Let’s play a game to demonstrate that the future of movies is dead.

First, pick you favourite movie.

I’ll wait… I know it’s a tricky question

OK, Good choice.

Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.

Ok, What’s you second favourite Movie?

Ah! Crafty one.

Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.

Right, third (and final) favourite movie choice.

Heh, ok.. I see what you did there.

Ok, you know the score, Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.

You now have three movie files on your laptop, all 5Gb in size.

We wont mention this to the copyright authorities. It’s between you and me.

The thing is, you only need the one file for all three movies. The data for each movie has been conformed to the same size, it’s the sequence of the data that enables the viewing of the movie - through the player that understands the codec.

You see, any movie that has ever been made also exists within the single 5Gb file.

Still with me?

The data file is just noise, it’s how you tune out the movie you want is the trick.

But the fact that every movie that has ever been made is held within that data file also means that every film that will ever be made is within that file.

[Pause for thought - I know you're thinking at this point.]

Think of it like radio, you have to tune to the right sequence of the data to get the movie you want or the movie you can imagine you would like to see.

Now, for the technical reader, I know you’re snarling at this - yes - it’s a question of retrieval and we don’t have the technology nor the methodology to tackle this puzzle.

But it does indicate a finite number of movies that can be made. It’s a huge number - but it’s finite.

Look at it from an single image perspective.

If you have a jpg file, 800pixels x 600pixels, the limitation of the dimensions, that is, the number of pixels multiplied by the colour depth is the limitation of the format of the image.

As screen/image performance ‘increases’, the colour depth improves and thus more variation can occur, but there is a limit somewhere. 32bit colour depth is probably what you have your monitor set to. Hi Def Tv blows this away, but the visual plane of us creatures is limited to a spectrum. We can only see so deep.

But back to the movie puzzle.

Schrödinger set a thought puzzle back in 1935,

He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, where the cat’s life or death was dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the box is opened.

You can read the whole cat debacle on Wikipedia.

If you have a 5Gb of data, the movie you want is in there if you can perceive it.

Now, there’s an alternative view of this puzzle from proposed in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal. Their experiment essentially involves looking at the Schrödinger’s cat experiment from the point of view of the cat. It’s called the Quantum Suicide.

Which makes me think what will power does a movie that has never been made have, to fight it’s way out of the 5Gb of noise, sitting on your desktop?

What ‘will power’ do characters and scenes of movies that, don’t exist, have?

This question shows how our minds project emotive responses towards fictions, how we project our own sensibilities onto formats of existence. Narratives act as vehicles for our own perceptions, but do they have a magnetism to the needs of conversation between ourselves?

It makes no sense to reference movies that don’t exist because they are not a shared point of understanding - we tend to use the past as a reference, not the future. But as the sum total of all possibilities of movies can be formulated if we understand how language informs communication, then reference points remove any notion of authored time - that is, what will be and what has has no hierarchy - that is, the past is no more informative than the future.

But I digress.

If every movie can exist within 1 file, have a look at Amazon, Blockbusters, netflix and youtube. That’s a lot of duplication, a lot of technology used to propel unit sales where instead we should be looking at the solution of movie automata - growing movies - so that we are freed up, to move on to something else.

If you’re in marketing, especially planning, and tuned into the digital storytelling scene (ahem), you’ll know about Faris’s Transmedia Planning essay. You’ll probably know that it comes from Henry Jenkins notions of Convergence Culture, and you might know that he took it from Nicholas Negroponte, Director of MIT, book called Being Digital, where he talks about Bit Streaming. Bitstreaming is where the point of production which becomes the point of consumption (basically - think about Lifestreaming, User Generated Content and Conversation On-line). Your doing is the act of consumption. To use is to learn.

BitSteaming is not Transmedia, something has got lost along the way here. We have to stop thinking in terms of making media; production and distributions are side effects of design, they are not a means to an end.

Design, as an act, infers solution. Design is much better at finding problems than having to abuse creativity to produced polished productions for consumption.

Brilliant things are the messes we are fixated upon. Headlines in the press attract attention, not for the morbid cultural events but for the persuit of reason. A mess is a loose space that we can occupy mentally. There is peace in the eye of the storm. Time stands still in this space.

There has been so much written about this area within marketing, and I think Marcus bagged the best review so far, but it all amounts to avoiding the subject that authorship does not matter. It matters not for an audience nor for the producer, authorship is a channel for communication. Communication, does not need a singular writer to produce media. Films may have a director, but there is almost a countless cast of assistants required to design, produce and distribute.

There’s is also the notion of copyright and licence. That was demonstrated in Where are the Joneses?

You may want to look at Roland Barthes ‘Death of an Author’ or Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Both have indicated the moral and virtues decline in the notions of authorship. It can be argued that authorship maintains our identity as humans. Crosbie and Doc Searles may debate that synthesis of human authorship is almost upon us. Though Andrea may not agree.

Digtal methodologies, as we have seen within all forms of publishing, does not honour the author as a predicate for future productions. From Markov chains to Bayesian search theory, pattern matching of semantics is beginining to be taken seriously as the direction of technology which will author our future. BookLamp is doing something interesting in this area (Thanks to Ben for the link). We will be experiencing the automaton of narrative far beyond the postmodernism of Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra as seen in those Matrix Movies.

