ICONSMASHER

India is Having A Moment

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:05:00 -0700

(L to R: Kal Penn, Nikki Haley, Aziz Ansari, Bobby Jindal)

Not since Apu stormed these shores in 1990 have we seen such a surge in Indians in the popular consciousness. I’m talking about Kal Penn on House (and later in the Obama White House), Aziz Ansari on Parks and Recreation, Bobby Jindal back to national prominence in New Orleans, and most recently, Nikki Haley as GOP candidate for governor of South Carolina. What distinguishes all these Indians is that they’re portrayed as American first. No “thank you, come again” accents, no jokes about all being engineers or 7-11 managers. It’s like all of a sudden they’re the go-to ethnic group to demonstrate how far we’ve come in the post-Obama, post-racial America.

Then there’s the counter-directional examples. First MetroPCS’s bizarre Tech & Talk ads featuring Ranjit and Chad, two walking racial stereotypes. The first spot ran during the Superbowl, and I think The Richards Group is walking a very fine line. And then in the Fall we can look forward to Outsourced, an NBC show from the creator of The Office that plays the immigrant fish-out-water story for laughs (a la Balki from Perfect Strangers) - in this case it’s a gang of (heavily accented) call center workers and a well-meaning, white call-center manager teaching them the ropes of American culture. It’s like Indians are the last ethnic group that’s safe to make fun of.

So which is it? I think India is in a very interesting place in the American consciousness- simultaneously exotic (Slumdog Millionaire) and familiar (Jay Sean).

Photo

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:48:18 -0800

Making Sense of Chat Roulette

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:36:04 -0800

Is Chat Roulette a milestone in Web history or is it destined to become a footnote that will be forgotten as fast as the Winter Olympics?

A quick recap of the site (and you should definitely visit Chat Roulette yourself): a Russian teenager named Andrey Ternovskiy has created a simple interface that connects your webcam to a random series of strangers from across the world. You or the stranger have the power to move on to the next random encounter at the click of a mouse. It’s populated with bored teenagers, sexual thrill-seekers, and some genuinely creative and interesting people exploring a new medium. You can guess at the rough ratios of each.

Is this the next big thing? I don’t think so, but here are a few thoughts on what Chat Roulette is telling us:

Publicity on Internet time

Ternovskiy launched the site in late 2009 for his friends to mess around with, it was featured in New York Magazine on February 5^th, and it reached some kind of apex of publicity with a front page article in yesterday’s New York Times Style section. In between, it’s been reviewed by everyone from hipster satire site LATFH (where I first heard about it) to late middle-aged blogger Claudia Feldman of The Middle Lane: Between Adult Kids and Aging Parents (“I’m not sure what I make of all this except I’m not big on depravity or extremists, and I like our special spot in the Middle Lane.”). From the teen perspective, by the time it gets to this point, it’s so over. I think the more popular the site becomes, the less interesting it will be. When I’ve been back, I see a lot of bored people on the site, waiting to be entertained.

Teens, Sex, and Technology

There’s no question that the focus of this site is on sex. Whether it’s good for anonymous sexualized interactions and therefore has drawn teens, or if it started with teens and they naturally gravitate towards sexual themes is open for debate. But I don’t think Chat Roulette is going to evolve significantly away from this central focus. This is speed dating, Craigslist Casual Encounters style. I think most non-teens are shocked at how explicit it is, but it opens a window into the way teens use technology to express their sexuality to their peers away from the prying eyes of their parents. CosmoGirl and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancies completed a national survey on Sex and Tech in 2008 showing that 21% of teen girls and 18% of teen boys have sent/ posted nude or semi-nude images of themselves. Stickam, “sexting”, and now Chat Roulette all reflect a modern teen’s view of their sexuality – a casual, hook-up culture where anonymous nudity is not that big a deal.

Internet Ageism

Chat Roulette is one the first technologies that I have encountered on the Internet where ageism has come into play. The kinds of people who typically blog about technology- white men in their 30s and 40s – have shall we say not been so warmly received by the younger Chat Roulette “community”. The democratization of Facebook didn’t create this kind of backlash because college 20-somethings could maintain their own closed networks within the community. But Chat Roulette is open by design. Look for Chat Roulette (or a competitor) to add an age filter – the equivalent of tying registration to a college domain on the early Facebook. I wonder too if looking back we won’t see this as the start of a more general trend toward segregated “neighborhoods” online after many years of all-ages sites.

