think story experience

A constantly changing context

Working in the live experience space I'm always talking about how the world is changing...how the world of online is affecting and shaping and enabling the world of offline...and vice-versa. It's a constant battle to make sense of the changing context and landscape we're all living and working in, and to understand the implications for a bunch of other stuff.

On theat note, I liked the way Charles Saatchi responded to a Guardian interviewer when asked...

Should the country be spending money on saving old masters for the nation, or buying up works by the next generation of artists?

His answer was a perfect example of understanding how a changing environment (travel, wealth, connectedness) requires a changing response...

At the risk of being lynched – again – by the art crowd, I don't think there is a great need any more to save paintings for the nation at the cost of supporting new art. What difference does it make if a Titian is hanging in the National Gallery, the Louvre or the Uffizi? This isn't the 18th century: people travel, so there's no need to be nationalistic about the world's art treasures. Much more important is to back living artists.

Living and working in phases

It will not have gone unnoticed to my (occasional) regular readers that my output has slowed to an almost complete halt over the past few weeks. 

I wondered the other week that the weather and the general humid apathy that seems to descend on New York in summer was to blame. But perhaps it's something more fundamental. 

Perhaps, when I began blogging eleven months ago I was in an intellectual comfort zone. I had begun my third year of working in the same role. I had completed a lengthy apprenticeship in the world of brand experience marketing. And I had lots of learnings and outpourings to share. I was, in other words, in a very blogging-friendly phase of my career. 

Now I find myself in a different situation, a different career phase. One where what I think is being challenged, shaped, and refined daily as I work with new people, on new problems, in new surroundings, and for new clients. 

There's no profound observation here. Other than that perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when not every week, month, or year is the same. Perhaps it should be no shock that we (both as individuals and organisations) often find our priorities and preferences shifting rapidly and unplanned as things move from one phase to the next. 

Life is rarely a democracy

Have a read of this interesting piece by The Guardian's art critic, Jonathan Jones. Titled 'Art criticism is not a democracy', the piece makes two fascinating points relevant to any field...

ONE. Criticism matters. As Jones argues, "iI nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs".

TWO. No one is going to declare you a critic (or an expert). Instead, it's an exercise in arrogant self-promotion balanced with honest self-assessment. Here's how Jones puts it, "I don't believe my views on film or TV or music are worth anything special. But I do believe – actually I know – that my instinct for what is valuable in art is unusually sure."

I take a simple lesson from this. Everything is worth challenging and criticising, and no one is going to give you the permission to do it. Your choice is whether you want to be someone whose opinion on something matters and what you're going to do about it.

Twitter is kinda pointless shocker!

Did we really need a 15-year-old to tell us this?

This follow-up piece suggests not.

A self-indulgent link

Had a little piece on social media published online by AdAge today.

Destroying the death star

Ok, so I may have been a little hasty and harsh in a conversation earlier today. I told a recent advertising graduate that advertising was dying because it was part of the problem. In fact, think I referred to it as the death star. That was extreme and unfair!

The truth is the problem is not advertising but simply the way too many people think about advertising. Because while it may not always be the problem, it certainly ain't always the solution either.

Like any form of communication, advertising can be a powerful way to solve some strategic problems. But that's exactly the point...some problems.

The task for people who love advertising, who want to defend it, and who want to see it evolve and thrive is to become more subtle in the way they think about the role and strategic application of advertising. 

Because advertising is not the only way to sell more stuff...and sell more stuff is not the only thing advertising can do. You just have to think about it a bit more.

A new role for communications professionals

I used to call myself a communications professional. I used to think I was good with words. I used to believe that my great strength was understanding how to persuade and influence people. And to an extent all that remains true.

But what I have realised over time is that the most interesting thing is not the ability to influence people through communication, but the ability to to improve stuff through innovation. The underlying skills are the same...thinking about people, understanding what makes them tick, and identifying what would make them happier. The difference is the application of those skills.

As a communications professional you use your skills to make the status quo sound, appear, and occasionally work better. As a innovative thinker, you use your skills to change the status quo. In other words, you don't just change the storytelling, you change the story.  

Forget Twitter, I've got a new pet hate

Check out Plinky.

Or, on second thoughts don't bother.

The whole concept is horribly depressing, plumbing the depths of banal, same-same self-expression.

Doesn't anyone have anything interesting to do with their time any more?

And now I've been inspired to write five lines more than I should have by it...

Something to check out...if you're in London

Melanie Crete (who handles PR for weknowwhatyoudidlastnight) blogs here about the new Unseen Guy Bourdin exhibition at the very cool Wapping Project space in East London.

I love Guy Bourdin's work because he understood the right way to use photography to make ads and create images for brands. His work both for French Vogue and for Charles Jourdan is just beautiful...sexy, subtle, and very effective.

Blurring the lines between art and marketing, understanding how to create aspiration and desire, and contributing to popular culture in the process. If only more modern marketers would check out the exhibition and learn something...

An oldie, but a goodie

My strategy/planning type colleague Umit sent me this great post from Nicholas Carr's Rough Trade blog on the psychology of Twitter. It's actually a re-posting of a piece Nicholas wrote more than two years ago, which just reminds you how long it takes something like Twitter to 'tip' even in the age of hyper-connectedness.

Read the blog post for the full article. My favourite bit goes...

"The great paradox of 'social networking' is that it uses narcissism as the glue for 'community'. Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols."