get your post-apocalyptic designer dream on…
Illuminated is a new animated series being created by some of the people behind GNN (Guerrilla News Network), Phong.com (Eminem’s “Mosh”), Pod Collective, Broken Saints, and ConceptArt.org.
and while you’re looking at that you may also want to look at this: how to share illuminated
and this: how to buy illuminated
it’s refreshing to see the strategy match the caliber of the product.
“the biggest problem americans have is what cereal to buy in the cereal aisle.”
-my dad (who spent the first 56 years of his life in the USSR)
i’ve been watching my friend sarah write about her adventures in crazyblinddate land, and it’s gotten me thinking.
sarah explains:
CrazyBlindDate.com was started by the folks who brought us OkCupid — the free social networking / test-taking / dating site that’s given the pay sites like Match.com and eHarmony a run for their money. And so far, I’m impressed.
The premise is simple: you tell them a few things about yourself, who you’re looking to meet, where you’re willing to travel, and when you’re willing to do that. Meanwhile, other people are on the site doing the same thing. The Internet Brain lines you up, makes a match where requirements coincide, and asks both parties to confirm the date after showing basic information about the other person. This includes very blurry pictures of each other, as a teaser. Once you say yes, you’re committed to it.
….Why I’m excited about this site: they’re taking something that has massive screw-up potential, and handling it well.
sarah then decided to test out exactly how well this screw-up potential is indeed being handled by subjecting herself to some first-person “Field Research in Extreme Social Media Sports.”
in case you’re wondering, that crazyblinddate ended up going something like this:
and here’s where it gets interesting. despite the lame-o first foray, and despite the fact that she herself admits that, “Blind dates are inherently sketchy-sounding,” she decided to do it again!
see, what’s happened is that we all (well, most of us, anyway) seem to have ended up in some scene. ethan watters coined it as “urban tribes” in 2003, but this kind of thing has been going on for ages, really. it’s hard to escape noticing how many times the word “scene” is uttered in the course of i’m not there, todd haynes’s recent movie about the live(s) of bob dylan. evidently “folk music” was a kind of “anti the pop tastelessness” scene going on in greenwich village in the 60’s.
what’s happened since then, however, is that social network apps have come along. which, in retrospect is barely even an appropriate way to think about them because we (generally) use them to connect to people we already know rather than to random strangers. what these sites have really become are “friend management systems,” which is an important tool for the maintenance and enhancement of any social scene, if you think about it. it’s preceisely what’s great about those kinds of sites: we can now assert our place in our scene even without leaving the house. true to form, bob dylan’s myspace page has been viewed 2,983,449 times.
so what’s interesting is that crazyblinddate is the anti all of this. we’ve become so obsessed with needing to control our choices, our lives–or lifestyles, our destinies, that we’ve become insulated against chance. and despite what facebook’s aggressively chance-destroying mini-feed has to say about it, with its relentless broadcast of all the activities of all your friends all the time ever, i think, really, we LOVE chance.
it’s what makes something like last.fm so great, for instance. the possibility of an unexpected, fantastic music discovery that we do not have to actively seek out. it finds us. by chance. if there was a service that i’d say CBD offers–aside from the “matchmaking” service–it’s that deliberate creation of chance.
even though we love chance despite our neurotic compulsion to set up barriers against it, we are also simultaneously overwhelmed by the amount of choices we have to make. a few weeks ago a friend of mine took me to this famous ice cream parlor in berkeley, and the amount of choices of ice cream flavors was suddenly paralyzing. even after the samples, i really was not adequately prepared to have any idea if i wanted raspberry cheesecake flavor ice cream or apple cobbler flavor ice cream. all i wanted was ice cream.
yes, we want as many options as we can get so as to have the opportunity to find the thing that fits US the best, but sometimes having to slog our way through the trenches of the long tail is just fucking taxing. i think, horrified as we are to admit it, we kind of want something randomizing. we don’t always want to have to think about it. we want the perfect ice cream flavor to find us. by chance.
