A new icon-building approach?

The TED newsletter came in this morning and I could not avoid watching one of the videos for two reasons, it was only four minutes long and it was about music videos, the talk was conducted by designer and creative thinker Jakob Trollback, and he basically tried to show a new music video form, one that was created not to be "driven by a concept nor to build an image", the song is "Moonlight in Glory" by David Byrne and Brian Eno, from the album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", the version shown in the video below is taken from the 2006 remastered version of the album:



Every art form tends to be taken by people and then reinvented, we do bump everyday into mash-ups and add-ons of the most diverse things. I guess that happens so things that are still important and relevant evolve with the times, maybe that is the approach Mr Trollback is trying to show on this video.

Maybe it's just a matter of time before everything evolves towards efforts like that, it will require more imagination from people instead. Non-image-driven efforts are really boring, it seems like there is no purpose to most of them and yet despite the fact that most of the western society is a bit too concerned when it comes to that subject, image is still good and easy to digest, just look at this TED talk's posted comments.

Fitna

Google Reader this morning on the bound-to-be-controversially famous mini movie, Fitna, an anti-quran feature made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. The video has been removed from Live Leak due to threats to its employees, but as of this morning it's still up on youtube.
It's sad though that we witness the threatening to the freedom of speech on the internet.

EA's My(dead)Space

Just keeping the topic running and fresh, I just read last night Wired's blog post on the upcoming sci-fi horror game Dead Space. I started having some interests around DS when I first heard the news that EA along with a multitude of companies plans to start an early buzz around the game's plot creating diverse content to get gamers talking about, interacting with and getting more and more eager for any extra material that might lead to a full understanding of the game, which is only due out for Halloween.

Among the already announced content one might expect the not so surprising: comics, webisodes and a direct-to-DVD animation, all that, before Halloween... Let's hope the content is good in order to keep people's attentions, because the degrees in which these different medias can engage a gamer are completely different.... Starting from the video game itself, a game usually tends to allow more interaction than a movie, that's why the later should rely on the extra use of violence or storytelling, for example, to keep one's attention, and that's not the case of DOA, BloodRayne or FF: Spirits Within, they all sucked, and I wasn't expecting anything from the first two and still, they managed to do it.

EA and Image Comics are coming out, starting this month, with six comics, which will tell the story of the six weeks prior to the beginning of the actual game, once I get my hands on them I'll blog about.

After watching the trailer for the game it actually looked kinda cool, I am really nostalgic about this genre, it does make me wanna go back home and spend a whole week playing RE2 or the first Silent Hill (which surprisingly came out with a great film, but then there was French production on this one...)

The trailer:

"New kings of the wild frontier"

Going through Adage this morning I finally read something that really cheered me up, finally some news that translates quite well today’s digital efforts. The article is all about Unilever’s recent endeavors in the so-called new media, it starts nicely by stating that “2008s number one digital A-list” (Unilever, itself) doesn’t really do digital campaigns, and this holds down the whole article to what this is all about, integration combined with worthy content.

From TVC extensions to consumer-originated content, it’s all about integrating people in a passionate way sharing the values a brand relies on, in other words, a community. Digital could either be peripheral or central, but always combined with other medias. I guess that's because it’s hard to measure its impact alone, and also because you can manage to engage customers in a more effective way by keeping their attentions up once they start "migrating" for more information.

Some points from Adage worth stressing about:

Unilever doesn’t have a digital media person, it automatically presumes that digital is part of everyone’s daily lives, so every marketer should know how to work it.

No time for “experimental”, in a fast pace world it’s all about going for it and learning from mistakes if necessary (that’s a great accumulated asset later on).

Difficult to separate the impact created by digital media, so integration is key in keeping people entertained and eagerly migrating from different medias.

Superdistribution, which means dare to create breakthrough and relevant content to be picked up and promoted by different medias.

Chinese pop culture

I am a brand executive working for an American branding consultancy in Beijing, and eventually I came across one of, if not the most famous Chinese brand right now… and (not Yao Ming), I am talking about Haier.

It’s already one of the top 3 manufacturers of white goods on the planet, they even sponsor the NBA and have an over-the-top Manhattan HQ, but still, who knows them? The development of Chinese brands, as everyone knows is this country’s next step towards global domination, without it, they remain what they are now, manufacturers.

