Big Ideas

Proof that media is culture-specific

Check out this Indian PSA promoting safe sex.... not only is it bizarre and hilarious at the same time for us Americans, it's also highly demonstrative that media and really, communication, is much more culture-specific than most give thought to on a regular basis. This is, given the Indian media that I've seen, pretty normal in some important ways. Feel free to go rent a Hindi movie if you don't believe me :) 

(Hat tip to my media guru sister, who passed this on to me).

 

But wait a second... are you sure that I'm not just doing the ignorant thing and taking some piece of media that's meant mockingly (say, like the Colbert Report) and ascribing serious attributes to it? What if this was an ad from a popular comedy show (SNL India perhaps?) and now I'm telling you all that this is a real ad? The credits at the end make it a little odd, don't they?

So let's see.. what else is out there in the way of condom ads from India?

It turns out, according to this news item that another condom ad won an award from the UN this year. Much shorter, more serious but the point of the ad is that condom is an ok word to say - now that might be kind of different from what we'd see in America, but not as shocking as the above video. Check it out:

But wait, there's more...

You should then remember that this is an ad that was judged to be good by the UN. While the story does mention quite a bit of activity done in order to promote the campaign, it doesn't mean that this campaign was particularly effective. What it might actually speak to is the subjective judgements of largely Westernized citizens on the UN panel of judges. Oh, that and the fact that according to that article, it sounds like the campaign was only competing against 2 other campaigns for this award... Minor detail, no?

 

So, what's my point here, now that I've tied your head in knots?

Won't it be a great world when advertising and marketing messages are much better translated to the cultures that they're targeting?

Which of the above campaigns really gets people in India to use condoms and practice safe sex?

Remember, that's the goal here - to get the message across and impact people's behavior.. that's what this stuff is all about. It's not about winning awards or having something that is so funny and odd that people on the other side of the world are looking at it and passing it around to one another as a joke. This campaign is about promoting safe sex and hopefully slowing the growth of AIDS in India, the country with the most reported AIDS cases of any country in the world.

*Wow, that's a very serious goal, isn't it?*

Yes, advertising and marketing messages can be unwanted and annoying. They can be offensive or deceitful. They can even be culturally damaging.

So can any type of communication.

But when it has such a high ceiling, we should really be focusing on making it better, not arguing about exactly what is and isn't ok. And when I see media like this, I think to myself, "Damn it, we need to be making ads that communicate better to the cultures they're hoping to connect with!"

What U.S. company can effectively advertise in India? It's damn hard, isn't it?

We need people to take much more seriously the fact that in order to communicate our ideas globally, we have to be able to tailor those messages: not just language, not just images, but real cultural tailoring. Understanding, experimenting and continuing to revise those messages so that they hit home with the target audience most effectively. 

It's happening now in small ways (think about McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" or the massive growth in Spanish language media), but it's very very slow for society as a whole and this should really be changing dramatically with the Internet.

Anyone want to help speed that change up? I bet there'd be some money in there for ya :)

 

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Culture targeting, Cultural communications, media and culture

Just an awesome, awesome interview

Valeria Maltoni, over on her Conversation Agent blog, conducts an awesome interview with the Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com over here:

"Meet the (New Media) Editor -- John Byrne, BusinessWeek"

Excellent questions, as usual, from Valeria, but I was really impressed by John's answers. The guy is thoughtful and he gets it - he understands the importance of the conversation that goes on around journalism. He also really understands the importance of the permanence that the digital medium provides and says:

The aha for me is that the most permanent and influential of all journalism today is, in fact, digital. Unlike the journalism in a magazine or newspaper that gets thrown away, digital journalism is a permanent searchable record. You can access it anywhere around the globe at anytime, whether you are at home or work, in an airport lounge in Warsaw or a cafe in Bangalore. Unlike print, it doesn’t disappear with the garbage. You can’t line a bird cage with it. Instead, digital journalism lives on forever.

Wow. Sometimes I take this progress for granted. But it wasn't that long ago that I was hearing that the online medium cheapened journalism and content. I LOVE how much people's perceptions are changing.

Technorati Tags: Business Week, Online journalism

The best advertising sometimes isn't advertising at all..

While surfing around the Yahoo! Music website, I came across this video, from the soundtrack of the movie "Into the Wild". It turns out that Eddie Vedder did most of the music for the movie (for his pal Sean Penn, who directed it) and this is the video. Being a Pearl Jam fan, I clicked play and 5 minutes later, I'm searching around the 'Net to find out more about the movie, the story behind it and when/where it's playing.

Now, while you could argue that this video is meant to be marketing for the movie, I would suggest that this is much more compelling and useful than some 30-second snippet that's edited for TV. It's also interesting to note that despite being a song done by a famous musician, he doesn't really appear in the video at all.

