NoahBrier.com

Baudrillard, Economics and the Death of Reality

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:58:40 +0000

Getting all postmodern on the economic crisis.

Economics, it seems, is all around us. With banks in trouble and bailouts passing, America's financial future is the new Sarah Palin. With that in mind I'm going to try and articulate something I've been trying to articulate for quite some time (mostly unsuccessfully): The idea that everything is imaginary.

I know that sounds a bit odd, so please bear with me as I try to explain. Mostly I started thinking about this around the time of brand tags, when I was spending a lot of time talking about how brands all exist in people's heads. As the site illustrates, everyone has a different idea of what a brand is, shaped by an infinite number of factors (when they were introduced, how they were introduced, whether they've actually experience it, etc.) and every single person, no matter how different their perception is, is equally right.

This starts to send one's head into a bit of a tailspin: How can everyone be right about something with completely different answers? In the case of brands it's slightly easier to understand (I think), but then when it comes to the economy it's slightly more difficult but equally relevant. While there's lots of stuff that makes up the economy, ultimately it's mostly a bunch of people's perceptions about how the economy is doing that drives it. In a state of perceived crisis (such as now), we all react by following the leads of others, even though the vast majority of us don't actually understand what is going on and how it threatens us as individuals. Or, as Paul Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California explains, "I am not a financial genius. I do know that when you see millions of people in the market essentially freaking out, that spills over into your brain and you get this impulse to do what everyone else is doing." Which is freak out.

So, we all hear about people freaking out about something that we don't really understand so we all start freaking out and some of us start taking our money out of the bank and then all of a sudden there isn't enough money to give the rest of the people who want to take their money out of the bank and we've gotten ourselves into a giant mess (luckily we aren't in this giant mess at the moment).

What makes this financial crisis especially interesting is that it's built on top of more "imaginary" stuff, mainly pools of mortgages that have been combined and recombined (and recombined) so that the original bears no resemblance to the final product. As The Deal explains, "The rationale for such complexities is credit-risk transfer. The realities: securities and leverage so much bigger, more complicated and detached from actual assets that value itself became an abstraction."

And now, all of a sudden, economics is starting to sound a whole lot like postmodern philosophy. Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodern philosopher is most famous for writing about what he called the simulacrum. Like most things in postmodernism, it can't be easily defined, however, it's roughly the point where the simulation becomes reality. Put more simply, "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." A quote from Ecclesiastes that Baudrillard opened his essay, Simulacra and Simulations with.

Turning back to the economy for a minute, thinking of it as a simulacrum actually works out quite well. In the essay, Baudrillard walks through the four phases of image transformation:

It is the reflection of a basic reality.
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
It masks the absence of a basic reality.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Now mapped against my simple understanding of economic history:

Trade: It is the reflection (or formalization) of a basic reality (give something, get something).
Money: It masks and perverts a basic reality (trade).
Credit: It masks the absence of a basic reality (money).
Collatorized Debt Obligations (or any similar complex financial products): It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Part of the reason we have lost control, I would argue, is that we've entered a new age. Again in my very limited knowledge/understanding of economics, we reached a point where the financial products ceased to reflect any of their underlying realities. They became something completely new. Just take a look at this chart from The Deal to get a sense of just how many steps removed from a basic reality we were/are.

Now part of the reason I think people are having so much trouble dealing with this is because they've got to accept two very difficult things: First, things are random. Or, as Baudrillard explains:

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Or, more simply put, "in situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories." When things move beyond our realm we try to find patterns even when none exist. This is how we cope. We're no good at accepting that sometimes randomness happens because with it a lot of other institutions are thrown into wack. As a simple example, anyone who works in marketing can attest to post-rationalizing the success of a campaign and the failure of another when in reality you really have no clue what happened. (Duncan Watts has written about the reality of this as it relates to musical stars.)

As for the second thing we're really bad at: Lack of moral clarity. To illustrate, I was having a conversation the other day about the bailout. The argument was that we were bailing out a bunch of people who didn't deserve it. My answer was yes, and we were doing it because not bailing them out may have meant digging our own grave. The answer, in this case, exists in a moral netherworld: There is no right or wrong, just the reality (or hyperreality) of the situation at hand. Luckily, Baudrillard just happened to have written about this as well:

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.

