Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody” is one of everyone’s favorite TED speakers.  Here are a few of the points I took from his most recent on Cognitive Surplus – a title shared by his latest book.

Our new found connectivity is changing what we do in out free time.  A significant portion of our intrinsic motivations are not economic; As a society, we are discovering that we like to create and share. We like to create value for our civilization.

Through the sharing, we witness a host of stupid creations (he uses LOLcats as an example: cute cat photos with dumb captions) but the importance that shouldn’t be missed is that the gap between creating nothing and creating something is narrowing.  Stupid creativity is still creativity that can, and probably will, improve.

Taking that initial step is like going to the gym; the first step out the door is the toughest. After that first step fitness comes easier as does creativity.  The first step in the creative process is the hardest: doing.

The next step in the use of our free time is in creativing value for society which Shirky calls Cognitive surplus.  His talk is worth view.

The Bird House and “The Cabbie”

The Bird House:

Bird House

On a weekend walk my wife and I came across our community’s annual Bird House Design Contest; apparently a local favorite unbeknownst to me.  There were nearly 100 bird homes in 6 or more categories – who knew it was that involved?  Excited, my wife ran through the designs doing a preliminary judging then a final run through as I waited having completed my vote.  Turns out, she is a much more thorough bird house judge.

Walking away from the event she said, “How fun was that”?  I said, “Well, that’s 30 minutes I’ll never get back.”  Wait, I suddenly feel like a bird house snob pronouncing only one or two barely worthy of my standards, yet I knew nothing of bird housing.

Every one of them looked like a bird house; that hole for the bird is a dead giveaway.  Is there some invariant form of bird home that birds comprehend; one that we’d dare not reject without risking vacancy?  What if I wanted to use design thinking to create a new bird house, where do I go to gain bird empathy or am I fated to derivative designs, i.e. where do I put the hole?

Maybe I’ll crowdsource this. Throw out a bird house challenge: describe the problem (new bird house design), set a price, get solutions from the crowd (via 99designs.com perhaps?), vet solutions, reward the winner, take ownership of the design, and retire on the sales profits.  I’ll send one to the design winner as a gift to be nice.

What do you suppose is a “fair” price for an innovative bird house design?  I want quality; I’m casting my net for brilliance; I want true innovation not some left over design sitting in someone’s closet.

Wait – how do I know who wins?  I know nothing but what looks good; I’m a visual guy – sure – but what if it looks great but functions like crap or is a huge bird disappointment?  I need an expert or better yet, I’ll bone up on all things bird.  Assuming I’ll never know bird “want”, I’ll immerse myself in bird “need”. Birds don’t really know what they want but sometimes they get what they need. It’ll have to be good enough.

The Cabbie:

Original still on which "The Cabbie" was based

Vincent Laforet is an LA based photographer and director.  He was asked by Canon to kick off The Story Beyond The Still. The story continues when the last frame of the previous video is used by the next artist to continue the story with their video creation – and so it goes.

It’s improv technique applied to video storytelling. The story is created by the artists, we get a cool story, and Canon gets publicity – everyone wins.

[via: The Story Beyond The Still]

It’s the first ever user-generated HD Video Contest where photographers become filmmakers, and we all see beyond the still. Last month Josh Thacker was chosen as the very first winner for his film “Job Security,” based on his interpretation of a still photograph at the end of the previous chapter, “The Cabbie,” shot by Vincent Laforet on a Canon EOS 7D. Josh’s film was the second chapter of seven, ending with a still photograph of its own for the Vimeo community to interpret. After a flurry of entries, Keegan Uhl’s “The Beach” was chosen as the winner for Chapter 3, and now, once again the question is posed to you, what do you see beyond this still?

"Alan Guitar Hero" directed by David Shane

Of one thing I am sure, the folks listed below created a funny sophisticated ad for the Doritos King of Ads contest.

Does anyone else find something Deliciously ironic about hiring the best in the business to produce a spot that will invite the production of a bunch of borderline Cheesy spots?

How far will user content extend the value of professional content?

