So I created my own ‘Future of Advertising’ presentation. In fact, aiming really high, I want it to be the mother of all ‘future of advertising’ presentations. But I tried to keep it really simple, insightful and actionable as possible.

So here you go – everything you need to know in order to kick ass in this brave new world.

Until very recently, LIKE, for me, was the lukewarm, shy cousin of LOVE.

“I like you” was merely a regulator, a milestone on the path to saying “I love you”. Of course it also means to favour something (not just someone) but personally, I find that there is something quite vanilla-ish in the word Like, some reservedness or lack of passion, almost banal.

And then almost overnight LIKE took a massive turn. From linguistic mundane LIKE has evolved to be a currency, a clickable human gesture, a mass behavior (I wonder how many global LIKEs are clicked every day).

Of the many things and stuff we LIKE everyday now, naturally, one very interesting area to research this new behaviour is the relationships between people and brands. Who would have thought two years ago that LIKE will evolve to be a desired behaviour featured as comms target on clients’ briefs.

It might seems like just as a semantic turn but to me it feels as if something in the (symbolic) power relations between people and brands has slightly changed in the shift from “Become a Fan” to “Like”. ‘Like’, until recently, was a gesture kept to our friends’ status or a photo etc. Today, brands overtly want people to like them. Turns out it’s good for business

Don’t you find it a bit ingratiating and even forced? I can’t help seeing something approval-seeking in ‘Like’ in this context.

With Become a Fan it was different. Become a fan is like an invite to a membership of a club or a community. Now I just have to LIKE you. A bit of a downgrade if you see what I mean?

This is exactly the point where the whole “brands are like people” becomes a bit odd. This is why I’m a bit ambiguous with the culture of “Like-bribing” – Like as a condition, requirement we have to fulfill in order to get into your world.

No LIKE – no in!

So when everyone gone crazy about how Nike made it big in ‘digital’ (and social!) by hiding the new World Cup ad behind the Like button, like Andy, I really found it quite cheeky. We’ll let you see our new (a-may-zing BTW) ad only if you’ll like us (AND of course, not only that, you will have to tell all your friends that you LIKE us.)

Brands are like people, they say. But Nike you’d all agree is like the coolest boy (or girl) in the class. People like him anyway for who he is and what it does. Surely if he throws a party he won’t ask people to like him in order to get in? No, that’s totally uncool. He will let everyone in first and only after everyone had a good time he will quietly enjoy seeing his popularity rates go even higher.

There are very few brands that can get away with that (that’s true to all ‘forced -into-newsfeed’ interactions, e.g Massive Attack’s Tweather. If your content is good I’ll talk about it but it’s quite rude to ask people to help you with your marketing before you even showed them what you’ve got. Nike should have had more confidence in the quality of the content (hell, it’s the best ad of the year so far) for it to earn them Likes without making it a condition for viewing. My verdict: not on-brand.

On the other hand there are other equations, other Like practices which I find far more appealing. The best example is Hyper’s recent campaign for Pedigree adoption drive. The value proposition was totally different – here we asked people to Like Pedigree and for every Like, pedigree donated 50p to dogs’ rescue centres around the country. People’s Likes were a symbolic invitation to do good on people’s behalf. (Of course Zizek would argue that this is just as manipulative as the Nike behaviour but hey, I’m not a new-communist cultural theorist, and I like good, clever or awesome marketing)

So to conclude the ramblings everyone and everything around us want you to like them today. The meaning and value of ‘Like’ will keep evolving in interesting ways. I wonder if it will stick. Or perhaps it will quickly loose it’s novelty and become so ubiquitous and banal it will eventually be meaningless.

What do you think?

If you’re in a hurry just go and watch this video here

You know I normally don’t shout about own work but this one is important.

At Hyper we’ve recently been working with Pedigree to launch their 2010 Pedigree Adoption Drive – a campaign aimed at reducing the numbers of abandoned dogs on our streets.

There are currently 108,000 abandoned dogs in the UK, many of them in danger of being put down if funds can’t be raised to keep them alive.

That’s why, amongst other activities, we’ve created Charlie’s Story – a film with an ending that can be affected with every 25,000 views.

And while Charlie’s life can be changed just by watching the video, so can the lives of many real dogs as Pedigree will donate £1 for every view Charlie’s Story receives.

All films can be seen here

Thanks for your support etc.

I can’t believe me I haven’t heard about this one until today. This politically incorrect masterpiece is nothing short of genius!

