Month: July 2018

  • Kevin King + more things

    Digital Chief Kevin King Quits Edelman After 14 Years – More recently, sources familiar with the situation also point to ongoing questions regarding the agency’s investment priorities. Famously, Edelman has hired more than 600 creatives and planners over the last three years, in a bid to better compete with agencies across the paid and earned media spectrum – I don’t know Kevin King, but I do know that he was a long term fixture at Edelman and helped build their digital capability. Kevin King will likely turn up at one of the new agency groups in the near future – Edelman non-compete clause allowing. More Edelman related content here.

    CSL on Fifa 19: not quite fantasy football but you can see why the China league is joining the EA party | South China Morning Post – unsurprising given the Chinese government’s aspirations for soccer and the domestic league. EA can’t ignore the size of gaming in China either

    Natural Cycles: ASA investigates marketing for contraception app | The Guardian – The Family Planning Association is also concerned about the app. A spokeswoman said: “The use of the word ‘certified’ suggests that there is independent evidence supporting these claims, whereas in fact the only evidence is from the company itself. It has amassed a vast database, which is very interesting, but that is not the same as verified independent evidence. – and there is the challenge of a blind faith in big data. If they get this wrong the individual consequences are huge

    The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine – IEEE Spectrum – the interesting bit about about this is that in sea turbines aren’t considered instead of wind. Wind’s economics problem is their consistency, turbines are actually only doing work less than half them time – that’s the problem that’s driving size. If you put the the turbines in the water to take advantage of currents instead energy transference, more consistent power and size becomes a civil engineering problem like a dam rather than space programme style construction. How are super conductors supposed to even work?

    Britain’s Fake News Inquiry Says Facebook And Google’s Algorithms Should Be Audited By UK Regulators – if this goes through its the thin end of the wedge. The UK is much more beholden to commercial interests than even the US. The record industry the the English Premier League have managed to bring down the full force of government censorship with the Digital Economy Act. And both Facebook and Alphabet only have themselves to blame. China’s concept of cyber sovereignty starts to look prescient; and we all look as if we might be living in a darker world

  • What if Stories are Brain Code?

    The boy on the wall

    From Hollywood to the marketing industry we’re told that stories resonate with us. They are the reason why films, books, video games and TV dramas entertain. According to storytelling theorists like Joseph Campbell; we find fulfilment understanding what is happening. Campbell et al think that our enjoyment of stories analogous to the enjoyment of solving puzzles. What if stories can be more than puzzles for our enjoyment?

    Our understanding of storytelling

    Our understanding of storytelling is of a more tenuous nature than Newtonian physics or organic chemistry. You could argue that Joseph Campbell was a ‘victim’ of his discipline. He worked in the fields of comparative mythology and religion. Campbell was looking for universal patterns in stories. He assumed that rest of us are as well. Though this ‘understanding’ would be occcuring at a ‘low level’ in computing terms. Only select (mostly educated) people would think of it at a higher conscious rational level.

    Like many academics in the early and mid-20th century his work drew inspiration from eastern religions. In Campbell’s case, like Nietzsche; he drew from Hindu thought. Campbell’s interest in Indian philosophy was due to a meeting. In 1924, Campbell encountered the messiah elect of the Theosophical Society. He was on a cruise liner from Europe to the US. Campbell was also profoundly affected by Nietzsche’s work.

    • Did Nietzsche open Campbell to Indian philosophy or was it the other way around?
    • Was it just the nature of a naturally enquiring mind?
    • Were there factors that made him more open to it?

    Campbell based his theories on myth and its connection to the human psyche in part on Sigmund Freud. Campbell’s myth concepts drew on Jung’s dream interpretation methods. Jung’s insights into archetypes drew from The Tibetan Book of The Dead. Campbell quotes Jung on The Tibetan Book of The Dead in The Mythical Image:

    “belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life… For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.”

    (Bardo Thodol is another name for The Tibetan Book of The Dead). A lot of this hinges on the value of dreams. Heres what Dream interpretation and false beliefs has to say. It was published in the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice in 1999:

    “Dream interpretation is a common practice in psychotherapy. In the research presented in this article, each participant saw a clinician who interpreted a recent dream report to be a sign that the participant had had a mildly traumatic experience before age 3 years, such as being lost for an extended time or feeling abandoned by his or her parents. This dream intervention caused a majority of participants to become more confident that they had had such an experience, even though they had previously denied it. These findings have implications for the use of dream material in clinical settings. In particular, the findings point to the possibility that dream interpretation may have unexpected side effects if it leads to beliefs about the past that may, in fact, be false.”

