Adora Svitak, only twelve years old, has already lectured to children and adults across the United States and the United Kingdom promoting literacy and sharing her love of writing. Most recently she was invited to be the youngest speaker ever at the February TED Conference, a week-long conference with top intellects from around the world who lecture on “ideas worth spreading.” After becoming recognized as a “child” prodigy from her essays, poems, and blogs at the age of 6, she was first denied a publishing deal with one major children’s publisher who said they “don’t work well with kids.” Frankly, this kind of behavior is more childish than her.
Often when children are called childish, it’s because of some kind of irrational demands or irresponsible behavior that does not line up with the rules and expectations set out by adults. But it is important to remember that things like temper tantrums are just as irrational as 7-year-old Charlie Simpson thinking he could raise £500 for Haiti earthquake relief by cycling 5 miles around South Park, London. And indeed £500 was irrational, considering he ended up raising over £200,000, or over $300,000. The difference between this and a temper tantrum however, is the potential value of the irrational behavior – a temper tantrum is very egocentric, with aims at obtaining immediate personal benefits (i.e. ice cream or an extra hour of television). But the potential value of the seemingly absurd dream to raise money by riding your bike is obviously beneficial to a large population of people. Childish should not be associated with creativity that boarders irrationality, but with the egocentrism in Jean Piaget’s 2nd of 4 stages of child development that is outgrown by age 7.
Although sometimes it seems this stage 2 egocentrism is never outgrown – imperialism or world wars could be called just as irrational and selfish as a nation-scale temper tantrum. But we can already look back at some events like this throughout history as childish because we have progressed. And as many of us have read on inspirational posters in school classrooms, the children of today are the leaders of tomorrow. The whole reason we’ve progressed beyond cavemen or the dark ages is because each generation improves upon the one before it. That is because kids still dream big, and as Adora says, “in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first.”
A simple example she uses, is the Museum of Glass in her home of Tacoma, Washington. Here, glass blowers invite children to draw and design some pieces they will make, which are often much more imaginative and creative because they aren’t limited by the knowledge of what’s easy or hard to shape. In a larger sense, children aren’t burdened with as much knowledge of past failures, limitations, or road blocks in order to make their dreams a reality – their imagination often pushes the boundaries of possibility. They are fortunate to come into the world a blank slate of personal experience but with the knowledge of past failures to guide their thinking.
When children are called childish, or discouraged from dreams adults consider irrational, we are lowering our expectations for them to the level of our own past accomplishments. We should not be trying to turn kids into our kind of adult, we should provide them with opportunities to lead and succeed so they can be better adults than their parents. Age discrimination is self-defeating to our future. We cannot call Adora or Charlie childish for dreaming big because the brilliant ideas that will benefit our world in the future lie in the dreams of children today. We need more child-involved programs like GreenMyParents to continue to foster children’s imaginations and confidence so that their dreams can become a reality.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Cars 2: Parking In Walmart After A Race Through Theaters
DreamWorks Animation’s last week release of How To Train Your Dragon included the deployment of Viking ships full of Dragon merchandise in over 2500 WalMarts worldwide and Happy Meal toys at McDonalds. As part of promotions leading up to its release, DWA and Paramount also negotiated a first of its kind partnership with The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America to create a special Dragon Training badge (which of course required scouts to watch an advanced screening so they could name and identify at least three dragons from the film). This isn’t the first and surely won’t be the last time that major retailers, manufacturers, and production companies team together to squeeze as much money out of a single idea as they can.
But at least DreamWorks Animation has produced a non-sequel film, which is rare in these days, that has also brought technological innovations and much positive critical attention. However, when the attractive potential of auxiliary markets out-performs the desire to retain artistic integrity, we’ll continue to see films like Cars 2 released solely for consumers to drive their way to WalMart instead of parking themselves in the movie theater.
Pixar has established itself as an animation company that releases only one feature film a year, that is a compelling, original story, which has earned them an astounding 24 Academy Awards from only ten films. And of all their critically acclaimed successes, Cars, the only film to receive less than a 90% rating on RottenTomatoes with a C-rating of 75%, will extend its franchise with a sequel in the summer of 2011. Worse yet, this film was also their poorest performance in the box office in over ten years, leading many movie fans to wonder what the motivation behind the production really is, and what happened to Pixar's originality?
Follwing the Cars release in June of 2006, Disney Consumer Products reported that “Cars is recording 10 to 1 more retail volume than Finding Nemo at the same point in its release.” In fourth quarter reports later that year, Disney’s chief executive Robert Iger promised investors “we expect to see a holiday boost for Cars merchandise, which has been one of our biggest lines of the year, with retail sales around $1 billion." In an interview last year once Cars 2 had been announced, Iger explained that he conceived of the sequel while still promoting the original film on a worldwide tour – this, coincidentally, was when those first reports of '10 to 1 retail volume' were coming in.
It’s strictly business when a production company signs licensing and merchandising deals to get more promotion and marketing, or even to make more money from auxiliary markets, but it’s downright lazy and manipulative when they depend on these contracts instead of retaining their own artistic integrity. The kind of integrity that would prevent them from making a sequel to a film where three actors for five of the characters’ voices have all died - the writer of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, Joe Ranfit, and legendary performers Paul Newman and George Carlin. Whether they're re-cast or written-out, don't worry too much over this slap in the face to real artists, because Larry The Cable Guy is still around to reprise his role.
Coming to theaters near you next summer, your kids’ favorite car toy Lightning McQueen will venture outside the country for the first time. This international racing adventure, that has already encountered lots of story problems and re-writes, will lead him to encounter a vast array of new cars whose limited edition toys will also soon be available for purchase. Also next summer, look for films based off the board game Battleship and the ViewMaster toy. And summer of 2012, in Pixar’s third consecutive year releasing a summer sequel, look for Monsters Inc. 2 along with Stretch Armstrong and Legos movies.
