From jokes about Brett Favre to South Park stealing lines, we're in a crisis of originality thanks to easy searching on the internet, writes Ben Greenman. Whatever happened to getting credit for an idea?
Recently, Brett Favre met with NFL Commissioner Roger Gooddell to discuss whether or not he took pictures of his penis and texted them to Jenn Sterger, a former New York Jets game hostess. Favre, an egomaniac, became the subject of yet another round of mockery as a result of this scandal. Saturday Night Live ran a skit about Wrangler, the jeans company for whom Favre serves as a spokesman, marketing pants that let the offending organ hang loose. Concerns were raised about the skit, not on the basis of taste, but because it was relevantly similar to a Modern Humorist sketch that had run a week earlier.
SNL ran a skit about Wrangler, for whom Favre is a spokesman, marketing pants that let the offending organ hang loose. South Park creators apologized for a show that stole jokes from a College Humor feature. (Photo: Nam Y. Huh / AP Photo; Comedy Central)
This has happened to plenty of people, in one way or another. Almost 10 years ago, I published a musical about the Elian Gonzalez controversy on McSweeneys. Less than a week later, Saturday Night Live ran a similar parody. The similarities were indisputable, but as I told a reporter at the time, that’s no proof of plagiarism, even of the subconscious variety (paging Robin Williams). The same is true of the SNL/Modern Humorist case. Sometimes similar ideas spring up in two places at once, or in two places in different times without any connection between them. And even when there are connections, what of it? Take Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” the huge disco hit from 1978. Now listen to Bobby Womack’s “Put Something Down on It,” from 1975. Sounds like a straightforward case of thievery, doesn’t it? But now listen to Jorge Ben’s “Taj Mahal,” from 1972. There are enough points of contact to raise more than eyebrows, but that doesn’t affect the quality (good or bad) of any of the work. Everything comes from somewhere. Most seeds are hybrids. The human brain, while complex, is not infinite, and all creativity is a mix of innovation and imitation.
Thanks to places like Google, the Internet is now the equivalent of an instant patent search that allows you to search for recurrences of phrases, puns, neologisms.
With that said, though, there’s a problem, and it isn’t about Saturday Night Live or Brett Favre’s naked bootleg. It’s about the Internet, and how quickly it lets us track cases of alleged borrowing and appropriation. When Juan Williams was fired by NPR last month for what the radio network considered intemperate remarks regarding Muslims, the Internet erupted. That’s what it does. People accused Williams of racism at the same time that other people accused NPR of overreaction and knee-jerk political correctness. I didn’t want to weigh in until I had seen the actual interview—which now, thanks to that same Internet, is efficiently archived. Williams said that he’s nervous when he sees people in “Muslim garb.” I understood his point, at some level. He was saying that his perception of Muslims was permanently changed by the 9/11 attacks.
But there was a flaw in his reasoning. Leaving aside that Williams seemed to have a monolithic, almost cartoonish idea of “Muslim garb,” it occurred to me that Islamic terrorists are the least likely to dress traditionally. Their strategy, were they to try to board a plane with a weapon, would be to dress as inconspicuously as possible. I was thinking about it, so I sent something out via Twitter.
About 10 minutes later, I got an email from someone I didn’t know. It accused me of stealing the insight. I don’t know why he didn’t just tweet back or even send me a direct message. Twitter has all those features built into it, for maximum annoyance. But he chose to email.
He told me that other people online had already thought of that argument, and had even said so online. One of them, he said, was Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to work at The New Yorker, where I work: The implication, I guess, was that I had somehow shadowed Jeff, taken his idea, and then claimed it as my own.
This is idiotic in many ways. First of all, it’s not true. I didn’t see anything that Jeff wrote, and while I agree with him on this point, it’s only because he agrees with me. Second of all, how have we reached the point where the standard for a thought is chronological primacy? There are, of course, still cases where ideas move from one brain to another by way without authorization. Last week, the creators of South Park apologized for a show that satirized the Christopher Nolan film Inception after it became clear that they had pilfered a few of the jokes from a College Humor feature. South Park co-creator Matt Stone told Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times that they had run across the piece online and assumed that College Humor was using dialogue from the actual film: “It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid and we just threw it together. But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.” The South Park case demonstrates how easy it is to accidentally run across an idea online, and claim it as your own, even without malicious intent. There’s no question that the Internet, which distributes an unprecedented amount of content to an unprecedented number of destinations, enables theft of intellectual property. But if the Internet can enable theft, it can also detect it. If your original content—your ideas, your jokes—gets redistributed without proper credit, it’s easier than ever to track down the culprits. Thanks to places like Google, the Internet is now the equivalent of an instant patent search that allows you to search for recurrences of phrases, puns, neologisms. Here, though, is the root of a larger issue: The cure is far worse than the disease. The Internet’s search capabilities, which permit easy detection of unoriginality, also have a chilling effect on originality.
