The first small films shot entirely with the iPhone4 are coming to light. This rather laboured piece, “Apple of my Eye” seems more like a viral puff piece than a genuine short film.

With that said, it is a reminder that the camera now shipping with a phone exceeds the capability of many previously “semi professional” cameras.

It can edit for one thing. And upload the file to the net.

This  ubiquity of mediation is problematic for the media.

Adding to the nature of abundance®, there is no reason that these devices can’t deliver reasonable news footage from the field and in real time. How long until face time video calls, enabled by citywide WiFi allow on the spot coverage of events? How long till stories are happily filed for news websites from an iPhone?

This is another slippery moment in the dissolution of media as we know it. Rupert Murdoch’s idea to charge for what he provides online is a poor second [or second millionth] to an entire metaverse of media with an almost infinite number of creators and aggregated through search. Rupert, I’ll tell you this for free – once the masthead loses the broadcast model [the 24 hour news cycle with a command and control system of publishing authority] people start to “use” news differently. You can’t own it like you used to.

Online news is both more tabloid than its paper equivalent, and less bound by the rules of “quality”. Rupert, the most popular clip on news.com.au last year was of a koala getting a drink in the Victorian Bushfires.

And it was shot on a phone. By a non journalist.

Online news gets the most accurate polling available in real time, 24/7. This worked. This didn’t. More bikinis…

Assuming the business is still predicated on selling an audience, and the cost of staff reporters stays where it is – there will be a trend against “quality” – against “professional authorship” and against centralised editorial control.

At the same time, if online readership drops by 90% on a charged subscription basis – where does that leave the advertising value of an online masthead? Are the remaining audience worth ten times as much to advertisers?

The audience is no longer bound by the scarcity© of the sources. They are potentially the co-creators of the news. Teaching someone to work in TV news takes a few years. In online news video – a few months.

People will teach themselves how to use their iPhone – transforming from eyewitnesses to distributed points of creation - broadgathering© the news from everywhere. Photos today, videos next week.

It’s another step in the groundswell of participatory culture. No longer the root and tree of media scarcity© but a thousand plateaus.

During the winter season in Tokyo, two disillusioned models fall in love. When their stay extends, the relationship combusts.

TIGER is a reminder that for the million people who talk about making a film someone goes out and does it. In this instance, Beaufort (nee James McFay)

My Fay’s creative output is consistent across a number of media, [the volume of short stories the Venus 200 is another example]. Here it operates under his own quite evident muse on the subject. TIGER is the clearly autobiographical tale of two young people falling in and out of love during a stint of modelling in Tokyo. It is also a touchstone to the Zeitgiest in a number of ways.

TIGER is compared to the recent American Mumblecore genre, by one reviewer, entirely on a viewing of its trailer. Sure, the production inflects elements of the Mumblecore oeuvre. Clearly low budget – self funded – it is set frequently in close interiors and it makes a character device of speculative and rambling dialogue that becomes the reason for entire scenes. More importantly, it depicts the relationships between young people in interstitial periods – between things and places and without particular responsibilities, a preoccupation of the style.

TIGER’s  characters are, like Derrida’s ontological negativism, itenerant subjectivities – defined in terms of a future that never arrives. Waiting. They all want to “do this for a while – to make some money….and then get out….”

Mumblecore, as an American genre, usually sets itself in locations familiar to the protagonists – it’s a theatre of the everyday. These locations are depicted as the mise en scene that frames the dislocation and ennui of the characters.

The films are, in this sense, low tech critiques of comtemporary America, where locations are used [often with intended irony] to frame the characters own removal form the broader narratives of social participation.

This is a particularly American trope. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation could be seen as a more grandiose (and admittedly well realised) version of the highly DIY aesthetic exhibited by the Mumblecore auteurs. She uses Tokyo a topical backdrop to the characters’ relationship and their abiding sense of alienation, exaggerating the ironic and in doing so trivialising the culture in which they find themselves.

