true voyeur

Flickr is a site that on paper, may not sound that amazing. Its a site that allows people to store their photos in online albums. The difference: its free, anyone can see your phtos (unless you restrict them) and it has a killer app interface very much like the visual theasaurus . Better yet,you can tag a photo and leave a comment on it.

This is being used in all sorts of ways. Anthropology, planners doing research, as a photo blog and as art. The diners in Restaurant 11 in Amsterdam were able to use their mobile phones to submit a keyword of their choice, which will later appear on the surrounding screens with corresponding photographs, courtesy of Flickr> so that while they dine the backdrop of the restaurant will be adapted to their personal wishes.

In one sense, this site is like any other blog: a means of uncensored, risk free self-expression. On other hand it plays into our national (maybe international) fantsay of voyeurism: to be somebody else by looking at their life from the outside. Is it that we are permanently discontent with out lot. I don't think so - or at least I hope it isn;t ('cos otherwise I should have become a therapist years ago and become stinking rich). Instead I think it is that we have becme programmed by modern society to cnstantly seek out new things. To seek and move and not to stand still. Maybe we're all ADD, but we now live an age where exploration is fairly risk free. Unlike Columbus, we're not going to fall off the edge of the world if we're wrong, even if the world is flat again.

the musical afterlife

Guitar sales have trebled in the last 10 years. Seems like 30 year olds like me still harbor dreams of rock stardom and so are tooling around in the basement with compression pedals and arguing about whether valves sounds as good as tubes. In fact the record stores are targetting parents buying their kids guitars etc. and have "school of rock" type programs just for them.

But if half the people in the US don't like their job (see previous post) its not suprising that these people are indulging their innner Van Halen, or that people are more active and spend more time on hobbies. And maybe thats why they are always complaining that they don;t have enough time. If only everyone could love their job (sigh)

Quarterlife Crisis

I know it seems like everyone is always in a crisis. Now even the mid-life crisis has a crisis. It seems we now have quarter-life crises. People in their twenties are working shorter tenures for more employers. Many are going back to college only a few years after going to work. They are often ill prepared for the real work world - what it takes to really succeed - or find that they were overhwlemed by the career options ahead of them and made the wrong choice.

But its not just these people who are unhappy. Job satisfaction has dropped significantly between 1995 and 2004 for even the highest earners. It now seems that half the people in the US don;t like what they do.

What's also interesting is that the twenty-somethings in question feel permission to change. In the 50's and before, a career choice was something you stuck with, even if you didn't love it. Now, the change culture and the modern permisiveness of (being in debt) mean that changing direction is easier than ever. Which, if you think about it, is the only way you can reconcile the tradition of American Dream with the desire for happiness and personal fulfillment passed on by the boomers that we now take for granted.

Ouch!

This is a really nice piece I found in Fader. It's a booklet entitled "ouch" and is all about various tattoo artists, their thoughts on tattoos etc. The best bit is the booklet's producer: Tylenol. With a tag and logo on the back ("pain is inevitable, suffering is not" and a subtle logo on the page, this is a piece something that really made me reconsider this brand (normally, its Ibuprofen or gritted teeth.It shows the continued power of being unexpected and relevant and not falling prey to the idea that an audience is out of reach.

Post APG Thoughts

So now that the fog of alcohol has somewhat cleared, maybe I can better reflecton the week on the planning conference.

There were some very good speakers (mostly in the main session), but as usual very few offering new points of view. Even Malcolm Gladwell's (very well received) plea to the Supreme Court to ban focus groups is something most planners would recognize (I hope). It seems that we keep talking about the same issues because we haven't managed to solve them or keep coming up against them time and time again. Is it because we haven't truly convinced clients or (more likely) CEOs, CFOs etc. at client companies that they need to go to market or think about their business in a different way? The companies whose advertising we laud the most (Nike, Apple, Ikea) often think with a planning or creative mindset. So maybe we need more people who are offering different points of view about marketing,how it works, how it should be done. People doing interesting research that can help us move the argument along with clients. Because right now, its just ad folks (mostly planners) trying to give a point of view, and the attitude may well be: "well, they only do ads, what do they know".


The exceptions to the above were Mark Earls and Russell Davies. Mark's ideas about co-creativity are really helpful and inspiring. He made a point that we are not yet co-creating internally, so how can we expect to do it with people. This is probably why we keep talking about the same issues at planning conferences all the time. A few years ago Emily Reed and I did a session at an APG conference about the personalities of creatives, planners and account people and found that they weren't much different. So have people work in teams and have the whole team be responsible for all the work.

Mark's ideas about co-creating with people are also really great - similar to Alex Wipperfurths stuff. Again, the challenge is getting clients to let go of some of the control of their brand so consumers can "mash" it. We've spent years telling them to be consistent, be the brand police, so its going to be hard.

Which leads into Russell Davies ideas. I loved his thoughts on execution and strategy needing to be mixed up and that complexity is more important than consistency. It intuitively feels right. People are more easily bored today, they want new stuff, new ideas all the time. So if your brand can express itself in many different ways and talk about many aspects of a broader idea, then it will constantly feel fresh.I wish he had spent more time on how to mix execution and strategy (and how to have creative directors feel OK with that).

Sweet Home APG

A quick post from the APG about posting. Russell Davies is doing what bloggers do - posting immediate feedback and commentary from the conference (thanks in no due part to the fact that he probably has an Apple that actually can get a wireless connection, not a crappy PC). The posts are a interesting conversation starter, but most interesting is that it is a conversation starter with someone I don't know, yet identify with. It is social glue - and that is the power of blogging and the INternet come to life in planning.

I'll post more about the actual conference once the traditional AP hangover has subsided (next week) - another reason to be impressed by Davies. But needless to say that we keep talking about the same issues year after year because we can never implement them - the definition of insanity. Mike Doody presented a great case about adoption, Mike Hall, Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Earls were all interesting. But even they were not saying anything truly new. Cynicism consumption is everywhere - even in planning !