This is why Hollywood is dead wood, tinsletown will burn to the ground.

We’ll be left with an ever present of change, a shifting sifting of values that look more like noise than logic.

The Semantic hope of web3.0, where stuff talks to each other, means that we are the participating audience of a story that we all know even though it has not been written, and constantly trying to escape by retuning the aesthetics back to what makes us feel comfortable. It’s going to harder to be feel secure in the thought that you have a fate, destiny or an objective future when the principles of subjectivity are iterations of a systematic upgrade of general consensus - you belong to your peer’s perceptions.

Narrative may well collapse into pace determined by a rhythm of participation. The story and melody could be perceptive instead of prescriptive.

From storytelling to synthesis, we see performance and identity central to the act of engagement. The human centrality is the primary node within a creation plane, which is pure transaction - an act. It’s how you map the individual the execution of transaction that will make the semantic web, not the alignment of meanings within language. An act is a meaning - a word is a symbol. Signs are conduits between the two.

Life will become a pure dress rehersal because the movie will never be made. Maybe this is the constant betaness. Maybe this is how we should never to be afraid of making mistakes. This sense of ‘incomplete’ or ‘disconectivity’ makes us relate more to each other.

Our patience for this consistant change will be subject to invariants. Just as the notion of interestingness is based upon anomalies; configurations, standards and useful protocols that provide moments of clarity, will become the Greek island oasis that defines peace - and maybe peace of mind. While Advertising hates this, marketing loves this. Disruptions in perception are only useful when you want someone to believe that they are in control - isn’t that so tiger?

But I digress, again.

I’ve no idea on how to retrieve the finite collection of movies within the 5Gb of data, but I’ve started using Twine to collate the ideas and references that made me thinking of this problem called Schrödinger’s Movie . If you’re using Twine, do pop by and have a look, help out, or comment.

Either way - the song remains the same. Open up.

Update [27-04-08] There is now a really interesting thread on Yahoo!Groups about this post.

Open up
Now open up
You lied
You faked
You cheated
You changed the stakes
Magnet toss that pie in the sky
Unrehearsed let the bubbles burst
All in all a three-ring circus
Of unity with parody tragedy or comedy
Probably publicity

Open up
Make room for me
Now open up
Make room for me

Lose myself inside your schemes
Go for the money, honey
Not the screen
Be a movie star Blah, blah, blah
Go the whole hog
Be bigger than God

Burn, Hollywood, burn
Taking down Tinsel Town
Burn Hollywood, burn
Burn down into the ground
Burn, Hollywood, burn
Burn, Hollywood, burn

Take down Tinsel Town
Burn down to the ground
Down into the ground
Burn

P.s. Ask me sometime how I know Peter Andre is responsible for LeftField’s first 2 albums.

Designers should always have a have a plant not a bird.

Work, talk less.

Pull off something at the table.

Click for a larger version of the diagram

You can argue there is a right time for everything; you could say that the unexpected is always a jolt to your perception.

Either way, there must be a correlation between usefulness and uselessness and the sweet spot must be a time based ideology.

Now, if time has curves to it, then the act of serendipity acts like a magnet to possibilities, and possibilities are either useful or useless, depending on what you think you are looking for.

Being in a state between passive and alert, shall we say ‘open’, at what point in the cycle of interaction of stuff do we identify possibility?

Basing this upon the 4 Humble Demands, and mapping on LongTailness (Green line in the diagram above) [via Chris Anderson] and The Dip (Blue Line in the diagram, above) [via Seth Godin], with an understanding that inventions are either pushed onto audiences (Advertising) or pulled into markets (Marketing), we can see two points of attraction/repulsion that seem to occur in society debate: Criticism and Appropriation.

Godin’s point about the Dip is one of persisitance and quitting - identifying what you are expert at and disgrading the rest of your work - as ever - the persuit of the remarkable.

Andersons, well discussed, model of markets as a Long Tail, where there is more possibilities in the tail, than in the head of market releases, that is, your back catalogue is of more value (if not the same) than your new inventions.

I’ve nudged Andersons long tail model to have a bump, so to reflect the point of interest in a back catalogue. Let me expand upon this.

When a new movie comes out (normally pushed) it will pass through criticism and drop to a level of the market, after which referals to the movie will be peer or algorhythm based (Amazon/Netflicks) after which the title will fade to obscurity (either being watched lends itself to being shelved or that the referal wasn’t adequete).

Therefore the bump in interest is the secondary market moment.

Now, as with the Dip model, a market that examines your efforts (criticism) increases your desire to succeed until you find a moment of self doubt, which makes you rexamine your interest in what you are going. It’s during this Dip that you look around for something that will help you understand and refine your offering, and if you get out of the Dip, you know you’ve found something useful.

It’s the point at which The Dip and the secondary Market meet each other that is of interest to me. It’s where a connection is made that either enables the Longtail model to revive a market or an inventor to disolve an interest. It’s a point of grave decision on what to do next.

Let’s look at the time factor, between the Slow and the Fast.

Releasing an invention (book, film, lawnmower) is a done with some form of promotion: with (creative) agency engaged, the clock starts to tick because the billings have kicked in. You have stock in the warehouse and you have to shift the glorious invention. Time is money at this moment. Costs are driven by a demanding ROI.

