NeverNeverMind

VW Routan ad vs. Ford Flex ad - retooling America's Big 3 automakers

2009-01-10T15:47:00.006-05:00

First, thanks to the folks who commented on my post about the "aging hippies" VW Routan ad. Since then I recently discovered Ads of the World has a whole folder of VW ads. I'd like to add a couple of thoughts to my previous post.

One, I don't feel critical or bad about aging hippies. God, I AM one! And I'd die to have a vintage VW bus like the one in the driveway in that ad. I'm terribly jealous of all the folks who love their buses and rebuild them and take road trips and go to those crazy van club get-togethers.

I just thought that VW Routan ad was very peculiar thing for VW to do when hippie culture basically adopted the Beetle and the transporter and opened up the huge North American market for them. It seems just, well, ungrateful.

Second, I think we've really lost something when the only purpose a van seems to have these days is to promote middle class family values, mom's driving their kids to polo practice, schlepping around piles of consumer toys. Van used to be associated with a lot more than status quo consumerism, but these days the only sex drugs and rock 'n roll that remains is in the sound tracks.

Now along comes the Ford Flex (shown in the Canadian ad above) - not really a van but not really a truck either. What is it anyway? It should be called the Ford Can'tMakeMyMindUp.

But wait, to be honest, there's something about the Flex that grabs me. It looks a lot like this '67 Country Squire. I've always loved station wagons and have owned a few. Maybe it's the idea that you can lie down in them :)

Anyway, everyone has to be very concerned about the economy right now. Surely the geniuses working at Ford, GM and Chrysler must know that it won't matter what kind of vehicles they produce when nobody has money to buy them and the banks aren't lending.

By all means bring on the hybrids. But the idea of greening up motor transport is only part of the solution. We are going to need a lot more than that. We need to do something about six lane freeways clogged with vehicles, each with just one driver, no passengers.

Maybe the Flex and the Routan are pointing unconsciously in a new direction: Let's get everyone in America driving around together in vans. And bring back hitchhiking while we're at it.

Yes we can!

.

Social Media for Publishers

2008-12-16T13:12:00.011-05:00

Notes from a webinar with Chris Brogan, hosted by O'Reilly
December 16th, 2008

Examples of social media:

Blogging is good, can be instantaneous.

Facebook is also instant, good networking through groups
but it's important to write about more than just your own books.
(Hey, I'm doing this already http://www.readingart.ca/blog/)
It is said that on Facebook, businesses should do fan pages rather than profiles, which are for "real" people.

Twitter - most people don't like one way communications, but if you look people up, you can use like a research tool (find out who is talking about you), and people who are following you will watch what you are following... and can engage with people directly... a certain kind of bravado is entertaining, in the online world everyone is a publisher.

Somebody, whose name I didn't catch, called Twitter the "social phone"
(ha ha, in 2000 I dubbed it the "mirror phone," mirror borrowed from the research that showed that chimpanzees can identify themselves in mirrors, and because a lot of social media like blogging especially are about putting yourself up there whether or not anyone else is looking, there's a strong vanity aspect to all of it... and phone because all the online media are fundamentally call and respond, every click is a call for data, and then you want to relay that data on to others - the idea of interaction with data is perhaps overrated.)

O'Reilly said this is all about "first move" media, innovators lead.

The Secret power of Twitter:

search.twitter.com - e.g. "book and gift"
you can find people who are interested in the same things you are, or your authors are, or what your books are about, and start conversations with them... but it is very important not to overtly market to them, you have to have a "gentle" relationship with them

YouTube - book trailers
YouTube got 13 billion views last month - almost imaginable what that means.
But look at what author Scott Sigler did; he was not getting far in his writing career, but then he
made a podcast out of his book, serialized it, and that got a lot of downloads, so many that he was able to take that to publishers, show them how much interest there was in his work, and before long he had a publishing deal.
Now he is published in print but also giving away his work in PDF serialized form.
(About the image showed in the webinar slideshow of a Sigler YouTube trailer: I like the Häagen-Dazs product placement, did Sigler get paid for that?!)

LinkedIn
This is a business, professional network. Gives you a way to tap into networks like your college alumni; college graduates and professionals are big readers.

Strategy is The Diet

1. have a "home base", like a blog
- this can be "nightstand" (variety) or "niche" (specialized content, eg. business books); it can be one vertical, or it can be author specific, (there a lot of opportunity in the latter).

2. create "outposts" like Facebook, Twitter, podcasts
- be where the people are
- for marketing obviously, but also can find authors this way
- podcast book reviews

3. consider video trailers
- but be cautious about investing here: trailers are really for passionate readers
- and they are not very useful unless they are done well
- but if the tone is conversational, trailers can be done cheaply and can be effective (especially good for author personalities)

4. extend your content through giveaways
- the extra piece of stuff you can get, e.g. bought a book just so I could get a code and login and see this thing online (game?)
- "free prize inside"
- Seth Godin with his book Tribes created a social network site; it was exciting to be part of that, especially early on
- always do something outside the conventional print channels

5. put everything on paper
- consider how galleys are generally used: only go out to people who are working on the book, but the question is whether it could it be otherwise, using the text in development, drafts, partial scripts, create buzz, get people interested and involved
(We had a good experience using a wiki, we were able to develop the multi-author manuscript this way but also put some information about the book as it was developing on public pages within the wiki - but the maintenance of this was time-consuming, inho there's huge potential in wikis for publishers who have the means to invest in them.)

Kindle - (Hey, me too, I need to get one for the holidays :)

Listening is the new marketing

technorati, radiant6, Google alerts

Audio books

Chris Brogan want to get all publishing formats at once.

Somebody is going to bundle paper, audio, e-book, pdf all together for consumers.

The question is whether people would buy everything together and for how much more money; probably not twice as much, maybe 1/3.
(So there is an issue here of cost effectiveness - it's a lot of work to put out all those formats, possibly double the work - so there's a need for cost saving somewhere in the process - e.g. integration at the production level, where manuscript is xml-formatted and can flow out then into InDesign, Acrobat, web pages, etc.

Somebody is going to offer this first. You can be a "first mover" or you can end up being a "me too."

Google Reader
- excellent tool for listening
- can share your feeds with others

Outposts
- set up presence on different sites, but you have to actually be there, keep them updated

Publishers are now in the information exchange business.
- why wouldn't you buy a certain blog and find ways to monetize it?

Community
- activating people who are really active
- Google wiki within each book
- Seth Godin Tribe website
- companies that buy 50 copies of a book like Hedgehog (?)
- Would people pay per year to be part of a certain, exclusive conversation?
e.g. 24.95 for access to a social network with the author in it, book given away for free?

Print on Demand
blurb.com
lulu.com

$ COST - Really Expensive

How do you activate authors?
- especially so it isn't like you are heaping more work on them
- if you can show author that they can make the needle move, have a real impact on the numbers, then they get interested
- some authors don't like crowds, but will be socially comfortable online

Revenue
- comes out of marketing budget
- speaking of marketing, pics of covers are important, people collect them on their phones

You have to be prepared for the lonely mall effect... just because you build it doesn't mean they will necessarily come. But if you don't build it, no chance at all. Any kind of a following is good, e.g. 20,000 is a pretty decent number.

Can you get the author involved but not leading, letting the people drive the thing?

People - How do you staff this? Get someone to start one or two hours a day, with Twitter search feeding into a Google reader.

Competition - Someone's asked whether we can we do this together instead of competitively?
The answer seems to have been no, because no answer was given. Instead, Brogan mentioned that there are a lot of ways other people can come in and take your industry, then you have to work doubly hard to get it back. So the emphasis again was on first movers.

Tools - e.g. Hubspot... excellent platform for blogging with a mountain of analytics.
(And Brogan said if you buy 10m worth, he gets a pony or something :)

Small is the new big

We don't all want to eat at, shop at, go to... etc.
There's interest in the "craft" approach, e.g. microbrewers, some of whom are actually quite large.

How do you convert page views into money?
Equip people with information they need, and they will pay something for it.
But if people smell marketing, they won't go there.

--

My evaluation:

This was a great seminar, brief, to the point, well-presented.

I knew most of what was presented but I didn't know about Twitter search, so now Twitter makes sense to me.

I also liked the slogans used throughout. Expressions like "small is the new big" are entertaining and convey a lot of information.

Where the streets are paved with grass

2008-12-10T00:38:00.006-05:00

Can you believe that there are still car ads on TV? I mean the car industry is so screwed and yet they're still dishing up double cab trucks crushing the environment while sucking down a barrel of oil a minute. All the industy's managed to do so far is cancel Tiger Woods endorsement contract and stop using the executive jet (at least to go that one time to D.C.). Woohoo.

Anyway, the irony of car ads (and not just car ads) at a time when the economy is tanking reminded me of this ad I wanted to post about some time ago. The ad lasted about three seconds on Canadian television. I think I saw it only once but happily found it just now. I love it.

This ad for the Honda Civic is so f_d up. You can see the thinking behind it. Green is good right? Grass is green right? So what if the streets were, like, all grass?!?

The ad likely got yanked because somebody watched it and finally thought about what happens to grass after thousands of cars drive over it? That same somebody probably also noticed that all that grass with no cars actually looked pretty good, too good in fact. Maybe the ad was giving the wrong message: that streets without cars and with soft plush grass might be a really good thing.

Anyway, now we know what to do when cars finally become a thing of the past. Replace the pavement with grass! The dogs will love it. You can bike on it. Kids can play on it, and what's more, it's quiet. Brilliant!

Honda Civic "Grass" was produced by the Grip Agency.

Canadian election results

2008-12-07T23:03:00.011-05:00

Above reflects the proposed Canadian government made up of coalition partners Liberal and New Democrat parties, with the Bloc Quebecois party, which has agreed to support the coalition in Parliament.

Whereas the above reflects the current composition of the Canadian Parliament resulting from the 44th general election held in October, 2008.

Legend

	Proposed Coalition (including Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) - 153
	Conservative - 143
	Liberal - 77
	Bloc Québécois - 49
	New Democratic - 37
	Independents - 2
	Vacant - 0

The above diagrams are .svg files, adapted from the original found on Wikipedia.

Other seating arrangement diagrams:
the Government of Canada's, in .pdf format

an adaptation of that on Wikipedia

Generally, the results as reported on CBC

Architecture as 3d visualization of information - Frank Gehry's Art Gallery of Ontario

2008-11-15T11:28:00.007-05:00

Is architecture a kind of information visualization? Perhaps if you consider the functions that buildings support and the people they house to be very rich data. Consider this example below showing a topographic rendering of text topic search results in which the size and adjacency of "mountains" tells you about the similarity of results.

And if viewed this way, then does it become reasonable, or even necessary, to evaluate (criticize) architecture in information visualization terms like legibility and accuracy?

Frank Gehry's buildings, like his "Fred and Ginger" building in Prague would hold up pretty well under such scrutiny. As whimsical as it looks, the building actually takes a lot of cues (reads data from) its environment, squeezing in so as not to obstruct the sightlines of its neighbours and fluidly reflecting the river it overlooks.

At the recent OCAD VizDay, Pierre Boulanger repeated a well-known addage: without knowing the uncertainty of a piece of data, it is not a measurement, merely an opinion. Architecture is historically considered to be an art rather than a science; in that view, buildings more like opinion than data. But with Gehry's deep engagement with software, more and more his conceptual and modeling processes are data driven.

What can we see visualized in Gehry's newest project, the renovated and expanded Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto? There is something about that sweeping wing of glass along Dundas Street that seems to want to be measuring wind currents, northern light and perhaps sound bouncing around from the bustling Chinese market a block west. And the big blue titanium box on Grange Park at the rear; it's a sky-ish sort of blue, a blue like the sky reflected in Georgian Bay, meant to disappear under the right conditions. How long before the color of building facades can be modulated by computers so that they change with the weather?

Hippie bus - VW Routan ad bludgeons aging boomers

2008-11-10T10:18:00.004-05:00

In this TV ad airing now in Canada for the Routan mini-van, VW pictures aging hippies living chalk-a-block in a suburban house, slumped depressively over photos from their heydays, until a new Routan wheels by in slow motion, causing them to rise from their chairs, stunned. "We dared to reinvent our classic van." is the final slogan.

There's no percentage in mocking one generation to sell to another, especially if the generation you are mocking is older. Unless of course you are confident that economic clout has shifted so decisively to a younger generation that you think you can get away with it.

This is an example of a very interesting ad concept bumbling hopelessly over complexity. The relationship between generations and the adoption of the VW minibus by the counterculture are complicated matters. It would take insight and great art to handle them well; neither are evident here. For example:

A. It is interesting to think about where the hippie generation is at right now. How old are they? How do they live? What are they doing? What interests them?

Instead of answers or insight, we get clichees meant to be funny: hippies as decrepit (uniformly grey haired, wrinkled and slow moving), poor (living communally at age 65) and drowning in nostalgia (looking wistfully through photo albums that make their current decrepitude only more accute). The soundtrack, Live for Today by The Grass Roots, is like salt in the wound: counterculture spurning of convention, in particular money, leads to social and financial ruin.

B. It is interesting to think about the remarkable legacy of the VW microbus (a.k.a. the Transporter) and to try to capture some of that cultural value.

But instead of valourizing the legacy, it is mocked. The vintage bus seen briefly in the driveway is... what? still running? out of commission? a relic, as aged and useless as the various greyhairs rambling through the ad?

The VW Routan ad is an interesting development on, and departure from, an advertising trend identified in 2007 by Stuart Elliot in the NY Times. Elliot pinpointed the potential trouble even then. Just as agencies were seeing the 60s as something consumers could identify with, possibly tapping into anti-Iraq-war sentiment, Elliot noted the danger of superficiality, ads that only appeal to the financially successful of the older generation.

C. It is interesting to think that subsequent generations didn't make the same mistakes but today enjoy the kind of financial security and family life that makes the minivan the most successful of any auto manufacturers lines.

The rather grim reality here is that Chrysler minivan has consistently captured marketshare because it is incredibly cheap. Massive sales kept prices low, the joy of the market system. But as the automobile industry collapses, the minivan is unlikey to escape the fate of all other vehicle lines.

This is a train wreck of an ad that even if times were good, stumbles into the minefield of generational and economic classes, exploiting the disadvantage of one for an assumed-to-be-affluent other, that, as it turns out, has no or minimally more security.

The salvage:
Something can be salvaged from every ad, something revealing about our culture or how we think about culture.

In the VW Routan ad, it's interesting to see a group of aging people living together communally. What a good idea! Something definitely to be added to our toolbox of coping strategies for the new millennium.

The prognosis:
Will 60s nostlagia ads be shelved under the current economic meltdown? Certainly it is challenging territory, emotionally rich but also highly sensitive. Finding just the right balance between the idealism of the 60s and the cruel realities of the present could be very rewarding. The Obama agenda (www.change.gov) places high value on the ethics and creativity so evident in the 60s. Advertising with a 60s bent has the potential to reinforce the message of bringing people together, doing things in new ways.

US Election - Visualizing the Vote

2008-11-07T11:09:00.004-05:00

How exactly I've come to renew my interest in Information Visualization will have to wait to another blog post. It started accidentally with a workshop called VizDay at the Ontario College of Art and Design this past week.

If you've wondered as I have how the Democrats came to be identified with the color blue, contra the red that you might intuitively expect, this post sheds some light on that, http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=5679

The Liberal Values blog also some interesting maps visualizing the US election vote:

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=5750

Adidas - Impossible is $200

2007-03-15T21:43:00.000-04:00

Those of you who know me, know the slogan:
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VACATION AND VOCATION IS O

which I created at the Banff Centre in May, 2006.

Well, check out Addidas new "Impossible is O" campaign. Evidently O is the new black!

I like this ad not only because it uses a syntax I feel I personally invented :) but because it uses athletes as "artists". This one's with Gilbert Arena and there's one with David Beckham painting a painting too. I also like the documentary treatment of their "stories" that fleshes the campaign out. It is almost shocking too that these guys seem to be able to create pretty good art, tho' really that could be just faked by the agency.

What I like more though is Stephon Marbury's endorsement of a $15 court shoe called the Starbury... Marbury is campaigning for shoes that parents, and teenagers can actually afford, an absolutely awesome concept. What I like less about the Adidas campaign is that I'm still paying and paying and paying for all this creativity in the price of brand-name runners. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, actually itemizes the percentage of consumer price that pays for marketing. I'll have to look that up, but we know it's high, very high.

So kudos to Adidas for syntactic imagination, but really the campaign should read Impossible is $2OO.

Sopranos Vista

2007-03-12T19:42:00.000-04:00

Gosh, but I AM straying far afield. Focus, Rob, focus. Aw fuck it!

My local ISP, Rogers, just notified me by email that they are having "problems" with the Vista upgrade and that they are "working with" Microsoft... that sounds an awful lot like an episode of the Sopranos in which a local landscaper loses a Sopranos-related client to a crime-related competitor and asks the Sopranos.org (local boss) for "help"; resulting in him getting back his contract... at a cost of 50% of his revenues... ouch!

now, I don't know from Microsoft, but how much is Rogers going to have to pay Microsoft I wonder?

Bill, if you're listening, please, there's time, you CAN change the world, just not in the way you think.

(visual) quieting - life after cars

2007-03-08T23:14:00.000-05:00

What will we do when the streets are empty?

Please contribute your ideas by way of comments or by sending me an email to adminATkloojDOTnet. Thanks!

[ img src ]

We'll ride bicyles!

[ img src ]

We'll find other uses for cars and parking lots:

[ src: Just Add Water event by Samantha Crowhurst and Leah Sandals ]

[ src img: more about Adrian Blackwell ]

Microsoft - the invisible possibilities ads

2007-03-08T00:22:00.000-05:00

This is a good example of how the attempt to render a positive by portraying a negative can backfire. Here, a black waitress is shown without (outline only) the graduation cap and degree that is presumed to be necessary for her to get a better job. The ad assumes a lot of things, like that higher education is an automatic ticket to a better job and a better life, that college grads don't end up working in diners, and that people who work in diners all want to work somewhere else. The ad copy "We see..." attempts to correct the image, to explain the invisible cap and degree as "potentials," achievable with Microsoft's help, which is all well and good, but really what the ad is showing us is a happy waitress in a nice diner who doesn't need a higher education.

I also question who these ads are talking to. If they're in Harper's or The Atlantic, then they are preaching to the converted, talking to people who already have post-secondary education, validating that education as an objective for and attainable by working people.

These ads are a little old now, but might they not be considered an indication of Microsoft's increasing disconnection from reality, now crystalized in the brilliant Apple vs. PC comparative advertising campaign? But more about those later.

visual quieting - at what point does marketing start to work against itself

2007-03-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

The increasing price of consumer goods is largely due to marketing and delivery costs. Companies have learned that marketing pays off, especially once they reach the global scale. This cost effectiveness of marketing is what feeds the increasingly overwhelming clutter of billboards, print and other materials we face every day.

At what point is enough enough? Does brand awareness ever get sufficient that marketing budgets can be safely trimmed back, optimized so that companies start to become more responsible about the "cultural noise" they are creating.

Nike running shoes, for example, could cost substantially less if you bought them direct online from Nike. And I don't need to see another Nike ad for at least several years.

So, for example, take Nike's own numbers:
--
Consumer pays: $90
Retailer pays: $45 to NIKE, and then doubles the price for retail.
NIKE pays: $22.50 and then doubles the price to retailers for shipping, insurance, duties, R&D, marketing, sales, administration and profits.
The $22.50 price paid the factory includes: Materials: $14.60; Labor: $3.37; Overhead: $3.41; Factory Profit: $1.12; Total Costs: $22.50
[ source ]
--

and get rid of the retailer and the marketing:

Consumer pays: 33.00 direct to Nike
This eliminates the retailer (disintermediation) and much marketing so the price comes down to somewhere between 22.50 and 45.00... split the difference. This also opens room up so people assembling the shoes could be paid better, Labor is a pitiably small portion of the cost of production according to the document above. How much sense does that make?

2007-03-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

zefrank is one damned media savvy dude; check out this video on brand emotional aftertaste.

Not as cleverly crtical but awesome in his depth of knowledge and almost-over-the-top radio voice, Terry O'Reilly does a show called the Age of Persuasion on CBC radio (Saturday, 4 p.m.), and has just started a new blog: http://www.oreillyradio.com/

It's tax time, feeling tied up in knots?

2007-03-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

One the finest ways that advertising reveals truths about our culture is when it shows a problem in order to claim the solution to that problem for its product or service. The Canada Revenue Agency, a.k.a. Revenue Canada, for example, wants you to believe that they will make tax time so easy you won't have to have the flexibility of a gymnast to get through it, or that their online tools will make it so easy it will be as if you had the abilities of a gymnast. What the ad really tells us is "you can't do this". Go on, I dare you to try that pose.

And while we're talking about the tax dept. why'd they change the name? We used to have Heritage Canada, Industry Canada and others, names that had a professional feel and that put the title of what they were about ahead of Canada... Canada Revenue Agency is so utilitarian, opaque, bureaucratic, a gulag of naming.

Hands in my pockets - Capital One

2007-02-22T19:00:00.000-05:00

This is a series of TV spots showing banker-types following normal folks around in all sort of daily activities with their hands in their pockets. Like they are stealing, continuously, every minute of every day, in every situation. Like pick pockets, but without the craftiness.

I think these ads are only in Canada because I can't find the video anywhere on the Web. But Capital One's "Hands in my pockets" series has not only delivered a memorable jingle, known and loved (and hated by those who can't get it out of their heads) by all, but they've made a stunning indictment of Canada's Big 5 banks, who charge higher interest rates than anybody.

The gamble is that "truth in advertising" doubles back and bites them, along with their targets, in the ass. Basically, everyone hates credit gouging and the greed, disrespect, narcissism, cynacism and corruption it represents. Note to Capital One, you want our respect (and business)? Live up to your promise of a real alternative.

Whatever, we this ad.

The great irony of it is that the song, by Jim Guthrie (link below) is plural, handS in my pocketS, not hand in my pocket as the images show in the ad, and is a very sweet song about walking around with your hands in your pockets. It's dreamy and the way the ad couples it up with a hateful thing banks do is... well... brilliant, the best advertising can do combining sweet and sour, threatening and securing at the same time.

"So I forced my hands in my pockets
And felt with my thumbs,
And gallantly handed her
My very last piece of gum."
- Bob Dylan 4th Time Around

who's got it totally wrong

sorry, you can't criticize advertising properly if you're trying to get a job in advertising

view and rate TV ads - this is great site, performing a great service... Thank you!

wierd cutting edge video shit

e.g. this is why we all LOVE to drive cars and won't stop, no matter pretty much whatever...

re: prison, see my last post on the Globe and Mail ad campaign

at least somebody is paying attention to Capital One ads in video

Yet more hands in my pockets stuff:

the song, by Jim Guthrie

about the ad

about the issues

funny-cute rip off...

Pity the poor CBC, the Canadian broadcasting service, aka "the mothership" for having some good, if beside the point info about songwriters and the commercial biz

Criticizing advertising - Prison (Globe and Mail Ultimate Home Makeover)

2007-02-17T11:08:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting to create a place for critizing advertising, so for the next few months this is going to be that place. I'm not interested in the moral-high-ground type of criticism, as important as that may be, but in criticism that sees the critical meanings underneath the obvious messages, in TV ads in particular.

To get things started: Some of you will be familiar with my text, Prison, presented at the Banff Centre last May. Well check this out; seems I'm not the only one who thinks the middle class is a form of prison, or that prison-culture is the reality of the future. And we thought debtors prison was a thing of the past.

Globe and Mail newspaper, Ulimate Home Makeover, February, 2007
the above TV spot is online here.
There are three TV spots all together in this series, accessible from here.

other resources:

Dr. Christopher Johnson's insightful criticism of corporate names:
TheNameInspector.co blog
about it

The kind of criticism my posts won't be like:

Suicide prevention group protests Superbowl ad.
The ad they are protesting and where you can also view and rate other Superbowl ads — about the ad: a poignant reflection on the current grim conditions of work (we are robots) and how self-esteem is wrapped up in employment (lose your job and you're going to want to commit suicide) and what motivates people (your daydream of failure, ending in suicide will drive you to become a perfectionist). As if that were not enough, the anthropomorphising of the robot, which is given an imagination (tries to find other work) and emotions (experiences despair), reflects something very creepy about technology.

defenders of advertising, essay

advertising and social values, esssay

massive change

2007-02-13T00:41:00.000-05:00

You've heard about it. The premise is that the world is changing massively. And that such massive change is necessary if we are to survive as species on this planet.

That's a lot to absorb. Personally you have to admit a lot of things are changing, and the pace and scale of change is pretty, well, massive, but...

two things:

1. massive change kind of assumes we need to change a lot in order to stay the same, e.g., the current climate-sort-of-situation; we want to keep that, or at least avoid hurricanes in New Orleans and windstorms in Vancouver, and

2. we are in control... this is the whole premise of the captital M massive and capital C change... that "design" will be the way we orchestrate and manage change, and design, being a function of control-types, like CEOs, and NASA, doesn't really have too much to do with you and me.

however, I predict it will be not long before them, named above, and us start talking not about how to control change, but about how to adapt to change... e.g.

- no warming Gulf Stream, i.e., a much colder Europe and UK...
- melted polar ice caps and higher ocean levels worldwide... stilts anyone?
- depleted oceans as a food source... pass the rice...
- no Oxygen producing rain forests (lungs of the planet)... cough, cough
etc. etc.

the fact is the disconnect between West and East and developed and developing worlds is too profound to be overcome within my lifetime... but, being an eternal optimist, let's consider some things that we (you and me) might, together, massively change, the first of which I proposed some time ago here:
dog treats and grooming pay for Katrina's costs

So, let's look at the stats and find the nickels and dimes among our millions and billions that can, actually, produce change.

For ref: www.massivechange.com/

United Church ad campaign / Wonder Cafe review

2006-11-21T00:36:00.000-05:00

You don't need to believe in God to enjoy the United Church of Canada's new ad campaign. Where can I get me one of those for my dash!

That said, I have some serious misgivings about the ad campaign and the related website Wondercafe.ca. One imagines that the UCC wouldn't invest $10M if they didn't strongly believe that it was going to put more bums in pews. I find it hard to believe that the UCC even has that kind of do re mi but that's a topic for another time... Anyway, it's a big investment and for what?

Does it show the UCC to be hip? Hipper than most, mostly... but practically not everywhere; congregations vary widely.

Does hip translate into interest in attending church? Maybe. It can't hurt, though I imagine there are those who would argue that hipness is actually counter-religious, like liberalism, a kind of softening of moral values. Maybe a lot of people are looking for that kind of experience, a sort of cool hanging around religion to see if any of it rubs off. Works for me.

Does it matter? Yes, if your concern is to keep the doors of the Church open. Yes, if you believe that people are better off with religion than not (and there's LOTS of evidence to support that theory) and that getting their attention is worth any amount of effort. But not if you think that getting people's attention this way, through big media (corporate, centralized, manipulative and mercenary, without any real moral foundation) is pretty much anti-Christian at its very root.

Conclusion about the ad campaign: Like most advertising, creating brand recognition produces benefits but maybe not in the ways or at the time you expected.

Wonder Cafe is another story. It's a really nicely designed site, though the type is maddeningly small and brown as a motif is a little on the scatological side. But the site has plenty of features; a weekly poll, a topical essay by someone prominent each week, a discussion area for that topic; a "discussion lounge" where you can comment on some pre-set themes like Parenting, Politics or Health, and an area where you can create your own topics. Called blogs, the latter are not really blogs. Your first post stays at the top and people comment, or you add your own subsequent thoughts, below... not a "log" at all really, which makes you wonder how knowledgable the folks who decided to call it that are. Also, once you start your "blog" you are stuck with that first post at the top, can't edit it. Have another idea and you have to start over again with a new "blog". And the first blog, well, it drifts down to the bottom, as each new blog created goes at the top of all the blogs created. So far there are 83. I started mine the day after the ads came out. It was no. 5, but given the reverse chronilogical ordering, it's now no. 78. Buried basically. Nobody's going to discover it at this point. All I can do, if I actually want people to read what I might write there, is to delete it (which I can do, yea!) and start over (boo!)

The E-Z Squirrel animation is kinda funny and got some media attention. And the ad campaign materials are there too, which would be useful from a general info-on-the-Web perspective if the whole thing wasn't in Flash. The ads and all these other cool features don't have unique URLs so you can't bookmark them, return to them directly, send specific pages to your friends. Unless you like trying to unravel such things by looking at source code, in which case you can locate some discrete bits of content, like the bobble-head Jesus .jpg.

There's also this wierd sort of internal email thing. If you register you get a "mailbox" and can send mail to other registered users. It's another level of possible interaction I suppose but I don't really get what it's for when the whole idea of the blog thing is to talk "publicly."

So notwithstanding the lame "blog" effort and the vague "email" thing, it's a pretty full featured experience. You could spend quite a bit of time there surfing around, leaving comments, for sure.

But will you? I don't think so. After the novelty wears off, I don't think people who really want, on a regular basis, to turn over various issues in a religious context are going to go there. There are lots of other venues for that type of discussion and they aren't organized by churches.

This is going to be an expensive site to maintain and my feeling is it will run its course in maybe 6 to 8 months and it'll take the UCC a year or more after that to realize it isn't being productive and pull the plug.

While it may sound old school, this ain't going to be the Slashdot of progressive religion.

steal from the rich, sell to the poor

2006-11-20T23:32:00.000-05:00

dunno if this relates, but you gotta love the Sunday NYT, a copyright story right up there on p. 1... a painter of sports pics getting sued by a university for using "their colours"... 'course he is putting his images on coffee mugs, for which he probably should be sued, for bad taste... too bad the NYT doesn't leave their stories up for more than a second anymore.

Think Globally, Shop Locally

2006-09-04T23:39:00.000-04:00

I came up with this slogan, "think globally, shop locally" a long long time ago. Finally, it's come up... a little shy of irony, but nonetheless:

Our local rag, the Globe and Mail, had a book review Sat. that for the first time that I know of, mentioned the concept... actually, the author, Alanna Mitchell, says "think globally by buying locally" which is where the irony gets lost, but I'll take it anway.

art theory, learning by watching, learning from seeing

2006-08-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

How we learn from art, if indeed we do, is NOT learning by watching, which applies in sports and other kinds of physical activity. In art, it is more a matter of learning from seeing.

So what do we learn by looking at art? It would be fun to argue that people would not have an appetite for all the bad modernist condominium buildings sprouting up all over the world unless they had first embraced Ikea, which itself would not have been possible without years of systematic promotion of abstract art by our cultural institutions.

It would also be fun to argue that only after years of postmodern head softening could religious fundamentalism and right-wing politics resurface without irony.

Learning by seeing

2006-08-20T21:04:00.000-04:00

It is the folly of art criticism to search for the positive benefits of art. We read it time and time again; art edifies, instructs, points to (often uncomfortable) "truth"... and so the stage is set, comfortable vs. uncomfortable... none of this is meaningful. Art is. Artist after artist will tell you so, or fail "to explain."

That said (as if we could proceed without judgment) what art may do, is demonstrate. My friend Ben has invented a term, objectivate, to describe what artists do. Not "objectify:" we know what that means, but to show something, a meaning, a feeling, an idea, through production, of a thing, action, event...

It is difficult to say this without making it sound like an explanation, a justification, that art may serve a purpose. It doesn't, or rather this question, purpose or non-purpose, misses the point. Yet, still, we know practically nothing about how we learn and how we "know." Visuality, or visualness, are aspects of experience that are, to say the least, poorly understood. So maybe there is something there, in art, about learning.

"...Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the world's train on the move; Deleuze, that "grass grows from the middle" and not from the bottom or the top. The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links
with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression'."
- Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud (1998)

actually, forming imaginary and utopian realities never was art's role, where do people come up with this shit???

still, something, about learning by watching, by seeing...

Bubble dance

2006-08-06T22:49:00.000-04:00

My friend Sarah sends this link, DRIFT.
director: Koert van Mensvoort
dance: Nancy Mauro-Flude
music: Artefact

Bubble - metaphor

2006-07-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

The bubble is used in two metaphorical ways, one positive, one negative. A bubble can be protective, like the shell that insulated Bubble Boy from his toxic surroundings. The bubble is sometimes associated with spirituality, personal energy. And the quality of complete, seemless, cohesive and elastic surface is attractive when associated with things like learning and memory.

The negative association is also common, however. Bubbles are vapourous, illusory, short-lived and burst, leaving nothing behind. Thus, we speak of economic bubbles, real estate bubbles, the dot com bubble. In some cases, the positive, protective association combines with the negative one, as in the Bush Bubble, which both protects the President while making him vulnerable because he is too insulated from opinions that matter but simply cannot reach through the bubble around him.

Other people's thinking about bubbles:

Steven Soderbergh's Bubble (2005) - "an absolutely riveting little tragedy in High Def in an Ohio doll factory, starring non-professional actors."

Sir John Everett Millais painted this painting, called "Bubbles" in 1886.

The Cyberpunk Project manifesto of 2003 ponders the bubble as a metaphor.

In corporate-speak: "Through the use of a metaphor, the research suggests that a confidentiality agreement has many similarities with the properties and characteristics of a bubble. This bubble trope is used to enhance conceptual understanding of confidentiality constraints in an organizational-change context."

And of course, there's the movie, Bubble Boy, 2001.

The bubble - type, trope, trip

2006-07-22T23:43:00.000-04:00

Tomas Saraceno's interactive thingamajigs.

above: Superstudio's City of the Hemispheres

Archigram's moving units, Seaside Bubbles (still looking for this one online)

Yona Friedman's spatial cities