How the Terminator broke my reality

Right, I’m confused about reality. No, really – a Warner Bros online marketing campaign has triggered an existential crisis, brought on by too much metafiction! Seems peculiar, but it’s the truth. Let me explain…

Warner Bros are currently winding up for the release of the rather groovy looking Terminator Salvation – official website here. As part of the campaign, they’re putting groovy viral material out online.

I came across that part of the campaign through the Skynet Research twitter feed, which then led me to the Skynet website, and then this more overtly promotional resistance site.

A key – and, I thought, fictional – figure in the resistance is someone called Bre Pettis. He’s been posting various Youtube videos documenting his increasing horror at Skynet – this is the latest one:

So far, so standard; we’ve seen this kind of thing before with Cloverfield, with Watchmen, and so on. But yesterday, Bre triggered my existential crisis.

Tooling around on Bad Banana blog yesterday, I found this – a set of 1930s warnings about how not to electrocute yourself. It’s just the kind of thing they put up, and a rather wonderful little piece of graphic history.

Digging around, I realised that it’s part of the Bre-niverse; it’s one of his Flickr sets, and links back to his blog. Thematically, it fits beautifully (and very subtly) with his anti-Terminator paranoia. Rooting around on his Flickr feed, I found lots of robot-related pictures, plus some interesting personal stuff.

‘Wow!’, I thought, very impressed, ‘Warner Bros have really fleshed this character out!’ And of course, I was pretty stunned by the reach of the Terminator Salvation promotional material; it is – I thought – so well put together that it’s appearing on blogs like Bad Banana, quite independently of any mention of the film.

That set me thinking about the kind of background information that the web helps film makers put out. Ever since the original Blair Witch Project campaign, the film industry’s been using the web to enhance films by providing additional backstory, character information, gaming experiences, etc.

These kind of transmedia narratives achieve a certain kind of marketing nirvana; they both enrich viewer experience of the movie in a very real, very satisfying way, while encouraging those viewers to spread information about the film to their friends and associates.

An ideal state of communications co-operation is reached; film makers get publicity and commitment from core fan communities, while fan communities get really cool stuff that they can both enjoy in itself and get kudos by sharing. The new media promotional ideal is achieved, and everyone’s happy.

Anyway, back to Bre. He’s so convincing! And that set me wondering – as I headed over to his website, to catch up on the news from the future – about the limits of the transmedia covenant – about the ethics of creating fictional on-line personae.

At what point do you let people know that they’re engaging with the unreal? Is the Terminator campaign so subtle that the Bad Banana folk themselves had been taken in, leading them to spread promotional material as if it was a real, historical artefact? What are the ethics of augmented reality? What can we learn from Orson Welles?

And then I reached Bre’s blog – and that’s where my existential, metafictional crisis began. Rooting around on it, moving beyond the prominently displayed Terminator material, I began to realise that he’s a real person! Who really exists!

And that completely freaked me out. For the last few weeks, following Terminator content online, I’d been assuming that he was a character in a story, played by a reasonably convincing actor – an effective fictional representation of a certain kind of technology guru.

But he’s real! And that made my head explode! Because all of a sudden, I’m living in Philip K. Dick-world, where nothing’s real but what is not. That confusion between fiction and reality is one of the unique properties of transmedia narratives, where unreality piggybacks on reality to create something utterly engaging and entirely new.

And that – wondering where the joins are – is all part of the fun. And, of course, the fact that Bre can be so convincingly absorbed into Terminator-world is simultaneously a tribute to a truly magnificent bit of real person casting, to a great performance from Bre himself, and to the subtlety and coherence of the broader Terminator viral material.

On becoming an organisation

In his late 50s essay. ‘A Process Conception of Psychotherapy’, noted American psychologist Carl R. Rogers laid out a for-the-time revolutionary theory of how patients progress through the therapeutic process. That essay remains very resonant, often in surprising ways. Re-reading it the other day, I was struck – for example – by how it delivers some really interesting insights into what marketing (and by extension, organisations) should be in our modern, web-fuelled world.

In the essay, Rogers posits two extremes of psychological health. At the unhealthy end, patients are rigid and restricted in their responses to life, testing any new experience against their pre-existing belief and response systems, and only engaging with that experience if it’s in accordance with those systems. They perceive their self to be a static structure, and understand anything that might force change on that structure to be a deep, destructive threat to their very being.

At the other extreme are the healthy – in Rogers’ terms, those who experience the self as a set of ongoing processes, responding flexibly and spontaneously to life as it happens. They welcome new experiences and inputs, and are happy to modify beliefs and behaviours in response to them. As a result, they experience daily life as something consistently positive and stimulating, rather than as something consistently negative and threatening.