Equally, those who invent in public (always in beta) are looking for feedback - the faster it comes, the faster the product can be refined.

In both states, adrenaline is pumping - it’s exciting to be involved with inventions. It’s a birth thing…

But the thing about enthusiasm, it wains, and even if you artificially pump the enthusiasm with buzz and PR, unless the invention finds a residency in usefulness, the interest levels drop to what a market will find acceptable. The pace of conversation around your invention will naturally succumb to banality, because there is always something else that is being invented, released and hopefully criticised.

On the other end of the spectrum of pace, is the slow time, the pace of acceptance and controllability. This the audiences control over the objects in circulation. It’s the pace at which a decision (acquisition) happens.

The 4 Humble demands (Inspiration, aspiration, insight and acquisition) are charted as volumes of time, not spped of time. I have a base line ratio of these 4 psychological phases, there are:

Inspiration - 30%

Aspiration - 20%

Insight - 40%

Acquisition - 10%

So as acquisition takes up the smallest amount of time (this is the actual transaction) it also happens with a pace of consideration. Insight on the other hand, has more energy and more depth to the action. Insight and Aspiration, although have a greater degree of excitement, the attention or dwell time is less significant.

So you get the idea.

Now, back to the point of this, finding the point at which invention becomes a useful, or why inventions don’t become useful.

There are two significant moments of in the diagram that influence the outcome of invention. First is initial criticism, which either way creates buzz for you (No PR is bad PR) and the second is the point of the invention being picked up for REUSE. Now this is likely to be of renewed interest based upon a contextualisation of circumstances, or that there is a detail in the invention that is applicable to something unrelated; regardless, the Appropriate Moment is activated when retrieval and doubt meet.

Uniting the sought and the lost which make a connection happens pace begins to slow down; the attributes of the seeker and the object are identified, connected and revived because of time resisting to be used as a catalyst.

This point in the curvature in time can make a journey become fascinating; renewed understanding of the relationship of things can not happen when an accelerated conversation is happening, nor when the audience is asking what, why, where, when or how (Aspiration phase).

The implications of this are curious - the mid paced ethos of curating has more value to society than the release of new inventions - it’s the recycling of the existing which hold the value of markets.

I think we know this deep down.

Equally, the Dip is nothing more than an opportunity to explore markets for cross-selling and product development.

Now, I could go off on a tangent to mark that commercial appropriation only really works with a Creative Commons BY-SA licence, though many IP lawyers will point out that the largest market for them is the abundance of patents their clients own make them the most money - and of course these are activated financially at the Appropriate Moment.

But I wont.

Instead, the lesson from this is that the channels of pace are widely overlooked in terms of marketing.

Instead of the heady pace of releasing the new (and The Shock of the New is worth a read to understand when an art market goes nuts the quality of production’s interestingness plummet), the area to focus on is around the Appropriate Moment, the space where the audience can gather, create and refine their interests.

It’s some time after the time where they ask questions (”Do you have these in a Blue?”) but before they make a purchase decision. Hmm, that’s a bit obvious isn’t it.

Ok, the Appropriate Moment is when the audience / prospect is beginning to considering.

You know that moment when you get cold called and the smart ass broker is yakking and yakking, you said yes to a couple of meaningless questions and then they drop the line on you and you pause to think…

That’s the moment.

It’s the moment that useful and useless collide and all you can see is possibilities.

That’s the invention of use.

Use does not come from invention but a grasping of the affordances of oppotunity.

An invention is just a configuration of what already exists because the inventor found an Appropiate Moment.

Designing for sustainability is a huge desire when considering ROI models for a project. As a client solution from an agency, digital media demands a mindset that seeks productions that persist through reuse: in short, digital should always be aggregating value. Digital should never have a half life. Digital is not for campaigns.

We’re living in a time where beta and ‘release early’ is a mantra, waiting for an audience to pick up on your communications is a requisite, and creating a ‘buzz’ about what you do is consider ham-fisted. Digital, being the youngest of offerings from communication agencies, is picking up bad habits from the elder modes of media, namely broadcast formats of print and TV.

It aways make me chuckle/snarl when a new website is marketed with other marketing. This is missing the point of being digital.

I want to discuss how digital is badly treated when consider an ‘execution’. Digital is business interface that needs caressing and attention - because as a medium, it’s going to change the fundamentals of how you maintain a service orient business (products are part of a service - in case you needed reminding).

Polemics of creative productions, driven by a business case (e.g. something has fucked up | market has changed | you’ve got a new invention you want to sell), clash horribly with expectations of virtue. This is true for all commissions, but for digital, the application of code requires fullfillment not appreciation. Working with a broad range of T-shaped creatives at Imagination, many who are very fuzzy, reveals a huge amount of possibilities and closures about how people should work together.

Now, every agency I’ve spoken with, regardless of their forward thinking team dynamics, billing philosophy or Raison d’être, all rely on people roles to coordinate, organise and deliver the client solutions as a job.

Account handlers, Planners, Creative Directors, Human Resources, Traffic, all have a similar practice where ever you go. Media law, recruitment law, pension schemes and personal assistants all rein in the affordance of the individuals freedom to perform. The context of production is the architecture of society not the business model of the agency owner/stakeholders/banker.