But at least DreamWorks Animation has produced a non-sequel film, which is rare in these days, that has also brought technological innovations and much positive critical attention. However, when the attractive potential of auxiliary markets out-performs the desire to retain artistic integrity, we’ll continue to see films like Cars 2 released solely for consumers to drive their way to WalMart instead of parking themselves in the movie theater.
Pixar has established itself as an animation company that releases only one feature film a year, that is a compelling, original story, which has earned them an astounding 24 Academy Awards from only ten films. And of all their critically acclaimed successes, Cars, the only film to receive less than a 90% rating on RottenTomatoes with a C-rating of 75%, will extend its franchise with a sequel in the summer of 2011. Worse yet, this film was also their poorest performance in the box office in over ten years, leading many movie fans to wonder what the motivation behind the production really is, and what happened to Pixar's originality?
Follwing the Cars release in June of 2006, Disney Consumer Products reported that “Cars is recording 10 to 1 more retail volume than Finding Nemo at the same point in its release.” In fourth quarter reports later that year, Disney’s chief executive Robert Iger promised investors “we expect to see a holiday boost for Cars merchandise, which has been one of our biggest lines of the year, with retail sales around $1 billion." In an interview last year once Cars 2 had been announced, Iger explained that he conceived of the sequel while still promoting the original film on a worldwide tour – this, coincidentally, was when those first reports of '10 to 1 retail volume' were coming in.
It’s strictly business when a production company signs licensing and merchandising deals to get more promotion and marketing, or even to make more money from auxiliary markets, but it’s downright lazy and manipulative when they depend on these contracts instead of retaining their own artistic integrity. The kind of integrity that would prevent them from making a sequel to a film where three actors for five of the characters’ voices have all died - the writer of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, Joe Ranfit, and legendary performers Paul Newman and George Carlin. Whether they're re-cast or written-out, don't worry too much over this slap in the face to real artists, because Larry The Cable Guy is still around to reprise his role.
Coming to theaters near you next summer, your kids’ favorite car toy Lightning McQueen will venture outside the country for the first time. This international racing adventure, that has already encountered lots of story problems and re-writes, will lead him to encounter a vast array of new cars whose limited edition toys will also soon be available for purchase. Also next summer, look for films based off the board game Battleship and the ViewMaster toy. And summer of 2012, in Pixar’s third consecutive year releasing a summer sequel, look for Monsters Inc. 2 along with Stretch Armstrong and Legos movies.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me
This old idiom is a lesson that you should not let people take repeated advantage of you. But it's also a lesson that the first time they take advantage of you can be forgiven. In a 2003 joint study between the department of Economics in the Yale School of Management, and the Harvard Psychology Department, scientists uncovered an innate capacity for mutual altruism in Tamarin monkeys that follows these exact same parameters.
In the study, Tamarin monkeys were put into a variety of situations where one monkey has the opportunity to help the other at a cost to itself, and vice versa. They made sure to use unrelated monkeys in the scenarios, as previous studies have shown that throughout the animal kingdom, cooperation is correlated with genetic similarity. In this particular study, two monkeys in separate cages next to each other repeatedly took turns at a task where one monkey could pull a lever that released food into the other monkey's cage but not their own.
What they found was that if a monkey refused to pull the lever and help out the other monkey, it did not affect that monkey's behavior significantly. Essentially, a "fool me once" was disregarded, and that monkey was still willing to help its peer who would not help them. But once a monkey refused to cooperate twice, the other monkey would also then refuse to cooperate - "fool me twice." Once this mutual altruism broke down from two consecutive acts without cooperation, not only would the monkeys never work together again, but even years later when they re-tested the experiment with the same monkeys, relationships of spite continued to exist.
So to me, the proverb is more an external representation of an innate animal capacity than it is some profound idiom constructed through intelligent reflection. The first part, "shame on you," was seen in these monkeys along with other animals in similar experiments - it did not necessarily hurt the relationship between the two actors, but it was definitely stored in memory for future interactions. And the "shame on me" part, represents that once an individual has refused to cooperate with you twice in a row, you shouldn't trust them anymore. Shame is a negative association with past actions, so if you look at the behaviors of ourselves and other animals in terms of costs and benefits for survival, this "shame on me" is an innate capacity for learning not to trust an individual who has "fooled you twice."
In the study, Tamarin monkeys were put into a variety of situations where one monkey has the opportunity to help the other at a cost to itself, and vice versa. They made sure to use unrelated monkeys in the scenarios, as previous studies have shown that throughout the animal kingdom, cooperation is correlated with genetic similarity. In this particular study, two monkeys in separate cages next to each other repeatedly took turns at a task where one monkey could pull a lever that released food into the other monkey's cage but not their own.
What they found was that if a monkey refused to pull the lever and help out the other monkey, it did not affect that monkey's behavior significantly. Essentially, a "fool me once" was disregarded, and that monkey was still willing to help its peer who would not help them. But once a monkey refused to cooperate twice, the other monkey would also then refuse to cooperate - "fool me twice." Once this mutual altruism broke down from two consecutive acts without cooperation, not only would the monkeys never work together again, but even years later when they re-tested the experiment with the same monkeys, relationships of spite continued to exist.
So to me, the proverb is more an external representation of an innate animal capacity than it is some profound idiom constructed through intelligent reflection. The first part, "shame on you," was seen in these monkeys along with other animals in similar experiments - it did not necessarily hurt the relationship between the two actors, but it was definitely stored in memory for future interactions. And the "shame on me" part, represents that once an individual has refused to cooperate with you twice in a row, you shouldn't trust them anymore. Shame is a negative association with past actions, so if you look at the behaviors of ourselves and other animals in terms of costs and benefits for survival, this "shame on me" is an innate capacity for learning not to trust an individual who has "fooled you twice."
