Author Archives: Richard Tseng
Chris Poole breaking teh 4Chan down 4U, haz not cheeseburger
Chris Poole, aka moot, aka meme generator, aka 4Chan creator, made a compelling argument for anonymity at Sunday’s keynote for SXSW. The crux of which was that in many ways anonymity contributes to a level playing field that brings about much creativity and collective action. At least that’s what I think he was saying. It’s perhaps not surprising that the the world’s most famous champion of anonymity seemed a little socially awkward and very nervous in the spotlight.
Until now, you probably know 4Chan best as the raunchiest message board ever. Thus far the media has framed the community as a bunch of random strangers who post random things and occasionally ruin people’s lives. It’s even earned the title of ‘the dark side of the internet’. And in many ways, 4chan feels regressive. The technology and UI of 4chan feels ancient. There’s no way to share to your social network other than to do it manually, there’s no account signup or search whatsoever. Definitely a step back in web evolution right?
Actually, it’s more a step sideways. With posts coming in all the time, Poole likened 4chan to a waterfall where only the most interesting things keep from being washed away through constant re-posting. And here’s where anonymity becomes crucial. Not knowing who made something means the kind of material that stays afloat does so on its own merits. Meanwhile those who’ve made boring posts know they can keep experimenting because they won’t be ignored based on reputation. This contributes to the frequency in which posts arise and the alarming ways they evolve. Which is why posts are often so interesting that they leap out of 4chan and into the mainstream.
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If you had to sell 100 million people a product in less than a minute, what would you say? Saying too little is what makes Super Bowl ads more obsolete every year. It isn’t that the commercials were better back then, and increased viewership has nothing to do with it. There are just too many better ways for advertisers to spend $3 million now.
They’re advertising ads now?
A clear sign that advertisers are losing faith in the Super Bowl is the pre-released ad. To generate buzz this year, Volkswagen, Careerbuilder, GM and others released their commercials weeks before the game. Then they tried to drum up further interest with ‘making of’ videos and other media appearances. When advertisers are trying this hard to sell you on their commercial, you wonder why they don’t just sell you their product, story or brand another time.
It’s a tough crowd.
Despite murmurings that social media would radically alter this year’s Super Bowl commercials, very little changed. Most ads tried to get a laugh from the lowest common denominator, employing animals or children or plenty of CGI work. It’s understandable, because it’s hard to get a big crowd to listen but it’s easy to accidentally turn one against you. So the best hope with so large an audience is to entertain without offending. As a result most ads aren’t memorable to anyone.
Super Bowl viewers don’t want to interact.
Although brands did try to get users involved, it was little use. Many tried to get viewers to find them on facebook, watch alternate endings or tweet about them, yet most refused. And those brands were the lucky ones.
As the ‘noughties’ finish, those of us in the marketing/advertising/PR (more simply termed, ‘communications’) industry recall last decade’s tectonic shifts with nervous anticipation. Brands are finally able to offer its customers advertising they can choose to watch, services they genuinely enjoy and dialogues that are, well, actual conversations.
At the same time, a large number of traditional agencies have disappeared while audiences seem to be everywhere but in front of TV sets or newspapers. And yet the French adage, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ still holds. Here are 10 books published last decade offering a good shape of the communications industry and what’s to come:
What’s Changing?
1. The Idea Writers by Teressa Iezzi: If you want to get caught up fast, read this. It’s a great primer with plenty of insights on what’s changed and what’s still required to get an audience’s attention, online or off. Teressa is the editor of Advertising Age’s Creativity magazine and an expert on branded campaigns. Highly recommended.
2. Baked In by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor: This book was written by what could be the alpha and the omega of advertising in the past decade. Alex Bogusky is arguably one of the leaders of “a second “Golden Creative Age” and “Creative Revolution”. John Winsor is the founder of crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils, perhaps the end of what we call agencies today. Together they’ve written a book that expands the marketing process into product design, anthropology and beyond.
Richard Tseng | Critical Mass Toronto
There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.
Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.
Web info overload and why Web 3.0
This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.
