Dissertation Bootcamp, San Diego, CA, July 2010

It’s a fine line between credible and ludicrous when you take concepts with different affordances and smush them together to make a new concept. It’s a fantastic idea generation activity, but let’s think carefully before moving forward (and let’s think about how to make these mashups believable and viable). What does “dissertation” connote? What does “bootcamp” evoke? Do they work together? OKAY, MAGGOT, DROP AND GIVE ME 20….BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITATIONS!

• Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing » Lone Gunman – In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of content online and you are going to find quite a number of people self-publishing books. In fact, there are number of folks doing interesting things already:
• Hybrid Books Add Video and Web Features to Reading – In the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

  Simon & Schuster is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read ­ and viewed ­ online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

  Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel ­ published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version ­ in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.

  Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading.

• New York Art Book Fair Bustles at P.S. 1 Arts Center in Queens – If you harbor even a speck of doubt about the continuing viability of hold-in-your-hand-and-turn-the-pages print publications, check out the New York Art Book Fair this weekend. You’ll find thousands of new books — smart, weird, engrossing, beautiful — that will never be Kindle-compatible. They’ll make you feel good.

Last October I blogged about NBC’s use of “fusion marketing” with the show My Own Worst Enemy.

Are they at it again? A recent episode of the NBC show 30 Rock revolved around a mini-microwave, “The FunCooker“…

…and then a week later in some webvertising I saw an ad for this-

-the iWave cube, a tissue-box sized microwave.

I couldn’t help but wonder if there was another fusion marketing approach afoot.

Marketing is both ubiquitous and stealthy, and in this mashed-up and pervasive environment, any piece of communication in any medium could be a marketing effort. I find this simultaneously intriguing and disquieting.

Pervasive, cross-context marketing is producing some creative and thought-provoking experiences (the recent Skittles/Twitter (Skwitter?) campaign, for one). And it can be fun to spot marketing easter eggs–I felt a little thrill of potential discovery about the two microwaves.

At the same time, this lack of clarity about whether any particular piece of communication is company-sponsored or not adds another level of opacity to an already Filo-dough-like world of layered information. Will bionic critical thinking skills become the new common sense?

Related posts:
Interacting With Advertising
Collateral Damage
Crossover Hit

• The McGangBang: a McChicken Sandwich Inside a Double Cheeseburger – (via Kottke) Another awesome example of customers co-opting (or trying to) the corporation. It's a user-generated menu item and people are trying to order it by its (rather unpalatable) name and then documenting the results. Like the obscene Skittle comments on Twitter, this is people taking a brand (and an experience) and playing with it. And then using the Internet to bring energy to that small piece of celebratory rebellion. If we ever needed another example of the brand being created by the customers not the producers, this would be it.
• Chinese Internet meme about Grass-Mud Horse is a form of social protest – An online phenomena features a mythical character is built on the name – in Chinese – sounding close to an obscenity, but presented as an innocent song (with some fable-like plot twists) that the censors (so far) can't/won't remove. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do not allow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative, right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — I am a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law.”

The trailer mashup may have hit its peak a couple of years ago (hey, there’s at least one blog devoted solely to examples of the genre) with my favorites Shining and Toy Story Requiem.

I’ve written before about how technology increasingly makes producer work available to consumers and so I was struck by the latest trailer mashup, combining The Ring with the hated Saved By Zero commercial.

The ability to put video inside video might have been out of reach to mere consumers (and I don’t know the details of who made the above mashup), but it looks like these tools are becoming available to anyone now.