Contemporary American Indie films frequently highlight kitsch and the banal in their depiction of contemporary America, and this amounts, cumulatively, to a preoccupation with the empty shell of capitalist spectacle as it is seen in decay. The films are possibly a response to the exaggerated, hyper realist spectacle of both American urbanity and it’s bombastic cultural output – cinematic and otherwise. How often do young people in “indie” films work in fast food outlets in strip malls?

This desire for authenticity through the rejection of Hollywood production values exploded, I feel, with a slew of films that I would call American Rural Gothic – made at around the time of Wim Wenders Paris Texas, and wrung to death with David Lynch’s cliched Wild at Heart. These films parlayed the desert landscape, endless petrol stations, desert roads, remote diners and dusty strip malls into a stage for the love lives and minor criminalities of the protagonists. These films themselves seemed a response to the the history of the Western and the white picket fence suburban melodrama.The Cohen Brothers’ deft Raising Arizona is perhaps the most well realised example of the genre.

Lost in Translation, as a film set in Tokyo, manages to parlay this obsession with cultural irony into an almost monotonous trivialisation of Japan and Tokyo – as if it can exist for nothing more as a stylised amplification of American urban disconnection.

TIGER never lapses into this cliche of culture as backdrop, staying resolutely with the two main characters, their relationship, and more subtly, on the mechanisms that have brought them here in the first place. All of the models inhabiting the lifestyle portrayed by the film are in search of an undefined financial outcome – there’s no specific end game in sight. They are frequently shown as inert figures who are discussed, driven, housed and instructed to attend castings in the service of information capitalism.

Offscreen voices from modelling agents make cutting asides in Japanese about the weight and attractiveness of the models. They instruct them over the phone to attend go-sees and to travel to other countries. The models are shunted in joyless herds in minibuses like well treated cattle – pacified with ipods.

Models and agents in the film are like children and their perpetually absent parents. The models constantly seek approval and engagement through being allowed to work. In this respect, agents become the underlying motivation for any action – apart from waiting. The final scene in the country where the relationship between the two main characters finally implodes happens in there at the behest of an agent, who remains as always, unseen in the process. The models wait for them to turn up and argue over taking polaroids of themselves in the meantime.

The film makes this theatre of inactivity a clearly motivated outcome of the minor political economy in which the couple finds themseleves. Bussed into their agency apartments with cheap bunk beds and entertained for free in nightclubs where the passport to entry is a model’s composite. Being “at home”, going to nightclubs, changing cities… all become part of the non action that is the defining aspect of their lives.

Cleverly, TIGER skirts the use of Tokyo as a kitsch backdrop, forgoing the glib outsider view of the city that Lost in Translation can’t resist. The Japanese themselves barely feature in the film, and the naïve observations of the cultural outsider are mercifully absent.

Unlike most of the films it will be compared to, TIGER is actually shot on film, not mini DV, in a style that is albeit spare and somewhat constrained by the limited shooting ratios such a production pathway will necessarily entail. Within this limitation, it retains a vibrancy of vision that holds together extremely well over the hour or so that it runs. Combining this with what are genuinely resonant moments of observation, it is a pleasure to watch.

The project is amplified, in the way of modern underground media, by a profusion of references in Blogs, cross media promotional parties and a cultivated network of social media postings. Particularly clever are the short subject mock interviews with female models that obliquely explore the themes of the film and act as references – distributed pointers to the text itself. As a film it manges to transcend for moments the directionless “slacker” milieu to which it will undoubtedly be compared. As a work of self promotion, it is surprisingly modest. TIGER operates through a veil of aliases – neither Beaufort or McFay are James’ real names, rather nom de plumes that refreshingly distance the creative process from mediated references to the self.

Six months after its date of production it would undoubtedly be shot as HD video on a Canon 35mm still camera – with spectacular results. Without doubt, it is enabled, in its present and somewhat iterative incarnation, by the possibility of laptop editing, promotion and marketing. As a work of trans-media enterprise, it is a splendid example of the enabling possibilities of the moment.

I have spent time in short spaces discussing the new field of Service Design with a colleague, Dr Andy Polaine. Andy is working full time on these issues – but for me, there is a constant revelation in everyday life as to how this concept applies across a range of fields.

