A preamble.
Lately I’ve taken to sitting down and starting to write an essay with no particular subject in mind. This is one of those, one that has moved beyond the digital version of crumpled up sheets of paper tossed in the wastepaper basket. Why that is so I have no idea, other than to say it kept writing itself – a cliché I know, but I’m going with it.

Should you begin the essay below, you might be inclined to scratch your head and ask “what the hell has any of this got to do with advertising?” Well, other than the obvious references to Mad Men, the answer might appear to be, not much. Yet if you get all the way to the end of it, I would hope that you’ll unearth a few relevant points of reference along the way, as I attempt to weave the Classics, Mad Men, shifts in the social construct, and the travails of “digital” advertising, into a single tapestry. (There are many clues throughout but I decided not to highlight them.) It has been two decades now since the beginning of the great shifts in our culture brought on by the advent of the World Wide Web (and now, Mobile,) and one can often find historical parallels to these cultural shifts everywhere if one cares to look: i.e. technology has been disruptive throughout the ages.

The essay’s underlying subtext, one that I hope meanders as an undercurrent throughout, also has contemporary inspiration – Iain Tait‘s idea of “shaping the connected-world,” of how, with his work at Google Labs he wants to get into “the shaping of products and services, showing people the life-enhancing potential of technology, and helping to get those things into people’s hands,” as outlined in his letter of farewell to Wieden + Kennedy. And Iain is not alone in understanding how society is gradually moving towards “products that do good” and away from standard advertising (we may soon have to find a different descriptor than “advertising”.)

Dan Hon who still works at W+K posted to Medium recently, The Tyranny of Digital Advertising, where he writes, “I’ve done a lot of doing, thinking and trying about what it means to be “interactive,” “digital,” or “non-traditional” at an advertising agency. And man is this shit complicated.” Reading between the lines of Hon’s post, it reads like a prequel to a goodbye letter, maybe he too wants to join Google Labs? Anyway, it’s easy to agree with his “it’s complicated” statement, but it shouldn’t be that way as agencies have had two decades of the Web to sort that shit out. (Dan actually gives a good example of “product thinking” when he links to what Russell Davies, formerly of W+K, is doing with the British Government.)

I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe one of the problems is still that anything that doesn’t look like marketing or advertising confuses marketers, and good digital “advertising” doesn’t always look right to brand CMO’s, who tend to want to see something that looks like a duck, and walks like a duck. Obviously we have seen some great digital work coming from all corners of the advertising world, but when you see advertising executives moving from their storied perches at ad agencies to “product” companies such as Google or even Facebook, you have to wonder what’s up. (Who will Yahoo! be hiring, for instance?)

In other words, Dan may be pushing the right rock up the wrong hill. It might be time for him to switch hills.

Ultimately, I’d say it comes down to three things: Are we asking the right questions? Can we make it better? What does the audience/consumer/user choose to use?

There are analogies to be had in what Google’s Larry Page said from the stage at the recent Google I/O conference: “As an engineer, a technologist, go to first principles and say, ‘What is the real issue around our power grids?’ or ‘What is the real issue around manufacturing?’ I think people don’t usually answer those questions, and as a result, most of the work done is very incremental and we don’t make the progress we need to.”

So, yeah, referencing Soren Kierkegaard in this essay may seem absurd, but at least he asked, and wrestled with, the right questions. So what is the real issue around digital marketing?

[A quick note about the essay's title: Daniel Mendelsohn points out that Barbarian was the ancient Greek word for people (mainly Persians) who didn't speak Greek, their language sounded like bar bar bar to them. So, language as barrier.]
_ _

The staff at the agency Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods dressed as Mad Men characters [via]

Hubris
It is Sunday evening and somewhere in the USA a TV is burning Mad Men into the retinas and synapses of an audience. I haven’t been watching for one simple reason: I never became attached to the series; I understand its appeal but I’ve never been a fan of soap operas.