You can watch the whole thing here

Thanks @iditf

So I decided to do something more useful and interesting with these unused stuff. Every month in 2010 I will dig something of value out of my drawer/storage, put it on ebay and 100% of the money from the sale goes to charity of choice – the winner will inform me where do they want their money to go to.

I’m starting with my old classic iPod mini that served me well and is still in perfect condition, packed with good music – all proceeds from this sale go to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal unless the buyer will insist otherwise.

Well, to be honest it also reminds me the Seinfeld episode (The Pilot #1 and #2) where NBC executive Russell Dalrymple’s obsession with Elaine begins to affect his work; she tries to let him down easy by saying she can’t be in a relationship with a high-powered man and would prefer to be with someone selfless, such as a member of Greenpeace. In order to prove himself worthy of Elaine, Russell joins Greenpeace and is lost at sea during a botched assault on a whaling ship… (apologies but couldn’t find the scene on youtube)

For all categories- in no particular order

Best albums of the year

1. The phenomenal handclap band – S/T
2. Fontän – Winterhwila
3. Rone – Spanish breakfast
4. JJ – JJ no 2
5. The XX -S/T
6. Jana Hunter – There’s no home
7. Memory Tapes – Seek Magic
8. Fat Freddy’s Drop – Dr. Boondigga & The Big BW
9. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
10. Bibio – ambivalence Avenue

Best books of the year

1. The End of Mr Y / Scarlett Thomas (2008)
2. War World Z / Mel Brooks (2006)
3. Journey by Moonlight / Antal Szerb (1937)
4. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce / Slavoj Zizek (2009)

Best film of the year

District 9

Best commercial things – no categories, just brilliant work

1. Live Strong chalkbot
2. Caramel bunny digital pop up shops (am a bit biased, yes.)
3. Best job in the world
4. Philips carousel
5. Whopper Sacrifice
6. Love Distance
7. Maison Hermes by Tokujin Yoshioka

Best non-commercial things

1. Cardon copy
2. Hands from Above
3. Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ UBC video
4. TweenBots
5. Thru you
6. KideoPlayer
7. Learning to love you more
8. Alice and Kev

…and lastly as we did last year, the most hideous trend has to go this year to….Augmented Reality. In might change the game one day but last year 95% of the works were me-too-digs-technology-crapness. The rare exception here is the really great Hidden Park iPhone app.

Send me your stuff please

Happy 2010

Asi x

Don’t know what about you but I can get fairly irritated at the odd tube station that doesn’t have the next train display – I don’t mind waiting, it’s part of life, I just hate not knowing how long I have to wait… I’m therefore a sucker for everything that makes your ‘dead time’ moments in life less dead by either entertaining you or, more importantly lifts you out of the misery of uncertainty and lack of control over your time.

In Zurich airport for instance, in the designated belt at the baggage area there is a count down clock that tells you exactly when your luggage will turn out(the flight’s luggage of course, it’s not personal). The time display on Firefox when you download something or the rare customer service line that keeps you informed of the time it will take the next available person to answer you etc.

All of these are the little things that make dead time more bearable.

Eko light by Damjan Stankovi does just that only on an even more prevalent situation:

Eko light is a simple yet, highly practical concept for traffic lights that not only helps preserve the environment by reducing pollution but promotes safer driving as well. Eko can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort while significantly improving overall traffic dynamics.

There are many benefits of the Eko light, the main ones being:

Less pollution.
Drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light.

Less fuel consumption
Turning off your vehicle while waiting on the traffic light can lower fuel consumption in the long run.

Less stress Since you know exactly how long you have to wait you can sit back and clear your head for a while. No need to keep your foot on the gas. Relax.

Safer driving- With the Eko light both drivers and pedestrians can be fully aware of how much time they have left before the light changes and that way reduce the chance for potential traffic accidents.

Slightly less practical but nevertheless awesome is EggWatcher – one of the projects that came out of Poke’s recent hackday. Good work mate!

What / where else we could use a time indicator?

There is something very seductive in the evolution of streams as well as the evolution of the discourse around streams. It’s fallacy is the usual early-adopters twitter-centric outlook that tends to categorically ditch the old world and embrace the new but if you read through the hyperbole there is definitely something worth watching closer.

Of all articles I find Jeff Jarvis’s the most interesting (I forgive him for the overly simplistic outlook of Stephen Fry as the future of media)

The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.

and…

So imagine this future without pages and sites, this future that’s all built on process over product. If you’re what used to be a content-creation – if you’re Stephen Fry, post-media – you’re all about insinuating yourself into that stream. If you’re about content curation – formerly known as editing – then you’re all about prioritizing streams for people; that’s how you add value now.

