Why Digital Isn't About Digital

why digital isn't about digital

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McCann

McCann are taking a bit of a kicking at the moment. Senior staff being poached, clients in New York bailing out and all the usual shit one is accustomed to hearing about from the agency that used to by and large run Coca-cola worldwide and probably got a bit too fat on it.

I do urge you to read "For God, Country & Coca-Cola". It's freaking ace. It maps the brands distribution in advance of U.S. troops securing Europe, city by city during the second world war. It's one of my absolute favourite marketing stories and one that inspired me when pitching Coca-cola in Asia because I concluded in Vietnam, that with under the counter Coke sales in Ho Chi Minh, the beverage had succeeded where the US marines hadn't. Not a bad USP.

The creatives did good work on the "Freedom" positioning. I still believe its got legs today. Actually they went off piste and did some nuts stuff that would put CP&B to shame but Asian clients are reluctant to be first. In some ways it's the pressure of growth. Best work comes in a downturn.

Anyway, McCann aren't totally shit. I've bumped into two kick ass digital transmedia pieces from their Israeli office that are well worth your time.

I always know it's good when I think that's how I'd do it. Modest aren't I? Here's another.



PR brief anybody? So well done Nir who I think had a lot of input in this.

David & Goliath

Somebody on the Linkedin Planners page asked a question.

"Do you need a British accent to be a good planner?"

For fun I answered it. So this is a cut and paste job from last night though I'm even more pleased that I found a Carravagio to portray the drama.

The answer is no, but it helps. A better question would be why do British planners do so well? London is the home of planning so there's some heritage equity there. The accent has some Hollywood stereotypes. Villainous, Effete or Intellectual. All three help. Then there's the way the accent commands attention. I once read a script to a C Suite in Germany and the CEO said 'shit that sounds so much better in English'. 

But the real value of a British accent. And this is my hypothesis after watching American Planners in action, is that we have a pattern of inadvertently telling the unpalatable truth. One only needs to say Should George Bush be up for war crimes? Do Corporations commit ecocide? Are sales the only benchmark for great advertising? and there's a collective bowel movement around the meeting table. 

By the time the speccy Brit has shuffled out the room; maybe, just maybe, someone switched-on recognises it's not all about saying awesome all the time but about being a bit uncomfortable. 

Eternal optimism does indeed rock. But rock throwing is eternal. 

Ask David. 

Fuck it. Ask Goliath.

Goldman Stock - Hit By A Rock

For the first time since crony capitalism did a great rock and roll swindle on main street culminating in 2008's stand and deliver in the Whitehouse, it seems some judicial teeth are being bared. 

Frankly I didn't think the home of capitalism pie had the stones for it, but this story isn't going away any time soon. Goldman's stock looked like someone dropped a rock on it yesterday as shown above. It looks like they stitched up a young and cocky French patsy (The fabulous Fab) who appears, despite his gleaming education to have been in over his head.

As we've all learned since the word subprime entered the vernacular, a bucket of nuclear waste debt was extended to another financial firm by Goldman to distance them from the act of actually picking  the radioactive synthetic CDOs which they then shorted while ostensibly recommending long to their clients.

At worst their reputation just took a serious blow but the obvious head on the platter is their big Kahuna Lloyd Blankfein who conveyed that Goldman through capitalism were doing God's work. Even thought it's not exactly a footnote in Matthew 20:12 that Jesus lost the plot only once when casting the money changers OUT of the temple.

It's a helluva story.

Janelle Monae

In terms of inspired dancing style I don't think anything as stunning has been done since Michael Jackson's Thriller. And that's just the co-dancers looking like they're having a ball following Janelle Monae. The track is a bit spesh and the star of the piece is freaking fresh. 

As in yummy bucking candy fresh. 

Addis Ababa springs to mind but only Doddsy knows the bare bones of that tale. H/T Mike

SEO FAQ FTW JPG and other useful acronyms

Is good no? Via Len Kendall in Chicago

First Warning.

