Using the Christmas break to catch up on a backlog of reading, and this passage on how reading inspires creativity (because innovative ideas are usually derivatives with enhancements) is the perfect reminder of why I should do this more often:
“When you read you might hear voices of the dead that make your hair stand on end, or that trigger in you a thought analogous to the founding thought and prompt you to write a response that grows from the times you live in, and differs from the earlier text simply because times and thinking and words have changed… You may see new things in the earlier text, and so give something back to it.”
Want to be more creative in the new year? Read more. Watch more. Listen more. Consume more. Because the greater the range of sources of inspiration you expose yourself to, the more varied and interesting your output.
Do “what the best poets do, trying to think *behind* the words… whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street…”
A good new year’s resolution, that: Think *behind* the words.
Everyone’s going to be sharing this NYT piece on location data – and rightly so. Scary stuff, with some superb journalism backed up with excellent presentation that should make the telecoms, tech and advertising industries (as well as regulators) all take a good hard look at themselves.
But the real challenge (and huge opportunity) is finding ways to enable safe sharing of this kind of data without impeaching on privacy or personal security. Because – even anonymised – this kind of data can lead to insanely useful insight that goes far, far beyond serving up targeted advertising:
“Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.”
This isn’t a problem with the concept of location tracking. It’s a problem with the execution.
There’s nothing to overly worry us human creatives so far, based on the examples on show here – unless you’re a fan of surrealism and the avant garde, that is… Still, there’s a lot of promise. After all, “A machine that can caption images is a machine that can describe or relate to what it sees in a highly intelligent way.” Give this tech time, and it will get more sophisticated, and harder to tell from human creative.
The potential to use AI to reinterpret disparate inputs into new creative forms – poems based on images, an experimental novel based on the inputs of GPS from a road trip – is definitely the kind of thing to get creative directors’ creative juices flowing. AI can already write, paint, compose music and create photo-realistic images. How can we deploy it to boost human creativity?
Most brands know what they look like, what their tone of voice is. If you could programme an interpretative AI with your brand’s key attributes and ask it to reinterpret the world around it, what would the results be?
The answer might be meaningless nonsense, but it sure would be fun to find out.
A postmodern, magic realist extended analogy about efforts to recover a pre-colonial sense of identity and belonging? Yes. Very much yes.
Brutal in places, though, as I suppose should be expected from a book that opens with a murder and that revolves around a curse – but that magical element is more subtle for the most part. It’s more a McGuffin than central, and the book more realist than magic realist for the most part.
The true centrality is instead Uganda itself – a country invented by outsiders who couldn’t pronounce its name, torn apart and warily trying to put itself back together while trying to avoid having to look too closely at its past.
So many very well thought-through metaphors, many of which I’m sure I’ve missed in my ignorance – but a superbly constructed and considered book.
One of the better books in the series, and certainly the most adult in terms of content. Contains a number of pretty clear parallels with the real-world events of the last few years, from the refugee crisis to dodgy, divisive politics – as well as almost certainly not child-friendly descriptions of how men leer at young women, and even a brutal attempted rape.
There are some more suspect elements too, from stereotypical portrayals of non-English people and cultures (even the Welsh are all miners, and people from the Middle East all seem to be either downtrodden victims of oppression or oppressors, with little in between) to some familiar characters behaving in ways that seem unlikely based on past behaviour in previous books.
There’s a fair bit of quite simplistic philosophising as well, but of a rather more pretentious kind than the straight-up Atheism 101 of The Amber Spyglass, which again suddenly pulls you back into realising this is still a book for kids / teens.
This shouldn’t be a surprise – of *course* it’s a kids book – but tonally it makes the whole feel inconsistent, as Pullman evidently has aspirations for this to appeal to an older audience – and to really *say* something, especially in the latter parts – but can’t quite break out if the writing for kids style that nudges him into a less complex view of the world.
Still a solid four stars on a re-read, despite getting a bit unsubtle and preachy in places. Still kinda impressed that this got published as a book for kids 20 years ago, considering how soon after the pissy responses to things like The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ that was.
The strange thing is the logical inconsistency in the anti-religion message.
