Blogbook
With the Virtual Biobank, the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute has changed the game in the search for a cure for cancer. Via Gizmodo:
Together they have created “The Virtual Biobank” – a world first platform hosting 3D copies of human cancer tissues. With tissue samples digitised, it means everything is accessible for researchers whenever they need it, wherever they are.
“It currently takes many months before researchers are able to obtain tissue samples from a physical biobank and carry out investigations with it,” Chief investigators Dr Jamie Flynn, Dr Antony Martin and Dr William Palmer explain.
Not only that, but once a researcher has performed their study, that sample usually can’t be used again.
The Virtual Biobank changes all of this.
“Each digital cancer sample in The Virtual Biobank is made up of high resolution microscopy images in both 2D and 3D, plus important clinical and molecular information that provides the foundation for virtual research into cancer,” Drs Flynn and Palmer told us.
“We’ve taken a tiny sample from tumor biopsies stored at the Hunter Cancer Biobank and converted them into a virtual copy – enabling anyone around the world with an internet connection to carry out research from their computers or easily request access to the physical sample they need.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkcsdzzFJjo
Black Panther is out this week! For those who aren’t familiar with the Marvel character, this trailer is a primer on the lore and ‘verse. TIME magazine discusses how Black Panther marks a major milestone:
The first movie I remember seeing in a theater had a black hero. Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams, didn’t have any superpowers, but he ran his own city. That movie, the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, introduced Calrissian as a complicated human being who still did the right thing. That’s one reason I grew up knowing I could be the same.
If you are reading this and you are white, seeing people who look like you in mass media probably isn’t something you think about often. Every day, the culture reflects not only you but nearly infinite versions of you—executives, poets, garbage collectors, soldiers, nurses and so on. The world shows you that your possibilities are boundless. Now, after a brief respite, you again have a President.
Those of us who are not white have considerably more trouble not only finding representation of ourselves in mass media and other arenas of public life, but also finding representation that indicates that our humanity is multifaceted. Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood, but also for others who need to see and understand us. When it doesn’t happen, we are all the poorer for it.
Storytelling is a bit of a fad concept in adland. The fact that adland people like to call themselves storytellers isn’t surprising. We love our fancy titles. Solutions architects? Yeah mate, why not. Strategic Visualiser? That meant to be literal or what? Cat herder? Sure. And now there’s ‘storyteller’, which I hope was meant ironically before the fad started, given the tendency of many people in the creative industry to claim they’re ‘visual’ people and only read books that include the words ‘Harry’ and ‘Potter’ in them. If at all. The ability to spell was a rare skill in design school in Australia, strangely enough, as was the ability to tell the difference between “your” and “you’re”.
Just check out Adweek’s recent list of 12 Books That Will Make You a Better Writer and Storyteller. Charlotte’s Web, really? That’s a book I enjoyed when I was six, before I became an avid National Geographic enthusiast and realized quite a few species of spiders actually have babies that eat their mothers. It’s a stark contrast from the “Best Of” lists that fiction authors like to produce, which usually include books like Lolita and Ulysses. I’m not claiming that those books are more entertaining than Charlotte’s Web. Confession: in the shallow darkness of my soul I probably enjoyed the book about the unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider more than Ulysses, which still doesn’t fail to put me to sleep. The sheer dissociation between adland’s fav ‘storyteller’ books and the rest of the world’s, sadly, speaks to the dissociation between what adland considers a good story and what the rest of the world does.
You’re A Storyteller! You’re A Storyteller!
storytelling
ˈstɔːrɪtɛlɪŋ/nounnoun: storytelling; noun: story-telling
adjectiveadjective: storytelling
Yes, some adland people are, objectively speaking, also well-regarded tellers of stories. James Patterson, one of the world’s juggernaut bestselling authors, was the creative director of JWT, then its US CEO. Peter Mayle, who nearly single-handedly created a new genre of books with his Year in Provence, worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy, then as creative director for BBDO. Salman Rushdie was also in Ogilvy. Dr Seuss used to be an adland illustrator.
The list stretches on, both in film, in art, and on the page. The fact that many adland people have become successful published authors, filmmakers, and illustrators within their own right doesn’t make us all storytellers. By unironically co-opting and throwing the term around, adland is beginning to devalue what it means to be a storyteller.