The first time I heard this I'd been in a funk for about 10 days. Ordering McDonalds delivery so that the brown paper bags were piling up on my bed and I was tipping the delivery guy to go and buy me some fags because when I don't want to see anybody the most taxing thing is polite chit chat. I'm neither polite, and I'm not interested, and so by that I mean  I don't want to speak to the maid, the security guard, reception and I especially don't want to deal with stuff like friends and if you really want to see a grown man cry get my family to call up to see if I'm OK.

Anyway.

Have you noticed I like to say anyway?

Well anyway, Inland Knights say "anyway" better than any mother fucker on the planet. It's like a precursor to bringing out a pistol. I say a Glock, but it could just as easy be a Beretta or a Mauser (when they made pistols). It's like 'anyway, now I shoot you' without actually saying anything, but if you want to verify the validity of that statement you need to check the tune out. It's called Back Chat.

Anyway. The first time I heard this I'd been horizontal for a while and I guess I must have fallen asleep listening to Doug Rushkoffs podcasts, but by the time I awoke I had no idea what the fuck was going on. I recognised the track but it was also really alien. The last time I had a track play games with me like that, was waking up to ELO's Strange Magic which comes close as a description but not close enough because I thought I was having a religious experience on that occasion.

This time I didn't need any epiphany. I wasn't debating whether this was the Good Lord speaking to me so I just leaned over to iTunes and reset it back a few minutes while I adjusted to the rude but welcome musical intrusion into my life. I realised it was special and got out of the 'pit' as I like to call my crib on these occasions and went to blip.fm or Youtube to see if I could track it down.

Somebody once wrote that ABBA were the last band to sing optimistic pop songs. Of course there are exceptions but in general they were our last gasp before we consumed ourselves. Now you may choose to propagate that machine unthinking or otherwise but that's not what makes me tick, so when I listen to ABBA I actually hear the dwindling voice of an age. You can call it the seventies or whatever but no group will ever have the audacity to sing  like ABBA ever again or at least until the Long Now Foundation  start to make an impact on this smear of mathematics we call culture (One for Steak in Kidney).

So when I heard RIng in Swedish by Abba I tumbled out of the pit to find it so that I could always play it when I needed it and on demand. I needed it in the cloud under a book mark. Ring Ring in Swedish is a culture remix that always existed. Who knows how the song was originally written. It's probably in Wikipedia but the point is that it sounds more authentic than ABBA in English. For all their preternatural and superlative laden, hippy white bread drippy pop aspirations, when ABBA sing why don't you give me a call in Swedish, it's unpretentious and feels more exposed than making a buck in English and somehow taps into what we all felt as young people (before SMS and email) waiting for a phone to ring so that we could know we exist.

As opposed to the brass patina and distressed leather cynicism of middle age when one knows you will eventually call and we extract the quid pro quo of doo lallying in the first place.

Word.

Brand Karma

A few years back, one of the few people in Asia that I noticed was subject to a fair amount  opinion in the offices, bars, karaoke joints, award shows and massage parlours of advertising (maybe not the last one) was Craig Davies. A lot of people had a lot to say about Craig when he was Regional ECD for Asia and Africa.

But until he interviewed me as Global ECD for JWT in Knightsbridge back in 2007 I had no opinion. But I got lots now so listen up. First off it was a very tough interview. The questions got harder and harder not easier and I couldn't believe that he knew more than enough about my rapidly moving world to assess whether I was any good.  For example a  memorable question was 'what do you think of Andrew Keen?'. This was in the thick of all the social media Web 2.0 hype at the time that is pretty much mainstream now that Facebook is something most people can relate to.

Difficult to be moderate on that question. Well difficult for me as I can't stand Andrew Keen. I replied that he was more an opportunist peddling shallow arguments for a living than having conviction. 

Risky move. Craig was both reading his book and by any definition is not only a professional but probably one of the most senior and accomplished professionals too.

I didn't stop there (do I ever?). I said that the cult of the professional was responsible for millennia of disastrous decision making. That professionals were often intoxicated with their perceived talents and that  the ability to self produce, present or publish instantaneously and globally had shown that amateurs talents were astonishing us time and again.

