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“Sometimes you have to destroy something you love”
That’s one of the many stirring quotables from a blog post published last week at John Winsor’s blog.
John is the CEO of Victors and Spoils, the new model (ad) agency that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
The piece is really quite inspiring, drawing a distinction between the great people and creativity you find in advertising, and the business of that business “which really sucks”.
In the post, John discusses the impact of abundance on the advertising industry. It’s a big theme that we saw Clay Shirky applying to the broad sweep of human history and nature at SXSW this year. In this context, both John Winsor and his guest and recent investor Jon Bond chew over the way the ad industry mistakes abundance for over-supply and commoditisation of their business models. This reminds me of another nugget from the Shirky keynote, which was actually the most re-tweeted line from it:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Both men lament the fact that structures, complexity and fear are blinding agencies to opportunities, but I have to say that neither is holding out a quick panacea – or any kind of panacea – to the legacy players. I don’t think they believe that it’s possible to change things gently and piece-by-piece without really radical renewal, by which I mean epic-scale, biblical, creative destruction. It’s not about tinkering about at the edges any longer. This paragraph nails it:
I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.
That’s my highlighting – but it can’t make for very happy reading if you run a big holding company, unless of course you don’t believe the hype and think things will sort themselves out just like they always have. I think that’s ignoring the bigger picture. I know it’s hard to imagine chaps, but what’s happening is somewhat bigger than the ad industry.
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Online > offline: we still love paper goods
Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)
It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design types larging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.
The exhibition covers the gamut of design: architecture, furniture, product, graphics, interactive and fashion. One of my favourite pieces was a bit of folly with a serious message: ‘Panda Eyes‘ a crowd of WWF Panda collecting tins, wired up to a camera in the sky to detect human movement and shift in sync as you walk around them. Its intention is to raise awareness of pandas’ plight in the wild. I think.
What I found interesting is that some of the graphic entries were really all about the relationship between online and print (and therefore arguably candidates for the interactive category). These three entries all had online generation in common: the articles, images, comment and opinion are all drawn from the crowd, using twitter, blogs and data to bring a concept to life.
Newspaper Club (which for some reason has a bit of an ugly website, but produces beautiful papers) allows anyone to create and print their own newspaper, without the need to be a multi-millionaire media mogul.
Here’s a particularly cool example that’s both useful and will please anyone who likes a bit of data visualisation loveliness. The Postcode Paper was an experiment from the Newspaper Club themselves that took information from data.gov.uk such as local services, crime stats and other useful stuff you need to know when you first move somewhere, like TFL transport links, and republished it in one handy, paper format.

(Photo credit: Newspaper Club)
It’s Nice That brings together the best of the creative industry in one place. As well as existing online, they also produce “a bi-annual printed publication, monthly talks and videocast, an online shop selling exclusive products as well as regular interviews and features with current practitioners.” I haven’t seen the print publication, but they feature some mighty nice stuff online.
And having recently received an extremely dull pre-conference magazine for SXSW, I can appreciate how something like The Incidental would be refreshingly interesting and bring the good stuff to your attention when wading through the programme at a conference. Essentially, it’s “a community-generated news pamphlet and website at international design events which offers debate, reviews, news updates and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about.”
This has given us some ideas for SXSW…
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Aaron Koblin on data visualization
Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin gave a talk at BBH London yesterday which, being in the same building, we were lucky enough to be able to attend.
Aaron took us through his work, from his student days at UCLA where he worked on projects including the visualization of US flight patterns, to his work at Yahoo! and now Google Creative Labs (I’m sure some of you have seen the collapsing Google page experiments, which can be seen at Chrome Experiments - there are tons more and some of them are a lot of fun to look at, so you should!). A lot of his work, which you can find on his site, uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a platform to channel the participation of thousands of people from across the world, all working in isolation from one another and with very limited knowledge of the projects they were working on. As Aaron mentioned, the interesting thing was to see how crowdsourcing in this manner is a good example of the sum of the parts being more intelligent than the individual parts themselves – a principle expounded on by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of the Crowds.
Music fans are probably familiar with Aaron’s work for the Radiohead House of Cards video, which used no cameras or lights, but merely manipulated data using a lasers and sensors to capture 3D images. There’s a lot of information on the video, and the video itself, at the Google Code site, including a ‘Making of’ video that explains the process. Watching the House of Cards video in this context made me realise how far technology is really advancing (as with the Toshiba time-sculpture ad), and the seemingly endless things we can do when data and technology come together.
Data visualization is a subject that really interests us at Made By Many, and it was great to see someone so involved in his craft explain the topic with a range of examples of projects that he’s worked on closely. Aaron’s tips will be useful for anyone who has ever sighed while looking at mundane Excel data sheets, or even creative souls who hit that road block when engaging with data from time to time:
- Looking at data in different ways completely changes your perspective on it.
- Use multiple visualization techniques – there is no one best way.
- Think about data, not the ‘real world’.
- You don’t have to use all the data that you have at your disposal, so don’t feel pressurised to.
- Let your data free. The first thing that came to my mind when he said this was Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ album (which was initially available on the web on a pay-as-much-as-you-think-it’s-worth basis), but I suppose that’s more a product than data per se!
- Work with Radiohead. OK, this was said as a joke but I guess working with someone who is ready to experiment with data, and, as Aaron said, people who are more talented than you always helps your own work.
Data visualization isn’t only about prettying up otherwise staid-looking numbers. Aaron’s work on the flight patterns made me recall this slide in a presentation by Matt Jones of Dopplr, who said that simply plotting the places members visited resulted in a map that was almost a replica of the world.

And in response to a question asked by someone in the audience, Aaron also said that visualizing day-to-day data, as Nicholas Feltron did with the Feltron Report, can give you a birds’-eye view of your whole life, and in the long run that kind of information is quite useful and interesting to have on a personal level.
We’re only at the beginning of the data visualization revolution.

















