All aboard!

Google needs to brand itself. For years the search engine has been the main entrance to the Internet, by virtue of being a great product and becoming incredible popular; so much so that the term Google became a verb, a synonym for online search. As big and successful the company turned up to be, it also became invisible, like a commodity service.
But with the advent of Social Media, Google started facing substantial competition. People are now getting access to content on the Internet through peer-to-peer recommendations and mobile apps, negating the exclusive need for Google searches. The search engine stopped being that invisible, almighty entity on the Internet to become another choice in the presence and in contrast to its Social Media competitors. In that context, Google needs to brand itself to compete against new ways of online discovery and to talk about its advantages to users and potential ones. In my opinion, that's why you may bump into one of its ads on a train or on billboards. Once an invisible giant, Google now needs to have a voice and a personality.
The competition is for conquering users who would make sense of the advertising space search engines and social media platforms sell, but ultimately, it's also for converting every single human being into an Internet user, and for that they need to go and look for them where they have always been: on the streets.

US losing information war to alternative media

Mediating the same events from multiple angles is always good news, and great if that's happening. The US has been leading the entrepreneurship race and therefore commanding the development and globalization of digital media for decades, a process from which platforms like YouTube were born. But paradoxically, media like these have been allowing the creation of multiple discourses, a situation that worries Hillary Clinton very much, as this video shows:

No easy task

I love this logo. How to better communicate the idea of 'easy' than using a flying elephant? Designed by Alexey Markin.

Social Media people, look what's on TV

The people at ABC Copywriting blogged about the recent @ShippamsPaste social media case, a company who was delivering tweets 'in an engagingly naïve tone with adventurous spelling and punctuation'. It is a very interesting analysis, worth reading. The piece of thinking that struck me the most was this one:

'The social content that people genuinely respond to is much closer in spirit to a traditional interruptive TV campaign than it is to ‘engagement’ – however that hazy term is defined.'

I think it depends on the case, but it could be true. Creative and disruptive TV commercials work and have been doing so for decades. They have been developing a communication style that proved successful, regardless the lack of interactivity of the medium. Today, the same creative logic still applies to any type of communication platform -TV or online-; the message that manages to get people's attention, wins.

It's the metrics, stupid!

Artist Ursus Wehrli tidies up art, as these photos show. It's an interesting way to make sense of something supposedly untidy, chaotic and meaningless. Geeky minds who look for parameters on everything they see may find Wehrli's method somehow comforting. As for me, I find these art pieces a very good way to represent the currency of today's online world: metrics. Everything is measured, organized and shown as numerical data of some sort, from Facebook 'likes' to Twitter followers to infographics about percentages of any trade you can imagine. Everything is measured for the sake of the busy reader or user, who needs to make sense of his or her Internet usage and performance, not to mention businesses who need to understand what these users are doing. Thanks to Wehrli we see that nothing is safe from metrics, not even art. It's the world we're living in, stupid!

Technology is nature

This TV commercial for the new Audi A6 Avant works as a metaphor to uncover the type of environment most of us humans live in, which is a technological one. Most of the world's population live in cities, a very complex technological development. We live our lives longing for what we think 'nature' is: the trees, the mountains, the rivers... but the truth is that our natural setting is nowadays a technological construction, a city. Nature as we like to think of it is just something you see in travel agency posters.

Prepare for change

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.

This infographic about 15 facts about the internet in 2015 made me think about the forecasting of change and how it has become a cultural convention we live by. I wonder, why does everything have to change? Technologically speaking, why the future has to be different?

Gadgets have their own features and programmes, and these are languages. Interactive media changes in relation to how the user uses it, so the language changes all the time and we have to adapt to it. Communication gets broken all the time. Some people adapt and some give up in the process. For example, some good friends I used to communicate via Facebook with have stopped using it because they didn't want to invest time in learning the new rules and our connection broke up. I ended up communicating with those who didn't give up and adapt.

All these constant changes, are they needed? Maybe it's just because information technology has hit the consumer market so then media is treated as a commercial product at the mercy of the laws of competition, and that promotes constant innovation. But at what cost? Changes on the flavour of a soda doesn't affect us much, but changes in the tools and languages we use to communicate online jeopardizes the construction of our identity and our social relations.