Facts and logic cease to matter in the simulacrum because it's no longer governed by the rules of reality. We have to abandon these things and only deal with what's in front of us, which may in fact be a perfect way to think about the future we now face.

Or not: Maybe I'm just assigning order to something inherently chaotic.

On the Bailout and Branding

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:14:29 +0000

The other morning I was having a conversation about how I thought the bailout was essentially a marketing failure. All in favor of the bailout failed to help regular folks understand what it was all about, which created the backlash that in part caused the first house vote. What's more, after the first vote the house did an abysmal job in explaining why they had voted the way they had or offering up another path and the market responded by dropping 700 points.

That same day, my mom sent me over this article which discusses the marketing of the bailout in another light: The name itself. "A bailout makes us all smaller for having participated in it," the article suggests. "'Bailout' connotates failure and Americans hate failure - unless there is the promise of a second act where the hero finds redemption."

All in all I think we can agree that it was poorly handled.

COMMENTS OPEN

Required Reading: State of the Economy

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:22:39 +0000

Rick wrote an amazing email that he sent to the company outlining the current state of the economy and how we got here. I've read a ton of articles on what's going on and of course followed the bailout votes, but to be honest I had very little understanding of what was really going on (except there was a big problem with mortgages and the very real possibility of people not paying them off). Rick was kind enough to sum everything up in layman's terms and it really just makes me want to read more in that tone. How come this stuff is so hard to find? Why aren't more people writing simple explanations of these complex topics?

I actually think there are two reasons (not that this has anything to do with economics): First, most people just don't understand it that well. There are probably lots of people who say they understand it, but when it comes time to write it, they focus on the one bit they understand. Second, there are a lot of bad writers, especially in academia. The whole idea that writing for complexity instead of simplicity was always something that drove me nuts. Sure you can have good complex writing, but most of the stuff that comes out of the academic world is anything but good (sure the ideas are good, but the explanations suck).

Anyway, that's a really long winded way to say, stop what you're doing and take 15 minutes to read Rick's explanation of how we got into our current economic mess.

COMMENTS OPEN

Quotes on a Plane

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:30:10 +0000

Lots of links before I get on the plane.

I'm working on a longer entry on simulacrum and the current status of the world, which I hope to finish on my plane ride home from Germany. Until then, though, I figured I'd throw some links up on the good old interweb for your enjoyment. I'm going for a quote edition this time to switch things up a bit, hope you all enjoy.

What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse. [Nicholas Carr]

Nicholas concludes the entry saying that it's no surprise more institutions are handing email duties over to Google and the cloud. Mostly, though, I just find this astounding. The amount of money being wasted on spam must be extraordinary. Is there any other communications medium that deals with 95% waste?

It turns out that in real life there's a reason you should repeat, or at least there used to be. In the 1950s, when shampoos began to be mass-marketed, we didn't wash our hair all that often--once or twice a week, as opposed to five times a week as most of us do now. Also, we used a lot more goop in our hair. [Fortune Magazine]

As I was showering this morning I got to wondering, how did the whole "later, rinse, repeat" thing come about. Mostly I was curious to know if it was some tricky marketer who figured if you repeated you'd use your shampoo up twice as fast (and therefore need to buy twice as many). Turns out, though, that there was actually a real reason (or so the story goes).

In honor of our 10th birthday, we've brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001. [Google]

For a month only, Google is allowing people to search it's 2001 index. It's good fun. I, like most geeks, went first to see if there were any results for my name. Only two turned up: One for an old web development company I had called Nextworx (now long defunct) and some student thing. Any results are show in the Wayback Machine when available. Anyway, it's good fun.

Our economy and putting it back on the world. No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was able to go back and forth. We we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to second-guess what their efforts would be if they believe that it is about doing a lot of other senators and representatives did for us. I can help the ticket, if you go back and forth. We we do it's very important when you consider even national security issues Let me speak specifically about a credential that I have the confidence in that Washington establishment, where, yeah, they've had opportunity to do this with you. [Interview Palin]

Amazing site that puts together Palin-esque answers to political questions. It's funny, the first thing I thought of when I saw it was the Turing Test which pits computers against humans and asks the human to decide whether he is speaking to a silicon or flesh. Also, in case you missed it, this is in reference to Palin's answer to a question on the economy which was equally brutal and inspired this editorial from Fareed Zakaria suggesting this is no time for games and pushing McCain to drop Palin. (The original quote is in the Zakaria article.) Oh, and in case you prefer video, here's Zakaria making his point on CNN.

