Idea IS the format

Labels: ponderings

I started twiddling the idea of anti-social marketing between my proverbial thumbs a week or two ago.

Anti-social marketing is television commercials.



It’s advertising hoardings, bus sides and posters on the underground.

It’s direct mail, leaflets through your letterbox and flyers underneath your windscreen wiper.

It’s banners, overlays and pop-ups.

It’s spam.



Some anti-social marketing thinks that by being creative and clever it can become artistic and intellectual and, ever so occasionally, it’s almost right.

More often anti-social marketing’s about people finding ways to interrupt our sentences in order to tell us about something we weren’t talking about, aren’t interested in and have no pressing need for.

The fact that we’re being interrupted may even predispose us negatively towards something we would have otherwise had a genuine interest in.

Instead we’re subjected to a process that’s as profligate in its indiscrimination as it is prescriptive in its approach, telling us what we should and shouldn’t think about something and why it is or isn’t of interest to us.

Anti-social marketing operates on the basic principle that our time and attention can be bought and sold in the marketplace. It does so with a brazen indifference to the question of how we might feel about that.

It’s a bit like being at a jumble sale.

(I think Americans call it a ‘yard sale’.)



There may be a few items of genuine interest kicking about. Maybe we’ll even buy something (even though it may well turn out that we didn’t really want or need it after all).

Most of the stuff will be junk though, of little more than curiosity value. We’ll peer down our noses at it for a little while then wander on.

Anti-social marketing is actually worse than being at a jumble sale. At least if we're at a jumble sale it's because we probably chose to be there, because we didn’t have anything better to do, and we had some time to kill, and we felt like killing it digging through a huge pile of vinyl on the off-chance of discovering a pristeen signed copy of Pet Sounds.



Anti-social marketing is more like a door-to-door jumble salesman.

He figures just because I have a door that gives him the right to knock on it. He knows that I’ll have to answer the door in order to find out who’s knocking, and that this will create a tiny window of opportunity in which he may be able to seize my attention with some random trinket.



He has to knock on a lot of doors, and he has to drag his box of jumble around with him. It’s hard work, but it’s all he knows, and he can always rely on the fact that if he knocks loud enough and long enough on enough doors sooner or later he’ll sell something to somebody (even though it may well turn out that they didn’t really want or need it after all).

He doesn’t really care how much of everybody’s time he wastes in the process. As far as he’s concerned his time is at a premium, and nobody else’s is. This is anti-social behaviour, and he is an anti-social marketer.

For a long time anti-social marketing was pretty much the only way anybody tended to find out about things they might want or need.

The only other way we’d find out about anything was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth was great, in that the person telling us about something was probably a friend of ours, who knew us reasonably well, and had our best interests at heart. The problem with word-of-mouth was that we could only have one conversation at any one time, in the pub, on the telephone or gathered around the office water-cooler.



Then we invented the internet. We invented email. We invented ICQ, and forums and notice-boards. We invented instant messaging, chat rooms, blogs and social networks. We invented a thousand and one ways for us to connect with like-minded people, and to effortlessly express our enthusiasm for something some of those people might want or need. Word-of-mouth became word-of-mouse, and we began to have a thousand conversations at once.

At the same time, the advent of interactive media created a problem for the door-to-door jumble salesman.

We could see him coming.



It became our new surveillance system; a network of platforms and media empowering us to filter out the noise. As we continue to engage with these tools, and the greater control they grant us, our mindsets change. We no longer accept the door-knocking as a fact of life. Some of us don’t even notice it, subconsciously blinding ourselves to banner ads on web pages, or using Sky+ to very deliberately skip the ads every time a commercial break comes on.

Instead we’re busier than ever talking to each other, about the things we love, the things we hate, the things we want and need. All around us ‘social marketers’ are igniting conversations, fanning the flames with genuine care and attention, and fuelled them with fresh content and collaborative creativity, growing colourful communities around the campfires of our bright ideas.

