How? Seems like one part open source one part franchise one part mad brand skills. Frankly I think only good can come from this. But the real how we’re just going to have to stay tuned for.

If you want to see a great departure from classic branding, give a glance at their slideshow on Fearless Revolution.

It’s a moving comic book that tells the story of an HIV-infected employee and the challenges she faces. In my research around the web I found so little media about stigma in the workplace, and I come away from the project really impressed with the work Levi’s is doing on the issue. We dove deeply into complex information and various presentations they had in order to come out with a narrative that reflects the issue, the personal journey, and the policy.

Addressing stigma through story

We had a month to write, storyboard, animate and code an eBook based on the upcoming (now released) Will Ferrell/Brad Pitt/Tina Fey Dreamworks Animation movie, Megamind. While I have managed productions all the way back from the floppy disk Shockwave movies of 1896 (okay 1996) to CD-ROMs, websites, kids animated videos, puppet shows and viral videos, an eBook was of a different story, so to speak. It was kind of a little bit of everything all at once.

The job was to sort through endless production images, read the script, get a shortened version of the story and storyboard out to Dreamworks, then create a dozen micro animations, camera movies, sound effects and voice files, add it all together and make a Megamind eBook Story in record time. And that wasn’t even the back end, which is still very code intensive at this point in iPhone/iPad application development.

For about a month there it was: eat, sleep and read craziness, while on two other simultaneous deadlines, topped off with many middle of the night wake up calls by my sweet powerhouse of a daughter Sofi (read: weaning).

While I look forward to having a bit more breathing room to tell these stories it was a great experience and it looks like there are going to be more to come. Hats off to Woody and iStoryTime for the opportunity, Aubrey for the animation and Julie for the production wizardry. To see on iTunes: http://bit.ly/caszMK

For some bits and pieces here is a trailer:

People love to tell  stories about things they love. Storysourcing is the method of leveraging that that passion through audience-created written, photographed, or videoed stories of experiences that clearly support an an organization’s brand.

Nobody can tell those stories better than your audience. No agency, no famous commercial director. Toyota (and Saatchi, who created the campaign) has found a good structure here; since July 2, they’ve supposedly collected 5,400 stories on Facebook. It shows Toyota’s belief in the power of story, the power of social media and the power of their audience’s voice. It’s a good number considering they’re not even giving out prizes. Really small barrier to story entry: just choose your car and type in your little story, and maybe they’ll show up with a camera and film you. Very smart.

The campaign does the following:

• strengthens Toyota’s audience engagement
• heightens (and helps repair) their brand authenticity
• gives Toyota serious fodder to expand their social media presence

The content is a wide variety of compelling, highly targeted and inspiring stories to be posted and reposted with a dash of branding, and evoking a high level of audience trust. I saw one cool video called the “Boller Camry Tree” about a family that have been driving Toyota for years. The 14 year old kid is hoping to get the Camry hybrid for college; the mom doubts it.

Toyota is culling a small selection of the best stories to market more widely, has used eight of them in commercials…and supposedly they’re going to animate them. I’m looking forward to seeing this.

Compare Toyota’s campaign to Thermos’ recent ‘story’ project. Looks like actors telling stories that aren’t really stories, and aren’t really interesting…too bad.

Toyota shows once again that they get it.

See the Ball, Be the Ball

After I sent balls flying this way and that for a while, Nate stepped up to the tee to show me how it was done. “You have to see it before you do it,” he said, pointing out to the green. “See where the ball will land. Then aim and swing.”  He whacked the ball, turning it immediately into a white pinhead traveling far out on the horizon.  “Now you,” he said, as he handed me the club.

I shrugged, and tried to conjure up a vision of the ball landing firmly on the green, but I came up blank. The vision system wasn’t working. I swung, and sliced the ball so far to the right it was almost behind me—if it were baseball I would have hit the popcorn guy. The next hour was more of the same.

I just couldn’t SEE the ball going in. My mind was too busy with the wide variety of details. Shoulders, wrist, hand, stance. Foot, shoes, eyes, pants. It was all too new.  My vision channel was jammed; all that came up was white noise and squiggly screen…much like when I was 12 and I used to try to watch the “R” rated movies on ON-TV. My rational mind was so busy thinking, it was short-circuiting what my imagination could actually envision.

Then this past week, one conversation made it all clear, my row-mate on a flight to Chicago downed many Bloody Marys and shared moderately boring stories of being a fiber optics technician. Through a mouth full of chewing tobacco, Tim told me about a recent conversation with his father, a retired Air Force pilot, about oil in the Gulf.

