Ged Carroll

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  • Facebook Live + more things

    Facebook live

    A Facebook live streaming service (a la U-Stream and YouTube) was newly launched this week. You can stream on your page or in-group. There is a map to discover streams going on in realtime. I already  found one seminar by Nu-Skin a multi-level marketer of wellness and beauty products in Hong Kong as an example of where Facebook Live was being used from a commercial perspective.

    The Stanton Warriors embraced the new Facebook live streaming service to promote further fan interaction whilst they were in the studio. It will be interesting to see the best and worst that brands do with this medium. From a piracy point-of-view I would imagine that it is likely to be used for streaming live sports coverage – expect the Premier League to be very unhappy.

    RUN and RUN

    Not exactly the same sound but J-Pop act lyrical school’s debut track RUN and RUN has a really clever smartphone optimised video with amazing breaks of the fourth wall.

    UPDATE: Our James pointed me in the direction of an even better link for the RUN and RUN video on Vimeo that I hope works here

    RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 from RUNandRUN_lyrisch on Vimeo.

    If you can’t see anything point your browser here.

    Godzilla

    Japan’s king of all monsters, Godzilla returns from chilling out on Monster Island for his 31st outing in the Japanese cinema. This new trailer is interesting as the visuals evoke Fukushima Daiichi  nuclear disaster and the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. Check out the Cloverfield-esque shots in the 30 second trailer below. There is a longer trailer where Godzilla appears fully in shot leaving no mystery to how bad ass he is this time. This means that the film is likely to go beyond his usual mayhem and might touch on contemporary issues.

    Vintage CGI

    Last, but not least; a vintage show reel by 1980s CGI shop MAGI Synthavision in its full neon wireframe magnificence and southern country rock soundtrack. More similar visual stuff here.

    As good as special effects get, this time lapse footage of the sun still amazes

    It is interesting how retail is looking to replace sales assistants. Nestle is rolling out SoftBank robots in Japan to sell cans of coffee. The robots are manufactured by a French startup that Softbank bought into. They are doing interesting things with these robots in Softbank mobile phone shops as well.

    Interesting idea by jam band Phish that combines a Disney sound effects album from the early 1960s with their live performance. First I am amazed that Disney hasn’t sued them into oblivion as they are very careful about their intellectual property rights and the way brand assets can be used. Secondly, it is an unusual direction for Phish to take as well.

    Phish are best known in the UK for being the inspiration behind the name of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. They come out of the live tradition of rock with devoted fans that The Grateful Dead pioneered. Many of the younger Deadheads that I have known think that Phish are the closest to the real deal of seeing the Dead live before Jerry Garcia left us.

    Guardians of The Galaxy is rolling out on digital distribution, Blu-Ray and DVD in the US which seemed like a good time to highlight the many different ways of saying ‘I am Groot’ in different terran languages. I am not a big fan of the Marvel universe but I do like the tripped out kooky vibe of Guardians.

  • Emotion research paper by Facebook

    Over the weekend if you went on to quality (not Buzzfeed) news sites you would have probably seen something about a scientific paper that was published by researchers in the pay of Facebook on how emotion spreads through social networks.

    Emotion research explainer

    There was a lot of copy written already about the experiment, so I recommend that you read The Atlantic‘s piece on it instead. There has been a lot written about whether it is moral, legal or ethical. As far as it being legal, Facebook’s highly paid legal counsel could provide a better steer on it than I could; and I suspect they would tell you it was completely legal.

    As for the morals and ethics of it, I rather think that those are a mute point. Consumers emotion states have been tweaked for decades, the question of morality sailed with the rise of the mass market consumer product.
    Guilty Viewing Pleasures: They Live
    Whilst public relations as it is practiced now is more of a mechanistic craft; its father Edward Bernays viewed propaganda as a ‘modern instrument’ driven by scientific thinking including understanding of audience psychology to move people.

    Advertisers utilised motivational research from the early 20th century on to create cognitive dissonance  with a consumer and then provide the product as a solution. The Atlantic carried an article on the psychology of advertising back in 1904. You are a better Mum if you wash your kids clothes with Persil, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk will put a smile on your face. All of which mine directly into consumer’s emotion, spreading dissatisfaction.

    Political pollsters use voter psychographic profiling to induce a constituency result. We already live in the world of a malleable proletariat envisioned by by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

    The people who are outraged by this need to get over it, log-in to Facebook less and realise that they are already sheep with a gallery of multinational shepherds herding them through their consumer lifecycle. What you can do is become more informed and read your environment in a more critical way. More related content here.

    More information

    Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment | The Atlantic
    Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks by Adam D. I. Kramera, Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock
    The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford Handbooks) the Auerbach and Castronovo edited anthology gives you pretty much everything you need to know from Bernays onwards about psychology and audience manipulation
    The Psychology of Advertising by Walter D Scott | The Atlantic (1904) – no that’s not a typo
    Frontline: The Persuaders | PBS
    Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals | Jib Fowles

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