Monday, March 22, 2010
Entertainment, It's Service, It's Future
Entertainment will always be a service, so treating it as a product sacrifices the integrity of the content and the experience of the audience. The Internet and similar recent technologies have placed the mass media industries in a current state of turmoil, with top executives at major television and motion picture production companies losing their jobs left and right due to their inability to continue to capitalize on their market as they had in the past – but this is nothing new. Barrett Garese, founder of Spytap Industries, which specializes in online business development and social media, stated in his most famous essay, “disruptive technologies always put people out of work…temporarily.” He cites the automobile industry destroying the horse drawn carriage industry, but that “the smart ones adapted their businesses or skillsets, and the others went away.” So looking at these revolutions in entertainment from stage to screen, print to radio, cinema to the home television, and now everything to the internet, the business models need to adapt; not the content creators.
In all of these scenarios, no industry has completely disappeared – they have just reestablished their niche in a changing environment. But the film and television industry has not been able to do so despite their complete recognition of this recursive phenomenon. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that “the industry has gone through more change in the past five years than it has in the previous 50,” and CEO of the independent finance company Film Department, Mark Gill, agrees similarly that “there’s been more change in the last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years.” In the past, major studios and networks controlled the content and distribution of the dominating entertainment, but this is no longer the case.
In film before the 1980s, to be entertained you needed to go to a specific venue at a specific time and pay a specific price all determined by a small group of companies. With home video, you still needed to wait a specific amount of time to buy a specific product for a specific price but you could now view it at your own leisure at home. For television, you needed to tune in to a certain channel at a certain time, or perhaps wait until it could be purchased on home video or DVD. As Garese explained, the business model was based on “scarcity of product; either physical product scarcity or timed scarcity.” But with Internet downloads and streaming, scarcity ceases to exist. Even films still in theaters, and sometimes prior to release as well as television shows from all time periods, are available at any time and place to the consumer – and that last part is exactly the problem. The audience is considered a consumer, and the content created for them is considered a product.
When people went to the theater for the premier performances of Shakespeare’s plays, they weren’t paying for popcorn, bonbons, and over-sized cokes. They were paying for the service of being emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically aroused through the shared experience of the audience and performers. Entertainment is an innate human capacity that has only changed technologically. Sociability is the most basic human instinct that let us progress culturally beyond any species on Earth, so it is no surprise that it continues to fuel our entertainment today. It’s the same as the tribal dance or the reenactment of a successful hunt when we were nomadic cave dwellers. It’s a way of taking a personal emotion or experience and sharing it with the group in order to learn from and bond with your fellows. We enjoy this act so immensely because for tens of thousands of years it groomed us for survival – whether it be a story to learn to succeed or to learn how not to fail. Entertainment and the happiness is brings are services to our psyche, they are not a product you can buy as so many artists, musicians, and philosophers have pleaded for centuries.
Creating something that the largest possible audience can appreciate and share with one another is true entertainment success, regardless of the medium. It’s easy to use James Cameron’s Avatar as an example – because it was physiologically and emotionally arousing through its stunning visuals, but more importantly it was the most watched and talked about feature film in a long while. But how about the most viewed youtube video of all time – Charlie bit my finger – which has been viewed over 170 million times. It’s less then a minute long, the visual quality barely rivals a cell phone camera, but nearly everybody has joked about it with friends. The under looked aspect of entertainment has always been camaraderie.
Slumdog Millionaire is a perfect example of how corporate Hollywood’s ignorance of this camaraderie and perception of their content as a product is destroying them. The story was universally relatable and emotionally stimulating, but when screened to Warner Brothers executives, they turned down the offer to distribute the film theatrically. Thinking it could not sell well, they proposed printing it straight to DVD. So the producers went with Fox Searchlight, an Independent Film company that looks at acquiring just this niche of films that are seen as bigger risks but have compelling stories that deserve to be seen shared with the world. And we all know what happened – it made back over twelve times its production budget and won the Academy Award for best picture. Steve Hickner, animator and feature film director, told me it’s because Hollywood has become an industry based on “no.” He said that those Warner Brothers executives might have kicked themselves in regret, but at the end of the day they still had jobs. He went on to say that the person who may no longer have a job is the person who said “yes” to a film like Gigli or All About Steve.
Jon Horn, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz wrote an article last October about this executive firing ‘horror show’ saying that “film lovers may not rejoice, but it might buy the studio chiefs some job security.” Coming next July to a theater near you will be Transformers 3, and films based off the ViewMaster toy and the board game Battleship. And in development are projects based on Legos, the video game Asteroids, and the toy Stretch Armstrong. As hopeful as one could be that Stretch is a rich, deep, relatable character whose compelling plight can be collectively enjoyed by us all, it does not matter – because his toy after the release will pay off any blockbuster blunder. The ‘creators,’ and not artists, behind these films care more about the bottom line than their own artistic integrity. And Pixar’s film Cars, its only critically bashed film in the company’s history, is getting a sequel because how could one possibly pass up a second opportunity to sell more toy cars than Hotwheels?
Enough bashing the poor decisions and lack of trust in artists by the big guys on top, what can they do to adapt their business model? It’s as simple as changing the equation from churning out a product to sell the consumer, into creating content that sells themselves to the consumer – simply put, reestablishing themselves as service providers. Jason Kilar, the genius behind Amazon.com and Hulu, said, “shows are the brands users care about, not the networks that air them.” When Chuck Salter featured Kilar in an article, this was Kilar’s response to the question of why Hulu, a site “owned by NBC and Fox allows you to search for, say, CSI:Miami – and then provide links to take you to the CBS site?” It’s because Hulu wanted to be the online authority on streaming videos, so they needed to provide the consumer with whatever they wanted – the customer is always right.
