Planning - Planners & The Plan

DROP IT LIKE IT'S HOT

British PM David Cameron - 8/11/12

"There is a danger, if we’re not careful, that this could turn into a sort of witch hunt"

"no matter how high up in British Society they are, that is what the police are four" [Not Channel 4] https://t.co/n3XMo25xoI

— CharlesEdwardFrlth ⚔️ (@CharlesFrlth) September 21, 2023

When the Channel Four - Dispatches Scandal broke, I jerked upright, like a BOLT of electricity had gone through me, and sort of glazed over robotically like a Manchurian Candidate about to dive off the high board into the second most divisive 'conspiracy theory ' scrap on the internet since Julian Assange was framed for rape in Sweden.

Remember when they said Julian raped a woman and it turned out she'd worked for the CIA in Cuba?

You know who paid the price. Real victims of rape not bogus trumped up charges squashing free speech. It's you they want to stfu by making an example. Obv to all but retards/haters https://t.co/yadJo0s8bQ pic.twitter.com/L2MKYWpyKH

— CharlesEdwardFrlth ⚔️ (@CharlesFrlth) September 16, 2023

At first the mediated version of events (tear jerking sax solos, female silhouettes texting hurriedly in the UBER enroute to console the sex addict and Z-list junkie Rusty McDusty AKA Russell 'Rocket' Brand.

People I've followed for anywhere between 15 days to 15 years, from Twitter to X had gone insane. These people are good people; the very best. They don't trust the mob, the media or DOT.gov-MAFIA AKA the Uniparty wings of the same craven bird.

We have always inexplicably concurred on some of the thorniest issues of our time without waiting to share our views. Emancipated from partisan political hymn sheets, we've long flown from that bickering nest to climbing the air through storm clouds alone, before soaring down, scientifically descending closer, before landing together, on the same tree of life.

I was last to the felicitous fracas. By then it had been a raging Sqwawkbox for half a day (maybe half a night) or so before I chirped in. People who have never cussed online were now dropping obscenities and severing friendships that may or may not reconcile.

It's for the better though. It's good we don't agree on this, not because anyone is right or wrong, but because this has obliged me to look deeper and ask more questions about a space I'm ignorant of as a lifestyle decision.

I know very little about celebrities, TV faves and the adjacent hyperbole such as "ant&dec saved british TV a couple of decades ago". Again, I didn't care if they saved it, or tanked the TV industry programming model. Fame is only a friend when coupled with pure motives.

Good job it didn't. Because eventually, after the biggest online punch-up at a wedding subsided, I had the freedom to start sniffing around on how that seldom seen thing, or uncommon event if you will, hadn't happened since Julian Assange was falsely accused of rape. That was the last time the global village beef kicked off, good and proper.

That uncommon thing that I don't have a name for had a common factor.

Julian & Russell were/are both accused of rape but they are not the same rapists.

I rape

You rape

We rape

We don't rape

We get raped

You get raped

I got raped

Those are the six variables I think we can describe as a set (theory) of rapes. Theoretically one of 7 permutations (8 if we include 'We weren't raped', but that opens up a ball-ache of past present future events. Can we stick to 7?

I now have the evidence and you're not going to like it but I provided my phone number and all the rape victims have that if they need to talk. I have unlimited time for victims of sexual crimes. It's not funny being sexually assaulted and its worse when it's a woman with a penis locked up with incarcerated females to rape.

Now you know

You have more than you know.

The Backpedalling Begins

The yearning of the duped to be reassured by the gaslighting media that they're not wrong is pure infantilism. The Atlantic knows what's coming, yet paradoxically despite this canary in the coalmine article, their readers still have no idea.

They're not my words but when I first read them, I could feel a conviction the like of which I'd never encountered before.

"Nothing can stop what's coming. Nothing"

Olympic | Titan

But he thinks he'd blow our mind

Daniel Holtzclaw Is Innocent

Listen to "Brian Bates Private Investigator HoltzclawTrial.com" on Spreaker.

The media never gang up on a cop (unless).

There are numerous recorded examples of extraneous police brutality for which the media said nothing while being full-throated about unrecorded instances of whatever suits them.

Why would the media choose some stories and others not.

Why would the media gang up on this cop?

Use Logic.

Adrogynous - Miley Cyrus, Joan Jett & Laura Jane Grace of Against Me

The kind of people obsessed with celebrities, spectator sports, corporate media news and money are the least likely to spot the globalist transgender agenda. However I have different perspective on this subject. While I don't push it in anyone's face, I have more transgendered friends and experience of gender dysphoria environments than most people I've encountered in real life. 

It's not an issue for me but I can see why others are troubled by it.

However economic and war machine-violence are far more important. Flat world or t'other.

What is Transmedia?

It's fair to say that if you work in media and haven't caught on to Transmedia Planning then you are probably not part of the solution for 21st century communications. The old top down hierarchical control of media messaging that belonged to the 20th century and its devastating cultural enforcement through propaganda techniques are beginning to erode and the good thing is that it allows creativity and real engagement to flourish. What's transmedia? There are lots of explanations but flexibility and room for a story to breath is my sound-bite.

The Plot Thickens

This idea is beginning to unfold in a way that I appreciate very much. The transmedia influence is gathering steam if you can spot the link from yesterday's photography on Flickr that I posted about.

Charlie's Angle - Not made for TV

I've been pussyfooting around what I think, the future agency model should look like, and I may have failed quite badly by alluding to things rather than getting to the point. I was trying to suggest that the future agency (in some way) was likely to have some sort of Black Swan meets transmedia planning as a fundamental approach to work, although I never really explained in simple terms how things would tick, and then I saw that Adrants wrote that Wendy's used the inefficacy of an ad to explain what I wanted to say, and so I thought it best to be brutally simple given that I haven't seen enough to support the article's main assertion and more importantly the one I wish to emphatically make.