Labels: ponderings

Diligent as ever, The Lorries have asked for another opinion piece - this time they're after a response to the news that the BBC is launching a social networking site for kids called MyCBBC, filling the gap left by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo who set their lower age limit at 13.

Marc Goodchild, head of interactive and on-demand at BBC children's, is bullish about the opportunity here for the BBC: "There is a commercial market failing in the children's space because they don't want to take on the responsibility for younger users. The only player which can do this has to be a public service broadcaster."

This may be true, but the BBC will need to move beyond this traditional remit considerably if it is to succeed in delivering a genuine social networking experience. It will be interesting to see whether they can overcome their instinct to broadcast and embrace the aspects of the web that best characterise social media; aspects that differentiate it from their traditional haunts of television and radio?

I'm talking about personalisation, at the expense of brand integrity; user-generated content, at the expense of quality control; and, most importantly, using the web as a medium for the free exchange of ideas between 'audience' members, rather than as a mechanism for their delivery from a single, central point of origin.

It would be easy to imagine that this somehow doesn't apply for kids, and that they will settle for less. Less freedom, less creativity, less of a platform for their imaginitive energy. Yet when is your creativity less inhibited, and your urge for self-expression more exuberant, than when you are a child?

Bebo recently declared itself a 'social media network', and, with reality shows like The Gap Year, appears to be moving inexorably in the direction of becoming a web-only broadcaster. As reality TV and interactive media blur at the edges, it will be fascinating to see if the Beeb is capable of moving far enough fast enough in the opposite direction.

Labels: ponderings

PLEASE NOTE: This post was heavily updated a couple of days after I first published it. With everything I've added, I'd like to think that it deserves re-reading.

After keeping his cards very close to his chest for the last few months Tommy P finally spilt a handful of beans on the new venture he's going to be involved with in 2008 - www.graze.com.

The site currently consists of little more than a mailing list, some nice sweeping images of greenery and healthy goodness and the promise of 'nature delivered'. Nice to see that it's already showing some class - the data capture is carefully graded, allowing you to leave as much or as little useful info as you want, accompanied by the promise that 'we hate spam'.

I haven't been able to prise out of Tommy exactly how Graze will work, but it's looking like some sort of online grocers. The venture is the brainchild of a former colleague of his from Lovefilm, which offers some clues as to the business model behind it. As with Lovefilm and the home entertainment industry, the internet undoubtedly has the potential to revolutionise the mechanics of grocery shopping, through the creation of more efficient mechanisms for ordering and fulfilment. Unlike Lovefilm (in its current incarnation at least) fruit and veg aren't about to be rendered redundant by people downloading their nutrients on demand.

Several of the established supermarket chains are already well underway with the process of adapting their business models to begin realise this opportunity. As of 2007 the online grocery sector was still dominated by major supermarket chains including Tesco, Sainsbury's, ASDA and Waitrose, of which Tesco is a comfortable front-runner. The closest thing to a successful internet-only brand is Ocado, a warehouse-based retailer partly owned by The John Lewis Partnership, which is steadily expanding its area of geographical coverage and has become another leading player in this sector.

Whatever headway has been made in fulfilling demand for online grocery shopping, the extent of the demand will always dictate the pace at which the opportunity can be brought to fruition. Consumer behaviour can be influenced by advertising, marketing and public relations, but any internet business forgets at its peril that the foremost casualties of the dotcom bubble were businesses failing to account for the extent to which we consumers are irrational, creatures of habit, not about to change our habits overnight for the sake of raw fiscal or logistical incentives.

A recent report found that 15.9% of respondents purchased groceries via the Internet at least once in a year, with 3.2% making online purchases at least once a week and 2.7% making them two or three times a month. The largest proportion, 4.5%, purchased groceries online one or two times a year. The UK Internet grocery market, considered to be one of the most developed in the world, is expected to increase its current value by 80% within the next 5 years. When one considers how uniquitous a requirement groceries represent, these must be regardeded as nascent levels of demand, leaving plenty of grocery shoppers whose allegiances to their local supermarket chain are there to be tested when they make the transition to ordering online.