A majority of income for the entertainment industry today is advertisement revenue – and this is another system that Hulu has redesigned for the changing atmosphere. They limit their commercials for a half hour show to two minutes, rather than the television eight-minute model. But not only do viewers get a quarter of the entertainment disturbances as television, they can choose when to watch the adds, and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to personalize what they see over time. At the same time, this is increasing the advertisement rates by 50-100% per thousand viewers as compared to broadcast television. Essentially, Hulu has created a two-way street for optimization by both parties – consumers get more of what they want with less commercial time, and because they provide demographic information upon registering with the site, the advertisers also get more accurate and valuable market research through feedback. As Kilar explained, “customers won’t tell you what they want, but their behavior will tell you if you capture and analyze it.”
This advertisement adaptation is the first of many that will drive an overall change in the corporate entertainment business model – but still the most important step is reestablishing each entertainment platform’s niche. Because of Hulu and similar websites, along with home televisions capable of connecting to this content directly, the television and Internet media industries will have the toughest battle. Both thrive off of the viewers’ constantly increasing ability of control – and people love being in control of themselves. Television began to thrive on an aspect of flow – shows the lead into each other well with advertisements targeted to their audience, in an attempt to keep the viewer on one channel for as long as possible. But there were always multiple channels, then came remote controls, and cable, satellite, pay-per-view, DVRs, and the list goes on. Because it lacks the participatory culture of a large cinema audience, viewers’ participation and connectivity to the content is routed in their ability to control what they watch.
Outside of Internet-based television programming, the personal computer still has a much more immense capacity for control through constant and immediate interactivity – gaming, applications, and ‘choose your adventure’ style narratives are only the beginnings. Computer programming and web scripting will continue, as it has, to become more and more interactive and ergonomic. And with so much more collected information about its users behavioral relationship to its content, users are directed to more of what they want more efficiently. If television wants the same big-bucks advertisement revenue it once had, it needs to go back to it’s original niche – event programming. People used to tune in at a certain time to a certain channel to see that new episode of their favorite TV show. However, scripted programming is no longer an event because of the flexibility and immediacy of the Internet. The highest watched shows today are live reality programming like American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance, and major sporting events like the Super Bowl or March Madness even out perform them.
And the film industry is suffering not only because its content is displayed on the two aforementioned formats, but also because it no longer provides as unique of an experience. The cinema has always been a spectacle, a big show, and despite the over-flattery, an almost circus or carnival. The screen is huge, the sound is incredible, and large groups of people immediately respond to the entertainment alongside each other. But home theater systems are huge high-definition screens, with surround sound, and a website like RottenTomatoes will tell you exactly what the rest of the audience feels about it. But thankfully, the cinema has a new secret weapon – 3D. It’s not the blue and red anaglyph glasses our parents wore, its scientifically designed to enhance the viewing experience. Cameras with dual lenses shoot alternate views for each eye in exactly the same way we see the world. As David Zaslav put it, chief executive of Discovery Communications, “3D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks ‘closest to real life.’” And in Japan, theaters are already experimenting with ‘4D,’ where the films include smells, wind, vapor, and even seats that slightly stimulate the viewer physiologically. It may sound cheesy now, but experimentation is the only way to improve the viewer’s experience – and these kinds of technologies will appear in theaters long before your home TV or computer.
In all of these respective media niches, the message remains the same – they provide unique services to the audience. As soon as that service gets systematized into a product, the audience will be disinterested – good entertainment will sell itself. As much as we would like to think that the human race is special, we are still all animals – and animals survive off of mutual altruism amongst their species, flock, school, or pride. For humans, entertainment grew from sociability routed in a form of mutual altruism. We entertained each other with stories and they helped us survive by sharing our knowledge and experiences with one another, because a group is only as strong as it’s weakest link. The entertainment that will continue to prosper will be the entertainment that shows and tells us something new, something vital, something real, and is universally experienced in the same innate capacity that it grew from.
Works Cited:
Garese, Barrett. “Scarcity, Experience, And A New Seat At An Old Table.” [weblog entry.] Barret Garese’s Weblog. July 2009. (http://www.barrettgarese.com/post/141270170/scarcity-experience-and-a-new-seat-at-an-old-table)
Graser, Marc. “Digital Format Adopted: Studios, retailers aim for ‘buy once, play anywhere plan.” Variety 4 January 2010.
Horn, John, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz. “Hollywood Studios in Midst of Their Own Horror Show.” Los Angeles Times 6 October 2009.
Salter, Chuck. “Can Hulu Save Traditional TV?” Fastcompany.com/magazine. FastCopmany, 1 December 2009.
Stelter, Brian, and Brad Stone. “Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension.” New York Times 5 January 2010.
In all of these scenarios, no industry has completely disappeared – they have just reestablished their niche in a changing environment. But the film and television industry has not been able to do so despite their complete recognition of this recursive phenomenon. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that “the industry has gone through more change in the past five years than it has in the previous 50,” and CEO of the independent finance company Film Department, Mark Gill, agrees similarly that “there’s been more change in the last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years.” In the past, major studios and networks controlled the content and distribution of the dominating entertainment, but this is no longer the case.
