Strands of Genius: Fictional Influencers, Real Magic of Global Brands, Choose Your Own 2020 Adventure
Strands of Genius: Fictional Influencers, Real Magic of Global Brands, Choose Your Own 2020 Adventure
plus our thoughts on: relaunching
WRITING FROM | London, UK
WORKING ON | One more proposal, logistics, book promotion!
LOOKING AHEAD | United Kingdom :: Oct 6-Nov 2 | Miami, FL :: Nov 2-4 | Isla Mujeres, Mexico :: Nov 4-9 | Tulum, Mexico :: Nov 9-17 | Isla Mujeres, Mexico :: Nov 17-22 | Nashville, TN :: Nov 22-Dec 2 | Beersheba Springs, TN :: Dec 2-18 | Atlanta, GA :: Dec 18-20 | Nashville, TN :: Dec 20-30
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We’ve continued our whirlwind touring around London, stayed with the friends who hosted our wedding, Adrian&Phillippa, last week (my how their kids have grown) and spent the weekend in Camber Sands on the coast near Rye with Faris’ brother and sister-in-law, all of which was delightful. We are now staying with Asad&Dan in Peckham, catching up on internet email work things.
It’s already our last week in the UK, can never spend enough time here to see enough people with decades of life entwined in this city, and we should be back in March for a gig. Hooray for gigs coming back, ever so slowly.
Also - Happy Halloween! It is 60 days until Christmas.
The days are long but the years are short.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Adrian&Phillippa, Sonny&Lexie, Ramzi&Lyndsey, Asad&Dan&Chingu, more Squid Game + Inside Job (Netflix), reading the actual paper, walks in the British countryside, pubs and micropubs, dunes (real, sand, not the movie), homemade pizza from a portable pizza oven, & YOU.
Hello! Faris here
My book Paid Attention is being published (again) in November!
(It’s November 3rd in UK and November 30th in USA because those are the release days for the respective distributors those countries have.)
This second edition is completely updated and includes two new chapters covering the recent developments in the thinking, creative practice and measurement of attention and advertising.
Plus there is a cool new cover and I got some lovely new reviews, like this one:
“Paid Attention is the most stimulating and useful blueprint for genuinely fresh thinking about advertising and communications that I have read in the last ten years."- Adam Morgan, author of Eating The Big Fish
Isn’t that awesome? You can trust Adam, he knows what’s up.
If you are an academic you can request an inspection copy from the publisher here and if you haven’t read it I hope you will consider it. Thanks for your support!
On Friday November 12th, at 12p ET, Faris will be hosting a Zoom video update to share more around the new updates and new thinking!
Email Ashley@GeniusSteals.co with your order or pre-order receipt or letting her know you’re a member of the School of Stolen Genius and we’ll send you an invite for free.
:: THE LINKS ::
FICTIONAL INFLUENCERS
You may have seen the red flags on social of late, which can be tracked back to a TikTok posted by “Sydney” who “works at a dating site”. However, it turns our Sydney isn’t real, as a company is spinning up the lonelygirl15 approach and building a narrative network inside social media of fake, scripted ‘influencers’. “We’re basically creating an MCU-style universe of characters on TikTok.” Considering the nexus of alternate reality games, conspiracy theories, blurred reality, AI powered interactions with digital characters, there are (maybe?) more early forays into the metaverse. (Vox)
THE REAL MAGIC OF GLOBAL BRANDING
Faris’ column this month looks at the global roll out of the new Coca-Cola brand idea and considers the challenges and approaches for global branding more broadly. “Beyond language, of course, there are innumerable different cultures with different mores, myths, media and memes, all of which are crucial tools in any type of communication. Locally sourced culturally insightful communication is optimal, but global organizations often can’t justify the budgets required to do farm-to-table advertising in every market. This leads to confusing hybrid situations…” (WARC)
CHOOSE YOUR OWN 2020 ADVENTURE
Ever since the movie Big culture has been trying to find satisfying ways to upcycle the idea of the choose your own adventure books that were huge when we were kids, providing a sense of agency inside a branching narrative world. Of course, now we have video games, but that’s only one version of the idea, as Netflix showed with the Black Mirror Bandersnatch experiment. This choose your own 2020 is not for children but might make a fun Christmas present as we all look to find ways to assimilate and process the last couple of years. You can sample and make a few choices on the site. (Andy Smith) BONUS we also heard the choose your own adventure as a device on a recent This American Life for a rather harrowing story about being stuck in abusive relationship called You can’t go your own way.
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: RELAUNCHING::
It feels a little peculiar to be re-launching my book. I had never written and marketed a book before doing it last time and feel like I learned a lot creating and promoting my own thing.
Talking about attention has been a core part of our work ever since, and is a core part of all work in communications IMHO. It is certainly a conversation that has become much, much more salient since the book was originally published, and there have various ideas I have since mused upon that felt that had a natural home in Paid Attention.
It’s not a sequel, or a remake, but those are of course the mainstays of modern popular culture.
In the music world, the second album is acknowledged as ‘difficult’. The first was the culmination of years of work and thinking with plenty of alone time. If the first is successful, the second reflects very different circumstances, with the band having been busy touring the first all over the world. Ahem.
Anyway, I’m proud of where the second edition has ended up, it feels more complete now, and now of its moment, or just ahead of it, hopefully, but not too far. People have been very kind to tell me they have and continue to find it useful, which makes me fly.
Meeting up with various friends in and around the industry in the wake of the last couple of years and lots of people around my age are making moves in and out of jobs, reconsidering the pathways of their lives. It is interesting to me that on one particular lunch all of us used to have full time employment and now all of us our doing our own things, in lots of different ways, that enable us to own our own time again.
We have this inevitable tendency to think about things, rather than processes. This stage of our career, this project, this book, this talk, but in truth none of these things ever stay the same - and neither do we. Books and records are snapshots, taken in time, refined into a polished product, but those ideas and words and songs continue to live and change in the telling, as does the person doing the telling, and the audiences. There are new audiences since I wrote my book, a whole new ‘generation’ has turned over in advertising agencies, marketing and beyond who may have never read my blog, or any blog at all!
The ideas in the book have grown ever since it was ‘finished’, in new articles and updates to talks, in conversations, in dialectic with the changing world. Everything flows and is in flow, and sometimes we just have to decide when to stop and move on to the next thing. Sometimes we need to give ourselves time to reflect in order to muster the momentum for a new path. Sometimes the world change and makes things more relevant, or worth reconsidering, or worth putting back out into the world to capture some new attention.
Maybe the key to being agile, adaptive, evolutionary in the ever changing world is to never stop relaunching. Cast aside that which doesn’t serve you, (re)introduce the world to the new you. Speaking of…wait until you see what we do with the School of Stolen Genius next year….
:: AND NOW… MUSEUM OF FORGERIES ::
From a very Genius Steals-y manifesto, from the recent MSCHF drop.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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