In other words, consecrating ads as stories satisfies every meta-marketing objective.
So what’s the issue?
One obvious problem is that most brands have no particular story to tell—at least not anymore. (x)
We like being called storytellers because there’s a mystical quality to the word. It’s an expression of craft and talent with a lineage that stretches as long as there has been language. While advertising can be called storytelling in the thinnest sense–some ads do have some sort of basic commercial narrative–to put advertising on par with Anna Karenina is a bit of a stretch.
Humility? Good gracious. Perish the thought!
We do want to be taken seriously by everyone else, don’t we, Don Draper?
Second confession: in the agency, we have a list of keywords that we call ‘Wanker Words that Work’, a list that many a ‘solutions architect’ would be familiar with. (Yes, we’re self-aware here on the Starship.) Please don’t make us add ‘storyteller’ to the top of the list.
What Even Makes a Good Story Anyway?
A good story sticks with you. It seeps into your bones. You’d remember it forever, because it probably changed part of you. That’s something that a good ad can share with a good story: the resonance. You can’t work in adland without being able to name your favourite ads. The ads that you watch and make you happy to be part of the industry. I’ll start. My favourite ad of all time so far is the Volkswagen Little Darth Vader ad:
Hugely successful, this Super Bowl commercial was said to have changed advertising. Strategy-wise, anyway. The ad was released pre-game, which was considered controversial at the time, at least in adland, which often has a strange idea of what it thinks should be ‘controversial’. It’s the most shared Super Bowl commercial of all time, and one of the most shared commercials anywhere, ever. Storywise, it’s simple: a little boy wants to be Darth Vader, but is unable to summon The Force until his father uses Volkswagen’s remote fob to make it look like he has. Hamlet it is not, but it’s clearly resonated with millions of people worldwide.
Still, the Little Darth commercial is an outlier. The vast majority of advertising, even 60 second ads, is built to push a product or service. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s what advertising is for. Making out people to be ‘storytellers’ can make creatives lose sight of what they’re in advertising to do: to work for a client. An ad that does nothing for a client–whether by increasing market share, pushing its bottom line, or fulfilling some other measure of KPI–is a failed ad.
Nice story, though.
You Can’t Deny Some Branded Content Are Great Stories, Karen.
Ahh branded content. These effectively long-form ads don’t always push products or services, and are often, in their best forms, pretty much sponsored short films. There are also some literal stories: KFC, for example, famously created a romance novel for Mother’s Day. There have been great films pushing social issues that resonate with a core audience, such as Shiseido’s “Marriage Market” short. And, more recently, Apple got acclaimed director Peter Chan to film a short film called “Three Minutes“, using the iPhone X, about motherhood, Chinese New Year, and sacrifice.
Great branded content is an outlier. Few brands can be persuaded to go to the expense or the trouble. When executed well, good content can do more than make a brand stand out in the marketplace: great, sticky content will resonate with consumers, leaving a mark in today’s ultra-competitive world. But at its core, branded content is still advertising. An expensive piece of content that does nothing for a client in any way will mean an unhappy client, and rightfully so.
Good stories do stand out from the noise. That’s why the classics last the test of time. It’s hard to imagine an ad having the lasting power of 14th Century’s Romance of Three Kingdoms, and that’s probably a good thing. We’re not in this industry to create the next War and Peace. We’re here for our clients. We may not all be storytellers the way we’d like to be, and–unpopular opinion–that’s fine. We’re adland people.
Now if you’d excuse me, I’m going to try to finish reading Ulysses.
About the Author: Anya is the head of branding at Starship. Her first novel, the Firebird’s Tale, was published in 2016, and her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily SF, Giganotosaurus, and other magazines.
Chau, Beyond the Lines is a 2016 Oscar nominated short film about an aspiring artist growing up in a village for victims of Agent Orange. Via Short of the Week:
With the stakes set so high, Chau’s perseverance and pluck is astonishing to witness and a major source of the film’s appeal. It is also a credit to director Courtney Marsh, and the serendipitous magic of the documentary film process. In a normal profile doc, you know what you’re going to get story-wise. It’s usually retrospective, and relies on interviews to catch viewers up on a journey that is already well underway. That was not the case with this film. Marsh in 2007 was an undergrad at UCLA, and, equipped with a good friend who was Vietnamese, naively decided to embark on a feature film documentary about Vietnamese street children. A few small grants later, she was on the ground in the country searching for her story.