In film before the 1980s, to be entertained you needed to go to a specific venue at a specific time and pay a specific price all determined by a small group of companies. With home video, you still needed to wait a specific amount of time to buy a specific product for a specific price but you could now view it at your own leisure at home. For television, you needed to tune in to a certain channel at a certain time, or perhaps wait until it could be purchased on home video or DVD. As Garese explained, the business model was based on “scarcity of product; either physical product scarcity or timed scarcity.” But with Internet downloads and streaming, scarcity ceases to exist. Even films still in theaters, and sometimes prior to release as well as television shows from all time periods, are available at any time and place to the consumer – and that last part is exactly the problem. The audience is considered a consumer, and the content created for them is considered a product.
When people went to the theater for the premier performances of Shakespeare’s plays, they weren’t paying for popcorn, bonbons, and over-sized cokes. They were paying for the service of being emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically aroused through the shared experience of the audience and performers. Entertainment is an innate human capacity that has only changed technologically. Sociability is the most basic human instinct that let us progress culturally beyond any species on Earth, so it is no surprise that it continues to fuel our entertainment today. It’s the same as the tribal dance or the reenactment of a successful hunt when we were nomadic cave dwellers. It’s a way of taking a personal emotion or experience and sharing it with the group in order to learn from and bond with your fellows. We enjoy this act so immensely because for tens of thousands of years it groomed us for survival – whether it be a story to learn to succeed or to learn how not to fail. Entertainment and the happiness is brings are services to our psyche, they are not a product you can buy as so many artists, musicians, and philosophers have pleaded for centuries.
Creating something that the largest possible audience can appreciate and share with one another is true entertainment success, regardless of the medium. It’s easy to use James Cameron’s Avatar as an example – because it was physiologically and emotionally arousing through its stunning visuals, but more importantly it was the most watched and talked about feature film in a long while. But how about the most viewed youtube video of all time – Charlie bit my finger – which has been viewed over 170 million times. It’s less then a minute long, the visual quality barely rivals a cell phone camera, but nearly everybody has joked about it with friends. The under looked aspect of entertainment has always been camaraderie.
Slumdog Millionaire is a perfect example of how corporate Hollywood’s ignorance of this camaraderie and perception of their content as a product is destroying them. The story was universally relatable and emotionally stimulating, but when screened to Warner Brothers executives, they turned down the offer to distribute the film theatrically. Thinking it could not sell well, they proposed printing it straight to DVD. So the producers went with Fox Searchlight, an Independent Film company that looks at acquiring just this niche of films that are seen as bigger risks but have compelling stories that deserve to be seen shared with the world. And we all know what happened – it made back over twelve times its production budget and won the Academy Award for best picture. Steve Hickner, animator and feature film director, told me it’s because Hollywood has become an industry based on “no.” He said that those Warner Brothers executives might have kicked themselves in regret, but at the end of the day they still had jobs. He went on to say that the person who may no longer have a job is the person who said “yes” to a film like Gigli or All About Steve.
Jon Horn, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz wrote an article last October about this executive firing ‘horror show’ saying that “film lovers may not rejoice, but it might buy the studio chiefs some job security.” Coming next July to a theater near you will be Transformers 3, and films based off the ViewMaster toy and the board game Battleship. And in development are projects based on Legos, the video game Asteroids, and the toy Stretch Armstrong. As hopeful as one could be that Stretch is a rich, deep, relatable character whose compelling plight can be collectively enjoyed by us all, it does not matter – because his toy after the release will pay off any blockbuster blunder. The ‘creators,’ and not artists, behind these films care more about the bottom line than their own artistic integrity. And Pixar’s film Cars, its only critically bashed film in the company’s history, is getting a sequel because how could one possibly pass up a second opportunity to sell more toy cars than Hotwheels?
Enough bashing the poor decisions and lack of trust in artists by the big guys on top, what can they do to adapt their business model? It’s as simple as changing the equation from churning out a product to sell the consumer, into creating content that sells themselves to the consumer – simply put, reestablishing themselves as service providers. Jason Kilar, the genius behind Amazon.com and Hulu, said, “shows are the brands users care about, not the networks that air them.” When Chuck Salter featured Kilar in an article, this was Kilar’s response to the question of why Hulu, a site “owned by NBC and Fox allows you to search for, say, CSI:Miami – and then provide links to take you to the CBS site?” It’s because Hulu wanted to be the online authority on streaming videos, so they needed to provide the consumer with whatever they wanted – the customer is always right.
A majority of income for the entertainment industry today is advertisement revenue – and this is another system that Hulu has redesigned for the changing atmosphere. They limit their commercials for a half hour show to two minutes, rather than the television eight-minute model. But not only do viewers get a quarter of the entertainment disturbances as television, they can choose when to watch the adds, and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to personalize what they see over time. At the same time, this is increasing the advertisement rates by 50-100% per thousand viewers as compared to broadcast television. Essentially, Hulu has created a two-way street for optimization by both parties – consumers get more of what they want with less commercial time, and because they provide demographic information upon registering with the site, the advertisers also get more accurate and valuable market research through feedback. As Kilar explained, “customers won’t tell you what they want, but their behavior will tell you if you capture and analyze it.”
This advertisement adaptation is the first of many that will drive an overall change in the corporate entertainment business model – but still the most important step is reestablishing each entertainment platform’s niche. Because of Hulu and similar websites, along with home televisions capable of connecting to this content directly, the television and Internet media industries will have the toughest battle. Both thrive off of the viewers’ constantly increasing ability of control – and people love being in control of themselves. Television began to thrive on an aspect of flow – shows the lead into each other well with advertisements targeted to their audience, in an attempt to keep the viewer on one channel for as long as possible. But there were always multiple channels, then came remote controls, and cable, satellite, pay-per-view, DVRs, and the list goes on. Because it lacks the participatory culture of a large cinema audience, viewers’ participation and connectivity to the content is routed in their ability to control what they watch.