Essentially – it comes down to this – everything you do, or offer to the public as a business is a service. Each time they interact with you. it is a touchpoint, and an opportunity to offer what is wanted from that service. I noted this in an earlier post on the NRMA insurance campaign, where the usual interaction, the touchpoint of buying insurance is, for most people, a grudge purchase and hopefully, nothing after that.

Service design would look at how this takes place, and not what the insurer wants to offer, but what the customer is wanting from that service, and design the process based on the customer.

Doesn’t sound like a whole lot – but it is a very powerful idea. Most businesses drive their process from the centre out – in the style of managerialism that looks at internal process and systems as the element to be understood and designed, and the offer to the customer is based on that system, if they like it or not. Supply chain, HR systems, capacity planning, IT infrastructure – all of these drive the internal logic of business, with the customer as a vaguely referenced idea – understood through the faulty logic of customer satisfaction surveys. If anyone needs a more protracted and eloquent argument on the fallibility of surveys and referrenda, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities by Jean Baudrillard unpacks the mystique of public sampling very nicely. It also is remarkably prescient on the post 9/11 worldview, but that’s another story….

In my experience, there are few organisations that understand service design as poorly as telecommunications companies. Years ago, when I rang Telstra to cut off my broadband after suffering outrageous excess nadwidth charges for several months in a row, I was offered a “better deal” by the operator on my broadband. At this point, I felt the time to make that offer was a week ago – doing it as I was about to disconnect was so cynical as  customer retention ploy that I couldn’t wait to leave. That’s anti-service.

The failure is simple – I want the service – in this case broadband – with the capacity that feels right to me at a reasonable price. If there is reduced pricing available, let me know. To use a better deal as an offer of last resort doen’t make me feel good, it makes me feel like you hate me – that I am a revenue opportunity to be tolerated – strip mined for every possible dollar.

It’s about me offering you “yield”.

There’s not much that helps you “feel good” about telecommunications providers – each of them spend crazy amounts of time and money on “brand advertising” that is so bloated with the hyperbole of the image that it bears no resemblance to the service offered. It’s netwrok access after all.

Last week, Vodafone rang me to “see how I was going with my phone plan” and to “offer me a new phone”. In reality, my contract is up and they want to lock me in to another contract.

Let’s put this in context. I have been a Vodafone customer for over 10 years now. They call me every couple of years with a similar call.

The twentysomething on the phone asked if I was happy with my service, and after thinking about it, I said “actually – no. The 3G coverage, even in major urban areas, is patchy and overloaded, and this also made it very slow – with a lot of latency in the ability of the phone to download email and so forth”.

So she, as the touchpoint with the service provider, gave me a speil about how the service was getting better, and launched into her sales pitch for a renewed contract.

Now I did’t initiate this call – she did – and asked a service question – which she essentially had no solution for. She then offered my a number of phones, and I replied that I was happy with my iPhone, and like many others. would probably buy the new iPhone when it came out. Oh – and I was looking for a prepaid data plan for an iPad…..

So she pretty much hung up on me.

Most likely she has a script, and is incentivised through sales targets. When I didn’t fit her use for me – she left. She raised a problem in my mind, and offered no solution. Her offering – the service – was predetermined by the business – and when I didn’t fit that offering – they had no service for me.

A service design approach would try to understand and consider my requirements at this touchpoint, and offer ways to realise those. Nothing unreasonable, but maybe a negotiation that looked to how the exchange [my money for the service] coud be improved from my point of view, or even how they could offer me the iPhone as part of the service as it became available. She had nothing to say about an iPad data plan – even though I told her I was looking for one.

Nothing about me – everything about how I could be converted to a sale. Nothing about what I wanted from the experience.

So nothing. Bye bye.

I hadn’t had the cause to think about Vodafone – remember – this is a call I took from them. This short interaction left me with the feeling that I was just a potential revenue unit – not even a customer – and certainly not someone who was buying a service I wanted from the business.

I went from not considering Vodafone to actively resenting them in one phone call.

