a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…”
The scholar responsible for that article summed up the Apple experience:
“When you’re buying into Mac, you’re buying into an ideology. You’re buying into a community.”
It’s funny. In a day and age where the church is trying to figure out how to learn from Apple, Apple seems to have flipped the metaphorical apple cart – in basing its business practices on the church.
I haven’t seen Kick-Ass yet. But real life vigilante Super Heroes are pretty cool in a “don’t try this at home,” “what you’re doing is illegal and stupid” kind of way. You’ll find a bunch of Real Life Super Hero posts around these parts (check the tag below). Here’s a story about a little posse of heroes that covers the basic elements for your gang. If you do want to start one. Which you shouldn’t.
Z is the enforcer. His bedroom just has weights, a punching bag, and a mattress. Victim is the gadget man. He’s based out of town so operates a bit like Q from the Bond movies – shipping in gadgets and technology and scientifically tested armour. Zimmer is the medic. He also wears a blindingly bright light, Iron Man style, as part of his costume. He uses it to stun would be assailants. Tsaf is the group’s girl power. Her name is “fast” backwards. Lucid is extra muscle. Lucy the kitten is their animal mascot
They wear costumes:
“Z sits down and begins strapping on his full body armor, a homemade medley of leather, pads and stainless steel bits and pieces, which he describes as a “poor man’s Iron Man suit.” The suit includes boots, leg, knee and ankle pads. A pair of arm bracers he made out of leather and steel are attached to his arms with truck ties and work as both defense and offense. To complete the look, he wears a black Predator-type mask sure to creep out anyone who sees it on the street. He then puts on his “butcher mail,” a stab-proof apron of metal scales over a lightweight bulletproof vest, which he then covers with a sleeveless, brownleather zip-up.”
Functional costumes – no aesthetic but impractical spandex.
“Everything I wear is either protective gear or to blend in during plainclothes patrols, with gear underneath. No spandex. Ever,” Z explains. “If I ever wear spandex, I deserve to get shot down in the street like the dumbass that I am.”
By night they patrol the streets – essentially hoping to entrap bad people into doing bad things in their presence.
“The strategy is that Z will skate ahead on a longboard, a sturdy, fast skateboard made for cruising. The longboard is also a good excuse to be wearing a lot of protective gear. Next in the lineup is the bait (described as the “nucleus” of the patrol)—usually TSAF or Zimmer. In tonight’s case, TSAF wears a white dress, purple eye makeup and is carrying a bulky purse. She tries to lure predators looking for someone vulnerable. Zimmer follows on foot about a block behind her.
Lucid, if he were here, would act as a runner, skating back and forth on his longboard between the group members as they move forward. TSAF watches for Z; Zimmer watches for TSAF; and Lucid would be watching everyone. Communication is vital: All parties are connected by cell phone, ready to leap into action if anything happens.”
“TWO Victorian couples are suing doctors for failing to diagnose Down Syndrome in their unborn babies, denying them the chance to terminate the pregnancies.”
I hope the judge takes one look at this case and throws the couples on the street.
“The girl, 4, who now attends a specialist kindergarten, was born with heart, kidney and thyroid problems, can’t walk, and needs help feeding, her father said.
“Don’t get us wrong: we love our daughter. She’s part of our family, and we treat her like gold,” he said.”
So they’re saying “we love her, but we wish she had never been born.” That’s not love. That’s sick. You know who else wanted to breed disease out of the human gene pool through selective breeding programs…
I don’t often give serious parenting advice here. I know my audience. But my purpose for this post is twofold – first, to congratulate Steve Kryger from Communicate Jesus for this piece on Sydney Anglicans that has been syndicated on Gizmodo.com.au, and second, to share Steve’s list of ten tips for parents. I think they’re good, and a great acknowledgment that clean feed, or no clean feed, the issue requires a thought out approach from parents not a government mandate.
Understand what your child is doing online (put the computer in a public space, talk to your children, use accountability software).
Ask your child to explain to you what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
Talk to your child about your values, and how these should be lived out, regardless of the environment.
Filter the content that your family views online.
Understand the minimum age requirements for different websites and technologies (children under 13 should not be on Facebook).
Understand how these popular websites are used, and what the opportunities and threats are.
Understand what avenues are at your disposal if something goes wrong (e.g. your child’s Facebook account is hacked).
Consider how you will respond if you discover your child is acting inappropriately, or viewing inappropriate material.
Decide when or if your child will get a mobile phone.
Understand the new functions of mobile phones, and what the opportunities and threats are.
David Thorne, you’ve heard of him right? The guy who tried to pay his debts with a picture of a spider. Amongst other things (hit the David Thorne tag below for all his hijinks that I’ve previously featured).
