Dash Away, Dash Away All

Here's a piece of out-of-home advertising that really gets the heart racing...

The sports-shoe manufacturer Asics set up a 60-foot video wall in the Columbus Circle subway station in New York City to see how close you can come to leading U.S. marathoner Ryan Hall's 4:46 average pace he sets over the course of the 26.2-mile race.

Reminiscent of other, similar kinetic out-of-home displays such as Volkswagen's efforts in its "Fun Theory" series, this shows how to pay off a brand message through action, not just reading. Lace 'em up and stretch out!

Living Well With Digital

Kip Voytek, partner with MDC, is a novel combination of geekazoid and humanist thinker while working with one of the largest marketing services agencies in the world. He's able to toss Emerson, Montaigne, and Shakespeare together with "The Matrix" and refs to Wikipedia.

His imaginative and energetic five-minute spin here about making your way in the digital world shows this eclecticism, and is fun(ny) to boot.

Hunt for the New

The pace of creating new devices continues to increase. This recent posting in "I Have an Idea" surveys the most recent lot of them. (No, this poor guy in the image doesn't have a bad case of acne; read the article to see what the heck's really going on.)

While I can understand its gee-whiz wonderment at these devices, it's not yet clear how they might be used for telling compelling stories and for creating compelling forms of involvement.

While it's important to keep a finger on the pulse of new devices, it's just as important to remember that devices are only one part--and, frankly, an increasingly small part--of what really new media are all about.

A Troglodyte's Call

With snail's pace of innovation in really new media over the past weeks (same ol' stuff week after week), I thought it was a good time to think about trends in media education as well as in media work.

We've all heard about "convergence." Despite its value, what it means too often is efforts to cut costs primarily by trimming staffs and making each remaining person wear more hats.

While there's a benefit gained with people breaking out of narrow job-description silos, the trouble is that the broader people are spread, the thinner their knowledge and practice inevitably becomes.

Nowhere is this more true than with really new media. If the demands for profitability increase to the extent that we return to the days in which fewer people do everything from copy to design and production, the inevitable result is thin, safe work.

The pressure to produce overwhelms the need to explore and create. Safety in reusing what's worked in the past becomes valued over innovation.

Particularly with digital techniques, only extreme techies have the depth of technical sophistication to help creatives translate concepts into execution. There's no way the creatives who cook up the concepts could also execute work such as the Nokia World Biggest Signpost and the Halo Monument Light Sculpture.

So, consider this a vote against workplace convergence--not in favor of a return to the assembly line of yore, but of pioneering new ways of working together that preserve depth of knowledge and the freedom to create and innovate. And the value of doing so.

More on the 'Real' as the 'Virtual'

Okay, so there's video games and real games, right?

Britvic wants to change all that, and, by doing so, underscore the cutting edge of digital as dispensing altogether with such facile distinctions as that between 'virtual' and 'real'.

Britvic's Champion of the Playground is an online game/competition directed at kids, and intended to interweave a product message about their juices with encouraging kids to exercise more ('really', not virtually).

Kids register and receive a 'skill kit' to use. As The Drum puts it, "Skills kits contain a kit bag and a web cam, as well as a digitised skipping rope and a digitised hackysack that contain micro-chips which record a code when the child practises certain skills. Children can enter the recorded code online to receive further skills points and see how they compare against their friends in their friends league'.

The activity takes place virtually and really, rendering the ol' division between 'virtual' and 'real' increasingly irrelevant. 

Blurring the Line Between "Virtual" and "Reality"

How often are campaigns and promotions thought about as linking a separate "virtual" with a separate "reality"?

A number of recent efforts highlight how limiting this is.

Another recent effort that doesn't simply make a "virtual" anything, but instead maps the "real" onto/within the "virtual" is the mixed-media project/proposal "110 Stories," pitched through Kickstarter by Brian August.

By visually reproducing a view of the absent World Trade Center towers to anyone looking at Ground Zero through an iPhone, it not only helps people see/remember what once was at that site, it helps them share that experience with others.

Just as the virtual makes tangible what once was real, the real provides the impetus and substance for the virtual.

These and other efforts are remaking what we mean by "digital."

My Current Favorite

In terms of meeting "really new media," few I've seen recently can top Nokia's effort it titles the "World's Biggest Signpost."

The installation is strategically very sharp, with the user involvement not simply a standard contest or game, but rather is directly contributing to delivering/enacting the key message. What's more, the monumental scale  underscores the power of a user's finger digitally enabled, while the sheer fun you can see on people's faces (rather than stress, as in many competitive games) sets this one quite a ways apart.

Finally, this project also demonstrates what to me is the next frontier in digital thinking: Namely, that digital isn't simply what happens virtually as opposed to in the "real world," but it's how the virtual becomes mapped onto the real.