Karmic Birdseed

Cue shameless self-promotion plug: Red Bricks Media won an ADDY. Well, two to be exact: A gold and a silver for our work with Wells Fargo on an identity theft kit for prospects and clients.

Theresa Lee and I (Bain Smith) worked hard on this project. She created a knockout design using the ancient Wells Fargo trunk and lock imagery, to convey the safety that Wells Fargo wants its customers to associate with the brand.

The copywriting was dry as far as copy goes (it is a bank anyway), but I did a lot of research for a 45-slide presentation that went along with the direct mail piece, which contained a letter, three pamphlets and an invitation to join the presentation seminar.

If you’re interested in working with Red Bricks Media on direct mail or other marketing pieces, contact us at sales [at] redbricksmedia [dot] com. We got some love for you. And some awards too.

UPDATE: We also won a silver ADDY, but not for Wells Fargo. We won it for an alternate reality buzz marketing campaign on behalf of THQ and its new first-person player game, Frontlines: Fuel of War. Congratulations go out to Peter Vaughan, aka the Vague Panther, for steering this campaign to an award-winning, very successful finish.

Shepard Fairey is a plagiarist. If you read the headline and got fired up about defending how politically empowered and clever Shepard is, take a gander as this cogent essay outlining why Shepard Fairey is a plagiarist.

He has made millions — without attribution or acknowledgement — by lifting legitimate artists’ work, or using symbols he’s appropriated for profit that bear a likeness to, say, a Nazi skull and crossbones.

It steams me that OBEY Industries — whose home page again plagiarizes Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “the medium is the message” — has created a cashcow, without any commitment to originality or authenticity.

Artists can’t help but stand on the shoulders of giants (pun intended) who came before them in borrowing themes, styles and ideas of predecessors, but it is Shepard’s refusal to acknowledge — and go so far as copyright as his own — the stolen work he shows in galleries, makes tons of cake from and pawns off as his own, that puts him in a bucket of pizzle alongside Kenny G playing over the recordings of Louis Armstrong.

Shepard Fairey has taken a huge turd on originality, responsibility and respect for the past; to think that people wouldn’t respond to his gutless acts of plagiarism is naive.

It’s important to defend art and the real artists who make it from hubris like this, and it’s important to speak up on the subject if you have anything creative at all to share with the world.

Shepard: this is for the dead artists who can’t do it for themselves.

I’ve sequestered myself in the deepest recesses of the Red Bricks Media web laboratory this week, poring over mountains of data, reading exhaustive summaries of research from all over the world, and mixing beakers full of consumer behavior patterns, all in hopes of achieving that perfect alchemy known as Predictions for online marketing in 2008.

So without further ado, let’s get down to brass tacks.

1) Social networking will continue its meteoric rise and touch more people in more places in 2008.

While “socialnetworkitis” is a real concern, any rumors of social networking’s demise are greatly exaggerated, and I’ll tell you why. There are approximately two things that make the web interesting: content and people, especially people you know. So it stands to reason that social networks, whether Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, or another as yet undiscovered network, will continue to attract zillions of eyeballs and provide unparalleled levels of “stickiness” to their users.

The difference in 2008? Since people create the content these social networks profit from, expect to see new networks pop up that pay users for their participation.

2) StumbleUpon will become a household name in 2008. Pretty soon more people will stop googlin’ and start stumblin’.

StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering (an automated process combining human opinions and machine learning of personal preference) to help you explore a rich, vast variety of content you would never see otherwise, and rate it with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down via an easily downloadable toolbar.

It leads to unexpected discoveries, and dare I say it: Fun. There are myriad features that make it even stickier, but StumbleUpon has single-handedly rekindled my love of the web.

3) Twitter, while not for everyone, will continue to influence the influencers and make waves in 2008.

I mean it: Twitter is not for everyone. But for those who crave direct, brain-to-keypad-to-eyeball stream-of-consciousness interaction with people they like, respect, look up to, or are just plain curious about, it can be an experiential revelation, unearthing information, news and opinions, literally as they are happening. Companies and others are catching on to this new info-delivery platform, and people are making a living from it.

4) Advertising on video sharing sites and mobile devices will increase, and consumer noses will turn toward the sky in response. If you’re still in doubt, read this prescient manifesto for more on why.

Today’s consumers are not a TV generation. Video advertising is interruption marketing, and consumers don’t play that game anymore (TiVo anyone?). The same goes for mobile ads, except it’s an even more personal invasion of privacy and space.

Smart marketers, responding to the challenge, will come up with new, innovative ways to engage and “go steady” with the audience beyond sticking ads in their face. It’s already happening. Video and video game product placement is increasing, and mobile apps (widgets) that engage and help the audience will become the norm on mobile phones.

