Marci Ikeler

The evolution of our vision of the future is more interesting...

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:30:06 -0400

The evolution of our vision of the future is more interesting than the actual evolution of the present. (via R U A CYBERPUNK? [Pic])

"The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius."

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:04:45 -0400

“The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius.”

- Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, via swissmiss

Make Things People Want

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:22:00 -0400

Great presentation on why the future of marketing likes in making things that people want, not making people want things.

The Future of Marketing: Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things?

The hierarchy of innovation

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:08:36 -0400

The hierarchy of innovation:

In response to Neal Stephenson, who recently wrote that the Internet may have put innovation “on hold for a generation”, Nicholas Carr posits that we’ve simply moved innovation to a different plane on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Whereas earlier innovations were about increasing survival (fire, weapons), then our safety (electricity, plumbing), we are now at the stage of using innovation to actualize and express ourselves.

Benchmark - May 9th, 2012

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:03:00 -0400

Benchmark - May 9th, 2012:

I’m hosting a round table discussion at the Benchmark conference in NYC on Wednesday. Benchmark is the first conference focused on measuring social media results - I’ll be chatting about how to bring brand experiences to life in social. Come say hi!

Revolutionary User Interfaces

Thu, 03 May 2012 17:51:19 -0400

Revolutionary User Interfaces:

Gorgeous museum of innovations in user interfaces - from the first calculators to the iPhone.

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:22:15 -0400

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”

- The same can be said for innovation.

Pablo Picasso (via simko)

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:33:17 -0400

““Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.””

- Steve Jobs, 1996 Wired Interview, via swissmiss

Observations from India

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:31:00 -0400

Aaron and I recently returned from a two-week vacation to India. I chose to travel to India because I wanted to go someplace completely different from anything I’ve experience before.

Mission accomplished. India is beautiful, bizarre, emotional, and intense. I’ve travelled fairly extensively, but I’ve never seen anything like it. So while this isn’t strictly technology or marketing related, I thought I’d share a few observations about the journey.

1. India loves Angry Birds

Angry Birds is an absolute phenomenon in India. It seems as though 1 out of every 5 man under the age of 25 is wearing an Angry Birds t-shirts. Angry Birds toys are sold on the streets. Knock-offs proliferate - whether it’s Angry Lolos or the culturally-relevant Angry Brides.

2. Indian drivers are the best in the world

Indian traffic bears little resemblance to what we’re used to in the Western world. There are few stoplights/traffic signs, and nobody obeys them. I only saw lane markers in a street once, on a highway in Mumbai. Traffic in India is like a river: it flows and weaves, and everyone involved goes at their own pace. And it’s not just cars: tuk tuks, rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, cows, horses, camels, goats, people, and water buffalo are commonly found in the middle of busy streets. Everyone honks constantly, but it means “I’m behind you” or “I’m to your side”, not “get out of the way. This video is a fairly accurate representation.

Dealing with this chaos requires a steady hand and some serious driving skills. The cars (and tuk tuks, rickshaws, etc.) I rode in could pass another vehicle within a half an inch. They signal using sound (horn), hand motions, and eye contact. Once I’d adjusted to the differences, I felt incredibly safe.

3. Foreigners are still a spectacle

I was surprised by the number and variety of people who wanted to take my picture or have their picture taken with me, regardless of who I was with or what I was wearing. I asked several English-speaking Indians what it meant, and they all had the same answer: seeing someone with fair skin is still an unusual event for many people in India (and to be clear, the requests were not negative - they were friendly and curious). These little eccentricities of attention are disappearing as our world and media become more global.

"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of..."

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:55:00 -0400

“Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.”

- Clay Shirky on the future of reading.

"Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:35:23 -0400

“Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.””

- Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ - NYTimes.com

Mechanical/Digital

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:46:15 -0400

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the trend for gaming health via wearable computing - think Fitbit, Nike Fuelband, etc. It’s something that feels so futuristic - devices that ambiently allow us to quantify our movements.

On Saturday, I bucked the digital trend and bought my first proper mechanical watch. Automatic watches keep themselves wound through the movement of the wearer’s wrist - when you don’t wear them, they stop running. To start them again, you have to wear the non-functioning watch on your wrist for a while; eventually, your bodies motion will get them going again, so that you can restart the time.

I was struck by the similarity between this mechanism and the Fitbit. In both devices, movement = reward (in the case of the watch, the reward is having a functioning timepiece).

How many other digital innovations and devices are preceded by analog concepts?

We made this, and it's not an ad

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:51:49 -0400

We made this, and it's not an ad:

Looks like the best presentation I missed at SXSW 2012.

View more presentations from Duncan/Channon

SXSW as pressure cooker

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:29:46 -0400

People are always asking what the “breakout” app of SXSW was. The truth is that, in 13 years of SXSW interactive, there have only been two big ones so far: foursquare in 2009 and Twitter in 2007.

Even with that caveat, the impact Twitter and foursquare have had on our culture are huge, so the question is worth asking: why do some apps become famous after 5 days in a town in Texas? Here’s my formula:

Tons to Do + The Latest Gadgets + The Nerdiest People = New Behaviors

Let’s break these down.

Tons to Do

Both Twitter and foursquare rely on a need for a constant stream of information. Although I had dabbled in Twitter when it launched in 2007, I never used it regularly until I first attended SXSW in 2009. Suddenly, it became essential to get the latest, real-time information on the best panels, parties, and people. I’ve been a Twitter addict ever since.