As it happens, I am currently working through another book of essays, a book in which a review of Mad Men appears – Waiting For the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture by Daniel Mendelsohn. The book’s back-flap notes, his “reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.” Let’s just say that he is an exceptionally smart man; after digesting the first six essays that incisively dissect the works of James Cameron (Avatar,) Philip Glass (Einstein On The Beach and Satyagraha,) Julie Taymor (Spider-man,) Aleksandr Sokurov (The Sun,) and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, and after re-reading the first essay in Classica, Battle Lines, a review of a “slimmer, faster Iliad,” one realizes rather quickly the breadth of Mendelsohn’s intellect, his lyrical prose, and his ability to avoid the unnecessary rancor and polemics of many critics.

Those first six essays I mention above fall under the rubric Spectacles and should you read them you might be reminded of the parallels of contemporary media culture and the writings of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. For decades, writers and producers of films and TV shows have written scripts that deeply reference and/or re-shape Shakespeare’s plays or the writings, epic poems and myths of the Ancients – nothing new there, in other words.

Hubris looms large in Mendelsohn’s telling of Julie Taymor’s failed Spider-man excursion, where working with two rock musicians to bring a super hero to Broadway turns out to be much harder than producing the circle of life. And Mendelsohn, in his critique of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, mentions Don Draper’s hubris often – this is my favorite passage from the Mad Men essay, a paragraph that delves into the “irrational reasons” for the show’s curious, magnetic appeal:

“I am dwelling on the deeper, almost irrational reasons for the series’ appeal – to which I will return later, and to which I am not at all immune, having myself been a child in the 1960s – because after watching the fifty-two episodes of Mad Men that have aired thus far, I find little else to justify it. We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, which among other things is a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, to my mind, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture.”

Do you see what Mendelsohn does there? In one short paragraph we come across Aeschylus and by association, his contemporaries Sophocles and Euripides, then there’s reference to the Aeneid, Virgil’s poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans [reference], and all of this is before Mendelsohn gets to the Classics! In short, he challenges the very idea of Mad Men as a television show when it is held up against others, in this “new golden age of television…”

I’ll circle back to Mad Men but I’d like to stick with the Ancients (as it were) for a couple of paragraphs.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing
Meet Anne Carson, the renowned classical scholar, poet and sometime performance artist who also teaches ancient Greek. Carson appears in Mendelsohn’s essay “In Search of Sappho” where he discusses her book If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. She happens to have published a new book recently: Red Doc>. The author’s description on Amazon reads:

“Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”

The poet Daisy Fried wrote a lovely review of Red Doc>:

Geryon and Herakles reunite in “Red Doc>,” middle-aged. Geryon is now G, still a cattle-herder (of sorts) if not much of an artist, though he reads Proust and Daniil Kharms, the Russian Soviet-era surrealist-absurdist. Herakles is now called Sad But Great — “Sad,” for short. Sad is a traumatized veteran of a recent war. This adds a welcome political dimension rarely seen elsewhere in Carson’s work. G and Sad take a road trip, ending up at a strange clinic in an icy northland. A handful of other characters derive — nominally — from Greek mythology. Hermes is a mysterious man in a silver tuxedo who shows up every now and then to guide them. Io — the nymph turned into a cow by Zeus, then maddened by Hera’s gadfly — is the loveliest member of G’s herd, a sexy musk ox:

She is a beast
constructed for smooth
striding. Now long pelvic
muscles organize her and
the vast loosejointed
shoulders glide forward
into movement.

I’m new to Carson’s work and I’m just now digging in to Red Doc> which is a delight, because, as Fried says: “Each new Carson project comes with new parameters [edit]. Here’s what else she gets away with: Most of the poems in “Red Doc>” are delivered in narrow strips of type, justified at both margins like newspaper columns. It’s a format that counterintuitively speeds you down the page, as if creating a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put useful pressure on the poems’ wild music and wilder state of mind.” And also of what Mendelsohn points out in his In Search of Sappho essay: “There are other details in Carson’s rendering of Fragment 31 that show a praiseworthy sensitivity to the original: “puts the heart in my chest on wings” is a stunning solution for the Greek eptoaisen, a word that conveys both a fearful shuddering and the airborne intention of beating wings; [...]

Carson pulls from her deep knowledge of the ancient Greek culture and delivers her prose-poem in a new way, bound in an old format, a book, one that doesn’t scream “Look at me, I AM NEW, AND MODERN.” An aside: The artist Karen Green appears to have done something similar in her new book, Bough Down, where she tells of her four short years married to David Foster Wallace.