Anyway, I walked out of that interview not knowing if I'd said the right thing or not but somewhat comfortable that at least I'd been myself. I got the job after a bunch of other interviews and then got to see both Craig and the Guy Murphy (the Global PD) in action , working  and collaborating together. In my experience a lot of the heavy hitters who get to the top of the agency business have eaten so much crow by the time they've shinned up the greasy pole, they have some of the most formidable political skills in any business period. But no longer really love great ideas or often don't know what a kick ass contemporary idea even is. 

That wasn't the case with JWT and one of the reasons why I have such strong faith in the agency is that I was lucky to see people like Guy and Craig who are quite understated, still quite young and really enjoying their work in action. Quite refreshing, and I like to think that JWT"s improved reputation and ongoing successes is something I spotted a little early on from reasonably close observation in London.

In any case, Craig has now relocated to his home country of Australia, and has started something that is both simple in it's aim, but is I believe an important idea. I wont say any more as there's an introductory video for you to watch. This ties directly into what I feel is a huge opportunity for brands (corporations) to shake off the lethargy of undifferentiated, link tested, politically correct but morally stultifying blandness and start to stand for something. Something I wrote about more at length over here. Watch the video and come join us on Brand Karma if it strikes a chord.

SoundCloud - Samurai.fm

I've noticed SoundCloud being punted around elsewhere and really like the visual interface. For people into breaks, minimal tech, glitch and all that other good stuff it can take a while for a track to warm up, or rather lots of any given track is given over to mix/play space for DJ's to do their thing. SoundCloud helps to fast forward to the next disruption in the track so I can figure out if I'm really into it. Also it's a really good showcase for new DJ's or just to have a dig around in different genre's like the mix below which although  bit on the industrial side for my usual taste is nevertheless the background music while I type this post out.

The thing that makes me take SoundCloud proper serious is that my long standing favourite streaming mixes station Samurai.fm have had a redesign and are using SoundCloud to embed the mixes now. It sort of tells me that they are fast becoming the de facto music platform (within my genre tastes) for me now that I've lost Last.fm to CBS. Though you can always check out my music profile over there as once upon a time it couldn't have pleased me more and I assume it's frozen in time from then.

I used to pay their subscription when it was voluntary but after years of use from when they were audioscrobbler I'd have thought CBS would know how to send an email out to introduce themselves and their business model. Oh well plenty of examples of big companies mismanaging 2.0 platforms. This mix is Dub, Glitch and DnB. 

I hope the embed fits.

Sub-Sonic Symphony - A Journey Through DubStep, Glitch & DnB by Agent.Smith

Tumblr Stats

I may have exaggerated a bit about quantitative data in that post earlier which should be retitled "If it's measurable and you add no meaning to it, you're probably wasting my time". Anyway, my tumblr stats have taken off. They look very different to this blog's stats which I last took a snapshot of over here. Take a look.

Is Social Media About Being Opaque?

Something occurred to me during the Nestle chocolate meltdown in Social Media the other day. I picked up on the story from @jamiec and took a wonder over to the Facebook page seeing straight away that the language used might well be one of the last examples of unvarnished corporate sentiment we'll get to see. It's the language of 'fuck you' isn't it?

"it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus"

So among other digital dropped jaws, I tweeted that part. It was picked up State-side where it started to do the rounds. I can't imagine too many multinationals making that mistake again. It's inconceivable that a Facebook fan page will instruct its fans how to behave and even more damagingly resort to biting sarcasm.

From this it's clear that many are still naive about what makes for participation in social media. Who are still drawing on legacy sentiment from the past. That is the mechanistic and 'professional' corporate bullying tone. Invariably a top-down, hierarchical monologue model (both internally and externally).

But somewhat surprising to me about the whole affair is the sheer hypocrisy of the blogging and digital social media community. The people who jumped on the band wagon who profess to understand social media. These are people who seemingly claim to partake in its values and yet who time and again dodge being transparent, authentic or  in current parlance, human.