David Brooks is right that the failure to pass the bailout represents a massive failure of American governance and leadership, most of all at the Congressional level. That's true even if you think, for other reasons, that the bailout was a bad idea. (Can any hero be cited in this debacle?) Andrew Sullivan (and others, including myself) was right that early versions of the Paulson plan bypassed checks and balances and gave far too much power to the Executive Branch. So Congressional oversight was needed. [Marginal Revolution]

That's in reference to David Brooks' scathing Times editorial where he said, "This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation, and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed," amongst other things. Wherever you fall on the bailout, it is fairly amazing that they let a bill like that fail without more thought/plan around how to deal with the fallout.

Awesome. [Me]

That's in reference to seeing this extraordinary demoscene video called Texas by Keyboarders. The whole thing is a 4k executable. Holy crap.

With influence-tracking, Google could follow this group of fans' shared interests more closely, see which other fan communities they interact with, and—most important—learn which members get the most attention when they update profiles or post pictures. [BusinessWeek]

Apparently Google is working on a system that follows groups interests so that advertisers can better target their ads. While this sounds interesting (and potentially problematic from a privacy perspective), I wonder how effective it will be. For the most part, I think that kind of socializing that happens on social networks, specifically Facebook, is more around friends of shared context/space than interest. This is the opposite, of course, to blogs, where there is a shared interest. The thing about the friends you make in college, for instance, is that you often have completely different interests. Anyway, I'm sure it will cause a big hubbub, but I don't know that it will be all that effective in the end.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. [The Nation]

Pretty self explanatory.

Okay, that's it, time for my plane. See you soon.

The Failure of the Bailout Bill

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:33:49 +0000

As soon as I saw the news of the failed bailout, I searched for some info on who voted for what. House.gov has the full breakdown (how knew that even existed?) and this article from the post had some nice commentary: "It's no coincidence then that of the 205 Members who voted in support of the bill today, there are only two -- Reps. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Jon Porter (R-Nev.) -- who find themselves in difficult reelection races this fall. The list of the 228 "nays" reads like a virtual target list for the two parties."

(Oh, and I'm back from vacation.)

via rc3.org

COMMENTS OPEN

Pint in London Tonight?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:27:50 +0000

If you happen to be around London tonight I'm planning on crashing Pier's PSFK drinks at The Endurance Pub in Soho (90 Berwick Street). I'm going to get there around 6pm or so. Hope to see some of you there.

COMMENTS OPEN

Another Day, Another Link

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:28:53 +0000

Some more linkage.

You know the drill. Lots of links to stuff ... Hope you enjoy.

17.1 percent of US households have dropped their landline. Or, as Mike reblogged: "17% of the American public are not reflected in polling data because Federal law prohibits autodialing devices to be used on cell phone numbers. I wonder if the data from this survey could be combined with existing polling data to give a more accurate picture of the state of the race?" After a bit of searching it looks like Pew did a poll with cell phone users and found minor differences (48% Obama, 41% McCain with cell phones and 46% Obama, 41% McCain without them). They also found that "cell-only respondents are significantly more likely than either the landline respondents or the cell-mostly respondents to support Barack Obama and Democratic candidates for Congress this fall." Which isn't overly surprising.
Copy Paste Character has all those random characters you need sometimes but can never find. I'm bookmarking it right now. (Via swissmiss)
SEE stands for Stanford Engineering Everywhere. In their words, "For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world." That's rad.
I just posted this over at The Barbarian Group blog, but does anyone have opinions on those social media buttons that show up on every blog and media site? Have you seen any research on their effectiveness? Thanks.
The story behind the Palin email hacking. As soon as I read all that stuff about her using her personal email for state business that she didn't want recorded I knew someone would get in there ... Was just a matter of when. (via Waxy.org)
Rex wrote a quick post about Google's new audio search engine called Gaudi last week. Thought this was an interesting insight: "this could be enough for you to soon create supercuts like Jon Stewart's last night, which obsessed about the word 'blink.' This technique is usually considered Stewart's strongest rhetorical device, but does anyone else think it's starting to tire? And is it just format fatigue, or has the wonderment become less mystical as technology makes the ability to cull clips across years more common?" Not sure I have something to add, just thought it was interesting.
While we're on the topic, though, is there a company in the world with more incentive to nail voice recognition than Google other than governments? Seriously, it's an arm race. Google needs it because it's a whole new way of serving ads and thus a new market for them to move into. The government needs it for other reasons. Who will win? (Unless the government already has and we don't know about it yet. Which is also possible.)
How Things Work is a site that "explains the physics of everyday life." I love it. I have tons of question just like this and am so excited there is someone out there answering them. Some of the ones answered on the site: "My eight year old daughter asked me, 'If light is the fastest thing in the universe what is the second fastest thing in the universe?'" and "How do glasses work and the physics behind them?" It's even got an RSS feed. Sweet. (via swissmiss again ... she was on a roll this week)
Back on politics, the latest New York Times/CBS poll results were pretty interesting. Mostly things are back to where they were pre-conventions/Palin: 48 percent Obama, 43 percent McCain. This was the most interesting part for me: "But the Times/CBS News poll suggested that Ms. Palin’s selection has, to date, helped Mr. McCain only among Republican base voters; there was no evidence of significantly increased support for him among women in general. White women were evenly divided between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama; before the conventions, Mr. McCain led Mr. Obama among white women, 44 percent to 37 percent."
Video time: Ninja cat makes me smile and Richie Hawtin's DJ setup is awesome.
Last but not least, some New Yorkerness: Maybe the funniest thing I've read about Sarah Palin and a fascinating look at the ants that live in New York's medians.