Agency: AMV BBDO, London

Client: Doritos

Director: David Shane

Production Company: MJZ

Copywriter: Paul Knott

Art Director: Tim Vance

Agency Planner: Tom White

Agency Planner: Nicola Davies

TV Producer: Suzy MacGregor

Media Agency: OMD

Media Planner: James Campbell

Production Company: MJZ

Post Production Company: The Lab

There’s no faulting authentic cause marketing.   Doing the right thing by committing funds is inspiring.  A perfect example is the Ronald McDonald House supporting families of hospitalized children.  It represents everything we’d like a corporation to do with their profits: give some back to the community that buys the product.  All positive public relations are genuinely well deserved.

Pepsi Refresh feels similar.  The soft drink company uses the internet to field ideas and award favorites monthly with large sums of cash to finance a cause.  Excellent.  Spread the love and the goodness of a brand.  The Publicity is good; the causes are great and they used new social networking techniques to make it even more powerful – awesome.  Much better than a one run Superbowl networks 30 sec. spot.

Let’s take a moment to sincerely thank them for this approach.  Honest – no sarcasm intended but it’s hard to write this stuff without it sounding that way.

OK – that said, let me risk more by sounding overly cynical and ask about statistics regarding ROI for cause marketing.  It must be impossible to measure.  Maybe it’s not necessary to measure.  Building a brand by making members of a cause and their benefactors love it, how can that fail?  Pay it forward, right? Everyone will love Pepsi and buy their product because they’re doing the right thing. [Well, that’s a little sarcastic]

While Pepsi’s approach was inspired, it feels like a dead end and outside the brand to me.  Each cause is individually separate and disconnected from anything to do with Pepsi as a refreshment maker other than cash outlay, a brand mark, and a slogan.

I think about those times my parents gave me money for college.  I am eternally grateful but that’s not why I love them.  I also received a partial scholarship from someone but I’d have to go back and dig through papers to find out whom… I forget.  In fact, attach strings to payments and recipients may get resentful: a girlfriend’s Dad once offered $1000 to her for quitting cigarettes – you can guess how that turned out.

A better approach would be to create a product that inspired it’s own cause and its own marketing.  Let’s pretend Pepsi Co. created a delicious tablet that, when dropped in water would give a day’s worth of nutrition in a thirst quenching drink while simultaneously clearing foul water of harmful bacteria.

• The tablet tasted better than sports drinks of the wealthiest fit minded communities.
• The tablets are so effective that it could be distributed to earthquake victims in Haiti and Chile to help solve drinking water shortages.
• Pepsi would be marketing the same tablet everywhere; one which would give 50% profits to groups dedicated to quench the thirst of the world.  [Insert Pepsi Refresh cause marketing here].
• Track profits from areas of the globe and where they go through online mapping – create a competition between shopping segments – who can generate more thirst quenching for drought stricken areas.
• Perhaps a live video feeds from the areas being helped or of people buying the product that will be shipped to the truly thirsty.

These thoughts are incomplete and raw but I think you get the idea.  Everything from the product to the financing to the cause and the outcome are all Pepsi.  The product is the marketing and everything to do with it perpetuates the brand and its thirst quenching essence.  It offers consumers something genuinely healthy to purchase and one that did good tangible things across the globe as well as an opportunity to pick up another Pepsi products sold next to the tablet while at the store.

I know, I know,  the tablet may be a technological fantasy but something isn’t that would fit the scheme.  I’m just sayin’ – Pepsi is doing good stuff but I think they missed an opportunity on this one.

I live for the thrill – a captivating moment in the creative process when engagement turns exciting.  Nothing else matters but refining how it sounds, looks, reads, feels.  My concentration is off the immersion chart.  Volume is past 11 on the engagement control.

The route to vibrant creativeness may be tough to find and even harder to finish; putting pencil to paper and drawing the first line or writing that first sentence, it’s classically agonizing.  Similarly, slogging through an ultimate final edit for the 10^th time is plainly mundanely dutiful.  Yet, those moments in the darkroom chasing a fine b+w print for the first time, photographing an expressively electric target rich scene or expressing a new idea with elegant phrasing makes the process compelling beyond any accomplished artifact.

It feels as though we – the artist – are in a frantic improvisation inside ourselves when “yes …. And” can’t come fast enough, yet it does.  It’s a feeling of comparatively little effort and high output.  He’s on fire; she’s in the zone; I’m in profound flow.

On stage improv is fundamentally an additive process that rides flow like a snowboarder.  The Grateful Dead meandered aimlessly in sloppy hunt for improvisational synergy that – once found – inspired a loyal horde.  It’s nothing like drilling for oil – more like sharing demonstrative dreams at 20 – 20,000 MHz.