It’s glib to say “the customer is always right” – because some people are unreasonable, and 20% of your customers give you 90% of the headaches. Smart businesses chase the other ones.

Problem is – I’m one of the other ones. Solid phone plan plus data – paid monthly – and a customer for over 10 years. No great hassle for Vodafone as a rule, and I was just getting along with the patchy coverage and network congestion without any complaint. Until they asked me about it.

Vodafone – you don’t have a shopfront I interact with. Your touchpoint is a pdf bill each month.

I see you as part of the visual miasma of advertising (I see but rarely consider) related to the transformational abilities of telecommuncations products. In one phone call, I went from not having you on my radar to actively disliking you, because you asked me to articulate my service requirements and did absolutely nothing.

What’s worse, the interaction made me feel like your very average network service levels are  problem with my perception.

Here’s my perception. We’re done. Over.

After 10 years that’s hard to do in a single phone call.

I have produced a range of parade programs at Fashion Week over the years, and have been surprised at the shift in the way the event is mediated. Five years ago I was probably one of the only people in the pit with a smaller form factor camera – there were four news crews and a zillion photographers.

What has changed is that the small cameras filming the shows were, until recently, ubiquitous.

Now it seemed that order had returned, with major media outlets being given video access, and the rafts of specualtive bloggers with home video cameras being kept out of what was way too crowded a media pit.

This year I shot and produced the coverage for marie claire / Yahoo7, and the game, for us had really changed. While the bloggers were not as evident in the media pit, they were everywhere at Fashion Week, as this view of the media room might attest.

The immediacy of the event is now more important than ever – the stream of minute by minute commentary is so pervasive that you either keep up or lose impact. Our team included 3 on video, the great team from six 6 photography taking stills [of every show] and an online editor who twittered, facebooked and ran a microsite with the media as it came to hand.

Our base in the media room is to the left of the low wall, my editor with his back to the camera.

The days are long – offisite parades in the morning at 9am with an 8am setup, and the last offsite finishing at close to midnight. We managed to take the finished media from each parade and cut from the digital originals in HD on a laptop, sending the finished, compressed packages to the server as they were finished. The fastest package was available [edited] in 30 minutes from the last walk – we usually uploaded within 60 minutes.

We made thirty one packages that week. Well over an hour and a half of HD video edited and put online, while the broadcasters managed less than five minutes each.

Fashion bloggers making do with any space in the name of speed

Keeping pace with the blogosphere means that you need to work at their speed – being a major media outlet means that you need to do it better – the quality, the coverage and the execution.

Traffic for our coverage was double the previous year, we had half a million pageviews on a single day midweek.

Therese Rawsthorne’s show at Australian Technology Park – media pit [top] and stills from our footage

What the speed of delivery means for the future is clearly a real time event – where the fast turnaround video, and the iPhone twitter upload from beside the catwalk are replaced by high quality, realtime coverage using state of the art networking, streaming, delivery and archiving capabilities. It’s not can you shoot the parade, but how well and how quickly can you make it available.

For some time I have been fascinated with the seismic shifts in production that arise from the use of digital tools. Speed, quality and new opportunities seem to open up every year with access to new technology.

Recently, I was approached to produce – and by produce I mean “make in it’s entirety”, a commercial for Nutrimetics, who have not done consumer facing, retail advertising for 30 years in Australia.

To make this in the budget, we used the Canon 5D for the shoot – allowing capture of full frame 35mm imagery on an incredibly lightweight platform.

Why is this different? If you work lighter, you work faster, with less lighting, less grip and camera support – so you move through the setups more quickly. You save time and use almost no crew – we had two people.

Shooting day for night [with 4 m of widows across the side of the room] we managed to shoot the spot in about six hours.

Finishing the spot, sound mix, music composition, grading – all accomplished on a single workstation. It’s quick, removing the friction of pulling together a team and multiple facilities for the work.

Even pre-production on digital tools makes it possible to turn the script to a storyboard – and then the storyboard to an animatic – so that the timings of the spot – length of the supers and speed of the voiceover – are understood before you shoot.

