Link to start:
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/i/t154d/

Link to first appearance of Landor:
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/i/t154d/?t=31m33s

BTW One thing they don’t show, is that a couple of weeks later, blacksmith-lady Becks has made a tattoo of the pink anvil logo designed for her. How’s that for a client advocacy of the work?!

This is a recurring pattern in many industries, where it replaces the more familiar bell curve. A simple example will be the fact that while big companies are getting bigger, we now have new small companies which are smaller than companies ever were.

It his post, Pink links two news items showing how the middle tier of the legal services industry deteriorates. On the low end – people will just get basic services online, which started with simple contracts, but quickly progressed into more complex services like divorce agreements. All for record-breaking low prices. On the other end of the well you get the big offices charging record-breaking high prices for high-end, bespoke services.

If you’re a law firm that used to make a lot of money out of divorce contracts but can’t justify a price premium any more – you’ll be falling into the well…

Make no mistake – this is happening in design and across the creative industry .

It is often believed that design and the creative industries as a whole will be the last to suffer from the wrath of globalisation and off-shoring, Pink himself has largely maintained this position in his excellent right-brain manifesto “A Whole New Mind.”

But the existence of a well curve within our own industry indicates that we are far from safe. Looking around I see that we are increasingly competing with both low end products (often rapidly becoming comparable) from emerging markets. Additionally, for high-end design, boutique agencies with more compelling price structures are competing with us on premium services (enjoying that other well-curve which makes being a small company increasingly acceptable and effective). I won’t even mention pro-am culture. This forces us to move higher and higher up the other side of the well, as the middle will not hold long-term and no leading company wants to become a part of the commoditised side of the well.

The solution? One option is to change the price structure to support this commoditisation of design – ad agencies have been doing it for years on some labour intensive deliverables. But who wants to work in that company, right?

So the other solution is to hire only outstanding talent and create an environment that lets them create fantastic stuff. Then, a company can price accordingly. Any big agency is clearly on the latter end of the spectrum, which implies – that its potential client pool will continue to shrink. It’s a scary trend – unless we price out more and more prospects, we’ll be facing more and more competition.

The next decade will be about finding new ways to justify this price premium facing an increasing amount of competition and new models for agencies, the major players won’t give up so quickly and will constantly push them and the entire industry, forward. Now isn’t that exciting?

P.S. the above would still hold if I was still working for a boutique agency, their prices are usually closer to the big ones than the other end.

I lost my identity card /Yehuda Amichai

I lost my identity card.
I have to write out my curriculum vitae
all over again for many offices, one copy to God
and one to the devil. I remember
the photo taken thirty-three years ago
at a wind-scorched junction in the Negev.
My eyes were prophets then, but my body had no idea
what was happening to it or where it belonged.

You often say, This is the place,
This happened right here, but it’s not the place,
you just think so and live in error,
an error whose eternity is greater
than the eternity of truth.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names
like abandoned cemeteries
or like an absurd history class
or a telephone book in a foreign city.

And death is when someone keeps calling you
and calling you
and you no longer turn around to see
who it is

Me: Hey, listen – do you think any of the net-savvy literary theorists that you’re connected to has ever mentioned the connection between Bakhtin’s phatic function of language and things like twitter and other instances of ambient intimacy? [link, now broken]
She: could be, but I’m on the phone and then have to run. I’ll get back to you.  Hi, by the way!
Me: Exactly!

Lip-syncing was one of the genres which indicated the rise of YouTube and rising dominance of user-created video content. But why did so many people find it engaging as viewers or performers?

On a semiotic level, I find lip-synching fascinating, as it emerges as such prominent “sign of the times”. So this is my go at some “history of the present”…

Lip-syncing seems to me like the child of karaoke, it is the next step in a series of social activities centred around music. Additionally, both of them are socially acceptable ego-trips. Before both, we had sing-songs, with people coming together to sing in a group (The T-mobile singing flash-mob campaign looks more like a mass karaoke than a traditional sing-song).

With karaoke, the original performance remains the central subject of the performance. The performer becomes bigger as she connects with the original cultural artefact. Simply: I sing Bowie’s “let’s dance”, friends and strangers cheer, and for a moment – I touch glory.
The original self melts away, I’m now a vehicle for the song, and my gestures signify the original’s concept of stardom. I’m a prophet and my god is the original pop-culture artefact.
Many karaoke moments are compromised of people getting together to celebrate their mutual cultural history, performing the anthems of their youth, whilst celebrating their chance at feeling the kind of attention saved for pop-icons.