That's it for now. Hope everyone had a great time at likemind today. Sorry I missed it.

First Win for Brand Tags

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:08:43 +0000

Mark sent me this story about Tribal DDB winning the McAfee business which includes this awesome paragraph: "Tribal identified McAfee's brand challenge as differentiating it from competitors Norton and Symantec. To prove that the brands tend to blend together for many consumers, Tribal turned to Brandtags.net, a Web site that produces tag clouds of the words users associate with brands. The clouds for McAfee and its rivals were similar."

Nice to see brand tags going to good use. Would be great to hear from agency folks what other things would be useful additions to the site. One thing I've been thinking about (just for this type of situation) is the option to spit out an 800x600 JPG for presentations because I know the current layout is awful for showing others/taking screenshots. Any other thoughts?

via Mark

COMMENTS OPEN

Making Stuff on the Internet: Passing Data and Databases

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:16:17 +0000

All about two of the basics for making web applications.

This weekend I gave a talk at Interesting New York titled, "How I Learned to Make Stuff on the Internet (and You Can Too)." Even though I was a bit rushed (it was supposed to end at 6pm and I went on at 6:10 with two more to go after me), it was super fun. Everyone was really great and it totally lived up to billing. Anyway, I figured I'd put my presentation and a rough version of my speaking points up online for people to enjoy.

Real quick, before I get into all that stuff. The basic idea here is something I've talked about before around here. I really believe that learning to build awesome stuff on the internet isn't that hard and that a big part of the problem is just the mental blocks ("it must have been so hard to learn" people say). The truth of the matter is, after I understood how to pass data between pages, everything else pretty much fell into place. Sure I knew a bit of HTML/CSS, but essentially once I understood a few basics I was able to search for whatever additional information I needed (and if there's one thing that exists in excess on the web, it's information about how the web was made).

So, here's the presentation, followed by some speaking notes. Hope you enjoy. Also, I am seriously thinking about getting some people together in NYC and trying to teach a little class on this. I'm not expert on PHP or programming, but I think that's part of the fun. Let me know if that sounds interesting and maybe we'll make it happen.

Making Stuff on the Internet

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: php sql)