i think the creators of CBD definitely realize this. the whole site is about the sudden, emphatic, click-first-ask-questions-later push into the pool of chance:
Welcome to Crazy Blind Date! We like to keep things simple. That’s why on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You’re not allowed to see their picture or even communicate. Choose your city:
when i was in NY a couple of weeks ago i heard ads for CBD on the radio, evidently it’s been featured on the monrning show too. the intention here is definitely not about being a service for a niche kind of demographic. EVERYONE likes chance in some form. that’s the point. and even while the promotion for this thing is certainly not flying below the mainstream radar, the chance inherent in the site’s service still makes it feel like you FOUND it by chance. it’s amazing that mystery as an aspect of the service can be self-fulfilling in terms of the “discovery strategy.”
the way CBD works, you don’t get to see what the person you’re meeting even looks like beyond just this blurry kind of photo:
you don’t get the option to stalk them on myspace first, you don’t get to find out anything about who their friends are. it’s the opposite of what so many social-network sites, or even dating sites offer, and i bet there’s going to be a lot more stuff coming like this. whether it’s with music, dating, or ice cream, i think we’re all looking for opportunities–and sites–that plug a “controlled randomness” feature back in.
first, you need to watch the trailer for sony pictures’ across the universe: here. if you cannot be trusted to come back here afterwards, however, you can just watch the shittier-quality youtube version:
ok then. now that you have been adequately briefed, we can begin.
i first saw the trailer for across the universe on quicktime.com in march and was not only blown away by how stunningly imaginative the visuals looked, but actually–i swear!–brought to tears by the drama of 60’s-era youth struggle depicted in just 2.5 minutes of preview footage! needless to say, i saw the movie opening weekend, six months later, and left the theater feeling beyond satisfied. the movie was so visually innovative and different it was like i’d just witnessed julie taymor–the director-slash-visionary best known for broadway’s “the lion king”– reinvent the very concept of movie a little bit.
i then proceeded to tell all my friends they should check it out, and even posted the preview on facebook. i was somewhat startled to discover the incongruent presence on the movie’s otherwise fairly unimaginative site of a special link that allows for easy one-stop posting of the preview directly to facebook. either this was incredibly nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, i figured.
last friday, the LATimes weighed in on that debate, asking: Is this the next cult sensation? as you may have noticed, across the universe is a musical about teenagers. and while the plot-line is punctuated by beatles’ tunes, the fact that this coming-of-age movie didn’t find an audience with middle-aged boomers, who were part of the original “beatlemania,” apparently came as a marketing newsfalsh:
To judge by “Universe’s” trailer, which began screening in front of “Spider-Man 3” in May, it wasn’t immediately clear which genre “Universe” belongs to. Is it a coming-of-age story? A rock opera á la “Moulin Rouge”? A surrealistic period piece? (Answer: all the above.) Worse for marketers at Sony, the film’s distributor, contractual obligations bound them from hitting home with “Universe’s” primary selling point.
“Yoko Ono, Paul [McCartney], Ringo [Starr] and [George’s widow] Olivia Harrison were all supportive of the film, but I couldn’t use the Beatles name in any advertising,” Taymor recalled. “That didn’t make things easy. And you can’t advertise that you have Bono, Eddie Izzard and Joe Cocker in cameo roles. We didn’t have a real big push from Sony; they were stumped by it. So nobody was really sure who the film’s audience was.”
i’m ten years older than the median teen-movie demo–but on the tail end of recovery from the quarterlife crisis the concept of trying to figure out life in a conflicted, confusing, “changing world” still feels totally relevant–and that’s, i think, the cutoff point for the audience to be marketing coming-of-age tales to.
After an uninspiring opening last month… help arrived in the form of an audience whose parents were their age when the first wave of Beatlemania hit. After three weeks in theaters, the PG-13 movie finally penetrated the top 10 by connecting with a zealous core constituency: teenage girls.
….According to Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Media by Numbers, audiences are now finding their way to “Universe” thanks to Sony’s textbook execution of what is known in the industry as a “platform release.”