Indeed one wonders how much of a hurry established chains are in to see their customers drifting online. An internet shopper is less likely to make impulse purchases outside the scope of a shopping list; less likely to buy weekly magazines, and certainly daily newspapers, as part of a fortnightly or monthly order; less likely to buy music and DVDs from an outlet who can't compete with Amazon on price; less likely to buy clothes without being able to try them on; less likely to be seduced by point-of-sale leaflets advertising loans and other financial services; and far less likely to buy fuel for their car when they no longer need to make the trip. No, the chains will always prefer their customers in-store rather than online, for as long as their core business isn't being threatened by upstart start-ups offering an improved, exclusively online alternative.

There's no inherent reason why the chains shouldn't be challenged in this way. Amazon itself has succeeded in establishing itself as an online retailer leading multiple markets ahead of existing businesses who've attempted to make the transition from high street to information super-highway. Seth Godin examines Amazon's success in his latest book, Meatball Sundae, ascribing it to the very fact that Amazon was built from the ground up, conceived for the medium of the web and free from the baggage of an established bricks-and-mortar business.

Certainly anybody wanting to compete in this space faces some substantial barriers to entry. These include high start-up costs, efficient stock-picking and replenishment systems, comprehensive delivery networks and user-friendly website design, assuming the start-up adopts the same basic business model. Of course, every now and then some bright spark affects a paradigm shift, re-envisaging the way a service is offered and a need fulfilled, and managing to clean up off the back of it. I'd love to think that Graze is about to do just that, but until I hear otherwise I'm assuming that they'll be competing with the big boys on roughly the same terms. If so, the key to their success will be the little differences, and how they communicate them to make one big one.

Indeed, I think there is an important opportunity here, growing from a grassroots disillusionment with the chains. There is a strengthening consensus that a steady decline in UK food standards - and the corresponding woes of British agriculture - can be ascribed to disproportionate influence exerted by supermarkets over customers and suppliers. I can't help feeling that they're well overdue a comeuppance in this respect - the kind of sudden, sweeping retribution that only this new industrial revolution can inflict - and I think that Graze will quickly engender some precious goodwill if it's seen to be reasserting the primacy of the relationship between consumer and producer.

The tyranny of Tesco was one factor in Emma's and my decision to start having a box of organic veg delivered by The Organic Delivery Company. This comes once a week, and contains a selection of stuff selected by the delivery company based on what's in season. Putting our current raw beetroot surplus to one side, this is a great way to get your veg. It reminds of a comment Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy made in his presentation at The Media Summit a few weeks ago, to the effect that people have been found to be shopping for organic food because there's a smaller selection to choose from, and in this context choice is sometimes perceived as burdensome. I think Graze would do well to consider how they can enable time-starved grocery shoppers to relinquish this burden, putting it in the hands of a responsible supplier using technology to better understand our needs and act on our behalves.

It will be interesting to see how Graze unfolds, but it certainly looks like a project Tommy will be proud to be a part of. We've worked together building websites and interactive applications since 1998, most notably developing Ploggle together from the ground up, and collaborating on all manner of ground-breaking projects for PPC. As developers go he's a natural, and as hard-working as anybody I know, which is a potent combination. I hope this venture allows him to finally turn these talents into wealth beyond his wildest dreams, but, more importantly, that everyone involved has a blast making it happen. For my part, I'll keep tapping him up for titbits, and I'll keep you posted.

Labels: graze, ponderings

PPC's impressively proactive PR firm, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (AKA "The Lorries"), have been back in touch. Turns out they quite liked the last opinion piece I posted for them, so I'm doing another one.

This piece is about 'mobile social networking', whatever that is. It seems to pertain to social networks that are only accessible through mobile devices. That seems a little odd to me. Why would you do that? It would be like only drinking lager out of cans, standing on street corners.