    This doesn’t necessarily invalidate Campbell’s theory in terms of storytelling. But it seems to cast doubt on the application of Jungian dream interpretation for clinical use. The best advice that I can give in this matter is caveat lectorem.

    From Academia to Hollywood: formulaic stories

     

    Joseph Campbell was a prolific author.  He published material that went into over 40 books. Part of this was due to the efforts of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, which collected his papers and published a number of work after his death. These included: coverage of his academic work, travel diaries and even his personal philosophy. It was picked up on by the American public, which has been endless quoted and misinterpreted due to the phrase ‘follow your bliss’.

    The key work of Campbell was his 1949 work The Hero With A Thousand Faces. it was his first solo work and got him recognition outside academic circles. The central them is that ‘myths’ from around the world all share a common structure. This is what Campbell called a ‘monomyth’. The monomyth or hero’s journey was mapped out visually on Wikipedia

    heroes journey

    Campbell went on to propose the purpose of these myths which he grouped into four functions. Wikipedia described it thus:

    The Metaphysical Function – Awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being The Cosmological Function – Explaining the shape of the universe The Sociological Function – Validate and support the existing social order The Pedagogical Function – Guide the individual through the stages of life

    Campbell’s work went on to influence luminaries of the 1960s counterculture movement including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison. It’s obvious influence in film kicked in around the same time. Stanley Kubrick introduced it Arthur C. Clarke. This happened during their collaboration to turn Clarke’s short story The Sentinel into 2001 A Space Odyssey screen play and book. George Lucas’ role in the popularisation of Campbell’s work was probably the biggest single effect. Hollywood at the time was in a state of dramatic change. This change mirrored the kind of change that the punk ethic and independent labels wrought on the music industry a decade later. Artistic and cultural change, further globalisation of artistic culture, new motion film camera technology and the rise of television created a set of factors that helped facilitate the rise of New Hollywood. The initial success of these director-driven films allowed power shifted from the producers to the studios for a time.

    • Directors drew on foreign influences: new wave cinema, Japanese cinema
    • The MPAA ratings system allowed more adult subjects to be discussed that would have otherwise been taboo
    • The Panavision Panaflex camera provided a more compact way to shoot on 35mm film. This facilitated greater use of location shooting, providing a more naturalistic style and also facilitated Lucas’ special effects in Star Wars

    Whilst Lucas was part of this movement; both THX 1138 and American Graffiti, fit within the New Hollywood genre. But like Stephen Spielberg, Lucas unwittingly created the next stage in movie development that helped producers take back their seat of power. Star Wars became a blockbuster. Though the ingredients were very different to the corporate creations of Marvel Studios or the Transformers franchise.

    Its homage to the chambara films of Akira Kurosawa, pre-war Flash Gordon episodes and vintage westerns smacked of New Hollywood. It’s blockbuster status meant that the industry paid attention to valuable lessons learned. George Lucas became the first film maker to publicly cite The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other Campbell works as influences. Lucas repaid the creative debt that he owed to The Hero With A Thousand Faces by allowing Bill Moyes to shoot a series of interviews with Joseph Campbell  at Skywalker Ranch.

    Campbell and storytelling theory then became baked into Hollywood’s DNA. Over time it came into marketing, firstly through the creative side of the advertising industry. Television advertising at the time borrowed creative direction and stories from movie expertise. Directors like Tony Kaye and Ridley Scott moved between advertising and film projects. Eventually storytelling moved through other parts of the marketing industry including public relations. Hollywood have taken a number of turns at further refining Campbell’s monomyth model.

    One has to note that their goals are different from Campbell’s research. Hollywood largely seeks to entertain (for profit) and getting the viewer to suspend disbelief for the duration fo the movie or TV series rather than  achieving one of Campbell four functions.

    Different cuts on the hero's journey

    Volger is commonly cited by modern script writers. He refines and expands the thinking around the monomyth. Volger puts more emphasis than Campbell on the hero’s change in emotional state and internal journey.  His emphasis on emotion is important when one is creating content to land brand messages and would be of interest to the advertising community. The biggest area of disagreement that many have with Volger’s approach is that his structure implies a steady change in emotional state and internal journey of the hero. A paradigm shift in state would possibly create greater dramatic tension for the viewer.

    From monomyth to winning algorithm.