A few months ago I taught myself PHP (yes, that’s a recursive initialism).
In the process, I think I discovered two big mental barriers that I needed to get over: How to pass information from one page to another and what an online database was ... So, I want to spend some time going through those two things with the hope of inspiring more people to make stuff on the internet.
So, let’s get started.
Pretty much every application on the internet relies on forms to get data from users and input it into the system. Gmail, for instance, has a send button ...
Facebook has “post” for changing your status.
And Google has “Google Search” to find anything you’re looking for. Essentially when the user hits that button, the information they’ve inputted is sent to a server and handled. The thing is, I didn’t really understand how this happened. Sure, I understood the basic idea, but my question was how do I get it back? Where does the information go?
The answer, it turns out, depends on what method you use for handling your form. The two most popular are GET (for retrieving information, a la searching) and POST (for sending information to a database, a la an information form). By using one of these two methods in the method=”XX” portion of your form HTML, you chose how you’re going to handle the data that’s inputted.
How about an example? Google uses GET. The html for the form goes something like method=”GET” action=”/search” (actually they leave out the GET, since it’s the default method for handling form data and they’re all about keeping the file size down on the home page ... or at least that’s why I assume they do it)
Anyhow, GET works something like this. Ever notice all the crazy stuff up in the URL bar when you search on Google? You know, all the stuff after the question mark ...
Well, that’s your query (and a bunch of other stuff). Just look before each equal sign and you’ll start to be able to decipher what it all means.
But the most important piece of it is the “q=”, since q stands for “query” and that’s where they store whatever you are searching for (try changing that in the URL bar next time you search to see how it works). Essentially Google pulls that information down off the URL bar and builds the page off it. Not too shabby, huh?
POST, on the other hand, passes data without sending it to the URL bar. I’m sure someone with more knowledge of how this stuff works could explain it better, but unfortunately I’m not that man.
So finally, just in case, here’s a sample of some PHP that shows how you would grab that query from your GET or POST stored values. Note that the language already has GET and POST built right in and all you need to do is grab those values and then do whatever you want with them. Pretty simple, actually.
Okay, now for part 2: Databases.
They’re not really as scary as people think they are.
Basically they’re just like an excel spreadsheet (which I’m assuming you’ve all played with)
A database is made up of columns.
And rows.
And tables (which Excel calls sheets).
The big difference lies in how you actually pull information out of the database. Unlike Excel, you can’t just highlight a row and grab that data. Instead you’ve got to use some SQL code to grab your information. This is the basic structure of a SQL call to read data from a database. You select the column you want from the table you want where the value for column x is equal to (or less than, or greater than, etc.) whatever value you’re looking for.
Let’s say we just wanted to grab all the information from rows where the person lives in California ...
Well, the SQL would look something like this. Select * (which means all columns from that row) from sheet1 (remember, that’s the name of our table, which is basically just a different spreadsheet) where the value in the column “state” equals California. Make sense?
Thanks to the magic of transparent overlays, we can see that the row that gets returned is just the one we wanted (Fake Fakerton is the only person in our database from California).
So what about writing data to the database? Well, that’s pretty easy to. You just insert into the table of your choosing the values (x, y, z, zz, etc.) ... The only important point here is that this assumes you are inserting data into every column, if you want to skip any you need to specify that. But let’s not worry about it for now ...
Here’s a more specific example. Let’s say you want to add Noah Brier’s (that’s me) info to the DB. You would just use the code above (remember, we’ve got to go in order of the columns we have). So that insert into sheet1 (the table of our choosing) the following values (which are all in parentheses).
And voila, it’s just added to the next row (assuming your DB is set up that way). Simple as pie.
So that’s it. I know I haven’t gone that deep, but hopefully this will encourage some people to get started.

That's it. If you like this maybe I'll do a few more on the topic.

Investing in Shared Resources

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:43:47 +0000

Last week Umair Haque wrote this about Google after Chrome's release: "Chrome is a shared resource that ensures the sustainable growth of a larger ecosystem. There are two key words in that sentence. The first is shared. Google is investing in a shared resource because it has the potential to expand the pie dramatically for all, and so Google stands to benefit more than by hoarding it. The second is sustainable growth: through Chrome, Google ensures the ecosystem stays a level playing field, amplifying incentives for innovation, quality, and productivity." [Bolding mine]

Then this week, "Google is planning to launch a network of satellites to bring internet access to three billion people in Africa ... Google claims the new technology could cut the cost of broadband by 90 per cent for some of the world's poorest countries. " They're not alone in the deal, but they're leading the way.

Both are examples of the same kind of strategy: The kind that's forward thinking, incredibly rare (companies hate investing money in things their competitors can profit from) and can only come from a market leader (that's how they make money after all).

COMMENTS OPEN

Me on Brand Tags

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:22:52 +0000

I wrote this little piece for AdAge about how Brand Tags came to be and what I think the keys to its success were. After the seriously long intro that explains how the idea came to be, I end with four things I learned from the experience: It's a lot of work (answering all the emails and updating a site that takes off is a time consuming thing), nothing beats personal contact (this is something I've written about a bit in the past, but I really believe in answering every email personally), teach yourself some code (again, something I've mentioned in the past here, but I really believe it's worthwhile to learn how to make things on the internet) and be ready for spam (what can be spammed will be spammed).