Don Draper as Antigone? [A stretch]
Once more to Mad Men, and here I refer to Emily Nussbaum’s recap of Mad Men, one that focuses on Don Draper as the show’s “anchor,” not as in foundational rock but this – “[...] Don, instead of being the show’s engine, has become its anchor—heavy, even in the sixties sense.”

To recap: Don’s real name is Dick Whitman. His prostitute mother died in childbirth; his dad, her john, beat him. His fundamentalist stepmother called him a “whore’s child.” Then his father got kicked in the head by a horse, and the stepmother moved in with her sister, herself a prostitute, living in a brothel. The stepmother, heavily pregnant with Don’s half brother, prostituted herself to her brother-in-law, as the teen-age Don knelt outside her door. He watched them, through the keyhole, have sex. C’mon, now. This is no longer the backstory of a serial adulterer; it’s the backstory of a serial killer.

We haven’t even got to the part where Whitman goes to fight in Korea, accidentally blows up his superior officer, Don Draper, steals his identity, forms a secret relationship with his widow (she’s motherly, yet also somewhat prostitute-like, since he pays for her upkeep), becomes a greaser, and seduces a model who is also concerned primarily with appearances. Eventually, he gets into advertising, and when his half brother, Adam, finds him, Don rejects him, and Adam hangs himself. It’s not that none of this makes sense, or could make sense; it’s just too much, overdetermined. None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it’s a lazy way to impose meaning. Nested among better scenes, the flashbacks feel like a high-school production of “The Grapes of Wrath.” (Back in Season 1, when Don was canoodling with the department-store heiress Rachel Menken and reading “Exodus,” I wondered if his dark secret was that his mother was a Jew. Life was so much simpler then!)

Well, Nussbaum holds no punches there; she makes Don sound like a male version of Antigone.

In an opinion piece recently, on the occasion of Soren Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, Yale graduate student, Ulrika Carlsonn writes: “[...] the most central theme in Soren Kierkegaard’s religious thought is the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we share in some essential human guilt simply by being born.” Hello, Don Draper? Does Dick Whitman’s re-birth as Don Draper condemn him to the curse of heredity guilt, which, as Carlsonn points out, Kierkegaard translated to mean “inheritance-guilt,” that is “especially appropriate for his modern Antigone, who considers the curse on her father not so much a disease as a birthright.”

Don’s heredity guilt runs deep. Deeper than him.

Daniel Mendelsohn points to more of Mad Men’s weaknesses:

The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame – sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed – and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something – a useful technique, which strongly gives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script. As for the acting, it is unexceptional in general and occasionally downright amateurish. (The baby-doll performance of the porcelain-beautiful January Jones, as Mrs. Don Draper, is an embarrassment.) I am not one of those critics who admires the performance of Jon Hamm as Don, which seems to me to emblematize the glossy inauthenticity of the show in general. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one; Matt Damon is, now, another. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he reminds you of advertisements, and after all the show is about advertising – he’s a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the other actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. Coupled with the fact that most of them are so awful, your sense of the characters as mere types – the loner with a secret, the prep, the philanderer, the bored housewife – short-circuits any possible connection to them. I cared more about what happened to the people in Friday Night Lights after one episode than I did for anyone in Mad Men after four seasons.

[Edit]

In its glossy, semaphoric style, its tendency to invoke rather than unravel this or that issue, the way it uses a certain visual allure to blind rather than to enlighten, Mad Men reminds you of nothing so much as a successful advertisement. Indeed, the great irony of Mad Men may be that it functions the way that ads function, rather than the way that serious drama functions: it’s suggestive rather than discursive, juxtaposing some potent pictures and words and hoping you’ll make the connection.

Mendelsohn’s big takeaway after all of his digging, is very simple: the show’s viewers tend to be “in their forties or early fifties…” and “…it occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children.”

“The better a piece of art, the more rejection it will receive in its moment” – Seneca

Is Don Draper now living beyond his myth? Does anyone care? I think it’s worth noting that there is a bubble effect around this show – less than three million viewers watch Mad Men and according to Inside TV, it’s a modest hit. Compare that to Fonzie “Jumping the shark” – 30 million people saw that episode.