As digital storms through the traditional billings of broadcast media (TV, print and performance - well, anything that doesn’t base itself on audience dialogue), the agency’s role is to convert business requirements to something quite fabulous with a hook to sell, promote or defer the competition collapses around the moment when the teams realise that the story of the construct requires huge amount of faith, believability and patience of an audience.

Brand-as-a-narrative has served Market Communications for hundreds of years, today, we see/hear/look at platforms for the facilitation of conversation - the emperors new banter - with only a thread of brand DNA to hide the hook’s modesty.

Building us towards freeconomics, friend following and DRM free productions, is a belief that there is an audience that is intentionally rebelling against the Market Communications from your clients. The slogan “You don’t own your brand, the audience does” has been dragged through the blogosphere to the point where it realises that it’s being pushed by consultants eager to recount stable reads such as Naked Conversations, Cluetrain and Here Comes Everybody as billable insights. We’ve all done it, haven’t we?

Solutions to business problems, by sucking on the business cases, has been the stock process for devising, designing and executing since someone thought about thinking about solutions. Arguably, the mutha of all invention is bare necessities, and I say arguably, because the agency model, networked or a team of 2, will always be at odds with a guarantee of success. That’s why you must embrace failure.

Indexing with ROI for KPIs are all indicators of reasoning within myths. The belief that x will happen is y and z interact, belongs to the clinical abstraction of calculus, a language non-compatible with myth, but as said, within myth. (Planners - take note)

And here lays the problems with any notion of integration - that is - blending the channels of 360 marketing with that of transmedia narratives. The belief that participation is desirable is at odds with commuication being logical. You don’t ever get what you expect - comprismise is latent in every reception, awoken only by distraction. Choice has begun to chew at the hand that invited consumers to be free.

If we look at the success of software, where scalabity, features and transparency have lowered the access points to diverse interpretation of engagement, the learning curve of use has been inversed by the audience who, when confronted with personal affordances of simple applications (think twitter, friendfeed, yahoo pipes), the question mechanic that always appears is “What is this for?” not “When do I need this?”.

And the answer is always defered by the retort, “you get out of it what you put into it.”

I think I’ve written about roles in system design before, UML using the term Actor, to define the types of users within a system, human or not. What we are seeing today is technology being rolled out freely, inducing individual’s performances confiscating demographic averages whilst establishing Social Graphs (plural) upon reputation and attention not perception of desire.

This freedom of role undermines the need for defining what the experience of your client’s communication solution business solutions is. Rolling in branded utility motifs may save you from having to induce accents of need in presentations, but the role that an agency plays in the progressive design of effectiveness becomes reduced to translator of what the client thinks might happen within a market.

Agencies are bookies if they are left to define client requirements without a framework of the social ecosystem that is defined by freedoms of engagement induced by open-use software. An agency that isn’t gambling on an outcome is playing safe to the point that they wont impregnate the audience with seeds of joy.

This is very different to thinking about how an agency has a ‘digital’ division - normally, they would ‘use’ the digital channel to get at the ‘difficult’ consumer - them the ones not watching the TV. Hmmm, brilliant.

Digital is not a channel, it’s the business interface that can be amended, grown, shrunk, adapted, designed to be adaptive and fundamentally, in the possession of the customer. Emotion is the only channel left in the world of 360 planning, digital is the gateway - either via production, distribution or design.

Twitter is wonderful for all kinds of social discourse, but under the hood, the genius is in the API model. Talk though Twitter any way you want - use a phone, a desktop client or the web.

Imagining buy anything you want through any form of transaction you want. Not just trade (”I’ll give you three horses for that cow.”) but trade through proxy - where currency is not of issue, but affordance of you’re gesture is valued because it’s reusable by the vendor.

Stay with me, there’s a money shot here, somewhere.

Compare Google, a wealth of functions backed up with some outlandish brute force technology, with the late ‘n’ great Jackson Pollock, a wealth of gestures with a brutal temper.

The value in discourse between an individual and a system is retrieval: recalling what options have been preferable may induce you to think along the lines of AI, or training a system, but what really is becoming, for an agency model, is stimulation of creativity for a client so that it’s a recursive feedback loop. This is in fact intercourse for reproductive, relational, and recreational needs.

Ok, let me come at this at another angle.

You know when you look at a image, that you find appealing, you can say, “It hangs together”. The aesthetics is being converted to a value only you appreciate. Ignoring all the talk from peers and critics, it’s your experience that underwrites the value of the image.

Converting that to currency, or better, to business, is where an agency can get to grips with media integration and client gratification.

The joy of a fine production, is unfortunately in the ego of the producer. An audience does not give a monkeys moment to the joy of the producer. If you ever read about Da Vinci’s Last Supper, you see that the artist will always have the last laugh at the cost of the commissioner and the audience. (Da Vinci knew the painting would collapse if he used Tempera.)

Agencies need to work for the audience, not the client.

There, I’ve said it.

This is not to be confused with how a TV broadcaster seems to pander to an audiences desire for programmes, in the process, shafting the advertising industry, forcing them in to 30sec spots/branded evenings / programmes or events.