This is a fascinating evolution. But, as I said, I think that Jarvis is falling to the fallacy trap of new X is killing the old Y. He ignores the simple fact that old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve.

There is no future with no pages and sites – there can’t be a future with no pages and sites. Content will never be reduced to 140 characters, it has to live somewhere. News, reviews, TED, blog posts, recipes and whatnot still have to live somewhere (and be funded somehow but that’s not the point of this post). Neil was absolutely spot on when he wrote:

Websites used to be everything. I think their role now is more akin to a kind of content hub supporting a more distributed presence. Designing for platforms and streams enables an exponentially larger reach for content than could ever be acheived through a destination model, so in this way scale comes through connection. With decent content acheiving scale is relatively easy, but scale without connection is one-dimensional. Because connection builds permission: “the understanding that the real asset most organisations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.”

The sea-change and therefore the focus is on changing consumption behaviours. The idea that our consumption of ‘stuff’ will be channeled through The Stream increasingly resonates with my daily experience.

There are 3 general ways in which I (we) consume content and ‘stuff’ online:

1. The websites I like
This is old-school bookmarking. Whether my home page or all the other stuff organised on my browser tabs which I visit occasionally

2. The RSS feed(s)
This is all the stuff I found interesting and decided to subscribe to over the years, currently 150 feeds through Google Reader

3. My stream(s)
All the stuff that my network (read: Twitter and Facebook, Emails and IM etc) is sharing and spreading.

Recently it seems that the first two are in decline and the Streams are on the up. The reason I find streams so fascinating is that in being anti-context they somehow prove to be hyper-personal-meta-context. Unlike the relatively organised bookmarking and RSS the streams suffer from lack of context (unless you have 16 columns on your twitterdeck). If Twitter is the future, or more accurately, if Twitter represents the future of how we will consume content than as Jarvis pointed out streams are full of life!

My Twitter (and Facebook) streams are essentially a hodgepode of friends’ blurbs, news and very few artists and brands I chose to invite to my stream. All in one place. Intuitively this mishmash of context doesn’t make sense but it does when you understand the natural selection of interestingness from an individual as well as from a societal perspectives.

So to test this new-age idea that if the news is that important it will find me or that if something isn’t in my inbox it’s not viral. I decided to live the rest of the year totally reliant on my stream(s) to know my way in the world.

I won’t access actively and directly any website, webblog, web page or other destination of content – content will have to find me. No RSS, no home page, NOTHING. Just me and my stream. I will occasionally report on my experience of “living ON the stream” through twitter and write a summary post at the end of the year.

Anyone care to join me?

It’s this time of the year… New year’s trends lists are the currency of the moment, and every blogger and his sister compile a knowledgeable trends list for 2010. The world doesn’t really need another one from me.

So instead I’d like to talk about one trend which we should try to avoid in the next year.

Please can we stop killing things?

Over the last few years we’ve been all guilty of new-technologies sensationalism. Our response to the overwhelming pace of change made us believe that emerging platforms and technologies will categorically and dramatically kill everything that was before them. Search for “TV is Dead” on google and you’ll get over 2million(!) results. But is it? really? (That clever dude who wrote a book on the death of TV advertising also founded a new agency that specialises in marketing in Second Life. No, really!)

What else have we had?

Twitter is killing blogging!

Widgets will kill the homepage!

Second Life is killing Real Life!

Digital is killing advertising!

Yahoo pipes will kill the browser!

Google is killing Microsoft!

iGoogle is killing Newspapers!

Gaming is killing the cinema!

Books are a thing of the past!

Google Wave will kill Facebook!

Facebook is killing email!

Twitter is killing Facebook!

And now, the most recent hyperbole, straight from Twitter’s (AKA The Pulse) oven, I give you….

Streams are killing the web page.

Guess what. it turns out that when human evolve and construct culture(s) they have some time-attention-alchemist-like qualities whereby old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. Honestly, we’re like every good parents – when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)

True, there are some casualties (DVD did kill the VHS) and natural selection (e.g. closure of few magazines and channels), some people make less money, some people make loads new money. Things do expand and contract, evolve and change but reality is more complex and is no where near the new-technologies massacres we read about every day.

So for 2010, let’s try to avoid the trend of killing old things in favour of new things and live happily ever after…

Peace