Archive for April, 2004
April 30, 2004
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So British Petroleum changed its logo a few years ago from a shield (symbol of strength, masculine values etc) to a flower-starburst-looking thing (symbol of life, energy, life-energy, feminine values etc etc).
I suppose a cynic would call it the first move in their “We’re not evil, honest!” campaign.
I have no trouble with the oil business. My father, a geologist, was in it for a good portion of his working life. It was oil that put food on the table.
Sure, I will concur with Big Oil’s detractors for the need for environmental and ethical vigilance, but I would say that was true for all large companies.
But I can only give the detractors so much slack. A lot of them are perfectly willing to hold down fancy media, academic and government jobs, bringing their agenda to their constituencies. But what they’re not willing to do is actually go and get the oil themselves.
They’re not willing to live 7 months a year on a rig off the coast of Guatemala, or have to deal with the Nigerian government, in a way that (a) fits their moral prism and (b) makes a profit.
i.e. They don’t actually have to get their hands dirty. They leave that job to other people.
The energy biz is interesting stuff. Which is why I’m so enjoying watching what happens with Evo Limosines. My gut tells me they’re going to be big.
April 29, 2004
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I
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My computer is still on the heart & lung machine (currently borrowing a friend’s). So no new drawings till next week at that earliest. In the meantime you’ll just have to survive on republished old ones, and the occasional link etc.
Life is tough all over.
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I’m going to Paris on the 5th of May. While I’m there I hope to meet up with Loic Le Meur.
Looking forward to it. He’s an interesting guy.
Plus I’m dying to sit at a proper zinc bar and drink the coffee.
If anybody knows of any good, archetypal Parisian zinc bars, please leave the info in the comment section, merci.
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Rick Bruner’s ‘Business Blog Consulting’ is the best new website I’ve seen for ages.
Basically, Bruner cites the most interesting examples of people using blogs for business purposes. He’s probably the best in the business for this kind of thing.
Go read it. Now.
Nice to see the capitalist motive finally coming to the fore in the blogosphere. It’s been wanting to for a while, of course…
April 28, 2004
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From PaidContent: Tacoda Forms Behavioral Ad Network, Challenges Paid Search Players.
Behavioral targeting technology player Tacoda Systems is developing a pay-for-performance network of content sites that will run text ads and leverage its audience-profiling technology…
Tacoda has so far convinced at least four of its existing publisher clients, though it won’t say which, to join its new AudienceMatch Network. Tacoda’s clients include USAToday.com, Tribune Interactive, Cond
April 27, 2004
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David Galbraith points to “Meme Endorsement”, one of the more plausible future-of-advertising ideas currently doing the rounds. He cites Burger King’s now-famous Subservient Chicken.
Alexa today shows a traffic rank of 1,255 and a 1.5% reach for Burger King’s subservient chicken.
Brands will be endorsing memes the same way brands endorsed entire TV programs in the 1950s. So we’ve gone full circle. The difference now being that memes, unlike TV studios, cameramen, actors etc. do not need costly molecules in order to exist.
Future job description: “Meme Broker”. Somebody who finds advertisers and memes and gets them to work together somehow. Perfect schtick for Technorati.
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My computer’s been sick n’ hospitalized the last couple of days, hence the light posting. It’ll be a couple of days till I get it back, so no new drawings for a few days (just previously published ones etc). Apologies in advance etc.
I’m working full time now. I’m now a creative director for a very cutting-edge communications agency. It’s my first real senior management job, so I’m pretty excited.
The great thing is– it was my blog that got me the job. As I’m fond of saying, blogs are a great way of making things happen indirectly.
Doubtless I’ll be telling you all about it in the next wee while…
April 19, 2004
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My spies tell me my blogcards were a big hit at Bloggercon.
Jeff Jarvis plugged them, I am told, at his session on making money via blogging.
Thanks, Jeff!
Also, thank you to the many people out there who have bought a box so far. I hope you’re having fun with them.
Certainly in terms of all the products I’ve made over the years (t-shirts, greeting cards etc), they are the most satisfying.
April 18, 2004
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Pretty much all the ideas that came out of Jarvis’ Bloggercon workshop on “blogs making money” are listed on this wiki.
Some ideas are more interesting than others, naturally. Personally I think blogs are better for selling high-price goods (e.g advertising services) than low-price goods (e.g. toothpaste). But I have a huge economic incentive in being proved wrong, so if can prove me wrong, please do so– the sooner the better.