This is a book that basically says religion is actively bad – but:
1) The final message is that something went wrong when science arrived. It’s science that is the cause of Dust leaving the universe – in the age of religious credulity, which Pullman dislikes so much, Dust was stable and even growing. The only way to reverse the damage caused by the Subtle Knife (a product of the new science in the same way Newton was) is to meticulously fix the damage it’s caused and destroy the knife. The message there? Science is bad, and the universe was healthier in the age of religion.
2) At the same time, “The Authority” (aka God) turns out to be a delicate, senile, but seemingly benevolent being who – despite having been set up as something evil and a usurper – has himself been usurped by a much more malevolent, lust-filled angel (who used to be a man). Every other angel we meet is also benevolent. The implication? Not aspects of religion are literally true (god and angels both really exist, and are “good” despite the protestations that there’s no such thing as good and evil), and it’s only humans who have perverted it – be it ex-human angel usurpers or the fanatics of the Church.
3) The world of the mulefa – with its natural roads, seed pod wheels, and creatures perfectly evolved to use those wheels – is repeatedly hinted at being evidence of something closer to intelligent design than evolution. And “the Creator” is mentioned on a few occasions throughout the seriea in a way that heavily implies this was a literally true being, again supporting the core idea if (Christian) religion of a created universe.
4) The alethiometer allows Lyra to communicate with some kind of (never fully explained) higher power that reveals “truth” and appears to be omniscient, aware of the future as well as the present. This same force – and the witches’ prophecy – firmly underscore the idea that there is such a thing as fate / predestination. Despite suggestions that Lyra may not follow her fate, or that her destiny could be shifted by others, follow it she does. Is there actually free will in Pullman’s universe? It seems unlikely. Everything happens for a reason. The higher power, whatever it is, knows best.
The implication is, therefore, not that atheism is the way forward, as I remembered it, but only that organised religion has perverted the deeper literal truths underlying Christianity. Which makes this a much more conservative trilogy than I remembered it – effectively a fantasy version of Martin Luther.
A strange, dreamlike extended metaphor for the eastern European experience of the mid-late 20th century.
After the shift in tone and narrative between books one and two, it wraps up with a third book of gloriously appropriate confusing ambiguity about the nature of identity and truth.
Constantly odd, occasionally nasty, sometimes showing warmth and kindness, but always detached, it’s surprisingly readable and engaging considering the unlikeable nature of the main character(s?) / narrator(s?). Four stars simply because it’s hard to love a book like this – but very easy to admire.
Impressive in ambition, wildly erratic in execution.
Parts of this overview of Western philosophy and thinking (including psychology, science, and humanity’s understanding of the world in the broadest sense) are excellent – enlightening, clear, engagingly-written.
Others are waffly, repetitive, and lack sufficient context of explanation for newcomers to the ideas being discussed.
Yet others are actively confusing – not because they don’t make sense, but because it’s unclear how they could have been written by the same author.
The Epilogue is a prime case in point. This follows a strong chapter on postmodern thinking – one of the best in the book – that has emphasised the flaws in teleological / progress-driven / narrative interpretations of history and the universe. But the conclusion is explicitly, unashamedly teleological, expounding some grand theory of destined progression of thinking to wind up with a frankly rather patronising, paternalistic suggestion of what’s next.
Apparently the same author has also done a book on how astrology can explain key moments in history. Had I known that when I picked this up, I may not have bothered – and it does explain a lot about that conclusion.
But still, some strong chapters mean I don’t utterly begrudge the time spent with this one. A kinda useful companion to other histories of philosophy – albeit one with some very odd quirks.
This didn’t get only three stars because this isn’t well-written, or that it’s not fun and interesting – but because it’s so inconsistent and hard to follow.
It purports to be the “story of a city and its people”, but can’t decide which people. Mostly it seems to be the story of kings, occasionally writers, very rarely others.
It both assumes a lot of prior knowledge of French history and explains the well-known at length – including things that have little specifically to do with Paris. But then it passes over specifically, uniquely Parisian events like the Revolution and barricades of 1848 in mere paragraphs, ignoring the vast numbers of fascinating people who could have made for great diversions.
Basically, I can’t work out the author’s criteria for what to include and ignore.
This lack of a clear schema means you’re better off with a tourist guide for the linear narrative history, a literary guide for the cultural, and a social history for an insight into the people. This covers parts of all, none of them comprehensively enough to be fully satisfying – but well enough to make me want to find out more. From a more coherent, consistent book.