    Technology has moved from the creative process of film making an into the commercial side of the process. The movie industry is supporting machine learning based startups like ScriptBook. Belgium-based ScriptBook analyses screen plays to produce forecasts before a film is put into production. ScriptBook provides a box office earnings forecast, likely MPAA rating and recommended market demographics. Of course, many classic films had screen plays that were altered or completely rewritten several times. The tortured overworked scriptwriters working miracles in really short times and ‘script doctors’ called into ‘fix’ a bad situation. Both are part of the Hollywood system and its own mythology. In many respects ScriptBook mirrors the marketing industry’s move towards the adoption of predictive analytics for consumer behavioural change.

    How stories work for the brain.

    Behavioural scientist Nick Chater has roughly two decades of published academic work behind him based on research in various aspects of cognitive science. He has a depth and credibility to his work that we currently don’t have  on people and storytelling.

    In his book The Mind is Flat, Chater posits that the mind doesn’t have conscious and unconscious aspects. Emotions aren’t hard wired, instead thoughts and feeling are created on the fly. This effectively invalidates Freudian psychology principles. Our inner voice is effectively our brain telling storytelling to itself.  Our identities are constructed and given shape on the fly by the stories that we tell to ourselves as we go along. The unconscious mind would appear to be a conceit about our depth.

    This brings to mind the final episode in season two of Westworld, where the systems who had been trying to replicate humans realised their challenges. They had assumed humans were complex in nature, where as the show claims that they can be replicated in 10,247 lines of code, with definite limits on their potential. Of course 10,247 lines of code, whilst less than Photoshop could have a world of fractal complexity.

    Essentially there is no ‘deeper’ language than storytelling. Stories aren’t only about rules and plot consistency, but about creative leaps.

    This means from a marketing perspective whilst if we get stories right, they can be more powerful than we had previously imagined. In computing terms we would be writing direct the processor or ‘hitting the metal’ as games programmers would call it. It also needs to take into account that getting great stories is really hard.

    It also casts more questions about whether we have learned the right lessons to date about storytelling from the likes of Joseph Campbell?

    More information

    Joseph Campbell – The Mythical Image
    The Tibetan Book of The Dead
    Mazzoni, G. A. L., Lombardo, P., Malvagia, S., & Loftus, E. F. (1999). Dream interpretation and false beliefs. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 30(1), 45-50.
    The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
    Hero’s Journey – Wikipedia
    2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
    The Writer’ Journey by Christopher Volger
    Artificial Intelligence Might Affect How Studios Greenlight Movies | Cinemablend
    Artificial Intelligence Could One Day Determine Which Films Get Made | Variety
    ScriptBook “Hard science, better box office” and Crunchbase profile
    This Man Says the Mind Has No Depths | Nautilus
    The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind by Nick Chater
    ‘Westworld’ Season Finale Recap: Code Unknown | Rolling Stone Online

  • COSCO Shipping + more things

    COSCO SHIPPING Lines | Customer advisory on network breakdown within America Regions – Customer statement on how their business IT systems were (allegedly hacked and) shut down. COSCO is one of China’s state shipping companies. COSCO is also one of the largest owners of containers in the world. COSCO also owns OCS, the Hong Kong shipping line. More security related content here.

    ITV Self Serve – this could be the equivalent of 1980s era slideshow style cinema ads for your local Indian restaurant. I could see the benefits for estate agent chains, car supermarkets and local hotels. All of which will be reliant on powerful expensive intermediaries (rightmove, autotrader and booking.com respectively)

    Facebook Added Several Creative Tools to Its Ads Manager App – Adweek – reminds me a fair bit of percolate’s editing features

    Hollywood Marketing Firm Ant Farm Is Shuttering | Hollywood Reporter  – Omnicom, an advertising and media holdings conglomerate, is seeking to shed any venture that doesn’t have a substantial return on investment, or a 25 percent margin. “Omnicom is having a tough go, and they didn’t think they [Ant Farm] was core to their strategy,” said one insider.

    Why Monocle shuns social media in favour of going swimming with its readers | The Drum – contrarian strategy in action

    Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) – Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities – interesting project, there is a tension between this and the US law enforcement community’s concern about ‘going dark’

    China economic analysis by Martin Wolff | FT – mix of rising debt, slower growth and lower than needed domestic consumption

    Facebook stock plummets after warning of slower revenue growth – Axios – most of the growth now must be in the developing world

    Apple Is in Danger of Abandoning Creative Pros – ExtremeTech“You will see us do more in the pro area,” CEO Tim Cook said back in early 2017 at a shareholder meeting, in a response to a question about the Mac Pro. “The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular.” I still don’t doubt the company’s commitment. But I’m certainly disturbed by its inability to execute lately.