As a TV character we don’t really have to care about Don, (and I suspect a large part of the audience for Mad Men who may care, works in and around the advertising agency world anyway, and as Mendelsohn points out, given the timeline of the show, back to the sixties, those children on the show are actually us, today,) but is Mendelsohn missing something in his critique? Is the show not actually prescient about the future of advertising? Is Weiner looking backwards to move the plot forwards, showing us these heinous, unlovable characters as the dark side of advertising, a side that the children on the show see and understand, and in future would not want to be a part of an industry that doesn’t actually work toward “the shaping of products and services, showing people the life-enhancing potential of technology, and helping to get those things into people’s hands”? I can speak to this anecdotally, as each year I see a greater percentage of the students I teach in the SOJC at the University of Oregon, not wanting to join “advertising” companies.

Perhaps at the end of the day it all comes down to this: Hubris, also hybris, from ancient Greek ὕβρις, means extreme pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence or capabilities.

So, no more Bar bar bar – we should all be speaking the same language.

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Karen Green was married to David Foster Wallace for four years. She has written a book, her first, one that Maggie Nelson says “[...] is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read.” I have ordered my own copy and it will arrive on Monday. I’m not sure that I will have the strength to read it.

A description from the book’s publisher:

With fearlessness and grace, Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband’s suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green’s voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world-pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage–and the creative act of making it–evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.

And Maggie Nelson has written a wonderful review.

KAREN GREEN’S NEW — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement.

Upon first read, Bough Down feels disorienting and surreal — like entering a drugged wormhole of grief, pills, and barely tolerable engrams and emotions, which appear via allegory, hallucination, synecdoche, and blur. Upon rereading, however, the bones of the book’s structure become admirably clear. “June, black // Does it begin like this?” Green hovers at the start, before plunging into the day of Wallace’s death, her experience of finding his body, her dealings with the police, and the haze of public commemorations. (I’m feeling free in this review to use “Green” and “Wallace” instead of the more formalist/distanced “the speaker” and “her husband,” even though the text of the book avoids proper names.)

As the “support guys” become scarce, as they eventually must, we stay with Green — now alone, and haunted — in her house, her garden, her “village,” her mind, her body, her heart. We also bear witness to her own deepening relationship with psychiatrists and pharmaceuticals, which takes place in something of an echo chamber left by her husband, who struggled mightily to treat the depression which precipitated his suicide. The book charts the passage of time by moving through the seasons and stations of Green’s “non-linear, inelegant progress” of grief. Green smartly ends the book (spoiler alert!) “I can’t wrap this up” (how could she?), but nonetheless there is a real sense of progression and resolution in Bough Down, one that feels earned and wise, never cheap.

Indeed, while Bough Down is a memoir of grief, part of what keeps it from playing “the grief castanets” (to borrow Wayne Koestenbaum’s phrase) is the acuteness of Green’s sensibility. She suffers no fools, and instinctively calls out and rejects any trope that feels easy or predictable. She is never mean per se, but she is keen, as when she describes a “doppelganger widow” in town (presumably a woman who performs “outliving” almost professionally): “The doppelganger widow shows up at the most prestigious service draped on the most smartest and meanest support guy. She does not totter in her heels; she branches out with the graceful invulnerability of a coastal cypress.”

Full review here.

via Daring Fireball

Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.

There is a dogfooding lesson here, though. Does Mark Zuckerberg carry an HTC First, or any other Android phone with Facebook Home installed? Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not?

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to.

Turn Facebook Home into an interface that Facebook designers and engineers want to use, not merely feel obligated to use, and then they’ll have something. But if it remains something that even Facebook’s own designers and engineers do not prefer over the iPhone (or stock Android, or any other platform), if it remains something that the company needs propaganda posters to promote even among its own employees, then Facebook Home will remain what it is now. A dud.

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Agency of record + integrated campaign = win!

Just over a year ago we started a small experiment that we named SLAB, which is short for Social Lab. A year later we are proud to say that last night we won two awards at the 2013 Social Media Awards show: Best Agency, which is self explanatory, and Best Breaking Social, awarded for “Most innovative or unique use of a social tool, platform or application.” We want to say thanks to the SoMe awards judges for voting for us. I personally want to say thanks to Jessica Williams (center in the image above) and Alison Reilly (right in image) for their hard work and innovative ideas, not just on this campaign but on all of our client campaigns.

