Visualizing the Future

Notes taken watching "The Persauders" -- Frontline Episode on Advertising produced by Douglas Rushkoff

Show can be watched at PBS
Brands as cults as the basis of emotional branding. Products as transcendent experience. WWF is not male wrestling -- its a balletic struggle. Kevin Roberts (Saatchi and Saatchi) has written a book about emotional branding called “Lovemarks”.  “We've moved from brands into experiences” since all products work and do basically the same thing. ATT, Coke and Hallmark.
Therefore companies become movements and an ethos -- a bond with customers.
Queer Eye and product placement is the antidote to TiVo?  Hmmmmm. . .
CastAway as a film about a brand. Airline about Southwest.
This movement is called Madison and Vine in the same way as the web industry in NYC was Silicon Alley.
Integrated Entertainment Products is one of the premier product placement agency. Problem is the the trust of this relationship between Madison and Vine and the economic calculus is shaky.
BMW films and Seinfeld Superman are cited as huge web successes -- evangelized by John Hayes (CMO of AMEX).   good blog on product placement
Seems to me that the whole thing is creepy but inevitable -- advergames, edutainment, advertainment -- the bottom line seems to be that only times any of this works is when it's not overt --just like old-fashioned advertising, the best examples are ones that are amusing and latent, not blatant. Whether literally or figuratively, companies must sell now and in the future by covert coercion, the must stalk and sneak up because their prey knows their game and wishes to be amused and delighted.
Dr. CG  Rapaille  is the godfather of a particularly fascinating strand of market research that encourages clients to tap into the inner psyches of consumers to discover the code at the core of what he calls the "reptile mind" -- an inner animal psyche that is far more primal and emotional than any intellect at work in a buying decision.

"Pullling a Rabbit Out of My Ass" -- Perhaps the Greatest Turn of Phrase of All Time -- Dave Sifry of Technorati on Entrepreneuring

So you wanna be a hi-tech entrepreneur? Oy, it's a huge pain in the ass. First off, you've got to come up with the idea. Then you've got to bring together the team. You communicate the idea with the team, and you iterate, iterate, iterate. Then you come up with the business plan and its close cousin, the presentation (or preso, as we like to call it). Think you're doing well? Ha! You're not even started. You've got to get the lawyers and if you're lucky, they'll work at a discount, or even defer fees until you get funded. Then you've got to work on the pitch, which i everything. You've got to display a clear, concise story about the idea, but this time tailoring it to whomever you're talking with, be they customers, investors, potential employees or vendors. After all, this is all about creating something from nothing which is scratch-your-head-silly, if you really sit down and think about it. Someone was talking on a financial radio show today, and they asked, "Everyone's talking about this loss of wealth in the past few years, and before that they were talking about all of this wealth that was created during the thriving economy. Where did all that wealth go? Whose mattresses are bulging?" Well, that's just another way of looking at the fact that the best entrepreneurs create something from nothing. Forget all this bullshit about "increased productivity this", and "lowered costs that", and "more efficient that-other-thing". The most amazing thing is that wealth gets created when someone, through hard work, a good idea, and a lot of bullshit, actually pulls a rabbit from out of his ass. This rant begs the question, "so where did all that wealth go in the last 12 months?" Why, the rabbits crawled right back up into a whole lot of asses.
From 2/8/2002 -- http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2002_01.html
Posted by dsifry at 02:12 AM

If . . . . . .

OK. A prediction. Though I didn't like him, Kelly quoted the poem IF, by Rudyard Kipling . I believe a lot in art, literature and and what someone's taste says about the nature of their soul. My vote : Kelly.

Dan Kennedy Asks the Billion Dollar Question

The other day, I helped our family friend set up a blog to promote his new book. Dan is somewhat new to the blogging phenomenon, but the man knows publishing -- he's the Publisher of the Sacramento Business Journal. So after the expected few days of experimentation with layout and the like, he wrote today and asked a brilliant pair of questions. Here they are, along with my answer(s)

-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Kennedy
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:35:22
To:Reuben Steiger
Subject: wonder how

Hi Reuben,

Okay, with the work day slowing as the holidays approach, I've been nosing
around to learn about blogs. For example, I went inside Forbes.com and found
an article about the ten best food blogs, in their estimation. One was by a
woman who decided to make all of Julia's Child's recipes from her cookbook
... and had 775,000 occasions when people checked in on her blog.

Here's a question. How do you nose around to find blogs on subject matters
of potential interest. And how does anyone find your blog? - Dan

-----Original Message-----
FROM: "Reuben Steiger"
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 06:04:58
To:"Diane Kennedy"
Subject: Re: wonder how

Well, Dan, now I realize the degree of your considerable acumen! You just asked two of the most important and interesting questions in the “next wave” of web publishing - aka blogging.
The simple answer is that blogs are not that different froM any other web pages and leading people to you blog is as tricky (and well-understood) as mmarketing any website. What's interesting about blogs is that many of their authors use features like “blogs I read” that list just that. This makes the “blogosphere” as the global community of blogs very interconnected and self-referential. From a conventional publishing perspective, this creates an interesting opportunity. Here's why:
All commerce on the web is driven by the use of “keywords” the words that describe a webpage that are bid upon by customers of Google to attain high-ranking on a search result page for search word that is the same as the keyword. For example, you could buy the word Zihuatanejo for 10 cents a click from Google and hope that a large percentage of people Googling Zihuatanejo would be excited to see there was a book about the holiday destination and buy your book.
The opportunity, I think, lies in the way in which blogs authors create targetted content and “flock together”.
As to the other question re. finding bloghs on topicsn there is no good blog portal or directory. There are a couple of ones to look at -- www.technorati.com is a list of the 100 most popular blogs and www.weblogsinc.com

Let's talk more about this in person. Best,

R

Bridging the Real and Virtual Worlds

I'm fascinated by the relationship between a few types of online experiences that meld the online and real worlds. There is an emerging class of advanced mapping and visualization technologies, notably KeyHole which was recently acquired by Google and is being used for a variety of applications by both industry and the public sector. Next there a group of enterprise search and analytics software providers typified by Visual Sciences Corporation which allow clients to visualize complex and fluid data-sets in a much more dynamic and dramatic manner than their predecessors. Finally, there are Massively MultiPlayer Online Games, most notably SecondLife and There . Both these games allow real-time collaboration between their players (or "residents") in vibrant virtual environments as well as, in the case of SecondLife, user-authored content and robust meta-economies and trade.

"There" seems to have foundered as a profitable game but after a re-org and capital injection, it has reformed under the name Forterra Corporation and is making attempts to private-label the gaming engine for simulation purposes for the military and large companies.

Having been deeply immersed in creating large networked communities with dynamic interfaces as well as having built an RFID software company Mission Assurance Corporation I find these topics fascinating.

While RFID's initial promise lies as a mobile barcode that will allow large supply-chain companies to more effectively track and monitor their physical goods, there is another more alluring and promising aspect to the technology. In essence, RFID and Auto-ID represent one of the final links necessary to create the "Mirror Worlds" described in Gelernter's book of the same name. In other words, RFID and related technologies enable us, should we so choose, to link identity information with objects and people, and theoretically, to visualize those objects/people in a shared environment or simulation such as There or SecondLife. Powerful stuff.

But when you mesh these concepts (collaboration/game engine, RFID tagging/mesh networks, and advanced mapping and analytics, the calculus is irrevocably changed. It suddenly becomes possible to run rapid scenario simulation, real-time goods/people tracking and advanced analytics in a manner I believe will have an enormous breadth of applications.