Sure it's one thing to gasp in surprise at Nestle's coming out party. But the number of bloggers who are missing a human side to Nestle's use of Palm Oil by Indonesia's deforesting Sinar Mas conglomerate didn't escape me. New meeja's transparent schadenfreude at Nestle was easy to see and yet seemingly opaque when it came to their own positions on the issue. You do have a position right? It's only human after all.

It's one thing for Nestle to parade their sensitivity to local issues by creating say regional flavour variants of Kit Kat in Japan (how Kawaii), but it seems the locals of Indonesia's Riau province on the island of Sumatra are taking a good pasting while trying to protect the land from deforestation by Sinar Mas. All three Youtube clips are still below two thousand hits despite Nestle + Social Media search terms on Google being around half a million.

What does this tell me? It tells me that the sit-on-the-fence, have no controversial opinion, follow-the-dollar attitude that contributed to the decline of advertising's reputation is spilling over into social media. I just don't know how y'all can profess to being authentic, human, transparent and 'keeping it real' if you have no opinion on the issue. Which isn't about Nestle messing up in Social Media. It's about the deforestation for palm oil in Indonesia. Or did we just hijack it so we can wave it in the face of the next corporation to put us on the pitch list and who are stuck in the 20th century so that we incentivise them to work with us? 

Transparent, human and authentic us.

Google Retaliates Against China's Great Firewall

In a timely move leaked details of Google's beta firewall breaker is emerging on the internets. Could this be information warfare? Is the Empire Striking Back? More details over at Sinosplice.

Skinput

Clay Parker Jones brought my attention to this after an impoverished skim the first time it hit my life stream a couple of weeks ago. It made first draft and so I'm finishing it off before it starts to rot in my draft folder although I suspect the high resolution art directed shots like the one above contributed towards its renaissance. 

User interface on your skin developed by Chris Harrisson

So anyway, I was listening to another McKenna podcast a while back that conveyed some of his anomalous thinking on the big picture stuff that I find refreshing against what I'm labelling random theory; which is the prevailing explanation for anything prior to a low entropic state.

I'm also re-reading Taleb's Black Swan as part of a process of disposing of anything extraneous including books. I may have lost a lot of important stuff last year but I'm focused on not acquiring replacements and furthermore want to go completely minimal. Too much has been lost over the years, and in various countries to take possessions seriously any more, though I notice The KLEIN would be like having a few fingers amputated should that go missing or need to be jettisoned.

This rationalisation process means my wardrobe is a little less hip than when I was carrying the first division threads in a suitcase carrying way too many other important things, but I can't justify not being resourceful, when I have more 2nd Division T Shirts than I could get through in a lifetime. You realise this isn't just aesthetics, though that in itself is a radical departure from my life until now. It's also an alignment with how I want to live the remainder, which offhand can't be that much than four or five hundred months if I take an unhealthy interest in actuarial norms. Which I don't.

Back to McKenna. he was riffing on as he does so well, about nature being in principle a conservative and conserving force, and about how its frugality driven if that makes sense at all within the context of an abundance machine that we plunder without precedence.

There was also something said about nature's answers being fundamentally elegant solutions, and about that being a good indicator of how to think when trying to solve problems usually belonging within the remit of the natural sciences. Which brings me back to the topic of this post.

Skinput strikes me as a great use of existing human biological real estate. I just made that line up but bear with me because I really think Skinput is clever and resourceful. It's low on atoms and somehow for me begins to change the way we think about the stuff we're hell bent on possessing; principally that will be possessions, or am I over egging with alliterations now? Sorry if it's annoying.

Sure we're always going to be attached to social objects and badges of modernity, sentimentality, nostalgia and utility. However, as it becomes increasingly unnecessary (through possession convergence) to require a watch, a notebook, a phone, a portable music device or even spend time teasing apart the UX debate on the demise of QWERTY keyboards as Apple's iPad has instigated, I can see an evolutionary change in our relationship to stuff which changes quite a lot of what we assume our BIOS will be like in the future. I hope it's not the same. I can't see why it would remain the same if I look at other fundamentals that have shifted as culture does.

