[Repost from my entry at the openexchange.org.]

Created by Google Creative Labs,”3 Dream’s In Black” is part art experiment, musical collaboration, part CGI video and breakthrough web coding assignment. Driving a culture of experimentation, all Googler’s are encouraged to pursue experiments both relatable and non-relatable to Google’s business. All to drive a passion of innovation.

How Google makes innovation part of the cultural fabric, not a project or a siloed process.

• Democratizing Ideas. Engage “the people.” Have people magnify the mania and become your evangelists. The user is your marketer.
• Gaining Credibility through the right partners: With finesse of smart salesmanship to make ideas happen.
• Challenging conventions. Question how things should be done (e.g., YouTube and the Guggenheim??)
• Don’t do marketing. Solve problems.
• Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two. What’s the emotion behind the idea? * taken from Jeffrey Davis’s blog, post his visit to Google Creative Labs.

Rome: 3 Dream’s in Black is an impressive feat with famous musicians including DJ Dangermouse of Gnarls Barkley fame, Jack White and Nora Jones. For most of us it might appear interesting, but not far from what we expect from video games and animated movies. The true stunner, is that this was essentially built with web code, “Web GL-JavaScript” and HTML 5. And.. through a Google Chrome Browser, you can steer and immerse yourself within it.

Amazing. Say hello to the future, the 3D virtual web experience.

Great stuff under the direction Chris Milk, Google Creative Director, Aaron Koblin and @radical media. More about the project at Mashable.

[Quote from Oscar Wilde.  As presented by Jeff Swystun of DDB in "Brand Consistency Redefined"]

Recently,  A colleague asked me for some thoughts on “The Importance of Brand Consistency.”   I haven’t jumped down the branding philosophy rabbit hole in some time, but this topic is one that hits close to home.  Having bridged the world of traditional brand planning, identity design, advertising and digital, it’s a big topic to chew on.  My simple answer:

“Brand Consistency has never been more important.  Brand Consistency has never been more meaningless.”

Consistency has had to evolve to be more nuanced, take into account media fragmentation.  In fact, because a brand’s platform to connect with people has expanded so much and (of course) the “consumers are control” thing, consistency has had to evolve to a brand focusing less on being consistent and more on becoming a brand in concert with it’s activity and the people it connects with. There’s a ton of rationale out there for this, but I particularly like this articulation by friend and colleague from Upstream, Tim Sweeney.

There is no average consumer so brands should be customized to individuals

Brands should/must conform to different contexts people may be in… which runs contrary to consistency.

Articulations of this aren’t completely common I find.  More so, I think there’s a ton of smart marketers that haven’t really been exposed to this change in paradigm beyond CGM driven ad campaigns and talks on transmedia.  Corporate communications leaders and the passionate designers responsible for brand guidelines and identity find themselves in the mostly fruitless job of playing brand cop.  They keep on pounding the drum of consistency

Maybe the job of brand identity management should be more orchestral and open minded.  It certainly would make people lives somewhat easier.  “Open source” branding may just work, though not perfect.  Releasing your  control as a brand manager, creative designer and identity manager to the loose architecture of brand experience design might, in fact, be liberating.  And it doesn’t have to mean crowdsourcing and foresaking the beauty of thoughtful design.

Here’s the story I tell about the (r)evolution of consistency as it relates to brand strategy and brand identity:

1) Brand consistency is as important as ever in a digital, disrupted media world..but the notion of how it works and is applied is changing dramatically.

2) A Brand and it’s consistency has traditionally been attached to Brand Identity.  Today it’s important that one not equate THE Brand as being THE Brand Identity, rather Brand Identity is a part of the overall Brand Experience.  In a traditional media world Identity led the process and Brand consistency was an effective method.  With media fragmentation, replicated consistency in look, tone, feel and message shifts to a need for a connected Brand Experience and story across mediums, with shifting narrative and presentation.

3) More specifically, a Brand Experience must retain element of consistency, but be fluid with a narrative arc.  The caution is that exact sameness is easier to tune out for consumers in a fragmented media landscape.  A connected less, literal Identity can actually help retain attention and reinforce the backfrop of Brand Identity’s intent.  Guidelines apply but may be less singular and prescriptive.

4) “Branding is now like conducting a symphony… With many acts, movements, instruments, players and styles that compliment one another to engage… to create resonance.”

5) We believe Identity elements must retain a connected, reminiscent and identifiable sameness in message and presentation.  However, it does not necessarily need to be exactly executed to template.  Big brands are taking note of this, and shift and change their look and message continuously, yet lead consumers to the same conclusion, reinforce the same purpose. This is particularly the case given the impact of consumer generated media. Entertainment brands have evolved to allow consumers to take the elements of their content and brands, be creative with it and execute differently yet allowing for it to come “from the same place”. This approach embracing an open brand has led to the strategy of Transmedia Brand Planning.

6) Brands are keeping a degree of control of their brand, and it’s identity by recognizing the need to architect message, media and design in context to where the message is.  By understanding how it intersects with a consumers life… Their journey, by intersecting in the right place and the right time.  By being relevant, useful and meaning to these places and times. For brands like Apple, Whole Foods, Method, Nike and Coca Cola Brand Purpose becomes it’s bellwether for consistency.

7) The result is that Brands are spending less time and effort managing the executional elements of Brand Identity.  Rather, they are spending more time being articulate across the brand experience and keeping consistency in their Brand Purpose and Brand Experience.