In a piece published on Aljazeera, Marsh describes the origin of the very different film that came to be. “Because we had to get permission from the government to legally shoot in Vietnam, word got around, and a Vietnamese television producer met us at our hotel. He thought our subject matter was fine, but trite, so he offered to take us to a “peace village” tucked away in the back of a maternity hospital. This peace village was Lang Hoa Binh: a care centre for kids disabled by the chemical Agent Orange.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySLn-2MZenU
Three Minutes is a sad, sweet film for Apple by acclaimed Chinese director Peter Chan, filmed on the iPhone X for Chinese New Year. Via Adweek:
Titled “3 Minutes,” it tells the story of a woman who works as a conductor on one of the longest train routes in the country. (Millions of people in China travel on crowded trains to be with their families over Chinese New Year.) Each year, this woman misses the holiday with her young son—but this time, she arranges to have her sister bring him to one of the train stops, so she can briefly see him.
Crucially, the entire film was shot on the iPhone X.
The film is scripted, but it’s based in truth—it is a real family, and the woman really is a conductor on the train.
[…]
The film is far from a straightforward, feel-good family tale. A sense of longing hangs over the piece, giving it an emotional depth that seems to have resonated in China, where it’s been viewed 68 million times in less than a week.
The countdown clock creates a sense of urgency—of love on a timer—and the boy’s efforts to impress his mother illuminate the closeness but also the distance between them. Their farewell at the end of the piece is complicated. Their three minutes together haven’t gone as planned, though of course they were never going to be able to communicate everything they feel for one another in such a condensed period of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPi9nTE70aA
Coca-cola’s Superbowl ad, the Wonder of Us, includes a beautiful message about diversity to kick off the brand’s 2018 marketing platform. Via Adweek:
Wieden+Kennedy Portland created the 60-second spot that will air during the fourth quarter of the game. Alma Har’el directed the spot.
“For this particular message, it is a strategic choice for us. It’s such a big audience and we want to celebrate the diversity of that audience. It isn’t as much about it being advertising’s biggest stage as we feel like it is the ability to reach all of those billions of unique you’s,” Brynn Bardacke, vp, content and creative excellence for Coca-Cola North America, said.
Coke’s latest ad, “The Wonder of Us,” showcases all types of people enjoying Coca-Cola products with different people narrating the spot, which is actually set to a poem about the brand. A Wieden+Kennedy team member (who also happens to have a Ph.D. in poetry) wrote the poem that viewers will hear in the spot. A print version of the poem will also run in The New York Times on Sunday and again in USA Today on Monday.
“The poem is something we’ve really fallen in love with, and seeing the words themselves, not only hearing them but seeing them, was the right combination,” Jennifer Healan, group director, integrated marketing content for Coca-Cola North America, said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09M3C4VD1Fg&feature=youtu.be
Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 is one of the Oscar-nominated short films for 2018, capturing the inspiring story of Mindy Alper. Via Short of the Week:
Frank Stiefel’s Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 is a quintessential artist profile—there are thousands of similar films on Vimeo, roughly following the same kind of emotional and narrative arc, and utilizing similar techniques. Yet each story is unique, and the confluence of subject and filmmaker still proves the possibility of making any individual film exceptional.
A rare dual-winner of the both the Jury and Audience prize at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 is certainly one of those exceptional films. A moving portrait of the artist Mindy Alper, the film’s director, Frank Stiefel, finds her on the cusp of an important gallery showing of her art, and gives Alper room to reflect on her life’s journey through profound mental illness. Inspiring in moments, but gut-punchingly devastating in others, Alper relates to us a childhood filled with debilitating anxiety, exacerbated by an emotionally abusive father and a distant mother. From there things spiral downward into a stint in a mental hospital in her late 20’s, followed by frequent episodes where, for months at a time, she lost her ability to speak. Through it all she expresses appreciation for the mentors who’ve encouraged her art, and for the ever-tenuous peace she is occasionally able to attain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ZTh9Rd0aA
The Dundee Movie is Tourism Australia’s hugely successful 2018 campaign for the Superbowl, and the ad has many people wishing it was real. Via News.com.au:
Still Australia’s biggest hit at the local box office, the Paul Hogan blockbuster which put the larrikin actor and our outback on the international map, is the inspiration for an all-star ‘trailer’ — starring Chris Hemsworth and Oscar nominee Margot Robbie — set to air during the NFL’s end-of-season showdown.