Loic sums it up well:
Business rules are changing in an extreme way. I am using my blog as a business tool more and more and it works, I get incredible good contacts reading blogs, or via comments and emails. I get help from all European countries friends to launch Typepad in Europe (thanks !).
Things are changing fast. It’s either (a) you’re getting up to speed or (b) you’re watching your career crumble into powder over the next 5 years.
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This one, entitled “American Flag”, now belongs to Henry Copeland. Black india ink with red and blue ballpoint etc.
Yeah, yeah, Jasper Johns, eat your heart out…
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Young Adam has its own homepage, finally.
It’s all done in Flash, which I hate. But it’s got a pretty good director’s statement from Dave MacKenzie (photo above)…
Also, it has a link to Moviefone.com listings, so you can find out where it’s playing near you.
All credit to the marketers for getting a prominent interview and promotional ad campaign in Nerve.com, which is the perfect audience/vehicle for it.
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Sexually frank “Young Adam” interview of Tilda Swinton in Nerve.com.
“We rehearsed for a couple of weeks before we shot. We were very clear that this film’s so much about a relationship that’s borne out through the sexual contact, and that that’s the way they communicate. And we also knew that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film
April 17, 2004
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Anil makes a great point about the limitations of “popularity” to measure how successful your blog is.
So when I see disparaging of “unpopular” or low-flow weblogs or the use of someone’s readership as a barometer of their legitimacy, credibility or importance, and I have to strongly object. Popularity is easy. What matters is that you connect.
No surprises there. I’m in the business of getting people to hand over 5, 6, 7-figure checks, either to me or the people I work for. It’s a different process altogether than mass-media campaigns, the majority of which deal in 1 or 2-figure numbers.
I’ve told this story before: My father went to Harvard Business School in the 70s. One of his professors, an eminent scholar, had studied the question of what was harder in business: to get one person to give you a million dollars, or to get a million people to give you one dollar.
The prof insisted getting one person to fork over a million was statistically easier by a very wide margin. Again, no surprises there.
Bloggers who get hung up over audience size are still thinking in mass-media terms. Big mistake. Very big.
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Young Adam opened yesterday in the States. Hope some of you manged to catch it etc.
It’s been a good experiment seeing how blogging can be used to aggressively promote a piece of mass-entertainment.
To any film client thinking of using blogs in a similar fashion, my advice is– start early, update frequently and be prepared to spend some money driving traffic.
Blogvertising is about letting the message slowly seep in, “like absinthe on a sugar cube”, rather than the old-media “hit them with a firehose”.
It’s a different way of talking to people…
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Graham Holliday’s blogcards arrived in Saigon.
Graham is a Brit journalist is living in Vietnam. His very cool blog is about Vietnamese food, and the local Saigon restaurant culture. Utterly mouth-watering.
He’s got an interesting life. He lives somewhere cheap and exotic, and he makes his living off the internet, writing stuff for the British papers. The kind of arrangement I imagine would turn a lot of bloggers green with envy, including myself.
So now there are blogcards in Saigon. You have no idea how happy that makes me.
(get your own blogcards here etc.)
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April 14, 2004
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(Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor in “Young Adam”)
Tilda Swinton, the female lead in Young Adam, and I swapped e-mails recently:
Dear Tilda,
I am trying to help my old friend Dave with his film, Young Adam, by promoting it on my website. I thought asking one of the actors about it would be a good idea, hence this e-mail. Thanks so much for helping out.
Here are the questions I’ve prepared, I’ve tried to keep it short:
1. David never made a feature film before. But here’s you, an internationally well-known actor with a superb reputation, turning up in a debut. Was it an easy sell or did you need a lot of convincing?
2. As an actor, how did you rate playing the part of Ella, the main female lead? Was it a particularly challenging role for you? I imagine it would be quite hard to pull off the very sexual side to it, while also maintaining that grim, joyless, hard edge that Ella had.
3. Both Trainspotting and Young Adam, the two big Scots films of the last few years, are both pretty bleak and existential in nature. Do you think that was coincidence, a sign of the times or a unique symptom of the Scots character?
4. Final Question: How do you find the Americans reacting to the film (the ones who have already seen it, anyway)? I imagine it flies against their perceptions of Scotland quite noticably, even more so than Trainspotting.
Thank you very much,
Best,
Hugh
Dear Hugh,
This comes from a plane from San Francisco to Denver on the all-kicking Free World tour of Young Adam .. David is beside me reading W .. they are bringing us ‘shrimp’, sauteed and laid over ‘mescalin’, apparently ..