You’d think, if you worked with such a renowned internet prankster, he’d be the last person you’d turn to for design help. Which is what his colleague did after her cat went missing. She asked for a “lost cat” poster – here are some of the suggested designs (read the email thread here).
I thought I’d share with you some tidbits from the newest edition/addition in my library. These are photos from my iPhone.
It’s brilliant. It opens with a statement I can paraphrase as: if you/r friend are/is overweight, not only is it the devil’s fault but you should question your salvation.
I’ll deal with the substance of the argument in a future post – but now I’m going to share with you some of what I think makes this book special – its style.
Some of its illustrations look like Chance cards from Monopoly:
With a bit of high art (which may suggest that the original sin was gluttony not disobedience).
The problem is your sub-conscious. It’s the Devil’s playground.
It’s this sort of advice that will set you on the path to skinniness:
It says: “A glass of water will do you for breakfast. It’s surprising how satisfying a glass of water can be.”
The Devil is an imp in a top hat.
He ends up in web of positive thinking and healthy eating advice:
I’ve only posted less than half the post-worthy illustrations here (and they’re photos from my iPhone). I’m hoping to post the rest in coming days/weeks in better quality and with the kind of analysis you’ve come to expect from St. Eutychus.
I trust you’ll enjoy this journey of self discovery thoroughly.
This Old Spice campaign is going to be dissected by social marketing students for years to come. It is almost perfectly executed (I can’t actually think of a flaw yet).
It all started with this critically successful commercial launched during this year’s Superbowl. A commercial which has now had more than 13 million views on YouTube.
It’s a one shot shoot, here’s the explanation of the process:
Here’s the accompanying 15 second ad.
Then there was an equally well executed follow up (with 7 million views).
That was apparently also shot in one take. Isaiah Mustafa, the actor (an ex NFL player) explains…
This was the point at which the Old Spice campaign went from well executed and hilarious commercial to social media phenomenon. They organised an online campaign where the Old Spice Guy responded, in video, to interactions from around the internet. Here he responds to popular tech blog Gizmodo:
Here he helps someone propose to his girlfriend:
Here he, as Old Spice Guy, responds to himself, Isaiah Mustafa…
“In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time… We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”
Here’s his sign off from a day of answering the audience:
It’s a campaign where everybody wins. Old Spice, the Creative company Wieden + Kennedy, the writers, Craig Allmen and Eric Kallman, the director and production company, and finally the actor himself.
Successful viral campaigns strike the right balance of humour, production quality, strategy, and level of interaction with the audience. If they’re pitched right they become juggernauts – like this one has – inspiring users to generate their own content. This is the Holy Grail of viral marketing. Getting people past talking about your product and into participating in your conversation.
Here’s an almost equally well produced parody.
This campaign, coupled with Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign from last year, will set the bar for thinking about integrating marketing campaigns across traditional and new media. It’s an amazingly well executed feat. To close, here’s an analysis of where advertising might go from this point, complete with a nice little quote about the social medium:
“Start here: as it became apparent that this wasn’t just a one-time media drop, but instead an ongoing live performance—a spectacle in progress—I was reminded of some thing that I heard Rex Sorgatz say years ago. I’ll paraphrase, broadly: blogs are actually more related to live theatre than they are to, say, newspapers. The things that make a blog good are almost exactly the things that make a live performance good—and the most important, the magic catalyst, is the interplay with the audience.”
Science has solved the great riddle of poultry origins – in a manner entirely consistent with the notion of an entity creating life (so don’t worry my fundamentalist brethren).
The chicken came first.
“It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,’ said Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University, who worked with counterparts at Warwick University.
‘The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process,’ he added.”
Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois [an author of a book on gaming] tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?
if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.
Here’s the rub. This is why you keep feeling compelled to play a stupid game. It’s social psychology.
“The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. “
Penn Jillette, half of Penn & Teller, is a famous illusionist who once even guest starred on the West Wing. He’s a pretty outspoken atheist, though he also reserves some praise for Christians who act in a way consistent with their beliefs. I posted a video from YouTube where he praised Christians who hand him Bibles a while ago, here it is again:
He was recently named the most influential performer in Las Vegas by one of the casino state’s media outlets – and in the interview he had this to say about why Penn and Teller don’t go after Islam like they do Christianity (and why they respect Christians for the way they take a verbal beating).
Are there any groups you won’t go after? We haven’t tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tacked Islam because we have families.
Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back … Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific.
“You do go after Christians, though … Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good f***ing Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.
This seems true of almost every atheist blog or book I read – Christianity is an easy target, mostly because “turn the other cheek” is a lower risk than “kill the infidels”…
“…if you read the Bible or the Koran or the Torah cover-to-cover I believe you will emerge from that as an atheist. I mean, you can read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, you can read “God Is Not Great” by Hitchens… but the Bible itself, will turn you atheist faster than anything.
