June 2009 – Page 2 – Andy writes!

When’s the last time you tried something crazy with a project?

I’m talking silly walk, mad-as-hell, call-the-whitecoats, dangerous-for-your-career kind of crazy.

Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I did something crazy, either.

How pitiful.

This AdAge post (hat tip: @frankmartin) — about Apple’s now-legendary Think Different ad campaign and one of the lions of advertising, Jay Chiat — got me to thinking about how tame and timid much of our marketing, PR and advertising ventures are. How much we settle for the timorous and the mediocre. How much of our work is the product of compromise and committees.

And how unfortunate that bloggers have to reach way back to the 1990s to find a single example of an ad that celebrates going against the grain.

It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs, isn’t it.

And I know I’m part of the problem. Hell, I had a hard time accepting the incorrect grammatical structure of Apple’s famous campaign, so you have to know that the wild and crazy stuff just doesn’t come naturally to me.

Maybe there are daring, beautifully subversive marketing campaigns in the works somewhere out there. But I don’t know of any — certainly not in the realm of higher education. Do you? (Well, okay, there’s this one, but it’s from the University of Phoenix, and they didn’t get where they are by playing it safe, so you expect something that goes against the grain.)

What do we need to do to bring crazy back?

Bart Cleveland, the guy who wrote the AdAge blog post mentioned above, point in that post to another article that says “the secret to staying relevant in advertising is twofold: mess with culture and help make companies successful.”

So, how are we messing with culture?

Cleveland thinks the script to the Think Different commercial “should be the mantra of our industry.” He’s talking about advertising. That’s true. But shouldn’t it also be the mantra for education?

Read the script and decide for yourself.

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them. Disagree with them.
Glorify, or vilify them.
About the only think you can’t do, is ignore them.
Because, they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to change the world,
Are the ones who do.

Now, go forth and get crazy with it.

P.S. 6/25/09 – I meant to work this recent Seth Godin post, On the road to mediocrity, into this post but forgot. It’s worth 30 seconds of your precious reading time.

In the days since the Iranian election and the protests that followed, much has been written, broadcast, tweeted and blogged about how Iranian citizens have seized the power of social media to report what is happening to the outside world. In the United States, the mainstream media has picked up on this phenomenon, but sadly most of the reporting has been about the cool factor of Twitter, amateur video, etc.

But a few mainstream media outlets are getting the hang of new media. They’re aggregating the citizen-journalist reports, lending context, and sharing with the rest of us. Mark Jones of Reuters highlights a few of them in his blog post about running web commentary on Iran.

The challenge of providing the latest to a world hungry for the news from Iran “is to match what TV stations can do when they switch between news bulletins to rolling 24 hour coverage,” Jones writes. “Only the web ought to be able to do so much more given its scope for interactivity.”

In an ideal world you’d want to provide the fastest, most thoroughly verified reports around the clock whether they or not they are from conventional journalists. And as a user I think you’d also want to be pointed in the direction of where you can find out more. If all this was easy then it would have been done by now. But it’s a lot of work. And all news organisations have had to strike compromises on one or more of those counts.

Live blogs that attempt to document the unrest in Iran — such as The Guardian’s and the New York Times lede blog — help to meet some of that need for information and blend the accounts of citizens on the ground with journalists’ analysis and annotation. Jones also discusses (briefly) reporters logs, which rely on the news organization’s staffers instead of citizen journalists, and “the most interesting approach,” aggregated information streaming in from “validated” citizen journalists, such as what Sky News is doing.

“None of these approaches has entirely nailed it,” Jones writes. In his perfect scenario, the ideal blend of mainstream and social-networking media would include:

Direct publishing by sources validated by the news organization
The ability for live blog anchors to republish and annotate external contributions
A means by which participants could add to or critique particular elements of the commentary

What about you? How do you think mainstream and newstream media should converge to cover this unfolding story?

Month: June 2009

Crazy talk