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

COMMENTS OPEN

Umbrella Today?

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:21:26 +0000

Umbrella Today? is a super simple site that falls into the category of "I wish I made that." You put in your zip code and it tells you weather you need an umbrella in a simple yes or no. Funny enough I left this comment in response to a post about the same idea involving pants a few weeks ago, "I actually think there could be a whole series of these. I wanted one specifically for umbrellas as well. Shouldicarryanumbrellatoday.com ..."

They came up with a better domain than me (and I still think you could come up with a whole series of these for different stuff).

via Lifehacker

COMMENTS OPEN

Seinfeld + Gates = Microsoft

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:11:50 +0000

Just some thoughts on the new Microsoft ad campaign.

So a whole lot of people around Twitter and blogs seem to feel quite strongly about this new Microsoft spot starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. After Twittering, "I thought the Seinfeld/Bill Gates Microsoft ad was kind of funny ... Am I really the only one on the planet that feels that way?" I got responses like "did nothing for me. more importantly, what did it do for Microsoft?" (that's almost perfectly representative of all but one response). So rather than trying to respond one-hundred-and-some-odd characters, I figured I'd write up a few thoughts.

First off, judging advertising, especially without any eye to the effect of the campaign on the business, is purely subjective. Like any taste, take my opinions with a grain of salt. I found it kind of amusing. I mean, the richest (or second richest or third richest, whatever he is now), making fun of himself in a commercial is funny to me.

With that said, though, I'd point to the strategic impetus for the spot. Microsoft doesn't need to build a brand, they need to rebuild one. There's no awareness problems with Microsoft, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in the United States who hasn't heard of the company, or at least their most popular product: Windows. That moves this advertising into a new realm: Repositioning.

What are they repositioning themselves from? Well, funny you should ask, I just happened to have built a little tool that attempts to answer just that question. Here are Microsoft's top ten brand tags: microsoft, crap, computer, shit, crash, vista, bill gates, monopoly, pc and sucks. Now of course, these tags are a bit biased, as brand tags skews a little more geek (though not much) than the general public. But anyway, let's assume they're pretty accurate. We can throw out "microsoft", as that doesn't mean much (you could argue something about ubiquity I guess). Then there's the negative adjectives: crap, shit, crash and sucks (I'll leave monopoly out of that for the moment, since it's also a fact). Finally you've got some associations, specifically "vista" and "bill gates" (very interesting that Windows didn't make the top). Interestingly enough, for those who took less than 5 seconds to come up with their tag, the three most popular are computers, evil and windows (in alphabetical order).

Anyway, let me get to my point. I think there are a lot of problems at Microsoft, most of which can't be solved with advertising. For one, it won't solve the fact they put out a dud in Vista is something they're not going to fix with an ad campaign (OS 9 ring a bell??). However, what it can start to do is make people think about Microsoft in a slightly different way. It starts to soften the company around the edges. As I wrote in an IM to Alan earlier today, you can't just jump from super-nerd (Microsoft's perception) to cool guy (Apple) without at first rolling up your sleeves. The ad humanizes Microsoft by making one of the world's richest men seem like an every day guy.

If nothing else, though, all this debate has meant nothing but good things for Microsoft. People are arguing about their ads instead of talking about how much Vista sucks.

Also, not for nothing, but I find it very amusing that a bunch of advertising pundits who are always arguing for clients to take their word for it and not include all that messaging about this and that are complaining that this ad hasn't explained enough. But hey.

Anyway, this is all very much my opinion. Feel free to leave yours. Also, I don't plan on doing this very often.

Also, if this isn't interesting at all, feel free to ignore it. I kind of got more and more bored of writing it as I went along and might have half-assed it a bit towards the end. My apologies.

Update (9/5/08): Really smart post on the ad by Gartner's Andrew Frank (via David Card). He nails it with this: "Here's something I picked up a long time ago at an ad agency that worked for another large technology company: high-tech branding is not about end users or IT decision-makers, it's about the shareholders. And it's not about changing their minds about Microsoft's products, it's about changing their hearts and their instincts about what kind of company Microsoft is and where they're headed (and hence what kind of investment they are)."