As the agency of record for KEEN footwear, the NORTH Social Lab was deployed in March 2012 to increase awareness and drive traffic to a campaign microsite. We quickly expanded our SLAB role and partnered with KEEN on social strategic direction, community management, campaign development, and analytics. Across KEEN’s social landscape we took on a wide scope of work, from a strategic advisory role to the introduction and maintenance of KEEN’s presence on social channels as follows.

– In 2012 KEEN expanded into three new social platforms: Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.

– After eleven months on Instagram, KEEN now has over 21,000 followers.

– KEEN reached its goal of making the Outdoor Industry Association’s Top Outdoor Brands on their Twitter list.

– KEEN currently resides at #8 on that list with over 33K followers, gaining 7K followers over the past six months.

– KEEN’s Pinterest, which was officially announced on May 15, boasts over 2.8M followers.

– KEEN’s Facebook fans have increased 65% over the course of the year.

– Blogger outreach efforts resulted in more than 500 contacts.

As with everything about the social web, collaboration and team work is important and the combined efforts of SLAB and KEEN’s Chris Enlow and Eric King came to fruition resulting in success for all involved. Also we want to give a shout out to Postano whose engagement platform we used to great effect on our Worldwide Recess Day campaign.

In a straightforward Digital Strategy sense, the goal of the NORTH Social Lab is to test and analyze across all the social web platforms, helping us to understand which platform results in the greatest success for our clients. It’s an ongoing experiment as the audience, especially young people, keeps shifting platforms. As more and more users transition to mobile-only platform access one of our insights is this: It’s not the device that is mobile; it’s the User. This means that more than ever we are focusing on our five “W’s” – Who, What, Why, When, Where?

We look forward to continuing to create more successful social web campaigns for our clients in 2013.

For those of you who are interested in our Social Media Awards submission, you will find everything here.

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This article titled “Daft Punk’s retro album Random Access Memories gets Shard debut” was written by Dorian Lynskey, for The Guardian on Tuesday 14th May 2013 16.12 UTC

Reading on mobile? Click here to view video

Shortly before sunset on Monday night dozens of guests made their way up to the top of the Shard for the UK launch of Daft Punk’s latest album, Random Access Memories.

Guests in the landmark skyscraper at London Bridge were heard to remark that it felt like a throwback to a more affluent era, when record labels could regularly afford such flamboyant gestures.

Everything about Daft Punk’s fourth album stands out from the rest of the modern industry like the Shard does from the London skyline: bold, divisive, unfeasibly big and impossible to ignore.

Daft Punk’s feverishly debated promotional campaign would be spectacular coming from an established superstar. It is the more remarkable for being conceived by two shy Frenchmen who have not been photographed without their robot helmets since the 90s and who made their previous three albums (Homework, Discovery and Human After All) at their homes on modest budgets.
Only David Bowie’s comeback has generated equivalent excitement this year. It is typical of the attention to detail and insistence on creative independence that has defined Daft Punk’s career since their first single 20 years ago.

"The only secret to being in control is to have it in the start," Thomas Bangalter, one half of the Daft Punk band, tells the Observer Magazine this Sunday. "Retaining control is still hard but obtaining control is virtually impossible."

Daft Punk have said that Random Access Memories is an attempt to revive the "magic" of the event albums that soundtracked their childhoods. Professing themselves bored with electronic music, they worked with crack session musicians and some musical heroes in various studios and cities.

The promotional campaign is similarly interested in looking back in order to go forward. A teaser video released on Monday – showing a robot lovingly dropping the needle onto a vinyl copy of the album – sums up the duo’s retro-futurist aesthetic.

Daft Punk’s sense of heritage explains their alliance with Columbia Records, which celebrates its 125th birthday this year. They approached Columbia last summer – having already financed the recording of the album themselves – with detailed promotional plans, including vast billboards on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

"We wanted it to be a campaign of weight, like when record companies had the confidence that they had a big, big, record," Columbia Records’ chief executive, Rob Stringer, recently told Billboard magazine.

Secrecy was enforced by withholding key information and making everyone who came into contact with the record sign strict non-disclosure agreements.