An agency must develop relationship working processes with the non-client business market, by doing so, gratification comes from reflecting the ego of the audience whilst delivering work that is loved, respected and enjoyed - an agency that gives to an audience, receives attention from a client.

Now, this may start sounding like Agencies need to be rock/pop/hip-hop stars ‘n’ bands. It’s intentional. The problem is, bands are volatile (Spinal Tap). Agency’s tend to have a turn over of staff (The Fall). Client’s objectives change with the Chairman’s wife taste in soft furnishings…

But that’s all good. Because the audiences kind of interested in who is messing with the band’s soft furnishings or if there is a pillow fight kicking off somewhere.

Agencies, on the whole, are not public facing entities, they’re private clubs for clients ’steaked’ out in cool venues in hip cities. Night clubs for the day time, refreshments and air conditioning on tap, possibly some designer furniture to ease the pain of spending money on myth making.

Now, before that thought of your agency becoming Radiohead (and buy - you want that I know), let’s have a think about your band members, who’s on drums, bass, lead, rhythm… woah! STOP.

Radiohead are a buch of guys who can play. Just play. They are T-Shaped and they are fuzzy. One prefers drums, the another bass. But they swap when they can sense an oppotunity to try something - so to invent. (Go back up and see the fuzzy link if you’re confused..)

Hands up who would like to see the Head of Client Services to the banner adverts tomorrow?

Hands up who wants to do the book keeping?

Hmm.. see. Tricky.

Multidisciplinary teams are visioned as agency roles - planner, account, designer, producer yadda yadda.. making these roles fuzzy (a designer who can do 3D, motion and loves paper stock) is one thing, but find me a designer who is willing to do / try / be interested in co-ordinating travel logistics and (actually - I’d book that person), I’ll be impressed. Find me 10 and I’ll set up a specialist agency tomorrow…

My point is, diversity of teams can help integration if there is a keeness to trade time with other roles, not faking it, but genuinely migrate skills and interests so that the organisation is well, more like an organism. It’s a way of learning. Like jamming in a band.

Now, client side employees already work like this, it’s how the business gains a richer understanding of it’s abilities = staff are encouraged to take a path through the company - it’s good way to retain value as an employer. Agency side, account handlers may move to planning, planners may move into design, sometimes. This is all good. But an audience will only see the benifit when the organisation begins to create with them in this manner. If you become diverse, you will become more open. If you don’t then you’ve misunderstood why you’re in a creative environment.

An audience wants to relate to people, not roles (Britney, Madonna, Vanilla Ice, George Bush) - people who demonstrate a love in being a part of something that evolves. Something substainable so that they can invest their time | attention | money into.

Just as you may read Campaign or Advertising Age, the movers and shakers that move from agency to agency - this is you investing time into your industry. You are building an industry out of attention, not work.

Gratification scales too, it’s a system that you can keep adding to; sometimes bit’s fall off, but it scales. Integration is something that requires no attention when it works - the desire for intergration is the warning call of systems failing to scale.

As advertising disintegrates into marketing which is in turn poisoned and/or digested by culture, we will see the job dissatisfaction of producing for what seems like an ungrateful audience evolve into the stasis of performance - a mode of practitioning that works neither from script nor from rehearsal, improv nor applause, but necessity of creation.

Whilst we live through this open-use software induced transition of production, look around at how your colleagues interact with each other, how the communication of daily agency life is centric to, and it really should be this order, else you’re nuts: the work, the client relationships, the team.

We’re facing a transition towards : the audience, the client relationship, the work.

What happened to loving the team? Who said they were keepers? Teams need to wander from shop to shop. The role of agency is to be part of the audience, not part of the client’s team. It’s access to the audience that you will be charging for, not the productions.

So you see, the team, the people around you, need to be polyworkers, not just for their sanity, but for the relationship with the audience to become rich and meaningful.

As client-side has more and more taken over the business of market insight, looking and crunching the numbers, reviewing ’segmentation’, the role of agency is to perform to these numbers - but in the persuit of client love the agency model has begun to drift away from the audience - and the work in hand.

Does this help the role of ‘commercial’ communications? Does this help bring “Brand and Consumer Together?” Does this help the audience?

The work is relationships with an audience; making stuff for them is just the easy way to do this.

And so on to the punch line.

The business models of supply and demand are influenced by the same mechanisms the agency uses to convey, construct and cash in on.

Digitalness is meddling with the notion that product is the transactional inducer for profit.

Microsoft don’t make product, they assemble code. As does Google, as does Proctor and Gamble as does any corporation, SME and individual. As this becomes more and more loosely coupled, we’ll see the shibboleth materialise as a currency devoid of form. Data is without form. Data is open for connectivity.

We’ve watched the collapse of the publishing businesses with no great surprises other than the likes of Radiohead, Prince, Madonna and those guys teaming up with Bacardi, invent what is for sale. Exposure. Ambient Exposure. Voyeurism. It’s a game of two halves.

Rock stars acting like an agency for brands to connect with consumers.

They’re just doing their thing without the brand sponsor making minute by minute demands. Owning an artist is a frightening business - ask Sony BMG about George Michael - so brand sponsorship is handled, not with radioactive gloves, but an understanding that the messy business of making creativity is best left to those who love their art.

But the product is not important in any of this. Data supporting the business model, more precisely, the ingredients of data, are the valuable assets within this equation.