The New Statesman has a long piece on the ongoing slow death of the advertising industry, with some fun distinctions between the ad industry (creative, visionary) and the ad business (dull, obsessed with data).
Can you guess which part the person who wrote it comes from?
Of course, the simple response to the majority of the article’s debate about whether high-impact artistic visions or hyper-efficient attempts to ensure relevancy are the best way forwards is:
But while there’s much to disagree (and agree) with throughout, it was this particular passage that sparked a realisation about the real challenge for the marketing industry:
“Now that people carry media around with them everywhere, advertisers have less incentive to create memorable brands. Instead, they concentrate on forcing our attention towards the message or offer of the moment. The ad business doesn’t care about the future of its audience, only its present.”
This, within the context of modern ad microtargeting and algorithms (as well as the general proliferation of TV channels, streaming video, and the decline in newspaper readership), is kinda true – with no clear way to ensure a follow-up interaction, the classic old ad model of trying to get a message in front of someone eight times (or whatever) and it’ll stick is no longer as straightforward as it once was. Even if you succeed, it’ll be by using cookies to track someone across multiple sites, firing the same advert at them so relentlessly that it seems desperate – and obvious.
But the obsession with the fast-paced present also shows how many marketing campaigns continue to utterly miss the point of social media.
The clue’s in the name
Social – done properly – *isn’t* simply of the moment, as much as it’s often dismissed as ephemeral.
To think of social posts as throw-away one-offs, as much marketing does, is like viewing a single frame of a film that’s designed to be watched at 24 frames per second. It’s like the blind men and the elephant – you may *think* you know what’s going on, and how your audience is responding, but you’re not seeing the whole (motion) picture.
Yes, a single tweet or Facebook post *can* work in isolation. It can have impact. A person with a couple of hundred followers can see something they post go viral and reach hundreds of thousands of likes. An influencer can amplify it to the point the original poster can monetise that single moment, or use it as the starting point to become an influencer in their own right.
But the clue’s in the name – social is *social*. It’s about relationships, not one-off interactions. And the internet is the same – again, the clue’s in the name. It’s a network. It’s interconnected. Nothing online operates in isolation.
This is why an approach to online advertising that thinks only about the advert – in isolation – is always going to be doomed to fail. (And yes, if your social media post or article or video or whatever is put out on a schedule to broadcast to your followers – whether you put paid behind it or not – if you have no plan or resources to follow up and respond to the replies, then all it is is an advert.)
Even if you aggregate all your social data to see trends over time, you may *think* you’re seeing the big picture – but you’re not seeing it from the perspective of your audience. You’re lumping them together as stats, when in reality they’re all individuals – each having a distinct interaction with your brand. The long-term trends hide the fact that your audience is not always the same audience – different people will see different posts at different times, and many won’t see some of what you’re putting out at all. This means they’ll all be getting different impressions of what it is you’re about.
I remember when all this were fields…
When I started playing about in IRC and messageboards in the 90s, it took months to be recognised as a regular. When I started blogging in the early 2000s, it again took months to build a following and reputation.
And that’s months of multiple posts a day. Multiple replies to comments. Discussions. Following commenters back to their own blogs and reading *their* stuff. Getting a sense of how they thought.
This was all pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook – but post-IRC, and after messageboards, MSN Messenger and the like had become passé. We’d encounter each other on other people’s blogs, in their comment sections, and notice we were talking about the same things through trackbacks, RSS aggregators (after 2004 or so), checking now-defunct sites like Technorati, IceRocket and the like to find other people talking about the same thing (because Google was still rubbish for realtime search back then), and occasionally directly emailing.
Looking beneath the surface
The public face of blogging was our individual blogs. The individual posts. But those were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg – the starting points for interactions between blogger and reader that in some cases have lasted years. Some of the people I met virtually through my various blogs have become real-life friends. Some discussions inspired people to take up blogging for themselves, or to pursue different careers. Some of those interactions even led to real-world, paid work (as they did for me – which, in turn, led to my transition from print journalism to digital, and from there to my current role developing multiplatform, multimedia digital marketing strategies).
All these deep, lasting, sometimes life-changing relationships started with a connection around shared interests – just as, today, algorithms try to match adverts to people who may be interested in them. Superficially, to anyone looking from outside, those initial interactions in the comment sections under individual posts would have looked like that was all there was. If you’d looked at the stats on our blogs, the numbers would have looked *tiny*.