Will we be talking about Chat Roulette three months from now? A couple of years down the road? What else makes Chat Roulette significant, fascinating, or trivial?

EVB/Facebook Connect Juiciness

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:45:08 -0700

I have no idea what this has to do with contact lenses or eye exams or whatever the hell this is for, but as an execution it’s awesome:

http://thegreatbernie.com/

Full Screen Video
Really nice retro cinematography
So-so use of Facebook Connect data

Building a Profitable iPhone App

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:44:30 -0700

This is one of the better and more to-the-point presentations on building a successful iPhone app that I’ve seen. A few highlights

Exposure is crucial: it pays to make the Top 100 /Top 25/ Top 10 apps lists, by an order of magnitude
The App store is designed for maximum turnover, so the best strategy is a burst of maximum exposure, knowing that downloads are going to fade. Price cuts can juice paid apps (duh), especially if they are well-timed, but you can’t pull this lever with a free application
Usage of free apps drops precipitously after one or two days (slide 12). Paid retains their audiences longer- probably because of consumer investment in the product. Long term audiences are 1% of total downloads on average
Majority of free applications are run at most 12 times after first download

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

Latest Guilty Pleasure

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:10:49 -0700

Cobra Starship!

Diversity Days

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:11:25 -0700

Race is a topic on everyone’s mind again with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the beer summit, and (Justice) Sonia Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” comments, which by now may have even become a catchphrase like “Black is beautiful”.

Here at my advertising agency we coincidentally had a “Diversity Job Fair” where a number of woman- and minority-owned vendors came in to talk to us about potential partnerships. It had the empty feel-good vibe of a top-down corporate initiative, and the awkward intensity of an episode of The Office. Twenty or so vendors from around the country shuffled through the office for a series of short meetings. I met a guy who specializes in recruiting micro-communities for research (Hmong in Minnesota, anyone?), an LA-based political consulting firm that specializes in turning out the vote in the black community, and inexplicably, the heads of an economic development not-for-profit in Oakland.

Minority groups are historically under-represented in advertising, and the matchmaking was well-intentioned if not totally effective. What was great is that it gave me an opportunity to think about race in the context of business relationships, and I had a couple of observations.

First, these vendors really stuck out. I don’t mean because of their race (and ironically many of them were white men representing minority firms). It was more that they were clearly out of their element. For a start to a person they were all over-dressed (suits) - which reminded me that there’s a certain arrogance required to dress down. As in, we in the creative class are so confident in our abilities that we have transcended the need to dress up for other people. The political consultants, who create marketing campaigns of their own, didn’t understand the way our business works and had a hard time articulating their value to a big ad agency. The Hmong guy kept talking about how hot or cold various places he recruited from were. These vendors weren’t smooth like advertising people. They didn’t seem like peers, they seemed like people from some other part of the economy, some other walk of life. (Assuming I had the need anyway), it would require a major leap of faith to partner with them.

It all came together for me when I read this commentary on the current race debates by Helene Cooper, an NYT White House Correspondant and a Liberian immigrant. Writing on Sotomayor and Gates, she reminds us that these folks are cultural elites- products of affirmative action yes, but also products of Yale, Princeton, and the vaguely meritocratic machine that grooms America’s leaders. Our diversity vendors were not elites, at least not advertising elites, and it made it very hard for them to bridge the gap to become potential partners.

Writing about her own experience as an affirmative action student at UNC, Cooper says “the principal thing I learned was how to make [white friends] feel at ease around me”. This blew my mind, because I think the ability to blend in to mainstream cultural norms - what Nicholas Lemann of Columbia calls the “double consciousness” of minority elites - is too rarely part of the dialogue on race.

Thoughts From Comic Con

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:00:00 -0700

I attended my first Comic Con this year and came home wanting more. If I have one impression from the show, it was how incredibly diverse the offers are. From comic books (duh) to toys to LARPers to anime to costuming to movies, what holds the whole thing together nowadays. It’s about fantasy and an escape from the mundane.