CRM is a toe curling concept - not that it is about harvesting email addresses (with permission) but that the concept of data is so poor. Of course a marketing department wants to know as much about you as possible, but CRM will always give a poor approximation - no one hands over habitual data without cringing. Even Nectar card holders.

But, ask the audience(s) if they would like free goods in exchange for their social graph data, and the game becomes interesting. At present you see Facebook, crunching your social graph data as you use it’s people management applications - sucking out all the little nuances about you life as it’s defined by context of your ‘friends’. Imagine a manufacturer doing this. Can you imagine a product developer migrating their business from product to data?

Any organisation, with trust, that has the richest data and uses it to create new, disposable, fragile markets will dominate the consumer/producer lifestyle. Choice within choice becomes infinitely possible when audience participation of product (the transaction receipt - not the economic shibboleth) is the conversation.

Digital is about grooming data - sifting, expanding, performing and refining, the relationships between things in abstractions that defy the premise of spoken/written languages. Invention is within the patterns of existing human activity, the market is the catalyst induced by the audiences request for bespoke productions.

It’s an investment in ego. The participants ego. The sponsor must be modest to be loved.

This leaves the (digital) agency in a curious position - are they to be production centric or performers - their attantion spent on creating or extracting value from audience engagement?

When publishing was backed by advertsing, strict controls were placed to prevent distribution of exclusivity. When the publisher model is replaced by a brand, the business of piracy is the finest way to spread the message.

Excitement must be fluid. Mess is Lore.

If anything, it confirms the notion of integration within the agency context as not a skill based concern, but as a audience based concern - how does an agency operate like a ‘new media’ platform?

Look at Mahalo as a model of this. Pure Splogging mind you, but beautifully riding the Google engines.

Look at the Human Genome Project. Every breath you take, we’ll be watching you.

Look at Top Up Travel Cards. It’s a loan system for the city plus you hand over your travel data - for free!

Agency, will be creative for the remit of a sponsor. Agency, will be loved by an audience. Agency, will be staffed by those who insist on the last word on creativity. Agency will be the gratification of disintegration.

Integration is the speed bump of social realism in the transition from producers to artists.

Ask a Rockstar. Or better, just play with them.

Update. Just spotted this article via Digg. [Link to original article]

When “Grand Theft Auto IV” launches April 29, it’s expected to gross a record-breaking $400 million worldwide in its first week. That’s good news for the game biz, but daunting for execs in other sectors of the media industry.

…

Last summer, “Pirates of the Caribbean 3″ broke all box office records, with a $404 million worldwide haul in its first six days, roughly the same amount expected for “GTA IV.”

Image Credits

Hot Coffee Mod for GrandTheftAuto: San Andreas

http://patrickw.gtagames.nl/

Video of the Mod in action

http://www.gtasanandreas.net/news/single.php?id=1469

It’s almost a year that I started the Doesday philosophy and every Tuesday I still dodge meetings. It’s far the most productive day of the week AND I look forward to them.

The work diary is blocked on Tuesday with the simple message - “Doesday - Don’t even think about booking a meeting.” and on the whole, the good teams at Imagination oblige my ‘whim’. They all know Tuesdays is for Doing.

After pointing out to fellow Doesdaian, Strategist, blogger, twitterer and fellow of TBWA empire, that tomorrow I’m facing a do-a-thon, he promptly agreed to be the first, yes unbelievably, the first ever guest blogger over on the Doesday blog. This means Doesdays is now powered by AdLads. Awesome.

Give it up folks to Sam Ismail, liberating all our meetings from Tuesday on this very special Tuesday Doesday.

Doesday blog, as if you didn’t know, is here:-

http://doesday.wordpress.com/

Update: Sam’s post: Read, learn and do as he says.

http://doesday.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/how-one-sam-does/

Freedom is designed to be currupted.

[31m00s onwards]

Sell, Sell, Sell the team.

Invest in fences.

(Peter Thiel was an Exec Producer on Thank you for Smoking and the Angel Investor of Facebook)

Last November I was approached by the Open Rights Group about the business model of Where are the Joneses? that Imagination constructed for Ford of Europe. Lured by my use of the Creative Commons BY-SA licence - meaning that there were no commercial restrictions of the use of the media assets produced during the course of the project - ORG recognised that this was as break through for copyright, agencies, brands and media producers alike.

ORG superhero, Michael Holloway (above), who I met a year before at the ORG’s Drunken Brunch meeting of like minded open licence people (I recall meeting Dan Lockton there), interviewed me in November in preparation for a couple of talks I gave last week.

Michael, with Suw Charman-Anderson (in the red top), have been working with the interview to produce a case study for everyone to review and hopefully, use, as a framework for other commercial open media projects/companies/initiatives.

On Monday, Rob Myers (pictured above right), joined me to talk about the use of Creative Commons and it’s relationship to Intellectual Property. Rob and I have been friends since 1992, meeting at art college, and since have discussed how the economics of media production, the downstream of culture, as we learnt at college, is the building blocks for anything today and tomorrow.