A fascination with enduring American cultural institutions led the duo to break the news of the album with an advertisement on Saturday Night Live, on 2 March, featuring a 15-second loop of the single Get Lucky. Eager fans quickly posted their own extended versions on YouTube.

"The internet allows for a very interactive and playful connection with the audience," said Bangalter. "It’s almost like a striptease where you see something gradually instead of uncovering it as a whole."

There has been little traditional promotion by the pair themselves, who dislike interviews and have decided not to tour. They outsourced much of the press publicity to guest performers such as Pharrell Williams and the loquacious Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers.

Each key musician on the record filmed an interview for the Collaborators series on the band’s website, shot using 16mm film stock by the veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman.

On 14 April, a clip from the video for Get Lucky was debuted at the Coachella festival in California, inspiring more buzz in 90 seconds than most of the bands on the bill.

Get Lucky, an unusually straightforward disco anthem, had the hardest job of all: setting up the album with a bona fide hit single.

So far it has topped the UK charts for three weeks and broken Spotify’s record for the most streams in a single day, attracting the kind of new listener who does not get excited about Saturday Night Live commercials.

The only apparent deviation from Daft Punk’s plan was the worldwide streaming of the album on Monday, which replaced an eccentric scheme to debut it at the Wee Waa annual show in New South Wales, Australia, on Friday.

It is uncertain what lessons the industry will draw from the success of Random Access Memories, because no other band has Daft Punk’s influence (on other performers such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Kanye West) and mystique.

The pair’s last album, in 2005 and entitled Human After All, flopped; their 2007 art movie Electroma was little seen, and their score for the 2010 sci-fi film Tron: Legacy, had mixed reviews.

Only their groundbreaking 2006-7 tour, a pivotal influence on America’s subsequent electronic dance music boom, was an unmitigated triumph.

Yet here they are in 2013, looking very much like one of the biggest bands in the world. Perhaps the only lesson is that it is, after all, possible to make a huge impact by being bold and doing things differently.

Critics of the industry dismiss hype as a kind of brainwashing imposed from above, but hype only works if the excitement is widely and genuinely shared.

Guests at the Shard party wondered whether Daft Punk themselves were there – anonymous without their helmets.

They were not, but then they did not need to be. In an era obsessed with celebrity, these two canny Frenchmen have somehow managed to create an unprecedented sense of occasion while staying in the shadows.

Read an exclusive interview with Daft Punk in the Observer Magazine this Sunday.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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//

Today I am testing the repost service to bring you this somewhat hyperbolic article from Pando Daily, written by Brandon Mendelson.

I’ve often written about the social media shell game, for e.g. Social Media Marketing Sells Social Media, but refrained from going after the proponents – Mendelson is happy to fire on all cylinders and seems to have ruffled the feathers of Gary Vaynerchuk. In between the flying lead he makes some good points about what those “social media proponents” brought down upon their own heads, and how they are attempting to change the messaging around the term “social media” and push the idea of “real-time marketing” as the new sell.

Let’s face it, we could talk about this until the cows come home, but really danah boyd summed it up best when she wrote “[...] when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.”

Social media may finally be dying, but the BS around it hasn’t (via Pando Daily)

By Brandon Mendelson On May 13, 2013. Editor’s note: Gary Vaynerchuk disputes three points in the story. He says he never used a book-buying service like ResultSource. That is, he says, a “categorical lie.” Gary says he appeared on Conan and Ellen before being represented by CAA, and says…

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In a post last week I pointed to an article by Ryan Holiday that had a sub-header titled “Native Ads Are the Next Advertising Hustle.” Holiday’s article mentioned the debacle that ensued when The Atlantic partnered with the Church of Scientology, allowing the church to run a content piece disguised as op-ed. Jack Shafer has some good insights into that story and on “native advertising” and “sponsored content” in general here.

Here’s an extract:

When Web publishers deliberately blur the visual and textual divide that separates editorial from advertising, as The Atlantic did, they force readers to judge whether a page is news/opinion or a commercial advertisement. But they’re not confused; it’s the publisher and the advertiser who are confused. The publishers and advertisers have polluted their own tradition by erasing the traditional line. Suddenly, it’s completely reasonable for readers to blame controversial news stories directly on advertisers and blame controversial advertisements directly on reporters and editors, because publishers and advertisers have essentially merged operations. Such calamities injure both publisher and advertiser, even already controversial advertisers like Scientology. (In The Atlantic‘s defense, it should be noted that it ultimately conceded that it “screwed up” the presentation of its advertisers message and promised to do better in the future.)