More context from Henry Jenkins: Transmedia’s Role in the Shifting Experience of Brands:

More written examples.

* A great white paper on evolution of consistency by DDB from Jeff Swystun/2007: Brand Consistency.

* The digital marketer point of view on consistency: Brand Consistency is Killing Digital Advertising/ SXSW

* A POV on the continued importance of a crafted Identity: Who Care’s What Your Logo Looks Like?

* A metaphor for your marketing, Branding “in concert”: Apple is the new Grateful Dead.

* Open marketing, the storytelling experience of a transmedia centered brand: Transmedia Planning

Though not blogging , I have been pulling together thinking and training in the digital space – content to help senior marketing and business folks understand the digital landscape.  Here’s an example of our latest long form work: Social Evolution: What’s Next For Social Media Marketing 2011. A collaboration with Graham Saxton, Ipsos Global Insights Director .

Share, steal.. and of course share-and-share alike.  Check out the Open Thinking Exchange blog at www.theopenexchange.org for more.

via whatconsumesme.com

an update of the XKCD classic

Posted via email from reeboot’s posterous

awesome.

First, one of the best planners and digital minds around, Helge Tenno and his thoughts on Retail:

.. and PSFK’s look:

PS: Step back to Wired a Magazine flashback (1998) to the future to see where the bar is set for future retail predictions:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.07/negroponte.html

via mashable.com

…a surprising list eh? More over at Mashable.
(http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/social-media-company-employees/)

Posted via web from experiencefreak

via aiga.org

Continuing my latest dive into design fiction, check out this collaboration between Penguin Book and Six To Start an experiential design firm in London. Perhaps a bit ahead of it’s time (launched in 2008) these stories used Google maps and other immersive online media, rolling out over the course of six weeks. Very cool concept for marketers and advertisers to think about as a case study when creating experiential narratives.

See more via the AIGA blog: We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start by Holly Willis.

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

Design Fiction has been on my mind as of late. Particularly after hearing Bruce Sterling’s thinking about it’s role in experience design, product innovation and technology as well as other’s speaking from a designers point of view at SXSW 2010.

What follows is a design fiction exercise, wrapping a narrative around thoughts about the weird, wired world we live in and the tremendous social implications it has for possible futures.  William Gibson I’m not, but digest this and tell me what you think it means to us now and possibly what it could mean for the evolution of the web.   Indulge me while I surf through themes of the social web, digital immortality, privacy, an open data world, artificial intelligence and more, not in a blog post commentary but instead in a blurb of storytelling.

I’m Jack Meta and I’m a repo man of the digital conscience.

Let me give you the 30 second update. Life got pretty weird for the bio-brains soon after the AI-Data Flux. Once the open-conscious hippies broke the Googleplex server-farm wall and data burst through the behavioral floodgates, meatspace humanity found itself standing around more naked than a politician post-sex scandal. Funny that nobody saw their personal Peyton Place hidden in all those facebook posts, tweets and ISP logs long ago. Just plain stupid that nobody figured their conscious would get reassembled from all that data, through code lumps that algorithm-geeks created in their hobbyist spare time. You can be damn sure no one would want think about little Bobby and Sue talking to your long “dead”, pixellated great grandood-self in a kitsch retro-quaint Ed Hardy shirt, your abrupt and embarrassing re-entry into the world 70 years into the future. They didn’t think of any of this, not until open-data and uber-AI hit them in the skull like a mallet anyway.

But I’m a bitstream myself, so far be it for me to judge what the bio-cell’s thought about the weird world of digital immortality back in the day. I’m just here to clean up their act once they hit the biological brick wall and surrender their brains and personal lifestream to the meta-sphere.

What’s my game? I’m an identity moving van pulling up to my client’s scattered persona-attics to steal back their life in little bits and bytes. Then I spit polish, metatag and redflag pieces of digital conscience so it ain’t so boring, confusing or just plain dirty once it hits the AI’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not much of a combinatorial artist so I leave your final coming out party good-looks to my persona stylist biz partners. It seems the cyberpunk jokers that plugged me into the meta-sphere to do this job secretly watched antique’s roadshow a hundred years back. Surfing through the digital-conscience flea market is in my genes.

Anyhoo, good meeting you mate and welcome to the ‘sphere. I can tell you’ll get the hang of things pretty quick once you shake that linear, cerebral cortex processing hangover. I’ve gotta get back to work to pull this boring experiencefreak.com assignment. Mundane crap I tell ya and a pisser given it hit my approval cue right before the Charlie Sheen assignment of a lifetime hit the market. Just my luck. Now that would’ve been hella more hilarious than this grey haired, tech-fetish archival and family photo-pixel antique show.

See you ‘round. And remember, watch where you leave your digital droppings now that you’re back in action.

More on design fiction:

Near Futures Lab

Interactions Magazine

An Essay on Design Fiction

]]> http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/18/info-agent-man/feed/ 1 http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/ http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:13:21 +0000 andyhunter http://experiencefreak.com/blog/?p=1242 I’ve never been a huge Gary Vee follower, but right on for this video.  I think it represents emotions many feel after being so immersed in social media, the info rich web and culture of personal branding world.  The addictive nature, the distractions and the overwhelming opportunity to interact with others can stretch people to extremes.

I see this as a tipping point in culture, not just for Vee but for many early entries into social technology.  Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and others have seen, felt and are worried about how technology is effecting our ability to think, connect and be creative.

Get zen Gary, read, think.  Get at it.

[h/t to @alexknowshtml - dangerouslyawesome.com ]