The framework of the Joneses project - not the storyline, nor the commercial relationships with Ford of Europe, owes a lot to many many many conversations Rob and I have had over the past 16 years. It’s a very special model that could never have been worked out within the confines of a job, or a hobby, or as artists. The relationship between producers and the audience at large, the communities within communities that wrapped themselves around sections of the Joneses - both agency and public attention - was a mix of perverse curiosity of what this model was and anticipation to see the comedy, the editorial, failing.

The heritage of such a project also owes much to the work of XPT - and in particular, Tim Wright. XPT’s Online Caroline and Tim’s own Oldton project are very close to my heart as a technologist and as a creative. Those who lived with the projects when they we’re alive and kicking have extremely fond memories of the productions - an emotion far removed from serial broadcasting - because the audience made the memories between themselves.

But what inspired the use of Creative Commons as the turnkey solution for the Joneses (it could never have been done under normal copyright models) is that Free Culture is the basis to facilitating a conversation - it’s a giving host, not a prescribing guardian. For the ethos that I wanted Ford of Europe to understand and it’s relationship to its shifting understanding of marketing, the non-30sec-spot 360-channel matching-luggage-prescription that a large network agency uses to manage a global communications campaign erodes the relationship with the intended audience and the client. The care and attention that goes into grading, editing and placing adverts is very agency/brand focused - it’s self gratifying and loses the attention of amplifying an audience who wants to be considered important.

It’s why Imagination was a great place to make WRTJ, we are small and nimble yet large enough to speak our mind about invention instead of waffling on about innovation. Case in example is Ford of Britian’s follow up to the Joneses by Mindshare and Ogilvy - Bite. Big ready made audience from Yahoo and Channel 4, low emotional resonance.

The same applies to Kate Modern, a show used to drop in product placement, focused on young impressionable Bebo minds. And possibly a smart move to enable a lumbering AOL to regain some value. I’ll leave this for another post about my anti-hero Carl Icahn.

An audience without participation, nor the right to control the editorial, is being treated like a herd. Such mentality is why the commissioning model of media results in the pursuit of conversation.

ORG are not a marketing focused organisation in so far as their interest does not cover the interest that brands or advertising are efficient, measurable or actually gain a sale. With the Joneses, ORG, a government backed organisation, has become acutely aware of the damage advertising has on culture - advertising agencies produce more copyright material into the world than any other producer - as a rage to conquer all human attention, especially if we are hitting the peak, a social concern of not just urban/social spam comes into consideration, as we saw in Brazil, but also of the moral consequences of making a world full of unreusable communications, unreusable under legal frameworks that benefit neither audience nor client nor even agency.

Suw is currently pulling together the report and will shortly be available for everyone to review here. I’ll post when it’s ready.

For me the Joneses has been lingering around for months but I’ve enjoyed watching the amount of commentary about the project. There is much behind the scenes about how it was managed and the micro conversations between users that I was privileged to participate in.

I will compete a longer essay about the project when time becomes available. In the meanwhile, it’s lovely to spend time doing Questions and Answers about the project - especially to new audiences such as the one ORG arranged.

Again, many thanks to Suw and Michael (and Becky Hogge) for acknowledging the project.

Do check out the ORG wiki, especially the other case studies presented alongside the WRTJ - namely Tom Reynolds: Blood, Sweat and Tea and John Buckman: Magnatune.

Photo credits to Marc Hankins, who released the session photos under CC-BY-SA.

Identify and promote the anomaly.

(If you have a fever and need more cowbell, the original dosage is here)

If you have to work with a FatBoySlim tack, make the most of it.

Question authority.

Second albums are always the hardest, so I was thrilled to be called into help Gavin and Drew make the Age of Conversation sequel even better. I’ll be nestled in amongst 275 other meddlers of marketing, adding a little salt with an article on how to give away your intellectual property and profit/win an audience/make better products/sleep well at night.

The book will be themed ‘Why don’t they get it?’ - alluding to clients who either refuse to accept that the audiences are in control of commercial communications (in design, distribution and production) or who believe that all this web2.0 malarkey will just go away some day…

So in true collaboration style, Gavin and Drew handed out 7 topics for us to pick from and write under.

They are : -

• Conversation to Action
• Manifesto
• My Marketing Tragedy
• Business Models
• Keeping Secrets
• Life in the Conversation Lane
• A New Brand of Creative

You can see who’s writing about which topic here.

I’ll be sketching out my article on my wiki, here.

To be honest, I haven’t a foggest who most of my fellow writers/bloggers/evangelists are, so I’m going to have spend some time going through this lot :-

