BusinessWeek’s Kenji Hall recently sought Reuben’s input on Joi Ito’s still-relatively-new role as head of Creative Commons. Reuben has known Joi personally and professionally for some time, and we’re especially happy to participate in conversations about online IP given the July launch of our IP-protected celebrity virtual goods business, Virtual Greats.
Mockumentaries are, in their own way, a genre of the virtual worlds and alternate reality games that we specialize in. For North American audiences, I suppose that Christopher Guest’s work or “This is Spinal Tap” are among the best-known examples.
I love this stuff. Mockumentaries count among my favorite “practical jokes” because of their delicate blend of absurdity and plausibility. As a kid, I used to torture my long-suffering mom with stories involving a special mix of ridiculous bullsh*t (i.e., a neighboring county being colonized by menacing Druids) and detailed, realistic elements that would leave her very unsure as to whether or not my stories were true. Making the little details boringly believable - dropping the name of local city councilperson or mixing in some mundane real-life issue with the story - made it hard for her to separate the narrative wheat from the chaff. My mother saves a very unique kind of exasperation for these moments (confession: I still do it, albeit rarely). Oh how I savor her all-too-visible temptation to believe me, along with her knowledge of my mendacious ways…
So I was pretty thrilled to stumble upon the work of Australia’s Chris Lilley, and I apologize if I’m behind your surely very steep pop cultural curves, dear readers. He has been rocking Australia - and global premium cable audiences - since 2005 with two great mockumentary TV series, We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year and Summer Heights High. Lilley does all the main characters in both shows.
It’s the kind of humor that has us laughing at our own ostentatious self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and petty mean-spiritedness, but does it all with a huge and very sympathetic heart. It’s also a really interesting snapshot of contemporary Australian pop culture. It’s all great, but my favorite character by far is “Ja’mie King” - she is in both series. She’s summed up by Wikipedia as a girl who “lives in the North Shore of Sydney, New South Wales, but was born in South Africa. Ja’mie is a 16-year-old girl and has sponsored 85 Sudanese children for Global Vision (a fictional organization parodying World Vision), which gave her the National Record. Due to her work of raising money Global Vision decided to make her the ‘face’ of their organization. Ja’mie also does the 40 Hour Famine twice a week which she says not only helps raise money but ‘keeps me looking hot.’”
Ja’mie’s not a bad person, she’s just really, uh, confident and/or self-absorbed. You can find her all over YouTube, but if you have very delicate sensibilities about, well, all the things people get sensitive about, consider yourself warned.
Several current MoU employees and alumni had the good fortune to study under Randy Pausch at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Pausch has become widely known over the last year for his “final lecture” delivered on Sept. 18, 2007. This was a very affecting - to say the least - presentation in which he urged his students to treasure and protect their sense of childlike wonder. He also spoke of his love for his wife and kids and the curiosity that essentially drove him forward in life. Dr. Pausch gave the presentation because he had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died this past Friday.
We became familiar with Randy before there was a book or a segment on Oprah. A couple of our colleagues, former students both, had heard of his final lecture through the CMU community and encouraged us to watch it streamed live from Pittsburgh. We had no idea it would become such a sensation - credited with helping people move on from divorce, choose life over suicide, or escape from abusive relationships - but it’s hardly surprising.
It so happens that Randy was one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on what The New York Times called in his obituary “computer worlds that students could use to create games. [His students] were learning sophisticated computer skills. His annual virtual reality contest was highly anticipated, and work on virtual reality by some of his students won them the chance to experience weightlessness on an aircraft. They then used virtual reality techniques to mimic weightlessness.”
The technical and creative skills that Randy taught are at the heart of our virtual worlds industry. What a pleasure it is to work in a business defined by thinkers motivated by wonder, curiosity, whimsy, and imagination. I personally treasure my sense of childlike wonder and think that losing it to cynicism, emotional exhaustion, “sophistication,” or anything along those lines would almost be worse than death itself.
But let’s not take ourselves too seriously, because life is short. After learning that his lecture was being compared to “Tuesdays with Morrie,” a popular book about wisdom its author gleaned from a dying college professor, Randy told USA Today he “didn’t know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.”
