Tom Milsom is so digitally whimsical its almost painful, but in a good way. Is that a compliment? I'm not sure, but I really like his chiptune cover of one of my favorite songs, the Magnetic Fields' "All My Little Words":
I did some shallow digging and found some of Tom's other work, as well. Precocious, talented and fluent in lulz, the nineteen year-old British musician / artist / vlogger reminds me of a younger Patrick Wolf, had Patrick Wolf been born six years later and not fallen in with gypsy bird people and feral film stars inhabiting a bizarro 1930's London hidden behind a half-bricked wall in Camden.
Apparently it's very common for Somali pirates to shoot a lot of video of their endeavors, editing the footage together into short montages to serve a dual purpose--on the one hand, they use the videos, easily emailed / FTPd, as proof to authorities that a ship is in fact under pirate control and that the crew is all safe and accounted for, and on the other hand, the videos are great, easily-sharable marketing materials for pirate sympathizers around the globe.
Despite the fact that such videos are common, they usually remain in the hands of the authorities as classified evidence. Or at the very least, they've been buried way below the heap of mainstream news coverage that gained critical mass last year as the West started paying attention to the pirate problem in earnest. But watching the following video exclusive obtained by WIRED magazine, shot aboard the Turkish cargo shipYasa Neslihan after pirates collected a ransom for the ship, its crew and its cargo of 77,000 tons of iron ore, I can't help but be struck by the fact that it's so.....boring!
Especially when you compare this to the astounding images being captured by the various militaries trying to curb the hijacks / negotiate with hijackers / deliver ransom money.
Even though the pirates are using film, a medium that has the potential to carry so much romance, emotion and weight, and that's capable of communicating nuanced, complex messages in just a few seconds, they've decided to only make videos that serve a purely functional service--showing proof of capture / status of goods.
Which makes me think back to how this whole Somali pirate thing began. It's a story that's not often included in most media's coverage of the situation, an unfortunate fact because keeping in mind the conflict's origins could go a long way towards helping us arrive at a possible solution for all parties involved. Like what's happened in many African countries over the past few decades, what began in Somalia as a justifiable rebellion against a legitimate injustice has quickly evolved into an empty, mercenary quest for money, divorced from its original political aim.
Since the early 1990's, Somalia has been a horrible place to live. Without a stable government or economy, its people have largely lived on the brink of starvation and death. Sensing a power vacuum, many Western nations saw great opportunity in Somalia's unregulated waters--both for industrial dumping and unregulated commercial fishing.
First, open-sea trawlers are governed by extremely strict regulations in terms of what kinds of nets they can use, the species of fish they can catch, the size of fish they can catch, where they can work, etc. But off of Somalia's unregulated coast, European fishing ships could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and no one would ever know. Suddenly, Somali fishermen in 17 foot wooden skiffs found themselves competing with factory ships the size of a football field.
Second, in the mid- to late 1990's, Somalis who lived along the coast began to present a wide range of curious illnesses, ranging from unusual birth defects to chronic nausea, and while the local population suspected that it might have had something to do with the mysterious barrels European ships had been dumping off the coast, no one knew for sure until the 2005 tsunami, when some of the barrels washed ashore. It was nuclear waste, taken from European factories and hospitals, allegedly laundered by the mafia and then brought to be dumped cheaply and anonymously in a place where no one was paying attention. Except for the local fishermen.
The first acts of retaliatory piracy were made by such fishermen, who call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia, and in early interviews about their crimes, many participants cited as reasons for going renegade exclusively ecological concerns. With virtually no other options, about ten years ago the most frustrated fishermen bought cheap AK-47s and started boarding ships, demanding compensation for stolen fish and pollution. Cut to ten years later, look at a video like the one above, and there's no sign of the original grievances that drove Somalia's young men to take up a life of crime on the high seas.
So are the original instigators of this vigilante campaign to take back their local waters no longer interested in political results, satisfied instead with the surprisingly large sums of money being offered as ransoms? Or have they been outnumbered by younger Somalis who are just in it for the cash?
Either way, as evidenced by videos like the one above, for some reason camera-wielding pirates often no longer bother using their extremely well-publicized acts of disobedience as platforms to raise awareness of the local issues that started this whole mess. There's a long history of vigilante groups using exclusive and mass video to serve both practical and political purposes, and the internet makes it possible for everyone to tell their side of any story...so why don't these ransom videos include justifications for the acts of piracy they depict?