“He said to me, Tim, I know we’re going to have to change our ways. We just don’t know which way to change them.”

Then it occurred to me. As with golf, so with oil in the Gulf.

It’s one thing to be able to see the ball landing on the green. Or to to envision ten million dollars in the bank.  But it’s another thing altogether to have a vision of a world beyond oil.

That’s a ball that is just damn hard to see on the green.

One might say we need a charismatic leader to do the bold visioning for us (evoke moon landing here). Or the world’s smartest people to have a Manhattan Project for energy. Then of course one may also say we need “a crisis” (I quote this because it has no further definition in these conversations) for people to change their ways.

Even so, the crisis is just the catalyst; we still need to be able to see the ball on the green.

Al talks serious business

In the past decade since I’ve been paying attention, I’ve seen a huge shift in environmental awareness, such as ecological products, green energy investments, political will, car fuels, and even in the natural food content in my mother-in-law’s kitchen. An Inconvenient Truth told millions how bad things might get. Wall-E showed still more millions how bad things might get after that.

But there’s been one critical area where we have been lacking, an opportunity I feel is just below the surface, and it’s ready to burst out. In order to hold a vision and work towards it, we need to not only be educated and entertained: we need to be inspired. We need transformative stories that bring us from anger into solutions. Stories that can be repeated again and again by everyday people, stories that tantalize dreams and propagate technologies and propel college students into new careers and new inventions. We need stories that serve our need for overcoming conflict and quest and feed our dreams for a new way of living.

Lonely Robotic Futures

Stories that illuminate that you don’t have to go back to living in a cave in order for society to survive.

These stories will help our society look forward several generations from now and see our ball on the green. A few balls might be thriving rainforests, clean rivers, a prison population dwindled as our economy is strengthened, vastly re-localized food, flourishing farmers, oceans free of plastics and oil rigs, and thriving with salmon and pelicans flying overhead. And no, these aren’t just a liberal stories. They can’t be.

These stories will be written or performed, in many shapes and sizes.  Some may be Avatar sized, others Lorax-sized. Some may be alternate reality games like World Without Oil or like Heroes creator Tim Krieg’s new Conspiracy for Good–and some might be board games. Many will be tied in with creative actions, incentives and social networks. Some may be told by Buckminster Fuller types, others by Steve Martin types.

Some may be stories belted out streetside, by mad nouveau beat poets riffing their rhymes that just happen to have flip cams. Some will be real life stories of adventure, others nearly unfathomable fiction. Some will be sponsored. Some of these future-stories may come from Hollywood, at least from Participant. Some will be told from the future working backwards, like the Free Range oldie Climate: A Crisis Averted.

Future Flick by Free Range

Others might come from you.

The challenge is for the storytellers to take to the course, to tell enough stories from enough angles that a meta-narrative evolves…and so that we, too, begin to see these possible futures. And adopt one or two as our own. And see ourselves in them.

I believe these stories are brewing. Believe it if you want to; I believe it because I have to.

James Cameron goes big

Cameron also talked about the perceived dichotomy between eco and economy.

“Look at ‘Avatar’: It’s good for the environment and it’s good for the economy,” said Cameron. “That’s the paradigm that we all need to look towards. The Republicans have created this concept that you can either have a healthy economy or you can work on the environment — but you can’t do both. You have to choose between them — but you don’t! … What’s good for energy and what’s good for the environment is ultimately going to be good for the nation.”

Full article here.

]]> http://jaygolden.com/blog/2010/04/26/james-cameron-tours-dc-to-talk-climate/feed/ 0 http://jaygolden.com/blog/2010/04/14/odd-job-nation-this-web-show-gets-you-working/ http://jaygolden.com/blog/2010/04/14/odd-job-nation-this-web-show-gets-you-working/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:01:47 +0000 JG http://jaygolden.com/blog/?p=145 I’m not a push-over when it comes to judging web shows, but I love this one.  Odd Job Nation.

It’s one part Odd Couple, one part Flight of the Conchords (er, I mean, without the songs). It’s funny, it’s timely, and it has an odd jobs board to consult, after Nate and Joe help you feel that much better about your own employment situation. My personal favorite part is the “What you talkin ’bout Will-is” song. Check out the first episode, you’ll see.

Oh and P.S. just won a Streamy!

….

McLUHAN: I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written — conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear — tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

Borrowed from:
http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/