Rogers felt that his therapeutic duty to his patients was to help them move away from the former state, and toward the latter. The body of the essay deals with that process, and seeks to understand how it works. Read from the point of view of a marketing professional in 2009, it takes on a very different meaning. It becomes a way of understanding two different definitions of what marketing is, and how it functions within the modern corporation.

Marketing’s role used to be fundamentally expeditionary; heading out into the at best unknown, at worst hostile, worlds of consumer-dom, and returning with treasure – de-contextualised insights, that could safely be fed into the body corporate without overly destabilising or unsettling it. This process was defined as being ‘the consumer’s representative within the business’ – a definition that confirmed the powerlessness of the consumer. Consumers could never themselves be present in the business; they could only ever be represented by a small group of marketing professionals.

Social media has changed that by removing the need for marketing explorers. It allows consumers to talk directly with the businesses that interest them. The point of interface has changed; live conversations between consumers and business representatives can happen on any screen, anywhere within the business, through blogs, Facebook, messageboards, Twitter and so on. The way in which those conversations can take place has also changed. Again thanks to social media, it’s much easier for consumers to form self-organised – rather than marketeer organised – groups, to pool their influence and bring it to bear on a particular business in a particular way.

So, consumers can be directly present within the business, either individually or en masse, in ways that were impossible until very recently – and without any kind of marketing mediation. That change means that marketeers now have a new role to play. No longer explorers, they have to become hosts; rather than going out to find consumers, they have to discover new ways of welcoming them into their companies, and ensuring that those companies can constructively engage with these (one hopes, honoured) guests in as positive and direct a way as possible.

Rogers’ essay helps understand the terms of that change. The most successful businesses will be those that – in Rogers’ terms – move towards health; that are able to quickly and effectively sort and respond to input as it comes in, rather than forcing it through pre-determined channels that exist to ensure that the status quo is maintained regardless of external conditions.

Some brands already understand that. Ben and Jerry’s regularly carry user created ice cream flavours. Innocent began with a question to their consumers, and since then have made their brand as much an experience to be interacted with as a set of drinks to be bought. Amazon couldn’t exist without its user-contributed reviews – and, even as I type, are being hauled over the coals by user groups outraged by #amazonfail; neither the Wispa bar nor HSBC free student overdrafts would exist without a Facebook-based consumer campaigns that brought them back from (respectively) chocolate and banking heaven. Microsoft’s Channel 9 encourages direct engagement with its users. Dell’s Ideastorm website allows Dell users to directly impact on the way that Dell makes computers – and so on.

But that’s only a start. Rogers doesn’t just talk about a change in attitude to the world; he describes a structural change in the self, a complete rethinking of what it is to be a person. The depth of that change is hinted at in the title of the book the essay’s published in; ‘On Becoming a Person’. But I haven’t been using it to talk about people; I’ve been using it to talk about organisations. So, I can’t help wondering what kind of ideal business unit a book called ‘On Becoming an Organisation’ would describe; and I can’t help feeling that we’re seeing the beginning of a process now that will – over the next few years – help us find out.

Making the Black Death AND the office fun!

A quick entry this morning, as I’m rushing around today. So, rather than lots of typing, here are two links.

The first is to a Science Museum site that uses rather nifty graphics and some eye-opening information to make the Black Death fun (who knew it could be?). Their proof reading could be better, tho’ I do love the idea of seeing off the plague by firing Canons, rather than cannons. Of course modern science has proved they should have sacked the Bishops, but hey…

The second is to this lovely little Penguin Books promo site for Alain De Botton’s ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’. They’re really on a roll just now; their online work is quirky, creative and genuinely thoughtful about moving the experience of reading onto the web.

Moi, the provisional mini-meme

Well, I seem to have become a very modest viral presence on YouTube. The lovely people from UKParliament asked me for my thoughts on government and social media at the Tuttle Club a couple of weeks ago; the resulting clip has now been watched by nearly 1,000 people.

Watching it again, my main thought was that I really should given my hair a bit of a brush before they filmed me; I’d just taken off my cycle helmet, hence the slightly exploded look. But that would go against both the point of what they were doing – recording spontaneous, unrehearsed comments – and also one of the deeper properties of the web itself.

The web has substantially lowered barriers to the publication and dissemination of just about any kind of information. That means that it’s much easier to share content with a wide audience when it’s still in development.

The discussion begins earlier, and the content creator can be part of that discussion while whatever they’re developing is still being finalised – as, for example, Charles Leadbeater found out when he released a beta copy of his recent book ‘We Think’ online for pre-publication feedback.

Unlike the printed page, or the television or cinema screen, the internet is a provisional medium; it demands engagement rather than finish, discussion rather than monologue. And, in a small way, my clip is part of that.

You don’t see a polished, scripted, finalised version of me, with a makeup person hovering just off camera, waiting to touch up my perfect hair; you see the provisional, daily, real version of me, delivering a first draft, not a final draft, and above all hoping to start a conversation, rather than deliver a conclusion.