But the *real* story was the ongoing conversations and subconscious assimilation of each others’ ideas. The discussions and collaborations that stretched over months, and led to the short-lived rise of group-blogs, real-world meet-ups, grand plans that (in my case at least) never quite came to fruition. It was about the relationships and trust we built up over time.
The *real* impact took *years*, and in some cases was more significant than any of us ever imagined when we first put finger to keyboard.
How humans work
We’re all humans. We latch onto stories. We need big ideas. Emotional connections. Things to inspire and entertain. Things that speak to our gut instincts as well as to our heads. We’ve all read Daniel Kahneman, and know these heuristics are classic marketing creative territory.
And yes – as we’re humans we can also be manipulated if we’re targeted with the right message at the right time. Some of us will be more susceptible to some messaging than others. We will all have slightly different interests, meaning you can’t speak to us all in the same way. So a data-driven approach makes sense to try and finally give some clarity to John Wanamaker’s classic “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted” conundrum.
But where big idea creative can attract attention, and data-driven targeting can increase relevance, what’s still missing for many brands is the follow-up. The vital thing that comes next.
In some cases this is where CRM comes in – but I can tell you from my blogging and chatroom days, in most cases being overly keen to initiate a conversation is going to have precisely the opposite response from the one you want. No one wants a pop-up window asking if they want help the second they land on a site any more than they want cookie notifications or requests to turn off their adblocker. Overly keen CRM = instant bounce, often with feelings of mild violation and anger. Not great for the start of a relationship. There’s a reason Microsoft killed Clippy…
My point? Let your audience go at their own pace
The reason the brief Golden Age of blogging (from around 2003-2006, by my reckoning) led to so many strong, lasting relationships is that those relationships were able to be built at our own pace.
There was no realtime chat. There was no “unread” notification to put pressure on us to respond unless and until we were ready. We all gradually built up archives of work that our readers and fellow bloggers could all check out at their leisure to get a sense of who we were and what we stood for. We linked to our past work – and each other – where relevant, showing how our thinking was developing over time, and allowing others to follow our trains of thought at their own pace to catch up and join in the conversation.
So when you encountered an unfamiliar blog or blogger – which was frequently – you could dip your toe in, test the water, and go back and check the context before engaging only when you had an idea what you were going to get involved in.
It was a slower-paced, more civilised way of communicating online that the likes of Twitter seem to have permanently destroyed with the constant need for instantaneous responses to everything.
But today’s pressure to living in the moment and make instant decisions is deeply offputting. It’s not how people like to work. It’s not how any successful relationship has ever been built. It goes against all the instincts of the high-pressured world we’re now in, but today’s emphasis on the hard sell and call to action – not just the obvious “BUY NOW!” but also the more subtle “CLICK HERE TO…” and “FIND OUT HOW…” – may give a short-term nudge but not a long-term engagement.
Engagement – true, lasting engagement – comes through recognition, familiarity, and trust. This can only ever be built over time – often a long time. It will never come through a hard sell, and rarely through a single call to action.
In short:
Rather than worry about big ideas vs targeting, what the marketing industry really needs to learn how to do is revive the art of the soft sell and the long tail. That’s the more human way of building relationships that last – but to work it needs a significantly more nuanced understanding of how people will be interacting with you than I’ve seen from pretty much any modern brand marketing campaign.
So remember:
Every interaction with every part of your brand’s marketing campaign may seem like a one-off to you, but it’s part of a series to your audience. It’s all connected – but one bad experience could break the chain.
This means you need a truly integrated combination of high-impact big ideas and detailed data and longer-term storytelling and archives of the earlier bits of the story so people can catch up and targeting to the people who’ll be most interested and a true understanding of how people – and the internet – actually work.
No one said it was easy. But some things take time.
To help shape my thinking, I write essays and shorter notes examining the ideas and narratives that shape media, marketing, technology and culture.
A core focus: The way context and assumptions can radically change how ideas are interpreted. Much of modern business, marketing, and media thinking is built on other people's frameworks, models, theories, and received wisdom. This can help clarify complex problems – but as ideas travel between disciplines and organisations they are often simplified, misapplied or treated as universal truths. I'm digging into these, across the following categories - the first being a catch-all for shorter thoughts:
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