So:
1 Very little arm-wrestling needed to get me into this agreement to make the film with David. His script was so impressive .. but more: it made me want to talk to him about the film it promised he wanted to make .. once we started talking, we never really stopped .. but the fact that he, or any filmmaker, had no track record would never really figure as a disadvantage for me .. if anything, it’s a thing I know very well, the working with first time, or relatively inexperienced, filmmakers — Susan Streitfeld, Sally Potter, Robert Lepage were all in that category .. since Young Adam, I’ve worked with Mike Mills and Francis Lawrence, both first time feature filmmakers — there is a sort of beginner’s mind about people with that fresh vision and atmosphere of adventure .. and absence of battle scars ..
2. All tasks have their particular challenges: my playing Ella had these: that, given the neo-realistic verite sort of atmosphere of the environment, it was clear that the task meant sinking myself into the world of this working class, 50’s, Glasgow with as much accuracy as I could. I had a voice, and a way of moving, to find that meant that Ella felt authentic and not enacted. That meant a kind of heaviness in the limbs : in the book, Ella is very specifically and evocatively described as being large and fleshly .. David and I intended that I should be fatter than I am naturally to express that sort of living flesh thing for Joe .. but I found it impossible to get there, so we went for a different kind of lumpenness — something to do with a rawness and a slumping shape, a slackness of body tone and a Stanley Spencer skinny/bruisedness .. Ella’s story is so much the story of her body: what it signifies to Joe and how she learns to live in it .. once we had rooted her shape and energy in that way, it became easy to tell her story ..
3. I happen to see what you describe as bleak and existential as a particularly Scottish melody .. not the ONLY one possible, but a speciality, you could say .. certainly in terms of Scottish film, as in our culture in general, I do believe that our roots and tendancies have always married better with an internationalist, specifically European, tradition, than the English cinema’s close relationship to the theatre and to the American market pressure to sell its identity through class and romantic comedy ..
4. We can tell you more after the film opens on Friday about the American audience’s reaction to the film .. but so far, the journalists we have been speaking to have been extremely supportive and respectful and not particularly surprised .. no one has yet mentioned the lack of castle locations or caber tossing, but we are not in Denver yet, so we’ll keep you abreast of all breaking news ..
All best
Tilda
(Young Adam premiers this Friday, the 16th, in the US. Cities include: New York, Chicago, LA, Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis etc.)
Please post this link on your website, if you have one. I’d like to spread the word on this film . I’ve seen it, and it’s great. Check out my links for more info etc.
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(drew this on the train to work this morning)
April 13, 2004
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The Daily Jarvis: Jeff has set up an interactive list for all the possible ways to make money blogging… it’s for a speech he’s giving at Bloggercon this weekend. It’s quite a long list, including:
BLOG TO BENEFIT YOUR CORE BUSINESS
$ Use your blog to promote your consulting (e.g., Rick Bruner)
$ Use your blog to promote your service (e.g., Denise Howell and a law firm)
$ Use your blog to get freelance writing gigs (e.g., Tim Blair)
$ Use your blog to get a book contract (e.g., Claire Berlinski and the Julia Child blog)
$ Use your blog to get hired at a publication (e.g., Elizabeth Spiers)
$ Use your blog to smoke out what’s happening in your world and make contacts (e.g., Fred Wilson at AVC)
$ Use your blog to start a lecture tour
And there’s more. Much more.
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Starting tomorrow I start working full-time. More cash, less blogging. Yeah, I think it’s an acceptable trade-off.
I’ll still be drawing just as much…
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So this guy did a gapingvoid tribute drawing and sent it to me. Heh.
(i.e. somebody else drew this)
April 12, 2004
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Somehow the comments got closed today, as I fiddled with my site configurations. Never mind, I fixed it. You can now leave comments from this day forward.
Yeah, I like comments. I wish more people left them.
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The Daily Jarvis: “Om Malik is back home in India, filing all kinds of interesting observations, including this, on the “dark side” of outsourcing…”
Here I got to talk to many who answer my phone calls whenever I have a question about my Amex Bill. Amid their sometimes drunken but polite arguments, you hear the cry for help. The constant pressure of trying to be someone else, faking accents and trying to deal with the abusive behavior of their customers, you find many are crumbling. The late nights, cooped up in cool but antiseptic halls, the call center workers are turning to drink, drugs and sex to find some meaning to their lives.
It’s a neat trick you learn quickly as a blogger: instead of spending hours every day surfing the net, just visit the site of somebody who does it far bar better than you ever could… somebody like Jarvis.
Then steal all his ideas and take all the credit. Hurrah!