5) A backlash occurs against obsessive, exhaustive communication, connectedness and the glut of “gadgetry.”

It’s only a matter of time before people stop IM’ing the person two feet to their left, rest those stiff, fatigued Blackberry thumbs, take the Bluetooths and iPod earbuds out of their ears, and engage in more honest, real conversations, offline and face-to-face with other human beings.

Don’t forget that ultimately there is a reason they call it word of mouth marketing, because the real marketing gets going when face-to-face conversation is flowing.

These are my modest marketing-related predictions for 2008. Now back to the lab.

I like to support my friends by blogging about their good work. In this case, the work is better than good. You can take a look at it here: http://www.getblake.com

In Charles’ words:

“The Blake brand is pretty unique….they only do small lots of shirts and are not really into big ecommerce. The site is all Flash (since they did not want ecommerce and wanted to incorporate video). It is basically an interactive catalog. The cool thing is that we are going to be shooting a film chapter by chapter over the next year that tells the story of this fictitious Blake guy (me). Every other month or so a new video will go up on the site, which builds on the previous and reveals insights into a larger story that is unfolding……next shoot is fly fishing in the Bahamas.”

While infinitely jealous of the fishing trip plans, I can still marvel at the eloquence of the visual delivery, and speaking of eloquence, the copywriting is relaxed and, how shall I say? Beachy.

If you’re wondering, Charles is the guy biking across the page. This is his design shop: http://www.linearchitecture.com

Make sure to tune in for future installments of the Blake story.

Facebook, the darling du jour of social networking, recently rolled out a new ad system with the clever and daring title, Facebook Social Ads. Don’t let the mundane title deceive you, however, because this ad platform is anything but business as usual for consumers and advertisers.

Two weeks ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced, “Facebook Social Ads represents a completely new way of advertising online,” adding that “nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend.” So what is so completely new and revolutionary about Facebook Social Ads?

Peering under the hood of this beast, we see that there are actually four new elements: Facebook Beacon, Facebook Pages, Facebook Insights, and Facebook Polls. (The previously released, much-heralded Facebook Platform has made waves since its introduction in April by allowing third-party developers to create applications (read: widgets) that integrate deeply with Facebook.)

Facebook Pages allows companies to create and maintain a page that serves as a “brand home base” for companies like Coca Cola and Verizon. Nothing new here. Myspace has been doing this for years. Facebook Insights and Facebook Polls are both tools provided for advertisers to research and mine the very granular, very valuable information in the Facebook social graph for authentic data about Facebook consumers, in real time, so as to make informed decisions about how to advertise to their audience. Nothing new here either. This is Google Analytics, Facebook-style.

Clearly, the most unorthodox and controversial piece of this glistening new platform is Facebook Beacon, which launched with the participation of 44 big-name ecommerce websites, including the likes of eBay, Blockbuster, NYTimes.com, Sony Pictures, Overstock.com and Yelp. Facebook Beacon allows users to “share information” from these and other participating websites for distribution in their Facebook friend network via the Facebook News Feed feature. This information includes actions like product purchases, video views, reviewing businesses or recipes, signing up for a service, or adding items to a wish list.

Facebook states that it provides advanced privacy controls so that users can decide whether to distribute specific actions from participating sites with their friends, but many are already skeptical of this ostensible privacy protection, and I’ll attempt to explain why.

Let’s say you purchase a movie from a Facebook Beacon-enabled website like Blockbuster. It will ask you in a pop-up if you’d like to inform Facebook friends that you bought a movie. There is an opt-out feature proffered (no opt-in feature, an immediate privacy concern and marketing worst practice). If you choose not to respond after 15 seconds, the pop-up goes away, sending a default “yes” answer to Facebook.

First, this default assumption of Facebook’s is presumptuous at best and malicious at worst, because it assumes that no answer at all is a yes answer, which—last time I checked—is giving someone’s answer for them. This default assumption is not the kind of thing to inspire confidence in users who, until recently, reveled inside their gated “dot edu” network of collegiate exclusivity.

Second, there is no universal opt-out button provided that allows Facebook users to say, “I don’t want any of this at all, ever.” As a Facebook user, you will need to opt out of every single website that employs Facebook Beacon that you visit, even if that means doing so dozens of times. Is something starting to smell a little funny?

My third concern may be the most controversial. When a browser loads a page or file from a Beacon-enabled site, standard information is sent back to the Facebook web server. By way of example, when a Facebook user loads a Blockbuster page, s/he is also loading a Facebook page, because there are three lines of Facebook javascript code added on. What does this all mean? Well, any time you load a third-party, Beacon-enabled page, Facebook knows exactly what you are looking at, including your clickstream and click path data, precisely correlated to your Facebook identity, whether or not you want to share your actions with friends in the News Feed. Does this sound a little Big Brother to you?