An example: There’s a guy in my neighborhood who dresses exactly like Bruce Springsteen, circa 1975. He has the jeans. He has the cap. He has the beard. After seeing him a handful of times on the street, I nicknamed him “Born to Rerun.” It made me laugh, for a second. It was a pointless little joke, no more than that. Out of curiosity, I searched for the phrase, which I thought I had invented—or rather, which I had invented, at least for my purposes. I discovered, predictably, that the phrase has been used before, frequently: in 2003 by Entertainment Weekly, last year by a fan posting a review of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and on and on. I’d like to report that I don’t care about those earlier occurrences, that I brushed them off and moved on, but the fact is that I do care. It’s deflating to learn that your original idea, no matter how trivial, has already made an appearance. Before the Internet, I might have kept that pointless little joke alive in my head. It might have ripened into something or it might have died on the vine. But it would have been my tomato. Now, the process works differently. The incontrovertible proof that the phrase was already circulating made it difficult, if not impossible, for me to claim it as my own. It acquired the feel of something shoddy and second-hand, and I jettisoned it.
This is an exceedingly trivial case. I readily, happily, heartily admit that. But originality can be an extremely serious issue (the last few weeks have seen claims of appropriation or plagiarism against the poet Raymond McDaniel and the fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer) so maybe it’s easier to illuminate it without the interference of significance. The first spark of an idea—whether a short story, a song lyric, a newspaper headline, a movie title, or a joke about an oddly dressed neighbor—is tenuous at best, and conditions need to be perfect not to douse it before it can kindle something more substantive. If the Internet moves us toward a get-there-first-or-not-at-all world (that phrase, by the way, seems all new, at least according to Google), then hundreds of thousands of newly born “proto-ideas” (1180 results) will end before they have a chance to “flower into genuine articles of faith” (9 results). And that means fewer “moronic skits” (151 results) about “Brett Favre’s organ” (4 results).
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and the new What He's Poised to Do. He lives in Brooklyn.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Social games, like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and MyTown, racked up a number of high-value brand partnerships during the past year, and the social gaming industry in general is seeing huge interest from investors and consumers.
The top 10
The U.S. population alone is also a good indicator of user adoption — one in five Americans over the age of six have played an online social game, according to a recent study.
Increased user activity has spurred attention from investors. From an acquisition point of view, we witnesed Disney’s $763.2 million acquisition of Playdom, Electronic Arts’s $400 million acquisition of Playfish, and Google’s acquisition of Slide. Regarding investment, the big winner this year is Zynga, having now raised a total of $366 million.
Brands are taking notice and acting quickly, implementing innovative ways to advertise in social games and capitalize on the rise of virtual gaming.
Carree Syrek, a partner in social media strategy at Mindshare, a global media and marketing services company, recently spoke at ad:tech on the common misconceptions that companies have about marketing in social games. Here’s are the four concerns she discussed.
1. My Audience Doesn’t Play Social Games
Brands often look at social gaming as something that only a niche group of gamers partake in, but multiple surveys show that social gaming actually appeals to a much broader audience than most would expect. One early 2010 survey found that the average social gamer was a 43-year-old female.
“One of the biggest things that I hear when I talk to brands is ’social gamers are moms. They’re middle-aged moms,’” said Syrek. “But actually, this is not the case. Each of the games or the worlds that you’re in have very specific audiences that you wouldn’t necessarily see unless you dug a little bit deeper.”
Syrek pointed to the disparity between FarmVille and Mafia Wars demographics as an example of diversity among social gamers, as presented in the 2010 PopCap Social Gaming Research Results.
- FarmVille pulls an audience that is 62% female, 33% of its audience is between 18 and 34 years old, and the average income is between $60,000 and $100,000. The FarmVille audience is also 84% caucasian and 7% Hispanic.
- Mafia Wars’s audience, on the other hand, is 51% female, with 28% of the audience between 18 and 34 years old, and the average income falling below $30,000. Seventy-one percent of Mafia Wars users are caucasian, while 17% are African American.
Syrek clarified that raw numbers don’t explain the full story, pointing to index numbers as a way to better understand an audience. Index numbers are used in marketing research and indicate the strength to which a certain demographic is represented on a site or service, generally with a weighted base number of 100 representing the average
“There are different ways to segment for ethnicity if you’re going after specific markets,” she stated. “The numbers in parentheses [as pictured above] are index numbers. So, you can see that even though, say in Mafia Wars, the African American segment is only 17% of the people who play that, their index is 198. So, you’ve got a really receptive market there that you can tap into.”
“The point is that you can actually dig deep, and you can find the proper environment for your target demographic,” stated Syrek.