These are fast moving times and so it's even more important to be professionally radical, given there are fewer chances as the money dries up, to do what ad agencies excel at under the right conditions: kick ass commercial messages, produced to the highest level with flawless scripting (something the US market leaves the UK in the dust for), micro second timing and creative touches that often are more emotive than the creative idea. I think the days of doing an expensive TV commercial as the shop window output of the agency, or ground-to-air communication missile for clients are numbered. There will always be room for this kind of work. A smarter agency-client relationship will coalesce that it's a lot more effective to deliver more frequently and more experimentally, then execute in Lo-Fidelity, responding lightening quick and making use of contextual dynamics such as what was on the news an hour beforehand. That's just for starters.

Easier said than done, as to embrace this communication ideology means making and accepting lots more mistakes, yes more inexpensively but creatively (statistically speaking) doing more surprising and successful work that is, by the potential of its breadth, much more internet sticky. It makes a lot of sense to do 20 to 50 different types of communication pieces for a brand knowing that one or more is destined to be a Black Swan viral than to do a one-off that is by any historical assessment likely to be a well-polished and quickly forgotten museum piece. Sure there will be times when it's not smart to use this route. But in principle, if a polished but unmemorable piece of work is the category modus operandi, then more variations (and predictably forgettable failure) make sense in much the same way that say the author of The Black Swan (Yes I know, his pecker is rarely removed from my chops these days) Naseem Nicolas Taleb espouses spreading risk over 50 biotech stocks rather than one blue chip as an investment strategy providing worthwhile returns.

We can see in the prevailing global financial topography, that mediocristan is not so safe or smart is now self evident. Actually it's dangerous but nobody took an economy down by doing mediocristan advertising to my knowledge. Or maybe just by beating any creative or intellectual pulses into submission we extinguished the likelihood of respect from our customers.

If we start to reorganise agencies around the idea that experimentation and failure make for much more interesting and effective work, as well as marrying the successes into transmedia execution -- or part of it -- I think a more robust case is made for spending marketing budgets today by deploying more unprecedented attempts at risky but rewarding ideas than are currently being implemented. There you have it. 50 scripts, Lo-Fi execution, one or more hits that get passed around, and a model that doesn't bank on the bazooka approach but takes a good idea and lets other media play around with it as Faris would espouse. I would love to know if any people disagree with this. There are lots of gaps that need filling but surely the status quo of risk aversion and forgettable TV commercials is a scandalous waste of money. Particularly in these belt tightening times.

Let me say that again. Most shit is scandalously shit and furthermore it isn't hard to figure out why it was so easy to get away with in the past. That media context is changing so fast I can't see many modern marketing/advertising types surviving a brutal employment cull. My only hesitation is that as the volume of output increases with the model I'm proposing, the attention intervention, isn't necessarily deserved. It's likely though that the old frequency metrics which shaped 'campaign' efficacy are nowhere near the levels I'm thinking of for Transmedia meets Black Swan. Even the best virals I've watched only a handful of times. Naturally this idea will piss off a lot of creatives, and scare the crap out of agencies and clients who have built whole careers on risk aversion, but there's a shed load of opportunities too, if any are suspicious of what ostensibly looks like random shot blast for marketing communications. It isn't. It's about playing.

I make no claim for coming up with something new. Just being a bit culturally recombinant about existing ideas and knowing how the system worked in the past. Those days are numbered.

White Swans

I've been borderline garrulous recently about a potential new model for the marketing communications business which is classic recombinant culture theory that I nicked off Faris. It would take some balls from an agency and even more from their respective clients to seriously implement but in principle it's about mixing and remixing some transmedia planning along with fair chunks of the book, The Black Swan which I talked about at length here.

To save a wee bit on time I want to cut and paste from that post:

"Our view of history is always explaining backwards as best we can. This is a linear approach that cauterizes the true story. Even more breathtaking is the idea that viewing history by working backwards is a fallacy, because history is actually always moving forward."

I ran this by Johnnie Moore the other night (you should check out his ace podcasts) at The Endurance pub in Soho while Piers was in town, and without even ruminating for a second, Johnnie cheerfully fired back that Kierkegaard wrote something similar as follows:

"Life is understood backwards, but is lived forwards"

This was the first seductive simplification that knocked me for six, and I scribbled it down quick on my hand because I knew it was, as are many of Johnnie's thoughts and occasional silences on lots of stuff, really important. It was lovely to see the ink on my skin the next day to remind me to give him a shout about it. I just did. Thanks Johnnie :)

So it's not like I've really discovered anything new, or I'm responsible for inventing anything seminal, but earlier today, as once again I ran the thoughts I've been bundling together on "transmedia-planning-meets-black-swan-mashup" by a generously attentive listener who works in the strategy game, she encapsulated the bit about The Black Swan that takes ages to explain. Describing narrative fallacy and how it leads to the illusion of predicatability that many draw from so called dependable data is not easy, and is actually probably just me trying to be too smart for my own good, but in essence Tania my listener, chipped in and captured the thrust of my long monologue with a lovely expression which she and her colleagues call 'the upside of risk'.

That made for two very seductive simplifications.

That'll do for the time being as I've still got lots of things about China that I'm practically bursting to blog about. So in the spirit of some timely recombinant culture media here is that White Swan I saw walking down the road in Marlow. The file wouldn't open from the Sony mobile phone when transfered to a Sony Vaio PC which Rob has nothing to do with, so instead, I've squirted a Nokia N95 mobile phone video on to it. I may come back and rotate it to portrait, if I find someone who can actually do important stuff like that, but in the meantime here's a White Swan doing a 'Black Swan'. Or put another way, a bird walking down a street that is right up mine.