Reading on through the notes they passed on I found a reference to some 'thriving mobile-exclusive social networks'. I'd never really come across such things, which I found odd and slightly alarming, given that my endeavours in international movie marketing have required me to acquaint myself with pretty much all of the world's most popular social networks. A quick trip to Wikipedia yielded the names of two such mobile-exclusive services; Jumbuck and airG.

Cue a trip to the Jumbuck homepage, and the immediate realisation that Jumbuck isn't so much a social network as 'the world's largest provider of mobile community services', offering white label products including Power Chat, TXT Chat and Fast Flirting. I'm thinking I've got their number (and, thanks to a drunken run-in with The Flirt Hotline, that they've got mine). The realisation that I may be one of their 15-million-strong global user base - and that until a few seconds ago I wasn't even aware of it - undermines the suggestion that they are a social network, in any useful sense of the term.

Further examination does yield Chat Del Mundo, a 'dedicated mobile chat and picture community for Spanish speakers in the South and Central America, the USA and Spain, with over 1 million active users', owned and operated by Jumbuck. Reading about Chat Del Mundo I was reminded of a presentation at last week's Media Summit, at which one of the speakers noted that, globally speaking, far more people have internet access through mobile devices than via PCs.

The speaker was Bob Greenberg, Chairman of interactive agency R/GA. Anticipating that 2008 would see the 'third screen' (by which he meant that of a mobile device) well on its way to becoming the first screen, surpassing PCs and television along the way, Greenberg called upon various statistics to illustrate the accelerating proliferation of mobile devices. One stat I do recall is that in the UK there are more mobile devices than people. Greenberg himself professed to carrying three mobiles about his person 'at all times'.

In defining the difference between the three screens Greenberg argued that television was a medium designed for the delivery of narrative, that PCs are best suited to interaction, and that mobiles are defined by context. This was a theme that was later picked up by Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, who saw mobile media as defined by its location-specificity, 'much like Pernod. Outside a rustic French cafe; heavenly. Inside a small London flat; piss.' Indeed, beyond greater levels of global accessibility, this is where I could see mobile social networks offering something extra to the end user.

Suppose I'm in LA. I'm out and about in Venice Beach on a friday night and I want to settle in at a decent bar. I could try and find something searching listings through WAP, but that's not going to give me any real indication of quality, or whether it would be my kind of place. How about if instead of that I could pose the question to friends of mine - and friends of theirs - using Facebook mobile, even providing them with a map using GPRS to pinpoint my exact location at the time?

If you take my 150 'friends' and, allowing for overlap, reckon that each of them brings a further 50 uniques to the mix, I have the potential to hit 7,500 people, each of whom would know me, or someone who knows me. Filter that down to people living in LA, and you're probably still in triple figures. A few of them are probably going to know somewhere decent to drink in Venice, some of them might even be out in the area and up for meeting up, and, who knows, if I wasn't happily married I might even enjoy a night of consequence-free sexual intercourse with one of them. A long shot, perhaps, but I'd take my chances over The Flirt Hotline.

This is just one scenario in which mobile could add real value to social networking for the end user. And this is the problem I have with the idea of a mobile-exclusive social network. Restricting access to any service to mobile devices can only really benefit the service provider, by enabling them to drive more revenue through reverse billing and micro-payments. Where mobile social networking can succeed is by recognising and monetising the opportunities created by context for yours and my benefit, not at our needless expense.

Labels: mobile, ponderings

I've spent much of the last twenty-four hours chewing over two articles twittered by friends of mine, each of which has accelerated my growing disillusionment with Facebook. Indeed, as I will come to explain, I have decided to take action.

The bigger picture
The first of the articles, entitled With friends like these…, is written by Tim Hodgkinson, and ran in The Guardian’s Technology supplement. It’s a long piece, and well worth reading in its entirety, but for the purposes of this post I’ll offer the following précis.

Hodgkinson starts by making the point that, far from connecting people, Facebook is increasingly responsible for isolating us in front of our computer screens, on the pretext that conducting relations through their site can be construed as socialising.