Question: Why would reading the Bible make you an atheist?
Penn Jillette: I think because what we get told about the Bible is a lot of picking and choosing, when you see, you know, Lot’s daughter gang raped and beaten, and the Lord being okay with that; when you actually read about Abraham being willing to kill his son, when you actually read that; when you read the insanity of the talking snake; when you read the hostility towards homosexuals, towards women, the celebration of slavery; when you read in context, that “thou shalt not kill” means only in your own tribe—I mean, there’s no hint that it means humanity in general; that there’s no sense of a shared humanity, it’s all tribal; when you see a God that is jealous and insecure; when you see that there’s contradictions that show that it was clearly written hundreds of years after the supposed fact and full of contradictions. I think that anybody… you know, it’s like reading The Constitution of the United States of America. It’s been… it’s in English. You know, you don’t need someone to hold your hand. Just pick it up and read it. Just read what the First Amendment says and then read what the Bible says. Going back to the source material is always the best.”
It’s a shame that such a well thought out guy couldn’t engage with the notion of reading the Bible as a unified work rather than cherry picking stories he didn’t agree with and stories like the one of Lot’s daughter as though God was ok with it because it wasn’t the focus of the narrative… it’s like saying the author of a crime novel is ok with the crimes he describes…
Scent branding fascinates me. It seems so obvious. Appealing to all the senses – especially when taste is so related to smell. It’s like nailing two senses with one blow. I went to a tourism marketing seminar with Tom O’Toole, the owner of the Beechworth Bakery. One of the first things he did when turning the bakery into a landmark tourist attraction and nationally renowned bakery was to pump the smells from the kitchen out onto the street. I read elsewhere that fast food joints use similar strategies (which is why they always smell so good).
Smells effect us all. They trigger memories, comfort us, stimulate us, warn us off dodgy food… Jasmine is apparently as effective as valium. Smells are chemically complex – the aroma of your freshly ground pile of coffee can be formed by as many as 800 different aromatic compounds. Smell is powerful stuff – and besides food chains and deodorant manufacturers its been a pretty underutilised element of branding. Sure, we describe new purchases by their scent (cars, leather etc) – but this seems more a marker of quality than a factor in the purchase decision (though you wouldn’t buy a stinky new car). Scent marketers Air Aroma cite research that suggests that 75% of our daily emotions are triggered by smell.
The practice of creating artificial smells is pretty controversial (unless you’re a celebrity launching a perfume brand – ala Bruce Willis… because smelling like a sweaty male action figure is awesome.
Since Le Méridien was founded in 1972 by Air France, Penot and Roschi took a very old copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince—the author was a pilot—and had the rich smell of the book’s pages analyzed. (Capturing the scents of familiar objects is quite standard in this industry, though presumably the choice of this particular old book for the testing was more whimsical then determinative.) They used the results to create a scent, which they took to Ziegler. She decided it would be Le Méridien’s signature fragrance, its olfactory logo.
Scent branding isn’t new, the article above dates its use in travel to the 1970s – it even has a name for the part of your brain that the method targets: “Singapore Airlines has a branded scent… used in all of its planes, a light sweet scent like pure steam from fresh rice. If you’re booking a flight…you’ll find it that much harder to go with the competition because the Singapore scent builds the brand in the limbic system.”
The future of the hotel industry will apparently involve us selecting a scent for our room at check in, and the room smelling of roses (or whatever we choose) by the time we get to the door. Some people see this practice as a form of subliminal manipulation, or have problems with the ethics of the perfume industry.
Natalie Dee, a designer, very usefully put together this periodic table of smellements – a grading of smells we find pleasant or noxious.
And, incidentally, it’s now possible, through the availability of precise scientific measuring tools like mass-spectrometers (made famous by NCIS), to analyse a person’s “scent print”…
“Florida International University chemist Kenneth Furton studies the smells that might be of greatest use in a crime investigation. These, he says, are the ones that come from the hands. (Murderers rarely wield weapons in their underarms.) For the last five years, Furton has been cataloging the many chemicals that compose hand scent, including odoriferous acids, alcohols, aldehydes, hydrocarbons, esters, ketones, and nitrogen-containing compounds.”
Robyn tells me that using aromatic oils in the classroom also helped moderate behaviour – lavender calmed the kids down, lemon and eucalyptus perked them up.
Which all adds up to a compelling case for harnessing smells in branding – but is this an area churches should be playing in? Should we install ventilation systems dedicated to pumping the odour of a well read bible through the auditorium at reading time? Should we be pumping the smell of morning tea onto the street to entice people in on a Sunday? What smell do you think captures, or enhances the church experience? What did Jesus smell like? A mix of sawdust, dirt, and after his anointing a liberal dash of perfume. Was that the first case of scent branding?