    Molecular clock chip promises improved smartphone navigation | eeNews Europe – huge for navigation and time stamped applications

    The man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986) – POLITICO – interesting reflection on where machine learning has been before

    There is no precedent—a president sides with America’s enemies – interesting if optimistic take on the rise of China. I think that the west’s beliefs have been shown to be malleable over the past couple of decades

    Understanding multimodality: An analysis of early JUMP users – drives overall app use, cannibalises short distance drives

    Before scooter shares, The Sharper Image was selling Razors to tech workers — Quartz – circular innovation in action. I remember the first person I saw with a micro-scooter was a German freelancer that we had in the office. It made him look like a knob as he tried to ride it through Covent Garden during the dot com boom. When working on Genie (a still birth mobile internet product that was extended out of a trial proof of concept) we had lots of them all over the office. The bag that the scooter came in was a solid cotton canvas duffle that I still have. As far as I remember I only took the bag and there was a load of these scooters sitting folded up and unloved in a cupboard in the back of the office when I left a year or so later

    WPP courts Chinese tech giants‎ Alibaba and Tencent over $2.5bn deal – if they wait until Brexit drops, Alibaba and Tencent could push through a tricky purchase easily

    The Chinese Communist party entangles big tech | Financial Times – there’s some antitrust arguments the west can easily make

    Multinational brands predict higher spend on influencer marketing | PR Week – not sure why at the moment, where is the business case?

    Amazon advertising is working directly with brands now, cutting out ad agencies – Digiday – this is similar to what Baidu, Sina and Tencent do in China.

  • The Heat & more stuff

    The heat. At least in Hong Kong I lived with air conditioning, but there is no respite from the heat in London. In my area of London there hasn’t been much of a breeze either, the heat has been inescapable.  At least my music needed to be cool, and I reached back to nu-disco and space disco over the past few years. If there was one tune of the week it was this on

    Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station | Open Culture – literally out of this world. Kraftwerk pushing performance innovation after five decades.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I still lust after Ferris Bueller’s Carver M-500t power amplifier (on the top in the screen shot above), E-mu Systems Emulator II sampler and his l33t maker skills. Check out this blog that collated all the immense taste that went into his bedroom design: TimLybarger.com: Ferris Bueller’s Bedroom

    Scooter is one of those guilty secrets with catchy melodies and nonsensical lyrics that confound comprehension for English speakers. It was unusual to hear ‘How Much Is The Fish ‘ played on the piano and its a pleasant surprise. Scheps is better known as a classical pianist in Germany and has brand sponsorship deals with Audi and Chopard – so a world away from the image of Scooter.

    Here is the original for comparison purposes….

    As a student of Silicon Valley history, I was aware of General Magic. It is now getting a well deserved documentary about it. General Magic tried to build the predecessor of the Palm PDA and modern smartphones, before the the internet wi-fi and very nascent cellular networks. I’d heard of some people using them as a desk phone replacement

    Here’s the trailer

    Here is the documentary’s website

    Here is a guide to their DataRover 840F. Check out the skeuomorphic interface that is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob. Stylistically the fonts, design details and Easter eggs reminded me of the early Macs that I used. This isn’t surprising as it was started by Mac veterans.  Why is General Magic important now? Like the later PayPal mafia the General Magic alumni have been all over Silicon Valley developing some the most successful products and services. More on technology here.

  • Kickstarter

    If you’re reading this blog, you will have heard of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding and has become a verb. There are several crowd funding platforms out there including Indiegogo and China’s Demo Day but none seem to have caught the public imagination in the same way Kickstarter seems to have.

    Major companies like Sony have trialed offerings of products on crowdfunding platforms as a way of accessing market size and viability for new products. Bands from Public Enemy to unknown artists have financed their album recordings and production in a similar way

    Kickstarter failure rate

    I’ve personally subscribed to projects with very mixed results with Kickstarter projects that I have funded. My experience of my first couple of projects were very positive. My most recent experiences have been one of disappointment to the point that I no longer use it. They failed. There was production problems, the timelines over ran. And at least one of them looked as if they took the money and ran when the project seemed more difficult than they originally assessed it to be. 

    Therefore it was interesting to hear Kickstarter used in a different context, that reflects my experience with the platform.

    I like the Techmoan YouTube channel as a good deal of its content introduces retro technology, many of which is is equipment or media formats that I hadn’t come across previously.

    The channel host Mat used Kickstarter not as a brand, but as a verb to imply that a product was somehow inferior and lacking in quality. It has become synonymous with an amateurish effort. Just because technology and globalisation have democratised access to manufacturing; doesn’t necessarily mean better quality products. That can’t be good for the brand.

    This is on top of crowdfunding’s high degree of funding failures, product failures and increasing numbers of alleged fraud.