On the contrary, he asserts, we are being commodified, and the relationships we individually cherish are being intensively harvested so that the economic value can be extracted out of them and made available to the highest bidders, be they corporations or governments.

This in itself is nothing exclusive to Facebook. Their only distinction is that they’re currently the market-leading exponents of this dark art. However, having established this, Hodgkinson examines who’s behind Facebook’s operation, financially and ideologically, and challenges us to evaluate whether these are people fit to be in charge of what is effectively their own country, ‘a country of consumers’.

In terms of the key players, we’re talking Mark Zuckerberg, the geeky front man given to appearing provocatively self-assured about pretty much everything; Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, libertarian, neocon activist, futurist philosopher and chess master who recently pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist searching for the key to immortality; and a host of investors, including In-Q-Tel, the venture capital wing of the CIA. Yes, that CIA.

I don’t know about you, but I’m edging towards the door the minute I find out that the guys who put one in the brain of JFK have a stake in my social calendar. Already I’m think that, just because I’ve gone and said something not-so-friendly about them, I’m going to start landing really crappy Scrabulous hands. Bringing me neatly on to…

The killer app
The second of the articles is a piece on CNNMoney.com by Josh Quittner entitled Will somebody please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous? At least a dozen people have, include one the logo of which combines that of game manufacturers Hasbro and that of the Nazi party.

This is a response to the news that Hasbro have finally decided to acknowledge the existence of Scrabulous, a Facebook application recreating scrabble tile for tile for a user base of approximately 2.5 million people, a quarter of whom use it every day. Indeed, they’ve announced legal action against its developers, two guys from Calcutta named Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla (aged 21 and 26 respectively).

I can’t summarise it better than Quittner:
If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running.

Scrabulous is my only remaining reason for signing into Facebook on a regular basis. Without it, I’d probably lose interest altogether. Not because it doesn’t offer me anything of value, but because, following on from my realisation that social networking is actually more akin to social publishing, I’m embracing tools like Blogger, Twitter, and Google Mail (whose spam filtering seems to have suddenly gone up a gear), all of which give me more freedom to express myself, and offer more back in return.

I use these tools and services, not the other way around. They are genuinely vibrant and community-oriented, igniting exciting new relationships, as opposed to incubating existing ones or rekindling old flames (flames that generally burnt out for a damn good reason). It occurs to me that there’s actually very little that’s creative about Facebook – it’s far more about logistics.

So, could I do the unthinkable? Could I leave Facebook?

Probably not. Two reasons. One, I have an intractable professional need to be familiar with Facebook as a marketing medium, and on that basis alone I will probably never be able to bow out completely. Two, it’s practically impossible to delete your account. Steven Mansour seems to have gone to hell and back in the process of trying to do so, and with only limited success.

I have to do something though. More than ever I see myself as a citizen of the web, not as the subject one particular service layered over the top of it. So I’ve decided to try something different. I’m going to start removing the people I really care about (or people I'm already connected to through other better channels) from my friends list. Not all at once, but every time I realise that our relationship doesn't need to be defined in such narrow terms. So, if you really like me, and you hope that I like you too, let’s de-friend.

* * *

Cartoon reproduced from GapingVoid.com without the kind permission of the author.

Labels: facebook, ponderings

This is the end result of one of the oddest games of Scrabble I've ever played. It's one of a few dozen games I've enjoyed on Facebook, pitting myself against Walter, an old friend of mine, and a masterful opponent.

Neither of us set out to use only half of the board - it just happened that way. It didn't limit our scoring either - 674 is a still a perfectly respectable combined total.

Scrabble has been Facebook's killer app for me. It accounts for about 95% of my dwell time, the rest of which is spent trawling for curiosities in my news feed and messing with my status. I only started playing the game at all regularly a year or two ago, at the behest of my visiting father-in-law, Big Mike. In a series of encounters over a series of single malts he took me to pieces. It didn't take long to work out why.