Interesting New York

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:10:44 +0000

Two years ago Russell started a thing called interesting (which Grant summed up beautifully). David and friends have brought it to New York and it's happening Saturday, September 13th. I'm doing a talk titled "how I learned to make stuff on the internet and so can you." In case that's not so interesting to you (which is totally fine), lots of others are doing awesome talks as well. A few friends I'm especially looking forward to: Nick is doing "A brief introduction to the fermented drink Kombucha along with a tutorial on how to make it yourself," Amber is doing "Embracing bastardization: What your reaction to fan fiction culture says about you" (which I can't say I understand, but am psyched for), Faris is doing "Ideas are new combination: A history of recombinant culture from Locke to Linux" and Colin is doing "A quick history of techno music, its evolutions and mutations, and where it finds itself now. With each time period, I’ll play a representative sound snippet and talk about it." (And lots of other awesome folks are talking as well.)

So what are you waiting for? Go buy some tickets.

Oh, and someone should plan some drinks for afterward. Maybe I'll do that ... Anyone have any brilliant ideas on locations? Or want to get in on the action?

COMMENTS OPEN

Ephemeratic

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:36:43 +0000

Just another post full of random thoughts and links.

So once again, I don't necessarily have enough to put into a "proper" entry, but I have lots of random thoughts and links I've been collecting over the last few weeks. I really do swear at some point I'll get back to the regular blogging schedule, but it's probably going to have to wait a bit until things slow down.

The Barbarians and I are having a party on Friday in NYC. You should come.
More Americans watched Obama's closing-night DNC speech "than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year." (Seems like ages ago now, I know.)
Someone decided the world needed a Twitter marketing agency.
Fascinating look at the links between Wikipedia entries. The center of Wikipedia: The aggregate article for 2007. "It takes on average 3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2111479 articles reachable from it." Interestingly the most central non-aggregate entry is actually the one for the United Kingdom, followed by (and there's no chance you were thinking this), Billie Jean King.
Fake following just might be the "most important feature in the history of social networks". Seriously. FriendFeed implemented it and basically to the person you're following it looks like you're paying attention, but in reality you're not. Fits in nicely with my opaque friend management idea, which is basically that it's easy to not "friend" someone in real life: You just go to the bar and go get a drink. But in the binary world of social networks, this process is a whole lot trickier. Fake following is a step in the right direction. (As is friend groups on Facebook, which I've just started messing around with.)
Speaking of Facebook, I've been playing with it much more lately and been running into an unbelievable number of interface quirks. When you spend enough time on a website, as many do on Facebook (including me), little UX issues start to magnify quickly.
A computer virus infected International Space Station laptops. We were just having a conversation the other day about how being a rocket scientist isn't necessarily the highest level of intelligence anymore ... I believe when I forwarded this along I included the note "virus author > rocket scientist" ... For whatever that's worth.
TechCrunch had a good piece on how NBC screwed up the Olympics web strategy. (Wow, I really need to start writing more often than once every two weeks. These were all interesting in a world before Palin.)
Zara is a super fascinating company. On the occasion of their taking the crown of world's largest retailer away from The Gap, The Telegraph has a nice profile of just how they made it happen.
Open source is all the rage: Laconica is an open source Twitter (finally) and Opentape is an open source Muxtape. (I haven't played with either yet, so use at your own risk.)
My friend Charlton is a professor at NYU and writes a blog about race and politics. Not surprisingly, his blog has been of fire lately with interesting insights. Check out Breaking News: Republicans Support Affirmative Action (Sorta) and Preview of Republican National Convention.

Hmmm, really thought I had collected more links than that over the last few weeks, but I guess not. I'm sorry that I haven't had more time to write and think here, but I've just been totally crazed with work and other stuff.

It's also kind of odd, I just haven't had that much of an urge to write anything substantial (I've been keeping up on the "quickies" entries pretty well lately ... those are the ones on the right). Not sure why that is, but I feel like it is some kind of reaction to my recent desire to just make stuff. I feel like I've been fairly productive as of late, turning out Is the internet awesome? and my silly little iPhone ringtone. While these things don't seem like much, they feel like small wins: Part of some larger portfolio on internet ephemera that I'm quite proud of (for the record included in there is How Much Does it Buy? and Holy Crap! Facts).

Anyhow, it's late and I'm rambling a bit. Have a great night.