 

Technorati Tags: Into the Wild, Eddie Vedder, Marketing and Advertising

Definitely a wonderful digital world

Well, the good news is that I'm making more decisions these days and pushing forward several important things. The bad news is, I'm not having as much time to sit, think and write as I would like. But, between 16 hours of travel time this upcoming weekend (heading to a conference in Miami), and some newfound mobility in my computing life, that should change soon.

In the meantime, check this out. It's freaking cool, of course, but, the fact that my friend Sarah could send this on to me in email and then I can go find it on YouTube to share with all of you is the really cool part.

 

 

Technorati tags: cool videos, digital world, sharing of media, influence economy

Sharing experiences: another amazing YouTube video

By way of my friend Damon's blog comes this amazing video of a home crowd at a basketball game. It's incredible to watch how into the game they are and the lack of social fear.

That's right, social fear. Maybe you should think about that for a moment. Do you have social fear? Are you afraid of being yourself in public?

The digitization of our lives is happening. Whether it's Flickr, YouTube, your blog or whatever's coming next, we're becoming more digitally entwined. That scares people. A ton. But it's also good, because you can share these experiences. Watch this video and then think about it like this:

- Imagine that you go to school here and you're trying to tell a friend who doesn't go there about your freshman year. You're telling them how cohesive the student body is, how tied together everyone feels and how much they love basketball. Your friend listens intently, but they don't "get" it. Not just with your words.

- You send them this video.

Then what happens? Maybe your friend picks up the phone and calls you with 5 questions about your school. Maybe they want to transfer there. Or think you should leave.

But, all of a sudden, they've gotten to experience your life more intimately than ever before.

Isn't that what we're really seeking with this stuff? The ability to more fully share who we are, what we think, what we do? Aren't we really try to share the experiences of our lives?

I think so.

You tell me. Tell me what you want out of blogs, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. I'm dying to know.

Technorati tags: YouTube, Sharing experiences, digitization of life, economy of influence, transparency

Proactive Discovery; Find Something You're Not Aware of, On Your Own

Over the past few months, I've had this demo (below) emailed to me several times with comments to the effect of, "Holy crap, this is so amazing. I guess Microsoft can still do cool stuff every once in a while."

I usually laugh when I get those notes.

Ridiculously Cool Technology - Watch more free videos

I've been aware of the Photosynth technology out of MSFT labs for a while now and I'd seen a demo of Sea Dragon as well. So, I laugh because I've already seen it and my friends assume that they're going to shock me. But, I also laugh because of the implicit commentary about Microsoft. I think it's really funny how many people assume that Microsoft is an old, boring, closed-minded company that's not doing anything exciting at all. On a semi-regular basis, I try to peek into their research labs site and see what's going on over there. In short, it's pretty amazing.

As I touched on in this post on perceptions and the media, Google's currently the hot company that everyone's paying attention to in the Internet space (with Facebook starting to give it a run for its money..). Whether it's Microsoft Surface, Yahoo! Answers, AOL Video or any number of other very cool developments from companies not named Google, the crowd seems to be overlooking a lot of it at the moment.

So here's an idea: go find out about something new and cool today that you're not aware of and then come back and tell me about it in my comments. I'd love to see what you find and share it back out with the rest of my readers in a subsequent blog post or two.

Go, now. Do it :)

Technorati tags: Microsoft Live Labs, Microsoft Photosynth, Microsoft Sea Dragon, Microsoft Surface, discovery, Yahoo! Answers, Google, AOL Video

Continuing the influence thread: consumers marketing to themselves

(Scroll down to skip ahead to iPhone goodies if you'd like)

I write about the nature of influence from time to time (a list of a few of those posts here) and think about it quite a lot: as consumers we market to each other, all the time.

The constant innovation around content creation and distribution tools means that peer marketing communications are, along with every other type of communication, expanding rapidly. This isn't a new phenomenon, it's just something that's being accelerated by the technologies employed. Which is not to underestimate the impacts of that acceleration, but rather, to say that I dislike it when people frame this as something that is brand new and novel. It's not, get over it.

Which brings me to a few things I've wanted to share:

"Advertising's New Reality" - Aside from the unfortunate title, this is a pretty thoughtful piece about the fact that consumers are assisting in the creation of advertising and importantly, do so willingly because it fits with their interests and existing activities. I believe that thoughtful marketers have always understood that involving consumers in the process of creating, marketing and revising their products/services but now, more marketers are waking up to that fact. The really exciting thing is that it's getting easier to connect with consumers in order to accomplish this.

"Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" - This lengthy but entertaining piece (like my blog posts right :)?) focuses on one innovative musician who's using peer communications and the new tools at his disposal to create and grow an audience (it's not easy though, it takes a ton of work). An example of the great stuff to discover in this article (bolding mine):

Coulton’s fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent gig, half of the audience members (!!) I spoke to had originally come across his music via one of these fan-made videos.

"Critical Mass: Everyone listens to Walt Mossberg" - For those of you who don't read the Journal regularly, you might not be aware that Mossberg's considered to be one of the best consumer technology writers out there. This piece by Ken Auletta (an excellent writer in his own right, I really enjoyed Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way) talks about how influential Mossberg is: a mention in his column can boost sales, traffic and awareness. What's relevant here is that Mossberg writes for the consumers as a champion. The article relates that when Mossberg came up with the idea he stated that: 

If it works as I envision it, this column . . . would be the voice, the champion, of the individual person actually faced with buying and using the core hi-tech devices—the customer whom industry calls the "end user".

Segway to a very hot discussion topic: the Apple iPhone.

Yep, I, along with every other blogger, must mention the iPhone. But I mention it as an extension of the article about Walt Mossberg. The video below is his video review of the iPhone (from the larger print review). The review is basically a ringing endorsement of the phone. For those who make it to the end of the video, they'll see the drawbacks of the AT&T exclusivity (certainly limiting) and the EDGE network (very slow for data), but most people won't need to get that far to buy in.

 

This video and review will sell a LOT of iPhones, mark my words. As someone who has successfully achieved his goal (quoted above) of being the voice of the "end user", Mossberg has gained an amazing amount of influence. Although the hype around the phone is astronomical, there are still many taking the "wait and see" approach. Mossberg's review does something that no amount of corporate advertising can do: it convinces you that you don't need to wait and see.

It already convinced Jason Calacanis 

Did it convince you?

Technorati tags: influence economy, economy of influence, Walt Mossberg, Ken Auletta, Apple iPhone

Some quick hits so that I can get my computer to shut up..

I don't know about you all, but I have yet to come up with a good way to queue up stuff to read for later / blog about later. To date, the best approach for me has been to create a draft blog post in Live Writer, but I'm finding that even that isn't efficient enough for me. Saving to MyWeb kind of works, but it's not integrated enough into my daily habits that I go and check a specific tag on a regular basis... Anyhow, tips are definitely appreciated, if you have any. In the meanwhile, here are some tabs I've been keeping open in Firefox that I can now close and get my computer to stop whining (why the hell is FF such a resource hog!?!?!):

 

Brody Jenner is either the biggest tool ever or a genius.. : I stopped watching "The Hills". I just couldn't take the idiocy of the two "stars", Lauren and Heidi. But reading this back story on the two toolbag boyfriends, Spencer and Brody, almost makes me want to put it back on my Tivo, just so I can follow them a bit more. I haven't even processed what this says for us as a society..

P&G understands "conversation marketing": A very short piece in Ad Age, but an important one. Jim Stengel of P&G understands that there is no ability to control someone else and that a company can actually build relationships with its consumers. "This business is personal" - great line from the video. This stuff gets me so excited about the future that I scare myself sometimes.

Google's advertising product development reaches out: Maybe this is about trying to determine the priority of its ad product development, but my gut says this is something a bit more savvy. I think this "survey" is actually intelligently positioned marketing. I think Google's trying to get big, slow, old advertisers to understand that they don't have much in the way of metrics from the majority of their buys.

A reminder that not all great companies are public: This quick blurb on REI from the Motley Fool reminded me that I really need to get my series on Seattle companies going. I heart REI.

The Starbucks memo from Howard Schultz: Speaking of Seattle companies that I love, here's a link to a memo from Howard Schultz that illustrates just how different of a company it is. "Let's get back to the core" he says. By the way, the fact that there's a "Starbucks Gossip" blog that is obviously frequented by baristas is not only unsurprising, I actually thought to myself "holy crap, I'm an idiot for not finding this before" when I came across it.

Social shopping is alive!: I might get more into this later, in its own post, but it looks like some folks are making real progress on social shopping (something I first brought up here) in a variety of ways. Sounds like the National Retail Federation is getting after this with some big tech partners. Awesome.

Bleeding edge artwork

UPDATE: Looks like CH's embed code isn't working, so check the video out here

This strikes me as a precursor to what some art might look like in the future. Not just the format or the tools, but also the method of consumption.

I love the fact that we get to see the process of creating this and that it's even set to music. Would be even cooler if it was set to the virtual soundtrack of what the artist listened to while making it, if they did. In any case, it's pretty damn cool.

And if you're curious, it's even being monetized..

 

Technorati tags: digital artwork, art and creation

Got 60 seconds? Watch this and try not to laugh too loudly..

Technorati Tags: humor, funny video, jesus christ the musical