In any case, there's a video  about Skinput that I have embedded here for a lot less atomic space than was possible before the emergence of digital delivery. It's a bit dry but worth a look (Though I'd like it if Youtube allowed users to review videos at a faster speed than is conventional. Double and quadruple. That sort of thing.

Anyway, my only niggle is that the line Skinput have used is:

Appropriating the body as an input surface.

It is that already isn't it?

It's also a genius output surface and a lot lot more.

I guess it's the implied subservience of nature to science that annoys me with their endline. Mainly because I feel that nature is often most fiercely legislated around when it comes to sports of all things. Even the EPA hasn't earned the same gravitas and respect for nature that sports do. Whole forests and canyon, whole elements still in the ground don't get the same reverence for nature that sports does when considering the notion of purity and artificial helpers.

Sad, but over the years, I've never met anyone who supported my view (apart from a sports ethics philosophy professor who  I listened to on The Forum) that we should allow sports participants the choice of pharmaceutically enhancing themselves. I think the enhanced Olympics would be more special than the Special Olympics were that to be the case, well it would be ace and well worth watching.

I'm not quite making my point clear. I see glimpses of neurological rewiring from Skinput, in much the same way that Google's anschluss of my neo cortex coupled with stealth tech creep of real simple syndication (RSS) has changed the way I digest data. Not just the way I think but my self awareness (not to be confused with self consciousness as I learned last week)

 I like what Google did, no question they raised my IQ if we're flexible about the definition of intelligence, but I had no idea it would or that there's a quid pro quo. 

So now's a good time I guess to think Skinput through. Spontaneous prodding is OK on Facebook but I can't imagine I'd like my skin to be less than mine if say a Blackberry Skin were to come on the market.

Update: The bioethicist I was looking for is Julian Savelescu

Anatomy of a Hashtag #cashgordon

Tweets containing JavaScript is a new one for me, though anyone who thinks there's any difference between the Tories and Labour is deluded. They're all 'on side'. 

Look at who's introducing the digital *reform*... Lord Mandelson. 

What a snake. Pic via @megpickard

Pink Terror Hawking

I think this is exceptional. Via Mike

Through Ficken Fin (Some thoughts on social media)

When is Germany going to wake up to the genius that is Marcus Brown?

The Kaiser's Toilet

I was offline for a week or so and missed most of these, so I've been catching up. Marcus is an Englishman who lives in Munich. Actually we grew up a stones throw from each other in Southampton, UK, though I don't think we ever met even though there are a few parks and beaches we both used to spend time at and have both coincidentally gone on to work in Germany. A place we both love.

Anyway far more important than that is his work which is all over the internet under different names which makes it difficult to list but the Vimeo productions are a great start.

Chomsky

I purchased this in Delhi between travel from Chennai and on the way to Mumbai a few years ago while doing some work for a French multinational that had nothing to do with advertising and yet called upon much of my experience as a planner to figure out a way of developing a market entry strategy as well as developing a nationwide network. No small task given India's size, and that in rural places a cart and oxen will take the place of the more modern services we're used to, and which India is naturally capable of providing in larger cities.

India is the most challenging country to the senses. Not even Burma or Laos comes close. I like it immensely though I find Mumbai less compelling and lean more towards the pregnant haze of spirituality in Madras over the unmistakable scent of gargantuan power in New Delhi. I still find it odd that the most British place I've ever been to in my life was the New Delhi Gymkhana Club. It's straight out of an E.M Forster novel, we had a full on three course dinner with my amiable Indian host, including Spotted Dick and Custard with cigars for the gentlemen afterwards. Lots of really interesting people from all over. People I couldn't figure out what they did or why they seemed so different from the expat crowds in other parts of the world.

This book doesn't take long to read. I just finished it a few minutes ago after two grazing sessions. There's not much that Chomsky can teach me historically these days as I've devoured most of his works over the last few years. He's a great teacher. 