“Expectations were unknown. But Sony has handled it perfectly. They got big initial interest in limited release, then they’ve been capitalizing on that every week.”
“They’re taking their time. On a movie like this, that’s what you have to do.”
so… like, besides the fact that the movie’s supercute cast is totally perfect bedroom-wall poster material, and that this “60’s story” is retold with acutely contemporary (and boomer-anachronistic) sensibilities…. did, um, no one at sony bother to check if maybe teenagers might not actually totally dig the beatles, at some point before they released the movie?
three and a half years ago (maybe somewhere around the time taymor got this funny idea for a musical) USA today reported:
Beatles historian Martin Lewis began spotting a young wave of Fab Four fanaticism as emcee of Beatlefan conventions the past 14 years. Boomers constituted half of the audience in 1990. Now 75% of attendees are under 30, and many barely in their teens.
As marketing consultant for The Beatles Anthology, he met with label execs plotting campaigns targeting fans 45 and up. “I’ve got news for you,” Lewis told them. “I’m the oldest guy at Beatlefan conventions.”
Sure enough, a marketing survey showed that the under-30 constituency scooped up 40% of the first Anthology run. “I’ve interviewed those kids,” Lewis says. “I’ve said, ‘Surely you’d rather listen to Justin Timberlake. Why are you here? Were you forced by your parents?’ But they chose to be there.”
the relative “drought” in contemporary rock (“Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer,'” says a manhattan producer and guitar teacher quoted in a feb. 2006 article in rolling stone called “teens save classic rock“), multiplied by the internet’s universal ease of access to music of all decades, means you better do your homework about whom to target with your alleged “primary selling point,” yo. (even hiphop’s got love for the fab four as evidenced by wu-tang’s becoming the very first group EVER to legally sample the Beatles (!!?!)–sooooo… THAT happened.)
…anyway:
While Dergarabedian heaps praise on the marketing plan, Taymor feels the movie has benefited from a kind of benign studio neglect. “In a funny way, young people found the movie because it wasn’t marketed huge,” she said. “Young people don’t want to be dictated to about what’s the new cool thing.”
…. “We gave people the sense that they’d discovered it for themselves,” said Valerie Van Galder [the division’s president of domestic marketing].
i am sure that beyond classic rock’s sheer novelty or vintage cred, for the current crop of teenagers, its appeal likewise stems from the satisfaction in the personal discovery. this is a sense that is simply not possible to generate through mainstream teen-targeted music options. (wait… did classic rock just turn into alternative rock? wow. bizarre.)
i’ve written before about how valuable sustaining a sense of mystery can be for a brand, and it applies to the process of its initial discovery as well. whether sony was just hedging their marketing dollars on this weirdo bet of a movie, or whether they actually had the temperamental teen psyche aaaaall figured out reverse-psychology stylie when they eschewed spending money on any TV commercials, billboards, or PR, i think there’s something to be learned from across the universe’s model–accidental or not–that can be applied to a more deliberate kind of “discovery strategy”:
and in case you’re wondering, this is NOT a “viral campaign.” the difference is between a ploy to abuse some unfortunate loophole inherent in ADD for an attention-spike, and a strategy to enable the creation of a meaningful, personally-compelling discovery that leads to a lasting (consumer) relationship.
from the LATimes:
Nicole Sacharow, 15, from Culver City, for one, ranks “Universe” among her “favorite movies ever.” She’s seen it twice and would already have notched up several more viewings were it not for scheduling conflicts with her friends.
“You go up to a group of people and say, ‘Who wants to see “Across the Universe” this weekend?’ ” Sacharow explained. “The songs are addicting. Everyone who goes to see it has the soundtrack. I listen to it every day. I hear people singing the songs around school.”
i’d say the movie has the potential to become this decade’s RENT (the war allegory standing in for the 90’s AIDS nemesis.) with wu-tang paving the way on beatle’s rights clearance, i could easily see a broadway version of across the universe in the future. but where could they find a visionary, multi-Tony award-winning director to–oh!
uh… never mind.
