Our friends from the Norman Lear Center, one of the world’s leading think tanks and research institutions devoted exclusively to entertainment, is celebrating their 10th anniversary in style – with a list of ten good reasons why TV, the last remaining mass medium, is good for you: “We've heard the arguments: How TV is bad for us, how it's linked to violence, the obesity epidemic, the dumbing down of culture. At the Norman Lear Center we've made it our business to study entertainment -- televised and otherwise -- and believe that whatever its downsides, TV also has much to contribute to a healthy, connected and well-informed society.“
"10. TV Can Change Policy After an episode of ER was shown to Congressmembers, the Patient Navigator Act was passed. And an episode of Law & Order: SVU that shed light on pesticide testing prompted an official response from the EPA.
9. TV Can Keep You Company As humans, we crave connectedness. Studies have shown that those who suffer from loneliness find comfort in parasocial relationships with favored TV programs and TV characters.
8. TV Can Tap Into Our Better Selves Fonzie got a library card and requests for library cards increased over 500% nationwide. When Hollywood, Health & Society worked with the CBS show Numb3rs on an organ donation storyline, a study found that viewers of the episode were more likely to become registered organ donors.
7. TV Can Make Us Smarter Over the years, popular television has grown in complexity from simple narratives (Bonanza, anyone?) to multi-threaded storylines featuring 15 or more characters (Lost). In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that these complexities in plot, storyline and character have actually made us smarter.
6. TV Can Break Down Barriers Following the 1965 Watts Riots, then CBS broadcast journalist Joe Saltzman produced Black on Black, a primetime documentary about what it meant to be black in Los Angeles.
5. TV Can Motivate Us TV viewers are learning important civic lessons from government-themed dramas like 24 and Law & Order, according to a Lear Center study.
4. TV Can Bring People Together In today's fragmented media markets, shared televised experiences are few and far between. Televised events like the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the World Cup give us a rare opportunity to share a moment in time with the world.
2. TV Can Empower Entertainment-Education posits that what we watch can amuse as well as educate. When South Africa's soap opera Soul City featured a key character as a victim of domestic abuse, it spawned the grassroots "Pots & Pans Campaign." Soul City's creator received the 2009 Everett M. Rogers Award in 2009.
1. TV Can Save Lives For better or worse, viewers absorb what they see on TV, including health information. Studies indicate enormous potential for TV to serve as health educator. The Sentinel For Health Awards recognize achievements of TV storylines that inform, educate and motivate viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives."
“I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.”
- Bob Dylan
Silver Fish Hand Catch! As the social web’s echo chamber is gushing about Wieden+Kennedy (W+K)’s masterful Old Spice campaign (actor and former football star Isaiah Mustafa wowing viewers with his smooth-talking delivery in video replies to hundreds of online queries or comments tweeted to him by web users),first spoofs are manifesting its pop-cultural credentials, and the meta-story is increasingly becoming the story ("how did they do it?"), both practical and philosophical questions arise. The jury is still out on the campaign’s commercial impact (various news sites and blogs are reporting that sales have fallen by 7%, which various other news sites and blogs dispute). I’m more interested in the campaign as a cultural phenomenon and its lasting implications: Is it a one-off nifty idea or are we witnessing the emergence of something bigger than that, a whole new paradigm for marketers and content producers, as Mashable claims?
Without a doubt, several things are remarkable about the Old Spice campaign. First of all, the numbers: A total of 183 individual video responses have been posted to the Old Spice YouTube channel, and to date the videos have attracted more than 38 million individual views. During the campaign, the Old Spice channel was the most viewed channel on YouTube, and it is now the third most subscribed channel ever on the site’s “sponsor” category. Total upload views for the channel, a metric that includes the original TV ads, currently stand at over 92 million. The final video reply, addressed to “everyone,” has amassed 3.3 million views and over 20,000 comments alone. As of today, the brand’s official Twitter account has grown to 92,000 followers.
Secondly, the campaign has exposed a key ingredient of viral content - disruption, in the form of a classic “What If” proposition that challenges conventional views: What if the main character of a commercial suddenly takes on a life on its own and starts directly responding to viewers?
Thirdly, Old Spice has probably been the first campaign to be both hyper-individualized (Mustafa's individual replies to Twitter users) and hyper-social (spreading virally as people have forwarded and embedded the replies). In fact, the very personalization of the responses has made them so unique and worth sharing. And all of that at hyper-speed: Seldom before has an advertising campaign produced so many highly personalized pieces of content in such short amount of time.