Nothing encapsulated this better than a long conversation I had with this lady, a noblewomen from The Adrian Empire, which is “like SCA, but we fight with steel”. She was intelligent, passionate, and articulate. But what I most got from her was a sense of longing about how things might be in the world, as opposed to how they are. The community for her represents an opportunity to reshape the world. She told me how the Emperor of The Adrian Empire is a janitor “in the mundane world”. She started to tear up when we talked about how it was too bad that he wasn’t able to apply his obvious leadership talents in his day job. I heard the same sentiment in Darkon, an excellent documentary about The Darkon Wargaming Club, a LARPing group (they use magic so it’s not strictly a reenactment; she hadn’t heard of it).

Comicon is for people who, for one reason or another, find fault with mundane world and want to escape to a better one.

A Navy SEAL and the Power of Self Possession

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:57:07 -0700

I was down in LA last week listening to a former Navy Seal talk about what it takes to be a “Tier 1 Operator”- an elite Special Forces soldier who does the most dangerous counter-terrorism, insurgency, and behind-enemy-lines work. I’m not the kind of person who closely follows the military or knows a lot about soldiering. But man, was this guy impressive.

He is working as a special advisor on the latest installment of a military shooter game. He didn’t spend much time regaling us with war stories. Maybe that added to the mystique. No, most of what he said had to do with the mindset of being a Tier 1 operator. Bascially, you have to believe in yourself totally from the outset of selection, or you will fail. You’ll fail because the physical and psychological demands of training will break you otherwise. You’ll fail because the other guys competing with you for a spot will sense that weakness and attack it, like animals in a wolf pack. You’ll fail because it takes a certain arrogance even to dare to dream of being an elite soldier when you first sign up. “It’s a test of mettle that is harder than anything I could find in the civilian world. I needed to find it in myself first”

He was addressing about 30 of us and he had the whole room rapt. It was like listening to a fireman when you’re seven years old. I think his physical presence helped - he was handsome and poised with the strapping build of a pro linebacker. But he took pains to emphasize that the biggest misconception about his profession is that everyone is built like Superman: “we’re all shapes and sizes”. I think what worked is that he didn’t bother trying to establish himself or his credentials- he just started talking from a position of authority. Quiet confidence, not ego. If there’s one lesson I learned from all this, it’s the power of self-possession. Listening to him talk was what I imagine it’s like listening to an elite athlete like Michael Phelps or a world class musician. Someone who has such supreme confidence that they are at the top of their game that they have nothing to prove to an audience of mere mortals. I’d love to bring some of that mojo to my own work.

Designing The Future of Medicine

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:35:57 -0700

My mother-in-law is on the outer edge of the boomer generation. At 65 give or take, she just had double knee replacement surgery. Even five years ago, knee surgery was considered so invasive that you would never do both knees at once. Now here she is goign to a specialist clinic, the Center for Joint Replacement in Fremont that’s basically a factory of new knees for seniors. She was in hospital for a total of only THREE DAYS. She was carrying my daughter around within a month.

I really enjoyed the experience of going to visit her, because it seemed to me to be a glimpse into the future of medicine. A very narrow clinical focus. Exclusively immigrant care-givers. A tight age range of White patients between maybe 55 and 75, with a mean of 65. And as much a therapy session as a surgical clinic.

Post surgery, all the patients were wheeled into a common room twice a day for mandatory group physical therapy. There was no coddling here. Everyone had to do their exercises, and if they complained that they were too old, too weak etc., the response was consistently; “look at others in the circle, they’re doing it. And if you want to get out of here soon, you will do it too!” It was amazing to see the power of peer pressure being used on seniors! Another part of the magic was that you see the progression of recovery around the room- it was obvious who was there on Day 1 following surgery vs Day 2 vs Day 3, no just from the amount of bandaging etc. on their needs, but on how fit and hearty they looked. I think getting your knees replaced has the potential to be profoundly depressing- you’re old and weak and you will never walk properly again. But in fact you have to push through the pain immediately in order to get full range of motion back. It reminded me of birthing classes, but for seniors.

All But Discipline

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:02:28 -0700

I was in the habit of blogging *every day* at Organic. Yesterday my wife asked me if I might enjoy blogging more regularly again, and I found myself making the following excuses:

(1) No one blogs anymore, all the conversation has switched to Twitter.

(2) It’s too late to start a new blog. Either you have a readership today, or you don’t.

I think there’s some truth to both statements, but I think I forgetting a major benefit beyond getting famous: it’s a great discipline to take the thoughts floating around in my head over a 24 hour period and try to turn them into something articulate.

