Excellent Exchange- Brian Morrissey & Troy Young on the Future of Content RT @socialisticny #infdist

From: Troy Young
To: Brian Morrissey

Re: creative….people love to interact with interesting, attractive, usable things. But, lets pull apart two types of creative that confuse people. First is creative that will always have diminishing marginal returns. The stuff designed to get you to engage with an ad. This is what your DSP guy was talking about. It's not that interesting. It describes most online advertising. Second is creative that delivers increasing marginal returns. Experiences that create dialog and culture. This is the stuff that matters. The web has not done this kind of advertising very well yet. Mostly because it works best when you have a critical mass of attention. And audio. Crafty marketers have delivered cultural moments with with social channels. But it's hard. And rare.

Now, forget creative for a sec. Lets talk about media economics. Everything is media, so it ain't like it used to be and we a have a surplus. Blah blah blah. Let's imagine for a second what it means when we say $1 CPM (what the Web seems to be doing to inventory). For a measly $100 you can speak to 100,000 people. Two football stadiums. My entire home town (almost). There is something ridiculous about this. Are you really buying attention? I doubt it. 

Now let's think about a $100 CPM. For a hundred bucks you are talking to a good size auditorium. That starts to make sense, if you have the audience's attention in a meaningful way. So the question is, can you create an experience with your audience that is penetrating and meaningful? If you can, you should get a $100 CPM. I think you can. Will you have to lend your influence? Yes. Can you do it with integrity? For sure. 

Is this back to the future, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom stuff? Absolutely. Marketing is hard and expensive because everyone can do it and most people need to do it. Tactics change. Fundamentals don’t.

Public Art Event in 200+ Global Cities: ART BY CHANCE 2011-Look Around!

From MUBI:

"You may come across a short film!

Largest Public art event Art By Chance 2011 is on! CHANGE themed ultra short films on 20.000 screens in 20+countries 200+ cities worldwide from 13 May to 13 June. The festival takes place simultaneously in Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, El Salvador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey, UAE, UK, US

Music by POST…"

Neil Gaiman fans crash Republican's website after Neil is called 'thief' & 'pencil-necked weasel' | guardian.co.uk

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Read the full post on the guardian.co.uk:

Pencil-necked? Maybe. Thief? No way. Award-winning author Neil Gaiman has defended himself against Republican Matt Dean's extraordinary claim that he is a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota".

The astonishing attack from the Minnesota House of Representatives majority leader, published in the Star Tribune yesterday, centred on a fee of $45,000 (£27,000) paid to Gaiman – "who I hate," Dean added – from state art funds last year for a speaking appearance at Stillwater Library in Minnesota.

Describing the comments as "bullying schoolyard nonsense", Gaiman said Dean's assertion that he stole the money "is a lie". "Yes, I gave the money to charities – a sexual abuse one and a library/author one, long ago, when the cheque came in, well before this ever became a political football. But that seems completely irrelevant to this: I don't like the idea that a politician is telling people that charging a market wage for their services is stealing," the bestselling fantasy author wrote on his blog. "[But] it's kind of nice to make someone's Hate List. It reminds me of Nixon's Enemies List. If a man is known by his enemies, I think my stock just went up a little."

Gaiman was less perturbed about the "pencil-necked weasel" insult. "I like 'pencil-necked weasel'. It has 'pencil' in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like 'intellectual' may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people," said the author, whose 1.5 million Twitter followers managed to crash Dean's website after he posted a link to it. ("Bugger. Did not mean to #neilwebfail the twit's site. Sorry," tweeted Gaiman.)...'

Very Interesting: blur Group, tracking crowdsourced projects in realtime | by Piers Dillon Scott/The Sociable

The world’s leading crowdsourcing organisation has launched the first realtime web-app to track crowdsourced creative projects.

The blur Group’s blur Trading application shows the number “…type size, description and location” of the briefs submitted to the company’s Creative Services Exchange.

blur Group Trading logo

Corwdsourcing is the process of using digital, usually social, technologies to bring a number of interested people together to work on a single project.  While almost exclusively reserved for artistic purposes an increasing number of organisations, such as the blur Group, are applying this innovative methodology to the business and commercial sectors.

According to the app’s current data 39% of the Group’s projects come from the UK, India and the US, with the remaining 61% coming from the rest of the world.  Some 28% of these projects are completed with another 35% in the pitching process.

The blur Group’s crowdsourcing process works by encouraging businesses to submit briefs which freelancers or creative agencies can pitch for.  The Group’s current projects are as varied as a £40,000 fashion website,  a $5,000 series of viral videos for a US film organisation, to a $2,500 Indian biotechnology projects

Speaking of the growth of crowdsourcing and the company’s Creative Services Exchange blur Group CEO Philip Letts said, “We expect all of our indicators to continue to grow throughout the year and make our first full trading year on the Exchange since leaving stealth mode exceed expectations.”

The company also said that it has already exceeded the 10,000 creatives and agencies signed up to its Creative Services Exchange network, which it announced last week, and has added General Electric Healthcare to its client list.