Lastly, the campaign has beamed us back into an age of Mad Men superpower, perfectly coinciding with the imminent launch of the new season of our favorite TV series this weekend. Ironically, though, rather than by relying on traditional persuasive ad-power Mad Men’s clout has been restored by an ad agency using social media of all things. Or, to be more precise: Transmedia. After already toying with them for their 2008 “Somebody Else’s Phone” campaign for Nokia, W+K borrowed the principles of Transmedia again for Old Spice – but this time augmenting them to much more visible effect.
Consider Transmedia a variation of social media. The term is commonly attributed to Marsha Kinder, who premiered it in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Communication scholar Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture, formerly at MIT, now with the Annenberg School in L.A.) then made it popular by crafting a theory of “Transmedia Storytelling” in a Technology Review essay, depicting it as a cross-platform narrative where each platform adds something meaningful to the fictional world – whether it’s more back story, deeper stories for secondary characters, the interactive dimension of a game, or new opportunities for the fans to participate in telling the story. More specifically, Jenkins laid out the “Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling”: Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.
Over the past ten years or so, Transmedia has again and again been considered the “next big thing” without ever really breaking through into mainstream. Battlestar Galactica, the Batman series, or The Matrix were sporadic examples of innovative Transmedia entertainment plays, but only as of late, the proliferation of games, social media, and mobile platforms has given rise to a more widespread adoption of the concept.
Transmedia is now increasingly popular for content producers who are facing economic pressures to maximize their assets across platforms. The NBC series Heroes is often cited as a watershed moment, and Tim Kring, its creator, is widely seen as the man who made Transmedia plausible for a mass TV audience. Kring is also one of the forces behind Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale cross-platform movement that attempts to use Transmedia to support social causes – Lina Srivastava calls this “Transmedia Activism.” At the heart of the Conspiracy for Good experience is a locative event over the course of three weeks in London, starting in mid-July and running until August 7th. Another recent example of Transmedia Storytelling is the comic franchise The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa’s vision of Muslim superheroes that he has extended to multiple media formats. Moreover, Wired UK recently hired agency Six to turn its latest issue – featuring a cover story on Transmedia – into a transmedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG). There are even some who call the iPad “the world’s first transmedia device” – a questionable notion given the rather retro lean-back mode of consumption that the iPad encourages.
Before this backdrop, the Old Spice campaign is arguably the most comprehensive use of Transmedia in an advertising context to date, and it serves as the blue print for what I call “transformats.” I would pinpoint their three main characteristics as follows:
- Transmedia: Transformats use a multi-modular presentation of narratives that extends the story across various media and allows a social web-enabled “audience formerly known as the audience” to participate in the story development. In the case of Old Spice, it went full circle: from YouTube to Twitter and back.
- Transcendent: Transformats transcend not only the original medium but also the original story, creating new meaning beyond the conceived plot. In the case of Old Spice, the main protagonist was given a life on its own and the power to directly interact with members of the audience. Thus, the story became an open-ended conversation, and the initial message faded amidst a chorus of issues (user-)generated by the cultural fabric of the social web.
- Transformative: Transformats advance marketing best practices and lift the state-of-the-art. Key here is that the design of the marketing program itself is the story (see meta-marketing), or at least an integral part of it. Case in point: The majority of coverage on the Old Spice campaign heralded its innovative quality, and many stories were background stories that shed light on “the making of.” Perhaps that’s the most powerful thing about innovation, from a marketing perspective: True innovation always is a story in and of itself.
Transformats may indeed constitute a whole new framework for state-of-the-art marketing. They may span even more media (TV, social web, movies, radio, print, AR, etc.), zig-zag more artfully between virtual and real world, and incorporate more gaming mechanics that incentivize users through “achievements” modeled on behavioral economics. Besides advertising, transformats may also have a place in media outlets: Imagine direct video responses from reporters to readers’ comments or interactive maps that enrich stories by pulling in user-generated real-time data and commentary, as a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism. Or reporters who post their intent to run a story and publicly ask for input and feedback (a moderated WikiLeaks, if you will, where readers can follow the genesis of a story). Or articles that readers can “park” after the morning read of their print newspaper, just to pick them up in the evening on their TV screen (as envisioned here by the NYTimes R&D lab). All of this would make the newsroom of the future a social media-savvy, super-convergent, real-time multimedia production studio, with the release cycles of stories shrunk to almost zero, and various media and engagement modes extending their life cycles to X.
It doesn’t require too much imagination to see transformats also play a seminal role in transforming education, healthcare, civil society, and even politics. Already, Gwynne Kostin, director of new media and citizen engagement at the General Services Administration, examines on GovLoop how to “adopt ‘Old Spice’ success to government” by embracing what she extrapolates as the campaign’s main tenets “speed, planning, talent, and trust.” While this ambition appears to be perhaps a bit of a stretch at this point, the overarching trajectory is evident: In an economy where attention is as scarce as commitment to action, stories that transcend their original storyline, set new standards for their genre, and engage people across various media can make a difference. As the complexity of our societal challenges is increasing, our solutions are becoming more open-ended. In other words: To tackle X-problems, you need to have X-conversations. Old Spice was just the beginning.