The Atlantic debacle hasn’t stilled the enthusiasm of Web publishers for sponsored content. Lewis DVorkin of Forbes, an early promulgator of sponsored content, continues to bang his drum for it. He claims 20 partners (SAP, UPS, Harris Bank, et al.) for Forbes‘s “BrandVoice.” It’s enough to make you barricade yourself behind Orwell’s collected works when DVorkin approvingly quotes his chief revenue officer’s quip about BrandVoice: “It’s not an ad, it’s thought leadership.”

No, Lewis. If money moved from the client’s hand to that of Forbes, and Forbes posted the client’s copy, it’s an ad.

Robert Cringely has some thoughts too in his post Here lies Web Journalism: Dead at the hand of the almighty advertiser.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a hullabaloo over online ads masquerading as editorial on the Web these days. I’m here to tell you that the situation is actually much worse than you might think.

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Google marks the birthday of the iconic designer Saul Bass. Checkout the Guardian’s Bass gallery.

Also The Guardian has a story about Google’s plans for a “Spotify-like audio service”

Google is said to be pushing for an ad-free YouTube subscription service to be tied in with its planned Spotify-like audio service. According to an executive familiar with the issue, the tech giant already has deals in place with a multitude of record labels, including the majors, for the audio subscription service. However, there is said to be disagreements regarding how Google should remunerate the labels for the bundled YouTube part of the subscription.

While Google is said to have agreed to pay a minimum per-stream rate for the audio service, just like Spotify does, it only wants to pay on a revenue share basis for the YouTube part. The record labels, however, want both parts of the service to have a minimum per-stream rate.[Full story]

 
In Hashtag Sympathy Cyborgology takes a philosophical look at society’s use of social hashtags and how “tragedy in social media often resembles disaster porn.” Extract:

[...] under the ceaseless pressure of shareability and virality, tragedy on social media often resembles disaster porn: a ghastly vine, a sappy post, attention seeking hashtags, confusing the spread of symbolic images for profound political achievement.

That grief is best endured in groups was not lost on those involved in the Boston Marathon or to those who experienced it through networked media. As platforms for articulating emotion, the streams of Twitter and Facebook have been inflected with profound sympathy, unabashed condolence, and a peculiar kind of catastrophe catharsis. Blood drenched pavement has a way of putting petty difference in its place. Tragedy breeds camaraderie.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Law—that each year we will share more of our life-moments on social networks—and Facebook’s axiom, that everything is better when shared with friends, fits nicely into this paradigm. The “My heart goes out to the victims in Boston” and “Prayers to law enforcement” posts can be seen as healthy extensions of sympathy. The hallmarks of Facebook’s logic—extraversion and sharing—seem acutely appropriate for coping with the psychic trauma of disaster.

But even the most gentle heart sees something amiss.[Full article]

Katie Zhu, currently studying computers and journalism at Northwestern, outlines her thoughts about the lack of joint programs in schools today. Extract:

When I tell people I’m studying both computer science and journalism, a frequent reaction I get is amazement that such a joint program exists.

Well, it doesn’t.

In fact, the degree requirements for my two majors couldn’t be further apart. The respective buildings are even located at the polar opposite ends of campus.

So I’ve been walking alone. Quite literally.

At the risk of sounding like I have a huge chip on my shoulder, let me say that there’s a pretty awesome niche of hyphenated types (programmer-journalist, designer-developer, you know) who have been invaluable and a big reason of why I’m in even in this field.

But I’ve also experienced ample frustration in my choice of double majors. [Full article]

 
Recently Ryan Holiday of The New York Observer had a look at the world of sponsored posts in blogs calling them ” a waste of ad dollars.” The article’s sub-header reads “Native Ads Are the Next Advertising Hustle.”