Add to that the ability to review takes instantly on set, [without paying for a separate split operator!] and you have a client who is engaged and participating in the production process as it unfolds.

While this process is ideal for making lower cost media at high quality in the online space – there are a surprising number of broadcast commercials being shot this way. It just works, with a fraction of the production overheads of a traditional film shoot, and it’s so much lighter than most digital cameras with the same capability.

It’s not a replacement – just an amazing new choice we have.

For years people have wanted the access to tools – now it’s access to projects and distribution channels that count.

My eight year old son recently picked up a copy of WIRED magazine, its cover emblazoned with a futuristic impression of London, covered with the text YOUR LIFE IN THE FUTURE.

“Dad – when will the world be like this?” he asked.

“Probably never” I replied, reflecting on a question that has puzzled me for some time -  when did the FUTURE cease to be imagined?

When I was a boy, the legacy of the post war industrial boom had produced a raft of imagery promising a new type of urban utopia in my lifetime. Flying cars – cities that wove their monorails and transport ducts like lattice above impossibly tall skyscrapers. People wearing clothing that would fit in in an episode of Star Trek, and domestic robots welcoming you home with a tray of drinks and an offer of slippers – a technological cypher for the 1950’s housewife.

About the time that The Jetsons morphed into Blade Runner, the future became a popular dystopia. In this alternate fiction, alienated individuals struggled with their technologically mediated identities – forever dislocated in a meta mediated, high rise grid, whose internal world was skewed with hidden influences from the technological panoptica.

This shift in imagination, from technology  as solution to technology as doppelgänger, lurched into cyberpunk – whose online reality quickly morphed from transcendent to immanent. Snow Crash and Neuromancer  were partly real in about five years.

Amongst the avalanche of novelty we currently experience, iSlates, Google Maps and a million channels of media, we have lost the sense of a transcendent future in which technology suddenly lets machine do the work, so people are left to think.

The future is now something not to be imagined. Local governments wrangle about building a Subway, the term “sustainability” is an unsteady panacea to our concern about using up the planet’s resources in the next few decades. Mechanisms of consensus – from the Copenhagen Summit to the War on Terror seem to be as empty as the satisfaction promised by marketers – tales of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Cue the Sydney monorail).

Organisations who “plan” their futures, through the rampant managerialism of the “Strategic Plan” usualy cast the future ten to fifteen years out. Governments, lockstepped to the three and four year rythym of electoral campaigns, are similarly myopic. Demographers point to fourty years hence as the event horizon.

Where is the hundred year plan? Where is the three hundred year vision for humanity? Nowhere.

It seems amidst all of the excitement about the now, there is nothing to even suggest the “and then…”. The event horizon is defined by the release date of new gadgets, movies and games and the seasonal growth and fruition of the fortunes of sports teams.

The future is over. We gave up on it.

picfog.com is a site that streams images associated with twitter. In the site’s own words:

Picfog, the real-time image search engine shows the pictures uploaded to twitter photo hosting services in real time as a visual stream. You can search for any keywords, but you’re shown the recently trending topics.

What emerges from watching picfog for any length of time – it updates in realtime – is exactly that. A fog. A haze. A miasma of imagery, of self fashi0ning, of anti-idealised representation where the vernacular of cellphone pictures intersects with the lergaely narcissistic urges of the general public in its most carefully considered unguarded moment.

With the incessant discussion of the impact of social media – largely cast in terms of how it changes the game from pre-digital, top down media – “old” media, picfog shines like a beacon of field research. It overturns the logic of the focus group to reveal that there is a social personality beyond the realm of demographic and psychographic profiles.

There are an entire class of supposed media savants who act as self styled contemporary anthropologists of popular culture.

Look-look, a self styled agency of coolhunters rose to unwitting notoriety in Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent PBS documentary Merchants of Cool.

Their pitch was that they could help large businesses understand the minds of consumers by providing catalogues of observed memes. These in turn could be integrated into the tropes of advertising campaigns.

In the same manner, Trendwatching makes a sweeping synopsis of what it believes are the current genus-phylum-species of the collective mind, through a similar method of distributed observation and reportage.