Adam Crowe
Adrian Ho
Aki Spicer
Alex Henault
Amy Jussel
Andrew Odom
Andy Nulman
Andy Sernovitz
Andy Whitlock
Angela Maiers
Ann Handley
Anna Farmery
Armando Alves
Arun Rajagopal
Asi Sharabi
Becky Carroll
Becky McCray
Bernie Scheffler
Bill Gammell
Bob Carlton
Bob LeDrew
Brad Shorr
Bradley Spitzer
Brandon Murphy
Branislav Peric
Brent Dixon
Brett Macfarlane
Brian Reich
C.C. Chapman
Cam Beck
Casper Willer
Cathleen Rittereiser
Cathryn Hrudicka
Cedric Giorgi
Charles Sipe
Chris Kieff
Chris Cree
Chris Wilson
Christina Kerley
C.B. Whittemore
Clay Parker Jones
Chris Brown
Colin McKay
Connie Bensen
Connie Reece
Cord Silverstein
Corentin Monot
Craig Wilson
Daniel Honigman
Dan Goldstein
Dan Schawbel
Dana VanDen Heuvel
Dan Sitter
Daria Radota Rasmussen
Darren Herman
Darryl Patterson
Dave Davison
Dave Origano
David Armano
David Bausola
David Berkowitz
David Brazeal
David Koopmans
David Meerman Scott
David Petherick
David Reich
David Weinfeld
David Zinger
Deanna Gernert
Deborah Brown
Dennis Price
Derrick Kwa
Dino Demopoulos
Doug Haslam
Doug Meacham
Doug Mitchell
Douglas Hanna
Douglas Karr
Drew McLellan
Duane Brown
Dustin Jacobsen
Dylan Viner
Ed Brenegar
Ed Cotton
Efrain Mendicuti
Ellen Weber
Emily Reed
Eric Peterson
Eric Nehrlich
Ernie Mosteller
Faris Yakob
Fernanda Romano
Francis Anderson
G. Kofi Annan
Gareth Kay
Gary Cohen
Gaurav Mishra
Gavin Heaton
Geert Desager
George Jenkins
G.L. Hoffman
Gianandrea Facchini
Gordon Whitehead
Graham Hill
Greg Verdino
Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming
Hillel Cooperman
Hugh Weber
J. Erik Potter
J.C. Hutchins
James Gordon-Macintosh
Jamey Shiels
Jasmin Tragas
Jason Oke
Jay Ehret
Jeanne Dininni
Jeff De Cagna
Jeff Gwynne
Jeff Noble
Jeff Wallace
Jennifer Warwick
Jenny Meade
Jeremy Fuksa
Jeremy Heilpern
Jeremy Middleton
Jeroen Verkroost
Jessica Hagy
Joanna Young
Joe Pulizzi
Joe Talbott
John Herrington
John Jantsch
John Moore
John Rosen
John Todor
Jon Burg
Jon Swanson
Jonathan Trenn
Jordan Behan
Julie Fleischer
Justin Flowers
Justin Foster
Karl Turley
Kate Trgovac
Katie Chatfield
Katie Konrath
Kenny Lauer
Keri Willenborg
Kevin Jessop
Kris Hoet
Krishna De
Kristin Gorski
Laura Fitton
Laurence Helene Borei
Lewis Green
Lois Kelly
Lori Magno
Louise Barnes-Johnston
Louise Mangan
Louise Manning
Luc Debaisieux
Marcus Brown
Mario Vellandi
Mark Blair
Mark Earls
Mark Goren
Mark Hancock
Mark Lewis
Mark McGuinness
Mark McSpadden
Matt Dickman
Matt J. McDonald
Matt Moore
Michael Hawkins
Michael Karnjanaprakorn
Michelle Lamar
Mike Arauz
Mike McAllen
Mike Sansone
Mitch Joel
Monica Wright
Nathan Gilliatt
Nathan Snell
Neil Perkin
Nettie Hartsock
Nick Rice
Oleksandr Skorokhod
Ozgur Alaz
Paul Chaney
Paul Hebert
Paul Isakson
Paul Marobella
Paul McEnany
Paul Tedesco
Paul Williams
Pet Campbell
Pete Deutschman
Peter Corbett
Phil Gerbyshak
Phil Lewis
Phil Soden
Piet Wulleman
Rachel Steiner
Sreeraj Menon
Reginald Adkins
Richard Huntington
Rishi Desai
R.J. Northam
Rob Mortimer
Robert Hruzek
Roberta Rosenberg
Robyn McMaster
Roger von Oech
Rohit Bhargava
Ron Shevlin
Ryan Barrett
Ryan Karpeles
Ryan Rasmussen
Sam Huleatt
Sandy Renshaw
Scott Goodson
Scott Monty
Scott Townsend
Scott White
Sean Howard
Sean Scott
Seni Thomas
Seth Gaffney
Shama Hyder
Sheila Scarborough
Sheryl Steadman
Simon Payn
Sonia Simone
Spike Jones
Stanley Johnson
Stephen Collins
Stephen Cribbett
Stephen Landau
Stephen Smith
Steve Bannister
Steve Hardy
Steve Portigal
Steve Roesler
Steven Verbruggen
Steve Woodruff
Sue Edworthy
Susan Bird
Susan Gunelius
Susan Heywood
Tammy Lenski
Terrell Meek
Thomas Clifford
Thomas Knoll
Tiffany Kenyon
Tim Brunelle
Tim Buesing
Tim Connor
Tim Jackson
Tim Longhurst
Tim Mannveille
Tim Tyler
Timothy Johnson
Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Toby Bloomberg
Todd Andrlik
Troy Rutter
Troy Worman
Uwe Hook
Valeria Maltoni
Vandana Ahuja
Vanessa DiMauro
Veronique Rabuteau
Wayne Buckhanan
William Azaroff
Yves Van Landeghem

And if you haven’t picked yourself up a copy of the original book, there’s a ‘crowdsource-mega-bum-rush’ on the 29th March - details here. Go on - join the conversation…

Be your designs.

Write to the beat.

Reviewers are useless and dangerous.