Outside of Internet-based television programming, the personal computer still has a much more immense capacity for control through constant and immediate interactivity – gaming, applications, and ‘choose your adventure’ style narratives are only the beginnings. Computer programming and web scripting will continue, as it has, to become more and more interactive and ergonomic. And with so much more collected information about its users behavioral relationship to its content, users are directed to more of what they want more efficiently. If television wants the same big-bucks advertisement revenue it once had, it needs to go back to it’s original niche – event programming. People used to tune in at a certain time to a certain channel to see that new episode of their favorite TV show. However, scripted programming is no longer an event because of the flexibility and immediacy of the Internet. The highest watched shows today are live reality programming like American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance, and major sporting events like the Super Bowl or March Madness even out perform them.
And the film industry is suffering not only because its content is displayed on the two aforementioned formats, but also because it no longer provides as unique of an experience. The cinema has always been a spectacle, a big show, and despite the over-flattery, an almost circus or carnival. The screen is huge, the sound is incredible, and large groups of people immediately respond to the entertainment alongside each other. But home theater systems are huge high-definition screens, with surround sound, and a website like RottenTomatoes will tell you exactly what the rest of the audience feels about it. But thankfully, the cinema has a new secret weapon – 3D. It’s not the blue and red anaglyph glasses our parents wore, its scientifically designed to enhance the viewing experience. Cameras with dual lenses shoot alternate views for each eye in exactly the same way we see the world. As David Zaslav put it, chief executive of Discovery Communications, “3D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks ‘closest to real life.’” And in Japan, theaters are already experimenting with ‘4D,’ where the films include smells, wind, vapor, and even seats that slightly stimulate the viewer physiologically. It may sound cheesy now, but experimentation is the only way to improve the viewer’s experience – and these kinds of technologies will appear in theaters long before your home TV or computer.
In all of these respective media niches, the message remains the same – they provide unique services to the audience. As soon as that service gets systematized into a product, the audience will be disinterested – good entertainment will sell itself. As much as we would like to think that the human race is special, we are still all animals – and animals survive off of mutual altruism amongst their species, flock, school, or pride. For humans, entertainment grew from sociability routed in a form of mutual altruism. We entertained each other with stories and they helped us survive by sharing our knowledge and experiences with one another, because a group is only as strong as it’s weakest link. The entertainment that will continue to prosper will be the entertainment that shows and tells us something new, something vital, something real, and is universally experienced in the same innate capacity that it grew from.
Works Cited:
Garese, Barrett. “Scarcity, Experience, And A New Seat At An Old Table.” [weblog entry.] Barret Garese’s Weblog. July 2009. (http://www.barrettgarese.com/post/141270170/scarcity-experience-and-a-new-seat-at-an-old-table)
Graser, Marc. “Digital Format Adopted: Studios, retailers aim for ‘buy once, play anywhere plan.” Variety 4 January 2010.
Horn, John, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz. “Hollywood Studios in Midst of Their Own Horror Show.” Los Angeles Times 6 October 2009.
Salter, Chuck. “Can Hulu Save Traditional TV?” Fastcompany.com/magazine. FastCopmany, 1 December 2009.
Stelter, Brian, and Brad Stone. “Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension.” New York Times 5 January 2010.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Response To Mack's Climbing The Ladder of Success
In a recent post, Blogger Mack proposed that economic inequality between classes could be a much bigger hit to a country than we realize. From a review by Pickett and Wilkinson of the book The Spirit Level, Mack quotes, "Though Sweden and Japan have low levels of economic inequality for different reasons - the former redistributes wealth, while in the latter case, the playing field is more level from the start, with a smaller range of incomes - both have relatively low crime rates and happier, healthier citizens."
From a capitalist point of view, one could argue that the individual's ability to grow beyond his or her peers in an upper class is a comforting reminder that they live in a culture that rewards hard work and ingenuity. But at the same time, the jealousy created by divided classes could contribute to the higher crime rates, and less happy, less healthy citizens as compared to countries like Sweden and Japan. When looking back on humans from a long-term anthropological standpoint, both sides of the argument are better understood.
For a long period of growth when humans were tight-knit groups of hunter gatherers, the socioeconomic structure was completely focused around the survival of the group as a whole. And these groups could be anywhere from twenty or thirty individuals up through about a hundred and twenty or thirty people, but rarely more than that. So for a lot of our most recent cultural growth and cognitive evolution, we had been naturally selected to survive best as a tribe - a relatively small group of equals, where everybody knows and trusts each other, and everyone's efforts contribute to the well-being of everybody else. There wasn't really any class system, and because it was successful for such a long period of time, humans became accustomed and happy with this structure. It's the same as people today feeling happy and rewarded when they feel part of a team, an organization, or group of friends that has a collective success. It's that same part of our ancient brains that would rejoice and sing and dance after successful hunt that fed the tribe.
It makes sense then, that a more socioeconomically equal country like Sweden or Japan would foster less crime, and happier and healthier citizens. But the flip side of it all is just as ancient - competition between neighboring tribes. Tribes were constantly inventing new tools and technologies, discovering new resources, and working to exploit these advancements in order to out perform the other tribes around them. Basically, if your tribe figured out a better way to hunt or collect water or something than the tribes around them, they'd ultimately obtain a monopoly on the resource. And this division in socioeconomic power from tribe to tribe, would foster greater potential for survival and success for the tribe on top - prehistoric capitalism. So as we progressed into larger tribes, cultures, and now are a globally connected system of nations, we still fall prey to our ancient tribal qualities. Deciding where you stand between socialism or capitalism is ultimately deciding who is part of your tribe and who is not, and who you feel includes you as part of their tribe and who does not.