The problem is that these services are prefigured to fit the logic of marketing departments, who want defensible strategies, research and expert opinion to support their decisions.

They are in some senses a limited and self regulating narrative because they prescribe the scope of their activity in the light of what they hope to be able to sell as “experts”.

What they have to say is, in many ways, already known – they generalise the collective consciousness through the signs they themselves can identify, in terms they already understand. Once it’s all reduced to a “report” with a tangential name, the result seems less about understanding and more about selling yourself as a pundit – it’s a form of marketing about marketing:

Hey – it’s a living. The nagging doubt remains that the picture they paint, with its powerpoint friendly catchphrases is nothing like this:

But then how do you sell that?

Having been around the block a few times, I have seen the generational gush of hyperbole surrounding “new” media. Now we’ve dropped the “new”-  let’s drop the “digital” media tag -- what’s analogue anymore?

I remember the first wave of “multimedia” and the concurrent slew of pundits prophesying the rise of the all conquering CD-ROM, which was set to overtake all previous media because of its interactivity.

The hideous Microsoft Encarta, a disturbingly synoptic series of 75 word hyperlinked summaries on all sorts of generic fast facts became the unwitting poster child for everything that was dull and reductive about the CD ROM format.

Multipath stories [what ever happened to them?] which would revolutionise user participation in narrative were hot on the heels of the CD ROM.

Turns out that people like being told stories, and they like it better when the ending is probably what they imagined all along -- the good guys win.

Make your own stories are called… real life. You get all the decisions you can handle. In the meantime, narrative functions quite nicely as diminished tableaux that is re-presented to us.

Still, you couldn’t shut up the people at talkfests, in the media and in academia who theorised that humanity, starved of interactivity, was ready to embark on this new adventure with technology.

In fact the development of any media -- particularly the digital stuff -- is the development of software, which has prescribed limits.

“Interactive” choices are usually a series of binary decision trees, pre-programmed under the logic of the last decade’s most superfluous two words:

“Click here”.

Stories are linear in the same way directions to get somewhere are linear. Too multipath and it’s not a story. It’s LEGO.

I recall the Minister for Science and technology, circa 1995, spruiking the brave new world of the CD ROM, the parade of second rate corporate video hacks that bought CD burners and PCs to reinvent themselves. The Australian Multimedia Enterprise, the Creative Nation program [c’mon Australia - let’s be creative with technology n’ that...!].

At the heart of it all was a good idea. The idea that  all of this new stuff needed good things to go on it. In a subtle sense, people expected digitisation to be a game changer. Which was right.

Fast forward the best part of 15 years and the second wave of pundits is upon us. On the wake of the empty “catch all” content, we have come up with new words that try to cast vast commercial software and media experiments as something else. I’m thinking of that word -monetise.

Who talks about monetising a business except experimental non-businesses? When did the CEO of Woolworths ever get up and talk about monetising supermarkets? Does Fed-Ex say they are looking at how to monetise their business?

Now we have the din of opinion on the relevance of social media to business, how to Twitter your corporation. We have Web 2.0 or three point whatever.

Yet high participation may not make the media empire of the future.

Facebook users are different to people watching TV. Facebook is good for quickly sharing holiday snaps from digital cameras -- [imagine that connectivity five years ago!] but it is perhaps not the advertising medium of the new millenium. Are its users even an audience in the traditional sense?

Is there a good way for coprorations to be “social”?  People may not welcome BP into their friends list, yet there is a slew of social media experts ready to consult on call. Do we need them? Or is it a play to create a nice of expertise where the imagined barriers to competition are actually very low?

Compare this with studying medicine, which has a highly developed, formal body of knowledge and takes many years of study and effort to get an entry level position.

Your bank’s Twitter feed may not be as relevant as them monitoring people’s opinon of them on Twitter. It’s market research for free -- but maybe not a new messaging channel.

Casting aside the rhetoric, there are three things that have always made good online media applications.

1. Some form of media [from text on up].

2. The power of a good relational database. [and its extensibility by users]

3. The connectivity of the network itself.

Once you introduce crowdsourcing -- from Flickr to augmented google maps, you have the power of media in rhizomatic form, its polyphony- in stark contrast to the linear, top down modes of production and distribution that operated in media scarcity©.

