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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: Trends

It Doesn’t Matter What They Say, TV Is Here to Stay!

I don’t want to start this with an apology, but I will. I’m sorry, Internet, I really love you. I love interacting, building, sharing, uploading, creating and all that cool stuff that you let me do, but, sometimes, to my personal shame, all that you offer is no replacement for me when I just want to veg out and watch TV and be entertained with no expectation of my involvement other than pressing a few simple buttons on my remote control. Internet, this doesn’t mean I don’t see our relationship growing and becoming stronger. It’s just that we’ll need to make room for TV time, too.

Lest you think I’m just old and that my feelings aren’t relevant to the youth of today, there is new research to back up my love of TV.  Media Post, a really great media news site, has Even With Rise of Web, Kids Still Watching Tube, a story by John Consoli. It seems that kids are actually watching more TV now than they did 5 years ago. According to the article, “Even with the newest videogames and online disruptions, younger viewers are still watching television just as they always have been.”

Maybe those kids are simply learning to multitask though. Do you really think they’re giving their full attention to That’s So Raven and Hannah Montana?

The YouTubified Election of 2008

This morning, Hillary Clinton officially announced her presidential ambitions. My impression is that Hillary Clinton a really smart person, who is definitely up the difficult task of being president of the United States. The other candidate competing for my vote, Barack Obama, also seems like a smart, capable person who may also be up for that challenge. (I’m sorry, John Edwards, you’re not up to the challenge when competing against these two.)

But who will win the Democratic primary race, Clinton or Obama? For many years, a candidate’s on-camera persona has held sway with voters than the substance of their message. The JFK Nixon debates are an easy example of this. Radio listens thought Nixon won the debate, TV viewers though JFK did. In the upcoming YouTubified election, I believe this effect will be magnified more than ever. Perception trumps reality. Minus any scandal, the candidate who speaks best, regardless of content, will win the election.

Let me suggest what is reality and what is perception between them. The reality is that Hillary Clinton is a tougher, smarter politician, better suited for the presidential seat. She’s got the experience and the savvy to get people on her side behind the scenes to get her goals accomplished.  Barack Obama has also got some of these qualities—he’s intelligent and has some political experience, but if this were a written test, he would definitely come in second to Clinton. But reality is not the only factor here that determines who people cast their vote for. The perception war between these two favors Obama. His on-camera persona is one who feels the voter’s fears and personal struggles, understands his or her lot in life. He’s here to fix things for “me” and has the best chance of doing it because he “gets me”.  Ms. Clinton, try as she might, can’t “feel” more than Mr. Obama.

Clinton’s web site promises a conversation happening between each voter and her, facilitated by the web. This is where I think the reality of her political savvy could potentially win. If she’s here, in my living room, listening to me more than Obama is, maybe she can get enough of those “perception” points in her column to pull this out.

I’m definitely ready for a different attitude of the person who occupies the office of the president. Luckily, I think either choice between Clinton and Obama is a much better situation that we are now in.

All I can hope is that the best candidate (but by which criteria) wins.

Now for some video.

Barack Obama on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton on The View

Update: I may be completely wrong about this race. See this story on ABCNEWS called Clinton Leads ‘08 Dems; No Bounce for Obama. Go Hill!

CES: User Generated Media session

The first “knowledge session” I attended at CES 2007 was User Generated Media: An Internet, Communications and Advertising Transformation. It was really informative. My notes from the session aren’t complete but I’ll try to reconstruct as much of them as I can here. Some of my own thoughts have slipped in.

User-generated content is providing the voyeuristic view that traditional producers of media wouldn’t approach. Consumer generated media isn’t new though. Remember Rodney King? That event basically was the video tape beating. That user-generated video generated the story back on March 3, 1991. Skip forward to today and the power of user-generated content is shown again in the Saddam execution video. The “official” video—molded and edited to serve an authority’s purpose—was quickly supplanted by the grainy camera phone video that exposed the taunts and chaos of the situation. That camera phone video is now the version people know of that event.

We’re also seeing the emergence of very high-quality video pieces now that the technology that used to be only in the hands of “professionals” has become affordable to the masses. One example shown of non-professional content produced by a student on his/her computer was Dollface. You can see it here below.

Given the power of user-generated content and the production values it is now capable of, we need to ask ourselves the question, how does this change the rules for media and advertising producers? Advertisers need to follow their potential consumers wherever they happen to go. Where are they going with their eyeballs consuming content? They go all over the place. The problem with so much content in so many different situations is that there has got to be some guarantee that the client who is buying advertising associated with that user-generated content is represented correctly.

When a new technology comes along, it seems “spectacle” is the first forms of expression that happen there. “Storytelling” comes later. Initial attempt in film were just spectacle pieces, showing off what could be done with the technology. The storytelling came later. We will probably see user-generated content go in that direction too.

When we ask for users to generate content for a brand, we are going to get the people who are highly motivated by that brand to respond and it will be really informative to see their perspective. People want to tell their story. They sometimes want to express themselves using the world they live in which is filled by lots of copyrighted material. There needs to be more effort trying to rectify this problem. We’re asking people to live with our brands and they’re taking us up on that request and they are going to use them to express themselves when they create content about their lives.

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