From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.
After all the anticipation, controversy, and analysis, it all comes down to a simple formula: Germany versus Spain. Before the mouth-watering semi-final in Durban, the German media is having a blast. I guess it's one of the beauties of the World Cup that it can convert deeply rooted stereotypes into more subtle narratives...well, sort of. :)
This one might be more subtle though than intended. Did the German press really not notice that the fruit it picked is Orange - Orange like the "Oranjes," the Dutch? Might that be a subtle sign of what is in the cards?
One thing is clear: If it comes to a Netherlands-Germany final, one of the biggest arch rivalries in the history of football, it will be an indirect contest between our two European studios in Amsterdam and Munich (after our Milan studio had really nothing at all to cheer about in this tournament). One of them will suffer, and previously fruitful relationships across offices might run dry.
One last subtle hint: The infamous octopus Paul has predicted Spain will win. Note though that he has already erred before - when he predicted a German victory over Spain in the EURO final two years ago...
If you worry about social media pushing the boundaries of privacy on sites like Facebook these days, then you may want to be mindful of what is looming on the horizon next – because ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ What we are sharing (mostly voluntarily) today is mainly a cocktail of sociographic data (birthday, birthplace, location, education, memberships, hobbies, etc.), convictions, intentions, and activities. Soft stuff, really, if you think about it; information that can conveniently be tweaked and entirely made up at your fingertips online, as needed to enhance your social credentials. It remains a virtual currency in a virtual world.
“Hard” privacy data looks different, and we have not been sharing it much to date. It cannot be easily fabricated or altered because it is literally an existential part of our individual lives, and as such becomes only social through the act of sharing. Radical Transparency in its most radical notion extends to those human areas that are most personal, and it doesn’t take much imagination to pinpoint the most sacrosanct of them: our genetic code and our dreams; the very physical and the very meta-physical fabric of our selves.
As for the latter, movies have long envisioned the intrusion of others into our utmost private spheres. Think of “Strange Days,” “Minority Report,” or “Memento,” which all riffed on memory-theft or manipulation. And now the director of “Memento,” Christopher Nolan, has a new mega-project out, “Inception” (the film opens in the US on July 16), in which the main protagonists are dreams. In an interview with the New York Times the director describes the radical thought experiment underlying the film, the idea of multiple people sharing the same dream: “Once you remove the privacy … you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.” Web sites such as Dreamstop or Whispy are already delivering on that vision, albeit in poor execution. Someone needs to come up with a less esoteric way and a better business model for social networks based on dreams. How much wasted creativity could be harnessed if there was technology allowing us to make the subconscious transparent, as a social “dream feed”?
An even “harder” and more integral data set of ourselves is the genetic code that we all carry. The temptation to “socialize” this very foundation of our individuality will be hard to resist. It is only an incremental step, technically, but a huge leap, of course, morally, from sharing personal health records to making publicly available the source code of one’s life performance. But as the cost of getting personal genomes deciphered is plummeting, it seems fair to assume that this information will sooner or later populate the social web (on sites such as 23andMe). In a recent special report on “The Human Genome,” the Economist somewhat pragmatically deliberates the implications of this new brave world of bio-transparency. Referencing Stewart Brand, the American futurologist, who famously coined “Information wants to be free,” the magazine posits that “One of the lessons of the new biology is that it is all about information.” It claims that “Everyday genomics is coming, ready or not” and that there is “no hiding place.” “There will be mistakes on the way, and suffering, too,” it concedes, “But technology, once invented, cannot be unlearned.” The article closes with another one of Stuart Brand’s memorable quotes: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” That might be required indeed, especially if you consider sharing information about our genomes to be the precursor of sharing actual genes – the real deal.
My colleague Fabio Sergio has written and spoken extensively about the subject of smart bio-feedback, raising some provocative questions around his vision of “your heartbeat becoming the conversation” – a body-to-data interaction model that turns our bodies into messengers, into “pulsating active nodes on The Network.” By the same token, sharing our dreams and DNA will make our bodies and souls the ultimate social media of the future. As a result of it, publicness will emerge as the only possible human modus vivendi – sharing ergo sum; see my genes, see my dreams, therefore I am. Privacy won’t be dead. But everyone who chooses to live a public life may ultimately gain the ability to live a more fulfilling, healthier life.