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So the BBC, thinking the internet terribly empowering yak yak yak, decide to emulate the blogosphere themselves. Something that acted like the blogosphere– a mini blogosphere, as it were… all happening on its own server, within its own specified interface, with all that wonderfully reassuring Beeb branding… Ahhhhhhhh.
They come up with “ican”. As in “I can”, geddit? The idea is you go to THEIR SITE and “empower” yourself by interacting on THEIR TERMS on THEIR SERVER with other like-minded “empowered citizens” yak yak yak.
Well, thanks for telling me that “I can”, you stupid quango*. Like I needed your permission. (*Quasi-Autonomous Non-Government Organisation, in case you were wondering).
But that attitude is typical of the BBC, or any big media company…
“Come to OUR site and use OUR technology on OUR server and use OUR interface based on OUR agenda… so when it takes off the and the media gets a hold of the story they’ll write about OUR site and OUR technology and OUR agenda…”
i.e. “WE HAVE TO OWN THE MEANS OF CONVERSATION.”
It’s not just they think an orchestra needs a good conductor. They assume they have a God-given right to own the musical instruments as well.
“Owning the means of conversation.” Remember that term. It’s a good one.
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This cartoon is about the film biz. But it could apply to a lot of industries, including my chosen profession.
A lot of us advertising hacks often wonder if Madison Avenue is just going through a period of readjustment, or is it in permanent meltdown, a-la the record industry?
The answer, of course, is both. People will always have stuff to sell, and there will always be a market for finding cheaper and better ways to empty the warehouse. That area of the business interests me.
But advertising as a commercially exploitable “cult of creativity” has been (quite rightly) in meltdown for over a decade, just few people spotted it.
April 11, 2004
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Regular readers of gapingvoid are asked to help support the site by buying the occasional box of blogcards. Thank you.
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One of the companies I’m working with, Evo Limo, just got an article in the New York Times.
The two men, who had virtually no automotive experience but a lot of Hollywood connections, have built a bustling business in Los Angeles by offering environmentally friendly but cool rides. Their Evo boutique limo service features three black S.U.V.‘s much like Mr. Richardson’s. The vehicles also have Game Boy consoles and minibars stocked with organic goodies like soy-based vodkas and soft drinks made from green tea. Celebrities like Cameron Diaz and Woody Harrelson are regular customers.
(Evo Limosine homepage here)
The two Los Angelinos who founded Evo were seriously sick of the nebulous nature of the media/entertainment business they were in. So they bagged it and got into engines and cars. It worked.
Their company provides a useful, valuable service that ties directly into the main industry where they live. The real genius is that, unlike writing screenplays, producing TV pilots, turning up for auditions etc etc, not a lot of other people are doing it.
“Creativity in everything but the actual business you’re in” is a funny phenomenon I regularly see among the “creative” professions. Usually their answer to a business problem is “Work harder”, “Accept less money”, “Kiss more ass” or “Take fewer drugs”. But “Find a new business model” is often the last thing on the list.
It should be the first.
April 10, 2004
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Good Clay Shirky interview over at Gothamist.
“So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”
April 9, 2004
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Cynthia Rockwell’s blogcards arrived. She seems happy enough with ‘em. Happy enough to blog about it, anyway. Heh.
(order blogcards here)
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“Watercooler”
Back when I worked for a large advertising agency as a young rookie, it used to just bother me how much the “Watercooler Gang” just kvetched all the time. The “Watercooler Gang” was my term for what was still allowed to exist in the industry back then. Packs of second-rate creatives, many years passed their sell-by date, being squeezed by the Creative Directors for every last ounce of juice they had, till it came time to firing them on the cheap. Taking too many trips to the watercooler and coming back drunk from lunch far too often. Working late nights and weekends on all the boring-but-profitable accounts. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze
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RSS in ten words or less…
“Email, but you only get messages your computer asks for.”
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Young Adam, the Ewan McGregor movie directed by one of my best friends, Dave Mackenzie, opens in the States in a week i.e. Friday, 16th April.
I wish I had more info to give you. I’ve been bugging the producers about trying to get listings to post here, but it and they have not been forthcoming. I don’t think they quite “get” how the internet, particularly the blogosphere works… but then very few people do.
Anyway, check your local rag (e.g. The Village Voice, Chicago Reader etc.) to see if it’s coming to a cinema near you etc.
Just got a nice e-mail from Dave. He’s currently in LA, doing a whirlwind PR tour with Tilda Swinton. Lots of work. Nice hotels that you don’t stay in for very long before you’re whisked away to another press meeting or airport.
Anyway, it’s all exciting stuff.
