Nemo CD Mark Lewman is out in Beijing checking out the BMX events, a big first for these riders – BMX, China, Olympics no way! They are all stoked check out the NYT piece. Meanwhile there was a crazy pile up that laid Kyle Bennett low – here’s pics of the action leading up to the crash.
Kyle Bennett, a team USA athlete racing for a slot in the finals, gets tangled up in the first turn. This was the gnarliest crash of the day.
The berms are asphalt and riders carve through the corners held in place by G-forces. Their bikes are almost level against the wall of the berm. So rad.
But one fuck up at this speed and it all goes to hell in a hurry.
The Dutch guy leading the pack buckles under the G-forces and he goes down, starting a chain reaction of bad stuff…
…Which ends with Kyle Bennett on the ground, completely jacked.
Mark Lewman our CD at Nemo who works on the Nike 6.0 brand came up with the idea of freezing the 6.0 shoes into blocks of ice, so Nike found a rad ice sculptor guy to come out and carve an 8 ft tall Mogan Mid. See below.
Then the kids had at ‘em to see who could be the fastest to thaw out the shoes and win a free pair.
Nemo’s Creative Director Mark Lewman and me were riffing on his idea of how a company’s work and overall business can be validated in an era of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and radical transparency et al. The bottom line that we seemed to arrive at is that it is not good enough to deliver good work these days – anyone can do good work. The task at hand is to be trusted to create amazing work and then, when your amazing work is discovered, fame will surely follow.
Here’s Mark’s distilled thoughts so far:
Success in the 21st century means finding balance between two timeless elements Trust and Fame. Your work is who you are. This is the part of the equation you control. To stand out today, everything you do must be awesome. When people encounter what you produce they must find substance and excellence. Just because an idea can be relied upon as great doesn’t mean it automatically wins. It isn’t complete until it has believers; distribution and exposure make an idea stronger and add value through cultural validation. As trust and reliability grows so should the fame.
Jeff Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine – “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.”
And then, looking beyond transparency at the barriers to creative expression and its dissemination, it is worth remembering this point that Jarvis recounts elsewhere in ‘The Myth of the Creative Class‘ after he has reconsidered his views on copyright law and realizes that a too stringent application of copyright infringement can stifle the spread of what has been created – “when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.”
I love coincidences. Or maybe I should say that as you spend your waking time fully immersed in your daily activities you should deliberately give some of that time over to your subconscious, then there would be no such thing as coincidence; we would just call it awareness.
I posted my summer reading list recently and mentioned that I am buried in E.O. Wilson’s wonderful intellectual adventure ‘Consilience; The Unity Of Knowledge,’ in which he argues just that, the need for unity of knowledge – a common system of knowledge. Today in the New York Times I read an interview with Dr. Wilson and, not for the first time in his career, he is challenging common wisdom. He is arguing that the gene is not the only level at which natural selection acts and because he has new data about the genetics of ant colonies now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group. Interesting; what does this mean for all you social media advertising gurus?
He argues that we have long been conditioned to believe that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children. His studies of ant colonies, a passion of his for many decades, suggest otherwise. He says there is another level at which evolution operates – social groups. He suggests that we may have genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior, that benefit a group at the expense of the individual. He will be working on these theories for his next book. I can’t wait to read it.
So what genetic code could Dr. Wilson possibly unravel that would explain the human proclivity toward having “feelings” for inanimate objects? Cars are cherished, protected and nurtured like family members. Ships are regularly christened with female names and referred to as “she” or “her.” Houses, cities, buildings, mountains – this urge to have “feelings” for inanimate objects is the same urge that drives humans to want to save the Earth; it is a controlling urge and is a by-product of Christianity.
All of which brings me to the brilliant Spike Jonze and his Ikea ad. [Full disclosure - Nemo and in particular our creative director, Mark Lewman, have deep ties to Spike.]
The ad works from a simple premise; play on our emotional attachment to inanimate objects – in this case a desk lamp that is discarded. In the first second, as the woman leans in to turn off the lamp, we hear a click of the switch or is that maybe a goodbye kiss ? The lamp is then dumped outside alongside a trash bag. It’s raining… How do we feel as the piano tugs at our heartstrings? We should feel nothing, it’s a ridiculous situation, but in many people it may trigger deep human responses to abandonment. That illusion is shattered by a man with distinctly Scandanavian/German overtones to his accent, who berates us for having such stupid feelings.
Spike spent exactly one minute reminding us, if we are really watching and tapped into our subconscious, that the human need to control other animals and inanimate objects is foolhardy and doomed to failure. It won’t stop us buying new desklamps though.
