101 Culture

Influx insights published a nice post referencing the recent Christian Bale remix activity and pointing out that real time communication means that brands and agencies need to become more adept at understanding and responding to fast changes in cultural conversation.

Why now? Well it seems that brands have had it easy while TV has been such a powerful medium. Attention can still be bought in a medium well suited for telling emotive stories. It seems likely that the web can be a much more powerful storytelling medium but the tricky part for large, slow organisations is the need to embrace the power of loose collaboration derived from losing control over content and ideas.

While ad agencies have honed the art of crafting concise messages to disrupt and seduce the public, the public might have found a more efficient way of spreading ideas to large audiences: by participating constantly in a mass conversation. Individual producers find it easy to adapt to current trends and garner attention online. Organisations have long employed prominent artists to further their needs. Consider how the Catholic church used the greatest painters, architects and musicians of its boom time. Brands today need to take the same approach with the prominent players who are bathing daily in the massive meme pool. Obviously copyright laws are often a hindrance. But that's a topic for another time. However they do it, the key point is that organisations will benefit from a more digital way of behaving. They need to constantly listen and react rather than planning, doing and waiting until the doing has finished to work out what happened. I still don't know who Christian Bale is though. Maybe I need to watch more telly. [image from fofurasfelinas]