Twitter Explained with Schweppervescence

I was in some old fashioned groups last week for Beijing University students and I learnt some pretty neat stuff. Best of all, again was really how nice the folk in Beijing are in general - innocent almost, if that doesn't sound patronizing (that excludes advertising folk and clients btw). I was describing this to a colleague and concluded that it's not the worst place in the world for the balance of power to shift from D.C. to Beijing.

As I believe it already has from a global psychological power-perspective.

Even more so in a few months when more people will be looking at China than at any time in the entire history of the country. But more practically I can share how most of the youngish respondents were pretty conversant with Lost, 24, Desperate housewives and Heroes through P2P file sharing.

I thought it was a brave and edgy way for the curious and young to find out a little more about the frankly amazing media culture of the U.S. but after a little bit of probing it seems that in China, content like this is seen as being from the outside world more so than the U.S. specifically. Which raises an interesting view that I haven't really thought of since I first learned German in the early 90's and discovered that foreigners are called 'Auslander'.

Anyway, completely unrelated to any of this is the Twitter explained video which is useful for those still scratching their heads over the whole thing. Unfortunately it doesn't even come close to explaining the Twitter Karate that Sam and I invented over the weekend (with a little subsequent Twitter Wrestling from Angus

Lastly I want to post about this Schweppes ad which is easily the best thing since Gorrilla although I'm loving Singing Dog and Moonwalking Gorrilla. It highlights what for me is a growing problem and one that can only deteriorate as clever brands move closer to achieving feelings and move further away from 20th century messaging model, which has it's place, but more in an Adsense/Google way than the last-years-of-TV as we know it should.

Incidentally I think this could be a Golden age for advertising because the clever brands will mark out territory for feelings while the clock ticks for interrupted attention media. It's just a matter of time. The difference between describing an ad using storyboards (or even using them in research) to seeing the final piece is too wide for me because it doesn't come anywhere near close to conveying the emotion that I feel when I see a fantastic piece of work like this. I did read about some of this brand talked about over at Rob's but I had no idea if the Cynic gang were involved with this piece while writing this post. Either way it stands for itself. Bravo!