Innovative Campaign: Ben & Jerry's Fair Tweets puts unused Twitter Characters to Good Use

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"PUT YOUR UNUSED TWITTER CHARACTERS TO GOOD USE.
AND HELP SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT FAIR TRADE.

Every day, millions of Twitter characters go unused. That's not very fair. But now you can tweet as you normally would, and we'll turn any leftover characters into a message about Fair Trade. Now that's fair.

FAIR TWEET FROM WHEREVER YOU ARE ONLINE."

(nice site too)

TFI :: Getting Your Marketing Hands Dirty

From the Tribeca site:

"Getting Your Marketing Hands Dirty

Building awareness is an essential aspect of any traditional or cross-platform project. In the article below, cross-posted from the Tribeca Film Festival's Future of Film Blog, Chris Thilk shares some thoughts on marketing.

If you follow to any extent the happenings out of Silicon Valley you'll see that the founders, investors and other key players in any number of start-ups are always hustling. They're on Twitter and Facebook talking the site/service/app/tool up, investing time in pitching influential media outlets and hitting as many parties and other events trying to make sure everyone knows what they're doing. They're doing so with a handful of potential outcomes in mind: They might be looking to make money through either selling paid versions or through ad sales. They might be hoping to attract a critical mass of users in the hopes of being acquired by a bigger existing company. Or they could genuinely think they have a great idea and just want as many people as possible to know about it.

This contrasts to a great extent with something I've heard more than once from independent filmmakers, which is that they're much too busy to be personally involved in the marketing of the movie they're planning, shooting or have already completed. There's no problem with attending festivals, of course, but writing a blog or something like that apparently will require more time than they have and is akin to asking them to dilute their art with tacky marketing. I'm generalizing of course but I've come across this sentiment enough times to worry that it's fairly widespread...."

Must Read: No Tangible Limits « BBH Labs Interview with Geoloqi founder Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist

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Excerpt from Jeremy Ettinghausen's interview:

"Labs: You’ve just given up your day job to work full time on Geoloqi – was this a hard decision and what are the differences between working for a company and being a start-up?
AC: This was a decision I thought about a great deal. Leaving a stable job is a difficult thing, but I felt more constrained every day.To me being a startup is going after something that hasn’t been done right, or building something that brings joy or excitement into the lives of others. A lot of technology out there is broken. Technology in general is very difficult, and there are problems out there that are very difficult to solve. I think it is a very valiant thing to try to solve those problems.
Labs: I remember a quote which said that a technology won’t propagate unless it satisfies a human/social need – what human/social need do you think Geoloqi satisfies?
AC: The need to be human. The need for technology to get out of the way and let humans live their lives. Innovation in technology comes from reducing the time and space it takes to perform an action, or compress redundant actions in order to free up time. Computers used to be the size of gymnasiums. Now we have computers in our pockets, begging for attention. We’re constantly planning for our future selves. We look at Yelp! reviews to prepare our next culinary adventure. We want to guarantee that our future selves will have a good experience. We’re connecting to tons of people to do this, connecting to the collective wisdom of a data set that consists of many samples. The more samples, the more accurate the data set. Why ask one person when you can ask many?..."

Must See: LEA 50 - LEA New Media Exhibition: Re-Drawing Boundaries - Locative Media, New Media and Mapping

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

This exhibition presents key innovators in Locative Media, New Media and Mapping in a show that works to display not only fields and works but more of cross pollinations, progressions, the need to move beyond labels just like the importance of reconsidering borders on maps, what space is and what pragmatic tools and previous forms can do.


The selected artists are:

Kate Armstrong, Alan Bigelow, Louisa Bufardeci, Laura Beloff, J.R Carpenter, Jonah Brucker Cohen, Vuk Cosic, Fallen Fruit, Luka Frelih, Buckminster Fuller, Rolf Van Gelder, Natalie Jeremijenko, Carmin Kurasic, Paula Levine, Mez, Lize Mogel, Jason Nelson, Christian Nold, Esther Polak, Proboscis, Kate Pullinger, Carlo Ratti, Douglas Repetto, Teri Rueb, Stanza, Jen Southern, Kai Syng Tan, Jeffrey Valance, Sarah Willams, Jeremy Wood, Tim Wright.


We are in an age of cartographic awareness that is arguably unprecedented, but is of a malleable map, of layered spaces, of maps in new contexts. Boundaries are not the only things that are being reconsidered on maps: mapping systems and our base sense of space. It is how we see and share information, communicate, react and remember. The sea change is occurring right now and it is being led by the ideas of works of these radical thinkers and others who are making the static map and our sense of space open up.

The range of works in this exhibit have not only shown in Biennials in some cases or started whole fields of work in others, but more importantly, show in them a connectivity of exploration and practice between many people and works in differently named fields. Data is not just cold measure; place is not static; function can be many fold and startlingly so by intention. Space and location are not simply to be marked or named. There are histories, tensions, conflicts, stories, many types of data and ways of measure.