This is what can happen in well orchestrated collaboration: open source projects, teamwork in progressive companies or creative agencies, and productions with unusually talented performers. The outcome is inevitable – the project concludes – but creative performers push it to surprising places.

As Maria Schneider says in this clip, “When it works at the end of a performance, the performance belongs to all of us. … There is a meeting place that makes something rich if it’s done right.”  To paraphrase further: In the end, the music is where you and I meet rather than waiting for a perfection that never conforms to my vision.

Maria Schneider’s Biography [Via Wikipedia]:

Schneider was born in Windom, Minnesota. She moved to New York City in 1985 after attending college at the University of Minnesota, the University of Miami and the Eastman School of Music. She studied under Bob Brookmeyer and Gil Evans, working on various projects with Evans, including the film The Color of Money and Absolute Beginners. Her works share many characteristics with other jazz composers influenced by Gil Evans, including Lou Marini, and Grammy Award winning composer Bob Belden.

Schneider formed The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra in 1993, appearing weekly at Visiones in Greenwich Village for five years. Her orchestra performed at many jazz festivals and toured Europe.

Schneider was one of the first artists to use ArtistShare to produce an album. Her 2004 album, Concert in the Garden, became the first Grammy Award-winning recording sold exclusively via the Internet. It was named Jazz Album of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association, which also named Schneider Composer of the Year and Arranger of the Year and named her group Large Jazz Ensemble of the Year.

Schneider’s ensemble is now titled “The Maria Schneider Orchestra”. Their new album, Sky Blue, was released in July 2007, also via ArtistShare. Schneider’s composition “Cerulean Skies,” from Sky Blue, won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition in 2008. Schneider is an avid birdwatcher and enlisted band members to contribute bird calls on “Cerulean Skies.”

“The committee is usually wrong; yet the crowd is commonly right and incredibly dull. If you’re part of the crowd you’ll be sourced and forgotten.”

I’ve Tweeted this statement a few times to gauge response.  My aim is to demonstrate that creativity has an individual source.  Whether we talk about the wisdom of crowds, group think or committee decisions, true brilliance comes from an individual, were,  in contrast, group worth is measured in evaluation, validation, and exploration.

Within each committee is a devil’s advocate – in this case not the anti-Christ but the anti-creative.  Creative teams are highly successful (if kept nimble) but I challenge anyone to find a good creative team staffed with devil’s advocates or those with outside agendas or unruly egos.

By far, the best (or worst) example of committee is most recently the U.S. Congress.  Ignoring its tragedy, there is comedy it the way a group can come up with a product absolutely no one finds entirely attractive.

Source a crowd and what do you find?  If you’re lucky, one individual with a great idea ready to be diluted by the committee or – much better – open it up to be altered to fit by another individual or creative team.  Either way, you get my drift.  Crowds are dull – it’s up to you to find the brilliance through open sources or create it yourself .

Ji Lee demonstrated the value of open creativity with The Bubble Project.  It didn’t involve a committee. It sources a crowd. It highlights the brilliance of individuals.  Yet, he was the catalyst for the disruptive idea.  He found the brilliance.

More on Ji Lee

Ji Lee Biography via 99%

Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Ji Lee studied design at Parsons School of Design. He currently works as the Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York and teaches design at School of Visual Arts. In the past, Lee has worked as the branding director at Droga5 and art director at Saatchi & Saatchi.

Ji Lee is the founder of the widely publicized Bubble Project and the author of two books: Talk Back: The Bubble Project and Univers Revolved: a 3-Dimensional Alphabet.

Lee has given numerous lectures, including Harvard University, MIT and MoMA. Lee’s work has appeared in ABC World News, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, WIRED among others.

When turning pleasurable pursuits into a profession there needs to be barriers to entry or exceptional value that adds economic scarcity; conceivably risk, distinctive talent or financial investment.  This is permanently true.   Your value-add – if not unique – requires higher risk, or supplementary resources, or less pleasure if your unwilling to settle for lower (or no) compensation.

In the 80 / 20 hay day [the 80% worth consuming is produced by 20% of the talent], creative professionals would rely on institutions like the recording industry, art galleries or advertising agencies to organize creative output.  Our institutions filtered talent, packaged product, controlled access and provided distribution.  Groups were organized, consumers and producers kept separate, and chaos avoided.