However, this book still pricked my conscience about the historical revisionism that has taken place with regard to Indonesia in the 60's. What the British, the U.S. and the Australians sanctioned through Suharto is possibly one of the worst genocides we've had a hand in and I really don't understand how there's only been one Bali bombing there or why I was I've always felt reasonably safe on my trips to Jakarta, including a stay at the Marriot which took a hit a few years back, and now has a large veneer of safety wrapped round it. I say veneer because all the waving of hand detectors in the world wont stop a determined person and in some ways this book is all about why some people are so determined to hit back and make up for history.

It becomes increasingly evident that the complexity of running a Hyper-power (notice how that word has slipped in the last few years) is extraordinarily complex and yet it's people like Chomsky (and Arundhati Roy who gets a few mentions) that are our real moral compasses; the people who should have got some airtime for every mention of 'weapons of mass destruction'...or was it delusion?

Why Socialised Media Matters

I'd be unhappy if I used to have a monopoly on a monologue communications model where I was the mouthpiece, only to see a dialogue model open up and start calling shots for what they are. I'm surprised that Goldman haven't included Yves from Naked Capitalism here because her blog has that insider authoritative critique which consistently eviscerates the line that Goldman and other financial institutions try to pass off.

Given the quality of information that's available I fear we're in the Golden age of the internet and it wont last. I worry about how Australia is clamping down (as a pilot study?) or why people like Lord Mandelson or Lord Young seem to be in the back pocket of people like Rupert Murdoch. What is the quid pro quo for their legislative favours?


Update: The next link in my feed reader was this Wired story. You should read it to know where the real threat to our freedoms come from.

Good Clean Fun

For me Axe is Brut or Old Spice so I don't really buy into the brand and much of their communications. This just works though doesn't it?

Channel Planning

Renaming routers has proved invaluable in the past. The Prestige comes to mind.

If it's measurable it's not worth knowing.

Joy Island

The title is meant to be provocative and counter intuitive though it's more important than business aesthetics blather. 

It stems from something a senior market researcher said to me a while back. He said "if it's not measurable, it's not worth knowing". I was his house guest at the time, so it seemed  churlish to respond that love can't be quantified, that the feelings of pain, elation, euphoria, crying, singing, dancing, winning, losing, worrying and so forth and so on are all deeply integral to our lives and that there's beauty in the unquantifiable. It would be like putting a cost benefit analysis on a spouse to see if we've secured a better deal than our neighbour or colleague. It would be offensive to measure up our respective life partners to see who manages the household better, breeds superior children, has better taste in furnishings or provides a superior quality of sex.

Pathological quantitative analysis of pretty much everything within the corporate environment has led to the dominance of the spreadsheet as a killer predator drone for the decision making process. 

Numbers are safe, numbers are transnational. Numbers are unambiguously intentional, and the numbers add up.

That's why it's really important to know when to count yourself out.

The ability to make decisions based on intelligence and intuition is an important part of what makes a kick ass business, kick ass.

Sure the universe is mathematically coded at a particle physics level and more, but here's my argument. Putting the numbers before the love, is the surest way to to a diminished life. An inferior attempt at living what feels like a bespoke chance to manifest our true identities. One that by another definition, by its slavish devotion to numerical advantage is restricted to making decisions based on what the numbers say and not how they make us feel.

Feelings are more important than facts is something I've lifted off more formidable minds than mine to support how great advertising works more effectively on an emotional level. But here's the irony. You need to crunch the numbers to figure out if it's the numbers or the feelings that work better. Which is my way of saying Im not a numeric luddite. Unlike the Unabomber's target, numbers can't be bombed and are most definitely here to stay.

Nevertheless, the irony of using numbers to verify the supremacy of feelings is a mirror reflection of yet one more of the many enigmas of life that only a fool can fail to encounter. We know so little of where we come from, probably less about where we're going, and all the while we're saddled with a biased processor for decision making.

Irrespective of the numbers the evolutionary biologists know how well our primate brains are embarrassingly backward at dealing with slow moving catastrophes. We all panicked over say the Y2K bug, because it wasn't inconceivable that we might be on a flight the night the millenium rolled over. But the slow moving catastrophe we face from the way we exploit the planet and it's displacement on say the climate or the maths on never ending diapers and finite landfill space feels less tangible. 