When I played, my first instinct for each new hand was to check my pieces in search of a seven-letter word. Nothing wrong with that, except that most of the time I wouldn't find one, so I'd see if I could find a six-letter word, and failing that a five-letter word, and so on and so forth. Only once I'd found my longest word would I consult the board, looking for somewhere to place it. If I couldn't find anywhere, I'd go back to the hand and resume the process. Taking this approach, I'd be happy to consistently score in double figures.

Big Mike saw things differently. He started by analysing the board, finding the opportunities; not just open letters leading to bonus squares, but what he could scrounge from high value pieces already played. Once he'd mapped the board's potential he started looking for the strength in his hand. He played through a process of ongoing reconciliation, punctuated by flashes of inspiration.

You'd be forgiven for wondering where I'm going with this, beyond drafting a possible introduction for Scrabble for Dummies. Well, I spent friday afternoon going through one of our clients' 2008 film release schedules. There were all sorts of different movies represented therein, from the tentpole summer blockbusters through to bread-and-butter spring and autumn thrillers, dramas and romcoms. Some promise high-value talent and expensive visual effects, others offer subtle and engaging narratives, and one or two even look as though they might manage to combine the two. I've seen what pretty much all the major distributors have to play with next year, and at first glance it looks like some have better hands than others, but in the end what's going to separate them in 2008, more than ever before, is how well they play the board.


This analogy extends much further than you might imagine, certainly beyond a single post. Hence, The Scrabble Series. I'll put together Part 2: What is the Board? in due course, if I receive the faintest indication that anybody would like to pursue this further.

Labels: ponderings, scrabble

PPC has recently appointed a new PR agency. They contacted me recently to ask if I would contribute some ideas for a potential opinion piece on social media, so I agreed to post a few thoughts here, for general reference.

These are the questions they wanted me to address:

- Should companies develop their own social networking tools? Are they better off trying to exploit existing networks?

- How should companies go about using social networking to promote their film/game/brand? What are the issues they need to be aware of? Are certain kinds of brands or products better suited than others?

- What effect will the opening up of sites like Facebook and Bebo to third parties have on social networking? Will it be beneficial to brand owners or cause more problems?

Well, let me begin by taking you back, if I may, to life before Facebook, to life before MySpace, before Friend Reunited or Classmates, before Instant Messenger or Hotmail, before you even knew how email worked or what the internet really was. That's about a decade for me, I doubt it's much longer than that for many of you.

You probably had just about the same number of substantial relationships in your life as you do now (and maybe more, given that life didn't seem to be lived at a pace that starved you of every spare waking moment). You would have expressed these relationships through interaction, over the phone, by writing letters, and by meeting up. And, generally, the more established and unconditional the relationship, the less often you'd actually need to see or speak to each other to remain connected. This was your social network; the people in your life that mattered, for whatever reason. It still is. All that's changed is the tools at your disposal to maintain and develop it.

The reality is that services like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are just a souped-up rolodex. If you want to communicate one-to-one through any of these social networks you still have to use email-style messaging, phone-style VOIP or IM-style text chat. There seems to be this misconception that social networking sites have enabled us to somehow grow our circle of friends - that we now have the means to form and maintain hundreds, even thousands of relationships, because of these miracle tools that have enabled us all to become such good 'friends'.

I would argue that, beyond the fifty or so people you have meaningful relationships with (a high proportion of whom are probably the same people you had meaningful relationships with over a decade ago), what you have is an audience. An audience consisting of friends, family, acquaintances from school, college and university, work colleagues, clients and suppliers, maybe even some people you can't remember ever having met but who you've agreed to be friends with because they asked and it felt rude to decline.

Furthermore, when you scrutinise the tools and features that define the social networks, beyond email, chat and telephony services (all of which pre-date the social networks considerably), they are orientated towards communication with an audience. Take the Facebook wall - the essence of which is that you're choosing to make a supposedly one-to-one correspondence visible to everybody you both know. Facebook status, one of my favourite features, is also totally indiscriminate in its reach, within your established sphere of influence.