Lately, creative professionals are suffering the heartbreak of  fading uniqueness and coping with pressures to add value in other ways.  Clay Shirky gave his first TED talk in 2005.  His institution v. collaboration presentation must have appeared abstract to more listeners then than now, nevertheless, Clay’s talk hasn’t faded in value for those of us trying to recover our bearings in a once familiar profession.

The chaos of coordinated groups without institutional control is just beginning.  Creative professionals are faced with a massive increase in expressive capability beyond that of the printing press, telephone, recorded media (photos, sound) or broadcast (TV, Radio).  Consider this a call to discover new uses for the new connective media; acceptance is an imperative.

Photographers will find Clay Shirky’s example of Flickr particularly familiar. You can find Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody here.

(via Wikipedia)

Clay Shirky (born 1964^[1]) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University‘s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.^[2]

He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client-server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the U.S. Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation and the BBC.

Predictions? No. Trends? Uhhh, not really, but mainly because I refuse to be called trendy.  What the PTS Watchlistapalooza represents are ideas that make sense for the next five or more years.

All of these points are especially important for the creative professional since we are the tip of the spear.

1. Look for goods that can’t be sucked into the cloud* – i.e. Google getting into the hardware business
2. The “Democratized Renaissance” (via David Burney ) a.k.a. cooperative organizing of creativity, has brought us to chaos.  Watch as the professional class scrambles for shelter – this goes double for my native profession of commercial photography.
3. Marketing messages become more toxic.  The smarter among us will steer their marketing further away from propaganda.  Keep it real by phasing out the ad push of the last century and phase in the pull by providing valuable but authentic content.
4. The return of web ROI.  Information wants to be free but let’s get real folks – and we will – we just haven’t discovered appropriate pay for play models.
5. Content is king; watch for it to return to its rightful place as old institutions transform (or fail) into new organizations.
6. The emerging Renaissance Specialist will find his niche.  Simply having a high skill in a narrow specialty will no longer cut it.  Go ahead, establish a brand based on a specialty but you’d better be prepared to add value across a broader range of skills than you did in prior decades.  Watch for the return of Liberal Studies.
7. Privacy gets more consideration from marketers. The younger generation may have a lesser expectation of privacy but don’t fool yourself, invade it at your peril – social media marketing is a risky proposition for those interested in broadcasting a message.
8. Watch as institutions to get into trouble when the old guard tries new social media tricks.  Remember that rogue employees representing a company on Twitter can communicate messages out of reach of the board room – enter Risk Management.
9. Integration is no longer just an 11 letter word.  The new tools are awesome but like every new toy we eventually return to our real pleasures and passions.  Integrate your product into culture or change culture otherwise no one is going to listen to your message.
10. Not going away: matching of buyers to sellers and “you get what you pay for”.
11. Pay attention to generative values – read Kevin Kelly’s thoughts (Better Than Free) on uncloneable assets around which we can build economic scarcity: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.
12. Social Media will remain – uhhh well – social.  While there may be a deluge of fan pages, click through advertising and contests, social media participants will never have patience for intrusions into the space where they keep relationships.  Your message might be sitting on someone’s lap, be careful what you put there.
13. Phase out direct marketing mentality, create internet advertising that is magnetically experiential; add value and then make the turn, but rather than asking for the sale like Ron Popeil, ask for a relationship.
14. There’s no longer 10,000 hours (a la Gladwell’s Outliers)  to be an expert at any small thing and the small things are getting bigger.
15. Innovation will move from “perceived” to “real” or the perceived will need to become real by adding value to the experience – see Kevin Kelly’s generative values.

*Also Check out John Hagel’s Edge Perspective

Enormous Word Warning: Disintermediation

I’m no economist, but any word that begins with “disinter” can’t be a good thing. Mediation sounds harmless enough; almost soothing – but combined, its disposition is ruined.

Yet, cutting out the middleman sounds more pleasing unless – of course – you’re the middle man. Cheaper and faster is the result of the missing middle, although whatever value intrinsic to the middle is wiped out with its extraction.