Foursquare is the same story. Location based services aren’t really useful unless you have a lot of friends and places to be in a small geographic area. Foursquare did a great job of addressing this need in the world’s best test case: Austin.

The Latest Gadgets

A big challenge with the uptake of new technologies is the fact that 90% of the population is using old devices. Take a look at the television industry in the US vs a more controlled culture like Japan. Not so at SXSW: not only does everyone have an iPhone, everyone has an iPhone 4S. This makes it easy for a new technology to take off by using the best of the gadgets that are already on the market.

The Nerdiest People

This one goes without saying. Most everyone at Southby is an early adopter, and, more importantly, is motivated by being perceived as an early adopter. The social currency of the conference is knowledge, but not the kind that’s not particularly deep or useful - it’s all about the latest, the next, the hip. This means that you have a group that’s uniquely motivated to try new things - things that you might not try if you weren’t surrounded by your nerdiest peers.

Summary

The reason SXSW continues to by fascinating to me is that it offers a unique opportunity to watch and participate new behaviors emerging, live. It doesn’t happen every year, but when it does, it’s magical.

PS: If you must insist on new apps from SXSW 2012, Highlight, Sonar, Picle, and Spin Cam got the most buzz.

Southby

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:57:00 -0400

This was my fourth year attending SXSWi, which I think makes me a bit of a veteran. While what all the haters have to say about the event is true - it was indeed too crowded, too rainy, and too over-hyped - it is still the best interactive conference around, and I’ll be there next year.

I’ll be sharing a few of my key learnings over the next few days as part of my annual “let’s get blogging again initiative.” Stay tuned.

"As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of..."

Fri, 20 May 2011 12:28:07 -0400

““As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.””

- danah boyd

Haters Gonna Hate: My SXSW 2011 Panel

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:08:07 -0400

Visual notes courtesy of Ogilvy Notes.

Speaking at SXSW has been something of a goal of mine for a while now, and I’m proud to report that this year I achieved it.

My solo panel was called “Haters Gonna Hate: Lessons for Advertisers from 4chan” and my intention was to use the things I learned through my love of /b/ as a metaphor for lessons for advertisers. The SXSW planning team completely changed the format of the talk at the last minute, which was a bit tricky, but I think it came out okay.

If you’re playing along at home, feel free to listen to an audio recording of the session:

The Problem of Group Management

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:00:00 -0400

Visualization of my LinkedIn network, automatically generated through inMaps.

As I have been contemplating SXSW this year, one thing that struck me was that, unlike previous years, there wasn’t a clear “winner” in terms of a new technology or platform.

The reason for all the attention that the technology and advertising industries lavish on SXSW is due to the fact that, for the past several years, it’s been the site of the popularization of a game-changing technology. Twitter in 2007. Foursquare in 2009 (as a new idea) and 2010 (as a popular, extensible platform).

In 2011, there didn’t seem to be a breakout app or service, despite the best effort of what felt like thousands of startups equipped with flyers, schwag, and scantily clad volunteers.

Aside from their over-aggressive marketing tactics, one thing that several of these start-ups had in common was an attempt at solving a common problem: group management.

The way that human beings socialize in real life doesn’t match how software treats us online; I don’t really have 290 equally important friends in my life the way that Facebook displays them. Instead, I have a core group of friends who I socialize with on the weekends, a group of people who I work with, a whole bunch of other groups whom I’ve worked with in the past, friends from college, friends from high school, and family members - not to mention a few miscellaneous acquaintances I’ve met and lost touch with over the years. Status updates that are intended for my friends are sometimes offensive to my devout Christian cousins, and - like many people - I find my self second-guessing what I post, since I know it will be visible to my coworkers and boss.

This is not a new insight. In fact, Facebook tried to solve this problem with its introduction of Groups in October 2010. The project garnered a ton of attention from tech bloggers, but, 6 months later, it’s rarely mentioned (Facebook hasn’t published usage data, but anecdotally it doesn’t seem that many folks are using it).

Several companies at SXSW gave the group challenge a shot - GroupMe,Hashable, and Hurricane Party all approached the problem in a different ways.

However, as with Facebook Groups, none of these apps seemed to really take off. Real-life social circles are incredibly complex. Right now, it seems to be impossible for software to handle the fluidity and complexity of social groups without requiring users to manually maintain complex lists of membership rules - which no one has time to do. And even if such magical solution could exist, I’m not sure how comfortable consumers would be with an automated solution to something so important to the way that we socialize.

So is there a way to manage groups that’s not manual? I can’t think of a solution at the moment, but history is full of solutions to problems that previously seemed insolvable. This will be an interesting space to watch over the next few years.

"The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat."

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:35:57 -0400

“The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

- Lily Tomlin, via Ashley Simko.

Shifting deck chairs on the Titanic

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:53:00 -0400

There’s a strange undertone at many of the advertising-related SXSW panels this year. The past few years have involved discussions of Twitter, platforms, transmedia, etc. This year there’s still a lot of that, but it feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of the real issues.

Communication has changed, media has changed, and yet advertisers are still living in the agency-client model that has been consistent for the past 50 years. I don’t think that hiring a social media expert, or creating a new department, or using a few new shiny tools is going to get us far enough.

I don’t have a solution. But the situation for advertisers in 2011 is starting to remind me a lot of the music industry in 2001. There’s a sea change coming, and I worry that all the little changes we’re making are blinding us to exactly how huge it is.