AdAge has our CEO Reuben’s latest blog post up and it has provoked a lively discussion. “Has the internet failed to create stories? I think it has (and often begin my presentations by throwing down this gauntlet). Let me explain….”
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Hoo boy. Some days, the heat and light around next-generation press releases, effective communications with bloggers, and all the rest of it are enough to blind you and leaving you dripping in a dazed sweat. It’s important, but as is so often the case, a certain proportion of the self-styled experts in this field are, I might venture, all hat and no cattle.
Valleywag today chose to lay into one of my fellow PR professionals for an unfortunate misrepresentation: conflating social and business time in a disingenuous way. Now, I know work and personal time - and contacts - are getting very blurry everywhere; and that is certainly the case here in the Valley. But if you are going to extract professional or commercial value out of spending time with me, I will appreciate your honesty in characterizing the proposed interaction that way; and I will extend the same courtesy to you. In my experience, journalists, bloggers, and human beings of any occupational stripe seem to appreciate this no-bullsh*t approach.
I don’t want to be too hard on this seasoned and accomplished PR person - she appears to have done some interesting and innovative work - but look at the pitch note Valleywag printed. In addition to asking one of her blogger contacts for hotel recos - which takes a certain chutzpah, although it’s harmless enough - she asked him/her to spend “’social’” time with her. Yup, social was in quotes. So does that make it really social? Or a trojan horse for a pitch to be soft-peddled over candlelight and absinthe? The quotes say it all, or at least make an unsavory impression. There was a different, better and more honest way to propose this very interaction, but it’s too close to quitting time on the Friday before a long weekend for me to figure that out. There was definitely, however, a better way.
I’m all for greasing the wheels. As my buddy Steve Kerns has memorably said in so many words, “free sandwiches and beer help when you’re networking.” But as a businessperson - let alone a PR person - I have always found that the most effective business partnerships emerge when both parties understand (at least at a high level) one another’s motives and the possible tension between them. You see this in New Yorkers arguing about a restaurant choice. Self-interest is presented nakedly and accepted without judgment, and a mutually acceptable choice quickly emerges. This is incidentally one of the things I love most about New Yorkers (although you’re welcome to ask me again if you ever run into me at 3am in Chelsea).
For the benefit of any blogger or reporter contacts I may be so lucky as to have reading this blog: if I ever propose “social” time with you, it will be really social, and it won’t feel forced, and you will have met me in person before. In the interim, I’m happy to give you a great scoop or a creative pitch over a few beers I buy with the company credit card, we’ll understand one another, and it will be a nice way to kill an afternoon. Have a great long weekend - and enjoy your social time.
Eric Caoili over at Worlds in Motion was among those picking up today’s big MoU staffing announcement: adland veteran Brian Dunbar, most recently with Goodby, Silverstein in SF, joins us as EVP for Client Services. Read all about it here.
Given the ongoing conversations he has across the interactive advertising, social media, entertainment and virtual world spaces, Reuben is fast becoming an oft-cited authority at the messy intersection of these disciplines. MediaWeek’s Mike Shields today quoted Reuben weighing in on the implications of the recent reorg at Fox Interactive for advertisers pushing into social media. MySpace is obviously central to this discussion.
Be sure to check out Reuben’s first contribution to AdAge’s new DigitalNext blog, which AdAge describes as follows: “a collection of news and opinions on the emerging media and technology space and its opportunities and impact on marketers. The group’s esteemed (and opinionated) contributors run agencies, startups, and creative departments and hail from all sorts of disciplines, including design and user interface, social networking and community, mobile, gaming and virtual worlds.”
Already the recipient of an LACP Spotlight award, last fall’s WWE SummerSlam in Gaia campaign has been recognized as an Honoree by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, best known for putting on the Webby Awards, aka “The Oscars of the Internet.”
Virtual Worlds News picked up today’s announcement that Millions of Us is leading an industry coalition working with Forrester Consulting to help deliver standardized - and more in-depth - metrics for virtual worlds marketing campaigns. They key issue is moving away from simplistic eyeball counts towards a measure of engagement quality.
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