Compare these two examples of Augmented Reality based applications for phones. One is elegant, well considered and makes you think about what it could do right away. You get it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08

The other, “Sekai Camera” quite aside from the presenter’s dramatics, presents at one point in Akihabara [not a low information environment at the best of times]  a diabolical cacophony of “tags” -- to the point of being inane. Number one : I can see the phones on the shelf. Number two : What if the shelf display changes? [when even your “list view” doesn’t work...] Fail.

There is a point when the “multi” in media is just too much. With all new things, the rhetoric of the “future” is best served with simple common sense.

Oh -- and Microsoft Encarta is being discontinued, even as a web product, on October 31, 2009.

Time always decides.

Seldom do I see an advertising campaign that I regard as genuine genius. Clients team up with advertising agencies in a self congratulatory stew of messaging excess. On the one hand – the “brief” from the client is often a reflection of their own internal narratives – what they would like to “communicate” to the world – their values or brand proposition.

Worse still – this is passed through a system of advertising which seeks constant approval of its messaging in “creative” terms. Making a 30 second spot that gets on a clips reel of flashy [mostly English] advertising is the seen as the pinnacle of success.

It’s messaging your values to the “audience” – like it or not.

Which is why, driving on the East M5 in almost car park conditions, I was fascinated by a billboard on the overpass that simply said:

“Unworry”.

Good thought – and it made me curious – who wants me to unworry?

Turns out it was NRMA insurance, and it preceded an advertising campaign that is so clear and insightful that I have to take my hat off to the creative and the client.

10 out of 10. But why?

one: NRMA’s last campaign was the dreadful H.E.L.P augmented by the pessimistic strains of INXS’ “By my Side”. It showed people being HELPed after fires and car crashes – showed all of the bad things being made right by the good insurer.

Now this is a great way to motivate your people. You tell them that “Insurance is a promise – and we are delivering on that promise” It makes doing overtime in the claims department into a messianic mission to heal the world – particularly when you work in a call centre, and you’re pulling a triple shift after a bushfire. It’s a great morale builder.

Trouble is – the public don’t want to know that. Nobody buys insurance thinking “this will be great when I have my next disaster”….

two: Following on from point one- insurance is a grudge purchase. People pay premiums under sufferance. Anyone in Insurance can tell you this along with the idea that it it embodies a promise.

Now breaking this down – the insurer knows its a promise, but to the customer – well they just focus on the grudge. It’s something you buy hoping to never use.

Unworry goes to the heart of that – it essentialises the customer experience of never wanting to worry about the outcome – getting on with your life.

three: The imagery around H.E.L.P [and the plaintive wailing of “by my side”] depicted specifics – little children tear stained after their house was incinerated in a bushfire. Helping hands from soot stained firefighters lovingly cupping the infants, and distraught people being put right.

Let’s face it – not a great association for your product. Internally – it rallies the troops to feel their work is about a higher calling. Insurance is pretty dry, and as I pointed out  noone really likes you – so to feel you are part of a virtuous mission to restore shattered lives makes it all seem OK. But showing real people in quasi – documentary style just makes it all seem too real – too immanent.

Unworry uses imagery that at once depicts moments of carefree pleasure, and it does so in a slightly out-of-focus way that allows the happy people Unworrying in the ads to act as a cypher for the viewer. They are blurred, mostly faceless. Potential anybodies.

Their actions are simple slow motion evocations of carefree life – floating on a pool, playing with sparklers. One is of a dog, letting its tongue wag in the breeze as it hangs its head from a moving car.

The imagery is really an abstraction that anchors the calm, matesey voice that asks “when did life get so complicated”? Sympathetic to the spirit of the age and our desire for simplicity no doubt – but comforting, seductive and utterly aligned with the user’s desire to never have to worry about their insurance.

Unworry takes the experience of the user – which in known by everyone in the industry – insurance is a grudge purchase. It lets this belief dictate the messaging, and by implication, the culture of he organisation. While you’re at it – it adds the idea of Unpay – buying more insurance gets you a discount.

