Make Seriously | Design and Life

Some Really Awesome Tools to Commemorate the Inauguration

For those who aren’t keeping up to date, there are several cool visuals out there to help commemorate and share experiences from today’s historic inauguration. Regardless of your political sway, this is a huge moment in America’s history and in the advancement of civil rights. As such, people are doing all they can to share in the moment and to become a part of history. Their names won’t be in the books, but there is always the pride and joy of saying “I was there when America broke the racial barrier to the presidency”.

CNN is offering up Your View of History, which allows iReporters and laypeople to post their photos and reactions from their experience at the mall. Posters put their content at their viewpoint, and describe their experience from that point. There are definitely some great candid images and a lot of great visual descriptions of the emotional aspect of the event.

Even cooler, CNN is also offering the chance to rebuild The Moment using Photosynth. The short version: Live attendees post their images to the photosynth database, and it uses Microsofts crazy new technology to rebuild a 3D rendering of “the moment” of the inauguration. To get a good idea, here’s a moment and a description of the software. Reeeeeally cool stuff.

CNN is offering a third option for the tech savvy out there who can’t not check their facebook every five minutes: a live status update response to the events of the day as they unfold, without blinders to statuses across participating pages. In other words, you can see the updates without leaving facebook, without opening up your profile, and without the minor lunacy of message boards. I don’t have a link, but you can find it on their home page.

MSNBC is giving viewers a chance to brush up and compare Obama’s speech to others by offering the last 18 Inaugural speeches. Also pretty cool, and very informative. It’s interesting to see the approach each president has taken in his first address to the people, and then to look back at how they acted in office.

MSNBC also does an amazing job at allowing people to report their own reactions of the Inaugural by giving them the power to create their own clips. I’m pretty sure this is the web2.0 innovation of the day. It allows users to do what the news normally does, except without the need to be there with fancy equipment for capturing audio and video. It basically comes down to permission to make it what you will, and that’s a huge step for a media outlet like that.

Marketers have some lessons to learn.

I spent a good portion of the last few years studying two things: design and propaganda. During that time I learned a thing or two about influencing people and getting action from that influence, and the role that images play in that. Over the course of my lifetime, marketers have been pretty good at taking those principles of design and propaganda and employing them to move products off shelves. Over the last couple of years, however, a few problems have presented themselves:

1 | Marketers have quit being creative in favor of banking on the creativity of other people.
2 | Marketing students have learned business models, and have not focused on creativity.
3 | The market sees the greatest influence from creative, private citizens.

Those problems, of course, are a vicious cycle. Marketing students, focusing on business instead of creativity, need to find creative solutions to promoting their products. A lot of times they work with firms to control the image and visual promotion of a product. Lately, however, it seems that they forego finding creative, unique, solutions to their problem and instead opt for the “viral thing”. Facebooking works, right? Well. It can. And viral marketing can be successful when done well and when unique to the product. Of course, the whole viral concept is best evidenced with the spread of random, quirky videos. Of course, not all videos are as… cruel… as that one. But the interesting point to make is that the video has been watched nearly ten million times. What about that low production video makes it worth viewing ten million times? It’s not particularly well done, it’s not useful. It is, however, interesting, and there’s a demand for it. And that’s where marketers, lacking creative training, turn so often to promote their products. It’s worked before, right? So it must keep working, right? And that’s where it falls apart. Creativity isn’t recycled, it’s reimagined. Recreated. Remade. It’s not something you can copy, but something you can learn from and move in a new direction.

That said, I find myself continually impressed by the Obama campaign, and tonight’s “infomercial” is perhaps the most compelling part of it. When was the last time that something like this came from a candidate? (other than Ross Perot… the answer is Kennedy) It’s huge, and despite the criticisms Obama has faced for making this move, I find it a particularly meaningful and creative approach to solving a problem in his campaign. So far, there’s been a clear difference in the visual vernacular of each campaign. One asks for patriotism (country first), and the other plays on the thing Americans seem to want most (hope and change). Artists have continually supported Obama and created compelling images which have become part of the campaign. The debates painted a calm, cool, collected image in contrast to McCain’s aggressive, time-to-fight attitude. And tonight, it seems that the image has come full circle as Obama takes the time to address the nation as a whole, for a period of time, focusing on what he has to bring to the nation. It’s moving, and it takes an otherwise divided nation and joins them through stories that all of us can relate to and offering solutions to the problems we face. It sends chills down my spine, and I applaud it as a great, creative marketing solution.

There’s something strange in the neighborhood…

…and it’s called Sarah Palin’s sudden and fiercely loyal fan-base.

I didn’t have a particular desire to bring politics into this writing space, but it’s become so strange that I can’t help but write about it. What’s really causing the brunt of my confusion lately is this whole “Sarah Palin” thing. She went from relative anonymity to a strange representation of what a social and fiscal conservative should be. It’s very curious how much energy she’s brought to an otherwise lackluster campaign for John McCain, but it’s even more curious that those who have jumped on the bandwagon are so ready to support her while burying their heads in the sand about some very clear facts:

1. She’s not fiscally conservative.
2. Her social conservatism only extends to her household, not her politics.
3. She knowingly pandered.
4. She’s blatantly lied about her involvement in busting up big oil.(note the date where Palin got involved: after it was taken care of by the FBI)
5. While her husband may be a union member, her allegiances don’t follow.

While this should make conservative republican voters upset, it has really just caused reason for irrational support and defense of this choice. This leaves me in quite a conundrum: why on earth are so many people sticking their head in the sand about this nomination rather than facing the fact (which often include their own arguments). I’m left with very few ways to think about this. Are they really this desperate to prevent Barack Obama from taking office? Maybe they’re just being driven by the wrong body parts… Whatever the case, I’m left very confused by such a poor pick and rather upset that so many are willing to become hypocrites to defend her case when they should be just as upset.

Maybe we’ve really just gotten so lost in politics that people care more about winning than who it is they push across the finish line first.