Before writing off social gamers as middle-aged moms or male teenagers, be sure to look at the types of games out there and learn about their audiences — you may find that your audience is present on a few niche social games.
2. Virtual Worlds Are Not for “Serious” Companies
“I think it’s important to note that there’s a place here for everyone. It’s not just about the Jolly Green Giant being in FarmVille… it doesn’t have to be that literal, and there are spots for everyone here to play,” said Syrek.
It is a misconception that advertising in social games is only territory for entertainment brands or brands that want to be seen as “fun.” On the contrary, many serious brands were discussed during Syrek’sad:tech session.
Linda Gangeri, manager of national advertising for Volvo Cars of North America, discussed Volvo’s recent campaign on MyTown, in which Volvo’s strategy was to “leverage location-based services to deliver Volvo-branded messaging and virtual goods to people checking in to competing dealerships.”
Upon launching the Volvo S60, the Volvo marketing team decided to test virtual goods as a way to build awareness for the new vehicle.
“It was a 30-day campaign from September 1 to September 30,” explained Gangeri. During the 30-day period, 5.3 million Volvo-branded checkins were reached, 1.3 million Volvo-branded virtual goods (including a steering wheel, a wheel, the Volvo iron mark and the S60 vehicle) were delivered, and 20,000 clicks to “See the S60 in Action” were logged, for a click-through rate (CTR) of 1.5%, which is much higher than the CTRs that the rest of the marketing industry is accustomed to.
“It gave us the opportunity to dig deeper, to immerse ourselves in an environment where people are having fun [and are] engaged, and then to take branded items, embed them and expose them to this huge audience of people,” said Gangeri, happy with the results of the campaign.
3. It’s Always About Capitalism
Within social gaming, the virtual goods market is the top revenue driver for social game creators — virtual goods makes up 90% of Zynga’s revenue, for example. Social gamers are willing to buy digital goods in order to improve their positions in the games. This is great for game creators, obviously, as they are technically selling nothing. Users buy fake shovels and tractors to tend to their fake fields. There’s a lot of money in that — the U.S. virtual goods market is predicted to pass $2 billion in 2011.
While the money is certainly there, social gaming and the virtual goods market aren’t always about capitalism. In fact, Syrek mentioned four examples of social good on social gaming platforms:
- Pet adoptions in
- Teddy bear purchases in Mafia Wars raised more than $100,000 for Coalition for the Cure (Huntington’s Disease) in March 2010.
- The Pandaren Monk pet in World of Warcraft generated $1.1 million in donations for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
- To date, Zynga players have raised more than $3 million in connection with Zynga.org social partnerships, the majority of which has been directed to the welfare of women and children in Haiti.
These cases illustrate that social games could be a good route for for-profit or non-profit businesses hoping to raise a little awareness for social good projects.
4. Social Games Are a Fad
Social networking dominates most people’s time spent online, but next in line is online gaming, Nielsen reported in August. Of course, social gaming only accounts for a portion of that sector, but still, the fact that social networking and online gaming dominate online activity is a nod to the growing importance of social gaming.
Syrek pointed to the 2010 PopCap Social Gaming Research Results to validate her argument that social gaming isn’t a fad. The study found that 24% of U.S. and UK Internet users play social games at least once a week, and that most social gamers play other genres of games, including casual and hardcore games.
In another portion of the session, Manny Anekal, director of brand advertising at Zynga, illustrated that users are spending a lot of time playing social games. FarmVille users average a whopping 68 minutes of FarmVille play per day and Mafia Wars users average 52 minutes per day on the game, according to April 2010 Cisco Security Intelligence Operation data, for example. It’s no secret that social games are engaging (and addictive), but who knew users were spending so much time tending to virtual farms and brawls?
While it is admittedly difficult to decide if social gaming is truly a fad or not, data points toward its continued and growing popularity.
What are your thoughts on marketing in social games? Let us know in the comments below.
For more Business coverage:
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
Kara Dioguardi Without Makeup (& Other <b>News</b>) - Starpulse.com
Kara Dioguardi showed up to the opening night of Cinderella at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood last night looking almost unrecognizable with hardly any makeup or hair styling. Looks like l...
Simpsons Fox <b>News</b> | Simpsons O'Reilly | Simpsons Fox <b>News</b> Joke <b>...</b>
Last night, for the second week in a row, The Simpsons took a shot at corporate cousin Fox News. However, if you're clicking over to Hulu or Fox's websites to check out this week's helicopter gag, you're going to be disappointed.
Leslie Nielsen, 'Airplane!' and 'Naked Gun' star, dies at 84 <b>...</b>
Leslie Nielsen, who dazzled with deadpan in The Naked Gun and Airplane!, passed away on Sunday at a hospital near his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he...
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/alpine-payment-systems-c270446.html
No comments:
Post a Comment