Tribal DDB,
Carl Fremont, EVP / Global Media Director at Digitas, and
myself (sitting in for Bob Jeffrey).

Interesting highlights from my perspective?

• It is harder to move marketers from TV spending then print or radio part because it works and part because it is fun for marketers
• Local can replace print for retailers that need to cover specific metropolitan areas
• Media is all being measured and recession has forced ROI conversations about each media channel
• New IAB units are driving excitement clientside and in the industry.  Real campaigns versus simple banner ads
• Innovative multichannel ideas throw the whole media plan up in the air

Here is the archived stream: http://www.livestream.com/digiday/video?clipId=pla_1980fdee-ea17-4b7a-87e9-636bb512d30e