From a capitalist point of view, one could argue that the individual's ability to grow beyond his or her peers in an upper class is a comforting reminder that they live in a culture that rewards hard work and ingenuity. But at the same time, the jealousy created by divided classes could contribute to the higher crime rates, and less happy, less healthy citizens as compared to countries like Sweden and Japan. When looking back on humans from a long-term anthropological standpoint, both sides of the argument are better understood.
For a long period of growth when humans were tight-knit groups of hunter gatherers, the socioeconomic structure was completely focused around the survival of the group as a whole. And these groups could be anywhere from twenty or thirty individuals up through about a hundred and twenty or thirty people, but rarely more than that. So for a lot of our most recent cultural growth and cognitive evolution, we had been naturally selected to survive best as a tribe - a relatively small group of equals, where everybody knows and trusts each other, and everyone's efforts contribute to the well-being of everybody else. There wasn't really any class system, and because it was successful for such a long period of time, humans became accustomed and happy with this structure. It's the same as people today feeling happy and rewarded when they feel part of a team, an organization, or group of friends that has a collective success. It's that same part of our ancient brains that would rejoice and sing and dance after successful hunt that fed the tribe.
It makes sense then, that a more socioeconomically equal country like Sweden or Japan would foster less crime, and happier and healthier citizens. But the flip side of it all is just as ancient - competition between neighboring tribes. Tribes were constantly inventing new tools and technologies, discovering new resources, and working to exploit these advancements in order to out perform the other tribes around them. Basically, if your tribe figured out a better way to hunt or collect water or something than the tribes around them, they'd ultimately obtain a monopoly on the resource. And this division in socioeconomic power from tribe to tribe, would foster greater potential for survival and success for the tribe on top - prehistoric capitalism. So as we progressed into larger tribes, cultures, and now are a globally connected system of nations, we still fall prey to our ancient tribal qualities. Deciding where you stand between socialism or capitalism is ultimately deciding who is part of your tribe and who is not, and who you feel includes you as part of their tribe and who does not.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
David Cameron and The Next Age of Government
David Cameron, leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party, gave a very thought provoking speech at a recent TED Conference on how he thinks the information revolution can benefit government and policy. The TED conferences, standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design are devoted to just that, but more specifically new innovations with the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading." Speakers are often scientists, researchers, inventors, but rarely politicians. So I was surprised to see that Cameron gave a talk, but it still certainly fit the TED brand.
Here's the gist of what I got out of it - he talked about how information today spreads incredibly quickly, cheaply, and to almost anywhere in the world and government's are not using this to their advantage. He stated that the information age can give more power to the people, and has lead us to understand people better. Understanding people better should lead us to designing policies and programs that treat people the way they actually are, rather than the way we wish them to be. And more power can be given to people simply by translucency of information which is now much cheaper and easier.
One simple example he used was putting government spending, dollar by dollar, available online. He reminded the crowd that the world has over 30 trillion dollars in debt, and the easiest way to start alleviating it is to reduce government spending. And that's exactly why there are always people going line by line through our budgets, trying to analyze what programs work or don't work, in order to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. But what if all of our spending, down to every individual government contract, was put online? Businesses could search the database for contract jobs they could fulfill, and compete to do it for a lower price. And he promised that should the Conservative Party gain control of Parliament, they will do just that in the UK.
He also showed a screen shot from a Chicago website called Clearmap, which updates publicly the occurance, description, and location of crimes committed in the city. Before the internet this is information that only the police department would know, but now it is public for all citizens. Kind of like the e-mails I get from my USC's Department of Public Safety, this information can show people how to avoid being the victim of a crime. It can show where not to go at what hours during the day in a very obvious visual display. Not to mention the fact that this makes the Police Department to their jobs better because they have easier access to and representation of information that had previously been stored in file cabinets or personal memories.
The most interesting thing to me though, being a psychology major, is how he believes we can use behavioral economics and our understanding of ourselves to improve culture. One easy example we're all familiar with is recycling - people started doing it more, when you started offering them money for it. Yes I know it's simple, but that's why it's such an easy way of using something we know about people (they like money) to do something that collectively makes a difference. An example he used, which I'm not sure I agree with but makes a lot of sense, is a simple way of reducing energy usage. Politicians have tried everything from those PSA's telling you to turn the lights of when you leave, to city-wide voluntary no-power hours. Cameron suggests using the vast amount of information we have and giving it to people to really show how they fit in - what if your monthly electrical bill had a bar graph with your energy usage, your neighbors' average energy usage, and an eco-friendly energy aware household's usage? Psychology experiments for years have continued to confirm that people feel uncomfortable giving/taking more/less than everyone else; essentially, people like equality and collaborative altruism. So if Joe Shmoe sees that he's using four times as much energy as the rest of his block, maybe he actually will start turning lights off when he leaves rooms. Obviously this proposal may bring arguments of privacy, but the point of it is really using what we know about people to design more effective policy.
Here's the gist of what I got out of it - he talked about how information today spreads incredibly quickly, cheaply, and to almost anywhere in the world and government's are not using this to their advantage. He stated that the information age can give more power to the people, and has lead us to understand people better. Understanding people better should lead us to designing policies and programs that treat people the way they actually are, rather than the way we wish them to be. And more power can be given to people simply by translucency of information which is now much cheaper and easier.
One simple example he used was putting government spending, dollar by dollar, available online. He reminded the crowd that the world has over 30 trillion dollars in debt, and the easiest way to start alleviating it is to reduce government spending. And that's exactly why there are always people going line by line through our budgets, trying to analyze what programs work or don't work, in order to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. But what if all of our spending, down to every individual government contract, was put online? Businesses could search the database for contract jobs they could fulfill, and compete to do it for a lower price. And he promised that should the Conservative Party gain control of Parliament, they will do just that in the UK.