(Ah… Attention, the rarest resource of our times, the key ingredient in intimacy, unfortunately a magic ingredient in business, therefore coveted by many.)

One step beyond karaoke, Lip syncing is a purer ego-trip.
In lip-syncing, the original artefact is reduced to a soundtrack for the performance. The re-enactment of music is no longer as central, and, therefore, it’s importance seems reduced. While karaoke is an acting-out of a stardom fantasy, synching dismisses singing, therefore decreasing the imitation component, and indeed, more often than not the lip-syncer does not imitate the gestures of the original performer or any pop performer.
The vocabulary of lip syncing fuses three registers – the quoted mass produced style of pop videos ; a “tradition” of lip syncing gestures that is common to the genre and the peer group, often copied in “reply performances”; finally, it introduces the performers’ own style. While karaoke always creates a dialogue with the original performance, lip syncing, singing excluded, is more expressive of its performers own ideas and fantasies. The fact the soundtrack is identical to the original, rather than interpretive, shifts the focus to what happens on the visual level.
The song then become a soundtrack for the performers delight at her own mannerisms. The vocabulary of lip syncer’s gestures clearly focused on a dialogue between themselves and their peer group (and a reflexive dialogue with syncing genre itself). Syncers have their own private language, while karaoke singers try to merge with the big soul of music.

The famous Wayne’s World Bohemian Rhapsody scene embodies a bridge between karaoke led gen-x culture and lip-sync led gen-y culture. In that scene you can see the focus is still on worshipping the original, but in most YouTube creations, it isn’t so.

Karaoke, so often used as a metaphor for Postmodernity is a part of a culture of quoting, sampling, remixing. Lip-syncing is much closer to mash-ups, cut & paste – further towards the edge of postmodernity.

Personally, I see in lip synching a metaphor for adolescence. Youth tribalism is often unfairly accused of being vacuous and shallow, and lip syncing bundled with many other “online signs of the apocalypse”. But in fact, it is just a symptom of the struggle to discover individuality and authentic meaning in a mass-produced global culture. Both lip syncing and karaoke echo the dream of stardom, but oddly, there is more of the self coming across in lip-syncing.
As a viewer, with many instances of lip-synching, you often feel that beyond the allegedly narcissistic facade of conventions borrowed from leading-peers and mass produced culture, you get a glimpse at who those teenagers truly are. That’s why I find the genre strangely hopeful and optimistic.

* My thoughts on karaoke in this post owe a great debt to Israeli author and columnist Dror Foeyr. Who wrote “Tzadok”, a book about an international karaoke “star” and prophet, full of wonderfully charming, funny and insightful monologues. I wonder if he ever dabbles in lip-syncing.
** In the UK the term for lip syncing is miming, I chose the American term as the specific type of syncing I’m discussing has very much emerged in America.

There is one thing it does very well.

I’ve joined many social services in my time, but don’t remember a single one that has tied together my social network so quickly.

The main benefit, so far, is for Google Reader. One of the best thing about Greader is sharing items. However, up to Buzz Greader relied mostly on your contacts to populate people you follow. Because many people, myself included* , don’t use their gmail address as their “official” address, just for Google services. Even if those people were Greader users, they’ve been “invisible” so far.

Lo and behold – less than 24 hours from Buzz’s launch, and %80 of people in my network that I was sorry weren’t sharing items with me now do.

And maybe that clever little thing points to the simple fact many people out there are judging Buzz using the wrong criteria.

*I do use gmail as an imap client for other addresses.

Semiotics, cultural theory and media studies

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Barthes’ short passages are prototypical examples of a semiotic critique of culture. The distance between what he does and practical marketing may seem big, but hopefully our course demonstrated this is not the case.

Hall, Sean. This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics. London: Laurence King Publishers, 2007.
A lucid visual introduction to semiotics. Compromised of extremely concise essays, each opening with a question using signs and images, followed by a debate of possible answers introducing key semiotic concepts.

McLuhan, Marshal. Understanding Media. New York: Routledge, 2005.
It’s worth travelling beyond the more common text of “the medium is the message” to get better acquainted with McLuhan’s seminal work. He explores the ways we reinvent ourselves through our technologies and make them our extensions, mainly discussing media related technologies and their sociological and psychological implications. Marketing, being a communication based practice, makes these dense, abstract, ideas surprisingly relevant, if not useful.

Marketing & Branding, theory and practice

Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Principles of Marketing (13th Edition). Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall, 2009.
A “canonical”, clear, introduction to old school marketing, the more communication oriented episodes introduce some traditional concepts we’ve touched upon. Bear in mind the critical information provided in the course about situations where these traditional methods break down.