The only flaw I can find with this is that its creators presuppose the presence of electricity and a modicum of understanding of in-depth scientific information. Although I suppose that if you've already created a working time machine, the latter won't be much of an issue.
Just don't touch anything! I don't want to all of a sudden have tentacles and speak butterfly language.
It's like these birds know exactly how evil they are, and are really excited for you to find out how evil they are, and also know that because they're just owls, there's nothing you can ever do about it. This is like watching the most f****d up cuckoo clock ever.
Just another great example of why the GIF is one of my favorite content formats. I bet the entire, long-format video of these owls isn't actually that creepy (or maybe 3 seconds is all the cameraperson could capture before these owls telekinetically exploded his head), but reduced to a perfectly-choreographed, looped GIF, what would otherwise be a random few seconds of weird synchronization within a longer video becomes its very own piece of content.
What once had to be considered within a larger context now is it's own context, with an entirely separate meaning. This is even more true for animated GIFs culled from popular, familiar entertainment properties.
Every year, companies spend millions and millions of dollars so PR, advertising and all other species of marketing agencies can try to achieve what Southwest Airlines' HR department inadvertently accomplished when they hired this guy:
WARNING. I AM ABOUT TO START TALKING ABOUT MARKETING AND OTHER BORING THINGS. Videos like this make me think about the state of marketing right now....Despite the fact that nearly every brand has an openly stated desire to embrace social media and empower its employees and organically engage audiences, it's still extremely, disappointingly rare to find a company that would have officially backed an employee-generated stunt like this, and even fewer employees at those companies who would take the initiative to do something this interesting.
That's why is why amazing pieces of content like this video, the one I posted earlier this week from an auto plant and Warren Robinett's infamous Atari Adventure easter egg almost always have to happen organically. And this just reinforces something crucial that's infrequently discussed when brands talk about how they can better engage different audiences, not just through social media but in general. I've been saying it for years, but I think this video proves more eloquently than I could ever articulate that powerful PR begins and ends with powerful, strategic HR.
Who is your company hiring? What kind of attributes do you look for in employees? When screening applicants, does your brand put more of a premium on Experience with a capital "E," or do you look for innate curiosity, people who have a passion about something other than their work? What kind of people have been answering your job listings? How are those job listings written? How much freedom do you give employees to express themselves once they've signed on?
So few brands bother to ask or answer these questions as they think about how they market to consumers. Instead, they hand millions of dollars over to creative professionals who sit around a conference room brainstorming about viral campaigns, trying to pull The Next Big Thing out of thin air between budget meetings.
The reality is, I don't remember a single piece of marketing I've ever seen from Southwest, but I'll remember this video for a long time. When it comes to marketing, brands would do much better if they just found a way to hire more people like David Holmes.
For a measly $350, you can completely revolutionize your world and the way you extract and populate streams of information from and into your surroundings. Created by students and professors at (surprise, surprise) MIT's MediaLab, Sixth Sense is the perfect marriage of digital and analog, molecules and megabytes.
That's a cute way of saying that for the first time, someone has figured out how to engineer an almost seamless connection between the real world and the internet. And the best part is, they used regular, affordable off-the-shelf electronics to do it: a camera, a mini-projector and a mobile device.
It's a bit long, but this video explains everything. Watch for yourself:
A bit more detail from Gizmodo if you couldn't get through the whole video:
"The camera recognizes objects around you instantly, with the
micro-projector overlaying the information on any surface, including
the object itself or your hand. Then, you can access or manipulate the
information using your fingers. Need to make a call? Extend your hand
on front of the projector and numbers will appear for you to click.
Need to know the time? Draw a circle on your wrist and a watch will
appear. Want to take a photo? Just make a square with your fingers,
highlighting what you want to frame, and the system will make the
photo—which you can later organize with the others using your own hands
over the air...
Now take this to every aspect of your everyday life. You can be in a
taxi going to the airport, and just by taking out your boarding pass,
Sixth Sense will grab real time information about your flight and
display it over the ticket. You won't need to do any action. Just hold
it in front of your and it will work.
The key here is that Sixth Sense recognizes the objects around you,
displaying information automatically and letting you access it in any
way you want, in the simplest way possible."
It's almost enough to make me forget about Siftables.....almost.
As the personal blog of Jonathan Bellinger, all opinions expressed here belong to the author and are not necessarily shared by Ketchum PR or its clients.
