If the execution of this is actually as good as it looks then this is a great example of new technologies providing engaging branded experiences for consumers (unlike, say, a superfluous QR code in the corner).
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It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—-what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
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The best way to help Gotham is to have a popular movement that is supported by a broad coalition and not just a narrow elite. This movement should focus not only on replacing the current leaders of Gotham, but should also work to alter the underlying extractive political and economic institutions of Gotham City. Neither Bruce Wayne nor Batman do anything of this sort. At best Batman is doing absolutely nothing to save Gotham, and at worst, he’s contributing to the city’s demise.
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When companies go public, people stop thinking about them as companies, and start thinking about them as stocks: it’s the equivalent of judging people only by looking at their reflection in one specific mirror, while at the same time having no idea how distorting that mirror actually is. Many traders, especially in the high-frequency and algorithmic spaces, don’t even stop to think about what the company might actually do: they just buy and sell ticker symbols, and help to drive correlations up to unhelpful levels. As a result, CEOs get judged in large part by what the stock market in general is doing, rather than what they are doing.
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One of the most common complaints about a [story] is that it “doesn’t have a second act.” When people are disappointed, it’s usually not because the first act wasn’t good because the first act is the build-up… Nothing gets people to lean forward in their seats as much as, “let me tell you a story.” That’s the promise of something in front of you. “Come with me” is much more exciting as “here it is.
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Viewed from the perspective of an ex ante commitment to meritocracy, these all look like giant bugs in the system. But I think they’re actually features of a healthy ecosystem. Ability and hard work and good judgment are more-or-less rewarded in an all-things-equal sense such that it makes sense for people to try to do a good job, but it’s just obvious that a hazy veil of contingency hands over the whole thing. Wall Street, by contrast, has done the best job of any American sector at ensuring that meritocratic values are upheld. By definition, the people who are “the best” at financial manipulation are the people who make the most money. It’s a total disaster, but it’s very much a meritocratic one.
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People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
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Interesting art allows you an obvious entry point, but doesn’t necessarily give you an easy exit.
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Hard to argue with comms like this…
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We need oblique approaches [to our goals] because we live in a world where our capacity for abstraction is limited, where our knowledge of our goals is achieved incrementally, and in which the world is characterised by an irresolvable uncertainty. In world’s that are characterised in these ways, prcesses of adaptation - evolutionary processes - are generally more effective than attempts to design and plan our way through…
Evolution/adaptation is smarter than we are… Through the process evolution and adaption you could actually construct things that are more complicated than any human intelligence could ever conceive of… That is how complex watches have been constructed. They are not the products of some original design. They’re actually the products of centuries of adaptation through the processes of watchmaking.
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If you fail, all you know is that the particular path you took through that decision space didn’t work. But, it really doesn’t tell you much about which of the other paths might work. But, if you succeed, you’ve created a pattern for success; a guide through that huge information space that can give you a sense of where to go next time. It helps you understand, at an intuitive level, what feels right and what feels wrong. In essence, it gives you what everyone calls a “gut feel” for success. And, it’s why venture capitalists hone in on past successes much more than past failures.
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For many people in industry, the connections between innovation and manufacturing are a given—and a reason to worry. “We have learned that without a foothold in manufacturing, the ability to innovate is significantly compromised,” says GE’s Idelchik. The problem with outsourcing production is not just that you eventually lose your engineering expertise but that “businesses become dependent on someone else’s innovation for next-generation products.” One repercussion, he says, is that researchers and engineers lose their understanding of the manufacturing process and what it can do: “You can design anything you want, but if no one can manufacture it, who cares?
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…The balance sheet of evolution guaranteed that the genetic or energetic cost of violent behavior was inevitably offset by the potential benefits that it might yield. The ferocity with which the bees defend their hive arises from a genetic quirk ensuring that the workers are all intimately related sisters, sharing more genetic similarity with one another than with their mother. As a consequence, their willingness to die for the collective ensures a continued production of sisters and thereby genetic facsimiles of themselves.
…The currency of evolution is the gene: the more copies of you, the richer you are. When he spoke of his daughters, the tender tone belied his evolutionary dogmatism, but when it came to insects he maintained strict scientific objectivity. He brooked no sympathy for the worker bee eviscerating herself as the inevitable result of stinging to defend her colony. This suicidal creature was simply placing an unconsciously calculated bet with a well-established genetic payoff—if the queen is killed then the biological factory producing more sisters is destroyed. For most creatures, only one’s own life takes on this value, which explains—at least in part—why predators have only a 10 percent success in securing a meal following an attack. If the predator fails, it goes hungry. If the prey fails, it dies. Dr. LaFage rattled off a litany of extreme, last-ditch efforts used by insects to escape the grip of their predators: beetles that squeak or bleed spontaneously, moths that flash hind wings with owl-like eyespots, and crane flies that sacrifice still-twitching legs. When the cost is your life, whether corporeal or genetic, the nothing-to-lose approach becomes viable.
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The topic of QR codes came up at a recent workshop I attended. Some of the participants suggested that implementing campaigns with QR codes suggested it improved perceptions that the brand was ‘cutting edge’ even if the QR code was hardly ever used. The others laughed at lack of utility QR codes and how useless they are.
Both are wrong.
QR codes have unfairly been derided in the comms world. They were conceived by a Toyota subsidiary for industrial inventory management and have been successfully used to track automobile parts for over a decade. QR codes are neither innovative or useless in their original context, nor are they inherently innovative or useless in a marketing context.
The failure of QR codes in the comms world has been by the marketers, not the technology. A QR code is not a compelling innovation. It’s not an innovation innately suited to advertising strategy. It’s certainly not an innovation likely to generate excitement in and by itself.
It’s a barcode.
There are some great examples of QR codes being effectively implemented and improving the user experience, such as Tesco and the Wealie app. What connects these examples is that the QR codes have been implemented in situations where users are not required to change their behaviour. In South Korea, Tesco has a fake supermarket “shelf and product” interface for mobile shopping, with QR codes attached for the scanning of products to be added to carts. Wealie takes the usual ‘loyalty’ card system and removes the annoying stamp and card system. In these contexts, QR codes actually represent a valuable proposition. Most importantly, the QR code is essentially a mechanism for streamlining an existing behaviour, and not the strategy that underpins the experience itself.
Putting a QR code on outdoor and print ads asks users to change their behaviour. People aren’t used to stopping at a magazine ad, pulling out their phones, scanning a barcode etc. That’s a both an effort and a cognitive behavioural barrier to overcome. Furthermore, early marketing adopters regularly used QR codes to link through Youtube videos in lieu of any other compelling reason to include a QR code (to improve perceptions of brands as innovative). This situation undoubtedly requires more effort, breaking the flow of a behavioural pattern, than makes the “payoff” worthwhile.
Providing access to a website or video isn’t exciting - URLs can do that, and there’s been no significant demand by consumers for a new technology to replace URLs. What can QR do? Take an existing experience and make it better by leveraging that QR can offer – better tracking, more portable, ability to store (lots of) information, quick access to that information etc.
Unfortunately, QR codes now have the stigma of being a low value proposition. They’re a joke, best summarised by this tumblr. Wven a useful, innovative QR campaign has the deck stacked against it thanks to the ghosts of hundreds or poorly conceived earlier QR campaigns. If your campaign does succeed it will be because of the value it adds for the user – not because of the novelty in using QR. And if doesn’t, don’t blame the technology. Or the user.