He also showed a screen shot from a Chicago website called Clearmap, which updates publicly the occurance, description, and location of crimes committed in the city. Before the internet this is information that only the police department would know, but now it is public for all citizens. Kind of like the e-mails I get from my USC's Department of Public Safety, this information can show people how to avoid being the victim of a crime. It can show where not to go at what hours during the day in a very obvious visual display. Not to mention the fact that this makes the Police Department to their jobs better because they have easier access to and representation of information that had previously been stored in file cabinets or personal memories.
The most interesting thing to me though, being a psychology major, is how he believes we can use behavioral economics and our understanding of ourselves to improve culture. One easy example we're all familiar with is recycling - people started doing it more, when you started offering them money for it. Yes I know it's simple, but that's why it's such an easy way of using something we know about people (they like money) to do something that collectively makes a difference. An example he used, which I'm not sure I agree with but makes a lot of sense, is a simple way of reducing energy usage. Politicians have tried everything from those PSA's telling you to turn the lights of when you leave, to city-wide voluntary no-power hours. Cameron suggests using the vast amount of information we have and giving it to people to really show how they fit in - what if your monthly electrical bill had a bar graph with your energy usage, your neighbors' average energy usage, and an eco-friendly energy aware household's usage? Psychology experiments for years have continued to confirm that people feel uncomfortable giving/taking more/less than everyone else; essentially, people like equality and collaborative altruism. So if Joe Shmoe sees that he's using four times as much energy as the rest of his block, maybe he actually will start turning lights off when he leaves rooms. Obviously this proposal may bring arguments of privacy, but the point of it is really using what we know about people to design more effective policy.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Prezi and Persuasion
Tuesday night I attended a special guest lecture from Peter Arvai put on by USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Arvai is the CEO of a new presentation tool software called Prezi, the third new media start-up he has been involved with that began in Hungary and is beginning to spread. Personally, I think Prezi beats the shit out of powerpoint, and I'm not the only one. The great thing about the software, is that you have one giant interactive pallet to place all your content - text, images, sound, and videos. You can place it all in different sizes and locations to enhance your argument, and when presenting you can come in and out of any part at any time. So, rather than a strictly linear, almost movie style presentation that we're used to, Prezi allows the presenter and audience to interact with each other and spend more or less time on different topics depending on the flow of the presentation. And what makes it even better, is that it's free to use, and it's all online - you build your presentation in a web browser, and save it to a customized URL that can be called up from any computer. No more worrying about saving the powerpoint file somewhere, or worrying about compatibility with other computers.
The presentation Arvai gave using Prezi was mostly about how to give a VC pitch. But whether intentional or not, his outline for a VC pitch was an outline for persuasion in general. He asked the audience what the goals of a VC pitch are, and how you accomplish them. After some back and forth with the crowd, we came to a list of three things you need to do - display potential for your idea or product, competency in yourself, and do it in a way that can be easily communicated to other people. For a VC pitch this makes complete sense; you need them to like your product and see that it's profitable, they have to believe you can come through with it, and you have to package it all in a simple argument they can remember and recount to convince their partners.
But I think this is important in trying to persuade any audience to do anything. Take Obama's campaign as an example: his goal was to get elected. So he had to present his ideas, or platform to the voting Americans and prove they had potential to work. He had to look good doing it, speak well, and convince us he is capable of coming through. And he had to make it all fit into an easily remembered argument - Yes we can. Obviously there was a lot more that went into his campaign than I just outlined, but he hit the three big parts of persuasion right on the money. And how about McCain? He also had to present his platform to voting Americans and convince us he is capable of coming through. But in proving his competency to complete the tasks at hand, he was not nearly as successful. A lot of the flack he got in the media was his running mate's competency and his own age. Jokes about him possibly dying in office, and viral videos of Sarah Palin sounding like she didn't know what she was saying, killed their campaign. And things like Tina Fey's depiction of Palin became that easily remembered and transferable message. Once again let me point out that these weren't the only factors influencing the election, but when looking at the simple act of persuasion, Obama beat the shit out of McCain.
The presentation Arvai gave using Prezi was mostly about how to give a VC pitch. But whether intentional or not, his outline for a VC pitch was an outline for persuasion in general. He asked the audience what the goals of a VC pitch are, and how you accomplish them. After some back and forth with the crowd, we came to a list of three things you need to do - display potential for your idea or product, competency in yourself, and do it in a way that can be easily communicated to other people. For a VC pitch this makes complete sense; you need them to like your product and see that it's profitable, they have to believe you can come through with it, and you have to package it all in a simple argument they can remember and recount to convince their partners.
But I think this is important in trying to persuade any audience to do anything. Take Obama's campaign as an example: his goal was to get elected. So he had to present his ideas, or platform to the voting Americans and prove they had potential to work. He had to look good doing it, speak well, and convince us he is capable of coming through. And he had to make it all fit into an easily remembered argument - Yes we can. Obviously there was a lot more that went into his campaign than I just outlined, but he hit the three big parts of persuasion right on the money. And how about McCain? He also had to present his platform to voting Americans and convince us he is capable of coming through. But in proving his competency to complete the tasks at hand, he was not nearly as successful. A lot of the flack he got in the media was his running mate's competency and his own age. Jokes about him possibly dying in office, and viral videos of Sarah Palin sounding like she didn't know what she was saying, killed their campaign. And things like Tina Fey's depiction of Palin became that easily remembered and transferable message. Once again let me point out that these weren't the only factors influencing the election, but when looking at the simple act of persuasion, Obama beat the shit out of McCain.
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