Posts Tagged ‘viral’

A breakfast meeting with David Blaine last week was a very pleasing and revelatory experience; it’s good to sit and talk with someone who really, really gets true showmanship, spectacle, creativity, word of mouth and viral publicity and who has encountered many of the same things I’ve encountered, even the Russian circus act with a coat of living minks.

Blaine is a great, great grandson of Barnum and has built his persona on the Barnum and Houdini models, always connecting with his audience and constantly astonishing them. Most importantly, he is always sure that they are talking about him. He knows that without promotion something terrible happens. Nothing!

A perfect case in point is the trick he showed me. I didn’t dare ask – it felt too gauche – but Blaine offered. He got me to shuffle a pack of cards and lay out two lines of ten cards, making sure that each one was different. Then he asked me to take ten of them and hold them behind my back. Next, he suggested I look at the remaining cards and mentally pick one. “Not the Ace, it’s too obvious,” he said.

I chose the four of diamonds and told him that I’d chosen. Next, he made a gesture and told me to place the cards I held behind my back on the table. The ten cards I had hidden behind me were now eleven in number and sure enough, the eleventh card was the four of diamonds. I was gob-smacked. I have absolutely no idea how he did it – it seems an impossible trick.

But this is the reaction Blaine is constantly seeking, since he instinctively knows I would go away and talk to several people about the trick and how astonishing it was and, in this way, his reputation would be perpetuated. Now, of course, I am also blogging about it. The chances are that his reputation will spread in ever increasing circles if everyone who is astonished by him does as I have done.

Just as interesting was the revelation that Blaine actively thrived on the people who came and taunted him with food and insults whilst he was attempting to live on only 4.5 litres of water a day in a Plexiglas box above the Thames. “I needed people to react in the way that the did to get through the stunt,” he told me.

Their antipathy during his 44 days of starvation gave him something to prove to the haters and became a media focus for the endurance stunt, guaranteeing it more coverage and even comments from then-President Bush. No wonder he was heard to murmur “I love you all” when he finally completed the stunt.

He is the greatest modern showman / illusionist and will remain popular as long he can maintain the incredibly high creativity, the quality of his unique stunts and continue to amaze and astonish. Celebrities, brands and publicists have a lot to learn from David Blaine.

In a world rife with the ability to keep an eye on where we are, with posters that are embedded with cameras that register how many people look at the poster for more than ten seconds and GPS phones that can traced their owners to within a yard or so, why is that that complaints are so few and far between?

Alright, there are the net conspiracies about social networking brands and how they are allegedly linked to information-gathering for the NSA (that’s the USA’s National Security Agency of course, not the UK’s National Sheep Association) but this is not a serious, concerted force; there are people leaping up and down about blind emails and viral marketing, but no complaints have really registered about how technology is monitoring people.

Monitoring is back in focus at the moment, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude, which is based on the Google Maps service. It allows people, through their computers and mobile phones, to keep tabs on their friends and family by pinging out their location to anyone who’s part of the service. Given that this is Google, and that they dominate the tech market, there is some fear as to what latitudes Google will allow themselves with the gathering of information and how they may use the data that such an application gathers.

In light of these concerns, Google have announced that they will not be keeping information on Latitude users who wish to hide their location, but is this the most effective way of managing the potential crisis in confidence for a company whose ideals were once trumpeted as being pure as the driven snow? The PR machine behind Latitude, both on and offline, is to be congratulated on the way it has so effectively quelled any seeds of unrest.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been greater outrage about Latitude, however; Latitude seems to me to be little more than a covert widget to make Google’s advertising model more effective; one that impinges on the privacy of anyone using it. Added to that, a Latitude-enabled phone could be easily stolen and used against the person the phone belongs to. It’ll be interesting to see if any human rights group make like French lorry drivers and park a protest right in the middle of Google’s information superhighway in the near future.

The Financial Times report on a blog that’s gone viral, complaining about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow, apparently written by a creative at WCRS advertising agency. They asked me for my take on the matter.

“…some bloggers … suggest it was a viral marketing campaign by Virgin, a charge the company strenuously denies. Others believe it to be a shameless bit of self-promotion by the author, Oliver Beale, who happens to be a creative at advertising agency WCRS. But both Mr Beale and the agency seem keen to distance themselves from the e-mail.

“Mark Borkowski, public relations expert, believes it would be a foolish company that risked a viral campaign like this one. He suggests the contagiousness is down to more than providing light relief from a gloomy climate: rather, people feel frustrated at their complaints being ignored by companies, especially banks.”

To read the full article, click here.