Baker, Michael, and Susan Hart. The Marketing Book, Sixth Edition. St. Louis: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007.
This book is also great to hit burglars with, as a door stop or as a tool for stunning cattle, in case you’re interested in exploring this more traditional form of branding. This tome is the official manual of the British Marketing Institute. A clear and through survey of up to date marketing theory and methodologies with advanced students and practitioners in mind. Stephen Brown’s slim chapter about postmodern marketing is highly recommended.

Boyett, Jimmie T., and Joseph H. Boyett. The Guru Guide to Marketing: A Concise Guide to the Best Ideas from Today’s Top Marketers. New York, NY: Wiley, 2002.
The best (and occasionally the worse) ideas, trends and hits from marketing best-sellers of the 90′s and early naughties. The authors introduce the kernel of many guru theories and discuss them critically. Slightly superficial, yet a good introduction to the misty lands of commercialised marketing theory.

Kapferer, Jean-Noel. The New Strategic Brand Management: Creating and Sustaining Brand Equity Long Term (New Strategic Brand Management: Creating & Sustaining Brand Equity). London: Kogan Page, 2008.
If you read just one branding manual, read Kapferer. A meticulous survey of brand management from the conceptual to the minute. Solid theory combined with illuminating case studies and, thankfully, almost no propaganda.

Further afield

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley, 2005.
Sophisticated thriller led by a charming heroine, who happens to be an American brand consultant arriving in London on a secret visual identity project. More insights into marketing then most guru books and much more fun.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink. boston: Little Brown, 2005.
This readable best-seller explores, among other things, how difficult is it to get useful insights into the minds of audiences and what makes them tick.

Klein, Naomi. No Logo. New York, NY: Picador, 2000.
This much debated tome looks at the dark side of the connection between marketing communications, globalisation and branding. The cases she brings and the fact she misses many of the real villains of the global corporate world while focusing on mass-market, “in the limelight”, brands, is evidence to the power of brands as cultural constructs.

And this kid was 7, maybe less. And he had this thing, for years, when he’d walk up to the mirror and watch himself for a while, and he’ll make faces and concentrate, and then he’d start crying. With big, round, wet tears. Often he’ll be truly bawling.

All this time he’d be staring at his own reflection in the mirror, and I seem to remember him having this intense look. Like he was amplifying and looking through it the same time.

Like he was trying to understand.
Who is this kid?
Why is he crying?
Whose body is this?
Why is it crying?
Whose kid is he?
What do those “crying” signs mean?
Who do they belong to?
And so on…

So lately I’ve been thinking this kid was a pioneer. It seems a lot of kids are doing that these days.
Or maybe he wasn’t and they always had.
Anyway, for some reason, nowadays kids are often quite happy doing it.

And in London they say: jyouknowhaamean?

The oldest trick in the spammer’s handbook, brought up to a new level. Just how convoluted is that?

Sigh… The road’s still long.

(This was encountered on a credit card application)

I’ve always rejected the myth of the suits/creatives split. Have always maintained a common language between marketing, design and other media is important and empowering to everyone involved. Hopefully, I can introduce some useful concepts and break some myths.

(And in case it doesn’t come through: OMG!!!!1! I’m so bloody psyched about this!)

Brand strategy reconstructed
How marketing lost the plot and how it might find meaning again

Marketing is a discipline in crisis. For the last decades it has become evident to practitioners and scholars alike that many of the trusted old methods were just not cutting it any more. Worse, it now seems some of them weren’t valid in the first place. This series of contemplative talks brings together ideas from narrative studies, semiotics and cultural theory to drive design thinking in solving the challenges of postmodern marketing. Numerous examples will be given from actual projects, popular culture and recent marketing cases.

The first six talks:

1. Marketing, meaning & decadence: an introduction to the sophistication of marketing sign-systems and their tendency to degenerate.
2. Suspicious minds: the myth of “a consumer subject”.
3. On branding and meaning: can a simplified theoretical tool-box cut through buzzwords and hype?
4. Advanced narrative marketing: the untold story of brand stories.
5. Marketing plots: cultural pattern-recognition as a strategic tool.
6. Embracing the mess: how clients and agencies are changing their work culture and methods to encourage more sustainable marketing strategies.

Mondays@17:00, Starting May 18th, excluding 25/5 (bank holiday) and 8/6 (prior obligation).

To my non-UK readers: London College of Communication, formerly London College of Printing, is the largest constituent College of the University of the Arts London, Europe’s largest university dedicated to art, communication, design and related technologies.
Two graduates Israeli readers will know are David Tartakover & Alex Livak.