Onward!

Cafe Press + American Idol

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:21:00 -0700

I love Cafe Press. Not necessarily as a place to buy stuff, mind you, but as a fantastic expression of the cultural zeitgeist. I love seeing people’s creativity (and plagiarism) and the capitalist drive at work. No event is too minor that some entreprenurial type hasn’t thought to stick it on a T-shirt.

I nearly worked with Cafe Press when I was at Organic. They have gone through a couple of management cycles since then, and they have clearly improved their merchanding. Tonight I am using number of T-shirt designs proferred to predict the American Idol finalists. Based on this survey, it’s going to be Adam Lambert (559 designs) vs. Danny Gokey (374 designs) in the final, and not, surprisingly, Kris Allen (262 designs).

Update: per Newsday and The Davie Brown Index, brand reseach confirms my hypothesis!

“Basically, each celebrity gets an overall ranking, which is based on how test audiences scored them on eight things: Appeal, aspiration, awareness, endorsement, influence, breakthrough, trendsetter, and trust.”

Rating/Person
91.28 Barack Obama
90.85 Will Smith
89.92 George Clooney
87.46 Angelina Jolie

81.52 Elvis Presley
80.77 Carrie Underwood
79.68 Justin Timberlake
78.92 Kelly Clarkson
78.87 Miley Cyrus
78.59 Britney Spears
74.55 Michael Jackson
71.80 Clay Aiken
66.17 Mick Jagger
64.84 Jordin Sparks
63.45 Kanye West
61.10 David Cook
58.64 Chris Daughtry
57.70 David Archuleta
44.12 Fantasia

46.47 Adam Lambert
46.46 Anoop Desai
44.24 Danny Gokey
41.27 Lil Rounds
39.62 Allison Iraheta
39.26 Kris Allen
37.29 Matt Giraud

Amazon Kindle 2.0 = Fail

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:25:22 -0800

Amazon’s big annoucement is out today- a redesign of the Kindle. On the face of it, this is a story about the power of design. While Tim Brown of IDEO singled out Kindle 1.0 as an example of poor design (sorry Bob Brunner/Ammunition) that in turn hobbled adoption, Kindle 2.0 is a Frog Design re-envisioning, basically Mac-ifying the form factor with rounded buttons and a slimmer profile that immediately invited (favorable) comparisons to the iPhone 3G.

Still, I think most coverage misses the point. The secret of the iPod is not the form factor- it’s iTunes. Anyone can replicate the industrial design (as the Kindle proves)- but no iPod competitor can replicate the delivery mechanism for the content. WalMart, Amazon and other have tried, to no avail. Kindle’s secret sauce is WhisperNet, not the reader itself. I think Amazon made a big tactical mistake in not lowering the price ($359), especially in this economy. They should be following the razor & blade model - building unassailable market share in eBooks and taking a loss on the hardware if necessary. Mark my words, a re-designed Kindle, no matter how slick, is just not going to move the needle in terms of attracting a wider user base.

Does SNL/Pepsi Threaten Traditional Agencies?

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:15:18 -0800

Does SNL/Pepsi Threaten Traditional Agencies?

I'm Calling the Next American Idol

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:40:55 -0800

It’s Adam Lambert.

He’s got the looks, the personality, and the kid can sing.

This notwithstanding (and maybe because of) the minuscule coverage he has received so far on Season 8. You could tell when he walked into his first audition that the judges loved him already. He has a very timely pansexual quality- think Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy.

The only potential snag: can he be the first (openly?) gay winner?

Pepsuber Meta-Advertising

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:25:43 -0800

I love SNL (lately- and it’s only tolerable on Tivo), I love Will Forte, and honestly I think the most out-of-the-box and therefore effective Superbowl ad was Pepsi’s three-part riff off the MacGruber sketches. Very memorable, and I love the nudge-and-a-wink “we know that you know that you’re being advertised to”.

Peter Arnell calls it “un-advertising”, but I think a better word is meta-advertising. Just right for the kind of jaded sophisticates who watch SNL in the first place. My only question- are these people Pepsi drinkers? My thought is that most viewers (like me) are too old to drink a full-calorie soda.

Unfriend Me!

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:48:00 -0800

As usual, Crispin Porter’s latest campaign has tapped into something deep in the pop culture zeitgeist. I don’t mean to trivialize it- they are genius at the frivilous- it’s just hard to know whether that the same thing as effective marketing. I’m talking of course about Whopper Sacrifice.