Like having a spoon less of sugar in the next cuppa or reusing a polymer bag.

Put another way. It's not the numbers that point the way to figuring out our medium term survival chances. The scientists, those high priests of the quantifiable, the repeatable and the observable-on-demand can't agree on what constants are. Speed of light, boiling points and much more from the contextual variables that can't be repeated and thus we've backed a horse with magically erratic form.

Maybe we need to lift from the mystical language that the quantum physicists are using? They talk with stroked beards of matter coming into and out of existence, of particles being everywhere at the same time but in other dimensions, of parallel universes, dark matter, time as surface and maybe exceptional linear narrative (in this dimension). Ladies and Gentleman the slide rule slides incoherently in space time theory. It's beyond the unifying theory powers of the mathematical geniuses of our day.

But Oh how they would kill for a concise unifying equation that fits on a T Shirt.

If they, our scientists, are struggling with linear and coherent logic to explain how something as simple as the existence of matter actually matters, then why would we sacrifice any potential to embrace chance and circumstance as unpredictable friends of the business environment? Why would we replace them with the dead and sterile certainty of spreadsheet fetishism and the uber conclusiveness of knowing every decision until the grave will be a quantitative and numerate assessment of likely risk over potential gain? 

I yawn melodramatically.

There's a call centre consultancy business I know that I use as a stage setting over determining the right level of quantitative rigour that is required to ensure that work efficacy is given the remit it deserves because the call centre business is one of the most measured and controlled problem resolution environments we know.

And the most reviled.

I'm not binary about this though. I had a sensational call centre experience in Hong Kong booking my flight back to Bangkok (Thank's Emirates). Yet we've all been caught in 'put on hold' hell or endless detours to return to our original call destination through obtuse call management and it's this unfuzzy logic style of problem assessment and solution, that human operators need to be able to pull the rip chord on. To descend away from a higher systems blindness, and on towards an intelligent and intuitive approach that embraces human intuition over standard operational procedure. Whatever that is.

So to round up. While quantitative description of business scenarios and operational decisions will always be the hygiene of grown up business, it's really important to file all those numbers and the spreadsheets they are crunched from, in the proper place. It's the one that knows everyone else is using the same systematic approach to achieve the same unremarkable consistency and mechanistic results. It's a depressing reason for dragging one's sorry ass into work and taking a salary for as it diminishes our purpose as a species and prevents us performing in a manner where the remarkable takes place. 

That's why if it's measurable it's not worth knowing.

Or more accurately. 

If it's unmeasurable. There's something interesting going on.

What else is there to meaningfully achieve during our enigmatic but historically brief stay on this planet?

Oprah & Satanism

Soon...

Hero

I did mention back here that the Scandinavians are producing some of the smartest and most creative work on the planet and I stand by it. Particularly digital.


Via Leon

Klong Toey Market

It took me a day or so to wait for this to happen when I saw it for the first time and decided to film it. Not many people can relate to what it means to be acquainted with a living deity from another culture, but if you can afford to sit out the first minute or so, I think this clip I took in Klong Toey Market of Bangkok makes the point clear.

This may also be among the last authentic shows of respect of its kind unless anyone else knows of an example I haven't thought of (Bhutan maybe?)

Shirt By Givenchy

Seems a few of you quite like my Givenchy Shirt that some girl snapped me in last week so I thought I'd put it up here for your amusement. I bought it second hand on Melrose, Hollywood in 1995 along with some awesome boot cut 70's Calvin Klein Jeans, a real L.A. County Jail Shirt made by the inmates, a bunch of Skateboard wear that I got into during that time (Including my first Vans) and other bits I'd rather not remember from last year when I was robbed in Hong Kong.

 I wish the girl who took this let me take a photo of her. She had incredible skin colour and the type of immaculate teeth that have never seen a dentist. There's just something quite awesome about unadulterated preternatural teeth.