Hugh Macleod is a well-known cartoonist and blogger whom I was fortunate to meet off the back of some screenings we co-ordinated for David Mackenzie's movie HALLAM FOE. With over 1,200 friends he is what Facebook themselves now refer to as one of their 'whales', among whose ranks you will also apparently find Jimmy Carr, Russell Brand and Stephen Fry. By Hugh's own admission, "I don't go around looking for friends, but it seems kind of rude to say no to somebody."

Hugh was recently described in an article in The Guardian as 'Britain's most successful Facebooker'. This label does Hugh a substantial injustice, insofar as it puts the cart of his Facebook following before the horse of many years establishing his reputation as a prolific original thinker in the spaces of marketing, social media and, through his cartoons, life in general. This plaudit is also interesting in the choice of term used to define his popularity; success. If social networking is about success, and we're playing a numbers game in terms of how we choose to measure it, then we're surely back in the dark ages of web v1, and the mentality of the playground. If web 2.0 has been about anything for me it must be the growing acceptance that all hits - and, by extension, 'friends' - are not equal.

At another level, Hugh's popularity on Facebook is genuinely indicative of success, since he engages this following as an audience, as he does his readership on Twitter, and that of his blog. In this respect Hugh uses Facebook not so much a social networking tool as a social publishing tool, as, I would suggest, do many of the rest of us, albeit for the benefit of a smaller, more familiar crowd.

Re-reading this post I can see that I haven't answered any of the questions I was charged with addressing, but that I'm on my way to doing so quite definitively. I can see a couple I can take now before I go, and I'll come back for the rest.

"Should companies develop their own social networking tools?" Depends entirely on the type of company, but, for the most part, good god no. "Are they better off trying to exploit existing networks?" Maybe, but only if they quit trying to be my new best friend, and start getting to know my audience.
___

Interesting factoid: The first 3D movie from a major studio (Warner Brothers) was HOUSE OF WAX (1953) directed by Andre de Toth. Unfortunately de Toth was blind in one eye, and could only see in two dimensions. History records that he would consistently come to the rushes and want to know what everybody was so excited about.

Labels: ponderings

My time at PPC - 6 years and counting - has tossed up a few projects I've managed to get pretty excited about. I wasn't much of a Wes Anderson fan when I first heard of THE LIFE AQUATIC, but by the time we were done creating PIRATE PANIC! and I'd had a chance to feast on the movie's beautiful audio-visual aesthetics he'd become one of my instant heroes of cinema.

PIRATE PANIC! was very much the inspiration behind the considerably more successful CHAINSAW MANIAC! This was definitely a better fit for the audience in question, a beautiful nostalgia piece paying hommage (i.e. ripping off) Nintendo's single-game consoles of yesteryear, supporting the main RESIDENT EVIL 4 microsite (dubbed an 'iTrailer' by yours truly, on account of its ground-breaking focus on video-rich interaction).

As an aside, Resident Evil 4 is the first computer game I've played to a finish since completing The Legend of Zelda on the first-generation 8-bit Nintendo. Resi 4 coincided with the arrival of my daughter Lola, as a result of which many of her formative first nights were spent asleep in my lap, blissfully oblivious to the bloody path I was carving through the rich and deadly landscape of a truly great game.

When I first became aware that SIN CITY was in production, and that it would be distributed by (what was then) Buena Vista International, I was resolutely determined to ensure that we worked on it. Off the back of the RESIDENT EVIL 4 iTrailer we were commissioned to develop a SIN CITY equivalent. It's hard to be objective about how well it turned out, but it was undoubtedly one of my favourite projects to be involved with, and meeting Frank Miller himself at the UK premiere after-party was the icing on the cake.

With SIN CITY under my belt I probably ought to have taken the view that I'd been there and done that with Frank Miller. I didn't. Earlier this year we pitched very aggressively to create a presence for the movie 300, directed by the inspiring Zach Snyder, within the 3D online community Second Life. This included a virtual press conference and movie expo, the inner workings of which need to be read to be believed. This was the single most demanding and rewarding project of my working life. A Second Life junket for Transformers followed. My inner ten-year old would never forgive me if I didn't rate that as another highpoint of my career.