It takes a lot of awareness for an organisation to tweak the semiotics of its message this finely. For a big player like NRMA, this is a rare achievement.

And if the public forget about you, that’s success.

There is a prevailing rhetoric that insists that young people need access to computers to be “skilled” in terms that suit the Zeitgeist.

To this end – there are moves afoot to provide cheap netbooks to students in high school so that they can each “have access to a computer”. Just look at this graphic! Emails and little lines – they must be…. information…..circling the globe!

Under the headline of an “Education Revolution”, the Federal Government will

turn every secondary school in Australia into a digital school

…if that means giving kids netbooks so they can format MS Word documents and put up Powerpoint slides in class – you might accurately call it an “anavalance of unfettered mundanity”. While unequal access to computing is in important social issue, giving out low cost netbooks is like providing new rubber flip flops for kids without shoes.

In winter.

What are the pitfalls of the sweeping notion that computers = good?

1.  Kids without access to computers from their socio-economic circumstance have little contextual support in the home for the use of computers. They are culturally, not economically disadvantaged.

2. Kids who come from socio-econmically privileged backgrounds already have computers. Good ones. Private schools mandate the use of high end laptops or Macbooks across the school. [Return to point one and repeat observation on cultural divide between public/private education]

3. Teachers [bless them!] have widely varied abilities with digital tools. Some think that powerpoint is a great way to convey information. It’s really not. (Read this before arguing….) My mum’s a teacher, in high school. She needs help booking a flight on the internet. She’s not alone – so extrapolate. Or better still look at the image below. This in an actual presentation from a teacher [name blurred for modesty] who was an ICT MAJOR at University. This is not how to “communicate digitally” – clip art and all. Again – this person is likely to be a high performer in the area – as they are presenting on digital learning at a conference. NOW extrapolate….

4. Activating the collaborative and communicative power of computers is not about putting in a wi-fi network and letting the internet do the rest. It’s about having great collaborative tools that are specific to the learning environment. Universities seldom get this right – schools have a worse chance as their activity and curriculum is largely proscribed by educational bureaucracy.

5. Software is inherently a designed evironment that mandates particular ways of looking at the world. [See note above on Powerpoint]. If you let most kids loose with Photoshop, you get a lot of twirl filter applied to images. Not that Photoshop is not a great application – but in teaching it’s about having both comprehensive technical skills and a developed pedagogy – with any digital tool in order to make it useful in the classroom. If you look at “digital art” in High Schools it’s largely the preserve of the autodidact who works without close mentoring, to produce what is ultimately “art-as-artifact” – produced by happenstance, not teaching.

It’s fine to spend money on computers in schools. Sure, there are equity issues in making something available to all kids.

The real issue is that there is no great pool of teachers who can develop their peers with digital pedagogy, there is no real money for program development, teacher training or even some real “blue sky” initiatives that would make this a truly creative contribution to the national output.

The Australian Council for Educational Research and education.au supported by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), presented a series of symposia around Australia to explore and illuminate the possibilities and the realities of the implementation of the Digital Education revolution (DER).

There you have it. Let’s illuminate the possibilities and the realities of implementation with a three letter acronym…..

Good start comrades! DER!

You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted at every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own. – Rupert Murdoch

It’s unlikely that the State Education Departments will catalyse this process in any meaningful way – the thinking about digital technology in the Education Sector is too pedestrian, and it’s hamstrung by process. Yes state education needs benchmarks, processes and standards – the point is these operate in functional opposition to the iteratve creativity of the wider digital community.

In the end, you are comparing the open framework of the computing community – which thrives on innovation, it is distributed, intelligent, rhizomatic and ultimately subject to the processes of evolutionary fitness – with centralised educational planning –  which is hierachical, commitee driven, largely self regulating and internally bureaucratic.

Sure you’ll get a “Learning Architecture Framework” or a “National Bandwidth Action Plan” – but ultimately -  here’s your revolution…..

Call me a smarty pants – but at least I’m smart.