I was interviewed by Rogier Bikker for Sparkcast, the podcast of Dutch branding agency Energize, on my “Chief Meaning Officer” concept.
You can listen to it here (sorry about the rambling….the session was recorded in Shanghai during my last, very intense China trip, and I think I was rather tired...)
In the very last minute of extra time, Dominic Adiyiah headed what should have been the winner for Ghana. The ball, without doubt, was going in. But Uruguay striker Luis Suarez got in the way – with both hands: “The best save of the World Cup," he said later, not the hand of God, “the hand of Suarez.”
It was a decision that would keep Uruguay in the World Cup and would change many lives forever. Suarez was sent off and Ghana was given a penalty. The penalty before the penalties, as we know now. When Ghana’s forward Asamoah Gyan was about to take the shot, a whole continent held its breath. Seconds later, the silence in and outside of the stadium was eerie - after he had only hit the crossbar.
It will go into the annals of the World Cup as the crossbar that broke Africa’s heart. The historic weight of the moment was disproportional to the margin of error that tilted the psychological balance in Uruguay’s favor. Ghana had literally been inches away from becoming the first African nation ever to advance to the World Cup semi-finals. But it was not meant to be.
The ensuing penalty-shoot out was nerve-wrecking and heart-wrenching. Gyan himself showed tremendous character when he stepped up again and coolly converted the first of Ghana’s penalty kicks. But two of his team mates failed to score, Ghana eventually lost, and the scenes of inconsolable players as they broke down overwhelmed by a sudden and all-consuming fatigue were hard to stomach. It was – as the ESPN commentator put it – the cruelest tournament exit ever witnessed at a World Cup. Even some neutral spectators shed tears. And how could you not?
In sports as in life, losing is part of the game. Yet football might be the sport with the biggest emotional roller coaster-rides. Because there is so much room for human error (of both referees and players), victory and defeat, drama and tragedy co-exist in close vicinity. No other sport is so unjust and stirs so much controversy. No other sport can shatter dreams and throw a whole nation into mourning within just seconds. There is no other sport with such a fine line between heroism and embarrassment, euphoria and depression.
But there is also no other sport in which losers can win so much respect and compassion. As much as winning in style is admired by football fans, losing in style is an art in and of itself and will guarantee a permanent spot in football’s hall of fame. The most legendary teams all excelled at losing, often in dramatic defeats: FC Barcelona’s bitter loss to arch rivals Real Madrid in the European Cup final 1960, Germany receiving the infamous “Wembley Goal” 1966 against England, the Netherlands losing the World Cup final in 1972 against Germany, Bayern Munich losing by two last-minute goals against Manchester United in the Champions League final 1999, a deflated Brazil losing to France in 1998, and so forth. And at this World Cup: the spirited US against Ghana and now Ghana against Uruguay. The history of soccer would be poorer without these epic battles and the infinite sadness of those who lost them.
Of course this won’t console the Ghanaian players and fans. As Africa’s World Cup dream has come to a harsh end, here’s a reminder of how the passion of this proud team, which produced such entertaining football at this tournament, evoked the hopes and dreams of a whole continent: a poem called "The Soccer Fanatic" by the Ghanaian poet Prince Mensah, from the collection One Ghana One Voice (presented, yes, by the Ghanaian Football Association):
Goal! That is the word we want to hear for here In this sea of deafening cries Our emotions reach their highest altitudes Through good music, good people, good attitudes – Our team must win, no way around that – We need goals, goals, more goals: We must prove that we did not come here to play, We came to conquer, to seize the day, To make victory our mainstay
Goal! I love the sound of that four-letter word, the sod On which our rollercoaster moods play - Our affinity to spectacular goals, The infinity of a good match, The divinity of our soccer-love drive us Into states of consciousness where each kick, Each dribble, each foul, each whistle eat away Away our patience but still our flags sway Whether chances go green or gray
Goal! The euphoria never abates, always lightening The pensive mood, never failing the ears As we expect a pass, a shot, a goal Sudden like bright-afternoon thunder and lightning – As flashes from a thousand cameras capture When the ball crossed the line and kissed the net – The players know that they carry our hopes in each kick, They know their misses make us sick, They know only winning will do the trick
Goal! Love for this game propels the vane of our energies We will not cease now, we will not sing in vain As we scream on top of our lungs, veins drawn on our necks Losing is not an option because too much Has been invested in this, too much life and love - If eleven men can send us to soccer-heaven, We will give them our all, we will stand tall As they kick the ball, as they rise and fall, As they win in the long haul
After crashing out of the World Cup today, Brazil - as yet another big football nation after Italy, France, and England - will have to reinvent its brand of football and build a new "golden generation" of players.
