Passion for Interaction

For a Marketer who doesn’t identify as a Geek, going to SXSW Interactive is pretty similar to getting sucked into a passing acquaintance’s personal blog. It’s full of curious information, titillating details, and makes you feel an undeniably voyeuristic amusement in the certainty that the author wasn’t really prepared for you to be reading any of it quite so out of the context within which it was written.

This may sound like a sort of far-fetched analogy at first. After all, half the premise for interactive media is exposure. You’d expect those most deeply involved in its development would be aware that their industry isn’t a filtered post. And you’d be quite surprised at what you’d inadvertently discover.

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SXSW is a conglomeration of festivals. There’s the Music one, which everyone knows. There’s the Film one, which heard that music was throwing a party while its parents were out of town and showed up too. And then there’s interactive. The little orange kid on the right, waving his hand, going, “Hey! Me too!”

People get really passionate about movies, and people get really hardcore passionate about music, but “Interactive” refers to a kind of tool that enables a process. For most people, it’s not the tool or the process of Interactive that gets them all hot and bothered. It’s the experience!

And yet it’s the experience of interactive that seemed to go almost unnoticed at SXSW-Interactive. Your favorite movie is not a choose-your-own-adventure, and your favorite band is not going to let you sit in on gigs. Interactive holds the promise of precisely that kind of meaningful, resonating, participatory experience you’re craving with all that has previously been inaccessible, but all it wants to talk about is the application.

At the event’s opening remarks speech, the audience was split up into key populations. First the designers in the room were asked to stand up. Then they sat down and the programmers were asked to represent for their team. Next, the “money people” were asked to stand. They got to stand up for longer than the other two groups so that everyone could remember who they are better.

And that was it.

That’s apparently all there is to interactivity. There’s the design of the tool, there’s the development of the tool, there’s the funding of the tool, of course, but as far as an understanding of the people who use the tool and the impact of how they’re using it and what they’re using it for–what would that have to do with a conference about interactivity?

It’s kind of like a camera festival with movies thrown in for bullet points. Or an amp festival with rock and roll as a liner-note afterthought. I mean, hey–there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting excited about cameras and amps, but if you were actually interested in creating an opportunity for a lot of forward-thinking, curious, innovative individuals to converge (“convergence” is the new “2.0”), wouldn’t it make sense to develop the focus of this meeting ground into more than just about… uh… equipment?

You don’t need to be a filmmaker or a musician to appreciate movies and music. Why should you be expected to be a technologist to appreciate interactive media?

Ok, ok, you get it. Fine. Enough bashing Interactive for missing the point while busily staring into the source code of its navel. There’s another culprit here as well that’s just as guilty.

That’s right, Marketing, I’m talking to you!

Watching the panelists on “How to Build an Online Fanbase” describe their personal discoveries of promotional strategies as if they had individually invented the wheel of marketing, it was difficult not to feel frustrated by the evident segregation keeping the two industries apart.

John Batelle, of Federated Media, hit the nail on the head during the panel on “Why Marketers Need Conversational Media,” when he said, “Marketers are scared of not being in control.” Considering that this interactive tool and the process it enables seem to accomplish something that is completely anathema to the industry that invented “Spin Control,” of course Marketing would be reluctant to play nice with Interactive.

Well….Deal with it, Marketing. Interactive’s not going away, so why don’t you go and hang out with it? Maybe go check out a festival or something. Get drunk together on free booze, and make out with it in some dark corner of a crowded club. Might even be fun!

And that way maybe next year Interactive will even consider asking the marketers to stand after the “money people” sit down.

    



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one of my best campaigns

I helped SkinGraft Designs develop this campaign for their rad line of holster accesssories. Watch out. Cavalli or someone’s gonna steal it next. Naked circus freaks will be hawking you Gucci bags and Armani glasses.

But I highly recommend the original.

    



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