Results for articles with tag 'fincher' (3 total)
10/22/2010 07:09:55 AM 
For many, this was the chance to bask in the headlights of fame as advertising brought your brand and your job to a national audience. If you got it right, you would be noticed and talked about, not just your brand, but you the marketer.
In this world ,there was an uneven distribution of creative talent, the advertising got all the attention and some areas got nothing at all. In such a world, those other areas of the business that lacked the creative magic dust, could and would look dull and uninteresting to those with it. At an extreme, the scientists in the R&D labs rarely got to hire a top flight agency creative team to present their meeting findings, similarly the Accounting Department couldn't do the same at their financial meetings with the board. Meanwhile, the marketing and advertising department could look way better than anyone else and bask in the glory that was their advertising, providing it was good!
Since there's been a democratization of creative technology and costs have come down rapidly, other departments have been elevating their game and making their stuff sexier. Data is the talk of the town right now, it's the thing that agencies are looking to provide and clients want to showcase their ROI, but it's not sexy and it's very hard to bring creativity into it, unless you have a data visualization wizard on your team.
That said, I found this video from Gatorade really interesting, it's all about one facet of their marketing department- the social media measurement team, this could be presented in a really dry and boring way and have nothing to do with the energy of the brand. However, in this little film where they explain in a topline way what they do, they brand themselves "Mission Control" is way more interesting than "Social Media Monitoring" and importantly, they show not just how they're essential for the business, but how they connect to the brand.
Data is obviously the area where creativity can have a huge impact, but there are so many other areas of business that are going to benefit from and will need to have creative firepower, to bring their skills and stories to life. This is not just a story about democratization of creativity, but in an era of fading and faded attention spans, everyone, irrespective of department, needs a creative way to bring their stories to life.
Posted by Ed Cotton
09/29/2010 07:39:17 AM
The Social Network will likely emerge together with Inception as a contender for movie of the year. While the later uses fantasy to take us to a future world that's built from an understanding of present realities, The Social Network is very much about "the now" and the changes we've seen going around us over the last five years.
While Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher explore many themes in the film- one that's central to the film is the difference between those who make and create and those who merely have ideas. It's been said multiple times that ideas are the easy things, and that execution is the tough part, this movie is very much about that.
Zuckerberg may suffer from limited social skills and again, that's another big theme of the movie, a guy who can't socialize, setting up the ultimate social tool, but he makes up for it with an incredible ability to build.
The movie shows the dramatic socio-cultural shift, that's been described by many historians as the move away from industrial production and into knowledge work, but there are many movies have gone there in some way, usually negatively by showing the de-humanization of the cubicle worker. Sorkin and Fincher show us something else all together; the new being, the supreme knowledge worker, who isn't the boss of old who commands a legion of white shirts and has power merely because of his experience, but someone who's there because of their skill.
Meritocracy is the force that flattens everything and in the case of The Social Network, it smashes and pushes aside the supposed power of venerable institutions, like Harvard.
We are now going through a moment of time that just simply doesn't conform to the past. Business always required ideas, but they were often based on assembling the right combination of people and things to do something new. It took time to grow and scale and needed lots of capital and people to do anything significant.
It's a new world when someone can take an idea, even if it did come from someone else, and bring it to life using their brainpower. We've always regarded the object as a totem with the most emotional power, but the movie shows it's possible to make something in the digital world that can play with our core emotions in an even more powerful way than any physical object.
To bring an idea to market and achieve success has always been dependent on a unique combination of factors and this hasn't changed.
What's very different now is that it's really possible for someone who has the right skills, to change the world from their bedroom. The shift is significant because it means the power base has shifted to those who not just imagine the future, but importantly, build it themselves.
Posted by Ed Cotton
07/20/2010 12:47:11 AM
It's a celebration of the rise of geek power. What's interesting here is how the geek has moved from the meek and mild background character that survives only on their intellect, to Geek 3.0 as manifested by Zuckerberg, who won't let anything get in the way of his ambition.
Perhaps the movie will serve as a PSA; providing the inspiration for thousands of high school kids to become Geek 3.0s by studying math, computing and science and provide just what America needs to maintain its innovative edge.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Articles for tag fincher (3 total).