Today’s NYT takes it to the next level of analysis- what does it mean to have more “friends” than friends in the world of social networking? I had a personal experience with this via LinkedIn this week -a “friend” contacted me about a rec for a job at Organic. He had a cartoon for a photo and I didn’t recognize him at all. I had to ask him directly how we know each other- very embarassing- and kind of cover it up by offering to help him out anyway.

I explored this a little bit about two years ago when developing a combination trend forecasting/persona development product at Organic. One of our predictions is that people would want tool to manage social media lenses- multi-personalities and levels of access to their “friends”- their party boy persona, their business persona, their Second Life persona etc. This is precisely one of the suggestions from blogger Henry Blodget in the article.

Recruiting Mandates for a Recession

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:13:50 -0800

Recruiting Mandates for a Recession

Male Bonding

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:15:26 -0800

Few things are more fascinating to me than trends in popular culture. The latest trend to bubble up- “bromances”. Honestly I think the beginning of the trend (in recent times) was Brokeback Mountain, even though the most recent incarnations (MTV’s Bromance, TNT’s Trust Me, Dreamworks’ I Love You, Man) are all about two straight guys who, uh, happen to enjoy one another’s company.

My first glimmer that this whole thing had legs was the relationship between (gay) Ronnie and (ostensibly straight) Ben on Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel. Something about their friendship/sexual tension clearly appealed to the young female demo that supported the show- they both stuck around until the very end despite otherwise inferior talent. So to me it’s a misreading to that this is a genre that men want to see, but rather about what women find sexy and appealing. It ties back to the NYT Magazine article on What Do Women Want. At least according to plethysmograph studies (a plastic probe that sits inside the vagina and measures genital blood flow), women find two men together (subliminally) hot.

MediaWeek has this round-up:

Career Advice to Myself

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:36:57 -0800

Sometimes I lose sight of why I am interested in design, experience design, new product development, customer insights, digital innovation- whatever it is I do. I despair (and rejoice) that there are no elders in this field and there is definitely a very poorly defined career path. Then every now and then one of these design institutions actually comes through. Listen to this Design Global Agenda Council Manifesto (ugh) written in Dubai (double ugh) for Davos (triple) via Bruce Nussbaum:

“ON DESIGN

Throughout history, design has been an agent of change. It helps us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to turn them to our advantage by translating them into things that can make our lives better. Now, at a time of crisis and unprecedented change in every area of our lives – economic, political, environmental, societal and in science and technology – design is more valuable than ever.

The crisis comes at a time when design has evolved. Once a tool of consumption chiefly involved in the production of objects and images, design is now also engaged with developing and building systems and
strategies, and in changing behaviour often in collaboration with different disciplines.

Design is being used to:
· Gain insight about people’s needs and desires
· Build strategic foresight to discover new opportunities
· Generate creative possibilities
· Invent, prototype and test novel solutions of value
· Deliver solutions into the world as innovations adopted at scale

In the current climate, the biggest challenges for design and also its greatest opportunities are:

· Well-being – Design can make an important contribution to the redefinition and delivery of social services by addressing acute problems such as ageing, youth crime, housing and health. Many
designers are striving to enable people all over the world to lead their lives with dignity, especially the deprived majority of the global population - “the other 90%” who have the greatest need of
design innovation.

· Sustainability – Designers can play a critical role in ensuring that products, systems and services
are developed, produced, shipped, sold and will eventually be disposed of in an ethically and environmentally responsible manner. Thereby meeting - and surpassing - consumers’ expectations.

· Learning – Design can help to rebuild the education system to ensure that it is fit for purpose in the
21st Century. Another challenge is to redefine or reorient the design education system at a time of unprecedented demand when thousands of new design schools are being built worldwide and design is increasingly being integrated into other curricula. Designers are also deploying their skill at communication and visualization to explain and interpret the overwhelming volume of extraordinary
complex information.

. Innovation – Designers are continuing to develop and deliver innovative new products at a turbulent time when consumer attitudes are changing dramatically thereby creating new and exciting
entrepreneurial opportunities in the current crisis. They are increasingly using their expertise to innovate in new areas such as the creation of new business models and adoption of a strategic and
systemic role in both the public and the private sector.”