Remixed TVCs

Though some companies like Exxon Mobil, Gap & General Mills are perhaps miffed with Hip Hop artists getting creative with their corporate logos & ads – I think this is a great opportunity – especially for youth brands.
Imagine if you invite users to come forward and create their own remixed versions of the corporate ad jingles or better still give an unusual twist to the TVCs!
With technology by their side and the desire to express themselves; an opportunity like this can only make the youth happy.
Imagine the kind of stickiness this act could have. It is a great candidate for a news story in itself.
While the ads try to ‘influence the users’ remixed ads could well be the way, as the original ad remixer Eric White said, “to influence the company right back.” Companies could learn a lot about their user and what they think and feel about the brand, from what they make.
With companies spending so much money to ‘bombard’ the audience with brand messages and still wondering if it did exactly what they wanted the message to do; it is time that they took a break and let the users do their own thing. Creative collaborating is another way to position their brands as unstuffy and open.
Remixing ads could almost be like turning the interesting whispers in an auditorium into something useful for everyone.
And if it is consumer’s, even a whisper can sound convincing!

An algorithm for everything!

Algorithm for Art
Computer programmers in companies like Platinum Blue (US) & Orixa Productions in Madrid are working on what they call “Music Intelligence”.
It entails developing software that would predict which songs would become hits.
The software uses a technique called “Spectral Deconvolution”. It isolates & analyses around 30 parameters that define a piece of music. These companies have compiled database of more than 3 million successful musical arrangements including data on their popularity in different markets.
They claim that they can reveal striking similarities in the underlying parameters of two songs from different eras - for example between U2 & Beethoven!
You are beautiful by James Blunt is one of the many songs that were predicted to be big hits by Platinum Blue.

Algorithm for ideas & creativity
A company called Icosystem has developed the Hunch Engine. The software explores characteristics of products, images or names that appeal to a client. It then applies those characteristics to the automated design of new objects that can be displayed on screen. The Hunch Engine can be customized for corporate clients. Icosystem is now experimenting with a version that will spit out striking original brand and product names.

Algorithm for daily needs
And Google, as some publication recently indicated, could be the World Brain in making.
Why?
It helps us search everything from Paper Clips to PDFs and Power Points. Now we can even create our own word spreadsheets that would be housed on a Google server. In many ways Goolle is leading the emergence of central & networked intelligence simultaneously. First it helped us find anything, anywhere & anytime and now it is prompting us to do everything that we do, at the one place. Google has been the guide map and Google could well become the final destination too.

I am not a scientist thus I can’t say this as an expert but as an observer I feel that what strings the above three together (Algorithm for art, ideas & needs of everyday life) is their reliance on predictive matrices. In other words trying to predict different things in future, basis all the things that have happened in the past.
If history repeats itself and if there is some kind of order in the chaos of business, economy & everyday life; a kind of Order that can be sensed only by a well-trained eye or a bloody-good algorithm, then we cannot be overestimating the enthusiasm of developer-entrepreneurs like Brin & Page (Google) and others behind things like Music Intelligence & Hunch Engine.

What surpasses my imagination is what role would instinct & intuition play in a world of predictive algorithms.
Would the meaning of creativity change?
Would we stop using some of our intellectual faculties (a lot of our thinking anyway has been reduced to typing search strings on search engines!)?
Would there be a counter intelligence that would emerge – intelligence that is less algorithmic and more intuitive?
Would there be a division of roles between Algorithmic Intelligence & Intuitive Intelligence in a way that the former would drive the maintenance of order in this world, and the latter would explore new frontiers of development?

More importantly who would control whom?
And most importantly – what role would human intelligence play in all this?

New Khosla Kunj - Compromise

One of the defining character traits of middle-class (and perhaps larger India too) is compromise. Compromise with the circumstances and situations comes to us naturally. There could not have been a better way of reflecting this in the film than the way it was done.
His friend, and confidante, Mr. Sahni, advises Mr. Khosla that he should not contest his son’s desire to change his name. Compromising with grown up kids was the best way to lead a peaceful retired life with one’s kids. He goes on to say that the “young boys these days have a very MNC kind of mind”, and we should not challenge the way kids want to live their life.
He then goes on to say that this whole country is running on compromise (“Ye pura desh hi pancho compromise pe chal raha hai..”).
Though lightly said but this statement has a lot of meaning in it. Come to think of it – as middle-class Indians we never put up a resistance for what we think is wrong. If roads are bad we compromise, if trains are over crowded we compromise, if the govt is corrupt we compromise, if power supply is erratic we compromise, if there is encroachment on our land we compromise, even if a part of our province is taken by another country we compromise. As a society and nation we do not know anything in the name of resistance. At best we talk and then settle down. Compromise is the mindset that drives the assimilative nature of our culture.