All of which might seem like a rather self-indulgent trip down memory lane, if it wasn't for the fact that the next 48 hours is going dictate my chances of working on another project with a very special place in my heart. I can't spill the beans quite yet, but this is a must-have from where I'm sitting. I'll keep you posted.

Labels: ponderings

I was lucky enough to be on set down at Ealing Studios on monday, overseeing the filming of some extra web-only material on a movie currently in production. Lucky, both because it was a huge eye-opener to see the business end of the business, and because it was a far better place to nurse a BAFTA-winning hangover than the orifice (PPC picked a second BAFTA up on Sunday night, this time for our RECOLLECTIONS DVD-ROM, created in conjunction with Film Education and the SHOAH Foundation).


Meeting Justin Fletcher (AKA Mr Tumble) at the Children's BAFTAs

I can't go into too much detail, not only because what we're doing is still under wraps, but also because it's late, and I need to sleep. What I can say is that in my experience it's unprecedented for an entire extra day of shooting to take place on a movie capturing material purely for use as part of an online marketing campaign. As marketers we're being permitted to extend the narrative of the film forwards onto the web, giving the world their first glimpse of the characters in question. Kudos to the director in question for letting it happen.

As for my first experience of a working film set, it may have been cold and confusing, but it certainly made a nice break from being bent double in front of a computer all day. I could definitely get used to it.

Labels: ponderings

Met up with pre-eminent bloggers Neville Hobson and Trevor Cook for a bite of lunch yesterday. Neville worked with us on the virtual press junket PPC co-ordinated for "300" back in March (up for a BIMA in the category of Innovation a week on Thursday) and was up in town to speak at an event organised by Mantra, my sister-in-law's PR firm, seeking to understand the nature of Web 2.0 in relation to corporate communications and public relations.

The lunch was the first time Neville and Trevor had met in the flesh, despite the two of them having a digital friendship extending back over several years. Both of their blogs are far loftier and better travelled than mine, but I enjoyed being able to use the example of WEATHERMAN to illustrate how blogging had worked as a way of sharing an idea with a specifically chosen audience of six. The web is often seen as a great way to reach an audience of millions, whereas - as somebody at yesterday's event pointed out - Web 2.0 is all about communicating with 'a million audiences of one'.

Another blogger acquaintance, Hugh Macleod, has been experimenting with social media as a means to raise the profile of a wine label he is involved with - Stormhoek - to good effect. I managed to find their Pinotage in Tesco on Sunday, and picked up a couple of bottles. With my palate it's much of a muchness whether I drink one £4.99 bottle of wine or another, so it was great to be able to try a wine I had a relationship with, however obscure. I'm thinking this is the essence of what Hugh is driving at when he talks about social objects, conversation and decommodification (which he does. A lot.) As my friend James will surely testify, after despatching an unholy amount of unusually fine and criminally surplus burgundy on Sunday evening (I suggested that he bathe in it) there can't be many objects more 'social' than red wine.

Labels: ponderings

This came up in the course of preparing a presentation for a company strategy day last week. I wanted to identify how the interactive division differs from the parts of the company producing audio-visual and print material, dvds, that kind of thing.

At the heart of any movie or game is a narrative concept. Through the production process that concept is developed into a finished product. Through the marketing process, that product is propagated into lots of smaller ideas, packaging it for market and seeking to engage the target audience. These ideas are conceived to work across certain formats - a trailer or tv spot, a poster, a standee, whatever it may be. The idea is developed creatively, then adapted to the format, within a familiar set of constraints, which stay relatively constant.

Interactive is different. Because our medium is constantly changing, as are the habits of the audience we're seeking to engage, our creative concepts are now inseparable from their interactive context. Furthermore, imaginative use of that context often becomes the driver behind a great idea, and a compelling campaign. The idea IS the format.

Labels: ponderings