Tom Adams

The whole Intertube in one

It's doing the rounds but I want to make sure I witness this extraordinary sprint through digital creativity and innovation from Google on this page. Favourites are YouTube Symphony and this wonder from Uniqlo.
And what better diversion for a cold autumn evening than Parkour interactive style on the Intertube.

What on Google Earth

Just when you thought it was safe to consult Google Maps on your way to granny's house, it seems that Google are taking the (logical) next step to introduce branding to augmented reality mobile applications. So you can see where the nearest coffee bar or McDonald's is when you're on the move. Similarly, consider the potential for context sensitive branded video content that maps onto Google Earth from these boffins at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mediated

New from Dr. Michael Wesch - the Kansas State Professor of Digital Ethnography who delivered The Machine is Using Us (over 10 million views of this version alone) - comes a wonderful talk on the anthropology of YouTube. I was doing something altogether off the subject of digital strategy the other day and found myself coming back to the theme of mediation. Wesch makes a compelling case, building on Marshall McLuhan, that media mediates not content, but rather human relationships. And as media change, so does the way we relate to each other.

As we grapple daily with the improbably knotty problem of MyTwitFace and its impact on brand thinking, this thought keeps coming back to me. In essence, we simply need to remember that everything is mediated: relationships, reputation, ideas and commerce. In the sense that everything increasingly passes through someone or something else before it reaches us. And in the transition, it takes on new meaning. For example, someone sending a funny film isn't just someone sending a film. It's them saying: 'This is funny', 'I know what funny is', 'I'm thinking of you' and 'We like the same things don't we'. It depends on them using a computer, a video aggregator like YouTube and email. As Wesch and his students point out, when we Tweet, we are doing it alone into a phone or computer screen and talking simultaneously to ourselves and 'everyone'.

As with all the best thinking, I found myself wishing I had said or written nearly everything in this lecture. Which means I will promptly try and say or write most of it again with continual reference to Dr Wesch by way of paying it forward...

Brand reputation lives in this reality now, and just like ideas or relationships, it passes through people before it reach us - and takes on new meaning as it travels. If I say I like a restaurant or a car or smoothie or a holiday company, other people will take my view seriously and build it into their decision making. They will also take our collective opinion seriously, even if we have all submitted our views independently of each other. So we have to work even harder to keep the promises brands make, and tell stories that resonate, so that when they reach consumers - like chinese whispers - the message is consistent with our hopes.

And even more powerful is the idea made tangible by augmented reality apps like this one for iPhone users in Paris that actually mediate your view of the physical world in real time, by showing metadata on the high street you're standing in. Detractors have long talked about the low impact of digital media on impulse and food purchase decisions, but if you can hold your phone over two competing products in a Walmart aisle and see which one consumers vote 'best buy', this argument starts to thin.

I have an ongoing debate with a friend about whether comedy catchphrases of the kind seen in Little Britain (or Harry Enfield before him) are powerful because of the initial observation, or because even the most unfunny people can use them to make their friends laugh in the pub. I think it's the latter. They work, because they work when they're mediated. Perhaps creative communications needs to get back to that kind of simplicity in the new media reality?