I guess the big question to ask a Facebook user is this: do you want your friend network to know what color socks you bought at Overstock.com, or which article you just read on NYTimes.com? It’s a rhetorical question, but I’m interested to hear people’s opinions about this.

Ultimately, social networks are used for exchanging social information and staying in touch with your friends, family and long-lost roommates, not for buying and selling things and interacting with enterprises. If this Facebook group is any indication of the rising tide of contempt against this platform, Facebook better think a little harder about how it wants to marry its beloved “social graph” to the whims of the almighty dollar, or risk a social network’s worst nightmare: irrelevancy.

Hello blogos-fear,

I will shamelessly plug this video that the creative team at Red Bricks Media recently produced. It was hard work - and a lot of fun - to make, and it supports the efforts of San Francisco SAFE, a truly unique non-profit here in San Francisco that is dedicated to educating the public about crime prevention and personal safety. I want to thank fellow Karmic Birdseed bloggers Peter Vaughan and Kathy Guis, as well as Josh Borgschulte and Alan Peng, for their help in making this film special.

Feedback is more than welcome, it’s encouraged. Or better yet, you can help SAFE by donating money, your time, or buying some SAFE gear here: http://www.sfsafe.org/4ych_donate.htm

End shameless plug.

Props to Bain for finding the hilarious “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Warning: If you become obsessed easily, do not visit this blog. “It will drive you insane.”

Hate to brag, but my prediction came true. People are bragging about spending $1,000 on the new Radiohead album. It has become more about protest… Also heard a rumor that 1.2 million downloads have been made. We’ll have to wait to see how much profit…

Everything. The band that has done the most for music since the Beatles (yes, I’m a fan) has done it again. However, this time it’s less about the music and more about giving labels the middle finger. By deciding to release their latest album through the web without the aid of any record label, Radiohead is officially conducting an experiment in consumer faith.

Not only can you decide to pay whatever you want for the album, but Radiohead has been pretty vague about their, ahem, copyright policy. Am I finally free to pass it on to friends without fear of an FBI agent flying through my bedroom window and confiscating my computer? More importantly, should I share it? Can I claim to be a true fan and only pay one dollar for an album I have been waiting four years for?

I’m sure that most of you would say: “Hey, they don’t care anymore, they just want to get their music out there as best they can. The live show is where they’ll make the money.” Well, ok. But consider this - wasn’t the whole idea of piracy supposed to be about protesting a record label’s capitalist greed? Weren’t album prices so high because they took a chunk of the profits for themselves and left the band with next to nothing? At least that’s how it seemed to be spun. I hope it wasn’t just a way for you to cover up the fact that you actually are - oh no! - stealing.

Now that Radiohead has eliminated the middleman, we already know all the profits are going directly to them. The amount you choose to pay for the album is not only a vote of confidence in their music, but also how badly you want them to keep making music in the future. Thus, Radiohead has somehow shifted the guilt away from labels and put it squarely on the fans. After all, if they don’t turn a profit with this little experiment, who else is left to blame? (Well, I guess you could say the music itself, but come on, we’re talking about Radiohead!!!!)

In fact, as marketers and advertisers, I think we could all learn a little from Radiohead. Trusting the consumer? Wow, what a refreshing way to look at things. Prediction: Not only do I think that this album will turn a massive profit, becoming a form of protest against the distrust record labels treated us with all these years, but I also think it will become a bragging right amongst hardcore Radiohead fans to share how much they bought the album for.

So, how much did I pay? 15 bucks.

Does anyone else think the summer iPod ads are a little racist?

Whew. Its summer. Its Hot. Its Steamy. And the natives are going craaaa-ay-zeeee!

Imagine the pitch meeting for those fluorescent iPod ads that dominated San Francisco’s billboards this summer. “Ok Steve, so we are sticking with the silhouette thing, but this time, we are going tropical! The background will be jungle-icious ferns and tropical flowers. And best of all, all of the figures will be noticeably not-white! They will be dancing even more wildly than the striped-shirt indie kids we slapped all over San Fran in spring! They will throw up their bare feet! They will shake their dreads! They will epitomize the subtlety of modern-day American racial stereotyping!”

Gag me.

This is why advertisements can be so dangerous. Consciously or no, our brains register these subtle signals and incorporate them into our consciousnesses. Ads like these, created by talented people for a cutting-edge company, remind us that racism comes at us from every angle.

And it’s not just about race, it’s not that simple. These ads are weirdly colonial. It’s like they are saying “Hey you! Look at these tropical people! Whew! Hot! Fun! Exotic! For Your Enjoyment! And after the show, be sure to visit the four star buffet on the upper deck!”

I really want your opinion. Am I the only one offended by these ads?