Ideas that can be advertised

I've written about moving from advertising ideas to ideas that can be advertised a fair bit recently, but Gareth Kay sums up exactly what that means and why it is important in this 5 minute call to arms for the communications industry. There are some great quotes, drawing on Andrew Ehrenberg and Mark Earls:

We should be Bower Birds not peacock tails

Ideas that do... that do things with and for people, not at and to them

Ideas that aren't advertising ideas, but ideas that can be advertised

We think we have to change minds in order to change behaviour, when in fact the opposite is true..

Anyway... you should watch it

(HT to Jon Howard)

What he said...

Sony Ericsson's SMAA and the theft of ideas

SMEBS Watch - Meet Andrew from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This was a really funny thing that Marcus did a few months ago - it's part of his campaign to warn about the dangers of Social Media Expert Burnout Syndrome (S.M.E.B.S.), which was also tied up in the Tweetreading phenomenon - now lots of us spend far too much time getting far too excited about the next big thing in our day jobs, and stuff like this pulls apart the pomposity of it all, which is why it makes me laugh. Out loud. A lot. And why I thought that there was something familiar about the Sony Ericsson campaign for the SMAA (Social Media Addicts Association.... see any similarities yet?)

There's more of this stuff at http://stopwritingonmywall.com/index.html, which is worth a look, as some of it actually uses whole chunks of Marcus's stuff. The agency behind this is Nascom in Belgium. Hopefully Copyc*nts will pick up on this soon, because it is one thing borrowing ideas from movies or TV shows, which are popular enough for viewers to understand how an idea references another idea. It is a totally different thing to steal ideas that have been shared around small groups of people and pass them off as your own when selling them on to major brands. Nascom call themselves a digital agency on their website, but they miss the most basic truth about the internet: everything is about reputation. Linking and referencing builds reputation. Steal and lose it.

UPDATE - @minorissues and @jannikolaas of Nascom reply to Marcus's version of events

#TwitterNovel: Writing things (in 140 characters or less)

There's been lots of 'how to use Twitter' articles been flying around in the last week, some good (Wall Street Journal, FT), some less so (Shortlist). And ad agencies are not immune - this Slideshare deck from BBH/MadeByMany is a great intro that also starts to talk about how the service has been used to publicise things other than the people using it. The challenge for ad agencies joining in is all around the 140 character limit: what can actually be said in 140 characters (or less)?

In terms of narrative, 'flash fiction' predates short message formats, and although the genre tends to be Six Sentences, or even One Sentence that take the 'short story' to its logical conclusion, the genre tends to focus on narrative under 1000 words. The goal of this style of writing is to create narrative that exists in isolation of other reference points within pre-defined limitations. Kind of like what Twaiku (Twitter Haiku) does already within Twitter, but with more words to play with.

But for the communications business the 'in isolation of other reference points' bit is irrelevant: nothing exists outside of the framework of cultural and commercial significance, and everything contributes to it. So 140 characters is not the limitation for telling a story, rather an opportunity to reference the existing story.

So I was thinking along these lines after reading some Twaikus, and wondered how big an idea you can condense into 140 characters if everyone knows the original idea. My attempts are below, which I'll also publish on Twitter as it seems a much more relevant medium than here. Please add to comments if you want join in, but again, it seems like something that shouldn't really exist in a blog environment, so maybe better to use #TwitterNovel (actually that's giong to make it 127 characters or less, and every character counts...)

His Dark Materials

Most conspiracy theories are true, but only kids and physicists know it. BTW Milton was right, Satan’s a dude

Lord of the Rings

Get off your arse. You’ll be surprised what you achieve. Look, there’s King Arthur with the Romans

The Great Gatsby

Maybe boy meets girl, maybe girl rejects boy, maybe boy wins girl back. Who knows, sounds good though, eh?

Catch 22

War? LOL that’s sane compared to people. I’m the only normal one here. Don’t trust the normal ones. Jump!

The Beach

Smug narcissistic backpacker seeks similar for utopian idyll. GSOH unnecessary. May lead to reality TV show