Not so in the case of “Open Source”. Open source is a form of development that promotes shared access to the product’s source materials. Like a never-ending beta test -apart from the agreement that any enhancements are, in return, shared without compensation – Open Source is ceaselessly creative and occasionally innovative. Designs are mutually beneficial to a virtual crowd with shared interests giving them the opportunity of equal benefit. A score passed along a musical chain would be a good example or – more conspicuously – there is Linux code [yawn].

We can also source a community by holding an “open call” [notice the opportunity for confusion through the word “open”] much like the organizers of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair did through a contest for design submissions that lead to an iconic structure to compete with the Eiffel Tower. The winning innovative design – by the way – was submitted by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. and the stakes were high; much more than the average compensation for the winner of a CrowdSpring contest for example.

Anytime an opportunist can pocket some change, exploitation is an enduring prospect. Exploitation is a shell game; a game that typically relocates money from one pocket to another with little or no value-add – they are disinnovative. While not entirely useless [occasionally entertaining], exploitation games can sure piss some people off.

You disinnovate by making something look innovative when – in fact – it merely reframes processes, economic dominance, or both without adding value; much like I’m doing by swapping unnovate with disinnovate as a coined phrase thus reassigning title from Umair Haque to me. Others might disinnovate with an open call for a logo design at $400.  No innovation here just a shifting of profit from the logo designer to the solicitor; a shell game.

“We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.” – a punch line commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, also conjures the worst of the worst of Crowdsourcing and its disinnovative result that causes much venom spewing by creative professionals. Nearly all tools can be constructive or destructive, yet the old rules still apply:  “there’s a right tool for every job” and “you get what you pay for.”

Engage a crowd so they can influence a brand or participate in the development of products they want to buy – while not uniquely innovative – is inclusive in a variety that benefits everyone. A sure fire way of creating brand advocates is to get a community vested in its development; it’s a relationship much stronger than what conventional advertising will ever deliver.

Creativity is principally the domain of an individual enhanced by great relationships, but just as a properly harnessed horse team can pull harder, the right creative team can produce more consistently powerful messages. That said, teamwork isn’t what crowdsourcing stimulates. Consequently, don’t expect a creative product superior to that which you’d get from a reputable individual or strong creative team. Fluffy the cat will probably fetch your morning paper more often.

Conversely, “Open Source” not Crowdsourcing is the resource for absorbing virtual communities in teamwork. Their motivation is different; It’s less competitive and collectively engaged in a superior more productive solution. Open Source is much more likely to produce innovative, not disinnovative, results.         - Bruce DeBoer

In the attached video are two enthusiastic Crowdsourcing advocates. John Winsor – seated to the right [camera left] of Edward Boches – recently cofounded Victors and Spoils that lays claim as The world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. What that means exactly and how far they can leverage a potentially disinnovative idea, we’ll have to wait and see. If brand awareness is a green signal for success, they’ve got a solid start.

For more go to:
victorsandspoils.com

Follow them on Twitter:

@jtwinsor

@edwardboches

Undeniable. We live in interesting times.  Perhaps it takes more courage – albeit a different kind (a New Kind if you will) – to live now than during the original Renaissance.  Creativity is spilling into the streets creating an awareness that we haven’t seen before these last few years.

According to David Burney, we are living through a “Democratized Renaissance“, one in which creativity is available to more people.  New tool sets allow everyone to compete, whether you choose to be an artist or find your niche in business or both.

In part II of the interview with David Burney, he frames his ideas about what we should be thinking in the next decade and what our value is currently as creative professionals.

Biography (via NEW KIND website)

David has nearly 30 years experience building and leading creative services organizations. Most recently, David served for 4 1/2 years as Vice President of Brand Communications and Design at Red Hat—one of the most disruptive technology brands in the world. David led the company’s overall brand communications strategy, including all creative communications functions.

Prior to Red Hat, David was the owner of Burney Design, partner and Chief Creative Officer at Capstrat, and Chief Designer at the NC Museum of Art.

In addition to serving as Red Hat’s brand executive, David also created an internal innovation program to drive the power of design thinking throughout the company. The program fast became an integral part of quarterly executive meetings. It was subsequently leveraged across the company worldwide to create departmental and individual goals that align with annual corporate business objectives.

David is an active and long-time member of AIGA, the professional association for design. He was a founding member of the Raleigh chapter where he has served as President. He has also served as the Chair of the National President’s Council.