Post War Britain - A Political History

I mentioned a while back that I read so few books now compared to a few decades of stuffing a lot of print down my visual oseophagus that I feel compelled to blog each completed book. The good news is that I'm no longer plodding through publications that I feel obliged to read or just don't really enjoy. So while that copy of Moby Dick is waiting to be read as a gift from Christmas, it doesn't feel right quite now.

I guess it's the sort of book I'd really dig on a long bus ride to nowhere like my own Burmese Days where if it were not for time available, I'd  could not have completed The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Something I'd have to say is impossible now given competing distractions but it served well on the way from Rangoon to Ngapali Beach on the Bay of Bengal in Burma and back again to the creaking, decaying capital in buses that I'll never forget.

I picked the book above from a charity book store in Hong Kong for 10 Bucks. I used to cream through this sort of stuff and the book reminded me why. While I'm  no longer as fanatical about politics (don't the Corporations call the shots these days?) this book was a fresh digging of a field left fallow for some time. I'd forgotten the names of the the real political left from the  60's and 70's in the UK. Mick McGahey, Bill Morris, Frank Cousins, Jimmy Knapp and so on and so forth. They don't exist now. I don't know any characters in Parliament. Even Dave looks like the kind of PM who if he does well is a chancer who lucked out.

Those old Labour characters seem so much more authentic now then how I used to perceive them. Nobody could argue that they were in it for the money or the glory. They dressed like shit, looked like shit and paid themselves less than shit. But somehow, they had a vision of working class Britain that never really materialised given the sloth of British industry prior to Thatcher but that doesn't mean that if the UK had inexplicably lurched to the left and say Militant had gotten a stranglehold on British politics, I'm quite sure that the Brits would have made the best hardcore communists in Europe.

Commies to be reckoned with. Don't ask me why and even more importantly don't ask me if that's a good thing.

The best and most gripping part of the book was the narrative leading up to, through and just after the Falklands war. There are so many details I had no idea of at the time that reading it was a joyous and pure lesson in history that I can never quite pay the proper tribute to.

However let's try; apart from Socialist Red Blood pumping through secondary picketing, and war torn limbs pumping arterial blood from HMS Sir Galahad or the Battle for Goose Green the book is a bit shit and pedestrian in parts. Mainly because of its obsession with the electoral numbers which leads me nicely on to my next post....

But in case anybody can spark me into devouring Moby Dick, I'd be interested to hear why. Go on. 

Taunt me into reading it.

Dave

What's not to like about this campaign for the conservative party leader, David Cameron, in the run up to the United Kingdom's general election? There's a bunch of stuff in politics which I find disheartening, as there's so little between the parties in terms of ideology that arguably there's little to take seriously. That's both Stateside and in the UK.

However, these posters hit the spot for electorate participation. They draw the poison on the usual political invective don't you think? There's a more interesting write up on the topic over at Russell's and for an instantaneous slice of sentiment you should go to the #mytorytombstone search hashtag on Twitter.

Augment Your Amygdala

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Well not unless you really have to. I can see some clever uses for augmented reality with some simple caveats. As little as possible and with the least amount of distraction. Unless you're one of those people who really needs another screen between you and reality. 

Oh you can't hear me? 

Well why not take that bluetooth earpiece out and I'll repeat it for you.

Via Ed.

Visible & Invisible Lines

I've been unpacking some stuff that hasn't seen the light of day for quite a while and I came across this classic email I received from Andreas after a meeting I think about a pitch for the German Railways (Deutsche Bahn) when I worked for BBDO in Dusseldorf. I hope Andreas doesn't mind (he's actually one of the more polished creatives I've worked with and was ahead of the curve on social media circa 2003) but I'm using it because it also highlights one of the pressures of what I've called parachute planning. 

That is, turning up in a new country in a new agency with a bundle of business issues that need to be resolved such as new pitches, saving existing accounts and raising the standard of work in progress, all with a bunch of people who are quite rightly suspicious of what you can do until you deliver. And yeah, in a different language sometimes. It's not for the faint hearted.

I've also got some sweet stuff from Hakuhodo in Hong Kong that will make your hair curl. Expect a few retro posts while I'm unpacking stuff I'd long forgotten about or otherwise.