Here’s a remarkably mind-blowing infographic solely related to Facebook’s role in amassing our collective digital snapshots. According to this fascinating blog post on the photo-sharing site 1000memories blog, they host 140 billion photos today, and will add 70 billion this year. Using some fancy guesswork, they estimate that equals about 4% of all the photos ever taken in history.
Wow.
I have yet to see Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie Contagion, but this living, growing installation in a downtown Toronto storefront perfectly captures the disquieting nature of the film’s subject. Our agency CEO Kevin DiLorenzo shared this piece at our Monday morning status update and it was riveting. I’m not sure Petri-Dish Outdoor will become a thriving new ad medium, but you can’t deny this is pretty engrossing (see what I did there?).
On the menu at Chang’s Thai Bistro in Old Monrovia, CA…
Nope, didn’t try it. But it definitely one-upped the Crab Rangoon sell.
Apparently, this Rick Mereki fella travelled thirty-eight thousand miles over a month and half to create this remarkably delightful, short film. You and I probably don’t have that much free time…
We had a lovely family Fourth of July weekend up in Green Lake with uncharacteristically perfect weather. On the drive back to Minneapolis, I saw this outside the VFW in Princeton…
I hope you didn’t forget to also wish a Happy Birthday to Eunice.
People blog for all sorts of reasons; the discipline of daily writing, the joy of self expression, the fleeting sensation of relevance when a couple hundred people read a post. Over the past two years, I’ve blogged every weekday for all those reasons and one far more important: to keep up. Or perhaps more accurately, to catch up.
I’ve enjoyed a terrific career making advertising but three years ago, when my prior agency’s fortunes changed suddenly and radically, I looked up and realized the world had changed while I was busy making TV campaigns. I had largely ignored the biggest revolution in marketing: the pervasiveness of digital screens, the stunningly-swift adoption of social networks and the increasing presence of mobile marketing.
I started blogging everyday to force myself to explore all these emerging platforms and immerse myself in the new reality. As Facebook continued to work it’s way every deeper into our lives, I started to recognize how social networks can provide savvy brands with crowdsourced PR. I was amazed how transparent and public people had become, sharing remarkable details of their personal lives. I learned about search and geo-tagging and the seamy creepiness behind unchecked online tracking. And I probably saw more than my fair share of virals and flashmobs and public self-destruction at the hand of Twitter.
I learned a lot, both by actively searching for subjects to discuss and happily, by reading comments posted and emailed from smart people offering their own points of view. It’s been wonderful catching up.
But I gotta cut back. We’re doing lots of interesting things up here in Minneapolis, expanding the agency as we build and activate all sorts of brand communities for a wide range of clients. And I need to dedicate more time to that process.
So thanks for reading, thanks for your attention, thanks for your help. Going forward, I’ll post every now and then–habits can be tough to break–but my pace is definitely gonna slow.
Because advertising’s pace certainly isn’t.
On Monday, MSNBC’s Technolog posted the graphic below which outlines exactly what happens out there on that World Wide Web every blessed minute of the day…on average of course. Even a casual perusal can be kind of mind blowing: Google answers nearly 700,000 search queries, which is roughly the same number of status updates posted on Facebook each minute. Over 168 million emails are sent, 20,000 new posts go up on Tumblr and over 13,000 hours of music stream over Pandora. And beyond the limits of minutes, over 110 new pictures posted to Flickr every second!
Of course, things really get crazy when you convert these minutes to full days. Or god forbid, actual years. Do the math on YouTube video uploads: if there are over twenty-five hours of video added every minute, that means there are over 1,500 hours each hour and a whopping 36,000 hours every day, which equates to well over four years worth of video. Every day. Good luck keeping up with that.
Thanks to the ease of content generation, the explosion of social sharing and the basic premise of Web 2.0, content isn’t just King, it’s exponentially ubiquitous. Or some other expression that means really, really freaking massive.
Damn internet, you scary big!
Yesterday, the FDA posted new graphics mandated for all US cigarette packaging and advertising by October of next year. They represent the latest and by far most serious escalation in the Surgeon General’s battle against cigarette addiction. Two years ago, the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act forced cigarette packaging to include large type warning statements covering half of the front and back of each package, along with minor graphics on the sides. This newest mandate ups the ante from words to far more arresting graphics front and center: images like the sutured chest of a dead man, rotten teeth behind a cancerous lip lesion, and everyone’s favorite grim reaper party trick–smoking through a hole in your throat.
Depicting dead bodies and patients on ventilators represents a major step by U.S. health officials. Words can be ignored far more readily than images, particularly ones which at least initially, have the potential to sear themselves into your pre-frontal lobes.
The challenge of course, will be maintaining that shock value. Over time, even the most disturbing images lose their impact. And given the glacial pace of government bureaucracy, we can’t expect anyone will be updating these images frequently enough to keep our discomfort fresh and squeamish. That’s really too bad…
Because come to think of it, that would be a really interesting job description.
As a writer, I admit to despising the phenomenon of reality television programming whose sole strength is raising conflict to an art form even as it shreds every other aspect of drama. Braying hyenas aren’t fascinating in a zoo, let alone Beverly Hills or the Jersey Shore.
Which is a long way of explaining that I have never watched Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi ‘perform’ in anything outside of a TV news clip. I know she’s on a popular show, I know it pretty much centers around mook-y behavior and I know if I were forced to watch a season of it, I would spoon my eyes out. This is the excellent foppery of the world, and all that…
Somewhere, Christian Louboutin must be pounding his forehead with a three inch heel…
What exactly does the “S” in “DSW” stand for again?
Happy Weekend Weekend.