Tourism Australia on Sunday refused to comment on rumours the Dundee show reels were part of a Super Bowl ad campaign, which has teased fans for weeks with the prospect of the movie’s revival.
Now, even before the $5 million ad goes to air before an estimated TV audience of more than 100 million US viewers alone, the NT News has seized on the viral sensation to launch ‘Bring Back Dundee’.
Making the most of momentum around the Super Bowl spoof, the public campaign will seek celebrity and government support for the film to be lured back into production — potentially bringing with it a jobs bonanza in both the tourism and entertainment sectors.
NT News editor Matt Williams said he hoped people would sign the petition in hordes after the ad airs at the Super Bowl today.
“Once it airs we hope people get very excited and sign our petition and make this movie happen.
“(Chris Hemsworth) grew up in the Terriroty with his brothers and he’s a mega star now, he would be perfect to take a front and centre role in a new movie.
“Bring back Dundee.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksnvi6c9sAk
Amazon’s Alexa loses her voice in this hilarious Superbowl ad featuring celebrities like Gordon Ramsay and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Amazon also has a clever trick to ensure your home’s Alexa won’t be activated during the ad, via Bloomberg:
The word “Alexa” is uttered 10 times during the Super Bowl spot, but thankfully, the Amazon Echo in your living room isn’t going to perk up and try to respond. An Amazon spokeswoman is guarded about explaining exactly why, saying only, “We do alter our Alexa advertisements … to minimize Echo devices falsely responding in customer’s homes.”
Bezos and company have evidently been thinking about this problem for a long time, before the Echo was even introduced. A September 2014 Amazon patent titled “Audible command filtering” describes techniques to prevent Alexa from waking up “as part of a broadcast watched by a large population (such as during a popular sporting event),” annoying customers and overloading Amazon’s servers with millions of simultaneous requests.
The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.
About a year ago, a Reddit user calling himself Asphyhackr did a little more legwork and concluded that Amazon was creatively employing this second technique. By running Alexa commercials through digital audio editing software, Asphyhackr discovered that Alexa ads transmit weakened levels of sound in an upper portion of the audio spectrum, between 3,000 and 6,000 hertz, outside the most sensitive range of human hearing.
Filmed in 3 days in LA, Logic’s breakout Grammy-nominated hit 1-800-273-8255’s music video is a suicide prevention PSA, beautifully filmed. Via Huffpost:
Calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline tripled after Logic’s powerful set at the Grammy Awards last month, which featured a song named after the organization’s crisis counseling phone number.
The Lifeline answered three times the normal amount of calls in the two hours after the 28-year-old rapper performed his Grammy-nominated song “1-800-273-8255” at the awards show on Jan. 28, according to TMZ and CNN.
Logic, whose real name is Bobby Tarantino, received widespread praise from mental health advocates for the moving performance, which also featured pop star Alessia Cara and singer Khalid.
“Logic’s performance during the 2018 Grammys was an incredible moment in suicide prevention,” Frances Gonzalez, director of communications for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, told CNN.
“By sharing a message of hope and taking the stage with individuals who have been personally affected by suicide,” he continued. “Logic demonstrated on a global scale that healing is happening every day for people in crisis, and that there is help available.”
[…]
Hotline activity took off last year, following the April 2017 release of “1-800-273-8255,” according to Dr. John Draper, the director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
“We had the second-highest call volume in the history of our service the day of the song’s release,” Draper told Variety. “It’s remained high ever since.”
The Lifeline’s call volume increased 50 percent following Logic’s performance of his suicide awareness anthem at the August 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, according to USA Today.