Haier has a dynamic and short history, a Jack Welch-worshiped type of CEO and some interesting marketing tactics, and for that, of course I am talking about the Haier Brothers, a Chinese cartoon series of 212 episodes centered around the, well, Haier Brothers traveling 190,000 km around 56 countries and regions. According to the English edition of the People's Daily:

"This cartoon series tells a mystical adventurous story about brothers Haier and their friends who, created by an intelligent old man, tour around the world in order to relieve humans of disasters and to solve endless riddles about nature"

In another piece of news from the P'sD, US kids really enjoyed it and it was supposed to be picked up by a major US cartoon cable channel.

The Haier Brothers is the longest running cartoon series in China, and fourth in the world, after eight years on air it finally showed its final original episode in 2001

If you are not in China nor the US you ought to have fun nonetheless, check the opening out:

Origins of a dionysian society

Well, everyone knows that people can get easily nostalgic… so, why is that? Should we go back to what we miss the most? Can we recover it? Which perspectives we crave for that no longer can be shared? Why does it have to change?

A little background first:

I was hanging out with Charles Frith on Saturday at crowded Xidan, Beijing’s Harajuku, and right after some Korean food we sat at a starbucks and I randomly started out of nowhere tell him how feminism is responsible for today’s biggest self-esteem problems. I read this and got inspired by The Rebel Sell, one of my favorite books of all time, and the guys (Heath and Potter) do a great job in getting back to the 60s and sharing their POVs on how countercultures can screw up the world.

To understand counterculture one can think of living against the norms.

Feminism and its free love movement emerged as the counterculture to “men are the breadwinners, while women are the housewives”, but never realizing that this would only lead to the exploitation of women. Why? Because it simply fought against what it should have stood for, norms, or if that is too outmoded then come up with the "evolution" of the norms, something to suit the society of the time in order "to lead" people somewhere.

With the absence of “the norms” people tend to get lost… what are the roles women and men should play then? What are the consequences of this in such an individualistic society? Later on some women did the unthinkable and stood up against feminism, relating its free love philosophy to the rise in rape crimes. The authors picture it: "(...) you only have to tour a gay bathhouse to see how men choose to organize their sex lives when they don't have to cater to feminine sensibilities."

But the whole point here is to try to get to why does society change in such radical ways, and why counterculture when it becomes mainstream (the new norm) can drag an entire society along...

Feminism and other countercultures sell, that's a major point why it's "facilitated", one can think of classic examples of counterculture-oriented lifestyles from the 60s hippies to the 00s greens. As the authors put it, counterculture will only contribute to the entertaining of some, “the rebels”, and also to the system it tries to bring down, because counterculture moves markets, does not destroy them.

It contributes to the system of rules it fights against because it becomes the new system of rules, it re-fuels the consumer society playing a big role in dictating a "whole new era", contributing to new ways one start to think, act, speak and of course, shop.

Besides the nice Saturday afternoon chat I got also inspired by a smart friend of mine, who blogged about the lack of love in this world…

When Disney met Sade…

I live in Beijing, and on a random night waiting for the subway at Dongsishitiao I got a sight of a bear paw keychain on a girl’s bag, and it got to my attention right away, it automatically connected to the toys I watched on BBC Three’s Japanorama series, the Gloomy Bear ones, they are already a bit old (early 2007), but nonetheless great, the perfect match for a school bag.

The Gloomy Bear was created by Mori Chack (Chax), a Japanese graphic designer, to be the antithesis of the cuddly ones (no Poohs, Snoopys nor Hello Kitties here), in his mind men and animals don’t get along, animals are naturally wild, so why do we keep on picturing them as fluffy and happy creatures instead of fighting-for-survival-at-any-costs against human permanent hunting spirit?

You can totally tell Chax’s sadistic leaning here, according to the legend he was discovered as a street artist trying to make a living out of selling Gloomy Bears postcards until the guys from Pony Canyon, a major Japanese audio/visual company, decided to give him a try.

Today, just like its Sanrio counterparts, the Gloomy Bear fad stretches from bloody paw key chains to animation series, and just like Sanrio again Chax and his gloomy pals have their own, no so cuddly, characters world, including Podolly, a sheep in wolf skin.

It feels like a slap in the face when people come up with things we don’t dare to think of, and I’m talking about things that are real but we don’t dare to argue or create some sort of controversy. The Gloomy Bear is such a match made in heaven not just for fashion but as a statement for the times we face (facing it in cold blood)… Perfect timing for an environmental-unfriendly beanie baby…

PS1: The funny and interesting part is Chax’s “about” on his website, where he links it to some cruel images of animal abuse.

PS2: I got my own Gloomy Bear paw key chain this Saturday in Xidan for RMB 20.