For those of you who are only peripherally involved in the media business, the death of the page-views-as-profit model is why you’re beginning to see a lot of chatter about a new form of advertising called native ads. Since the market is flooded with more inventory than could ever possibly be purchased, CPMs (the amount advertisers pay per thousand impressions) have been driven essentially to zero. Now, desperate to generate cash, blogs have to create new kinds of inventory.

Some sites call it “native advertising.” Some call it “sponsored posts.” Some call it “advertorial.” But regardless of the name, it’s based on short-term thinking and built almost exclusively on industry hype. It’s not a long-term strategy; it’s just a way to juice dumb media buyers for cash—or in other cases, to create just enough semblance of a business model to convince dumb brands to acquire them. [Full article]

Holiday is frustrated at what he sees developing and he has a point. I side with him regarding how industry jargon and hype create a bandwagon effect. I also agree that applying short-term thinking and solutions to what ought to be a long-term strategy to create great content, that users actually want to interact with and in some cases pay for, is frustrating. He points to his own article about Andrew Sullivan’s blog as an example of “something worth paying for.” It’s also worth recalling the debacle around The Atlantic and the Scientology “advertorial.”

Meanwhile Giselle Abramovich of Digiday asks, In a Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?

 

Image: Jimmy King

My friend Rick Moody has written an amazing, in-depth article for The Rumpus, on the new David Bowie album The Next Day. One to save to your Pocket for reading later. You can read all Rick’s articles for The Rumpus here.

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At lunch today I came across the website of the Dickinson Digital Humanities Advisory Committee and in particular, a blog post from Chris Francese which is a message to the Dickinson Board of Trustees.

Here’s an excerpt:

Among faculty there is a growing realization that the internet, technology, and social media are not just things that distract our students, give them short attention spans, and allow them to do superficial research for papers—though the internet enables all of those things. New digital tools can actually help us do our jobs better, help us teach and do research more effectively. But how, exactly? That’s the question that hangs over all the many discussions regarding technology and education in a liberal arts college setting. The answers are discipline specific, and vary even from class to class in a given subject. But I think there are three broad benefits. In the liberal arts college environment, academic technology can

Develop students into public scholars. Podcasting, blogging, and collaboration on faculty-led projects puts students in a situation where the audience is now not just me. I become the coach, not the judge. This has powerful benefits for the teaching of writing. My own experience with podcasting is that the initial drafts of the scripts are in a traditional, stilted academic style, but the second drafts involve massive re-writes and improvements, into a style that more closely approximates the kinds of writing they will have to do after college. It’s the best way to teach writing that I know of.

Show publicly what the liberal arts can do. Traditionally, what the liberal arts does has been behind closed doors, very cut off from public scrutiny. In the age of $50k tuition it’s more important than ever to share the products and innovative teaching methods openly so people can see them. What liberal arts students learn to do is contextualize, analyze, and present information. These are things the internet really needs, and we can provide, a real social benefit that is consistent with our mission.

Enhance collaboration and sharing among scholars. This is a true revolution, and I have experienced it over and over again with my own project, the Dickinson College Commentaries. People from all over the country and the world have come forward to contribute to this project. It has attracted everything from Oxford professors to freelance app developers to grad students, undergraduates at other institutions, high school teachers, amateur enthusiasts, and even a lieutenant in the US army. The kind of public impact one can make with a quality website in some cases outstrips–is of a completely different order than–what one can do in a print scholarly journal. Which is not to say that print is going away or is irrelevant.

This all sounds good to me…

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We put together our NORTH social lab, aka Slab, just over a year ago. What began as a digital strategy experiment has morphed into an agile unit that brings great results across the social web for NORTH’s brand clients. The Social Lab consists of: Alison Reilly, Jessica Williams and Dave Allen.

We submitted our KEEN Footwear Worldwide Recess Day campaign to this year’s Social Media Awards for Dream Team within an agency, Just ‘Cause, Breaking Social and People’s Choice.

We’ve shared an extensive case study from our work with KEEN Footwear during 2012. All of the social platforms noted here were essential in making Worldwide Recess Day KEEN’s most successful 2012 campaign.

You can access the KEEN campaign Social Accounts in detail via the following links:

Worldwide Recess Day / KEEN Twitter / KEEN Facebook / KEEN Pinterest / KEEN Instagram / KEEN LinkedIn

If you like what you see there please click through to YouTube and like the video above to cast your vote.